The Divide

by Robert Charles Wilson

  She cleared her throat. “Warm baths might help with that bruising. Maybe Tylenol for the pain. You’ll be fine in a couple of weeks. If you stay away from Hondas.”

  “It wasn’t a joke.”

  “What?”

  “About the Honda. It wasn’t a joke.”

  “No … I guess it wasn’t.” She bowed her head and made a notation in his file folder. “Is there anything else?”

  Roch stood up and left the office.

  * * *

  The landlady had wanted to kick him out of Amelie’s apartment, but she backed off when he paid two months rent in cash and promised to clean the place up. He told her he was working as a clerk for the provincial government. Which was a lie, of course; he’d picked up the rent money doing day labor. His life savings, ha-ha. The fucking check had taken two weeks to clear, or else he’d have spent it by now. But it was important to have a place to sleep.

  Though he hated being alone.

  It was getting harder all the time.

  At night, especially. With Amelie gone he didn’t have to sleep on the sofa, but the bedroom was like a big box with its single square, soot-darkened window. He would lie awake in this cold, dark room and feel the city pressing in at him. The city made a noise, as familiar as his own heartbeat but more disturbing. Sirens, motors, tires gritting down cold night streets. This noise was amplified by the winter air and beat against Roch’s eardrums until he could not distinguish it from the singing of the radiators or the rush of his own blood.

  He resented the sound. It was the sound of everything he could not have: pleasure, companionship, confidence. He couldn’t walk those streets except as an outcast. He had learned that lesson when he was very young. Nowadays he did not attract much immediate attention; he was older and less physically grotesque; he worked out in the gym. He was not the puddingy, froglike thing he had been as a child. But he was not one of those ordinary people, either. He could not move among these handsome men and confident, smiling women except as an impostor. He might have been a creature from outer space, disguised as human. He knew that.

  He was alone in the dark and his ribs hurt and he had been humiliated.

  And he was angry.

  He thought about getting drunk. But, oddly, the impulse wasn’t really there. When he thought about drinking he pictured his father coming home on winter nights like this, screaming out curses in peasant French and beating Roch with his stubby fists. Big man’s hands with dark hair and callused knuckles: Roch remembered those hands.

  Lying in bed, he looked at his own right-hand fist—a shadow in the dim light. It was his best friend, his lover, the instrument of justice.

  His anger was like a cold, uncomfortable stone that had lodged in his chest.

  And he understood, then, why he didn’t want to get drunk. This was a pressure that drinking would not have relieved. He needed all his energy for planning, because he was going to fucking do something about this thing with Amelie. Roch understood revenge in intricate detail. The rules were basic. When you were humiliated, you had to eat it—or else enforce a punishment. And he knew all about punishment. Punishment was like a big, simple machine. It was easy to operate once you got it going, and terribly difficult to stop. And all it took to work that machine was some careful planning.

  And he was good at that. It was the only kind of abstract thinking Roch enjoyed. It shut out the night sounds of the city. He could spend hours working out the details and the necessary steps, the payoff being some act … it was not yet specific … some final and irretrievable moment of equalization. An orgasm of justice.

  This new purpose seemed to seize him all at once, utterly.

  He was not smart, but he had a goal. And he was methodical. And determined. And perhaps best of all, he knew a secret. He thought of all those people out there in the lively darkness of the city, thought about how they were bound to one another with sticky ropes of loyalty, love, duty, guilt—how these impediments constrained them and restricted their movement. And Roch smiled in the dark, because here was his deepest and most profound knowledge about himself: that he was not bound by any of these things. He could do things that ordinary people could not even imagine. He was utterly alone, and therefore he was utterly free.

  The first step was to locate Amelie.

