Chapter 13: Less Dangerous - Asbestos

Late afternoon, Friday, September 20, 1991

Every school week ends on the same question: What to do with my Friday night? I’ve got no homework, no swim class. I don’t make friends easily, and I don’t exactly feel like going home to find my mother still in bed at the end of the day. My strategy is to furtively observe the movements in the hallway while I put my books and binders in my orange locker, see which non-hostiles are gathering into groups and where they’re going. I can’t make out anything conclusive over the clunks of metal doors and clinks of padlocks catching, the shouting and swearing and the laters and I’m outs. In the eye of this noise, my thoughts drift back.

In the hallway earlier, after getting out of math class where I’d spent several minutes creating soothing sets out of equations – constant functions (1-2-3-4), linear functions (1-2-3-4-5), and affine functions (1-2-3-4) – but before I made it to my locker, I’d run into Robert Houle, my English teacher from the year before. ‘Bob’ was bilingual in the same way Hitler was an artist. The moment he saw me, his eyes flashed, as if he’d just remembered he had something important to tell me.

Steve, was it your father who passed away?

Yes.

How old was he?

Forty-one.

My answer was rewarded with a doltish look, raised eyebrows above calf-like eyes, while he let out a brief sigh that was meant to be sympathetic but came off as almost admiring. Then he walked off.

That’s right, Bobby Boy, go study your irregular verbs. Don’t ask me how I’m doing, you cretin. I’m still at my locker trying to figure out what happened, gnashing my teeth and imagining comebacks that might have been, when into my field of vision steps my old nemesis Provost. He’s smirking, looking mean as ever. For a split second, an angle and a distance combine to form a dazzling affine function that would send the corner of my locker door on a collision course with the left socket of his stupid eye. Another retort destined to go unspoken, but I don’t release my grip on my locker door. In the palm of my other hand, the combination lock I’m clasping grows warm. I have no intention of listening to a single word from Provost’s mouth, or of surrendering a single inch of turf when he corners me with his foul breath. No, not today. Today no one can get to me, I’m unreachable. Murderous phrases flash out through my dark eyes, and I’m convinced Provost can see them, read my every thought – he can read that I know his father beats him, like mine did, but also that his father rapes him, and his mother and two sisters too. He can read in my eyes that I know he lives in a shithole in Saint-Daniel, and that I know he’s desperate not to go back there tonight. He can read the combination of my lock, which I imagine stamping onto his face five times, twenty-five times, one hundred and twenty-five times, six hundred and twenty-five times – a pyramid erected overtop the mush of his beaten-in face. He can also read that, in my hatred for him, he’s been downgraded. He can read that there’s no one left in my life who scares me. Then he reads my white silence, pregnant with every imaginable violence.

Provost seems to mutter something that might be aimed at me, but he keeps walking.

Outside, Binette skates past as I’m making my way toward my bike. You coming to the skate park? Veilleux got a camera, we’re gonna film some tricks!

I don’t have a board.

That’s okay, bring your bike!

Binette speeds off, hitting an ollie on his way. The sun hugs my shoulders, which feel as if a load has been taken off them. I’m no longer unreachable, just out of reach. Strangely, tears don’t come. The fury in my veins subsides. As I make my way to the park, I see a group of skaters. Cindy’s there.

* * *

A few days earlier September 11, 1991

What are you doing?

It’s not like Cindy’s prying, or mocking me. But I can still tell right away that I can’t answer without revealing something. She’s looking at me the same way she always does: subtly attentive, free of judgment.

I’ve just crossed my eyes without really realizing it. The TV is on, we’re watching MuchMusic at Cindy’s, sitting on the long soft couch, with her legs propped up between us, in the den in the basement where she also has her bedroom. I stammer out the beginning of a confused but honest explanation; she doesn’t answer, but she’s listening, I can tell by her slightly narrowed eyes. I take a deep breath and pursue my confession.

First, I tell Cindy about my five-part patterns: phases, pyramids, and parks. Next, I explain how I line up objects in the corners of my vision, my colour associations, the invisible lines I draw and redraw, the steps I count, the underwater songs I sing – all my exhausting rituals. And about how I gap out sometimes. I tell her I’m scared that I must not stop at any cost, that even if I wanted to I wouldn’t know how.

