Sweet Affliction (5 page)

“And?” Alex says, examining the spine of a paperback book. Dickens's
David Copperfield
, a Harvard Classics edition. He starts to put it in his backpack, then takes it out again.

“And she fell under a boxcar, couple years back. Lost a leg. They say she painted a huge mural on the wall of the physio clinic, then disappeared.”

“Spooky,” he says. He opens the book, reads the
Ex Libris
on the flyleaf. A feeling like a cold finger on his neck ripples through him, and he shivers in the heat.

“What,” says Sally.

“Nothing,” says Alex. “Allergies.” He tosses the book to The Skills, saying “Put it in the pile for Welch's.”

“Here it comes!” says J-J-J-Jenny. And they all hear it: the steady faraway rumble accompanied by a high-pitched whistling, a forced-air sound. Then the tube above Alex's head begins to vibrate, and the rumble becomes a clanging. Alex leaps to a corner of the boxcar, crouches and covers his head. The lid of the tube flings open with a roar and a rush of stale air, and a clot of material—wood, cloth, paper, cushions, books—whumps out and crashes onto the pile. The sides of the boxcar shudder, and go still. Alex stands up, coughing, as dust particles, feathers and bits of pink fluff settle around him. His shirt is stuck all over with tiny Styrofoam balls.

“Whoa,” says Sally. “Big day.” She hoists herself up one side of the dumpster, and, taking Alex's hand, swings one leg then the other onto the refuse heap. She squats gingerly and starts picking her way through a collapsed stack of DVDs. The smell from the dumpster is heat and dust more than animal or vegetable. It reminds her maybe of factories, places where things get made, where grease and sweat keep everything turning. She closes her eyes.

A crowd on foot moves through the traffic jam in the Old Port. They carry flags and hand-held signs. They beat drums and play tin flutes and someone periodically pumps a few resonant belches from a tuba. Some are dressed all in black, some wear fluorescent legwarmers and neon tunics and some just look regular. Cars honk as they pass, in frustration or solidarity, each honk eliciting a corresponding outburst of cheers from the crowd, regardless of the driver's intent. The crowd is moving toward the mayor's office in the yearly protest against Moving Day.

Christophe steps quickly through the centre of the crowd. He can't quite get a comfortable grip on the sign he's holding. First his right and then his left arm tires, and when he uses both hands his shoulders start acting up. He tries resting the wooden beam of the sign against one shoulder like a rifle, but the cardboard corners keep getting tangled up in the long dreadlocks of the girl walking beside him.

“Sorry,” he says.

“No worries,” she replies.

He lowers the sign and tries to use it as a walking stick. The crowd is beginning to chant.

“TENANTS UNITE, KEEP UP THE FIGHT”

“À QUI LES DOMICILES? À NOUS LES DOMICILES!”

“HELL NO, WE WON'T PACK”

As the crowd approaches the mayor's office the drumming increases in volume and speed, and the chants break down into a general din of shouts and cheers. Someone is blowing a whistle right next to Christophe's ear. He reaches a finger into the collar of his shirt. It's damp in there, and sticky. He wishes he had worn something lighter than the collared shirt and sweater-vest he had on when leaving the house, but most of his clothes had been hastily packed away and there was no time.

A slender young man in a pink shirt and purple bandanna hands him a flyer for a Moving Day party at some dumpy loft in St. Louis-Cyr. He thanks the man and folds it into his pocket.

Outside the mayor's office an area is cordoned off with police tape. Riot police surround the Designated Self-Expression Zone, looking like clunky toys with their shields and helmets. The crowd, moving single-minded as a flock, sidesteps the DSEZ and continues on down the block. Above their heads, a couple of teenage girls stand on the balcony of a glass and steel condominium, banging pots and pans and waving at the crowd. Some people cheer and throw fists in the air. The woman next to Christophe pulls down her bandana.

“Yuppies!” she shouts. “Homeowner scum-spawn! If you're so down why aren't you down here!” The girls smile and wave. One of them blows bubbles with a red plastic wand.

