Bellevue Square

by Michael Redhill

  “Our blogs.”

  “By gum, anything! It’s quite a commitment. I mean, they’re wet-hooked right into the computers. Gives us slingshot clockspeed that uses today’s internet to build links!”

  “You’re insane. What future civilization is going to want to read our blogs?”

  “And our comic books, bootlegs, cures, operas, our spoken word performances, how to read Braille, every formula science has ever come up with, episodes of China Beach, all of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. All of our pictures! Kept permanently available to anything that comes after us, whether on this planet or some other. It’s the remaking of the library of Alexandria!”

  The man whose badge Cullen is wearing strides toward us with a blank look on his face. Cullen removes the lanyard from around his neck and hands it over without a word. Dr. Macdonald goes back to wherever he emerged from and Cullen says, “We have to keep things on the lowdown, totally confidential. Here.” He digs in a pocket and removes a small silver pillbox. Inside are half a dozen tiny pink tablets sitting on black velvet. They are the exact size and colour of children’s Aspirin. “It’s better if you chew it. Work it into your epithelials.” He pops one in his mouth and chews it up. It even smells like children’s Aspirin. He holds the case out to me. “Take a couple.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the thing itself—No-mind! I trust you, Jean. You’re labile, you’re honest, and you’re flexible. To do our work, that’s very important, to wit what is and what isn’t and what’s now and what’s not. It won’t hurt you. It will help you.”

  I take two of the pills. “Maybe for later,” I tell him. I might be getting a headache.

  He clicks the case shut and puts his finger beside his nose. “I believe you will come to see ‘later’ as a very rather particularly elusive concept, Jean. I really believe you will, Jean. I will see you later, although I’ll also be here for a while. Thank you very much for our talk.”

  “Thank you.” I carry on down the hallway, feeling I should tread carefully.

  “Oh—do you have a good credit rating?”

  “I don’t know,” I call over my shoulder. I open the door to Jimmy’s room. Cullen is approaching and I make quick to get behind the door and lock it. It’s lucky Jimmy is asleep. I can hear Cullen breathing on the other side of the door and I remain still and silent. After another half minute, he walks away. The problem with manic depressives is that you can’t wrangle with them. Mania is an airtight argument. I hear Cullen out there haranguing others, addressing their concerns with even more ornate reasoning.

  I worry, though, that his basic theory makes sense. Wasn’t Isaac Newton bonkers?

  When the coast is clear, I go down the back stairs and return to the park. I didn’t speak to Jimmy, but I know he clocked my presence, from whatever in-between place they’d put him in.

  A light snow falls on College Street.

  I’M NOT AN ADDICT of anything, although I will admit to compulsions. Not bad ones, just certain things I have no control over. I have to check the mailbox when I’m walking into the house, for instance, even if I collected the mail four hours ago. Ian joked about it for years (he wasn’t above sticking the day’s mail back into the mailbox), but he eventually lost patience and I had to make a case for something I knew I couldn’t stop doing. I told him that there was sometimes a special delivery, for instance from FedEx, or someone might drop off a handwritten note after the mail had come.

  When I told Dr. Morbier about this, he asked me if I could remember the first time I found something unusual in my mailbox, and I easily could, because I still have what I found. On my ninth birthday, I found an envelope with my first name on it in the mailbox and there was a five-dollar bill in it. It had the serial number A/Z 00000011.

  Morbier of course wrote this all down. What does the A/Z mean, he wanted to know. But it means nothing. It was just the series designation. Maybe you are the first and last of something, he suggested. He wanted me to figure out what A/Z meant, but I haven’t and I won’t. Not everything means something, I told him. It doesn’t matter. If there is anything strange about me, I’m still me.

  During that session I could have told him about the current compulsion I’m dealing with: that I cannot stop thinking about Rabbi Shoshana. If I told him about her, though, I might be putting myself in a dangerous position. Because if Shoshana knows Ingrid, then Morbier is not who he claims to be. And Shoshana knows Ingrid. I owe it to myself to listen to the compulsion, or I might do the wrong thing. Shoshana is the mailbox with the hand-delivered letter in it.

