The Dishwasher

by Stéphane Larue

  “What’s your name? I’m Mélissa.”

  Lauryn Hill’s friend was holding out her hand to me. I introduced myself.

  “Come again?”

  I said my name again, a little louder, and she said once again that it was nice to meet me, though she hadn’t had any better luck catching it the second time.

  “So you’re Greg’s friend?”

  “Well, we work together at the restaurant.”

  I heard Bébert telling Jonathan to take it easy on the drinks, those pills wouldn’t make him invincible.

  “You a waiter?”

  Her big dark eyes shone under her bangs.

  I didn’t find her as pretty as her friend Lauryn Hill, but it still seemed inconceivable that a girl like that would start talking to me out of the blue.

  “No . . . a cook,” I said, hoping the guys wouldn’t hear me.

  “Cool. I like a guy who knows how to cook.”

  She must have thought I was older. Then she asked me to dance with her, but I wasn’t drunk enough to say yes.

  “Too bad.”

  She winked at me with a little laugh, and went off to meet her friends. The vodka was going down easier and easier.

  Jonathan was starting to fade and slump over. He focused on something on the varnished tabletop, a reflection or maybe a mirage, the shimmer of a fainting ghost. I asked Bébert what was wrong with Bonnie today.

  “She’s partying a little too hard these days.”

  I took a big sip of ice-cold vodka. It went down like water.

  “Is it serious with the guy at the Roy Bar?”

  He looked at me with a face that was half surprised, half mocking.

  “Why you want to know, man?”

  “Uh. Just to know.”

  He started laughing, like chainsaw firing up, and lit a smoke. I took another sip. This time it burned. It was all I could do not to cough, and to keep my calm. I coughed into a clenched hand. My eyes filled with water.

  “Don’t go there, man.”

  “Go where?”

  “You really got your eye on her?”

  His laugh had sputtered out, leaving only the trace of a sardonic grin.

  “Bonnie? Well . . . uh . . .”

  “Stop it. You’re not the right guy for her.”

  I looked at Jonathan, who looked lost in meditation. He was on the verge of passing out.

  When he held in his smoke to talk, Bébert always seemed a touch more serious.

  “Is that what you were asking Jonathan about just now?”

  “What?”

  “You know, about Bonnie. . .”

  “Nah, dude. We were talking about his girlfriend.”

  Greg came back to sit down again, looking pumped. He leaned over the table, poured himself another drink, and started talking to Bébert. I pretended not to listen.

  “Tell your buddy to leave the door unlocked. If everything works out we’ll leave him ten. And tell him if anything goes wrong he better forget about us. Never heard of us. ’Cause we don’t exist.” Bébert nodded a couple times, to the beat.

  “All right! Cheers, B-Bert,” said Greg, filling up our glasses. “You too, Tom Araya.”

  He raised his glass. We drank a while. The vodka was going down. Each new sip tasted better than the one before. Greg got up after that and went back to working the room. I was starting to get seriously loaded, but not as bad as Jonathan, who was more or less sleeping in the booth. Bébert and I decided it to call it a night. He got up. I did too, careful not to knock over the glasses on the table. He took his coat from the booth. He looked around for Ziggy and Kasper, and said bye by touching his temple with his index and middle finger. We helped Jonathan stand and managed to get him out of the club without his state showing too much and before he threw up all over himself. He was cooperative and chattered away unintelligibly. We put him in a taxi. Bébert paid the fare in advance, and we went for late-night falafel.

