Garcia's Heart (11 page)

He tried to stand and with only the slightest effort to roll onto his side the room swayed and rotated. He stopped and the sensation didn't worsen so he restarted, slowly regaining the vertical. At the end he was perspiring and wished the doctor hadn't gone, but after a minute or two he was closer to feeling better. He looked around for Celia, turning his whole body in the slowly spinning room. She and her son floated by, sitting in a corner. He tried to focus on her but it was difficult. Her son was sleeping in her arms. Teetering in front of her, Patrick remembered that her father was sitting in a holding cell waiting for transport and now her brother was probably in handcuffs somewhere. The boy she held looked to be the only man in her life who wasn't making things difficult for her. Patrick was able to focus on her face and was surprised to see no sign of the expected anxiety or despair. In fact, Patrick had trouble deciphering her expression, except to say it was something other than stoicism. Something more impressive. Calm but intent, not the face of a martyr, but a look he'd seen worn by tradesmen, plumbers contemplating the extent of a job. A shitload of work.

“We need to get Roberto out.”

He didn't even ask why Roberto had hit him, which was fairly instructive about where that relationship stood. Maybe that's why the pain of his face, which was now trying to become a bigger face, swelling to close over his right eye, was, after the initial shock, sort of manageable. In a way, he could understand Roberto's anger. Patrick had avoided contact with the García family for years, through the allegations levelled against Hernan and through Marta's death. It wasn't just indifference, it was betrayal. On the plaza, Patrick was a representation of every person who had walked away from the García family, showing up too late with an empty gesture of support.

And now Roberto was being detained. Patrick knew he wouldn't be much good as a witness, but he understood that wasn't the reason he'd been enlisted to help. He tried to imagine what the police would ask him, their questions becoming his own: why had he continued to walk toward an advancing Roberto, how had he not managed to see the fist coming? He'd been watching Celia. Or maybe he hadn't seen Roberto coming because that was easier than seeing him coming. Maybe it was the Valium or just guilt he had wanted absolved. It didn't matter to Patrick, he was raised a Catholic and trading guilt for pain was a fairly standard currency conversion.

He tried not to look at Celia as they made their way out of the infirmary and walked down the underground corridors they hoped would lead them out. Patrick drew alarmed reactions from passing staff. He suspected they were more familiar with theories of violence and forensic data than with a specimen like his mottled face. The tribunal personnel offered solicitous and vague directions how to get out of the lower levels of the building. It took them another ten minutes before they were outside. Celia was still holding Paul, and though
Patrick couldn't be certain, it seemed the boy was still asleep. She made no noise and he followed her across the plaza for the second time.

“Where are they holding Roberto?”

“At a precinct station two blocks from here. Nina's there right now,” Celia said without turning. Fifty yards farther across the plaza, aware he was being marched over on an errand, that his forgiveness and consent to help were assumed, he stopped.

“Maybe he needs to cool off for a while.”

She turned and stood silently for a second or two. Paul was in her arms, awake but quiet. He played with a length of her hair. He looked like her.

“I need Roberto with us, Patrick,” she said without emotion. It was the quality of her appeal, the complete pragmatism, that made him nod and walk after her.

It took the better part of an hour speaking to a Dutch police inspector to get the charges against Roberto dropped, during which time Patrick lied repeatedly–the bruises were sustained in a fall after a relatively minor scuffle. Patrick's fault entirely. Clumsy, clumsy. He appealed to her to understand the cultural propensity of North Americans to physicalize their conflicts. He mentioned, in passing, that he was a doctor (a tactic he used selectively with the general public–it often backfired in retail situations, acting like a 20 per cent surcharge). Patrick even played the war card, mentioning that he was originally Canadian, which he hoped still carried some weight in a part of Europe liberated from the Nazis by a bunch of people he never knew but who held the same passport. The police inspector said she would have to consider the matter further and asked Patrick to wait in the lobby of the station for her answer.

