He and Mary had travelled all over, seen the far-flung corners of the world. As he sat cross-legged in the basement of the large house on Île d’Orléans he’d bought with his inheritance, he teared up at the fact of his wife’s absolute absence, he felt it even in his things. He remembered their trip to Eastern Europe. Dozens of countries, bungled attempts at speaking local languages, friendly people they’d met and never seen again. He remembered how easily Mary made friends, how she could make herself understood with nothing but her hands and a smile. She had died one morning, in the garden, with a weed puller in her barely wrinkled hand, her dark skin scarcely touched by age.
Thomas spent a week settling the inheritance, took time off to sift through the layers of the intimate, private details of their shared past, details known to no one, not even us. He’d loved her his whole life, he thought, yes, even as a child he’d loved her, when she’d come to the door and borrow his mother for a few hours. When he tried to return to that exact location in his memory, that’s what came back: Mary’s smiling face, as she came in the kitchen, rattling the screen door behind her. He’d be on the living room couch with a picture book, and would hear them laughing. They’d put on music. Mary would sing the words she knew by heart, she knew them all. Through the window, he could see the cars and the pedestrians who never stopped to listen to her.
At that moment, entangled in this skein of memories, he understood.
A few days later, Thomas had brought the compass to the laboratory, placed its face under the microscope, and taken a sample of his ancestor’s skin. Between two esoteric symbols etched by patient, expert hands, between the four needles that had stopped working ages ago, a DNA sample was conserved: a trace of Aimé, a residue of his skin. It was the first time Thomas had ever seen or had direct physical contact with him.
There was, they said, no observable difference in the test tube where the final serum was concocted, at least not to the naked eye, but the ingredients were already starting to act.
He had taken measures, his colleagues had been notified, and there was a sense of anticipation in the air.
He passed through other buildings where other eras of human history had been recreated in painstaking detail, summed up concisely with a touch of humour, for the kids and the parents as well. He went in. There was the new hall that would be home to the new exhibition he was consulting on. He entered the honeycomb-like structure, all onion domes and mezzanines, with a large glass sphere that let the sun through. They were waiting for him to finalize the details and ascertain certain facts. Thomas was not only a great scientist, he was also well known as a popularizer, and they’d brought him in as someone who could handle last-minute adjustments. The room was almost ready, it would open to the public in January 2050. Everything was on schedule.
He came in and shut the heavy temporary doors behind him.
The re-creations were superb, and the interpretive walk had been reviewed by historians, ethicists, and Thomas’s fellow scientists from a wide range of disciplines. The expert committee had been approved by all levels of government. He walked in and was taken to his colleagues, other scientists like himself and programmers and modellers who had worked on the project; his role was to check the details and the accuracy of some of the more theoretical assertions. It was one of their final meetings. All that remained was to pull it all together, choreograph the many parts of this virtual ballet and finalize the stunning beauty of the whole. It was one of the last meetings, to discuss an important, surely critical, issue. Their task was to use holographic projections and digital displays to tell, in accessible but not reductionist terms, a story. They had to make it real without sugar-coating or trivializing it. Their job was to encapsulate the glory of human history in all its shapes and forms.
As Thomas often said, with a smile in the corner of his mouth but still as serious as can be, they had to show visitors the meaning of this new phase of human history, now that no one would die anymore.
EPILOGUE
TLO VA SA
JANUARY 2000
MONTREAL, QC
Buildings remained standing, planes flew as before, the electrical grid kept working, and no one’s computer blew up. When you got down to it, nothing really happened. Eventually the TV pundits moved on to the next story. It was strange to think they’d experienced something important without noticing, as if this thing they’d all been waiting for with fear and trepidation had happened at a microscopic or even an atomic level, so no one even noticed. No one died in hospital from defibrillator malfunction. No electronic system failed in prison, setting thousands of inmates free. The night had passed without event. In Manhattan, in Times Square, there were even more people than usual, despite the authorities’ fears. It was absurd and reassuring at the same time, though no one said as much. The skyscrapers still towered over the city, tall and straight and imposing in their rectitude. It was very cold, but that was normal. Nothing was out of the ordinary.
Thomas was walking along Saint-Laurent with his hands in his pockets. His breath formed an opaque cloud in front of him. A pebble in his left boot was bothering him, but he didn’t stop to pull it out. It was one of the ones you found in with the de-icing salt. The street was already full of garbage and decorations for the festivities: empty beer cups, Happy New Year streamers in silver and gold, confetti and water bottles. Everyone had gone home after the party, you could barely see anyone in the streets. The faraway sky was still, as if it too was frozen solid. Thomas stepped over a toppled garbage can. He heard a siren in the distance, it sounded like it was coming from the south somewhere but it was hard to tell, the sound could be bouncing off the front of a nearby building. A taxi went zigzagging by. When he ran into people, couples and groups of friends walking toward him, he tried to imagine their features and body type, hand movements, whether they spoke French or English. Though he was wrong almost every time, he persisted in the belief that it was possible to guess. He tried to define certain criteria — hair, chins, foreheads, hand gestures used to punctuate a point — there must be particular traits, but he couldn’t figure them out. Everyone wore thick mittens, but he’d forgotten his, and his hands were freezing, despite the relative warmth of his jean pockets.
