Fall from Grace

by Wayne Arthurson

  Instead, they made a half circle around me, and after a second, they pointed and started shouting those words that Michael had said. And they laughed. And pointed. And shouted those words I couldn’t understand. And then some new words.

  Then some new kids joined them. And then, despite the protestation of the teachers, the whole lunchroom joined in the shouting, pointing, and laughing at me. It was then that I knew that even though I couldn’t understand the words, I understood the hatred and anger. Never in my life had I ever been the butt of such bullying. No way would something like that happen at a school full of army brats. I felt my face get hot, tears streaming down my cheeks. My head was spinning in grief and anger. But instead of running away, I calmly closed my lunch box and moved to walk away. Michael stood in front of me, laughing and shouting.

  I hit him.

  In the face.

  With my metal lunch box.

  Nothing told me to do it, I didn’t even plan it, I just did it. The sound of metal cracking bone echoed through the room. Michael’s nose exploded in a gush of blood and he went down, out cold. There was a stunned second of silence in which I felt happy and light, and then people started screaming and teachers started running. Someone grabbed me and took me to an office, and even though they talked to me, yelled at me, in French and English, and even though Mom and Dad came by and yelled at me, Dad in French and English, and Mom in English, possibly even Cree, I said nothing. I didn’t think of Michael, I just looked at my lunch box and wondered how I could fix the dent.

  A few days later, I stood in front of the class at the DND school, telling the students my name and that I had just moved from Germany. When I sat down, the boy next to me asked me what part of Germany I had just come from. When I told him, he asked me if the chocolate factory was still there and if you could still find salamanders in the ponds in the woods.

  I said yeah.

  36

  In the distance, a blazing white light moved closer until it stopped right in front of me. A second later, a disembodied voice spoke to me in a language I should have understood, but could not. There was another sound, an insistent hum, a high-pitched wail. The voice spoke right in my ear. “Hey, you!” it shouted in an accent that was not quite French. My world started to shake, and the cold started to creep back in. “Wake up, wake up. I know you’re in there, wake up!”

  I lifted the cumbersome weight that was my head, and turned it toward the voice. My eyes opened like the peeling of an orange and stared into the face of Jesus, or someone who looked like Jesus, the way Jesus really looked, with brown skin, short curly hair, a scruffy mustache and beard, and a prominent nose that was long yet flattened at the edges. White light behind him formed a halo around his head.

  I blinked twice and reached out with my hand, the cold returning to my body like a vengeful army after the sack of its country’s capital. The shivers began in my internal organs and then spread throughout my body.

  The face smiled in pure benevolence. “Alhamdulillah! You are still alive! Still alive. Can you walk?”

  I nodded and tried to push myself up, but I couldn’t feel my legs. I stumbled. Hands reached out and pulled me to my feet. I groaned as sharp pains stabbed me in the thighs. My legs stiffened and held me up, but I wouldn’t have been able to stand without those helping hands. They pulled me, steering me toward the light and the humming noise. A cloud of smoke drifted to the sky behind the lights. I moved forward, grunting as jabs of pain struck with each step.

  “Does it hurt?”

  I nodded. “Very much.”

  One hand left me and slapped me on the back. I almost fell but caught myself. “Excellent. Pain is good. Pain is good. If you feel pain, then you are still alive. Still alive.”

  Yes. Still alive. I am still alive. Someone has come to save me, I thought. It took me a second to realize that the bright light came from the headlights of a car, and the insistent hum wasn’t the conversations of the Saved in heaven, but the alert given by a car when a door is open while the engine is running.

  I stopped and turned toward my benefactor. “Thank you. Thank you.”

  He pushed one hand into my back to move me forward and placed another on my head to push me down. “Get in the car first, and then thank me. It’s warm inside.”

  The passenger door opened, and as I moved to crawl into it, I heard another voice, this one filled with distress. “What are you doing? You can’t do this! This is unheard of!” But no one responded to the voice, so I thought it was some kind of cold-induced hallucination, my hypothermic body playing tricks on my mind.

  My new friend pushed me into the car. The softness of the seat was so exquisite, the friendly warmth blasting from the vents so breathtaking, I raised my arms in exultation and collapsed in a feeling I hadn’t known since the birth of my children. Life was the most incredible experience in the universe, because without it, there would be no light, no joy, no pain, nothing but darkness and cold. Not even a glimmer of hope or despair. Just endless nothing.

  But there is life and I am alive to see that!

  A few seconds later, my savior climbed into the car, shutting the door and silencing the hum. He reached forward, grabbed a plastic cup from the holder, and held it out to me with both hands, like a priest offering the sacrament to a parishioner. “Drink this,” he said.

  I recalled a line from church, and while taking the cup from his hand, completed the ritual. “This is the cup of life.” I pulled the cup to my mouth, bathing in the misty heat that rose from it. The scent of coffee was a powerful aphrodisiac, and I pulled it into me like a monk giving up vows of celibacy. The heat burned my lungs, but I didn’t care. After an eternal olfactory orgasm, my lips reached out in a kissing pout to touch the silky softness of the liquid. There was a quick, sharp burn, and my lips snapped back, but only for an instant. They reached out again, tentative but insistent, and touched the surface. My lips parted, and my tongue reached out between them to caress the coffee. It was hot, but I pushed forward and plunged into the cup, taking a sip and feeling the warm, delicate liquid swirling in my mouth.

