Envy was not green, as Paul knew perfectly well. It was a burnt purple, like the beached remains of a jellyfish, dead and dry in the light but lambent in the darkness, and he couldn't hide from it. No, not envy: Père Gilles always defined that word carefully, and corrected him when he used it to mean jealous. "You can only be envious of what you don't have. Jealousy is a fear of losing what you do have. Jealousy is defensive, envy offensive."
Paul had always been envious before. He'd had friends once, and he lost them, and yes, he was envious thereafter when he saw them walking home from school. Ostentatiously crossing to the other side of the street when they passed his house. That was textbook stuff, even if he couldn't put a name to it at the time—he wasn't even angry at them, or bitter, he just wanted very badly to be back there with them. He wanted what they had. He used to test himself: if you could be human again, and they asked you to, would you forgive them? If it meant things could be just like they were? Yes, yes, absolutely. And it wasn't because Paul was so very holy, just because he had nothing and needed them.
That, of course, was another meaning of the word in French. J'ai envie d'être normal encore.1
He hadn't been angry then, but he was angry now. Of all the fucking times to...to get busy with a girl. To make things complicated. They didn't even love each other, not really, not enough to make this worth all the trouble that would follow. Paul knew what real love smelled like. It was delicate and solid like tofu, you could almost miss it, but it was there, a constant undertone.
That was always the problem, that he could see and smell these things so clearly and yet he could never see the reasons.
He got up at seven, having slept only a little during the night, and found Joel in the kitchen with a cup of tea.
"Bonjour." Joel pushed the teapot closer to the centre of the table. Sugar and cream were already set out, although Joel always took his black, and Paul knew it was a sort of apology.
"So how was it?" Paul asked. He hadn't wanted to be crass about it, only friendly and curious like an ordinary guy, but it came out as a taunt anyway.
Joel blew on his tea. "We didn't do anything."
"No?"
"No."
"Why not?"
He shrugged. "I don't know."
"You must have an inkling. Or—did she stop it or did you?"
"I did. Don't make me talk about it, okay? I just...it didn't feel right. It was making me nervous."
"You should talk to someone about that. A pro, I mean. I may be a psych dropout but I can smell issues."
"Would you stop it? I don't want to have sex. Period. It's nobody's business why not and it's not doing anyone any harm. Including me. I'm going to break up with Hodya." He said this last part absently.
"What? Because of...this?"
"Yeah, because of this. It's a valid reason. A genuine impediment. I'm off the air, where that stuff is concerned. People who like each other and don't touch each other are friends, that's it. I should have broken it off long ago."
Paul looked up at the ceiling, feeling like he needed to clear his airway. "I hope you're not going to tell her like that."
"I should. I need to make things clear. That's my whole problem, I never make things clear. Half the time I don't even see clearly, and I mumble and mutter and put things off and hope something will turn up to let me off the hook. Not this time."
"I'm just saying this isn't a situation where you need to be all Thomistic. Have a heart, and so on."
"I'm not being Thomistic. Maybe a little Pauline. Even a little Augustinian. Not nearly enough, though."
"Whatever, whatever." Paul poured himself some tea, adding the cream and sugar afterwards. He knew it was the wrong way but he liked to see the cloudy swirl in the liquid. "You're only fooling yourself, you know."
"You're the one who's always huffing and blowing whenever Hodya comes by. I'd have thought you'd be happy."
"I'm not happy that you're making yet another extreme decision that's only going to end up constricting your life. What did Friar Tom say about seeing you as a counsellor? You never mentioned."
Joel got up with an air of great purpose and busied himself with the toaster. "I'm leaving school this term, I'm not going to be a Dominican, so he doesn't need to have anything to do with me anymore."
"Oh, great."
"I get tired of you constantly looking for flaws in my psyche, you know."
"I don't hardly need a magnifying glass, Frère Joël."
"Well, this isn't the time, how about that? Don't fucking analyse me when the house might be bugged, it's a breach of confidentiality." He pressed the lever down and wiped the chrome surface with a rag. "I'm tired of myself, anyway."
"I know how that is," said Paul quietly.
"Right." Joel sighed. "I should call Madame DuPont, let her know that Jeanne-Marie's gone."
"Why?"
"She cares. She'd want to know." He pushed through the red door that led to the east side of the house. When the toast popped up, Paul spread it with butter and tahini and ate it himself.
After a bit of fussing with one of the Sisters, Joel got hold of Madame DuPont herself. "This is Joel McCree at St-Jean-de-Dieu in town."
"Yes?" A moment of confusion. "Oh! Oh, how is Jeanne-Marie, monsieur?"
