The Extinction Club (5 page)

« Not exactly, no. Listen, I need to get to a hospital. My shoulder, I think I dislocated it while shovelling snow— »

« I got my rounds, eh? »

« I’m not asking for a lift, I’m asking for a boost. My battery’s dead and I … » I took out my wallet. « I’ll pay you for your time. »

« Everything’s out, eh? Wires down every which way. Hospital’s on emergency power. Surprised you still got juice out here … » He paused to examine footprints in the snow leading to and from my neighbour’s. Then took off his tuque and scratched his head. Bald as a stone. Ears twisted and rubbery, as if they’d been boiled. He squinted up at the cabin, shifting his head one way, then the other.

I turned to see what he was looking at. In the front window a shadow, then the dark curtain falling back into place.

« I thought you said … » The snowplower winked. « Put your goddamn wallet away. You got cables? Okay, gimme
three of them twenties. Where’s your car at anyway? Can’t see duck turds on a plate out here. »

I padlocked the storm shutters, pulled the curtains shut. On my sleeping patient’s bed table, as a hedge against dangerous times, I placed my neighbour’s canister of bear repellent, stun gun and Sig Sauer handgun, hoping she had the knowledge and strength to use at least one of them. Left a bilingual note, grabbed a hefty wad of bills, double bolted the door.

In the recharged van I spun out of the driveway, which the snowplower had more or less cleared, and headed back toward the church in the wake of his plow. The road was like a tunnel, with overarching branches and lofty white banks on either side. I approached the old bridge carefully, lining up the truck’s wheels on the twin wooden planks. Didn’t get out of first gear until hitting the highway. The snowplower went one way, I the other.

This time I was able to get up the hill, which had been salted with cinnamon-coloured dirt, and soon reached a green sign declaring the town limits:

BIENVENUE À SAINTE-MADELEINE

POP. 4 200, ÉLÉV. 810 m

(JUMELÉE À GEEL, BELGIQUE)

It bore what appeared to be bullet holes through all the zeros.

The snowplower was right about the storm. Broken tree branches and power lines had fallen onto the road, and all the buildings on the north side were dark. I passed a great
structure of granite four storeys high, surrounded by a wall of masonry twenty feet high: the hospital, I assumed. There was no traffic so I paused in front, watching a tall crane move spasmodically behind one of the buildings like a prehistoric forager. I looked around for the name of the place and found it in on a gate between two stone pillars with ball crowns:

L’INSTITUT PSYCHOGÉRIATRIQUE DE STE-MADELEINE

POUR LES CRIMINELS ALIÉNÉS

ST. MADELEINE PSYCHOGERIATRIC INSTITUTE

FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE

I continued on, down a commercial strip with Christmas decorations hanging off lampposts, through a snag of car dealerships, fast-food shacks, motels with snow-filled swimming pools, to a spanking new Walmart. Its parking lot was being plowed and salted as I entered.

Two competing banners were strung between old-growth fir trees, as tall as the Christmas trees in the Vatican or Trafalgar Square I saw as a child. One demanded unionization, the other proclaimed:

OUI NOUS AVONS DU COURANT! DES DINDES AUSSI!

WE GOT POWER! TURKEY TOO!

All bilingual signs in this province, I was beginning to notice, contained French three times the size of the English, as if all francophones were near-sighted.

The rock salt crackled under my feet as I walked toward the entrance, reminding me of the gravel path I had taken in the fall, following my father’s body in the funeral procession.
And with the sound came flashes—of the coffin swaying on canvas belts, being lowered over chromed rollers onto green felt, shovelfuls of earth falling with thuds …

Music intruded from outdoor speakers. Christmas music. I’d been so deep in my thoughts that I’d forgotten where I was and when.

