Garcia's Heart (30 page)

This was Den Haag at dusk. This was the sea.

He had come to the very edge of Holland, in Scheveningen, the place that Birgita had told him about. He thought it would be a bus journey away but it was really nothing more than the northeast corner of Den Haag. Scheveningen was a beach town, infamous and deserted and so close to Den Haag that he'd walked there without particularly intending to. In the early evening light it was beautiful, even more abandoned
than the city just to the south. In the guidebook he bought at one of the few open stores, he learned that Scheveningen, other than being the North Sea version of Daytona Beach (with everything, positive and negative, that that entailed), held a special place in the psyche of the Dutch as the proper pronunciation of its name–Skay-veninguh–was so difficult to German speakers that it was used as a shibboleth, a test by the Dutch to identify enemy spies during the war.

“Skay-veninguh,” he said, loudly and ineptly enough for any bystander to cast a suspicious glance, but he was alone. Ahead there was a boardwalk that led to a pavilion on a pier, all of it stilted above a sea the colour of slate. He was an invading army of one. The city was his.

Patrick turned a corner and walked down another street and this confirmed the emptiness, an almost pathological emptiness. It was the sort of abandonment that reminded him of evacuation from some impending civil catastrophe. He expected to look through windows to see pots bubbling on stoves or doors swinging on their hinges. Maybe a flood was coming, the rising waters even now overwhelming the vaunted system of dykes and canals, leaving scant hours until they were all waist-deep in North Sea. Maybe the evacuation orders had been issued in Dutch, and the foreigners, stumbling through Skay-veninguh in every sense, had been left behind to fend for themselves. “Skay-veninguh,” he repeated to himself, lacking even the conviction of a proper spy. He had been found out, consigned to a Dutch rooftop in the coming flood, wind-whipped and waving for rescue.

He told himself that if he had been alone on an empty beach the solitude would have been tolerable, even pleasant, but wandering the streets of a ghost town filled him with
dread. He wasn't used to seeing everything closed, everything was 24/7 back home, and he understood in that very North American way that only the sight of a functioning retail establishment was going to reassure him now. He grew so desperate that he almost retraced his steps to the shop where he had bought his guidebook. It took him another ten minutes to find a restaurant that didn't look boarded up on one of the side streets off the Strandweg. He was further relieved to find the door unlocked, and he ventured inside, coming face to face with two restaurant workers who regarded him with a look of astonishment and shock, as though he'd emerged from the foam after having swum over from Norway.

They were apologetic for only having sandwiches, but it was fine, Patrick told them. The meal in the dining room, with its huge diorama window fronting the coast, calmed him down. By the time they brought Patrick a cup of coffee and the bill, Scheveningen had again become just another off-season beach town, one of a fraternity of forlorn places. The sky deepened and then the sky was black. No stars, but the lights of the coast extended to the right and left and that was enough for him.

It was cooler by the time he left, and he could smell the sea now. The pier disappeared except for a small skeleton of lights that outlined where the pavilion would be. He could go back to the Metropole, but he thought about his cell phone and laptop and whatever concierge was on duty, all waiting for him. No, right now the empty streets of Scheveningen were what he needed. Shop windows full of beach gear, bicycle rental places boarded up; even though it wasn't yet seven o'clock, nightfall had normalized the streets for him and he was able to imagine it was three in the morning. As he passed the shop windows, he could see the flesh over his cheek
sagging now like low-lying Dutch evening clouds, a right eye still swollen to the point that it looked like he was winking. Patrick stopped and peered into a darkened shop window. He opened his mouth, and the skin over the swollen cheek stretched. His eye opened slightly. Past the reflection he saw that the shop was a gallery, with paintings stacked on the floor against the back wall. Two paintings still hung in the window–seascapes, with more compositional skill than typically seen in tourist-grade oils–asserting a more-than-seaside-town-gallery aspiration for the establishment. It was natural that he thought of Celia at moments like this. Art from the sidewalk, inadvertent, brought back memories of a moment like this on a different street fifteen years earlier. It was how he had found his way back into the Garcías' lives.

