Nikolski (18 page)

A series of numbers suddenly draws her attention. Joyce can recognize in a single glance the credit card numbers of most of the shop’s regular customers. This particular number belongs to some businessman who
comes every Tuesday, double-parks his BMW, demands to be served first, berates anyone within earshot and complains about the appearance of the most trivial shrimp, faulting whoever has the misfortune of standing behind the counter at that moment. All the employees of the shop, including the very peaceful Maelo, dream of slicing him into little steaks.

Joyce, deep in thought, fidgets with the receipt. Something rapacious momentarily flickers across her iris. Beneath its lovely freckled skin, the plaice is a predator.

She is about to note the card number in the palm of her hand, hesitates for a long while, then changes her mind. She staples together the receipts and calmly goes on with her calculations. There is a cash overage of $7.56. Joyce puts all the money—including the overage—in the deposit envelope, seals the envelope and slips it into the safe.

After entering the alarm system’s activation code, she goes to the door while counting down in her head. Outside, the air is heavy with various smells: carbon monoxide, overheated asphalt, crates of rotten fruit piled up along the edges of Jean-Talon market. Joyce inhales deeply and, taking her time, crosses the street.

The janitor is polishing the building’s glass door, his arms moving in broad, fluid strokes; he looks oddly like a cleaner fish suction-cupped to an aquarium wall. He interrupts his work and greets Joyce with a nod—a
respectful acknowledgment reserved for honourable, wage-earning citizens.

The fruits of Joyce’s most successful piece of camouflage.

Available For A Limited Time, Special Offer While Supplies Last, Fall-Winter 1995 Collection, $15 Discount With This Coupon, Made in the U.S.A., Prices in Effect for the Week of 12 September 1995, No Deposit, No Credit Charges, 15% Discount On All Items, Class A, Top Quality, Warehouse Sale, Up To 70% Off On All Clothing, Grand 99¢ Clearance Sale.

Altogether, ten centimetres of glossy paper and newsprint, high-quality printing and colour photos compressed inside clear plastic wrapping. On the geological scale, these ten centimetres would represent centuries or even millennia, but as this is only advertising tossed through the door, Noah dates the whole thing to a mere five days ago—which leads him to the conclusion that Maelo has been away on holiday since last week.

Knapsack slung over his shoulder, sleeping bag rolled under his arm, bearded, smelly, studded with mosquito bites, he has just returned from Stevenson Island and is on a short fuse. He grabs the heap of paper and heads
toward the closest garbage pail, sifting through the bundle as he goes. The net result is three bills and two letters addressed to Sarah, which have bounced back from the post offices in Athabasca (
T9S 1A0
) and Waskatenau (
T0A 3P0
), respectively. He drifts into the living room as he opens the bills, and turns on the television in passing. There is a news report on the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina. NATO forces have shelled Serb positions and, in response, the Serbs have bombarded Sarajevo. Noah shuts off the TV with a kick and drops down on the couch. After four months of isolation, he can see the world hasn’t changed. Arms spread wide, the Hydro-Québec bill unfolded in his lap, he stares at the ceiling. Last year’s floods have left their mark even there. A flourishing colony of fungus has begun to trace petroleum-green atolls across the roughcast.

Noah’s thoughts turn to the South Pacific. He would like to be somewhere else but has no idea where.

He casts a weary glance at his watch. Might as well have a shower and head over to the university.

Thomas Saint-Laurent is giving his first course of the term (AR-10495—Activism and Contemporary Archaeology), and Noah finds himself alone in the laboratory, grappling with a grant application.

The office is quiet except for the hum of the computer and the mummy freezer. Noah’s eyes are on the monitor but his hands have not yet touched the
keyboard. Occasionally, he sniffs the inside of his wrist. The soap has not washed away the resinous tang of Stevenson Island.

He looks at the four walls of the office in search of an excuse to go out. He has a sudden craving for some very strong coffee. In the kitchen, the tiny black-and-white television set is playing with the sound off. As he stirs his coffee, Noah discovers the merits of a revolutionary razor with aloe vera, a diaper with a built-in humidity gauge, and space-age garbage bags. The commercials are interrupted by the four p.m. news bulletin. He is about to return to the office but stops in his tracks.

The screen is completely filled with a close-up of Thomas Saint-Laurent’s face. Noah turns the volume all the way up:

A long line of trucks stretches across the screen. Against a backdrop of seagulls, Thomas Saint-Laurent and his crew of about twenty students are waving protest signs that were evidently put together during the practical portion of their course. The camera captures some of the slogans:
Save the refuse!, Garbage Dump = Heritage
and
NO to Incineration!

Noah wonders if slogan-writing will count toward their final grade for the term.

