A steady stream of mutant kids came in to St John of God House from seven until one or two in the afternoon on most days. They ranged from addicts who might be dead within a year to kids with homes who were just skipping school, looking for a place to spend the day away from bullies and cliques. They got breakfast, watched cartoons or the news on TV, talked to each other, read books and old magazines from the house's motley library, and did homework (or pretended to). A few, like Paul, had special dietary needs, and one of the fridges was full of specialty foods: duck eggs, moose moss, cock's combs, fortified molasses, dulse, corn smut, Osage orange, burdock roots, calf brains, and red locusts. Paul, a bit of a gourmand, enjoyed hunting for the unusual in the Atwater and Jean-Talon markets, in Chinatown and Little Italy, and on the occasional trip to a nursery or pet supply store.
Joel came out of the east side of the house almost an hour after Jeanne-Marie, and he was looking a little vague. He'd been looking that way a lot lately, which Paul didn't like.
"Fall asleep in there?" Paul said as Joel poured some tea into his mug from the Museum of Man, the one with the bog person corpse on it.
"What? Uh, sort of. Remind me to call Dr Stein."
"Shit." Dr Stein was Joel's neurologist, the best in the city and the only one who could begin to make sense of Joel's damaged and mutated brain. "I can call her this afternoon for you."
"It's not a big deal."
"It's your fucking brain, of course it's a big deal." Part of Paul's mutation was something like the reverse of the display on his skin; he got intuitions about people's feelings, and was very rarely wrong. No one was even sure if it was his mutation or a personal oddity; it wasn't like a telepathic empathy, but rougher, unpredictable and olfactory. Joel often had a eucalyptus tang of worry around him, but he was seriously worried about something now, a bright onion-stem cloud of it. The smell always made Paul irritable, even though he knew he should be sympathetic. "Aren't you going to eat anything?"
"Not now. Did you see Niko come in?"
"No."
Most of the kids didn't hang around long enough for Joel to be at ease with them, but he usually went in to drink his tea in the dining room and listen to the conversation. Paul followed with his own breakfast, silkworms cooked in goats' milk with raisins and brown sugar. The other kids glanced up at them briefly, but Paul didn't see Niko among them.
He knew all their names, some real and some nicknames, code-names—Juliette, Culbute, Breton, Mary Jane, Sleeper, Zizi, Obsédé, Edouard, Hécatombe, Ox, Requin, Mars, and King Prawn were in the house today, gathered around the two big tables in the dining room. Paul always found himself looking for the ones who, for one reason or another, stopped showing up. Thérèse. Jonquille. Furball. Keith. Silk and Mustard—both of them gone at once, no explanation. The list of the missing was longer, and he couldn't remember everyone, but when he was out on the street he kept catching sight of people who looked familiar.
Joel kept files, in his haphazard way, and rotated the names of the missing through the grace at dinner. God bless Rachel, God bless Sparrow, God bless Samar. Sometimes the kids would add other names.
"And France."
"And Darren."
"And Rishi."
Sometimes this was how they found out that a kid hadn't been seen for awhile. Maybe the poor sods were fine, maybe they'd gone home or headed to Niagara to pick fruit or won a million in the 6/49. In reality, a lot of them were simply institutionalised. Police had the authority, thanks to the Gatineau Accords, to pick up mutants on the street and put them in lockup or in psychiatric wards, or in recently-established "safety centres." There were over a hundred safety centres in the city alone, and while Joel and Paul might call a few likely ones to see if they could bail a kid out, there just wasn't time to search them all.
Paul waited for a lull in the conversation before asking, "Where's Niko been lately?"
Ox and Sleeper shrugged, but Requin grinned, displaying his rows of sharp teeth. "Got a job."
"Oh. Good for her. With who, d'you know?"
"Ottawa somewhere," said Requin.
"RCMP," Prawn put in, his mouth full. "Or wait, maybe not them. She said it was government security, so I guess we assumed it was doing something for the Mounties, but I don't really know how that stuff works."