More and more it feels like if I stop I’ll die. I know it’s ridiculous, but I can’t shake it.

Cindy’s posture unblocks a place of safety. The way she faces me as she leans on the couch seems to say, It’s okay, to validate what I’m going through, to encourage me to lay down my story without a word from her. She implants the embryo of a belief that one day I’ll be able to occupy an unbroken, uninsulated body, an undivided land where thoughts and emotions and sensations can circulate freely, simmer over a low fire without ever boiling over. This moment of compassion is all the attention I need in the world. My confidences flow forth, like a creek swelling into a stream and then a river.

Cindy tells me Joey Ramone has a similar condition – she read about it in Rolling Stone and will lend me the article when she finds it. Joey Ramone takes us to Pet Sematary, first the song and then the movie, and then to other Stephen King books. Cindy has read most of them in English, while I’ve only read a few, but I still feel a burst of pride. She can quote lines by heart, sum up scenes in a handful of words. I’m fascinated by her spiralling memory, the way so many unrelated things tie together in the weft of her complex, laid-back personality. As we spend more time together, her boundless appetite for the world opens to me. When we hit on the film Christine, another vivid memory seizes me. I gap out again. As always, Cindy reads my mind.

Did they bring your dad’s car back, after the accident?

Yeah. But I never saw it. Daniel sent it to the junkyard.

The TV goes black for a moment, and the living room is splashed brown by the light filtering in through the basement windows, small rectangles on the upper reaches of the walls. Seven o’clock strikes upstairs, and the credits of the MuchMusic show roll across the screen. We watch in silence as a veejay in a blue suede jacket presents the week’s first new release. The video opens with sepia-toned images: a basketball court in a gym, morose cheerleaders, a janitor dancing with his mop, a crowd of students in the stands. By the second chorus, we’re sitting on the edge of the couch, poised to jump up into the cathode-ray mosh pit that has hijacked the living room.

Cindy breaks our speechlessness.

Fuck …

Right?

The singer’s left-handed.

His voice is sick!

The fucking drummer’s sick.

And those anarchy-sign tank tops.

Fuck …

Fuck …

When the video ends, we’re standing in front of the TV with clenched fists.

The blue suede veejay announces that the band is playing at Foufounes Électriques in Montreal on September 21. Cindy seems to know the venue. It’s on Sainte-Catherine Street, which I know is downtown, though I’ve only ever gone there with my parents, when we used to visit my grandparents on the West Island. So, before they died, when I wasn’t even eight years old.

I want to see that show.

You have to be eighteen. I might get in, but you probably won’t. She’s not making fun of me, and I don’t take it that way. Cindy is sixteen and I’m still fourteen. It’s fine.

* * *

Friday, September 20, 1991

Straight ahead to the southwest, the sun comes crashing down on Mitchelltown. I’m riding my bike along Mooney Boulevard, counting the allowances I’ll have to save to buy a skateboard. I haven’t gotten a cent since my father died. Four Fridays: twenty dollars. I’d hoped my mom would remember.

I’m heading back from the skate park, set on asking her for my allowance. It’s going to be awkward, but I need the money. It was embarrassing not being able to keep hanging out with Binette, Ouellet, Doyon, and Veilleux because I didn’t have enough to buy a can of beer from the corner store that doesn’t ID us and go play a few games at the arcade.

I had a chat with Cindy, proud when she came over to say hi, since she was more focused on nailing her tricks than socializing with the other guys. We talked about Nevermind, which now lived permanently in her Walkman. I wanted to tell her how I’d held my ground with Provost after school, but instead indulged my fantasy that she could somehow read it in my eyes or in some new thrumming of my being, that I owed this victory over Provost to her, that so much of the air only now reaching my lungs was freed by the explosive charge her presence detonated against the prison walls of my life.

I race like the wind down Mitchell Hill, hunched low over my ten-speed’s handlebars with my head between my shoulders. The game is to build up enough speed to coast all the way to my front door. I win.

