The Origin of Species (21 page)

“Forget about romance,” his sister Mimi had said once. “Your children are the biggest love affair you’ll ever have.”

At the time he’d thought,
Not enough sex
, but now he hung on the notion as if it might save him. Then he went by to see her.

“I’m not even sure I
like
my children,” she said now. She was about half his size, the legacy, probably, of protein deficiency back in the old country and a bout of anorexia as a teen, though now she looked wasted away from even her usual elfin self. She’d just built a new house that she hated, so that there were rooms in it she wouldn’t even enter, so far did they fall from her hopes.

“My children are like strangers to me. They’re like these lugs who showed up here and I have to look after them.”

It was true: her children were lugs. Mimi loved books, loved conversation, had had hopes, but her boys, three in a row and big as oxen, no protein deficiencies there, spent their days in the rec room glued to the Mario Brothers. Mimi had raised them, but they hadn’t turned out like her. They had turned out like her husband Nick. Alex remembered finding him alone with them once when they were little, and the smallest screaming bloody murder when Nick had tried to pick him up.

“I want Mommy! I want Mommy! I want Mommy!”

Nick had put the kid down as if he were a ticking bomb.

“Okay, okay.” Not panicked, really, not angry; just baffled. He was a good man; he liked American football, he’d been to university, he never used five words when three would do.

“You might want to pop next door and get your sister,” he’d said.

Alex wasn’t sure what it meant, that Mimi had given her lifeblood, had given up teaching, had read Dr. Spock, only to produce these pod-kids who were nothing like her. Meanwhile Nick had stood back like a breeder watching his stock and had somehow prevailed.

“They’re just teenagers,” Alex said. “They’ll come out of it.”

“All I live for now is when they leave home. It’s awful but it’s all I can think about.”

Alex tried his luck with his brother Bruno’s daughter, Melinda. She was five, a better test case. He took her to lunch at McDonald’s; he took her to the petting zoo at Colasanti Farms. It was a perfect day. In the evening they sat with her folks and went over it.

“Tell them about the lion cub,” he said. “How it came up to the window.”

Melinda completely ignored him, looking off to one side with a wicked little half-smile.

“She’s probably just tired,” her mother said. Alex got into his father’s pickup and drove home, though in the driveway, finally, he turned off the engine and sat blubbering like a child because he’d been snubbed by a five-year-old.

That had been his refresher in family dynamics. Back in Montreal—who knew why he chose this moment for it?—he got out his little address book from years before, filled with the names of people he’d met in hostels or on roadsides or at currency exchange booths whom he hardly remembered, and he called Ingrid. He heard the ring tone at the other end, with its echoey European chirr, and the panic set in, at all the questions he didn’t know how to answer.

There it was, her Swedish singsong.

“
Hejsan
.”

“It’s Alex. From Canada.”

A long pause.

“Oh. I see.”

Things went downhill from there. The sureness he’d thought he’d feel at the sound of her voice, the knowing what to say, hadn’t come.

“I got your letter,” he started.

Her English was rusty.

“Yes. I have wondered.”

“It came a while ago, actually. January, I think.”

Another pause.

“Oh.” Why had he admitted that? “So. Then, you are not so convinced.”

“Sorry?”

“Not sure,” she corrected. “What you would like.”

Every word seemed so freighted. He’d been an idiot to think they could just pick things up like old times, as if all these years hadn’t passed.

“It’s just that my life is a bit complicated right now.” But he’d grown defensive. “It’s not as if I can afford to just hop on a plane.”

That had been the worst thing to say. The tone was off, the suggestion of imposition, the crass sound of
afford
.

The last time they’d been together, they had argued over money.

“Yes, I see,” Ingrid said, and then, with sudden Oxford precision, “But of course, you needn’t have answered me.”

Afterward he wondered if he hadn’t intended to botch things.
It’s not as easy as you think
was what had been going through his head. But she had softened finally, had sounded almost contrite.

“Maybe it’s a better idea you should write me a letter. Maybe it’s clearer.”

