| In
a piazza in Rome, I once saw a woman waiting at a corner. I don't know how long she stood there, or whether the one who hadn't come did come in the end, or not. But after her death, God will gently pry open her head, as he always does, to look for the name of the one she truly loved. And it won't be His name, it won't be His. — Yehuda Amichai |
Neurocherche stood off the highway just outside of Repentigny, a squat and sprawling concrete building crouching behind the ditch-wheat and the massed pines that lined the road. The parking lot was full, even at seven-thirty in the middle of the dead week between Christmas and New Year's.
"We haven't been able to find the lesions," Dr Gervais told Joel in the office. "That doesn't mean they're not there, necessarily. Necessarily. But they're not showing up. I'm not going to give you another MRI—it's a waste of money when we know what we're going to find."
"Could...could the seizures be psychogenic?" Joel asked, trying to help him by using the right term, not getting bitter and saying, Are you saying I'm faking, are you saying I'm crazy?
"No. No, I don't think so. You've had them while asleep, for one thing. Your EEGs don't show the transients that are usual in epilepsy, but if I went by EEGs alone I'd say you were constantly half-asleep. Your brainwaves are unusual. Luckily, we're not carving you up so there's no need to pinpoint exactly where the treasure's buried, yeah? We know which parts are malfunctioning, even if we don't know the details. Although I wish I knew the details. But we can place the electrodes at the temporal lobes, which should stop the secondary generalised seizures. The ones with the bees. But I'll warn you now that the absences might not stop. Is that okay?"
Joel had never been inclined to question people in lab coats; he never asked for exceptions, reasons, implications, name rank and serial number. What was he supposed to say? Whether it was okay or not didn't change the facts. "Sure."
"That means you won't qualify for a driver's license, even if the generalised seizures stop. There's also a chance you'll respond to the drugs and everything will clear up. It's...the brain is a many-splendoured thing, you know. Even with regular people, it's messy. With mutants, I almost hesitate to call it science."
"Almost?"
Dr Gervais leaned back in his chair and spread his arms wide. "Nature is big. It doesn't follow the rules. You learn that in the university lab, when you find that your fruit flies aren't following the rules of your little first-year experiment. You mess with their genes, their simple little drosophila genes, and something completely unexpected happens, so you massage the facts a little to make your graph look smoother. Stuff a few more things into the full suitcase. That's science, that's always been science. Nature doesn't match it. Nature flips a coin. God plays dice with the universe, it's true. How can I say that something isn't science, just because it's chancy, unpredictable, it messes with the facts in Harrison and Merck, it doesn't follow Osler or Galen or anyone? I can say we're trying, we do it like the pros, so it's science. But that doesn't mean you can set your watch by it. You get me?"
Joel shrugged. "I'm a theology student, so..."
"So you understand. You study something and you try your best, but you can't control it. It's true. It's bigger. The divine is bigger. Nature is bigger. And you put your life on the line same as all my patients, don't you? Just because it matters doesn't mean you can have a guarantee." Gervais smiled, then glanced down at his file and bit his lip. "Now, I saved the worst bit for last."
"The lumbar puncture."
"You must have had one with the meningitis."
"Yeah. I don't remember it, though." Why did he say that? Joel had some vague idea that it would save the doctor's feelings. But of course he remembered it. Propped up on a stool, his Aunt Grace holding onto him with her strong cool nurse's hands, supporting all his weight—and he'd been fat then, bloated and fever-hot—and they told him not to tense up. They were honest. This is going to hurt, Joel, are you ready? He didn't remember what he answered, but they put the needle in his back and God, yes, it did hurt. The world slid like an egg yolk in the pan, but Aunt Grace held his shoulders up, she whispered, Very good, lad, you're doing very well. But she was afraid, and Joel knew he was dying.
But he had lived. The unlikely luck of that struck him now as the nurse led him into the smaller room and left him alone to undress.
There was a knock on the door. Joel took a deep breath. "Yeah."
