Justice is to me a warm spirit, born of tolerance and wisdom, present everywhere, ready to serve the highest purposes of rational man. To seek to create the just society must be amongst the highest of these human purposes.
Pierre Elliott Trudeau
The Right Honourable Thomas Sherbrooke came by Dr. Xavier's suite in the Château Laurier the next evening, as soon as he could decently get away from his dinner obligation. Joel and his mother were there -- Joel was doing well, after excusing himself to vomit in the bathroom, running the water to cover the sound. All he had to do was be there, and look pathetic as the mutant scion of the family, speaking only when spoken to. That was tolerable. He could do it.
It was a hot night. Sherbrooke had his shirtsleeves rolled up, exposing his freckled forearms. A contrived casualness. There was always something automaton-like in his manner -- Joel could imagine him saying the exact same things to an empty room, shaking hands with nothing. There were military men who were the same way, and teachers: people who had been so honed and shaped by their jobs that they were a mass of pre-conditioned responses, until you pierced them through with something unexpected.
Or, as Joel had discovered, if you said nothing to them, if you didn't know the responses to their ritual statements, they would drop the mask and react with irritation, disgust, even fear. That wouldn't happen tonight, though. So long as there was someone else to talk to, these armoured professionals could ignore the person sitting silently. All would be well.
Sherbrooke was now leaning forward in the loveseat, in an attitude of intrigued receptivity, listening to the Professor's explanation of the X-Men.
"We are," said Dr. Xavier, "a small group of men and women -- there are, at the moment, only five of us -- who believe that peace between humans and mutants is possible. Not only possible, but a true necessity. The domination of one by the other can only end in the destruction of both, as tyranny always damages those who practice it. To that end, we fight to protect both mutants endangered by prejudice and humans put in jeopardy by mutants. This is...a more unique case, I will admit: humans have been put in danger by anti-mutant prejudice."
"You could be described as a private army or militia, could you not?" the prime minister said.
"That seems a little strong for a group of five people, Mr. Sherbrooke."
"But you don't operate under anyone's jurisdiction down south, and your funding is exclusively private -- from what I hear."
"You've done your homework on us." The Professor smiled, the cool smile that said he was slowly running low on patience. Joel was familiar with that expression.
Sherbrooke didn't dignify that with an answer, and Joel privately agreed.
Dr. Xavier went on, "Our funding is private, so that we are not dependant on the goodwill of the government. Mutant-human relations are tense in the United States, as they are beginning to be in Canada as well."
"I understand, Doctor, but I want to know who will be accountable if something goes wrong."
"I will be," said the Professor.
"Really?" Sherbrooke was unmoved. "You'll be sued, or charged with whatever criminal blunders your X-Men may commit? You'll go to a Canadian prison over them without crying to Washington and making our lives difficult?"
"I will." No hesitation, and Joel suddenly realised that the Professor had no intention of allowing any such thing to happen. Minds would be wiped before Xavier ever appeared before a judge.
Either that, or he was just supremely confident that the X-Men would make no mistakes. Joel didn't think the Professor was that stupid.
Sherbrooke seemed to be thinking the same thing. "I believe I'd like that in writing," he said.
"Draft something up with a lawyer," said Dr. Xavier carelessly. "I'll sign as soon as it's ready."
It was here that Joel had to excuse himself. In the creamy-porcelain suite bathroom, he sank down to sit on the cool tiled floor, feeling feverish and sick. Part of that was accumulated stress, he knew. The other part was lobster bisque -- a very bad idea, even if the hotel's dining room did make the best in the city. At one time, he would have concluded that the meningitis was back, or that he was dying of something else, but now it seemed easier to accept the more sensible conclusion. But he knew that the prime minister would not remember to draft anything up with a lawyer, would not even remember that he had considered it, and Joel could do nothing about that.
After the lobster bisque made its glorious exit into the toilet, Joel washed his mouth out in the sink and took a long look at his face in the mirror. If he emerged from the bathroom looking even worse than usual, they would notice. As he was turning to leave, he caught a glimpse of his profile: his father's, he realised. It was an odd feeling; no one had ever remarked on a resemblance before. But the long nose with the bump in the bridge was his father's, and the strong chin. He felt as if, in some subtle way, he had become somebody else.
