Nikolski (27 page)

FLIGHT 502 TO NEWARK
is due to leave Caracas at 7:10 a.m. local time.

Noah and Simón, who have just come in from Margarita, have scarcely fifteen minutes to catch the flight. The rain is hammering against the glass walls of the national terminal, but there is no sign of any slowdown in airport activity. At most, some flights are ten minutes late. A few travellers, contorted in their plastic chairs, sleep unperturbed. From time to time, flight numbers are announced on the loudspeakers. Rum and black coffee are both served, without distinction, at the refreshment counter. The comforting routine of an international airport.

Noah and Simón gallop through this great calm and at the last minute locate their boarding gate. A sleepy-eyed woman checks their tickets, pushes them into the airplane and shuts the heavy hatchway behind them.

At exactly 7:18 a.m., just as the old Boeing 727 rises from the runway, the airport notice boards start clacking in unison. All flights scheduled that day will be delayed for an unspecified period because of weather conditions.

Our two fliers are quite oblivious. They gain altitude, leave the airspace of Caracas, and climb through the cloud ceiling just in time to see the sun come up.

Simón takes the events with extraordinary composure. It is true, though, that the strangeness of their departure is tempered by the general unlikelihood of the situation. In a world where you cross the Caribbean at ten thousand metres above sea level while listening to Britney Spears on closed-circuit, what could be more natural than to decamp at two in the morning without telling anyone goodbye, in order to spend the winter holidays in the hemisphere next door?

Pressing his nose against the porthole, Simón silently marvels at the ice crystals. The on-board thermometer indicates that the outside temperature is 40 degrees Celsius below zero, a figure that boggles the mind.

At the airport in Newark, they pass through customs without a hitch. The customs officer appears unfazed by the arrival of a half-Chipewyan father with his half-Venezuelan young son. Noah pockets the passports with a sigh of relief, and off they go to a new boarding gate, a new Boeing, a new adventure.

Terminal C looks like a refugee camp: hundreds of travellers everywhere, sitting on their luggage or on the floor. The sleet has grounded planes for hours, and an amorphous crowd is thronged at the counters of the international area. Noah studies the monitors. The next flight to Montreal is put off indefinitely. The end of the day seems more remote than ever.

They ensconce themselves in an unoccupied corner. Simón is philosophical about the holdup and busies himself studying every detail of the surrounding chaos. A few paces away, a monitor is broadcasting the CNN Airport Network non-stop.

Their closest neighbour is a young woman around thirty years old. She has short hair, an oversized sweater and slim reading glasses. She is seated nonchalantly on an old blue sailor’s duffel bag and munches on chips as she leafs through a guidebook to the Dominican Republic.

Noah vaguely follows CNN, a blend of news and commercials interspersed with stock market figures. Simón and the girl sneak glances at each other. They appear to find each other intriguing—two birds perched side by side on an electrical wire. After a time, she half smiles and holds out the bag to him.

“Want some?”

Simón looks with distrust at these crunchy pinkish snacks. The label shows cryptic orange ideograms— nothing to help identify either the contents or the taste.

“Shrimp chips,” she explains. “They’re crazy about them in Japan. Do you know about Japan?”

“I know Pokémon!” Simón exclaims.

Reassured, he snaps up a chip and chomps at it enthusiastically. Over his head, Noah and the girl exchange a polite smile.

“Your son?” she asks.

He nods. Simón has another chip. Then, suddenly, the monitors start to flash. New departure times pop up beside various destinations. A huge sigh of relief goes through Terminal C as immediate boarding is announced for Chicago, London and Santo Domingo. The girl slips the guidebook into her pocket.

“I’ve got to go,” she tells them as she rises to her feet. “Good luck!”

Simón waves to the girl, who moves off and vanishes, literally engulfed by the throng.

Noah’s mind is on something else. A thread of sweat runs down his neck and goosebumps spread over his arms. On the television, there is a special report on the violent floods in Venezuela.