But it wasn't the nurse, it was Paul, his fair skin flushed with a watery green that made him look ill. "They said you might want, ah, some moral support."
"Yeah. Thanks. Good of them."
"They're not bad here."
"No. You don't have to stay, actually. I know you hate needles."
Paul half-turned towards the door, shifting his bundled coat from one arm to the other. "Well...do you want me to go?"
"If you want to go, you can go."
"But do you want me to? I mean...I know you're..."
Paul made a vague, mocking gesture that suggested an old-fashioned Jansenist modesty—a flipping of an imaginary cassock, a gasp of shock. But the streams under his skin were still nervous green and a softer blue of worry, and Joel smiled.
"It's not like that," he said. "I don't care. It's just not very pretty."
"I'm not a delicate kitten who can't stand unpleasant things, you know. It's not needles or blood or anything else I have a problem with, just the—the smell of it, the atmosphere, when someone's hurt. It's like wasabi, you eat a bit and think it's fine and then it rips the roof of your mouth off. You know what I mean?"
"Well, I'll try not to be in too much pain."
"Shut up."
"You want to tell them they can come in and get this over with?"
Paul did, and Dr Gervais came in with a nurse and moved the stool closer to the bed. "It's Paul, isn't it? You can sit there. We'll have Joel on the table, less risk of herniation."
As Joel assumed the foetal position on the table, back exposed, the doctor made a small sound in his throat, the sort of sound you might make upon discovering bad steering in an otherwise good used car. "I'm surprised you didn't get some work done on some of these scars."
"I was pretty sick of the hospital at the time." The scars ran all along the backs of his arms, but they were worst on his back and chest. His feet too were mangled from the illness, the smallest toes missing.
"But since then? What do you do on the beach? Here comes the pinch. I mean there's a lot you must be missing out on."
"I'm not a beach guy." The first needle, the lidocaine, not too bad.
Paul asked, "What do you need spinal fluid for, anyway? I thought you only did this for infections."
"Mostly, not only. And that's in ordinary medicine. For mutants who fit a particular profile, it's a useful procedure for predicting how the brain will respond to the Allassine we administer after the surgery is completed and the implants are programmed. The result from this will be the final arbiter on whether this surgery is appropriate or not. I'm very confident, though."
"So this might all be a waste of money, is what you're saying."
"Paul, shut up." But Joel was thinking it too. Prawn had cashed the cheque, characteristically, and Joel's mother had advanced them enough money to cover the medical tests and surgery. For the rest, she'd said she wasn't going to be responsible for Joel's poor judgement, and Joel was now resigned either to dealing with the family's obnoxious financial planner or getting an ordinary bank loan like a peasant.
Yellow flashed along Paul's temples. "Oh, God."
"Don't look at it. And don't tell me how big it is, either."
Gervais rested cold gloved fingers on Joel's back. "It's not big. It's a very fine needle. Now, try to relax. And don't...move..."
Even with the anaesthetic, he felt it, every millimetre, straight between his bones. Paul knew better than to make any attempt at distracting conversation, and instead just sat, breathing shallowly.
"And straighten out your legs..."
It was like the pangs of joint pain he got when he hadn't had enough sleep, but tight, as if something might pop. He prayed, to keep his mind busy more than anything else. A simple scrap of Latin, nothing onerous. Adoramus te Christe, benedicimus tibi...
And then he felt it. Once in school someone had headbutted him—not even on purpose, but Joel had been cutting through the lunch crowd and somehow wandered into a fight between two hulking grade elevens, one of whom reared and charged without looking. This was like that, not a touch or a probe but an onslaught on his mind. He thought that surely he must have jerked or thrashed, but Gervais was still murmuring calmly about beaches and subarachnoid space. The great vastness of Nature.
Leave me alone, someone said in his mind. Shut it up or I'll crack your head open. I can do it.
He couldn't think, couldn't string two words together. The telepath prodded him, rummaged through a few recent memories (tea and buckwheat pancakes at breakfast, stretches of salt-parched highway, Churchill on an old National Geographic giving V for Victory), then seemed apologetic. New one. All right. Keep your God-talk to yourself, though. Quiet. Everyone can hear.