My mother is in the kitchen, covering the meal she’d made in plastic wrap. Daniel and Nathalie were supposed to come over for dinner, but they cancelled. Her jawline is drawn taut, eyes rimmed with garnet. Her dark brown hair (black Irish, like Enya, she’d say), styled in a loose bowl cut, is fading into shades of grey. She moves slowly, as if guided by some crude remote control held somewhere far away. That’s when I see the extent of my mother’s loneliness, infinitely deeper than my own. What did she leave behind, at twenty, to marry my father?

From what I’ve pieced together, my parents’ story starts in the outer Montreal borough of Ville Saint-Laurent. My father was part of the first cohort to attend the free public junior colleges that opened across Quebec in the 1960s. Early scenes: evenings spent dancing downtown, catching English-language movies at the theatre, a popcorn stand at Expo 67. Then the picture blurs – my mom pregnant with Daniel, my dad having to wait until he turned eighteen to get married and dropping out of his vocational program – but which program? Then back to his hometown to work in the mines. A town my mom had never been to. From Expo 67’s Man and His World to the underground man. My mother’s journey reads like a tale of woe.

Want me to heat some up for you?

Sure. Mom, I was wondering, um, about my allowance … Uh, I need it for … this thing at school …

My mother trundles over to the entryway and reaches into her purse. She tells me she has to go to the bank. She hands me five red bills: ten dollars. Two robins peck at the grass before a tourmaline sky with the word Canada overlaid like a nuclear disaster.

The robins’ puffed-out breasts remind me what I came here for, beyond hoping to collect my dues. I need Poulie’s bracelet, which I’m going to return. His memory hangs on me like a rope holding me back. I no longer know what to do with his memory, can’t figure out how to hold it. What is a best friend? Do I have a best friend? Do I have friends, period? Boys, girls – who will it be, now that there’s no Charlélie at the pool, no father to come inspect my room, no more summer days of going out into the woods. None of my sets can embrace an absence, a wavering. My best friend said goodbye and checked out. He gave me a girl’s bracelet, and I kept it hidden. I no longer want to carry any of this, I want to fly away.

In front of Charlélie’s house, the ever-handsome Pit Poulin sets down his glass of wine and comes over to greet me. He’s wearing socks and sandals. It’s hard to see him again. I often go out of my way to avoid Coleraine Street and the freshwater spring. Pit’s bushy red moustache smiles out at me, his eyes are dusky. He speaks softly to me, places his hand behind my head. I hold back tears. He speaks softly to me. I say No thanks to a bite to eat, something to drink, some oil for my bike chain. I shake my head and tell him I’d like to see Camille.

Of course, pal, she’s just inside. Go right on in.

Camille Fugère spotted me through the window and opens the door right away. The house still smells fresh, citrusy. Something to eat, a drink?

No again. I stammer nervously.

It’s just that I found something of Charlélie’s. But I think it might really be yours. And I wanted to give it back to you.

Camille’s hands speak before she does, clasping and unclasping in a little prayer. She won’t be taking back the bracelet. Her bracelet.

Charlélie asked me if he could have it. To give to you.

I know what she’s trying to ask me. What has taken hold of me, what is it that haunts me, won’t leave me in peace? It isn’t a question, since the same loss haunts us both. She doesn’t say, He loved you very much. I don’t tell her, My life has been empty since that day. She doesn’t answer, Mine too, and I don’t say, Same. Her hands tremble a little, her lips pressed tight, sealed. She looks at me the way you might try to pacify a cat before the vet puts it to sleep.

Is there anything you’d like for your birthday?

I hear myself say, A skateboard?

Claire’s smile is a dam against the rashness rising up in my blood.

Outside, Pit has sat back down on his porch chair. When I close the door, a few birds fly away from the tree in front of the house. I follow them with my eyes. His glass is empty, his expression gloomy.

Don’t be a stranger, Steve. Come see us again soon. We love you.

Pit has always spoken to me softly.

I get on my bike, pianissimo. Night has now fully fallen. The stream in my eyes and the amber stone on my wrist gleam under the street lamp’s dense halo.