Cosmo (12 page)

‘Where are we?' he asked after a beat, throat cracking with dryness.

‘What do you mean?' Her voice was the same, but newer, like listening to a recording of his own.

‘Ah, hell,' he said, pointlessly, catching a tone between baffled and bemused.

She kept smiling. The desert still, hushed, gathered around to watch them.

‘This is a bomb shelter,' she said, as if amused by the word
bomb
. ‘Cold War relic, you know. Not many people know about it.'

‘You were waiting for me?'

‘Why not?' She took a step forward. Matthew wanted to back away but his legs felt too heavy. Sandra curled a pinky finger around his, hanging loose and slack at his side. The finger sent a warm shock up his arm, through his neck, making him salivate. She was inches away and smelled of green things, of juice and fruit, citrus and lime. Beneath this airy smell there was the scent of rot somewhere. Her cheekbones were so defined they seemed chiselled from the ridges that surrounded them. He saw the small scar on her jaw that makeup and cameras typically covered up – a line he'd traced and retraced with his thumb, kissed. Her neck was dirty, but her sweat made long and clear lines in the soot.

‘How'd you get out here?' he asked.

She looked in his eyes. Her brow knit in sympathy. ‘I got a ride.'

‘Ahh,' he said. He found he was smiling, too, though nothing was well. His free hand went looking for hers, tugging at her fingers. ‘Ahh.'

‘Want to get started?' she asked.

Matthew looked down, staring at her dusty sandals, the zipper of her jeans and her shirt's hemline. He was nodding. She knew about the bodies, the brothers. It was like someone knowing your filthy secrets. She radiated knowing. He kept nodding, conscious of the work to do, but it didn't feel right to waste what light they had by handling such ridiculous cargo. He'd driven out to the middle of nothing and found her here, after months of separation. They should be sitting together in the doorway, watching the sun descend and ravish the sky. They should be driving to Silver Creek, where there were motels and soap and clean sheets. L.A. waited for them in the west, the coffee shops and bars and restaurants where her dark eyes glowed in the dancing light of a candle. There were conversations left unfinished, the last word on every subject left hanging and deferred. He thought he was healing but the wound hadn't even closed.

He wanted to remind her of a phone call he'd made a few weeks after their breakup. It was stagey, like an audition – he was channelling all the rainy regret of the season, drunk on Jim Beam and standing against the door to his bedroom, the phone cord wrapped around his fist. It was after two in the morning and he stood whispering into the receiver, reasoning with her, bargaining for a solution. Saying maybe they'd been too hasty. He didn't want to start promoting
The Newton Boys
without someone out there waiting for him, someone who knew his secret weaknesses, someone to counsel and support him. He was drunk and weak, weaker than he'd ever felt, but she kept saying the same thing, like a chant:
No, Matty
, unwavering, despite his plea bargains, his careful arguments, his gambits and his begging. And when it was done, when there was nothing left to say and resentment rose against her tireless denials, her strength, he threw down the receiver and sunk into bed, exhausted and sick of himself. He wanted to remind her of that last conversation – how hard it was on him. He wanted to tell her that she'd never given him a second chance; that maybe if he'd gotten the reviews he deserved for
Amistad
, say, she would have acted differently. That maybe it was all about careers, in the end – their stupid, absurd careers sabotaging something so alive between them. He wanted to call her a bitch, an idiot for letting him go, cruel for blowing him off when he needed her most.

‘I miss you so much,' he found himself saying, staring at the patch of earth between her feet. He waited for her to answer, clutching her hands harder than he meant. The light was changing. Then he heard her say, ‘I know,' and she slid her hands up past his wrists and over the back of his arms, letting him take her into an embrace, and upon feeling the heat of her body he found himself sobbing, loud and hard against the citrusy, rotten smell of her new T-shirt, smelling her hair and her sweat, arms pawing and clutching at the fabric around her back. He watched, felt himself doing this, surprised at the show. His snot and spit pooled on her shoulder. He held her as hard as he could, whispering, ‘Wake up, wake up,' still convinced that this was all made of dreams and dust.

‘Please?' he asked, choking on the
l
. He knew he shouldn't have asked, knew it was useless. He pulled back.

Sandra shook her head, but not without kindness. ‘We should finish,' she said firmly, withdrawing, gesturing toward Cosmo with her eyes.

Matthew wiped his nose, sniffing. ‘Ah, hell,' he said again. The light was rich and fiery in her eyes. ‘So what are we doing?' he asked.