The sun glints off a corner of the building and Christophe looks away. He thinks about the boxes of clothes and books and dishes piled in the back seat of his car, parked outside his old apartment. He had nowhere to put the Eames chair and so he left it next to the car, with a neatly lettered sign on it reading BEDBUGS. That ought to discourage the salvage crews. By now the new family has probably finished cleaning all traces of him from the light switches, the bathroom mirror, the doorjambs: all those places where bits of him have collected and smeared. The house will be crisp and foreign-smelling.

The crowd has stopped moving now. The woman with the dreadlocks is doing a strange, herky-jerky dance, all elbows and knees, shaking her head from side to side and lifting and dropping her heavy work boots. A man shimmies to the top of a traffic sign, pulls off his T-shirt one-handed and waves it like a flag. Christophe blanches at the sight of his puffy nipples and fungus-white torso, but he envies the man's bareness. He untucks his shirt and smiles tightly at the woman, who gives him a friendly if slint-eyed look in return. Probably she wonders if he's undercover.

“Looks like they've got us surrounded,” the woman says, pointing her chin at the riot police.

“Yeah,” Christophe agrees, heartened by her use of
us
and
them
, his inclusion in the crowd's animal body. He feels drawn in, as to a warm bath or a hug. The woman shrugs, opening and lifting her arms in a gesture that is at once resigned and resolute. She rolls her eyes and does a nifty soft-shoe, hands gripping an invisible cane. Christophe watches her until she disappears between a grey-haired woman and a papier mâché effigy of the mayor. A few moments later, he feels the first sting of the water cannon on the back of his head.

When Lynnie arrives at Sally's place the first thing she sees is a grey cat curled up in a handsome leather recliner. Sally lifts the cat, who mewls in protest, and flops down into the chair. “Ahhh,” she says, “another day, another dollar.”

“Nice chair,” says Lynnie.

“I know, right? It's real. I mean…” Sally clears her throat. “I mean it's a real designer chair. Fifties minimalism. I could get good money for it on eBay, but I don't know.” She wiggles her ass, and the chair moans a bit, like a dreaming animal. “I kind of love it.”

“Where should I put this?” Lynnie says, lifting the box she's holding.

“Oh. The room is on the other side of the kitchen. The housemates are still out scavenging, so make yourself at home. One of our friends was supposed to take it last week, but he decided to spend the summer studying taxidermy in the Yukon, so…” Sally's voice fades out as Lynnie moves through the hallway.

On one wall of the kitchen someone has spraypainted
Love & Squalour
in baby-blue cursive. Lynnie examines the fridge door, as she always does in an unfamiliar home. Like a beach, all sorts of detritus washes up there, and it can tell you what kind of environment you're in. There are hand-drawn and Letraset fliers for bands with names like Performance Anxiety and East Infection, expired coupons for Dairy Queen, a program grid for the local community radio station, blurry shots of kids jammed four and five to a photobooth. There is a FREE TIBET bumper sticker; the words “with every purchase” are Sharpied beneath.

“So how come you guys didn't have to move?” Lynnie calls over the kitchen's cavernous space. “Someone who lives here owns the place?”

“Nah,” says Sally, “we squat. Someone had a lease here, once, but…” She trails off. “I guess we're just waiting around for someone to notice us, and hoping they don't.”

“I know what you mean,” Lynnie says, though she doesn't.

“Let me show you around,” says Sally. She takes Lynnie through a back garden (tomatoes and peppers in buckets, pole beans and sweet peas climbing homemade trellises, herbs for cooking and medicine); a bathroom converted to a darkroom and silkscreen wash station; a “chill-out room” full of half-decomposed bikes and tools; and the workshop, where furniture in various stages of strip, repair and paint sits on thick greasy carpets of newspaper. The room reeks of varnish. Lynnie recalls someone passing her a tiny bottle of amyl nitrate on a dance floor and instructing her to sniff: the sick-sweet piercing of her nasal cavity, the nauseated sense of wellbeing, and the headache. She feels a mild high just standing in the doorway.

“I know, it stinks,” Sally says. “Alex started building a ventilation system but he kind of got distracted. Your room is pretty far away, but if it's a problem…”

Sally has a formal way of fading out her sentences, as though she has no intention of ever finishing them.

“It isn't,” Lynnie says.

