Pierre is not to return to the main garage at 1500 Saint Laurent; he is to avoid the scene where his anger got the better of him.
Pierre is not given the same job. He has to explain this to his mother three times before she understands. He is instead given another job, this one more suited to his particular needs. He is scheduled to begin work as an audit clerk. Paperwork, mailing, filing, accounting, written correspondence. A low-stress environment. Cubicles and witnesses.
As Terry leaves the boardroom where the apology takes place, he turns and smiles and silently mouths a word so only Pierre can see: Scabby.
Pierre feels a tender boundary, a hot point, a boiling line. He thinks of Terry’s smiling, receding face, of collective attacks.
Participants in Anger Management Therapy are asked to complete an end-of-session evaluation. An evaluation of their therapists, their time spent under scrutiny, the process of healing. They are asked to circle a response ranked from one to five to the statement I found this therapy to be successful.
The response Pierre circled: Strongly Disagree.
This happens in August 1997, an extremely hot and humid month in Ottawa. Pierre thinks, sees, can feel tenderness everywhere: in the laughing faces of boys, in the skin-tight skirts of girls, in his dreams of slow-motion mechanisms unfolding. As if the city were an enormous stopwatch. The air a pulsing electric storm.
Pierre, do you often feel moody or sad because of your anger?
He had a bit of a speech impediment and he was teased a little bit. It got to him because he had sensitive feelings about it. But maybe they just got him at a bad time when maybe there was other stuff going on in his life.
– Robert Manion,1500 Saint Laurent Boulevard garage supervisor, 1999
Mrs. Boros, Polish and severe, sits at the end of the dining room table. A twelve-year-old Pierre watches her lips move in slow, exaggerated pantomime, mouthing sentences that spike in sharp, stenographic contortions: Pierre presently proposes a particularly preposterous pursuit; David delights in daring, duplicitous disguises. Pierre fails, consistently, to work his way through the words without halting, chopping regular alliterative metre into staccato fragments. His mother sits at the opposite end of the table, her hands clasped on the wood, her lips a polished red line. Each time Pierre fails – which he does every time, choking on consonants, oblivious of words stressed and unstressed, his jaw aching, his tongue lying thick and heavy and dry – Mrs. Boros smiles weakly, taps her fingertips on the tabletop and closes her eyes. Pierre doesn’t dare look at his mother.
‘Is it the order of the words?’ asks Mrs. Boros, her eyebrows a conjoined storm.
Pierre shrugs. He doesn’t know. The stutter bubbles up and shoots skyward like bilious oil.
‘You know’ Mrs. Boros continues, ‘it might do for us to look at the sentences out of their normal order. English has strict, rigid word order. We think in subject, verb, object. Active sentences. We think in chronological, linear terms, as everyone knows, but it’s even there in our text, our written language. It’s encoded. We look for stages, words providing the framework for other words, other meanings blossoming from the precise, uninflected word order of our preceding statements.’
Pierre stares at a spot above her hairline.
‘Rearrange the words so that they are more elements than stages. Presently particularly Pierre proposes pursuit preposterous. Proposes Pierre preposterous presently particularly pursuit. It’s the individual words you need to look at. Let’s just look at their shape and sound.’
An hour passes in frustration, terror, Pierre praying for some sort of ending. He puts his fingers into his mouth, pulling his lips and cheeks away from his teeth, attempting to physically force his flesh into utterance. He arrives at something absurd, clownish. His face flushes; his eyes well with tears. His mother reaches across the table and slaps his face, hard, making a cartoon clap sound, thinking he is mocking Mrs. Boros, who sometimes holds her chin or throat to demonstrate proper positioning, clear enunciation. Pierre’s mother’s hand comes away wet with his tears.
Mrs. Boros says nothing, has nothing to say: unversed in the true nuances of articulatory phonetics, a mere novice in the demands of vocalism. Oblivious to psychological trauma.
This is October 1969, after school. Leaves wither and fall from the maple trees on the front lawn. A vehicle heaves and sighs somewhere in the street. The moment Mrs. Boros leaves the house, Pierre’s mother puts her arms around him, begins to cry. Says I’m sorry over and over.