Outside in the sitting room, Sherbrooke was saying, "If you can keep it extremely low-profile -- extremely -- then yes, okay, we can do it."
"We are used to working discreetly," Dr. Xavier said with a little smile.
"The officers on the ground will be the ones who make the final decision, okay? If they don't want to use you, they don't have to."
"I would like to be able to give my field leaders a bit more say than that."
The prime minister shrugged, and said in his meandering way, "Well, we'll talk to Brazeau about that, you know, since it's his case. I'm only saying that we don't want tension between your team and the Mounties. We want people working in harmony or not at all. Now, I can take this to the Solicitor-General and the Commissioner and say, 'look, we have an offer from this American team to help you out.' I'm not going to micromanage this. That's not how I do things."
The Professor gave that a few seconds, to show he wasn't completely happy, then said, "That would be acceptable."
"Good!" said Sherbrooke. He glanced at Joel's mother, and said, "I think it's reasonable to let you know something else, which I don't want going to the media. It will get its own press conference, trust me, but I don't want to risk being misunderstood here."
"What is it?" asked Joel's mother.
"We're going to agree to their demand for a referendum on Charter protection for mutants."
Dead silence. Joel, strangely, was the first to speak. "You're kidding."
"No, I'm not."
"So, so, what, you're going to put us through Charlottetown and Meech again?" Joel was stuttering in his shock. "You'll get all the provinces to come to some sort of consensus on mutants?"
"We'll start the process, yes. Most likely no one will agree and we won't have to have the referendum at all, so nothing will change. If it does -- well, we need something in the Charter to cover mutants."
"That wasn't what the CFH demanded, anyway. They wanted us to be specifically uncovered."
"Well, what they demanded wasn't possible, so I'm afraid they're going to be misunderstood." Sherbrooke was smiling broadly, that smile Joel had seen so often on politicians who were sure they'd just outfoxed somebody.
"Have you thought of what this will do to the economy?" Joel demanded. The whole thing was suddenly unreal: he was not sitting in the Château Laurier telling the prime minister to think of the economy, surely not. "I'm sorry, sir, that was stupid. But -- do you really think this is necessary, after you just announced that you wouldn't negotiate?"
"We promised that we wouldn't negotiate with the CFH, yes. But we do need to negotiate with the Canadian people, and I've been hearing complaints about how civil rights for mutants are being handled. 'Judicial activism'--" he made quotation marks with his fingers -- "is not popular, and it looks like we're forcing something on people undemocratically. Doing it in Parliament isn't working, because any laws that we pass just get challenged in the courts on Charter basis, saying it goes against 'the spirit of the Charter'." Quotation marks again. "Now, as you know, the Charter says nothing specific at all about mutants, and therefore that needs to change. Mutation is something Trudeau and the boys didn't foresee."
Trudeau was probably spinning in his grave, Joel thought. "You're going to have a referendum on whether to give a minority their civil rights?"
"That's right. You seem to have your father's passion for constitutional law," Sherbrooke said, too heartily. "But you see the issue. The CFH were right about one thing, and that's the need for constitutional amendment regarding mutants. They were wrong to demand it in the way they did, but it's a topic the Canadian people need to address."
"Sir--"
"So the wheels are in motion to call a First Ministers Conference. Democracy in action, my son."
This was unbelievable. Joel was no civil rights expert like his father, but he had read enough history to know that even a best-case scenario would risk tearing the country apart. If it wasn't mutants, it would be Quebec, but whatever happened, dangerous precedents would be set and the ground was going to shake.
When they got back to the house in Manotick, they found a bottle of wine and a bouquet of flowers sitting on the table. A card tucked into the flowers offered "kind thoughts in this trying time" from Shimon Eitan, an Israeli diplomat who was a friend of the family. Amanda had left a note on the table beside the gift, reading, He will call back later. The flowers were rosy melon-coloured things, foreign, shaped like the heads of strange birds.
Joel's mother poured two small glasses of the wine. "It will be very sweet, so not too much."
