As I sat, receiving the truth, the air around me turned thick and putrid. Fear writhed like a worm in my gut. I tried to move, to recoil from the cursed book that traced the path of the roach’s malignant juice from the very origin of the country to the TV spots the Sons of Khepri were currently running twice every half hour. But my limbs were frozen, mired to immobility in the viscid atmosphere. My eyes bulged and my heart tripped as the bugs streamed off the pages and up my useless arms. I couldn’t move, but I could feel, on my skin, the tickling of a million tiny legs, as they crawled up my neck and over my chin and into my nostrils and through my clenched lips, wriggling. They hit my eyes and I felt a gnawing pain, and then nothing at all.
When I came back to myself, I was somehow down by the water, behind the treatment plant on King Street, staring at a stripe of reflected moonray on the waves and the blinking red lights of the turbines across the river on Wolfe Island. When I turned around, the roiling sky and everything beneath it hit me like a bolt to the skull, an electrical shock. On the grass sloping up toward the road, on the street and sidewalk, hundreds of ghosts staggered in weightless despair, echoes of the people who had walked here and had their world taken away. I staggered and had to kneel. But the barrelling clouds called me forward. I got up and walked away from shore, navigating my way through the apparitions, up Centre Street, to the long green fence that marks the grounds of Bellevue House. I turned right, through the gate, past the Visitor Centre and through the trees. The house rose up before me, cast turquoise in the lunar light.
On the golden steps, at the top of the iron railing, he stood — Old Tomorrow himself. This time, it was no scroll he clutched, but a child wrapped in a woolen blanket, pinned with a brooch that I recognized too well: the heart of the Sons of Khepri. Macdonald’s eyes blazed up at the white moon, and a dense clicking noise like the riffling of cards issued from his bulbous nose. A black shadow danced on his lips, and slowly there emerged from between them, black and glistening, the horned head of a giant cockroach. It loosed itself, skittered up his arm, and plunged its mandibles into the flesh of the child’s bare neck, dribbling blood mixed with a black, oily secretion, a glyph of death daubed on its skin.
And that’s where comfort ended, for me.
7. Let’s say Sir John A. Macdonald killed his firstborn son. Let’s say he gave the child as a sacrifice to a god he couldn’t articulate but which ruled him nonetheless — an ancient thing from beyond space and time, cultivating devotion in the powerful and merciless of the Earth. Let’s say Macdonald raised up his child in the light of the larval moon and let the ravenous pest consume him.
Is that any worse than the truths we know?
It depends on which version of the story you believe.
It’s around halfway through the movie when the script diverges so wildly from reality that it becomes a different story altogether.
We’re back in the mayor’s office with Staughton, Webb, and Gant. This time there’s no whiskey. The mayor has no suit jacket on; Gant has his tie loosened and is sweating profusely. Only Tyson Webb keeps his DiCaprian cool, looking, the whole time, as though he’s about to wink at the camera.
“Well, gentlemen,” says the mayor. “Shall we commence the discussion about how utterly fucked we are? I told you, categorically, that if word of the plan got out, they’d destroy us. Now here we are: dog shit on the bottom of the public shoe. Webb, care to shimmy your frat-boy ass out of this one? It was you I recall saying, ‘It’s covered,’ yes?”
Webb smiles but says nothing, and any lingering sympathy for pathetic little Tim Gant teeters into the void of Tyson Webb’s silence.
“We have to renege,” says Gant in a nasally voice, making his infamy complete. “We have to cancel the deal. We can’t risk provoking these people —”
“What people? You know who’s behind all this, do you?” yells the mayor. “You got something to tell us, Gant?”
“No! I mean, no. I don’t know who they are. But they obviously have power. What if we can’t beat them? We have to renege.”
“So much for your stake in the public good, eh?” says the mayor. “And are you going to tell the CEO of Zocalar about a little twist in our plans? Eh? What makes you think he won’t flay your nutsack faster than you can say five for embezzlement?”
