Benjamin came into the room while Amelie was packing.
Amelie ignored him—just went on emptying the big chest of drawers into her ragged Salvation Army suitcase, pretending he wasn’t there.
After a time, watching her, he said, “Where will you go?”
It was a very Benjamin thing to say. Straight to the point, no bullshit, kind of little-boy innocent. It reminded her of what she had loved about him and what she still loved, and that was painful; she winced. She looked up at him. “I don’t know. Maybe back to Montreal. It doesn’t matter.”
He said, “I wish you wouldn’t go.”
She turned to the window. The snow was still falling. Fucking horrible winter. That was the thing about winter in this city. It was likely to do any fucking thing. If you were ready for snow you got rain; if you were ready for rain you got ice. “I thought you understood.”
“You’re leaving me.”
She turned to him. “So? You left me.”
“No. John left you.”
“But you were talking about leaving. Even before that. And when you finally called, you called Susan.”
He shrugged, as if to say: Yes, that’s so.
She said, “Things had already started to change, hadn’t they? Even then. You knew we couldn’t stay together. You knew what was happening.” He did not answer, which was answer enough. Amelie nodded. “Yeah—you knew.”
“I know a lot of things I don’t want to know. A lot of it is John. There’s more John now than there used to be.” His frown was huge. “I wish you would stay a while longer.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s cold out. Because you don’t have anywhere to go.” That helpless look. “Because there’s nothing anyone can do about this, about what’s happening to me.”
Amelie narrowed her eyes. “How do you know?”
“John knows. Kyriakides was lying all along. He lied to Susan about it. But John can tell. Kyriakides wanted to do the tests, and maybe he thought there was a chance that something would happen, something miraculous. But there’s nothing. He knows it, John knows it. That’s not why they’re here.”
“Why, then?”
“Kyriakides is here to finish his experiment, and because he feels guilty. John is here—well, it’s an experiment of his own. But for me, I think it’s only the end. I’m scared of that.”
“Goddammit, Benjamin!”
She held out her arms for him. He put his head against her shoulder.
She was blinking away tears. But who was she sorry for? Herself or him? Maybe both of us, Amelie thought. Two fucked-up losers. She just felt so
sad.
“Nothing is the way it used to be,” he said. “I love you.”
“I’ll stay a while longer,” Amelie said. “It’ll be okay.”
Not believing either of these things.
After some time had passed he helped her unpack again. He was about to leave the room when he reached into his back pocket and said, “Almost forgot—this came for you today.”
It was a thick manila envelope bearing the return address of the Goodtime Grill on Yonge Street.
He held it out.
Amelie took it from him, frowning.
After the humiliation involving his sister, Roch had checked himself in at the Family Practice Clinic at Toronto General Hospital. A few days later and he might have run into Amelie while she was in town for John’s PET scan. But he wasn’t looking for Amelie—at least, not yet.
His chest was a mass of bruises where the car door had slammed into it. The clinic sent him up for X-rays, but there was no evidence of any significant fracture to the ribs, which was good; it meant he wouldn’t have to be taped. Hurt like shit all the same, though. The doctor, a woman about as tall as Roch’s collarbone, asked whether he’d been in a fight. He said, “A fight with a fucking Honda.”
In return she flashed him a skeptical, condescending look… which burned, but Roch kept carefully silent; this was not the place or the time. He was getting older, developing an instinct for these things—when to hold his tongue and when to act. He merely stared into the female doctor’s wide green eyes until she frowned and looked away. Roch smiled to himself.
She cleared her throat. “Warm baths might help with that bruising. Maybe Tylenol for the pain. You’ll be fine in a couple of weeks. If you stay away from Hondas.”
“It wasn’t a joke.”
“What?”
“About the Honda. It wasn’t a joke.”
“No… I guess it wasn’t.” She bowed her head and made a notation in his file folder. “Is there anything else?”
Roch stood up and left the office.