Later on we’ll conspire

As we dream by the fire

To face unafraid

The plans that we’ve made

Walking in a winter wonderland …

Inside, an old gaillard with a Santa Claus beard, real I think, greeted me jovially while pulling out a red cart. It had a wonky wheel but I pushed it anyway toward the Comptoir Santé. From the first-aid shelves I grabbed tape, gauze, swabs, ointment, forceps and a thermometer. I asked the pharmacist—Emad Azouz, according to his nametag—where I could find a bedpan. Aisle 7. And a bed tray table, you know the kind with little legs? Aisle 13. I then requisitioned sleeping pills, acetaminophen with codeine, syringes and a quart of Betadine, each of which he smilingly retrieved from behind the counter. But frowned when I asked for other things, like cloxacillin and morphine and lidocaine. And Cymbalta, antidepressants that I had left behind, stupidly, in my father’s car. Along with my Risperdal (for hallucinosis), Antabuse and Baclofen (wagon straps), each of which my father had prescribed. Generation Rx: I was part of it, its poster boy.

When it snows, ain’t it thrilling

Though your nose gets a chilling

We’ll frolic and play

The Eskimo way

Walking in a winter wonderland …

Onward, to the food section, where I began stuffing my cart with instant junk: violently processed microwave dinners, violently sugared cereal, violently salted snacks … all the things little Brooklyn used to love. For myself, I grabbed six middling merlots (from the French for “blackbird”) and arranged them gently in the cart. With shaking hands I then put two bottles back, rolled my cart a few feet, then put back the other four.

I left the cart where it was and went to get another. Pushed it to the children’s clothes department and tossed in flannel pyjamas, little wool socks (doll socks!), cotton underwear, cotton T-shirts with reinforced necks, three for $10, made in Bangladesh. I knew all the sizes because my little-girl-lost was only a hair taller than Brooklyn. Albeit more than a hair broader. On my way back to the pharmacy I impulsively threw in items: a 17-inch flat screen and shocking-pink DVD player of Chinese manufacture, a half-dozen DVDs, a half-dozen CDs, including Arcade Fire’s
Neon Bible
and The Stills’
Ocean Will Rise
, a stuffed bear that I changed my mind about, and a thousand-piece jigsaw of a snowy owl in a snowstorm for which only a convalescent would have the patience.

Back toward my other cart, then a U-turn to sporting goods to see if I could find a two-way hand-held radio. Known in the vernacular as a walkie-talkie. Known in French as a
talkie-walkie
. A middle-aged clerk with a Beatle cut, distracting me with the thickest glasses I have ever seen, led me to one. A good one, he assured me, static-free, on sale. With a distress button. Range: 8 to 10 miles.

« How about a cellphone? » I suggested. « That’d probably be better, right? More practical? »

He looked at me over the top of his heavy black plastic glasses, like the ones American soldiers get for free. « In the mountains? More practical? With all the dead spots around here, smoke signals might be more practical. »

Back toward the pharmacy with my
talkie-walkie
, mouthing the words of a carol, then to the hardware department for one last item. Propane.

… though the frost was cruel,

When a poor man came in sight,

Gathering winter fuel …

«
Ça va bien?
» the cashier asked when I arrived with my two-cart convoy. She had pigtails and looked almost as young as my patient. Perhaps a classmate.

« As good as can be expected under the circumstances, » I replied in French, « which could be better and could be worse. » Answering idle questions, making small talk, has always been beyond me. I don’t think she heard me, in any case, because the jigsaw’s barcode wouldn’t beep. This flustered her to no end. Red-faced, she looked around for help before entering the numbers manually.

« Those things would fit you, right? » I pointed to the stack of clothes she was now scanning. She went a deeper red, and I wondered why. Did she think I was offering them to her?

«
Je … je pense que oui.
»

I paid from a sheaf of American twenties bigger than a wad of socks and she didn’t bat an eye. «
Bonne fin de journée
, » she said, handing me some Canadian bills, purple and green and blue, along with a handful of colourful coins.

«
Pareillement
, » I replied while examining the bronze birds, nickel beavers, silver mooseheads. «
Et joyeux Noël
. » I handed her a mint American twenty, which she scrutinized as if it were fake. Which, in a way, it was.

On my way out, the old man who looked like Santa asked me if I’d bought a turkey. Before I could answer he said that when he was young he could kill, pluck, cook and eat a turkey in twenty-two minutes. Which was a record in these parts.