“They’ll turn the public against us!” says Gant. “This city isn’t ready for so much change —”
“Fuck the city!” says the mayor. “I won’t —”
There’s the sound of a throat being emphatically cleared, and the camera pans to Tyson Webb. He appears calm and righteous, lit to shine.
“Boys,” he says. “I suggest we stop the bickering and get down to business.”
“The worthless taint speaks!” snaps the mayor. “What business? What other fucking business is there? Enlighten me, Webb. What could possibly require our attention beyond the entire fucking world collapsing on top of us?”
Webb smiles, slow and slick. “That depends who you mean by ‘us,’ Jim.”
There’s a terrible pause as the mayor’s face goes red and his eyes balloon and his fists curl up into hard little walnuts of rage.
“You dickless weasel!” yells the mayor, jabbing his finger, getting right up into Webb’s face. “What do you think about me checking your candy-ass into solitary at Collins Bay? I still have that authority, goddamn it!”
“I don’t think so, Jim,” says Webb, a smile sauntering across his face like a sly millipede. “I don’t think you understand how little truth there is to that statement.”
At this point, in the film, Webb snaps his fingers, and the big wooden doors to the office bust open to disgorge a swarm of federal officers in riot gear. They stamp in and surround Jim Staughton and Tim Gant, pistols drawn. Downey Jr. is the first to put up his hands — again, a subtle nod to his essential moral complexity, the trace of goodness in him that allows his redemption later in the story.
Tim Gant, not-Buscemi, just follows suit. Hapless, guilty, loathsome, weak.
The cops slap cuffs on both of them. The strings well up over triumphant timpani rolls as the camera pans to Tyson Webb, riot police spreading out like black wings around him. The music stops and we cut to a close-up of his blue-eyed celebrity face.
“Now,” he says. “Here’s how it’s going to be.”
Here’s how it’s going to be.
Those are Hollywood words. No one says them out loud, not in real life, not the way they do in the movies. Real life can get lost on the cutting room floor, though. It gets buried under myth. Warped and changed.
In real life, Tim Gant had a spine. He came to that second meeting shaken, filled with dread after his nightmare of a statesman gone mad. Filled with conviction, too, that Bellevue House should be knocked down. Determined to make the case for its demise, knowing what black dreams lived like fungus within its walls.
In real life, Tyson Webb showed up to City Hall that day wearing a pin in the shape of a heart, and I knew right away that I’d misread everything. That our paths had diverged, and that the road Webb was on led to a place he’d sold his soul to reach. In real life, there was no big public trial for corruption, with Robert De Niro as the crown attorney. In real life, I negotiated a plea deal that kept me out of prison, but killed my chances at holding public office, or maybe any job, ever again. In real life, I went back to my family with my head hung like a guilty, furious dog.
In the movie, I went down hard. In real life, things were much, much worse.
8. When the public announcement came out of City Hall, it was worded as a personal statement from the mayor: a confident, almost lusty reassertion that Bellevue House was to be demolished, its ghosts banished to the trash pile of history. A plaque would be erected on site to note that the house had been there, and had been significant. But plans would proceed as scheduled.
If the missive also hinted at some cowardice or weakness of heart on the part of the mayor’s office — a grace note to set the scene for the perform
ance to follow — I wouldn’t know: I couldn’t bring myself to read the full release.
I do, however, remember the following day, when the real Tyson Webb appeared on television for his first big press conference. Dressed in a shiny grey suit and a crisp blue tie pinned with a tiny golden scarab that most people probably didn’t notice, Webb presided over a crowd gathered under the grand arches of Memorial Hall, fingers jutting with purpose, expressing with palpable scorn his absolute disgust at the corruption that had taken root in the office of the mayor. He explained how, working closely with local police and the OPP, he’d brokered his way into the mayor’s inner circle to witness first-hand the disregard for the rule of law on wanton display in the crooked deal with the powerful Montreal development firm Zocalar. He listed our offences in clinical detail, decrying our cynicism and blatant disrespect for the genuine spirit of reconciliation that had been exploited to line the pockets of political elites. He made a point of implicitly laying the whole swindle on the back of one shameless councilman who had abused his privilege for personal gain. Finally, Webb vowed to fight back, demanding a formal inquiry and pledging to personally spearhead an initiative to clean up backroom dealings at City Hall.