  —

  I go back to Bellevue Square. The crusty snow is long gone, replaced by a slush with the texture of quicksand. It goes shklort when you walk in it. The top layer is a dump of grey wet snow an inch deep over a mantle of hardpack five months old, now mid-thaw. It’s treacherous. It’s cold.

  I don’t see Miriam, but Ritt is lurking by the public washrooms. The usual drug deal is endlessly unfolding behind the locked bathrooms. The money and the drugs go round and round like an Escher drawing.

  Ritt comes to where I’m standing, across from the Kiever.

  “I never paid you,” I say, getting out my billfold. I only have twenties. I give him one.

  “I don’t have change.”

  “Keep it.”

  “I want a piece of cake.”

  “Well, you have twenty bucks now. Go up to Wanda’s.”

  “I’m gonna go up to Wanda’s.”

  “Better hurry before they close.”

  “Remember in the olden days,” he says, “there was cake everywhere and everyone had a piece of cake after supper in a time of prosperity when people ate richer desserts?”

  “I don’t think you see things as they are,” I tell him.

  “That’s why I take pictures of them.”

  “Pictures don’t see things the way they are, either.”

  “But they can see what things are not,” he says.

  He goes up to Wanda’s.

  —

  I walk down the side of the synagogue, past the recessed hydrant (and really, why put it there?), and go behind the building, where I have never been. The back door, made from planks, doesn’t have a handle, just a brass disc with a keyhole in it. It’s a sinister door.

  It opens and a man in a worsted vest and a leather kippa stands in the doorway. “Can I help you?”

  “I was looking for the lady rabbi.”

  “Shoshana? She was a rental. You looking to rent?”

  “No. I was looking for Shoshana. Do you know where she is usually? Which temple?”

  “She’s more of a travelling salesperson than an actual rabbi. Far as I know she’s the same lady who used to live in the park. Was a long time ago, but I don’t think she went to rabbi school. Just the same, she’s got a lot of followers. On Twitter, I mean.”

  “Ah. Do you know how I can reach her?”

  “She uses the handle @rabbishoshana.”

  “I mean, do you have a phone number?”

  “That’s all I know, sister.” He looks past me, as though the street might be full of possible synagogue renters.

  Within an hour, I have managed to install Twitter onto my phone and made an account (@ingridftoronto), all on two dots of reception while sitting on the playground wall, my legs pressed together, shivering. It’s having two kids that convinces you you can handle anything, but while I was watching the screens load one after the other, step by step, and then inputting the verification code that took more than six minutes to arrive as an email, and so on, I became lividly angry. Why am I still a part of any of this? I haven’t seen Ingrid in months. I can stop seeing Dr. Morbier any time I want, and I am happy, to be exact I am much happier than I was. And yet, I cannot stay away from this place. I need do nothing more than continue as I was—in my normal life. I can have that life.

  But what if it is not the truth? Could I not easily make a Coles Notes of my whole life, as Jimmy, a schizophrenic living i
n stir, was able to do? A reading of the phantasmagoria that I experience as my life? But rooted elsewhere. Beside or beneath my conception, beside or above my feeling. Only as real as felt. How does that make me different from any other person on Earth who worries they’re sleeping through their life? Reinforced in the witness of others, grounded in repetition, the Me that is out among other Me’s. Good afternoon, sir, I confirm your existence. Sweetheart, your tongue in my mouth is confirmation of the existence of an Other. Have I got a lovely bunch of shibboleths.

  You can probably take apart every detail of your life and make it stand as evidence in an unreal pattern. Why do I and my husband have the same name? We are both called John in English. Why did the entity that provided that detail do it? Why Bellevue Square?

  The most obvious association to the name Bellevue is the hospital with the famed psych ward. I close Twitter and go to my notebook app and type:

  Bellevue. New York City. Madness.

  Ingrid the original elle, the A/elle. Jean is the B/elle.

  Vue/Look.

