How shall we speak of Canada,
Mackenzie King dead?
The Mother's boy in the lonely room
With his dog, his medium and his ruins?
He blunted us.
F.R. Scott
The Professor had wisely refused to stay with Aunt Carmel. She offered, because she was the only one in the family who had a wheelchair-accessible house, and damned if they would let him stay in a hotel; that was for the sort of ruffians who charged admission for wedding receptions. But the Professor dug his heels in, so to speak, and tirelessly insisted on the phone that he was quite happy to stay in a hotel and wouldn't hear of imposing upon anyone. Joel didn't think that anyone else could have prevailed against his family to refuse their hospitality, but of course Dr. Xavier was the most powerful mind on earth. Even his mother and Aunt Carmel had their limits. The Professor would be staying at the beautiful Château Laurier, in order to spare Carmel's feelings, because to turn her down and then stay at the mere Westin would be an insult.
They were just finished with Customs and were waiting by the baggage carousel when someone ambushed Joel from behind, catching him around the neck with a hug. His mother, of course. She was always doing that -- she would come up from behind and embrace him, and it had always made him panic and struggle until he realised who it was. He remembered being in kindergarten, waiting for his ride home at the end of the day, and having her swoop down upon him and scoop him up, and how he screamed, thinking he was being kidnapped. Everyone had laughed.
Even now, it took him a second to register his mother's patchouli scent and her soft leather raincoat. She kissed him on the top of his head and let him go. "It's so good to see you, darling."
"Yeah. Hi." He straightened his collar.
"How was the flight?"
"Fine. I'm, uh, a little doped up." Dr. Grey had given him Xanax before they left New York, in order to prevent panic on the plane.
His mother raised her eyebrows and turned to the Professor. They quite calmly exchanged compliments and pleasantries, as if everything were normal and they were meeting over tea and squares in the living room at home. Attempted suicides and kidnappings notably did not come up. Joel was grateful for that, but it only contributed to the air of unreality that pervaded everything. As if he could unspool the whole weekend and wind it up again so that nothing terrible would have happened. He would resist the terrible conviction that he deserved to die, and the CFH would resist their own desires, and Joel's father would eat lunch with the Honourable Dean Henstock on a Saturday afternoon.
Joel's mother took him by the arm, dragging him back to reality, and walked between him and the Professor through the light rain out to the parking lot.
They managed to manoeuvre Dr. Xavier into the car with a minimum of undignified manhandling. Joel's mother was a special ed teacher, and had a fair amount of experience with the handicapped, particularly children who were far less able to help themselves than the Professor was. They drove from the airport along the curving tree-lined parkway, north to the city. Rain was falling harder now, drumming on the roof.
"Are you happy to be home, Joel?" his mother asked, rather plaintively, from the front seat. She was hurt by his silence, as she always was.
So he answered her, telling the truth. "I really am."
He could never have explained to anyone else, even had he been in the habit of explaining things, how he felt to be home. Returning to the city of his birth. Even when Joel had talked about it with his friend Paul at St. Rita's, he still could not explain it. Paul had just shaken his head and said, "No, no, I don't feel like that anywhere. I don't feel like I belong." But it wasn't about belonging, it was just about...and he still couldn't describe it. A city as a whole could have a personality, he thought, and even if you had no friends there you could still love the city itself. You could be somehow compatible with its streets, the smell of the air.
They dropped the Professor off downtown at the castle-like Château Laurier, then drove all the way back out to Manotick, where the house seemed grey and forlorn, the lilacs all dead on the trees.
His mother opened the door herself, but as they were taking off their coats Amanda appeared at the end of the hallway. She did a double take on seeing Joel. "I didn't realise you were going to the airport, ma'am."
"Didn't I tell you? No, leave the bag. Joel can bring it up himself."
Amanda put the bag down again, and actually wiped her hand on her skirt. She did it surreptitiously, but Joel saw it, as he always did. She addressed his mother, not looking at him. "Lindsay King from the Citizen called at one, wanting to schedule some time to talk."
"Lord." His mother hung up her scarf and sighed. "All right, put her down for six tonight. We can eat at five, talk to her at six, and then still be at Notre Dame for seven. Tell her twenty minutes, absolutely no more."
