Aline was humming a lively La Bolduc tune as she plunged the knife into Grandfather’s right eye with her left hand. She had decided to name this year’s jack-o’-lantern after her husband. She remembered how much her own mother’d enjoyed Halloween, sharing it with her daughter and teaching her its liberating spirit:
“And now, who’s the biggest pumpkin-head in our lives, Aline? Who do we dislike this year?”
Aline would name some current neighbourhood bully or some rival classmate, and her papa would call from the living room with the name of a current politician or his boss, and her mother would cackle with glee and suggest her sister-in-law, or Aline’s babysitter—whom she’d caught flirting with Papa—and then her mother showed Aline how much fun it was to stick a knife into a pumpkin named for an antagonist.
Aline’s mother loved Halloween. It was the one day in her proper Catholic existence when she didn’t feel bound by her social constrictions as a woman. It was practically the only time she laughed aloud, and she sang as she prepared for the trick-or-treating. She smoked cigarettes. She had a drink, and then another. She even swore, by God.
And she played dress-up with her infant daughter. They chose the proper clothes together, they bathed together and brushed out each other’s hair, they dressed. Then came the neighbourhood kids ringing the bell, and they were all dressed up too. It was fun for Aline to see the surprise waiting on their doorstep, and what her mother’s reaction might be. For sometimes she smiled and welcomed the gangs of children, and sometimes she screeched and cackled at them like a witch.
At that, Aline always responded with her own squeaky giggling, as the surprised and frightened kids ran in all directions. Her mother slammed the door. “That was one of those Trembley brats. They’re all bastards.” Together the dressed-up ladies laughed and ate the candy themselves.
Her mother died young, in the fifties, but Aline still allowed herself to keep playing the Halloween games her mother’d taught her. It was a link between them, a time when the universe or God allowed the dead, good or evil, to circulate without hindrance among the living on earth, and Aline felt closer to her deceased mother. It was the only day she felt able to think the unthinkable: “If you’re so good, God, why have you taken my mother away?”
She set her one-eyed jack-o’-lantern in the parlour window, lit a candle in its head and went upstairs to dress. She showered and dried her hair with a hand blower set at full to make it frizzy, and powdered it with talc to make it grey. In her bathrobe she pulled out all her black clothes of any kind, and threw them all on the bed. When she’d chosen a long black dress with long black sleeves and a long black shawl, she thought about whether or not to wear jewellery. And what kind? What goes with such a dark outfit? No, nothing at all, unless—yes, just a single, glittering, pure white diamond on a simple ring, like a talisman, the only jewellery a witch should wear!
And so naturally she thought of her mother’s engagement ring. She remembered she’d left it in Grandfather’s bedroom. She’d better rescue it before he pawned it.
She stepped into the hallway, thinking of the fun she’d have with the children tonight. She stood in front of his door, dreading to go in. He was still asleep. But it would be worth it to complete her outfit for the evening.
Aline stole in as quietly as possible, leaving the door open just a crack to let in light from the hallway. She stood just inside until her eyes adjusted, listening to Grandfather rumbling in his sleep. He’d left the window open and it was cold in the room, except by the radiator under the window, which was too hot to touch. She hated being back here. It was harder than she’d bargained for. Somehow it was still musty, like the whole house. No matter how hard she tried to clean it, it was cramped and closed and mouldy. The house defeated her.
Aline closed the window, tried to shake herself out of her sudden, despairing reverie, and looked over the dresser for her jewellery box. She opened it and searched among the pile of plastic and glass for the one true stone she had. She found it. Instinctively she put it on the same finger as her wedding ring. And then she thought, I should wear only the one ring; any other detracts from its importance. So she took them both off, put on her mother’s diamond again and placed her wedding ring in the box.
On the dresser was a small framed photograph of Grandfather and Grandmother on their wedding day. They were young, dressed as well as poverty ever allows, standing on the steps of a small parish church. What could she have been like? Grandmother. No one would ever call Aline that. Her husband was too old, and she no longer wanted his children. How could this other woman, smiling in the photo just as Aline herself had on her own wedding day, have lived with such a horrible person for so long? Had his children? Was she aware of his job? She must have been. Yet she was a Catholic woman too: they were standing on the chapel steps with the priest above them in the doorway.
That must be it. She’d been caught in the same trap as Aline. Lured in and then unable to escape. Grandmother had lived her life as his wife not because she approved or even tolerated him, but because she was Catholic. And now Aline would too.
On Grandmother’s hand, holding up her bouquet, was a small whitish spot severing one finger: her wedding ring. It wasn’t possible to distinguish it from the one Aline had just removed.
Aline realized the horrible truth: her very wedding ring had been scavenged from the dead. Her heart sank. She wasn’t bothered by its being used, second-hand; she wasn’t stuck up like that. But knowing that her husband hadn’t enough respect for either of them to allow his first wife to go to her rest with the ring that consecrated her marriage, or his second wife to live among his family with her own ring, her own dignity, was approaching the unbearable. To think that Grandfather had robbed even Grandmother’s grave meant that he’d never thought of either marriage as anything more than a simple change in his civil status. It meant she had found herself among people who knew no respect for boundaries, be they personal, societal or legal. It struck her with dread that she was wearing Grandmother’s old clothes as well. Never before had hand-me-downs or second-hand clothes from a church rummage sale weighed upon her mind; but she realized these dead woman’s clothes were hers simply because her husband hadn’t bothered to throw them out.
A dead woman’s ring, a dead woman’s clothes. They signified not acceptance into the clan as she’d first thought, but that she was accepted as a substitute and not a person. That her own, individual life was over; she had been declared dead. Without ever having been allowed to live and speak for herself.
And no one was bothering to do anything with Angus’s things either; they were still boxed and piled against a wall in the basement, like bricks in the very wall. The Desouches did not honour the dead; they lived off them. They built their lives off the dead, scavenged everything wherever they could find it, feared letting anything go as if to save it up was like saving money, putting away for the future.
But was that a future worth having? To live in the clothes of the dead, eat off their plates, read their books, give their toys to the children?
Hyde was nervous. It was a new feeling for him; he hadn’t had so much riding on success or failure since his medical school exams, and then he’d been prepared. All he’d had to do that time was show that he’d learned, prove that he knew. This time, he didn’t know. No one knew. This time he was not demonstrating a command of all the facts. This time he was creating knowledge, literally, without precedent. He was on the edge of his profession, and he was edgy. Years had been eaten up in waiting for everything to come together.
