The Origin of Species (62 page)

It always came to this, even with Jiri, he saw now: toe the line. Maybe he was right. Who did Alex think he was, exactly, making up his
own little scheme of things? There was a whole industry out there, professors at Yale, at Cambridge, at the Sorbonne, each of them building in tiny increments on what came before, while he was building on air.

“I can rework it,” he said, his mind scrambling to think where he could shift things to bring them more in line with the prevailing order. “It’s just a draft. I was planning to bump the language up a bit in the next revision.”

“You’re not listening to me, Alex.” Here it came, the undoing. It was never a question of tinkering with Jiri—you had the goods or you didn’t. “The language is the crux of it. You’ve stepped out into the wilderness. It’s always lonely out there, but you’ll have to stick to your guns if you want anyone to listen to you. It’s the simplicity of the thing that’s the strength of it, really, the beauty of it. Like something so obvious it’s staring you in the face. What was it that Huxley said? ‘I should have thought of it myself.’”

He started going through the submission page by page, noting weaknesses, clarifying his notes, acting in every regard as if the thesis were viable. Alex sat mute, not daring to interrupt, not even daring to believe he had actually understood. An impossible crossroads seemed to shimmer ahead of him, the place where what he had aspired to and what he had done intersected.

He didn’t know what question to ask afterward, afraid to ask the wrong one, to ruin the moment.

All the bitterness he’d ever felt toward Jiri seemed washed away.

“I wasn’t sure about the texts,” he said. “I mean, if they’ll work.”

“No, no, they’re exactly right. It’s like a survey of three thousand years of Western civilization. I’d stick to Bloom with the Joyce, though, the rest is mainly just playing around.”

Suddenly, every possibility was open to Alex—he could go, if he wanted, there was nothing to hold him back. At some point he would have to speak to Jiri about the matter, about Sweden, though at the moment the terrain seemed a bit too treacherous, trip-wired as it was with the question of fathers and sons.

Alex noticed, for the first time, how unusually tidy Jiri’s office was, even for Jiri. There were no piles of books, no end-of-term clutter of essays and exams, no half-typed page on Jiri’s Selectric to give Alex the sense he was merely an interruption of some more crucial task. He kept waiting for the peremptory tone that always signaled the end of their meetings, but Jiri was still eyeing him.

“There’s something behind this,” he said. “Something personal. I can feel it in the writing.”

“We talked about it. About the Galápagos.”

“Yes. You and Darwin. Some sort of epiphany, I suppose.”

Alex hoped he would just drop the subject, as he had done before.

“I guess.”

“So? What was it? What was your finch?”

There was something plaintive in Jiri’s tone that tugged at him.

“If you want to know the truth,” he said, before he could stop himself, “someone died there. Someone I was with.”

It was the first time he had ever spoken of Desmond.

“A friend?” Jiri said, with uncommon delicacy.

“No. Not a friend. Just someone I’d met. A researcher.”

Jiri’s attention was still on him.

“What was it, an accident?”

“There was a storm. He fell off our boat. It was all a bit complicated. He was a jerk, really, it was stupid. It’s not even worth talking about.”

It had been a colossal miscalculation to bring this up with Jiri. Battened away in his mind Desmond’s death had had a kind of integrity, a kind of amplitude, but to speak about it seemed to make it instantly amorphous and vulgar.

“So you felt responsible, was that it? Because you didn’t like him?”

Jiri had said this charitably enough and yet the easiness of this casual interrogation made Alex’s blood rise.

“Something like that. To tell you the truth, I was ready to push him myself.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“You didn’t actually push him.”

He was treating Alex like a child.

“No, I didn’t fucking push him.”

“And afterward. When he fell. You didn’t look for him. You didn’t try to save him.”

“Look, I get it, I didn’t actually kill him, if that’s your point.” He was practically shouting. “Don’t make fun of this. Just don’t. I could hear when he fell, for Christ’s sake. I heard it, and I didn’t do anything.”

He felt so angry.
Choke on that
, he thought.
You’re not the only one with a fucking past
.

It was always a mistake to give Jiri an entry, Alex knew that. He always made you shovel your shit to hide his own.

“Have you ever told anyone about this?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Seriously. How long have you been carrying this around?”

As if he ought to feel unburdened now. As if Jiri had done him a favor. He didn’t feel unburdened. All he felt was grief, a hole, as if he had given up something important.

