Cosmo (13 page)

‘Wipe your mouth,' she says. She walks to the counter and wrings out a dishcloth.

The return address on the package is
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
. The boy wipes his mouth.

 

All in all, he was a pretty peaceful lad. I didn't think he was ill.

– Ozzie Morin

 

Things Pierre is taught to remember:

That anger is a natural human response. That anger is a normal human emotion. That he should not cower from nor ignore his anger, nor allow his anger to build up inside him without a proper outlet.

That he should cradle his anger. That he should treat his anger like a crying baby because a baby cries in response to need. A baby cries in response to discomforts and longings, physical and emotional, because crying is all it knows. Crying is a natural response buried beneath the veneer of control and maturity and masculinity, as is fury.

The room in which Pierre receives these lessons is modern and bright. He sits on faux-leather couches and chairs surrounded by waxy plants and windows that offer a view of the parking lot and road and swaying trees and sky.

That
everyone
has so-called boiling points. Points at which things tend to spill beyond reason and control. That he should watch these hot points with patience and care. The tender boundaries.

That anger does not have to be the deciding emotion of his life.

That Pierre's anger comes from easily identified traumas. That all of these factors assemble to form a portrait of a real person who has
resolvable
problems.

Pierre sits with four other people, three men and one woman, who are enrolled in Anger Management Therapy as part of various work-rehabilitation programs. His therapist is in her mid-forties. Her voice is sharp and tough, but she speaks slowly, pushes her eyes into his eyes, doesn't let him look away. She wears a necklace of translucent gems and clunky bracelets, has dependable lines on her face.

Pierre, have you ever lost a job because of your anger?

Pierre, have you ever felt alone and misunderstood?

Pierre, are co-workers and peers concerned about your anger?

Pierre, have you ever been so angry that you forgot things you did or said?

At the end of his therapeutic treatment, Pierre apologizes to Terry in a sincere manner in the company of his therapist and an
ATU
representative. They sit in an empty boardroom and shake hands. Terry shakes as if trying to snap Pierre's knuckles, looking him in the eye. Smiling.

Pierre is not to return to the main garage at 1500 Saint Laurent; he is to avoid the scene where his anger got the better of him.

Pierre is not given the same job. He has to explain this to his mother three times before she understands. He is instead given another job, this one more suited to his particular needs. He is scheduled to begin work as an audit clerk. Paperwork, mailing, filing, accounting, written correspondence. A low-stress environment. Cubicles and witnesses.

As Terry leaves the boardroom where the apology takes place, he turns and smiles and silently mouths a word so only Pierre can see:
Scabby
.

Pierre feels a tender boundary, a hot point, a boiling line. He thinks of Terry's smiling, receding face, of collective attacks.

Participants in Anger Management Therapy are asked to complete an end-of-session evaluation. An evaluation of their therapists, their time spent under scrutiny, the process of healing. They are asked to circle a response ranked from one to five to the statement
I found this therapy to be successful.

The response Pierre circled:
Strongly Disagree.

This happens in August 1997, an extremely hot and humid month in Ottawa. Pierre thinks, sees, can feel tenderness everywhere: in the laughing faces of boys, in the skin-tight skirts of girls, in his dreams of slow-motion mechanisms unfolding. As if the city were an enormous stopwatch. The air a pulsing electric storm.

Pierre, do you often feel moody or sad because of your anger?

 

He had a bit of a speech impediment and he was teased a little bit. It got to him because he had sensitive feelings about it. But maybe they just got him at a bad time when maybe there was other stuff going on in his life.

– Robert Manion,1500 Saint Laurent Boulevard garage supervisor, 1999

 

Mrs. Boros, Polish and severe, sits at the end of the dining room table. A twelve-year-old Pierre watches her lips move in slow, exaggerated pantomime, mouthing sentences that spike in sharp, stenographic contortions: Pierre presently proposes a particularly preposterous pursuit; David delights in daring, duplicitous disguises. Pierre fails, consistently, to work his way through the words without halting, chopping regular alliterative metre into staccato fragments. His mother sits at the opposite end of the table, her hands clasped on the wood, her lips a polished red line. Each time Pierre fails – which he does
every time
, choking on consonants, oblivious of words stressed and unstressed, his jaw aching, his tongue lying thick and heavy and dry – Mrs. Boros smiles weakly, taps her fingertips on the tabletop and closes her eyes. Pierre doesn't dare look at his mother.

