The Dishwasher

by Stéphane Larue

  “I’m already looking.”

  “Look harder.”

  He asked the waitress for another coffee.

  “Do you owe Vincent money too?”

  “A little.”

  “Shit.”

  He looked bummed out.

  “Okay, c’mon, eat, man.”

  The bolognaise sauce was turning my stomach while it whet my appetite. I picked at my food. He lifted his cup to his mouth.

  “And don’t you ever lie to my face like that again.”

  I nodded.

  I managed to get through my meal. He paid for us both and drove me back to Ahuntsic without exchanging a word. We spent a few minutes in front of Vincent’s apartment. You could see the light through the living room window. Malik was flipping through his CDs.

  “Okay, try to get your head together now. Get going on your project with your friend Alex, catch up with your classes, draw, read, whatever man, do whatever you gotta do to keep busy. And stay the hell away from the bar.”

  “Okay, don’t worry.”

  My voice was gone. My muscles hurt. I felt like I was catching a cold.

  “Give me Vincent’s number so I can call you. I’ll call you Thursday.”

  “You’ve got my pager number.”

  “Just give me the number, man.”

  His tone was harsh again. I gave him the number.

  I waited a minute in the warmth of the car. Our gazes got lost in the traffic lights farther off on Henri-Bourassa. I felt like crying. Malik could tell. He grabbed my shoulder.

  “Hey, hey, hey. Don’t start crying in my car. It’s gonna be okay, man.”

  I thanked him for everything he’d done and got out of the car. Malik got out too.

  “Hold on, come here.”

  He came up to me and gave me a hug.

  “See you Friday.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Friday.”

  Chapter 6

  I woke up feeling like I’d been run over by a steamroller. Grey daylight was creeping through the cracks in the venetian blinds. The fridge was growling like a lawnmower. I rolled over onto myself, still half unconscious. I could hear the cars driving by on Henri-Bourassa, making a swishing sound. I opened my swollen eyelids and rubbed my face and eyes at length. My pants were still wet and greasy. Three-forty p.m. I’d missed two more classes. It almost didn’t bother me anymore. I chased the thought from my mind. Getting up was painful, so I sat down and pulled myself up with my arms. I yawned and looked around to see if Vincent was there. His boots weren’t on the hall rug. My hangover wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, but my muscles ached, and my back was all bent out of shape, like after my first construction shift last summer. I still reeked of cooking oil and mop water. I got up off the sofa with a frown and pulled on a pair of jeans whose leg was sticking out of my backpack. Spent a few minutes wandering around the empty, silent apartment. I glanced at Vincent’s room. His bed had been made in a hurry, and then I remembered hearing him leave that morning. His bench press was covered in dirty laundry. On his bedside table was a bottle of Givenchy cologne, a track and field trophy, some gold chains and a photo of his girlfriend Janine. On the floor lay his soccer bag, a pair of beat-up indoor shoes beside it. The dreary day cast a feeble light on the messy room. I went to the kitchen and checked out the fridge—nearly empty. A shrivelled-up pepper, some old Chinese macaroni in a Tupperware, two Molson Drys and a two-litre of Sprite. I took out the green plastic bottle of pop and opened it, with almost no whoosh of carbonation, and took a few long flat sips as I searched through the cupboards for something else to eat. On the counter there was a little barrel of protein shake. No cereal, no bread, no fruit. I ended up grabbing a handful of Fudgee-Os from a cupboard and went back to the living room with the box.

  After a few minutes’ hesitation I sat down in front of the computer. I checked my Hotmail. There was an email from Alex, already a week old. I opened it and read it for a second time. “Hey man. Hope you’re good, and ‘inspired.’ Ha ha. Anyway, looking forward to seeing what you’ve got. I sent you the lyrics you asked for. Mike wants to see how it’s going. At least the logo?”

  The last two sentences sent shivers up my spine. I read the email one more time, as if the answer to the riddle lay somewhere between the lines. Took a deep breath, clicked on “Reply,” and exhaled a thin puff of air. “Hey Alex, I’m super busy with the end of my term but I’m making some progress on the illustration and the logo. And I called a few printers, and found one you guys can afford. I haven’t scanned it yet, but I’m looking forward to showing you guys. See you.”

