The Longest Year

by Daniel Grenier

  He hadn’t thought about February 29 for years, and here was Albert making it the lynchpin of his story. At the very centre of it all, the very centre of the knot itself, was Aimé, his ancestor, the original leaper, the man who hadn’t aged like others, the man who had arrived on earth at a specific moment in time, barely bigger than the eye of a needle, shaped by the precise astrological configuration. Albert wasn’t afraid of astrology, they were talking about science after all, there was nothing to fear. He looked Thomas in the eye for the first time that night. Aimé was his obsession. If he counted the early months picking through Jeanne’s journal entries and putting together the first hazy connections, he had spent exactly twenty-five years, four months, and one hundred and eighty days on his research, with his nose in a book or his feet in the mud, falling asleep in libraries or breathing heavily on mountain paths. At nineteen, he remembered it like yesterday, he’d found his first important clue, involving one William Van Ness who fought in the Union Army before disappearing into the woods somewhere in western Mississippi. On an impulse he’d set off for Chattanooga, where an important new civil war museum had opened. The archives were said to be phenomenal, a boundless trove for anyone interested in the War of Secession and the thousands of anonymous men who’d played a part in it and died on the field of battle, on both sides of the line of fire.

  Albert told Thomas about how he walked into the Galaxy diner, in April 1979, and met Laura, and Thomas felt a sort of vertigo, as the two versions of the story butted up against each other, and the moving but still somewhat-static image in his head took on a third dimension.

  “Mom always said it was May — May 17, to be precise.”

  “That’s impossible. I remember perfectly, I kept the bus ticket until I left. I’m not saying she lied, just that she got her dates mixed up. I arrived in Chattanooga on April 13, after three days on the road. I met your mother that very morning, at her restaurant. I went to eat there every day for the next two weeks.”

  From that point, Albert’s story subtly shifted, and certain details got mixed up. The family story, his and Laura’s love story, was interwoven with this other story of origin and ancestry, the forefather he had pursued in the belief that, with enough effort, he would manage to find and follow his trace. Albert had been driven by his certainty that Aimé was still alive. He talked about it to his young fiancée, talked about it passionately, and when he learned that she was pregnant, at the end of June, they left together, got married, and embarked on family life.

  Strangely, Laura’s parents had no place in Albert’s story. They were totally absent, as if he’d barely gotten to know them or the pernicious attitudes so often described by their daughter. Jo and Wright, their fanaticism, racism, opposition to the marriage — none of it was there.

  Thomas didn’t stop Albert to ask for more, he let this sudden feeling of simultaneous loss and fulfillment sink in. Albert described the years that followed as a time of both conjugal bliss and slowly eroding self-confidence. He’d found a menial job that left time for research. He could hardly believe his son was born at the right time. He’d been convincing, too, and Laura had agreed to let him do experiments, convinced as she was of the deep love that inspired them. There were birthdays. Thomas was home-schooled. He had a vague recollection, like a burning, of speeches on such subjects as his luck, his exceptionalism, even his destiny. There were years of disappointment and dejection, but also great discoveries: during those years Albert had recovered Aimé’s trace, picking up a thread here and another there, in the Appalachian Mountains or a Quebec jail cell. Throughout those years Albert talked of virtually nothing else, unable to see that life went on outside the timeline he never stopped redrawing as it grew ever more complex. He described those years and stressed their capital importance for Thomas to understand his father’s personality, frequently repeating that he wasn’t proud, no, he’d learned to view this long march toward nothing as a fault line in his life, a failing of sorts, a culpable, almost morbid negligence on his part, a kind of crime.

  Today, he said, he realized it had all been for naught. He’d invented every bit of it. Do you understand me, Thomas, I dreamed up this whole thing in a dark corner of my selfish mind. It was easy to say, now that he felt he’d been cured of his obsession: I invented all of it, and forced my family, my wife and my son, to partake of my madness. From the first cold clue to the unshakable conviction of having at last found Aimé, my whole adult life was built on a series of dishonest, factitious connections. He started blushing and almost stuttered when he brought up the interminable letter written in late 1986, in a sort of trance; such a long letter, he had copied out the entire legend, from the first line to the last, imagining his invisible ancestor recognizing himself, believing this man would be so impressed by all the work that had gone into it, so moved by Albert’s patience, that he would come running to meet him. He’d written all night. No, it was two whole nights, two days and two nights. Laura and Thomas weren’t there, they’d gone off somewhere, he didn’t remember anymore, they’d been impossible to find in the house, and he’d written a sort of mad desperate tract stained by wine and tears, all to say one simple thing: I’ve found you.

  The final failure — Aimé’s failure to turn up at their rendezvous in downtown Pittsburg, Kansas, on March 13, 1987 — changed everything for Albert. He’d waited fourteen hours on the designated park bench, as clouds slowly gathered overhead, forming the embryo of the storm that would finally force him to take shelter along with everyone else in town.