For all his months of agonizing, he felt he’d come nowhere. They hadn’t even mentioned the boy, not in so many words—it was as if there was some test he had to pass before they could get to that. Then the days went by, then more, and the letter didn’t get written. He tried, then again, but couldn’t get the tone right, kept slipping into self-pity and excuse, couldn’t find the balance between what to include and what to withhold.
The boy
, he kept thinking; what mattered was the boy. He did a draft on his computer but then reverted to long hand—he couldn’t bear those tight little dots that his printer spit out, as if there was nothing of him in the words, as if he hadn’t sweat blood.

He could barely remember now what he’d said in the letter he’d eventually sent out. Two tight little pages: one for the past and one for the future, that was how it had seemed to him. He’d weighed every word, as if he were on probation, though there was also the other side of it, a kind of seeking permission or a waiting to be told,
This is what’s right
. He could be let off the hook, still; there was that chance. He thought of that, and saw himself falling, with what felt like freedom or terror, he couldn’t say which.

Nearly a month had passed now since he’d sent the letter off. With each day that went by without a response, his thoughts grew more wild. He’d been too dry, too removed, as if they were dealing with a piece of real estate to be portioned off; he’d said the expected things, the ones any idiot could guess, but not the ones that mattered. He couldn’t remember if he’d offered to go to him, if he’d been as clear as that: was that possible, had he left out the most important thing? In his own mind nothing counted, really, until he showed up in the flesh. He ought to be home right now calling or writing again, offering to board the first plane, instead of sitting here at a conference on ozone depletion with a woman who was so extraneous to the main thrust of his life that to be with her was little more than a way of not being with himself.

Alex was no longer following the speakers. One after another, middle-aged white men had got up at the podium spouting rhetoric, mostly in English, though Alex had switched his headset to Spanish to help shut them out.

Tell me, Alex, because I think people will find this pretty darn fascinating: How in bejesus did you end up in the mountains of Morazán running guns for the FMLN?

Well, Peter, it was really my wife, María, who got me into it
.

Beside him María was taking notes, close enough for him to feel the heat off her, though the whole session she had hardly so much as glanced at him. Ghostly redolences of sweat wafted over from her, sharp and undoctored, that made something go weak in him.

He took off his headset to make the effort, for María’s sake, to follow the current speaker. But he was speaking in French.

María leaned over to him.

“Is very interesting, no?” she whispered. “Is very important, this conference.”

He had spent all summer reading about the Salvadoran war, when he should have been boning up on chlorofluorocarbons.

“I have to admit I’m not quite following everything.”

She tapped his headset.

“You must use it for the French.”

Maybe she was right; maybe this stuff was more important than he gave it credit for. What put him off about the environmentalists was the religion they made of things, how they seemed to have come back full
circle to wood spirits and river gods, but maybe they were just correcting the great life-denying aberration that monotheism had been. Alex blamed a lot of things on monotheism—his messed-up sex life, for one.

He’d put his headset back on.

“
Aleex!
”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Is finished for coffee break. We must go.”

They had set out refreshments in the concourse. Alex lit a cigarette—the place was already blue with smoke—and started beating a path to the coffee table. Along the way María ran into a fellow greenie, a tousled-haired Quebecois with the flimsy T-shirt and thin-legged jeans of the St. Lawrence bohemian set, and the two of them launched at once into animated French. Alex disliked the guy on sight. He had that natural elegance to him that Alex, all hulking shoulders and fumbling hands, could never aspire to.

“Alex! Is that you?”

He turned, and there coming toward him through the crowd, his hand already outstretched, was Félix. What was he doing here? Alex felt a moment of disorientation, as if he’d been caught at something shameful.

“What a surprise! I didn’t know you were involved in this sort of thing.”

They’d kept up their arrangement the entire summer. The more time they’d spent together, the more unsure Alex was about what they were up to.

“You’re here alone?”

The shadow that he always felt around Félix came over him. The shadow of those twenty-five dollars an hour.

“No, no. With a friend.”

