A Very Bold Leap (18 page)

“Yes, we will,” Isabel said with conviction. “If we ask God with all our strength.”

Blonblon turned scarlet and nodded in agreement.

Two days later Charles returned to the hospital without Céline, who had to stay after school to rehearse a play. Steve’s condition seemed to have worsened. His colour was more chalklike, his face more deformed than ever. It was several days before Charles could bring himself to go again, and after that he found it difficult to visit his friend more than two or three times a week. He went out of a sense of obligation, but without much hope, finding it painful and useless to keep someone company who was so obviously inhabiting a different world, a pitiful mechanism that no longer produced anything but a suite of sinister sounds and a vaguely acidic odour.

Blonblon and Isabel, on the other hand, made it their duty to visit almost daily. They sat beside Steve’s bed for hours, hand in hand, including him in their conversations, uttering words of encouragement. They even exchanged furtive kisses that were at times interrupted by the rather noisy arrival of Madame Lachapelle or one of the members of her family.

Weeks passed. The patient slowly started looking human again and began to experience brief moments of semi-consciousness; he would look around his room with eyes dulled by morphine, apparently unable to recognize any of his visitors.

“Someday he’s going to get his senses back again, isn’t he?” Madame Lachapelle would ask the nurses in alarm.

And they would tell her again that the neurological tests had revealed no cerebral damage, that the process of healing had begun but that it would take time.

Charles’s visits, which had become even less frequent, always plunged him into a state of unbearable depression that took all his strength of will to pull out of. It was clear to him that, despite all the encouraging prognostications from the doctors, Steve was not going to leave the hospital alive. One night, as he watched his friend sleeping, mouth hanging open, breath coming in quick, hot gasps, saw the yellowing, transparent skin on his face, his left arm mummified in an enormous cast and lying at his side like a lifeless object, a sudden, suffocating anguish came over him. He was gazing upon Death, and it was a long time since he had seen it looking so young. He recalled the body of his tiny sister, Madeleine. He’d been four years old, standing on tiptoes, his chin pressed between the bars of her crib. It had shocked him to see the baby lying so still, so quiet, her clenched teeth giving her such an expression of mischief. His mother blew her nose and sobbed behind him. He wanted to touch the baby’s moist, unnaturally red face. “No, Charles, let Madeleine go beddy-byes,” Alice had whispered in a choked voice. “She needs to rest now.” Wilfrid had grabbed him by the arm and led him out of the room, despite his tears of protest.

He left Steve’s room, went down to the cafeteria, and ordered a hot chocolate. Then he decided to go home. For the rest of the night he could do nothing but slouch in front of the television. Blonblon and Isabel rang his doorbell and tried, without success, to convince him to go out to a café. The next day he was so distracted at work that Lucie asked him what was eating him. Taking her concern as criticism, he told her to mind her own business and retreated to the stockroom, leaving her alone in the store to deal with customers.

Céline was surprised by his dark mood.

“Come on, Charles! After all, the doctor says he’s going to get better…. Get a grip on yourself, you’re going to be worse off than he is!”

Fernand also tried to reason with him. He told Charles about a spectacular accident he’d witnessed when he’d been seventeen.

The family had lived not far from a garage that specialized in the maintenance and repair of heavy equipment. One Saturday morning, he’d been
watching a mechanic inflating the enormous tire on a ten-ton truck when the tire exploded.

“Lucky for me I wasn’t standing any closer, otherwise it would have rearranged my face for me! As it was, a lug nut hit me in the forehead and gave me a lump the size of my thumb, and my ears rang for three days. But you should have seen what happened to the mechanic! He was lying there stretched out on the ground, his face as black as one of the pieces of tire, and swollen up like a watermelon! Like a watermelon! You couldn’t see his nose, or his eyes, you couldn’t even see his ears! He looked like a monster, I’m not kidding! Even the ambulance drivers turned their heads! ‘Poor old Edouard,’ my father said sadly. ‘He was a good-looking lad, he was, but if he ever pulls out of this, his womanizing days’ll be over…’ But three months later his face was back to normal and he was picking up chicks like you wouldn’t believe!”

