Borderline
Page 4
“I do recall that the van tried to pass me about ten miles back,” Felicity was saying thoughtfully, with the air of one summoning up intense powers of concentration. “I remember because I get these silly competitive urges, you know? We stayed level for a mile or so, before I realized what I was doing and let it get ahead. But before that” — she closed her eyes tightly — “no, I’m afraid I can’t recall being aware of it at all.”
“What’s your citizenship?” the man asked.
She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “American.” As though he had asked: What sex are you?
“Born there?”
Felicity sighed. “As it happened,” she said apologetically, “no. I was born in India.”
“India!” He looked at her sharply. She might have told him she was smuggling heroin. She was tempted to say: I know; very poor taste on my part. But border guards rarely had a sense of humour. She knew the rules.
(Border Catechism No. 1. Question: What shall constitute a legitimate and acceptable human being?
Answer: A person, preferably of Anglo-Saxon stock, with the decency to have been born in a country familiar to the presiding official, and respectable in his eyes. Such person shall be deemed to be largely above suspicion, provided he/she does not exhibit vagabond and philandering territorial habits. Past association with only one other country, two at the most, shall be deemed appropriate.)
It was the way the officer looked at her that goaded Felicity. She could not resist. “It was negligent of me, I know. But my father was preoccupied with medical matters, you see. A local epidemic. And then I arrived in the middle of a riot, which finished my mother.”
“Finished her?” The immigration officer was bemused.
“She died. Terrible timing.”
The officer was not certain whether she considered the riots or her own advent or her mother’s death inopportune. He was not certain whether she was serious or joking. He observed her warily. Felicity, vulnerable, smiled into his eyes with lambent trust.
“Well,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Still. Could I see your driver’s licence, please?”
“Of course.”
He retired into the booth and typed something into a terminal. “Routine check,” he said apologetically. “I need to look inside your trunk.”
Gus held his breath, his guts seeping slowly from him, his head light. The officer’s face was floating now, swaying away from its shoulders, performing arabesques. Were the movements benign? Gus watched Felicity drift to where her car lay at anchor. Everything fluid, the edges of objects undulating like sea anemones, Felicity’s car shimmering and swimming to the oceanic Other Side of the border, lappy’s something-or-other into wild blue yonder.
Now judgment.
Was the officer speaking to him? To Augustine Kelly, who had taken pleasure and was guilty of mortal sin? He could hear nothing. I can’t hear you, Father, he whispered. And the priest, not unkindly, urged: Speak up. A strange vibration, a voice perhaps, but not one he knew, issued from somewhere inside his chest. “Too much for me,” it said. “All this. Don’t feel safe till I’m back on Canadian soil.”
Did the priest smile? His face was flowing in the swaying air and difficult to read. Absolution was perhaps being granted, God’s mercy being infinite. It seemed that the Chevy’s engine was readying itself, a Gregorian chant throbbing from beneath his feet: Amen, Amen. His car was swallowing highway. He thought he saw a road sign in French.
Miraculously, he was through.
7
Across the border, some of the changes are immediate and obvious. Interstate 87 from New York City (catchment Thruway for the Massachusetts Turnpike from Boston and for I-81 from Philadelphia and Washington) becomes L’Autoroute Quinze to Montreal. The speed limit, to visiting Americans, seems to catapult into the stratosphere because it is in kilometres. Instead of Schuyler Falls and Plattsburgh and Coopersville, the little towns have names like Ste Clothilde, L’Ascension, St Jérôme du Bois.
But other changes are intangible.
Felicity’s Datsun, like a spooked horse that knows the way home by instinct, left Autoroute 15 a scant ten miles north of the border and turned sharply east, lured by the scent of river pine. Felicity drove by some sixth sense.
Conifers crowded her. Maples, oaks, a commotion of sumac, even the occasional elm that had survived the plague, all jostled for roadside space. It was a country road she followed, narrow and rutted, winding at whim to mark the boundary of some old habitant farm or the bank of a creek — though Felicity saw none of it, having crossed another border.
