“Maybe,” John admitted.
“How can you just walk into that?”
“Because I have to. It’s a debt. I want to pay it off. Not just a debt to Amelie.” He regarded Susan solemnly across the table. “I’ll tell you another secret. There are lives I could have saved. Thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands. But I didn’t. So I have to save this life, Amelie’s life. It’s not just one more experiment, Susan. It’s the only experiment that matters.”
She didn’t know what he meant, but it was impossible to ask—there was a ferocity under the words that she was afraid to provoke.
He stood up suddenly, put down money for the bill. “The roads should be clear by now,” he said.
* * *
They stopped at a Home Hardware outlet off Yonge Street, miraculously open for business although there was only one clerk inside. John bought a heavy-duty flashlight and fresh batteries and assembled them as Susan drove south and west through the snowbound streets.
She followed his directions toward the lakeshore west of the city, over the railroad tracks and into a labyrinth of warehouses and crumbling brick factories where the snow lay in pristine mountains and the little Honda labored like a crippled pack-mule She parked when he told her to park. The silence was sudden and absolute. “We walk from here,” he said.
Susan was dressed in high boots, a ski jacket, jeans. She tore the jacket sleeve while climbing through a hole in the fence that defined the railroad right-of-way. Now we’re trespassing, she thought. Now the police will come and arrest us. But there were no police; there was only the snow clinging to the tree branches and the soft sound it made when it fell; the glitter of the track where an early morning train had polished the rails.
She followed John along the arc of the railway for a hundred yards or more, then scrambled after him up an embankment.
“There,” he said. “That’s the building.”
Susan stood panting and looked up.
The building was huge. It was an old black brick building on an abandoned railway siding, sooty and Victorian. There were no windows, but the open loading bay gaped like a toothless mouth. The snow had not softened or warmed this building, Susan thought, it was big and indifferent and it frightened her.
John’s gaze was fixed on it. “I want you to stay here.” he said. “If I bring Amelie oat, help me get her to the car. Give me twenty minutes inside. If I’m not out by then, find a phone and call the police. Understand?”
“Yes.” She looked at him critically. “John? Are you sure—I mean, are you all right?”
He shrugged.
“For now,” he said.
She watched him walk away from her, toward the building; and she understood with a sudden, aching finality that she had been afraid of this place all along, even before she knew it existed—this dark chamber where he was determined to go—and that she could not stop him or bring him back.
26
Roch was pretty comfortable in the warehouse.
Sure, it was cold. Of course. But the Sterno fire helped. More important, he was alone here … except for Amelie, and he was able to keep Amelie sufficiently blissed out that she was not a real presence.
He was alone in this vast, empty building and it occurred to him that this was his natural state; that he had discovered his ideal habitat. His problems had always been with other people—their prudishness and their nasty glances. He was a stranger out there in the world. What he needed was what he had found: his own kingdom, this place. He moved down these dark and windowless corridors with the flashlight in his hand, king of the lightbeams, his pockets stuffed with a treasury of D batteries, and when he laughed his breath smoked out in front of him.
Of course, he had a purpose here. None of this was random motion. He was waiting for the man Amelie used to live with. No, more than that. He was waiting for justice.
He had left a trail and he believed the man would follow it. If not, maybe Roch would wheedle an address or a phone number from Amelie—she was cooperative, in her present condition—and the challenge could be issued more formally. But it would be better simply to lure the man here. “Benjamin,” Amelie had said his name was. (She whispered it to the air from time to time.) But the name didn’t matter. What mattered was the humiliation Roch had suffered in Amelie’s apartment, months ago, and its sequel, his humiliation at Cherry Beach, both events now blurring into a long history of similar humiliations for which they had become emblematic. Roch understood that his life was an arrow, with moment following moment like the points of a trajectory toward some target not wholly of his own choosing. But he was happy in that service and he was happy to have found a home here.
He explored the snowbound building in great detail. He avoided the ground level, where there had been extensive vandalism and where the walls were emblazoned with vulgar graffiti. He preferred the lightless upper regions, closed to the world, a wooden ladder and the Eveready flashlight his admittance into a pure and angular wilderness. He also liked the cold-storage chambers at the rear, where the furs used to hang behind the loading bays, though these were less hospitable: bleak caverns where snowmelt dripped from corroded freon pipes and animal dung lay thick on the floor.
Time was nearly meaningless here … or would have been, save for the periodic demands of his body and the ticking clock of Amelie. Now he ambled past a shuttered window where rags of winter light penetrated from the west. Afternoon, therefore. He circled back to the room where Amelie, bound at the ankles, had crawled closer to the Sterno fire, some instinct for warmth operating through the narcotic haze. She seemed to be asleep; her breathing was shallow and periodic. Roch considered giving her another injection, then decided not to. It would be too easy to kill her. This was a ticklish business. Still … even if he did kill her … hadn’t she served her purpose already? Assuming “Benjamin” showed up. She was disposable, really, except as a potential hostage against some emergency Roch could not entirely frame or predict. Dead, she would only have to be disposed of.
Still—
But he hesitated in his deliberation, startled to a new level of alertness by the distant but distinct sound of footsteps in the cavernous space of the warehouse.
