Nikolski (11 page)

Closing her eyes, Joyce divides the price by the minimum wage. This outrageous apparatus represents over four hundred hours of lopping off cods’ heads!

She sighs and lets fly a vicious kick at the nearest garbage bag. The plastic splits open and a half-dozen floppy disks tumble out haphazardly on the sidewalk. Joyce examines one of them. Under a small, multicoloured apple is a tantalizing invitation:
Meet Your New Macintosh.

Joyce turns toward the heap of refuse, transfigured.

NOAH INSTANTLY FELL IN LOVE
with César Sánchez’s old bike.

Standing on the pedals, with a firm grip on the rim of the basket, head down, he feels as though he’s sailing over the neighbourhood. The hazards of the road disappear. No more traffic, no more one-way streets, no more driving regulations. All that remain are the landmarks, stretched by speed: the Jean-Talon market, the St-Zotique church, an elderly man sitting on his bench, the statue of old Dante Alighieri, the alternating butcher shops and shoe-repair shops, a tree-lined sidewalk.

The deliveryman’s job, which he initially viewed as dreary, suddenly seems to him like an ideal way to map out the neighbourhood. Riding his bike, he constructs an aerial view of the territory—squares, alleyways, walls, graffiti, schoolyards, stairways, variety stores and snack bars—and when he talks with the customers, he gathers intelligence on accents, clothing, physical traits, kitchen smells and bits of music. Added together,
the two catalogues make up a complex map of the area, at once physical and cultural.

He tries to transpose his observations onto a map of Montreal, but two dimensions are not enough to contain the wealth of information. Instead he would need a mobile, a game of Mikado, a matryoshka or even a series of nested scale models: a Little Italy containing a Little Latin America, which contains a Little Asia, which in turn contains a Little Haiti, without forgetting of course a Little San Pedro de Macorís.

For the first time in his life, Noah is starting to feel at home.

JOYCE IS SITTING
on the fire escape nursing a beer. In her lap lies a ragged Spanish handbook (retrieved from the trash bins of a language school); she is memorizing the irregular verbs of the
pretérito.
At her feet, a patched-up radio is tuned to the ten p.m. news.

There is trouble in Baie-Comeau: a handful of demonstrators are trying to stop a Soviet freighter carrying PCBs from St-Basile-le-Grand from mooring in the harbour. The toxic oil was denied entry by the port authorities in Liverpool, and now an attempt is being made to discreetly hide it away on the North Shore. The Sûreté du Québec riot squad and the citizens are battling for control of the pier, while the Soviets look on and curse.

The news report comes and goes, crackles and disappears. Between two magnetic storms, Premier Robert Bourassa discusses environmental management and the upcoming provincial election. Joyce yawns and kicks the radio off. She drains her beer and scans the
immediate vicinity. All is quiet. On the opposite side of the street a cloud of phosphorescent plankton is drizzling around a lamppost.

The night is young, and the alcohol has blurred the contours of the cosmos. She decides to go fishing.

Where do old IBMs go to die? Where is the secret burial ground of TRS-80s? The charnel house of Commodore 64s? The ossuary of Texas Instruments?

These are the questions that are on Joyce’s mind as she picks through the rubbish of Little Italy. So far, she has salvaged a host of useful items—a radio, a fan, a work stool, vinyl records—but as far as computers go, her only bite has been an ancient, charred Atari. And yet people must somehow get rid of their old, obsolescent computers.

Behind St-Hubert Plaza, she comes upon a colleague ransacking the bottom of a trash container. His head dives down, bobs up, dives again, while his flashlight sporadically illuminates the surrounding walls.

Joyce approaches, coughing a little to make her presence known. The man lifts his head out of the container. He looks like a mad scientist: fiftyish, round glasses, a small white beard, and a scar shaped like a Möbius strip under his left eye.

“Is the fishing good?” Joyce asks with a look of innocence.

“Not bad at all. I’ve located a shoal of Italian footwear.”

“Anything else?”

“What are you after?”

“Computers.”

“Fishing for the big one,” he says, with a whistle of approval. “This isn’t the right area to get a bite. The best place for computer equipment is in the business district. The Stock Exchange, IBM, Place Bonaventure … Get the picture?”

“Not really. I’m new to Montreal.”

“Give me a second.”

The man scribbles some directions on the back of a business card.

“Here. And watch out for the security guards.”

She examines the card. On the front she reads,
Thomas Saint-Laurent Ph.D: Department of Anthropology.
On the back is a tiny treasure map with streets, alleys, underground parking lots and Metro stations.