Later in the evening, in the soft yellow glow of the den, the record player percolates and crackles beneath a series of cloying and simplistic nursery rhymes. A man’s low, sonorous tenor recites the lyrics, is joined in the second verse by a chorus of high-pitched children. Pierre sits cross-legged on the carpeted floor beside the player, pretending to listen to the words. He reaches into his pocket and carefully removes a folded piece of newspaper. The fibres have deteriorated; the once-rough texture has become soft and flimsy from folding. He stares at the black and white image of a man in a tuxedo, smiling, standing before a roulette table spun into a seamless blur. Pierre imagines blazing lights and the heavy scent of cigarette and cigar smoke, the taste of bourbon and water, the giant whirling wheel an ill-defined haze of red and black, colour bleeding into colour until luck and chance and expectation become a single image, a gripping fear and exhilaration without words. Six-sided dice clatter from his open palm, collide and ricochet down a pool-hall green, and come up seven. A lithe, boa’d arm slinks around his shoulders, and sunglass-wearing spectators erupt in cheers. You’ve won, they scream, as the chips are pushed toward him and the slot machines whistle and Pierre doesn’t say anything at all.
There, he thinks, you don’t have to speak. A happy ending.
The record player rolls forward in a singsong voice, no stutter. A muttering incantation, the murmur of a congregation’s prayer:
See, saw, Margery Dawe,
And Jack shall have a new master.
He shall make but a penny a day
Because he can’t work any faster.
He was very clever, very nice. You just don’t think you’d see this in your lifetime. I thought it was a joke – everybody did.
–Grant Harrison, OC Transpo auto-body repairman, 1999
Sex no longer even remotely available, now elevated and perverted to the level of pure mystery. The kiss and taste and heat of a woman – all meaningless abstractions. Infuriatingly meaningless, when it’s all been shoved so violently down his throat (at home or work, on TV, in dreams). Or, rather, almost meaningless: some vestigial memory of a physical encounter from 1988 still lingers, but barely (he was drunk, details get distorted). Pierre’s conceptions of coitus, pre and post, have settled down into the sediments of personal fantasy: a pastiche amalgam of pornography, soft-core romantic flourishes, sitcom couplings, Discovery Channel documentaries, Grade 12 sex ed. Every now and then he tries to imagine what it’s really like. Rubs and kisses his own skin. Feels icky. Gets off to old familiars: pictures wrenched from real-life scenarios, thrust into the hot, masturbatory lair of his imagination.
Martine Berthelot, twenty-five, audit clerk, co-worker. Co-worker and slight superior in his new environment of stress-free paperwork, clerical monotony, sedentary labour. To Pierre’s co-workers, details of last year’s strike are still vividly and bitterly intoned – the lack of strategy, the indifference of management, the prolonged negotiations. The scabs. But Martine is new; Martine has no memories, has no reason to sort co-workers into camps determined by political lines. She gives Pierre a moment, a space, in which to breathe. Every other room and hallway is ruled by the battle lines of politics.
‘Good weekend?’ she asks him this Monday morning, catching him off guard. ‘Go hunting?’ she adds, with a little quiver of a laugh (a joke) appended to the question mark. He lets out his breath and rushes to speak, telling her that yes, actually, he went across the river into Gatineau, Quebec. That he was using his
Remington (a 760, 30.06 Gamemaster, a variation of the model that James Earl Ray used to murder Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis, 1968 – something he doesn’t share) to hunt deer. He stutters brutally when he attempts the word deer, so much so that he eventually gives up, says game. She nods through it all – the d-d-d-d-ing, the massaging of his jaw muscles, his exhaustion – and he knows instantly that any attempt at furthering the conversation into the personal (the intimate?) is ruined.
She’ll find him hopeless, handicapped, he thinks. She’ll find his combination of speech impediment and passion for rifles murkily disturbing in that modern, womanly way. Her eyes will glaze over with disgust, a grossed-out scoff about to bubble up in her throat. He’s seen it before, heard and imagined the assumptions. To these women, living with Mom into your forties equals too much time at home. Possible abuse. Hobbies turned into obsessions. They might think he has a sort of dopey, forgivable homeliness (and this is what he clings to in odd moments of hope: the appeal of the pathetic, the loner, the misunderstood), but he knows they always imagine his existence – the particulars of Pierre, the irreplaceable qualities of a singular life – as a mere caricature of a lonely man’s. Entire bookshelves filled with VHS tapes on gambling tips, counting cards. An immaculately clean apartment. Hunting magazines stacked atop worn and outdated Penthouses. Posters of Asian schoolgirls in short skirts flaunting stick-thin white legs.