"That was why I'm calling. She's—she's taken a job in Ottawa, with the government. I thought you'd want an update on where she was. You're the next thing she has to family." He wondered about Jean-Paul, but then decided that the Martins were no family of Jeanne-Marie's, and the boy himself wasn't old enough to be responsible for her. Eighteen was a different age on different people.
Madame was quiet for a moment. "What sort of a job?"
He ought to invest in a cordless phone, he thought, wishing he'd brought his tea into the office. His throat was dry. "Um...it's a sort of mutant police force, I suppose."
"I see."
"I have a phone number for them around here somewhere..."
As he sifted through the pile of business cards in the drawer, Madame asked, "Did you try to stop her?"
"From joining?"
"Yes."
"I did. I tried. You don't approve?"
"I cannot approve of women in roles like that. The sexes are different, with different roles appropriate to them. More than that...I don't disapprove of mutants using their powers, you know. Our Lady has said at Orloo that mutants were not originally part of God's plan, but He can turn anything to His own purposes. And yet—I don't know. Perhaps I would change my mind if I had longer to think about the idea. But women should not be asked to use force against other people. Not like that."
Joel wasn't annoyed, and that bothered him; he thought annoyance was a better response to such an argument than indifference, at least when it came from someone else in the Church. A member of the family, in a way. "I understand."
"And you? What made you disapprove?"
"I don't believe in violence. For any reason."
"Ah. I don't agree. But I'm not surprised," she added, rather kindly, "given what happened to your father."
He hadn't connected the two things before. "It wasn't like that."
"Oh no?"
"It was—I just believed in the Catholic Worker, at first. I wanted to just, just give hospitality. But then the more I read, and the more I worked with the people, the more I felt like...I can't talk about this very well, I'm sorry. They're Christ, though, they are. You have to remind yourself all the time but it's the only way to keep going. Every one of them is Christ. And how can you hurt someone then?"
"When it's necessary, we do what we must. Even to Christ. What would have happened to us without the Crucifixion?"
"But it didn't have to happen like that. I don't think it did. Christ forgave people, just because He wanted to. 'Your sins are forgiven.' God didn't want blood, we did."
"And is that how you explain everything else? The wars in the Old Testament, 'not peace but a sword', all of it?" Madame DuPont's stilted tone had not changed; she seemed to enjoy arguing with him.
"There are a lot of explanations. I'm just—I'm worried right now, and we have a lot of stuff going on here, madame."
"Of course. We'll discuss it some other time. Did you ever get a chance to read about Our Lady's apparitions at Orloo?"
Joel couldn't think of a situation in which he'd have the time to sit down with something like that. Jail, maybe. "No. I'm sorry. I'll definitely look into it."
He was about to say goodbye when he had an idea. Maybe a bad one, but worth a try. "You must use schoolbuses over there, right? For field trips and stuff?"
"No. We are too small. We have two large vans and we hire buses when we need more than that."
That was the answer Joel had been hoping for. He plunged ahead. "Could we borrow them, do you think?"
If the phones were bugged, then he might be about to get Madame DuPont in some trouble. But what else could he do? How else could he make plans? Joel again regretted not watching more spy movies.
"What do you need them for?" Madame sounded cautious.
"There are—some mutants are being held in a facility. Mistreated. There are twenty or thirty of them and I don't know how else to get them out."
"Mistreated."
"Used and manipulated for information. Experimented on. I can't tell you any more. Is that enough? These are human beings. Or whatever you think we are."
A long pause. "The vans are yours."
Joel felt ashamed of himself. He hadn't been expecting to win.
Aurora fell asleep in the car. When she woke up they were stopped at a light, Langkowski muttering into his cell phone.
"Yeah, we're just out of Gatineau now. I dunno, half an hour or so, maybe? Traffic's all fucked with an accident on Dalhousie. I was thinking she should get something at Timmy's before we head in. Or do you want to...? You do. Fine. Twenty minutes, then. Later."
She peered through the window. Snow was swirling through the headlight beams, and in the red and blue flashers of a couple of cop cars. A sporty little VW was crushed in the middle of the street, like a pop can, its occupants either dead or long gone. She saw no one, only a dark head inside one of the cruisers.
Langkowski glanced up at her in the rearview mirror. "Awake?"
"Uh-huh."
"We're in Ottawa. Well, obviously. Almost home."
"I've never been here before," she said.
"Not much to see, really. Not this time of year. God, I hate winter."
