Sometimes he wants to be killed, putting his
heart or what there is of it in the way of arrows,
bullets, he wants his soul or what there is of it
to spring heavenward to the village where people
begin again, he too
wants to cross the bridge.
Paulette Jiles, "Windigo"
Inspector Jérôme Brazeau had the look of someone terminally unimpressed, with a face whose features seemed too big for it. He had a long Roman nose and thick dark eyebrows that nearly met in the middle, and he was probably muscular in his youth -- now he had the mountainous heaviness of late middle age.
He set up at the kitchen table, slamming his briefcase down as if he blamed the McCrees for dragging him out to work at this hour, and spent about eighty minutes talking to Joel's mother. His English was perfect, accentless, sharp and quick as a flicked rubber band. He kept a notebook open in front of him, and the notes he took were copious but illegible, ornamented occasionally with bored doodles of food items: pies, loaves of bread, carrots, heads of lettuce.
Joel observed this, invisible, from over the inspector's shoulder, although he mostly hung in the back corner of the kitchen. He didn't care much if he fell over into the whiteness, not tonight, and paradoxically that seemed to make it much easier to control his state. When Brazeau dotted a sentence with a rather violent period and turned a page, saying, "All right, let's have the son in here," Joel was able to drift back to his room and reappear there in time to answer his mother's call.
Brazeau did not get up when Joel entered the room (again), but he extended one big hand -- one of those subtle handshakes with no perceptible movement that the RCMP favoured. He introduced himself, and said, "I'm leading the investigation on your father's kidnapping. Can we take the action outside, please?" This he addressed to the other two officers still talking to Joel's mother. "Thank you."
When they were alone in the kitchen, the inspector rubbed his forehead and uncapped his pen again. "All right, you spoke to the Senator after your mother. She woke you up to receive the call. What did he have to say to you?"
Joel repeated the conversation from memory; his father's words were clear enough in his mind, but he was vague on what exactly he had babbled into the phone. Brazeau wrote it all down, though, and flipped back through his notebook to read the earlier stuff again.
He tapped his pen on the desk for awhile, then looked up at Joel, studying him carefully. "You're the mutant, then?"
"Yeah." Joel hated that word, hated the 50's sci-fi sound of it.
"Show me," said Brazeau, leaning forward a bit.
Joel felt a moment of complete outrage, as if he had been asked to strip and display his genitals, but he hid that and descended slowly into the Aphanes. The whiteness was underneath him, a yawning vastness, but he could stay above it if he was careful. When he had entirely disappeared, Brazeau stretched out his hand across the table corner and moved his fingers experimentally through the empty air. Joel reappeared as soon as he took away his hand.
"Your mother said it wasn't well controlled."
"It wasn't. I've been getting better." He wasn't sure why that was happening, but it was. Xavier had taught him some exercises, almost as an afterthought, just as Father Gilles had tried to do. They were actually working, for the moment. Joel's policy was not to trust the inner workings of his head, even if he seemed to be making progress.
Brazeau made a note. "You can't be touched -- can you walk through things? Walls, closed doors?"
"Uh-huh."
"Huh. Your mum says you have some mental problems."
"I guess."
"Fill me in, please."
Joel was sceptical. "You know what I have, if you talked to my mom."
"I can see the Liberal Party influence on your young character. No, I don't know what you have."
"You know I was bad enough to be at St. Rita's."
"But you're not anymore, are you? I need specifics here, okay? Let's just hear the diagnoses."
"Major depression, generalised anxiety, and avoidant personality disorder," Joel said. He would have put up more of a fuss, if he hadn't had some recollection that the material was already public. His father had made an impassioned speech on bullying and emotional disturbances in children, a couple of years ago, and might well have named names in the debate afterwards, if not in the speech itself. Joel therefore had the lingering feeling of having been exposed, although he didn't know if he actually had been or not.
"No psychosis there?"
"No." Father Gilles had refrained from listing the Affair of the Shared Room as a psychotic episode, preferring to describe it as an "uncharacteristic bout of extreme paranoia, reality testing intact", and Joel was grateful for that.
Brazeau wrote all this down, and then asked, "D'you have a security clearance, by any chance?"
"No."
