Asylum

by André Alexis

  Rundstedt (PC):

  Mr. Speaker, if the Communists…

  Oshawa (NDP):

  What Communists?

  Rundstedt (PC):

  I mean the Socialists, Mr. Speaker. If the Socialists had bothered to ask before making these accusations –

  Burnaby (NDP):

  What accusations?

  Oshawa (NDP):

  We asked a question.

  Speaker:

  Order! The Minister for Prisons and Correction has the floor.

  Rundstedt (PC):

  Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As I was saying, if the Communists had bothered to ask, before accusing us of wasting public funds, they would have found that…

  There follows a steady, lengthy thrashing of the Opposition, a peroration on need, a moving description of citizens, fawnlike in their innocence, prey to the wolves of Have-not, to the lawless who will stop at nothing to take what is earned, earned with dignity, by the sweat of a brow, by a bone-wearying day’s work, work gone for naught, there being wolves here and jackals there, wolves and jackals whose rights are protected by Liberals and Communists, I mean Socialists, who show deeper, more reverent concern for criminals than they do for victims, because we live in woeful times when the straight road has been lost and we are in a dark wood where it is evening and the sky is bruised and we are far from shelter…a stirring speech but familiar, ignored by all present, including Rundstedt’s fellows, who know a victory when they smell it and who are loath to pay attention when attention is not crucial.

  Gander-Twillingate (L):

  I wonder who’s Rundstedt’s tailor?

  Essex-Windsor (L):

  He does have a fine jib.

  Essex-Kent (L):

  But he sounds like a sewing machine.

  Essex-Windsor (L):

  That’s true.

  Davenport (L):

  You boys hear the latest?

  Gander-Twillingate (L):

  Oh God. No, my son, leave humour for them that knows how.

  Davenport (L):

  No, no, this is a good one.

  Gander-Twillingate (L):

  So tell it.

  Davenport (L):

  Why don’t blind people skydive?

  Essex-Kent (L):

  I don’t know. Why?

  Davenport (L):

  It scares the hell out of the dog.

  Essex-Windsor (L):

  Oh, for God’s sake.

  Essex-Kent (L):

  I don’t get it.

  Across the aisle, Members of the ruling party weigh more weighty matters:

  Joliette (PC):

  Je suis allé diner avec un ami hier soir, puis il m’en a sorti une bonne.

  Chambly (PC):

  Enweille donc.

  Joliette (PC):

  Bon. Paraît que mon ami a une cousine qui n’est pas trop smart. Franchement, là, est complètement tarla. Puis, y’a deux ans, elle s’est mariée avec un gars aussi cave qu’elle. Alors, tu comprends pourquoi la famille avait peur qu’ils aient des enfants. Et c’est c’qui est arrivé. Elle était enceinte et là là tout le monde avait peur qu’elle donne un nom ridicule à l’enfant. Mais non, l’enfant est née puis on l’nomme Barbara. “Barbara,” c’est pas si pire. La famille se rassure, et puis…un an plus tard, voilà qu’elle est enceinte encore une fois. Mon ami appelle sa cousine pour la félicitér. Puis “Qu’est-ce que tu vas nommer le nouveau?”, qu’il demande. Sa cousine répond, “On va l’appeler ‘Poil de souris.’ ” “Mais comment ça ‘Poil de souris’? T’es pas sérieuse. C’est pas un nom d’enfant, ça.” “Pourquoi pas? dit sa cousine. On a nommé la première ‘Barbe à rat.’ ”

  Chambly (PC):

  (laughing) Ah oui, j’ai toujours aimé celle-là. Mais elle est vieille.

  Joliette (PC):

  C’est-tu vrai? Moi j’l’ai entendu pour la première fois hier.

  Chambly (PC):

  Bon, moi j’vais te passer une plus récente…

  And back again:

  Davenport (L):

  I wonder how long Rundstedt’s going on for this time.

  Essex-Kent (L):

  Could be days.

  Davenport (L):

  Why’re the NDP carrying on with this prison protest business, then?

  Essex-Windsor (L):

  They’re desperate for something to call their own.

  Davenport (L):

  This isn’t a clean government. There’s lots of other things they could go on about.

  Among Rundstedt’s confreres, there was the usual wonder that Rundstedt could, when speaking of his portfolio, talk for so long without coming to a point. They applauded at the occurrence of words like justice, duty, and responsibility. They suppressed their mirth as, first, the NDP and, then, the Liberals tried to interrupt his going on, tried to move to other business. As far as the Conservatives knew, Rundstedt’s department was efficient, not at all profligate. His doings were of interest to them, though, not because anyone cared about Rundstedt’s philosophy but because the man might, he just might, win approval for the building of a new federal penitentiary. The money, the employment this would bring to the province that built the prison was, naturally, of deep, even reverent, interest to everyone. So, his confreres applauded and shouted, “Hear! Hear!” from time to time, to show their respect for Rundstedt? Yes. For Rundstedt’s efficiency? Yes that too, but, above all, for the wealth Rundstedt might bring to them and to their constituents.