She craned her neck as they drove past the Parliament buildings, the green roofs caked in snow. As usual, she didn't know quite what to think of them. They were handsome but stern, foreboding. Was that what you were supposed to think? Or should she feel a rush of belonging and pride, like an American seeing the Statue of Liberty? They weren't even impressive as architecture, really, not like the Reine-du-Monde cathedral in Montreal. All up-and-down, square angles and sharp spearpoint ornaments. It was not the buildings that were supposed to impress her, though, but the law. She knew that. She knew she was supposed to be cowed.
Maybe she was, a little.
Jeanne-Marie had been taking out the garbage early on New Year's Eve when she saw a tall, broad-shouldered man at the gate, ducking under the low doorway in the stone wall. His blond hair was uncovered in the cold, cheeks and ears pink. She didn't recognise him, but he held up a wine bottle and smiled at her.
"Can I help you?" she had asked, a bit nervous. He was too old to be one of Prawn's friends.
"Peace offering," he had said in English, "for New Year's. Is McCree in?"
She shook her head dumbly.
"What about Paul Laliberté?" He pronounced it in the extreme English way, Lalliberty.
"They're both out." She realised, too late, that it might have been a mistake to say that. Although what protection were they, either of them?
"Oh. Too bad. Tough to make a good apology when the masters of the house aren't home. You know when they'll be back?"
"No." She caught herself. "Sometime tonight. I just don't know exactly when. They—they could be back any moment. Are you, I mean, do you want to talk to someone in charge?"
"Well, we can talk, right? Why don't you let me in and we'll discuss the whole thing. If McCree gets back before I have to leave, I'll do my obsequies for him. Otherwise you can pass on the message. Once I explain myself."
Jeanne-Marie didn't like to get between two men who were fighting, blessed are the peacemakers or not. Being a go-between was a thankless job. Aurora always liked to be in the thick of things, though. "You should really talk to Sabine Godefroy instead. I'll get her for you."
"No, I—wait." He smiled and rubbed his eyes. "I'm going about this all wrong. I owe all of you an explanation. Department H does, I mean, but I'm here to give you the message. The Director reamed me out good for the way I went about recruiting you, believe me, and they really want to make sure you know what's what. Can I please come in? This wine's not supposed to be chilled."
Jeanne-Marie hadn't known anything about Langkowski or Department H, but now she was clued in: she'd missed something, and Aurora was to blame. Blindsided again. She pursed her lips, turned around and climbed the icy steps up to the door, the big man tailing her. She went through the kitchen to the east side of the house, where the formal sitting room was empty, as usual. The man set the bottle down on the coffee table and wandered over to the picture window, on which the Catholic Worker logo and the name Maison St-Jean-de-Dieu were stencilled in white.
"Is Dudley here?"
"I can get him."
"Please."
She went across to the back common room on the west side and knocked on the doorframe. Prawn, sprawled on the big sectional couch with two other kids, looked up from the TV. The tableau held for a moment, the beer bottles on the end table and the grey drift of newspapers on the floor—nobody had done chores in here today—Edouard and another kid lounging around with plastic cups of Pepsi and rum, Christopher Lloyd on the television with his time machine.
And as easily as that, her brain seemed to swerve as if across an icy road, and Aurora rose to the surface. "Hé, Roi Crevette. There's a man here to see you."
Amid catcalls, Prawn stood up unsteadily, swaying his hips. "I am just in fucking demand tonight, lads."
"Even a stopped clock gets lucky once a year," said one mutant, who Aurora thought was called Obsédé. He was drunk. "Or twice."
"Knock on wood, knock on wood."
"Prawn, come on."
"Is this a ploy to get me alone?"
"Of course it is," she said, and Prawn grinned. He did have bad teeth, but he had the English trick of smiling so that few of them were visible. Aurora liked him, even if he did look (and smell) like a wild pony—she always had a soft spot for tall boys, the leggy and awkward ones. He would be enthusiastic in bed, she judged, if a bit too fast.
Prawn walked with exaggerated care to the sitting room, but when he saw who their guest was, he stopped and seemed to sober up a bit. "What do you want?"
"To talk."
"It's fucking New Year's, mate."
"It's a perfect time for starting again, isn't it?" Langkowski smiled. "I wanted to make things right between us for the new year."
"Right, well, sorry I didn't ring up and let you know or anything, but I'm out."
"Out." Aurora had never seen a man literally blanch before.
"Out, you know. I'm not going to work for you."
Langkowski sat down. "Why not?"
"Christ, you don't want to get into this. Because an insane pacifist paid me off, that's why not." Prawn picked up the bottle of wine. "Oh shit, it's that pink stuff. Pass."
"I assume you don't know any other insane pacifists besides McCree."
"None who have money, no."
"How much did he offer you?"
"You're not going to get into a bidding war over this. I'm a lazy, unreliable bastard and you're better off without me on your payroll."