"No, that doesn't sound like RCMP," Joel said doubtfully. "She might have meant something like museum guarding or doing security in government buildings. That's plausible. But I don't know if they'd take someone with a record."
"I doubt it," said Paul.
"Yeah. Huh."
"If you find anything out, get me an interview too," said Prawn. "I got fired a couple of days ago."
King Prawn always had good stories whenever he got fired, so the others teased him to cough it up. Joel leaned back in his chair and said to Paul, "Want to come up to Laval this morning?"
"What's in Laval?"
"Well...sedevacantists?" At Paul's blank look, he elaborated, "Conclavists, actually, since they have their own pope. Heretics, schismatics. Jansenists and Feeneyites. Et cetera. You know."
"Are they sending you out on Dominican ninja missions already? Are you gonna go all Torquemada on them?"
That made Joel laugh. He didn't laugh often, and would try to suppress it, so that he snorted and twisted his mouth when a joke surprised him. "Torquemada! No, it's house stuff, not the Spanish Inquisition. Even just a ride to the station would be good."
"Bon," said Paul, getting up and heading back to the kitchen. "I'll take you to Bonaventure, at least, since the weather's so bad."
"Good. I owe you."
"I hope that means Chambord and caviar at Christmas?"
"Not together, I hope?" Joel scribbled his itinerary on the whiteboard and added, Cell off afternoon – exams. back at 5.
"Oh, of course not. Caviar goes with Jewel of Russia, ice-cold. Chambord is for dessert."
"And Smirnoff simply will not do, right? What'll dessert be, a cake trimmed with diamonds?"
Paul rolled his eyes. "This isn't the start of a lecture on Lady Poverty, is it? You're a goddamn animal if you want to serve Smirnoff with caviar."
"Gold-digger," said Joel, affectionately. "Come on."
Gare Centrale was not far away, but it was a long drive in the thick powdery snow. Paul wound through side streets to avoid the manic Montreal drivers. He had never been one. He won his license after six attempts, six expensive tests and innumerable panic attacks. At last the only thing that helped was pretending, telling himself it does not matter, these other cars are asteroids, they are mindless forces of nature and if they hit me they will hit me and what is my life worth anyway? He had a long prepared monologue of this false equanimity, and didn't believe it, but he could imagine a self that did believe it, and he lived in the corridor between that self and the real one. That was what it meant to be healthy, he thought—you learned a repertoire of other selves, pastiches to cover all the sore places in the real one. With his mutation constantly betraying him, Paul was at a natural disadvantage, but he'd learned how to conceal.
Joel, beside him, had a book about the epistles open on his lap but was looking out the window at the falling snow. The sharp onion smell of anxiety was back, dulled a bit because he was tired. He glanced across at Paul and said, "So what's with you and Jeanne-Marie?"
"Hein?"
"You looked like you didn't like the look of her."
"It's not the look of her I have a problem with," said Paul. "What's the connection with these guys in Laval?"
Joel talked about Jeanne-Marie, and Paul listened, letting ideas float in as if on an underground river while his conscious mind was absorbed in driving. Paul was always at his best on the road. Something about the trance-like state and the constant threat of death, he thought. Second-hand information gave less than first-hand, but Paul could clearly remember the smell that hung around Jeanne-Marie. Chemical strawberry and cough syrup with...something rustly. Garlic peel and onion skins. Landfill smells, but harsher.
"She's hiding something," said Paul. "She's doing something wrong and she knows it. You know that feeling you get when you're poking around, maybe in the woods somewhere, and all of a sudden you touch something that crumbles away, something soft and rotten?"
Joel nodded, saying nothing.
"Most of the kids who come in smell like that, you know. They're liars. We all are, of course, but you know—more so when we're in trouble. But I never learned to like the smell of it. You can't, it just makes you sick, like you can't breathe at all, it gets in your lungs."
"How can you live like that?" Joel asked. He was half-gone down là-bas; Paul didn't have to look to see the difference. There was no warmth, no sound of breathing, no smells, none of the tiny cues that make up human presence except for the lingering sense of being watched. A hovering intelligence, not what the soul was made for. "No wonder you hardly leave the house."
