by Liam Durcan
It could be said that everything had gone well, that having no limitations and becoming wealthy had made him feel renewed and re-energized but he found he couldn’t shake a sense of exhaustion. He attributed it to holdover fatigue, a lingering after-effect of the petty, narcissistic atmosphere of academia, and then, over time, he reasoned it was the stress of starting a business and that eventually he’d feel that energy again, that unfettered curiosity amped up by entrepreneurial ambition. But he felt nothing other than nagged by his partners, even Bancroft. He felt lost.
In the last year his insomnia had worsened. He woke up earlier and yet was always tired. Typical stuff. It wasn’t difficult to see what was going on. He had the chance to speak to a psychotherapist but really, how can you be talked out of a serotonin problem? A physical thing, a serotonin thing. He decided on the pharmaceuticals because they made the most sense to him. And he had felt a little better recently, more able to face people at the office and able to come to Den Haag. Perhaps the war crimes trial of a friend in the middle of a Den Haag autumn was too stern a test for any medication. It made him feel like a test pilot, brave and doomed, his fate only partly under his control; let’s see what this baby can do. Take before meals.
But this helped–here, walking on a Den Haag sidewalk with the García sisters and Paul, he felt something. Maybe it was the aggravation of their questions. Or just strolling in the warm Dutch November twilight. His face hurt, drooped with pain, but he felt better. Maybe it was the punch, Roberto’s gift of a mini-lobotomy. But more probably, it was the Garcías. Getting pissed off, after all, was a very human emotion.
Across Johan de Wittlaan, Patrick heard voices rise and then the thud of a ball being struck. People in a park. A makeshift playing field, the grass a dull yellow under the streetlights. Nothing unusual about a game of six-a-side soccer, except that the players were speaking Spanish and one of them, now on the ball, was Roberto. Patrick didn’t say anything to Celia or Nina, instead slowing his pace, falling behind to watch. One of the men on the sideline was a white-haired man whom Patrick recognized as the union organizer from San Pedro Sula. He had been on the witness stand earlier in the day. People shouted and laughed, they knew each other, they were Hondurans. So this was where they went after the trial, Patrick thought, suddenly alarmed at Roberto’s recklessness for playing on a field with some of his father’s accusers. His victims. Roberto chipped the ball ahead and another man, in his twenties, judging from his pace, latched onto the lofted pass and nudged it between the two shoes that served as goalposts. Half the players lifted their arms and gave a shout and Celia and Nina looked over. They must have seen Roberto too, but they said nothing, and walked on.
The Garcías told him they were staying at a pension a few blocks down the road from the strip of hotels where the Metropole stood. It hadn’t occurred to Patrick that Den Haag continued past the Metropole, and the thought of houses and pets and people cooking food and scratching themselves out there was slightly unsettling. Once at the Metropole, they idled on the sidewalk for a while, the events of the day and ten years of silences weighing on them. Patrick didn’t want to go back to the hotel room. He didn’t want to be alone, a realization that would make anyone lonelier, more panicky. He offered to get some milk from room service for Paul if they wanted to come up. They agreed to come in, still wary, looking up at the towering Metropole as though they had been asked to scale the facade. Patrick asked Celia if she wanted him to carry Paul, and after she paused, he qualified the offer by saying she must be tired. Celia then passed Paul over, slowly, as if to allow maximum time for the child to react to this stranger. But there was no eruption. Paul settled into Patrick’s arms and they carried on through the revolving doors. They walked unaccosted through the lobby, the Dutch respectful of what they assumed must be a sleeping child and so he was spared the frantic clerk waving him down as they crossed to the bank of elevators. The child was light in his arms. His brown eyes studied Patrick, and he tilted his head from side to side to survey the swollen eye and compare it to its unpunched cousin. Patrick could only guess at what the boy saw, the before-and-after effect.