  (Strange though it seems, I can’t think of the House of Commons without a longing for home. It’s as if the cacophony itself were my city, the waves of voices held by Robert’s Rules of Order the way the ocean is held by a narrow reef or the wind by a picket fence. All those who were raised in capitals could say as much, I’m sure, but my city’s squabbles have so decisively influenced my view of the country, I have affection for the arguments themselves.

  Quebec, for instance…

  I remember driving with friends along the Trans-Canada from North Sydney, I think it was, going home to Ottawa. This was just after high school and we had, because most of us had nothing better to do, taken a dresser and a mirror from Ottawa to Port-aux-Basques.

  We might have chosen a more scenic route. The Trans-Canada serves few provinces well and, frankly, it betrays others. It flatters Nova Scotia, but it murders New Brunswick, which, along the highway, looks as drab as an old man’s drawers. Still, we took the Trans-Can because it’s well maintained and we wanted to get home as quickly as possible. We’d been travelling all day and left New Brunswick near sundown. And, as if a curtain parted, we entered Quebec. It was particularly beautiful. The water was high in places, in places almost touching the highway. The hills were coddled in evening. The land was green and soft.

  From Matapedia to Ste-Florence, it felt as if no one has been here before us and no one wo
uld come after. It was the first time I understood how beautiful my country was, the first time I felt love for the land itself. We were in the province that sometimes wishes it were not, and as we made our way through Quebec (Lac au Saumon, Rimouski, La Pocatière, Montreal), I couldn’t help taking leave of it. As if we were all in the same elegiac mood, the conversation suddenly turned to “indépendance.” Someone said

  – The problem is plebiscites. They don’t always mean what you think they mean. Say you and your friends have been drinking, and now everybody’s hungry. You ask people if they want fish for dinner. Six out of ten say yeah to fish. Well, it’s no mystery: most of you want fish. And even if you want lamb or chicken vindaloo, you bow to the majority, okay? You can argue about the kind of fish, but in the end you all know, more or less, what you’re going to get. Now, you take these same friends, and you ask if they want freedom. Ten out of ten will say they want freedom, but, at the end of the day, you’re no closer to knowing what it is they want. Even after you’ve asked each of them what they mean by freedom, you’re bound to come up with incompatibles, contradictions, and diametrically opposed notions: freedom from, freedom to, freedom within the bounds of social democracy, freedom within the bounds of the anarcho-communist collective, anarchic freedom. There are more “freedoms” than you have houseguests. And nation is closer to freedom than it is to fish, okay? There’s no way to tell what Quebecers want when they say they want a nation, and they haven’t even managed to say that much.

  And someone answered

  – Well, Jesus, wherefore Democracy if you can’t trust the word of the people?

  – Calm down. You’ll miss the turn off at Ste-Anne de Bellevue. Look, a plebiscite is useful for deciding if your neighbour should be allowed to turn his Victorian mansion into a rooming house, but otherwise…metaphysical questions can’t be resolved numerically, okay? As far as I’m concerned, democracy is an endless argument about democracy, but it’s infinitely preferable to the silence of tyranny.

  – No, no, no. Democracy is rule by the people, or by the people’s chosen representatives. It isn’t an argument, it’s a form of government. And the problem is our chosen representatives behave one way when they’re seeking election and another way once they’re elected. Once they’re elected, they serve power and money. It bugs me that Canada is Canada, for them, only as long as it’s economically viable. Canada isn’t only a name. It’s a place with a history. Now, there’s your long conversation: Canadian history. And it needs Quebec to go on. It needs Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta…

  – Look, there’s the turn to l’Île aux Tourtes. You know, I remember when I first read Whitman. How does it go? Somewhere he says that every atom of himself is shared by all and vice versa. I remember thinking you have to be either a poet or insane to think that way. You know, we’re all one and so on? Still, the poetic is noble and selfless, and wouldn’t it be great if we were all poets? If we were all poets, we wouldn’t need countries, don’t you think? We’d all be part of a true democracy.

  – You’re insane. Poets need countries more than everybody else. They’re all about the particular. Besides, if we were all poets, who’s to say we’d be Whitman? What if we were all Philip Larkin? You’d see a lot of small, sour little states.

  – You’re missing my point. I’m talking about an ecstatic way of being in the world. Poetry’s the only thing that comes close to taking the world in ecstatically. The world is too much for the mind, because world and mind aren’t equal. Our minds prey on the world, but a mind can be poetic or prosaic. So why shouldn’t it be ecstatic? And if it’s ecstatic, what do you need Canada for, eh?

  – Okay, now you’re just getting overheated. The problem with ecstasy is that it doesn’t care about anything but itself. No Canada, no Quebec, no democracy, nothing. Ecstasy is paradise, and paradise means the end of the world. Anyways, close the window a little, will you?

  – You cold?

