Believing Cedric (16 page)

Steven came to learn that this was how violence worked. It wasn't logical or predictable, it wasn't a buildup of reasonable causes that led to an unreasonable effect, an argument that escalated, a series of increasingly potent threats exchanged; it was just suddenly there, abrupt and conclusive. And it was something that couldn't be questioned. Its aftermath could, yes, but not the certainty of the act itself. The act was final, absolute, definitive. And it was something you had to be ready for, everywhere, always.

The second time, he was twelve. It was near the Boardwalk, where the dealers strutted invincibly along the pavement until they spotted a ghost car on one of the periphery streets, when they shuffled timidly out of sight. This time, he and another friend, a girl named Kirsti, to whom he would lose his virginity before either of them were pubescent, were loitering in the wading pool, built only four years earlier but already largely dilapidated. There were tiles missing, grout chipped and peeling, hammer dents in the moulding, a half-submerged shopping cart poking above the surface like a miniature shipwreck, the fountain of water spewing out at crooked angles. (Steven understood, and at a very early age, that his neighbourhood was not green, not kind.)
Bam
. A body crumpling to the ground at the edge of the pool, a dark puddle fanning out from beneath it. No warning, no pre-empt, just screams to follow it through, round it off. Kirsti grabbed his arm and together they fled deeper into the housing complex, the wet of their footprints chasing them.

Steven was dealing drugs long before he was aware that drugs were even dealt. His cousin Kipp had him running around on “errands” all over Regent Park, bringing wads of something to someone's living room and running back with a wad of something else. In return Kipp would give him some money for candy, chips, and pop whenever he wanted it, reminding him, offhandedly, handing him a ten-dollar bill, “not to take shit from anybody.”

And Steven was getting the hang of that too, was less and less afraid to tell people off when he had to, to push people back. He'd even taken to testing the limits with his aunt and uncle when they fomented into one of their screaming fits. He was thirteen. It was 1979. And life was good. The Montreal Canadiens had won the Stanley Cup, there was a new television show called
You Can't Do That on Television
, and the movie
The Warriors
was playing in theatres with authentic and exciting brawls spilling out of the cinemas afterwards. Steven even had friends, or at least people he could hang out with—break bottles with, steal from 7-Elevens with, and stand in alleyways with afterwards, smoking purloined cigarettes in a contemplative apathy. He'd found, in his own awkward way, a niche, a place to belong.

Then, on a cloudy day in March 1980—when the remnant piles of ice leftover from the snow removal of the winter had turned pebbled and muddy, water fingering out from beneath them and streaking the cement between the apartments with glistening pinstripes—everything changed. He had just finished running an errand for Kipp and had rounded a corner where he came face to face with a police officer, uniformed, polite. “Hey,” he greeted, hands on the black implements of his belt, “I was wondering if you could help me out here, bud. I've got a couple questions for some kids, about your age, but they're not at their house. Maybe you can tell me where to find them. Their names are, uh . . .” he produced a small spiral-bound notepad, flipped the page, and stepped closer, to show his list. At that point, a strange impulse came over Steven, and he couldn't explain why, it was just there, and happening, automatically. He noted the proximity of the policeman's foot to his, lifted his leg, and stomped his heal onto the polished black toe of the man's boot, spat in his face, turned, and ran.

When he was caught and put into the officer's cruiser, it was the first time in his life that he'd ever felt constrained, confined, and couldn't explain his reaction to this either. He flailed, screamed, bit, clawed, pulled hair, spit until his mouth was dry, lay down across the backseat and tried kicking the windows out, and when none of this worked, he managed to get his pants below his waist and piss everywhere he could fling his urine with furious pelvic rotations. He was further restrained, driven away, pulled into a tall and official-looking building, and heavily sedated. When he woke, bound to a bed, he could only think of his cousins, how they were going to laugh at this story, how Kipp would tell his friends about it while rolling a joint over the coffee table, how Natalie would probably ruffle his hair, call him a brat, chuckle. He'd be a kind of hero in their eyes, he imagined, standing up to the police like that. He was brave.