Despite the scrutiny and the headache worsening with exertion, Patrick felt taller, stronger. He considered that carrying Paul, carrying any child, must confer an ennobling effect. He imagined he skulked less with the child in his arms. With a child, he was not a man with a bruised and beaten face but simply a man carrying a child. Anyone would look at them and surmise that Patrick got this bruise defending the boy, rescuing him. Paul could be his son. Yes, Patrick would give his life for him. The small boy touched the swollen ridge of Patrick’s cheekbone, not a ridge any more but a hillock inflating into a butte, and Patrick tried not to wince, not to react in any way that would alarm the child. He couldn’t help but wonder who Paul’s father was. He saw only Celia in the boy.
In the panelled mirrors of the elevator, Patrick was presented with multiple views of his face that he felt striking him like a second punch. No discoloration in the yellow light but the entire right side looked deformed, a stuck-on prosthesis from a bad movie. He tried to turn away from reflections of himself, but it was impossible.
When they got to the room, everyone spent a few respectful minutes in front of the view of Den Haag from sixteen floors up. The streetlights were on, and a half-galaxy of stars scattered on the flood plain until they were extinguished by the North Sea. From her bag, Celia extracted plastic bags of sandwiches and carrot sticks, passing them out to Nina and Paul, who accepted them wordlessly. Patrick called room service for milk and they sat down. Paul climbed onto the bed with a sandwich clamped in his mouth.
After finishing his meal, Paul began bouncing tentatively on the mattress, negotiating the surface like an astronaut. The García sisters looked lost, and the room seemed smaller to Patrick than it had earlier that morning. Nina, sworn enemy of silences, picked up the remote and snapped the television on. Whatever pleasure he had in inviting them up dissolved into the admission that having them there felt like nothing more than an embarrassing foray into nostalgia, memory burdened with need. But it was human need, he thought, as Paul bounced beside his aunt and Celia stared out into the twilight, and he did need the Garcías now, as much as he had needed them then.
SIX
That first day Patrick showed up at Le Dépanneur Mondial, García was waiting for him at the front door. He unlocked it and, after letting Patrick in, gave him a sheet listing all the tasks his young ward would do that day. It was a contract. Patrick was to read it and García waited until it was signed. They went first to the back alley where Patrick whitewashed over the aborted spray-painted message. He swept and then scrubbed the aisles. He replaced light bulbs and washed counters. García showed him how to “face” items on a shelf of canned goods and then told him to do the whole store. This was before nine. Once the Dépanneur Mondial opened, customers began to drift in, and by mid-morning there was a constant crowd. Some people sat at one of the two small tables the Garcías had set up near the newsstand at the front of the store, drinking concentrated coffee from small cups and reading their papers. Many were people who Patrick recognized from other deps, new customers here now, thumbing the fresh produce and chatting to Marta García, who again and again lifted her eyes to keep track of Patrick, as she would do throughout the day.
At eleven that first morning, Roberto backed through the front door, pulling a dolly piled high with boxes. He was a year older than Patrick but clearly a different species: much taller and already growing a moustache that made him appear even more like his father. He wheeled the dolly around with a professional indifference to the safety of others, purposely weaving toward Patrick to make him jump out of the way. Not a word of acknowledgement, which told Patrick that Roberto must have known why he was there, what he’d done to his father’s store, Roberto’s store. Patrick’s fists clenched as he passed, but nothing happened. The door chimes sounded again and this time it was a young woman, carrying another box of what look
ed like bananas. The young woman leaned over the counter to kiss her mother. Roberto shouted something in Spanish to his father, who turned to Patrick.
“They left another six boxes of plantains out front.”
Patrick said nothing, watching the girl. She had the blackest hair he had ever seen. She wore a dress with flowers on it. This was Celia García.
“Go get the plantains.”
“What are plantains?”
“They are a type of fruit. To you they would look like bananas, except for the fact that they are in boxes that look like boxes. Go.”