Her life was much like one of those small lizards that Australian children chop into sections with penknives. The children do not believe they are being cruel because each scaly severed section wriggles away and becomes a whole lizard again; at least, so the children believe. So they used to tell Felicity when she went to school with them in Brisbane. She thinks she must have picked up the habit from the lizards; she is prone to incarnation into one of her segments.
In the country she has returned to, there are flame trees flamboyant as whores. Red petals are falling on her shoulders, and a brick-coloured dust rises from her sandals in soft plumes. She is alone. Her father, as usual, is off in some village with stethoscope and comfort. Felicity is watching two black crows and two Untouchables fighting over a not-quite-dead cow. The crows are going for the eyes: slash, slash, the beaks brutal. The men are beating at the crows with lathis, but they are afraid of them too; they flail out with their sticks and then dart back. Of course they are not permitted to touch the cow until it is dead. A caw of triumph: one crow swoops off on arrogant wings with its prize like an amber ping-pong ball in its beak.
Felicity screams and covers her own eyes with her hands and runs, slipping and stumbling, all the way back to their house where her ayah, her Didiji, is waiting. But the road is fiendishly rutted from monsoon runoff. The Datsun loses its footing, spins, lists dangerously, pitches into the dust and grass of the shoulder. Felicity brakes, trembling, and throws herself into the comforting arms of Didiji.
“Listen,” Didiji croons, “you do not know the whole story. Listen, Felissiji. For many months the crow-demon has been tormenting our village. He has taken a thousand forms. Don’t we know it? Haven’t we snapped at all thousand of them with wet clothing when they swooped at us on the roof and in the courtyard? He has eaten the ears of new rice, that wicked crow-demon, and savaged the plantains and jackfruit before picking time. But listen, Felissiji: the goddess, who devotes herself to the prosperity of those who offer her puja, has taken the form of a cow to tempt the crow-demon to his own destruction.
“Listen, little peacock feather. If you had only stayed to watch, you would have seen that the crow-demon has choked on the eye of the cow and fallen to earth like a stone!”
In Didiji’s stories, the demons always lost; the Untouchables, whose dharma it was to eat carrion, were fed as they should be; and the will of the gods triumphed. “As it always does, Felissiji. It cannot not.” Didiji never knew any English; and Felicity, today, can remember only a dozen or so words of Malayalam, yet the story (in which language?) survives entire in her memory.
“But what about the cow, Didiji?” she cries into the past. “It was still alive. It was writhing in pain.”
The monsoon is at her car window, an importunate battering. She winds it down and says vehemently: “It won’t serve, Didiji. It won’t serve.”
“Are you crazy, or what?” Gus reached in and took hold of her by the shoulders and shook her. He seemed to be in a rage. As in: disgusted married man brings hysterical young mistress to her senses. “You’re not even hurt!” he shouted. The final outrage, an affront to panicked concern.
Felicity is still arguing with the past: It’s not just the question of suffering, Didiji. It’s the problem of the proper response.
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” she said to Gus. “Just how accountable are we? You and me.”
“Je
sus,” Gus said.
“Why us? Why me?” Felicity asked dully. “Why me? I mean, did I inherit this, or what?”
“Oh Jesus,” Gus said. “Oh shit. Do I know how to pick ’em!”
He clambered out of the ditch and walked back to his car for the whiskey, twisting handfuls of his hair into peaks as he went. How he yearned for the known sins and miseries: the simple, guilt-fraught act of adultery; the tight lips (both sets) of his wife. How he wished he were sidling into Therese’s kitchen, sheepish, flowers in hand, facing nothing more than a cold shoulder and a cold bed.
He shambled back, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.
“I’ve just realized what we’ve done,” Felicity said. “I mean really realized. Do you?”
He was beginning to, whiskey and all. An alcoholic trance along the artery, illuminations of the lymph, visions of courtrooms and headlines like sugarplums in his head.
“It hasn’t got through to you,” Felicity sighed. “You’ve had too much booze to be upset.”
