Nikolski (19 page)

Joyce raises her glass to Leslie Lynn. Then she picks up a telephone wire coiled under the table and goes out on the fire escape. She tiptoes to the neighbour’s window and peeks in between the curtains. The place is dark. No one home.

The neighbour is a trucker for an oil company. He leaves Montreal every Monday at dawn, drives to Halifax and does not come back before Saturday afternoon. His apartment is unoccupied 80 per cent of the time, and Joyce has taken advantage of this absence to
upgrade
his telephone equipment. Using an electronics handbook she found in a Bell Canada dumpster, she has patched together a small intermediate concentrator and hidden it in the gap between the fire escape and the wall of the building. This clever device allows her to use the neighbour’s telephone without worrying about phone bills or RCMP interference.

She connects the wire and goes back into her apartment. She flicks awake Jean Lafitte and, with a serene
smile on her lips, listens to the modem yodelling its way toward a connection—the song of a whale adrift in the city.

The modem goes silent again. The connection has been established and Eudora announces the day’s tally:
You have 34 new messages.
It will take a while to download them all.

Joyce backs up her chair, takes a sip of rum and turns on the radio. The local news bulletin reports that a rally got out of hand near the Miron waste-disposal site. After they had disrupted the work of the garbagemen for nearly an hour, internal strife erupted among the demonstrators. The group split into two factions and they came to blows. The police, after letting the demonstrators beat each other up for a while, arrested nine individuals. The reasons for the demonstration remain unclear.

An imperative signal from Eudora draws Joyce’s attention. She puts down her glass and scans the messages. In most cases, the title and name of the addressee are enough to give away the content of the message: credit card numbers being sent or requested. Business as usual.

She opens her database and composes a few requests. The results twist her face into an annoyed pout. Her supply of numbers has reached the critical level. She has traded practically everything left and right, and it would be imprudent to put off any longer a foray into the financial district to replenish her supplies.

She leans out the window and glances at the sky. There is about an hour left before sunset. She drains her glass, refills it and starts to undress. She pitches her work clothes onto the pile of dirty laundry and pulls on black overalls, a black T-shirt and a scruffy black sweater. From under the bed, she fishes out a pair of black army boots, a flashlight, a pair of black work gloves and Grandfather Doucet’s venerable navy-blue duffel bag.

As she gets dressed, Joyce works out a plan of attack. Her brain encloses the entire downtown district, carefully cut up into quadrants, zones and subzones. You don’t go fishing for just any old thing, any old where, at any time. The makeup of the trash not only varies from one alley to the next, but depends as well on the season, stock-market trends and U.S. foreign policy.

For Joyce, this is all organized in a complex map. And beneath the surface flows a huge mass of information: memos, passwords, organization charts, cash-register receipts, carbon copies, address books filled with names and telephone numbers, not to mention the hard disks, floppies, magnetic tapes and compact disks. This wealth of data fuels the precision operations that—quite ironically—she later performs on computers salvaged from the very same garbage.

And when the last drop of juice has been extracted, the rinds are discarded in another bin.

While she laces her boots, Joyce wonders what Herménégilde Doucette, the scourge of the New
England coast, would think if he saw his great-great-great-granddaughter preparing a raid on the downtown dumpsters. He would surely approve. Pirates, after all, are pragmatists.

A sweet aroma of fish, cumin and lime is filling up the room. The soup on the stove has begun to simmer.

STREET LEVEL
. A vagrant wearing a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey tuque pushes a grocery cart loaded with his harvest of empty bottles.

Noah considers with some apprehension the massive door of the hotel. A half-ton of oak and polished brass. As there is no one around, the doorman is busy hustling the cart-pusher out of the line of sight of hotel guests. Noah pulls open the door and lets himself be drawn in by the lobby’s vastness. Thick carpets, reproductions of antique furniture, crystal chandeliers—he asks himself what he is doing here. He checks the back of the crumpled grocery slip where he wrote down the room number, and takes the elevator to the top floor.

Arizna apologizes for receiving him in this impersonal penthouse, but she was obliged to take a room at the hotel because her grandfather has moved to Miami.

“He’s traded diplomacy for import-export, the old fox.”

She pours a Perrier for Noah (who wistfully thinks of his case of beer back home) and sits down opposite him, in a purple Louis XV armchair of some sort. An embarrassed silence settles over the penthouse.

“Your voice on the telephone was odd,” she ventures. “Was I bothering you?”

“No,” he lies. “Your call surprised me, was all. I thought you were in Venezuela.”

“I was. I just arrived.”

“You seem to change locations on very short notice. Are you living in Caracas?”

“No, I’ve moved to Margarita Island. My grandfather has a house there. But I spend most of my time in the capital.”

“Are you still a student?”

“Only part-time. I’m working on other projects right now. I’m about to open a publishing house, you know.”

A mobile phone starts to vibrate on the table. Arizna excuses herself and, answering in Spanish, expedites something about a contract, meetings and percentages. She looks quite pleased as she puts the cellphone back on the table a minute later. She jots down a few notes on a pad, nods her head and refills Noah’s glass.

“So, please, tell me about this publishing house,” he says politely.

“It’s called Editorial Tortuga.”

“Like your research team, right?”

