LATER THAT NIGHT, LONG, LONG AFTER THE argument, I was lying on my bed reading Bonheur d’occasion for school. The white cat was lying next to me, dead asleep. He looked like a lumberjack that had taken off all his clothes and was asleep in his long johns. Nicolas started making a fuss in the other room.
“Oh my God. It’s Raphaël!” Nicolas yelled. “Nouschka, come quick. That asshole from across the street is on the news.”
I walked into the living room. Nicolas and Loulou were sitting on the couch. When we had brought the couch home, it had had only a couple flowers at the bottom; now it was covered in wild, giant pink roses. Who knew that it would thrive in that spot? They were eating chocolate-covered marshmallows and watching the eleven o’clock news.
“Why do you always call him an asshole?”
“Because he’s a snob. Once, I asked him to play soccer baseball with us and he just stared at me and walked the other way. Who does that! I wanted to kill him.”
The news cameras were filming outside Raphaël’s house in Sainte-Agathe. They had raided the house earlier that day. He had about 145 dogs in his house. The city health inspectors showed up with trucks from the humane society to take away all his dogs. The cameras showed the inside of the house, which was littered with debris and feces. The furniture was all ripped apart. There were plates of dog food all over the bedroom floor. The news presented it as tragic for the dogs, which of course it was. But it was also a terrible shame that Raphaël had gone to pieces like this.
They showed all the dogs being taken into trucks. One of the dogs had a tie around his neck instead of a collar, and they all looked on the skinny, mangy side. His dogs looked like they had all the diseases that used to kill humans all the time in the old days. They looked like they had TB and syphilis and cholera. They looked like they had scurvy. They looked like pirates.
There was a close-up of a dog with droopy ears that made him look like he was wearing an aviator hat. The dog looked like a kid who has been warned not to open his mouth and complain one more time. It broke my heart.
Then they showed Raphaël being led out of the house into a police car. He was in as bad a condition as the dogs. He was dressed in jeans and socks. He sounded confused when an interviewer held a microphone up to his face for a comment.
“We’re all equally anticipating the end of a venture we call life on earth. There’s only 412 days left.”
He was wearing handcuffs. He lifted both hands at once to brush his hair over to the side, I guess so that he would look good on television. His face was tanned except for the pale circles around his eyes, which came from religiously wearing sunglasses.
“Woo-hoo!” Nicolas yelled. “He’s lost it!”
“He was always a little oddball, wasn’t he?” Loulou asked.
“He was quiet,” I said.
“His mother was really, really pretty before she got so fat,” Loulou added. “I couldn’t keep track of her kids. She named them all after planets. Wasn’t there one named Neptune and one named Jupiter and one named … Pluto maybe?”
“His brothers’ names are Paul, Samuel and Christophe.”
“It’s a shame. He wasn’t such a bad-looking kid. And he knew how to skate. Remember all those swirly whirlies he did in the park?”
“Hey!” said Nicolas. “I knew how to skate too. There’s a limit though. No man needs to be spinning around in a twinkly catsuit and touching his toes.”
“You may have a point,” Loulou said.
Nicolas and I used to watch him sometimes at the community centre. Raphaël was fourteen then. His hair was short in the back but he had long bangs. I think it was the style with figure skaters to have long bangs like that. Once, the lockers at the rink were closed because of a flood in the boys’ bathroom, and I got to watch Raphaël getting ready on a bench beside the rink. He put gel in his hair and turned the hair dryer on and aimed it at his face until his hair stuck straight back behind him. He never had any expression on his face back then.
He wore an outfit that was cut down the middle to expose his nipples and his belly button. He had enormous feet and his black skates looked too big for him. I wondered if it held him back, having such huge feet.
He used to do a move where he spun on one leg while leaning back and hitting his chest with his hands as if he was stabbing himself to death. Then he would spin in a huge miraculous circle, his arms wide, wide open as if he was showing someone just how much he loved them. And sometimes he squatted down with one leg straight out in front of him and spun with his arms straight up in the air as if he was a corkscrew trying to drill himself into the ice.
I had always been so amazed by Raphaël’s skating. I would stand there, absolutely still, as if I was doing something that required incredible concentration myself, like balancing an egg on a spoon or walking on a tightrope. I felt like my stillness was somehow responsible for whether he landed his jumps. They were so beautiful that I couldn’t bear for him to fall and spoil the effect.
Nicolas would sit watching me watching Raphaël as if I was completely out of my mind. Nicolas wanted to be my most favourite human being, which of course he was. But Raphaël was just a much better skater. We used to have a consensus about whom we were friends with. I never got to spend any time with Raphaël, because Nicolas decided he was definitely off limits. We wouldn’t hang out with someone that the other person didn’t like. This prevented us from having any real friends at all while growing up.
I was glad when the footage of Raphaël was over. Okay, so obviously I liked the guy. But I didn’t like how crazy I felt when I was looking at Raphaël. I didn’t know why people made like it was such a great thing to be wildly attracted to somebody. It felt like being a fish caught on a hook, reeled in whether you liked it or not.
The newscasters began talking about the chances of there being another referendum.
“Oh, turn this shit off,” Nicolas said. “It’s so boring and repetitive. Québec will never, ever have the guts to separate.”
“It might be bad for the economy,” Loulou said.
“I hate to be the one to tell you this, my darling old man, but we are rock bottom. We can’t get any worse.”
Nicolas shouting, “Vive le Québec libre!” as a rumple-headed kid had gotten as many Oui votes as anything politicians said. He was still an ardent separatist, even if he had no faith in the government.
“Look at all those sideburned monkeys from the past,” Nicolas said. “All these heart-attack-prone pseudo-intellectuals without a cause. These ranting syphilis-ridden lunatics, kicked out by their wives and showing up in filthy unlaundered suits to Parliament. If they hold a referendum this time they’d better win.”
I had been listening to Nicolas’s angry rants for years. Sometimes I thought that he wanted to separate from Canada out of spite and to mess things up. The apartment suddenly became tiny again. For the first time it came upon me: the absolutely natural desire to move out. It was weird to think it. Nicolas and Loulou were both sitting on the couch, totally comfortable in their own skins, having no desire to be anywhere else in the world.