‘Is it the order of the words?' asks Mrs. Boros, her eyebrows a conjoined storm.

Pierre shrugs. He doesn't know. The stutter bubbles up and shoots skyward like bilious oil.

‘You know' Mrs. Boros continues, ‘it might do for us to look at the sentences out of their normal order. English has strict, rigid word order. We think in subject, verb, object. Active sentences. We think in chronological, linear terms, as everyone knows, but it's even there in our text, our written language. It's encoded. We look for stages, words providing the framework for other words, other meanings blossoming from the precise, uninflected word order of our preceding statements.'

Pierre stares at a spot above her hairline.

‘Rearrange the words so that they are more elements than stages.
Presently particularly Pierre proposes pursuit preposterous. Proposes Pierre preposterous presently particularly pursuit.
It's the individual words you need to look at. Let's just look at their shape and sound.'

An hour passes in frustration, terror, Pierre praying for some sort of ending. He puts his fingers into his mouth, pulling his lips and cheeks away from his teeth, attempting to physically force his flesh into utterance. He arrives at something absurd, clownish. His face flushes; his eyes well with tears. His mother reaches across the table and slaps his face, hard, making a cartoon
clap
sound, thinking he is mocking Mrs. Boros, who sometimes holds her chin or throat to demonstrate proper positioning, clear enunciation. Pierre's mother's hand comes away wet with his tears.

Mrs. Boros says nothing, has nothing to say: unversed in the true nuances of articulatory phonetics, a mere novice in the demands of vocalism. Oblivious to psychological trauma.

This is October 1969, after school. Leaves wither and fall from the maple trees on the front lawn. A vehicle heaves and sighs somewhere in the street. The moment Mrs. Boros leaves the house, Pierre's mother puts her arms around him, begins to cry. Says
I'm sorry
over and over.

Later in the evening, in the soft yellow glow of the den, the record player percolates and crackles beneath a series of cloying and simplistic nursery rhymes. A man's low, sonorous tenor recites the lyrics, is joined in the second verse by a chorus of high-pitched children. Pierre sits cross-legged on the carpeted floor beside the player, pretending to listen to the words. He reaches into his pocket and carefully removes a folded piece of newspaper. The fibres have deteriorated; the once-rough texture has become soft and flimsy from folding. He stares at the black and white image of a man in a tuxedo, smiling, standing before a roulette table spun into a seamless blur. Pierre imagines blazing lights and the heavy scent of cigarette and cigar smoke, the taste of bourbon and water, the giant whirling wheel an ill-defined haze of red and black, colour bleeding into colour until luck and chance and expectation become a single image, a gripping fear and exhilaration without words. Six-sided dice clatter from his open palm, collide and ricochet down a pool-hall green, and come up seven. A lithe, boa'd arm slinks around his shoulders, and sunglass-wearing spectators erupt in cheers.
You've won
, they scream, as the chips are pushed toward him and the slot machines whistle and Pierre doesn't say anything at all.

There
, he thinks,
you don't have to speak. A happy ending.

The record player rolls forward in a singsong voice, no stutter. A muttering incantation, the murmur of a congregation's prayer:

 

See, saw, Margery Dawe,

And Jack shall have a new master.

He shall make but a penny a day

Because he can't work any faster.

 

He was very clever, very nice. You just don't think you'd see this in your lifetime. I thought it was a joke – everybody did.

