“Gentlemen,” he says. “It’s game time. The arena is packed. I’d hate to see two of the best political minds in the history of Kingston lose their fortitude before the opening buzzer. Remember: we have this covered.”
Hard cut to Staughton and Gant looking at each other, eyebrows raised. “Do we have it covered?” the mayor asks. “Do we absolutely? Do we truly understand how combustible this situation is? Tyson? How many ways there are for us to end up tied to burning stakes? Or sunk to the bottom of the river in bags filled with concrete and lye? It has to look organic. Not a single fucking iota of information tying us to the protests or to Zocalar can leave this circle.”
“Sir, if I may,” says Gant. “I couldn’t agree more, which is why we’ve taken all the precautions. But if we —”
“BOYS,” says Webb, his voice raised in an overly theatrical way, even by Hollywood standards. There’s a light on him that makes his skin shimmer and his eyes shine like glass spheres offering the viewer a glimpse of his righteous soul. “It’s going to work. The players are all lined up. We just have to execute. With conviction. Sell it right, and the rubes won’t even know what’s happening in front of them.”
The mayor stares at him, hard. Shakes his head.
“You’d better be goddamn right, Webb.”
Tyson Webb (or DiCaprio) smiles a smile so cryptic and infuriating it would make the Mona Lisa gag. On the soundtrack, a single, deep cello note begins playing in slow staccato as the camera crawls in toward him.
“Let’s not forget that this isn’t just some small-change development deal,” he says, seizing the monologue. “This is the big time, men. It’s a matter of hearts and minds. The people will follow, if we show them the way.” He uncaps the decanter and pours three big glasses of golden whiskey. “We’re all going to win here. Trust me.” Raising his glass, he looks back and forth between his two colleagues, daring them to challenge his air of manifest destiny.
The mayor looks out the window, gnawing at his bottom lip. This suggestion of doubt is what ultimately saves his character — the implication that some inner moral compass is forcing him to wrestle with the crimes he helped engineer, clearing the way for the true villain of the story to emerge. Credit to Downey for selling it the way he does.
“Fuck it. Your game, Webb. But if this goes bad, I’m going to cut off your prick and feed it to the press gallery in a kaiser bun. Are we clear?”
“It’s covered,” says Webb.
Downey/Staughton picks up his glass and waves it at B-lister/Tim Gant.
“All right then,” the mayor says. “The first protest goes tomorrow at noon. Gant, you’re responsible for making sure they all sign the NDAs. Nobody, I mean nobody, gets paid without that signature. Webb, I want the first news story out by two p.m. Linda at CBC is already teed up. No dropping balls on this. Are we clear?”
Tim Gant — in the film, too weak to protest, devoid of any inner struggle of his own, a peon and a pawn, pathetic human smear — nods in silence and picks up his own tumbler. The three men clink glasses and take a long drink to seal their pact, and the scene fades to black on the blaring of horns.
3. Sandra knew something was wrong from the very first day. We were washing dishes together after dinner. Cold wind off the lake rattled the windows. On the radio, the last bars of “New Orleans Is Sinking” gave way to the news. Bellevue House was the lead story.
“Indigenous protesters demonstrating outside the historic home of Sir John A. Macdonald have drawn a response from city council, as lurid new rumours have emerged about his conduct . . .”
I felt Sandra tense up beside me. As a rule, we tried not to talk about work. Between her professorship at the university and my position on council, our family could have too easily been swallowed by our careers. But I’d been edgier than usual, and she’d noticed.
“Is that something you’re involved in?” she said, nodding at the radio. “Sounds complicated.”
“Some people don’t think so,” I said. I considered telling her everything — about the backroom deal I’d made with Staughton and Webb; about our arrangement with the Quebec developer, Zocalar; about the plan to use old Sir John and his crimes against humanity as a tool to get the result we wanted: a revitalized waterfront and a new centre for arts and culture, built by our good friends from Montreal. This was my window, to let her in.
“I know a little bit, but it’s not my file,” I said.
She knew I was lying, but nodded anyway.
