Black Bird (13 page)

And besides, he (or they) would say, just look at the results. More donations to the hospital, more government and private funding of research at both McGill and the Royal Vic, more acclaim within the medical community for both Hyde and hospital.

But damned few cures or recoveries. Never mind; if none of the ex-patients were complaining, there must be good reason. Many of them were dead or vegetative or otherwise, but that only proved the need for further research.

Mother’s case was quite interesting; she simply lay down to sleep and refused to wake up. It certainly wasn’t anything he had told or asked her to do, or thought might do her any good, or even thought of at all. True, he had a ward full of comatose and vegetative cases up the mountain, but they were mostly in reaction to “developmental treatments” or “radical therapies.”

“Why’s she asleep, Doctor?” asked Mrs. Pangloss.

He opened Mother’s left eye and shone a penlight into it as if he were looking for something that had rolled under the bed. “I don’t know. I’ve done nothing to her.”

“Didn’t you give her some pills?”

“Yes, but she’s taken them all and I won’t give her more. Besides, they wouldn’t account for this.”

“What is it, then?”

“She’s simply asleep. It’s a mystery.”

Mrs. Pangloss gulped some tea. “The Lord, then, eh? Mysterious Ways. That’s what Father Pheley says.”

Dr. Hyde put away his tools. “Yes. Well, it would help if His ways were not so mysterious to physicians.”

Mrs. Pangloss was devastated. It was too much. On the one hand, here was the city’s most celebrated man of medicine attending her friend in her very own home, in Mrs. Pangloss’s own presence. On the other, he not only could do nothing for her, he admitted he was baffled. Further, she suspected his remarks bordered on blasphemy. Not only Mysterious Ways, but a clear-cut example of Giveth and Taketh in the same instance.

When Father and Jean-Baptiste entered to hear the diagnosis, the doctor prattled on in the most extravagant of Latin phrases about what exactly he had done and in the least common medical jargon about what exactly he had found. Jean-Baptiste was looking at him quite suspiciously. Father finally pressed the point.

“But what is it?”

Dr. Hyde donned his greatcoat and heaved a sigh. “Brain fever,” he said.

“Brain fever? My God. What can we do, Doctor?”

He put on his hat, took his gloves from his pockets. “Keep the windows open. It’s too hot in here. And wait.”

Father was clearly burdened with this news. Why wasn’t there something to be done? A prescription,
a treatment, even an operation? Why couldn’t it simply be over with, and let them all get back to their lives?

When Dr. Hyde had left and Aline was clearing away his untouched plate and cup, Mrs. Pangloss remarked, “He’s not so smart. Great Man. In a pig’s eye.”

“What the hell is brain fever?” asked Father.

“A usually mortal affliction in Victorian novels,” said Jean-Baptiste.

Father’s voice broke. “What!”

“Nothing,” said Jean-Baptiste. “It’s nothing at all.”

Mrs. Pangloss asked, “You mean it’s like
psychosomatic?
Is that the word?”

“Yes,” said Jean-Baptiste. “Except it’s the doctor imagining the illness, not the patient.”

So Mother slept and life was easier for her; but Grandfather couldn’t. There was, first of all, the pain. Although now it had dulled considerably, it was still constant and likely to stay that way for some time, according to Dr. Hyde. And whenever he closed the other eye, he still tried to close the absent one and received a stabbing reminder that he couldn’t. And then there was the intermittent presence of Grace at the window. She was like Captain Hook’s crocodile, hanging around as if she wasn’t finished with him.

There was also the proposal Dr. Hyde had put to him to consider: transplant or artificial? Though it was now almost too late for a transplant—too much healing would preclude the idea. And there was the problem of a suitable donor. Besides which, the
thought of someone else’s eye in his head was not a pleasing one. Would it even fit properly? What would he see with it? Would it match the other? No, better to go without. A simple patch might be best—wait, now we’re back to Captain Hook and that damned bird.

That was it, then. A glass eye.