  * * *

  He had never been to the restaurant where she used to work, the Goodtime Grill, mainly because her employment there had always rankled him. It was scutwork and she deserved it, but it had given her an independence from him that Roch resented deeply. This was back when they were on the street, when she was shaving her hair and wearing that old leather jacket with the sleeves down over her hands so that only her fingers poked out, how whorish she had looked and how she resented it when he suggested the logical and obvious way of bringing in some money. As if she liked sleeping in abandoned buildings, for Christ’s sake. He savored for a moment the memory of her in that jacket and how the cars would cruise by and sometimes stop and men would call her over and how she would come back sometimes with a little money and that expression on her face, which he could not decipher—of some deep, secret grief. But then she got the restaurant job and the crappy St. Jamestown apartment, and Roch got involved with some guys boosting cars out in the suburbs, and he forgot about her for a while. That was the basic mistake he’d made—letting her get away from him.

  So he’d never been inside this particular restaurant. But maybe that was a good thing. Nobody here would know him.

  He stood a second on the Yonge Street sidewalk staring up at the “Goodtime” sign. Cold noon sun on cheap faded plastic, picture windows with bead curtains and a menu taped up: Souvlaki, Fish Chips, Burger Platter. Roch pushed his way through the door.

  He took a table by the window. This was the hard part, he thought. Anything involving deception was difficult for him. He could not predict what people would say, and the thing she said often provoked strange, hostile reactions. But there was no need to hurry. This was only the first, the most basic step.

  One of the waitresses brought him water. She was a tiny small-breasted woman who looked vaguely Oriental. According to the tag on her uniform, her name was TRACY. In a voice so timorous he barely made out the words, she asked him if he was ready to order.

  He asked for the burger plate and a beer.

  When she came back with the food, he said, “Tracy—is that your name?”

  She ducked her head, which Roch took for a nod.

  He said, “Tracy, listen, is Amelie around?”

  “Oh—Amelie? Oh—she doesn’t work here anymore.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.”

  “Are you one of her regulars? ’Cause I don’t recognize you. But I’ve only been here since summer.”

  “I’m her brother,” Roch said.

  He watched her face carefully. She narrowed her eyes and tensed up a little. Obviously this information meant something to her. Amelie had been talking.

  Loudmouthed bitch.

  But Roch felt a tingle of excitement.

  “Oh, her brother, okay,” Tracy said, and turned away. Roch let her go. Slowly now, he instructed himself. He forced himself to eat, even though he wasn’t hungry. The food was tasteless; it had the texture of styrofoam.

  When Tracy came back with his coffee, Roch smiled at her. “You a friend of Amelie’s?”

  “I can’t talk,” she said. Her voice sounded like it had died in her throat. “I have other tables.”

  “I know I haven’t been on good terms with her. Maybe she mentioned that? The thing is, she’s gone off and I don’t know where to find her.”

  Tracy only stared at him, the carafe somewhat slack in her hands.

  “Look, I’m not trying to hassle her. Is that the problem? You don’t have to tell me where she is. The thing is that I have some of her stuff. Mail and things like that. She didn’t leave a forwarding address. I just want to know whether, if I gave you some of this stuff, you could maybe get it to her
.”

  There was a long, delicate silence.

  “I don’t know,” Tracy said finally.

  But Roch had to struggle to contain his excitement, because this was all the confirmation he needed. Tracy knew how to find Amelie. Otherwise she would have said, “No,” or “I’m sorry.”

  But he was improvising now. He didn’t really have a plan; only the glimmer of a possibility—an idea beginning to take shape at the back of his head. “Look,” he said, “if I packaged up some of this stuff and left it with you—would that be all right?”

  “And bring it here to the restaurant?” Tracy said. “Because I can’t give out my address or anything.”

  Christ, Roch thought, she thinks I’m after her! It was laughable. He imagined pinning down this goggle-eyed bitch and raping her. It was a joke. But some of the thought must have been reflected in his eyes or his expression, because she took a sudden, startled step backward. He restored his smile and aimed it at Tracy again. “Sure, I can bring the stuff here.”

