The Origin of Species (63 page)

The tenants’ association had long ago imploded, the victim of its own internecine bloodbaths and of the Byzantine vagaries of the Régie du logement. The association hadn’t stood a chance, really—since it had no official standing and no right to the details of individual files it was no match for the owners, who knew every claim and every hearing and had only to hive people off one at a time and cajole them into submission. It had all begun to seem positively Orwellian. People living a few inches of drywall from each other were stuck in their little boxes of paranoia and fear, while the owners, with their direct line to the Régie, knew every time anyone farted or flushed a toilet or turned on a light.

Alex’s own claims had slowly wended their way through a nightmare of bizarre twists and turns. A series of letters arrived announcing hearings and then deferring them, combining some of his claims into single ones according to criteria that were never made clear, then separating them again. Finally, in January, his first hearing came up, on the
actual increase. He trudged through the ice and slush to the Régie offices, carting letters from the landlords, association minutes, photographs, timelines, double-registered reply cards, and sat in a windowless waiting room on the sixth floor of a downtown office tower while one by one people were called in before the
régisseur
. After two and a half hours the bailiff called out a mangled version of his name and led him to an open area set out with a few rows of auditorium chairs and a dais up front where the commissioner sat at a flimsy table like someone doing a product pitch at a convention. There were so many people milling about, assistants carrying files, young men with coffee cups, a worker who was changing a fluorescent light, that they might as well have been in the middle of a train station.

He was seated at his own little table. A few lonely faces stared out from the back rows of seats, but none that Alex recognized. The
régisseur
, a pleasant-looking Quebecois in a stylish suit who spoke impeccable English, had the air of someone who had accidentally wandered into the midst of an argument and had gamely agreed to help settle it.

“For Le 1444 Mackay Enregistré?” he called out.

But no one came forward.

The bastards had stood him up. Alex was livid—after all the letters, the lists, the postage, the months of waiting, they hadn’t even bothered showing up.

“So what does that mean, exactly?” he asked.

“I suppose it means you’ve won,” the
régisseur
said, with a whimsical smile. “You should get your notice in a couple of weeks.”

So they had just lain down like that without a fight. Alex didn’t get it. Maybe it wasn’t worth their time, paying a lawyer or whatever to sit twiddling his thumbs waiting for a hearing; or maybe they knew they didn’t have a hope. The whole affair left Alex oddly deflated—he had wanted his day in court, had wanted to spin out the whole saga, the strong-arming, the threats, the outages, the insidious injustice of it. Instead he was walking away, like everyone else, with only his few bucks of saved rent to show for it all, and maybe not even that, since it still fell to the Régie to settle on what it deemed a reasonable increase.

At least it was over, he thought. But a few days later someone slipped a sheet of paper under his door in the familiar pink foolscap of the Régie: a notice of appeal. The owners hadn’t even bothered to send
it double-registered, as if daring him to claim he hadn’t received it, to stoop to their level. Under “Reason for the Appeal,” someone had written, in the worst sort of scrawl, “Unable to attend original hearing.” That was reason enough, it seemed, to start the whole process all over—more counter-forms to file, more months of waiting, more trudging down to offices, another smiling
régisseur
. Then, beyond that, surely another appeal or maybe even a judgment against him, because of heating costs gone up or necessary repairs done or costs for bylaw compliance, who knew? It was maddening; it was hopeless; it was criminal. Bucketloads of taxpayers’ cash had been spent to set up this vast instrument to guard tenants’ rights, laws had been drafted, offices built, civil servants hired, thousands of forms printed up, and it was all just another tendon in the long arm of The Man.

Alex knew then that he had already lost. He had neither the stamina nor the will to follow the matter through, not to mention that he was already thinking by then of being gone by the summer. In the worst-case scenario nothing would be settled by then and not only would all his damage claims be dismissed but the outrageous increase would simply be rubber-stamped, so that he’d actually have to send a check over from Sweden for back rent or risk having his credit rating ruined forever, never able to rent an apartment again in the country or get a mortgage or buy a car. This was how, from the smallest of things, whole lives were unraveled and spirits were crushed. He might as well live in China or the Soviet Union.

