“Okay, don’t panic. You need to keep breathing, all right? Do you hear me?”
No response. He has turned white, his eyes glued to the ground. His forehead is beaded with sweat. Lisa is at a loss for what to do. Should she go get help? On the far side of the strawberry field, the roofs of the mobile homes seem to be on another continent. Mrs. Le Blanc is the only person capable of helping her, and right now she is in Valleyfield with her Danish winter-resistant-concrete expert.
Lisa crouches down beside Éric and, as gently as possible, presses her lips against his ear.
“Listen to me. There’s no one here. Just you and me. It’ll be okay. You have to calm down.”
She keeps on murmuring like this until, after several endless minutes, Éric gives her a feeble nod. He finally resurfaces and draws a few deep breaths. Lisa silently wraps her arms around him. The attack is over. Éric stands back up like a boxer who has been down on the mat for the last minute: pale, beat-up, but operational. He rubs his face, shoulders the cylinder and without a word heads off toward the line of corn. Lisa frowns as she watches him move away.
They finally reach the electric fence that separates the corn from the cattle. Vibrating between the two orange filaments is an enormous spiderweb speckled with dew-drops. After slipping the equipment between the two wires without receiving a shock, Éric and Lisa plunge at right angles into the cornfield. They go through row after row, which stretch like so many walls forming narrow corridors. The fragrant leafage brushes against their faces.
Once they have covered what Éric considers an adequate distance, they set about flattening the corn plants until they’ve cleared a nice round circle rimmed by cornstalks standing at attention. It looks for all the world as though a flying saucer landed here during the night.
Éric is rather pleased with the results, but Lisa is jumpy. She knits her brow and pricks up her ears. The only sounds are the calls of bobolinks and red-winged blackbirds. Éric is about to ask her what’s the matter when it hits him. In two or three weeks, the cannabis harvest will get under way. This isolated cornfield is the perfect spot for stepping on a bear trap or being blasted by a .22 rifle. He sees these surroundings in a whole new light, as though a Bengal tiger were lurking among the stalks.
Lisa gestures: there’s no time to lose.
They spread a tarp on the ground and lay out the contents of the cardboard box. First Lisa takes out a disposable white cooler, organ-donation size, bristling with snap-hooks. A porthole has been carved into the side of the cooler to accommodate the black eye of Mrs. Le Blanc’s Canon PowerShot, sequestered in the name of science. Éric has managed to reprogram it so it will take a picture every fifteen seconds until the batteries run down or the memory card is full, whichever comes first. Lisa has jammed hot packs around the camera to prevent the batteries from freezing.
In addition to the camera, the box contains the Garmik 55, a GPS beacon designed to trace motor vehicles. All that’s needed is to turn the gizmo on underneath the body of an automobile and the beacon’s geographic coordinates stream into a mobile phone—in this case the one belonging to Mrs. Le Blanc—in a highly instructive but (admittedly) rather spartan form:
GARMIK (3:03PM) > 06-08-25-190231-UTC-0, 44.9962973, –74.0864321
GARMIK (3:18PM) > 06-08-25-191808-UTC.0, 44.9975719, –74.0866145
GARMIK (3:33PM) > 06-08-25-193354-UTC-0, 45.0008417, –74.0867325
When she received this little series of test messages on her phone yesterday afternoon, Isabelle Le Blanc cast her son a dubious look.
“Who is this Garmik?”
“Nobody.”
“And what does all this mean?”
“It means Garmik is working.”
She shrugged. What in the world could these two kids be up to?
Having turned on the camera and the GPS beacon, Lisa seals the cooler with three strips of duct tape. She fastens the parachute to the snap-hooks set into the sides of the box and starts to carefully coil the suspension lines. If the parachute fails to deploy properly, the cooler will plummet thirty thousand metres, Mrs. Le Blanc’s PowerShot will shatter into thousands of tiny fragments of plastic and printed circuits, and the two young scientists will have to put up with a parental lecture on the topic, “Do our children have too much free time?”
They finally connect the weather balloon to the cylinder and Lisa opens the valve. After a short while the balloon has expanded to the size of a small car, a diaphanous white Fiat 500 floating in the cold air, visible from far above the sea of corn.