"Yes, ma'am." Amanda disappeared again down the hall.
His mother checked her watch and told Joel, "She's working until nine -- I know you like to know when she's leaving so you can avoid her. Are you coming to the vigil tonight? You don't have to."
"At Notre Dame? I don't know." The basilica was huge, and there would probably be a big crowd, including photographers who loved to get shots of "the faithful" being brave in a crisis. "No. I can't."
"Well, go sometime, please. It's been ages since you've been to Mass, and I want you to go. You make everything worse by hiding in your room all the time."
Joel nodded automatically. "I know. I will."
"Oh, you missed the call from the prime minister, too. He phoned last night."
The prime minister, Tom Sherbrooke, was an aging redhead of the type that freckled all over, with tired blue eyes and a soft voice that picked its way across long, rambling sentences. He was sharper than he looked, though, and Joel liked him. So did his father. "What did he have to say?"
"Nothing, of course. But he had to call. He offered condolences, and wished you the best on your exams. Apparently he'll be making a formal statement tonight at seven. Which I'll miss, but I guess you can watch it if you're home."
"I guess."
Joel's mother unzipped his bag and peered inside. "When are you going to learn to pack properly? You've barely got enough things for two days in here."
"Would you leave my stuff alone? I have lots of things here already. More than I need."
"Exactly, because you didn't bring enough things when you left for New York. And your father did most of the packing for you, at that. I wouldn't have had to ship six boxes across the border if you had done some thinking ahead of time."
Joel would have managed at Westchester with his single duffle bag for months, and had planned to have another two boxes sent after him, but his mother had outdone herself with six boxes -- books, knick-knacks, extra sweaters, a suit and nice shoes in case of formal occasions (ah yes, the annual Mentally Ill Mutants' Viennese Ball, who could forget it?), and so on. That was infuriating, that she would go through his things and pack for him, but there was no point in telling her so. Her rehearsed comeback to that was always: "If you don't want me rifling through your possessions, do a better job of packing."
So he just shrugged and took the bag from her, bringing it up to his room.
She actually followed him up the stairs. "How's your stomach? I remember you were sick for a week after the last time."
The last time he had to have his stomach pumped, she meant. "I'm all right," he muttered.
"No, you aren't," she said, almost impatiently. "Don't be silly. You never want to tell us when you're upset and then things like this happen. Are you happy there in New York? Or -- well, obviously not, but do you think it's helping you to be there?"
He put the bag on his bed, wondering how he could get her to leave. Maybe if he kept his back to her she would take the hint. "Yeah. It's not Dr. Xavier's fault."
"I know it's not, darling. It's nobody's fault. But -- oh, sweetheart, I wish we could make you better."
How unsatisfying pity was, like drinking seawater. He remembered being in high school, before the seizures and blackouts had started, wishing that people would realise something was wrong with him. Back then, he had thought that if people would just see him and pay attention, they would give him some mercy, and at least he wouldn't feel so alone. But it didn't work out like that. It only made him hideously ashamed. He wanted to swat away all these darlings and sweethearts. Leave me alone, he thought. To be totally forgotten, that would be ideal.
His mother stood behind him, rubbing his back the way she did when he was little and couldn't sleep. He didn't move. "You're losing weight again. I can feel every rib."
Joel did not react, could not, could only wait until she moved her hands away. He didn't know why it should bother him to have his own mother touch him, but he was bothered. To be touched was adding too much intimacy to a relationship that was already strained with too much feeling. It embarrassed him, in the old sense of the word: it was an encumbrance, a heavy load that kept him from moving.
She turned him around, forcing him, and he couldn't meet her eyes, so he looked down at the amber beads of her necklace. Polished amber from Poland, flecked with ancient insects, her favourite piece of jewellery. She chucked him under the chin. "Joel. Look at me."
He wished he could have disappeared, but he didn't quite dare do it deliberately. The Xanax fog had lifted; he could have fallen into it if he got upset enough.
"I know this is hard for you," she said, catching his eye, "but it's hard for me too. You know I find it really hurtful when you act like this. When you push me away, as if what you want is all that matters."
