Garcia's Heart (10 page)

He was ill. His first bet was the bami goreng or the beer stirred up by adrenalin. The room drew tighter around him and he felt a swell of nausea. He got to his feet, not caring what the guards or the other voyeurs thought, and shuffled back down the row to the aisle. He found a washroom and threw open a stall door, certain he was going to be sick, but it passed, leaving him sweating and winded, sitting on a toilet in Den Haag, studying the freshly scrubbed surfaces of the stall. Patrick ran his hand through his hair and it emerged damp, a Den Haag shower. His throat was tight and he was still short
of breath; it was only when he managed to get a couple of tablets of Valium out of the bottle in his pocket and into his mouth that he felt the pressure fade away. He sat and breathed and waited for the pills to do their business, soaking his synapses in that feeling that passed for relief. In the lower corner of the stall's door, an area that had escaped the cleaners' scrubbing brush, handwritten words were faintly visible. He bent forward to take a look, wondering what type of graffiti a place like this attracted, expecting feverish political indictments or blood libels with an ethnic spin, but he could only make out a telephone number and, three inches to the right, the word
moordenaar
.

Twenty minutes passed before he could stand up, and when he did he was able to take only tentative, newborn calf steps past the stall door, then a quick stagger toward the sink before he felt cold water on his face. “I am better,” he said to the faucet, to the water spilling off his face and down his wrists to wet the sleeves of his shirt.
I'm better. I am.

Once out into the corridor, Patrick began to feel stronger. People were passing through the foyer, heading to the exits. It was quiet and dreamlike, surprising him, pleasing him. He floated out into the crowd, a balloon of him filled with benzodiazepine bliss, messages of distress falling from him like ballast.

The crowd dispersed onto the Churchillplein, swallowed by space. He looked around the plaza past the fountain and saw Celia and Roberto walking away. Nina–that must be her, little Nina outfitted in an adult frame–was with them now. Patrick shouted out “Hey” in an embarrassing broken croak, the voice of someone who hasn't spoken to anyone for hours, a voice that caused quite a few heads to turn. Roberto
stopped and looked at him, a Serengeti stare, a calculation of space and velocity and a certain type of hunger, all of which caused Patrick to freeze in his gazelle tracks; but that lasted for a brief second before passing into a haze of memory.
These were my friends
. His stoner calm returned and he approached them. The Valium whispered a tuneless hymn of brotherhood and peace into his ear. He could see Celia. She was holding a child, a young boy who had buried his head under her chin. She was walking toward him. Roberto was beside her, several paces ahead. She had a son. He tried to read the look on her face, to see any sign of emotion, his eyes riveted to the details of her eyes and mouth, taking in every gesture in that way humans are wired for. But nothing came easily; with every step closer her features became more distinct, but she was still inscrutable. Her face. Celia's face, changed now into an adult face, a Modigliani of sadness and beauty. It was the last thing he remembered, this intense effort to decipher Celia García's expression, before he saw a flash of movement shear in from the right and a vision of sky, spinning, dusky.

 

FOUR

Celia smiling at him through a window that he still needed to clean. Evening. At seven o'clock she installed herself on the balcony with her easel, surveying the view down Lorne Crescent. She kneaded the pigment out of her brush with a rag, looking away from him and back to the scene in front of her.

He was pleased Celia brought her paints; the smell of her oils and turpentine filled the room, masking the stink that he noticed for the first time seconds after the janitor dropped the keys into his hand at the door. Hours later, he was still inside the apartment, scrubbing the sink and hoping that this and running the water would take care of the odour. He washed his hands and reached for a bag of plums, tore open the plastic bag and, holding two plums in each hand, washed them in the sink that still smelled. The give of the plastic and the deep crimson plum skin. The fruit was the only colour in an apartment filled with still-unopened cardboard boxes, a few with his belongings from home, others with pieces of
entry-level Swedish furniture waiting to be Allen-keyed into existence.

He heard shouting in the distance but it didn't disturb him. This was where he lived now and so it counted as ambiance, as neighbourhood. He had moved not just to be out of his mother's house or closer to the hospital but specifically for voices, talking, laughing, even shouting. He felt guilty leaving his mother alone in their old house but they had lived in a silence that mutually acknowledged he was already on his way. He lived in the student ghetto now, twenty square blocks of studios and three-storey walk-ups, a neighbourhood of balconies and student apartments polished and worn with use, a patina of serial tenancy. The walls were freshly layered with that skim-milky wash that greets new tenants, veined more thickly around corners and over the electrical outlet plates.

He opened the door to the balcony and, to his delight after the anaemic pall of his apartment, entered a world that could not contain its colour. The eastern slope of the mountain rose from the rooftops to take a deep verdant bite of the sky. Who could blame its appetite? It was an evening of soft scattered clouds, flanks bruised with shades of yellow, shades of blue. Celia sat, working. His plums belonged out here. Windows were open. He heard music along with voices.

Below them, pickup trucks jammed with personal belongings and mattresses wedged on end weaved between other trucks pulled up at angles to the curb to better unload. It was the first of July, moving day in Montreal, the only jurisdiction in the world with the inexplicable rule that leases should all end on the same day. It was a day of heroic friends and physical exhaustion and curbside drama, a windfall for movers and pizza deliverymen. Everyone he knew had spent
at least one moving day dealing with unconnected phones and cardboard boxes and the competing physics of walk-ups and sofas. Moving was a shared experience, a tribal event that renewed and reset the neighbourhood. It was a rare day when people from other countries, provinces, and neighbourhoods took to the streets in migration. Forget the calendar, this was the real New Year's Day.

