Fog, a Novel

by Rana Bose

  “And what’s with you man! What’s your story?” He said that with a weird smile, as if he was reading my thoughts.

  And then I told Nat about the lady who had delivered the courier package to me, some twelve years ago, the day before an airplane crash. I filled in all the details and when I finished there was silence. He stared at me. He had come to a complete halt. And then!

  Suddenly, “Fuck! That was an IED she handed to you, man! An IED! Like, are you joshing me or what?”

  Everything in my life was connecting: Myra, the lady with the parcel, my chiro with the diamond dust painting, the plane crash. My life was connected to all of it and it was all disconnected as well and I needed him to understand. Nat was the only one I could connect with.

  “I put it on the plane. I’ve hardly slept since.” There was a long silence. He stared into my eyes. I could see a thin film of water accumulate around the edge of his eyes.

  “It could have blown up right there, man!” His voice had weakened.

  “Yeah, but it didn’t.”

  He whispered softly, “Are you going to the cops or what?” His face had now settled down to a malleable landscape. His eyebrows were lifted. He gripped the table softly and leaned towards me.

  “No, I don’t think so, Nat. Not sure,” I replied. “I’m pulled in two directions. The cops gave it up as a weather-related mishap. Why did they do that? Was it a cover up? Who was behind it? But this was a small plane. Not a big target like the Air India plane and the tapes that got erased.” My throat dried as I tried to explain. “I want to kind of sleuth around on my own, you know, when I’m not busy. See what I can find out. But I also want to know the girl better.”

  “I’m with you, man. Lemme look around. Maybe I can find her.” A smile then spread on his face. We left it like that. I felt good I knew him so well. And that he cared. Knowing him was like having an accomplice without an agenda. Someone who understood with his eyes and took decisive action without being noticed, without being told.

  In the weeks that followed, I maintained my routine of working four full days at the courier company, racking up a total of thirty-two hours per week, and then spending a day hanging about in the cafés, taking notes. Broken china pieces moved in slow motion through the air around me, turning, twisting, taunting, almost fitting and then separating to float again before looking for a different mating piece. There was a design to all of it and I would fit them together: a mesmerizing snowfall on a painting on a wall, a receptionist smacking her gums with disdain, a lady in shades with a Mercedes in an arrogant hurry, a chiropractor flying to the Caribbean without notice, waybills with invented names, explosions in mid-air, and a cold case shut mercilessly.

  In the evenings, I walked around the neighbourhood, trying to avoid Boulevard St-Laurent. I’d walk through the back alleys where Chinese, Vietnamese, Greek, Polish, Algerian, and Québécois cooks, bakers, orange peelers and onion choppers, sous-chefs and cleaver-wielders took cigarette breaks sitting on the steps, where cyclists whizzed by recklessly, where gloves, needles, emptied prophylactic foils and silly stuff like that all rolled about together near dumpsters, and spray can artists smiled at you before they bombed nondescript brick walls with bulbous alphabet bottoms that looked like they were humping each other in a continuous procession. I continued through corner parks, past dépanneurs where orange-haired Thai waiters stood with muscular shoulders, looked up at the balconies to see chubby Portuguese women with stumpy elbows leaning against wrought-iron rails, always seemingly disgusted by the goings-on down below.

  Every such encounter was good for my soul, forcing me to rethink coordinates, helping me slow the constant swirl of broken china.

  Sometimes a door flung open and I’d see a busboy rush out to expertly throw several garbage bags into an open dumpster before rushing away again. In the unexpected light, I’d see at the edge of the parking lot a couple against a doorway, skirt lifted above the hips and pants folding around the knees.

  Chapter Five

  The Way It Happened at the Majestic

  It happened as arranged.

  “Bed and breakfast, you come and you go, you pay and you stay, no make trouble, no make nonsense.”

