The Secrets Men Keep

by Mark Sampson

  I chose a restaurant just outside of Old Quebec. Not a chain but not a fancy-pants either. Just some mid-range independent I knew wouldn’t be busy that early in the evening. I arrived on time, and, to my relief, so did the guy. I looked him over as we shook hands: baseball cap over mullet, rayon jacket, and sneakers. Fucking sneakers.

  “It’s nice to meet cha,” he said as we settled in at our table and the garçon, a gallant Frenchman, came by with our menus. “Vince must be right some busy if he had to send joo.”

  “You could say that,” I replied, imagining naked Vince surrounded by naked blondes screaming out in tortured pleasure. “You mind the drive?”

  “Not a’tall,” he said. “It’s easier gettin off the oylin now that we got the breedg. You seen that breedg?”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “It’s fucking yooge.”

  I exchanged a few more pleasantries with the guy—well, as much as you can with a rube—and then I started talking to him about his business on PEI. Surprise surprise—he got his start in pot, which he pronounced “pat”, but wanted to move on to something more complicated.

  “Yeah, I dealt a lotta pat, and some hasheetch,” he said. “But I’ll say this. And I ain’t ray-siss, man. I am not ray-siss. But most of the pat on the oylin these days is dealt by black people. So I just decided to get outtavit.” He took a sip of water. “When I heard about the Odessa-to-Moncton ting, I got involved. And I hafta say, your operation was right sophisticated. I was impressed.”

  “You got black people on PEI?”

  “Now that’s ray-siss,” he said with a chuckle. “We got black people. Hell, we got two Korean restaurants now in downtownsharltown.”

  Since he brought up the Odessa-to-Moncton deal, I started probing him about his involvement. Tried to get him to say—or not say—what I wanted. But as we talked, something changed. It became clear that, despite the accent and his relentless hickism, the guy wasn’t a moron. Far from it. As he walked me through the logistics of the deal, the clandestine emails and industrial park pickups, the connecting with the right strangers and knowing who to trust, I began to think that he couldn’t have been the one who screwed us over. The guy seemed to have his fingers on everything, and understood the severity of who he was dealing with.

  “The ting is, the deal was good until it wusn’t,” he went on. “I mean I followed buddywhatsisname out to the right spat. I did. But that guy was stunned as me arse. He’d beat the face right af me if he heard me say that, but he was stunned as me fucking arse. When the shit went down, I raced it outta there. Right back over the breedg, I went.”

  No, I didn’t think that this guy was the guy. I knew men with 20 years’ experience who wouldn’t have shown the instincts in that situation that this guy did. As much as I hated to admit it, he was a natural. He didn’t strike me as stupid enough to rip us off on his first gig. I asked him a few more questions to try and get him to say what I wanted, but he didn’t take the bait. And so I decided to press forward.

  “Look, Vince has some more work for you,” I said. “We wouldn’t be meeting like this otherwise. A few of the gigs you can do from PEI, but another one—the bigger one—would involve us relocating you to Montreal.”

  “No way,” he said. “I’m an oylin boy and I’m gonna die an oylin boy.”

  I squinted at him in genuine confusion. “Can I ask—why? You clearly have a knack for this work. You’re not going to go very far staying on PEI.”

  “Look, let me tell ya a story,” he said. “I grew up in this shitty little place up west on the oylin, called Alberton. My fadder, who’s a real ornery sumbitch, had hees own lobster boat and wanted me to work on it with him. But I told him to go fuck himself. He worked that boat for 27 years and at the endavit he had nuthin. And what’s he bin doin now, for the last 12 years? Commuting out to Fort McMurray—tree months on and one month af—doing the dirtiest, most dangerous work in the oil patch. At hees age! Nah, man. I moved to Sharltown at 18 and got myself a nice little setup there. I know I’m smart, that I could do better, but I know everybody there. I feel like I belong. It’s my compromise, you know. It’s my way of gettin out from under that stultifying loyf in Alberton, such as it was. But I know I’m a small fry. And I ain’t riskin my hide someplace bigger just to make more money.” He folded his arms over his chest. “You can give me whatever work you want, but I ain’t leaving the oylin. I know what I am, and it don’t matter. I’m just gonna end up in Sleepy Hollow anyway, and I’ve made my peace with dat.”