I placed the last bowl in the cupboard and went into the living room, where Eleanor was watching TV. Seeing my daughter was both antidote and venom: being around her, watching her grow into a beautiful little person, gave me the righteousness of parenthood to hold on to, even while I knew that what I’d done, was still doing, could hurt her if it went the wrong way.
“What are you watching?” I asked. I could see that it was Despicable Me, the animated film with Steve Carell as the lovable supervillain Gru.
“Movie,” she said, gaze fixed on the screen.
I dropped into the easy chair beside the sofa and let out a deep sigh. Then the movie went to commercial, and my blood went sour as vinegar. The room seemed to fold in on itself as the picture appeared on screen: a dreamy, rotating drone shot of Bellevue House, its green gables shining in the autumn sun. A voice like fresh, hard butter spoke out over the image: “A city’s heritage is its heart. It feeds our culture. Our memory. Our dreams. It keeps us alive.” This dissolved to a montage of close-ups, the camera crawling slowly up the house’s walls, showing off the creamy texture of the exterior stucco, the dazzle of sunlight on the golden front steps. The voice was joined by a loud drumbeat. “Now, corrupt bureaucrats want to rip out the city’s heart . . .” There was another dissolve to two flags waving against a blue sky, the standards of city and country flying side by side, and between them in the sky an image, ghostly but unmistakable, of the face of Sir John A. Macdonald himself. This faded to a wide shot of Bellevue House at night, overlaid with an icon of a bright red heart, pulsing and dripping blood in time with the beat of the drum. “Help save the city’s heart,” said the voice. “Help save Bellevue House.” A tiny line of text at the bottom of the screen said the ad had been paid for by the Sons of Khepri. It was the first time I saw the phrase — and it was like swallowing a rancid apple, core and all, and feeling the seeds take root inside you.
Eleanor was entranced. From the doorway, Sandra had caught the last half of the ad, too. I wondered if she noticed me turning white as a grub. I wondered how much she knew, and whether it broke her heart to watch it happen.
4. The next week, the posters appeared. Dozens were plastered to lampposts and construction barriers in the downtown core, and two billboards went up in Confederation Basin, all bearing the same image: Bellevue House, with the Sons of Khepri’s bloody heart superimposed on top. Social media exploded with questions about Bellevue House and speculation on who was behind the ads. Posts on both sides of the issue numbered in the thousands. Some praised the decision to raze the house, saying that to erase a history of genocide was no loss, and that it was necessary to healing. Others decried it as a political correctness run wild, another concession to the strident social justice mobs.
We were nowhere near ready to take the plan public; it went public anyway. For all the backroom secrecy, real or imagined, some leak or puncture in the seal had let the rumours out into the cyclonic churn of the media. The same night the posters appeared, the news was full of it: Bellevue House was to be demolished, the entire structure bulldozed and the site redeveloped into a new initiative, ostensibly to benefit the city.
Following the leak, the official statement from City Hall was as vague as we could get away with, which only fuelled speculation. I heard that Bellevue House had been purchased by a Chinese tech conglomerate for use as a digital innovation hub. I heard it would be turned into a Canadian flagship location for a Mexican-restaurant chain from the States. I heard it would be converted into
a mosque, at the behest of a Saudi prince looking for reasons to invest in Canadian wind power. I heard Avril Lavigne had bought it as a retreat. The obvious and fair choice was to turn it into an Indigenous cultural centre. (Which is what some of us always had in mind, no matter what the papers say.)
There were inevitable questions about costs for the taxpayer, implications for cultural heritage, zoning laws, bird migration routes. But City Hall insisted that the matter was too important to delay — the house’s time in history had passed, and both Parks Canada, who helped administer the site, and the City of Kingston agreed that a new narrative was needed to move forward in unity. It was necessary to acknowledge the hard facts: Sir John A. Macdonald had starved Indigenous people to herd them onto reserves, his residential school system leaving a legacy of broken families, languages lost, children beaten and abused. And never mind the lurid rumours going around about his firstborn son, the one who died at Bellevue House.