I loaded my cargo into the van, rolled back the two carts and looked around for a payphone. There was one inside the adjoining McDonalds. (Mikes, Moores, Wendys, Tim Hortons—were apostrophes banned in this province?) The dangling directory, in a black vinyl case, had chunks of yellow pages ripped out, but not the
V
’s.
Véhicules, Vêtements
…
Vétérinaires
. I inserted two quarters and punched in the number of the Hôpital vétérinaire de l’Avant-Mont. As it rang I watched a startlingly fat woman in the parking lot hit a golden retriever, once, twice, three times, with a snowbrush. What is
wrong
with this world?

“Thanks, I’ll be right there,” I said after repeating then memorizing the directions. I ran back to the parking lot, but the woman and dog were pulling away in a silver Saab. I could make out only the last three letters of the licence plate:
RND
. I fired up the van, which took a couple of minutes, enough time for her to make a clean getaway.

On the highway I fiddled with the chrome knob on the old radio, watching the red line scan the frequencies, stopping at Jean Leloup’s “Le grand héron” at 96.9, then a French version of “Angels We Have Heard on High” at 99.5, then “Bye Bye Bye” by Plants and Animals at 99.9. What a signal, all the way from Vermont! You can’t beat German radios, you can’t beat a Blaupunkt!

Candy canes dangled from lampposts, and green bulbs winked at me from nests of pine boughs and tinsel. While admiring them I drove at a geriatric pace, trying my best to keep to the speed limit every inch of the way. And trying my best not to jam on my breaks for the benefit of the car behind, a tailgating yellow Hummer. The concept of keeping your distance, it would seem, is as foreign to drivers here as it is in France. I slowed to a crawl and flicked on my four-ways. The driver flashed his brights, three, four times, before passing me on the shoulder, displaying his longest finger.

I reached for the .38 in the glovebox but thought better of it. Pushed on the accelerator, primed for a chase, but thought better of that too. Instead, I wrote down the licence plate (666 HLL) and flicked back to 99.5, a Montreal station. Classical music, my father’s lawyer once told me, is good for anger management. Vaughan Williams’s
Lark Ascending
was playing, which was perfect, but I couldn’t focus. Questions were crowding my mind. From the police if I got pulled over:
Are you aware, sir, that the vehicle’s registration expired two years ago and has not been renewed? Are you aware that this vehicle was involved in a serious crime? Are you aware that you are wanted in the state of New Jersey, and that a full-points bulletin is out for your arrest?

The streets were all biblical: Matthieu, Marc, Luc, Jean. I turned right on Mathieu, left on Marc. Past a disused arena announcing a Pumas-Lynx hockey game from the previous year, past a schoolyard with a swing set, climbing bars and a slide in the shape of a dinosaur tongue. But where were the children? I hadn’t seen a single one, anywhere. Why weren’t they out tobogganing or skating or making snowmen? Or whipping snowballs at cars and windows? Where were they? Was this a retirement village?

Right on Luc, past the flash and trash of new condos littering the mountainside, to a veterinary clinic atop a small hill. The cars were parked in front at a steep angle, presumably with their emergency brakes on. Mine didn’t work so I parked at the bottom and made my way up the slick staircase like a chimp on skates. At the top of the hill I looked down on a glaciated valley strewn with black boulders, at a line of birches and poplars that marked the course of a river whose wild waters defied the frost. I must have a suicide complex because I wanted to jump. It all looked so beautiful, pristine. And sad too, as if I were seeing the end of the old world.

A quaint habit of mine: trying to visualize landscapes from before Columbus landed—towering trees fifteen storeys high, titanic fish leaping out of crystalline waters, ferocious mountain lions, bobcats and wolves skulking through lush boreal jungle … Or trying to see in the other direction: toward post-human landscapes. It took ten thousand years to ravage Mother Earth, but after we’re gone it will take only two hundred years for her to have her revenge. To turn the concrete jungles into the real thing. To bring every skyscraper down, like one 9/11 after another. To sweep away all the dams. To turn cities back into swamps (Paris was once a marsh, and so was London). To save most animals from extinction …