And he was no longer young, not by any stretch. He could easily wait out the rest of his life without another opportunity. Yet he knew as well that some things needed more time. He knew some of his techniques were still too rough, that no matter how great the success he might display for himself tonight, it would be short-lived. His patient would probably not survive long, if at all. He adjusted the camera, inserted a film cartridge and set it rolling. His patient would by no means be a complete, normal subject. It might not walk, or see, or talk, or any of a thousand other normal things. A real mess. But if it lived, if it only lived unaided, for the briefest time … that’s all he wanted, that’s all Hyde needed. Proof. That’s all anyone ever needs. A few seconds of film.
He was going to use electroshock. (He’d had mixed results with it in the past, remarkable success and shameful failure both, although those experiments had been performed on live subjects. But it did physically stimulate the tissue.) And adrenalin. A dose enough for a horse, in a syringe the size of a caulking gun. Chemicals and electricity: after all, what else was a man? It was time to find out.
He couldn’t wait any longer. There was no way to tell which scavenged part might suddenly reach the end of its useful life and thereby doom the whole experiment. Loose ends or no, rough, untried techniques or no, there was no time to lose.
He charged his machines, lit his lights, donned his gloves and filled his syringe. He had no trouble inserting it through the wound in the sutured chest. He pumped the liquid directly into the heart. When the syringe was totally empty he quickly looked his patient in the eye. He saw nothing, but hadn’t expected to. He turned to his machine, flipped the power switch, set the dial to a low charge and pressed the button.
It made a sound like a door buzzer.
But there was no answer.
He pressed it again, longer. He increased the charge. More. More. He set the machine on full and leaned on the button, gritting his teeth. No, no, he couldn’t fail now, no …
The overhead light dimmed. In surprise Hyde took his hand from the button. The light came back. “Bah,” he exclaimed, and pressed again with all his force, as if the more pressure he applied, the more power would flow.
The light blew. The machine stopped buzzing, so Hyde took his hand away. In the darkness he felt his way to the door. Light spilled in from the hallway. He looked back at the operating table, but the patient was inert. Hyde went down the hall to the utility room, where he replaced a blown fuse.
He felt a physical release of tension, as if he’d stopped after running, or as if he’d finally been released from a small enclosed place. “I have failed, at last. It has happened: my worst fear.” Yet he felt no emotion. He was not hurt or angry. He’d always wondered what he would do, what he would feel, if he should fail in the Great Work.
Nothing, seemed to be the answer. His worst fear had been realized and the world still went about its business, regardless. He breathed deeply, stretched his back, shut the electrical panel and went back to the operating room.
Where the patient was breathing.
There was a lot of pain. And then he noticed he wasn’t quite sure where he was waking up, as if he were hungover in a strange place. But there was an equal amount of pain in his chest, as if he’d eaten far, far more than he should. Except he was also ravenously hungry. He was too weak to rise, so he regurgitated where he was. Fluid rose in his mouth like a combination of searing bile and an oily marinade. It slid down the back of his throat and he gagged loudly, coughing his head up off the pillow. It stabbed the back of his skull, while his chest felt like it was tearing open.
He flailed his arms, snagging them in the tubes speared into his veins.
Dr. Hyde approached and held him down. He loomed overhead, laughing through white teeth. “Relax, relax.” Hyde administered an injection and wiped away the waste while the thing that used to be Hubert, among others, slowly calmed.
“Now,” said Hyde. “Who are you?”
Hubert blinked slowly and inhaled shallowly—a deep breath hurt too much. His eyes shifted back and forth to take in the surroundings, but they were indistinct in the darkness that lay outside the glare of the overhead light.
“Who are you?” repeated Dr. Hyde.
Hyde’s eyes were glowing, his whole body taut, his arms locked straight on either side of the patient, and he gazed directly into his eyes as if looking for something lost down a hole. Hubert looked away.
“Answer me.”
He felt a little clarity resolve out of the pain and confusion, and tried to speak. He made a whistling moan but hadn’t much strength.
“I think fluid’s draining into your lungs. Can you speak?”
“… yes …”
Hyde gripped the patient’s arms urgently. “Who are you?” he hissed.
“I don’t know.” He had an inkling that in some previous life he might have been able to answer the question. “Who are you?”
“I’m Dr. Hyde. I’m your doctor. I saved you.”
“Saved me?”
Hyde giggled. “Yes. Saved you up, as a matter of fact. You’re the ultimate transplant patient. Parts of you from all over. But I need to know—who are you?”
“Don’t you know?”
Hyde snorted. “That’s not the point. Do you know? That’s the point. Tell me—do you know? Do you feel it?”
“Feel what?”
“Do you feel yourself? Do you feel your soul?”
“I don’t know. What is a soul?”
Hyde turned away, angry. He stood with his back to Hubert. He faced him again.
“I’ll explain. It’s possible you have amnesia and your memory will return. But it may not. So here’s the important point: if you know who you are, if you have a self, then you have a soul. But if you don’t—if you’re just an animated amalgam of interchangeable parts—then I’ve created a monster and you have no soul. If you, as an artificial man, have no soul, then the soul of a natural being transcends mere matter. It’s not just parts.” “Parts. Brought me back?”
“Yes. You were dead. All of your parts were dead. Which part is dominant? The heart or the head? Who are you?”
“You did this to me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Hyde shouted. “To prove or disprove the existence of the soul.” He calmed a little. He reached over and grabbed Hubert by the ears. His face was flushed, and though he shouted, he was restraining himself. “I need to know. I need to know if I have a soul.”
Hubert stared into his eyes and saw the searching. A rage was building in his head. This man had done something horrible to him. But a sorrow was emanating from his chest. This poor man was still searching his eyes.
“I will help you find out,” he said. He reached both hands up around Dr. Hyde’s neck and strangled him.
Hyde was so startled he hadn’t enough time to react. The patient, gazing eye to eye with him, was demonstrating the proper qualities. Conscious, deliberate action. Was it anger he saw in the monster’s eyes, or pity? A desire to help Hyde, or to strike out in revenge? It didn’t matter. What mattered was the success of the experiment. Even though, in this burst of final insight that Hyde saw as a brilliant light, instead of knocking on God’s door, he was nailing God’s coffin shut.
Hubert watched the surprise flash over the doctor’s visage, and then the fear mounting with the redness of his face, until his eyes rolled up into his head and he collapsed.