Even Henri added his encouragements, despite the fact that he had never felt anything more for Steve than a kind of amused contempt. One night he even rallied enough compassion to visit Steve in the hospital.

“Don’t freak yourself out over this, man,” he said to Charles after his visit. “That guy’s head’s so thick he’ll go through this like a bullet through butter. Just you wait and see.”

And he beat an affectionate tattoo on Charles’s shoulder.

Charles was taken aback by Henri’s gesture. When they’d been children, Henri had always been his protector, but now he felt as though they had become almost total strangers. Henri had his own circle of friends, whom Charles rarely ran into, and he was going out with a large, blond girl who worked at a travel agent’s, and whose appeal Charles had yet to figure out. A big outdoor sports fan, Henri was nonetheless closed to others; his sole ambition seemed to be to attend Business School and then go on to take over the family business from his father and inject it with a vitality that Fernand, despite all his efforts, had never succeeded in giving it.

Charles was also stalled on a different front. He may not have succeeded in conquering Montreal with his pen, as he sometimes reminded himself in a melancholic tone, but neither was he going to do it working in a hardware store. At least working as a barker, although he realized it was an odd, not to
say ridiculous, employment, had had the benefit of getting him out and “enriching his experience,” and he had been relatively happy while doing it. Unfortunately, his sexual exploits had brought his budding career to a sudden halt. He had to find something else to do, and fast. For a long time now, he had found that selling nuts and bolts, coffee makers, and electric drills had nothing new to teach him. He was spinning his wheels, wasting his time, getting nowhere slowly. He still dreamed about the vagabond life led by Aglaé Mayrand.

One Sunday afternoon he found himself alone with Steve in his hospital room. They had been talking for a while, with Charles accounting for the lion’s share of the conversation, babbling on about this and that. His friend had asked for news about Fernand and Lucie, about Henri and his bizarre girlfriend, and even about Monsieur Victoire, who had recently given up driving taxi to take a job as a packer at the Macdonald Tobacco Company. Then Charles had seemed to hold Steve’s interest for a few moments with his description of the incredible acrobatics Premier Bourassa had had to perform in order to justify Quebec’s signing on to the Constitution of 1982, repatriated from the U.K. without the province’s support; there were federalist Canadians working very hard to get
la belle province
to “re-enter the Canadian mansion” through a small back door disguised as the main entrance. But from the few questions and comments that came from his sick friend, Charles realized that the outside world was still something remote and inconsequential and a bit confusing to Steve, whose attention to such matters came only in brief fits and starts.

Suddenly, Steve closed his eyes and seemed to fall asleep. Charles looked at his watch. It was almost four o’clock. Céline, who had recently discovered the art of haute cuisine, was no doubt at that moment sliding a roasting pan of lemon chicken into the oven for their supper and putting a bottle of white wine in the fridge to chill. Quietly he took a section of La
Presse
from his pocket and began to read, at which point Steve abruptly hoisted himself onto one elbow and, staring at Charles with a strange intensity, asked him for a cigarette.

Stunned, Charles gave an uneasy smile. “You can’t smoke in a hospital room, Steve,” he said.

“I don’t give a shit. I want a cigarette.”

He spoke with such desperate weakness that Charles could think of no reply. His hand went to his shirt pocket but hesitated before taking out his pack.

“Come on, goddamn it!” Steve shouted in a sudden rage. “It won’t do me any good after I’m dead, I want it now!”

Charles lit a cigarette and slipped it between his friend’s lips.

“Light me another one,” Steve said after a few minutes.

“You’re going to make yourself sick, Steve, I’m warning you.”

“So, they make me sick, so what? They can’t make me any sicker than I already am, can they?”

