‘No, thanks,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m waiting on a ride of my own.’
He could have predicted as much. This wasn’t really Sandra, anyway, he figured. It was a stand-in. Another kind of clone he’d discovered, or recovered, from all this waste. He took a deep, noisy breath, imagining what would happen if he stayed out here past dark, waiting for Sandra’s ride. Who would be coming to pick her up. Another third actor. Another triangle. What nightmares in the final night, watching her climb into some weird jeep. He wasn’t meant to stay and watch. This part of the story didn’t involve him.
She was looking back at the sunlight. He felt less sadness now, watching her in profile. He’d meet her again, and it would be in a city, surrounded by the assembled regiments of sanity. She’d remember nothing of this (not that he’d ever bring it up – or if he did, he’d only hint at the time spent in the desert, near a bomb shelter, to which she’d just laugh and shake her head, say you’re crazy, give him one of those confused, amused glances he was so used to). He turned and kicked through the darkening stretch of sand, slamming the metal door to the shelter on his way.
Cosmo felt good. He regretted tossing away the Native American symbols. He’d defaced his own environment, this mobile extension of his youth. He shook his head; it was a moment of weakness when faced with such strange adversity. But everything would be better, he thought; he’d buried his three brothers safe into the ground’s receiving womb. He was lucky, extraordinarily lucky: he was able to say he’d buried himself. He kicked the van into DRIVE and turned on the headlights. He’d need them on the dark scrub, roaring back to the main roads and racing north, for the trip was definitely over. Before sliding down the hill in reverse, he caught Sandra in his lights: rubbing her arms, tiny and green, squinting into the harshness of the glare. It was the way he’d leave her, stuck in memory as if in amber, left alone and waiting for her ghosts and rides. He honked the horn, wheeled about and headed north.
Everything – the ground, the rattling frame, the rumbling engine – felt good. He pushed PLAY on the stereo, the Amboy Dukes launching back into the first song on the CD: ‘Journey to the Centre of the Mind.’ After the first verse and chorus, he hummed along with the lyrics, savouring the psychedelia, the drugstore mysticism.
And then he laughed, long and happy. They were stupid lyrics. They were written during a ridiculous time to be alive – a time when bomb shelters were still serious investments. He weighed the word in his mouth as he rolled onto the nameless, north-south road. Bomb. How Sandra’s stand-in had said it so oddly. She’d emphasized the om inside it. The om in bomb, kind of like the om in tomb, in womb, but just pronounced differently. It was dumb and profound, but he tried it out on his tongue, a low monotone hum: ommm.
It meant peace, he thought. It was a word that meant nothing, and nothing meant peace.
OM.
He had an idea, passing just beyond the reach of his understanding. He hit REC.
THIS IS NOT AN ENDING
Claude Brazeau: His name is Pierre Lebrun …
911 Dispatch Operator: Does he wear glasses?
Claude Brazeau: No. He stutters.
– 911 emergency telephone call, April 6, 1999, 2:39 p.m.
‘Hey, Terry,’ says Joel, a shipper. ‘Ask Scabby what kind of bus it is.’ ‘What kind of bus is it, Pierre?’ asks Terry, a mechanic.
Pierre Lebrun feels a lurching drop in his stomach, a stinging rush of blood to his ears. Although his eyes are lowered, he can still make out the blurry shape of Terry’s smile: a looming, left-leaning grin. Without looking up, Pierre reaches across the central workbench of the garage and wraps his hand around a Black & Decker vise. To calm himself, he thinks.
‘Yeah, Scabby, I think you know what I mean,’ Terry says, taking a sip of his Timmies.
Pierre drags the vise closer. He stares hard at the wooden workbench, watching hazy, oil-stained hands stumble over tools. Someone drops a screwdriver. Someone sorts noisily through rivets and washers. A piece of brake mechanism lies cleaned and gutted on the far side of the hangar-like repair shop, awaiting the strong, dexterous fingers of its operators.
‘Well, let’s narrow it down,’ Terry says, chuckling. ‘It’s not a slinky bus.’
