Consumption (40 page)

February 18, 1992

Dear Ms. Stevenson:

  Thank you for your kind letter. I received Penny’s effects a few days before it, and had wondered if she was moving home, but now I’ve learned that the news is much worse than that. I’ve
spoken to the RCMP in Rankin Inlet and they told me that until they find a body they can’t say anything definite but in their own minds they have little doubt.

Penny had mentioned you a few times and called you her only friend up there. I am glad you knew her. It would be much more painful to think that she had lived as isolated up there as she died. We will be having a memorial service for her in a week. If you come upon anything else in her apartment, anything that might have the address of her mother on it, would you call me right away with it?

Yours truly
,

Ed Bleskie

Marie packed her own clothes prior to flying south. She had protested that this trip was unnecessary, what were they going to do, for heaven’s sakes, that hadn’t already been done a hundred times over? Were the little pots into which she would spit somehow better down there? But Victoria watched her bony shoulders protrude as she leaned into this argument and any possibility of compromise evaporated. She was going.

She was frightened. She thought she might really have some form of TB after all—the few photographs of her mother at her age showed exactly her face, tight and large-eyed—but she wondered how well it could be treated by the usual drugs if none of the usual tests seemed able to find it. She did not want to have to go through surgery like her mother did. She thought about the scar and she shuddered. The
invasion
.

Her misgivings about all this had to do with her suspicion of Dr. Balthazar. She asked Justine what she thought of him and her sister had just shrugged. To Marie he seemed the essence of gross: his
thick lips and the perspiration on his forehead that accompanied the least exertion, the damp hair, and the white-white-white skin. Every year he was larger, folds around his neck now. His arms could no longer hang straight at his sides.

Marie had watched enough episodes of
St. Elsewhere
to know that he could not be considered representative of the medical profession, but at the same time, for her, he was. In his furtive, hesitant manner, she detected something dark, possibly malignant. Here he was sending her off into the arms of his colleagues and she could not help feeling deeply anxious about that.

Her mother was awash in her own anxieties, trying to summon up the resolve to pick up the telephone and book a ticket south to Winnipeg, to accompany her daughter. She had not been out of the community since she had come back to it in the Norseman, decades earlier. Her memory of Winnipeg was through the lens of her ten-year-old self, gawking at the department store on Portage Avenue, escalators of moving stairs propelling themselves steadily upward and downward. Then she had been propelled to the hospital, where she had watched children die, so alone, far from their parents and everything they knew, the sweet little boy Abraham, geysering blood from his lungs like a lung-shot
tuktu
and then his sister, Faith, turning away. She wept silently so that she would not interrupt Marie’s packing, shuddering into her hands. She would stay in a hotel room. She did not have TB any more, she was an adult, and she would come back with her daughter just as soon as the tests were finished. She picked up the telephone. She set it down.

When Amanda walked down the sidewalk, coming home from school, she saw from a block away that her father’s car was in the driveway. She thought for a moment that he had come home sick from work, but as she approached the house, she saw him through
the living-room window moving quickly, and she realized that whatever he was doing, he wasn’t lying on the couch. She walked up the steps and opened the door and saw his suitcases open on the living-room floor. He was shoving shirts into one of them. He looked up at her and began filling another case with trousers. Angela was standing in the kitchen, not speaking. Amanda stood there and watched. Neither of her parents addressed her. She went to her bedroom.

Kat and Beth were with them, in Lewis’s father’s kitchen; they had the elements on the stove heated to blazing red and butter knives wedged into the coils, the tips scarlet. Kat had a razor in one hand and carefully sliced small curls of hash off a larger chunk, pausing to roll the smaller bits into tiny balls. He wore a black leather jacket, which Amanda had never once seen him take off, and seemed to carry a knife in each of about eight different pockets. He was very eager to show his knives to people, which Amanda thought made him seem both less menacing and more whacko. He told her that at home he had a real samurai sword; he had stolen it from his uncle, who had been in the Marines. He was really into graphic novels, was she? He liked
Love and Rockets
the best. You know? He seemed lost and sweet.

She was so high she wasn’t sure where she was. She hadn’t spoken to either of her parents in three days now. After her father had driven away she had waited another couple of hours to see if her mother needed anything, wanted to talk about anything, but there was no knock on her door. She heard her mother go into her bedroom and close the door. Then she got off her own bed and left the house.

