Six Degrees of Freedom

by Nicolas Dickner

  “You’ve got ten minutes to become one.”

  “Okay, okay, okay. As far as I know, Shenzhen is a city with provincial powers, within the province of Guangdong. Most of Shenzhen is basically a special economic zone. Half of the West’s consumer products are made there.”

  “So we’re talking about a large port.”

  “We’re talking about a colossal port. Highest growth rate in Asia. Every quarter, they send hundreds of thousands of containers off to America—and in exchange, we send back raw materials and waste.”

  “Waste?”

  “Yes indeed. For the past few years that’s been our number one export sector. Scrap metal as well as paper and plastic. And electronic waste too. It’s the modern version of triangular trade.”

  “You are a fount of knowledge.”

  “I can’t take any credit. Three years ago, Division E investigated contraband waste. I can dig up the report, if you like.”

  “Contraband waste?”

  “Highly lucrative.”

  —

  All morning, Jay waits to finally be alone in the Enclave, but things don’t quiet down. Mahesh doesn’t stray from his coffee machine, Laura makes sixty phone calls, the office clerk comes to empty the recycling bins, and even Sergeant Gamache pops in (with bagels but no information).

  Jay finally decides to choose another tack and goes to shut herself away in the washroom. She removes the Nokia from her bag. The signal is weak but adequate. She sits down on the toilet and dials a toll-free number. Welcome to Canon Canada, bienvenue chez Canon Canada. To continue in English, please press 1. Pour continuer en français, faites le 2. Our customer support service is available Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Eastern Standard Time. Thank you. We are transferring your call to one of our representatives. Please note that this call may be recorded for quality control purposes.

  “Hello, this is Mariann speaking, how may I provide you with excellent service today?”

  Faint static on the line, a hint of a British accent. There’s no way of knowing if Jay is speaking to an Indo-Canadian from Toronto or if her call was transferred to a suburb of Mumbai.

  “Yes, hi, I…I don’t know if you can help me. My mother-in-law’s camera needs to be repaired.”

  “Yes?”

  “She took an extended warranty, but…I know it sounds silly, but she can’t remember the store where she bought the camera. She keeps saying she got it at Sears, but I know that’s not right. I checked.”

  “Did your mother-in-law keep the receipt?”

  Lowering her voice, Jay adopts a distressed tone. “No, you see, she’s begun to…well…There’s no diagnosis yet, but we think it’s Alzheimer’s. We try to keep her affairs in order, but it’s not easy, you know.”

  “I understand.”

  “She loses a lot of things.”

  “Do you have the serial number?”

  Jay turns the camera over and locates the number. Goosebumps ripple across her forearm as she reads out the numbers. At the other end, Mariann taps away on her keyboard.

  “The camera was purchased at Caméra Expert in Valleyfield.”

  “Aha, I knew it.”

  Underneath her confident air, Jay is actually baffled. Valleyfield? Which terrorist group worthy of the name would set up its headquarters in Valleyfield? She doesn’t even know where it is, exactly. Her grasp of regional geography doesn’t extend beyond the exit ramps of the bridges. West of Montreal, or maybe southwest? No, she’s confusing it with Granby.

  “Do you need the address?”

  “No, no, thanks.”

  “Is there something else I can help you with today?”

  Jay scribbles the name of the store on a piece of toilet paper. “No, that’s fine, thank you.”

  Immediately on returning to the Enclave, she launches a search on Google Maps. A map appears with, in the middle, a salmon-pink arrow piercing a liver-shaped island: Salaberry-de-Valleyfield, QC, future terrorist criminal nexus.

  LISA IS GOING TO MONTREAL. For good.

  As she sees it, the Domaine Bordeur has become a degenerative disease. Saturday nights are deadly. The demographics keep going downhill. Mr. Miron has stopped trying to get his Datsun running again. Not to mention her father, who is foundering, one bungalow after another, without her being able to do anything about it.