"You could get one, though," the inspector said, and leaned close to murmur, "You might have an interesting career ahead of you. Either CSIS or us at the RCMP -- it's a good opportunity."
"I don't think I'm really the type," said Joel. It was almost funny, although he knew better than to laugh.
"No?" Brazeau made a who knows? gesture. "What are you hoping to do? University?"
"Yeah, probably." No probably about it -- university or death, in his family.
"Ha. Where're you going, Wittenberg?"
Joel had a hard time interpreting jokes about himself, so he usually let them pass without comment. "I don't know."
"Not an English major, I guess?"
God, he hated this kind of person, who had to take little sniping shots at everything, who would assume you were stupid rather than just unwilling to play along.
"History," he said, refusing to react outwardly. "Or politics. Maybe law school eventually."
"The Invisible Lawyer, huh? I don't know. If you weren't so rich, we'd offer to pay for school, lodgings, whatever you needed. So what do we offer you?"
Joel was a little uneasy. How badly did the RCMP want mutants?
Brazeau shrugged, like he thought Joel was just playing hardball. "Well, think about it. The RCMP is interested. We could use a couple of people like you. I'll give you a card. You'll be eighteen soon, eh?"
Joel nodded silently.
"Huh. Back to business, then, I guess." The inspector flipped back a few pages again, and said, "Do you have any ideas about who might have been involved in this? These guys got into the East Block, they knew where your dad would be -- what do you think? How did they know that?"
"I don't know."
Brazeau just waited, doodling pictures of wheat sheaves and milk cartons.
"Amanda Kilborne?" Joel said at last, hesitantly. "That's my dad's assistant."
"What gives you a bad feeling about her?"
"She had all the information on my dad's schedule. And she doesn't like mutants."
"You don't think so? Why's she working here, then?"
"It's a job. We got her boyfriend a spot too, working for the Heritage Minister." Amanda and her boyfriend weren't rich enough to quit over anti-mutant politics.
"Who's the boyfriend?"
"Henri-Michel Marchand. He works for Mike Lalonde, who has his office in the East Block."
"Okay." Brazeau sounded bored. "Why didn't you guys fire her?"
"My parents think I'm imagining it. That she hates mutants."
"Is that..." The inspector seemed to look for a diplomatic way of phrasing it, and failed. "Is that likely?"
Joel didn't have any proof, of course. He was paranoid sometimes, and it was true that he usually assumed people didn't like him before they had even met. And yet he thought that Amanda was different from these unspoken and probably imaginary enmities. Even though it was muted by necessity, her hatred had a shockingly real quality, unlike the ambiguous disdain he saw in other people. But all he could say was, "She doesn't like me."
"Yeah, well, that could mean a lot of things," said Brazeau, snickering. He gathered up his notebook and levered himself up from the table. "I'm gonna go check on those clowns upstairs. Think about the Force, though, seriously. You don't want to end up sending your cereal box tops to the MI6 like the guys at CSIS, do you? And don't worry, you wouldn't have to go to Regina. I can promise you that."
Charles did not sleep well, even in the silken comfort of his Château Laurier suite, and the sounds of construction outside woke him early. Joel called soon afterwards to clumsily ask him if he would go with them to Marin Leavitt's funeral. Charles agreed, hoping to give some moral support -- he didn't know anymore what else he could be doing up here.
Ottawa was a tactical error, he thought: he wouldn't be here long enough to do any good, and if the crisis dragged on too long then Joel would stall for time, try to avoid coming back to New York to continue with therapy. Now, at a moment when they were so close to forming an alliance and perhaps reaching a breakthrough, all their progress could fade away.
In the taxi on his way out to Manotick, Charles heard about the Senator's phone call from the radio news. The CFH were apparently demanding changes to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to have mutants specifically excluded from its protections, or to have "normal" humans named as a protected group. They apparently weren't sure which was better. Charles wondered if they had thought of asking the expert human rights lawyer they were holding captive.
"That's rather an extreme thing to demand, isn't it?" Charles asked the taxi driver.
"Sure is," the man said. "I'm not sure they can change it -- don't they have to get all the provinces to agree or something? Or is that the Constitution? But it doesn't matter, cause they're a bunch of idiots and they're not going to get their way. I just feel bad that so many people had to die for it. And it's not looking good for the Senator, I guess."