As to the fate of Bellevue House, all plans would be put on hold until further notice, to ensure the process could proceed untainted by the toxins of greed and ambition.
Social media exploded again, and the papers published shocked headlines, and pundits across the country weighed in during the dinnertime news broadcasts. The names Jim Staughton and Timothy Gant were dragged through a mud so thick and black it could have swallowed up the sun. As the story progressed, attacks focused increasingly on the latter name — a young, privileged upstart with great potential, turned by his essential moral bankruptcy into a simpering twit, a devious rat, a man both wretched and despicable. His name became a shorthand for everything that was wrong with the system, every good intention made leprous with selfishness and hate.
Meanwhile, Tyson Webb emerged as a favoured candidate in the upcoming mayoral election, a political chrysalis heading for glorious rebirth.
The last meal my family and I ever ate together was a roast I overcooked until it was hard and shrivelled as a giant pill bug. It was February, the hard part of winter, when calls for me to resign were at fever pitch. We sat around the table in the dining room, smooth jazz playing in the background, as though everything was normal and fine. No one said much, until the ad for Bellevue House came on the radio.
“Crooked bureaucrats wanted to destroy it . . .”
Since Tyson Webb had worked his sorcery, preserving the house in the name of fairness and justice while forfeiting his soul to the vermin within, its fame had grown by bounds. People came by the hundreds to take selfies standing out front. At the Parks Canada Visitor Centre, they added a souvenir kiosk that sold postcards and tea towels and T-shirts with John A. Macdonald’s face in iconic Canadian red, in both PIONEER and MURDERER versions. The city’s culture office announced a summer concert series to be held on-site, which the radio had been advertising around the clock.
Still: I’d never considered that my own blood might get roped in.
Eleanor, pushing pellets of meat around her plate, cocked her head and angled her shoulder forward, like she always did when she wanted something.
“Dad,” she said. “Do you think you could get tickets to that thing? Through your . . . connections?”
I tried to stay calm. At least, I want to think I did. Either way, I looked at my nine-year-old daughter too hard, my eyes already hexed with the knowledge that the roach was out there, listening.
“Let me be extremely clear,” I said. “I don’t want you anywhere near that place. Erase it from your mind. It’s dangerous. Cursed, even. Don’t speak of it again. Forget it exists. Understand?”
I noticed that I was pointing my fork at her. I expected her to be a bit shocked, maybe even a bit afraid — I wanted her to be afraid — but instead, she just frowned and gave a half shrug.
“Bobby said you probably wouldn’t be able to,” she almost sneered. “Since you got disgraced.”
“Who the fuck is Bobby?”
“Tim!” said Sandra, in the middle of chewing a bite of roast like a plug of tobacco. Her hands were shaking, fork clinking against the side of her plate. My wife was a professor of economics, a hardened academic who’d paid her own way through school bartending at the city’s worst clubs. I almost never saw her rattled.
Eleanor looked at her mother. “Mom, can I be done?”
Sandra nodded, still looking at me.
I pushed back my chair and followed Eleanor to the living room, wary of the threat I exuded but too agitated by her mention of Bellevue House to care. She sat and faced the TV. I grabbed her chin and turned her face toward mine so I could look into her eyes. I needed to see: Did Hell have her, too?
“Look,” I said. “I don’t give a shit what Bobby says, whoever he is. He’s right. I lost my job. I paid the price. But that’s beside the point. Do not go near that house. Do you understand? DO NOT GO FUCKING NEAR IT.”
“Dad,” she said, her voice meek again. “You’re squeezing too hard.”
I let her go. She gave me a confused look, then shifted her gaze behind my shoulder, to where her mother stood, watching.