Lisa knots the opening, removes the hose and lets the rope run through her fingers. The balloon rises with the cooler and then stops four metres in the air, still tied to the helium cylinder. To the east, the sky is turning blue. Unlimited ceiling, zero turbulence. Lisa looks for a signal from Éric. Without a word, he hands her his Swiss Army knife. Lisa pulls out the saw, the file, the scissors and the awl before finally locating a blade. She presses it against the rope and, holding her breath, cuts it with a single stroke.
The balloon lifts off at an astonishing rate. It ascends almost vertically in the still air, and then begins to drift slightly eastward. When it comes level with the angle the sun has already risen to, the membrane is set ablaze like a Chinese lantern. Their mouths agape, Lisa and Éric watch the glowing sphere shrink against the dark blue of the sky, climb faster and faster, as if it has just been caught in a high-altitude wind, and disappear barely five minutes later behind the tops of the cornstalks.
What happens next will unfold far beyond their range of vision. The balloon will ascend through the troposphere, higher than Mount Everest, pass the cruising altitude of commercial flights, and—with a bit of luck—reach the stratosphere and brush against the ozone layer. In that rarefied atmosphere, it will expand to the size of a mobile home and burst. The Weisberg parachute will deploy—Lisa’s fingers are crossed—and the cooler will fall back down while a steady flow of coordinates are sent to Mrs. Le Blanc’s telephone. And then all they have to do is retrieve the cooler later that afternoon.
According to Éric’s simulations, the flight should last two to three hours.
For the moment, there’s nothing left to see; in the wake of the liftoff, the place feels empty and somewhat grim. They collect their paraphernalia and retrace their steps: wall of greenery, electric fence, pasture strewn with cow pats. Lisa thinks about the balloon, somewhere up there, spooling out a slender string of numbers and pictures as it ascends. She glances toward the east and sees nothing but empty sky.
Beside her, Éric advances with long strides, obviously in a hurry to return to his sanctuary. “What are you doing today?”
Lisa stops looking at the sky. “Baskine house, as usual. We’re painting the ceilings. I’ve already asked my father if we could go fetch something later this afternoon.”
“Did he say we could?”
“Yes. But I didn’t mention we might have to drive three hundred kilometres. Hey! See that?”
She points to a cluster of multicoloured balloons limply floating through their field of vision, skimming the roofs of the Domaine Bordeur.
Éric stops, dumbstruck, and sets the cylinder down on the ground before realizing it’s simply a bouquet of balloons that have broken loose from a children’s party and, after drifting through the night, are slowly starting to deflate.
“Weird coincidence, don’t you think?”
Éric nods.
“For a second, I had the feeling another you and another me had also just launched a high-altitude balloon.”
Lisa smiles at the thought of another Éric and another Lisa in another nearby cornfield. Now there’s an unlikely idea. Éric watches the multicoloured cluster float away, as if expecting the sky to soon fill up with balloons from one horizon to the other. The human race storming the stratosphere. The balloons are on the verge of disappearing just above the woods. In an hour they’ll be found snagged on a tree branch.
Éric lifts the cylinder onto
his shoulder, and they set off again.
HIS NAME IS ZHŌU PAVEL.
He picked up the Russian given name while working in Nakhodka, carried it all the way to Singapore, then Montreal, and now it’s been so long since he used his real first name that he’s begun to forget it. He’ll be turning eighty-four next week. He’s entitled to let a few details escape him. What’s in a name, anyway? Pavel knows he’ll never be going back to Shenzhen. He will die in this North American city wearing this Russian name, and it doesn’t bother him one way or the other. Right now he has papers to classify, a skyscraper of papers with a Rubbermaid container of cold noodles and a Thermos of tea perched at the very top.
He looks up. It’s drizzling on the parking lot, the tractors and the rust-brown containers. The camouflage colour of a furtive economy, and the fact is even Pavel doesn’t see them anymore. His gaze goes right through them.
He takes a sip of tea. Adds up some figures.
