Chapter 16: Still Water - Asbestos

Sunday, October 5, 1991

A lagoon of girls and boys, dying lotus flowers in the fiery rays of sunlight piercing the amber glass skylights of the municipal pool. It’s 10 a.m., time to get my Bronze Cross.

Daphne is hyperventilating, clinging to the edge of the pool.

Melissa is sitting next to the pool, casually massaging a cramp in her thigh, staring at me with her dark green eyes.

Jacinthe is treading water, teeth chattering. Hypothermia.

Iris is floating on her back, her eyes open and long arms undulating in an approximate M. Her navy-blue Lycra breasts bob at the surface to the spasmodic rhythm of her breathing. I have no idea what condition she’s supposed to be simulating, but she’s breathing.

Marguerite is crouched on the ten-foot diving board, clasping her wrist. A fracture or a sprain.

In the middle of the pool, Jasmin is open-mouthed in an absurd expression of fear, half-heartedly simulating the early stages of drowning.

Olivier and Chloé are horsing around while they bounce up and down on the three-foot diving board.

Furthest away is Sasha, whose body is straight as a nail but bent near the top, only shoulders and neck visible above the surface.

This is my test. Our two instructors and my classmates who are not playing casualties are lined up behind me like rushes at the water’s edge; my result is in their hands. My job is to administer first aid – set priorities, save lives. I signal to Daphne to put her hands over her mouth and nose. Communication. I shout to Marguerite to sit down and wait where she is, and then to Olivier and Chloé to get off the diving board. Caution, prevention. Shiny black eyebrows hem in Melissa’s insistent gaze. Her mouth opens slightly. Black lines dance in the aqueous humour of my eyes. My breathing gets heavier. I tell her to relax her leg, then I direct my eyes toward the water.

Silence. I enter the water in a flawless dive, no splash and barely even a ripple, only after first throwing a red rescue buoy out in front of me. I cut through the water with a measured crawl, keeping my head above the surface and giving an extra push on every fifth stroke. I make my way over to Iris and hand her the buoy along with brief instructions and words of encouragement. Vigilance. I keep swimming. Jacinthe can wait, she’s moving, but I still make sure to let her know that I see her, and I’m here. Presence. I sacrifice Jasmin, who’s too far away. There’s not much I can do for him, and I realize this will cost me points: the buoy should have gone to him. But you can’t approach a drowning person – panic can kill you both. Avoid traps like a wily animal. Experience.

I head toward Sasha Poissant.

I’ve often caught myself watching Sasha, who is top of our class, during our sessions. Such a caring yet meticulous way of intervening, such quiet charisma, such perfect strokes to slip through the water as if it were oil, with a frog kick reminiscent of the fluid, powerful swishing of a mermaid’s tail. Sasha always seems to be smiling – not unlike how I sing or count, to drown myself in oblivion.

My casualty floats perfectly still. I approach and ever so gently turn the body over. We slip into an unprecedented intimacy. I hold Sasha horizontally, with a hand supporting their neck as my legs tread water in the depths below. I’m struck by my casualty’s impassive salmon-coloured eyelids, lips mauve like a languid sky, arms with tan lines. My thumb opens their mouth, exposing the tongue. My fingers do not register breathing. Sasha has to be resuscitated.

I place a hand on Sasha’s forehead, which opens the jaw.

Our bodies arch in anticipation of this first aid.

I feel my innocence draining from my body, depleting me down to my very cells, as I transfer gallons of warmth from the depths of my lungs into Sasha’s. Our mouths come together in search of survival.

* * *

Later that day

Sometimes you have to burn a little gas to let off steam.