They sat at the table in the kitchen and sipped at the sweet, dark purple wine. Joel remembered Mr. Eitan, and his pretty daughter -- what had been her name? Hala, Hava, Hana...no, Hodya. A wonderful name, how had he forgotten it? It sounded Latin, almost: Hodie beata virgo Maria, he thought. Hodya had a mole on one cheekbone, under her left eye, and it gave her a remarkable solemn beauty. Her curly brown hair pinned up with a white silk flower, the delicate way she laid her napkin in her lap. Hodya, on this day the Blessed Virgin Mary...he didn't remember the rest of the hymn, although he remembered the music. Palestrina.
Mr. Eitan always called him Yoel, just as Father Gilles pronounced his name in the French way, with two syllables. Jouelle, it sounded like. Yoel and Joel were clearly two different people, irreconcilable. Yoel was probably tougher than he looked, with far-seeing eyes and maybe a dirty sense of humour, when he was hanging around with his buddies from the army or the kibbutz. The French Joël was quieter, but taciturn rather than shy, sensitive in a Saturnine sort of way. He probably took long walks through farmers' fields in winter, and occasionally left for days at a time, unannounced.
In reality, Joel had been named after a cousin who had died suddenly in a car accident, leaving behind a wife and several children. He could feel these other namesakes brushing against him like ghosts, like other lives that he was already leading, perhaps at night while he was asleep. The Israeli Yoel, the French Joël, and the dead Joel MacIsaac, Aunt Carmel's son.
His mother interrupted his thoughts. "I suppose it's good that you're coming out of your shell a bit, but you ought to consider people a bit more. The man may be the prime minister, but that doesn't mean his feelings can't be hurt."
"What?"
"You don't need to treat people like they're stupid, just because they don't see things the way you do," she clarified. "It's rude."
"I wasn't thinking. I'm sorry. I was so -- how could you not be shocked?"
For a moment, she looked like she wanted to abandon the conversation and go to bed, but then she said, "I'm not shocked because if there's one thing I've learned from years of activism, it's that the Charter doesn't matter. It has as much power as we give it. To have justice, you go to the people, rather than piling amendments onto a document that most citizens have never read."
"I don't see what chance we have of being just if we don't have just laws." An odd image came into his mind of the laws as enormous paper birds flying over head, circling like vultures, ready to dive like hawks to punish offenders. It wasn't like that, of course, and his mother had a good point, but something inside him still repeated the line from Antigone that his father had underlined: "To value life then one must value law." Not for the first time, Joel wondered what the Professor had seen in his brain. He imagined all the cross-references footnoting each other and becoming hopelessly tangled in quotes and parentheses, like Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch with his blood full of commas.
His mother sighed and went to wash out her glass. "You're too much like your father, Joel."
Joel half-wanted to ask what she meant by that, but then decided he probably wouldn't like the answer.
After she had gone upstairs, Joel washed out the purple traces from his own glass, still looking at the reflection of his own face in the dark window. As if it were the face of a stranger, someone he wanted to paint. Before turning the light out in the kitchen, he took the card from the flowers, and read it again.
He climbed the stairs to his attic, which was only barely cooled by the central air, warm as a bath. He liked it that way, even though the thick heat of Ottawa summers was as brutal in its way as the blind-white cold of the winters. The coldest capital city in the world. "Colder than Moscow?" people would always ask, when this factoid came up. Yes, colder than Moscow. Colder than Helsinki. Colder than Stockholm. Ottawa with its shoulder-high snowbanks. But for two or three months a year, it was steaming hot, and its rivers weren't wide enough to cool it. Joel nevertheless liked the languid hours in the muggy darkness before sleep came. And he always slept. It was finding his way out of sleep that was harder.
Irrigated citrus groves that suddenly rained bullets, snowy farmers' fields in the Laurentians, headlights crossing the yellow line. And then, just before dawn, like a gift -- Hodya, brown and slender, kneeling astride him in bed and chewing thoughtfully on her lower lip, as if deciding how to proceed.
