Chapter 5: Disaster Scrapbook - Asbestos

July 1986

Charlélie Poulin kept bringing it up. It bugged me how he never let anything go. Acting like I’d been too chicken to go into Monsieur Joly’s garage.

I wasn’t too scared to climb through the broken window. I just didn’t want to. We found enough anyway. Those cardboard tubes and big sheets of plastic are awesome!

But he just never stopped, kept coming back to those fabrics. Well, we couldn’t even start thinking about cushions for the fort until we’d waterproofed the roof and the walls. The window’s too high, and it’s broken anyway. I didn’t want to go back on Sunday. And I was sure it’d be emptied any day now. He’s dead, I kept saying, in the hope Charlélie might take away some larger meaning I was myself struggling to find. Instead Charlélie just mocked me.

If you’re too chicken to give me a boost, I’ll ask Ouellet.

He could tell he’d hurt my feelings. Our forts were for the two of us, not our friends. That had been the rule, since the second one.

I’d built the first myself, when I was seven. It took most of that summer, working on my own. I imagined that my fort was a real cabin in the woods, where I would have everything I needed, a world unto myself. The cabin could make my father disappear, and my mom could still come by once in a while, maybe even my brother. I’d have liked to stay out there through all kinds of weather, but my fort didn’t even have a roof. When it rained I was stuck in the house, with only my bedroom door to protect me.

That summer when Poulie moved into the neighbourhood, when I was eight years old, we’d built two forts, much more elaborate than my first. We learned by leaps and bounds, and Charlélie threw himself into the task with an ardour I’d never seen before.

We were a perfect match: I the kind to mull over my obsessions; he the type to get things done at any cost. Over many days unfailingly spent in each other’s company, I’d learned that, for Poulie, a fort was a never-ending project; for Poulie, no desire ever went unfulfilled.

* * *

June 29, the year before

Since the end of third grade, my morning ritual had never changed: I’d down a bowl of Corn Flakes or Rice Krispies, catch an episode of The Mysterious Cities of Gold on TV, get dressed, pick out a Tintin to stuff in my backpack, and jump on my bike and head off for the morning. That particular day was a Saturday, so I could hope to run into Pépin, who wouldn’t be at science camp. For a week now I’d found myself so alone every day I was starting to regret not accepting my mom’s offer to sign me up.

I rode my BMX toward Alfred Street, popping the occasional half-hearted wheelie along Black Lake Road. It had rained a few hours in the afternoon the day before, and crusts of mud had formed along the sides of the road grates. I stopped – meaning of course that I slammed on my brakes to leave a yellow skid mark on the asphalt – and came to a rest by a big dried-out puddle to see if I could break off a ‘pizza,’ as the neighbourhood kids called the slabs of mud that dried to a surprising hardness here due to the fibrous grey dust that flittered down from the sky when it rained. I’d knelt on the ground, which was quite warm even at this early morning hour, the better to peel the pizza off the tandoor that had baked it, and started cutting away a large pie with my fingers, working them in where the crust seemed hardest. Then, lying on my stomach, I slid my two hands beneath the disc, palms up and fingers spread as wide as they would go. The further you managed to slip your hands through the viscous matter below the crust, the greater the circumference of your pizza. I performed the delicate operation, this pleural detachment, with surgical precision, as if someone’s life depended on it, my exertion apparent in the sweat dripping down my forehead into my eyes.

To my amazement, I had prised free the largest dried-mud pizza that the neighbourhood had ever seen. By shimmying my elbows back toward my knees, I’d managed to push myself upright and now stood straight as a choirboy proffering a communion wafer worthy of St. Peter’s Basilica. With no one here to share my joy, my stunned grin did not reach full fruition, but in the here and now, my triumph was complete.

