Cosmo (14 page)

Martine begins to lick and seal envelopes. Her fingers pinch the paper and her tongue laps and darts along the adhesive. Pierre watches her large, heavy-lidded eyes, the sway of her highlighted, glossy hair. He thinks of a mature buck he found in the hills, the way it lifted its head, snorting, as its ears turned and flattened. He thinks of the crosshairs of the scope resting over the buck's neck, the cloud of steam from its breath, the shot tearing through the stillness of the wood. All things he has studied, measured, in mixed strains of longing and affection and frustration. He watches the tiny brown freckles on Martine's chest, scattered above the line of her blouse. He thinks of the animal buckling, its legs flailing, its last attempt to stand before it shuddered and fell forward. How its hooves clawed the earth, ripping up clots of snow. He watches Martine's small breasts, the subtle press of her rib and sternum. He wants to put her earlobe in his mouth, bring his teeth together, press his nose into the crook of her neck and breathe. Trace his fingers along the lines of her mouth, wrap his hands about her jaw. He thinks of how she would smell: the milky scent of skin, light perfume, soaps and creams, making him dizzy, dazzling heat in his bladder, his crotch. Back in his mother's living room, brushing her hair over her ear, he imagines her leaning in, quickly, and licking his lips. He imagines pulling two tickets to Vegas from a jacket pocket, watching joy and desire contort her face into a painting, a film star, a saint. Then he can deliver his kiss, the kiss of dreams and childhood. He thinks of the buck's lips quivering, mouthing words, as he stood beside it, somewhat out of breath, watching the bright flow of blood stain the snow.

He whispers something in a singsong voice. No stutter.

Martine doesn't look up. She folds the envelope and throws it into a box. Walks out of the room.

Pierre resigns from OC Transpo after thirteen years of employment in January 1999.
The ending
, he thinks, relieved and shivering in a bus shelter, headed home.
Finally, the end.

 

It's very curious why he selected certain individuals to kill and permitted certain people to live. He could have easily killed more people.

–Inspector Ian Davidson,

Ottawa-Carleton Regional Police, 1999

 

What's a kid from Ottawa know about Nevada? Only what he can imagine, dreaming of roulette wheels in early-stage childhood depression; only what he can glean from television westerns, tales of Paiute trails, fallout from nuclear test sites. In Pierre's boyhood imagination, Nevada is as cold and unpopulated as the cliffs and craters of the moon – which it may as well be, coming from a kid sheltered by the leafy suburbs of 1960s Ottawa, where even a good bike ride leads into the checkerboard slopes of the downright bucolic (this being before the population booms of later decades, before the amalgamation of the townships, before the Ottawa-Carleton Regional Transit Commission).

Expectation and reality collide violently in early 1999. Pierre approaches Vegas by day, bumper to bumper with a heaving vanguard of glistening metal. Freon whispers from the plastic dash; carbon monoxide makes the air livid. He has just left the mountainous, invigorating air of Logan Lake, British Columbia. His bid to find new work – something monotonous, solitary and quiet – has been unsuccessful. He feels that a gamble must be made; that after so many losses, the odds, finally, are in his favour. He drives through the serpentine highway systems and into the heart of the city: the strip, the wonderland pastiche of iconic cliché, pastels and the King, the homeless in flip-flops, big-chested transvestites, red leather, Siegfried and Roy. Tourists genuflect in khaki shorts and Tilley hats, snapping cameras at monstrous replicas of otherworldly culture. Pierre winds his car toward the Best Western, a gaudy porno flyer caught in his windshield wipers. He checks in at reception, rides the smooth elevator to the seventh floor and sits on the pressed sheets of his double bed. Perspiration dampens his underarms and back as he closes his eyes to the ceiling fan, the white walls.

At 2:51 a.m., fifteen hours later, Pierre returns to his room and lies back on the bed. He has lost almost $10,000. His bank account is empty and his credit card is maxed. The casino was too loud, he thinks. He has made a list of people who have offended him but doesn't need the list any longer. Something slips, quietly.

What were you expecting here?
he asks himself.
You were expecting what here? Here you were what expecting? Expecting were you here what?