  Meanwhile, on the far side of the Greenwich meridian, Éric is making great strides. He never mentions it, out of a sense of tact, so as not to annoy Lisa. He feels protected by distance and the language barrier, but Lisa knows how to google. She found out everything some time ago. Éric created a software company, and business is booming. Even once they’ve gone through the meat-grinder of online translation, the lengthy articles in the Danish newspapers about the young prodigy retain their gushing tone. The kid will go far. The kid has already gone far.

  And Lisa must get away at all costs.

  She enrolled in a Cégep in Montreal. In electronics, unsure of what she really wanted to study. She bought a rusted Honda with three hundred thousand klicks on the odometer. She rented a room in the Villeray district in an apartment shared by three strangers. She leaves tomorrow morning, the car crammed to overflowing, as though she were heading off to Oregon, with stuff and gear sticking out through the sunroof, without her father—she insists on doing this on her own—with the aim of conquering electric circuits, tin-based solder and analog signals.

  Éric will go far, and Lisa advances a centimetre at a time—but at least she’ll have achieved what matters most: leaving Domaine Bordeur.

  —

  At the age of sixty-seven, Robert Routier finds himself suddenly alone.

  He acts like a man who’s been through it all. He never needed anyone to cook his pasta or wash his socks. In fact, he hardly notices Lisa’s absence; there’s a new house to be renovated, a promising bungalow, where he’s thinking of adding a sauna-Jacuzzi.

  Late in January, he catches a virus. A garden-variety rhinitis, one of the bugs that are going around. But the cold persists, turns into bronchitis, transforms into a triple sinusitis, which degenerates into an exotic form of pneumonia. Robert is a rare case. Three labs vie for his lung biopsies. He is hospitalized for two weeks, intubated, aspirated, saturated and drained, then, on strict orders from his doctor, confined to a month of complete rest. He acquiesces under protest.

  Up until now, Lisa has never been concerned about her father. There’s a first time for everything.

  Robert gets back to work toward the end of March, but he’s not the man he used to be. At first glance, nothing has changed. Yet he starts to make uncharacteristic errors of judgment. Once sharp-eyed and sure-handed, now he gets things wrong at an alarming rate. The mistakes multiply to the point where they will soon jeopardize his meagre profit margin.

  But it’s the hammer episode that really raises the alarm.

  During the day, Robert is permanently surrounded by tools, which act as extensions of his anatomy. Most of them hang on his tool belt, but some wait within reach, placed momentarily on a crossbeam or ribbon strip, between two joists, and it takes only a minute of inattention to close up a wall and leave behind a screwdriver, a hammer or a crowbar. Except, the minutes of inattention are becoming routine. Robert tries to laugh it off, but his laughter is less and less heartfelt.

  When he walls in his third hammer in ten days, he stops laughing altogether.

  He gazes for a long time at the plasterboard partition into which he has just driven a hundred screws, and all at once he hits it with his fist. Then he punches it again. And again, leaving the imprint of four bloody knuckles on the paper surface.

  This doesn’t calm him down.

  He goes out of the house, walks to his van and back, and positions himself in front of the wall with his carpenter’s axe: three and a half pounds of surgically honed steel mounted on a walnut handle. Robert pulverizes the sheets of drywall, dislodges the studs with the butt of the axe head and even rips out the electric wires. T
wo hours’ labour wrecked in five minutes and twelve seconds.

  Robert tosses the axe aside, reeling a little, and slumps to the ground. As he drops down, he feels something strike the floor. It’s the handle of his hammer, hanging from his tool belt.

  JAY IS STUCK IN FRIDAY night traffic. It’s bumper to bumper for two kilometres, and the traffic update reports a series of disasters stretching from Dorval to Baie-D’Urfé. Do people really put themselves through this dystopian experience every day?

  She shuts off the radio and finds herself wreathed in the monotone noise of the engine. This sub-mini-compact Yaris is worlds apart from her recent rentals—the obscene Dodge Charger and the spotless surveillance van—but it’s equipped with a GPS. Nevertheless, Jay has bought herself a road atlas; it’s out of the question for her to enter even the most innocuous address into the device. The history of searches and routes is kept in the cache, and the contents of the cache can be consulted, searched, submitted in court. This is the shape of the modern world: bristling with cache.