Langkowski sighed and rested his forehead in his hands, then continued to droop forward until his head was between his knees, like he was feeling faint. "This is not good. Not. Good. Dudley, have you any idea what you're doing? You ever heard that thing about 'for want of a nail, the shoe was lost'? We need you."
"There's a whole passel of mutants in the other room. I'm sure one of them wants a job. And Joel doesn't have enough to bribe them all."
"None of them can do what you do."
Prawn tipped his head back slightly and gazed down the length of his long nose at him, saying nothing.
"I realise that it could have been seen as threatening," Langkowski said, looking across at her. It sounded like a prepared speech. "The way I approached the two of you, I mean. I'm sorry about that. The government of Canada does not threaten, does not blackmail. I used Dudley's S3 status to get your attention. It was a misuse of my authority as an RCMP official. I apologise."
"Did you need to scare my brother into going too?" Aurora asked.
Langkowski hesitated, staring at her as if he suspected something. "No," he said at last. "No, Jean-Paul was very interested in participating. I think he had some reservations about federalism and working for Ottawa, but he wanted to do something practical with his powers, something to help. But he wasn't living in an anarchist commune—no one was trying to buy him off or pressure him into staying."
"So now it's us who were pressuring people?" said Prawn.
"It's you who were pressured. McCree is—he's manipulative. We already knew that, from his file. A kid was wanted by the metro police a while ago, and McCree helped hide him in the church here on the corner. And the bishop wanted to give the kid up, but you know what? It didn't happen that way. I made the same mistake the metro police did, and assumed that McCree doesn't know what he's doing. He does. He's his father's son." Langkowski sighed. "Anyway, that doesn't matter now. I'm asking you again, Dudley: help us. You have an incredible power and a chance to use it to protect other people. Don't let somebody else tell you what's right and wrong."
Prawn looked for a moment like he would cave in; he stood gazing down at the carpet, not moving outwardly but clearly experiencing some inward turbulence, visible only as the slow movement of his chest. "No," he said finally.
"Just no?"
"Just no."
"What's the matter with you?" Aurora asked Prawn. "Do you even have a reason of your own?"
"Yeah, my reason is I don't trust them. And fuck this guy, Joel's right about one thing. My powers are more than dangerous. I've already hurt people with them. You think I really want to see somebody else go down with a face full of radiation burns?"
"We wouldn't ask you to—" Langkowski said, but Prawn interrupted.
"You would. Or maybe it would happen by accident. I don't know what's worse. And that's all I'm going to say. This argument's boring my tits off."
Langkowski lifted up his hands and let them drop. "All right. Okay. I tried."
That had been that, more or less. Prawn wished Langkowski a happy New Year, sounding almost sincere. And he left. Aurora said, "You promised us someplace to stay?"
"Absolutely."
"What if I came back to Ottawa with you tonight?"
He stared at her, eyes narrowed. Wheels moving. "Did something happen here?"
"I'm not comfortable," she told him, because it was none of his business. And she wasn't comfortable. Nobody was, lately. Joel's clique of devoted disciples were secretive and skimped on their chores, while the rest of them either redoubled their efforts (Vicky, Sabine) or ignored the "worker" element of the Catholic Worker entirely. Aurora was bored and Jeanne-Marie was disillusioned. The house was depressing when it wasn't boiling with paranoid activity.
So while the others dozed and fought in front of the TV, she had packed her few things in grocery bags and put them in Langkowski's trunk. Even now, here in grim and grey Ottawa, she didn't regret leaving: she didn't feel like an intruder or an imposition anymore. She was valuable.
Their destination was a tall, white building in a bland government neighbourhood, one with a lot of city planters and traffic islands. The building had sloped sides, and was dotted with many small, dark windows; it looked rather like a ship, poised as it was in an empty parking lot sea that swirled with white snow against the orange-dark sky. Langkowski slowed at the gate only long enough for the lot attendant to wave him through.
"Put your hat on, it's cold," he said as he got out.
They left dark footprints on the grey carpet as they walked through the halls. In the elevator, she asked, "Is Jean-Paul here?"
Langkowski sighed. "Not yet. Next week, or the week after. We're hoping. Things are very up in the air right now. I think Clarke was talking about pulling the plug on Friday, but now we've got you, and Bridget, and Niko. We've got Snowbird, me, Hudson and his wife. That's a good start. But I was really hoping Dudley would be on board."
"He might still come," she said reluctantly, thinking of the scene in the kitchen. "He needs time."
"Well, you bought us some time. I'm glad. I'll be back in goddamn Regina if this doesn't work out. Suicide capital of the country."
The elevator doors opened on a very bland institutional hallway, the air cool but stale. There were security doors and a guard, who checked Langkowski's government ID and Aurora's CRIM card.