Over the bright clink of metal, Pierre can still make out the faint hum of traffic from Saint Laurent Boulevard – a long stretch of commercial zones staggered in quick, corporate succession, a steady stream of cars flowing liquid in the sunlight, reflecting the glare of gravel, glass and steel girders, grass dead or dying. The long length of tarmac inching toward suburbia, to Pierre’s home: a late-century sprawl of concrete power centres, big-box parking lots, fast-food highways.
‘C’mon, Scabby, think. We’re waiting here.’
Other adults – co-workers, fellow employees – smile. This is a collective attack, Pierre thinks. He tightens his grip on the vise, feels hot in his sweater and collared shirt despite the chill temperature of the garage. He recalls, briefly and with a child’s sense of monumental injustice, the glossy brochures he received at an Ottawa-Carleton Transpo job fair ten years back. They described the company in terms of modern workplaces: places where employees are granted securities and non-negotiable rights – the right to a safe and healthy environment, say, or the right to benefits and meaningful salaries, steady raises that reflect the rising cost of living. Rights reputedly protected by the powerful Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), Local 279. Pierre remembers these as promises, as rosy guarantees. He thinks of safe zones and essential services, places of mutual respect and adult camaraderie. He thinks of meaningful employment in a capital-city service that demands excellence from all its partners.
‘It’s not a bendy bus, right?’ Terry asks, sounding goofy.
Pierre holds still, letting his thoughts meander, self-pitying. Again, he perceives his transfer to the main garage – his fourth move in the company since 1986 – to be a tremendous mistake. Each consecutive transfer representing a redistribution of talent, according to the ATU. Pierre requesting these changes in position not out of ambition, an aspiration to ascend ranks of financial seniority or even respect, but for the comforts afforded by lesser interaction, more independent work. Beginning his career as a driver, operating the #16 Alta Vista, Monday to Thursday, and finding himself incapable of dealing with the demands of actual passengers: the grotesque particulars, the spitting and whinging horrors. Then the irrational transfer into customer service, assigned to handle telephone queries, yet again finding himself unable to speak, unable to contain the hiccups and stalls of a stutter that seemed to rise and fall with his quivering distress. Transferring for the second time to a position he barely understood: travelling across the illogical spiderweb of the Ottawa transit system with an already hardened and compact maintenance team to attend to malfunctioning or snow-stalled machines, towing obstinate buses back to the main garage at 1500 Saint Laurent. Never getting the proper training, being placed beneath a pugnacious high school dropout with semi-coherent real-estate ambitions and ostracized from the cohesive team from the first shift onward when he was asked simple questions and as answers gave nods, shrugs, knowing his stutter was bad that day, as if hungover, vindictive. As if needing to be held and cradled, soothed into silence like a tantrum-prone child. How the experience drained him, lowering the natural defences of his body to allow for infection, invasion. His ensuing illness, sapping and depressing him, and the doctor’s orders to remain at home in bed during the strike of 1996. The unanticipated hostility he faced upon returning to work, having never walked the picket line with his co-workers. Picking up the name that rides him into sobs, fury: Scabby. Now here, in the main garage, working belts and brakes and batteries and the maladaptive components of the modern city bus.
‘You drove a bus, didn’t you? You can’t tell me what kind of bus it was?’
Pierre clenches his jaw, grinds his molars. He tries to stare through the wooden workbench, the vise heating up in his hand.
‘Now, no
w,’ Joel chimes in, as if hushing a child.
Terry rips into a bark. ‘Ar-ar-ar-ar-ar-ar-ar-TIC-ulate, my boy!’, answered by what Pierre interprets to be a roar of hoots and guffaws echoing off the towering walls of the repair shop. He glances up in time to catch Terry leaning back in laughter, his lips curled away from his teeth.
Pierre’s open palm strikes Terry’s cheek, making the surprisingly loud and fleshy clap sound heard in countless crime dramas. Terry is caught bewildered; he drops the wrench in his hand and stares, stunned. Conversation stops, giving the antiseptic pop song chirping from the nearby radio a strange sort of significance. And before either Terry or Pierre can react – both standing speechless, unsure of what just happened – loud male voices push between them, hey hey heys, Pierre still holding the vise in his right hand, fingers clenched around the metal.