Eventually a woman came to talk to him, gently, calmly, like you would talk to an animal before opening its cage to transfer it to another. She wanted to know about his family life, wanted to hear about his house, his aunt, uncle, his “cousins.” Steven was struck with another clever idea. He began to speak in a whisper, like there was something in his throat, something painful and swollen, and when she brought her face closer to listen, he spat in it, screamed at her to release him, struggled in his bonds, writhed on the polyester sheets. She called out over her shoulder and three large men appeared bearing one small needle and another day was gone. Or was it a week. A month?

When he'd finally agreed to cooperate, to sit and talk like a regular human being, the theatrics having become less a novelty, less worth their future storytelling, Steven found himself sitting across from a more stern-faced woman. She placed the news onto the table like stolen coins, her gestures half-guilty, half-smug. It seemed, she'd said, this “incident” had been coming for a while now. She'd met with his aunt and uncle several times, had been to see his home, interviewed his family. She'd learned that, apparently, he'd always been a bit of a problem child. Always a little wild, a little devious. He had, she warned, the potential makings of a criminal or, at the very least, of someone slightly unstable, depressed, with the traces of an anxiety disorder. Which had sparked some research into his parentage. Did he know, she asked rhetorically, that his “maternal associations” had a history of mental illness? Perhaps not. Well. She was afraid that, yes, that was the case. And these things could be hereditary, she wanted him to know.

Steven started shifting in his chair, shrugged. “Look, lady, I don't give a shit. When can I go home? I'm fuckin' bored here.”

The woman scratched the back of her hand. “I'm not sure you understand. Your aunt and uncle . . .” she turned her hand over, looked into her palm for a moment, then back up at him, “they don't want you back. That's not going to be your home anymore. We're going to find you another one instead. With a foster family at first, but I'm sure you'll be adopted in no time.”

Steven felt something growing inside his stomach, rising into his chest, and this time he knew what it was. Once, on a hot August day, he and one of his cousins had gone down to the Harbourfront, where the Gardiner Expressway thrummed at their backs, and had walked through sites of demolition and construction, the old factories with massive machinery rusting behind splintered windows, shards dangling in the frames like loose teeth. They watched as a thunderstorm edged across the lake, toward the city. It was so hazy that Steven could barely make out the contours of its cauliflower clouds, but he could feel the air turning viscous and weighted, becoming slower, electric. Until the growling of the storm had swollen above the burr of the freeway, the flickers of lightning piercing through the sooty veil like tracers of siren strobes. He and his cousin stood below, shrunken. It was mammoth, fierce, inexorable. And now it was welling up inside of him, lifting him as if he were caught in one of its updrafts, floating above his chair. His arms bolted down abruptly, finding ground. He flung the table aside, lunged to grab on to one of the woman's hands in the air—which had been raised in surprise, in fright—and sunk his teeth into her fingers until he had the taste of pennies in his mouth.

The juvenile ward of the psychiatric hospital was not a nice place. It consisted of three wings. One for the criminally deranged, people who had violent and aggressive tendencies toward others: pedophiles, child murderers, adolescent rapists, and chronic assaulters, all of them heavily medicated, strings of drool from the corners of their mouths indicative of how well they were being kept in check; another ward for those who did damage to themselves: anorexics, bulimics, substance abusers, the manically depressed, suicide attemptees, and self-harmers; and another ward that was reserved for borderline cases like himself, who were in danger (and seemingly the “imminent” kind) of slipping into the preceding two categories.

Because his was the least secured of the wings, Steven soon saw the potential of making a break for it and within a week had made the first of his two escape attempts. Looking back, however, he could admit it was a stupid move, ill thought out, ill timed, ill executed. Had he not spent the afternoon in therapy, the impulse probably wouldn't have risen up in him so strongly, and he could have bided his time a little more wisely.

