IT WOULD HAVE BEEN A HAPPY TIME EXCEPT THAT I was always conscious of the fact that I had not spoken to Nicolas in three weeks. We had never spent twenty-four hours apart before our fight at the wedding.
I had just ditched him. I wanted to see him again, but how could I face him? A month in the life of a twenty-year-old is a very long time. You can become a completely different person during that time. You can grow so distant from a person that you can never quite catch up in your friendship. It was like falling behind in school.
If Nicolas was actually able to stay mad at me any longer, then it would change everything that I knew about the universe. Surely there had to be one constant thing about this world.
I brought it up to Raphaël before he went to work one night.
“Nicolas is always going to be Nicolas,” Raphaël said. “He’s probably got to go through a period of not being himself—just so that he can be sure that he really isn’t anybody else. Or he wasn’t just himself by mistake. But then he’ll go back, you’ll see. And then we’ll have a shitstorm of Nicolas, don’t worry.”
For a second I was annoyed at Raphaël for not worrying along with me. I remembered how Nicolas had warned me that Raphaël was one of these lame-ass philosophizing types. And I thought, man oh man, my brother was right. Why didn’t I listen to him and refuse to have anything to do with this jerk? But then I sighed. Being mad at Raphaël wasn’t going to help this situation at all. None of it was his fault. I went back to worrying.
A few days later a twelve-year-old in a yellow and black striped sweater knocked on my door and said that Nicolas was waiting for me down on the corner. And then the boy buzzed away, off to smell some flowers.
Knowing how impatient Nicolas was, I ran around the house, scrambling for my peacoat and some shoes. I hurried down the stairs and onto the street. I started running but I was a little bit scared of how quickly my heart was beating, so I slowed down and walked.
I kept fixing my hair. As if I was on my way to a first date and was feeling insecure. I even stopped and looked at my reflection in the window of a car. I think I was wringing my hands as I walked. Trucks were bouncing along beside me on the street like they had thunderclouds in the back. What if Nicolas said he didn’t ever want to see me again? Whoever said that twins can read one another’s minds was wrong. I never had any idea what Nicolas was thinking.
Nicolas was standing on the corner, waiting for me. He put his hands over his eyes when he saw me coming toward him. He ran around and hid behind a skinny tree, all Inspector Clouseau–style. He picked up a piece of newspaper from the ground and then hurried to the bench and held it up in front of his face with his legs crossed, reading it. I sat down next to him, and each time we made eye contact we blushed.
He was wearing a green ski jacket over a brown acrylic track suit. I think he wanted to prove that he looked good in anything. He dressed like a toddler that had snuck out the back door while his mother was preoccupied doing the laundry.
“Well, here we are,” he said finally.
“Fancy that.”
“Just the two of us, like old times.”
“Yup.”
“I never gave you a wedding present.”
“If you promise that you aren’t going to talk shit about my husband anymore, that would be the best wedding gift that you could give me. You know?”
“Oh, you should have told me. I could have saved $3.99.”
He reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a small blue music box. When I opened it, it began to play the tune “Il Était un Petit Navire”—that song about a young sailor who is about to be eaten by the other sailors because they’ve run out of food. Why had anyone ever invented songs? They made your heart all crazy.
I loved it. I’m not even sure why I started to cry. Maybe it was partly out of relief. I had imagined this meeting 360 different ways and I was just glad that I didn’t have to picture it anymore.
“Do you like it?”
“It’s the most wonderful thing that I’ve ever been given in my whole life.”
“Oh, don’t overdo it now! You sound like a numbskull. It’s nothing. It’s nothing. It’s nothing. Don’t get so emotionally crazy, please. I never met anybody who cried the way you do.”
“Are we good? I don’t want there to ever be bad blood between us. You’re the only person who loves me.”
“Loulou loves you.”
“Loulou’s too busy worrying about his gastric problems to really love anybody. I’m a bum without you. I’m like a guy on a trapeze who’s hanging by his knees with nobody to catch. I mean that’s no kind of act, is it?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“I’m a bonehead without you. I’m a bungler. I’m a booger eater. A backwater bigot. A lonely pickled egg floating in a pickle jar. I feel like shit. I miss you, okay. You wanted to know if I would miss you. Well, I did. There you go. You’re a stronger man than me, Gunga Din. You win. You outdrew me.”
I laughed. It was funny because Raphaël had never said anything like that to me. I knew Raphaël loved me, but I sometimes got the feeling that if I left him, he would be perfectly all right about it pretty soon afterwards. I’d never met anybody that was as good at being alone as Raphaël. Nicolas would actually go nuts if I left him for good.
“I missed you too.”
“What a softie! Promise me that you won’t ever abandon me. Don’t move away or anything like that.”
“I would never do that.”
“He has to stay here as a condition of his parole, right?”
“Where would we go?”
“Somewhere where I could never find you again.”
“Okay, I promise.”
He looked content as he folded up the promise I’d given him and tucked it away in some deep, inner pocket.
“I need some normal clothes,” he said.
“I’ll say. You’re getting downright eccentric.”
“You want to come shopping with me now?”
“Oh, all right. I only have about five dollars though.”
“That’s great!”
Nicolas was in a particularly good mood. He called out random insults to people as they passed by. He stopped an Asian kid with a pocket protector and beige pants.
“Don’t ever change, man,” Nicolas said to him. “I love everything about that look. Seriously.”
There was a mural of the big bang outside the Salvation Army. Nicolas stood up on a bench to throw a beer can over his head into the garbage. His aim was really nice. It was lovely to see.
