Sweet Affliction (7 page)

Alex, meanwhile, had become an ideologue. Or so it seemed to Marcus, who saw his roommate less and less often. When he did, Alex seemed distant and preoccupied; he was starting to get a haggard and fanatical look about the eyes. He communicated mostly by pamphlet—he was in the habit of handing them out to the housemates like the young well-muscled guys Marcus would see on Ste-Catherine, with flyers for clubs with loud names like Boom and Shaker. Protests, demos, manifs, workshops, sit-ins, skillshares, occupations, benefits and benefices—they floated from Alex like dandruff. It wasn't that Marcus was indifferent to the causes but he resented being treated like street traffic in his own house. Sometimes while making dinner he would hear the back door open and Alex's boots thunk off in the hallway. Marcus would offer a how's-it-going as Alex passed by, only to be received with a grunt and, when he turned around, a stack of multicoloured photocopied squares on the kitchen table. Alex spent all his time at work or with his rats. Marcus liked animals too but there was something unwholesome about it, a flinty-eyed focus as of a saint or cult leader.

He would not serve, no, but who was he not serving? Stephen Dedalus had his Ireland, his priest-ridden dirt-poor fatherland, his own father squatting his consciousness like a golem. Marcus's background seemed flabby and permissive by comparison: Liberal middle-class parents who let him do as he pleased, a city whose watchwords were
fun
and
excess
and
live it up
and
why not
, where God was dead and everything was permitted.

The enemy as far as he could tell was so huge and remote and all-pervasive as to be insurmountable. At every turn he stocked its armoury, fed its coffers. But he would not let himself be defeated by it, not yet.

I will not serve. I will not serve. I'm not going to take it. No, I'm not going to take it, I'm not going to take it, anymore.

Then there was Flipper Week. That was when Alex, who by then had dropped out of university, decided that the cause of humanity's problems was rooted in opposable thumbs. “Think about it,” he said. “Tools, civilization, slavery, capitalism, war. None of it possible without these.” He wiggled them. As an experiment in what he called de-digiprivileging, Alex started taping down his thumbs with duct tape. His dexterity limited thus, his life became simplified, and he felt, he said, “free as an otter.” He could still perform most tasks, albeit slowly and with some difficulty. He could walk, type, hold a beer bottle two-handed, eat. He couldn't ride a bike, use a can opener, brush his teeth, or answer the phone. What did it matter? He was de-volving and it felt right. A week turned into two and the edges of the duct tape started to fray. His hands became glued over with sweat, grime, and hair. Alex took to gnawing the tape absentmindedly, like one of his rats. Sometimes he would sit staring into space, one flipper in his mouth and the other in his lap, where one or the other of the rats worked it over, making little clacking sounds with its long amber teeth. The sight made Marcus shudder.

If things went as planned he would go straight into a postgraduate program and from there a professorship; before long he would be tenured and could immerse himself entirely in theory. He had thought his life plan was something Alex would admire—maybe it would even inspire him to quit his job at the call centre. But Alex had shown indifference, almost discomfort, whenever Marcus talked about his future. He wondered if Alex could be jealous. Then he pushed the thought down; it had some nasty pleasure in it, like sniffing a fart.

Alex walked down Van Horne Avenue, which ran parallel to the train tracks separating Mile End and Outremont from Parc Ex and Petite Patrie. It's a city of divides, he thought, St. Laurent marking the East-West Anglo-Franco schism,
east of St. Laurent
a phrase indicating all that is foreign and unfathomable to an émigré from Out West: Elvis-themed laundromats, seniors in tiger print pants and purple bouffants. Van Horne, or the train tracks it mirrors, splits north from south, the complicated system of fences and overpasses forming a bottleneck that slows the flow of trendseeking twentysomethings into the old-man coffee clubs of Little Italy. At one historical point the split may have worked to keep the immigrants of Montreal North—the Haitian, Pakistani, Ethiopian, Congolese, Ghanaian, Indian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iranian, Jamaican population—from crowing out the older arrivistes of Mile End, the Greek, Portuguese, Ashkenazi Jewish, Quebecois
pur laine
. But now the barrier works the other way, as the young clamour ever north.

