The Extinction Club (7 page)

Every day I think up a new back-story for him. A heart surgeon who lost his nerve in the middle of an operation. A doctor on the run, fleeing a malpractice suit. A jailbreaker convicted of practising with forged medical credentials. An escaped mental patient who thinks he’s a physician. But he might not even be a doctor. For all I know he could be President of the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club.

I don’t know what he expects from me when I get better — if I get better. He obviously took my clothes off & God knows what else he did. But if he saved my life, I should be grateful, I guess, because it might allow me to do two major things before I die. More later, he’s back with more firewood …

With fuzzy vision I’m looking at water stains on the ceiling & one of them seems to be turning into the man with the orange gloves, but with his face upside down, mouth on top, eyes below.

Still trying to figure out who exactly I’m rooming with. I know he’s an American from his accent (he says “HOWse” and “badderies” and “huh” instead of “eh” and “zee” instead of “zed” and “Eye-rack” instead of “Iraq”), but he also speaks Parisian French with machine-gun speed, especially when he swears.

I fed him a line about a girl gang sticking me because I was a fat stuck-up know-it-all science geek who prefers reading to cellphones & texting & cloneclothes. And he swallowed it. If he finds out what really happened he’ll only screw things up, he’ll end up blabbing it all over the place & getting us both killed.

It’s not that he’s stupid or anything but he seems, I don’t know, like a fish out of water or a rabbit in New York City. Like a baby could take candy from him. He’s certainly no match for Alcide Bazinet …

He thinks I’m a poor little mute girl & I’ll let him go on thinking that. I’ll be like one of those Benedictine nuns in their refectories. Besides, I’m so painkilled I couldn’t speak if I wanted to. If he only knew what a little chatterbox I am.

If I can get out of bed, I’ll root around next time he’s gone, try to find out more about him. He won’t even tell me where he’s from. Keeps saying he’s from Neptune.

   V   

C
éleste was snoring softly as I awoke in the pre-dawn dark. Nightmares had raided my sleep, caveman dreams in which I was rubbing two sticks together, nose flaring, eyes roaming and ears straining for hidden danger, my short furry legs ready to outrun the wind. Dozily, eyes half-closed, I looked out the living room window at a scene dim and vague with flowing mists and mastodonic shapes with tusks and horns. The trees were ghostly and bent, the ice burdening or breaking their limbs. I could feel myself out on one of them, saw in hand.

Birds began to sing, reminding me that not all birds fly south. Nothing familiar to me, like the ovenbird’s
teacher teacher teacher
, or the catbird’s
meow
, or the towhee’s
drink-your-tea
. Just a few pigeon-like sounds, two repeated syllables,
doo-doo
, like the dodo is said to have made.

While listening to them I made a decision, a snap decision: to bolt, to go back to where I came from and face the music. I’d failed as a tourist, failed as a hermit; it was the end of my nature experiment, end of my doctoring. I’d stretched myself as far as I could and had no more stretch. Chalk it up to a bad month to be buried with the memory of other bad months.

Besides, how could I even
think
of living with a teenage girl after the charges I was running from? A teenage girl with
serious
enemies. A depressing foreign film is what I was in, complete with subtitles, handwritten ones. I was losing it, wobbling out of orbit. A pharmaceutical backlog—teenage acid, college weed, adulthood coke and alcohol, in unwise
conjunction, joining forces in a time-release attack on my brain cells. Turning my grey matter into shaving cream. Why else would I come to these alien pines, this gutted church surrounded by homicidal bog men? Heavenly callings? Delusions of sainthood?

I would go to the police, turn myself in, report what I’d seen. And get her a doctor. A real one. Céleste would give me no explanation of what had happened to her that night, nothing credible at least, but she’d have to tell the cops. And they’d protect her.

But first I’d go to the rectory for her, as promised. Or rather second. First I’d make breakfast. I leapt out of bed, glanced at my patient, then yanked open the fridge door.
It’s not giving up, it’s growing up
, an inner voice reassured me.