  Well. Jeez. If you’re going to use my own words, my own feelings, against me. I of all people really couldn’t argue with what he said. I looked at him for a while, pushed around the food on my plate, and then conceded his point without much fuss. It probably wasn’t a good idea to sic this bumpkin on our Montreal friendlies anyway.

  It was time to talk about the future. But before I let him in on the new work we were offering, I wanted to go over a few other details of the Odessa-to-Moncton deal, especially regarding his email exchanges with our Ukrainian and Russian contacts. This wasn’t entrapment—I just wanted the guy to understand that there were lots of things he did well but a few things he could’ve done better to protect himself and us.

  “Well that stuff wasn’t my fault,” he said after a bit. “Buddy from Russia shoulda picked a better email alias. I mean c’man—‘Ivana Jirkov’? Who’s gonna believe that ‘Ivana Jirkov’ is a person’s real name?”

  Shit.

  That was it.

  Shibboleth.

  I thought: You fucking asshole.

  My hands went all clammy as I looked around the restaurant, knowing what I needed to do. I got the garçon to bring the cheque even though we hadn’t quite finished eating, and loaded two fifties on the bill tray without looking at it. Then I hunkered in close and got the guy to do the same. I said: “This place is still pretty empty, but I’d feel more comfortable going over the new gigs with you in the bathroom. Sensitive stuff, is all. You understand. I’ll go into the men’s to make sure it’s empty. When it is, I’ll stick my head out and give you the signal. You count to 25 and then come join me. Make sure nobody follows you in. Abort if need be. You dig?”

  “Sure b’y,” he said, intrigued by all this cloak-and-dagger shit. “Whatever. Just, ya know, whatever you need.”

  I got up and went to the men’s. Somebody was just coming out as I was going in. When the door swung closed, I checked all the stalls, the urinal area. The urinals were the type that go all the way to the floor and overlooked the mirror on the opposite wall. I went back and stuck my head out, gave the guy the signal. While he counted to 25, I got myself ready. He walked in, the door swinging closed behind him, and came over to me. When I did him, he spun right around, as if doing a pirouette, and then tumbled into the urinals like a little kid shoved there by a bully. Lying supine across those smelly enamel trenches, his body nearly broken in half, he twisted his head around to stare up at me with a look of abject confusion. But it only lasted a few seconds. The urinals filled up fast, and the runoff headed for the drain in the middle of the floor like something out of fucking Hitchcock. I unscrewed, wiped down, packed up. “‘Ivana Jirkov,’” I muttered in disgust, then kicked him in the sneaker a couple times to make sure he was gone.

  I didn’t even stop at our table on my way out. Just hustled on by toward the doors. I passed our waiter as I did. “Merci monsieur, bon soir,” I said. “Merci,” he replied, giving me a suave little bow.

  ~

  As a precaution I overnighted in Drummonville, then headed out early the next morning for Toronto. The sun was rising behind me, firing this beautiful orange glaze over my rearviews and the hood of my car. On that drive I was more thoughtful than I normally am after a job. Part of me wanted to get back to the city as soon as possible. I wanted to ensconce myself in its safety and familiarity, in all the choices I’ve made about h
ow to use the brains and talents that God gave me. Part of me felt unprotected by not being there—as if riding out on this open highway was like falling without a net.

  But part of me felt something else. You know what. I wanted to make another stopover in Kingston, to see if I could track down that Natalie girl. It wouldn’t be hard—often a big part of my job is finding people who don’t know I’m coming. I just wanted to talk to her, to ask her if I was right about all those things I imagined about her on the drive up yesterday. Or was there something different? Was there something more? Of course there was. There was always something more when it came to people. You can’t snapshot anyone. But I like to think that I got it at least halfway right, that I understood something about her circumstances in that brief moment we shared.