  Albert was on the first bus back to Chattanooga the next morning. His marriage had long been over. Laura had made that much clear. In the yard, on his own private property, he burned what little was left of it, burned everything, hundreds of documents, sparing only a single notebook, the one where he had written out his most important discoveries, the one he called his “good copy.” If Thomas wanted to see it, he could show him, it was up there, in his parents’ room, on a bedside table, in a drawer, in a paper bag. He didn’t know why he kept it, it was totally pointless. And Thomas, in the dark of the night, could feel Albert’s gaze turn toward him, perhaps unconsciously. It lasted a fraction of a second.

  “Did the letter you sent Aimé come back? Return to sender?”

  “No, never.”

  That night Thomas fell asleep with a feeling of fullness in his chest for the first time, as if an oxygen balloon had inflated between his ribs, expanding to fill all the space where a heavy ball of anguish had been crushing his diaphragm since the accident last April.

  Lying on his back, like a man in a coffin, he folded his hands over his heart, that was how he managed to feel good, and thought about his birthday, and about being Albert Langlois’s son, and about Aimé, who might still be alive, his ancestor and his contemporary, and the passage of time, which could be measured in such different ways, and what it meant to him, and to his future. He had found his father at last. The wallpaper’s golden patterns shone in the moonlight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  NOVEMBER 2001

  MONTREAL, QC

  Thomas’s thoughts turned to his mother when he saw the second plane crash into the tower. It was her face that sprung to mind, a young woman’s face, she was thirty-four the last time he saw her, the morning she set off for Chattanooga Metropolitan to catch her flight to New York, late as usual, last minute as always. Her suitcase sat on the kitchen floor while she called a taxi and then gave Mary a quick call to say goodbye, the phone wedged between her shoulder and chin, the index finger of her left hand in her shoe, easing it onto her foot, maintaining a precarious balance and already nervous about flying. Thomas had been up for a long time, in his underwear, standing in his bedroom door with eyes wide open. She left and he had to rub off the red mark of lipstick on his forehead. The screen door slammed shut — it was the last sound she would make in his life. No, that’s not true, there was the sound of the cab door closing, and the s
quealing tires as it peeled out and took off at high speed, like a getaway car. She said that by fourteen you didn’t need a babysitter, you were old enough to stay by yourself. Mary would come by and make sure everything was okay early in the week. She said, You’ll see, I’ll be back so fast you’ll barely notice I left. Or something like that. She said she’d be back.

  It was his mother’s face that sprung to mind when Thomas saw the second plane strike the second tower on live TV, while gigantic clusters of black smoke billowed out of the first tower, through windows and pulverized walls, escaping the building, pouring out and dispersing against a bright blue background. Everyone was wondering what was happening, and you could see a triangular point on the right-hand side of the screen, disappearing momentarily behind the flames, then reappearing and causing a spectacular explosion on the other side. There was no sound, the images stood alone, words crawled along the ticker at the bottom of the screen describing what had occurred with a lag. None of the people standing next to Thomas staring at the screen were talking anymore, no one was saying anything, all you could hear was the sound of breath being held, a tiny inhale, a hand held in front of the mouth, and eyes, dozens of pairs of eyes, glued to the screen. As if drawn by instinct, herds of people emerged from classrooms.

  He was already at university when the images of the North Tower started playing in a continuous loop on the screens in the student café. A little after eight in the morning the employees changed the station, put on Radio-Canada, and Thomas looked up from his textbook. He saw the World Trade Center, an image of the World Trade Center as it usually was, two towers he’d never visited. The North Tower was on fire near the top, with a black hole in the upper floors. Helicopters hovered in the sky and cameras zoomed in fast. When the plane appeared onscreen and the other tower began to darken, everyone understood it was an attack, an act of terror, a deliberate act. The first plane hadn’t been filmed, there were no pictures to show, but the words crawling along the bottom of the screen told of another hijacked plane that had crashed into the Pentagon. Thomas read the words, let the violence of it all soak in. He’d never been to New York, except to change buses, and had never been to Washington either, he didn’t know any more about these cities than the people gathered around him, swearing and repeating again and again how unbelievable it all was, how there was just no way. A journalist with neatly combed hair kept coming back on and people were asking: Why him, didn’t he do the arts? Why is he the one talking? People said it must be a coincidence, he must have been in New York when it happened and the station asked him to cover it. He’d been a journalist first, after all, before he got the arts beat. He was a professional, standing on the roof of a building somewhere quite far off, Brooklyn maybe, somewhere safe but still on the front lines, the camera was filming and when he gave specific details he stepped aside and the camera zoomed in on the towers.