"Look, I just -- I'm not pushing anyone away, I just..."
"You just what?"
"I don't know. I don't -- you know I don't like people touching me," he said, all in a rush.
Her face crumpled, so he looked away. Long dead insect legs in amber. "Not even me?"
"No. Sorry." It wasn't that simple, of course; Mr. Summers had hugged him, in the hospital, and then it had felt okay -- because Joel knew that Mr. Summers wasn't the type to throw hugs around, because it had just been something that was necessary then. Not a big statement, not something possessive to prove a point. Look at me, I'm a warmly affectionate earth mother.
God, he could be cruel to people, in his own mind. His mother loved him; she didn't deserve this.
She was hurt, but the hurt was for him. "Why not, sweetheart? What caused this?"
"I don't know."
"Did something happen? You would tell me, wouldn't you, if someone ever..."
"Yes, Mom, I would." A lie. It had never happened, but if it did, he would never tell a soul, he knew it. "I'm just messed up, you know that. I just really hate being touched, it feels dirty, like people are laughing at me...God, I sound so insane."
She nodded, sitting down on his bed and looking at the things on his bedside table. The clock, the radio, a half-popped blister pack of sleeping pills, a rosary, one of his communication cards from St. Rita's. I cannot participate in activities today.
His mother picked up the rosary and played with it, winding the beads around her thumb. "You say you would tell me, but the kinds of things you say, they're so typical of abused children. I can't help thinking that somebody did hurt you, and now you don't want to talk about it or remember it."
"Mom! Nothing like that ever happened. I don't know if you remember, but I wasn't exactly the most attractive specimen of boyhood--"
She interrupted, "It's not about attractiveness, Joel, you know that. It's about power. Shy children are at risk, they told me, because pedophiles prey on them."
"So I can't do anything right, can I?" That slipped out, and it was clearly a mistake. He shouldn't have allowed this conversation to go on.
His mother shook her head, almost rolling her eyes but covering it by pretending to be very interested in his poster of the young Bob Dylan. "I never said you did something wrong by not being abused, if that was your point."
"No, it was that 'ooh, shy children' bit."
"What about it?"
"Never mind," he said, a little embarrassed. He wasn't sure what he had meant by that remark, actually. "It doesn't matter. But why can't you believe me when I tell you there's nothing there? Everyone's always acting like there must be some secret reason why I'm so fucked up."
"Language."
"Sorry."
"Just please consider other people's feelings. You are not the only person in the universe, and others will sometimes need your support, even when you don't feel like giving it. Think beyond yourself."
She was right, of course, and now it did hurt enough to drag him down into the white. All the way past the hazy shallows where he could still speak and hear, down to the cold depths where there was nothing. The last thing he saw was his mother sitting on his bed, staring at the now-empty air, with an expression that was mingled frustration, fear, and perhaps a tinge of awe.
Joel was happily past caring. Not happily: blankly. The arctic night of the Aphanes had never felt so welcoming. The long night, naked, high over the roof of the world, / Where time seemed frozen in the cold of space. He disappeared into it, let the cold into him like the story of the sorcerer who let the north wind into his veins. She was right and he was selfish, an invalid brat, but at the moment he was not. At the moment he was nothing at all but the rush of wind high up in the atmosphere, whiteness and loud silence. It didn't matter if he never surfaced again.
No. No. That was the last thing he was aware of, that groping No of perspective trying to right itself.
When he awoke, it was still light out. Progress! Joel tried to sit up, and then had to grab the plastic bucket by the side of the bed to throw up, a stream of yellow bile. Coming out of the deep Aphanes affected him that way sometimes: it could cause anything from coughing fits to vertigo and nausea. Dr. McCoy back in New York had not been able to figure out what was going on there, but he had been making noises about doing a barium milkshake test. Joel didn't like the sound of that.
"One would think that something is wrong when use of your power affects you that way," Hank had argued. "A mutation is not an illness."