Named for the railway CEO who dreamed it into being, Van Horne should have been a majestic avenue of luxury hotels, café bistros and microbreweries. Other Van Horne creations, like the Banff Springs Hotel, the Windsor Arms, and the Queen E, occupy their railside territory with gloomy grandeur. But Montreal's Avenue Van Horne, opening with a cold storage warehouse where the street juts diagonally from St. Laurent, continues on a distinctly unglamorous arc. It was possible, Alex noted, to walk blocks along Van Horne without passing a single retail enterprise. It was all warehouses and abandoned-looking apartment buildings and empty lots. There were so many empty lots that you started to imagine a taxonomy of them, as if they could be ordered from a catalogue. The feral lot, waist deep with burdock, goldenrod and ragweed. The unsold lot, pincushioned with
À Vendre
signs. The shy lot, the defiant lot, the who-gives-a-fuck-anyway lot. The lot that doesn't know it's a lot. The fresh lot: until last week it held a building, and now it lies open, unnerving as a freshly dug grave. A square of sky sits uncovered, a vintage area of space that hasn't been seen since the building went up in 1936. And see, it's been perfectly preserved—you can't tell it from the rest of the sky around it.

Finally the sign for the muffler shop appeared, and Alex was back in civilization. Docteur Silencieux smiled from the billboard, something sinister in his name and his handsome, reassuring face. Alex gave him a nod and continued on to Parc.

Alex carried a small cardboard box carefully in front of him. The box's weight was satisfying for its size. It had a density and a diminutive heft.

Inside the box was Alex's rat, Hall.

At the end of August the yard had that kind of late-summer post-coital exhaustion; the plants seemed overripe and limp, verging on rot, but with enough bloom left that you remembered it. The flowers on the chestnut tree were gone and the leaves had darkened to oily green; there was a smell like campfires.

On the back porch, Marcus and Sally were drinking some of Marcus's homemade beer, tossing bottle caps over the fence into the neighbouring yard. Someone was barbecuing and it reminded Sally that all she had eaten that day was a bowl of lentil soup.

“Where's Alex?” Sally said.

“Burying his rat.”

“Oh.” She ran the back of her hand over her lips. “Simon or Garfunkle?”

“Yeah,” said Marcus, “something like that.”

“Poor little guy.”

“Mmm.”

On the other side of the fence a voice said “Here comes the cheese!”

Sally led a monthly workshop in something she called Aromemorial Therapy. She invited participants to bring an object with strong ties to a personal memory. Using a combination of distillation and alcohol infusion they created an “essence” of that object, which they bottled in brown glass containers. Uncapping the bottle releases an aroma which, Sally believed, accesses hidden memories and heals trauma.

Sally's room was full of these bottles, ones she'd made herself and ones left over from workshop participants who never came back for the second day. There were teddy bears, old shoes, notebooks, mittens, coffee mugs, all varieties of mundane knickknacks, made mute and nostalgic by the brown glass, like sepia-tinted photographs. She called it the archive of trauma.

As Alex walked down Champagneur toward the tracks, he saw the guy who panhandled in the neighbourhood race by, dragging his plaid granny stroller behind him. Alex noticed he'd gotten a haircut—a good one, in fact. Where does a homeless guy go to get a haircut? The guy reached the fence, lofted the stroller over, and took the chain-link easily, hopping it in a couple of fluid thrusts. He picked up the stroller from where it landed and sped over the tracks, repeating the movements on the opposite fence.

Alex set the box down and adjusted his shoulder bag, in which he carried a rusted trowel and a bag of seeds. It still got hot out those days; only at night did the wind sometimes carry that smell of cold glass and dead leaves. Alex picked up the box again, trying to ignore the shift of weight inside it.

Hall had died early that morning, while Alex was asleep. Around five a.m. exhaustion had overtaken his vigil, and Hall had used that opportunity to slip the surly bonds of earth, collapsing, as Alex saw when he woke up, half inside his food dish, his back feet poking straight up in the air. Alex had lifted him from the cage, cleaned him up, and wrapped him in a handkerchief. He set off for the burial on foot. Lynnie had offered to come with him but Alex declined her company. Marcus had said nothing.