A white Dodge Charger appears between two tractors and parks in front of the office. Pavel frowns. He knows what kind of car this is. It’s not so much a vehicle as a sort of non-verbal language. There was a time when the police drove Crown Victorias. These days they’re equipped with Dodge Chargers or SUVs with tinted windows. Always an American make, never Asian or European. There is something subtly political about the way police services put together their fleets of vehicles.
A woman gets out of the car. Pantsuit, leather jacket, high-heeled shoes. Her face is hard and tired, as if this were the Friday of a hundred-day week.
Pavel drains his cup of tea.
She walks through the door, scans the place and steps toward Pavel. In her heels, the woman towers over him. She pulls out an RCMP badge and holds it up long enough for him to get a good look at the buffalo head and the crown and to take in the motto Maintiens le droit inscribed in the top banner.
Pavel nods his head. He says nothing, has no intention of doing so unless obliged to. His grasp of French was never very strong. The woman opens her briefcase—he catches a glimpse of lists of addresses struck through with a red pen—lifts out a sheet of paper and places it on the table.
He pretends to adjust his glasses, basically to stall for time. Written on the paper are Rokov Export and PZIU 127 002 7. The woman explains something, but Pavel doesn’t really listen. He knows exactly what she’s after. He knew it as soon as she stepped into the office, as soon as he saw the white Dodge Charger pull into the parking lot. It’s about that damned container. He was sure someone would come to ask about it sooner or later.
With a thoughtful expression, he places his finger on the sheet of paper and then withdraws it.
Acting as if he is in no hurry, he pours two cups of tea and offers one to the woman. She looks at the cup but doesn’t touch it. Pavel turns toward the venerable Pentium, wakes it by jiggling the mouse and then keys in a search request. The hard drive squeals and squawks. A few seconds later, at the other end of the room, the printer spits out an invoice in the name of Rokov Export. The history of PZIU 127 002 7 is summarized on this page in the terse dialect of management: addresses, travel dates, terms and conditions. At the very bottom, in the Means of Payment section, there is a check mark beside Cash.
The woman seems to be on the verge of smiling. She asks if Rokov Export often does business with them. Pavel shakes his head and raises a finger. Just once.
After a brief moment of silence, he brings the cup to his lips. The woman does the same—the insignificant sip gives her away. A real police detective would never have taken the tea. Pavel follows her gesture attentively, their eyes meet and he instantly realizes that she knows he knows. But it doesn’t matter anymore. She finally allows herself to smile.
She drains her cup, slips the invoice into her briefcase and goes out without another word.
SEPTEMBER GOES BY, RAINY AND FOUL, without Mrs. Le Blanc’s telephone ever receiving the GPS signal.
Lisa spins endless hypotheses. Maybe the balloon rose so fast it ended up beyond the reach of the cellphone relay towers? The device could then have fallen into the river or a bank of electric transformers or another similarly fatal location. Éric calculated the trajectory based on speed, wind direction and the balloon’s capacity to dilate, but Lisa is well aware that the effort was futile. There are too many unknowns left in the equation. The capsule could have landed anywhere between thirty and three hundred kilometres from the launch point inside a fifteen-degree wedge, an area equivalent to tens of thousands of cornfields.
As he waits for a sign from the heavens, Éric compiles notes toward a kind of manual for beginner stratonauts, a detailed user’s guide that will make things easier for another Éric, another Lisa, who, at some indefinite time and place, may want to launch their own high-altitude balloon. Rather than blindly fishing around for information, they can simply consult the manual. Éric takes some pleasure imagining this future alter ego hunkered down amid the corn at dawn, the manual in his hand. You can be reclusive and altruistic at the same time.
While Éric writes his notes, Mrs. Le Blanc searches high and low for her camera. Her son has managed to avoid the subject so far, but how long will he be able to hide the truth from her?
This bad state of affairs is briefly—and only partly—mitigated by the resurrection of Mr. Miron’s Datsun.
—
The car hasn’t touched asphalt for fifteen years. Gus Miron salvaged it from behind a barn, where it was hibernating on railroad ties, and he’s being trying to resuscitate it ever since.