  – Yeah. It’s cold out.

  It was night and the sky was cloudy and when we left Montreal, we left the light. Ontario was dark and quiet. The land smelled of wet earth and rotting wood. The windows in the farmhouses, small illuminations, nicked the vast darkness. It’s true the future ripens in the past and the past rots in the future, but how difficult it is, at times, to remember the long parade of the dead, their struggle for every yard of highway, every tree cut, every brick laid. From Rigaud to Castleman, however, I thought about the dead and wondered, as I often wonder still, if their arguments were so different from ours or if it’s the land itself that sets the agenda.)

  When Rundstedt finished speaking, the House voted on whether to begin construction of a new federal prison, location and so forth to be determined later. They voted their overwhelming assent and MacKenzie Bowell Federal Penitentiary took a step closer to being. It was a complete success for Rundstedt, perhaps his greatest day in office. And after the vote, pleased with himself, he had dinner with Franklin, where, in great detail, pausing only to savour the memory of his parliamentary grandiloquence, he related the particulars of his, of their, triumph.

  And, in a bout of optimism, they toasted the new penitentiary with Pernod and ice water.

  {29}

  CHANCE

  Reinhart had not actually accepted Franklin’s invitation to design a prison, but Franklin had said

  – There is no night

  or words to that effect and something in Reinhart had shifted and caught his attention.

  Months had passed. Months, perhaps a year…and the sediment of this moment had thickened. He was no closer to understanding why Franklin’s words had affected him, but from the moment he’d heard them he’d begun to meditate on the idea of night, to create with night in mind. In effect, then, Franklin’s words had been a presage, the onset of a task whose sense would not come until the task was done. When Franklin said

  – There is no night

  it created, in Reinhart, sense without meaning, or meaning without sense, so that it was up to him to recover either sense or meaning. Or, if you prefer: one of the muses descended and filled the artist with longing for something (or somewhere) that did not yet exist.

  So, Reinhart was inclined to accept Franklin’s invitation, but he never said so, because there was an element missing: the where. Over the months, Reinhart had often asked where the prison was to be built. Buildings were part of a landscape, after all, and Reinhart could not create one without the other, could not figure the scene without some idea of the ground.

  Naturally, Franklin was as frustrated as Reinhart, maybe even moreso, but the prison’s destination depended on things far outside his control: government approval of the project, a committee’s recommendation for ideal location…

  And then, after a sequence of events, the penitentiary came into clearer focus:

  – A Royal Commission found Canada’s penal system wanting.

  – There was (Conservative) assent to the commission’s findings.

  – There was (Conservative) assent to Rundstedt’s plan to investigate possible solutions to the system’s flaws.

  – There was (Conservative) assent to the idea that, for technical reasons, more prisons were not an unpalatable idea.

  – There was, from Minister Rundstedt, (qualified and not entirely heartfelt) acceptance that, for “economic” reasons, the best ground for MacKenzie Bowell Federal Penitentiary was somewhere in Quebec. The Cabinet had collectively chosen Quebec. Where exactly in the province seemed of little interest to anyone in the federal government. (It did not interest Rundstedt at all, as he couldn’t have told you where the Gaspé began or Montreal ended.)

  All of this created a real climate of “perhaps” for Rundstedt’s prison, and it happened in good time, politically speaking. The Conservatives were elected in 1984. The commission released its findings in June 1985 and, a few months later, the government of Quebec generously suggested three ac
ceptable locations for the federal government’s prison: the area around the Gatineaus, the area around Ste-Thècle or, finally, the area around St-Félix-D’Otis (which everyone called “Ostie St-Félix” or “St-Félix, ostie,” depending).

  Now, Franklin would have chosen a part of the province not on offer for MacKenzie Bowell, but the Gatineau Hills would do. The hills and the land around them were not unlovely and the site was close to Ottawa, so Franklin decided to begin his assessment of the three locations there. He had nothing deeper in mind than a cursory look. He invited Edward along to take photos of the terrain and, of course, he invited Reinhart, just in case the land proved interesting.

  None of them knew the Gatineaus well, but Edward drove because neither of the others wanted to.

  As Reinhart and Franklin were distracted by a conversation about Apelles, the Greek painter whose paintings no one has seen, Edward lost the right road. He inadvertently turned onto a narrow lane that declined along sharper and sharper curves until, finally, it stopped dead before a tangle of fallen trees, rotten branches, and jutting rocks. (Chance.)

  Reinhart, feeling cramped, got out of the car to stretch his legs and wandered off, over the tangled branches, out of view. (Chance, again.)

  For fifteen minutes or so, Franklin and Edward sat together in the car, more or less silent, waiting for Reinhart’s return. They would have waited longer, but, suddenly and from a distance, they heard what sounded like a cry of alarm. Both men went cautiously from the car, unsure the sound they’d heard had been human, but as they stood up to look around they saw Reinhart. He was some fifty yards before them, on the other side of the fallen trees.