Patrick remembered passing Celia. He had often thought about that moment. He would have loved to be able to say that he saw his future walk out in front of him, or that he’d heard music or had goosebumps. But his first memory of her was a solitary sensation. Synapses formed at that moment, a new circuit was created, and Celia García was fused into him. Just the sight of her in a hotel room activated a sleeper cell of memory, entraining other synapses, long dormant, now powering up. A network of Celia.
Nina ran through the television channels with Celia and Patrick watching from the corner. She settled on an English-language news channel and he saw Celia hover closer to her younger sister. The news everywhere was mostly bad and here it was worse: sirens throughout the city and word of more citizens brought in for questioning, some of them in Den Haag, all in the wake of the politician’s murder in Amsterdam. Any news aside from Hernan’s problem would be a diversion, he supposed, but not this. Celia, preferring not to have Paul watch Muslims marched off to police precincts or have another viewing of the politician’s body covered by a sheet, took the remote and changed the channel to something else. She handed the controls to Nina and then threw up her arms in frustration as her sister promptly turned back to the news program.
“What was going on there?” Nina asked, staring at the television.
“Someone was killed by an extremist,” Celia whispered, even though Paul was rolling on the bed, oblivious.
“What for?”
Celia looked at her, obviously not wanting to explain the geopolitics of the situation in front of her son. Patrick sat down on the bed. He’d seen this montage, the stock footage of the politician, the police staring at the sheeted body, unaccustomed to this sort of thing.
“It’s about head scarves,” he said. “I was watching it last night. The politician wanted to ban head scarves in school, I think.”
The covered body disappeared. Nina pressed the remote repeatedly until she found something for Paul, settling on an animated show that featured exploding underwater animals of some kind. She and Paul sat back on the bed and watched. Celia browsed through the basket of delicacies sitting on the minibar, fondling the punitively priced cashews and glancing over in his direction. He didn’t have the heart to tell her to take what she wanted, that Neuronaut had a corporate account with the hotel chain that made cashews seem like nothing more than, well, cashews. She took a bottle of water from the basket and sat down by the window with that view of Den Haag.
“How’s your father been holding up?”
“He’s all right, I guess. It’s been difficult for us, his silence.”
“I thought he’d at least talk to you.”
“Not to us, or di Costini. Certainly not to the tribunal.”
“Do you know why?”
“No.”
“I saw him use some medication.” Patrick made the gesture, pinching the empty air before his slightly open mouth, the internationally recognized sign for someone using a medication inhaler.
“He’s doing all right,” she said dismissively.
Nina and Paul had turned up the volume enough that he could fire a pistol without much notice. Patrick grimaced and leaned in to speak to Celia.
“Jesus, Celia, could you give it a rest? It’s me.”
“Not a word from you. Seven years since this started, not a word.”
“I’m here now. That should mean something.”
Celia’s face drew tight. “I had to get di Costini involved to get you here. It’s been seven years for my father”–she made a sweeping gesture with her hand, as if blaming all of coastal Holland, blaming the tides–“and in all that time, no calls from you. Nothing.”
One of the characters on the television screamed, and the room filled with the shrieking, metallic sound of a circular saw and Paul’s laughter. Celia leaned in this time: “You’ve already made up your mind.”
He said no but it didn’t matter; she’d already turned to look out the window.
The ring tone of a cell phone, difficult to discern at first but rearranging itself into a tinny digital chorus of “These Boots Are Made for Walking,” sprinkled onto the noise coming from the television. Celia and Patrick turned to see Nina stand up from the bed, rummaging through her purse. She flipped open a phone.
“Oui, âllo?” Nina said, as she plugged her free ear for a moment and then, grimacing with the insufficiency of the action, reached for the remote control and muted the room into a vacuum of deep-space silence. As Patrick watched from across the room, Nina aged ten years. She spoke, and it was evident that she wasn’t talking to a friend or even an acquaintance. Chiding and hectoring, she spat out a termination to the conversation and snapped the phone shut. She barely had time to glower when the phone rang again. The tone of her voice changed; maybe this time she was speaking as the superior to the poor slave-wager she had just finished haranguing. In thirty seconds, frank disgust, incredulity, bemusement, and then ironic concern found a way onto her face. It was a wonder to Patrick the way the facial muscles arranged themselves in the same way even though the conversation involved someone who had no way to appreciate it. Even her free hand gestured to the back wall of the hotel room, culminating in what could plausibly be the sign-language equivalent to “You’ll never work in this town again.”
