The kitchen suddenly seemed very noisy. Joel heard his chair scrape over the tiles as he leapt up, and he felt a tremendous heat inside his skull, but it all seemed far away, like images through the wrong end of a telescope. Even the fire inside his head, which he knew was blood rushing up to his face and through the vessels in his ears, even that fire was muted. There must have been less than a second between Prawn's words and his response, but Joel had time to notice that some part of his mind was repeatedly and automatically trying to remove himself from the Aphanes—it was irritating, like hearing someone bang a phone receiver back into the cradle again and again. Each time it set his teeth on edge, but it didn't take away the numbness. He could only listen to himself stutter.
"What? What? Washroom!" Oh, very smooth, McCree. Cover that up somehow. "Yeah, I, I have to go to the washroom. Just a second."
He lost control of his powers entirely before he reached the doorknob, collapsing under the pressure of the air like a candle flame going out. He couldn't remember ever feeling so discombobulated, not since his father had died.
In the bathroom, he fell on his knees in front of the toilet, retching. A stream of yellow bile ran into the water. He didn't bother to wipe his mouth, but sat back on the cold floor. There was grief in his stomach, a heavy weight of it like dough that wouldn't rise, and he couldn't think why it would bother him now, now out of all the times for the last five years that he'd been without his father.
No, you know why. You know why. It's because there's no one to get you out of this now.
He'd been wondering a bit lately whether Paul wasn't right, whether there weren't some telepaths keeping an eye or a neuron on the house—sometimes there was a voice in his head that sounded unfamiliar, that told him what he wanted to hear. But there was no question that this was his own voice, the one that had his number. It had been quiet for weeks now, but it had him twisting on the line again as easy as that. Like the northern pike with its angry mouth and the hooks in its belly, the one his father had skinned and cooked with lemon ten years ago.
Shaking, he got up and washed his face in the sink. He still looked red-eyed, as though he'd been crying, so he leaned on his elbows and waited, listening to the racket coming from the kitchen.
"Tais-toi, I mean, you fucking—shut up! Shut up! There's nothing going on!" Paul was stumbling on his words, caught between French and English.
"Does Hodya know? Is that why they broke up?"
"No. Just...no. Don't even ask me that stuff. Okay? Leave me alone."
"Nothing going on?" Prawn sounded sceptical. "I find that a little hard to believe. What have you two been sharing a room all this time for?"
"What do you think it's for? Do you even know what this place is supposed to be doing? Can you not see how saving a room for the poor might seem like a good idea?"
Joel sighed, and his body disappeared again. Invisible, he moved through the house, through the walls with their pink fibreglass innards and metal-ribbed cables. He didn't want to be doing this. But. Always a but. Everything was defined by the buts, and by what he didn't want. The Aphanes felt more and more like his natural state lately.
Snow and static in the picture. Mars looked as if she'd gone to the bathroom at the movies and come back in on the wrong show, wanting to leave but fascinated by what was happening on the screen. Prawn was very red in the face, and Paul was an unsettling blotchy mixture of indigo and orange. It was obvious that Joel couldn't leave Paul to face the firing squad alone, so he eased back out of the Aphanes, finding himself in a corner of the kitchen where (for some reason) he rarely stood. The floor felt harder here.
The colour drained out of Prawn's skin, and his voice became subdued. "You could have told us you were gay, you know."
"I'm not gay." He wasn't. Being gay meant having a sexuality in the first place. Joel didn't want any of that. He didn't want to be having this discussion and he didn't want to have done what he did with Paul.
Joel heard feet on the stairs then. If it hadn't been his house, he might not have noticed the sound, but he did: Hodya, barefoot, coming down into the kitchen. "What's all the yelling about?"
Nobody would answer, at first. Paul was looking at Joel. The outside of his skin was hot and the inside was cold, and it made him feel like a bit of weather, a confluence of systems that couldn't be controlled.
Prawn seemed to feel some sense of responsibility, so he started. "Mars and I walked in on...Paul and Joel were..."
"He kissed me," said Paul.
Hodya stared at them both for a moment, then turned around and walked out again, head tilted slightly like a broken robot.
"Oh, fuck you," Joel said to Paul, and went after her.