  Jay turned off the GPS when she took the driver’s seat, and if the damned instrument hadn’t been built into the dashboard, she would have wrapped it in three layers of aluminum foil. Such precautions are probably futile; another GPS beacon must be concealed elsewhere in the car so that it can be located 24/7. In any event, the chances that her colleagues will trace this particular GPS are slim. Jay is years ahead of the RCMP.

  She finally reaches the tip of the island and takes the Galipeault Bridge. A quick glance at the atlas and then at the clock. All’s well. She is in control of time and space. It’s 5:16 p.m. and no one on Earth is thinking about her. As she drives under a huge sign that says Salaberry-de-Valleyfield 28 km, she recalls paragraph 5(a) of her contract: “The Beneficiary shall refrain from leaving Montreal without prior permission; an itinerary may be required.”

  Fuck the itinerary.

  —

  On Victoria Street, the passersby lower their heads and hunch their shoulders. Twenty-six days before Christmas, there’s incipient panic in the air.

  Jay has parked the car in front of Caméra Expert. Sitting behind the wheel, she studies the shop, psychs herself up. She doesn’t know what to expect behind that glass door. Small retailers have become so rare. Over time, shopping at Best Buy has distorted our view of the world. We’ve grown used to innumerable blasé employees, the constant turnover of personnel, the maze-like layouts. There’s something intimidating now about the prospect of dealing in real time with an actual human being.

  Jay slips the camera into her coat pocket and steps out to face the unknown. When she walks through the shop door, a bell rings, a real bell made of bronze, not an electronic chime. She is instantly struck by the atmosphere of the place, the almost artistic way the lighting delineates the different sections, like a museum where the artifacts are tripods, zoom lenses and lens cloths. In a corner, in a discreet display case, is an exhibit of antique cameras. Jay places her hand on the glass, fascinated by the massive, intricate devices with unfamiliar names: Ricohflex, Asahi Pentax, Univex Mercury, Leica III.

  “Can I help you?”

  The man behind the counter is pushing seventy. He looks like an old aficionado who may have opened the store during the Quiet Revolution. He has witnessed the passage of traditional film, Polaroids, cheap 110s, the first disposable cameras and the first digital models. He wears a moustache and reading glasses on a chain. No wedding band on his finger. Jay imagines him shut inside the darkroom every Sunday, developing old rolls of negatives dug up in garage sales. The opening of Expo 67. The construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway. The Saint-Jean-Baptiste parade of 1968. A train derailed in wintertime.

  She draws the Canon out of her pocket and sets it on the counter as gently as possible.

  “I had an extended warranty on this camera.”

  The man examines the camera with a perplexed look, assessing the damage. He notes the chipped plastic on the corner of the camera body.

  “Did you use it to hammer nails?”

  Jay smiles nervously.

  “When did you buy it?”

  “In 2005, I believe.”

  Jay is glad she googled the model number before coming, and that she memorized various facts, in particular the year it was introduced. She feels well informed. Being informed lends plausibility. Plausibility is power.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “It doesn’t come on. You press the button, nothing happens. Kaput.”

  “Otherwise just fine.”

  “It still took good pictures.”

  The man says nothing, but his gaze speaks volumes. His eyes spell out euthanasia. He straightens his glasses and enters into a long, tactful detour about the problem this wreck represents.

  “You say you have an extended warranty?”

  “I believe so, yes. I suppose there was a paper…”

  “What’s your phone number?”

  Jay invents a number with the 450 area code. The man taps away on his computer, predictably to no avail. Jay slaps her forehead.

  “Wait a minute…You probably have my old number. Now, what was it?”

  “We can try something else.”

  “I’m really useless with numbers.”

  “Not to worry. Your name?”

  “Nancy Ouimet.” More tapping.

  “Nothing. Are you sure you bought your camera here? Hold on, I’ll search with the serial number. Seven, four, five…Ah, here it is. Mrs. Le Blanc?”

  “My mother-in-law.”

  “You did have an extended warranty, but it expired three years ago.”

  “Seriously? You’re kidding.”

  He swivels the monitor around. “See for yourself.”