The clock read 6:59 p.m., and his watch said it was still Monday. Couldn't take any of that for granted. Joel debated going downstairs and turning on the TV, then decided he wasn't up to that. He rolled over and turned on the radio to CBC. The radio was an old one that had lived at the cottage for many years, with a cracked brown plastic casing that put its origins perhaps in the 60's or 70's. Joel used to keep it on all the time when he was living up here, going in and out of the Aphanes constantly and unable to read books or watch television. Hearing tended to be the last of his senses to cut out.
"The prime minister," announced one of the voices solemnly.
"Good evening. On Saturday, our nation's capital suffered a terrible blow to safety, human rights, and the rule of law. Four loyal public servants lost their lives: the Honourable Dean Henstock, Marin Leavitt, and Constables David Persey and Michael Shipley. My most sincere condolences go out to their loved ones, and a nation now mourns these devoted and hard-working men. The fate of Senator James McCree remains unknown. His life is in danger, and my thoughts are with his family tonight. But tonight I am speaking to you to send a message: the government of Canada will never allow a man's life to be used for bargaining. The RCMP and regional police from both Ontario and Quebec are actively engaged in finding the headquarters of this terrorist organisation, but we still hope for a peaceful resolution..."
God, Sherbrooke's speeches were always so lame.
Joel curled up into a foetal position, but it didn't help. Something was churning inside him, the beginnings of a massive stress body-ache or a clusterfuck of panic and rage, and he couldn't deal with that now. He got up and went to the small bathroom that adjoined his room, and checked the medicine cabinet.
The old unfinished SSRI prescriptions were useless. Zoloft, Prozac, Celexa, Paxil, and half a dozen others, none of which had worked. Half a bottle of Oxycocet, but that was a bit too much firepower. Gravol was probably too weak. Neo-Citran, ah, comforting -- but that would require boiling water, which meant a trip downstairs. He would have risked it had he been alone in the house, but Amanda was still down there, and would be until nine. No, thank you.
Well, now. A full bottle of Zyprexa, sitting there amongst the impotent anti-depressants. Perfect. Joel had been on Zyprexa for a couple of weeks, until his family and doctors agreed that he had turned into a zombie. But it did have two useful functions: it guaranteed many hours of cavernous, sticky-mouthed sleep, and at least a day afterward out of the reach of emotions.
He took one of the little white pills with a handful of tap water, and sat down on his bed, waiting for the effects to kick in. Sherbrooke was still talking about the supremacy of law and the greatness of Canada's national police force, despite the urgent need for inquiry concerning the security forces on Parliament Hill. Et cetera.
Being a zombie wasn't so bad, Joel thought. Especially when you weren't disintegrating all over the place and eating brains. Zyprexa made him hungry, but only the way cows are hungry: put food in front of him, and he would eat it until you took it away again. Yes, being on this drug had definitely been more like being a cow than a zombie. What mattered was that he wasn't himself, and maybe the Professor was right when he said that Joel had never wanted to die in the first place. He just wanted to kill this shut-in mental patient, the waste of skin who trundled around the attic trying to decide if he was a zombie or a cow, who had seen the best psychologists in the business and was still irrationally miserable.
But of course, if he killed that person, then what was left? Nothing, Joel suspected was the answer -- but he was used to being nothing. It came to him naturally.
He fell heavily into a blank, fur-lined sleep, his clothes still on. There were no dreams and no sensations but that of being wrapped in cloth -- felt, perhaps, or baize, something stiff and warm.
Charles at the Château Laurier was just minutes away from Notre Dame, so after a leisurely dinner alone in the hotel dining room, he called an entirely unnecessary taxi to bring him to the massive silver basilica on Sussex Drive.
Notre Dame had two sharp, aggressive-looking towers, and a wooden Madonna between them, her yellowish colour clashing a bit with the grey stone and silvery steeples. Charles bypassed the high stone steps for a side door, which he hoped would be open. He had become adept at finding these hidden accessibility doors, coming in from the side or the back like a thief. It killed the spontaneity to call ahead and ask to have these doors opened for him, so sometimes he would try a locked door and then leave that church or that business, and not return. Charles like spontaneity, as surprised as his students would be to hear it.