“Yes. Actually, I’ll be working in tandem with the Instituto Indigenista. There’s no lack of projects. In January we’re launching a quarterly on indigenous studies. Followed by the first two titles of our catalogue: a book on Zapatism and alternative economies in March, and then, in the early summer, a textbook on pre-Colombian history.”

“You’re ambitious. Do you think it will fly?”

“We’re crossing our fingers. Our biggest problem is distribution. It involves huge sums of money. For the time being, my grandfather is putting up 75 per cent of the necessary funds.”

“Long live import-export,” Noah quips, with a wry little smile.

“I know. With some luck, we’ll be self-sufficient by next year.”

Second interruption—a knock at the door. Arizna rolls her eyes. Evidently, she has spent all day answering the door and the telephone. With a sigh, she gets up to open the door. Standing at attention in the hallway, an obsequious bellhop hands her an “urgent fax.” She tips him and shuts the door while skimming the paper. She then tosses it on the table and, rubbing her eyes, comes back to sit facing Noah.

“What about you? Still doing your postgraduate work?”

“Theoretically.”

“Now, that’s what I call enthusiasm.”

“Things aren’t working out too well for me these days.”

“Didn’t you want to do research on garbage dumps?”

“Yes, but I was told my project would be rejected by the admissions committee, so I agreed to work on Native Indian prehistory. The upshot is that I’ve just spent four deadly months on the Lower North Shore wading through lichen and pebbles. And then, as soon as I get back to Montreal, my research director gets thrown in jail.”

“Really?” she says, suddenly expressing interest. “In jail?”

“He organized a rally with his students at the Miron dumpsite. He was trying to keep the garbage trucks from unloading. It got out of hand, and the police ended up carting everyone away …”

Before he can finish the sentence, Arizna, with no warning and for no apparent reason, runs into the neighbouring room. Bemused, Noah wonders what has gotten into her. A minute later, when Arizna returns to the living room and sits down, she seems to have more or less regained her composure.

“Sorry. You were telling me about your thesis director.”

“Uh, yes. I don’t think he’ll stay in jail for very long, but there’s no doubt the department will try to have him fired. Holding rallies with students during
course hours is not exactly the kind of activity covered by the collective agreement.”

“What about you—what are your plans?”

“I’m not sure,” Noah answers. “I’m feeling kind of rudderless. I could go back to square one. Buy a trailer and head back to Saskatchewan …”

Arizna cuts him off, her forefinger raised like a stop sign. She listens, suddenly stands up and once again disappears into the next room. That’s it. Noah is now certain a third party is hiding in the penthouse—an observer, a bodyguard or some kind of accomplice. But an accomplice to what? Then he remembers the story about liberation anthropology that Arizna mentioned the previous summer and, in a flash, pictures a half-dozen guerrillas hidden under the bed.

He gets up, paces, toys with the idea of slipping away. He takes a few steps toward the front door, but then has second thoughts and decides, simply as a matter of courtesy, to tell Arizna goodbye before taking off.

When he walks into the bedroom, Noah is witness to something completely unexpected. On the floor there is a portable cradle, next to a box of disposable diapers and a bag containing medical and pharmaceutical products. Leaning over the bed, Arizna is powdering a baby’s bottom with liberal amounts of talcum and softly crooning endearments. She greets Noah’s bewildered face with a little smile.

“This is Simón.”

She fastens his diaper, buttons his sleeper and, before Noah can object, lays the child in his arms. The archaeologist and the infant observe each other curiously, both of them caught off guard. Noah has trouble seeing Arizna in the role of mother, even though he is holding the evidence in his arms, complete with pink nose, two ears, a tiny penis, a complete set of limbs and a pair of eyes that somehow … remind him of … someone.

Fourth electric shock of the day: he sees those eyes every morning in the mirror! They are Chipewyan eyes, the soft, skeptical eyes that he inherited from Sarah, who could confirm this on the spot if she were not three thousand kilometres away, somewhere near Calgary.

Noah starts to quake. Disturbed by this, Simón blinks his eyes and wonders whether or not to call for help.

“He’s three months old, isn’t he?” Noah stammers, after doing the appropriate arithmetic.

“Three months and one week.”

“Am I … I mean … Who’s the father?”

“Simón doesn’t have a father,” Arizna says categorically.

“No father?”

“That’s what I said.”

Simón starts to cry and flutters his hand in Arizna’s direction. She takes him in her arms and, having unbuttoned her blouse, takes out a magnificent, milk-swollen
breast. The nipple disappears into the infant’s mouth. Eyes wide open, he ravenously gulps down his dose of future.

Noah is squeezing the contents of his room into plastic— thirty cubic metres of universe divided into garbage bags whose fate he determines by labelling them
Trash, Recycling
or
Salvation Army,
with a felt marker.

He called the people at the research centre to inform them that he would be away “for an indeterminate period of time.” While he was on the phone, he asked for news of Thomas Saint-Laurent. All of his students had been set free, but the eminent professor of archaeology would have to cool his heels in jail for another few days. He would in all likelihood be fined for assault, unlawful assembly and obstructing the police, with fifty hours of community volunteer work added on top.

“But the real problem,” his secretary whispered, “is that the department will try to get rid of him. Some of his colleagues have wanted his head for years, and they won’t miss this chance.”