The current wisdom among the RCMP was that the CFH were hiding out somewhere in the Gatineau hills north of Ottawa, but no one had any exact locations; the phone call had been made to a payphone outside Aylmer, a town west of Hull, on the Quebec side of the river.
Cerebro did not find things that way, though. There were only minds in Cerebro, no geography, no grids and labels. Charles had come back to New York the morning after meeting with the Canadian Prime Minister, and he was now suspended in the huge spherical abyss, no longer aware of his body, gliding through various minds on the trail of the Senator and the kidnappers.
Without feeling that he was violating anyone's privacy in the least, he began by infiltrating Joel and his mother. Charles had only met the Senator briefly, not long enough to get a good look at his mind. Going through the memories -- and how soundlessly he could do that with Cerebro, not even arousing a feather-tickle of awareness in his subjects -- he began to put together the image of the man he was looking for.
Lily McCree had the clearest picture, shaded through various ages. The first glimpse: a rangy young man with reddish-brown hair and high cheekbones, introduced at a party -- he spoke with a slight sharpness to his consonants, and she guessed correctly that he was from Quebec. Montreal, the beautiful island city. "I always wanted to see Montreal," she told him, "but we just drove through it on our way up from back East. Aunt Carmel wanted to make good time and not stop."
"I should take you for a visit sometime," Jim had said, and as easily as that they seemed to be dating. James, then -- he had not become Jim until later, in his thirties.
Her girlfriends made fun of her for being a hippie flower child dating a strait-laced law student, but James spoke everybody's language. He talked about liberty and brotherhood with Lily's hippie friends, and about reason and good government with Aunt Carmel. A good talker; even when he was going on about the British North America Act, she loved just to listen to his voice, the way it marched along with its clipped accent, like a sentry checking the city walls to make sure everyone inside was all right. Ten o'clock and all's well. "Are you having fun?" he would ask her all the time, on dates. "Are you happy?"
Joel remembered that his father came to visit him at St. Rita's three times a week: Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays for lunch after Mass. He brought books, sometimes, books from his own musty library at the back of the house. "This ought to be on your bookshelf," he would say ceremoniously. Sophocles, and Cicero, and books on the Napoleonic Wars, books about ships and explorers. Joel had loved ships when he was twelve, and it was an interest that coincided with his father's. There was another very clear memory, the three of them in the living room cutting an immense sheet of shiny Chinese red fabric for a sail. Jim McCree built the little green boat himself, a small rowboat that could be converted with a removable mast and rudder into a sailboat.
Out on Meech Lake, the site of the famous ruined constitutional accord, they launched the boat from the dock, Joel at first rowing it alone around the shallows.
And there -- a bottleneck of memory, a mental swerve, and suddenly Charles was seeing it from Jim's eyes.
The boy was too far gone to flesh, it was true, but in the boat he was a natural, rowing as if it were pure instinct. "Like a Newfoundlander," Lily said, with some pride in her voice, as if knowing boats could be passed along in the genes. Jim called the boy back, and when the little green boat glided to a stop at the dock (the kid even stopped properly, reversing the oars rather than grabbing the dock like some kids would have done), he climbed in himself.
The boy only smiled, that small enigmatic smile that made him look like a Botticelli angel. Almost feminine in his prettiness, even with the fat.
"Beauty," Jim said, and they launched off again...
Charles drew back from this scene, willing the man to think about his present surroundings.
The fake wood panelling was depressing, it reminded him of his year staying at Newman House in university, that firetrap with the big print of Rembrandt's The Return of the Prodigal Son in the living room over the worn green sofa...
Where are you now? Tell me more.
He only had a bare mattress, no light. It was dark all the time, so he kept busy by reciting poetry when he could remember it, by praying the Rosary on his fingers, by trying to name all the kinds of birds or weeds or animals he knew, by thinking about that green boat on Meech Lake and the small grey room at St. Rita's. What a relief it was, in spite of everything, to be free of St. Rita's. The boy would sit there on the bed under the wooden crucifix, when he was visible, and just look at his father helplessly, as if to say, "Well, what do you want me to do about it?" He looked old, older than Jim, older than anyone in the world, just around the eyes. Jim had read about people who felt physical pain all the time even though doctors could find nothing wrong with them, and it shook his belief in God. Why should people feel pain for no reason? This was the same, but worse, because it was his son, his, the son they had waited so long for.