In an alleyway Alex saw a woman in
niqab
, the shape of a narrow archway, playing soccer with a little boy. She lunged gracefully, blocking his arcs. Behind the pair a billboard showed a black and white photo of a man in his underwear. He lounged in a posture of tensed repose, like a jungle cat. Alex remembered another time in this alleyway, walking with Sally and talking about a guy they knew who took all his conquests on the same date, a tin-can barbecue and bottle of wine by the train tracks. Alex had lived here long enough that his memories had memories.

When Alex reached the hole in the fence behind the auto shop, he ducked through. The train tracks stretched in either direction. The sky here looked bigger somehow than other places in the city. The tracks were bushy with weeds, thistle and lamb's quarters and small doomed trees. He put the box down, took out the trowel, and started to dig.

“Every morning I wake up at three a.m. on the nose,” Sally said, “even though I stopped bartending six months ago. That job reset my circadian rhythms to give me a boost of adrenalin in time for closing, when I had to throw everyone out, wash a bathtub's worth of dishes, put the chairs up, sweep the floor, lock up The Miracle and bike home. And now I can't stop waking up. I just lie there with my heart pounding, telling myself to go back to sleep.”

The wind shifted, bringing with it the smell of Vietnamese food. The house was located at the crux of several local updrafts and the housemates could tell the direction of the wind by the smell it carried.

“A full night's sleep is an invention of capitalism,” Marcus told her. “Before factories, before electricity, before industrialization, people would sleep in shifts called first sleep and second sleep. In between there is a period of wakefulness that belongs only to you. It was valued as a time of reflection and creativity. It's when peasant couples would talk to each other and fuck, and monks would pray, and poets would write.” He had read this somewhere.

The back gate creaked open, and Alex came up the small path through the backyard. He looked tired, and there was a smear of dirt across his forehead. He carried a small shovel, and his empty satchel hung from one shoulder.

“Yo,” said Marcus. “Got a beer for you.”

“I gotta go inside,” Alex said. “Oates—whatever.”

“C'mon, sit for a minute. We haven't hung out in forever.”

“Yeah,” said Sally, “like for
ev
er.”

Alex looked toward the house, then folded himself in front of the mildewed sofa and leaned back against Sally's legs. She wrapped her arms around his neck and he sighed.

“Get 'er done?” said Marcus.

“Yeah. No big deal. It's over, at least.”

“Cast a cold eye on life / on death; Horseman, pass by,” Marcus said, quoting Yeats's tombstone. Alex nodded. He looked up, then reached over and grabbed onto Marcus's fingers. Marcus squeezed back, and their hands remained there, suspended, until Alex let go and picked up a beer by its neck.

Marcus told Alex about Abby, the girl he liked.

“She's in my Shakespeare class. She said her favourite part in
Hamlet
is when Hamlet says ‘Woot weep?' to Claudius over Ophelia's grave. She said it makes Hamlet sound like a really upset owl.”

“Cute,” said Alex. “Did you touch her perfect body with your mind?” This was code for thinking about someone while you masturbate. I am so going to touch that perfect body with my mind, they had said to each other a million times.

“Gross, Alex,” Marcus says, looking at Sally, then back to Alex. He wondered when the last time Alex got laid was.

They all watched as the shrimp-smelling wind took a plastic bag off the porch and whipped it over into the neighbouring yard. Alex stood up and slapped at his jeans. He picked up his half-empty beer, saluted them with it, and went inside.

“Do you think,” Sally said, “that by letting our garbage pile up on the balcony like this we're just making more work for our neighbours?”

“Probably,” said Marcus.

Sally nodded and began stuffing things into other things; paper into boxes, bottles into cans and cans into bags. Later, even when he could barely stand to be around her, Marcus would remember this image, the tendons in her neck and the clomp of her rubber boots and the careless and efficient way she handled herself, the wind making a fan of her hair.

Marcus turned to see Alex standing in the doorway. His head was tilted to one side.

“How—” said Marcus. Before he could finish Alex's hand came out fast as a snake, whipping a projectile straight at Marcus's head. It hit the side of his face and dropped into his lap. The impact was dull and wet, as though Alex had flung a soaked wad of cotton.

Marcus put his hand to his jaw and looked down. In his lap was Oates, dead, his eyes and mouth open, teeth bared in a last grimace. His testicles were bluish and touching the inside seam of Marcus's jeans. He had not gone gentle into that good night.