  Mrs. Karamanlis runs the small hotel between Avenue Coloniale and St-Laurent, one block north of Avenue du Mont-Royal. It has twenty rooms on three floors, some with attached bathrooms, though most without, and is more like an auberge than a hotel, which doesn’t stop it from being called The Hôtel Majestic. Perhaps Mrs. Karamanlis thinks the lobby is majestic. It is certainly elaborate. The furniture at the front—for the space is large—has an art deco influence, and yet as one makes one’s way toward the back, the furniture, if one is in a generous mood, can be considered Victorian. There the sunlight streams in at a sharp angle from small, high windows in two recessed alcoves.

  Recently, an Italian friend from the neighbourhood sent me a link to a video of a hotel in Venice in which he stayed. I think the Hôtel Majestic has an identical sense of fading incoherence.

  Mrs. Karamanlis sits at the far end of the lobby, staring into the doorway like a jail warden. Usually there is no place to eat and no food is served, but in the morning—briefly—appears a breakfast table with croissants, Danish pastries, muffins, two pots of coffee, one decaffeinated, and a pot of tea. Everyone pays for breakfast. There’s a helper of Portuguese origin who looks like Susan Boyle before the makeover. She appears and disappears from behind the curtain grunting and sweating. Every day she serves breakfast, tidies the rooms, changes the linen, and cleans the washrooms. A young man comes by every second day to vacuum the corridors and the lobby. I know, because I review her general ledger on a regular basis.

  She has a perfectly legal liquor licence, unfortunately expired; she claims she does not sell liquor. All the bottles are kept under the counter. You don’t know what whisky you’ll get until she’s pouring. Do not ask for single malt. You will get “jez whishhky,” meaning the blended stuff from Seagram’s or a Johnny Walker Red, or maybe even inexpensive Bourbon: it all qualifies. She has a small fridge where she keeps ice cubes.

  Whisky? “Yesh.”

  Vodka? “Yesh.”

  Rum? “No! No mixers. Only straight. No martini. No beer.”

  Cognac and brandy? “Maybe…”

  Ouzo? “Oh! Yeah!”

  You might get some peanuts, pretzels, or Lay’s chips on the side. It all depends on her sense of ritual at the moment. If she knows you well she might open a bag of small pitas and place them on a plate with a dollop of taramosalata or tzatziki.

  There isn’t a computer at the front desk, only the large ledger. The first entry is from before 1970. There is a carefully guarded board behind her where she hangs all the keys. Most of the clients who reserve rooms have heard about the place from other business types, or maybe the Automobile Agency. Unsavoury elements are discouraged by aggressive questioning and advance deposits. If you come in with a backpack she gives you a thorough once-over. The rooms are well preserved and clean. The floors creak, but the linen is fresh and there are no bugs. Water pressure is decent.

  As she has made clear to me several times, she discourages one-nighters. “I donna want no shady people; mekke this my hotel like a den, like, you know? No mekke the shady here.” It’s her reputation she’s concerned about: once marked in this neighbourhood one is marked for life, although I don’t know how she thinks she can control it. I’m pretty sure “shly” folks do violate her standards, despite the power and threat of her menacing Mediterranean eyebrows.

  I call myself Chuck Bhatt, she calls me “Hey! Chudd”. I have corrected her a few times but she persists, so I don’t bother anymore. She goes every now and then to the dépanneur at the corner of Prince Arthur to buy biscuits. She likes Oreos. I was helping the owner there with his accounts when she asked me “Hey Chudd, come by shometime and look at my booksh.” That’s how I got to know her.r />
  I’m not an accountant, but I’m good at keeping a general ledger and bringing forward the accounts from one page to the next. I do it for the courier company on an accounting package and understand the logic. Of course, she doesn’t think of computerizing herself. “Whash that?” she says, her eyebrows raised as if I had proposed contracting a skin disease. There are times I bring along my laptop, run a small accounting package, and re-categorize the entries. Then I print it out and give it to her. She dutifully pastes it on a fresh page in the same large ledger book in preparation for her tax accountant and auditor. In return, she says I can use the lobby to meet friends. In fact, she occasionally serves us coffee and cookies, and even once fried calamari. I consider myself a privileged acquaintance.