Silence again arrests the office. Pierre, now daydreaming, watches Martine work at her desk. He imagines the luxury of telling her that the Remington’s wood finish is fine-grain American walnut stock. He imagines telling her about the gun in a more intimate setting – his mother’s living room, say, in Orléans, after dinner. He imagines speaking calmly and mellifluously, his voice a sure, confident metronome. He imagines showing her his rifle not out of eagerness or bravado but because she has begged to see it. She is awed, powerfully aroused, as he unzips a black canvas carrying case and places the surprising weight of the rifle on her lap.
‘Was it fun?’ she asks, bored, again cutting through the silence, her eyes down, turning to sort through incoming mail. He says yeah, sure, it was fun, before trailing off. He holds his mouth shut. He does not tell her about the white, painful look of the November sky, the light dusting of snow on the pines, about how much he enjoys the ribbing on the fore end of the rifle. How much he likes the way the professional finish catches the sunlight when the gun is cradled in his arms, his left eye shut tight, his right eye pressed against the thick glass of the scope. The way the light becomes a bead on the barrel, becomes a fist at the end of an arm.
Martine begins to lick and seal envelopes. Her fingers pinch the paper and her tongue laps and darts along the adhesive. Pierre watches her large, heavy-lidded eyes, the sway of her highlighted, glossy hair. He thinks of a mature buck he found in the hills, the way it lifted its head, snorting, as its ears turned and flattened. He thinks of the crosshairs of the scope resting over the buck’s neck, the cloud of steam from its breath, the shot tearing through the stillness of the wood. All things he has studied, measured, in mixed strains of longing and affection and frustration. He watches the tiny brown freckles on Martine’s chest, scattered above the line of her blouse. He thinks of the animal buckling, its legs flailing, its last attempt to stand before it shuddered and fell forward. How its hooves clawed the earth, ripping up clots of snow. He watches Martine’s small breasts, the subtle press of her rib and sternum. He wants to put her earlobe in his mouth, bring his teeth together, press his nose into the crook of her neck and breathe. Trace his fingers along the lines of her mouth, wrap his hands about her jaw. He thinks of how she would smell: the milky scent of skin, light perfume, soaps and creams, making him dizzy, dazzling heat in his bladder, his crotch. Back in his mother’s living room, brushing her hair over her ear, he imagines her leaning in, quickly, and licking his lips. He imagines pulling two tickets to Vegas from a jacket pocket, watching joy and desire contort her face into a painting, a film star, a saint. Then he can deliver his kiss, the kiss of dreams and childhood. He thinks of the buck’s lips quivering, mouthing words, as he stood beside it, somewhat out of breath, watching the bright flow of blood stain the snow.
He whispers something in a singsong voice. No stutter.
Martine doesn’t look up. She folds the envelope and throws it into a box. Walks out of the room.
Pierre resigns from OC Transpo after thirteen years of employment in January 1999. The ending, he thinks, relieved and shivering in a bus shelter, headed home. Finally, the end.
It’s very curious why he selected certain individuals to kill and permitted certain people to live. He could have easily killed more people.
–Inspector Ian Davidson,
Ottawa-Carleton Regional Police, 1999
What’s a kid from Ottawa know about Nevada? Only what he can imagine, dreaming of roulette wheels in early-stage childhood depression; only what he can glean from television westerns, tales of Paiute trails, fallout from nuclear test sites. In Pierre’s boyhood imagination, Nevada is as cold and unpopulated as the cliffs and craters of the moon – which it may as well be, coming from a kid sheltered by the leafy suburbs of 1960s Ottawa, where even a good bike ride leads into the checkerboard slopes of the downright bucolic (this being before the population booms of later decades, before the amalgamation of the townships, before the Ottawa-Carleton Regional Transit Commission).
Expectation and reality collide violently in early 1999. Pierre approaches Vegas by day, bumper to bumper with a heaving vanguard of glistening metal. Freon whispers from the plastic dash; carbon monoxide makes the air livid. He has just left the mountainous, invigorating air of Logan Lake, British Columbia. His bid to find new work – something monotonous, solitary and quiet – has been unsuccessful. He feels that a gamble must be made; that after so many losses, the odds, finally, are in his favour. He drives through the serpentine highway systems and into the heart of the city: the strip, the wonderland pastiche of iconic cliché, pastels and the King, the homeless in flip-flops, big-chested transvestites, red leather, Siegfried and Roy. Tourists genuflect in khaki shorts and Tilley hats, snapping cameras at monstrous replicas of otherworldly culture. Pierre winds his car toward the Best Western, a gaudy porno flyer caught in his windshield wipers. He checks in at reception, rides the smooth elevator to the seventh floor and sits on the pressed sheets of his double bed. Perspiration dampens his underarms and back as he closes his eyes to the ceiling fan, the white walls.