"The Director expecting you?"
"Yeah."
The guard waved them through, and Langkowski led her through empty halls that smelled of disinfectant.
She wouldn't have imagined someone so ordinary. The people she saw were usually strange-looking, beautiful, or so plain that their features slipped away from memory. But the almost-invisible boy had been ordinary, and specific. She remembered freckles, and the angle of his nose. More to the point, he'd been wearing a coat. Indoors. A black wool coat, missing a button, the right tab of his shirt collar peeking over the lapel. She didn't think her brain was smart enough to make something like that out of whole cloth.
But she shouldn't have been able to see freckles in the dark. That was a point for the opposite side. She could still call the image to mind, the narrow figure standing between her bed and the window, the light from behind him—no details should have been visible—and yet she could almost see past and through him. Dreamlike impossibility. The brain was a marvellous instrument, as Dr Gervais liked to tell her. She might be wrong.
They came in the next morning and put the needle in her neck. Did she know anything about some missing files? No. Had anything strange happened last night? Yes. What?
"A guy was here," she said. Like being really drunk, barely aware that she was talking.
"You saw him?"
"Yes."
"What did he look like?"
"Thin. Brown hair. Freckles."
"Not black hair?"
"No."
"Was there something strange about his skin? Did it seem to glow?"
"No."
"You didn't see a girl?"
"No."
They looked at each other. They wore white, but they weren't doctors or nurses. She didn't pay attention to their faces; different people came in all the time to question her and her roommates. Ling was watching her from across the room, waiting to get the needle herself. Ling saw everything, all there was to see for miles around. Kathleen wondered why they bothered asking anyone else.
One of the women in white sighed. "Tell us more about the guy you saw. How old, do you think?"
"Young. Early twenties." It was hard to talk, hard to think. Her tongue felt stiff.
"What was he doing?"
"He just...he just appeared. Standing there."
The man shook his head. "She was hallucinating. The cameras didn't show anything. We're wasting our time."
"They got in range. We don't know anything about their powers. It could be a sending, astral projection. Or any number of things," said the other woman. "Did he say anything to you, Kathleen?"
"Yes."
"What did he say?" The man clicked his pen.
The woman pointed officiously at the file. "Specific questions only, remember."
"Will you just let me work? What did he say, Kathleen? Start from the beginning."
"Don't remember."
"The first thing you remember."
"He said he was real." More was coming back to her. Like a hard exam question. "He wanted to know about us. What you do here. What you do to us. I told him, I told him everything. His name is Richard McBrien. He said he'd come back for us."
"Anything else?"
The woman checked her timer. "She'll be lucid in less than a minute, Mike. Directed information gathering, okay?"
"I think he was like a health inspector," Kathleen said. She felt dizzy. "He was interested in that stuff."
"But he was a mutant."
She blinked—she could feel her chin again, the nerves in the tip of her nose. The back of her neck burned. "If he was real. I guess. That's the only thing it could be."
The Neurocherche people moved to Ling's bed, bent her forward and injected her. They didn't even do it privately, which was the worst thing—no, she had to stop calling things the worst. Important to preserve the meanings of words. But there was no point in privacy, in a ward full of telepaths.
Kathleen lay back on the pillow, which hissed slightly with a sound of escaping air. She took the yellow earplugs from their plastic box on the bedside table and blocked out the sound of the questions, although she could still feel a numbness where Ling usually was. Knowledge shaken loose like muffins from a pan. Ling was always high up, she wasn't a loud thinker, but she was a gull sitting on a rooftop, she watched everything. She didn't understand it all, but who would? I am a camera. Who had said that? Nobody in the room knew.
The interrogators had no opinions, of course—they were technicians and nothing more. But Kathleen wondered what the higher-ups would think: had she been hallucinating or not? She didn't know herself anymore.
"I have no idea how to work this," Joel was saying. He had a rough sketch of Neurocherche scratched on the back of a church bulletin, the lay of the roads copied from the map section of the phone book. "This is like that lame riddle about the fox and the goat and the boat or whatever."
"You couldn't do those things?" Prawn found this amusing.
"No. Obviously I'm retarded."
"Just bad at lateral thinking. I used to kill at riddles and puzzles and shit. They wanted to put me in a special clever-clogs program at school. I wouldn't have it, of course."
Paul turned up the stereo, which was playing some dismal and interminable Doors song. "I'm still not sure we should be talking about it here."
Prawn shrugged. "Look, I scanned the whole property. Nothing here is transmitting radio on any frequency—nothing that isn't supposed to, anyway. I can jam all the signals if you want, but it's overkill."