"I leave the house, I just don't go alone," said Paul. "I'm out now, aren't I? And it has nothing to do with being too precious and sensitive for the corruption of the world or something. I just don't like being stared at when I'm out by myself."
"Still."
"Look, it's the same for everyone. Everyone at St Rita's, anyway—we all learn how to deal with it somehow."
"Sorry, with what?"
"With, I don't know, with having a unique perspective on how shitty the world is. You know what I'm talking about. That's one way Magneto and them are right, I think. Mutants have a different experience of reality. Maybe we're not superior, but we know where the weak spots are in humans." He paused. "I know how that sounds, but..."
"I know."
"So I live with it, that's all. Just like you live with the whiteness là-bas, like you told me, and like anybody in St Rita's learned to deal with being a freak. But there's something we know about the world that humans don't know. You know what it's like to exist without a body. You realise that? Steph knows what it's like to be both genders. Vicky knows—"
"All right, all right," Joel said in English. A rancid butter smell of resignation; he was tired of talking about it.
Paul didn't let it go, because he felt the click in his head of the pieces coming together. He could see them, a shimmering shape that hung over the hood of the car, six-winged and thrumming like a sewing machine, with two spouts spurting steam. The way things came together was always dreamlike and strange like that, but he understood. "A handful of people in history, possibly, have experienced what we have. And that's giving credence to a lot of legends that might be fiction. I know Charles Xavier and the X-Men pounded a lot of stuff about unity into your head, but just think about what unity would require. You're talking about a lot more than two solitudes here."
"Did I even say anything about unity? I was asking about Jeanne-Marie, and as an aside I was asking about you. That's it. As usual you had to drag mutant politics into it."
By this time they were in the underground garage at Bonaventure Mall, and Paul took the key out of the ignition, making no move to get out of the car. Joel wasn't actually in any hurry and Paul always resented it when people started conversations and didn't finish them. "Do you ever consider that maybe I know what I'm doing? Remember you're talking to an oracle, even if I do use my nose for it. Look at Jeanne-Marie's powers, her manifestation. That's where you'll find it. T'sais? Find out what she knows. You're all wrapped up in religion—as fucking usual, I might add—and you think her most pressing problems are money and heretics. You're wrong. Don't forget the body. You always forget the body."
Joel sat very still for a few moments, staring straight ahead at the concrete pillars of the underground parking lot. The radiator ticked softly, and the cold was beginning to seep in through the door in back that didn't shut properly. "That...that actually makes sense."
"You're welcome. Go catch your train."
He looked across at Paul, one of his unreadable psych patient looks. From his partially-visible state there was no way for Paul to sniff him out, but there was something. Don't do this to yourself, came the voice from the room down the hall, the safe room that wasn't afraid of the cars.
"Are you sure you won't come with me?" Joel said.
Paul flexed his fingers around the steering wheel. The skin was running with scarlet, melon, and white-gold, and Joel would know what that meant, as he always did but pretended not to. "I don't think I'd better."
From the Gare Centrale, Joel took the train alone to Sainte-Dorothée station on Laval's Île Jésus, a soporific trip in this weather, although he didn't dare let himself fall asleep. A fierce wind swept snow across the river ice, the snow taking shapes that looked to him like running human figures, and in the city the ploughs were out on the streets, whirling their blue lights. A few streetlights were still lit in the dark sky, and it did not look like morning, nor like any particular time of day. Dark mornings like this held a sense of expectation, for Joel—he associated them with snow days, with waking up early for trips. The strangeness was in time folding back on itself, he thought as he tried to force himself to pay attention to one of Karl Rahner's convoluted sentences. As if morning might decide it wasn't coming after all, forget it, turn the lights back on and stay inside.
He took a cab from the station, because Madame DuPont's school was situated out in a clipped countryside of golf clubs and waterfront mansions, not designed for travellers on foot. Most schismatic groups were tiny, and therefore strapped for cash, operating out of erstwhile storefronts and small church buildings. Joel wondered where Madame DuPont had got the money for her nice converted private school—wealthy benefactors, a determined shaking of the parishioners by their ankles, fraud?