Opinions poured forth. Statements came from the university, the military college, Corrections workers, the coach of the Kingston Frontenacs junior hockey team. Newscasters rushed to get reactions from local businesses, academics, economists, activists, students on the street. Everyone had an opinion, though no one knew exactly what was happening.
It was around then that I saw the two women for the first time — the ones who’d later confirm my ugliest fears. They were both interviewed on the six o’clock news, given the same question: What does Bellevue House mean to you?
The first, wearing a grey parka and thick leather mitts, was identified onscreen as Mary Tegan, Tyendinaga Mohawk. “It’s time to acknowledge Macdonald’s true legacy and to stop celebrating him,” she said. “For me, for my people, every time we walk by Bellevue House, it’s a reminder of all the damage he did.”
I didn’t catch the second woman’s name. She was hunched and hugging herself in the cold, wearing a yellow kerchief tied around her head. When the reporter asked her the question, she looked at the camera, and there was a drill boring into her eyes, some poison tip headed for her core that was too deep to be stopped.
“Bellevue House is a piece of our history!” she said, spitting out the words. “To rip it down is an outrage! A goddamn outrage!”
The problem was, I believed them both. I believed that Mary Tegan lived with wounds passed down directly from Macdonald’s hand. As for the second woman, I’d seen people gnash over hundreds of different injuries. I’d seen sorrow and fear and suspicion that grows over months, like a strangling vine. But I’d never seen someone mad like this. It was unnatural. Inhuman, almost. She had the certainty of the possessed.
That’s when I started to understand that the barriers were collapsing between us and something inconceivable. I hadn’t named it yet. Had no idea what specific horror was to come. But I could feel time buckling, in the rhythm of a sickness throbbing just below the surface of the world.
5. A house is a house and a devil’s a devil. Until it’s not. The smell of the gun is so natural to me now, like a vapour I can wear as skin by oiling the muzzle with my bare hands, to shield myself from the pest. But it wasn’t always like this. So much is fluid — permeable in ways we can’t fathom — but in some things, before and after are irreconcilable states.
The bomb threat on City Hall came on a Monday morning in mid-December. I was at my desk, trying not to look out the window at the flags. The screech of the alarm was so abrupt and jarring that I jumped in my chair and spilled coffee all over my hands. The scalding heat felt angry, and I was angry, too, at yet another drill, another false emergency.
I knew it was real when there was a commotion in the hall, everyone heading for the exits, voices clipped and nervous. I shuffled out of my office and into the cold with the rest of them like a dazed cow, empty of will. I tried not to hear the whispers running through the crowd, the cursed sibilants, “terrorists” and “explosives” and “house.” Somehow I knew that events would start moving much faster now.
That afternoon, police in riot gear cordoned off the blocks around City Hall and arrested a Syrian man who peddled trinkets from a rug in Market Square. I’d never spoken with him, but I was sorry to see him go: I knew he had nothing to do with the threat.
You have to be careful with certain terms. Search “bomb” and “schematic” and “fertilizer” in succession and men in dark suits start taking note. CSIS, FBI, Interpol. You become a person of interest, a potential threat, and one day the black SUVs show up at your curb, carrying agents who want to know if you have a pressure cooker in your cupboard or a copy of the Qur’an on your bookshelf.
Likewise, some words can betray you. Words like house and family, career and nation. They aren’t as stable as they seem; their structures can collapse, faster than you’d think. And you’re never sure who owns them — these words and the lives they attach to. You never know who’s found the controls to the system, and might decide on a whim to take the solid truths you know and rearrange the molecules. Who might use these words to systemize their own madness. To condemn people for generations. Seduce them into death. Destroy lasting love.
It only happened that once, with Sandra. I was sitting in the living room, watching the Sons of Khepri’s TV spot air for the hundredth time. For weeks, I’d been distracted by a festering sound underneath everything, like the buzzing of a massive hive. I couldn’t stop thinking about Macdonald’s son — how he’d died, and why. What a mad variety of atrocities his father had engineered, and what others he might have been capable of. What cruelty is at the foundation of all we do, all we are.