It was 1991. He had barely seen any of the Garcías and hadn't talked to Celia at all in the four years since he'd quit Le Dépanneur Mondial. After a year dodging Celia at the store and at school, he had been relieved to escape to the anonymity of a different
CEGEP
. He had friends and girlfriends and a life and Celia García was demoted to just another person he knew from his old neighbourhood. He was accepted into medical school after
CEGEP
(something routinely done in Quebec, if only for the extreme social experimentation of graduating twenty-three-year-old doctors) and became immersed in books, treading water with the other overachievers. In late September of his first year, walking through the downtown early on a Friday evening after a day of gorging himself on another thousand facts of biochemistry, he stopped on the sidewalk and turned his head sharply to the right. He still thought about that response; the flare, perhaps reaching the occipital lobes, tripping through substations in the temporal lobes, retrieving a
visual memory, comparing, triggering other associations. Not a decision to turn, but a response to something only partially understood and then the decision created later. He stopped. He was stopped. Through the window he saw something familiar among other paintings at a student exhibition. Patrick saw himself, emerging from a field of corn. He went into the gallery.

The exhibition space, a building belonging to the other English university in the city, was already full. Half the crowd–obviously family–was dressed up for the event and milled nervously, never straying far from the work of various offspring, while the other half, younger, whom he assumed to be the artists themselves or friends of the artists, were dressed less formally but with more eccentric precision. He was the rarity, the walk-in business, likely the only one. He strolled through the aisles of art, making his way to the wall that had been visible from the window.

He looked at the painting again and had to remind himself that he hadn't given it back, that this was a copy of the one that hung in his bedroom. Artist: Celia García. It was exactly like his. It was him in the painting, titled
Unknown boy in cornfield #2
. It was him pushing back those stalks.

She had four other paintings there. Stunning paintings. Patrick saw a rendering of the inside of the Garcías' house, distorted and yet still recognizable, a point of view that he could imagine only as coming from inside the aquarium that sat in her parents' living room. Another showed her parents, American Gothic-style, standing in front of Le Dépanneur Mondial. Hernan and Marta, gaunt and stoic, clutching a mop and carafe of coffee respectively. There was a portrait of a man about Patrick's age in which she captured something
intimate, a knowing smirk, that made Patrick feel the stab of a butter knife somewhere in his ego. Of course, there was
Unknown boy in a cornfield #2
, which was unsettling and impressive in its own right. Patrick's favourite was one whose point of view could have been his for the summer he worked at Le Dépanneur Mondial, impressionistic banks of colour on either side of a produce aisle.

“My professor doesn't like that one,” Celia said, having crept up on him. She whispered: “She doesn't like any of them really, they're all devoid of a personal style, all ‘imitative.'”

Patrick stared straight ahead at the painting, into a churning sea of yellow that he thought must be mangoes. “That's why they're being exhibited, I suppose. Setting an example.”

“No, seriously. She hasn't said so, but I get the feeling she wants me to discover my inner
La-tee-na
. You know–folksier style, crucifixes and skeletons, the new Frida Kahlo. That's how I'll get to be a great Canadian painter.”

He turned toward her. She had her arms crossed–all the students identifiable as artists stood with their arms crossed, as though sentries against the marauding philistines. But she smiled at him. She was taller than when he had last seen her, and she wore her hair pulled back and gathered into a thick cord that hung down her back.

He didn't know what he was supposed to say to someone he hadn't seen for three years. A summary of what he'd done in the intervening time maybe. He had imagined just this sort of situation, hoping whatever he had accomplished would impress her, surprise her. In these fantasies she was always the same, the Celia he'd known from the store, from that day they'd walked home together. But he was surrounded by evidence that she had changed too. Art was no longer a hobby
for her. She had become an artist, and it intimidated as much as it impressed him. As much as he tried to think of himself as different, as an older or more accomplished version of himself, it was still just a version. And she knew the other versions.

“Hi,” he said, holding out his right hand, “I'm Patrick Lazerenko.”

“Nice to meet you,” she replied.