“I’m upset, dammit!” He was shouting again, red in the face. “Crazy bitch, what got into you? We should have left her there. It was none of our business.”
Her eyes widened, unjustly accused. “You’re the one who was frantic, you’re the one who said the trunk, and how will we smuggle —”
“What! I never suggested a thing. I just … You mean you wouldn’t have if I didn’t …?”
She sighed heavily. “Yes, I probably would’ve. That’s the trouble with me. I probably would’ve anyway.” She said it as though acknowledging something shameful but hereditary. Epilepsy, say. Or congenital soft-heartedness. “Look. This is a mess.” She began to pace the creased crotch of the ditch. “I attract messes, they gravitate to me, just your rotten luck to be in the vicinity. I mean, you wouldn’t believe my life. Guinness Book of Records, a natural aptitude for foul-ups.” Pace, pace. “But for the same reason I’m a veteran at handling them, a professional. So why don’t you leave this to me? I mean, clear out, forget it happened. Go back to your normal life. I’ll never breathe a word, I’ve forgotten already what you look like. I’ve never laid eyes on you. Scram!”
“Jesus!” he said, as though hit by the fast ball of truth. “What’s the matter with us?”
“I told you. It’s me. Clear out before —”
“She’s in there. She might have suffocated, she might be dead.”
“Oh God, yes, the woman!” Unzip, zip, a waving of wands: changes of costume came to Felicity in the twinkling of an eye as occasion demanded. There was a flurry of efficiency and concern, cookie crumbs and sleeping bag flying. Is she conscious? Alive? Can’t very well get her out, can we? In case someone comes. Though couldn’t we sit her up, prop her up? Who spoke what, neither knew. A humming party line. And both again incautious, forgetting consequences and implications, in the face of such abject need.
Afterwards, endlessly afterwards, they would replay this day and think: there, at that moment, or at this one, or at least by such and such a time, was the point where we should have, well, stood back at least. Ah, hindsight. In the now there is so little leeway for thought.
“Her hands are warmer,” Felicity said. “So stuffy down there, but a good thing, maybe.”
“Get her onto the seat.”
“I’m trying, I can’t. She’s a dead weight. Here, you —”
And he managed it somehow, hefting her up into his arms. “She’s still unconscious,” he said. “The whiskey, quick.”
Even white and blank, the face took his breath away. He brushed the matted black hair from her cheeks, her head in the crook of his left elbow, and endeavoured to part and hold open her lips. Delicately, like a nervous father during a first bottle feeding, he let the whiskey trickle over her tongue. But the apparatus for swallowing does not necessarily respond well to unauthorized invasion. First, there was simply a welling back from the corners of the lips, a certain amount of messiness. Then violence: spluttering, coughing, a risk of choking. For heaven’s sake, for heaven’s sake, Felicity was expostulating. What are you trying to do? And Gus snapping: Get out, give us air! And thumping the invalid’s back, holding her head against his shoulder, rocking back and forth with her.
When the storm quieted, the woman went suddenly rigid, aware for the first time of the man’s hold on her. Catlike, she flared away from him and hunched up into the back corner of the car, knees hugged to herself, arms tightly around her legs, her limbs an instinctive system of fortification. Her gaze flickered from Gus to Felicity, back and forth, back and forth, intense, unwilling to let a microsecond’s worth of information pass unmonitored.
In such moments spells are cast, the eyes as assiduous and seemingly neutral as cameras, the mind recording details that will float up into dreams, that the memory will rerun in close-up time after time, new elements announcing themselves as on a screen, sharp-edged and super-real.
Felicity had a fantastic sense of everything being outlined in light, or in some antique emulsion of gold leaf and egg white. It was happening again: a painting incarnating itself, Perugino’s Magdalena, which was hanging at this moment in Florence. It was because she was negotiating for it, interfering with history; because she wanted it on loan in her gallery.
It’s suspect, Seymour would say, this retreat to the luminist past. They were all escapists, those fifteenth-century painters. Inappropriate for today. These are violent times, my dear.