‘There's a place for them underground,' she said, pushing her hair over her ears, which stood out gawky and endearing from the sides of her head. ‘Through here.' She pointed at the rise of concrete beside the metal ventilation shaft. There was a steel door set into the pasty yellow material. Matthew walked to the door and placed his fingers against the cool of the latch. It swung out with a stiff yank, whining on ancient, rusted hinges. Beyond were five feet of white cement floor, then a flight of stairs sinking down into absolute black, ageless and still.

Sandra stepped into the foyer of the shelter and picked up a flashlight from the floor, setting the beam on the top step, illuminating the short flight of stairs, the limits of a room beyond. Then she turned back to Matthew, smiling again: that same sad, resolved smile.

We'll do it together
, he thought.
We'll carry the trio down the stairs, one at a time, and leave them there.
It was senseless, meaningless, but it was a plan. Down beneath the soil, where his three sleeping triplets could hear the whispers of the earth, the insane god beneath their feet. Where they would rot unmolested. It was what she wanted, at any rate, and he'd always gone along with her notions.

So they began. Matthew held each twin around the chest while Sandra gripped its ankles. He went down backwards, shuffling on the stairs and disturbing clouds of choking dust. They grunted and sweated, wiping their foreheads with their T-shirts and steadying themselves in the foyer before inching down the stairs. The room at the bottom was large – much larger than he'd imagined. They laid the bodies evenly and with care: head to toe, head to toe. She'd run up the stairs before him, meet him at the van, the wind rising now and then to make her flatten and rake at her hair. The sky's pallet became awful, extraterrestrial. Jewelled stars and streaks of gases appeared in the east, growing a deeper and deeper blue. He unscrewed the caps on a pair of water bottles and they drank, gulping savagely. They'd made it to the final body, staring into the western skyline and wondering what sweet brute could have made a world so organized, so painful, so generous. ‘So beautiful,' he said to her, not knowing what to say, exactly, but feeling as if he could say anything in the world, leaning one arm on Cosmo's now radiant, sun-streaked door and gazing into the fading heat. And they returned to the long, back-breaking struggle, freighting the last body into its tomb.

After the Matthews were laid to rest, she ran up the stairs as before, but he didn't follow. Lingering there in the cool grave, he walked a slow circle around the square room. He could barely see, save for what was caught in the flashlight's patch of yellow. He looked at their sleeping faces, feeling the weight so heavy above him, the compact pounds of dirt and rock and cement, the fine filigree of dust that covered the world. He kneeled and took one of the heads in his hands, kissing it slow and on the brow, not knowing what he was doing, if this was right.
It doesn't matter
, he thought.
We make ourselves at every moment
. Looking around the room, seeing this kinship of flesh, he sighed, knowing this was the last look. He was okay with that. They were copies, but not essential. They didn't have his memories, his sense of humour, his heart. They could be buried, left in the dirt. He could forget.

He walked up the steps. Sandra stood halfway to the facility, hands in her pockets, staring into the boundless sky.

‘So, hey,' he said, walking toward her. ‘I really don't know what I'm saying. I guess I'm gonna go. It's gonna get real cold out here. You'd better come with me in Cos.'

‘No, thanks,' she said quietly. ‘I'm waiting on a ride of my own.'

He could have predicted as much. This wasn't really Sandra, anyway, he figured. It was a stand-in. Another kind of clone he'd discovered, or recovered, from all this waste. He took a deep, noisy breath, imagining what would happen if he stayed out here past dark, waiting for Sandra's ride. Who would be coming to pick her up. Another
third
actor. Another triangle. What nightmares in the final night, watching her climb into some weird jeep. He wasn't meant to stay and watch. This part of the story didn't involve him.

She was looking back at the sunlight. He felt less sadness now, watching her in profile. He'd meet her again, and it would be in a city, surrounded by the assembled regiments of sanity. She'd remember nothing of this (not that he'd ever bring it up – or if he did, he'd only hint at the time spent in the desert, near a bomb shelter, to which she'd just laugh and shake her head, say
you're crazy
, give him one of those confused, amused glances he was so used to). He turned and kicked through the darkening stretch of sand, slamming the metal door to the shelter on his way.