The landlady had wanted to kick him out of Amelie’s apartment, but she backed off when he paid two months rent in cash and promised to clean the place up. He told her he was working as a clerk for the provincial government. Which was a lie, of course; he’d picked up the rent money doing day labor. His life savings, ha-ha. The fucking check had taken two weeks to clear, or else he’d have spent it by now. But it was important to have a place to sleep.
Though he hated being alone.
It was getting harder all the time.
At night, especially. With Amelie gone he didn’t have to sleep on the sofa, but the bedroom was like a big box with its single square, soot-darkened window. He would lie awake in this cold, dark room and feel the city pressing in at him. The city made a noise, as familiar as his own heartbeat but more disturbing. Sirens, motors, tires gritting down cold night streets. This noise was amplified by the winter air and beat against Roch’s eardrums until he could not distinguish it from the singing of the radiators or the rush of his own blood.
He resented the sound. It was the sound of everything he could not have: pleasure, companionship, confidence. He couldn’t walk those streets except as an outcast. He had learned that lesson when he was very young. Nowadays he did not attract much immediate attention; he was older and less physically grotesque; he worked out in the gym. He was not the puddingy, froglike thing he had been as a child. But he was not one of those ordinary people, either. He could not move among these handsome men and confident, smiling women except as an impostor. He might have been a creature from outer space, disguised as human. He knew that.
He was alone in the dark and his ribs hurt and he had been humiliated.
And he was angry.
He thought about getting drunk. But, oddly, the impulse wasn’t really there. When he thought about drinking he pictured his father coming home on winter nights like this, screaming out curses in peasant French and beating Roch with his stubby fists. Big man’s hands with dark hair and callused knuckles: Roch remembered those hands.
Lying in bed, he looked at his own right-hand fist—a shadow in the dim light. It was his best friend, his lover, the instrument of justice.
His anger was like a cold, uncomfortable stone that had lodged in his chest.
And he understood, then, why he didn’t want to get drunk. This was a pressure that drinking would not have relieved. He needed all his energy for planning, because he was going to fucking
do something
about this thing with Amelie. Roch understood revenge in intricate detail. The rules were basic. When you were humiliated, you had to eat it—or else enforce a punishment. And he knew all about punishment. Punishment was like a big, simple machine. It was easy to operate once you got it going, and terribly difficult to stop. And all it took to work that machine was some careful planning.
And he was good at that. It was the only kind of abstract thinking Roch enjoyed. It shut out the night sounds of the city. He could spend hours working out the details and the necessary steps, the payoff being some act… it was not yet specific… some final and irretrievable moment of equalization. An orgasm of justice.
This new purpose seemed to seize him all at once, utterly.
He was not smart, but he had a goal. And he was methodical. And determined. And perhaps best of all, he knew a secret. He thought of all those people out there in the lively darkness of the city, thought about how they were bound to one another with sticky ropes of loyalty, love, duty, guilt—how these impediments constrained them and restricted their movement. And Roch smiled in the dark, because here was his deepest and most profound knowledge about himself: that he was not bound by any of these things. He could do things that ordinary people could not even imagine. He was utterly alone, and therefore he was utterly free.
The first step was to locate Amelie.
He had never been to the restaurant where she used to work, the Goodtime Grill, mainly because her employment there had always rankled him. It was scutwork and she deserved it, but it had given her an independence from him that Roch resented deeply. This was back when they were on the street, when she was shaving her hair and wearing that old leather jacket with the sleeves down over her hands so that only her fingers poked out, how whorish she had looked and how she resented it when he suggested the logical and obvious way of bringing in some money. As if she
liked
sleeping in abandoned buildings, for Christ’s sake. He savored for a moment the memory of her in that jacket and how the cars would cruise by and sometimes stop and men would call her over and how she would come back sometimes with a little money and that expression on her face, which he could not decipher—of some deep, secret grief. But then she got the restaurant job and the crappy St. Jamestown apartment, and Roch got involved with some guys boosting cars out in the suburbs, and he forgot about her for a while. That was the basic mistake he’d made—letting her get away from him.
