Fog, a Novel

by Rana Bose

  Rana Bose

  Fog

  A Novel

  Baraka Books

  Montréal

  PRAISE FOR FOG

  “Suspenseful and sublime, Fog is a powerful novel of intrigue and love, family and friendship in which fog is a feeling ‘like a tenderness of the soul.’ Grounded in place with exquisite detail and held aloft by an inspiring worldview, this is a story with unforgettable characters whose entanglements lead us through the magically rendered streets of Montréal and across continents in search of adventure and truth.”—Cora Siré, author of Behold Things Beautiful and other books.

  “Sometimes the fog is a moist mist which beautifully frames our deepest intimacies, sometimes it is a translucent curtain drawn to mask the pain of exile and displacement, and sometimes it is an obscuring darkness where all moral movement seems impossible. But Rana Bose’s characters join together to find new ways forward. They emerge from the fog by recognizing the history of ‘the Main’ while seeing it anew.” —Michael Springate, author of The Beautiful West & The Beloved of God.

  “... suspenseful, conflicting, mysterious and hard to put down. (…) A literate mystery/thriller set in Montreal (on ’the Main’) with side trips to Calcutta and Kandahar, this is a superbly written book about a neighbourhood, friendships, justice and belonging. Highly recommended.”—James Fisher, The Miramichi Rader

  OTHER BOOKS BY RANA BOSE

  Recovering Rude

  The Fourth Canvas

  The Death of Abbie Hoffman and other Plays

  Five or Six Characters in Search of Toronto

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  © Baraka Books

  ISBN 978-1-77186-184-7 pbk; 978-1-77186-189-2 epub; 978-1-77186-190-8 pdf; 978-1-77186-191-5 mobi pocket

  Cover and back cover photos by Jacques Nadeau

  Book Design by Folio infographie

  Editing and proofreading: Robin Philpot, Arielle Aaronson, Nick Fonda

  Legal Deposit, 2nd quarter 2019

  Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec

  Library and Archives Canada

  Published by Baraka Books of Montreal

  6977, rue Lacroix

  Montréal, Québec H4E 2V4

  Telephone: 514 808-8504

  info@barakabooks.com

  Printed and bound in Quebec

  Trade Distribution & Returns

  Canada and the United States

  Independent Publishers Group

  1-800-888-4741 (IPG1);

  orders@ipgbook.com

  We acknowledge the support from the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (SODEC) and the Government of Quebec tax credit for book publishing administered by SODEC.

  “In the most absolute tranquillity or in the midst of tumultuous events, in safety or danger, in innocence or corruption, we are a crowd of others.”

  –Elena Ferrante

  For Lisa Siobhan, Siraj Sandino, Durga Polashi and Willis

  Chapter One

  Bone Crunch

  I went up the stairs, all three floors, slowly. My palm slid up on the curved and recessed mahogany bannister. As I turned the corner of the last flight, my heart stopped. I noticed a light bioscoping out through the keyhole in my apartment door. My palm gripped the bannister. My insides lit up. A stimulus of sorts that combines chill with warmth, the knee-weakening urgency. I could describe it in so many ways. Hormones zipped by, like Formula One cars on the hairpin turns of L’île Notre-Dame. Then the light was gone. I was hopeful that Myra had reached home before me and had decided on a surprise, probably something totally crazy! I went slowly up to the door. No noise. I was going to turn the tables on her. Yes! The door was open.

  I pushed it open and stuck my hand slowly into the dark gap, to turn on the lights. I had just about reached the tip of the switch when a dry, parched, callused hand grabbed my wrist and wrenched me in and my face hit the door frame on the left-hand side of my forehead, above the eye. I stumbled in and only had time to say “Myra?” Red was already dripping down my temple. Then something very heavy landed on my head. As I fell to the floor, my neck to the side, the room circled and I saw two guys standing over me with what looked like large padded baseball bats. One of them was young and the other was heavy-set. They were both grunting. The younger fellow had a Cantinflas look on his face. As I lay on the ground, lifting my hands up tentatively, with them towering above me, I felt a steel-toed boot plunge into my stomach, then another penetrated my ribs. I heard the bones crunch inwards like a rattan chair giving way. I felt my lungs were now incomplete. Non-functional.