Hyde was heavy atop him. He couldn’t move. He slept.
Green helicopters burped out green troops, trucks rolled noisily and brashly through scattering city traffic, and within hours the army had secured all that it cared to secure. No politician was without his guard, no bus or railway station or bridge off the island was unwatched, and the only foreigners granted easy access in or out through Dorval airport were another army: the press. Flashbulbs and tape recorders from around the world descended on Montreal in numbers unseen since Expo 67, because something was happening the like of which had been unknown since 1837.
All the government buildings were policed, all embassies and consulates watched, every major street patrolled, and all the millionaires in Westmount had their own personal soldiers at attention just outside their front doors.
But no one was watching the wretched houses on Park Avenue or in St-Henri or the Point or the East End. In those lowly neighbourhoods, unworthy of attention or protection, life progressed as usual, with cheap beer and cigarettes and black-and-white televisions. The parents found what solace they could on their meagre wages and the children excitedly, delightedly, ganged up for trick-or-treating.
All the graves opened up and the spirits came drifting down from the mountain. It was Halloween and the streets rang with the laughter of goblins and witches and ghosts, demanding their annual due. People all over Montreal handed out bribes of sweets and small coins to ward away trickery, mischief and worse.
Except in Westmount, where soldiers armed and ready kept the rich anglophones safe from the children of the poor.
Gangs of ragged scarecrows, and zombies with axes buried in their heads or backs, still ran from door to door long after dark. Aliens with glowing eyes and flashing zap guns demanded their tribute, fairy princesses waved their glittering wands and leprechauns charmed; black-masked stripe-shirted robbers held open bags marked with dollar signs; skeletons rattled, pirates set their beards afire, and a Frankenstein lumbered unnoticed through the streets, bleeding at the seams in his flesh and trailing catheters.
The cold, rattling damp of autumn clung to him and he sought warmth and relief.
He was attracted by the noises of laughing, yelling children. He found them running up and down streets dodging cars and grouping at doors, where they were welcomed and given gifts. Flocks of them scattered and split seemingly at random, but when one rang a bell alone, she’d find herself swallowed into a gaggle of revellers before the door opened, and have to assert herself for her share.
Up and down the street, house lights blinked on and off like fireflies as doors opened to disburse candy to children, and jack-o’-lantern grins flickered in windows. Light and heat—and doors opening to let it out. Hubert fell in with Moonie McCairn and his friends and looked not so out of place with their costumes, and not so outrageously large or adult beside the hulking Moonie, though that was no concern of his. He was handed apples and ravenously enjoyed them; and then the door was shut, and he followed the children again.
Jean-Baptiste stood naked with his back to the mirror, turned his head and examined himself. The cop had done an excellent job. There were no marks at all. He was surprised, considering the pain he’d felt at the time. It had been a week before he could sit or sleep on his back. During the day he’d stood leaning his elbows or forearms on the horizontal bars of his cell, holding a book in his hands just outside the cage, gazing past the bars to read—bars that disappeared when he was swept into the story.
Once he was satisfied that his backside was unscarred, he noticed how pale his flesh was. No suntan this year. Not just his torso, but his arms and face. He’d missed the hottest part of the summer. Grandfather’d always said about Montreal, “Ten months of winter and two months of hell.” He’d suffered from the heat in August as everyone had, but he’d been stuck inside.
Now he was looking forward to getting out, was gathering his things together for his release next morning, but he was not looking forward to going home. Father had never come to visit.
He thought about the cheque he still had from Woland; maybe he should take a vacation. What else was he going to do with the money, really? He could hand it over as a contribution to the house, as a peace offering. It might help Father with his plans or pay some outstanding bill, or buy some new clothes for whoever needed them. But though that might smooth out his homecoming, even though it was more money than he’d ever had, it wasn’t enough to make a big difference for anyone at home. It might ease things for a week or so, even provide some small treats like an early Christmas, but it wouldn’t be long before the money was gone and forgotten, swallowed into their lives like a mere drop in the proverbial bucket, and then things would be the same as they had always been. They’d skimp and save so as to limp from one week to the next, never daring to spend an extra dollar, always worried there’d be too little on the plates. No, a single injection of cash would do nothing to alleviate their worries.
He noticed he’d put on weight. Three meals a day, regular as clockwork, for two whole months. That he’d miss; he’d eaten better in prison than at home. Now that was a crime. He’d learned things inside, though. Like there were damned few inmates who hadn’t shared his penurious upbringing. Not a lot of university graduates or corporate executives. He’d learned about state control of the poor, and how property was considered more important than people. He’d thought a lot about what Grandfather had told him.
Jean-Baptiste had spent two months at the mercy of the paltry shelves of the prison library. He was disappointed to find no Diderot or Borges, and even worse, no Henry Miller or Pauline Réage. Thus he’d plowed through the Tales of E.T.A. Hoffman and the Contes cruels of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. For the first time he’d been forced to squirrel out the meaning of a story he hadn’t immediately grasped. It gave him training in patience, the patience necessary to sit thinking for hours, worrying an idea or concept just beyond his reach. The patience he’d need if he was going to finish the novel he’d started writing. Even the Nuns Are Grey had originated in his imagination as something like Balconville or The Tin Flute, but somehow was turning out much darker than he’d anticipated. Funnier, too.
It was set during the Rebellion, and began: “In a town where even the nuns are grey, where coal is still burnt against the cruelties of January and the winter holidays are the important ones, I was born at the beginning of summer. The midwife led the women of the house in assisting my mother, while my father was in the basement attending to his secret occupation as an abortionist …”
But he was having trouble keeping things realistic. Occasionally a disruption would occur, and the character he’d made an elderly patriarch would suddenly turn into the pirate Hook or Bluebeard, or later show up in the story as a Cyclops:
“He dominated us all with his cruel laugh and physical unpredictability, as if having only one eye had kept his personality from rounding itself to the fullest …”
And yet only two pages later: “His constant silence, coupled with the accusatory look of the single immense eye in the middle of his aged forehead, loomed over us relentlessly as the summer sun …”
He’d thought he wanted to be Kundera or Calvino, but discovered himself some odd hybrid of Lautréamont and Clark Ashton Smith. In order to keep himself more reined in, he gave himself the task of writing up descriptions of his characters as if they were members of his own family, and produced portraits of them he could refer to in his story.