  Now, here is where a strange thing happened. Like, I am on to this plane crash thing, my sense of guilt had ravaged me beyond any notion of salvation and am also trying to find this gum-chewing girl. For a while I had been getting a series of strange emails. Normally they’d automatically go into the spam box, but these, for whatever reason, outmanoeuvred the filters and managed to reach me.

  “We’ve met a few times. We have a common friend. You may know me but maybe you don’t.”

  I guessed it was a woman, although she didn’t disclose much about herself. She was interested in meeting me, writing, “Maybe you would be interested in stuff I know.” That teaser sounded tacky, but I was attracted to the straightforwardness of her approach.

  I had almost convinced myself it was Myra, but then I realized I was simply believing what I wanted to believe. Myra wouldn’t write that way. The emails had a different personality. Besides, despite my long and faithful vigils, Myra hadn’t appeared at any of the various cafés and pubs she used to visit. She had clearly abandoned me, leaving me alone to research the mid-air explosion over Trois-Pistoles, an avoidable tragedy in which I was painfully complicit.

  Then the woman sending the emails informed me she was taking tango lessons on Thursday evenings. At that moment, I was hooked.

  Now tango is by far the most suggestive, stimulating, heat-transferring, pheromone-flying dance form conceivable. It is not sullen like most European dances. It is pure scarlet with a dash of black: it takes one to the edge and then dangerously hesitates before pulling one back. There are other art forms committed to rapture, but I think tango is in a tantric-hot class by itself.

  Not that I have any real experience with it.

  I remember Carlos Saura’s film. I went to see it with a relative, then visiting Montreal, and it sent exhilarating and unexpected chills up and down my spine. It hadn’t been hard for the only attractive cousin I have to cajole me into taking evening courses with her on the second floor of a very masculine building on St-Viateur. It was there that I learned many women—maybe most—dance as a way of exploring their own bodies. A lot of the male students didn’t know that when a woman invited them to dance it wasn’t with amorous intentions, but as a necessary launch-pad to better explore their own physical being. My cousin bluntly confirmed my tentative insight into the excitement of the male students, many in leather pants, who raced up the stairs to the weekly practice, “Yeah, well, men are like that. Dopes. Our bodies, ourselves, get it?”

  In any case the film, set in Buenos Aires, is the story of a director who finds himself bent upon making the ultimate tango movie. While doing so he falls in love with the girlfriend of the tough guy who is funding the film. Now if you are like me and don’t want to end up rotting in a dumpster on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, you’d find a way to avoid such an obviously precarious sequence of events. Nevertheless, the film was an extraordinary accomplishment, and remembering it again I knew I wasn’t about to walk away from the person who sent the email. Not as long as I had scarlet liquids simmering through my veins.

  When I told Mrs. Karamanlis of my plan to meet this new friend in a room in her hotel her eyebrows arched to such great heights that I knew I had erred.

  “You Chudd, you shurprishe me! You, I thinksh was not like them!” Her eyebrows went through several wave- like inflections which I couldn’t help considering as aftershocks.

  I explained that I had suggested her premises only because I’d be meeting a friend who was bringing along music to show me tango steps, and that I didn’t know where else I might find both sufficient space and suitable privacy. I very magically made a virtue out of the fact that I wasn’t inviting this woman to my own tiny loft. But to her grand unstained, reputable chambre.

  “Right, Chudd!” she said, with more delegitimizing, wriggling eyebrows, which slowly subsided. Then she smiled decisively, “Okay! I trusht my book-keeper.”

  I had the place, which was what mattered, and I could live with one night of utter shame as a book-keeper with out-of-control lust. I entered the suite to look around and get a feel for it. The furniture in the adjoining room had a rich burgundy finish. There were old pictures in sepia tones hanging tastefully along the walls beneath ornate ceiling work. There were doors that had brass plates, marble pedestals with brass flower vases, a red carpet in good condition and two yellowing chandeliers that had all the bulbs intact. There was an old-style mirror with dark veins running through it above a fake fireplace. In another corner, Victorian-style furniture was placed around a polished granite coffee table. The legs of all the chairs were curved and expressive, as if comfortable and well rested. There was a desk in the corner that had three drawers on either side and, on top, two slide-out drawers with a carefully carved arch over the centre. A lit lamp was on it.