The next step was to smash the crust as cleanly as possible. The four methods, in order of rashness, were on the ground, against a wall, on a car, or in someone’s face (or back). Of course I’d never have the guts for the last two, and there were no walls within throwing range. To cast my disc against the ground without a single witness would be anticlimactic after the heroic efforts that had gone into the making of my road-pizza. But what if there were a fifth option, heretofore unknown to me but eminently worth a try: to catapult the mucky flying saucer skyward. With great care I plotted out its trajectory, imagining the necessary force of propulsion to be a strong but steady, drawn-out push, not unlike kick-starting a dirt bike. At T-minus zero, I lowered my two forearms, leaned back, and launched my vessel with a controlled force such that in its upward motion my asbestos pizza shattered in my arms, with many fragments deviating off course and into my facial orifices.

In my deflated joy I was wracked by wet coughs that did nothing to expectorate the shame from my lungs. With the sole thought of getting the hell out of there, I ran my hands over my face and through my hair, jumped on my BMX, and rode up Alfred Street, off the seat the whole way, a piteous snivelling thing heralded by the crescendoing cicadas. I didn’t stop until I’d reached Pépin’s house.

My God, Steve, did you sleep in a ditch? No, Pascal isn’t here today. He’s in Disraeli with his grandparents for the weekend.

That soul-crushing start to my day came with a single consolation, my geographical position: from this high up on Alfred Street, I could easily ride over and bomb down the steep hill on Mitchell Road. But then where? Binette lived on that hill, but that would mean braking halfway down, and I was haunted by a pessimistic certainty that he wouldn’t be home either. At that point in my day, and in this early summer, I would have taken the hill with my eyes closed, just to see.

As I rode down the big hill that gives Mitchelltown its name, two heavy tears traced runnels in the brownish-grey crust on my face. I could barely sniffle through the crud in my nose. I turned left onto Coleraine Street. A few toddlers and their moms were in the little playground with swings at the bottom of the street. Pride prevented me from stopping there to splash my face with water from the fountain, which in any event sputtered out slow and lukewarm, like pee. Further along Coleraine, where the street grew shadier and the houses fancier, I might be lucky enough to clean up my face in privacy, at the water source we called the Frenchman’s Spring.

This incongruous tap, set a ways off the street, rose up without rhyme or reason from the ground in front of a beautiful multi-storey home behind tall trees. In a gesture of anonymous generosity now lost to time, someone had undertaken to make this cool, delicious underground spring water available to local residents and anyone else privy to the secret. The Frenchman had kept up the tradition. He bled the pipes to keep them from freezing in winter. The secret was not as well guarded as the mysterious cities of gold; you’d sometimes see cars lined up to fill their bottles, and every day people would draw gallons from the free spring on Coleraine Street.

But the area was deserted when I got there. I turned on the tap and a strong flow of cold silky water gushed out. That was when I burst into tears.

I was hungry, downtrodden, all alone for a week now. I hoped this outpouring of water would drown out my sobs, but no matter, I entrusted to this benevolent spring all my sorrows, despair, and loneliness. I plunged my hands into the flow and started scrubbing frantically, first my hands and then my face, which must surely be crimson from crying, and then my forehead and ears and hair, my hateful, ugly, straight, straw-coloured hair, and my neck, my skinny wrists and forearms so pale my veins showed through, and then my knees, my calves dotted with short ochre hairs, my ankles, and finally my filthy sandalled feet and toes. I ended my great ablution with my cheek against the tap and eyelids closed tight as I drank down great drafts.

I was drenched, I was shivering – but I’d recovered enough of my composure to get back in the saddle. The plan was to keep riding down Coleraine Street, turn right on Therrien, and then take Black Lake Road, ditch my bike at home, grab something from the fridge, and spend the rest of the day in my fort in the pine forest, where I could read and reread and reread The Shooting Star.

But then a white cube van appeared in front of me, parked slantwise across the road behind a belt of heat waves shimmering silver on the hot summer streets. A mirage.

