Authors: Nino Ricci
All he can see now of Jennifer Lowe is the black hole of her Indianness. As if he had debauched a Holocaust survivor, a child. As if in his split brain that was exactly what he had wanted, to go past some limit, some uncrossable line.
In the accounts he has read of crimes people have committed in their sleep the crimes always get depicted as going against the grain. The gentle giant who drove miles across town to murder in-laws who adored him. The devout Mormon who stabbed a beloved wife of twenty years against whom he had never so much as raised his voice. And yet there is always some detail that points to intent, the gambling addiction the in-laws would soon learn of, the problem at work over which the wife had not shown full support. If intent is there, doesn’t blame follow? Maybe all sleep has done is provide the permission the waking mind has withheld.
From those human guinea-pig epileptics whose brains had literally been cut in two a bizarre discovery had been made: that the brain houses within its separate hemispheres actual warring consciousnesses, each so distinct from the other, down to the level of political affiliations, of food preferences, of religious beliefs, as to seem those of entirely different people. In the normal course of things one side dominates and the other gets suppressed, though what this means is that everyone
carries within them a shadow self that dogs the dominant one like a stalker, always at odds, always seeking an outlet, awaiting its chance under cover of dark.
David sits in his office at his computer going through Jennifer Lowe’s dissertation. Only toward the end of it does he come across the half-dozen pages in which she sketches out her life. It turns out to be so close to the one he has imagined for her that he almost laughs: small prairie town, grain silos, big sky. Her father, a doctor, she describes as pure Scots. The native blood comes from her mother, descended from the Blackfoot Confederacy, though Jennifer’s only contact with actual status Indians before she started studying them seems to have been through a high school literacy project at a reserve near her hometown.
None of this ever came up in committee, of course. Despite the expected tokenism, any reference to something as specific as bloodline or race would probably have rung out like the N-word, surely part of the logic behind Sonny’s video interviews. Now, though, David can see that the evasions had the added bonus of allowing everyone to skirt the embarrassing truth at the heart of Jennifer’s Indianness that was exactly what made her the ideal candidate. Better by far to bring in someone like her, a doctor’s daughter, with barely half a black foot in the alien camp, than to risk the genuine article, whose grievances were too staggering by now, whose chances at redress too remote. It was the typical doublethink of academia, scared shitless of what it claimed most to want.
There is a final peroration in Jennifer’s bio sketch where she writes of a kind of turning-point moment, a visit to an old buffalo jump near her town where she had a vision of the order that had prevailed in the thousands of years before the coming of the white man. In a few quick strokes she conjures that vanished
world with an impressive complexity and breadth, the enmities and alliances, the different ways of life, the farmers with their settlements and divisions of labour and routes of trade and the nomads following the herds, slowly changing the landscape for their sake from woodland to grassland. The description has an authenticity to it that seems to moot the question of her own background. What does it matter if she is Micmac or Mongol if she has been able to make this sort of leap?
Something in the passage rings strangely familiar. When he reaches the end of it, where she compares the invading whites to the barbarian hordes who unravelled Rome, the connection hits him: his own
Masculine History
. He had included in it an account of his own turning-point moment, his visit to Ostia Antica as a child. Now he begins to see echoes everywhere, right down to phrases and words.
So she wasn’t just snowing him, then. Somehow this cuts him more deeply than anything else has.
She is merely ashamed, perhaps, something as simple as that. Remembers as little as he does. Or did a search of the drug she found on his bathroom counter, the doctor’s daughter, and needs reassurance, something to quash the nightmare version of the evening that might have formed in her afterwards. And yet already he knows that he won’t call her. That he can’t bring himself to apologize or make light, to face her different version of things or sort out what truths or lies he might have to tell to sway her to his own. Knows he can’t pretend he has done with her anything other than what he has intended, or that his first reaction at finding the spot next to him in bed empty was anything other than the old familiar one of plain relief.