My head hurts.
So don't we. The cripples don't stay long, though. You'll be fixed in no time. We just wait and wait. Not easy being a mystery, is it? Just put your walls up and keep quiet.
Wait— but the connection was closed. Joel opened his eyes. The needle was out, and Gervais was dressing the puncture site. It was useless to reach after the phantom voice, useless as trying to fly, but Joel tried anyway, until they left him and Paul alone in the dimly lit recovery room.
"You want to catch some zeds?"
"There are telepaths here," Joel said. The headache was already beginning, whether from the spinal tap or the psychic concussion.
"So?"
So, indeed. Joel couldn't formulate a good reason for what he was thinking; he had some hazy image of mutants in cages like lab rats, but thought that was probably unlikely. Any telepath who could hit a person that hard would be difficult to hold. But something was out of joint here. Paul wrinkled his nose and nodded, a few bright darts of interest flashing under his skin and disappearing. "Maybe I'll go look for a bathroom, then."
He really did need a bathroom, in order to do any serious exploring. Paul locked himself in the men's room and got his makeup out of his messenger bag. The light was bad, a harsh fluorescent that made everything too purple, but he managed to approximate an ordinary Caucasian winter skintone on his face and neck. Hands were tougher, and he didn't carry the more durable makeup around with him, so he found a pair of black acrylic gloves in his bag and hoped no one would mistake him for a jewel thief. Luckily he'd been in a mood for respectability that morning, and had dressed in a nubby blue silk button-down shirt and retro flannel slacks, which looked rather office-ish. Not bad. His gym membership badge was in there too, and Paul had to stamp down the temptation to try to pass it off as lab security. No. If he got caught, he could play dumb, but not if he looked like he was trying to fool anyone.
There was also a large interoffice envelope, full of pamphlets about digging wells in Haiti, and this Paul did use, hefting it under his arm as if it were very important.
He left the bathroom and picked a direction at random, going right and following his nose. He kept his head up, walking briskly and occasionally checking his watch or fiddling with the closure on the envelope. Exploring buildings had been a hobby of his since high school, before the mutation manifested, when he and his friends used to mess around in the old Eaton building and the ruins of the Redpath sugar refinery. It was just a bit tougher when the buildings were still occupied, that was all. And he now happened to be an extremely identifiable mutant instead of a random fifteen-year-old. No big deal, he told himself.
Neurocherche was a big place, so he took advantage of his anonymity. He didn't know what he was looking for, but he knew he probably wasn't supposed to be able to find it, so at the first STAFF ONLY door he tried the knob. Locked. Paul smiled at a passing nurse and strode off down a different hall.
As he left the clinic area, the smells began to change from ordinary office emotions of boredom and concentration to something meatier, whiffs of fluoride and stomach acid. In one hallway, the lights were turned off like in a school in summertime, but when Paul glanced up he saw that there were in fact no lights. No electrical outlets, either.
He tried another NO ADMITTANCE door, and this time got through into another hallway, this one lit by lights in metal cages like emergency lamps. Closet. Bathroom. And, at the end of the hall, a door with a keypad beside it—impasse.
Paul wished Niko were here: her powers were related to electronics, and she could bust through these computerised locks with ease. He was about to give up when something made him turn around. What? Nothing. A door on the other side of the hall, with a danger sign and an ordinary lock.
A good lock. But not that good. You could get through. Remember how?
A pressure behind his sinuses, like an ice cream headache. Yes. He could get through a lock like this. His father had taught him how to use a pick and a tension wrench, and it hadn't been completely successful. ("You're a clumsy one, aren't you? Use a bit of subtlety.") It had taken a long time to learn the sounds and feel of tumblers moving in a deadbolt, and even now the more difficult locks confounded him, but this—yes, he could do it.
He used a paperclip scavenged from the brochures in the envelope. The door thrummed under his fingers—it was a mechanical room. The pins inside began to give way, two at a time, and Paul listened carefully to the tiny clicks in the lock.