He sat down on one of the lawn chairs and dried off the plums. Celia was using broad brush strokes to cover the upper parts of the small canvas in front of her, trying to capture the light of the evening sky while there was still time. “Good luck,” he wanted to say but didn't, knowing the way it would sound.

He heard voices, louder, making what Celia was saying unintelligible and with this he felt a surge of panic. He looked over the balcony and then pulled himself back to the fruit resting on his lap, cradled in a crumpled paper towel.

All day long it had been building. It was the most unusual feeling, a simultaneous emptiness and fullness, and the only way he could explain it was to say it felt like the hunger for what he assumed his life was going to become. He wanted the future to arrive, a desire not based on any hardship he'd endured, not because he felt he was due this future, but simply that he thought it was going to be as beautiful as the mountain and the plums and Celia recording it all. It was an intense optimism, amplified now under this sky, a desire that frightened and consoled him, a succession of feelings that he knew were the first conceits of an adult life.

The sky ran through its riot of evening colours, finally ceding to a deep shade of purple. Their eyes stung with the day's last light. Celia put down her brush and he stood up to see what she had done. He had always taken pleasure in being
the first to see each new work, but she reminded him that he could only ever be the second. He was the boyfriend. And while she tolerated his sneaking around for a peek, maybe even condoned it, she let him know that she didn't particularly need his approval. She was the artist. He looked at the painting. In an hour, she had easily captured the movement of the street below, the lines of the neighbourhood and the looming swell of mountain. It was her sky that stopped him. It wasn't just a skilled representation but an exploration of sky, all possible skies, made plausible in front of him. He could tell her any number of things, all of which would sound facile and wouldn't properly convey what he felt. So he said nothing, instead choosing to stare dumbly at the street settling into shadows and at the illuminated cross on Mount Royal. What he could not say, could not even understand at the time, was that Celia's sky saddened him in a vague and shameful way, hinting of a future of beauty and promise that he had no hand in.

Then, more voices, barking and guttural, rising to a tunnelling roar but Celia didn't react. He couldn't understand what they were saying. Everything around him darkened except for the lights from the cross on the mountain, which amplified and coalesced into a single point that grew until everything disappeared into its luminous centre. A voice, closer. Smaller than the god-voice he'd imagined as a kid.

“Can you hear me?”

Patrick awoke in another Dutch room. Regaining consciousness had turned out to be an underwater experience, the pull of unfathomable currents and a variety of blurred lights: natural, fluorescent, the point of a penlight boring through his skull as he surfaced to find a doctor in the tribunal's infirmary
examining him. The right side of his head felt tense, and when he was asked to follow the doctor's finger with his eyes, he experienced an ocular pain equivalent to having an arm twisted behind his back.

“What happened?” he mumbled to the doctor. He was a complete coward when it came to any pain but
this
pain was unprecedented, an accessory heart beating against his right cheekbone. He touched his face, a move that elicited a tender, admonishing “No, no” from the doctor.

“Roberto hit you,” a voice said behind him. He swivelled his head around on the bed's pillow, a manoeuvre that bent and twisted his facial discomfort.

“Celia?”

“I'm so sorry. I didn't think he would do something like that.”

He couldn't see her. She was sitting off in a corner of the room made more obscure by the way he was lying and his swollen eye. Patrick felt uneasy turning his head any further–Celia or not–a wariness that seemed justified as one end of the room began to sink. He tried to grip the bed sheets but they were taut and thin with over-laundering.

“Hello, Mopito,” another voice said, similar but less recognizable than Celia's.

“Nina?”

“Yes,” the voice replied, a tone of satisfaction evident, even through the haze.

He heard Nina say something to Celia and then the sound of a door opening and closing. Someone had left.

The infirmary's doctor, a trim, pleasant man in his forties who introduced himself as Dr. Bolodis, proceeded to run through a fairly thorough exam and then suggested Patrick go
to the hospital for X-rays. Patrick acknowledged his advice–slipping in the fact that he was a doctor too–and then thanked him in that overly polite way that let a fellow professional know his recommendations would be immediately disregarded but that it wasn't a reflection of his opinion of the other man's expertise. A tribunal doctor probably didn't treat many people who were free to do what they wanted.

“Where's Roberto now?”

“He's been detained. I don't know if that means he's been arrested.”

The doctor, under his white coat of industriousness, was listening in on their conversation and had gone so far as to accompany certain remarks with a smirk or a grimace (Patrick couldn't tell which–both his eyes and head still felt partly unyoked). He told Patrick he could rest in the infirmary as long as he wanted. The doctor then nodded politely, this much Patrick could discern, and left. Neither he nor Celia said a thing. Only silence as the room undulated. Patrick wondered if he could have sensed Celia was there behind him without her having said something. Doubtful. He was never any good with presences. He remembered her saying that. Or was it absences? He wished she would say something.

Patrick heard movement, the ruffling of clothes and then the murmur of a child, still in sleep.

“Is that your son?”

“Yes. His name is Paul.”

“How old?”

“Two.”

For many years Patrick had imagined a moment like this between them, meeting again years later with their lives so decidedly adult and separate and complete without each other.
The two of them would stand there–probably in the rain, yes, rain felt right–and shake their heads in that world-weary manner. And even though they were in a city in Europe where one could safely assume it was raining or about to, and he was cradling his contused head and she was holding her child (something he hadn't foreseen), well, it just wasn't meeting the standard of how he thought it would be, and he wasn't sure whether it was a shortcoming inherent to the moment itself or his expectation. Either way, something seemed very B-movie. Patrick wanted to sit up. He wanted to go.