She is better off leaving this place while she can. He would do it himself if he thought he had anything in the way of real alternatives.
Maybe we need to look at that
.
As soon as the thought hits him he wonders how he could have taken so long to come to it. It is Sonny himself who has shown him the way out: all this time he has been busting his balls trying to hide his affliction when he ought to have been flaunting it. That is what his mewling colleagues do, using every wart removal and stubbed toe to milk concessions and excuse their sins. He is sure he can get Becker to paint a picture of his disorder so dire that the university will be happy to put him on paid leave just for the peace of mind of keeping him out of the classroom. So much for Sonny’s threats after that. So much for any of this, the enforced mediocrity, the institutional grind.
He calls up his collective agreement online and reads through the disability clauses, making notes. A burst of energy takes him and on impulse he starts packing up his office, grabbing some empty banker’s boxes from the utility room and beginning to fill them with his books. It is madness, of course, he can’t just walk out; it might take months to plod through all the paperwork. Yet now that the idea has formed he can hardly bear the thought of another day in this place. Shake the dust of it from him, no looking back. All his time free to work on his book, to do it properly now, no more dithering, no more false starts. He is not so old that his best work can’t still be ahead of him. He is not so afflicted that he can’t rally to the task once he is free of distractions.
Night has fallen. He catches his reflection in his darkened window like his own second self staring in at him and feels a chill. The thought of Montreal floats up again for an instant, the false bravado when he quit, the possibilities that never panned out.
He grabs another box and starts to fill it.
T
HE SHOP IS AT
the edge of a beleaguered island of gentrification bounded by crosstown expressways and the old industrial lands to the south, in a turn-of-the-century clapboard barely distinguishable from the residences flanking it. Across the street, the interstate runs where a row of the same clapboards must have once stood, raised up on its concrete pillars above the surrounding rooflines as if part of a separate dimension. From the online crime maps, which give a snapshot of crime across the city practically in real time, David knows that the interstate is a dividing line. It is like being at some borderland, the fraying edge of the civilized world.
He has landed here, in this dying Rust Belt city, on a year-long visitor’s chair arranged by his former grad-school sidekick Greg Borovic. Borovic is the one who has ended up at the prestigious American school David never got to, a Top 20 where he has won a closetful of teaching awards and oversees a raft of endowments
he seems to manage like a personal slush fund. David would have liked to tell him to go fuck himself except that he needs the money, reduced to living off a credit line on his condo as one by one he has burned whatever other bridges remained to him.
Inside the shop the August heat hangs like a fog. A rifle rack behind the counter holds a couple of Bushmasters and Remingtons, a glass-fronted display case an array of handguns. The walls, in faux wood panelling, are covered with joke signs and bumper stickers. “If you can read this, you’re in range.” “Make my day.” “Protected by gun.” It is like the setting for a B movie that takes place in a dystopian near future. Any second the aliens will burst through the walls or the zombies through the windows and the massacre will begin.
The man who emerges from the back room seems to have stepped out of the same B movie, dwarf-sized and slightly humpbacked and trailing an odour of cigarettes and boiled cabbage.
“So what can I do you for?”
David gets him to bring up some of his handguns. A Colt; a Ruger; a couple of Glocks. From a back cupboard the man takes out a SIG Sauer in black polymer that he sets in front of David like some vintage wine he has been holding back.
“Can’t beat the Germans for engineering. Believe me, you’re not going to find anything sweeter than this biscuit.”
The gun is entirely black, right down to its rivets, like a thing forged in the devil’s furnace.
“And the best part,” the shopkeeper says, “it’s completely modular. Don’t like the frame, get the bigger one. Want more concealment, take the shorter barrel.”
With practised ease he breaks the gun down and reassembles it with different components, switching the parts in and out like shells in a shell game. His fingers, despite the stubbiness of the rest of him, are elegant and long. David wonders
how many hours he has given over, sitting alone in his back rooms, to perfecting manoeuvres such as these.
