1. I feel I am writing the most important letter of my life.
2. At the moment I am in perfect health. I am well-treated, even with courtesy.
3. I insist that the police stop all their searches to find me. If they succeeded this would result in a murderous shootout from which I shall certainly not come out alive.
Pierre Laporte, letter to Bourassa
The Canadian Front for Humanity were a small group, and the only people who paid attention to them were the more dedicated mutant activists, a few RCMP who kept half an eye on them, and the Front themselves.
But they made their name well known that Saturday.
Police found twelve small mail bombs in the city of Ottawa that day; most were so poorly made that they didn't go off, but four of the twelve did explode. One injured the assistant of a Supreme Court judge; one went off prematurely in a pile of mail, causing damage to the door of an office in the East Block; one killed an Irish setter named Tuesday, who belonged to the MP for Ottawa South. Tuesday was fond of chewing on paper, particularly padded envelopes, and she often made sure to attack any packages as soon as they were delivered.
The last bomb killed Marin Leavitt, Chief Commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, a devoted public servant and activist. He was the first casualty, dying in hospital at seven in the morning with severe injuries to the face and neck. Had he not bent forward to get his fat Saturday newspaper out of the yellow Citizen-branded mailbox, he might have lived.
This alone would have been enough to cause mass hysteria in the capital, but there was more to come.
In the East Block of the Parliament buildings, where a number of senators had their offices, the Honourable Dean Henstock was meeting Senator Jim McCree just prior to going out to lunch.
Dean Henstock, an MP for northern Ontario, was Minister of Indian Affairs and was even aboriginal himself -- unusual, for politicians holding that office. A tall, broad-shouldered man in his sixties, with greying hair and frightening Vulcan eyebrows, he was widely admired for his sensible politics and integrity. There were bumper stickers in the city that read DEAN HENSTOCK FOR PM, which was either naïve or as cynical as you could get, but Dean didn't have anything to do with those. He was a good guy.
Jim McCree was a workaholic, which was why he was in his office on a Saturday morning to begin with. Jim was just locking the door when the gunman came around a corner and raised his weapon, an assault rifle of a type that should never have been available in Canada in the first place. Dean shouted, and was shot through the chest. Security footage showed McCree standing frozen by the door, his keys still in his hand, but there was little that he could have done. Long, long moments after the first shot was fired, someone heard him yelling, "He's dead, Jesus Christ, he's dead!"
The RCMP officers came on the scene -- two of them, junior constables both. The first officer shot and missed, lodging a bullet in the office door. The gunman shot the first Mountie dead, and managed to injure the second before executing him as well. The cameras showed a brief scuffle between McCree and the gunman at that point, but the man was not disarmed.
The gunman proceeded to lead McCree out of the building. Backup was on its way, and the rest of security made the decision to keep their distance until more help arrived. Perhaps wisely, perhaps foolishly -- an inquiry would decide. None of the officers were experienced with this sort of thing; security in the Parliament buildings was notoriously lax, at least when it counted, and mostly when crazies came in they made a scene in the House of Commons on a weekday, with Hansard reporters watching. Weirdness in the East Block was far less common, and discouraged by the fact that the locations of senators' offices weren't publicised.
In a blue '97 Ford, the gunman tore through the lunchtime traffic on Wellington and crossed the Pont du Portage Bridge into Hull, Quebec. Backup was delayed, the officers in the East Block stayed put, and they lost him: the Ford was found at the side of a residential street in Hull, and the only eyewitness was a fifteen-year-old girl who described the new stolen car as a "black and dirty" four-door sedan, an unhelpful description. McCree was still alive at the time they switched cars, she said; he was tied up in the trunk.
Some of this was in the paper, but many of the details came from Joel's mother. He called home and spent over an hour on the phone, asking questions and repeating the answers to Charles. Several other relatives had already invaded the McCree home, it seemed, but as his father's only son, his presence would obviously be required.
"What? Jesus... No, I know they couldn't do anything. Still... He is? Where are you going to put him up? No, I'd rather you didn't. Yeah, I might be. I don't know yet. Did I meet her? I don't remember."