  “Well, maybe, I don’t know,” Tracy said, and put down the check and scurried away.

  Roch left his money and a generous tip and went out into the street. He walked aimlessly for a while, breathing frost into the cold air. Really, this was turning out terrifically well. But he still had a lot of thinking to do.

  * * *

  Some days passed while he pondered the problem of extracting Amelie’s whereabouts from Tracy the waitress.

  Roch approached the problem by stocking up on food, mainly TV dinners, and holing up in the apartment. He kept the television turned on, and insulated the windows with strips of hardware-store foam, so that the apartment absorbed as much heat as possible from the building’s big, laboring oil furnace. The combination of the dry heat and the staticky noise of the TV helped him think. Ideas came to him in harsh, glaring staccato, like commercials.

  He thought about using force to extract the information from Tracy. Follow her home one of these nights. Beat it out of her, choke it out of her, whatever. She was scared of him already; it wouldn’t be hard.

  But it would be messy and it might get him in trouble. Even worse—unless he could frighten her into silence—she might be able to warn Amelie. Dangerous.

  But how else?

  He was frustrated, thinking about it. He did a set of pushups, ate a frozen dinner, and watched a Movie of the Week on TV. Nothing. He went to bed.

  Inspiration came with the morning mail.

  He had begun collecting Amelie’s mail, what there was of it, in case he needed it to flesh out the story he’d told at the Goodtime. The problem was that his sister had been getting junk mail and subscription ads and dunning letters from the credit department of a downtown department store, but not much else—not the sort of thing anyone would go out of his way to pass on.

  Today, however, there was an envelope with an illegible return address and a Montreal postmark … and Roch, sensing its importance, sat down to think before he tried to open it.

  Amelie’s name and address were written in an arthritic scrawl across the front. Think, he instructed himself. Who did she know in Montreal? Somebody from school? But Amelie hadn’t been that tight with friends. Anyway, it looked like an old woman’s writing.

  “Jesus,” Roch said out loud. “Mama?”

  He held the letter in his hand as if it were a religious relic. The letter was important. It was the key. Roch was suddenly, intuitively certain of that. He could use this letter to pry Amelie out of her hiding place … somehow … but he had to be cautious; he bad to make plans.

  He deliberately set aside the letter and watched TV for a while. He couldn’t concentrate, of course. Morning game shows flickered and vanished; the news came on. He forced his eyes to focus on the screen. It was an exercise in discipline.

  The question occurred to him: was it really possible to steam open a letter?

  He had heard about “steaming open” mail. But he had no idea how to go about it. And, of course, he couldn’t risk destroying the letter itself.

  He went to the kitchen and filled the kettle, put it on the stove to boil. While he waited he went through the mail he’d been collecting and selected three pieces: a book-club flyer, a phone bill, and a sweepstakes ad. All three were addressed to Amelie; all three were sealed. He cradled them in his hand, thinking hard.

  The kettle whistled as it came up to steam. It was a hard, shrill whistle but Roch didn’t mind; he liked the sound. He took the book-club flyer and grasped it in a pair of kitchen tongs, then held it so that the gummed flap took the brunt of the steam. He held it there while thirty seconds ticked off on his wristwatch.

  He realized as soon as he pulled it away that this had been a mistake; the envelope was a sodden mass. He waved it in the air to cool it and then tried the flap. The glue had been steamed away, sure enough. But the paper was drenched.

  He tried again with the phone bill. This time he passed the envelope quickly through the steam, a little farther from the spout. He managed not to damage the paper, but the glue was still firm. After a second pass he was able to pry up an edge without tearing anything. A third pass and the envelope peeled open in his hand; it was damp but would probably dry to its original condition.

  He practiced again on the sweepstakes flyer and did a little better this time. He figured he had the hang of it.

  Now the letter from Montreal.