It was past Mikaël and Cindy Drouin’s, two houses down. The truck, a long white box backing onto 1354 Coleraine Street, was parked with its ramp out. People walked back and forth through this unexpected scene. It took a while to realize that the truck was in my path, and to start braking – all business now, no thought of skids – but then my right foot in its wet sandal lost its grip and slipped off the pedal like a stomp, throwing me off balance and slamming my chest into the handlebars. Since I’d already slowed to a Boy Scout’s pace, I just fell limply to the ground along with my bike. No serious impact, no crash or great pain. Ridiculous, mostly: I’d toppled like a toddler.

I lay on the hot asphalt with my eyes closed for a moment.

I sensed a man coming over to me.

Took a little tumble, eh? Don’t worry, buddy, it happens to everyone. What’s your name?

Steve Dubois.

Go around to the backyard, Steve. We’ve got some chairs out on the patio, Charlélie should be here any minute. Take a seat if you want, and I’ll be right back with a Band-Aid for your knee, okay? I’ll grab your bike.

Such a calm, forthright invitation. Safe. I bet they were Block Parents.

I stood there, not stunned but slightly numb, exhausted from everything I had been through, and cast a red-eyed gaze on these people’s new house – a pretty one, white and blue. That’s when he appeared on the front porch: a boy around my age with a playful air. From the split second when our eyes met and the way he nodded his chin as I came into view, I knew this was the friend I’d been desperately awaiting.

Hey.

Hey.

Moments later, I found myself folded into a big brown Adirondack chair on the patio, with a drinking box of sweet apple juice in hand and Charlélie Poulin in an identical chair to my right. I shared this simple moment with him intensely, our closeness as effortless and epic as the coming together of two great beings – whales, cumulus clouds, nebulae.

What grade are you going into? he asked.

Grade 4.

Me too!

Which class? There’s two.

I don’t know.

Don’t worry, said the boy’s father now. I’ll sort you out, Steve. You did some damage to that knee! How far away do you live? If you like, Camille can drive you home in a bit. I have to keep an eye on the movers.

No, I’m fine. Thanks very much for the bandage, Mr. Poulin.

And to Charlélie: Do you have a bike?

Yup.

* * *

July 1986

Lying on our stomachs on the floorboards of our fort, propped up on our rough, sticky elbows, we were adding fresh clippings to our scrapbook. Charlélie had salvaged Monsieur Joly’s obituary from the Courrier Frontenac. His death was not, strictly speaking, a disaster, but we still wanted to put it in. I wrote in his date of death in black pen under the obituary, June 24, 1986. I had smart handwriting, my teacher had told me, when I’d handed in the year’s first dictation.

We flipped through the pages, reviewing our compilation of unfortunate events. Poulie squealed in delight as he discovered each catastrophe anew, working his way backwards through the scrapbook. My curiosity was of a darker cast. I was the one who took the album home for safekeeping after our days in the pine forest, hiding it in among my books where I was pretty sure my father wouldn’t pry. When it came to my room, my dad cared about only two things: making sure my bed was made perfectly every day, with the tight hospital corners he’d learned as a cadet, and that my window was never to be opened in winter. We aren’t trying to heat the whole country, Steve. Are you going to pay the heating bill next month? So the windows stayed closed, even as I suffocated at night in the stifling heat and had scaly, itchy ankles and forearms until spring. Still, always best to be cautious, secretive, an impenetrable fortress.

Two double-page spreads of headlines preceded the death of Monsieur Joly: Red Nuke Disaster; Serious Fire at Soviet Nuclear Plant; Nuclear Disaster: Moscow Calls for Help; Chernobyl Reactor Catches Fire; Kremlin Reports 2 Dead and 197 Wounded; Radon Cloud Sweeps Northern Europe; Soviets Admit Damage from Nuclear Accident; Moscow Claims Nuclear Power Plant Now Under Control. Poulie would have liked more pictures – all the papers ran the same stock photos from before the explosion – but I was overwhelmed by the headlines themselves, and certain paragraphs whose superlatives sent shivers down my spine: Soviet Atomic Energy Minister Andronik Petrossian admits to Western diplomats that the Chernobyl disaster was the most serious accident in the history of civil nuclear power; the quantity of Strontium-90 and Caesium-137 released in the accident was equivalent to a 30-megaton atomic bomb, two thousand times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima, according to American nuclear physicist Ted Taylor. Not one but two reactors have melted, exploded, and are burning. You can’t imagine what’s going on here, all this death and fire.