After it seemed that most of the news had been shared, Charles left him and went out to make his own phone call. It was almost nine o'clock, and the sun was close to setting. A warm early summer evening, the rain from that morning cleared away and the sky filled with clear golden light. There would be more rain tomorrow, judging by the iridescent cirrus clouds in the west, but for now the air was perfect, sweet and delicate. Even the knot of smokers by the hospital doors couldn't dirty the flower-freshness of the evening.
Charles found the number he was looking for in his cell phone, and he listened to the rings, over 300 miles away.
"Allo?"
"Evening, Dr. Visineau. Charles Xavier at Westchester, here."
"Ah." One of those sounds that carried a great weight of meaning: sadness, relief, sympathy. "I am glad you called, Charles."
"How's the weather there?"
"Beautiful," he said. "Terrible things always happen on the loveliest of days. I remember September 11th, how very blue was the sky. Is Joel all right?"
"No." Charles told him what had happened, finishing with, "...and now he has this to deal with."
"Well. It wasn't unexpected -- he's tried it before, and his issues are...severe. I spoke to his mother this morning. They don't know very much, but the whole region is on the alert. Will he be coming home?"
"Joel? I don't know. I expect so. I'm concerned about him having support while he's there."
"I'd be more concerned about -- oh. But I suppose it's all right."
"What?"
Visineau laughed ruefully. "I was going to say, I'd be concerned about his safety, and then I remembered that it would be hard for someone to hold on to Joel if he didn't want to be held."
"True," said Charles, "But he could be taken by surprise, just as those policemen were. Joel's reflexes aren't very remarkable."
This was a guess, on Charles' part, but he was sure that if he were to have someone test Joel in the Danger Room, the results would be predictable. Even though he had toyed with the idea that the boy might one day be a valuable addition to the team, he knew that Joel just wasn't the type. Slow, gentle, panicky, and absent-minded -- they could work around just one of those qualities, but not all of them.
And yet there was more to the X-Men than just combat. Charles wasn't ready to give up on the idea that every one of his students would one day contribute to the cause of mutant rights. Even if their contribution was just a normal life.
"He might be all right even so. Everyone who was attacked was an ordinary human," Visineau pointed out. "They only touched politicians who had publicly made statements in support of mutants. Dean Henstock was an exception, although I believe he was in favour...he had a good voting record, anyway. But he was a victim of opportunity. Lynn Brioux, whose dog got killed, she was in charge of the Brioux Report on the safety of mutants in school...the other senator who received a mail bomb, her daughter is here at St. Rita's. She's a pyrokinetic -- Lord, we've had trouble with her. I could go on, but everyone, believe me, everyone had some stake in the mutant issue. Mutants themselves, no one has attacked."
"They're trying to make it seem dangerous for mutants and non-mutants to form alliances?"
"I doubt they thought that far. They just wanted to punish." A sigh. "My kids here all know that. They're worried for me, if you can believe it. It's true that I shouldn't assume that mutants will be safe, that people who aren't in the government will be safe. This kind of fanatic, they strike who they can reach. St. Rita's is small enough that we can bear a siege, but it's dangerous even so."
Charles had forgotten, for a moment, that Visineau had his own students to take care of. "What sort of security do you have there?"
Visineau made a dismissive noise. "Less than they have on Parliament Hill, I'm afraid. Forty troubled mutants, eight Jesuits, and building staff. We'll beat intruders over the head with the Commentary of St. Jerome."
"You honestly aren't worried?" Just the thought of being that vulnerable would have made Charles' hair stand on end, if he still had any. "Have you ever considered that this might happen?"
"Oh, we have cameras and alarms and the usual things. What else should we have? Guns? We don't do things that way. When Ottawans don't like you, they have municipal hearings -- they don't break down your door and try to kill you."
"Until yesterday."
"True." The priest's voice was quiet. "But it was still not our door that they came to. We check our mail. We check our visitors. There is nothing else for us to do."
Charles was tempted to tell Visineau that this was Kristallnacht for mutants in Canada, and that if he ignored this he would be betraying the children for whom St. Rita's was founded...and that temptation in itself was strange. It was the sort of argument that Erik would make. But Charles had always argued strenuously for legitimate defence -- he hated the strawmen that Erik would set up, his emotional arguments: "Why don't we lie down and die for them? That's what you'd like, isn't it, Charles? Or annihilate ourselves, and save them the trouble." Charles had never held that position, and Erik knew it. The X-Men policed themselves and defended themselves, and would never submit to outside forces that sought their destruction, whether human or mutant. Charles, like Thoreau, valued self-sufficiency, and if necessary, civil disobedience.