  Around an hour later, unpredictably, the top of one of the towers collapsed and massive plumes of smoke and dust poured out in every direction. It was incredible, but no one said so this time. Silence had descended on the university hallways again. In the years to come, it was this silence Thomas would remember most: the way they had all watched, from here, hundreds of miles from the action, silent and transfixed, in perfect contrast to the chaos in the streets over there.

  The next day and the week that followed, those images cycled in a continuous loop. People waving white clothing in broken windows. Cameramen engulfed in a sea of grey dust. Buildings crumbling like houses of cards. Men and women in black and white and sepia, covered with lunar particles, walking, weaving like zombies through paper-strewn streets.

  Thomas didn’t know New York, he’d never been outside Tennessee before leaving the States, but he still had a feeling, like a reflex, that this was an attack on him, on both him and his mother, or the memory of his mother and what little she had passed down to him. Could anyone have blamed him?

  He hadn’t gone to class but it didn’t matter, the professor had cancelled it.

  Two weeks after what they were now calling 9/11, Thomas started going out and having a social life again. He could look at the unyielding blue of the early fall sky and appreciate its colour and depth. When two planes went by at the same time, so their flight paths appeared to cross, his nerves returned momentarily. There were times, these days, when he wondered how other people managed to keep going about their business, getting into cars, buying stuff on sale. He figured he would never get over it, as everyone else seemed to be doing, but at the same time the world kept turning, even as Ground Zero continued to burn and the water pumps ran twenty-four hours a day. They would never identify all the bodies, all the body parts, just as Laura’s body, lost at the bottom of the ocean, had never been officially identified.

  At the end of September he was invited to a party at the apartment of some people he didn’t know well, and he went, it would be good for him, to see people, talk, be social again. Thomas got ready, got dressed, chose a nice shirt and tucked it in. The address was on the other side of town so he took the Metro, still somewhat amazed at his power to adapt and adjust, how easily he slid his card into the metal slit and pushed the turnstile with his hip, executing the normal, routine movements that made up everyday life in the city. He didn’t know anyone who’d been killed in the Twin Towers, not personally. He often had flashbacks of small dots falling from top floors, filmed on the TV cameras by professionals accustomed to zooming in and out, falling points tracked throughout their entire descent, until someone in an editing suite realized these were people, jumping. They weren’t things, they were people, in suits and ties and skirts, trying to use their clothing as parachutes. Then the cameras stopped zooming in on the gaping hole and on the windows.

  Thomas got to the party early and introduced himself to his hosts, with his unusual accent and friendly smile. Everyone was around his age, he recognized faces from the university, guys and girls from his classes, some of the ones who actually talked in class. He knew a few of the people there, and got along with them; they’d been to his place, he’d told them about his family, how he’d done his schooling in the States before moving up here. When he talked about growing up in Tennessee, people always asked him to talk like a Southerner, stretching out the vowels, making it more nasal, and he’d do it, and they’d laugh. And then they’d ask Thomas all kinds of questions:

  “Aren’t people racist there?”

  “Well . . .”

  It stayed hot or at least warm even after the sun went down, and the party spilled out onto the roof. You could see downtown to the north and the mountain behind them with its giant illuminated cross. French- and English-speakers talked and laughed together over cases of beer and bottles of wine. Someone rolled a joint by the fire escape while Thomas’s friend strummed a guitar. A girl almost fell off the roof and everyone thought it was hilarious, especially her, leaning forward, her hand over her beating heart, her breath taken away, leaning on someone for support. Thomas was having fun. Soon after arriving he’d untucked his shirt, it was more comfortable. Most of the people were in the same program at the university, but there were also friends of friends and random people who’d showed up with something to drink and been welcomed with open arms. The roof was full of people and a little group had gathered around the guitar player, singing Smiths and Belle and Sebastian songs. The guitar player closed his eyes when he sang, and his nostrils flared, he had a seriousness no one would mock. The others sang along earnestly. It still wasn’t very late. The neighbours were far away.

  The lights downtown were impressive, you could hear horns honking and see the searchlights from Place Ville Marie cutting through the low-hanging clouds. A guy Thomas didn’t know was laughing. It came out loud and affected, like a demonic cackle, and then he suddenly yelled:

  “Anyway, fucking yanks sure got it this time!”

  “Finally.”

  “About time!”

  “Moth
erfuckers had it coming.”

  “Yeah, Osama!”

  Thomas listened, picking up on the nuances, the irony and bravado, the tone and particular features of each person’s voice. He backed up to the fringes of the group to watch this scene. Someone was dancing around an imaginary fire with a bottle outstretched like a spear, slapping his own mouth over and over to make a slow, high-pitched sound. Others had joined him in a sort of improvised powwow. The joint had made its way to Thomas, who hesitated a few minutes. He stared at it until he felt the tip burning his finger.