 

Quite apart from what's alleged or otherwise with Mr. Lebrun's situation, we know we've had a very unhappy work environment for a long time.

–Al Loney, chair of Ottawa-Carleton Regional Transit Commission

 

One night Pierre has a nightmare. In the nightmare, Pierre drives to the main garage at 1500 Saint Laurent Boulevard with a massive plastic Walmart bag containing springs, gears, screws, bolts, nuts and caps: a pile of fasteners and disassembled metal. His mother sits in the back seat of his car. She wears a white blouse reminiscent of something from the 1960s and smokes a cigarette.

Pierre rises from the car and walks to the employee entrance, the Walmart bag slung over his shoulder. It's early in the morning, still semi-dark, and hours before employees are scheduled to arrive for work. He walks from room to room, floor to floor, looking for his locker – it isn't until he has searched the entire complex that he remembers that his locker was cleaned out after his altercation with Terry Harding, which was long ago. He shoves the Walmart bag of machine parts beneath a red tool cabinet in an empty storeroom, concealing the spot with a folded janitor's towel, and waits for employees to enter the building, for the day and his shift to begin.

As no one arrives to work, Pierre becomes worried that he has made a mistake. Perhaps today is a holiday, he thinks. His mother will be furious with him. There will be no way or route home because she will have taken the car, and no buses run on this particular holiday. To his mother, Pierre is head garage mechanic.

The garage is utterly empty; Pierre begins to feel this, sense it in the settling silence of the vacant halls, the dark offices. He feels how keenly alone he is in such an enormous structure; the size and loneliness and cold are unnerving. But he hears something fall, distantly, something noisy and metallic. He fetches a handful of screws from the Walmart bag and begins to search for the source of the noise.

The noise leads Pierre to the hangar-like repair shop. He walks onto a second-storey rampart that looks down onto the floor. Below him is an enormous metal maze, a perfect square, with walls roughly ten feet from the ground, cobbled together with fist-sized iron bolts. Clearly visible within the maze is Terry Harding, or the ghost of Terry Harding, or a person with the body and bearing of Terry Harding with a face that is not quite present. Or a present face corrupted by decay and malice. Pierre sees over and above the labyrinth, as if floating against the ceiling, gazing down on the confusion of walls and alleys, Terry's rotted body wandering and blundering through its intoxicating emptiness. Pierre knows there is no exit or entrance. It knots itself in confusion, the walls melding and tying off, forming bows and nooses. Shadows begin to echo, make noise. The maze grows to the size of a city. It is the most horrible thing Pierre has ever seen or heard, and in the dream he loses his mind completely. He hears his own breath rising suddenly in his ears. He lifts his handful of screws and bellows like an ape. He trips down a flight of stairs, rushes to the side of the maze and slams its metal edges with his fist. Terry is screaming from some distant shadow. Then Pierre runs backwards out of the main garage and into the parking lot, the maze receding in size. It's raining outside. The moon moves as if in fast-forward, slipping between clouds. The city is empty, evacuated, but incredibly loud, as if the rushing wind and weather forced its inhabitants into shelter or escape. Of course, Pierre's car is missing. His mother has driven home to attend to her errands. He has mistaken his profession and his role within the organization, within the adult environment, so he begins to walk like a fugitive toward downtown. He sits on an abandoned highway embankment, utterly alone, and begins to moan, wracked with grief. He realizes that he has passed into some sort of afterlife, a punishment for his pretending to be something he is not. That Terry's bloated absence is the ruler of this world. Pierre's sorrow turns to bitterness and anger. Everything is in flux. This is Judgment Day, Pierre thinks, waking up to a motel room in Idaho.

 

He should have realized that nobody is against anybody.

–Grant Harrison

 

Two p.m., April 6, 1999. Pierre watches the main garage through the windshield of his black Sunfirgre. His eyes flit across rows of vacant, corrugated bus ports, a serried stutter of yawning lots. The tarmac surrounding the garage is edged by melting banks of rigid, blackened snow: the stubborn, clinging snows of early April. Everything is dirty, wilted, daunting. If there are trees, they are black fingers, arthritic and pathetic.