While listening to the bacon and eggs in the skillet, to the pig and chicks cursing and spitting in anger and anguish, it dawned on me why Céleste wouldn’t eat my breakfasts, or much of anything else. So I put the kettle on.

“You’re a vegetarian, right?” I asked when she opened one eye. I had deliberately dropped her plate with a clatter onto her tray table.

She nodded slowly.

“I made porridge for you.”

No response.

“You must be a rarity around here. Any vegetarian restaurants in these parts?”

Unsteady, dazed, she sat up and reached for a pencil and paper on the bed table.
As many as there are gay bars.

I smiled. Wondered why she would make that comparison. “Are
you
gay?”

Céleste paused, wrote a few letters, scratched them out. Then simply nodded.

Can one be gay at fourteen? “That’s … you know, fine with me.”

Glad you approve.

“How do you feel?”

Like I’ve been crumpled up in a ball for the last year.

“And mentally?”

I have a sense of impending doom.

Join the club. “No, I mean physically mentally, if you know what I mean.”

Like I’m underwater.

I paused. “Why can’t you … speak?”

She wrote something, scratched it out, wrote again.
Tried to hang myself, damaged my voice box.

This, I was almost a hundred percent sure, was false. “Would you like to tell me about it?”

About what?

“About who dumped you in the swamp. And why.”

You writing a book? Make that chapter a mystery.
She set her pencil down and turned away from me to face the wall.

“And don’t tell me it was a gang at school because I don’t believe you.” I walked around to the other side of the bed. I know that girls this age love to keep their secrets, but this is ridiculous. “It’s time, Céleste. Tell me everything.”

She stared right through me, stared at nothing. Her eyes were open but they appeared sightless. And then I lost her, her blood-red eyes sliding away from me in a sullen glaze.

Once again I placed the stun gun, bear spray and revolver on her bed table. But this time, in case of emergency, she also had a walkie-talkie. She couldn’t talk into it, of course, but she could send me a mayday (from the French
m’aidez
) with the push of a button. Or an all-clear. Provided she was paying attention when I showed her how. Provided I stayed within
eight to ten miles. Provided it worked in the mountains. For good measure, I leaned the rifle against the foot of the bed. She’s a country lass, she’ll know how to use it. I padlocked the shutters, pulled the curtains shut, double-locked the door.

Through my Vanagon window came the clean chill air, the smell of resin, of woodsmoke. The ship of sunrise burning, from ninety-three million miles away, turned the snow into a sea of diamonds almost painful to look at. Like all beauties.

At the top of the cedar-lined church lane I stopped in a kind of suspended time, or rather outside time, on the rim of the universe: the church cross and mullioned windows of the house were shimmering, mirage-like, in a sky of white and gold. A choir of angels sang inside my head. Angels we have heard while high.

Ding dong! verily the sky

Is riv’n with angel singing …

The tension inside me, the sad feeling that churches have, the danger I felt all around me, the horrors of the bog—everything was softened by the dawn light, the wilderness air, the smell of wood and rock and snow. Again, I felt that mysterious natural chemical enter my system, immeasurably stronger than antidepressants.
You’re here. You’ve been headed here all your life
. I gazed at the soft peaks and swells of the Laurentian Highlands, the dappled sunlight on pines, the black and ancient pond beyond the cemetery, the valley with the half-frozen stream rambling through it. I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds—the cascading water, the
carolling of birds. It all stretched out before me, the very essence of … what? Possibility? Redemption?

A faraway sound—a rifle blast from a distant ridge—triggered another sound inside my head: the
thwack
of Céleste’s body hitting the half-frozen mud. I closed my eyes and clasped my hands over my ears. It was like I’d been hypnotized to react to that deafening sound. But how was I to react?

When the rifle refired, I knew. Knew why I’d come here, what I had to do. Everything became clear as the wide blue sky. I had not come north to make a new beginning, to escape the city, to find peace and happiness in nature. It was not my destiny to be happy; I had not been programmed for it. I had not come north to save anybody either—although that was part of it, a big part. No, I had come here to kill somebody. And be killed.
A vacation to die for
. Buying this church was not a beginning but an end.