I can’t really say anything today that would say he was whacko, you know.
– Ozzie Morin, OC Transpo employee
So Pierre is asked to gather his things and leave. The grinding routine already pierced by vacancy, by the thought of a thousand empty, virginal days. He drives home mid-afternoon to the closed-window warmth and stillness of his mother’s home. A twenty-minute drive. Birds warbling through the glass. He watches sitcom reruns in bed, blinking occasionally. And this is heavenly: jaw-melting, drool-inducing. The hours of the afternoon white and empty of memory. He imagines his immediate future and smiles, humming with the pure pleasure of captured time: no work in the morning, no exaggeratedly gleeful djshrieking through the radio at some hard-edged, pre-dawn hour, no cold steel and stink of gas and clenched shoulders in the garage. Pierre is out of a job, fired, and he is happy.
This is how the first afternoon ends, how evening arrives. His mother eating in the kitchen. Three light beers nursed while watching television, listening to the scraping of her spoon. Tinkering on a length of damaged fence in the backyard amid the muddy reaches, reading an old issue of Field & Stream. As if nothing could alter the course of this new, comfortable life of unemployment.
But he can’t avoid his mother. He can’t avoid the revelation of his offence, dancing about the laboured conversation of what’s to be done now, what’s to be done about money, what’s to happen to your career? Pierre slapped another employee. Pierre raised his hand against a co-worker in a modern, egalitarian workplace; Pierre stressed the unthinkable physical fact of his being in a space of camaraderie and respect. To deal with his mother, Pierre chalks it up to a man’s rights, to taking only so much abuse, to standing up to a bully. His mother speaks this language, can relate to it and be proud, but she cries thinking about the money, about how Pierre’s going to have to start from scratch. (Not that he minds starting over; he imagines a job plugging cords into a switchboard, pulling a lever over and over again like an automaton. Working alone and silent in perpetual, daydreaming mediocrity.)
Of course, this isn’t what happens. The STU, Local 279, is there for him; he’s informed in a letter sent the same week as his release. A man named Paul Macdonnell keeps calling him; his mother writes down the phone number, his name, scrawling CALL BACK! on a pad of paper with urgent underlining. And Pierre does, feeling dreamy, feeling out of control. The ATU is determined to get him his job back. The ATU won’t let an employee with his particular needsbe dismissed so summarily. Macdonnell says they have a strong case if Pierre wants to pursue it. That the committee will be making an appeal, but they’ll need his help and full co-operation.
‘You have my, uh, co-operation,’ Pierre mumbles, still dreaming.
‘You have a disability, yes?’ Macdonnell asks. ‘You’ve indicated as such in your contract. Speech impediments are just as valid as any other disability, just as deserving of sensitive treatment. Expectations between employees differ according to ability, aptitude, functionality – elements out of our hands, M. Lebrun. Your ability to articulate your needs is compromised by your condition. Other employees are required to make certain allowanceswhen working with a person with your particular needs. And discomforts may arise.’
‘Yes, I have a disability,’ Pierre says over the phone, without a hint of stutter. His mother nods ecstatically by his side in a white bathrobe. Oui, j’ai un handicap!
‘But having a disability is no permission for violence, M. Lebrun, of which I am sure you are aware.’
‘Oui.’
‘Nevertheless, we have a written record of your attempt to contact OC Transportation about the individual in question, Mr. Terry Harding. You filed a complaint of harassment, oui?’
‘Not quite …’
‘Well, you spoke with Chairman Loney about the situation, did you not?’
‘Yes.’
‘What we’re trying to assemble is a case of accumulated, prolonged harassment, that your actions on the date in question were the result of exacerbations, antagonisms that should have been dealt with in a professional manner. An adult manner. You made every reasonable attempt to rectify the situation before it could escalate any further, yet the situation in the main garage was left to worsen and grow volatile without proper company intervention. Is this correct?’
‘Yes, correct.’
‘Well, we’re confident that we have something here. Hold tight, Pierre.’