The sky is wan. The sky is a piece of paper. Pierre's face is drawn tightly. There are bluish circles under his eyes. His hands are in his lap. He looks over his shoulder at the Adidas gym bag on the back seat of the car.

A #95 articulated bus heaves onto the tarmac from Saint Laurent Boulevard. The bus is empty save for a brown-skinned, squat driver, wearing an OC Transpo uniform: a faded navy sweater vest over a light blue, short-sleeve dress shirt. The parking lot is dotted with cars and trucks and minivans. The driver in the #95 crosses Pierre's line of sight, turning around the side of the garage.

It is quiet and warm inside the car. Pierre's heart thumps steadily in his chest. He pivots his waist and reaches into the back seat with his right arm, grabbing and hefting the awkward weight of the gym bag onto his lap. White, momentary spots flash in his periphery. His hands remind him of a jonesing junkie's, shaky and clumsy, in need of a fix. He brings his hands to his face, feeling along his forehead, his cold, shaking fingers an insufficient balm to the hot, dry skin of his nose and lips. He has not slept since Detroit, Michigan, two days before, in a motel that reminded him of an OC Transpo station: a cold-lighted signpost impossibly remote from anything warm or recognizable or welcoming, his mind swarming with the entire spiderweb of half-memorized timetables, charts and graphs and circuit speeds. How it all seemed so small, so enormous – time trapped in light, wants bludgeoned by needs. And then it was perfectly graspable, as if crosshairs weaved over the image of his hurt. Standing in Detroit, staring into the halo of the
VACANCY
sign, thinking of a Transpo station he was once stalled at, long past regular hours. A Transpo station stranded off the shoulder of an empty highway, sometime between two and three in the morning, in the middle of winter, snowbanks knee-high against the curb, the wind so wicked the glass howled and moaned in D-minor sympathy. Cold so draining that the ache became all there was: fingers and toes curling and unfurling through a pins-and-needles torture, so much worse for its sodium vapour glow. Thirteen years of employment reduced to this image carved from ice. Thirteen years stomped to
mistake
in an instant of time no one heard or saw or could take note of, reduced finally to the pale glow of a bus stop in the middle of the night, imagined in the parking lot of a Super 8 on the outskirts of Detroit, awash in the pale neon blaze of the
VACANCY
sign. Transformed finally into something terminal and black.

While Pierre Lebrun stood facing the unravelling of his adult life (wordless, soundless), Martine Berthelot was sleeping in her apartment on Bank Street in downtown Ottawa. She was roused during the night by the sound of her roommate dropping a jar of moisturizer on the toilet seat. Her dreams were banal in their ordinary insensibility: a giant wasp hovering in the corner of her bedroom, a bicycle shop's floor buried in sawdust, her mother laughing. The illness that would leave her feeling deflated still only in its formative stage, having yet to move from a mere tingle in her sinuses.

By the time she opens her eyes, she's sick for real. She calls the office at 7:03 in the morning on April 6, 1999, sniffling into a dry Kleenex, eyes red, lymph nodes as swollen as ping-pong balls.

And thus she avoids the fires, the heaps of recycled paper and wood shavings salvaged from Blue Boxes and garbage bags that go up quickly, promisingly, but are doused by the efficient ceiling sprinklers before they can become more than showy piles of grey, smouldering detritus.

She avoids the
PA
speaker pronouncements, the frantic, shrill cries. She avoids the clusters of employees cowering beneath desks, in supply closets, whispering in huddles, doors locked.

She avoids the moment Pierre stops thinking: the sharp, sudden recoil of his lips as he finds the metal of the barrel still hot from the firing.

Pierre runs a red light at 7:04 a.m., eager to push past the boundaries of the City of Toronto, having been awake for nearly twenty-six hours.

The 401 is long and grey and heavy. Suddenly it is two o'clock. Suddenly he is pulling into the main garage. Unzipping a canvas gym bag. Staring at a moving bus. Suddenly it is Judgment Day.

He thinks of Mrs. Boros's tight smile. Thinks of a dying buck. Rearranges all the words. Tries to put together a plot line, his head in his hands, the rifle on his lap. Isn't there somewhere else to go? Some final opt-out, a safety switch, a booked ticket to Vegas?