“It’s not such a big deal. I realize that. Let’s just drop it.”

Jiri stared down at his desk.

“Look, Alex, I’m not trying to minimize what happened to you. You got a look at a part of yourself most people never have to see. It changes you. But don’t make a monument out of it. People hoard their guilt in these rich countries like it’s some kind of commodity. Don’t fall into that trap. Save your agonizing for the important things, not some asshole who just happened to die while you were having bad thoughts about him. I’m sure I did worse things than that in the last week that I’ve already forgotten about.”

He said all of this with such directness it was like being sprayed with a water cannon. Alex felt such a mixture of things he couldn’t form a proper reaction, not sure if Jiri was belittling him or actually, for once, treating him like an equal.

“Here.” Jiri shoved over the newspaper on his desk. It was another
Toronto Star
. “Page three. You’ll hear about it soon enough. In case you’re wondering what it’s actually like to kill someone.”

The article looked so minor and inconspicuous, tucked to one side next to an ad for women’s leatherwear. “Man Dies from Injuries Following Brutal Attack.” Alex couldn’t bring himself to do more than scan it, glossing over the details and names. Kidney failure. Apparently one of the kidneys had been damaged in addition to the spleen.

From injuries sustained
. It took Alex a moment to realize the legal import of that.

“You know, I went to see him after the attack,” Jiri said. “I don’t know why. To apologize, I suppose. A stupid thing. He was out cold, of course, he must have been pumped full of morphine—it was like a joke,
the way he was trussed up, like one of those cartoons where someone’s been hit by a bus. This hunched-up immigrant man was sitting next to the bed, the father, I figured. He hadn’t even taken his coat off. He might have been sitting for hours like that, half out of the chair as if he was going to leave any minute. A big sour-faced old bastard with those worker’s hands, you know, that skin like cracked plaster. Kazlauskas. Lithuanian. I didn’t know what to say to the guy. I told him I was an old high school teacher of his son’s, that he’d been a good student, and he just nodded as if he couldn’t care less. Who knows what he was thinking, maybe that his son had just got what he deserved. But it was the same, you know, it only made everything worse. The only thing that kept me from putting a gun to my head was thinking, that’s it, it can’t get any worse than this. The rest’ll be easy.”

They had reached a funny plateau, one that gave a good view of things but was rather barren and windswept.
That which does not kill me
. Alex had to guard against showing anything like sympathy—he’d be made to pay for that.

“What about your son?” he said. “What’ll happen to him?”

“That’s the irony. This’ll probably help him in the end, now that they’ve got a good charge against the ringleaders. I know it’s funny to say it, but he’s not a bad kid. He was probably terrified at the time. He’ll testify against the leaders and if he’s lucky he’ll be home by Christmas. Then there’s just the rest of his life to worry about.”

He would testify to save his skin.
History repeats itself
. That had to be going through Jiri’s mind.

“Have you seen John?” Alex said cautiously.

“You mean Jana?” Jiri laughed. “What, you want to make sure I’ve got someone to look after me, is that it? That’s very kind of you, but you needn’t worry about me. I won’t be all right, but no worse than usual. As for Jana, he’s gone back to Czechoslovakia.”

John had never mentioned anything of the sort.

“Can he just do that? Won’t he be arrested or something?”

Jiri shrugged.

“He’d had enough, it seems. We had a big argument, in fact, but I couldn’t talk him out of it.”

“What about his shop?”

“Oh, so you knew about that. That should tell you everything. He
just locked the door and got on a plane. There were a few debts, I guess, but it wasn’t really that. It was the children. He wanted to see them. His wife turned them against him when he left, he never really got over that. Who knows, maybe glasnost will save him or maybe the party will use him as a poster boy. It’s a coup for them, in a way, to get him back. Fleeing the capitalists.”

Jiri set Alex’s dissertation in front of him.

“I should tell you that I’ll be moving to Toronto, of course, with the trial and everything. I’ve taken a job at one of the colleges there, composition, mainly, though they promised to throw me a bit of literature now and then.”

“But you’ll still be coming up here? I mean, you’ll still be on the faculty?”

“I handed in my resignation about an hour ago,” Jiri said cheerily. “A clean break.”

Alex twigged: he was heading off being sacked. He could have commuted otherwise, taken a leave, whatever, instead of languishing in the backwaters of community college composition.