They sat in Joel's office, Hodya on the Naugahyde couch and Joel on one of the plastic school chairs he offered to people whom he didn't want to stay. "I just don't understand why you wouldn't tell me."
"There was never anything to tell," he said.
"All this time? Nothing happened? You never thought about it?"
Joel swallowed. "I think about a lot of things. It never seemed...worthy of mention."
"You had a thing for him."
"No. I didn't. I was just acknowledging that yeah, I thought about it. Most guys would, I think. You live with a gay guy, it makes you wonder. That's all."
"So why would you kiss him?"
"He kissed me first." Childish.
"That doesn't really answer anything." She leaned over and turned on the lamp—the early winter dark was setting in. "I was at a party once in Israel, with a bunch of friends I hadn't seen since elementary school. My friend Gil was drunk and he kissed me. And you know what? I didn't feel the need to kiss him back. I can't even say I ever thought about kissing him, before or after. Because he just wasn't sexual to me. He was Gil, who peed in my sandbox once because his sister was taking too long in the shower and they only had one bathroom. What I'm saying is, that's not the kind of relationship you and Paul have."
"It's different when you're kids together," Joel said.
"Childhood sweethearts don't exist, then?"
"I guess I wouldn't know."
She had a certain trick of blinking very slowly, a bit like a cat. It always looked improbably artless, at least to Joel's untrained eye. He could never spot the artifice in Hodya, although he was always sure that it was there. "You're above all that, of course."
"That's not what I'm saying."
"I wonder how I missed that, all this time. That you want to be clear of all this, that you never wanted to be human in the first place. I think I just believed the political rhetoric, rather than you yourself. I had the texts of all these speeches superimposed over you. Mutants insisting that they're as human as we are, and the things you say about human nature and human frailty. But you don't want it."
His throat was too dry to answer, and he was glad. Silence was a more cinematic reply to that than anything he could have come up with. All he would have said was all that he ever said in these conversations: no, you're wrong, you don't understand.
"I've been trying to see things your way, but I can't imagine the same things you do. I think that's the problem. To me it looks like you're aiming at something like Alan Rickman in Dogma, all smooth down there. You're very intent on erasure. It's all you know how to do. But for what? Where will that get you?"
"Obviously it'll get me to heaven, because I'm a Manichee and I loathe humanity. Right? That's really what you think of me?"
Hodya shrugged. "I don't know what a Manichee is, but that's how you sound sometimes."
"You never—you really thought that?" He wasn't going to allow his voice to break, because then there would be no regaining control. "Then how...why did you keep going out with me?"
"I wanted to get in your pants," she said.
"Hodya..."
"Well, that's what you think of me, isn't it? I'm not going to let you play the emo kid twice in one day. Making it sound like I'm mad because of your theological opinions, of all the stupid things. This is such a dumb fight to be having that I really want to be sure. People can fix their sex issues. If they want to. They can't fix being gay, though."
He leaned forward and put his head in his hands. It helped a little. "I one hundred percent swear to you, Hodya, that's not the problem."
"Since when are you a hundred percent about anything?"
He took a deep breath and looked up at her. "Let me tell you a story. It's not a nice story so just stop me if you don't want to hear any more. I was eleven, eleven years old. Fat. My mother weighed me every day, and she kept a chart. I went to a school called Sacred Heart. This was a private school, out in the country. I'd been there since we moved from Tunney's Pasture, when I was eight. And the bus ride was very long. Forty minutes or so, through these winding country roads, green for a few weeks a year and then brown, and then white. I was a notable kid. The fattest kid in school, first of all, that was obvious. The richest kid. The teachers liked me best, usually. And I was the only kid who wouldn't fight back. Among all those hard country kids—it wasn't an expensive private school. Poor but honest, my dad liked to think. They weren't, they weren't at all. I've never known people like that since. I still—I still haven't forgiven them, you know. I don't. I forgive Henri-Michel Marchand but I don't forgive them. They knew what they were doing."
He took a moment to lower his shoulders and remodulate his tone. "This was in October. October fifteenth. We were riding home on the bus—it was the late bus, actually. I'd stayed after school for band practice. The school was just starting the band and I was excited, I'd been chosen as the oboist. They got a grant, and so they had an oboe, very proud of it. The oboe was in a shiny black case with the school's initials stencilled on it. Of course, so predictable, they got their hands on it. The boys did. Kirk McCormack and Stephen and Guy.