"And turning up the stereo isn't going to stop telepaths, if that's what you're worried about," Mars added. "Some of us are hung over, anyway. Have some courtesy."
"I appreciate your input. Why can't you put up some psychic shields or whatever?" It took an effort for Paul not to say, "Why can't you be useful?" He was irritable, and knew on some level that it was one of the early stirrings of one of his dangerous states. Have to be careful.
"Shields don't work like on Star Trek, okay? I can't shield unless I know what I'm trying to cover."
"Cover everything, what's hard about that?"
Mars tipped her head back, rolling her eyes, as if the idea were so vastly stupid that she didn't know where to start. "It's hard to cover other people without crowding into their heads. And non-telepaths putting up shields is pretty much a joke. A few people can do it, if they've been taught properly, which I sure as fuck couldn't do for you. Just stop trying to talk about stuff you don't understand. I'm here to help, and I'll help."
Joel was studiously ignoring them, tapping the pen on the table. "When Steph and Vicky get back with the vans, we should actually use them for something. On the off-chance that someone really is paying attention to us, which I still doubt. So we'll take some junk to the dump, maybe, and then move on out to Repentigny. Is Ox still around? Tell him he can have forty bucks if he'll move those old computers and the marine engine into the vans."
"What are we getting rid of the marine engine for?" Paul asked.
"What are we keeping it for?"
Paul had bought it on a whim for fifty bucks, several years ago. It had been the first in a long line of stupid purchases, a hypomanic episode that his psychiatrist had aborted with some heavy anti-psychotics. He vaguely remembered having some idea of turning the engine into a brilliant sculpture, even though he'd never been much of an artist. The engine was sitting in the backyard now, half-buried in the snow. "I like having it around."
"Whatever. We get out to Repentigny. If we got in once, I guess we could do it again. And then what?" Joel spoke almost to himself. "This is impossible."
Prawn glanced at Mars, then said, "I'll go hunt up Ox and see if he's busy, then."
It certainly wasn't a two-man job, but Mars followed after Prawn, leaving Joel and Paul in the kitchen alone. Paul cracked his knuckles and examined Joel's map. Beside it was written, where to put them? Joel had a few possibilities listed:
Xavier's
(train costs? Plane?)
St
Rita's - prob. not many
here??
a few? (safe?)
relatives:
mum, Martin, Grace, Carmel (maybe 1 each)
"These kids aren't homeless, remember," Paul said. "Their parents are going to want to know where they are."
"They can take them, then," said Joel, not looking up. "I really don't want to go away for kidnapping. All this is going to be a last resort—if I have to billet anyone with Aunt Grace I'll never hear the end of it. 'Oh Joel, we really did support you, and naturally we don't begrudge you our help, but obviously this project is a bit too much for you, and we always thought you'd make a wonderful lawyer, and whatever happened with the Dominicans?' No thank you."
"Right." In another corner of the paper was written, Call ministry. "Which ministry is this?"
"Health."
"You think they'd do anything?"
"Maybe. Neurocherche might have got cocky and actually broken a law or two."
"The government hasn't been too interested so far in what happens to unregistered mutants."
"Well, that's why I wrote that bit in small letters. But I'll have to do it anyway or it'll look bad at my hearing. You have to be civil in your disobedience." He ran a hand through his hair, which looked like it hadn't been washed in a day or two. "I'm mainly concerned about the electronic security. And the records."
"What does Hodya say about the ones we took?" Paul asked, and instantly regretted it. Joel and Hodya had had words around noon, and she was now retired to her room in the basement, "getting herself together", as Joel put it.
"We didn't really get a chance to talk about that," Joel said, turning red. "I guess we won't, now."
"So she's mad at you?" Paul, in the attic, had heard Hodya shouting, but the initial fireworks didn't always mean anything. "Long term, I mean?"
"I hope not. But I think she's just annoyed at me, rather than being hurt on her own behalf. She said I'm self-destructive."
"She's the goddess of the obvious," Paul said in English, because it almost rhymed that way. "Déesse de la manifeste? That one's not so good."
Joel rolled his eyes. "Anyway, apparently taking those records was a pretty pointless risk. She says she'll take a look at them back in Toronto."
"God, she's taking them with her?"
"I trust her," Joel said, going to the refrigerator and cracking open a Harp from the box Prawn had brought last night. "She can't leave fast enough, as far as I'm concerned. It's—I don't know, I still don't have any proof that we're not safe here. But I'm worried."