These passages made my irises itch. The double-page spread that preceded it featured two clippings from late March – Congo: Fighter Jet Crashes in Densely Populated Neighbourhood and 166 Feared Dead in Fiery Crash of Mexicana Flight 940 to Los Angeles.

On March 15, 1986, Pit Poulin’s Saturday paper informed us that Halley’s Comet, Indeed, Has Heart ‘Black as Coal.’ Like many others, Charlélie and I had been alive to the possibility of impending catastrophe, but the comet had not strayed from its orbit. Still, its destructive potential had whetted our interest. Hadn’t a comet, albeit a much larger one, caused the last mass extinction event? We’d talked about the comet a lot in class, right after the holidays, but our two-class art and science project on the asteroid had been abruptly cancelled in February. No one really protested, though Charlélie and I were disappointed to cancel the little puppet play we’d been planning. Poulie’s dinosaur figurines were to have been caught without warning when the Chicxulub meteorite crashed to earth in the Yucatán.

Among the English-language magazines my mom sub scribed to was the Plain Truth. Its cover story, Halley’s Comet: A Galactic Omen?, had so impressed me that I asked her to translate some bits where the English was beyond me. She struggled to convey the sense of the word omen, vacillating between an analogy with weather forecasts and a movie she remembered seeing just before I was born. It was called Galactic Omen – no, she recalled, just The Omen. The title in French, La malédiction, was more like a curse, which got me thinking. The moment the new issue of the Plain Truth dropped through our mail slot, I cut out the Halley’s Comet article for our scrapbook. My favourite passage gave examples of comets in history: Genghis Khan claimed the heavenly traveller as his own special star, and during its spectacular appearance in 1222, he pushed his Mongol hordes across southeast Europe, massacring millions.

Since Halley’s Comet was not visible in the northern hemisphere, our teacher’s awkward attempts to spark our interest were met with silence.

Before turning back the next page in our scrapbook, Charlélie and I paused. We both remembered.

We’ll read these ones last. Save them for later.

Okay.

We skipped over a few pages, landing on January 16, 1986: Singer Daniel Balavoine Among Five Killed in Paris–Dakar Helicopter Crash. This particular clipping was a bone of contention. I didn’t see why we should put it in the scrapbook, but Bala -voine’s name had caught Poulie’s eye – You’ve never heard of Johnny Rockfort? I figured out it was an album. The tape was in heavy rotation at Poulie’s house, one of Pit and Camille’s favourites. When I asked my father if he knew the singer who’d died in the helicopter crash, he responded with a disdainful indifference and said something about dying in Africa and getting eaten that somehow filled me with shame – at his answer, at my question.

As we worked our way back to the beginning of the scrap-book, we skimmed articles on earthquakes in the Northwest Territories (no deaths), the hijacking of Aeroflot Flight 101 en route to China (all crew safe and sound), landslides in Puerto Rico (180 dead and a headline that made our blood run cold: Children’s Drawings Said to Predict Disaster Three Days Before It Struck), the mid-flight explosion of Air India Flight 182 on the Montreal–Bombay route (329 dead, including 80 children), rioting hooligans – another word my mom struggled to translate for me – at a soccer game in Belgium (39 dead, 450 injured). On the very first pages, the clipping that opened our scrapbook – Powerful Tornado Hits Barrie, Ontario: Over 200 Homes Uninhabitable (8 dead, 155 injured).

Then, slowly, Charlélie flipped back to the forbidden pages. We reread them in silence, murmuring an occasional word or two out loud. They were dated January 29 and 30, 1986.