"Hmm," said Charles, in his favourite non-committal tone.
"I saw his wife in the paper, too. Sad business, eh? I remember when he lost his seat in the election a few years back, because the Tories really got on the mutant issue hard. Which is -- I don't know if you're a Tory or not --"
"I'm an American, actually."
"Oh! Well, there you go, you know how this stuff gets blown out of proportion, eh? I hear the fuss in the States all the time about dangerous mutants. All they gotta do is put the mutants who commit crimes in jail, right? That seems simple enough to me. Some people -- get the people in this city talking on politics, I swear to God -- they say it's too hard for cops to arrest mutants, because they have an unfair advantage. But you know what, my cousin can kick down a brick wall with his feet. He did it once. And he got arrested just fine."
Charles did not know what to say to that, so he fell back on, "Ah."
"See, all these people trying to change things are just going to wreck it all. We don't need all these revolutions, or referendums, or to get rid of the Queen, or any of that. They should just settle down. It's not such a bad world to live in as it is."
"One hesitates to use the word 'martyr'," said the priest, "because it has been so abused over the centuries. From September 11th to Brébeuf and his brethren, people have given up their lives for things that we find questionable: the deaths of so-called infidels, the assimilation of Natives. But Marin Leavitt -- I say this with great confidence -- like the Honourable Dean Henstock, like the two Mounties who died on Saturday -- Marin Leavitt was a martyr. He died because he had worked, as Commissioner for Human Rights, for the marginalised and the weak, those unwanted by society. That includes mutants. Marin died, was murdered in his prime, because a group of terrorists found this unacceptable. Marin Leavitt was truly a martyr for the cause of human dignity."
People often called Charles a starry-eyed idealist, but even he was uncomfortable with this eulogy. It was true enough that the man had died because of his beliefs, but it was equally true that he hadn't exactly faced down a firing squad or a tank, or gone to the stake without recanting. He'd been blown up while getting his Saturday newspaper. Unshriven, unanel'd, in the blossoms of his sin. To call that martyrdom seemed to give the crime itself a sort of dignity, as if it had been Marin's choice to die. Would he perhaps have repudiated his beliefs had he been held at gunpoint? Shouldn't a martyr have to make that decision, at some point? Shouldn't anyone get the chance to recant?
It was a closed coffin. It had been closed even at the wake, apparently, because of the injuries the bomb had caused to his face and neck. "Blew his face right off," said one elderly gentleman, after the Mass was over.
They were standing around in the vestibule of Good Shepherd, a sleek, modern church in the East End suburbs. Half-frozen date squares and Nanaimo bars had been provided. The church stood at the edge of town, and all that could be seen through the windows was highway and deep woods.
Joel wore a dark suit and what looked like a school tie, a welcome change from his usual frayed black sweaters. He stood by his mother for a few minutes, looking antsy, and finally excused himself and escaped to the parking lot. Charles followed.
"I haven't had much chance to speak with you, since the airport yesterday," Charles said. "Are you glad to have heard from your father?"
"Well, he's probably dead by now," said Joel, in a tone that sounded almost casual. Charles knew better, having access to his thoughts: it was late November there, dry leaves and twigs, the bears in hibernation. Joel would not expend energy on hope, not now.
But he asked, "What makes you think that?"
"Just -- they let him call, and Sherbrooke made that speech saying he wouldn't negotiate, and they made that crazy demand for Charter protection...it seems like they were all set to kill him, and to make it seem like less than murder, they asked for something. Something they knew they wouldn't get."
Charles could not deny that it was very much possible that the Senator was already dead, so he did not try. "How do you feel about that? About potentially losing your father?"
"I wish they would get it over with, one way or the other."
It felt like rain, and the green woods seemed to shimmer with it. For a moment, Charles could almost imagine that they were in the distant past, when only loggers came this way. Blind wilderness, without words.
"Did your father say he loved you?"
Joel looked down at him, eyes narrowed. He pulled his mind back, a spider retreating into a crevice. "Yup."
"Do you believe that?"
"Yeah, I do. He loved me. I don't deny that."
"Ah, you don't deny it. But do you accept it?" Joel shrugged. Charles pressed further. "It seems to me that at your core you don't accept that you can truly be loved. Does that sound right to you?"