The hypocrisy of that thought hit him a full second later, with a stiff pressure inside his temples. He paid the cab driver with an excessive tip, which only made the guilt worse, and got out at the school's gates.
The school was on a sizeable property with a winding drive and a wrought-iron fence out front. Rows of drooping dark Norway pines hid the grounds from view, and a sign beside the gate read "Private Property: No Trespassing." Joel took a moment to consider the sign as the cab pulled away. He decided he wasn't a trespasser so much as an unsolicited guest, and started the trek through the snowy grounds to the door.
He was soaked to the knees by the time he got to the front steps. In the shadowy front hall, he came across a tall painted plaster statue of Our Lady, with a long Latin inscription on the wooden pedestal. The Virgin was in the usual Immaculate Heart position, pulling her cloak aside with both hands like Superman to display the heart. There was no picture of the current Pope on the wall, either the real one or the Québécois impostor, but there was one of Pius X, staring sternly out of the frame from a holy-card background of fluffy clouds.
"Are you looking for something?"
Joel turned. A sister—a very young-looking sister—in full royal blue habit. Not a hair exposed by the coif and wimple, skirt long enough to hide her feet, hands folded under a black scapular. The effect was jarring, like meeting someone in a suit of armour. He'd seen traditional habits before, of course, but not often; big feast days at church and teachers in costumes on Marguerite Bourgeoys Day were it.
"Um—I'm here to see Madame DuPont. Sister."
She didn't change expression. "Do you have an appointment? Or are you a parent?"
"No, sister, but—I mean—I'm here about the girl who went missing. That must be...I mean, I'm sure that's a priority, isn't it?" She was wearing two veils, he thought, so she had to be older than a novice, but he could swear she was younger than he was.
"What girl who went missing?" The sister sounded sceptical.
Joel prayed he had the real name this time. "Jeanne-Marie Beaubier...?"
The sister pursed her lips for a moment, then turned and strode briskly down one hall, her rosary clicking at her side. "Follow me, please."
The halls were empty, but as they passed by the classrooms he could hear teachers lecturing in singsong intonation, the pupils responding in the same. Some older students were learning the first conjugation, the distinctive amo-amas-amat rhythm thudding dully like a heartbeat alongside the birdlike inflections of the French.
The sister left Joel sitting on a bench outside the office, where he sat for almost half an hour, listening to the chirrup of the phone and the muffled sounds of a scolding coming from the principal's office. It reminded Joel too much of being sick, or in trouble, back in his own school days. Right down to the wet pant legs and the squeak of wet boots on the floors. He felt his tiredness creeping up on him, and had almost nodded off when he heard a sharp crack come from inside the principal's office.
Again, and then again. Pause. Another group of three cracks. Another. More cracks, and Joel lost count, but then a long silence. He didn't let his breath out.
At last a very small girl of no more than seven ran out the door, rubbing her eyes. Joel stood up, but the door slammed shut.
He should barge in there, he thought, and...and what? Was it even illegal to do this in Quebec? He didn't think so. There was no federal law against it, although his father had tried to introduce one in his cabinet minister days. Joel rested his head against the wall and closed his eyes, hating himself a little for—for something. His mouth tasted sour.
Several long minutes later, the door opened again.
Madame DuPont was broad, but there was no trace of fatness about her, nothing soft or indulgent, nothing that suggested she ever satisfied any human needs. She wore a long, high-collared black dress that looked homemade, with a sagging waistline and a graceless skirt, the whole thing made of some cheap material that wouldn't hang properly. Her greying hair was tied back under a black scarf, so tight that her face looked a bit stretched. She had small, round eyes and eyebrows that seemed perpetually raised.
She let him in, saying, "I would prefer some privacy, but modesty directs that I must leave the door open."
He didn't know what to say to that, so he just sat stupidly until Madame came around to take her seat behind the desk.
"And you are?"