Just as Grandfather made this decision, he received a visit from Mrs. Pangloss, who came to the hospital despite her dislike of him simply because he presented her with an opportunity to visit someone else’s misery.

He groaned when he saw her, which she chose to accept as a greeting.

“I had to visit Billy Berri anyway,” she said. “He’s just had a prostrate operation. Insisted on showing me his catheter.” And she made a noise something like a giggle, but altogether too much like a cackle. She sat beside Grandfather’s bed, trying to look around and under his bandages to see the wound. When she couldn’t, she surveyed the ward in the same manner.

“You don’t look so good. Coming along? Well. Christ, you want to get out as quick as you can. House of horrors in here. Creepy old place. Not that you’re not used to that sort of thing, that house of yours, next to the funeral parlour. Nurse! Nurse! Open a window. We need some air in here, it’s not a morgue. He he hee.”

There was one thing the two could agree on: the hospital was no place for a sick person. Both were old enough to remember the days when few people ever returned from hospitals, and the association was still strong in them: hospitals were houses of death. What
do you expect when you put so many diseased souls together in one place? Whatever germs, microbes, viral infections, diseases and bacteria you were relatively free of before going in would surely be coming out with you—if you survived. If they didn’t kill you, they at least made you a carrier, a host.

Aside from that, there were the surgeons to fear. Mrs. Pangloss suspected the very idea of tampering with God’s work: if He’d put something in there, who were we to take it out? But she was forced to admit their successes and grudgingly bowed to an intelligence greater than hers; which after all was also a gift from above.

Grandfather, however, was on familiar terms with at least one surgeon, his own family doctor, Cameron Hyde. And this certainly did not put him at ease. It wasn’t a question of religion with Grandfather. He’d never been convinced that human life, or any life, was in any way connected to anything supernatural at all. If asked, he’d deny entirely the very existence of the supernatural. No, his doubts were quite firmly based in the physical. He knew a thing or two about bodies and how they fitted together. Surgeons, however, always seemed more interested in getting them apart.

In a word, butchers.

So the idea that he’d been under the knife himself was one he was having trouble accepting, one he was in fact trying to suppress, and the thought that he might have to undergo yet another operation unnerved him.

Bandage; eye patch; glass eye; perhaps even a human eye. But never again his own.

Grace scratched at the frost-covered window, startling Mrs. Pangloss. “Crikey, is that your wife’s buzzard? No wonder you won’t open the window. What’s she doin’ here, trying to get another taste? Hee he hee. Oh, that’s a filthy bird. You must be glad she’s out of the house.”

Strangely, thought Grandfather, another point of agreement between them. Or at least it would be, under ordinary circumstances. But at the moment, since he was not in the house, he would prefer that Grace were. Or at least that she were somewhere away from him. He sat up a little and turned his own single, baleful eye upon her.

With a screech, she flew away.

Somehow, they were all home for Christmas. As usual, there was no money for extravagances or even decent presents, and not enough real cheer among them to warrant giving one another anything frivolous. Mother slept through it, of course, but Father slipped her present, a new pillow, tenderly under her head. Aline had taken up a collection and they’d all scraped up enough money to make a down payment on Grandfather’s new glass eye. Aline herself received a set of aprons and oven mitts; Father and Uncle got cigarettes. Jean-Baptiste had been put in charge of his sister’s gift and agonized over it. What would she want? How little he knew her, how little they had in common, he realized. He fell back on buying her a book, of all things, terrified she’d throw it back in his face. But what else did he know? At least he’d tried to find one on a subject that might interest her, and presented her with Marighella’s
Manual of the Urban Guerrilla
.

The rest of them, especially Father, might have been happy to consider Marie’s mere presence gift enough from her. Yet she had insisted on doing her duty to the family and ungrudgingly moved herself to choose Jean-Baptiste’s present. And since she couldn’t
help herself in the face of the overwhelming sentiment of Christmas, which, even if it has no spiritual meaning, retains for most Québécois the enormous force of the most important of family rituals, she tried her hardest to choose something that would genuinely please him.