Of Aline he wrote: “Her hair is limp and dull against her pale neck. She is nervous, always moving, never at rest. She crosses herself and holds the crucifix that hangs on her neck. She speaks a common but prim French, so that a language I always think of as languorous and eloquent seems pinched and sharp. She’s small.”
Uncle and Father became neighbours, “ineffectual twins, neither with any apparent occupation, who nevertheless seemed to divide the day into equal shifts, for one was never seen during the day, the other never after dark. But they were easily distinguished, because one was a drunk and the other was missing some fingers.”
His sister became the wife of a Patriote, and the drive behind her husband’s dedication, herself handing him a cleaned and ready musket, or passing messages back and forth with other wives. He’d already written in a scene at the climax where Marie, now widowed, becomes a prime agitator in the riots that burn down Canada’s first parliament buildings in Old Montreal.
He couldn’t seem to find himself a place among them, either as the runt or the prodigal, until he fell on the idea of a young defrocked Jesuit making a little noise at the Literary Society on account of some licentious poems in the manner of Nerval or Baudelaire.
It was difficult keeping all these elements working together, because he had to figure them out as he went along, and his mind kept changing about what they meant or which character they were about, and he spent hours in silent contemplation until some other prisoner made a noise or commotion in some other part of the block, bringing him back to the real world of his stinking jail cell with a start.
He looked over his scattered paragraphs and could think of no way to arrange them all together in a sensible manner that wouldn’t contradict what he’d read in the musty History of Canada the prison possessed. He went back to the library and looked more closely at the Canadian writers he found, and then threw away his original opening, replacing it instead with pages of description before even bringing a character into the scene, let alone having an actual event happen. Once he’d done this, he recognized it as an odd recapitulation of the early English novel, where a title character begins by explaining his lineage back several generations. But being transposed to the colonies, characters who couldn’t claim a pedigree were validated by family lands instead, by their real physical presence in a landscape of material objects and forces, not a milieu of social rank and grace, or lack of it.
It was easier when he could sit again. He had finally hit his stride; he’d become familiar enough with the daily routine of prison life that he simply fulfilled his given role when necessary and spent most of his time on his bunk, either staring blankly up at the sky through the bars or scribbling madly in his notebooks. And now it was finally the end of October and he was being released.
Now what Marie needed was a gravedigger. Did she dare ask help from Grandfather or Uncle, both so experienced in that line? Could she go to Father with this problem as she had with her pregnancy? Did she have any option but to try shoving this skeleton into its closet? Of course not. One way or another, Cross must be disposed of without arousing the authorities. It wasn’t just for herself: even an ordinary murder would have destroyed all their lives, the investigation revealing their secrets large and small—from their theft of electricity and gas from neighbours, and the ghoulish profession of Grandfather and Uncle, to the body of a foreign diplomat and her clear connection to the bombings and robberies of the FLQ.
Yet the worst of it would be the family’s—Father’s—knowledge of what she’d done—the terrorism that slowly mounted from political scare tactics to the murder of one of their own family, Angus, and finally into the creation of an international incident. In their own home, no less. She lowered her face into her dirty hands and sobbed. She couldn’t bear the shame of Father finding out. She imagined the complex mix of disappointment, fear, anger and hopelessness the knowledge would cause him, and she felt all those things herself.
Under the bare bulb of the hiding place, with John Cross sprawled unnaturally on the floor, she sobbed over the corpse as parents do over the bodies of their own children.
She was alone. No one could help her in this. And this was a problem which could only be buried. With Grandfather’s spade she began to dig into the earthen floor of the hidden room in the basement. It was long and hard work. She kept having to brush tears away from her cheeks, and so smeared earth and blood from her hands over her face. And she was unused to handling the spade, and blisters formed on her palms alongside the gashes—blisters where Grandfather and Uncle had grey, dead calluses on theirs.
Angus was frustrated. Without a body, he was tossed about on the winds like a cloud of dust, and felt sometimes his motes gather close enough to resolve into wakefulness, and other times as if much of himself had been swept away and lost in the ether forever. Or was this just another dream of Mother’s? Was he truly still anywhere at all? Or just in her unconscious and unrestrained head?
The heat was like a desert, and the mass of blinding dust was a storm that was partly himself and partly simple patterns of air moving across rippling dunes. He was a mirage of himself, lost in the infinite particles swirling in forces he couldn’t resist.
Yet there she lay, asleep, and that bothered him so: Wake up, daughter! Wake up! You’ve got your life to lead, you’ve got your family.
You’ve still got your own body, damn it, and why don’t you use it? Oh, God, for a body to rest in—yes, rest in: all this flying apart in circles and clouds makes me nauseous. And falling in piles of dust on other, scorched deserts of dust—no water, no rest, no will of my own any more—and you just lie there, with a perfectly good body, you can get up and turn the thermostat down—it’s killing me, but I can’t be killed, just desiccated and floating on currents of warmer and warmer air.
Oh, God, for a body to speak with, to wake my daughter with, to live and die with …
Meanwhile, in the parlour, Mother’s friends took the opportunity of seeming concerned for their still-slumbering friend to abandon their own homes and save the expense of handing out candy. Since they had little to say on their own behalf, they spent some hours gnawing the trivia of neighbourhood gossip, and then lamenting worldly affairs.
As far as Mrs. Pangloss was concerned, the troubles all began on July 11, 1969. One giant leap indeed. That single event could account for all the noxious prodigies plaguing the world at large: the unpredictable raging of the weather, Angus’s horrible demise, Grandfather’s just deserts, Jean-Baptiste’s success-cum-notoriety, Mother’s persistent somnolence, Frère André’s missing heart, and up to and including the kidnapping of the British trade minister by those horrible criminals (what—pray tell, what?—would the rest of the world and Mother England think now of their once faithful, proud Dominion?); not to mention Mr. Pangloss’s creeping impotence.
Mrs. Harrison quietly cackled in sympathy, with a teacup held under her chin.
As a matter of fact, according to Mrs. Pangloss, all these disasters had clear forewarnings, if only proud, ignorant men had heeded the signs. It was the simplest process to trace back through history the calamities brought about by each aeronautic advance. Every one of these scientific achievements, Mrs. Pangloss averred, was a correlate of moral decline, tied in inverse proportion to the others. Had not jets occasioned a flurry of hijackings, and the opening of the hungry maw that was the Bermuda Triangle? Were not propeller planes and rockets the direct cause of the London Blitz and Germany’s unfortunate craze for Hitler? Even the age of dirigibles had eaten itself, vis-à-vis the “unsinkable” Titanic, which left its mark even in Montreal’s own Mount Royal and Côte-des-Neiges cemeteries, and ended with what is always referred to as the Hindenburg Disaster; oh, the humanity.