At last the lock felt right, and he turned the plug. The door opened, and he was in the hot and noisy mechanical room. Boiler room? He didn't know what it was called.
How had he got in here?
Paul rolled the paperclip between his fingers, which were red and sweaty. He'd taken his right glove off at some point, and his bioluminescence shed a faint yellow glow in the dark room. The machines made loud churning noises, and it was uncomfortably hot. What was he doing in here? Better go before someone caught him.
But on one wall, a panel had been removed, exposing the aluminum ribs of a wall vent. It was clear within, about three feet by three feet, and the air was relatively cool. That goes straight through. It's perfectly safe. Paul found himself kneeling down beside the open vent when he felt a hand on his shoulder.
He looked up and saw a security guard in blue, a paunch hanging over his belt. The man wore a small device that hooked around one ear, like a telephone headset, but it had a scrappy, homemade look to it, a single red LED blinking in the darkness. He took Paul's arm firmly and led him out of the boiler room, slamming the door. He had a fetid, goatish odour that Paul had come to associate with mild habitual cruelty, the sort of people who never got very excited about the pleasure or pain of others.
The man's face, though, was impassive. "What were you doing in there?"
Paul held up the envelope. "Glad someone found me. I was supposed to bring this to Human Resources, but the guy at the main desk must have misunderstood me when I asked for directions."
It was spectacular lying, the best he'd ever done in his life. At that, the man still didn't believe him. "How'd you get in?"
"The main entrance off—"
"To the mechanical room. Who gave you a key?"
"It wasn't locked," Paul heard himself say, sounding not only innocent but confident in his innocence. "I thought this must be the door, since it was open and the only other one here is the one with the keypad."
He was dimly aware that he wanted to say other things, but he couldn't think of the words.
The guard nodded, as if this was a familiar occurrence. "Come on."
Paul followed the guard back out to the darkened hallway, the one with no wiring in it. He felt a sudden pop between his ears, like suction breaking, and he realised with a heavy stomach that he was in a lot of trouble. Here the man faced him again and said, "Who gave you a key?"
Suddenly he could talk again. The truth fell out in a rush. "Nobody did. Nobody. I don't know what happened."
"You don't have a key?"
"I picked the lock," Paul said, because he knew it was true, but he couldn't understand how something like that had happened. One of the Jesuits at St Rita's had taught him how to jimmy a cheap door with a credit card, but that was the extent of his abilities in the field of burglary. The last ten minutes were dreamlike, nonsensical. "That's—look, I know I shouldn't have been back there, sir, but I never intended—"
"Relax, relax." The man adjusted his belt, and took out his walkie-talkie. "Someone arrange a sed for 129, thanks, over."
"What happened?"
"Not your fault. Just go deliver the package. And stay out of the Staff Only areas. Second thought, give the envelope to me and I'll bring it to HR."
Paul handed over the envelope to the guard, feeling dazed. He made a swift retreat back through the corridors to Joel's recovery room. Do not under any circumstances let them open that envelope until we get out of here, God, I mean it. Haven't I done enough for you? Someone had closed the blind in the little room, and it smelled, Christ, it was wasabi in here everywhere.
"What's wrong?" Joel said stiffly, when he heard Paul's breathing.
"Something weird happened. And I lost all those pamphlets about Haiti."
"What?"
Paul groped for a chair in the dimness. "I was in this hallway, dead end, about to turn back. But I didn't. I started—I started trying to get into this boiler room. By picking the lock. And it made perfect sense to me at the time, I was thinking about my dad teaching me to break into places, I wasn't scared of getting caught, nothing."
"Your dad knows how to break into places? I thought he sold Toyotas."
"My stepdad," said Paul, annoyed in spite of himself that Joel would make that mistake. "My real dad was a pharmacist."
"Known for their cat burglary skills, of course."
"That's my point, douche. This was..."
"They weren't your thoughts," Joel said slowly. "Not your memories."