  I must have passed out, because I don’t remember squat about anything after that.

  My landlord found me at midnight in a mound of freshly piled snow, about eighty centimetres high, at the bottom of the fire escape behind my kitchen. There were multiple fractures to my legs. Several bones in my collar and ribs had cracked. My jaw and both of my hands had also been broken. It was the depth of the recently fallen snow that had astonishingly saved my life. Nothing had broken open my skull or penetrated my heart. I had committed suicide, they decided.

  When I awoke, I figured I was strung up, my whole head bandaged and no sign of Myra. I could make sounds through swollen lips, but I didn’t know what I was saying. I was making liquid noises as the shapes in the room morphed around me like globules in pink and blue. I saw the map of the African continent distended on the ceiling, like rubber mats, down the walls. Like plastic paint that had dried. I think I said Sierra Leone or Congo repeatedly, for no reason, but the specific word didn’t actually matter. Or maybe I said Côte d’Ivoire or Leon Spinks, Maradona or Kunta Kinte or rubber, robber or leather, lather, diamond and also strangely, enough, Finkelstein, which came out as Ficklestheeen—whatever was easier to push out of my mouth. I was gurgling out a strange language, a vocabulary that meant something to me, and I was engrossed in the way that I could swish the words around in my mouth, like mouthwash, and then release them from the peculiarity of the sounds, themselves. Motor neurons inside my mouth were propelling unheard-of phrases with my suddenly acquired acumen and fluidity in political geography, linguistics and sports heroes.

  At some point Myra’s face appeared above the little hole through which I could see. She had tears and a smile. I knew then that I had survived and was in good hands. The globules were actually nurses milling around. Their voices sounded like those of nuns in a monastery. The lights in the room flickered like candles in a cloister. Myra brought her lips close to my pouted arse-hole-shaped mouth and repeated Royal Vic! Royal Vic! I became totally aware. I was in the same blessed hospital in which I had been born. I was reminded of the picture of my father holding me wrapped in a white towel, a few seconds after my mum popped me out. I had made a lot of noise then, too, or so they tell me. And then I was put in a warm incubator bed, as I was born a blue baby.

  I looked around and saw what I thought were prisoners, lined up against the wall. Waving, smiling from a distance. Family.

  Myra, her father, my parents and grandparents were all there. I had a nose tube that whispered cold oxygen into my lungs and then on to my mixed-race brains. On either side of my bed were green and blue monitors on which healthy sine waves sauntered by. I saw everything through a monocular device that some kind nurse had enabled for me, over my left eye. My mouth was also surrounded by a bandage, like in a kind of pouch.

  Myra sat close and said, “Don’t
say a word, babe. You were not trying to kill yourself. Okay? We know that. Don’t say a word.” Sierra Leone I said, Sierra Leone. That stayed in my head. Then Myra’s father whispered into my ear, “Break and enter. That’s our story. Break and enter. Get well, buddy. There’s a lot to do.” And recover I did. Like a bolt from the skies, that comes down like a zig-zag in cartoons. Every day, one bandage went out and so did my infatuation with Africa, sliding down the ceiling to the fluorescent-lit wall; boxers kept drifting away, Finkelstein, nuns, candles were all slowly gone.

  For the next seven days, Myra rarely left the hospital. When she did, however briefly, she ensured her father was sitting next to me. My grandfather, RK, came nearly every day, as did my parents. My father and mother alternated evenings. My bed was often surrounded, as if somehow the family had sensed it was necessary to encircle me. Myra’s dad assumed direction; he wrote down schedules and organized what can only be called a vigil. I made a few feeble protests, wanting to be alone, but they thought a twenty-four-hour presence was a better idea.

  I was told that the police were preparing to question me. Apparently, they believed my much-too-eager landlord, who had spread the word that I had tried to kill myself by jumping off the fire escape, because I had recently been fired from my job. I tried to make it adamantly clear that I hadn’t jumped and didn’t want to die.

