Garcia's Heart (45 page)

After leaving the hospital, Patrick had returned to the Metropole, where he made travel arrangements and packed his bags for the next day's flight. Despite sleeping with unusual soundness, he had still awoken an hour before dawn. At seven, there was a knock on the door and he opened it to find a young man asking his name and brandishing what turned out to be a tribunal subpoena, issued the morning before. He was accompanied by a solemn Edwin, now offering expanded concierge services. Patrick offered no explanation about what had happened to García, and so neither of the men at his door could have understood the obsolescence of the act or the reason for his indifference at receiving the summons. The young man didn't seem to care but poor Edwin looked crestfallen at the lack of drama.

Patrick wasn't due to leave for the train station for another hour, but after the morning visit he needed to get out of his room, and so he decided to walk over to the Garcías'
pension
on Geestbrugweg with the intention of giving Marta's book to Celia. He had been thinking about it since the night before; it seemed like the right thing to do in so many ways: a gift, a stab at that much-vaunted closure, a chance to see all the Garcías again, making sure they were all right after a night at the hospital. But on the way to the
pension
he reconsidered, worrying that Celia would eventually read the book and find her mother's judgment in the margins, thinking he should instead just put the book on the shelves in the
pension
's library and have it become lost forever. But as he turned and began walking back to the Metropole, he realized he was acting as much for himself, that the book in his hand was the only thing of the Garcías that he had left and it was something he couldn't relinquish.

The lounge around him now was mahogany-panelled, dark and familiar, with an haute rec-room clubhouse feel that made him wonder where the ping-pong table was. After several tactical seat changes–drawing the attention and curious glances of the waitress–Patrick concluded that there was no place in the executive class lounge to hide from the many giant-screen televisions and so he passed the time trying to avert his eyes from the muted montage of the day's events.

The hour passed slowly, more so because of his obsessive surveillance of the minute hand as it swept away the quarter hours. Patrick opened his computer, deciding that he needed focus, the industrious older cousin of diversion; yes, that's what was missing. He reasoned that the news about the Globomart deal would have been sent by now, and once back in Boston, he'd be patting Sanjay on the back and they'd be well on their way to deprogramming everyone at Neuronaut
from the cult of Lazerenko indispensability. The waitress came over, genuinely happy that this new seat was superior in some mysterious way to the other three he'd abandoned. Patrick chose something from the menu and sat in silent contemplation with other monks in the lounge, an order with faces pale before their laptop screens. He checked his messages for the first time that day and found a communiqué sent out late the previous night.

 

Neuronaut
CEO
Jeremy Bancroft takes great pleasure in announcing the signing of a new exclusivity contract with Globomart Inc., Medina, Minnesota, for “continued cognitive analysis of all Globomart marketing” for the next five years, including their soon-to-be-launched campaign–“Amer/I can.”

Neuronaut is also proud to announce the appointment of Sanjay Gopal, Ph.D., to the position of Chief Scientific Officer, effective immediately. Dr. Gopal has served in the research and development department of Neuronaut and was instrumental in developing analysis for Globomart's “Amer/I can” campaign.

 

The next message was from Bancroft himself and had a heading succinct enough–re: personnel change/exit strategy–that he didn't need to open it. The cult of Lazerenko had already ended. He closed his computer.

The waitress arrived with his meal. He thanked her and she left, smiling as she turned away. He wondered if she could tell how he felt. If it showed. Because it hurt, any sense of relief overwhelmed by the sting of dismissal like a punch remembered from a childhood playground. In the end, he hoped that, if asked, the waitress would say that she noticed nothing different about her customer when she came back
with his beer, except that his computer was now closed and he looked a little less fidgety than before.

When the boarding call for his flight was finally announced, it surprised him, perhaps because now, he didn't have any reason to go. He could take a flight tomorrow, or board the plane at the neighbouring gate for Barcelona or just wander through the terminal and any of it would make as much sense as going back to Boston. But Boston was as good a place as any and had the benefit of being the quickest way out of Den Haag, so when the second call came he shouldered his carry-on without hesitation and limped into that snaking line with the others, preparing his papers and wanting to see nothing more than the back of an airline seat. When he pulled out his boarding pass, the tribunal subpoena came along with it. Patrick folded the document quickly, and the gate attendant, focused on the boarding pass and matching his face with his passport's photo, didn't notice a thing.