He had arrived late. Hernan and Marta had come and gone earlier, and he had missed Roberto by a scant five minutes. The gallery emptied but he loitered, pretending to develop a taste for the work of the nearby exhibitors. Finally, he asked Celia if she wanted to go out for something to eat. Patrick didn't notice much about the meal–all his neurons were committing themselves to various Celia-related details. She laughed differently, the nasal snort was gone, and instead she pursed her lips. She was more comfortable in English now, pausing less as she spoke and, unless she wanted to make a point, the Spanish words had disappeared from her conversation. She spoke about art and her ambitions, sounding confident but not arrogant, a neat trick for someone in university. At one point, Celia mentioned a guy's name and the soup turned sour, but Patrick managed to carry on with some measure of composure. She wanted to know about medical school, and he told her it was, up to that point, a morass of facts that he had difficulty imagining would have any application. “We're learning about the brain,” he remembered saying to her, then regretting it as the words made him sound like a grade school child eager to impress with his knowledge of the alphabet.

There he was, over some meal listening to her talk about her family, explaining to him how she'd finally decided on
pursuing a career in art, seeing her smile and laugh. Both he and Celia still lived at home, not six blocks from each other. They laughed at that, but neither one of them could figure out why. And through it all, Patrick felt like a grey-raincoated dissident finding himself on the other side of the wall, enjoying an inexplicable day of freedom and wondrous excess.

They rode home on a nearly-empty bus and didn't say much to each other. They'd talked all night, after all, and so were reduced to the residue of conversation, to chit-chat–how Monkland Avenue was coming back to life and what it would mean for Le Dépanneur Mondial. But the ease, the pleasure they both had in each other's company, impressed him. The silences were like a lovely snaking song, full of subtle, irresistible grooves and hooks, mirrored in the rolling motion of the bus. He was counting stops until theirs arrived. Three. Two. One. We'll be friends, he thought. We are friends. He said goodnight to her and tried not to have his face drawn into the smile of a sidewalk cult recruiter. The night ended, quietly and definitively, like a door closing.

 

A couple walked by on the sidewalk behind Patrick as he stood at the window, the reflected flare of a red windbreaker in the window registering only by the time they passed. He listened to their footsteps already abbreviating into the night. Patrick fished out the card that Roberto had used to call the
pension
and saw that the address was listed as Geestbrugweg, fifteen blocks away, according to his map of Den Haag. He turned away from the gallery and began the walk back into town.

Along the Strandweg, the buildings dropped away, and in the dark interval between the street lights he got a slow, cycling sense of the depth of night. The lights of a tanker hung
suspended in the North Sea. He picked up the pace, enough to get his head pounding and feel a little sick to his stomach.

One morning, a few weeks after running into Celia at the art exhibit, Patrick had sat down for breakfast and watched as his father suddenly reached out with his right hand. Patrick's mother was looking for something in the cupboard; he remembered this, he heard the door close with that cupboard door sound. The radio was on. For some reason his eyes were on his father's hand as it froze there in the mid-breakfast air, and he had the impression his father was trying to ward something off. He watched the right hand drop slowly and then grip the edge of the table. His father had massive hands, the base of his thumb muscled thick as a chicken leg, and he squeezed the table so tightly that the thumbnail blanched. Patrick watched in fascination, as though he could only make sense of the man piece by piece, following the forearm up to the sleeve of his T-shirt and then finally arriving at his fixed and ashen face. He called out to his mother.

His mother dialled 911 while Patrick eased his father to the floor–
eased
, that was a joke, he remembered easing him like a lumberjack eases a redwood. Patrick started doing something that approximated
CPR
. His father's lips were already cool and bluish, and he had stopped breathing. He knew he should remember something personal from his father's last moments, he should, by rights, have had a flood of memories, some expression of devotion to him, but all he remembered was thinking: “This is a man dying.” Then he felt panic and the cold burden of futility, the sense that he was trying to overturn some unstoppable physical fact.
This is a man dying.
They took him to hospital in the calamity of sirens and frantic, choreographed action, but he was dead. Patrick and his mother sat
in the hallway in the emergency department, watching the doors open and seal up again like great tectonic plates. Patrick was in sweat pants, he remembered the cord dangling, and his mother was still in her dressing gown underneath her overcoat when a doctor came out and told them he had died.