  I hit “Send” and closed Explorer, then got up.

  The apartment felt emptier and even more depressing. Muffled sounds rose up from deep in the building, inaudible conversations, creaking floors, toilets flushing, ghostly rumours that were almost enough to convince me I wasn’t the only person waking up in the middle of the afternoon while everyone else was off working or studying. I spent a minute standing in front of the living room window, with a view of Henri-Bourassa. The two-litre of Sprite was still in my hand, as I watched the sad snow falling and cars driving over asphalt covered by a layer of slush the colour of anthracite. Across the boulevard was a public housing project. Christmas decorations blinked joylessly on balconies the size of rabbit hutches. I was preparing to emerge just as the day began to fade to bluish dusk. My body was at once numb and in pain. My stomach was growling, disagreeing with the artificial chocolate in the cookies. I went to pick my pager off the couch and came back to my perch at the window. 4:42. I pieced together the memory of last night at the restaurant. The faces of the various people I’d met appeared before me in a parade. I remembered Jade’s. I felt stupid for stuttering in front of her. Then there was Bonnie, with her pouty grin and scars. Something about her reminded me of Marie-Lou.

  I moved away from the window. The bottle of Sprite was empty. I tried to read a few pages of the Derleth I’d started, but just put the book down, unable to get through even a paragraph.

  I went for a shower. My skin was still greasy from the oil, covered in crumbs of burnt food. I was searching for something deep inside myself, some ingenious feint or counterattack or firewall to counteract what I could feel bubbling up slowly within me. As the steaming-hot water poured over me, I voiced my thoughts out loud: “It’d be nice if Vincent came straight home after class.”

  When I got out of the bathroom the winter night had plunged the apartment into premature darkness. I got dressed and checked my pager. Marie-Lou had left a message, wanted to know how my training had gone. I couldn’t summon the courage to call her. I sat down at the kitchen table and took out my Canson pad and graphite pencils. Tried to draw a bit, but every line came out ugly and wrong. I gave up after twenty minutes.

  5:40. Vincent still wasn’t back from school, and I was getting antsy, nervous. The crisis was brewing. Every once in a while palpitations started and I would feel something in my chest, and my temples would get boiling hot. No message. No Vincent.

  It felt like I was choking. I went through the pockets of my pants from last night and pulled out the money I had left, around sixty dollars. I put my keys in my pocket and threw on my coat and my headphones.

  The hallway smelled of washing, fried onions, and cat piss. My footsteps thumped despite the ancient, chewed-up, greyish carpet runner. I buttoned up my flannel shirt and went out of the building and into the cold, humid air. Then I turned the music on. With Maiden’s “Killers” in my ears I walked quickly down Henri-Bourassa toward the Metro, as if pursued by an evil creature. I cranked the volume to drown out the car sounds, and maybe the voices in my head. I walked past wanly lit laundromats, hair salon windows with photos of models faded by years of sunlight, a tavern I’d noticed a few weeks ago. I walked past Haitian women bundled up in eight layers of coats, their faces three-quarters hidden under wool scarves, and past labour
ers smoking as they walked, frowning from the cold and looking generally pissed off. Their tool belts hung under their coats, and a clinking of metal marked the rhythm of their footsteps.

  I kept my hands stuffed in my coat pockets and scrunched up my eyebrows, my face buffeted by heavy winds bearing melting snow. I walked past the tavern. I felt the rays of the “VIDEO LOTTERY” sign searing my skin. An overpowering wave of vertigo threw me off balance. It felt like sharp needles caressing me under the eyelids. I checked myself and kept walking down to the 99-cent pizza place by the Metro station.

  I walked into the over-bright room. Behind the counter two dark-skinned guys were watching American soaps on TV. I ordered dinner and scarfed down two slices with bacon, trying to read Isaac Asimov’s Robots. I’d borrowed it from my dad last time I went over for dinner. The cover was by Caza, an artist I liked.

  Next to me a bunch of Grade Eight or Nine kids were having a high-pitched, animated conversation in a mix of French and English, while a mother in a sari was lecturing her eldest, who was running around one of the tables hyped up on sugar. I’d brought the Asimov to give me a break, but was finding it even harder to read than the Derleth. I felt my pager go off in my jeans. A voice message. I drained my root beer and headed out to the pay phone by the front door of the pizza place. Two new voice messages.