Joel introduced himself. "I run St John of God House in the city, the, uh, the mutant Catholic Worker house. It's in Milton Parc, near Saint-Sulpice...?"
"Yes, I know it. Go on."
He gave her an edited version of the story, leaving out "Aurora" and her performance in Santropol, and not mentioning Jeanne-Marie's state of undress when she arrived at the house. Madame DuPont only listened with an expression of disdain, as if she were smelling something bad.
"She doesn't want to come back," he finished. "But she wanted to have some of her things, and to, to let you know."
Madame smiled, lips closed. "She is always welcome to come back. I'm afraid we may be the only place that can help her—no offense to you, Monsieur McCree."
"How do you mean?"
"I don't wish to cause scandal by repeating the faults of another. Suffice it to say that she is very troubled. Very troubled," she repeated, closing her eyes. "It's unfortunate. No one will force her to come back, of course. But it is the only option. I hope that you will see this and tell her so yourself."
Joel wanted to probe what "troubled" might mean, without asking for information he had no right to. "Well...can I ask what you were doing for her here? Has she seen a doctor?"
Madame looked affronted, and Joel knew he'd made a misstep. "A psychiatrist?"
"An ordinary doctor," he back-pedalled. "Or a psychiatrist, or psychologist. Anyone."
"Our school nurse examined her and said she was physically fine. One of the priests here gave her some counselling."
Joel put a few more questions to her and found out that Jeanne-Marie had no family doctor—students were taken to a clinic in Laval when they were sick. The nurse and the priest were it, for mental illness; Madame DuPont, it seemed, did not approve of secular psychiatry, which surprised Joel not at all.
"There is nothing wrong with her that human medicine can cure," she said. "Her problems are in the soul. The best you can do for her is pray. If you pray."
Joel let that one go. He said, "Can you show me to her room, please?"
She frowned, as if she wanted to disapprove of the request just on principle, but then she got up and led him out of the office.
Upstairs, in the small wood-panelled garret that was Jeanne-Marie's quarters, Madame DuPont stood in the doorway while Joel tried to soak in any information that was there in the neatly-made bed and the crumpled blanket on the chair. He wished Paul were there, although Paul didn't get so much out of objects as he did from people.
The only things Joel noticed were Jeanne-Marie's glasses and the St Louis de Montfort book lying open on the table. Louis de Montfort was sticky Marian piety of the candy-coated 19th-century flavour, a favourite among traditionalists and conservatives. The book was dog-eared and soft with age, and Jeanne-Marie's name was written on the flyleaf. "Is she very devout, Jeanne-Marie?"
Madame DuPont was silent for a long moment, but when he turned she said, "She is mad. And you must not listen to her."
"I'm sorry?" was all he could manage.
"I don't wish to make you think ill of her, but Jeanne-Marie is either mad or desperately wicked. She's not properly in control of what she does, and you can't believe anything she says. About the Society, or about us, and certainly you must believe nothing she says about the Lord or Our Lady. She is an habitual liar—that is only a fact, monsieur, not an insult. She is a mutant and sought to hide the fact from us. Even you would disapprove of such a thing, I would imagine. Père Chevannes said he examined her carefully and did not see any signs of possession, but clearly she is beset and obsessed by the Devil, or she would not behave this way."
"I—" Joel tried to figure out where to start. "She probably hid it because she knew you wouldn't—it wouldn't be received well, I figure. I wouldn't blame her for that."
"'Received well?' What does that mean? Approving of it? You are not with the Society, monsieur, but you call yourself Catholic. I will tell you what I told Jeanne-Marie, and I hope that you will listen. Both for yourself and to remind her of the truth." She guided him to sit down in the worn armchair, her hand carefully several inches from his arm, and she sat before him on the ottoman, staring into his eyes. "Mutants have a special vocation in the world. They are called to be witnesses to the ruin of original sin, the damage caused to nature by rebellion against God's grace. Have you read of the apparitions of Our Lady at Orloo?"
"Uh...didn't the Pope—well. I mean they're not approved by the Church. Our Church."