  Eddies of heat and pain circulated through my mouth as the liquid touched my cold teeth and my cavities. After a second, I swallowed, welcoming the soothing warmth down my throat and into my yearning stomach. A surge of warmth radiated through my body, ending in a climactic shiver. I drank again from the plastic cup of life.

  A harsh voice came from the backseat. I tried to look, but the tears in my eyes and the refraction of the light prevented me from seeing more than a silhouette. “This is outrageous. Don’t you realize that I have a flight to catch, and you stop to pick up some bum off the street? I’m going to file a complaint.”

  My driver friend turned toward the backseat, his face burning with the fury of Christ attacking the merchants at the temple. “Get out of my taxi! Get out!”

  “What? You can’t do this!” the male passenger said.

  “Of course I can. The Taxi Commission allows me to refuse or eject passengers if their behavior is threatening to the driver or anybody else, so you can just get out right now! Get out!”

  The driver leaned over the front seat into the back and I thought he was going to physically attack his passenger. I opened my mouth to stop the violence, but nothing came out. The driver’s fury was frightening and I had no strength to speak. The passenger probably thought the same thing, because I saw him scramble to the other side of the seat to escape. But we were both wrong. The driver wasn’t attacking; he just reached over the seat back to grab the back door handle and fling open the door. A gust of cold air blew into the warm taxi and I shrank down into the seat to hide from it.

  “There you are!” shouted the driver. “Now get out of my taxicab!”

  The passenger stayed where he was. I could feel him shivering, from fear or cold, I couldn’t tell. “You can’t leave me out here, I’ll freeze to death.”

  “So what? You’ll freeze to death. That’s what you wanted me to do to this poor
man, to leave him in the cold so he could freeze to death, so we can do the same to you.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry. I get your point.”

  “No you don’t. Get out of my cab!”

  “No. You can’t. I won’t go.”

  “If you won’t go, I’ll throw you out myself!”

  “No, please. Please don’t,” the passenger said, his voice breaking. “You can’t leave me out there.” I wasn’t sure what to do. I really didn’t like the anger in the driver, but then again, the passenger had been so obsessed with his own life that he was quite content to leave me to freeze to death so he could keep his schedule. Maybe he did deserve to be left behind but I couldn’t let that happen.

  “Let him stay,” I said quietly.

  The driver looked at me for a couple of seconds and then nodded. He reached back and shut the door. “You’ll make it to your bloody flight,” he finally said, turning toward the wheel, backing the taxi up, “but only because this man saved your life. Remember that when you climb into your comfortable business class seat, that this man that you wanted to leave behind decided not to leave you behind. You remember that the next time you have to decide between you own damn convenience and someone else’s life.” In a few seconds we were headed down the road.

  “I don’t believe you, I don’t understand,” the driver muttered. “This man would have died if we hadn’t stopped, he would have died, but now he is alive. A man’s life was at stake, and you were worried about something as silly as missing a flight. How sad is that? How sad? We have saved a man’s life. Can you not understand that? A man’s life has been saved.”

  The driver went on berating and shaming his passenger, and the words faded into a wonderful sound, the murmur of wind through summer leaves, the distant breaking of waves against the shore. I held on to my cup of life, sipping from its elixir, watching the streetlights take me back into the world of the living.

  * * *

  The driver dropped me off at the Grey Nuns hospital, at the far south side of the city. He offered to escort me in, but I assured him I was fine. He accepted my refusal with a thankful nod.

  “I don’t want our friend to be late for his important flight,” he said sarcastically, throwing an angry glance at the person in the backseat. “But take care of yourself. Make sure those doctors take good care of you. I know they are busy, but make sure they see you. I don’t know how long you were out there, so you might have caught something or created some sort of condition.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a card. “Call me when you can,” he said as he handed it over. “Let me know how you are feeling or if there is anything I can do for you.”

  I took the card and shoved it in my jeans. Even though this man had saved my life, I wanted to leave as fast as possible and forget everything about that night. I just wanted to be someplace safe. I thanked him for saving my life, but when he finally drove away, I didn’t go all the way in. I sat in the lobby until I knew the buses were running and caught one back to my neighborhood.

  37

  I phoned in sick and stayed in my room, sleeping and weeping. My phone kept ringing, no doubt someone from the paper, either Whittaker or Maurizo demanding to know where the fuck I was, whether I would be continuing with the stories, or Anderson wondering if I was okay. Probably all three, with Maurizo angry that I was somewhere gambling my life away and that the chance he had taken on me had blown up in his face. And he was close to being correct.

  The urge to say fuck it to it all was so strong, and one time I got out of bed, put on my clothes to head out and do just that. But there was a banging on the door upstairs, someone shouting my name and jerking on the doorknob. I thought it was the police back for me so I fell back into bed, waiting for the heavy thud of police-issue boots to come down the stairs in order to finish the job that had been interrupted by that wonderful cabdriver. I slipped into a long depressive sleep.