* * *

Morning, Tuesday, January 28, 1986

The two fourth-grade classes came together for special activities once in a while, less often as the year progressed due to our manifest unruliness. These manoeuvres entailed multiple stages of planning. Students had to be psychologically prepared and taught how to behave. A classroom had to be chosen, each visiting student’s chair had to be safely transported, and each pupil assigned a partner. The instructions – and consequences for failure to heed them – were drilled into us several days ahead of time.

The activities in question ranged widely; there were art projects (guaranteed chaos), science projects (the good old herbarium), and guest speakers often ill-suited to our age (the year before, they’d decided we were ripe for a talk about muscular dystrophy). Every once in a while we lucked out with a movie.

But the occasion that brought us together that morning was of a different tenor: a historic, scientific, anthropological, and human saga for the ages.

What mattered most to us kids was of course who we’d be partnered with. The most frequent method had a military efficiency: the visiting student in Position 1, Row A, would be summoned to the desk of the home student in Position 6, Row D, while 2A proceeded to 5D, 3A to 4D, 4A to 3D, 5A to 2D, 6A to 1D, and so on for rows B, C, and D. When a more ambitious art or science project was tacked onto the activity, requiring work outside school hours, the teachers would pair up the students based partly on where we lived. It must have been a monumental headache, but it didn’t matter to me, overjoyed as I was to welcome Charlélie to my desk.

Amid the squawks and clanging of shifting chairs as students found their partners, I waited patiently for my best friend. A few desks over, poor Julie Madore from the other class stood next to her assigned partner, Provost, who responded to her look of horror by ramping up his crude antics. In front of me, I could see Yannick Poulin’s ears redden at the arrival of his smiling partner, Hélène Grondin. (At school he was usually called Fat Poulin, one reason Poulie was often Petit Poulin.) Nathalie seemed happy to be seated with Mélanie, the other Nathalie indifferent to being partnered with the other Julie, Dereck was fine with Cloutier, and so on. Charlélie at last made his way over to my desk. When our eyes met, the look on our faces could be found in the dictionary under bliss.

I couldn’t wait to show Poulie my collections in my desk, just like I could never shut up about them once I got going. Since I knew both teachers would start shouting at the class to be quiet any second, I hurried to lift my desktop to show Char-lélie my prettiest rocks, sorted by colour in little sandwich bags, along with the stash of pop-can tabs I was saving for the muscular dystrophy foundation, as we’d been asked to do by the guest speaker the previous year. I’d amassed these treasures in the fall from around the schoolyard.

From the moment Charlélie set his chair down next to mine, it was like our first meeting in his family’s Adirondack chairs all over again. We had no idea that January 28, 1986, was destined to go down in history. But history was unfolding before our eyes.

Our initial interest in the launch was the teacher on the shuttle – we called her the space teacher, though her first name was Christa, and her last was proving hard for our teacher to pronounce. More than once I had to stop myself from piping up to share the ear for English I’d picked up from my mother: McAuliffe, muh-CAW-Liff. But I’d long ago learned that in this class, and every other, I imagined, it was unwise to display unexpected knowledge if I wanted to keep Provost off my back. Otherwise he’d come knocking the second the recess bell rang, and use one of the many means at his disposal to make me pay for failing to remain invisible. I certainly wasn’t going to risk being called an ‘English cucumber’ by an illiterate bruiser.

The space teacher, we’d been taught, had been appointed by the President of the United States himself, to represent the importance of educators in the space race. She would conduct experiments aboard the shuttle, observe Halley’s Comet, and even teach her students two lessons from space. Like the high school Christa taught at in New Hampshire, and hundreds of others across North America, our whole school would be watching the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger, carrying the first civilian in history to travel into space and her six crewmates.

Since early January, Poulie and I had scoured La Presse every day, along with my mother’s Time magazines, to learn more about NASA, Cape Canaveral, the Space Shuttle, and its previous missions. Of course we also reread Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon, and compared Professor Calculus’s X-FLR 6 rocket with the pictures in the newspapers. The Challenger launch had been postponed every day for going on a week, and our anticipation was now at fever pitch. Pit Poulin’s account of the misadventures of the Apollo 13 mission had also left its mark on our imaginations, prompting Charlélie to pronounce the tenth Challenger mission seriously risky.