“Ooh, that's a shiner.”

“Yeah,” he replied, summoning a frat-boy grin that made him want to take a shower.

At thirty thousand feet, the noise of an airplane was a beautiful thing. A seventy-decibel ode to constancy, an anthem to Bernoulli's law, it thrummed its lullaby to him. Close your eyes. Don't look at your watch. Don't look at your watch. The plane tore its way back through time zones, strung on contrails, elongating the day of Hernan García's death. But night would come. Somewhere over Britain the minute hand of his watch would cross the meridian of a particular quarter hour and it would happen, as it must, but Patrick had already climbed inside the noise of the engines, telling himself that it was already over, miles back and years ago.

He closed his eyes and remembered the evening before at the hospital, how they waited, staring at the lavender walls until, one by one, they began to excuse themselves to go on little hatchling expeditions to the washroom or the vending machines down the hallway. They ate in the hospital's empty cafeteria, all of them sitting on the same side of a long table, as if to dissuade attempts at conversation. After dinner, he and Celia took Paul for a walk down the corridor that led away from the intensive care unit, and, finding a sign for the solarium on the twelfth floor, decided to go farther. The elevator doors opened onto a room with walls and a ceiling vaulted in glass. It was a dark and quiet place, the rarest of commodities in a hospital, as rare as a clear night in Den Haag. The sky full of stars spread out over them. Below, the more orderly constellation of Den Haag street lights was hemmed in by the sea. For the longest time they just sat and looked out.

They could have talked about her father; he could have told her that he thought Hernan had made a grave and terrible mistake, a mistake that exceeded any capacity to forgive but an act that they could perhaps one day understand. Yes. He'd try to understand. But at that moment, he hadn't wanted to talk about Hernan. Hernan wasn't really alive any more and Celia was not a person who needed her father defended or eulogized to her.

An older man, a patient in a pale blue bathrobe and pushing an
IV
pole on its little wheels, came into the solarium and shuffled right up to the glass wall. He looked down at the streets below and then up and around at the city, as if to verify that the scale of things in the outside world had not changed. Then he turned, his hand on the pole, escorting it back to his room. It was only on his way out of the room that the man
glanced over and noticed the three of them sitting there. The expression on his face, visibly gaunt even in the low light of the room, did not change as he left.

In the silence of the solarium Patrick felt at ease for the first time in Den Haag. Celia was sitting beside him, and yet he felt no regret that he'd lost her nor anger that he'd spent his life trying to discount that loss. Instead, he wanted to tell her that he'd loved her, from what he understood of the word and of himself, not to change anything between them, but just so that she knew. It was important to him that she knew. But then he watched Celia hold her son in her arms and it all seemed unnecessary. Paul was falling asleep and she wiped the hair out of his eyes and kissed him on the forehead. The boy's eyelids fluttered and closed. Accompanied by the sound of her son softly breathing, they sat in the room looking out past the lights of the city to that point in the distance and the darkness where the sky and the sea must have met.

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It was a privilege to work with Jennifer Lambert at McClelland & Stewart. The enthusiasm and intelligence she brought to this book were much appreciated.

I would like to thank my agent, Denise Bukowski, for all her efforts on my behalf.

Thank you to Jim and Maureen Durcan, Bruni and Peter Erdmann, Anne Durcan, Alec Macauley, Maria and Rick Higgins, Andrew Steinmetz, Alain Dagher, and Jim Dixon. Finally, thank you to Florence, Niall, and Julia, for everything.

 

The following works were particularly important for me during the writing of this book:
The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide
by Robert Jay Lifton;
The Ethical Brain
by Michael Gazaniga;
Neuroethics: Defining the Issues in Theory, Practice and Policy
, Ed. Judy Illes. Details of the activities of Battalion 316 were first published in a series of articles in the
Baltimore Sun
that ran from June 11 to December 15, 1995, and are available through their on-line archives at
www.baltimoresun.com
.

 

COPYRIGHT © 2007 BY
L
IAM
D
URCAN

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Durcan, Liam
García's heart / Liam Durcan.

eISBN: 978-1-55199-174-0

I. Title.

PS8607.U73G37 2007     C813'.6     C2006-905097-X

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation's Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

While the activities of Battalion 316 described herein are based on documented fact, the characters are fictitious and the book is a work of fiction.

M
C
C
LELLAND
& S
TEWART
L
TD.
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com

v1.0