“So no harm, no foul, right? It all worked out in the end? You robbed me of half a year of my life!”
I expected some sort of protest; no matter how accurate the charge, most people reflexively defend themselves. But Menno just sat there quietly for a long moment, and then, slowly, deliberately, he removed his glasses, set them on his desk, and he looked at me.
With his dead glass eyes.
“I felt terrible about what happened to you, Jim. You have no idea how much it tore me up. And, as a psychologist, I know all about the indicators, the signs—the preternatural calmness that comes over a person when the decision has been made. And when I made my decision, I recognized it for precisely what it was, but nonetheless, it seemed the thing to do.”
His eyes always faced straight forward; he was incapable of a sidelong glance. And he was looking at me, or at least facing me, and although he blinked at the normal rate, his aim never wavered. Even though I knew he couldn’t see a thing through those glass spheres, it was more unnerving than even the psychopathic stare.
“You think it was easy, living with what we’d done? What I’d done?” He shook his head, blind gaze swinging like twin searchlights. “It tortured me. I couldn’t sleep; couldn’t—you know.” He paused. “I drove out to Dauphin one night—a long drive, a mostly empty highway. There were trees at the side of the road, which is what I’d expected, but it was frustrating as hell—just saplings, young elms. I wanted something massive, something I was sure wouldn’t snap in two. And then, there it was—a whole stand of them. I took aim at one in the middle, and I floored it. And, well…” He waved a hand in a circular motion in front of his face. “This.” He shrugged a little. “It wasn’t the outcome I was looking for, and it’s been a bitch, let me tell you, all these years, being blind.” The glassy spheres faced me once more, and I looked at them for as long as I could. “I can’t make up for what I did, Jim, but recognize that, in some measure at least, I’ve paid for it.”
17
I was still in a daze from Menno’s revelations when the taxi dropped me at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The design was supposed to suggest dove’s wings surrounding a glass spire that rose a hundred meters into the sky, but to me it looked like God had crammed a Bundt cake down around a traffic cone.
I was running late, and Kayla had already checked out of her room at the nearby Inn at The Forks; she’d texted me to say she’d headed on in to the reception. I hustled over to the entrance, giving my ritual nod to the statue of Mahatma Gandhi on the way.
The reception was being held in the Garden of Contemplation, which was in the vast lobby adjacent to the reflecting pool. It was bordered by re-creations of the basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway, commemorating the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Most of the men were in suits and ties, but I was dressed more casually; Kayla and I planned to make it all the way to Saskatoon tonight, and I wanted to be comfortable for the drive.
I looked around but didn’t see any sign of Kayla. But I did see Nick Smith, a partner in an accounting firm that was helping to sponsor the lecture series. He had a golfer’s tan that was close to a sunburn and was chatting with someone I didn’t know: a handsome black man of about thirty-five. As I drifted by, the man was saying, “I don’t even know how to put this, but—”
Nick caught sight of me, and he leaned out of the conversation long enough to pull me in. “Oh, Jim, let me introduce you to someone. Jim Marchuk, this is Darius Clark. Jim’s on the board here.” Darius was standing in a military at-ease posture, with hands clasped behind his back. As Nick turned back to face him, he adopted the same pose.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
“Darius is giving a lecture here tomorrow,” Nick said.
“Well, not exactly,” Darius said. He had a bit of a Southern drawl. “I’m accompanying my partner. She’s the one giving the talk.”
“Ah,” I said.
“But I was just saying to Mr. Smith here—”
“Please, call me Nick.”
Darius smiled at that. “I was just saying to Nick, I’m visiting from Washington—DC, that is. Latisha and I live there.”
“I love that city,” I said.
“No,” said Darius affably, “you love the Mall and maybe a few streets on either side. The city itself is pretty crappy.”
“Oh.”
“I only moved there to be with Latisha. She works for the DoJ, the Department of Justice. Anyway, my point is this. Y’all are having this wonderful reception for us here, and earlier today, we went to lunch at the offices of Nick’s firm.”
“Nice,” I said.
“It was. And I don’t just mean the food. I never had bison before, but…”
Darius trailed off, and I smiled encouragingly. “Yes?”
He lifted his shoulders. “Now I know what it feels like to be white.”
“Pardon?” I said. And, to my surprise, Nick chimed in with, “Say what?”
“If you’re black, you can’t walk into a law office, or a government office, or anything like that in DC without people looking at you like you’re there to rob the place. You have no idea what it’s like with people always expecting the worst from you.” He spread his arms. “But here I was welcomed, made to feel right at home. Nobody looked alarmed or scared when I came in. Everybody was like, ‘Good afternoon, sir. May I take your coat?’”
“Welcome to friendly Manitoba,” Nick said.
It was an empty response; “Friendly Manitoba” was the slogan on our license plates. Most Indigenous Canadians would tell a very different story about visiting highfalutin places here.
“I guess,” said Darius.
Nick was protracting his vowels now. “Really,” he said. “It’s totally normal here.”
Darius narrowed his eyes. “Are you making fun of me?”
Just then, a woman who must have been Latisha joined us; she slipped an arm around Darius’s waist, and I took the opportunity to maneuver Nick toward the bar.
“What’s wrong with him?” Nick asked, glancing back at Darius.
“You were imitating him,” I said.
“Pardon?”
“You’re saying ‘pardon’ now, but you said ‘say what’ back there.”
“Did I?”
“And you were totally copying his posture and accent.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you were.”
“Why would I—”
“Everybody does it to one degree or another. ‘Unconscious mimicry,’ it’s called.
“Oh,” Nick said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“No, no. Of course not.”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
I looked at him, my heart pounding, as I wondered if that were literally true.
Across the lobby, I spotted Kayla emerging from the ladies’ room. I told Nick I’d catch him later and hurried over to her, feeling apprehensive as I maneuvered around people. Normally I was fine in crowds, but I found myself wondering how many Nicks—how many p-zeds—were flocking about me.