There were introductions. María’s friend—
Rudolphe
, Alex got a snicker out of that, at least—hardly deigned to acknowledge him, turning at once to Félix.

“
Vous êtes du coté de la recherche?
”

Félix was in one of his business suits.

“
Non. De l’industrie
.”

There was an instant chill.

“
Ah, bon
.”

Rudolphe managed to hive off almost at once to a group that showed more promise, leaving Alex and María and Félix strangely islanded by the crowd. A feeding frenzy was in progress up at the refreshment table, with no chance of getting anywhere near it.

“You are with an environmental group?” Félix asked María in English, pleasantly enough.

“
Oui
,” she said, and didn’t offer anything more.

Alex’s cigarette had burned down to his fingers but there were no ashtrays nearby to dump it in.

“Félix and I met at Berlitz,” he said.

María ignored him.

“You are from a company?”

“Yes.” Félix pulled a card from his pocket and handed it to her. “We make aluminum.”

He didn’t seem quite so pleasant now. Alex could feel it, the iciness coming off him like an October frost.

“You are against the agreement?”

This wasn’t how you proceeded with someone like Félix.

He smiled.

“Not against. Just concerned. To see how it affects us.”

“Is very important,” María said. “Is very new, this conference.”

Félix looked at his watch. He was still smiling.

“Ah, I must go,” he said, grasping Alex’s shoulder. “I will see you at our lesson.”

Alex felt vaguely compromised when Félix had gone. A sourness hung between him and María and he had no idea how to get rid of it.

He was still holding his fucking cigarette butt.

“We must go back,” María said. “They are beginning.”

The day was getting away from him. He glanced at his watch, a twelve-dollar Timex he’d finally broken down and bought, and a little buzzer went off at the back of his head.

His appointment. He had completely forgotten about it.

“Shit! Sorry. I just remembered something. I have to go.”

María looked unfazed, as if he was not the sort to be counted on.

“Your translation,” she said. “You must get your card.”

It took him an instant to understand: his bloody headset.

He untangled the thing from the pocket of his Windbreaker.

“Here, you take it. You can bring the card tonight.”

He felt a pang at the thought of leaving it, but she might actually show up if his faculty card depended on it.

“You remember the address?”

“Yes, of course.”

For a moment, he dared to feel hopeful. He leaned out to kiss her, impulsively, and got her almost squarely on the lips.

“
Hasta esta noche
.”

“
Sí, sí
.” She had a startled look that pleased him. “
Esta noche
.”

He hailed a taxi, his lips tingling. He still had the cigarette butt. It could be his last, he thought, suddenly full of resolve, and slipped the thing into his pocket for surety.

T
he cardinal rule of Alex’s therapy, which Dr. Klein had made crystal clear from the outset, was that Alex had to pay out of his pocket for any missed session. With luck he could still make the last twenty minutes or so, enough, he hoped, to meet whatever attendance requirements the doctor might have to satisfy with the Ministry of Health. Over the summer his sessions had moved from the rehab center beneath the Shriners into Montreal General proper, and he had the cab drop him at his usual entry point at Emergency, to save circling up the mountain to the main lobby. Six dollars with tip, the cab cost him, a blow, but much better than the forty-three a missed session would have run.

The Emergency entrance led into the hospital’s labyrinthine basements, great engines humming away behind vented doors and orderlies in the pastel non-whites of medicine’s lower orders pushing bins stuffed with laundry and waste. The hospital was divided into wings that seemed to have no communication one with the other, trailing off into perpetual dead ends, though by now Alex was able to race through the place like the seasoned regular he was.

He caught the elevators to B4, Psychiatry. The floor was divided between the doctors’ offices to one side and the ward to the other, behind an intercommed metal door that read
KEEP CLOSED.
B4 and After. Alex always expected some scene from Bedlam to reveal itself behind the metal door, though whenever he’d snuck a peek through the little viewing window, the hall beyond was always eerily empty and quiet. If not for the door it might have been hard to tell which side was which, most of the doctors he ran into across the way looking wild-haired or wild-eyed or hunched up over their charts with the squirreled intensity of escapees.