After resuscitating Sasha, assisting Iris, and calming Jacinthe; after successfully managing the entire simulation; after passing the breath-holding tests at the bottom of the pool; after recovering the weights that had been placed there; after completing the stride jump from the one-foot and four-foot diving boards; after taking notes on and discussing the manoeuvres of my classmates; after receiving my Bronze Cross certification – with distinction – from the two instructors; after all the others have received their certificates; after a long shower in a locker room where I – where we all – bask in tranquil exhaustion; and after eating the sandwich I’d made myself, in the outer aisle of lockers where we keep our coats and shoes; after the instructors say goodbye to me, and after my future lifeguard colleagues leave the premises, one by one or in small groups; and after Sasha is whisked away in a waiting white car, I find myself outside feeling naked, new, bleached clean.

In my ears, a faint ringing from the depths of the pool, played like a whistle by a soft fickle wind. The sky is light grey, the promised sun hidden behind a milky veil.

Daniel dropped me off, but he’s at work now. I could have called Cindy from the pay phone to ask if she could pick me up, in the hope of spending the rest of the afternoon with her, but I forgot my quarter at home. I’ll have to walk. I have my Walkman to ease my boredom and my tinnitus. As I walk along Mooney Boulevard, the sun comes searing into sight over the tailings heaps to my right. The wind is off its chain.

I’m in high spirits, as if drunk on pure oxygen, and I don’t yet feel that emptiness moving to reclaim the space deep inside me. I’m Bronze Cross–certified. Before long, I’ll have a lifeguarding job, and the regular pay that comes with it. I need to look up some phone numbers for swimming pools in Montreal, get my hands on the Yellow Pages. Maybe at the bus station?

I feel the arousing adult power of my success. My lifeguard certification has an aftertaste, something like Sasha’s breath intermingled with my own in our downy mouths, those cool soft lips.

I replay the scene fifty times: two breaths – the maximum prescribed, for evaluation purposes – each one followed by a long exhalation against my cheek, the strength flowing through my legs, which lift us up without any effort on my part, the warmth of Sasha’s neck in my palm, and our mouths, again and again.

I’m not denying that I didn’t kiss Sasha. And I’m not denying that I didn’t actually resuscitate Sasha. Yet what I did still feels real, somehow overwhelming.

It’s as real as the friendly kiss Cindy planted on my cheek in Montreal a few days ago.

I’m on my way to find Cindy, and in this empty expanse of time I let my fantasies play out in my mind over and over again, our mouths over and over again. I also let my tears – tears of hot euphoria and fluster and wayward sensuality – run down my cheeks, where they evaporate into the October air. For a fleeting moment I allow myself to love and to hope, with no need to know the what or the who of it.

When I get to the Drouins’ house on Coleraine Street, just two doors down from Poulie’s, past the tap where I take a few gulps of ice-cold water, Raymond answers the door. Cindy isn’t there, he thinks she went out with a friend. Then he awkwardly offers his condolences – belatedly because, under the circumstances, I couldn’t be there for your father’s funeral, you know. I do know; I don’t care. He says something about my dirt bike, and I can’t bring myself to care about his small talk either. I thank him and leave. No way am I going to let myself be sucked into thinking tender thoughts about my brave and loving asbestos-mining father, how tragic his death, how proud of me he would have been, how he must be watching over us from on high. Please. The man’s death is a joke, no matter how he went. It makes no difference if he was sucked up into the sky by a tornado while driving down the highway to buy a dirt bike for his youngest son, or if he deliberately drove into a concrete pillar, or for that matter if he got crushed by a mining truck on his very last day of work six months from now, laid off by Raymond Drouin, corporate counsel. My father’s death will always be a joke. And is what’s left for me here below any different? My loneliness, my anger, a Bronze Cross that won’t save anyone, and a stupid dirt bike.

I try to contain my volatility until I get home, but joy is a gas, it burns away and leaves rifts that sting, a laughing gas.

My mother is in the living room, my mother is at the piano. I can’t remember the last time I heard her play. She hasn’t forgotten her signature piece, ‘Clair de Lune.’ I sit down on the couch.

There’s something moving about the sight of her hands on the keys. They seem to have a life of their own. Her hands seem alive in a way her face does not. We have to leave this place, get away from this hole that is sucking the life from us, extinguishing us.