But Visineau very nearly was the passive caricature that Erik loved to rail against. Charles remembered Joel's serene statement that the law protects life. What lay behind such thinking? Sheer naïveté and idealism? Lack of imagination? Reluctance to get one's hands dirty? What would Erik say to someone like Visineau?
Answer: nothing. He wouldn't waste his time. Wouldn't waste it on a mere human who got in his way, and who (in his eyes, at least) dared to espouse a sort of auto-genocide for another race.
And what would Charles say?
Also nothing. There was real grief in the man's voice, the sort of grief that magnifies the small things of life and suspends the usual rules, routines, and attitudes. It was not a time for politics, or even for principle. Charles could only imagine what things were like for those forty mutant children at St. Rita's, who were seeing their relatives and their few public allies attacked for standing by them.
"What can we do to help?" he asked.
"I'm happy just to have a call from a colleague, Charles. There's not much else you can do from down there."
"I know someone who might be able to advise you on security," Charles mused, thinking of Ororo and smiling. "She has...a useful perspective on keeping intruders out."
Visineau laughed shortly. "No need. I do intend to tighten things up, but we can find people closer to home."
Still a stubborn man. Charles swallowed a snippy remark about accepting help from others, and changed the subject. "I suppose you'd be too busy to keep an eye on Joel if he went back up there for a while?"
"I could fit in an appointment or two this week, but if he's in the hospital now, he will need more than that. Perhaps you could send somebody with him?"
Charles thought about that. Jean and Scott were far too busy, and the loss of this one Sunday was considerable for them. Hank more or less made his own schedule, but he barely knew Joel. Charles could, perhaps, make some adjustments to his planner and have Scott fill in for physics lessons. "If he does go, I could stay with him. For a few days, at least."
"That's good to hear," said Visineau, sounding relieved. "You know I don't mind being available for him, and I'm in close contact with the family. They're gathering close for the siege too. But you can't take care of everyone at once. Eh bien, you know how it is."
"So I do," Charles said, and bade the priest goodnight.
He took his time wheeling back through the hospital.
Joel was in a private room, so the nurses were willing to be lax about the scheduled visiting hours. But nurses always made exceptions for Charles anyway; he didn't need his telepathic gifts to beguile hospital staff. He had learned that trick long ago, during long hospital stays with white-capped nurses and doctors who smoked in their offices. Different days. He had noticed that Joel had his ways with nurses too, and knew that the boy's soft-spokenness was not just his nature, but a strategy. No one was innocent, to a telepath. He caught every manipulation, every advantage that was taken.
Charles wheeled quietly into the hospital room. The newspaper was folded at the foot of the bed, and Joel was half-invisible, his mind unavailable for comment. It was strange that you couldn't exactly see through him when he was in this state; he wasn't translucent, like ghosts in the movies. Rather, it was as if you could see around him, or past him, as if he were the blurry foreground of a photograph taken with a long depth of field. Not for the first time, Charles wondered exactly how that power worked. Hank had abandoned his alternate dimension theory and was now enamoured with some idea about bending space, but he was the first to admit that the data was simply insufficient for a proper explanation.
Joel himself had no opinion on the subject, and no useful information. Charles suspected that he had gained some control over his powers, in the month or so that he had been at the School, and he believed that these days, Joel chose to disappear more often than not.
"You are thinking of going home for a while," Charles said.
"I think my mother wants me to," Joel said, not looking up.
"You don't want to go?"
Joel shook his head. "I want to go."
"But?"
Joel just shrugged, but Charles could guess that the boy had little energy for dealing with a family crisis, or a national one for that matter. Charles could sympathise. "I see."
Neither of them said anything for awhile. The usual hospital clatterings and buzzings went on in the background, and Joel closed his eyes briefly. He was tired, but Charles wanted to have this discussion.
There was, unfortunately, no easy way to begin it. "Are you ever planning on talking to me, Joel?"
"I'm sorry."