Pierre holds tight. He drives his Pontiac Sunfire across the Ottawa River and unloads a rifle into distant wisps of cloud. He strips bark off a dying tree and punches until his knuckles rip and tear. He screams once, long and as loud as he can, just to test his limits. Birds rise from the folds of the wood, scattering in air like in a movie, something dramatic and picturesque, Pierre’s anger lingering above them in echo, sweating. The summer drops its petals, gets sticky like spilled Coke.
We’re going to look for causes, but really, I don’t think we’re going to find a cause. This individual was just sick.
– Paul Macdonnell, head of the Amalgamated Transit Union, 2000
A boy sits at a table in a kitchen, chewing a mouthful of cereal. He is staring at the cornflakes rooster. The boy’s eyes are large and unfocused. His jaw grinds slowly, like a cow’s, while the cornflakes become soggy in the milk in the bowl. A drop of milk dribbles over his bottom lip, making his chin glisten.
The boy’s mother walks swiftly into the kitchen, holding a thin cardboard box. She is wearing a brown corduroy skirt and a lacy blouse. She has black curly hair and tiny eyes. The boy stops chewing. The woman rummages noisily in a drawer beneath the sink.
It is a warm day in June. It is a Saturday morning in 1968. The boy notices their home address written in black ink, capital letters, on the middle of the box. The woman finds a pair of scissors in the drawer, turns back to the table and slides the sharp edge of the scissors across a line of packing tape. She pulls out a square shape, packaged in mismatched newsprint. In a picture on a section of ripped newspaper is a man in a tuxedo, standing before a giant spinning roulette table. The man appears to be laughing, crow’s feet and laugh lines cut deeply as if by a putty knife, his right arm beckoning behind him.
She unwraps a vinyl record from the newspaper and slides it toward her son.
On the cover of the record, thick letters read: YES YOU CAN! A Student’s Guide to Overcoming Stuttering, Volume One. The lettering looks yellow, as if dried by sunlight or smoke.
‘You’re going to listen to this,’ she says. The boy looks at her, swallows. ‘We’ll listen to this together, on the record player.’
The boy looks back down at the record.
‘Wipe your mouth,’ she says. She walks to the counter and wrings out a dishcloth.
The return address on the package is LAS VEGAS, NEVADA. The boy wipes his mouth.
All in all, he was a pretty peaceful lad. I didn’t think he was ill.
– Ozzie Morin
Things Pierre is taught to remember:
That anger is a natural human response. That anger is a normal human emotion. That he should not cower from nor ignore his anger, nor allow his anger to build up inside h
im without a proper outlet.
That he should cradle his anger. That he should treat his anger like a crying baby because a baby cries in response to need. A baby cries in response to discomforts and longings, physical and emotional, because crying is all it knows. Crying is a natural response buried beneath the veneer of control and maturity and masculinity, as is fury.
The room in which Pierre receives these lessons is modern and bright. He sits on faux-leather couches and chairs surrounded by waxy plants and windows that offer a view of the parking lot and road and swaying trees and sky.
That everyone has so-called boiling points. Points at which things tend to spill beyond reason and control. That he should watch these hot points with patience and care. The tender boundaries.
That anger does not have to be the deciding emotion of his life.
That Pierre’s anger comes from easily identified traumas. That all of these factors assemble to form a portrait of a real person who has resolvable problems.
Pierre sits with four other people, three men and one woman, who are enrolled in Anger Management Therapy as part of various work-rehabilitation programs. His therapist is in her mid-forties. Her voice is sharp and tough, but she speaks slowly, pushes her eyes into his eyes, doesn’t let him look away. She wears a necklace of translucent gems and clunky bracelets, has dependable lines on her face.
Pierre, have you ever lost a job because of your anger?
Pierre, have you ever felt alone and misunderstood?
Pierre, are co-workers and peers concerned about your anger?
Pierre, have you ever been so angry that you forgot things you did or said?
At the end of his therapeutic treatment, Pierre apologizes to Terry in a sincere manner in the company of his therapist and an ATU representative. They sit in an empty boardroom and shake hands. Terry shakes as if trying to snap Pierre’s knuckles, looking him in the eye. Smiling.
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