The thing is, you never stop loving them. No matter how far gone you get — how deep into the bog of fear and dread that separates our world from the ones beyond, how crushed by the pressure of your own obsessions — there’s always a place in which you are only ever loving them. You love them for what they are and what they’re not. You love them even if they betray you. You’d kill anyone who was trying to harm them, even if it only meant they’d live on to hurt you more, in the end. That’s just the way it is.
You never stop loving them. Even after they leave.
9. I eat boxed meals now. Kraft Dinner. Takeout pizza. Sticky orange chicken from the Chinese place down the street. I polish the gun, count the rounds. Look every so often at the contraption in the corner. Wires and timers. Fuses and dials. Gelatin and putty. Borax and bleach. It will take a lot of explosives to destroy the roach. If it’s even possible. It’s huge now, tumescent, its strength built up over months of feasting on fresh blood.
Because that’s the thing about growing a monster.
You have to feed it.
It was about a week after I finally resigned — the same week Sandra took Eleanor to her mother’s house in Gananoque — that the new campaign started.
At first, it was just a few ads in the Whig-Standard, solid black rectangles with nothing inside but the words INVESTING IN OUR HERITAGE, above the tiny icon that had shifted ever so slightly from a broadly cardiac shape to something more arthropod in nature. These drew little attention.
Much more controversial were the billboards that went up along Princess Street, showing Bellevue House wreathed in a halo of yellow light, with the same insectoid graphic superimposed on top and large, ecstatic lettering beneath proclaiming, BELLEVUE HOUSE: A NEW FRONTIER.
The CBC aired its first news story in March, a mini-documentary about a new virtual reality project on the house and its history. By then, social media was lit up, chewing the cud of the house’s journey from cruelty to redemption with a thousand hot takes and retweets.
The big TV spot started airing around Easter. It had been crafted to appear random — the work of some overpriced agency full of marketing gnats, no doubt — but the tells were there, if you knew where to look.
The ad began with a close-up of candles being lit, the lilting murmurs of a choir. This sound built gradually, in layers, one voice piling on top of another until the vocal melody kicked in and became identifiable as a full-blown choral version of the Tragically Hip’s “Ahead by a Century.” The camera pulled back to reveal the singers, four rows of angelic young men and women in white robes, each holding a lit candle bearing a tiny version of the icon of the heart of plague. The kicker, of course, was that they w
eren’t performing in the apse of St. Mary’s Cathedral, or on the stage of the Grand Theatre — but on the green, L-shaped portico and golden front steps of Bellevue House.
As the choir reached its crescendo, text appeared on screen, aligned to cut straight across the robes of the singers in the bottom row. THE NEW BELLEVUE HOUSE, it said. TRANSCEND. It was all too easy to miss the fine print at the bottom, stating that the ads had been paid for by the Sons of Khepri.
The spot created a frenzy in the media. A few reporters who still had their integrity looked askance at Tyson Webb, who had, after all, come to fame as the house’s champion. But that story already had its villain. And besides, by then, it was hard to say how much control we all had left. The roach feeds off outrage and zeal in equal measure, and if it all seemed to ramp up too fast, with too much urgency — well, that was a tell, too.
In its notoriety, Bellevue House became more and more of a symbol — of new beginnings, stories seen through changed eyes. Its Facebook page gained thousands of followers. The CBC produced a podcast about it. A local rock band mentioned it in a hit song. It spawned a series of trading cards, a coffee table book, a flurry of apps.
There was one further protest — organic, as far as I knew, or impossible to tell otherwise. A group of Indigenous activists gathered outside the gates on Centre Street, holding placards that reminded people what had started this whole thing in the first place: the murderous policies that Sir John A. Macdonald had crafted and enforced, the continued veneration of him a painful reminder of how little Canada understood of the pain that Indigenous people had suffered. The unspoken fact of his alleged infanticide. They wanted Bellevue House demolished, according to the original plan. Within a few hours, police had shown up to escort them into white vans, to shuttle them to an undisclosed location set aside specifically for public protest by Indigenous people. Online uproar was confined to a few radical corners of Twitter.
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