  We headed up Saint-Denis toward Amir. Walked by a twenty-four-hour deli that I’d never noticed before. Through the fogged-up window I saw a man whose appearance held me riveted. I let Bébert go ahead and slowed down. He wore a black suit and had long, straight black hair like an Asian woman, tucked behind his ears and falling over his shoulders. He sat across from a beautiful blond girl, my age or maybe a touch older, with a pit bull’s collar around her neck. A bowl of soup sat steaming in front of her. Her eyes were swollen with tears. She rubbed her face with a hand, as if trying to get the better of a persistent itch, or stop crying. He had an elbow on the table and his face resting in his hand, with a cigarette between his index and middle fingers. His skin was deathly pale, maybe from the fluorescent lighting. The girl’s soup was untouched. The young woman started talking, gesturing with her hands. That was when he turned toward me. Scarcely six feet separated us, and the glass was half fogged-over. His cheeks bore visible scars from burns, or maybe knife marks, it was hard to tell which. His eyes disappeared into their orbits and it looked like his entire temples were covered with black ink, or tar, which blended in with the fabric of his jacket. The guy looked to my right. I followed his gaze and I jumped a little. Bébert was standing next to me on the sidewalk. He’d turned back and grabbed me by the arm.

  “Dude, don’t stare at people like that.”

  I snapped out of it. We took off with our hands in our pockets, but I couldn’t help looking back. The blond girl gave me the finger.

  The line at Amir seemed interminable, probably because we were so hungry. I ordered two pitas, and Bébert had one with garlic potatoes. We took our food to go, and started eating right out of the bag.

  We went by the deli again. All that was left was the bowl of soup. That was when I started thinking about our paycheques, which came tomorrow. And about the casino. Apparently it was open all night. I could make way more there than at the machines. Bébert disrupted my train of thought.

  “Still thirsty? Come have a beer at my place.”

  The wet cold was sapping my will to wait for the night bus to Ahuntsic, and I didn’t want to blow another twenty on anything that wasn’t a taxi to the casino.

  “C’mon, make up your mind. I’m cold.”

  I followed Bébert to his house. He lived on Boyer between Mont-Royal and Saint-Joseph, a part of the Plateau where the streets all look the same.

  We walked into a long narrow ground-floor apartment with low ceilings. The wood floor creaked. The mess all around clashed with the carved baseboards and solid wood doors. Bébert’s roommate was sitting at a computer, working on a mixing program with DJ headphones on, his desk heaped with stained coffee cups, crushed cans of Milwaukee’s Best, and an ashtray overflowing with roaches and butts.

  All around the living room lay bits of plywood covered with high-contrast graffiti portraits. The facial proportions were clumsy, and graphically speaking it was uninspired; pretty bad, really. When he saw I was checking them out, Bébert told me they were his. I said they had attitude; he told me to fuck off. He crossed the living room to the kitchen. I sat there waiting. I heard him open the fridge.

  “Hey Big, I thought you were at the Circus tonight,” he bellowed.

  His roommate took off his headphones.

  “Huh?”

  “I thought you were spinning at the Circus tonight,” Bébert said again, as he reappeared with three cans of beer.

  He tossed me one.

  “Want a beer?”

  His roommate shook his head and stretched.

  “Forget that. Nate did it. I’m way too messed up. I haven’t slept for like three days. Your buddy’s shit is the bomb. Nothing like Landry’s Doves and Blue Jays.”

  Bébert laughed as he cracked open his beer. I think he drained it in two sips, then started on the one he’d offered his roommate. I sprawled out on the couch, he took a chewed-up easy
chair. MusiquePlus was playing on mute. Bébert rolled a joint, saying he’d be sous-chef by next week. Séverine was going to fire Christian, tomorrow at the latest, he thought. I listened, woozy from the alcohol and the apartments’ dry heat. Before I could even drink half a beer I started fading fast. But I forced myself to stay awake. The roommate played Bébert the piece he was working on. On TV Claude Rajotte was eviscerating the first album by Ozzy Osbourne’s daughter. I fell asleep, fully dressed, on the sofa, in clothes reeking of tobacco, detergent, seafood, and cooking oil.