"I should have let it go, and would have, if I'd known. But they got it away from me and when the bus stopped, one of them went off with it. The rest followed, and I could only think of what the music teacher would do to me if I lost it, if I let it be lost. So I got off too. I guess the bus driver thought we were all going to a party together or something."
Hodya got up and sat closer to him, on the other hard plastic chair. Joel felt a twitch in his stomach and had to remind himself that she wasn't trying to make fun of him.
"So, uh, we were at Kirk's parents' farm. They kept sheep, actually. Sheep and bees. It was a nice place. Kirk ran off down his long driveway, around the back of the garage, and he still had my oboe. I ran after him, not very fast. Stephen and Guy were yelling the usual stuff about Jiggles and telling me not to have a heart attack, nothing very serious. I only got scared when I saw that there weren't any cars in the driveway, and none in the garage, nothing except the tractor and the ATV. They did a little keepaway with the oboe, in the mud behind the garage, tripping and pushing me down, all that, but finally Kirk said, 'Okay, McCree, we'll make a deal with you. You get your kazoo back on one condition. Suck our dicks.'"
Hodya took his hand, and he jerked it away. "Don't."
"Joel—"
"I don't want that right now. It's not you. Just...don't. And don't think this is some grand explanation, either. It's just, it's only an example. An illustration." He took a tissue from the box on the desk and started to shred it in his hands. "Nobody ever really understood this, least of all me, but it didn't occur to me to think that they were anything but serious. They were a little bit serious. The first thing I thought of was surrender. They could see it, they could see that I was thinking that, because they didn't say anything more. Steve put his hand on my shoulder and pushed me down, not too hard, made me kneel in the mud. I could hear the sound of a train whistle, far away. Kirk was laughing, but he unzipped his pants, planning probably to just wave it around in my face.
"He had the oboe under his arm. I could have got it from him. But I thought it wasn't worth a fight, when I could play by the rules and have it fair and square, you know? I don't know what I thought. Better minds than mine have tried to figure it out. Father Gilles could never make head nor tail of it. I don't think I told Professor X, though. I could hear that train whistle, anyway, and the mud was all cold under my knees, and Kirk shoved his dick in my mouth and I don't really think he meant it, not as a sex thing. He just wanted to show me he could do it. They all couldn't believe I was just—they couldn't believe their luck. I did it, because I wanted it to be over. I remember I felt a little superior, because they didn't understand what I was giving up, in order to be good. In order to avoid a fight. Any of the grownups would understand, I thought. Why doing it was the right thing to do. It took a long time. Kirk wasn't quite old enough, maybe, or maybe he was a late starter or something. He faked coming. Then he said it was Stephen's turn, because this was an expensive instrument and easily worth at least three BJ's, wasn't it, and I did it. I don't remember doing Guy, but I must have. Maybe he let me off.
"They gave me back the oboe, and brought me back inside. We watched Batman, the old one from the 60's, in Kirk's rec room until his parents got home. Kirk and Stephen were really nice, they let me hold onto the oboe the whole time. They even went a whole episode of Batman without making a gay joke, which has probably never happened before. Nobody said anything, they were scared, fucking scared."
The tissue was turning to dust, tiny pellets showering the floor. Joel cleared his throat. "Anyway, that's not the point of the story. That was a Friday afternoon, when this happened. Monday morning, I faked sick, but my father vetoed it. He drove me in. And—God—everyone was talking about it. I think Guy probably told. The teachers knew and the students knew, and I even think the janitors knew because one of them looked at me funny. Guy told them that I sucked dick, that was how he put it. 'Is it true you're a fag?' everyone said. The teacher gave me a slip for guidance, and I had to talk to a counsellor. I didn't say anything. I don't know why I didn't. I felt guilty, even though I'd been so sure on Friday that I was right. So they called my father, and he had a hell of a time averting the PR crisis, I guess. That was what I thought at the time, visions of headlines in the Citizen saying JUSTICE MINISTER'S SON SUCKS DICK or something. I wasn't very savvy. My dad took me out of Sacred Heart. Sent me to a regular Catholic school closer to home, Cardinal Bernardin Elementary. The end." He smiled.