He’d hardly begun his second cigarette when a grey-haired nurse appeared in the doorway. She was thin and nervous-looking, but she stood her ground with her hands on her hips.

“Monsieur Lachapelle! Very well! This time I’ve caught you red-handed!”

She took two steps into the room and, with a quick, precise swipe of her hand, removed the cigarette from the patient’s mouth.

“I’m sorry, Monsieur Lachapelle, but we don’t smoke in here. In any case, you know full well that these things are little sticks of rat poison.”

“So, maybe I want to poison myself.”

“Well, you’ll have to do that somewhere else.”

“Somewhere else? When? How? I can’t even drag myself to the door!”

“Let me tell you something, Monsieur Lachapelle, and I’m not lying to you, I’m merely trying to encourage you. Every cigarette you smoke extends your stay in this hospital by half a day. At least half a day. Have you thought about that?”

“No, but I’m thinking about it now.”

“Don’t laugh, Monsieur Lachapelle, it’s a scientific fact I’m telling you. All the medical journals are saying it, and even the newspapers are catching on. You can’t imagine the damage these blasted cigarettes are causing, not to mention how they make everything reek —
pouah!
My God, how they stink up the place! So if you really want to disappoint me, you’ll stop smoking right now — so you can get out of here as fast as you can.”

When Charles left the room a few minutes later, he was filled with such a lightness of spirit that he smiled at everyone he met. The depression that had overcome him at each of his visits with Steve was nowhere in evidence. Thanks to those cigarettes, he now realized that his friend was going to live — and not just live, but return to being the Steve that everyone loved to see and be around more than anyone else he knew.

S
ometimes the finger of fate can move so obscurely that, when we look back on the train of events, we’re thrown into a state of blank amazement, as though we’ve been the victim of a trick played by a very clever magician.

One Friday evening, as Charles was filing out of the metro station at Berri-UQAM (as it had just been renamed) on his way to join Céline, who was waiting for him in a café on rue Saint-Denis, his eye fell on a brochure that was lying on the floor under a rank of pay phones. Intrigued, he picked it up, then gave a snort of irritation.

THIS MESSAGE IS FOR YOU, the brochure’s cover proclaimed in large, white letters on a background of a floral still-life. Another of those boring mystical tracts, Charles said to himself, the kind that religious fanatics handed out to spread the Good Word. He was about to let it fall back to the floor, but changed his mind. It was clean and in good condition, comprising some sixty pages printed on fine paper, the handsomely printed text illustrated by several not-bad drawings. Out of respect for the printer, if nothing else, Charles slipped it into his coat pocket with the intention of giving it a glance later, and promptly forgot about it.

It was days later when, sitting on a bus with nothing to read, he suddenly remembered the brochure and began flipping through it. He hadn’t been wrong. It was the usual, insipid blah-blah-blah that he’d never been able to read three lines of before beginning to yawn.

“What is truth?” asked the author. “That is the question all men, if they are honest, wish to have answered. But how can they know what the truth is? There are so many things in this world, and so many contrary opinions and different ideas about each of them, often without a grain of proof or support to back them up! And how much more perplexing it is when we are
talking about spiritual things! When it comes to the spirit, no science, no mere learning, can guide us to understanding, because the light of human intelligence cannot illuminate the immensity of what is Beyond.

‘“What is truth?’ the Roman governor Pontius Pilate asked Jesus (John 18:38). But he did not wait to hear Jesus’; answer. Let us not be like the pagan ruler. Let us be filled by the teachings of He Alone Who Knows. Because He ‘will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth’ (1 Timothy 2:4).”