The problem with therapy was that people bought into it not because it was helpful or they believed in the process, but because if you cooperated during the sessions, you were rewarded with “off-ward privileges”: like going outside onto the grounds, a patch of cement enclosed with an impossibly tall chain-linked fence, where you could mingle with older people who'd been institutionalized most of their lives; or to the rec room , where the recreation included puzzles with pieces missing or their cardboard swollen with dried saliva, boards with checkers from five different sets,
Connect Four
apparatuses mended with Scotch tape). For these honours, people let their emotions fly, sincerely pouring them out to the good-natured therapist and to everyone else who was forced to be there and listen.

“Me?” someone began that day, pointing at his sternum. “Well, this morning, I just . . . I wanted . . . I mean, I had this urge to, like, feel my bones somewhere, you know? Like with a knife. Like, cut to the bone and push on it, against it, you know? Like a steak. That feeling. You know what I mean?”

The therapist, slowly, earnestly nodded his head, narrowing his eyes, trying, seemingly
straining
, to understand. “Okay. Okay,” he said conclusively. “Thanks for sharing, Jamie.” At length he looked up at everyone else. “Okay. Okay, who's next?”

When the group of them were being escorted from therapy (a citrus-scaled room with brown flooring, yellow walls, and orange plastic chairs arranged in a circle) to school (a citrus-scaled room with chairs arranged in a square), they passed a door that looked to have access to the outside world and, without thinking, Steven broke away. He slammed through it and was sprinting down a lane that had manicured trees and grass that was greener than any he'd seen in his life. He was tackled before even reaching midway along it.

This stunt didn't just get him demoted from the P3 wing to the P2, he was also introduced to some of the rooms that were designed for the “implementation of disciplinary measures.” First, as he'd come back inside screaming obscenities at any and all of the staff, it was The Quiet Room, a cushioned chamber with thickly insulated walls and a door that appeared to have fingernails imbedded in the foam near its edges. There were no windows—not to the outside, not to the hallway—only a closed-circuit video camera mounted in one of the corners, a black iris steadily fixed on him. (When he first noticed it, he'd given it the finger.) He walked around in circles for several hours, maybe the better part of a day, finding the tender floor the most disturbing aspect of the room, the ground sponging under his sneakers like an orange quilt of moss. He thought of his family while he treaded around, which, of course, had never really been his family. He wondered why he hadn't seen this all coming, seen the fact that he'd become not only another mouth to feed, but another delinquent to bail out of trouble, another stress in his aunt and uncle's already stressful lives. He wasn't even their child; they hadn't brought him into the world, into their house, hadn't asked for him; they'd taken him in as a kind of regrettable favour, and that was all. Yeah. He understood where they were coming from. Sure. But that only made him hate them more.

No. He was on his own now. For good. Just him. And that was fine. That suited him just fine. (Throughout his day in The Quiet Room, the most defiant thing he could think to do was, ironically, be quiet, and so didn't make a sound padding around in front of the camera, didn't even whisper.)

Then, after lunging at the first person that came to speak with him, he was introduced to The Bubble Door Room. There, the priority was in keeping the hospital staff safe, with a Plexiglas bubble on the door that they could put their heads inside, in order to see if he was huddled in either of the blind corners, readying himself to lash out again, but mostly to check that he was still sufficiently sedated. The sedative of choice was chlorpromazine (affectionately referred to as
CPZ
), and the instant it was injected, his vision became blurred, the sounds in the room muffled. But worst of all was what it did to his mouth, his tongue becoming gluey, a thirst coating his throat, scratching at it—a thirst impossible to sate. Always asking for water, dreaming of the rim of a paper cup, what it would feel like against his lips, the cool liquid slipping down the walls of his esophagus, wetting the membranes. But water would never come. Just the thought of it, the asking of it, the word spoken out to an empty room, muted echoes pasted onto the baby-blue walls: “Canuhave somewadder please?” Tongue doughy, flour-frosted. “Please? Coulduhget a lill' water overhere? I'm real thirsty. Please? Just a cuppowadder?” Head tilted to the side, blinking slow blinks, eyelashes raking through the recirculated air. An epoch of stillness, of nothing.