  I sent off an email with the date, time, and place. She agreed to meet.

  On the awaited evening, Mrs. Karamanlis opened the door to my room and turned around, hands on her hips in what can only be considered an admonishing manner, but with a cooperative conspiracy in her gaze. I smiled and thanked her, then held out my hand. She gave me the keys and smiled in return.

  “You are cute, you!” she said.

  I had brought a small vase with two roses, two bottles of Australian Shiraz, a small tablecloth with lace at the edges which my mother had given me years ago, two wine glasses, and Belgian pastries from a shop on Avenue du Parc. I laid out the tablecloth carefully on the bedside table and put the corkscrew next to the wine bottles, at an angle. Mrs. Karamanlis had thought fit to give me two plates and two dessert forks, which she came by and left for me. I had put on a black corduroy jacket over a dark sweater and wore a pair of Kenneth Cole shoes bought at 50 percent off at Winners. I ensured that the shine on them was immaculate. I was excited, but also mystified: whoever Malia was—for she had finally shared her name—I would meet her at 7 p.m. I turned on the TV, kept the volume low and pretended to watch.

  By 7:30 p.m. she still had not come. I was impatient, although there was nothing I could do, not having her cellphone number. At about 7:45 p.m. I started pacing the floor and running my fingers through my hair. I heard a radio playing softly in the distance, but couldn’t tell where it was coming from. I tried hard to listen, but in the constant din of street noises and passing cars I couldn’t hear the beat. At a certain point, the music rose in volume and I realized it was definitely a tango, like a brassy version of La Cumparsita. It rose and fell. My insides leapt and collapsed. I was not ready for such games.

  I waited another hour, frankly irate, the music still playing, and by 9 p.m. I was imagining all sorts of possibilities. I thought I heard brisk movements on the floor above me in tune with the music, but I couldn’t be sure. At 9:15 p.m. I stepped out of the room and carefully looked up and down the corridor. Not a soul anywhere. Listening attentively, I realized that the tango was coming from the floor above. Meanwhile, I heard the distinctive sounds of erotic activity from the room opposite. I was infuriated by the heaving and breathing that was discovering its own quickening rhythm. I was now certain I was hearing things that weren’t actually there. Perhaps I had even made up the lady in the Mercedes-Benz. Nothing was re
al, except for my conviction of having been duped.

  I needed to do something. After walking back and forth, I returned to my room and opened the bottle of wine and started to drink. It seemed Malia was not going to show up. I reasoned that she had played a game and the tango from afar was a cruel joke. Around 10 p.m. I was well into the second bottle. After waiting for nearly three hours, I rose unsteadily and noticed that the tablecloth was stained by my careless pouring. At just that moment I heard the loud sound of a mirror or a window being smashed. The tango stopped.

  I stepped out of my room and the man across the hallway had also opened his door. He was wearing a towel around his waist and I could see behind him a woman sitting on the bed with the covers barely above her breasts. She looked satisfied. I didn’t say anything. He retreated after shrugging his shoulders.

  I finished off the second bottle of wine, packed up the tablecloth and the vase, threw the roses out, put the two glasses in my briefcase, and descended to the lobby. Mrs. Karamanlis was not there. Her nephew Dino was behind the desk. I gave him the key and paid my bill. I looked around. Was it true what the chairs in the lobby, facing each other, were saying to each other? Loser? Really? Was anything true? It was then that it struck me. I asked Dino if a certain lady had asked for me.

  “Yes, of course! I sent her to Room 310 with the spare keys.” He said this with easy confidence and a suggestive smile.

  “But I was in Room 210! Didn’t you tell her?” I was beginning to see floaters shaped like stars and knives in the corners of my eyes.

  “No! The boss said you were in 310. Everything cool?” He pushed forward a handwritten note from Mrs. Karamanlis that said ‘#310, lady for Chudd’. “She was pretty mad, you know, when she left! She stormed out with her radio and threw the key on the counter. I figured something must have happened. Is everything okay, Chuck?”