  Chapter 17

  My Cegep was a fortress—the Tower of Orthanck, or the Citadel of the Autarch—and as I approached I felt like Severian the apprentice torturer before he was banished to the Matachin tower. I went out for some air in the walkway in front of the main entrance, In Flames in my headphones, Walkman cranked to ten. Under the concrete overhang, students were smoking between classes, chatting away in small groups about the impending end-of-semester parties, nights out at the Saint-Supplice or the Conneries, exams, and of course their past and future weekends. It all seemed to be unfolding in some faraway land. Their mirthful excitement irked me. My coffee burned the roof of my mouth. It was all I could keep down.

  I felt old—no, not exactly old but spent, jetlagged like a traveller teleported in from another world.

  I was killing time in the hope of regaining some composure or semblance of will to live, angling my face toward the cold early-winter sun as if it were a matter of photosynthesis, when two guys I knew saw me. I’d met Benoît and Éric in page layout class last winter. We had philosophy class together as well. I’d helped Benoît revise his final paper. Nice guy, basically illiterate.

  They were smoking with two or three girls. One of them, who was kind of chubby with dreads, was telling a story with gestures that made everyone laugh. The two guys came up to me with a smile in the corner of their mouths, as if they’d stumbled upon a freak of nature or a revenant. I took out my earbuds.

  “You look like death warmed over,” said Éric.

  They laughed, and asked if I’d be there for the end-of-term party tonight.

  “Nah, I don’t think so.”

  “Did you hand in your assignment to Pierre?”

  I took a sip of coffee and answered.

  “That’s what I’m here for.”

  I had a frog in my throat. I looked at the group of girls they’d been with thirty seconds ago. Then I pictured Greg’s friends. Then the students in classrooms, sitting in rows. Acetates on overhead projectors, the cafeteria, the notebooks. None of it seemed real.

  “Anyway, it’s been a while, man,” Benoît said.

  He was warming his hands in the sleeves of his snowboard jacket, his nose in a neck warmer.

  “I’ve been busy. New job.”

  “You okay?”

  I checked the time on my pager and got up.

  “I’ll see you guys at exams,” I said, and put my headphones back in.

  I cleared a path between them. My stomach was in a knot, the centre of my forehead a focal point of pain. I threw my coffee in a garbage can. Faces shone all around like phosphorescence. My eyes hurt. I joined the crowd of students swarming around the glass doors, inhabited by a focused energy that felt totally foreign to me. The semester was coming to an end. I ran through the previous night in my head, then the previous week. It was like glimpsing the memories of another person, a life completely removed from this sunlit, diurnal existence. It might have been the Cegep itself, with its series of assignments to be dutifully submitted. All of it felt decidedly like someone else’s business. I seemed to be trapped in a single long hallucinatory night, a frenetic realm in which time was forever expanding and contracting.

  I made my way through the overheated lobby. Crossed the crowded agora, with its stench of wet boots and burnt cheese emanating from the ducts. Members of the Student Association were working the crowd, exhorting students to donate to Christmas hampers. A big redheaded guy from the improv team yelled slogans in a nasal voice. I could hear it all over the In Flames and the pounding headache that seemed about to get worse. The guy was wearing boxer shorts and a Santa hat. I walked toward the escalators. My confidence was eroding. Usually I had a facility for self-delusion, and no compunction about lying to myself. Today I felt totally empty and exposed.

  Pierre, who taught my illustration class, met me in the office he shared with his colleagues. He pulled up a chair and invited me to sit down. His hands were clasped, his forearms rested on his thighs. He looked disappointed. We were getting to know each other fairly well. He’d taught three of my classes, and in each one I’d been outstanding. At least that’s what he’d told me. He looked at me a minute, as if he were sizing up the situation and endeavouring to choose his words with care. His usually warm smile was nowhere to be found. His face was expressionless. I didn’t feel good at all.

  “I wasn’t expecting this from you,” said Pierre.

  I couldn’t look him in the eye for more than a second or two.

  “You’re gonna have to start taking this more seriously. It’s the end of the semester.”

  He turned around and fumbled with the things on his desk. There was a stack of student portfolios, with tracing paper sticking out the sides.

  “It’s not fair for the other students if I give you another extension.”