Although the beginnings of a yawn were already making the muscles of his jaw tremble, he flipped to the body of the text, which seemed to be an introduction to the Bible in the form of a dialogue. This must have been penned by a different hand, judging by the change in tone, which became more lifelike and natural, and by the absence of endless biblical quotations. A section dealing with the papyrus manuscripts from the Sinai Monastery and scrolls from the Qumran caves attracted his attention briefly. When the bland phrases resumed, however, he turned the pages impatiently until he came to the last one, where someone had written in black ink with a firm, assiduous hand:

This was followed by the phone number and address of the Church of the Holy Apostles of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, situated on avenue de Lorimier, in the north end of the city.

“Don’t hold your breath,” Charles muttered, stuffing the brochure back in his pocket. “Light me a candle so I can burn your ass …”

A few days later, however, lying stretched out on his single bed beside Céline, who was sleeping, he thought again about the offer of a job. He didn’t think they were looking for preachers (the Word of God doesn’t come from the mouths of curious vagrants who pick up their reading material from the floors of metro stations), rather that they needed flunkies — people to hand out tracts, look after buildings, answer phones, scout out meeting places, and organize groups, that sort of thing. Various sects were hoping to fill in the gaps left in society by the collapse of the more traditional parish organizations, and so were responding to the different needs of daily and family life
with whatever resources they could scrape up. Maybe there was a job awaiting him that would allow him to be like Aglaé, to travel from place to place around the province. He’d been dreaming of something like that for a long time. The novelist buried inside him was begging to be let out.

There was just one fly in the ointment: Céline, who would cry her eyes out and interpret his desire for the itinerant life as a sign of his loss of affection for her.

He refrained from talking to her about it that night. The following day he confided in Blonblon, as he usually did in matters of importance. At first Blonblon simply laughed in his face, but then he became thoughtful, and his expression turned serious. The idea of working for the Church of the Holy Apostles of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ must have awakened his own mystical tendencies, as well as his undiminishable desire to do good works, which had often led him into becoming a philanthropist and sometimes even a sort of preacher.

“Maybe you should give them a call after all, Charles,” he said. “You never know. Some of these sects aren’t as loony as we might think. Some really do some good for people, without trying to convert them against their will. It might be interesting work. You’re not getting anything new out of the job at the hardware store. What have you got to lose? Anyway, if you don’t like it, you can always go back to working for Fernand.”

“Oh, I doubt if he’d take me back. Business isn’t that good these days, you know. I get the impression that my leaving wouldn’t be a problem for him.”

“Well, then…” said Blonblon, making a gesture that suggested such risks were all part of life.

Days went by, with Charles unable to make up his mind. He had no desire to work for a bunch of holier-than-thous who wanted to assail the world with their obsessions — or, worse, for those who used the promise of eternal life to exploit the naïve and the stricken. And the fear of himself becoming indoctrinated held him back. These cults had people working for them who were specialists in brainwashing, so he’d heard — professional recruiters who gently but tenaciously worked on people’s equilibrium, and sometimes not so gently. And then there was the question of what others might say about him: if you
worked for a gang of crooks or lunatics, would it not suggest that you were a bit that way inclined yourself?

In the end, though, after spending twenty minutes one afternoon explaining to an old woman how to secure a hollow-wall anchor to a sheet of drywall, Charles decided to go down to the office of the Church of the Holy Apostles of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, take the bull by the horns, and if the job they offered him turned out to be just too wacky, he would tell the good minister to stuff it, and head for the nearest exit.

Things at the hardware store had quieted down by four thirty, and so he asked Fernand if he could leave early, saying he had to make an urgent delivery. Half an hour later he was standing in front of a beautiful Victorian church, all done in patterned brickwork. An imposing wooden sign had been affixed above the main door, spoiling the facade; the sect’s name was printed on it in huge, red letters on a white background, a grossly commercial eye-catcher. Beneath the sign was a banner, which read:

GOD LOVES YOU JUST AS YOU ARE

BUT HE LOVES YOU TOO MUCH TO LEAVE YOU THAT WAY

Charles stood in front of the church trying to make up his mind. Then his eye fell on the house next to the church, built in the same style, also in patterned brick, nestled at the rear of a small park, at the end of a laneway; it was no doubt the former presbytery. The door opened and two young men emerged and walked down the laneway, laughing and talking happily. Charles slipped a hand into his pocket, chewed his lip determinedly, and walked up the laneway in their direction. When he passed them, the men smiled amiably at him, and a moment later he was climbing the slightly off-kilter steps of the manse, to a porch surmounted by a wooden, white-painted portico; near the door, a small plastic sign told him to “Ring and Enter.”