  Jay stares intently at the screen. She has ten seconds to memorize everything at once: first and last names, address, two telephone numbers and date of birth. She misses the photographic memory she had when she was twenty-five.

  The man points at a field on the screen. “See? End of extended warranty, October 18, 2009.”

  “Ah, yes. Three years. Oh, well, too bad. The warranty has expired, so I guess that’s that.”

  “I can still give the camera a closer look.”

  “No, thanks. It’s not worth it. Sorry to bother you.”

  She collects the camera and leaves the store before her scenario unravels. Sound the retreat, all troops return to the trenches.

  The interior of the car is already cold. Jay boots up her Eee, blows on her fingers and transcribes in one go what she saw on the shop’s computer: Isabelle Le Blanc 5 Gaieté Street Domaine Bordeur Huntingdon date of birth May 14 1972 (same year as Jay, how about that). She’s forgotten the phone numbers.

  She starts the engine and opens the road atlas. She locates Huntingdon but not Domaine Bordeur. The car purrs while Jay ruminates.

  First option: drive to Huntingdon and ask around. Second option: enter the coordinates in the GPS, let the satellites figure it out, and suffer from insomnia for the next twelve weeks. Third option: find a wi-fi signal and google the coordinates.

  Jay launches the network finder utility. Nothing available within a radius of fifty metres. At least this is a task with a clear objective. She places the computer on the passenger seat with the screen facing her and sets off.

  The streets in the neighbourhood are narrow; the houses were built in the interwar years. The car wends its way among the invisible profusion of secured networks, like a whale amid plankton. It certainly looks as if people have learned to secure their home networks after all, but Jay is patient. After five minutes she locates an ancient 802.11 router belonging to the Théberge family. The signal is good.

  She parks, applies the handbrake and launches the password cracker. It takes only a few minutes to hack into the network. The password is something out of a game of charades for first-graders. First syllable: short for Edward. Second syllable: the fourth letter. Third syllable: not covered. The answer: “Teddy bear”—and the Théberges ought
to buy a new router.

  Once online, Jay searches “Domaine Bordeur+Huntingdon.” It loads—slowly—but it loads. Google presents her with the map of a microscopic hamlet, halfway between Huntingdon (pop: 2,587) and the border of the USA (pop: 317,095,000). She zooms in and memorizes the route. After hesitating momentarily, she captures a screenshot. As a precaution.

  She has to cover an extra thirty kilometres, and even though no traffic jams are expected, she nevertheless must cope with the Larocque Bridge, which straddles the St. Lawrence Seaway and has been raised to let a ship go through. A dozen cars are backed up, sending plumes of vapour into the frozen night. Next to the red traffic light, a digital clock shows another seven minutes of waiting time.

  Hands locked behind her neck, Jay muses. What exactly is she doing in the hinterland of suburban Montreal? Is she really tracking a reefer reportedly last sighted in Shenzhen, People’s Republic of China—the term “sighted” being a misuse of language, said container being notoriously elusive—and which may currently be sailing off the Philippine coast?

  An old CSL barge finally slips between the piers of the bridge and glides away, leaving behind the stink of poor combustion. A minute later, the bridge is lowered again. Jay closes her eyes, rocked by the mechanical grating. When she opens them again, the light has turned green and the other cars are already far ahead.

  The bridge is unbelievably long, as if it were joining two worlds. Jay listens to the Yaris’s antenna whistling in the wind, the cardiac beat of the tires on the expansion joints, and then solid ground again and the muffled swish of asphalt. In the distance, between two curves, the other cars are on the point of disappearing, their tail lights reduced to a few red pixels.

  On the passenger seat, the computer gives off a bluish glow. Every two minutes the screen goes into sleep mode and Jay has to prod it awake with her index finger, like a narcoleptic co-pilot. But the route is uncomplicated: continue driving straight ahead.

  Once past Sainte-Barbe, she comes out onto an endless plain. Lifeless fields sown with stalks extend as far as the eye can see. The land of the zombie corn. The clouds have parted, revealing a dizzy, star-filled sky. On the horizon, the lights of a farm can be made out; the silhouette of a grain elevator.