The first snow hadn’t come yet, they’d had nothing but freezing rain since winter began, nothing but icy raindrops coming down at a slant, whipping cheeks, gathering speed in spiral winds. Drops like thorns, and not a single snowflake. But this morning the air was dry and somehow too pure, as if oxygen levels had been reduced to a strict minimum, at high altitude, for the final part of an ascent. Thomas’s cheeks were red and his glasses stuck to his nose. He got to the corner of Sainte-Catherine and stopped a while to wait for the green light, jumping on the spot a bit. To his left was the city’s west side, stretching out endlessly; to his right, the east, extending even further. He knew nothing of its far reaches, the riverbanks and hinterlands of this sprawling island with a mountain in the middle. Just up ahead it would start to rise toward a plateau, the gentle slope would get steeper in a couple blocks. He started jogging, as if it might warm him up, maintaining a rhythm somewhere between a run and a walk, taking care not to slip.
On the corner of Ontario, Thomas stopped at another red light. There weren’t many cars now, but they were coming fast and appearing out of nowhere, from places he hadn’t thought to look. He waited. For a second, a cloud formed in the sky, then immediately disappeared, as if swallowed up by frozen particles. He could see, lower down, clinging to the rooftops, the smoke from the factory chimneys that was also being swallowed up. The cold made every detail sharper and every angle more acute. In front of him, two men came out of a building on the other side of the street, where a couple red flags hung in the dry air, on either side of a glass door. They spoke loudly and made sweeping gestures. They looked piss-drunk, and Thomas started watching from a distance, couldn’t help himself. One of the two didn’t have a winter coat on, o
r seem to care. He wasn’t frantically rubbing his arms to stay warm, he was happy to keep one hand in his pocket and gesture with the other. His hairless skin was dark and tough as leather, his hair black and long. He was walking backwards. His cheeks were ravaged by permanent acne scars. He stopped in the middle of the street, lit a smoke, and kept yelling. The light turned, a truck honked, and they started heading west, barely moving, giving the driver the finger. The first started yelling again, in English it seemed to Thomas. Something about a cigarette, a pack of smokes, a carton, just a smoke. He was making signs, and having a hard time standing upright. The other guy was making fun of him with a lit cigarette, blowing smoke in his face, in the searing morning cold. He smiled and Thomas could see what was left of the man’s teeth from the other side of the road as he crossed.
Then, suddenly and without warning, the first guy, with his T-shirt, jeans, and torn runners, and steam escaping his body in the early morning light, jumped at the other guy and punched him in the face. He fell down to the asphalt but got right back up. When he fell he landed almost right in Thomas’s legs, he had to jump to avoid him. He got up suddenly and went after the other man, spitting blood and yelling. His smoke was on the ground, far away, not even broken. He grabbed the first guy in his long arms, and they remained interlaced like that for a few seconds, staggering together in a violent hug, groaning incomprehensible words. The second man held his own until he got kneed, then crumpled over, landing a blow to the other guy’s stomach on his way down. He grabbed onto his shoulder, dug his nails into his skin, through the T-shirt, and, with a violent movement, sent him rolling on the ground.
Traffic had stopped at the intersection. You could hear the honking horns and insults flying from every direction. There was blood between the chunks of ice. People came out of another building, a store, but when they saw that the men were Indians, they went back in right away. Someone might have called the police. Thomas looked away, blinked a couple times, as if to erase something, and kept walking.
END
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author thanks Catherine Leroux, Maxime Raymond Bock, and Jean-François Chassay for the permission to give certain of their characters a second life in these pages.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© le quartanier / justine latour
DANIEL GRENIER was born in Brossard, Quebec, in 1980. He is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection Malgré tout on rit à Saint-Henri, and his first novel, L’année la plus longue (The Longest Year), won the Prix littéraire des collégiens and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for French Fiction, the Prix des libraires, and the Prix littéraire France-Québec. Grenier has also translated numerous English-language works into French. He lives in Quebec City.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
PABLO STRAUSS grew up in Victoria, British Columbia, and has lived in Quebec City for a decade. His translations of Quebec authors have appeared in various online and print publications.
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”
The Longest Year Page 29