Joel glanced back at the church. "If I had the time -- I could tell you --"
"We have the time," said Charles. "Trust me."
"When I was young..." Joel hesitated, and then started again. "Look, the thing is there are two true stories. I was loved, I was loved all my life, that's absolutely true. Absolutely. But it's also true that everyone hated me, laughed at me, all of that. Everyone at school. At home things were fine. There was the outer shell, that my parents loved, that got its picture taken every fall in the good clothes, and there was the inner thing that everyone else seemed to see when they looked at me."
Joel stood still for a few moments, looking out at the woods at the edge of the parking lot. He adjusted his tie, unconsciously. "Does that make sense? My parents love me, they love the shell. But the other thing is -- not even a monster. It's just need, need and something that inspires hate, something that makes people turn their backs. It's a tumour of the personality. If I go on living it will grow and grow and there won't be anything of me left, just it."
He said no more, and Charles knew that an answer could fit in here, a wise answer. And yes, he could have fashioned one, mirroring back what the boy had said in psychological terms. It wasn't an uncommon feeling, to believe in a secret flaw in the self that rendered one damaged goods. Victims of sexual abuse had it, and other children who had been subjected to small traumas, repeated, overlooked: they produced this pathology.
But Charles did not want to give the therapist's answer. He said nothing.
"That was why I did it, why I tried to kill myself. Not so much the first time -- at Mr. Leavitt's house. But if I could I'd have gone way up north, up to some place where the climate could kill me, and I would have done it there. That's where this thing belongs, it belongs far away from people. But I have to think of my parents, who lived this long to have a son and want what they paid for. No, all right, you're right. That isn't true. But they want me to get better. That's all they want, they're the only people who care about me, and I can't do it for them."
Joel sank down to sit on the curb, rubbing the back of his neck. He then looked up at Charles and said, "Do you get what I'm saying? Do you believe me?"
"I believe you," said Charles. "But I want you to know that your parents are not the only ones who care about you. I care about you very much."
"No, you don't. You care about succeeding with me, and that's about it. I don't blame you, but don't try to kid yourself, or me." The same false casual tone as before, trying to hold back some powerful emotion. Charles could make out the fringes of it, but no more. "You don't know me well enough to care about me."
"I know quite a bit about you, Joel."
Silence.
"I know that you love learning, and you love art and poetry. You have a strong sense of duty, a somewhat overdeveloped conscience. You want people to approve of you. You..." Charles began to feel the truth of what Joel had said. He didn't know, not really, and his caring was impersonal. He could have reached into the boy's mind and simply created trust, created a pleasant hormonal feeling of closeness, and perhaps he could have even justified it to himself -- you're saving a life, it's no different from medicating a patient until he can respond to therapy. But it wouldn't have eased his own sense of failure.
"You're trying not to hurt my feelings," Joel said.
"Yes, a bit."
"This is what I mean when I say the tumour is taking me over. By the end there'll be nothing at all to know about me. I'll turn into pages from the DSM-V. And when that happens I'm going to stop fucking around and really do it. I'll take a train up to Kenora or somewhere, get out in the woods, and blow my head off with a shotgun."
"So now I know not to let you go up north for a hunting trip," Charles said, attempting a light tone and failing.
"Oh, you won't be in the picture by then. You're going to give up, just like Father Gilles did."
And now Charles could feel that powerful emotion that had been trembling behind the boy's shields. It sang like a plucked string, and smelled sharp as mustard, and a long shiver went over Charles's nerves as he probed it. To name and label it would be to reduce it to something simple, something a doctor could read in a medical journal and nod over sagely and safely. But Charles could feel, all at once, the weight of those weeks in the attic, of the years in hospitals and care centres, of all the conversations his parents had had across his bed while they thought he was asleep, and that weight was too immense to dismiss. Ay, madam, it is common.
"Charles!" exclaimed Visineau. "You've done it."
"I haven't done anything."
They were in Visineau's cluttered, windowless office at the north end of St. Rita's. The remains of his lunch were still sitting out on the desk, and St. Joseph on top of the file cabinet was up to his waist in paper. The priest himself was eating a little tub of yogurt and swivelling back and forth in his chair. "You have the grail, though, the therapeutic alliance. The bird came and sat on your finger. I'm amazed."