For Lisa, the unstartable Datsun, perched on cinder blocks, deserved to figure prominently in the Hall of Fame of vehicles, alongside chariots of fire, enchanted pumpkins, the Saturn V, farcasters, witches’ brooms, balsa wood rafts, and flying BMXs. Actually, Lisa is starting to wonder if the car’s function isn’t purely symbolic. On several occasions she has surprised Mr. Miron sitting behind the wheel late at night with his elbow protruding through the open window, a cigarette stuck between his lips, daydreaming. Maybe he didn’t really want to resuscitate it.
In any case, the engine kept on turning over more and more often and for longer and longer periods of time, until it eventually appeared reliable, so much so that on the second Sunday in September, shortly before supper, Mr. Miron comes knocking on the Routiers’ door to ask if Lisa would like to, quote, go for a spin, unquote.
The automobile gleams in the sunset light. Indulging in an unusual bit of vanity, Mr. Miron spent two hours waxing the bodywork and polishing the chrome. Having got wind of the impending takeoff, a few inquisitive souls came over to make sure they would not miss the unlikely event. This part of the street has taken on a Barnum & Bailey atmosphere.
The pilot and co-pilot climb into the cockpit and shake hands ceremoniously. The Datsun starts up instantly. Mr. Miron rolls down the window and listens. To anyone who might have followed the trials and errors of the previous months, the engine’s performance is a harmonious concerto. As if it was finely tuned, 440 Hz on the nose. No suspicious ping, no whistle. Clutch engaged: the transmission groans a little, but the gravel can be heard crunching under the tires like coarse sugar. There’s excitement among the curious spectators, timid applause. All that’s missing are confetti and streamers.
Gus Miron pulls out, turns right and begins to drive up Bonheur Street. He must deal with a slight gradient, but the Datsun shifts into second gear without a hitch. There is a quick jolt as the gear changes, but the engine holds steady. This is the best show of the year, with the sunlight flooding the car’s interior. Two kids provide an escort on their BMXs. Lisa can imagine Éric’s face when he sees her pull up in front of his house, her arm draped nonchalantly over the car door. It will take a couple of honks of the horn to get that recluse to pay attention to anything that’s happening in the street.
Just as they shift into third gear, the engine coughs and stalls. Gus Miron immediately puts it in neutral and tries to restart it. It’s no use. The car comes to a stop right in the middle of the
road. They get out to estimate the distance they’ve covered: a hundred and fifty metres all told. Mr. Miron gives the car an affectionate pat.
“Well, anyway, we outdid the Wright brothers!”
The way back is a lesson in humility. To the amusement of the onlookers, the two of them push the Datsun back to its usual spot. People chatter as they drift away. From the bushes comes the sound of the first crickets of the night.
Having fetched his work light, Mr. Miron inspects the engine for the ten thousandth time, and a feeling of admiration wells up inside Lisa. That’s the spirit! she thinks. Never give in to adversity; keep fighting, always.
She suddenly feels foolish for waiting all these weeks for the GPS signal, as if the point of the operation was actually to take pictures from the upper atmosphere. The pictures were just a bonus. The real goal of the balloon was its fabrication, the evenings spent coding, sewing, debugging, finding answers to questions, and answers to the questions raised by the answers to the questions. Lisa must stop thinking about the balloon; she still has a long list of projects she’d like to suggest to Éric.
Leaving Mr. Miron to attend to his engine, Lisa does an about-face and is on the point of dashing over to the Gaieté cul-de-sac when she spots Mrs. Le Blanc approaching—on foot, no less!—looking determined, with that expression she wears on bad days.
WHAT USED TO BE THE garage of Autocars Mondiaux, at 230 Gibson Street, apparently has been closed for a few years. Clumps of wildflowers are slowly colonizing the cracks in the parking lot. A large poster for MVGR Global Rental pasted inside the window is the only indication that the place has not been totally abandoned to the elements. The garage does not look like the headquarters of a dangerous group of Russian terrorists—but how to know for sure?
Zoom out: what comes into view is the Saint-Laurent industrial park, its lifeless warehouses, its deserted streets below the approach corridor of the airport. Zoom out farther and the frame of Google Street View appears, followed by the Orweb navigation window and, finally, the screen of the Eee sitting on the living room floor.
Six Degrees of Freedom Page 7