"The current bishop of Rome is in heresy," said Madame DuPont. "Better than John Paul II, but not by much. And not enough. When he restores the Mass we will take his opinion on Our Lady a bit more seriously."
"I'm not up on the content of Orloo," said Joel, to bring her back a few degrees closer to the topic. "Except that she talked about mutants."
"Our Lady told us that Satan sought to destroy God's people by having monsters be born into the human race. I don't mean to offend you by saying monster—the same root gives us monstrance, after all. Did you know that mutants were originally called monsters by geneticists? And that genetics itself originated in the Catholic Church? Until Darwin infected it, it was a very godly science."
Joel nodded mechanically at all of these bits of trivia. Madame DuPont went on, "But God in his mercy brought good out of evil by giving these monsters a conscience, the same one that is in humans. And surely we can see the reasoning behind Our Lady's words. Satan may scrape creations together out of the world God has made, but he cannot give them a soul. It is obvious that mutants do have a soul, you are not demons. The offspring of the Devil are offered the same opportunity as man, who was made in God's own image. This is how vast God's mercy is."
She delivered this in the typical kindly tone used by religion teachers in Catholic schools. If he had read it in print, Joel might have laughed, but there was something terribly unfunny about Madame DuPont. Again he wished that Paul were here; to be alone with this sort of insanity was draining, and he thought it might not be long before he started to be convinced.
Madame was still talking. "I heard you were a seminarian—have you read about the nephilim and the destroyer angels?"
"I'm not in seminary. I'm just doing a pastoral theology degree."
"Oh. The nephilim—"
"I know what the nephilim were."
Patronising smile. "What were they?"
"Fallen angels who slept with human women. According to some commentators. Or the offspring of those angels. 'The great heroes and famous men of old.'" The last time he'd done a serious study of Genesis was two semesters ago, so he was pleased at remembering that.
"And do you know what the word means?"
He did, or he had at one point. He was going to fail his Hebrew exam that afternoon, he knew it. "Uh..."
"The root refers to abortion and miscarriage. You realise that what we call mutants started to appear soon after birth control pills became available? Our Lady's words at Orloo have been proven to be correct. The giants, the monsters born of humans and fallen angels, are mutants. Some Protestants have argued that because you are not human, you have no share in the salvation that Christ offers. But Our Lady herself has told us that mutants can be saved, if they will only consecrate themselves fully to her Immaculate Heart."
"That's fascinating, I hadn't heard that before," Joel said. He wouldn't be able to fake credulity any longer, so he made his escape. "Madame, I'm sorry, but I have exams this afternoon and I need to get back to the city."
She let him gather up Jeanne-Marie's books and even the four dresses in the armoire, but continued to harangue him. "The Orloo apparitions are Mary's great gift to mutants, and they happened in Canada—you have every reason to take them very seriously, monsieur. Her words have come to pass, and you know that the devil cannot make a genuine prophecy. What other sign could you ask for? And yet the post-Conciliar church has refused to acknowledge them. They cannot tolerate Our Lady's message because they are afraid of its truth and afraid of the world's derision. We are not. The Roman Pontiff can deny the words of the Blessed Virgin, but he only proves that he is insubstantial, a puff of dust. He sits in the seat but the seat is empty, his place does not know him anymore."
Joel felt sick and sad, and for the first time he felt genuinely sorry for Madame DuPont. The expression in her eyes was—he thought of labelling it "belief," but it was not faith as he'd seen it in the eyes of Father Gilles, of Friar Tom, or of Vicky or Dr Xavier. It was, he decided, the expression of someone earnestly lecturing a dog, or a tourist in the metro trying to make a francophone speak English by sheer force of will.
But he wasn't a dog, or someone who simply didn't know the language; he knew it too well, in fact. He could almost understand her.
"Do you know what the consequences are, if mutants do not consecrate themselves to Mary's Immaculate Heart?" Madame said, in the falsely patient tone of someone trying to reason with a madman.
The question was not rhetorical, so Joel said, "No, madame."