Everyone expected it would be a book. There was little point in buying him anything else. That had been learned by them all through years of experience. He might scorn any kind of practical or well-meant trifle—a sweater he’d never wear, chocolates he wouldn’t eat because they were milk, not dark—but no matter what book anyone ever gave him, it always elicited a genuinely grateful response. Even if it was one he’d no interest in reading.

And indeed, the package was obviously a book. But when he opened it, it so surprised him he found himself without words.

“Let’s see,” said Father. “What? It’s blank!”

Uncle scoffed. “What good’s that?”

The blank book had given Marie a lot of trouble. She’d struggled with a desire to fulfil a familial duty that opposed her own sense of the uselessness of literature. She felt almost as if she’d been asked to buy booze for an alcoholic, or smack for a junkie: it wasn’t going to help anyone.

She was gratified, at least, by the sight of the sign above the shop, which read:
Livres
. It was a lovely soft word, a French word. Not like that harsh, alien,
English word
Books
. It was soothing and familiar, yet it reminded her that political change was possible, that the power of the francophones was growing. For it was posted above an English bookstore, which like every other business in Quebec was required by law to post all their signs, inside and out, in French. Despite stocking nothing but English books, the proprietors were forced to replace the sign over each section inside their store. In here, you couldn’t buy a mystery novel; you had to settle for a Roman Policier. There was no science fiction, but there were Anticipations; no health, but Santé; no fiction, but Romans; no travel, but Voyages; and no humour at all. This method made it so much easier for the French to buy English books.

It made entering the store so much easier for Marie, where she found herself surrounded by words. Despite her initial fears she found that the thousands of volumes, shelved against the walls, arranged in pyramids on the floors and piled in stacks at the ends of aisles, didn’t threaten her. They weren’t her enemies, for there was nothing in them or about them that could do her violence, simply because she refused to engage with them, and that rendered them powerless.

Neither were they a temptation, a seduction away from reality or practical work, because they were in themselves a kind of work: she was a poor reader who expended effort in any kind of reading; and surrender has to be effortless.

As she browsed she noted the other customers’ seemingly unconscious slavery. They ran their hands
over spines, read front matter and dust jackets, opened volumes and lost themselves in the pages. They rarely spoke to one another and looked only at the books. When they did converse, it was only to recommend the relative merits of particular books, like born-again proselytizers or hosts for parasitical alien invaders. They were like opium smokers: calm, contented, alone with their thoughts and heedless of time or space.

It gave her the creeps.

And finally she realized the worst of the problem: Jean-Baptiste couldn’t read French. She might have given him
Prochain épisode
or
Nègres blancs
or even
Bonheur d’occasion
, but he couldn’t read them. What was she to do, give him
Two Solitudes
, or
Duddy Kravitz?
No, that was too much to be asked, to spend her own money on the Anglos and their Toronto publishers. She simply could not give him an English book.

So if both French and English were out, there was not much left. But there was a display of diaries, calendars, notepads and—blank books.

Instantly she grabbed one up, with a simple blue cover. Blue was Jean-Baptiste’s favourite colour. She stood in line to pay and thumbed through it. No dust jacket, no title page, no gaudy coloured painting (English books were so tasteless in presentation; at least the French were restrained). And best of all, no maudit anglais type.

And, she reflected, here was a perfect symbol: a book that was not a book. Empty. Meaningless. No matter how hard he worked at its contents, he could derive no pleasure from this one, he couldn’t make it
mean a single thing. It was a nothing, just as all books were nothing, just as his life was shaping up to be nothing. And it wasn’t in English. Although here he couldn’t possibly read between the lines, her message would strike from the pages of this blank book the instant he opened it. It was more than just bilingual, it would transcend all language in its direct, violent attack on his wasted, counterproductive obsession: bang, you’re dead.