  He carried it carefully into the kitchen and set it on the counter. He dried the tongs and then grasped the envelope. The kettle was still screaming. He turned to center it on the burner and then—disaster!—the Montreal letter slipped through the pincer-end of the tongs toward a sink full of dirty dishwater. “Shit!” Roch screamed. He clenched the tongs convulsively and managed to catch a corner of the envelope; it dangled over the water until he could snatch it away with his free hand.

  His heart was beating a mile a minute. He forced himself to stand still, calm down.

  The kettle continued to shriek, inches from his ear.

  He took a deep breath and started again.

  The second time was lucky. It worked like a charm. He worried out the letter from the envelope, unfolded it, and sat down to read.

  The kettle dried up and fell silent. Roch stood up to turn the heat off, but too late: the cheap aluminum was red hot and brittle. He threw the kettle in the sink, where it hissed and generated a white, astringent-smelling cloud. The kitchen was already tropical; the whole apartment was as humid as a hothouse. He imagined spores taking root in the old wallpaper, fungus breaking out in the dark comers of these narrow rooms. He was troubled by this thought, but only briefly. He sat down and concentrated on the letter. He had important things to do.

  * * *

  The letter was typewritten, pecked out on an ancient, faded ribbon. Roch had a hard time reconciling the text with his memories of his mother. Mama was a big woman who had often been drunk and sometimes aggressive. One time he’d seen her get into a fight with a shoe clerk at Ogilvy’s—she tore a flap of skin off the guy’s cheek. Whereas this letter was a whining, pathetic document, mainly about the lousy neighborhood she was forced to live in and how long it had been since Amelie wrote back.

  Screw the old bitch, Roch thought. She never wrote tome.

  But the bulk of his plan was already beginning to take its final shape. It was a grand, glowing edifice, and he was its architect. A brace here, a capstone there. He smiled and set the letter aside.

  In the afternoon he rode a bus down to the Salvation Army thrift shop and spent ten dollars on a clapped-out Underwood Noiseless typewriter. He took it home and discovered that the ribbon wouldn’t advance, but that he could produce legible copy if he cranked the spool by hand every line or two. He typed The quick brown fox and compared this with the letter from Mama.

  The specimen was similar but far from identical. Still, Roch thought, who notices these things? He doubted that Amelie would have an older letter to compare it with or that she would bother if she did,
as long as the counterfeit seemed authentic.

  He inserted a piece of plain white bond into the Underwood and sat before it, sweating. He could not think of a way to begin … then realized that he could copy Mama’s letter as written, with a few critical amendments of his own. He smiled at the ingenuity of this and began pecking.

  The cap came off the “e” key before he was finished, but he managed to wangle it back on without too much mess. He typed the penultimate paragraph from the original, then dropped the “you never write” complaints and added:

  Because I want to see you I have bought bus tickets to Toronto and will be arriving Saturday Feb 10. Hope you can meet me at the Bus Station as I do not know how to find your Apartment exactly. I would call you but unfortunately the Phone has been take out again by those Bastards at the Phone Co.

  Roch sat back and smiled at this, especially the bit about the telephone, which not only solved a potential problem but sounded a lot like Mama. He typed, Your Loving Mother, and duplicated her signature with a blue Bic pen.

  Masterpiece.

  The only remaining problem was re-sealing the envelope. Amelie had left a jar of mucilage in the kitchen drawer, and Roch discovered that a very thin layer of this would pass for the original glue. He sealed the envelope and set it aside. Good enough for today. He turned on the TV and watched Wheel of Fortune, content with the state of the world.

  * * *

  On his way back to the Goodtime Grill the next morning, a troubling thought occurred to him:

  What if Amelie didn’t take the bait?

  There was no love lost between those two, after all. Roch did not hate either of his parents—except his father, sporadically; hating them was a waste of time. But he knew that Amelie harbored deeper feelings, mostly negative. Amelie sometimes talked about Mama sympathetically, but with her fists clenched and her nails digging into her palms. Maybe she wouldn’t show up at the bus depot.