Cosmo felt good. He regretted tossing away the Native American symbols. He'd defaced his own environment, this mobile extension of his youth. He shook his head; it was a moment of weakness when faced with such strange adversity. But everything would be better, he thought; he'd buried his three brothers safe into the ground's receiving womb. He was lucky, extraordinarily lucky: he was able to say he'd buried himself. He kicked the van into
DRIVE
and turned on the headlights. He'd need them on the dark scrub, roaring back to the main roads and racing north, for the trip was definitely over. Before sliding down the hill in reverse, he caught Sandra in his lights: rubbing her arms, tiny and green, squinting into the harshness of the glare. It was the way he'd leave her, stuck in memory as if in amber, left alone and waiting for her ghosts and rides. He honked the horn, wheeled about and headed north.

Everything – the ground, the rattling frame, the rumbling engine – felt good. He pushed
PLAY
on the stereo, the Amboy Dukes launching back into the first song on the
CD
: ‘Journey to the Centre of the Mind.' After the first verse and chorus, he hummed along with the lyrics, savouring the psychedelia, the drugstore mysticism.

And then he laughed, long and happy. They were stupid lyrics. They were written during a ridiculous time to be alive – a time when bomb shelters were still serious investments. He weighed the word in his mouth as he rolled onto the nameless, north-south road.
Bomb
. How Sandra's stand-in had said it so oddly. She'd emphasized the
om
inside it. The
om
in
bomb
, kind of like the
om
in
tomb
, in
womb
, but just pronounced differently. It was dumb and profound, but he tried it out on his tongue, a low monotone hum:
ommm
.

It meant peace, he thought. It was a word that meant nothing, and nothing meant peace.

OM
.

He had an idea, passing just beyond the reach of his understanding. He hit
REC
.

THIS IS NOT AN ENDING

 

 

 

Claude Brazeau: His name is Pierre Lebrun …

911 Dispatch Operator: Does he wear glasses?

Claude Brazeau: No. He stutters.

– 911 emergency telephone call, April 6, 1999, 2:39 p.m.

 

‘H
ey, Terry,' says Joel, a shipper. ‘Ask Scabby what kind of bus it is.' ‘What kind of bus is it, Pierre?' asks Terry, a mechanic.

Pierre Lebrun feels a lurching drop in his stomach, a stinging rush of blood to his ears. Although his eyes are lowered, he can still make out the blurry shape of Terry's smile: a looming, left-leaning grin. Without looking up, Pierre reaches across the central workbench of the garage and wraps his hand around a Black & Decker vise. To calm himself, he thinks.

‘Yeah, Scabby, I think you know what I mean,' Terry says, taking a sip of his Timmies.

Pierre drags the vise closer. He stares hard at the wooden workbench, watching hazy, oil-stained hands stumble over tools. Someone drops a screwdriver. Someone sorts noisily through rivets and washers. A piece of brake mechanism lies cleaned and gutted on the far side of the hangar-like repair shop, awaiting the strong, dexterous fingers of its operators.

‘Well, let's narrow it down,' Terry says, chuckling. ‘It's not a
slin
ky bus.'

Over the bright clink of metal, Pierre can still make out the faint hum of traffic from Saint Laurent Boulevard – a long stretch of ­commercial zones staggered in quick, corporate succession, a steady stream of cars flowing liquid in the sunlight, reflecting the glare of gravel, glass and steel girders, grass dead or dying. The long length of tarmac inching toward suburbia, to Pierre's home: a late-century sprawl of concrete power centres, big-box parking lots, fast-food highways.

‘C'mon, Scabby, think. We're
wait
ing here.'

Other adults – co-workers, fellow employees – smile.
This is a collective attack
, Pierre thinks. He tightens his grip on the vise, feels hot in his sweater and collared shirt despite the chill temperature of the garage. He recalls, briefly and with a child's sense of monumental injustice, the glossy brochures he received at an Ottawa-Carleton Transpo job fair ten years back. They described the company in terms of modern workplaces: places where employees are granted securities and non-negotiable rights – the right to a safe and healthy environment, say, or the right to benefits and meaningful salaries, steady raises that reflect the rising cost of living. Rights reputedly protected by the powerful Amalgamated Transit Union (
ATU
), Local 279. Pierre remembers these as promises, as rosy guarantees. He thinks of safe zones and essential services, places of mutual respect and adult camaraderie. He thinks of meaningful employment in a ­capital-city service that demands excellence from all its partners.

‘It's not a
ben
dy bus, right?' Terry asks, sounding goofy.