Inside, the church was a riot of carvings, statues, and windows, with gaudy columns that looked like a sort of candy Charles remembered from his childhood, something they didn't make anymore. Every surface was fluted or rosetted or arabesqued. It was too much, an oppressive build-up of art. Even the ceiling was painted dark blue and spangled with thousands of golden stars. Charles had been raised in a Free Methodist church where a few square panes of coloured glass in the windows were hailed as princely decoration, and possibly suspect: something inside him still looked at churches like Notre Dame and wondered, like Judas, what this all was for, why the money was not spent on the poor.
Lily McCree was seated near the front of the church, as if this were a funeral, and she waved him over. She was dressed in conservative grey wool, her long hair pulled back, and Charles realised that she was actually close to his age. She must have had Joel when she was in her forties, which explained a few things.
Charles had to sit in the aisle, sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb, which was one reason (not the main one) for his rare appearance at religious services. Joel was notably absent too, and Charles asked about him.
"He's...unavailable," Mrs. McCree said, with a small glance at the other people gathering in the church behind them. "He went out on me this afternoon."
"He's under a lot of stress, I suppose."
"Well, we all are. I hate to put pressure on him, but...I wish he would make more of an effort."
Charles sensed sticky-flypaper resentment, for which it was hard to blame her.
After Mass, Lily talked him into a drink. They went to the house of the famous Aunt Carmel, where a number of relatives were gathered for the same purpose. The old house in the downtown neighbourhood known as the Glebe was narrow and tight, but everyone in the kitchen exclaimed with delight to see him, the American doctor who had taken the trouble to fly all the way to Ottawa for the sake of their young cousin.
"What will you have, Doctor?" asked Aunt Carmel, who didn't seem nearly as terrifying as Joel had made her sound. She was old and stooped, and wore black like Queen Victoria, but her white hair was still thick, swept back in a French twist. Her accent, which Charles at first took to be Irish, was actually from Newfoundland.
"Is there any of the nice rye left?" Lily asked.
"The doctor gets it, if there is."
"I know, that's why I asked. It's excellent, Charles, really. Have the rye."
Charles accepted a glass of the nice rye, which was indeed good, smooth and golden. Rye was usually too bland for his taste (he preferred Scotch), but this had a pleasant smoky undertone, and something else that you almost wouldn't notice, something he couldn't place. Like a secret. He sat at the kitchen table with these other people, strangers from another country, and let the conversation unwind around him while sipping at that warming golden rye, trying to guess what that elusive flavour was. Before he knew it, almost two hours had gone by.
"I wonder where he is," Lily said, swirling her ice cubes around. "The police tell me they probably have a hideout close by, maybe just outside Hull, maybe up in the Gatineau hills somewhere. He's probably less than an hour away. I feel so helpless."
She certainly did. Alcohol lowered people's inhibitions, and Charles always found that people became much louder mentally when they were drinking. When he was young, he had avoided parties and pubs for that very reason, and when he did go he stayed sober. Charles hated to lose control, and it happened very rarely. But now he could feel Mrs. McCree's worry tugging at his mental sleeve, and this very worthy rye was softening up his shields until they were fine and porous, letting in streams of other thought.
"We are not helpless," he said. "We can choose our reactions, even if we can't affect events themselves."
"But we can't. I can't choose not to feel this way, I mean. This is my husband. How can you love someone if you don't worry about them?"
One of the cousins, who Charles thought was named Simon, said, "What's that the Bible says? Who can by worrying add one day to his life? Nobody talks about Providence anymore, you know."
"Well, that was always a hard line to swallow."
"Many people find that spirituality helps with these feelings of powerlessness," said Charles. He was talking like a self-help book, he realised. Oh, the shame of it, for an Oxbridge intellectual!
Lily laughed. "Oh Lord, I feel even more helpless when I come out of church. It's one thing to turn it over to the police or the school board, but when things are so desperate that God's the only one who can change them, then you have problems. But we've certainly been in that position enough over the years."
She paused. "You get so tired, you know. Not being able to do anything, it'll wear you right out. What's wrong with him, Charles? Do you have an answer?"
He took a second to realise she was talking about Joel now, not her husband. "You were most likely told that depression is common in children who suffer meningitis, weren't you? It could be nothing more than that."