Again Charles drew back.
Where are you? Who is holding you?
He didn't know which of them shot Dean and the two Mounties. His memory of that was shot, it was dreamlike and blurry, there was no rescuing it now. They all wore masks, but there was the burly one, the one who smoked, and the one he had recognised (although he kept that secret): his assistant's boyfriend, Henri-Michel. Even with a pillowcase over his head, Henri-Michel's walk gave him away. He was very tall, and he walked stooped over, slowly, like a large water-bird.
Henri-Michel. Henri-Michel.
Charles cast around for it, and then felt the connection. Jackpot.
CBC was on all the time, fucking English CBC Radio One, but they had to keep it there because Sherbrooke might announce that they were giving in, or might talk about them. There had already been lots of talk about the Senator, his biography and all that. Sometimes they would have little segments, like, "Who are the mysterious CFH?" but they never said anything interesting. "That's cause they don't know anything," said Sean. "It's good." But goddamn, if they had to listen to this stuff all day, it would be nice to hear some recognition.
Maybe the CBC could fill in the time reading aloud from the communiqués, stuff Sean had written like, "Mutation naturally causes feelings of revulsion in normal humans, and in those quislings who will collaborate with impurities and the degeneration of a race, we can only conclude that the natural instincts are disordered." Although even Henri-Michel was getting sick of hearing that stuff now. They all agreed, so why keep preaching? They had other things to worry about.
Where are you?
It was Tim's house, and when Sean found that out he said Tim was a fucking idiot, that was how you got caught. Tim said he'd kicked his girlfriend out beforehand and everything, and Sean just rolled his eyes.
Tim's house. Good. Where is that?
Way up in the fucking armpit of nowhere, that's where it was. Tim didn't have a record, and no matter what Sean said, he'd never been caught before. That was the only reason why Sean had decided to stay there. It was so far out, though, that if anything happened they'd be shit for hard pressed to get away and move somewhere else. If they'd stayed in the city, they could have moved around from buddy to buddy's house -- Sean knew a lot of people sympathetic to the cause. Out here -- Christ, the nearest town was fucking Buckingham. Henri-Michel was the only one who spoke French, too, and he was scared shitless that he'd be the one to get caught. Someone in the gas station would remember him, or security in the East Block would find tape of him sneaking Sean in, or Amanda would freak out and tell somebody, or, or anything...
Go back to the drive to the house.
Charles watched the road signs pass, the fields and trees of farming country. Then Tim's house, small and cheap, white siding and a broken kid's bicycle out front. No number on the house, but the mailbox read MARKS and the green and white sign by the driveway bore a number, 60238.
Fucking Mounties, Henri-Michel thought. They'd find him for sure, and then he was ruined, his whole life ruined, his job and his life and his family and everything, everything. So he was already angling to get the sentence commuted, already trying to be extra nice to McCree. Every night he made a plate of pasta, no sauce, and carried it downstairs to the basement. He would ask, "Want anything?"
Usually the old man would just shrug, or sometimes he would have a request. A glass of water, a change for the hospital bedpan they let him use, and once he asked for a reading lamp and a book.
"A book? What book?"
"Anything. Whatever you have."
He went up to ask the others, but Sean nixed the idea. "No lamp. He could use it as a weapon."
"He could use the fucking bedpan as a weapon, Sean."
"Well, the only thing Timmy keeps around to read is porno and the instructions for the microwave, so there's no point anyway."
That was that. Henri-Michel told the old man to forget about it. And then, as if to prove to himself that he still believed in the cause (that is, The Cause), he had asked, "How the hell did you live so long in the same house with a fucking mutant and not put a bullet through his head?"
McCree only looked up at him blankly, squinting in the light from the hall.
Quotes and Notes: Changing the Constitution happens more frequently here than in the States; the Meech Lake Accords and the Charlottetown Accords were both attempts to change it, and they happened within the same 15-year period. Our Constitution was only patriated in the 80's, though, so cut us some slack.