It was a cue. He recognized it. Time had resumed its forward march. His heart began to batter against his ribs.
He picked up a fifteen-inch copper pipe segment he had set aside in rehearsal for this moment. A weapon in one hand, the Eveready flashlight in the other. Be prepared. The Boy Scout’s Motto, ha-ha. A smile formed on his lips.
27
Passing into the shadow of the building, John felt its presence as a physical chill.
He didn’t know this building, but Amelie had told him about it. (Told him, told Benjamin: in memory the merger was already complete.) It was a huge, cold, black-brick nautilus shell and she hated it. He understood why.
But that was pathology, John thought, his sense of the building’s soullessness. Because buildings don’t have souls, ever. He had read extensively in abnormal psychology, not psychoanalytic case histories but the infinitely subtler literature of brain dysfunction. And it struck him that what he felt now was like the “heightened significance” in the intrarictal consciousness of temporal lobe epileptics. The limbic system bleeding into perception … animal foreboding injected into the loom and bulk of this stony Victorian structure. But then, he knew what might be inside.
He took a step up onto the ancient loading bay. The wooden platform creaked ominously. He could smell the damp interior now. Animals had died in there. Hard to imagine even a homeless person sheltering here, even in summer. But Amelie had said nobody went inside much. Just lingered here out of the rain. Brief shelter. Still.
He remembered Amelie telling him about a TV show she’d seen, about dream interpretation. If you dream about a house or a building, Amelie said, you’re really dreaming about yourself—your mind. “And the attic or the basement is sort of your unconscious self. Maybe you don’t like what you find th
ere, or maybe it’s something great you forgot about. But either way, it’s part of you. It’s your secret self.” Maybe, he thought, I dreamed this building. It would be appropriate. Down into his jerrybuilt and crumbling soul, echoes of his own voice rumbling through these ruined corridors.
Moving into the darkness, he thumbed the switch on his flashlight. The beam lanced out ahead.
* * *
Soon he was aware of another human presence—of the distant, stealthy tread of feet, faint echoes at the threshold of perception: a whisper in this frigid air, but revealing. He didn’t doubt that the presence was Roch. Too many signs had pointed this way; the truth was too obvious. He tried to track the distant footfalls as he moved, to range on them … this was his uniqueness after all, his secret weapon…
But he was sidetracked by his thoughts. It was as if the sound of his own thinking had grown intolerably loud, a din that drowned out the external world. He recognized this as akin to the feverishness that had overtaken him last night, or maybe the same feverishness, a dementia that had never entirely retreated. He was dying, after all. Or, if not dying, then retreating into some utterly new form, a dim shape just emerging from the darkness. Which was, when you came right down to it, a kind of dying.
He stumbled against a damp concrete wall. Vertigo. This wouldn’t do at all. He had entered the world of Greek and Latin nouns: vertigo, dementia, kinaesthesia, aphasia…Too soon, he thought.
He thought about Roch.
There was a skittering from a dark room beyond the reach of his flashlight beam. Not Roch: some animal, maybe a rat; he hurried past.
He remembered Roch from their confrontation in Amelie’s apartment. A big man, muscular, no real threat—not then—but John recalled also his deeper sense of the man as a fierce kettle of hostility, at explosive pressure. But “hostility,” what an inadequate word! It was an anger as purified and symmetrical as a laser beam, far more potent than any physical threat and more difficult to overcome. John was, at this moment, more than a little frightened of it.
He had counted on his old abilities here, the superhuman edge, but since last night that surety had blurred. The edges of things ran together, events happened too quickly, some internal clock had slowed down. His impression of the corridor now, in the sway of his flashlight beam over concrete and blackened ceiling beams, was more vivid than it ought to be but less informative: he was hard-pressed to extract the implications of a footprint or an echo. Where was Roch? Where was Amelie?
Moving deeper now, he discovered a wooden ladder leading up through a gap in the ceiling where a staircase might once have been. The rungs of the ladder were not dusty but seemed almost polished, and this, at least, he could interpret. He switched off the flashlight and in the darkness detected a fainter light flickering above him. It wasn’t much, but it was something to follow.
At the top of the ladder he groped his way onto a horizontal surface and flicked the flashlight back on. He was in a narrower, older corridor; the wallboard had been pried away in places and the yellow lathing peeked through. The flashlight beam paled away in an atmosphere of dust motes. He moved still deeper, approaching the heart of the building.
He was totally enclosed now—the thought inspired a new, nauseating wave of vertigo. He heard faint sounds lost in their own echoes, which might be voices, or water dripping down these old posts and columns, or the sound of whimpering. His own footsteps seemed impossibly loud, and the dust was choking.
Then, without warning, he turned a corner into a long windowless room which was not empty. First he saw the flickering Sterno fire, then Amelie bound at the wrists and ankles and squirming against the floor. She was wearing grimy jeans and a striped top, a soiled ski jacket; her eyes were vague but she looked at him pleadingly.