Paul breathed the air, which smelled of eggs from breakfast, a damp-wool winter smell, and beneath those the vinegar-salt of fear. The obvious. Déesse de la manifeste. But under that was the stale, grimy smell of a fridge that needed cleaning, a babyish spoiled-milk sulk and the conservatism of spoiled vegetables. Paul saw the problem very clearly, and it was surgeons removing a liver, one that was blackened and pitted with use and poison.
He didn't know who was the surgeon and what was the liver, though. And Joel hadn't asked for any fortune-telling, so Paul decided to keep it to himself.
Joel poured the bottle into a glass, the head foaming up. "It's pretty ironic that a bunch of people with supernatural powers can't get twenty teenagers out of a lab in the suburbs."
"This would be way too easy if you could make other people intangible besides yourself," Paul said, a little hopefully.
"No."
"Have you ever tried?"
"Not really. Not extensively, if that's what you mean. But they asked when they were testing me for my CRIM card. Dr Xavier asked about it. Way back at the Civic in Ottawa they asked, when I first manifested."
"Maybe you should try extensively."
Joel shook his head. "No. It's—I can't even imagine how that would work. Like jumping over your own knees."
"Try it with me."
"No."
"See, this is what Hodya's talking about. You know how in Yellow Submarine all the giant monoliths spelling KNOW-with-a-k crumble and all that's left is NO-without-a-k?"
"Hodya didn't mention Yellow Submarine, actually."
"She'd agree with me anyway."
Joel put his glass down and reached out for Paul's shoulder, then frowned and took his hand instead. A shimmer of coral-gold ran over Paul's skin, with rivulets of violet and blue. His guts felt tight. He felt like he had to take an enormous shit. He wasn't even hard, only terrified, frightened that he'd finally pushed too hard and his only friendship was going to come apart like rice paper.
Nothing happened for a few moments, although Joel faded in and out. "Not working?"
"Hold on." Joel closed his eyes and disappeared again—this time Paul's watch went with him.
"Tabarnaq! You did it!" Paul exclaimed when Joel reappeared, the watch falling with a clunk onto the table.
"No, that's old news. There's sort of a field that affects little things. My clothes disappear with me too, after all. But a person's a lot bigger than a watch. Let me try again." This time he faded out, not touching Paul. He was gone for several seconds—a long time, it felt like—and abruptly Paul felt a hand on his face.
Then nothing.
Worse and bigger than nothing. Cold emptiness and a pale snowy blank that hurt the eyes. Eyes that were no eyes. He was dead. No flesh and no smells and no colours and no sounds. Certainly nothing so luxurious as a taste, not even the dank salt of his own mouth. He was alone and there was nothing he could do to undo this. He had been undone and unmade. Nothing left but this single point of thought that would not wink out, unwelcome as a ringing in the ear.
No one was with him. No one else existed. The long night, naked, high over the roof of the world, / where time seemed frozen in the cold of space. The emptiness was hungry for being, but it only destroyed. A cold so dry and bitter that a cup of water thrown out the door would sublimate to vapour with a gasp. He'd read that somewhere, hadn't he? He couldn't recall. English, English. All the tongues were whittled down to splinters here, there was no language. God speaks Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Men got lost out here, whole ships and expeditions swallowed. L'avalée des avalés.2 Planes tracing circles and grids would never find him. Mon coeur se serre, la peur me saisit.3 His place did not know him anymore.
And then he fell—not only out of the awful blankness but also off his chair onto the hard ceramic tiles. Someone was on top of him, his face was in someone's armpit. He couldn't remember who he was, or even what city he was in. The press of noise and details was coming too fast.
Someone was talking to him. "...you okay? I had to grab you fast or I didn't think it would work."
"It won't work!" Paul exploded. "Don't do that to another human being ever again."
Joel was righting the chair and sitting back down at the table, perfectly composed, nothing but a mild concern in his face. "Was it really bad? I couldn't tell—it was just like every other time for me. I didn't even notice you."
"I didn't notice myself either. People go psychotic in sensory deprivation tanks, you know." That was something of an overstatement, but Paul didn't care about being nuanced.
"I'm sorry."
"We can't use that to get anyone out of Neurocherche. Okay? You can't do that to someone else."
"Not even..."
"Ask me. Don't decide it for yourself, if it comes down to that. You're—you must be used to it. Immune. I don't know. But other people...you could lose yourself in there." There was some beer left in the bottle, and Paul drank it. He'd never liked beer. "Promise me."
"I'm not sure I could even do it with someone I didn't know well," Joel said. His voice was quiet. "Getting in isn't that bad, but getting out...it's hard to explain. It's like taking apart a toaster and putting it back together. You can learn to do that. But then try taking apart a toaster, taking apart an alarm clock, mixing the parts up in a pile together, and trying to rebuild both things. I know you. I can—I can find you down there and put you back together. With someone else, things might get lost."