Certainly, and with pride, had she been a peasant farmer in France (though perish the thought: herself a dirty, garlic-eating frog!) she, too, would have pitchforked a Montgolfier for a Satanist, or worse. There’s no denying the wisdom of the folk, even if hygiene isn’t a priority in the culture. She’d always said, you can’t blame people for what they are; it was God’s own business to reveal His wisdom as He saw fit, and if the Lord Himself was content that some of His creatures couldn’t speak proper English or wash the fields out of their hair before sitting down to dinner, who was she to question the Lord? Though really, bombings and kidnappings were going a bit far; that’s just taking advantage, and surely not what the Lord intended, no matter how twisted the thinking He put into someone’s head. Let it be said again, as it was said in the beginning (and hope, at last, mere foolish mortals might listen): Man Was Not Meant To Fly, Icarus.
Imagine: herself arrested in an FLQ sweep, and her husband dragged from his work to bail her out. They ought all to be rounded up and shot, or deported. Bombings and kidnappings and God only knows what else …
And Mother still lying there like a corpse.
Mrs. McCairn clucked more than once and shook her head, either in complete sympathy, or just possibly without the will to argue, resignedly.
When the doorbell rang again, Mrs. Harrison jumped and sent ashes scattering over herself, and Aline hurried down the hall from the kitchen with Grace following her in the air and landing on her shoulder.
It was delightfully nostalgic for Aline. In her own neighbourhood, her mother wasn’t the only adult to dress the part when handing out treats. It was a creepy delight for the children who stood on the threshold, surprised to find the staid, controlling, ordinary grown-ups decked out in black and masks and darkness. The reversal of roles threw the younger ones into a confusion of identity. After all, the children knew they were only playing at being ghosts and ghouls and grave robbers; but adults most definitely did not play at dress-up. Adults were the forces of stability themselves, the agents of comfort and security. So who were these people answering the knock on a neighbour’s door, and just where were the neighbours? Could these life-sized, lifelike evil spirits be real? Could they have done away with the ordinary, familiar grown-ups who lived here? Were their neighbours bewitched or scared away, or worse—buried in the basement?
Aline, dressed in mourning, with her dark lace shawl still smelling of mothballs and a great, cawing, curious raven staring down from her shoulder, opened her mouth and let out her best impression of Mrs. Harrison: she cackled with glee.
“Viens t’en, mes petites. Come in, come in, my pretties. Hee hee hee hee, have some candies!” And she doled out chocolate kisses and toffees and sugar candies. And for the smallest, most adorable pastel fairy princess she reached into her bag and brought forth a large, shining red apple, and knelt down before the child. She was trembling before the giant, sinister witch and her familiar, wanting to bolt, but petrified right where she was.
Aline was having too much fun to notice the child’s fear. “Now, my little precious,” she said, “take this apple home with you, it will put a rosy blush on your cheeks—but beware! You dare not eat this before going to bed—for apples will give you a tummy ache and you won’t … get … any … sleep!” And she thrust the apple into the little girl’s bag.
Suddenly, to Aline’s surprise, the fairy princess burst out crying, and all the now terrified goblins and monsters scattered from the porch, down the stairs and up the street as quickly as they could—some dropping or even abandoning their treasured sweets as they ran.
All except the Frankenstein, who stopped to gather spilt candy into his mouth, and Moonie, whose mother was sipping tea with the ladies in the parlour.
Now Aline was half pleased with herself for having given the children a chill to tell their parents and all their friends at school about, and half saddened that she might just have overdone it with the young girl. Oh, well, that was probably enough for the night anyway, since it was getting so late. In her broken English she bid Moonie enter to find his mother, and expected the other child to be off home, but …
Child? With the hallway lit only by a few candles for added spooky effect, Aline couldn’t be sure. A friend of Moonie’s might be another simple soul, and somehow he looked familiar—but he did look too old, and he did look a mess. Was that some kind of costume? With a torn and bloodstained hospital gown, and ragged bandages on his head and elsewhere, and those lines in his skin like wounds and stitches? A homemade, poorly made outfit, surely. Cobbled together from what scraps a destitute family with an idiot son might salvage from their closets and rags. But even Moonie didn’t eat candy from the dirt. And his clothes looked as though they were wet in the darkness. Aline sighed. She couldn’t let this one wander off unsupervised, obviously. She’d have to bring him inside and at least try to clean him up, try to find him something to wear, and shoes too—how can anyone walk the streets without shoes? Aline quickly glanced away from those dirty feet with a feeling of revulsion—his feet were clearly of different sizes.
She pushed him ahead of her down the hallway, past the door to the basement stairs, and thought, Of course. Angus’s things, all boxed and waiting downstairs. She’d find him a completely new set of clothes from head—good Lord, that really looks like a massive wound—to toe, if a pair or a couple of mixed pairs of shoes might be found, close enough to his various sizes, to fit. But anything might be better than the scraps of his costume. As he entered the lighted kitchen she saw the pallor of his face, and how one leg seemed olive-complected while the other was a pasty white, and his arms were rosy-fleshed on the left and suntanned on the right.
Grace squawked and flew around the ceiling madly and unexpectedly. Aline ducked her head as the bird flew by; never had Grace done such a thing before. She seemed agitated, and veered in a new direction too quickly, colliding with the ceiling light. The bulb snapped and the room went dark. Aline was startled and held still while she heard Grace settle atop the fridge. She moved to the cupboards carefully and brought out more candles. She remembered the momentary glimpse she’d gotten of the newcomer; she was unsure of what she’d seen.
He looked completely made of a patchwork of scraps, as if to match his costume, and he looked innocent and without experience of where he was and what was happening. In fact, he looked so horrible altogether that suddenly she feared his own family might have abandoned him some time ago and left him wandering the streets. She sat him down at the table and looked at the liquid drying on her hands. It looked like blood.
She rooted in the fridge to offer him milk or juice, and when she turned back to her guest at the table, Grace had perched atop his head and was picking with her beak into the wound.
“Oh my God,” she exclaimed, and rushed over to beat the bird away.
But Hubert put his hand up and his palm out and said, “No.”
“She’s hurting you,” said Aline, and made another move forward.