"No. They weren't. That's not what happened to you, is it?"
Joel started to shake his head, then winced and kept it still. "Ow. No."
"So what's going on?"
Joel lay still for a long time, and Paul wondered if he'd gone to sleep or fallen into an absence seizure.
The door opened, and a nurse bobbed her head in. "Checks."
"They do that every five or ten minutes," said Joel. "So I can't go over there and see for myself. Not today, anyway. I'll email the Professor, I guess. A lab full of telepaths is his department, if it's anyone's. But you know—we're dealing with a procedure done on mutants with mental and neurological problems. There are bound to be some unhinged telepaths in the building. It might not be a big deal. You smelled Gervais, right? He's for real?"
"I thought he was okay," Paul admitted. "But not the hallway, or the security guard. They smelled...you can't trust them. Maybe Gervais doesn't know the whole story. Or maybe he just doesn't feel guilty. But this place has all the wrong smells. You can't let these people cut you open. You can't."
Joel sighed. "All right. All right. God, I really thought this was going to work."
From: jkmccree@gmail.com
To: charles.xavier@xavierinstitute.edu
Subject: questions, if you have time, re TP/Neurocherche
Dear
Professor,
I was wondering if you knew anything about
That was about as far as he'd got. He didn't know how secure email was, or if it was very likely that anyone would bother to read his. Possible. Not likely. He couldn't find a way to phrase his doubts about Neurocherche without sounding ridiculous, didn't know what questions to ask, didn't know what evidence was significant. Telepaths in a laboratory, who wanted to get out. Fine. Joel had been in psych wards and mental hospitals long enough to know that wanting to escape didn't mean you were being mistreated.
The dangerous thing was that the Gatineau Accords meant there were very few restrictions on how health care providers had to treat mutants. Joel had watched the first few Supreme Court challenges carefully, wishing his father was still alive, but the decisions had all been discouraging. Public safety came first, and it wasn't hard to get labelled as dangerous.
The date on the computer read December 29, and Joel realised that Hodya hadn't called him yet for the holidays. She was probably waiting for him. Hodya always kept track of whose turn it was to call, and she wouldn't pick up the phone if the duty wasn't hers. He wondered what time it was in Jerusalem, and finally had to Google for a time zone converter.
He thought it was doable, since she liked late nights while she was on holiday, and indeed she answered in Hebrew on the second ring.
"Is it 'boker tov' over there?" he said. Hodya loved it that he was studying Biblical Hebrew and kept trying to teach him new phrases in the resurrected language.
"Yoel! Ma nishma? Yeah, I was just about to go to bed. How was Christmas?"
"Hectic, I guess. How are you?"
"Mmm." He heard her settling back against something that creaked, perhaps wicker or a couch with old springs. "Well, it's about two in the morning. I was watching the BBC news, and eating a sandwich, roast beef with lettuce and tomato and butter and swiss cheese. And now the sandwich is gone, and there's an apple sitting on the end table here, but I won't eat it over the phone. My father's gone to bed. Everything is—let me turn the TV off—everything is very quiet. I can just hear the traffic from around the corner. And a dripping faucet in the kitchen. Now you go."
Joel smiled. "I'm in the office at St John of God. I was...I was going to write to Professor Xavier, but I couldn't think of anything to say, so I called you. And it's only seven o'clock here. It was—it's not snowing anymore, but there's snow on the ground, fresh snow on the windowsill. All I can hear is the furnace and the dishwasher."
"You never say as much as I do. What are you wearing?"
"Is this going to get dirty?"
"No, I just want to be able to see you."
"I'm wearing the usual. Levi's, black sweater."
"Keep going."
He rolled his eyes. Hodya liked detail. "White socks, no shoes, blue boxers, watch, scapular, MedicAlert bracelet. Two dollars and change in my pockets. Bit of dirt under the left thumbnail."
"Thank you. You sound tired."
"Don't I always?"