Sandra came into the living room and kneeled in front of me, putting her hand on my knee.
“Tim,” she said, looking at the screen. “You can’t keep going like this. We can’t.”
Tim. Timothy Gant. Husband and father. City Councillor. So much erased in one moment of lost control. Base, animal instinct. Reptilian brain.
“Whatever it is you’ve done —”
I remember the tingle in my palm after it connected with her jaw. The moment I took to stare at my hand before reaching to help my wife up off the floor. How detached I felt from it, as though it was something I’d watched happen on TV.
Eleanor came to see what the noise was. The air in the room smelled of oil and furniture polish. We all looked at one another and pretended to be confused, jarred out of reality for a spell by some malicious invisible actor. But all of us knew what had happened, parents and child alike. We all knew, in that moment, that there are some truths you can’t come back from.
6. The Sir John A. Macdonald memorial statue stands in the southeast corner of City Park, about two blocks from where I used to live. Cast in bronze and perched on a pedestal of pink marble, the man they called Old Tomorrow clutches a scroll in his right hand and stares dolefully out across King Street, in the direction of the Celtic cross that marks where Irish died by the hundreds in the fever sheds while he hid out at Bellevue House, conjuring abominations.
On the night I hit Sandra, I stood before the statue, waiting in vain for answers. Who were the Sons of Khepri, and what noxious force was backing their campaign to bury us? What strange ministry had emerged to defend Macdonald’s legacy? What goal could possibly be served by preserving Bellevue House any longer? At the time, I still believed that, whatever the means, for some of us — for me — there was nobility in our intention to take it down and build something better. All the shady kickbacks and engineered outrage in the world couldn’t change that.
There were no answers at home and no answers from statues. But there was one place I hadn’t looked yet. From City Park I walked along Stuart Street, through the campus, past the hospital and up University Avenue to the Douglas Library. None of the official histories would have what I was looking for; no plaque or proclamation would speak of it. My hope lay in the university’s Special Collections, housed on the second floor of Douglas, the old limestone giant.
Inside, I requested dozens of volumes, poring over arcane hist
ories and yellowed pamphlets, searching for words that trilled with hidden menace. As I read, moving from book to book, page to page, I found only bits, tiny flecks of meaning that confirmed little. A death notice for Macdonald’s infant son mentioned a closed-casket funeral. A blurry photograph showed Macdonald at City Hall, wearing a pin on his lapel that looked to be in the shape of a heart. There were stories of him disappearing for days at a time and returning to Parliament speaking gibberish, behaviour blamed on his legendary drinking. But nothing concrete, no revelation.
I was almost ready to admit defeat when I picked up a heavy leather-bound tome and found, underneath, the slim booklet that would chew me to pieces.
It was the colour of dried amber and no bigger than a postcard. The cover was plain, bearing only the title — Hymns to the Roach of Khepri — and an eerily familiar image of a bloody heart sprouting cilia-covered legs and two long, curled antennae. When I opened it, the text was incomprehensible, tiny runes that didn’t seem organized according to any logical system or order. It wasn’t until the words began to move that I understood.
All at once, as though triggered by an inaudible whistle, the bits of text began scrabbling like tiny beetles across the page. Their movements were a coordinated churn, a language that taught me to read it as I watched. I like to think it’s because, by then, I was ready to see the repugnant truth. Moving through stories in a strange, whispering cadence, the insect text revealed the full extent of its sacrilege:
The beast has gone by many names. Leech of the Eons. Heart of the Ages. Im-Dzha’ggon’. The Scarab of Malice. Scum Locust, Shadow Roach, Black Organ of the Old Ones: Nssu-Gh’ahnb — a creature out of time and space, so horrible that to gaze on it is to test the bounds of sanity. It has always been there, outside of time. Only with the right invitation, the proper ritual, is it able to cross the boundary into our world. Only through the work of a dark priesthood willing to feed its heinous appetite. Only by the sacrifices of its Sons.
Different Beasts Page 7