"No," she said quietly. "Even before he got sick. He would come home from school and not say a word to us. His weight was the problem, we think. But I was hoping that he would have said something to you."
"The weight was part of it, yes," said Charles, remembering those acid memories that lived in the dark weeds of the green lake, where the fierce pike hunted. "I know he hates to think that he's making you worry."
"But what else can I do? I can't even hug him, my own baby. God, listen to me. I'm getting maudlin." She put her glass down. "I ought to get home, anyway. It was lovely to spend some time with you, Charles."
They left in taxis going in opposite directions.
Joel had been dreaming about living underwater, when suddenly his mother was in his room shaking him awake again. The sleep climbed off him but waited at his side; it was that sort of sleep. You couldn't kill it just by getting up. No, it wasn't at his side, it was still in his body, weighing the limbs down. God, Zyprexa. He never thought of this part when he took the pills, how hard it was to come back to the surface. His eyes were full of sand, as if he had been buried under the ocean floor. "What?"
"Phone. I called you and called you, but you didn't wake up." His mother handed him the cordless phone, whose buttons were glowing green in the dark room. She turned on the lamp by his bed, and the walls turned gold.
Joel held the phone to his ear, not entirely certain that he remembered how to use such an object. The clock face read eleven, but he felt as if he'd been asleep for thousands of years. And unlike Rip Van Winkle, while he slept time had gone backwards, so that he was not in the future but the distant past, sometime when this whole countryside was tropical and wild. Long ago the arctic was as warm as the equator.
He remembered what you said on telephones. "Hello?"
"Joel. You're all right."
That seemed to be what everyone always said to him, asking it as a question or stating it as a fact, trying to reassure themselves. Joel didn't recognise the voice. "Who's this?"
A moment's pause. "It's your father, Joel."
"Oh my God. Shit. I'm sorry, Dad, I'm sorry." The sleep had retreated further now. "You sound funny on this phone, and -- and I just got up, that's all. I'm so sorry. You're okay?"
"For now." There were some murmurs in the background. "They let me call because they wanted me to relay some messages to the police. Your mother took them down. She said you were home so I wanted to tell you how much I love you."
"Oh Jesus, Dad." They were going to kill him, definitely, probably as soon as he hung up the phone. Joel felt like throwing up. "I mean, I love you too. But Jesus God."
Why couldn't he think of anything better to say than that, to his father who would probably be dead within half an hour? Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Of course he had to pick tonight to drug himself to leaden stupidity, on a night when he needed to be clear. What if his father had clues to give in code, or something similarly cinematic?
"Now, don't panic, Joel. They haven't shown me their faces yet. Why would they bother with hiding if they were going to kill me?" His father sounded ludicrously calm. "I explained this to your mother. They aren't murderers. They're ordinary people who believe they're doing what they have to do to protect Canada's interests."
That was certainly for the benefit of those murmuring voices in the background, so Joel did not argue. "Oh, Dad."
"I did the nine first Fridays, you know. That means I won't go without a chance for Last Rites. So they won't just shoot me."
"That's not what it means, Dad." Joel's voice had broken.
His father dropped the jocular tone. "Yes, it does. A promise is a promise. Are you doing well with Dr. Xavier?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I'm doing a lot better."
"That's good. Still studying, I hope."
Joel wiped his nose on the back of his hand. "Yeah, I am."
"Okay. Keep it up then. I think they want the phone back now--" There was a click, and the line went dead.
"Hello?"
Silence.
Quotes and Notes: Naturally, as Rick Mercer has pointed out, the Liberals will rule Canada forever, so the PM in the not-too-distant future is a Liberal.
The title of this chapter is, of course, a line from the Tragically Hip's song "Long Time Running", from the album Road Apples (1991). F. R. Scott's satirical "W.L.M.K." from The Eye of the Needle is highly recommended.
The nine first Fridays is a devotion to the Sacred Heart which has waned a great deal in popularity since the 60's, supposed to ensure that you won't die without having a chance to confess your sins. Finally, the story of the sorcerer and the north wind that Joel makes reference to is a version of the Wendigo story.