He tries to believe this is a mistake, but the caption over the pictures—
Flash Floods in Venezuela
—leaves no room for misinterpretation. A working-class district of Caracas has been sliced in half by a torrent of mud and debris. A series of headlines stream by over the NASDAQ indices. The death toll numbers in the thousands, and tens of thousands of houses have been destroyed.

Questions roll through Noah’s head: Were there landslides in Margarita? Was Don Eduardo’s house swept away? Are Arizna and Bernardo safe?

He shakes his head. Nothing that has happened today can match the unlikelihood of this flood, which came out of nowhere. After all, he and Simón went through Caracas just a few hours ago, and there was nothing to foreshadow a disaster such as this. All at once, he feels as though he has been travelling for much longer than is actually the case.

Simón tugs impatiently on his sleeve.

“What?” Noah asks.

“They just announced the plane for Montreal.”

Noah comes back from his thoughts. He looks at the departures monitor. Clever kid—he’s right. Their flight is scheduled to leave in twenty minutes at Gate C42—at the far end of the terminal. They grab their bags and dash off again.

THE SHOPS CLOSED FOR THE NIGHT
over an hour ago. It’s dark, it’s snowing, and with the Christmas lights arrayed on either side, Mozart Street looks like a deserted landing strip. At the corner of Casgrain, the salmon in Poissonnerie Shanahan’s window manages to sputter on between gusts of wind, stubbornly swimming against the current of an imaginary river toward the spawning pool of its ancestors.

Huddled inside a telephone booth, Noah watches the mist rise from his mouth. The temperature is barely 5 degrees below zero, but never in his life has he felt this cold, except perhaps in a truck stop in southern Alberta on Christmas Night 1979, when the trailer’s radiator gave up the ghost. He presses the frozen plastic of the receiver against his left ear. At the other end, he hears nothing but metallic clicks and crackling, and he begins to wonder whether he has dialed the wrong number. After a while the international operator’s voice faintly pierces the interference.

“Hi-bonsoir-comment-puis-je-vous-aider
-how-can-I-help-you?”

For a few seconds Noah is thrown off balance. The accent seems to be neither Québécois nor American nor Latin American, but a sort of amalgam originating in every place and no place at the same time, as if the voice did not really belong to a human being but to a spurt of DNA designed to meet a specific need and then injected into the circuits of the telephone system. An entity with no accent, no nationality and no trade-union demands.

“I’d like to make a collect call to Venezuela,” Noah declares after a moment’s hesitation.

“What is the number?”

He gives the regional code of Nueva Esparta and the number of the Burgos residence, while restlessly surveying the area around the phone booth. No visible movement, aside from the blowing snow and the flickering salmon at Shanahan’s fish store. An agitated, diligent silence hovers at the other end of the line. One can just make out, in the background, the inconspicuous tapping of a keyboard, most likely a recording from which one is supposed to gather that international operators do indeed have fingers, and therefore bodies.

“I’m sorry,” she finally says. “The line is down.”

“You mean the person’s telephone line has been cut?”

“No, service seems to have been disrupted throughout
the whole region. Weather conditions are bad in Venezuela. The infrastructures may have been damaged. I advise you to call back a little later.”

Noah says thank you and hangs up. He cautiously opens the door of the phone booth a crack, and adjusts his too-thin coat and his too-short scarf.

“Carajo,”
he swears, mechanically.

He turns his head in response to a rumbling noise. An unfriendly-looking snowplough is approaching from the intersection. It roars past him, comes to a halt amid a blast of salt and gravel and laboriously starts away again. Noah jumps over the ridge of snow and follows in the plough’s wake.

When he arrives at the apartment, Maelo is watching the televised news bulletin. Set out on the table, so they cannot be missed, are a bottle of
mamajuana
and two small glasses. Noah shakes the snow from his coat and hangs it on the coat rack.