We sit together in silence for a moment.

That was beautiful, I say to her at last. I haven’t heard you play in a long time.

I used to play that one for you when you were in my belly.

I smile at her as lovingly as I can. She can tell from my eyes that I passed my exam, and congratulates me with a nod.

Mom, I’d be happy to move to Montreal. I don’t like it here.

She looks at me with something like confusion or dismay. Her eyebrows furrow.

Oh, dear.

The high-pitched note in my ears rises in intensity, vibrating in my head like a cool fever. I’d raised a question without thinking that I already knew all the answers. Finish high school, go to the local college, put our house on the market in this dying town. She may as well have told me to breathe in the cancer, bide my time between blasts, die. A joke, a black hole, a mass grave.

I head outside into early afternoon. In the shed on the north side of the house, the air is crisp. My helmet doesn’t have a visor and pinches a bit, and all I have for my hands is a pair of gardening gloves I spot on a shelf. I know the tank is almost full, but I still take the red-and-yellow jerry can of gas mix – thanks, Daniel – and fill it to the top. I raise the kickstand and roll my dirt bike out of the shed. The engine starts on the second kick. It’s a satisfying feeling, I have to admit.

Sometimes, Daniel said, you have to burn a little gas to let off steam.

As I set off down Black Lake Road, the engine is roaring, impossibly loud. I open the throttle to climb the small hill up to Coleraine Street – and for a split second, I imagine my bike catching air at the top of the hill, flying off and disappearing into the ether, a trail of blue smoke in my wake the sole trace of my passage. Instead, I turn right, squeeze through the open space in the fence, and let ‘er rip as I pull onto the gravel of Dostie Road. Today’s mission is to ride recklessly. Today’s mission is a game of Russian roulette. I’m up for anything, from old-school skids to driving right off the road and into a tree, from running out of gas to blowing my engine, from shedding every inhibition to giving up everything. My mission is to feel something greater than the banal death of hope.

The little XR80 feels sturdy and hugs the gravel road like a champ. I wonder if my father had time to pick up my dirt bike before his accident. Had it been tied down to the trailer? Was it blown away by the tornado? Did the whirlwind propel it high into the air before it came crashing to the ground in some field near Pierreville?

Past the Old Russian Village, I turn off the road onto the muddy, bumpy trail to the BC Mine dumps. I haven’t taken this path in years – five years, to be precise. The path has narrowed. Branches whip my helmet and shoulders and sometimes my cheeks as I power through, exhilarated by the sheer physical effort. As I emerge into a clearing, I realize where I am, at the foot of the dump that was home to our old tire graveyard.

Without even a moment’s pause, I attack. First I circle the dump, then I spot dirt-bike tracks on the ground from earlier that summer and follow them to the top. I’m there in no time. I cut the engine. Put one foot on the ground and get off my bike. My bum and thighs ache from the throbbing. I flip the kickstand down with the toe of my shoe and unscrew the gas cap with a shaky hand: the level hasn’t moved.

Atop this mountain of ashen tailings, I stand before nothing at all: a clearing below, trees all around, other tailings heaps looming in the near distance. The warm wind pelts me with dust. The sky clears. Nothing.

The graveyard at the top of the BC Mine dump is practically empty. The tires have moved on to the afterlife. Binette, Ouellet, Pépin, Péloquin, Poulie, me, and all the other miscreants whose names I’ll never know have sent all the tires in this graveyard hurtling off every which way at breakneck speed. All the way downtown.

Only two unliftable titans remain, collapsed on their sides and moulded into the grey sand of the dump as if they had somehow grown out of it. Two hands on the tire, I vault myself up onto the rubber and sit with my feet dangling. I’m the Caterpillar on his mushroom. Charlélie would have laughed and known how to take the joke further.