David takes up the gun. For all its space-age efficiencies it is not so far removed from his Beretta, has the same profile, the same frugality, the same weight. Nuclear bombs have fallen since his Beretta rolled off the line, men have walked on the moon, yet this simple design has persisted unchanged.
Already in the short time he holds it he knows his hand will remember the feel of it the way an addict’s arm remembers the needle.
“How much?”
The background check, on the phone, takes under a minute. David has brought along the state hunting licence the web sites said he would need in order to get the restrictions on foreigners waived, but the shopkeeper hardly glances at it. He fits the gun into a blue plastic carrying case that looks like it might hold a power drill or wrench set and bundles the case into an old Walmart bag along with two hundred rounds of 40-calibre Smith and Wessons.
David nods at a sign behind the counter that reads “We don’t call 911,” beneath an image of the business end of a revolver.
“Ever get bothered here?”
The shopkeeper gives him a furtive once-over.
“Nah. Not here.”
“I guess you’re taking your chances robbing a gun store.”
“Well, I’m ready for them, I’ll tell you that.”
Likely he has loaded weapons stashed in every cranny, awaiting a day of reckoning. It occurs to David that even in this place where the danger is real, it is still also a fantasy, that there is probably a part of this man that dreams only of this, of blowing some hoodlum to kingdom come.
Outside, the heat, the gun at his side, give the surrounding blight the post-apocalypse feel of the first-person shooter games Marcus has lately taken to. The violence of these games, that Julia would allow it, is always a shock to David, the blood spatters, the constant barrages, the enemies mown down in swaths or the innocents dragged from their cars or shot dead or simply run down and abandoned. Sometimes he stands watching behind Marcus as he plays and grows frightened at the silence between them, the weird energy that seems to join them like a third person they have formed.
He has left his car a few minutes’ walk from the shop, on a tree-lined side street where in a matter of paces the mood changes from urban menace to small-town idyll, complete with rose bushes and juniper hedges and picket fences. It is like the sudden scene shift of a dream, with a dream’s same inscrutable logic. In his drives through the city he has gone, in the space of a block, from the not quite faded glories of robber-baron carriageways to no-man zones that look like they’ve been pillaged by marauding armies, whole strip malls sitting abandoned, schools defaced, houses with their clapboard worn to the weathered grey of dust-bowl farmhouses.
He finds his car intact, no tires missing, no smashed windows. He puts the Walmart bag on the front passenger seat, where it sets off the seat belt alarm when he shifts into drive like another presence beside him.
If he had a gun
. In the moment when matters had come to a head it had actually felt possible, easy, just a matter of filling the magazine and emptying it out, of giving in to the him-not-him in his animal brain that acted only on the cold irrefutable logic of stimulus and response.
Instead of buffering him from Sonny’s threats, David’s
disability application had ended up playing right into his hands. It was David’s bad luck that the same week he submitted it he got flagged for double-dipping on his Ritalin, which had become a regular habit by then. Becker, who had sounded ready to write up whatever claim David asked him to, grew suddenly circumspect.
“It’s not a joke, David. It’s a risk for the doctor as well, this sort of abuse, you should think of that.”
This from the man who had been handing out meds as if they were jujubes the whole time David had been seeing him.
Everything began to unravel after that. The university used the charge as an excuse to drag its feet on his application, making David sit through a series of infantile psychological tests, presumably to determine if he was some sort of drug fiend. He had gone on unpaid leave by then to help buttress his claim, and as the matter stretched on he quickly burned through what little he had in the way of savings. He missed a child support payment and had a screaming argument with Julia when he went by for Marcus. The next day his brother phoned.
“We’re worried about you, Davie. Julia too. You’re the father of her child.”
“Are you doing her dirty work for her now, is that it? Can’t you see how she’s playing you? Are you that stupid?”