"A lot of the time," she admitted, not taking his tone as a hint to gloss over the topic. "It's better than when I first met you. Then you just sounded dead. That was...oh God, we were sixteen, and you were home on a weekend pass from St Rita's. I think I only saw you for half an hour or so during dinner, while our dads were comparing golf courses."
"That was a long time ago."
"I was scared of you, in a way. Not that I thought you'd hurt anyone—I knew you weren't that sort of crazy, or that sort of mutant for that matter. But I was afraid you'd break right in front of everyone, cause a big scene. Or worse, that it wouldn't cause a scene, that everyone would try to pretend nothing was wrong. Instead you just disappeared, wouldn't even talk to me."
"A long time ago," he said again. "I've changed."
"You have. But you still won't talk to me. Not as much as I'd like."
This was about not calling. "I'm sorry. I don't...I've been neglecting you."
"That's not it, Joel. I don't need constant attention from you. I have other friends. Other guys take me out in Toronto, you knew that. But when I do hear from you it would be nice to actually hear something. You know?"
Joel had not, in fact, known that Hodya was dating other people. She had talked about it, and he had agreed in principle that it was perfectly justified. Not really thinking that she would take that as permission. No, not permission—waiving his right to get upset, maybe. At that, he wasn't sure if it bothered him or not, that she saw other guys. Even though they saw each other less, and even though he'd been keeping things from her, she was still his beautiful secret, a thing you would never guess to look at him. And so he was diminished, like the candles in the red glasses before the Blessed Sacrament that burned down and dimmed, going out slowly like stars.
"It takes a long time," he said. "I'm sorry it takes so long. I'm sorry. You know I'd give you more if I had it. More energy, more time, more everything, more..."
He trailed off, as if "everything" were not everything, as if he could offer her still something else. St Clare looked down at him from the far wall, bare feet hidden under her robe, her hand raised to her heart as if she would give that away too. "I wish you were here now," he said into the phone, voice falling to a whisper. "I would give you everything. I would."
"What would you give me?" she asked, a smile coming into her voice. Not taking him seriously, which was always her problem. Their moods never matched. "I want tangibles, give me results. Would you give me your pots and pans? Good pots and pans are hard to come by."
"Of course, the whole set. And, what else, I'd give you my stapler, the big black one, and the three-hole punch that my mum stole from school. They're yours."
"Office supplies, not too bad. For a dowry like that I suppose I'd let you kiss me."
"This is getting dirty."
"Don't call it dirty. I don't like that. When was the last time I was down to Montreal? August or September? And we had to make out in the Beaux-Arts because you didn't want to warp the fragile mutant minds of your house kids?"
"Not wanting to get physical in front of a bunch of sixteen-year-olds isn't weird. Ask some of your other boyfriends."
A small silence at the other end of the line. "Are you jealous?"
He had the feeling that he ought to be more worked up than he was. "No."
"You're hurt."
"I guess. No. We aren't close enough anymore for me to be hurt. I'm happy for you."
"Ha," she said softly. "I always thought that was sweet about you, that you only tell the nice lies. I'm not so sure anymore."
"Sorry."
"Joel. I'm being—how do you call it—facetious? A little bit facetious. You don't have to lie to me, is what I mean. If you're hurt, I understand."
"A little bit hurt." He liked her, he still did. Loved her, maybe. "I do wish you were here. Really."
She was eating the apple, despite her promise not to. He heard the first crunch. Her voice, when she swallowed, was lower. "Do you want me to come down there for New Year's? I could."
"Really?"
"If you want, just for a day or two. See you, get some good bagels. Get back to Toronto in time to buy books for winter term."
"I'd like that." He was nervous suddenly, wanted to back out, even though he wanted to see her again, the snow in her hair, her luggage laid out on his bed. The way she draped her sweater on the chair. "I don't—we're having cash flow problems right now. It can't be a lavish weekend."
"You and cash flow problems?" she said, curious more than disappointed.
"Just me being stupid with money. You know how I am." He debated also telling her that it might not be safe, then decided that Department H probably wouldn't touch a human diplomat's daughter.