This would have been the perfect spot to smoke my first cigarette. I’d have pulled out a Zippo, shielding it with my free hand as I turned the flint wheel to ignite the spark and flame. I would breathe in a little cloud of burnt butane before inhaling the crackling tobacco. I would have smoked with Cindy. Through the blue smoke, Charlélie’s face would appear in her features.

I look up. Two planes have crossed paths in the sky, the long X of their contrails proof of their passage. No casualties this time. Sometimes the sky holds on to one. A Space Shuttle teacher, a child whose head got caught on a broken window. Sometimes the sky falls on us here below. Delta Charlélie Delta.

I should really carry Poulie’s photo with me everywhere. Would it be weird because the wallet is empty, not a single bill in it, nothing but the school photo of a ten-year-old boy? Imagine if Provost saw it. Or if the guys in the pool locker room found my little boy friend in my wallet. Or my father. I haven’t given myself permission to say it, not even in secret: I miss Charlélie. I haven’t even given myself permission to feel it. And no one ever mentions him anymore. Not Binette, not Ouellet, not Pépin, not Péloquin – no one but his parents, and them I avoid. They’re exactly the ones I don’t want to mourn my only friend in front of. I want to do that in the arms of someone who knows. Someone who would come back here, to this dead dump, for the same reasons, drawn by the same magnetism. But nothing happens; nothing comes back to me. Everything conspires to erase Poulie’s presence, to put it behind me: my father’s death, his tragic death, and the unspoken fact that my birthday, my existence in the world, caused his death. Unthinkable that such thoughts should overpower me now. I hated the man just as I hate his dirt bike – if I had my way, I’d blow them both up. I’d blow it all up and then I would be pulled up by a twister into the sky, smashed to pieces somewhere else – anywhere but this stifling hole.

You can’t even see downtown from here – only from the other dumps, over on Alfred Street.

I jump down from my oversized rubber seat. My sneakers are caked with grey mud, a fibrous cancerous poultice. I straddle the little Honda again. Pop on my helmet, kick-start, spark, combustion. The sun kisses my back as I set off again, heading back down the dump at full speed. Complete intoxication: I’m even more euphoric than when I left the pool, but I no longer know why. Just pure oxygen, white gold.

The sky turns pink, and afternoon gives way to evening. I burn gas all the way down Alfred Street, until I can’t hear anything anymore.

There, against the setting sun, I clearly see the Massive Attack T-shirt under a leather jacket. Same flame, same place. From a distance, in the fading light, Cindy seems to have been doubled: two black bodies with red hearts.

I’ve cut the engine apparently. I watch her from my angle, enclosed in my helmet, hidden by the sun’s glare. She’s far away, not so far away, on another landing of the dump, around where we met at the start of the summer. She’s walking with someone, they’re holding hands in the distance.

I should call out her name, wave to her, make my way toward her. Paralyzed, I count to five, set; stack up five sets, one hundred twenty-five, phase. She doesn’t seem to be alone. I don’t know. They’re leaving. The sky is darkening. What if I’m wrong, what if she hasn’t recognized me? What if she pushes me away for invading her privacy, tells me to stop stalking her? It’s true that I’ve been trying to find her since noon. I wanted to tell her that I kissed Sasha. What if she laughs at me? She’s gone, they’re gone.

So Cindy has a refuge of her own. Of course she has a life outside our twice-weekly phone routine. Friends in different scenes, parties to go to; she’s off at college, studying poli-sci and literature. When we talk on the phone, we never discuss our love lives, mostly just dissect our hatred for this town and everyone in it. I prefer our telephone conversations to any other way of being together. The physical distance between our heads, the shared fire in our bellies. Cindy wanting to explode all that is wrong with this world, me listening and imagining going up with it, with her, into the sky. That’s something Cindy understands, how to be in the world while you wait for it to blow. All I had was my room, and I wasn’t safe even there. Now the pool is my only sanctuary.