"No, apologies are not what I want. Apologies are not answers."
Joel took a breath, then let it out, probably stifling another sorry. He retreated a little deeper into his aphanic state, becoming just a trembling in the air. A crack in the atmosphere, perhaps. The voice was distant. "I don't have answers. I don't know what you want."
"I want you to feel comfortable enough to be honest with me," said the Professor, choosing his words carefully.
"What, you think I haven't been?" The anger in the hoarse voice surprised Charles, and seemed to surprise Joel as well. He solidified abruptly, and Charles felt a burst of agitation, like the static you hear when turning on a radio. "You think I've been lying to you?"
"Obviously you have," said Xavier, getting angry himself. "Obviously you were lying when you told me you weren't experiencing suicidal ideation. Obviously you were lying when you said you didn't need any extra help. You spent days planning this, and as I said, I do not believe that you ever truly wanted to die. You wanted to send me a message."
"You have no goddamn idea what I wanted!" Joel exploded. "None! Isn't that what you told me this evening? You never even asked me why I did it or how I felt."
"Would you have told me anything if I had?" said Charles, forgetting in his frustration to be professional. "If I was wrong, feel free to correct me."
"You're wrong."
"I need more than that, Joel."
Joel curled up with his arms around his knees. He was quiet for a second, then said, "I had to do it. I knew I had to. What I wanted didn't enter into it."
And he started to dig his fingernails into the skin of his forearms, and Charles remembered what he was supposed to be doing. He was a doctor, Joel was a patient, and it was not his place to play psychic and try to guess what was happening. Telepathy had been a dangerous crutch for him as a young man, but he had not acted like this with a patient in years. What he had said would require an apology, but not tonight -- tonight something else was more important, because for the first time in days (weeks, even?), Joel had volunteered a detail, almost an insight. He had given it without being asked a direct question, without Charles having to guess where the landmines were buried.
"Tell me," he said, quietly.
"I can't."
"Why not?"
"It's too..." Joel trailed off.
"Too what?"
"I'm thinking."
He thought, and then spoke slowly, the words coming haphazard and careful at once, as if he were feeling his way through a dark room. "Poison. It's poisonous. It's -- it's wretched -- it's so bad you need to use old words to describe it. It's shameful. And I can't talk about it."
"Why not?" Charles pressed, seeing that particular indrawn look in Joel's now-visible face, the look that said a patient was already in motion, somewhere in the deep cavities of the head, and the only thing needful was a gentle push. Permission.
"I don't understand it. If I understood I could say. But it comes so suddenly. There aren't any words or reasons. There's nothing that happens outside. It just descends. No -- it rises up, like fog from the river. It comes up. All kinds of things come up. Bad memories. Weird ideas."
"Like what?"
"Like--" Joel struggled for a moment, as if he couldn't make his mouth move in synch with his brain. "God, like what! I really believed it was right to, to do what I did. Necessary. My duty. People have come in and asked why I thought I couldn't go on. I could go on. I've gone on this long. I'm patient. I've never thought I deserved to be happy. But I thought it was right to do this. Dulce et decorum est. I was convinced."
"Why?"
"Because I'm nothing." It was almost like Charles wasn't there at all, as if Charles were the one who could become completely imperceptible. Joel's voice was painful to listen to, a rattle coming from low in the throat. "I'm nothing and I waste people's time. It would make things easier for everyone."
"Easier for who?"
"Everyone. You. My father."
"Why him?"
"He worries."
Charles waited for more, but there was nothing. In Joel's mind, only darkness, in suspension, blank as a mine shaft. Of course it was wrong to pry. But.
"I don't mind," Joel said dully. He was always aware of Charles's telepathic presence, no matter how subtle.
Temptation. "Are you sure?"
"I just...I just want it to stop. Maybe it will make more sense to you than to me."
So Charles reached out his right hand and gently pressed the fingertips to the boy's left temple.
The darkness fell around him, thick, showery, and soft. Like wet snow, maybe, but hot and prickling, like a fever that makes you want to peel off your own skin. He had thought of Joel's mind as a tangle of thorns, and the surface of his thoughts was like that, but here on the inside it was different. The same, but different. A tangle of weeds on a fishing line, which he handed dripping to his father to unravel.