Lewis was reading a comic book. Beth was standing close to Lewis and laughing with him over the pictures. Amanda felt herself being drawn into Joy Division’s mournful grind, which was playing at maximum imaginable volume through Lewis’s father’s very excellent audio system, Lewis was commenting on the narrative trends in
anime these days since westerners had caught on to it—since Sailor Moon had started off as parody and then became co-opted—God help them all, people actually thought that this is what it was. As if a desexualized anime could ever be genuine anime.

“Is Sailor Moon really desexualized?” Beth said. “I find her kinda hot.” Lewis smiled at her a really long time. Amanda wondered what was taking Kat so long with the hash.

Kat and Beth and Lewis had quit school and all now worked in a chain of video rental stores along Garden Avenue in Newark. They rotated among different outlets as the vagaries of employee absence and intoxicant habits dictated; in the course of this random mixing they had accreted to one another, recognizing a common something. They all had the same look, colourless, consumptive, and dark—and they listened to The Smiths, Joy Division, Iggy Pop. But as well a shared sense of disdain and humour drew them to one another, a sense that the prevailing recession was not for them to struggle against, and that any country led by a man such as George Bush was not much worth investing in. This latter statement gives the impression that they were politically informed, but they weren’t. Their dismissal of that world arose from a considered and deeply felt anxiety about it. It was like having unpleasant neighbour who was not worth knowing better. You just hope he isn’t worse than he appears.

In Emo’s view, it was a strange place for a man to live. But his view was not much sought. Which was okay with him. It was a little puzzling, anyway: what kept this place so warm, far too warm, and what fuel these lamps burned that lasted so long, days on end. There was fur on the floor but not from any animal he had ever hunted or eaten, nor would he wish to either, judging from the odour and texture of its hair. He did not understand why he was so tired, and so weak, and then he remembered that he was old. He thought to
himself, What a strange thing to have forgotten. And then he wondered to himself whether he would have preferred not to have remembered. And then he forgot what he had been thinking about and stood up. Where had he put his rifle, his
panna
?

TWENTY

BALTHAZAR SIPPED HIS BEER
. He and the priest were listening to “Strutting With Some Barbecue.” The priest had been reading an account by a Czech writer who had listened to this music as a boy during the Second World War. “They looked up the title in an English-Czech dictionary, ‘walking pompously with a piece of roasted meat’—what could it mean?” They both laughed. “When I was a seminarian, the priests learned of my affection for this music and they punished me. They told me it was carnal music.”

“Have you watched MTV?”

“I have, briefly, while looking for the news, yes.”

“What would they have said to that?”

“Their heads would have popped right out of their cassocks.”

“I suppose you could argue that music worth listening to is always carnal.” The priest nodded at that. “People hunger for things. Rhythm and blues is about hunger, perhaps, more than it is about sin.” He tapped his foot to the beat.

“Hunger—for liquor and women and dope.” Balthazar leaned back, eyes shut and also tapping his foot, teasing the priest.

“Well, yes.”

“Hard to imagine anyone enjoying this music who doesn’t understand those hungers.”

“Keith, if that’s your clumsy way of asking if I’ve ever desired
anyone, the answer is yes. I’ve fallen in love, in fact. Which is not the same as acting upon it, of course.”

“Falling in love is certainly an act, in itself.”

“It isn’t the definitive act. As you know.”

Balthazar grinned uncomfortably at the sudden intimacy. “I’m sure anyone human has been in love.

“You know that isn’t true, either.”

“I suppose.”

“Though one could assert the opposite: anyone who has been in love is certainly human.”

“Well, here’s to us humans.”

There was a pause in the conversation as the priest examined what Balthazar had just said. Then he resumed nodding to the bass line. The song finished and then the priest put on Muddy Waters singing slow. “Are you still in contact with the person you allude to?”

“Yes,” Balthazar said, and he could see Bernard deciding who it was.

“But you did not act,” Bernard said.

“Not in the way you mean, no.”

“That is better.”

“I’m not sure.”

“If you had, would you have maintained your other secrets?”

Balthazar was unable to speak, so Bernard answered for him.