And not a single friend waiting for me around the bend. That’s the part my father didn’t get. My friends are the kids who don’t ride dirt bikes. Binette, Ouellet – okay, that’s about it for friends. Where are they now? Maybe at the skate park by our school, or at the arcade downtown. I don’t hang out with Pépin and Péloquin anymore. It’s the other ones who ride dirt bikes: that jerk Lachance has one, no two – and so does Méti-vier, and Bilodeau too, I think.

Cindy has a life of her own, better things to do than wait around to disappear into thin air with me. She can disappear with anyone she wants. She doesn’t need some high school kid who’s scared of everything and has no one and nothing to love on a Saturday night. She has other plans for herself. I’m here trying to figure out how to find an ending for it all – this day, this evening, all of it.

She’s gone; they’re gone. I didn’t make a move; true to form I once again failed to make a move.

I’m a coward. I hear my father’s voice: Scaredy-cat. That’s what he’d called me that day in his truck. Don’t move, scaredy-cat.

I’m sitting on the dirt bike he wanted to give me, the dirt bike I should be grateful for. It shows that he cared about me with a love insulated from any sense of who I really am. And he paid with his life for his wish to force mine into the mould.

A hard kick on the starter and the bike roars to life. I accelerate, digging a dark serpentine trail into the ground. I turn around and head back the way I came. The 80cc engine drinks and exhales, full throttle, liquid, gas – like it’s swimming. Eighty: sixteen times five. I count furiously. How can I fit fifteen into eighty? How can I stay fifteen forever, never hit sixteen? My age is a mistake. The ‘error’ on your calculator when you try to divide by zero. My age is a broken clock. I’m nine.

I’m nine years old and this neighbourhood belongs to me, I know it like the back of my hand, and my mission is to cross it with my eyes shut. I cross Black Lake Road, like a spark skit-tering along a trail of gunpowder. The ringing in my ears is grinding my brain to dust.

Five years have passed since I last saw Monsieur Joly’s little storehouse. Yet just now, coming back along the trail to the BC Mine dump, I passed fifty yards behind it. From the trail here you can catch glimpses of the little shed through the pines. I see what Poulie saw: a glowing mirage holding out hope of glorious repose, for those able to find a way across the threshold of the forbidden.

The blue smoke from my bike is caught in the evening light settling over the grassy path to the late Monsieur Joly’s garage. I walk forward as if in a dream.

Poulie was here. Under the broken window through which Charlélie Poulin had glimpsed an afterlife of opulence, there’s a graffiti with, I swear, the initials CP. Other acts of vandalism have left their colours on the battered aluminum siding. The large front door is dented, the side door’s handle ripped off. Someone boarded up the broken window. But our little emir’s cavern is intact. That’s where my friend lives, forever imprisoned by an obsession as simple as childhood, one that I have inherited in opposite form. He wanted to break in; I want to bust out.

Some bird, perhaps a partridge, falls to the ground in a rustle of feathers. The ringing in my ears resumes. Gasoline sweat is beading under my nose, in the thin hairs of my puerile moustache.

I who have never had enough space to let the air out of my lungs, to empty my heart in silence, let alone to explode; I who built forts from branches and fetishized them into palaces just to escape the force of a law now quashed forever. What moral code still binds me?

A two-by-four juts out from the base of the wall with the guillotine window. Vandal hordes have tried to strip the garage of its siding. Now it’s my turn to yank and pull at the two-by-four, twisting with all my strength. I want to free this board from the nails and wrest until it yields. And it does. Now I’m holding a board, neither too long nor too short.

Gathering in my gut is the anger expelled from a skull wholly occupied by a white whistling, a compound of rage – my hatred at last here in my guts, at fist height, ready to kill, to split my ghosts. Now for once there’s something lodged in my stomach besides sadness, feckless misery, or cowardice. I’m panting as I round the small garage under the trees to face the garage. The air is cooler now: white mist cut through with blue-black shafts.