"The same that happened when the nephilim first infected mankind. The Flood. Humanity will be destroyed. And the giants and nephilim too." She raised her eyebrows. "You see the urgency?"
"Yes, madame. I do."
"Good. I will be praying for Jeanne-Marie, and for you."
"I'll pray for you too," said Joel, feeling his ears get hot as he said it. "I really have to go."
Hodya called that evening, at nine sharp as she always did. Sometimes Joel would turn his phone off just before nine, and put it back on when he was ready; the phone would always ring no more than five minutes later. Hodya wasn't eager, but she was thorough; if she planned to call someone she would call, and not accept voice mail as a substitute. Joel had been surprised by her methodical intensity, the first time they went on a date by themselves—back when they had first met, as awkward adolescents with important fathers and the dim understanding that boys and girls together were supposed to produce certain results, he had imagined her as delicate and sensual, full of feminine mystique, not the type to respond to emails immediately.
"Are you done with exams yet?" she asked him.
"One more."
"I just finished my last one. Obviously, or I wouldn't be calling."
"Hm. That's good, I mean."
There was a silence, and Joel thought of what Paul had said. He didn't want any more conflict tonight. It would be a waste, anyway, to tell her about the Dominicans and then just get rejected whenever he finally asked to put his application in. Friar Tom had been hinting that Joel should prepare for something like that. To tell Hodya and then have to confess he'd been rejected would be far too humiliating.
"What's your last exam?"
"Greek. Nine tomorrow."
"Should I let you go so you can study?"
He had no intention of studying any more, but he said, "Yeah, that'd be good, actually."
She said good night, and he pressed END, cleared the screen.
Joel lay still on the bed, heavy and motionless like a grounded boat at low tide. He heard Paul on the stairs, the creak of the floorboards under his feet. The snow outside hit the screens with a steady thucking, and Joel found himself thinking of something he'd read once, a critic of literature or music saying you couldn't hear snow fall. Of course you could, if you lay very still and listened very carefully, and made sure not to fall asleep.
Paul came in, felt the draught at the window with his hand, and turned on the space heater. He sat down on the end of Joel's bed. "You look really worn out."
The word in French had a sense of being used up and fed up, weather-beaten, sick of everything. Joel let his eyes close. "Yeah."
"Talk to Hodya?"
"A little. Not really."
"You going to?"
"Eventually."
Paul shifted his weight a little on the bed, and Joel opened his eyes. He was a sickly burnt orange veined with green. "Listen, man, you need to go back to the doctor."
"Paul..."
"I mean it. We have a deal, you know that. You tell me when I'm losing it and I tell you when you are. You're losing it."
Joel rolled over on his side. The familiar topography of the bedside table, the desert dunes of Kleenex and the cliffs of the two books he still hadn't read. Under the Volcano was hardly his fault, but he couldn't think of much of an excuse for failing with Evelyn Waugh. Waugh was supposed to be funny. "I'm not that bad."
"Not yet. That's why you need to go to the doctor now."
"What exactly do you think a doctor is going to do for me? What's Dr Stein been able to do?"
"What did Dr Xavier do for you? What did Father Gilles do for you?"
"I'm not sick like that anymore." Those endless days of lying in the whiteness of the Aphanes seemed impossibly idyllic, now. To be sick enough to relax, sick enough that getting up and working was simply impossible—it would be a relief to be worse than he was.
Paul flopped back on the bed, lying perpendicular to Joel's feet. He switched to English. "Please, please, please, please go see a doctor. Okay? That can be my Christmas present, forget the caviar. You're stressed out and pissy and spacey and you're having seizures again. You're not eating. And clearly you're getting delusional if you seriously think you don't have issues anymore. This does not need to be a big complicated debate."
"Fine, okay, I'm not doing so good. That doesn't magically give doctors a new pill to fix me with. I don't have time to get back into therapy. Hell, I should be memorising Greek vocab right now."
A long pause. Joel heard Paul inhale deeply, as he did when reading people. At last he sat up, propping himself on one elbow, and said, "So why don't you talk to Friar Tom about it?"