“What about my dissertation?” Alex blurted.

“You’ll be fine with it. You’re well on your way. I suspect you’ll be getting tenure somewhere long before I ever do.”

That was it, then. Alex couldn’t quite figure out what had just happened between them—it seemed they had revealed their darkest selves, then carried on as if it were nothing. Maybe this was what passed for friendship with Jiri, these perilous thrusts and feints, the constant raising of stakes until disentanglement became impossible.

“I liked your use of the transhumance, by the way,” Jiri said. “I assume that came out of some sort of family history.”

Out on the street Alex felt a peculiar lightness, though not quite the cathartic one he might have wanted. It was more like being reduced: he had one less thing to set him apart, one less excuse. He didn’t like to give up his bogeymen any more than anyone else did.

So let me get this straight. Here’s this bastard you’ve been trying to get rid of like a bad penny for what, six or seven years, and then you actually miss him? I know you’re not big on Freud these days, but come on. Oedipus Redux or what?

(Chuckling) I don’t know if you’re exactly in a position to be criticizing my father figures, Peter
.

Touché. Or your bastards, for that matter. But you have to admit it’s a little, pardon my French, fucked up
.

I don’t want to sound too mystical about it, but I guess I sort of became him, in a way. I took his place
.

The air had cooled. A lingering smell of winter wafted over from the shadows of the Hall Building:
I’ll be back
, it said. Things had a way of doing that, of coming back, especially the bad ones. The eternal return. Look at Jiri. He was running from himself, you could have said, he was running from the monster in the maze. But that didn’t really sound like Jiri. Maybe he ran as a dog did, because it could. There was a field and open space, no leash, and only the pounding of your blood.
Run
. Over the hill to who knew what, with just the wind against you and the roar in your head of being alive.

O
utside the light was fading. Already the thrill of Jiri’s approval seemed a distant memory.

A line of clouds was setting in over the river, maybe bringing with it a last rogue snowfall. Alex knew he ought to pick up some food, but he hadn’t the will. Each time he went home now the same fatigue came over him: he seemed surrounded by so much
stuff
, all of which he would have to pack up again and store or cart home or toss out so that one day he could start the whole cycle all over again.

He felt the familiar roil in his blood as he hit de Maisonneuve and his building loomed up before him. His renewal notice had come a few weeks before, proposing another insane increase, as if the previous year had never happened, and Alex, as was his right, had accepted the lease but rejected the increase. By now it was all tactics, though the object of them grew more and more obscure as the day of reckoning receded further and further into the distance.

He entered the foyer and checked his mailbox. The weekly Steinberg’s flyer, with a coupon for Folgers; an entire booklet of coupons from the already struggling Faubourg. Nothing more. Alex’s mood dipped. No letter from Per in over two weeks.

Across from the mailboxes, a thin young man with the washed-out look of a heroin addict was struggling to make sense of the new telephone entry system. The system was about the only real innovation in the building after all the months of work, a completely useless device that seemed to require an understanding of some of the finer points of integral calculus, so that every time Alex entered the place these days he was faced with the same dilemma, whether to quickly pull the door closed
behind him like an asshole or let through whatever petty thief or serial killer was puzzling over the keyboard.

Alex turned his key and held open the door.

“Thanks, man,” the addict said, disappearing into one of the elevators without even bothering to hold it for him.

Alex dumped his junk mail into an empty planter. A rough hand-lettered sign had been posted between the elevators for several days:
LEASE RENEWALS, 2ND FLOOR
. This time around the landlords were getting smart, calling in the refuseniks early on in an effort to nip any group solidarity in the bud. Alex himself had got a call, but had politely declined to meet. As was his right.
I prefer to let the Régie decide
. He had somehow been thinking of this as part of his plan—he’d have them over a barrel, with two years’ increases still in abeyance—but the truth was that the closer he got to departure, the less leverage he had. All his claims were still tied up at the Régie, and he might be forced simply to drop them all when he left. The lease renewal had just been a stratagem, a ruse, but it could easily turn against him. He was responsible for the place now for another year, and might have to spend weeks finding a subletter, or might be refused one and then be stuck paying his rent until the landlords chose to replace him. He could just abscond, of course, but that would be burning his bridges, and giving the bastards not just the legal victory but the moral one.