He ought to have settled and put the matter from his mind, but instead he kept tilting at it, pushing his forms and mailing them out, filing his lease renewal by the required date. His hearing for damage claims came and went exactly as the other, with the landlords’ side of the bench conspicuously empty. In a matter of days, wonder of wonders, a judgment came back to him, heartbreaking in its reduction of weeks and months of political struggle to the most finicky of sums: for the loss of water in the months of July and August 1986, thirty dollars; for electrical outages, two dollars per outage; for the loss of the pool, five dollars per month. And so it went. In total, the settlements, which covered the six or seven months when living conditions in the building had spiraled down to Third World levels, came to ninety-six dollars. Then two days after the judgment had reached him came the familiar pink form again, slipped under his door like the last one, the iniquitous notice of appeal.

In the elevator now he went to press the button for his floor but at the last instant hit the one for the second floor instead. Before he could change his mind the elevator doors opened and there before him, sitting hunched at his little desk in his office-cum-storage room, was Mr. Shapiro, looking a bit paunchier and a bit balder than the previous summer but not that much worse for wear. Alex felt a queasiness come over him at gazing like that on the baby-cheeked face of the enemy. The banality of evil.

He ought to just turn around and go home.

“Alan, isn’t it?” Too late. “Come on in, I’m just getting organized.”

The air on this floor still reeked of chlorine, though it had been many months now since the pool had been open. Another half-eaten sub sat in front of Shapiro, maybe the same one as the summer before, a cunning prop. To one side on the desk was an open banker’s box that looked stuffed with rumpled renewal forms, the building’s address scribbled across the side of it as if this were merely one enterprise among many.

“Sorry, refresh my memory about your last name. It’s a bit hard to keep track.”

Alex had to admit he was impressed that the man remembered him at all.

“Fratarcangeli. Alex Fratarcangeli.”

“Right. Alex. Sorry. Italian, isn’t it?”

He had turned from the banker’s box to what Alex hadn’t noticed resting on a low side table behind it: a gleaming state-of-the-art Compaq Deskpro, complete with a big
CRT
screen and a long row of fancy function buttons.

“You have one of these yet? I can keep that whole box of stuff on one disk.”

For a moment then, his eyes fixed on the screen, he was pure geek. He was running some kind of fancy data program, d
BASE
, it looked like. After a few glitches a screen came up with Alex’s name at the head of it. It gave Alex an eerie feeling to see all that data about him pixelating against the blue.

“Right. Right.” Shapiro’s brow furrowed as he scrolled through the file. “There’s still last year outstanding, I guess.”

He said this as if Alex were some shuffling deadbeat who’d come begging to him.

“So,” Shapiro said heavily. “How are we going to solve this?”

Alex saw his brother Gus in Shapiro’s place again, and his father, battling the welfare moms, the drifters, all the low-lifes who turned their hair gray and sucked away their tiny margin of profit.

It didn’t matter, he thought. He just wanted out.

“I’m not sure I’ll be staying, it turns out. I might need to leave in the middle of the summer.”

There, he had blown all his advantage. Now he was the one asking a favor.

Shapiro leaned back in his chair.

“I think we could work something out. I think we could manage that.”

It was all very dispiriting. Alex ended up agreeing to a five percent increase, backdated three months so it would have been in effect long enough to use as a basis for a new rent when he left, though Shapiro agreed to kick back the difference. The only other concessions he got were the right to break his lease on thirty days’ notice, and the ninety-six dollars the Régie had deemed he was due.

“Here, I’ll make the check out right now,” Shapiro said. “I’ll include the extra you’re paying on the rest of your lease, so you can just make out your rent for the full amount.”

There were half a dozen forms to sign. A new lease renewal, with the thirty-day clause, barely legible, scratched in in pen; then the agreement to backdate the rent, several retraction forms for the Régie. Alex felt like someone who had agreed, for the merest baubles, to sign a false confession.

Shapiro had taken on an unabashedly pleased, helpful air.