–Grant Harrison, OC Transpo auto-body repairman, 1999

 

Sex no longer even remotely available, now elevated and perverted to the level of pure mystery. The kiss and taste and heat of a woman – all meaningless abstractions. Infuriatingly meaningless, when it's all been shoved so violently down his throat (at home or work, on
TV
, in dreams). Or, rather, almost meaningless: some vestigial memory of a physical encounter from 1988 still lingers, but barely (he was drunk, details get distorted). Pierre's conceptions of coitus, pre and post, have settled down into the sediments of personal fantasy: a pastiche amalgam of pornography, soft-core romantic flourishes, sitcom couplings, Discovery Channel documentaries, Grade 12 sex ed. Every now and then he tries to imagine what it's really like. Rubs and kisses his own skin. Feels icky. Gets off to old familiars: pictures wrenched from real-life scenarios, thrust into the hot, masturbatory lair of his imagination.

Martine Berthelot, twenty-five, audit clerk, co-worker. Co-worker and slight superior in his new environment of stress-free paperwork, clerical monotony, sedentary labour. To Pierre's co-workers, details of last year's strike are still vividly and bitterly intoned – the lack of strategy, the indifference of management, the prolonged negotiations. The scabs. But Martine is new; Martine has no memories, has no reason to sort co-workers into camps determined by political lines. She gives Pierre a moment, a space, in which to breathe. Every other room and hallway is ruled by the battle lines of politics.

‘Good weekend?' she asks him this Monday morning, catching him off guard. ‘Go
hun
ting?' she adds, with a little quiver of a laugh (a joke) appended to the question mark. He lets out his breath and rushes to speak, telling her that yes, actually, he went across the river into Gatineau, Quebec. That he was using his Remington (a 760, 30.06 Gamemaster, a variation of the model that James Earl Ray used to murder Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis, 1968 – something he doesn't share) to hunt deer. He stutters brutally when he attempts the word
deer
, so much so that he eventually gives up, says
game
. She nods through it all – the
d-d-d-d
-ing, the massaging of his jaw muscles, his exhaustion – and he knows instantly that any attempt at furthering the conversation into the personal (the intimate?) is ruined.

She'll find him hopeless, handicapped, he thinks. She'll find his combination of speech impediment and passion for rifles murkily disturbing in that modern, womanly way. Her eyes will glaze over with disgust, a grossed-out scoff about to bubble up in her throat. He's seen it before, heard and imagined the assumptions. To these women, living with Mom into your forties equals too much time at home. Possible abuse. Hobbies turned into obsessions. They might think he has a sort of dopey, forgivable homeliness (and this is what he clings to in odd moments of hope: the appeal of the pathetic, the loner, the misunderstood), but he knows they always imagine his existence – the particulars of Pierre, the irreplaceable qualities of a singular life – as a mere caricature of a lonely man's. Entire bookshelves filled with
VHS
tapes on gambling tips, counting cards. An immaculately clean apartment. Hunting magazines stacked atop worn and outdated
Penthouse
s. Posters of Asian schoolgirls in short skirts flaunting stick-thin white legs.

Silence again arrests the office. Pierre, now daydreaming, watches Martine work at her desk. He imagines the luxury of telling her that the Remington's wood finish is
fine-grain American walnut stock
. He imagines telling her about the gun in a more intimate setting – his mother's living room, say, in Orléans, after dinner. He imagines speaking calmly and mellifluously, his voice a sure, confident metronome. He imagines showing her his rifle not out of eagerness or bravado but because she has begged to see it. She is awed, powerfully aroused, as he unzips a black canvas carrying case and places the surprising weight of the rifle on her lap.

‘Was it fun?' she asks, bored, again cutting through the silence, her eyes down, turning to sort through incoming mail. He says yeah, sure, it was fun, before trailing off. He holds his mouth shut. He does not tell her about the white, painful look of the November sky, the light dusting of snow on the pines, about how much he enjoys the ribbing on the fore end of the rifle. How much he likes the way the professional finish catches the sunlight when the gun is cradled in his arms, his left eye shut tight, his right eye pressed against the thick glass of the scope. The way the light becomes a bead on the barrel, becomes a fist at the end of an arm.