  When I woke up, I went through the motions of heading for the casino again, until finally I remembered that little kid who had just moved from Germany and how he dealt with those bullies at the French immersion school. But these were a different kind of bully; they were, in fact, the persons of authority to whom you were supposed to report bullies.

  It now was too dangerous to live in Charlie’s old basement room. If the cops who picked me up the other day knew my route home, they knew where I lived. I couldn’t make things easier for them to find me. The time had come for me to find my own place, an apartment that was more suitable to a white-collar worker than to a semihomeless street person on government assistance for mental health reasons.

  As soon as I had time, I would search the classifieds and find a decent place to live, preferably near downtown because that’s where the city’s transit system worked best. If you went too far out of the core, transit service was provided but it was sketchy at best, with buses running, even during rush hour, only every twenty to thirty minutes.

  I figured on the area west of 109th Street just north of the river as my best bet. It was filled with apartment blocks of various size and all the services needed for such an area. I might have been a bit older than the demographic of the area but it also included Edmonton’s tiny gay community so a single, almost middle-aged man wouldn’t stick out. It was a big step to take, to admit that I had finally turned the corner, but it was mostly for practical, life-preservation reasons.

  When I finally stepped out of the house, the cold snap had ended. It was even warm enough for me to walk to the office, but I would no longer make that walk. It was too dangerous. I headed a block north to 107th Avenue and grabbed the first bus downtown.

  When I arrived at the paper, I experienced something I had never known at a big city newsroom: a moment of silence. It was short and abrupt, like a shot from a gun, and almost as surprising. I froze, at first not sure why it had happened and wondered if it was directed at me or if it was just a coincidence.

  And when I discovered the truth, by how every face in the newsroom was looking at me, or in the process of looking at me, my gut reaction was exactly what one should feel at the sound of a gunshot, to run and escape from the incident as quickly as possible. But I checked that emotion and moved forward, knowing that the silence wouldn’t last long.

  It didn’t, because it was replaced by whispers that no doubt had to be about me. But even those whispers wouldn’t last long because while journalists are notorious gossipmongers, there is also the compulsion to move past the immediate event, my appearance at the paper, and move on to a more important compulsion, the deadline.

  Of course, a good number of the staffers continued to watch me, many of them surreptitiously, while they typed out their stories for the day, but many others filed my appearance away for future reference, something to look into once their main story, the one on their computer screen, was completed and filed.

  The reaction of the newsroom to my arrival and the sight of Whittaker dashing into Larry’s office a second later also confirmed another suspicion of mine: I was fired. Sure, I had broken a couple of big stories in the past few weeks, but no doubt the reaction from the higher-ups and the political fallout because of these stories, and the evidence that my gambling problems were back, had been weighed over and over again by Larry until he had decided that it just wasn’t worth it to keep me on.

  I was good because of the work I had done and the stories I had broken, but the reality of it—something I had no trouble accepting—was that I was lucky. Not only was I lucky enough to have been the first person on the scene where Grace was found and that Whitford had decided then to let someone from the media into the tent, but I was lucky to have been given the assignment in the first place. I wasn’t chosen to cover that story because of my ability, I was just the only crime-beat reporter in the newsroom who didn’t have an assignment or wasn’t in the washroom at the time or getting a coffee from the cafeteria.

  The truth of the matter was that while big stories were broken by decent hard work, it w
as just like finding a serial killer, a lot of it comes as a result of luck. You get the right assignment at the right time, someone gives you a tip or, in your efforts to find information about another story you stumble onto something else out of the blue.

  Woodward and Bernstein only broke Watergate because they were crime reporters who fell into a minor story about a break-in at the famed hotel. Neal Sheehan broke the Pentagon Papers story for the New York Times because Daniel Ellsberg gave him the Pentagon Papers. Sure, these reporters worked hard and long to develop these stories, but without a lucky start, someone else would have broken them instead.

  Any one of the staffers here could have found and written the stories I wrote so I was really nothing special. And because I had been hired as a scab during the strike, the union wouldn’t make much of a noise. My only hope was that Larry would instead banish me to the copy desk, but if that happened, I wasn’t sure it would be less hellish to be fired.

  I was content to sit at my desk to plan what items I wanted to take home, but Larry stormed out of his office, quickly followed by Whittaker like some royal retainer, and shouted across the newsroom as if he was Lou Grant on a caffeine high. “Desroches! Get your ass over here!”

  The entire newsroom turned at the sound and I could only shrug like a silent-movie comic and trudge over. Larry’s entire head was red with rage and Whittaker was smug beyond description. I refrained from any smart comments because that would have been stupid and uncalled for. I had plenty of respect for Larry, plenty of gratitude for how he had given me a chance and taken me in when no one else would have, so making a flippant remark like, Hey, Larry, what’s up?, would have been insulting to both of us. I simply entered his office, stood at the edge of his desk until he was ready to speak. Whittaker followed us, quietly shut the door behind her and leaned against it, as if standing guard.