Joyce smiles. The time is a quarter to midnight and she does not feel the least bit sleepy anymore.

IT IS EXTREMELY CALM
at the corner of de Maison -neuve and Guy.

A few pedestrians hurry toward the Guy-Concordia Metro station, chins buried in their scarves. Away from the street, camouflaged behind a metal lattice and a row of decorative sumacs, is the service entrance to a building. The blandness of the place has been carefully thought out. There is nothing to attract one’s attention except for two signs:
ENTRÉE INTERDITE / ENTRANCE FORBIDDEN AND ATTENTION: CETTE ZONE EST SOUS SURVEILLANCE ÉLECTRONIQUE
.

Joyce slips inside, takes a deep breath and analyzes the situation. At the very back of the parking lot, near the loading docks, are three dumpsters. She pulls on her work gloves and advances, looking in every direction. No security cameras in sight. She lifts the lid of the first container and sweeps the beam of her flashlight over its contents.

A computer keyboard is jutting out from the rubbish.

Joyce stifles a cry of victory. She tries to pull out the keyboard but the power cable is snagged somewhere under the garbage bags. She clamps the flashlight between her teeth, jumps inside the container and dives up to her belt in the leftovers from a department meeting: rotting pastry and sodden paper cups. An odour of sour milk leaks out of the bags with a whistling sound.

Joyce swallows her saliva and plunges her hand below the trash.

At the other end of the cable she can feel the cold edges of a computer. The stench of sour milk grows stronger. She holds her breath and sets about clearing a path through the bags. After a long while, the machine emerges from the plastic like a slippery fetus.

Joyce takes a firm hold and hauls it up to the surface. She is exhausted, and lets herself drop back into the garbage so that she can catch her breath. She feels nauseous from the excitement and the methane, but it does not matter—she has finally caught one.

She lifts the computer out of the dumpster and, down on her knees on the asphalt, inspects it more closely. It’s an old, battered Texas Instruments 8086 with neither a cover nor a hard disk. Not the big jackpot, but a good beginning.

“Stay where you are!”

She turns around. A paunchy security guard is coming toward her, stroking the handle of his nightstick. Without giving it a second thought, Joyce leaps to her
feet. The guard attempts to block her way, but she easily gets around him and dashes toward the exit. Bad luck: another gorilla is in position there—tall, thin, truncheon-wielding, twenty years old, aggressive-looking.

Joyce stops cold. Behind her, the paunchy guard is closing in at a fast trot.

Laurel and Hardy, armed and dangerous.

Joyce’s brain is operating at full tilt, every circuit abuzz with electricity. In a few seconds she will be pinned face down on the asphalt, a knee pressed into her back, and duly handcuffed.

She swings around 90 degrees and bolts toward the wire lattice. A Frost fence. Good—she knows how this thing works. She grabs the steel mesh and scrambles up as fast as she can. Too late. A pair of hands are clutching the cuffs of her jeans and pulling her down toward solid ground. She tightens her grip and kicks out blindly. The young, aggressive guard howls with pain and lets go.

Suddenly released from his grasp, Joyce describes an elegant arc over the grid. Sailing head down through the air, she wonders how this is all going to end.

She lands on the grating of the building’s ventilation system, the tepid breath of fifty floors of office space: dusty carpeting, overheated plastic, ozone, carbon monoxide, minute particles of paper and keratin. She shakily gets to her feet and yanks off her glove. She has gashed three fingers going over the top of the fence. In
the middle of her blood-soaked palm, her lifeline and her fate line trace out a scarlet π.

She inhales deeply and darts toward the street. The metallic echo of her boots ricochets through the depths of the ventilation system five floors below. She hops over a parapet and into the decorative sumac in the flowerbed, comes out on the sidewalk and collides with a vagrant who is pushing a shopping cart filled with aluminum cans.

The vagrant straightens his Toronto Maple Leafs tuque, gives Joyce the once-over and, without saying a word, continues on his way, as solemn as a judge.

Joyce makes off in the opposite direction.

An hour later, sitting on the tile floor of her bathroom, she swabs her wounds with iodine and draws lessons from tonight: she’s got to be more careful about surveillance cameras, blind spots and emergency exits.

Another dab of iodine, and no time for tears; her next fishing expedition will take place tomorrow night.

She sticks on one more adhesive bandage and glances at her watch. Two-fifteen a.m. Time to get some sleep. Her workday at the fish store begins in only a few hours.