“Well?” Maelo asks as he opens the bottle.

Noah drops onto the couch and wriggles his toes to try to get the blood flowing again.

“No news. The lines are down. I’ll go out to call again later.”

On the screen, Hugo Chávez is declaring a state of emergency in the states of Vargas, Miranda, Zulia, Falcón, Yaracuy, Nueva Esparta and Carabobo, and in the federal district of Caracas. This is the most devastating flood to hit South America in decades.

“Are you worried about her?” Maelo asks Noah, as he proffers a glass of
mamajuana.

Noah dreamily whiffs the contents of the glass and shrugs. Images flash randomly across the screen. A river of mud flowing through a slum area. A small red car wedged into a concrete wall. A man thigh-deep in brownish water, holding a child in his arms. Helicopters, fire trucks, ambulances.

“No,” Noah finally replies. “There’s no reason to worry. It would take a volcanic eruption to budge the Burgos house. It’s gigantic, with walls
this
thick. And built on the highest point in the city, near the Santa Rosa fort. It’s the safest place on Margarita Island.”

The General Assembly of the UN has replaced the turmoil of the floods on the television screen. They are deliberating on disarming Iraq, inspection teams, the demands of the United States.

The telephone rings. Maelo reaches for it and, without lowering the volume of the TV, answers a cautious “Hello?” A smile of relief spreads across his face. “Finally! I’ve been waiting to hear from you since this afternoon … Yes … What? Four hours at Newark airport?”

“Yeah, it was nuts in Newark,” Noah puts in.

He uncaps the bottle
of mamajuana
and pours himself a good-sized glass. On the TV, the local weather forecast for the next few days is snow and sleet in abundance. He takes the remote control and switches
channels. On every station, there is nothing but mudslides, refugees and antitartar toothpaste.

“Yes,” Maelo continues. “They came to the fish shop. Asked me tons of questions. I told them I didn’t know anything … No idea. They emptied out the apartment. It took them nearly the whole day. Did you ever happen to do any cleaning from time to time? …
¡Chistosa! …
Hey, I have to let you go. I’ve got guests … Yes … Fine. Let me hear from you when you have a minute. And don’t let Grandmother Úrsula make life too hard for you!”

He hangs up and grabs his glass
of mamajuana.

“It’s the season of hurried departures,” he explains between two sips. “A friend of mine needed to take an emergency vacation. I sent her to get some sun at my grandmother’s place.”

Noah nods absent-mindedly. He drains his glass in one go and yawns slowly.

“Well, I’m going to bed. I’m wasted.”

“Sweet dreams.”

Noah totters over to the bedroom and opens the door very gently. The beam of light sweeps across the room and illuminates the capelins swimming on the wall. He shuts the door behind him, muffling the sound of the television.

“Noah?” a small voice whispers in the dark.

He sits down on the edge of the mattress and strokes Simón’s forehead.

“What is it?”

“Can you tell me a story?”

“I already told you one earlier. Now it’s time to sleep. Come on, shove over a bit.”

A series of waves ripples through the sheets when Simón crawls over to the other side of the mattress. Noah shivers as he undresses, pulls on a dry pair of woollen socks and slides under the starfish. It’s strange to be able to recognize the least little bump in the mattress, and to find the discomfort both familiar and reassuring.

“Good night,” he mutters in Simón’s direction.

“Good night.”

He sinks his head into the pillow, closes his eyes and exhales blissfully. The room goes quiet. The sports news can be heard indistinctly through the wall.

“Is it true you lived here before?” Simón asks.

“Hmmm,” Noah confirms. “I lived with Maelo for four years.”

He lets out a long yawn. On the other side of the wall, a sports analyst discusses injuries, power plays and penalties.

“And this was your room?” Simón insists.

“This was my room,” Noah sighs, trying very hard to hold on to sleep.

“So this, this is the bed you slept in!”