He met Celia and Nina in the lobby and told them that nothing had been decided about Roberto, that they'd have to wait, which caused the García sisters to fume and glare in tandem. He couldn't help but take their reaction personally; he felt like reminding them that he'd done more than his fair share, and they should remember it was their brother, after all, who was responsible for this mess. But he knew better than to tamper with anybody's indignation. They trundled Paul off to the ladies' washroom, and Patrick was glad to see them go.

Somewhere, he supposed, there must be a record of it. He had only a shadowy recollection of the event, little else beyond shouting and a glimpse of the plaza through a thicket of moving legs. But somewhere, in a vault, on a disc or a hard drive there was most probably a record of a grainy rectangle of plaza captured by a surveillance camera into which he strides and then suddenly lurches away from another body, wheeling across the frame. He falls to the concrete, Roberto looming above, the two of them there for a moment before the arrival of others. He didn't want to see it. By the time the police inspector got to see it, if she ever did, it would all be a memory, like the bruise might be. They had another advantage in trying to get Roberto released. The police were quite visibly in full crisis mode following the murder of the politician van der Hoeven. A punch-up in a plaza must seem little more than a nuisance.

He sat on the wooden bench and closed his eyes. His head ran through cycles of pain, and as it intensified, thoughts began to buzz like the light from the lobby's failing fluorescent tubes. He'd never imagined joining that fraternity of those who'd taken one in the head. Through the strobing he didn't see the
typical icons of injury–no football players shaking off their concussions, no reeling heavyweights or flashes of Dealey Plaza–no, he saw Phineas Gage.

Phineas Gage, railway foreman, worked on the Burlington and Northern Line in the 1850s, surveying and helping to construct a railway through the schist of central Vermont. The hills of granite did not yield easily, and a great deal of blasting was needed. One morning in June 1856, Gage was at work, using a twenty-pound metal tamping rod to prepare a hole for an explosive charge when, because of an error in the sequence of loading the charge, an unforeseen explosion occurred. Everyone in the crew reflexively ducked and, after a pause, looked over to see their foreman lying on his back, without his hat on. The gunpowder was still in the air and whatever stillness existed was broken by the tamping rod clanging to earth fifty yards away. Witnesses described Gage as never losing consciousness, but no one was sure. When they reached him, he was moaning and trying to sit up. One man fainted and another had to turn away so as not to vomit on their foreman.

The tamping rod–which he had slammed into a hole that had already been set with explosive–had been shot straight through the left eye socket and exited through a gaping hole on the left side of his head at the upper edge of his forehead. Gage was taken by wagon to the nearest doctor where it was presumed he would die quickly.

But Gage did not die. Amazingly, he did not bleed to death nor did this man with two holes in his head, each the size of a billiard ball, succumb to infection or any other complication thought to be inevitable. It was with some wonder that weeks after his accident, his doctor felt it was safe to say that he
thought his patient would survive. After months it was apparent that Gage could walk and talk, fairly normally. He would never work again, but he was alive.

But his survival was not the only significant outcome to the accident. In the most famous of many epitaphs of Phineas Gage, his physician, John Harlow, wrote that while his recovery was miraculous, an effect of the injury was that “Gage was no longer Gage.” Gage had survived, but his behaviour had changed. The pious and industrious foreman was now dis-inhibited and unable to complete the simplest of tasks. He was undependable and shiftless. He became an offensive, lecherous man, one whom people cautioned women to avoid. Gage, of course, seemed unconcerned by any of it and ended his days as a drunken drifter.

Gage was the starting point, the living experiment that showed that the brain did not just control movement or perception but played a role in complex behaviour, personality, and temperament. The rod blew Gage's prefrontal cortex into the Vermont sky. In that annihilating moment, knowledge was advanced, and Patrick's field of expertise was baptised. There was much he owed to Phineas Gage.

Patrick was still sitting on the bench in the lobby of the police station waiting for Celia and Nina to come out of the washroom with Paul when he felt two hands on his shoulders. He opened his eyes to see Roberto and instinctively closed his good eye, opening it again to find Roberto sitting next to him on the bench. Patrick expected him to fidget, for the impulsiveness that fed the attack to be subdivided into a hundred smaller tics and twitches, but he was motionless and cool. And anything but repentant or thankful. Aside from the fatigue stamped on his face, he looked like a world champ
resting between rounds. It made Patrick sorry he had come to help him.