Nicolas was usually aiming a little bit too high. He always thought that he would be able to do things that he didn’t quite have the talent or ability for. He broke his nose once trying to ride a unicycle.
When we pushed open the door of the Salvation Army, so many bells rang that it sounded like the king had just died.
Nicolas went to the men’s section. He started trying to pile every suit jacket from the rack onto the crook of his arm. A fifteen-year-old store clerk gave him a funny look because he was making a mess.
“I’m going to a job interview on Monday.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
I wasn’t sure why he always had to claim that he was on his way to a job interview. It had probably become a nervous tic. The way some people had to laugh after everything they said.
“I had this friend named Maxim,” Nicolas said, raising and dropping his shoulders in a black jacket that looked too small. “He found out that he was one-eighth Native. So he goes on a spiritual quest. Because that’s what all Natives do when they are eighteen. And then they rename themselves. So he does this. He roams through the wilderness outside of Boucherville. And then he comes back and his name is Daniel.”
“So?”
“So? Are you retarded? He’s supposed to have a name like Sleeps with the Fishes or Little Itchy Ass. Not Daniel.”
“Just stop. You’re being racist.”
“How the fuck am I being racist?”
He went into the changing room to try on a grey suit.
“Remember my friend Xavier?” he yelled from inside the stall. “He lost his job as a teacher because he was teaching the kids to play Russian roulette or something like that.”
“Yeah, something like that. Something like that … Do you have any idea what Russian roulette is?”
He came out of the changing room in the suit. He actually looked really handsome in it. I gave him an enthusiastic thumbs-up.
“Why do they call Russian roulette Russian roulette? Because Russians are bastards. There are these Russians who own a wallpaper store near the library and they shortchanged me. After that, Russians were dead to me.”
“Understandably so.”
I walked over to a long green chesterfield with upholstered, buttoned armrests. It looked like it could fit a family of eight people on it. It was made when the Catholic Church was still in power and everyone had up to ten children. They needed a gigantic couch so that they could all fit on it together. I sat down, waiting for Nicolas to get his regular clothes back on. A cat’s tail waved above the arm of the couch like an elegant hand in a black glove waving goodbye.
Nicolas came out of the stall and walked over to a cart of fur hats and started trying them on, one after the other. I shook my head at each one. Every one of them gave him the effect of looking completely insane. Not that he would mind, but the police would stop him for sure if he was wearing one of those hats, using it as grounds to search his pockets. He held up a wire coat hanger with ties hanging from it.
“Remember Sébastien?” Nicolas asked. He couldn’t stop his nervous chattering. “Turns out his mother put Pepsi in his bottle when he was little. Now he has, like, jitters all the time. He has epilepsy. He’s suing PepsiCo. He’s going to be a millionaire.”
I asked the fifteen-year-old worker if he could turn on the television so we could make sure it worked. There was a rerun of Chambres en ville on television. Nicolas changed out of his suit and picked up a beat-up copy of Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel from a pile of paperbacks and sat, squished, next to me. We sat through two episodes, resting from the energy of having come to a store and found a new outfit. It was nice to sit on a couch. It was the closest we had been to being home together for a long time.
“Do you remember that time Loulou came to our parent-teacher interviews dressed in a tuxedo?”
I started to laugh. Our favourite thing was remembering stupid things that Loulou had done when we were children. There were memories that cracked us up every single time we told them to one another again. Like the time we got kicked out of the zoo because Loulou had brought along a plastic bag filled with steak bones and table scraps to feed to the lions. Or how we were once dilly-dallying on the way home from school, and Loulou called the police and told them that Nicolas had been kidnapped. Loulou wanted to see if there was a way to put Nicolas’s face on a milk carton, just to teach him a lesson.
“Remember the time Loulou cut out the picture of Tony the Tiger from the cereal box so you could wear it as a mask on Halloween?” I asked.
We laughed. Nicolas had to put his hands on his stomach because he was laughing so hard. I had to look away from him to stop laughing. If we laughed too long, they would think that we were stoned and throw us out of the store.
“Remember how Loulou used to hold his hand up high in the air and get us to kick it? I’m not sure what he was training us for.”
We had been together so long these memories were as important to history as Stonehenge and the Mona Lisa.
He brought a suit with him to the cash register. I counted out my change for the five dollars it cost. I held up my one-volume encyclopedia. The woman shrugged and said it was a quarter.
Outside the store, a robin hopped by. It looked like a fat man with a red scarf tucked into his waistcoat. It looked like it knew what it was doing with its life.
“You have a court date, don’t you?” I asked. “That’s why you’re getting a suit.”
“Saskia and I are going to court about visitation rights and all that. I’m sick about it. I don’t even like to talk about it, it’s making me so fucking nervous.”
“It’ll be okay. It’ll go fine.”
There was a photograph of Nicolas sleeping on top of a bar in the tabloids the next week. It was quite extraordinary that Nicolas had managed to get himself in such an awkward situation. But Nicolas was given special privileges in bars around the neighbourhood. If anybody else was up on a table, you could be sure that the owner would throw them the hell out. But if Nicolas was up on one, dancing drunkenly, it was good for business. People knew that they were hanging out in the right place at the right time.
Nicolas liked to make a spectacle when he was out. But he didn’t drink during the day. He was only going to AA as some sort of plea bargain that his lawyer had made for him after he was caught stealing a family-sized bag of Ringolos from a corner store at two in the morning.
But the tabloid saw the scene as a sign that Nicolas had begun to travel down some terrible road.
For a second, I thought, how bloody ridiculous. But then I felt an uneasy premonition in my belly. Maybe the media were the ones that were right. Perhaps they had been paying closer attention to Nicolas than I had.