He rang and entered. His nostrils were immediately assailed by the enticing odour of spaghetti sauce. The cheerful sound of plates clattering and utensils tinkling reached him from somewhere at the back of the house. Looking around, he found himself in a large waiting room, the only furniture a row of chairs arranged around three of the walls and a low table placed in the centre covered with religious publications. On one of the walls was a large painting in a black frame depicting the head of Christ, with a blond beard,
pink skin, and delicate if somewhat sappy features; his eyes, which were deep blue and slightly moist, seemed to gaze at Charles in mild reproach.

He heard steps approaching slowly, and a man who looked to be in his fifties, with white, free-flowing hair, came into the waiting room. His skin was as pink as that of the painting, but his features were heavier and gave him a good-natured, regular-guy sort of look. He smiled.

“It’s volunteer day,” he said to Charles, as though apologizing for having kept him waiting. “We always eat early on Fridays because that’s when we distribute the pamphlets. It’s a lot easier and more enjoyable to work in daylight, don’t you agree? You’ve come about a job?”

Charles nodded.

“Would you follow me, please?”

He took a ring of keys from his pocket and unlocked a door, then went through it into a minuscule room filled with filing cabinets. He sat down behind a desk and invited Charles to sit across from him. Through the window above his head, Charles could see the church across the park, and read the rather depressing message on the sign attached to the church’s facade.

“Normally, Sister Jocelyn would be looking after you, but she’s away just now — her mother has just died. And so the pleasure of making your acquaintance falls to me. I am Brother Miguel Fortier,” he said, standing up and offering Charles his hand. “I’m the pastor here at the Church, which was founded by Our Blessed Balthasar Chicoine, who departed this life some fifteen years ago to revel in the eternal contemplation of God. Now, what is your name?”

Christ
, Charles thought,
I’ve got to get out of here fast!

But he gave the man his name.

“Tell me something about yourself,” Brother Miguel invited, with a commanding smile. “After all, I’ll need to know something about you if I am to decide how you might best serve our Church. Are you here simply because you need a job, or are you answering the call of God?”

“Simply because I need a job,” Charles replied, hoping that this answer would end the interview.

“Good, very good. No need to blush, my son. Quite the contrary. Without work, a man cannot be a man nor a woman a woman. God has blessed us with the ability to rise to the very heights of our human condition, but we cannot do it without work, as Paul confirms in his Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter
four, verse twenty-eight. But leave that for now. You didn’t come here to hear a sermon. Where were you born? What kind of education have you had?”

Charles, who was becoming more and more suspicious and who could think of nothing but putting some distance between himself and this room, gave a succinct account of his life, carefully omitting anything that might pique the curiosity of the pastor, who sat smiling encouragingly, but looked at him keenly as though sifting through Charles’s reply for the deepest secrets of his soul.

After three minutes, Charles stopped talking. Brother Miguel gave no sign of impatience after having been bombarded with such a quantity of uninformative circumspection, so bland it could only be deliberate; he spread his arms on the desk and rubbed his hands together, humming to himself, his lips pressed together, absorbed in profound contemplation.

“We need an electrician’s apprentice,” he suddenly announced, raising his head.

“An electrician’s apprentice?” Charles said, taken aback. “I don’t know the first thing about electricity.”

Brother Miguel smiled a bit condescendingly. “That’s what apprentices do; they learn.”

“I guess that’s true, but surely there must be someone more …”