Pierre holds still, letting his thoughts meander, self-pitying. Again, he perceives his transfer to the main garage – his fourth move in the company since 1986 – to be a tremendous mistake. Each consecutive transfer representing a
redistribution of talent
, according to the
ATU
. Pierre requesting these changes in position not out of ambition, an aspiration to ascend ranks of financial seniority or even respect, but for the comforts afforded by lesser interaction, more independent work. Beginning his career as a driver, operating the #16 Alta Vista, Monday to Thursday, and finding himself incapable of dealing with the demands of actual passengers: the grotesque particulars, the spitting and whinging horrors. Then the irrational transfer into customer service, assigned to handle telephone queries, yet again finding himself unable to speak, unable to contain the hiccups and stalls of a stutter that seemed to rise and fall with his quivering distress. Transferring for the second time to a position he barely understood: travelling across the illogical spiderweb of the Ottawa transit system with an already hardened and compact maintenance team to attend to malfunctioning or snow-stalled machines, towing obstinate buses back to the main garage at 1500 Saint Laurent. Never getting the proper training, being placed beneath a pugnacious high school dropout with semi-coherent real-estate ambitions and ostracized from the cohesive team from the first shift onward when he was asked simple questions and as answers gave nods, shrugs, knowing his stutter was
bad that day
, as if hungover, vindictive. As if needing to be held and cradled, soothed into silence like a tantrum-prone child. How the experience drained him, lowering the natural defences of his body to allow for infection, invasion. His ensuing illness, sapping and depressing him, and the doctor's orders to remain at home in bed during the strike of 1996. The unanticipated hostility he faced upon returning to work, having never walked the picket line with his co-workers. Picking up the name that rides him into sobs, fury:
Scabby
. Now here, in the main garage, working belts and brakes and batteries and the maladaptive components of the modern city bus.

‘You drove a bus, didn't you? You can't tell me what
kind
of bus it was?'

Pierre clenches his jaw, grinds his molars. He tries to stare through the wooden workbench, the vise heating up in his hand.

‘Now, now,' Joel chimes in, as if hushing a child.

Terry rips into a bark. ‘Ar-ar-ar-ar-ar-ar-ar-TIC-ulate, my boy!', answered by what Pierre interprets to be a roar of hoots and guffaws echoing off the towering walls of the repair shop. He glances up in time to catch Terry leaning back in laughter, his lips curled away from his teeth.

Pierre's open palm strikes Terry's cheek, making the surprisingly loud and fleshy
clap
sound heard in countless crime dramas. Terry is caught bewildered; he drops the wrench in his hand and stares, stunned. Conversation stops, giving the antiseptic pop song chirping from the nearby radio a strange sort of significance. And before either Terry or Pierre can react – both standing speechless, unsure of what just happened – loud male voices push between them,
hey hey hey
s, Pierre still holding the vise in his right hand, fingers clenched around the metal.

 

I can't really say anything today that would say he was whacko, you know.

– Ozzie Morin, OC Transpo employee

 

So Pierre is asked to gather his things and leave. The grinding routine already pierced by vacancy, by the thought of a thousand empty, virginal days. He drives home mid-afternoon to the closed-window warmth and stillness of his mother's home. A twenty-minute drive. Birds warbling through the glass. He watches sitcom reruns in bed, blinking occasionally. And this is heavenly: jaw-melting, drool-inducing. The hours of the afternoon white and empty of memory. He imagines his immediate future and smiles, humming with the pure pleasure of captured time: no work in the morning, no exaggeratedly gleeful djshrieking through the radio at some hard-edged, pre-dawn hour, no cold steel and stink of gas and clenched shoulders in the garage. Pierre is out of a job, fired, and he is happy.

This is how the first afternoon ends, how evening arrives. His mother eating in the kitchen. Three light beers nursed while watching television, listening to the scraping of her spoon. Tinkering on a length of damaged fence in the backyard amid the muddy reaches, reading an old issue of
Field & Stream
. As if nothing could alter the course of this new, comfortable life of unemployment.

But he can't avoid his mother. He can't avoid the revelation of his offence, dancing about the laboured conversation of
what's to be done
now,
what's to be done about
money,
what's to happen to your
career? Pierre
slapped
another employee. Pierre raised his hand against a co-worker in a modern, egalitarian workplace; Pierre stressed the unthinkable physical fact of his being in a space of camaraderie and respect. To deal with his mother, Pierre chalks it up to a man's rights, to taking only so much abuse, to standing up to a bully. His mother speaks this language, can relate to it and be proud, but she cries thinking about the money, about how Pierre's going to have to start from scratch. (Not that he minds starting over; he imagines a job plugging cords into a switchboard, pulling a lever over and over again like an automaton. Working alone and silent in perpetual, daydreaming mediocrity.)