The green bottom of the lake was where the Lucky Strike hung waiting, twisting and reflecting back the light. His father kept a tiny bottle of iodine in the tackle box as well, and swabbed it on his son's fingers when the lures scratched him. Joel was not allowed to cut the belly open and lift out the broken pieces of the lure; he could only hold the flashlight, after posing for the camera with the fierce-mouthed pike that had scared him, jetting along behind the boat and baring its teeth around the line. Pike. Trout. Mask. Smelt. Like a cruel little fisher in the forest of weeds under the lake. Dark pines under water -- a whole snarling nest of other memories came attached to that, long strings of memorised poetry. Sinking, sinking, sleeper. Those associations were delicate, membranous strands that shimmered when the sun caught them, bright as the lure's mirrors, but Charles avoided them, and returned to the dock where Joel was still holding the flashlight with cold wet hands while the scales flew from the curved knife.
The man with the knife was entirely good. An interesting recollection passed by of his father in his formal barrister's robes, waistcoat, and white bands at a Red Mass one year -- and Joel was young then, bored and leaning against his father's side, cheek against the black woollen robe. A sickly beige snake curling under Mary's feet in the side-chapel. A homily in French. Did that matter? No, it didn't. Charles wouldn't bite; he groped back towards the man with the knife, who was entirely good.
Swarms of mosquitoes -- how had he forgotten those? The light jumped as Joel slapped at them. "For heaven's sake, Joel. Ten more minutes."
"The bugs..."
"What about them? Let them eat. You've got enough flesh to spare."
A small remark, but the boy fell silent and let the insects bite. The man with the knife had not meant it that way.
It took a bit more exploring for Charles to realise the import of that stinging little memory; Joel had been fat as a child. Not overweight or stocky, but fat. Charles did not investigate those hot-cheeked gym-class memories too deeply, or the hellish two months at fat camp, but they still burned like lye. They burned: purple-black lakes of poisoned blood in the skin became massive thick scars that looked like burns, like torn paper, over his back and chest, over the now visible ribs, creeping up to the collarbone's hollow. That was that episode of meningitis at thirteen that Charles had seen on the medical records, an illness that devoured the last month of grade eight and a whole summer after that, and left one persistent memory of standing in front of the mirror and examining those irregular ridged scars with his fingers. Sixty pounds gone. It didn't make a difference. When he finally went back to school, Joel was still a peeled nerve trembling in the hallways, hiding in the bathroom and the library, silent as a heretic before the Inquisition when the guidance office asked him what was wrong. How they had interrogated him: What is it? What is the matter? As if there should be some secret, some secret they deserved to know.
But the truth was that the man with the knife had not meant it that way, and he had never--
Abruptly, Charles felt the familiar kicking sensation that meant he was pushing too hard, suffocating his subject in memory. He retreated slowly to the hospital room, and felt the underwater struggling ease. Removing his hand from the boy's temple, Charles opened his eyes.
He was overcome with a feeling of waste. He could have learned that on his own, he thought. No great mysteries had been solved, nor had he figured out where that hidden resentment against the Senator lay buried.
Joel himself was still for a few moments, as if he couldn't move, and then he slowly moved to rub his eyes. "That was...uncomfortable."
"Tell me, Joel," said Charles, making one last attempt. "You said before that you were convinced that it was right to end your life. You don't think that anymore?"
Joel shook his head.
"Why not?"
"I'm in my right mind now."
Indeed? "And what is different? What do you understand now that you didn't when you were...not in your right mind?"
"I just know now that I don't have the right to hurt my parents," said Joel. He sounded exhausted, and Charles decided to let him rest.
Before leaving, he told the boy about his plans to accompany him to Ottawa, and Joel accepted that rather glumly. Perhaps he had been hoping to escape for awhile, and Charles almost felt like letting him have that wish. But Charles suspected he might find some answers to Joel's problems in Ottawa. The bell-tongued city with its glorious towers had to be hiding something.
Quotes and Notes: Gwendolyn MacEwen's poem "Dark Pines under Water" is referenced with the line "Sinking, sinking, sleeper".
"Pike. Trout. Mask. Smelt." is a line from the Rheostatics' "Me and Stupid" (Introducing Happiness, Sire, 1994).