At 2:51 a.m., fifteen hours later, Pierre returns to his room and lies back on the bed. He has lost almost $10,000. His bank account is empty and his credit card is maxed. The casino was too loud, he thinks. He has made a list of people who have offended him but doesn’t need the list any longer. Something slips, quietly.
What were you expecting here? he asks himself. You were expecting what here? Here you were what expecting? Expecting were you here what?
Quite apart from what’s alleged or otherwise with Mr. Lebrun’s situation, we know we’ve had a very unhappy work environment for a long time.
–Al Loney, chair of Ottawa-Carleton Regional Transit Commission
One night Pierre has a nightmare. In the nightmare, Pierre drives to the main garage at 1500 Saint Laurent Boulevard with a massive plastic Walmart bag containing springs, gears, screws, bolts, nuts and caps: a pile of fasteners and disassembled metal. His mother sits in the back seat of his car. She wears a white blouse reminiscent of something from the 1960s and smokes a cigarette.
Pierre rises from the car and walks to the employee entrance, the Walmart bag slung over his shoulder. It’s early in the morning, still semi-dark, and hours before employees are scheduled to arrive for work. He walks from room to room, floor to floor, looking for his locker – it isn’t until he has searched the entire complex that he remembers that his locker was cleaned out after his altercation with Terry Harding, which was long ago. He shoves the Walmart bag of machine parts beneath a red tool cabinet in an e
mpty storeroom, concealing the spot with a folded janitor’s towel, and waits for employees to enter the building, for the day and his shift to begin.
As no one arrives to work, Pierre becomes worried that he has made a mistake. Perhaps today is a holiday, he thinks. His mother will be furious with him. There will be no way or route home because she will have taken the car, and no buses run on this particular holiday. To his mother, Pierre is head garage mechanic.
The garage is utterly empty; Pierre begins to feel this, sense it in the settling silence of the vacant halls, the dark offices. He feels how keenly alone he is in such an enormous structure; the size and loneliness and cold are unnerving. But he hears something fall, distantly, something noisy and metallic. He fetches a handful of screws from the Walmart bag and begins to search for the source of the noise.
The noise leads Pierre to the hangar-like repair shop. He walks onto a second-storey rampart that looks down onto the floor. Below him is an enormous metal maze, a perfect square, with walls roughly ten feet from the ground, cobbled together with fist-sized iron bolts. Clearly visible within the maze is Terry Harding, or the ghost of Terry Harding, or a person with the body and bearing of Terry Harding with a face that is not quite present. Or a present face corrupted by decay and malice. Pierre sees over and above the labyrinth, as if floating against the ceiling, gazing down on the confusion of walls and alleys, Terry’s rotted body wandering and blundering through its intoxicating emptiness. Pierre knows there is no exit or entrance. It knots itself in confusion, the walls melding and tying off, forming bows and nooses. Shadows begin to echo, make noise. The maze grows to the size of a city. It is the most horrible thing Pierre has ever seen or heard, and in the dream he loses his mind completely. He hears his own breath rising suddenly in his ears. He lifts his handful of screws and bellows like an ape. He trips down a flight of stairs, rushes to the side of the maze and slams its metal edges with his fist. Terry is screaming from some distant shadow. Then Pierre runs backwards out of the main garage and into the parking lot, the maze receding in size. It’s raining outside. The moon moves as if in fast-forward, slipping between clouds. The city is empty, evacuated, but incredibly loud, as if the rushing wind and weather forced its inhabitants into shelter or escape. Of course, Pierre’s car is missing. His mother has driven home to attend to her errands. He has mistaken his profession and his role within the organization, within the adult environment, so he begins to walk like a fugitive toward downtown. He sits on an abandoned highway embankment, utterly alone, and begins to moan, wracked with grief. He realizes that he has passed into some sort of afterlife, a punishment for his pretending to be something he is not. That Terry’s bloated absence is the ruler of this world. Pierre’s sorrow turns to bitterness and anger. Everything is in flux. This is Judgment Day, Pierre thinks, waking up to a motel room in Idaho.
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