“Hello, Mopito.”

“I did it for your sisters,” Patrick said, studying the pattern of tiles on the floor.

“They're going to drop the charges, I guess.”

“I figured that out.”

Patrick was suddenly overcome by the need to ask Roberto if he was angry at his father, resentful for having to come all the way to Europe only to hear his father's story again. Was this what the punch was for? The thoughts tumbled together, racing around while he experienced third-person alarm at almost saying the words. He felt drunk and perversely giddy despite the half-moon face of ache, which made him wonder if his frontal lobe was contused by the punch and further disinhibitions were on their way. A fate like Gage. Maybe Lazerenko was no longer Lazerenko, which he felt wasn't so bad an outcome, given the situation. Patrick tried to focus on someone other than Roberto, anyone.

“I'm sorry about your dad.”

“Why should you care, Mopito?”

“Cut the
mopito
shit, please.”

“Okay,” Roberto replied, suddenly standing up and leaving Patrick alone on the bench. It surprised Patrick how quickly he walked away, disappearing through the doors at the end of the hallway.

Celia and Nina eventually returned from the washroom with Paul in tow, his face streaked with tears. Patrick looked at the boy. This was the life of a child, sudden, off-screen eruptions that didn't warrant an explanation. Celia apologized for the way they'd reacted earlier, and she and Paul sat down
on the bench with Patrick. Nina remained standing, scanning the hallways for her brother. Patrick was going to tell them about Roberto's release, but something held him back. Instead, he rose to properly say hello to Nina, not knowing whether to shake her hand or embrace her but in the end Patrick did the stuttering two-cheek kiss that most clearly identified an exiled Montrealer. On the second kiss, Nina reached around to kiss him somewhere on the angle of his right jaw, a gesture that seemed shockingly intimate until he realized that she was doing it to avoid the swollen cheekbone. Patrick remembered Nina as a shy eleven-year-old. She was a person as new to him as Paul. She resembled her mother more than Celia did and seemed less affected by everything that was happening around her. Patrick shook Paul's hand with more formality than was necessary between a two-year-old and a guy with a big black eye. To his surprise, the little boy didn't seem to be bothered by the look of the swollen face and Patrick wondered if Paul had seen his uncle swing at him, if that would lessen or heighten any reaction he had now. Paul started writhing to get off Celia's lap and, once he was on the ground, began to run the marble hallways. Celia's good mood returned and Patrick wanted to take it in, not ashamed to use whatever credit he had earned as the wronged-party/reluctant hero to get her to sit there a while longer, to look at her while her son clomped up and down the corridor, swerving between Dutch police officials. Nina went to rein him in.

“I didn't think you'd come,” Celia said.

“I hadn't planned on it.” Paul ran by. Patrick thought for a moment that he could detect the sound of the boy's footsteps rising in pitch, a mini-Doppler effect, but he knew it was impossible. “I wanted to hear what he has to say.”

She looked at him as though every word were a ploy.

“People have made up their minds. Besides, he's not talking.”

“You were all very important to me,” Patrick said, immediately regretting having said it. Celia did the right thing, he thought, by not responding. They both watched Nina and Paul idling at the far end of the corridor.

“Nina doesn't talk about the trial,” Celia said. “She doesn't want to go. She's glad to have Paul to watch during the day. So if you think he's guilty, please keep it to yourself.”

“What do you and Roberto think?”

Celia fixed him with a look of such sadness. Grace and despair residing on a face at the same moment. Nina and Paul jogged by, holding hands.

“I wonder when Roberto will be released,” Celia said, craning her neck to look down into the lobby.

“I don't know,” he answered, as she turned back from the lobby. Celia looked at him and he thought she could tell he was lying, but he realized he was imagining this. That was the way it used to be. Now she just looked away. But it didn't disappoint him. He wanted to sit. Just five minutes more, then he would tell her. He had earned this much.