  The only consonants in Bellevue: BLV. Believe.

  I save it and go back to Twitter, where it takes more swearing and furtive glancing around to figure out I have to use the “at” sign to write to someone.

  @rabbishoshana When will you be at the temple again?

  I have the superstitious feeling that I can’t leave the park. If I do, my message will be lost or her reply will never come. It begins to snow, an instantly melting, substanceless snow that adds to the base of slush. The folded NOW magazine I’m sitting on is beginning to soak through.

  Forty-five minutes pass and the last of the light fails. I’m the only sign of life in the park, and although the streetlamps up Augusta are glowing in different colours, here it’s nearly dark. A perfect time for a mugging, but it’s too cold to mug anyone. My screen lights up.

  @ingridftoronto There’s no minyan tomorrow, but come Saturday. We get the most people on Sat, you’ll be invisible. Some members of the book circle might crash it though, gotta warn ya!

  @rabbishoshana It’s not about the minyan. Are you busy right now?

  RABBI SHOSHANA, a coffee in front of her, is waiting for me in a booth in Steele’s Tavern on Yonge Street above Dundas. The bar is almost empty, and there’s a single chair and a mic stand on the tiny stage in the front window. The piece of white cardboard leaning against the chair says in red sign paint, LONNIE JOHNSON ELECTRONIC VIOLIN 7 AND 9 PM.

  We barely have a moment to say hello before the server comes. His nametag says STEELE. A grey pushbroom moustache sits on his upper lip. I order a glass of red.

  “Red what?” he asks.

  “Red wine?”

  “I have beer. You eating?”

  “What’s good?”

  “The breadsticks are free,” he says, snatching a drinking glass full of sesame-seed-speckled breadsticks off the table beside us. “Apart from that, the hot hamburger is good, the boneless fish steak, and the shad roe with bacon.”

  “The what?”

  “The shad roe with bacon.”

  “We don’t want any of that,” Shoshana says. “Can you make chips?”

  “Liver’n chips?”

  “Just the chips.”

  “Sure,” I say. “I’ll have…chips. I’ll have mine with the liver?”

  “You bet,” Steele says. “Grow hair on yer chest.” He returns to the bar, splitting the light spilling in from the front. The walls are upholstered in a velvety red fabric and hung with scuffed mirrors. The menus are tall enough to hide behind.

  “Is that the owner?”

  “I think so,” says Shoshana. “I don’t come here that often.”

  Steele returns with a beer for me. “Oh, I didn’t order—”

  “Yeah, all right, whoops!” he says, spinning around with it and expertly containing the suds. He puts the beer down in front of a man at the bar.

  “So, why did you need to get spiritual advice at this hour? Or is this about something else?”

  “Remember I told you about that bump on my head? Well, it’s a, it’s worse than a bump. I have a brain tumour.” Her eyes go wide. “It’s okay for now. But it’s affected some parts of my memory. And…there are phenomena.”

  “Phenomena?”

  “Hard to describe. What you said, my talk to your book club? I don’t remember that at all.”

  Shoshana puts her hand over mine. “Oh, Ingrid I am so sorry. How bad is it?”

  “They’re doing everything they can. I want you to tell me about that night.”

  “It was three years ago!”

  “Try.”

  “It was a smallish group. There were three of our ladies. One guy. Fella who comes and listens. Never speaks a word. One of the ladies gave you a rough ride!”

  “What about?”

  “Oh, gosh. She thought your detective had never been to detective school, to judge by her methods.”

  “Was she a detective?”

  “Just a cranky lady who reads a lot of books. She comes to all the meetings.” Shoshana’s phone goes A-men! and she checks it. “Shoot, I have to take this.” She goes and stands by the phone booth at the front. I hear plates clacking. Two chips one no livah. I watch Steele come down the length of the restaurant, shearing the light again, a tray aloft in his right hand.

  He sets the plates down. “You two students? Taking the stewardesses’ course at Ryerson?”

  “I’m a writer,” I tell him. “She’s a rabbi.”