With a discreet beep, she closed the phone again, looking like someone who very much missed the satisfactions of an era when a phone could be slammed into its cradle. Our little girl is all grown up, Patrick thought.
“We’ll be getting our produce from Laurendeau. As. Of. Today,” she said in a way that would sound perfectly natural coming from the mouth of a pharaoh. As if to acknowledge that the news meant nothing to either Patrick or Celia, Nina turned away: “Excuse me, I have to make a few more calls.”
“Wow. So she is running the store.”
“Since last year.”
“And Roberto?”
“There were some problems. He’s still at the store. But Nina’s the boss.”
Six phone calls later, a contract was agreed to and a GPS-tracked truck carrying crates of iceberg lettuce and California seedless grapes had been diverted to Montreal. Someone at the store would be there to accept the delivery that night at eleven. The next morning there would be fresh produce available at Le Dépanneur Mondial.
“Jesus, she should be on Hernan’s defence team.”
“Di Costini won’t take her calls. It drives him crazy that some Garcías talk so much while others won’t talk at all.”
Nina put the phone away and sat back down on the bed. She yawned and patted the bed for Paul to come over and sit with her.
“Do you believe he’s guilty?”
“He’s pleaded not guilty,” Celia said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“Did you speak with di Costini?”
“Yes. A lot.”
“And?” Celia said, turning up the volume on the television again so Paul would be distracted.
“It’s not like an insanity defence. There isn’t precedence for it in trials like this. It’s hard to argue Hernan has an abnormal brain when he’s shown excellent moral reason and judgment all his life except for the six weeks in question.”
He said this matter-of-factly; it was an argument he’d repeated to di Costini over and over again. But looking at Celia, her lips pursing into a grimace, it must have been her last, faint hope. She fixed him with her r
ed-rimmed eyes.
“Do you think he’s guilty?”
Patrick paused. “I think he did the things they say he did.” Celia put her head in her hands. She glanced over to Nina and Paul, both in another time zone of thought. Patrick touched her shoulder and leaned over: “But he could have been coerced, he could have been tortured himself. Nobody knows. Did he ever say anything?”
“Nothing.”
“And he won’t see you?”
Celia lifted her head and said, “No.”
He was afraid that she would start crying then and there, but she maintained herself, likely because Paul and Nina were only five feet away. Patrick noticed the vermilion of her lower lip blanch, and the muscle near the angle of her jaw flicker, and understood he was seeing a person accustomed to maintaining composure through pure will.
Celia rose and told Paul he needed to go to bed. He had been staying up later since they got to Den Haag, she explained. Patrick offered to walk them back to their pension or to call a cab but they declined. Celia collected Paul and shepherded him toward the door, but little Paul’s head was still turned and eyes fixed on the screen. Patrick turned off the squalling television and said goodnight, watching the three of them pad down the hallway. He was ashamed of the relief he felt once the door was closed. The room was quiet with the television off, and he spent fifteen minutes examining himself in the mirror. His right eye, visible only when he tenderly separated the swollen lids, was bloodshot. But he could still see from it. The cheekbone was red and tight with the bruising and shouted out disapproval as he tried to wash it.
He thought it was unfair of Celia to chastise him about not calling; it wasn’t as though he hadn’t agonized about speaking to Hernan most days for the last seven years. The urge to call had been, of course, strongest right at the start–yes, he had wanted to declare solidarity with him, to express his incredulity at the charges. But he hadn’t called. And then, of course, Marta had died and it was as if her death was a more explicable disaster, one for which he had a ready-made response. He wrote to Hernan, yes, he had contacted him then, but how could he raise the issue of the allegations as his friend was burying his wife?