"No. No. I don't have control of it yet. Who was it who said, 'My dog never obeyed me in his life, but sometimes he agreed with me'?"
"I have no idea. Farley Mowat?"
"That can't be it. But you take my meaning. He felt like talking, which is all very well, but I still haven't cracked him open." Charles thought better of that last phrase and said, "If you will excuse the violent imagery."
"Anyone who's treated that patient will forgive you some violent imagery, Doctor." Visineau rocked backward in his chair. He had wide cheekbones and a long upper lip, the sort of uneasy mingling of the Gallic and the Indian that Charles had noticed often in Quebec faces. He was dark, his hair just beginning to grey, and he always wore the traditional black, no pearl-grey or slate-blue clerical shirts. "No, believe me, if he spoke to you about blowing his head off somewhere north of Kenora, then you have won his trust. With me he always acted as though it was somehow impolite to tell your psychiatrist that you're suicidal."
"He wanted you to think better of him."
"Ah, the avoidant's desire for approval. C'est là que gît la lièvre," Visineau murmured to himself. He was quiet for a moment, then said, "Well. What are you planning to do next?"
"Right now I can only offer support. It's not the time to challenge him with anything very difficult."
Neither of them said anything about the potential death of Jim McCree. No need to borrow trouble.
Visineau asked casually, "Have you ever dealt with anything like this before, Charles? An abduction of a patient's loved one, I mean?"
"Occasionally," said Charles.
The priest caught his eye and held it for a few moments, appraising, then set to wrapping up his lunch noisily in the wax paper. "I've been working in the capital a long time, and I know people who know people. I've heard from some of them that you are associated with the X-Men in New York. Associated -- they didn't say how closely. They have no proof you're a mutant yourself. But your names are often spoken together. And if one wants the X-Men, one contacts Charles Xavier. That's all they know."
Charles did not answer that; better to wait and see. Visineau went on, "Yes, I snooped. Not very Christian of me. You'll understand that I'm not too fond of vigilantes right now, but...I am at your disposal. If you choose to tell me anything, I will keep it as secret as I keep what is under the seal of confession, as secret as I keep the affairs of my patients."
Charles felt the sting of that vigilantes, but he could hardly correct him; the X-Men operated with the blessing of certain federal agencies, yes, but he could not reveal that, even with Visineau's guarantees of secrecy. Charles forced himself not to pry deeply into the priest's mind, but he could sense worry, attached to nothing in particular but floating on the surface like algae. "I appreciate that, coming from you, doctor."
"And you are not getting involved?"
"How would it look, Gilles?" Charles asked gently. "A group of mutants from another country interfering in the investigation of a crime which was by humans and against humans. If we didn't succeed we'd be crucified."
Visineau raised his eyebrows at the "we", but said nothing about that. "So the problem is what, you're not sure you could do it?"
"I'm not one hundred per cent confident that they wouldn't make some hideous blunder, no." Charles felt two-faced, but it was the truth. Hostage situations were nasty, and if it came to a violent confrontation between the X-Men and the CFH, with the Senator caught in the middle, the diplomatic aftermath could cost the X-Men much of their federal support. "The stakes are too high in this case to allow them that margin of error."
Visineau nodded silently.
Charles, feeling guilty, added, "If we were in the States, I wouldn't hesitate. Or if it were a situation in which mutants were directly involved, rather than indirectly. But here...without the permission of the RCMP or some other authority, no, the X-Men will not intervene."
Visineau was quiet for a few moments, still swivelling back and forth in the chair. Then he said, "Suppose you did get that permission?"
Quotes and Notes: Blackburn Hamlet is the suburb I grew up in, as well as a Shakespeare joke. Good Shepherd is located there, the very model of modern Vatican II architecture. And surely by the not-too-distant future they will have moved on to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual for mental disorders (DSM-V).
The RCMP officers I've known were not such dicks as Inspector Brazeau, but they were just as derisive towards CSIS, our flimsy little intelligence agency.
C'est là que git la lièvre is an old French expression roughly equivalent to "there's the rub" in English, literally meaning, "That's where the hare is lying."