For a moment, I consider my approach. Battering ram? Lumberjack swing? I’m not sure how best to wield my wooden halberd, or what sort of damage I might hope to inflict on a metal door. But I don’t want to sacrifice a single ounce of this fury to the indecision and inertia that have always ruled me. I lunge and strike the large door, dead centre. The pitiful impact sends the board bouncing back. It hits me, sending a shooting pain through my forearms. I try attacking another side, the right side of the warehouse; with my board pointed upward, I try to pry off the strips of aluminum siding, with limited success. At least I have the pleasure of tearing off a few sections. Already my anger is slipping away from me, congealing into frustration. The building that ensnared my friend is taunting me now. All that’s left is to try the small window. A piece of plywood has been set in the opening. It seemed so high up above our tender heads then. Today, on tiptoes, my eyes come up to the window frame.

How did my father put it?

Just a little whack.

Restitution and liberation are just one blow away.

Just a little one. But it’s not a whack I have in mind; the movement I’m picturing is a direct hit, a powerful javelin thrust, a smashing of the threshold my friend never crossed, which has been holding us back since the afternoon when my cowardice left my inseparable friend alone with his whims. In the palm of my glove, at face-height, I position the plank in one hand and grasp it with the other as if it were a rocket launcher.

At T-minus zero, I launch my projectile toward its target. Thud: I feel the plywood give but not yield. Then my two-by-four slips from my grip and the ricochet slaps my chin. I take the blow, but my fury cannot stanch my tears.

I do it again, with a firmer grip on my board this time. Pummel the plywood five times, a short break to rest my arms, then resume my violent cardiac massage. I grit my teeth and force my board through to the other side, smash in the ugly face of this austere, murderous building and send Poulie to the other side of limbo.

I finally strike a blow that knocks the heavy plywood loose. It falls inside without a sound. With every remaining ounce of rage in me I hurl the board through the dark opening. It disappears.

And then nothing happens – just me and my gasping for air and my shoulder-heaving sobs. Nothing but tinnitus hitting peak frequencies. Nothing but snot running down my nose, like a child. Nothing but a sorrow that has reclaimed its rightful place alongside my shame and a dizzying nausea. There’s no one I hate more than myself. This hate has never left me. It will never fade; it cannot let off steam.

My tank is still full. I haven’t burned any gas at all. Just like this town, my pain will never burn off. My pain can survive any number of blows, and deaths, and even love.

* * *

Saturday evening is leaning into its dark ending. Further down Black Lake Road, the miners have left behind the great crater of King-Beaver Mine and parked their yellow titans for the twenty-four-hour Sunday break.

It’s midnight when disaster strikes. A harrowing silence is cracking my skull.

I climbed up, bombed down, carved long S’s against the tallest sides of the dump, as if tearing them open for my drowning. All my senses are radiating outward, cutting me to the quick, breaking me up into fragments.

I’d leaned my dirt bike against the parking lot’s chain-link fence. The man in the gatehouse didn’t see me. Now I’m deaf and dumb and invisible too. I weave my way between the massive haul trucks, a dizzy ghost boy, scared to death. Instinctively I search my pant pockets – empty, I have no toy car or other talisman.

Apparently, I’ve climbed into a huge yellow truck. I’m sitting in the cab. Through the windshield, beneath the artificial moonlight sonata of fizzing floodlights, I make out a white dot like a distant star. It’s the pond at the bottom of the asbestos pit. This centre is the heart of the miners’ quest, the forbidden hearth where everything disappears. The crater glows slightly along its concentric, hypnotic outline, as though the centre were a black hole of white light. I press the starter button. A furious roar rattles me. I want to shout. Gas fumes swirl in my field of vision. A few blurry warning lights come on in the cab.

A large orange fire radiates in the sky above us. It’s warm in our fort, and comfortable at last.

A bird flies by and blocks my view.

In here, a white silence streaks my ears. Everything goes black.

With my hand on the transmission, I count to five and set off for the hearth.