  And maybe, just maybe, the connection I felt between us was real. Maybe I would track her down, and tell her all these things. Maybe I would fuck her, and then we’d fall in love. And maybe I’d follow her to Halifax, just throw it all away, all of it, the familiar and the safe, and start afresh, built it up anew, go square, use these brains for something else, something all punch clock and lunchbox and weekends off.

  No. Fuck. If I did find Natalie, she probably wouldn’t know what the hell I was talking about, or even remember who I was. And besides, a man really should keep his fantasies to himself.

  SNOOP

  With delicious fits of mutual spite, she and I communicate mostly through Alumnotes. What else are those back-of-the-alumni-magazine pronouncements for? To keep vague acquaintances up to speed? Hardly. They’re to broadcast achievements both small and large to our oldest rivals. And she and I do exactly that, no matter how faint, how insignificant our accomplishments are. Alumnotes is our place to strut in front of each other.

  I often wonder what criteria the alumni department uses when defining a triumph. I assume polite rejection letters are at the ready if one attempted to submit something like this:

  JOHN DAY (BAH ’96) is pleased to announce his divorce from SARAH SMITH (BSC ’97) who revealed herself to be a two-timing cow.

  Even across the continents that separate us, she and I would shimmer with identical mirth if such a message could infiltrate the anodyne lineup of birth announcements and new jobs. I could describe the precise timbre of her laugh, the curling together of her knees, the intonation of her nodding “Braa-vo!” if she ever read a sentence like that. You can’t really hate somebody unless you’ve loved them first.

  ~

  I have been told since moving to this palm-treed city on the underbelly of the earth that I would have more friends if I would just carry a tracking device. Tracking device is my name for it. Here and in England they call them mobiles. Back home, they’re cell phones. In East Asia, handphones—or more accurately, hanpones, unless the speaker’s had her tongue snipped to aid pronunciation. Like I said, I call them tracking devices. People tell me they can’t always include me in their plans because I spend too much of the day incommunicado. They never say We would have invited you but we couldn’t reach you. Instead they say We would have invited you but we didn’t know where you were.

  Here in the light-bright days of summer, it’s often 35 degrees before 8AM. I sweat through my dress shirt while waiting for the train that takes me from Lewisham to my job in a distant, suburbanized business park north of the city. Other people milling on the platform never seem to mind this early-morning swelter. I suppose they’re used to it. They’re also used to their tracking devices going off despite having left the house five minutes ago. The interruptions don’t bother them; they crave that quick hit of connection before Smith’s Invisible Hand flings them into their day. Yeah nah, the train’s not here yet. Look luv, I’ll call ya when I get to North Ryde . . . And when the train pulls in and we all step on and find our seats, as the train takes flight, soaring over palm trees and stonewall bridges and houses with burnt-orange roofs, and as tracking devices ring inside the train to a desperate, distracting degree, I think to myself: Is it really that awful, to be alone? Why are we all so afraid of our own quiet thoughts?

  Thankfully, Smith’s Invisible Hand delivers me to a desk in air-conditioned bliss. I get paid a lot of money to do simple tasks for people who are easily impressed. The other week I got a small promotion—a lateral move actually, no pay increase but a basket of cool new responsibilities, a new job title—and I fired off a blurb about it to Alumnotes and played it up in emails to people back home. I’m certain that she will read or hear about it eventually, the thok of accomplishment I fire like a tennis ball in her direction. Only because she despises me so much will she care to know how well I’m doing.

  One day killing time on my lunch hour, I surfed into the narcissistic world of personal web logs. It didn’t take me long to locate acquaintances from years gone by riffing on the web with their opinions and daily whatnots. I knew I should have stopped my trolling there, with these half-strangers who talked about their kids, about their politics, about movies—but my curiosity got the better of me. One search too many and I found that she herself had started a blog, with photos and snippets of poems and uploads of music she was listening to. I exited that site as soon as I found it, but it was too late: it had infected me with the virus of nosiness. I went back in and masochistically subscribed to her RSS feed, thinking: Oh frig me, this’ll render Alumnotes the horse and buggy of our little feud.