"Because he's a vocations director, not a therapist."
"So? You know him pretty well. He's trained in that kind of thing. I'm sure he's noticed you're off your game—you haven't been the same since, shit, since April. Why don't you talk to him?"
"It's really annoying when you ask questions you know the answers to, Paul."
"I don't know, I'm just guessing. Does this mean I'm right? You don't want to tell him because you don't want it going on your psychiatric report? You're avoiding therapy because you want to be on paper as completely in remission, is that it?"
"All right, yeah, I'm stupid, thanks for the input."
"Câlisse de crisse, Joel. Are you serious? Did it occur to you that there are good reasons for them to reject loonies like us? You don't see me trying to be an air traffic controller or anything."
Joel didn't play shooter games much, because whenever he did he would get distracted and then suddenly notice that he was mortally wounded, the health bar dripping away to nothing. He felt that same way now, as if he'd lost track of the argument and all his points had disappeared, and for some reason it enraged him that Paul could do that to him. "I really fucking appreciate it when you belittle all my ambitions at every opportunity, you know that? I'm not a goddamn mental patient any more."
"Oh shit, now I'm belittling you?" Paul laughed, beginning to sound a little manic. "Look, I may be a cock, but I'm the same cock all the time since I got my meds straightened out, and if you're suddenly having a problem with that it means you're the one who's different."
Joel's torpor suddenly dissipated. He could almost taste the adrenaline burst. "So I'm not just sick of your shit, I'm crazy. I can't imagine why you flunked out of your first term of psych."
"You son of a bitch." Paul was a dangerous purple, the last step before the yellow-spiked indigo that indicated pure rage. He looked alien, like a Hindu deity. "I'm not—I'm going to ignore that because I know you're stressed out, but just back off."
"You're the expert at hitting below the belt, Paul, not me."
"I don't do it deliberately! You're just really—"
Joel waited for it, but Paul stopped and shook his head. "Look. Look. I'm your best friend—friend doesn't cover it—and I'm telling you this parce que je t'aime—bien—"
It was meant to be ambiguous, the bien relieving the weight of the je t'aime, but Paul's voice caught between the words and the meaning came out knottier and softer than mere liking, a mass of veins intertwined. Amo amas amat. Joel remembered sounding Paul out about it once, as obliquely as he could, and Paul had said only, "I never had a brother." And neither had Joel. It made nothing clearer, and they didn't want it to be clear. Or maybe there was too much clarity, the sun shining between two signal mirrors, and Joel wanted darkness, nothing so sharp and burning.
But Paul's words tore past like a cannonball through the hull, and in his desperation to stop the water from rushing in Joel agreed. "Okay, okay, Jesus, I'll go."
"Good." Paul swallowed, fading to a nervous blue. The snow thucked against the screen. "How did it go in Laval?"
Joel didn't think he had the energy to explain all the weirdness, but he provided a few highlights. "I don't know why she even told me all that stuff about Mary and the devil...you'd think they'd keep it quiet, like they keep some things quiet in the SSPX."
Paul didn't have much interest in that stuff. "Did you find out about Jeanne-Marie's manifestation?"
"Not as such, I guess," said Joel, throwing his balled-up socks at the laundry hamper. "I gather it would have been traumatic, since she felt like she had to hide it."
Paul groaned. "I don't know why I bother telling you anything."
"I got distracted."
"Ayoye."
The curtain that divided the room was drawn back, as it mostly was these days, but Joel had taken to undressing in the bathroom if Paul was around. Tonight, though, he left the door open, standing by the sink out of view of the door. As he unbuttoned his shirt, he looked at the burned-paper scars on his chest and thought, as he sometimes did, about surgery, what it might cost.
In the bedroom, Paul sniffed once, an ordinary sort of winter sniffle. "I think I'm getting the flu. That flu shot is worthless."
"J't'aime aussi, Paul."
Notes: See the glossary if the French gives you any trouble. "His place does not know him" is an allusion to Job 7:10 and also to Amos Oz's Fima.