  The first was Christian asking me to work the next day at four. Then came Vincent, who was hard to understand but wanted to make sure I had my key. He also let me know he was spending the night at Janine’s. I swore and hung up without even clearing out my inbox. I pushed the glass door and found myself out on the sidewalk. It felt colder now. The humidity was working its way under my coat. I looked around at the people hurrying by, a parade of faceless creatures under the falling snow which had started coming down harder now. I’d so often sought out solitude, to draw and read and listen to music. Today it seemed the most unbearable thing in the world.

  I started walking toward Vincent’s apartment. In my head I was trying to organize my evening, the night ahead, fill it up with stuff to do. I’d work on the illustrations for the band. Catch up on my homework. I’d get started on Alan Moore’s From Hell, play a little Twisted Metal on Vincent’s PlayStation. Okay, I’d play a lot of Twisted Metal. I’d play Twisted Metal until I keeled over and fell asleep.

  I was walking on the same side of Henri-Bourassa, being passed by buses trudging eastward in a spray of slush. The cold was biting now. I thought about the impending holidays, the family reunions that brought every year to a close. I thought about everything that no longer seemed to make sense anymore.

  I gave the door a push. The soles of my feet clacked on the tile floor. I pulled up a stool, sat down, and pushed a twenty-dollar bill into the slot in the machine. It sucked it up on the first try. I kept another twenty handy for beers. On the first round not one seven or a single cherry came to rest in the squares. Nothing but fruit. Nothing that paid. But I stayed glued to my stool and kept right on betting.

  The waitress pulled me out of my trance. Only then did I look around and take in my surroundings. A shitty bar without a shred of character, white walls plastered with Budweiser posters, a jukebox that spat out any coins you put in it, and, at the back, a melamine bar in front of a mirror that looked ready to fall over. Two taps, a few bottles of liquor—barely a starter’s kit. Not a single customer. I ordered a glass of beer. She brought it on a tray. I paid with a twenty and left a big tip.

  I bet with the recklessness that steals over you as you ride out the initial surge of momentum. I nearly lost it all, then won my twenty dollars back, then lost it again, then doubled my money. My credits seesawed up and down on the counter in front of me. I felt like I was somehow swelling up all over. Between bets I’d take tiny sips of beer. When the bells lined up in a cross formation, I drained what was left in my glass and ordered another. For the next fifteen minutes, every bell would compound my initial bet. Time dilated, like every time I went on a winning streak. The following minutes would be long, drawn out, electric. I was borne up on powerful waves of euphoria. My heart was pumping lava, my eyes were melting in their orbits, contracted to two small burning orbs unable to see anything beyond the lucky sequences stacking one atop the next.

  Then it ended. I came back down to terra firma. I counted my wins and managed to pull myself away. It took a superhuman effort to turn away from the machine, like turning your back on the Garden of Eden. I printed my ticket and went to cash out at the bar. Two hundred and ten dollars. In a surfeit of enthusiasm I decided to do a shooter with the waitress, who was twice as old as me. She poured them without asking any questions, accustomed to stumblebums, crackpots, and sad sacks of every description.

  I went outside. The boulevard now seemed calm as a sea of ice. Noises reached me from afar, as if muted by endorphins. I retraced my steps to the apartment, reinvigorated as if I’d slept three days on end. I was singing at the top of my lungs along with my Walkman. The anxiousness that had crushed me all afternoon was gone. I was incandescent, blissful. A single star had risen in the sky and was shining its singular light on me.

  I returned to Vincent’s with my money in my pocket. I didn’t go out again that night. I read From Hell and drank two tall glasses of water, then turned out all the lights in the living room and stretched out on the sofa for the night wrapped up in a flannel blanket. It took a while to fall asleep. I tossed, and turned, and sweated before finally going under, after an hour or two, lulled to sleep by the bad movie playing in my agitated dreams. This slow comedown that always came on the heels of the violent ecstasy of a win was a familiar state. Twenty dollars, two-hundred and ten—it didn’t matter how much you won. That’s kind of the problem. For a gambler, the books just never balance.