“No. Doesn’t hurt. I like the bird.”
Aline thought, of course it’s not a real wound, it’s just makeup. If this poor simple soul likes having Grace on his head, leave them both be. But it was disturbing to see her beak dip so deeply into the bandaged spot. It seemed as if Grace were trying to pick out a berry or a nut she’d glimpsed among the mess. She seemed to grip something and twist it this way and that as if she were working it loose.
“Burnt toast,” Hubert said.
Aline realized she’d been staring at Grace. “What?”
He looked puzzled. “Burnt toast,” he said.
“Are you hungry?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
Aline sighed. Of course she could give him at least some toast. It would be better for him than all that candy he’d been gorging on. She put two slices in the toaster and pushed the lever all the way to the right, the darkest setting. Burnt it is.
Hubert’s eyes lowered. He seemed to be looking at nothing at all, slumped in the chair like someone totally despairing of life. Aline felt like that sometimes. “Do you have parents?” she asked.
Without looking at her he said, “No.”
“No.”
“Do you have a place to live?”
“No.”
Aline suddenly realized how far she’d committed herself to this disturbing stranger. She really expected him to be simply lost, and that she’d just track down his home or his parents, or whatever institution he might be in care of, and hand him back. But now she was afraid she’d have to actually take him in, at least overnight. It was too late to call anyone now to do anything for him. No social agency or government office or even church would answer a knock or a phone call now.
The toast popped. Grace flew up to perch on the window frame. Hubert handled the toast like a child, unsure of his grip and awkwardly trying to fit it into his mouth. His eyes were still downcast, his shoulders hunched over as if he lacked the will or strength to sit up straight, and he masticated noisily and let crumbs fall from his mouth.
Aline burst into tears and lowered her head to the table, sobbing. It was just like having breakfast with her husband. He was unwashed, uninterested, ungrateful and uncommunicative.
Grace fluttered down to rest on her back. She cocked her head, leaned in behind Aline’s ear and squawked. Aline heaved and sobbed again.
Hubert had finished eating and sat, blankly. Grace hopped across the table, up on his shoulder and eyed the hanging, bloody bandage. She picked. He grunted. Grace prodded.
Aline raised her flushed face. The wave of despair had ebbed but tears still streaked her face. “What?”
“Sing,” he repeated. “Your voice.”
What was she going to do? How could she take on another burden? The whole household had become her burden: Grandfather, Mother, everyone else. No one looked after themselves, no one lifted a finger to help her. She had no life of her own, no friends, no hope. All she had was Grace. And now this basket case, another helpless burden, had landed in her lap.
He raised his eyes and looked straight at her. Grace had to jump to his head to reach down into the sticky mess. “Your voice is your heart,” he said. “The heart is the strongest part. Follow your heart.”
Aline laughed nervously and wiped her face with her bare hands. “Get off him, Grace,” she said. She got up, walked around the table and held Grace with both hands so she couldn’t fly away. “I can’t stand it, even if you don’t mind. It’s too creepy.”
She brought him to the basement, which was harder than she imagined because he was quite incompetent with the stairs. He stood unsteadily, watching her opening and sorting through boxes until she offered him some clothes.
“I’ll leave you with these, you can change yourself. We’ve no extra beds in the house, but you can sleep here on the floor. It’s hard, but not any dirtier than you already are. Wrap yourself in these blankets, and in the morning we’ll call the welfare people. Somebody else can give you a bath.”
As everyone retired, turned off the television, locked the doors and went to bed, Grandfather awoke and stretched in his bed. It was musty and warm as always, but he took note of it almost for the first time. Almost, because as he was feeling the touch of the stale sheets and blankets as never before, he realized they’d always felt that way. And with the window closed, how stuffy and warm it was.
Through the wall he heard his wife crying in her bed. Nothing had changed. But he took no satisfaction in it; that was new. He put his eye in, blinked, felt the paste in his mouth. Why should he now begin to feel guilt, where before her tears had justified his angry pleasure?
Exhausted, Marie had slept on the cot beside the grave. Earlier she’d stirred, half woke on hearing scrapings and bumpings at the wall, and voices in the basement beyond. But it was quiet now. She lay in the darkness in the small room without windows, with the knowledge of what she’d done, and felt how airless and hidden and muffled it was in there, as if she herself were dead and in her coffin.
She might as well be dead. She’d failed at everything, had lost everything. Burying Cross had been her only choice, but it was really a stop-gap measure. She couldn’t leave him here indefinitely; someone would find out someday. Even the false wall she’d built for this tiny hole she lay in was only ever supposed to be temporary. She must think of what she was going to do.
How do you get rid of a body? Who could help her with that question?
At the kitchen table, Grandfather lit his first cigarette of the night. He opened the previous day’s newspaper and read. He’d never noticed before how quiet it was. He heard the house creaking; he heard the occasional car race past on its way down Park Avenue, or the bus. He opened the window and heard the tree gently rustling in the cool breeze. He heard weeping still, and looked up to the bedrooms overhead. No, it wasn’t Aline. She was silent now. But he still heard it. He moved away from the window and heard it louder in the centre of the kitchen. He moved towards the hallway, and there—he heard it more clearly still, through the basement door. Someone was crying in the basement.
Finally, Marie turned on the light, wiped away her tears and stood up. She was hungry, she needed a bath and she had to pee. She took up Grandfather’s spade to return it before anyone noticed it missing, and stepped into the basement. She reached for the hanging bulb, closed the door behind her, flicked the light on and stepped around the boxes of Angus’s things. She looked up. A man stood slouching, his head down. It wasn’t Uncle or Father or Grandfather or even Jean-Baptiste.
He lifted his head. It was Hubert.
Marie screamed.
“Marie,” he said.
Grandfather yanked open the door and charged down the stairs. At the bottom he found Marie standing terrified before a stranger. She was holding his spade, in self-defence, he thought. He drew closer and saw the horribly shambling mess that shifted its weight from one foot to the other.
“Give me the shovel,” he said to Marie, but he had to reach over and take it from her hands. As he stepped up beside her he looked the stranger in the face.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said. This was the man the cops had brought to his back door, the man—the corpse—he’d sold to Dr. Hyde.
Without hesitation Grandfather lifted the shovel and swung it like a baseball bat. He broke Hubert’s nose. Hubert swayed backward and grunted. He lost his balance and toppled over.