It took Paul a moment to realise the import of those words. "So, what, we were—mixed together in there?"
"No. Sort of. Two people are at the centre of a nuclear explosion. What they experience is so much bigger than them, so destructive, that it would be impossible to say, 'This atom was his, this one was hers.' To dust you shall return."
"And how did you do it?"
"I don't know. Maybe I didn't. Maybe you'll find yourself liking Bob Dylan now."
The joke, like a wet match, failed to light. Paul's skin was a riot of colour, the stubborn sunset reds still skimming along over the shuddering turquoise yellows of his shock. Those pretty hibiscus reds, which Joel and everybody else could interpret perfectly well. And of course Joel knew, Paul realised. He'd been fooling himself for so long, thinking that what went unsaid must also be unknown. At least unconfirmed. But it was all in glorious, obvious Technicolor on Paul's part, and Joel too was blushing.
Joel turned his glass around on the table. He seemed to be thinking the same thing, and he said, "I don't want to have another awkward conversation today. But we'll talk about it."
"Talk."
"Yeah. Nothing else we can do." He looked up at Paul. "You know that about me."
Paul was suddenly irritated—angry, even. He understood how Hodya felt, how frustrated. He could smell desire, a smell that he couldn't reduce to other smells, a scent that insisted on itself and crowded into every other smell in the room. He was tired of Joel's asceticism, but more than that he wanted real explanations. He wanted an acknowledgement of reality.
Later, when he wondered why he'd done it, he was chagrined to discover that it was perfectly in line with his usual modus operandi: he had always preferred to provoke a response rather than ask for one. What was surprising was that he'd waited so long.
He leaned across and kissed Joel, hard, teeth bumping against lips and a fine scrape of stubble. That was, in the end, the only thing he remembered about the kiss, later—that and the way Joel's breath sounded in his nose, how it streamed across Paul's cheek as they broke apart. The rest of it all dissolved into blank space, which Paul filled in with memories of other kisses, until he wasn't sure what had happened when. Joel had put his hand on his neck, yes, but had he been the one with the long fingers that reached all the way to his carotid artery? Had that been Tim at St Rita's? Paul wished he remembered more, but all he could think at the time was, in ten minutes this moment will be in the past, it will be gone. And that thought made everything feel strange.
They did break apart, although Joel may or may not have turned his head aside, hand tracing the line of Paul's collar (no, almost certainly that didn't happen). He said nothing.
"You liked it," Paul said, hating the way he sounded, but believing it.
"That doesn't matter."
"It matters."
"How? How does it matter?" Joel sounded like he wanted to be upset but couldn't find the energy. "How does me liking it make it a good idea?"
"But you liked it."
Joel nodded, looking away.
"Good," said Paul, letting out a breath. His diaphragm shuddered, as though he was near tears or laughter. "You should do stuff that you like more often."
"I do. I like all of this, Paul. I like making giant pots of oatmeal in the mornings, I like bailing Prawn out of safety, I like getting up in the night to give someone a bed. I like you. The only thing I don't like is when I feel as though I can't do all that stuff. You know? You always get mad when people say that painting made Van Gogh crazy, because painting was what he did when he felt good. He killed himself because he was too sick to enjoy painting. It's like that. I'm happy." Joel sounded as though he'd had this conversation already. "Are you happy?"
Paul wasn't unhappy, he thought. St-Jean-de-Dieu was exciting, in a square sort of way, and he loved excitement. But a cat watching a fishbowl might not describe itself as happy, and neither would Paul. He was waiting for something.
Deliberately, Joel shoved his chair closer to Paul's, leaned in, and gave him a kiss that lingered somewhere between chaste and tender, a kiss without hunger that still had a gentle curiosity to it. It was unlike any other kiss Paul had ever had; it was, he thought, just the way it must feel to kiss a woman. He smelled desire, yes, but also something peach-warm and sharply sweet as black cherries, something that smelled like the gold and scarlet that were flowing across his own skin.
He had just buried his hand in Joel's hair when he heard, behind him, a shuffling step and a sharp intake of breath. Someone blurted out, "Oh my God!"
"I was going to come in and say 'Eureka,'" said Prawn, "but I guess this is actually more exciting than my thing. Carry on."
1: J'ai envie d'être normal
encore. "I still want to be normal."
2: L'avalée des avalés. "The swallower swallowed."
3: Mon coeur se serre, la peur me saisit. "My heart squeezes itself, fear seizes me."
Notes: L'Avalée des avalés is a novel by Québécois author Réjean Ducharme, available in translation under the title The Swallower Swallowed. If you have an ass, Ducharme will kick it. You have been warned.