  I awoke one morning to see Mrs. Meeropol standing at the foot of my bed. For a moment, I thought she was standing at the top of the stairs, impatient for a long discussion and ready to make tea. She came around the top and pressed her palm to my forehead. “I’ve heard about your alleged jump. I don’t believe it. I told Nat and he says he’s thinking of you all the time.”

  I accepted Gerry’s proposed idea of a break and enter. All we had to do was state that some money and a watch were missing. So, the story came out that I had resisted a break-in with such courage and dexterity that the robbers had thrown me down the fire escape in a state of induced terror. I liked that story.

  For the first time, I noticed that Myra’s dad was actually a stocky fellow. While everyone was busy I motioned him aside and tried to tell him through my pouted lips that he’d find the scribbled pages with the suspect’s handwriting in my pant pocket. Suspect. The Lady. The Gestapo chief. He clearly understood, even though I wasn’t sure I was making any sense. He nodded and replied, “I have it already and her i’s match. She makes a circle instead of a dot. It’s her all right.” Fuckin-A! He was quick, that guy, making it into my pockets before the cops. Maybe Myra had told him where to look.

  I felt enormously relieved that the evidence I had so painfully gathered was safe and in good hands. I immediately demanded a dose of “porphine,” that mind-bending drug made from poppies growing in the blue-green hills of Afghanistan. How Kandahar was indeed marshalling every move. The nurse prodded the syringe into a Y-tube next to the bag of dextrose draining into my veins. Before the lights went out, Myra said, “Babe, we’re gonna assault their headquarters. It’s gonna be war!”

  The pain disappeared for six or seven hours. The war lingered on. I again demanded the “porphine” though my muzzled mouth. The nurse, an elderly Barbadian woman, told me, “Honee dear, now you don’t hesitate to ask for pain killahs! Ras! Anytime!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I concurred silently.

  I had lots of time to think, although it may not have always been coherent. I wondered why Corinthe had put together a hit team to take me out only a few months after I had joined the company. Why was she panicking?

  She needn’t have worried—I wasn’t about to tell the cops anything. They came and dutifully asked me questions for about two hours. They wanted to know if I could recognize anyone from a file of pictures they had brought with them. I didn’t see anyone even vaguely resembling the out-of-focus images I had of my assailants. Then they wanted to know if I had ever received or bought stolen goods. That amused me, but it hurt too much to smile, so I just swayed my head from side to side. They smiled and winked because they had seen Russell Peters do the Asian bobbing head thing at the Bell Centre. They eventually thanked me for my time and left, mighty pleased.

  My mother made a habit of sitting next to my bed. She gently ran her hands over my chest while tears rolled down her cheeks. She’d do that while my grandmother prowled outside the room in a new pair of sneakers and grossly out-of-style Sears slacks, monitoring the corridor as if ready to kick-box any unwanted intruder.

  I was simultaneously in pain and happy. For once I felt my life had meaning; that the people I loved had come together. There was, for the first time, a collective action being undertaken by the whole family. The people who were dear to me were like warm candles glowing inside. I don’t mean anything religious, other than that I felt their illuminating presence inside me, and the origin of their light lay in each of them. Finally, I had begun to discover what I could do and not simply be an observer.

  I was in the hospital almost six weeks. They moved me to a single room for the last two even though I didn’t have the insurance to cover it. I was grateful to Myra’s dad, Mr. Banks. Afterwards, I was sent home with instructions to follow the rehabilitation program administered in a community centre in Notre Dame de Grâce. The local clinic assigned a nurse to me for weekly check-ups.

  My new place of residence was a super-secret apartment along the southern edges of the city near my grandparents’ condo, and it was announced to friends and anyone else who asked that I was recuperating in Florida. My personal insurance and the Quebec Provincial Insurance had come through with a modest compensation package, including assistance for victims of crime. I was to get a yet-to-be-determined lump sum along with one thousand dollars a month.