Marie ran up the stairs. Hubert! Where had he come from? He was dead, he was dead! How could he be here? She heard noises in the basement. Grandfather was beating him with the spade—should she stop him? Should she help him? Good Lord, she couldn’t let him try to bury Hubert—he might find Cross.
She dashed back down the steps and grabbed Grandfather’s arms. He’d been bending over Hubert, whose head had cracked against the gas meter and lay awkwardly against the pipes and the grey stone of the foundation. “No, no, don’t!” she pleaded, and held on to Grandfather’s arm as he made a swing right at Hubert’s face. She yanked his arm and he missed Hubert, but he hit the pipes and the soft lead of a fragile solder joint, and after the short clang came a sharp hissing and the pungent smell of gas.
“Christ, we’ve got to get out of here,” said Grandfather. “Wake everyone. Get out of the house. Call the fire department.”
“Are you crazy?” said Marie. “They’ll find him.”
Grandfather looked puzzled. Why would she care? “He’s an intruder. We’ve got a gas leak, we could all be killed. Get out, let’s get out!”
Marie stood still, looking from Grandfather to the unconscious Hubert. She was breathing heavily in short bursts, her mind racing so fast she couldn’t think. Grandfather grabbed her arm and tugged her along after him. He was filled with a sense of urgency and worry; he couldn’t really make sense of the situation, but somehow he felt, above everything, the need to get Marie out of danger. That was new too. Putting someone else first.
Hubert crawled up the wall until he stood unsteadily on two feet. He picked up the shovel and examined the thing that had broken his nose. He could feel the pain, but he wasn’t bothered by it. He dropped the shovel. It struck against the stone of the foundation, and two tiny sparks shot out. They pleased him. He raised the shovel again, and dropped it.
The explosion threw him to the foot of the stairs. He’d lost an ear, and the other rang painfully.
But the flames were nice and warm.
Aline ignored their pleas. “Open the fucking door, Aline,” shouted Father. “No one’s kidding around here.” But Aline lay still. Grace fluttered around the bedroom cawing, and Father and Uncle pounded harder and harder on the door.
In the hallway they were all shouting at one another:
“How’d he get in?”
“Who the hell is he?”
“Why didn’t you take care with the shovel?”
“Why didn’t you do a decent job with the soldering?”
“What’re we going to tell the cops?”
“Aline, the house is on fire. You have to get out.”
“Forget her. Let her die. I’m getting out.”
“For God’s sake, someone help me with Mother.”
Who is this person lying with a head split open? And look, great seams along his chest, his arms, everywhere. But nothing, no person in there.
There was a disturbance in the house, but more than that was unclear. Was this person responsible? He collected himself and moved closer. He drifted down against the warmth that pushed back at him, and still, there was no one in there. Repulsive. What an ugly, beaten monster. But when he got close enough, there was a thrumming, a pulsing that welcomed him. He offered no resistance. He settled in through the sutures and the gaps in the flesh, and he began to feel. His chest rose slowly, contentedly. Everything else hurt, hurt like hell, but his chest drew in air—air!—and he felt a kind of release of tension, as if some ordeal were over, and he was once again welcomed and loved.
He slept.
He woke to the sound of strident cawing. He might have been dreaming of vultures.
Hot. Why is it always so bloody hot? Red, orange flames, dark black smoke—what have I done? What did I do or not do? To be here, enduring this? I did what they told me to. I kept my nose clean, I didn’t cause trouble—is this my reward? Bodiless, in hell?
But those are my things burning—and I’m lying on stairs—fuck, my head hurts—my back—my chest—
He gasped the air, and then realized he’d done it. He looked around. Everything hurt. A jet of flame sprang from the wall and everything was catching fire. He struggled to rise, but had trouble with his legs and arms—
—these are not my legs and arms—
He crawled up the stairs. Black smoke billowed out the doorway into the hall. He crawled out of it coughing, raised himself on the door, took huge gasps of cleaner air.
This was his daughter’s house. He staggered down the hall and held himself up on the parlour door frame. There was screaming and thumping coming from upstairs. His daughter lay sleeping on a hospital bed. He slowly put one mismatched foot in front of the other and swayed unevenly, flailing his arms out to balance. Behind him he heard someone running down the stairs. He reached the bedside and steadied himself with both arms locked, and looked down at his sleeping daughter’s profile. Behind the sagging lines of middle age he saw the bright eyes and curiosity of the girl she had been. He saw his long-dead wife’s chin and smile, saw his own nose, saw her in her wedding gown, saw her in the hospital bed with a newborn in each arm.
Behind him he heard, “Jesus Christ.”
“Wake up,” he said to his daughter. Nothing. “Wake up. Wake up!” Nothing. He reached over to her ear, drew in his breath and yelled, “Wake up!”
Just as Father grabbed him by the neck, Mother’s eyes fluttered. “Wake up,” he croaked.
She opened her eyes.
And screamed.
Father yanked so hard the head came off in his hands. He yelled and dropped it. Mother scrambled from the bed, and the body fell where she had lain.
He was dead. Finally.
Aline was so depressed she convinced herself they were only playing some horrible Halloween gag on her. But Grace was agitated, shrieking and flying about, fluttering at the window. Aline got up to open it. Even though they’d abandoned their pounding and screaming at her door, it sounded like they were doing just the same elsewhere in the house.
When she had the window open, and Grace had darted out into the cold night air, she realized she could hear the sirens of fire trucks screaming towards her.
My God, had they been serious? She hurried to the bedroom door and flung it open. A wall of flame came rushing up the hallway towards the air pouring in from her window. She retreated. It really was a fire. How could things continue to get so much worse? Wasn’t there ever an end to the suffering?
She had no choice now but to go out the window, just as Grace had. She stepped onto the roof of the kitchen and saw flames licking over the lip from the windows below. The roof was hot on her bare feet. There were no stairs or ladder to the ground, which seemed infinitely far below. Behind her the top floor of the house was engulfed. In minutes the roof would collapse beneath her.
Grace flapped in her face, cawing. She beat the bird away, but it came back, flying around her in ever-widening circles, calling. Aline was confused. “Grace, go away, we’ll both die.”
The bird herded her to the edge of the roof. Across the lane the church was dark and lifeless. Aline couldn’t bring herself to jump: it was too far across to any other building or down to the ground. She’d always been timid. She turned and ran to the other edge. The church was behind her and she faced the flank of the mountain. The illuminated cross glowed out of the darkness. Grace flittered about her face again, and Aline staggered, almost went over.