So he’d never been inside this particular restaurant. But maybe that was a good thing. Nobody here would know him.
He stood a second on the Yonge Street sidewalk staring up at the “Goodtime” sign. Cold noon sun on cheap faded plastic, picture windows with bead curtains and a menu taped up: Souvlaki, Fish & Chips, Burger Platter. Roch pushed his way through the door.
He took a table by the window. This was the hard part, he thought. Anything involving deception was difficult for him. He could not predict what people would say, and the things
he
said often provoked strange, hostile reactions. But there was no need to hurry. This was only the first, the most basic step.
One of the waitresses brought him water. She was a tiny small-breasted woman who looked vaguely Oriental. According to the tag on her uniform, her name was TRACY. In a voice so timorous he barely made out the words, she asked him if he was ready to order.
He asked for the burger plate and a beer.
When she came back with the food, he said, “Tracy—is that your name?”
She ducked her head, which Roch took for a nod.
He said, “Tracy, listen, is Amelie around?”
“Oh—Amelie? Oh—she doesn’t work here anymore.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.”
“Are you one of her regulars? ”Cause I don’t recognize you. But I’ve only been here since summer.“
“I’m her brother,” Roch said.
He watched her face carefully. She narrowed her eyes and tensed up a little. Obviously this information meant something to her. Amelie had been talking.
Loudmouthed bitch.
But Roch felt a tingle of excitement.
“Oh, her brother, okay,” Tracy said, and turned away. Roch let her go. Slowly now, he instructed himself. He forced himself to eat, even though he wasn’t hungry. The food was tasteless; it had the texture of styrofoam.
When Tracy came back with his coffee, Roch smiled at her. “You a friend of Amelie’s?”
“I can’t talk,” she said. Her voice sounded like it had died in her throat. “I have other tables.”
“I know I haven’t been on good terms with her. Maybe she mentioned that? The thing is, she’s gone off and I don’t know where to find her.”
Tracy only stared at him, the carafe somewhat slack in her hands.
“Look, I’m not trying to hassle her. Is that the problem? You don’t have to tell me where she is. The thing is that I have some of her stuff. Mail and things like that. She didn’t leave a forwarding address. I just want to know whether, if I gave you some of this stuff, you could maybe get it to her.”
There was a long, delicate silence.
“I don’t know,” Tracy said finally.
But Roch had to struggle to contain his excitement, because this was all the confirmation he needed. Tracy knew how to find Amelie. Otherwise she would have said, “No,” or “I’m sorry.”
But he was improvising now. He didn’t really have a plan; only the glimmer of a possibility—an idea beginning to take shape at the back of his head. “Look,” he said, “if I packaged up some of this stuff and left it with you—would that be all right?”
“And bring it here to the restaurant?” Tracy said. “Because I can’t give out my address or anything.”
Christ, Roch thought, she thinks I’m after
her!
It was laughable. He imagined pinning down this goggle-eyed bitch and raping her. It was a joke. But some of the thought must have been reflected in his eyes or his expression, because she took a sudden, startled step backward. He restored his smile and aimed it at Tracy again. “Sure, I can bring the stuff here.”
“Well, maybe, I don’t know,” Tracy said, and put down the check and scurried away.
Roch left his money and a generous tip and went out into the street. He walked aimlessly for a while, breathing frost into the cold air. Really, this was turning out terrifically well. But he still had a lot of thinking to do.
Some days passed while he pondered the problem of extracting Amelie’s whereabouts from Tracy the waitress.
Roch approached the problem by stocking up on food, mainly TV dinners, and holing up in the apartment. He kept the television turned on, and insulated the windows with strips of hardware-store foam, so that the apartment absorbed as much heat as possible from the building’s big, laboring oil furnace. The combination of the dry heat and the staticky noise of the TV helped him think. Ideas came to him in harsh, glaring staccato, like commercials.
He thought about using force to extract the information from Tracy. Follow her home one of these nights. Beat it out of her, choke it out of her, whatever. She was scared of him already; it wouldn’t be hard.