And indeed, the woman was all blacks and bruised purples, an impasto of savage techniques. Pure Seymour, the latest phase.
But look, Felicity argued, the attention to minutiae. That isn’t modern at all. Look: the small mole, a fleck of dark velvet, high on the right cheek near the outer edge of the eye. The high cheekbones. The eyes (brown-almost-black) that skitter in demented flight patterns. The black cotton dress that is badly torn at the bodice.
(Seymour might introduce — in brilliant verdigris, say — the hand that had defiled her, the hand that had ripped at the cloth.)
But look at the skirt, Felicity argued. Yes, yes, it is torn, it’s done in your style. But it’s also voluminous, archaic, outlandish, surely not of our time or place. There is something otherworldly about it: tented down over the jackknifed knees to the ankles, almost covering those broken shoes that make one think of mouldering objects dropped from museum attics.
Felicity, hypnotized by eyes that seemed to be casting about for which language to say nothing in, thought dizzily: She is not a Perugino or a Seymour. She is a memory of myself.
She was the moment when Felicity knew she would never see her father or Didiji again, when she had said over and over — but apparently in Malayalam — to her distressed grandparents: I don’t believe you, it isn’t the whole story, Didiji will tell me the truth. He is only out in a fishing boat, he will be back when the tide turns.
(When Seymour heard this story he shut himself in the studio for three days, but if he had done a painting, she had not seen it.)
Gus reached out tentatively and touched the woman’s cheek with his fingers, the merest feather-brush of an offering of concern. The woman recoiled, her mouth formed the shape of a scream though no sound came out, her muscles tensed so violently that the ears of her rescuers braced themselves for the splintering of bones.
And then slackness …
Unconsciousness.
“Jesus,” Gus whispered.
“It was when you touched her,” Felicity said sadly. “I think perhaps she’s been raped.”
“Oh Jesus,” Gus said again, and crossed himself.
Nothing, Felicity thought, is so clumsy as the well-meaning gestures that pass haplessly from the safe to the totally unsafe.
8
What is one to do?
When recording fantastic events in which others have believed, where does the reporter’s responsibility lie? Let me illustrate: In a bar once in New York I met a woman who was convinced the CIA had implanted radio transmitters behind her kneecaps. They monitor everything
, she told me in a fearful whisper. They chart my biorhythms. I can’t even use hiccups as a code. If you speak to me they will hear every word, you are right to be nervous.
It was true that she made me nervous, but not, of course, for the reason she supposed. This is an extreme example, not at all a borderline case, and one for which a flippant reportorial voice would be cruel as well as unnecessary. Every few seconds the woman felt her knees compulsively, tapping out a morse code on the patella, gently probing the crease behind her leg. I receive things too, she confided; I pick up weather reports, I know when people don’t like me.
Such encounters, which are altogether too frequent in the seedier sections of great cities, either sadden or irritate depending on the speed and ease with which one can disengage. But no one can deny that the woman’s bizarre behaviour was logical once one accepted her premise; and her biographer would want to know, indeed would have an obligation to understand, how it felt to the woman herself when electronic impulses buzzed in and out along her calves.
This is my problem, compounded by the fact that the protagonists are dear to me, and apparently of sound mind.
Something happened at the border — and also at a roadside ditch a few miles in on the Canadian side — the details of which must remain unclear at least until the reappearance of the only witnesses, and perhaps beyond that. Whatever happened changed their lives, but I have little to go on. There were Felicity’s overwrought and elliptical remarks; there were the drunken recollections of Gus some time after the disturbance; and there was (in both the Montreal Gazette and the New York Times) a small filler item which I do not suppose I would even have noticed if Felicity had not alerted me to improbable happenings:
(Associated Press)
Canadian–US border: A group of illegal aliens was apprehended at the border today following an attempt to smuggle themselves into Canada in a refrigerated meat van. Two of the aliens subsequently died of hypothermia. The remainder, officials say, will be extradited back to the United States, where they had already been served deportation papers, following all necessary medical treatment.