Of course, this isn't what happens. The
STU
, Local 279, is there for him; he's informed in a letter sent the same week as his release. A man named Paul Macdonnell keeps calling him; his mother writes down the phone number, his name, scrawling
CALL BACK!
on a pad of paper with urgent underlining. And Pierre does, feeling dreamy, feeling out of control. The
ATU
is determined to get him his job back. The
ATU
won't let an employee with his particular
needs
be dismissed so summarily. Macdonnell says they have a strong case if Pierre wants to pursue it. That the committee will be making an appeal, but they'll need his help and full co-operation.

‘You have my, uh, co-operation,' Pierre mumbles, still dreaming.

‘You have a disability, yes?' Macdonnell asks. ‘You've indicated as such in your contract. Speech impediments are just as valid as any other disability, just as deserving of sensitive treatment. Expectations between employees differ according to ability, aptitude, functionality – elements out of our hands, M. Lebrun. Your ability to articulate your needs is compromised by your condition. Other employees are required to make certain
allowances
when working with a person with your particular needs. And discomforts may arise.'

‘Yes, I have a disability,' Pierre says over the phone, without a hint of stutter. His mother nods ecstatically by his side in a white bathrobe.
Oui, j'ai un handicap!

‘But having a disability is no permission for violence, M. Lebrun, of which I am sure you are aware.'

‘Oui.'

‘Nevertheless, we have a written record of your attempt to contact OC Transportation about the individual in question, Mr. Terry Harding. You filed a complaint of harassment,
oui
?'

‘Not quite …'

‘Well, you spoke with Chairman Loney about the situation, did you not?'

‘Yes.'

‘What we're trying to assemble is a case of accumulated, prolonged harassment, that your actions on the date in question were the result of exacerbations, antagonisms that should have been dealt with in a professional manner. An adult manner. You made every reasonable attempt to rectify the situation before it could escalate any further, yet the situation in the main garage was left to worsen and grow volatile without proper company intervention. Is this correct?'

‘Yes, correct.'

‘Well, we're confident that we have something here. Hold tight, Pierre.'

Pierre holds tight. He drives his Pontiac Sunfire across the Ottawa River and unloads a rifle into distant wisps of cloud. He strips bark off a dying tree and punches until his knuckles rip and tear. He screams once, long and as loud as he can, just to test his limits. Birds rise from the folds of the wood, scattering in air like in a movie, something dramatic and picturesque, Pierre's anger lingering above them in echo, sweating. The summer drops its petals, gets sticky like spilled Coke.

 

We're going to look for causes, but really, I don't think we're ­going to find a cause. This individual was just sick.

– Paul Macdonnell, head of the Amalgamated Transit Union, 2000

 

A boy sits at a table in a kitchen, chewing a mouthful of cereal. He is staring at the cornflakes rooster. The boy's eyes are large and unfocused. His jaw grinds slowly, like a cow's, while the cornflakes become soggy in the milk in the bowl. A drop of milk dribbles over his bottom lip, making his chin glisten.

The boy's mother walks swiftly into the kitchen, holding a thin cardboard box. She is wearing a brown corduroy skirt and a lacy blouse. She has black curly hair and tiny eyes. The boy stops chewing. The woman rummages noisily in a drawer beneath the sink.

It is a warm day in June. It is a Saturday morning in 1968. The boy notices their home address written in black ink, capital letters, on the middle of the box. The woman finds a pair of scissors in the drawer, turns back to the table and slides the sharp edge of the scissors across a line of packing tape. She pulls out a square shape, packaged in mismatched newsprint. In a picture on a section of ripped newspaper is a man in a tuxedo, standing before a giant spinning roulette table. The man appears to be laughing, crow's feet and laugh lines cut deeply as if by a putty knife, his right arm beckoning behind him.

She unwraps a vinyl record from the newspaper and slides it toward her son.

On the cover of the record, thick letters read:
YES YOU CAN! A Student's Guide to Overcoming Stuttering, Volume One
. The lettering looks yellow, as if dried by sunlight or smoke.

‘You're going to listen to this,' she says. The boy looks at her, swallows. ‘We'll listen to this together, on the record player.'

The boy looks back down at the record.