  Chapter 7

  The ice cream stand was wedged between the Georges diner and the Club International video store. In summer we’d stop in after dinner or on our way home from renting a Nintendo game for the weekend. Squeezed into the tiny room was a soft-serve machine that roared like an engine, a counter with a cash register, and a refrigerated display case of ice cream buckets. I always got pistachio. It was so cramped I never failed to wonder why they’d jammed what looked like an old arcade game into a corner, where it didn’t seem to be doing much beyond taking up space sorely needed by customers waiting to order. Each side of the machine was painted with a big jack of spades, and on the screen, in eight-bit colour, a five-card hand refreshed at regular intervals. No one ever really played. Once, as I waited for my cone, I tried pushing a few buttons and my Mum told me to knock it off. She said it was a video game for grownups. The idea seemed preposterous. I thought it looked boring for a video game. Cards were boring to begin with, and turning them into a video game wouldn’t make it any more exciting. I stared at the screen, with its strawberry-red hearts and king of spades flickering weakly. It all looked so drab and pathetic next to Mega Man and Final Fantasy.

  In all the times we went for ice cream I only ever saw one person playing, a woman in her late forties. She was perched on a stool in front of the screen. Her legs were crossed and her elbows rested on the stool back. She was smoking Players. I could tell from the smell. One of my uncles who spent a lot of time at our house smoked the same brand. She was sipping coffee in a Styrofoam cup. Her hair was creped and her wrists weighed down by bracelets that jingled together with every move, and she was tanned like a snowbird home for Christmas. The woman kept one eye half-closed to shield it from cigarette smoke. Every once in a while she’d press one of the buttons, unhurriedly, as if acting only after long and careful thought.

  Just when we were about to leave with our ice cream cones, she picked up her yellow plastic lighter and pack of smokes and stepped down from her perch. Her flip-flops snapped on the tile floor. She spoke to the counter boy in a gruff voice. He handed her some money. She slid it into her purse. I asked my mum what was happening. She said the woman must have won. I took a long l
ast look at the arcade game and we went out the door with our ice cream cones.

  In time those early machines were replaced with new ones by Loto-Québec. The new generation looked more like slot machines than arcade games. Not the 100% mechanical kind with a big handle you pulled, like grandfather clocks in their shiny red lacquered metal case with a glass screen where you beheld twirling fruits and number sevens in the vivid hues of billiard balls. No: The first generation of machines Loto-Québec rolled out in bars all over the province looked like a video game version of the one-armed bandit you found at casinos. At the very least, they possessed the same hypnotic power. In the early 2000s they started cropping up everywhere. There they were one day, lined up along the walls of bars and taverns like pop machines.

  The games would scroll by on the screen, each in its own radiant colours: crimson red, acid yellow, fluorescent green. It was enough to draw in gamblers and get them onto a stool in front of the machine. Just one game. That siren call was enough to reel me in and get my own ass parked on a stool in front of the machine for countless games. I’d insert a bill and it would be converted to credits, just like the way you got a certain number of lives in video games. Loto-Québec changed that over the years as well: it made it too easy to forget how much we were going to lose. Then, you chose a game on the touch screen, and the plastic buttons would light up like the dashboard on the Nostromo in Alien. You could set your bet and launch the game either by pressing the buttons or the squares on the screen. You could even bring the digital spin to a premature halt. Loto-Québec nixed that as well. It gave players a misleading impression that they could influence the game’s random outcome, and that made the anti-gambling warnings above the screen even more hypocritical. The Loto-Québec machines took anything, from hundred-dollar bills right down to the last quarter you could dig out of your pocket. Because on those machines, unlike their ancestors in the ice-cream stands and corner stores, you could play lots of different games: Keno, Poker, 7s Wild, Crazy Bells, and plenty more. On some games the minimum bet was just a nickel. But no bet is so small it can’t fuel the fantasy of new beginnings. I’ve won $184 after popping a single toonie in the slot. In the early years after Loto-Québec took over the VLT racket, machines started showing up all over the place. Today you don’t find as many in bars. I’m pretty sure Loto-Québec has changed the algorithms so the wins are smaller and less frequent. It’s not a theory I’m about to put to the test. There are things I’ll talk about in this story I’d never be stupid enough to try again, even after all these years. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter how much you win, or how often; every gambler pays the same price.