Hodya was shaking her head slightly, lips parted. "I don't...I'm so sorry, Joel, I'm really sorry, but I don't see how, well—do you mean that you're sure you're not gay because this happened to you?"
"No, I—no. I mean, I know that being gay's not the problem because the problem made itself evident that early, when I was eleven. I'm wired completely wrong, much worse than if I were gay. I mean—God, I didn't mean that. I don't believe that, it slipped out. I'm sorry. But it's true that what I have is a perfect example of what JPII would have called objectively disordered sexuality."
Hodya sighed, a silent movement of her shoulders, not taking her eyes off of his. "Is it okay if I give you a hug?"
The thought made his skin crawl. It was going to be a bad night, he thought absently. "No. Don't. Thank you for asking, though."
"I know I asked you dozens of times if it was an abuse thing and you always said it wasn't. I wish you'd told me sooner."
"It's not an abuse thing!" He was suddenly incensed. She never listened, never really. "That's not what it was! The sex was completely incidental, the whole point was just to embarrass me. And they did it. But it shows that I just don't work properly where sex is concerned. You see that? I was sick already when they told me to suck their dicks. No normal kid would have done it, not without a fucking gun to his head. But I did. Because I just had no idea. I'm trying to tell you that the sex wasn't important to me, and what was a million times worse was what happened after. If they'd kept their dicks to themselves and just called me a pervert, it would still be proof that I'm fucked. And what it has to do with you is that it all feels like that to me. I don't get into it. I don't lose myself in the moment. I don't enjoy it, I just get embarrassed, and that is how I know I'm not gay. Because if I was I would want some kind of sex. I don't. At all. Is it clear now?"
"A little bit," she said, and the thought that all that talking had only led to "a little bit" made Joel exhausted.
"Don't look at me like that. I don't want you to feel sorry for me. This is why we shouldn't be together, because I'm always the one on display. We're not equally fucked up."
She smiled a bit, looking away from him. "You don't have to convince me that we shouldn't be together, Joel. Not really."
"I don't?"
"What I always liked about you was...the other guys I date are very caught up in impressing me, making me admire them. You're completely focused on admiring me. Like you've given up on the idea that I might be impressed. And I like to be admired, of course. I never felt that way before—you feel very shut out, in a foreign country. And Israel is foreign to me too, in a way. People don't admire foreigners, not really. They like the parts that are familiar, and throw away the rest. You never seemed to do that. You liked me for the same reasons I like myself."
"I still do like you, Hodya."
"I know that.." She looked down at her hands. "My favourite thing you ever said to me was when you called me an explorer. That's the kind of thing I mean. You remember? I took a sample of your cheek cells, from inside your mouth, and let you look at them through my microscope, and you talked about the body as a secret world that I explore. And that was just how I always thought about it. All these hidden things that we slice and stain and photograph. I wanted to explore you, too. But that's...you don't want to explore me, do you? Not the same way. You're a saint, not a scientist. You just wanted to adore me."
Joel laughed, the hopeless sort of laugh that sometimes comes after crying. "I'm not a saint."
"I know. I just liked the alliteration. But that's what you're aiming for, isn't it? Have I guessed right?"
"Every religious person wants to be a saint. Most of us just don't want it enough, that's all."
She shook her head. "You're wrong, you're very wrong. It's the other way around."
Joel went with Hodya on the train out to the airport, and rode back alone through the blue evening streets of the city. At home, he found Prawn in the sitting room, looking at the movie reviews in an English paper. "What did you come back here for in the first place, Prawn?"
"What do you mean?"
"You left to go find Ox, so what did you come back for?"
"Oh. Em..." Prawn visibly had to try to remember. "We were on our way up to St-Viateur, where Ox usually hangs out, and we were talking about Mile End. I forget why. But it made me remember the tower on top of the safety centre. Mars says it disrupts telepathy. I know that tower uses microwaves, so if Neurocherche is using something similar to keep its patients in line..."
"You can jam it?"
"I can do whatever you want to it. I don't really believe microwaves can stop telepaths, mind, but you mentioned some sort of wearable psionic disruptors before—however they work, they must have some computer circuitry, right? Bloody hell, I could fry every computer circuit in the building that isn't behind a Faraday cage. Electromagnetic pulse."