She let it go. "I'll get hold of Paul when I know what flight I'm taking. I'll see you New Year's Eve. Kiss kiss."
She'd started that, wanting something more affectionate than goodbye. It was painfully unnatural coming from her, but any alternatives would have been more awkward. "Lilah tov," he said formally. "Boker tov. Mazel tov. Whatever."
"Terrible.
Yalla, bye."
Prawn had spent a few days at a shitty motel in Pointe St-Charles, a place with stains on the ceiling and a snowy TV at the end of the bed. He hadn't been able to face anyone at St John of God House, particularly Vicky and Steph, who were acting as if he'd robbed them. But as he was putting down his third fifty dollars for the room, he decided that he could put up with dirty looks if it meant free bed and board. Wasting this money felt sacrilegious, perhaps because it had fallen on him so miraculously.
So that night, after a day wandering downtown, he went back up Rue Sainte Famille and climbed over the house's back fence, wading through the deep snow in the back garden and letting himself in through the heavy oaken door that was always unlocked.
It was late, around eleven, but the door to the office was standing open and McCree was still up, reading a fat blue leather-bound book and singing a Latin hymn under his breath, his feet up on the desk. He shut up as soon as he saw Prawn, but only raised his eyebrows in greeting.
"Eh up," said Prawn. "All right if I stay here a night or two?"
"Course. Top bedroom on this side's free."
"Good."
"It's not easy finding apartments this time of year, I know." Joel turned his eyes back to the book, flipping back through the pages and marking his place with a green ribbon. "Assuming that's what you intend to be doing."
It was, eventually. Prawn had gone through the classifieds, and even called a landlord, muddling through a brief conversation in French enough to agree on an appointment date. He had then flopped down on the motel bed, wondering if he ought to take off for Toronto or New York instead, or maybe even go back home to Leeds. No, not to Leeds. London. No, Notts—he could live with his old mate from school, maybe. And the cities all collapsed together, and he couldn't imagine himself living anywhere, doing anything. He was trapped in a bubble, here in Montreal, and he couldn't see outside it. Being a half-mad homeless mutant in French Canada was such an unlikely turn of events that nothing else on earth could be impossible: everything was equally probable from this vantage point. No one could make a decision in a bubble like that.
"Do you want it back?" he asked abruptly. He hadn't known he'd say it until that moment.
Joel knew exactly what he meant. "No."
"Seriously. Here, what are you smirking about?"
"I like the way you say 'seriously', that's all. No, I don't want it back."
"You must be skint. How fucking rich are you that you can shrug off fourteen thousand dollars?"
Joel gave him a rare cheeky grin and said, "Prawn, let me put it this way: I own an island."
"Oh." Not much to say to that, really.
"No, I was joking. It's not much of an island, just a lump of trees and granite off Rockport with a cottage and a boathouse on it. And I wouldn't much like to sell it, either, so it may as well be a bill for property taxes. But I could sell it. I'm very far from poor. Just temporarily inconvenienced."
It was a bit like finding out that the local vicar went into the job for the benefits—not exactly shocking, but the sort of thing that had a strange power to sap your spirits. "So that whole performance on Christmas was just to psych me out?"
"No!" Joel swung his feet off the desk and got to his feet. "Absolutely not. When have I ever lied to you, Prawn? I meant every word I said to you that night, and if you've forgotten any of it, I'll tell you again. Stay away from Department H."
"Why? What do you know about them that makes you so sure?" Prawn hadn't been able to come up with a satisfactory answer to this question on his own, no matter how much he'd wrestled with it at night on his lumpy motel bed.
"I already told you," said Joel slowly, sounding almost frightened. "I talked and I talked. Didn't you understand me?"
"No. I didn't. Tell me again. There's a reason you don't trust these people."
"Jesus! Look, even if they were completely honest and aboveboard, I would have written that cheque. Because—because we're friends, aren't we? I’ve known you for two years. I like you, even when you're a dick. Friends try to keep each other from making big mistakes."
"What mistake are you talking about, for fuck's sake?"