  Myra had packed all my belongings, closed out my apartment, then closed out hers as well before moving in. Nobody other than immediate family and the Health Services knew where we were staying. We were now far from the Main. Something about that dimly registered in my mind, but I suppose all enigmas fade eventually, and you can’t salvage what no longer exists. Even though I doubt she would ever leave the Main, Mrs. Meeropol would understand that thought.

  I wanted to visit her as soon as I could. I felt badly that I had left her in the dark. She suffered silently. It was the fog. The pall that hung down low, the stories of wave upon wave of migrating nomads, settling and then moving on, opening stores and closing, dogs that stayed unleashed or remained tethered, business that brought in monthly family income and had their dreams destroyed in no time, poets and performers who carved their presence with initials on polished bar tables and then moved to LA. at the first opportunity. Indecision about staying, taking sides or wading in. The wringing of the hands in sadness and anger. The elusiveness of being away and being at home. The fog of being at war—being involved without conviction.

  As in the hospital, my mother came to sit and run her hands gently over my chest. I’ve learned that is what mothers do: sit by you and comfort you and watch out for you. Every day she brought a dish she had made. As my jaws attained greater amplitude and wavelength, she introduced meats. I was definitely requiring proteins, she said.

  After another month, my plasters were removed at the community clinic. I didn’t require surgery on either my legs or my face. The ribs, too, were healing on their own. In fact, after only two months I was able to limp around the apartment and begin physio. Myra bought a small second-hand car to help get me there. I found out later that my parents had helped her with it.

  During the long afternoons, I stared at the ceiling. Gazing up, I gradually recovered the image of the thin, hideous-looking guy I had first seen against the ceiling hovering over me and pounding away. Cantinflas. There was something unique about that Mexican actor I couldn’t quite define, but his dark outline became clearer and clearer each time he landed a blow. It was strange; I’d raise my hands in a protective gesture while the blow came closer and closer, like in a slow-motion sequence. At some poi
nt, as I played that memory back and forth in my mind, I finally realized he had a missing section to his lower lip. That was it! Yes, I remembered his lower lip was cut and kind of tucked in on one side, like a section had been sliced away.

  My grandfather, RK, was a great sketcher and he tried, based on my increasingly accurate descriptions, to capture the likeness of the thug who had busted me up. Finally, he achieved it, a wonderful composite that the Montreal Police would never see. Gerry Banks did, and so did Myra; they both studied it before they began to look for him.

  Chapter Two

  Debris from the Skies

  There were two incidents. In mid-air, as it were. Without warning. Several years apart. Incomprehensible, but inextricably associated. Like two howitzers launched from the same pod in different directions. Leaving a trail behind that drifted together.

  First, there was the plane crash, several years ago. Debris fell from the sky and spread in a lazy descent over the acquiescent countryside. A freak encounter with Myra, under most peculiar circumstances, introduced me to the story of this crash that happened several years ago in northern Quebec. “A small plane only,” she had informed me, with her bristling brown eyebrows raised in a distracted manner. “But, deep stuff! Big with implications.” I knew nothing about it. A well-known painter had been blown to bits, she added. Minor parts of the plane were retrieved and an investigation was carried out, but it was never established why the plane had gone down. It was proposed that it could have been engine failure or an unusual wind, or both, and the case had been closed. Strange indeed, she had asserted. But there was more to come.

  Now, the second incident.

  He was dissected by a missile from a drone, today’s eliminator of choice. Erased. My one friend from kindergarten on. It was not on the news. The email arrived the next morning addressed to me. His mother stood at the top of the stairs in silence, wrapped in her old red shawl. I went up the stairs, my left knee grazing the wall. Mrs. Meeropol put her arms out feebly. I put my arms around her and for the first time we embraced. Dust, bones, fascia, steel parts, charred skin had been deeply implanted in a small crater on a mountain pass, where Christiane Amanpour had left her CNN mark with her O-sounding inflection on every word she used. Bora! Bora! She said with a felicific howl. A thousand arcing curves of GI piss had been jeeringly deposited on the holy book of a religion. The absurdity of a new generation of airborne freedom fighters, bounty hunters for democracy, had become the order of the day.