Gesturing with his hands, Thomas Saint-Laurent is enthusiastically explaining the subtleties of his course syllabus to a stocky environmentalist holding a heavy placard. The meeting continues with the demonstrators swinging at each others’ placards. A melee ensues. The camera shows a close-up of three sanitation workers nonchalantly leaning on their truck, smoking cigarettes as they watch the scuffle.

The spectacular thirty-second report ends as a couple of constables totalling 190 kilos haul away a heroic Thomas Saint-Laurent—black-eyed and bloody-nosed—and bundle him into the back seat of a cruiser, a compelling image immediately followed by a commercial for analgesics.

Noah comes home carrying a case of beer, waging war against the whole damned Western world. He violently kicks the door open, uncaps a beer while standing in the hallway and, without even bothering to remove his coat, is about to knock back the first swig when the telephone stops him in mid-air. He grabs the receiver and barks, “Yes?!” like a raging Mongol warrior.

In response to this terse prelude comes a long, bewildered silence.

“Noah?” Arizna asks tentatively.

Noah feels the tension creeping into every fibre of his muscles, from the inferior peroneal all the way up to the occipital abductor. His spine goes stiff. His fingers tighten around the receiver, squeezing an agonized groan out of the plastic. His mouth is wide open, but nothing comes out.

“Long time no see,” she continues, too lightheartedly.

“A year,” Noah replies, his voice somehow foreign.

His right hand begins to shake. The tremor travels to his shoulder and continues down to his knees. His teeth are chattering and his skin prickles. And now his entire body feels like a wrecked car tumbling down a jagged slope. He tries to get a grip on himself.
It’s been a rough day,
he reasons, wiping his forehead. First coming back to civilization, then Thomas Saint-Laurent’s arrest and now Arizna’s reappearance. He thinks of the Texas Ranger who was struck three times by lightning. Lightning Rod Jim was his name—a
freak of nature. Noah has always wondered how this chubby, ordinary-looking man could have survived three electrocutions.

“Would you like to go out for a drink?” Arizna presses.

The air pops in Noah’s ear. He watches the fine spray of gas floating out of the freshly opened beer bottle.

“Well actually, I …”

“Excellent!” she exclaims. “I’ll be expecting you!”

Noah doesn’t have time to say another word. Arizna tells him her room number at a hotel in the heart of the business district, and he’s left alone with the one-note hum of the receiver.

The air around him smells of something burning.

WHEN SHE COMES HOME
, Joyce cautiously lifts the lid of a pot she left on the stove and subjects the contents of the pan to an olfactory inspection, before lighting the burner and turning it to low.

Her studio apartment is redolent with the smell of the sea. The kitchen counter is littered with the shapes of her last meals: grilled fish, poached fish, fish soup, shrimp chips. The area around the sink is overflowing with dirty dishes, soiled glasses, encrusted pots. The rest of the room looks much the same, and Joyce ambles through the disorder kicking lightly at the objects scattered on the floor.

The back of the room is taken up by a makeshift desk, built with wood lifted from a construction site. Two computers share this piece of furniture: Jean Lafitte (No. 54), in good working order despite the bruises, and Henry Morgan (No. 52), whose innards are currently exposed. The surrounding area is strewn with electronic remains, screwdrivers, stacks of floppies,
piles of old modems. The space beneath the table is crammed with an automatic dialer, an antique fax machine and three boxes full of printed circuits.

The only analog object in the area is a bottle of Saint James. Joyce uncorks it with her teeth and pours herself a glass of rum.

There are two news items pinned to the wall. The first announces the FBI’s arrest of Leslie Lynn Doucette. Forty lines, no photo—a pirate with no face. The second, even more concise, is a report on the outcome of the trial: Doucette has been sentenced to twenty-seven months in prison and will lose custody of her two children. The judge’s manifest intention in handing down this unduly harsh verdict was to set an example.

These two scraps of yellowing paper make up the entire media coverage of what might have become the Doucette File, but never got beyond the level of the 2,348th fender bender story in the summer of 1989. While computer pirates were beginning to capture the public’s imagination—and the attention of the American legal system—Leslie Lynn Doucette was paradoxically relegated to media limbo, somewhere between an oil spill at Dock 39 in New York harbour and a fire at a New Jersey postal outlet. The deskmen apparently felt that a young single mother from the northern suburbs of Chicago was hardly compatible with the mythos of the pirate.

The story’s conclusion remains a mystery. Did she sit out all of her twenty-seven months of detention, get time off for good behaviour, or escape by way of the prison’s ventilation system? Did she get back custody of her two children? Was she subjected to a special restraining order forbidding her from coming within ten metres of any electronic device? Is she working for minimum wage in a Burger King on North Ridge Boulevard?