Joel had never done very well at physics, not even when Professor Xavier taught it. "You could do that? You've done that sort of thing before?"
"Well...scale is a bit of a problem," Prawn hedged. "I'd probably do too much damage rather than too little. But Neurocherche is off in the hills, isn't it? It's not as though I'd miss and knock out a hospital's equipment. Or an airport's."
That was plausible enough that Joel had to recast his feelings on going back to Neurocherche. If Prawn was right, they could actually do it. There would be paper records left behind, but other than that...
He hadn't thought the thing was possible. He'd been planning to fail, but righteously. If Prawn's plan worked, they might succeed. Succeeding would complicate their lives quite a bit.
"Let me think about it," he said.
He spent the night deep in the chill-white centre of the Aphanes. Longer than a night. It was easier than going to bed, in the same room with Paul. When he emerged, it was mid-afternoon, January 3rd. He didn't need a calendar to know that: the house was scattered with fir needles and wrapping paper, the recycling bin was full of bottles, and the fridge was packed with leftovers.
Paul, sitting in the kitchen with his coffee and Le Devoir, gave him a desultory nod. Joel poured his tea and sat down at the table with him.
"So how are things?" Paul asked in deliberate English, only a little bit sarcastic.
"Things are confusing, is how they are."
"I'm sure."
"I don't want...I don't want what we have to change," Joel said, and he had to bring his voice down to a whisper to get the words out. "Not at all."
"Well, maybe I do. Maybe I think it's time we grew up."
"Growing up means—means romance or nothing?"
"It means not pretending. We were pretending, before."
"So we won't pretend."
"Good. But it's easier said than done." Paul flipped the newspaper page over. "You really let me get humiliated the other day. You haven't apologised. That's how things stand."
"I'm sorry about that."
"Are you?"
"You weren't the only one who was flapping in the breeze there, you know."
"It was worse for me. It's always worse for the one who's so obviously into it. The one who's saying no is always in a better position." He spoke calmly, not looking up.
"That's true."
"You'd know, wouldn't you?"
Joel let that slide. "You know this is why I never wanted to let things go so far. You should know, better than anyone..."
He trailed off, and Paul asked patiently, "I should know what?"
"That I couldn't."
"No, you could. We both know that."
"You also know that I have some good reasons for not having a relationship right now."
"We already have a relationship. We're talking about sex. Use the right words."
"It's not just sex!" Lower your voice. "A romance—is that the word I want?—it isn't just friendship plus sex, you know. That kind of relationship just isn't something I feel right about doing. Okay?"
"Why not?"
"Because I'm still in discernment." Joel hadn't known he was going to say that until just then, but it felt like climbing onto a boat from the water, setting his foot on something solid. And from that one point of solidity, he could catch his breath and see himself and Paul as if from a long way away. Not detached, as he had been when Prawn walked in on them, but as if he were already looking back on the conversation in hindsight. "And I am sorry, Paul. I should have told Prawn that in the first place."
Paul's nostrils flared, and he nodded. "All right. I forgive you. For that."
"What else is there?"
He sighed. "Nothing. Look, it just stings. It stings like awful, you know that. I've known for years that it was stupid, and now I get it rubbed in my face in front of Prawn, of all people. Just tell me—if you didn't think you had a vocation...would you?"
There was never any question of lying to Paul. "I don't know. I do like you. I love you. Eros, philia, agape, whatever. But I think I would have...religious issues. If it were me. I can't convince myself that you would go to hell for being—for loving men. But I could very easily convince myself that I would. I don't know why that is."
Paul shook his head and poured himself some more coffee. "It's because you're a mess, that's all."
"Or maybe I'm too fond of you to listen to my conscience properly."
"You really think that could be true, or are you just intent on lawyering me to death today?"
Joel shrugged. "I guess it doesn't matter."
The uniforms were a little ridiculous. Leotards in some space-age thermal knit, dark blue with a government crest on the left side, over the heart. The crest was not a borrowed DND design, but a unique bit of heraldry, with a blue dragon twisting around a black sword, surmounted by a crown. Jean-Paul felt a bit like an Olympian, especially when he and Jeanne-Marie were allowed to train at the real high speeds. They broke the sound barrier once, high over Algonquin Park, the two of them a brilliant white light in the black winter. When they made their landing, Snowbird said nothing and Sasquatch said only, "That was beautiful."