She was frightened. Grace screeched, almost hovering in front of her, over the empty air. “Oh, Grace,” she said.
The bird called out to her as she had during their singing lessons, with the notes and strains of the tune they’d worked out together. Aline turned and saw, on one side, a wall of flame advancing towards her from the rear of the building, and on the other, the coloured glass of the church windows flickering dimly in the shadows. There were angels circling in the air, leading the risen one up, in a scene of the Ascension.
She had always wanted to fly. She sang with Grace. She had to raise her voice to hear herself above the cracking timbers, and the wind and fire howling back and forth at each other. She felt the tar of the roof go soft under her feet, heard the groaning and snapping of beams giving way. Jump? She could no longer afford her fear.
She flew.
The firemen worked through the night to put out the blaze, but they were lucky to be able to contain it to just a few buildings on either side of the Desouche home. The sky gradually lightened, though as usual it was overcast, and so it couldn’t be said that anyone saw the sun rise. But what emerged from the darkness was a smouldering pile of rubble where the house had stood, and on the sidewalk in front of it, some miserable figures wrapped in the cheap blankets they’d been sleeping in. The firemen collected their hoses and stole away. The police opened the street to the morning traffic.
Grandfather surveyed the smoking ruins through his glass eye and thought, along with what little we owned, I’ve killed another woman. Part of him was bitterly ashamed. But still, he felt now as if he’d been reborn. The past lay consumed, inert and powerless to hurt him. It was late in his life for a man to begin again, but now nothing else was possible.
He saw Marie staring blankly at the ruins, hugging herself against the damp, and shuddering. He threw his arms around her and held her close, and he himself felt comforted.
Marie was light-headed with exhaustion and dread. This was what her years of continued and increasing dedication and work had brought her to. The devastation was complete. She surveyed the open field of ash and char; the fire’d been fuelled so efficiently by the gas that nothing recognizable was left, not any of their possessions or that horrible zombie Hubert, or probably even Cross in his grave. At the edges of the exposed pit that was their home, timbers and pipes and scraps of the neighbours’ dwellings and of the funeral parlour could be distinguished, and across the lane the grey stone wall of the church was blackened; but in the centre, where the blaze had begun, the largest surviving object was a small dark lump like a burnt potato. Unnoticed, it continued to ooze blood.
In the cold of the November morning, Ville-Marie de l’Incarnation Desouche stood, homeless.
Jean-Baptiste walked home from Bordeaux jail to save the bus fare. He’d never been so far out of his own neighbourhood before, never seen so many unrecognized streets and buildings. Yet they were all unmistakably Montreal. Countless French street names, street-front balconies and staircases, black ironwork and grey stone, and carved gingerbread doors, lintels, gables. Grey churches with green peaked roofs. Buses with brown and cream paint, red brick schools covering whole blocks, six storeys high, corner stores with their doors literally cutting the points of corners, always painted the same green as those church roofs. Enormous quantities of beer and cigarettes being carted up or down the block by ten- and twelve-year-olds fetching for their parents.
He walked streets with names like Henri-Julien, Cartier, Dollard. The city was alive with its ghosts, took special care to remember its dead, and surrounded itself above and below, on all sides, with the past, with corpses, with death itself. The invisible visitants of the Catholic spirit world haunted his every step, dogged him in all his travels: coming along St-Joseph he discovered St-Denis was blocked with construction, so he continued to St-Laurent.
From Ste-Agnès to St-Zotique, from Ste-Anne to Ste-Thérèse, the dead came back to life every moment of every day in Montreal, and poked and jabbed, laughed and derided the inhabitants ceaselessly, in every quarter of the city. There was no escape from their influence, from their judgment. Like the demons of a preliterate culture they swirled in the winds gusting down from the mountain, flipped hats from heads, inverted umbrellas, tossed leaves and garbage at faces. These imps of the past, ghosts of Montreal and gremlins of Catholicism, were a gang of adolescent troublemakers getting their revenge on the living for the direction they were taking, for paving their cemeteries, for toppling their statues and church spires, for the fact of not having died yet.
It all looked so shabby, like the home he was returning to.
Coming along Pine Avenue he noticed the darker smudge of smoke against the overcast sky and was conscious of foreboding. He turned down Park Avenue and saw one remaining red truck pumping water where his house used to be, and traffic edging its way around the obstruction. He saw neighbours and strangers hanging about. He stopped where he was. He saw Grandfather embracing Marie; he saw Uncle in his dressing gown, smoking and staring. He saw Father, and Mother—clearly awake, still in her nightdress—hugging each other, crying, laughing, so that he couldn’t tell whether they were devastated or overjoyed.
From this distance, when he looked at his sister, he saw Father’s features, just as he could see Uncle’s face in Father; he remembered looking in the mirror and seeing his mother’s eyes looking back at him, and how she’d always said he had Angus’s eyes. He couldn’t bring himself to move any closer. He’d been too long away to feel at ease with them now, under these circumstances. And he couldn’t bear to confirm that they’d all lost everything, that all his books, his poetry and scribblings and boxes of magazines, were gone. In a puff of smoke.
All he had now were the notebooks he carried with him, and the uncashed cheque. He turned about in the street, looking up the hill of Park Avenue, looking back the way he’d come, looking westward across the street. He looked at the papers in his hand, covered with his own messy scribbling. Patriotes. Rebels. Abortionists. Poets. It suddenly seemed too real, not historical at all, not even as fantastic as he’d feared. But how could he write any of this? What had happened when he dared approach the truth in his play? What good had come of it, for anyone?
It suddenly seemed so unimportant.
Jean-Baptiste had had enough of writing what he knew. It only caused trouble. He vowed he would never again write down a single thing in a realistic mode, because whether it had ever actually happened to him or not, whether he actually believed in it or not, everyone would think it was the literal truth. As if simply because they had absolutely no power of imagination, no one else had any either, and therefore whatever he put down on paper was talking out of school. Kissing and telling.
Enough. From now on he’d write only about other times and other places, preferably places that never really existed, and mix up all the times together whenever it pleased him. And he’d describe only characters who were complete idiots, because everyone who read his work would think they were wise, and therefore that he’d made them up. And events that were clearly impossible, fantastic things out of fairy tales, because people would think they were somehow metaphors for a secret truth.
There was only one direction open now. He’d tear up his notes, his scattered drafts, and begin again. He moved down the street to join his family. A string of words occurred to him:
Montreal, an island …