  ~

  The pulse of streets is the same no matter where I’ve lived. Traffic is a snake moving one laborious vertebra at a time: one person per car oozing down thick ropes of highway, not knowing that eyes narrowed with indictment watch from train windows. Those eyes are mine. Is this how we’re meant to live?

  Each evening, as I sit reading a book on the long ride home, the same surly fat woman gets on a couple stops after I have and inevitably sits near me. She dresses in awful pastels and her hair is a thick, helmet-like mullet, a feathery river of defiance that screams I will not update my hairstyle, I will not! I would know she’s there even if I didn’t see her board because the ring of her tracking device is the theme from Ghostbusters. I can’t imagine a more annoying sound as I devour my Borges or Nabokov. It rings every day, and every day the only thing the voice on the other end wants to know is: Where are you now? And to what end! I want to scream. Does it matter if we’ve passed through Central yet or if we’re just now rolling into Petersham? I live for that one beat of silence after she has flipped open the phone, killing off Ghostbusters, but before she squawks “Hello” in her nasally, benighted voice. It is in that beat of silence that I believe all things are possible, that one day there will be infinite afternoons of sunshine where I will have nothing else to do but be exactly who I am. I want to hate the mullet woman but can’t. The only way I could would be if I had known her before and she had been someone more admirable than she is now: a person bursting with spirit, some old soul who treated life like a carnival. And then didn’t anymore.

  ~

  I often run email experiments on my friends back home: I see how long I can go without mentioning myself in any way in our daily exchanges before they notice. It’s a tricky game that you could never get away with on the phone. It involves ignoring their “So what’s new?” or “Anything shakin’ there?” and concentrating on the day-to-day events of their lives, asking deeper and more probing questions. I keep track of how long it takes my friends to realize they aren’t learning anything new about me, that each day of my life slips past them like tugboats on a dark harbour.

  The record holder is my journalist friend Jarvis, in Halifax. He lasted a staggering eight months and five days before he clued in to my prank. And the only reason he did was because he ran into her, my Alumnotes nemesis, at the downtown library one day, and when, after the requisite small talk, she asked about me, saying, “How is he anyway? What’s new in his world?” he was caught flat-footed and embarrassed. He emailed me the next morning demanding to know why he had
nothing to tell her. God, I laughed at that. Laughed all day at the office and on the train ride home. Laughed and laughed, I did. You could say I laughed until tears ran down my face.

  ~

  I take it back. This “blog” shit is no substitute for Alumnotes. The message isn’t always under our control. If everyone you know is an amateur reporter now, filing stories into the permanent ether of cyberspace, then what stops them from skewering you if they wish? Who are the editors that vet these ramblings? Nobody. Make an ass of yourself at a party, get drunk and say something racist, tell the wrong woman you’re in love with her, and nothing (in theory) stands in the way of your enemies learning about it. This is why Alumnotes is superior. It’s strictly for victories, and bite-sized ones at that.

  Back home, her blog has really taken off. Strangers (at least, strangers to me) have begun leaving comments on those daily entries of exuberance. She posts photos of beaches we used to visit, bars we used to get drunk in. When there are pictures of her, she manages to look joyful without even smiling. It’s all in her eyes, that shrewd and penetrating certainty. I know I shouldn’t be reading this, that it tortures me to do so. But I can’t help it. How strange, I think, to know more about her from this fake, virtual life than I ever did from actually being with her. With these words and photos and music, she has captured the blissful velocity of living without me.

  ~

  There are problems brewing at the office. I am struggling with my new responsibilities. Managers are making passive-aggressive remarks that imply I’m overpaid for what I do. An afternoon meeting with executives goes especially badly—a pantomime of good cop/bad cop, only with no good cop. On the train ride home I am shaking, furious with myself. I need so much to be alone.