Their division had a name, for the moment: they were Alpha Flight. Besides the twins, there were Bridget (Arclight), Niko (Network), Langkowski (Sasquatch), and McKenzie (Snowbird). Over them all ruled Jim Hudson (Guardian), and his wife Heather (Vindicator). Jean-Paul himself was Northstar, a name that had been assigned to him and which he thought was a little bit twee. Aurora was simply Aurora, of course.
Their needs were all taken care of. They ate in the big bright cafeteria, which had enormously high ceilings and a view over the bare-branched city, the Parliament buildings and the river. At night they slept in small hostel-like rooms. They left the building for training exercises at Algonquin and a couple of military bases, but other than that they were kept mostly within the complex's many walls.
Not that it felt confining—Aurora went out shopping at the Rideau Centre one day, bringing Jean-Paul with her to critique outfits, and Jean-Paul himself visited the library on Metcalfe fairly often. It was the schedule that was exhausting.
Hudson approached Jean-Paul one day at lunch. "Eating alone?"
"The others are still at Algonquin."
"You were careful flying back, right?"
"Of course."
"Good. I just wanted to have a talk with someone on the team who has a flair for discretion, you know? I think that's you. Langkowski spoke pretty highly of you."
Jean-Paul didn't think he'd seen Langkowski enough to merit that sort of compliment. "We can talk."
"I'll be telling the others most of this stuff, but I just wanted to bounce the ideas off one of you guys first. We're coming up on our first mission soon. I'm not quite sure when."
Jean-Paul forked up some more noodles and gestured for Hudson to go on. He was trying not to be too excited, since there had been rumours about the first mission for weeks now.
"I want to emphasise that we'll be there to de-escalate any conflict. I don't even want us to be there at all, but it looks like it might end up being necessary. It all depends on him."
"Him?"
Hudson pushed a file folder across the table to Jean-Paul. He folded his arms and sat back, looking genuinely discomfited. He was a big guy, who looked more like a farmer than an engineer, which he apparently was. He had one of those square English faces that Jean-Paul found hard to read.
Jean-Paul flipped the folder open, scanned through a page or two of government legalese about confidentiality and security, and found himself looking at a personal record, apparently taken from the CRIM database.
Name: McCREE, JOEL KEVIN.
D.O.B.: 11/07/83
Status: Mutant (Patent. Class ± 3)
Manifestation
(inc. date if known): 15/11/98. Ottawa, Ont. (See file NO56904-3c,
Schedule II for details)
Jean-Paul looked up. "We're going after Joel McCree?"
"We're not 'going after him.' I have orders from higher up to make sure he doesn't do any serious damage to Neurocherche." Hudson stared down at the table. "I don't like it, and I want you to know that. We've dealt with Neurocherche before—Walter and I were working on a project with AmCan before this, in liaison with the feds. I saw what Neurocherche does. If McCree wants to go in there and spring some patients loose, we'll look the other way. If he damages some records, these things happen. But if he destroys any of their research, we'll have to stop him. Him and his crew."
Jean-Paul was not listening very carefully; he was looking at the passport-bland photo and wondering who was looking at his own file.
"You understand me? I wanted to come to you first with this, because you and your sister have had some dealings with him. He's a good guy, really. But I can't let him wreck all the progress Neurocherche has made. Then it will all have been for nothing."
"So," said Jean-Paul, trying to wrangle his thoughts into something coherent, "what are we going to do?"
"Watch and wait. If and when he makes his move, we'll be there. He plays nice, we get to go home early. He doesn't, we take them into custody. You got me?"
"I got you."
"Good." And Hudson shut the folder and put it back in his briefcase. "I'm glad we talked."
Notes: This might be a good time to remind people that I'm taking the same licentious liberties with the Alpha Flight characters that the Marvel writers do. I have no intention of writing Langkowski, Hudson, Snowbird, or anyone else as especially "canon." Volume II was my favourite Alpha Flight, though, which will probably tell you something.
Also, yeah, Network was the codename of a teensy bit-player in New Mutants/Academy X/whatever and Arclight is also a canon character. But did you see what they did to Arclight in X3? I don't feel any remorse for this whatsoever.
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