From one channel to the next, the news is the same. Riots, mass arrests, angry people shouting in the streets. Every year, every channel, the same stream of images like some kind of ritual. The same burning moving van appears over and over, as though it's the new emblem for current affairs. The same tearful driver speaks to the off-camera reporter, the same words, the same gesture of hopelessness and frustration. Mme Bruges-Robineau can't hear the words, but she understands the gist. Her fingers are slick and greasy with popcorn butter, and she licks them distractedly. The remote too is becoming shiny, deposits of saturated fat coagulating around the buttons, but she restrains herself from sucking one end of it like a Fudgesicle.

She flips the channel, then quickly flips it back. She unmutes the voices.

“—our only means of democratic expression at this point,” a young man says. He is being interviewed in front of one of the glass buildings of the Old Port that are like mirrored sunglasses. At the bottom of the screen his name appears, Alex Prole (“Ha,” thinks Madame, “that's a good one,”) followed by his affiliation, an acronym for a tenants' association. He is tall and narrow, wearing a faded pink shirt and a purple bandanna around his neck. It strikes Madame that in spite of all predictions he now looks more like her than like his father. Alex answers a few more questions and then the news shifts to another part of town, a suburb where two families shout at each other as aides and neighbours look on. Madame surfs for a few minutes, hoping to see the clip of Alex again, but all she can find is the burning moving van, commercials, and, now that the sun is down, the usual assortment of pay-per-view shills.

She thinks about writing a cheque to Alex's housing association, what was it called? He wouldn't accept money from her personally, she knows that, having already received a envelope containing a torn-up cheque and a photocopied pamphlet about Marxism, but maybe she can make a donation to his group. He won't be able to refuse that. She goes looking for her purse, stops to pet the cat. She's already forgotten the name.

Last Man Standing

I had lived in the apartment for about a month when there was a knock on the door.

“You probably shouldn't answer that,” my roommate said. But I was halfway there. They would have already heard my footsteps.

At the door was a very short woman in overalls and a blue T-shirt.

“Can I use your phone?” she said. I handed her my cell and pressed my foot down on the cat as he tried to slip out the door.

“Sorry,” I said to the woman. She stared at me, saying nothing, holding the phone to her head. She didn't seem to have dialled, but then I was distracted. She shook her head and handed me the phone, looking around nervously. She appeared to be distraught, or high. The cat struggled out of my arms and I went after him again. The woman didn't seem done yet, so I asked her to come inside so I could close the door. She leaned in and spoke into my face.

“My baby,” said the woman. “He's hurt. I need to take him to the hospital.” She had several teeth missing, and several more were dull gold.

“Do you need me to call you an ambulance?”

“Please,” she said, “no ambulance.” I couldn't place her accent. “I can't afford the ambulance. Please, sir, my baby is hurt.”

“Where's your baby?” I said.

“I need to take him to the hospital. In a cab.” She eyed my recording equipment, which was visible through the doorway to my room. It wasn't so fancy, but to a crackhead it would look like Big Rock Candy Mountain.

I clued in.

“Okay,” I said. “What's it going to cost me to get you out of my apartment.”

She paused for a moment. “Twenty dollars,” she said.

I tossed the cat into the bathroom and closed the door. When I came back with the money she was swaying a little and humming to herself.

“All I have is a ten,” I said.

She took it and nodded. “I'll bring it back tomorrow.” I closed the door on the sound of her shoes tapping down the stairs.

I flipped open the phone and looked through the recent calls. I highlighted the most recent one and pressed the green button. Surprisingly, it connected. I let it go for ten rings and then I snapped the phone shut. My roommate was rolling a joint on the sofa.

“Someone you know?” he said.

“Sure,” I said.

The rest of the day passed in a kind of pleasant undulation, like driving down the California coast in a big Cadillac with the radio on, just listening to whatever, with the cliffs on one side and on the other the green and deadly ocean.

Around three in the morning, my phone rang. This usually means either bad news or my cousin Micah is in town.

“Hello,” I said.

“You called me,” said a man's voice on the other end.

“I don't think so,” I said.

“Well someone called me from this number,” he said. “Twice.”