Amelie narrowed her eyes. “How do you know?”
“John knows. Kyriakides was lying all along. He lied to Susan about it. But John can tell. Kyriakides wanted to do the tests, and maybe he thought there was a chance that something would happen, something miraculous. But there’s nothing. He knows it, John knows it. That’s not why they’re here.”
“Why, then?”
“Kyriakides is here to finish his experiment, and because he feels guilty. John is here—well, it’s an experiment of his own. But for me, I think it’s only the end. I’m scared of that.”
“Goddammit, Benjamin!”
She held out her arms for him. He put his head against her shoulder.
She was blinking away tears. But who was she sorry for? Herself or him? Maybe both of us, Amelie thought. Two fucked-up losers. She just felt so sad.
“Nothing is the way it used to be,” he said. “I love you.”
“I’ll stay a while longer,” Amelie said. “It’ll be okay.”
Not believing either of these things.
After some time had passed he helped her unpack again. He was about to leave the room when he reached into his back pocket and said, “Almost forgot—this came for you today.”
It was a thick manila envelope bearing the return address of the Goodtime Grill on Yonge Street.
He held it out.
Amelie took it from him, frowning.
17
After the humiliation involving his sister, Roch had checked himself in at the Family Practice Clinic at Toronto General Hospital. A few days later and he might have run into Amelie while she was in town for John’s PET scan. But he wasn’t looking for Amelie—at least, not yet.
His chest was a mass of bruises where the car door had slammed into it. The clinic sent him up for X-rays, but there was no evidence of any significant fracture to the ribs, which was good; it meant he wouldn’t have to be taped. Hurt like shit all the same, though. The doctor, a woman about as tall as Roch’s collarbone, asked whether he’d been in a fight. He said, “A fight with a fucking Honda.”
In return she flashed him a skeptical, condescending look … which burned, but Roch kept carefully silent; this was not the place or the time. He was getting older, developing an instinct for these things—when to hold his tongue and when to act. He merely stared into the female doctor’s wide green eyes until she frowned and looked away. Roch smiled to himself.
She cleared her throat. “Warm baths might help with that bruising. Maybe Tylenol for the pain. You’ll be fine in a couple of weeks. If you stay away from Hondas.”
“It wasn’t a joke.”
“What?”
“About the Honda. It wasn’t a joke.”
“No … I guess it wasn’t.” She bowed her head and made a notation in his file folder. “Is there anything else?”
Roch stood up and left the office.
The landlady had wanted to kick him out of Amelie’s apartment, but she backed off when he paid two months rent in cash and promised to clean the place up. He told her he was working as a clerk for the provincial government. Which was a lie, of course; he’d picked up the rent money doing day labor. His life savings, ha-ha. The fucking check had taken two weeks to clear, or else he’d have spent it by now. But it was important to have a place to sleep.
Though he hated being alone.
It was getting harder all the time.
At night, especially. With Amelie gone he didn’t have to sleep on the sofa, but the bedroom was like a big box with its single square, soot-darkened window. He would lie awake in this cold, dark room and feel the city pressing in at him. The city made a noise, as familiar as his own heartbeat but more disturbing. Sirens, motors, tires gritting down cold night streets. This noise was amplified by the winter air and beat against Roch’s eardrums until he could not distinguish it from the singing of the radiators or the rush of his own blood.
He resented the sound. It was the sound of everything he could not have: pleasure, companionship, confidence. He couldn’t walk those streets except as an outcast. He had learned that lesson when he was very young. Nowadays he did not attract much immediate attention; he was older and less physically grotesque; he worked out in the gym. He was not the puddingy, froglike thing he had been as a child. But he was not one of those ordinary people, either. He could not move among these handsome men and confident, smiling women except as an impostor. He might have been a creature from outer space, disguised as human. He knew that.
He was alone in the dark and his ribs hurt and he had been humiliated.
And he was angry.
He thought about getting drunk. But, oddly, the impulse wasn’t really there. When he thought about drinking he pictured his father coming home on winter nights like this, screaming out curses in peasant French and beating Roch with his stubby fists. Big man’s hands with dark hair and callused knuckles: Roch remembered those hands.
Lying in bed, he looked at his own right-hand fist—a shadow in the dim light. It was his best friend, his lover, the instrument of justice.
His anger was like a cold, uncomfortable stone that had lodged in his chest.
And he understood, then, why he didn’t want to get drunk. This was a pressure that drinking would not have relieved. He needed all his energy for planning, because he was going to fucking do something about this thing with Amelie. Roch understood revenge in intricate detail. The rules were basic. When you were humiliated, you had to eat it—or else enforce a punishment. And he knew all about punishment. Punishment was like a big, simple machine. It was easy to operate once you got it going, and terribly difficult to stop. And all it took to work that machine was some careful planning.
And he was good at that. It was the only kind of abstract thinking Roch enjoyed. It shut out the night sounds of the city. He could spend hours working out the details and the necessary steps, the payoff being some act … it was not yet specific … some final and irretrievable moment of equalization. An orgasm of justice.
This new purpose seemed to seize him all at once, utterly.
He was not smart, but he had a goal. And he was methodical. And determined. And perhaps best of all, he knew a secret. He thought of all those people out there in the lively darkness of the city, thought about how they were bound to one another with sticky ropes of loyalty, love, duty, guilt—how these impediments constrained them and restricted their movement. And Roch smiled in the dark, because here was his deepest and most profound knowledge about himself: that he was not bound by any of these things. He could do things that ordinary people could not even imagine. He was utterly alone, and therefore he was utterly free.
The first step was to locate Amelie.
He had never been to the restaurant where she used to work, the Goodtime Grill, mainly because her employment there had always rankled him. It was scutwork and she deserved it, but it had given her an independence from him that Roch resented deeply. This was back when they were on the street, when she was shaving her hair and wearing that old leather jacket with the sleeves down over her hands so that only her fingers poked out, how whorish she had looked and how she resented it when he suggested the logical and obvious way of bringing in some money. As if she liked sleeping in abandoned buildings, for Christ’s sake. He savored for a moment the memory of her in that jacket and how the cars would cruise by and sometimes stop and men would call her over and how she would come back sometimes with a little money and that expression on her face, which he could not decipher—of some deep, secret grief. But then she got the restaurant job and the crappy St. Jamestown apartment, and Roch got involved with some guys boosting cars out in the suburbs, and he forgot about her for a while. That was the basic mistake he’d made—letting her get away from him.