In front of the blackboard, the TV on its khaki metal wheeled stand had been showing the same footage for at least an hour, and our two teachers were struggling to keep the eyes of around forty dissolute students on the blackboard. Then suddenly things started moving on the screen. The announcer told the audience to stand by for liftoff. Charlélie and I were riveted by the massive tower to the left of the white-winged shuttle, the twin solid rocket boosters flanking its enormous orange fuel tank. The ticker at the bottom of the screen read Kennedy Space Center.

Think it’ll be too high to see when the boosters drop off? whispered Charlélie.

I don’t know, I whispered back.

11:38 a.m. Close-up of the main engine, which would start up at T-minus five. Four, three, two, one, and the shuttle lifted off with an unfathomable slowness. Next it turned upside down, as if to show us its belly, spitting a long trail of fire from its rockets into the perfect blue American sky.

I was about to ask Charlélie if he thought the crew had lost consciousness, like in Tintin, when a large white-and-red ball shook the screen. My God, said the announcer, there’s been an explosion. The next shot showed an elongated Y of white smoke stretched across the sky. The elation of the moment dissipated into confusion.

Over the growing din of the classroom, and the cries of other classes that reached us from the hallway beyond, I heard the announcer clearly say, I hope they were able to survive, and then a few seconds later, We must assume that the crew is not alive. I repeated it calmly to Charlélie, who was stunned. The crew isn’t alive, they’re dead. He said it.

I looked over at our two teachers, who were talking privately, mouths agape, perhaps debating whether to keep watching or turn off the TV. For long minutes, debris spewing white smoke floated in the sky in an eerie, desolate daytime fireworks display.

At 11:45 a.m. the lunch bell rang, and many students cried out in surprise. Without a word, both teachers nodded to dismiss our classes for lunch.

A few weeks later, our twin-class arts and science project on Halley’s Comet was cancelled.

* * *

February 1986

I called it! Remember?

Poulie hadn’t brought up his prediction since the explosion.

Yeah.

The newspaper clippings in our disaster scrapbook bore headlines like Shuttle Explodes: Teacher, Crew Killed Seconds into Flight; Nation’s Cheers Turn to Horror as Challenger Explodes in Flight; Challenger Crew: Exact Time of Death of Seven Astronauts Still Uncertain; Space Teacher’s Parents and Students Present at Challenger Explosion. Charlélie’s face clouded over. How could this tragedy be affecting him so deeply? How could he possibly be to blame for the failure of two seals in a rocket booster?

There was ice on the motor, they –

It’s not that, he broke in. It’s just … I kept thinking there would be a disaster. I thought about it all the time in my head.

Yeah but – that disaster, exactly?

I don’t know.

It’s not your fault.

I know. But I’m not really into our scrapbook anymore. He paused. I’m hot.

Poulie leapt to his feet, grabbed his bag, and threw back the cabin’s tarps like curtains. Our sweat was wicked up toward a cool elsewhere, into the pine forest. He started climbing down the tall pine tree, branch by branch.

I’m going for a bike ride. You coming?

I closed the scrapbook and slipped it into my bag. Suddenly I was the one feeling bad, about collecting these disasters to satisfy my need for order, about being interested only in stories that end in calamity. I’d had no idea that Poulie’s premonition had been eating away at him like that. And I was consumed at all times by thoughts of disasters of the kind that filled the pages of the scrapbook – our school bus flipping over at the bottom of Mitchell Hill; finding my mom dead on the couch one morning; my father accidentally killing me.

But of course it was something altogether different when one of these obsessions came true. A moment of combustion, then flames. Plumbing the depths of my morbid compulsions, I’d always been sure that the fire would never reach me, as if some fireproof material insulated me, or these tics of mine somehow protected me from danger, each disaster scenario a firewall against the worst that might befall us.