  “A writer, huh? What kind of stuff you write?”

  “Oh, this and that. Mysteries, mainly.”

  “Like crime?”

  “Like crime.”

  “You base any of it on real stuff?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  Now he sits down, pointing his knees out of the banquette. “I bet real-life stuff happens allava time and you crime writers just change the names. ‘At’s what I’d do. You know what takes balls, though? You write the fictional novel. That’s what the smart money says. I got this idea about a guy who climbs a mountain, and I’m thinking there’s an avalanche.” He drifts away into thought. “Anyway, he finally gets to the top of the mountain and he looks, and he looks, and there’s the sunrise.” He shows me the sunrise with wiggling fingers. “But guess what?”

  “What?”

  “He’s undead!”

  “Wow! When did that happen? On the way up?”

  “No, he was always undead.”

  “And that’s how it starts?”

  “No. That’s the whole thing. I’m just giving you the broad outlines.”

  “Can I have some ketchup?”

  Rabbi Shoshana is now outside the tavern, still on her phone. Steele returns with the Heinz. “You’re right. It’s boring,” he says.

  “No, no—”

  “It’s lacking something. Hey, I’m being rude. I’m Clark.”

  “Clark Steele? Not Kent or Man of Steel, but Clark Steele?”

  “Ah, Superman. No one’s ever pointed that out before. Maybe there’s a novel in that. Hey!” he says, as if he’s just come up with the unified field theory, “I betcha there’s a novel everywhere you look. So what’s your new one about?”

  “Aw, it’s too far-fetched. And I’m still working on it. I like to keep it private while it’s gelling.”

  “Wanna hear a joke? A writer and a rabbi walk into a bar—”

  “Okay. Okay. Basically, there’s this woman. Her name is Paula. She’s a normal Torontonian, living and working in the city, good marriage, solid guy, two kids. So it’s like the story starts out and she’s just doing her thing.”

  “What’s her thing?”

  “Oh, uh, she works for RBC.”

  “Who’s Arby C.?”

  I squint at him. “Her boss. One day, she starts feeling like she’s being watched. She doesn’t have any proof, but sometimes she senses that something is watching her, an eye or a camera. At night, it’s like there’s someone in the room, looking at her.
”

  “Yeah?” He leans in, a fist under his chin.

  “Then people start to call her by the wrong name. She’s drawn to Kensington Market because there have been repeated sightings of her.”

  “Of Paula?”

  “No! Her identical twin.”

  Steele slaps his hands together. “Except! She don’t have a sister! Am I right?”

  “Yeah. Her twin is named Jean. They finally meet. And, uh, Jean tells Paula a story that is hard to believe.”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t know.”

  “What’s the story she tells?”

  I have to make something up. “That they’re clones of each other.”

  “Clowns?”

  “Yes. It’s all just a silly joke in the end, Mr. Steele.” I cut into the liver. It’s wet in the middle, the way I like it.

  “I thought probably at the end they’d wake up and it’d all be a dream.” The grey moustache above his smile fans out. “You want hot sauce?”

  I decline. He takes his charming self away to the bar.

  “Sorry,” says the rabbi, sliding back into the booth. “I bounced a cheque on the frummy who own the synagogue.”

  “Go back to my critic. At book club. What else did she say?”

  Shoshana zigzags ketchup over her fries. “I just think she hates everything. But listen, that happened a long ago now. Don’t worry about her. You need to focus on your health, Inger. Is it okay if I call you that?”

  I’m suddenly swoony. She leaps up and comes to sit on my side, pulls me against herself. She smells like hand cream.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Why would it be okay to call me Inger?”

  “You told me your name,” she says, her eyes wide with worry. “Ing—”

  “Don’t say it! Write it down.”

  With a trembling hand, she writes a name on the inside of a Steele’s matchbook cover. I look at it and put the matches into my pocket. “I have to go see my doctor.”

  “Right now?”

  “Yes. Help me up.”

  She supports me around the waist and leads me to the door. Steele comes speeding around the bar. “You want I should call a cab?”