  “I know. That’s not why I’m here.”

  I screwed up my courage. I was still burping up last night’s vodka, mixed in with the bad coffee. He looked at me, waiting for more. I glanced at the pile of assignments, the metal desk drawer, the keyring, the cubicles and suspended ceiling.

  “I came to tell you I won’t be able to hand anything in.”

  He looked at me more searchingly, with a seriousness I’d never before seen in him. I remained silent. Apart from a sharp pain between my eyes, which was starting to throb in my forehead, I didn’t feel a thing: not shame, not nervousness, nothing. I felt heavy and limp.

  “You can’t finish. Or you don’t want to?”

  Someone was hanging out in the hallway. I heard the loud laugh of a girl through the door, wishing someone Merry Christmas. I rubbed my forehead with a moist hand, without answering.

  “You’ll have to make some serious decisions. If you don’t get it together, you’ll be kicked out of the program.”

  Three months ago that possibility would have spurred me to action; now it left me impassive. All this would happen later. Right now I was trapped in a hermetically sealed racing car, speeding toward the ravine.

  “I know.”

  “So you’re not going to hand in anything at all.”

  The disappointment in his voice was hard to take. I felt like crying.

  “No.”

  “And you don’t have anything else to say to me.”

  “No, nothing.”

  He crossed his arms and watched me get up.

  “Know what?”

  I shrugged my shoulders and looked down.

  He hesitated a moment before going on.

  “I’ve taught lots of young people like you. I’ve seen people who were even better than you quit halfway through. Maybe you can tell me why so many of the most talented people are so happy to rest on their laurels?”

  My hand was on the doorknob. I wasn’t even trying to answer his question. I was looking somewhere between his office and my shoes, absorbed by the patterns in the polished granite.

  “I hope you’ll give it some thought over the holidays.”

  “I’ll try,” I said, lifting up my head.

  I think it came out as a whisper. Pierre put his glasses back on. He got back to work. I left the room in silence. Though I was sad, something else had been unleashed in me. I felt lighter, almost liberated. But it didn’t last. The stress and anxiety just came pouring right back. I thought about Malik, and then the guys from Deat
hgaze. I glanced at my pager, chased all these thoughts from my mind, and disappeared.

  Chapter 18

  Marie-Lou worked slinging beer at a tavern on Rue Ontario, close to my Cegep. She’d start in the afternoon and stay on through the after-work rush when the place filled up with broke students there for the beer specials. Obviously I never played the machines when she was working.

  Marie-Lou and I had lost touch during my first year of Cegep, when she’d gone to work in Field, B.C. Then, last semester, we’d started seeing each other again more often. After I quit my renovation job at the end of the summer, I’d started spending a few nights a week at her place. From that point on we were inseparable. When I got into trouble and couldn’t pay my share of the rent to Rémi she’d offered to lend me money without a second thought. I took her money. I promised to pay her back right away. Then I got right back to gambling again.

  A few weeks later, when she realized I was even deeper in debt than before, I had to tell her where all my money was going. She reamed me out worse than anyone ever had before. She told me she couldn’t trust me anymore. She told me I was weak. That if I kept it up I’d end up all alone in the world. At the end, when she saw the state she’d put me in, she just made me promise to never gamble again. And I’d promised. I promised and I actually believed myself at the time. I believed my battle was won, that she’d given me an antidote to the poison in my head. Not even Malik had that kind of power over me. Marie-Lou didn’t kick me out that night. She told me I’d always be welcome at her place, but that I absolutely had to stop fucking up. It was the end of September, the days were still warm, and she invited me for a beer on a patio somewhere. We talked about other stuff, my comic projects, the social sciences program she wanted to start up again at Cegep, the Virginie Despentes book she was finishing. Then we went home drunk and watched Donnie Darko together and ate a bag of brownies. But the next day I could tell something was broken between us. Or maybe something was broken in me, maybe I was ashamed and just couldn’t live with the fact that she knew. Four days later I was gambling again.