"Prawn." Ridiculous that a schoolboy nickname had gone this far, overgrown his real name, crossing the Atlantic with him and bobbing up like a silly little cork in this conversation which should have been serious. "Why did you come here in the first place?"
It hit him like a blow to the windpipe. "I—I was in trouble."
"You were in trouble because you killed someone," said Joel, the only person Prawn knew who could say a sentence like that with such gentleness. "And it wasn't the first time. And you knew then that...that you didn't want to live like that. You told me. You didn't want any of that anymore."
Prawn stared down at the rug. "The first time was an accident. The second time was self-defence."
"I know. But they both happened in a context of garden-variety violence. You didn't have to get into that fight in Leeds, anyway—I'll admit the second incident's more of a grey area. I wrote the cheque because I was bribing you to have a conscience. You know where violence leads, in the end. It leads to that guy in the alley with his brain cooked in his skull. Many times over. You're kidding yourself if you think that isn't what the government wants with you."
Prawn wasn't that naïve; he knew that the only thing he possessed worth ninety-six thou a year was his mutation. "Oh, fuck, man. I'm not—I'm not going to kill anyone. I only meant to go along with the thing until something more fun came along, you know? Take their money, leave when I felt like it. When they wanted someone dead, I'd leg it. But then I thought you must know something I don't, that they wouldn't let me go. That's not how it is?"
"Prawn, listen to me." Joel had gone rather white. "This is important. Department H as good as admitted to me that they will be hurting people. That's what 'combat' means. Even if they don't ask you to do it, they'd be asking you to help. There is nothing morally good you can do with an organisation like that, not even answering phones or opening mail. You can disagree with me on that if you want to, and God knows plenty of people do, but don't misunderstand me. This isn't about Department H being especially bad. I'd pay you just as much not to join the Princess Pats. I really would."
"Then you're mad," said Prawn, meaning it. He was aware, for the first time, that he was in a small room with a bona fide certifiable lunatic. "That's—Christ, McCree, that's not a normal opinion to have. What would you have done if you'd been where I was, in that alley in Pointe St-Charles? Get stabbed?"
"Maybe." A particular pompous tone always came into Joel's voice when he knew he was saying something bizarre or indefensible, but wanted to make it sound like a martyred, unpopular moral truth. Prawn had always thought it was just lawyerish rhetoric, but lately he wasn't sure how far Joel would go. Fourteen thousand dollars was good evidence of sincerity—although, he realised, it hadn't been seven thousand, or twenty-eight thousand.
"What about Aurora?"
He had used the nickname without thinking, but Joel froze, eyes wide. "What about who?"
"Jeanne-Marie, I mean."
"What about her?"
"You weren't breaking your neck to keep her out of Department H, were you?"
Joel sat heavily back in his chair. "She heard the same arguments you did. If you have any better ideas, let me hear 'em."
"Maybe she'd like an island."
"Jeanne-Marie wouldn't be bought off," said Joel, in a curious tone. "I don't know if Aurora would be."
"How's that?"
Joel shrugged. "Not the type to settle down in a place with no cable, I don't think."
Prawn nodded. He wanted a drink. And he'd never liked complicated situations. "Isn't there somewhere we can go? America, Russia, Venezuela, anywhere?"
"If we have to leave, I'll take everyone I can to the safest place I know," said Joel, far too seriously. "Until then, you've got the bedroom on the third floor."
Prawn took that as the invitation to leave that it was. The room on the third floor smelled musty, like old books, and he fell asleep watching the shadows of the bare branches outside sway across the walls.
Notes: The Yehuda Amichai quote is from his poem "Names, Names, in Other Days and in Our Time" from Open Closed Open, and the chapter's title is from the same place. Dr Gervais's speech about nature and science is ripped off from inspired by a remark made by my philosophy of science professor. Rockport, Ontario is nearish to Brockville—it's the Thousand Islands, but not the obscenely wealthy part; there are both mansions and cottages that are barely more than trailers clinging to the rock. Take the parkway if you're ever in that part of the province.