“Amelie.” He was hardly aware of saying it. Maybe it was Benjamin who spoke. Benjamin’s memories were powerfully present as he stooped to untie her. Their conversations, meals together, arguments, their lovemaking. She was tied with nylon clothesline and his fingers were too numb to manage the knots; but he had a Swiss Army knife in his pocket and he pulled it out and fumbled open the blade. Amelie watched curiously, as if she couldn’t quite decide who he was; which was reasonable, after all, because he wasn’t entirely certain himself … he had lost track of his own name. Words were suddenly elusive; he imagined them (the vision was crystalline in his mind) as a flock of birds startled into a cold blue sky.
The blade parted the cords. Her hands, faintly blue, sprang apart. But maybe Amelie had lost her words, too. She was pointing and gasping, backing away…
Too late, John understood her wild gesturing. He turned in time to see Roch rush forward from the doorway. Roch had a length of pipe in his right hand and John focused briefly on it, on the islands of verdigris laced across the copper, green in the flickering firelight. In its own way it was beautiful. Mesmerizing.
Roch smiled.
“Get out of here,” John told Amelie.
Roch brought the pipe down. John managed to catch the first blow against the open palm of his left hand, but the shock traveled up his arm to the shoulder and seemed to unhinge something there. The arm fell limp as Amelie scurried past. Passing, she slipped and kicked the burning Sterno across the floor. It spilled against an exposed spruce stud; the light was briefly dim and then flared much brighter … but John’s attention was on Roch, who had reared back for a second blow. John tried to veer away, but something was wrong here: the weapon came down too fast, or his legs were unsteady—everything happened too fast—and he was aware of the miscalculation but helpless to correct it as Roch brought the pipe down in a clean trajectory that intersected precisely with John’s skull; the impact was explosive. He felt as if he were flying away in every direction at once—and then there was only the darkness.
28
The blow connected solidly.
Roch allowed himself a brief rush of satisfaction, then turned and ran after Amelie.
Running, he transferred the pipe to a loop in his belt and took the flashlight in his right hand. He trained the beam on her; but she was already a surprising distance down the corridor … he must have been too cautious with the narcotics, must have let the time get away from him.
He tripped over a spur of concrete and almost dropped the flashlight; he managed to recover, but it gained Amelie some critical time. He stabbed the flashlight forward and saw her disappear down the empty stairwell—a miracle she had found the ladder in this darkness, but of course it was his own light, his own trusty Eveready, that had led her there. “Bitch!” he screamed, and drew out the copper pipe and bounced it against an aluminum conduit suspended horn the ceiling. The sound rang out around him like a bell, metallic and cacophonous in this closed space. Amelie ducked her head down below the floor … but Roch didn’t follow.
He was frozen in place … paralyzed by the sudden and terrible suspicion that he had done something momentous, something irrevocable … that he had jackknifed off the high board into an empty pool. How had he arrived in this dark, cavernous hallway? Basically, what the fuck was hedoing here?
But there was no answer, only the keening of the ventilator shafts down these blind, scabbed walls.
He clenched his teeth and suppressed the doubt. Maybe there was some truth to it, maybe hehad taken the dive without looking; but when you get this far, he thought, it just doesn’t matter anymore. You’re up there in the spotlight and you tuck and spin because it’s the focal point of your entire life even if you don’t understand it, you just know, so fuck all that pain and death that’s rushing up at you; that’s after. Now is now.
He hefted the copper pipe and turned back to the burning room.
29
Susan saw Amelie stumble away from the shadow of the building and knew at once that something had gone terribly wrong.
Amelie was sick or hurt. She took five lunging steps into the snow and then seemed to lose momentum—stopped, wobbled, and fell forward.
Susan ran o
ut from the cover of the trees. The snow hindered every step; it was like running in a nightmare. She looked up briefly as she passed into the shadow of the warehouse. The building seemed to generate its own chill, potent even in the still winter air.
She put her arms around Amelie and lifted her up. Amelie was trembling. She was cold to the touch, and her eyes wandered aimlessly… Susan guessed some kind of drug might be involved.
“Amelie!” Some recognition flickered in her eyes. “Amelie, is John inside? Is he all right?”
“He’s in there,” Amelie managed.
“Is he hurt?”
“He’s with Roch.”
Susan stifled a powerful urge to go in after him. She took a deep breath. Do what you have to. “I’ll take you to the car,” she said. “Then we can call the police.”
* * *
They crossed the railroad tracks and ducked under the link fence toward the Honda, both of them breathless and gasping by the time they reached the car. Amelie doubled over against the lid of the trunk, her cheek pressed to the cold metal. Susan turned back toward the warehouse, one edge of it still visible over a stand of snowy pine trees. She shielded her eyes and frowned at what she saw: a thick plume of white smoke had begun to waft upward from the western corner of the building.
30
The warehouse had been stripped bare years ago. Everything even remotely valuable had been sold or stolen. There was no furniture left to burn; the floor was pressed concrete; the exterior walls were brick. But there were ancient kiln-dried spruce studs: there were pressboard dividing walls where these lofty spaces had been partitioned into offices; there was an immense volume of sub-code insulation that had been installed by the contractor as a cost-cutting measure during a 1965 renovation. Altogether, there was plenty to burn.
The Divide Page 19