“Concordia student, right? What was it, history?”

“English, actually.”

“I always loved English. Shakespeare, Dickens, all those guys. I wish I still had the time, you know?”

In the elevator Shapiro’s check, for a hundred and thirty-six dollars, his damages plus his paltry kickback, felt like a scorpion in his pocket. He had given himself over to the zeitgeist, to profit and loss, just like everyone else. Social Darwinism was alive and well.

You can see it in the language people use these days, Peter, the metaphors, this whole mental shift. It’s all economics now. It’s not values anymore, it’s
value.

Well, to coin a phrase, I guess that’s the price we pay. What is it they say about Thatcher? A shopkeeper’s daughter
.

Exactly. Meanwhile, no one thinks of the social costs
.

That’s the bottom line, isn’t it? But it doesn’t look like anyone’s taking stock
.

María would never have taken the check. She would have stuck the thing out.

He ought to have clipped that coupon for Folgers. It was a cut above Maxwell House, if not quite Van Houtte’s. It occurred to him that he likely had Darwin to thank for Van Houtte’s: it was Darwin and his ilk who had displaced peasants around the world, so that great latifundia could be pieced together in places like El Salvador to grow things on more scientific principles than dumb peasants would ever manage. Liberals, they were called then. That had been Darwin’s camp. The conservatives, meanwhile, the bloody paternalists, had thought the rich should look after the poor, not realizing that that merely encouraged them.

He still remembered that awful coffee he’d had at Miguel’s apartment. It was all in the roasting, he’d heard. The thought of Miguel set off a little alarm at the back of his head.
Shit
. Their lesson. He had completely forgotten. He glanced at his watch: a half-hour late. If he was lucky, Miguel had waited. Or not lucky, exactly, but he was in charge of him now, María had put him in Alex’s trust. The least Alex could do was not make a botch of it.

M
iguel was sitting up against Alex’s door thumbing through another of the glossy magazines he went through like candy. Cheesy men’s stuff, mainly, of the sort that Michael sometimes bought for the bods, but also fashion magazines,
National Geographic, Chatelaine
, anything he could lay his hands on. He never read them, from what Alex could tell, only leafed through them looking at the pictures, pausing over these with the childlike curiosity of an extraterrestial marveling at Earth culture. Alex felt a jumble of emotions seeing him squatting there so innocent-seeming and absorbed. Relief that he hadn’t missed him and a grudging protectiveness, but also the inevitable irritation that Miguel had managed to worm his way into the building as if he was no better than all the other riff-raff that waltzed in off the street, that he was poring through his trashy magazines rather than doing the worksheets Alex had given him, which he surely wouldn’t have finished, that he was simply there, still in Alex’s life, practically his ward now, so that they would probably end up bound together in unholy alliance until the end of days.

“Hey, man. Is not normal for you, so late.”

Normal for Miguel was to waltz in forty-five minutes after the appointed time as if it were nothing. Now this one occasion that he actually seemed to have been punctual he had the gall to lord it over him.

Alex went straight for the door, leaving Miguel to scramble clear of him.

“Been waiting long?” he said tersely.

“No man, I’m jus’ coming now.”

In the elevator Alex had started gearing himself up for a possible man-to-man on the subject of María’s departure, but already he felt the
minginess that always came on him around Miguel, the unwillingness to let him imagine he took him seriously.

“I saw your sister.”

“Yeah, man, she’s going home. Is jus’ crazy.”

“So you know?”

“She’s my sister, man, you think I don’ know?”

Man
this and
man
that. You’d think the place was crawling with men. Meanwhile the real men, apparently, were off fighting the war.

“If she’s your sister,” Alex said, aiming below the belt, “then why don’t you stop her?”

“She’s my sister, man, not my kid,” Miguel said gloomily. “You know what she’s like. Even back home she’s always been breaking my balls.”

Though Alex didn’t feel he had given him any encouragement, Miguel had never wavered from his first attachment to him. After things had soured between Alex and María, Miguel had commiserated with him as if Alex was the one he’d been watching out for.