No Safeguards (13 page)

T
HINGS DID CHANGE
between us. “You betrayed me, man. From now on, it's war the whole fucking way. It's over between us. Over! Fini!
Snitch!
” He sliced the air with a hand sweep. “I'm your mortal enemy . . . And listen to me carefully: stop fooling with your life. Never you make the mistake of dissing me again in front of my friends, or you'll be dead, man. Dead! You're lucky I didn't tell you to kiss my arse or go fuck yourself, or give you the finger. You snitch!”

I didn't always resent how much of my time Paul took; there were pleasurable moments, like when he shared something he'd written or read me passages from books he was reading. I missed that. About a week before the incident with Mrs. Bensemana, he'd come into my bedroom, handed me a sheet of paper and said: “What you think of this? I just finished it.”

The Metro

Blue pythons speeding, hissing

Through burrows underground

Blessed to have food come willingly

Cursed to expel it undigested

From the same mouths

Eating and shitting.

Keep far from their mating

It's a cataclysmic coming.

Nodding admiringly, I handed the sheet back to him. “How many poems do you have?”

“At least a hundred.”

“You must show me some more.” But he never did.

During the next year he called me every insulting epithet that I'd already heard: dolt, dingbat, clotbrain, twit, boho, bozo; a few that I hadn't: foozle, gunk-head; and many I have since forgotten.

And the putdowns! “Paul, will you please turn the music down? I have a headache.”

“No, it's a herniated brain. It happens to cretins who think they're Einsteins.”

Not long after this Paul began putting weekly maxims outside his bedroom door. On occasion Anna invited work colleagues to the flat. After she rejoined fundamentalism her guests included church members. She argued with Paul to put his maxims up inside his room. He refused, saying they were there to make her think, “if you still think.” They left me intrigued and on occasion worried. But I complimented him for those maxims I liked (a mistake I now think):

Obedience is warm because it lives in a barn.

Opt for comfort and lose your sight,

Soon followed by your rights.

Flee compliance. It's a deadly blight.

Cultivate your thoughts;

They're swords of light.

Honey and traps are never far apart.

By the time he was 14 his behaviour worsened. Luck and his teachers' interventions — Mrs. Bensemana's and Mrs. Mehta's — kept him from ending up at Batshaw. He stopped participating in his classes and had some sort of arrangement with his French, English, and history teachers to hand in his assignments and pick up the corrected work at the office. That year too he read
Walden
and “Civil Disobedience” and met with Mrs. Mehta outside of class hours to discuss Thoreau and Gandhi. At the parent-teachers' meeting that May, she exclaimed to Anna about it, told her that Paul's reading scores put him at the university level, and suggested that he be sent back to St. Vincent to finish high school there. When Anna broached the subject with Paul, he said no; she should have done so the year before.

A Friday afternoon, about ten days after the parent-teacher's meeting, Paul came home sullen. “Nobody talk to me. Say one word to me and I'll kill somebody.” He remained in his bedroom all evening. It turned out that three days earlier, he'd gone to see Bégin about setting up a course of independent study. It would have involved broadcasts from the learning channel, various programmes on PBS, and material from my college texts. He told Bégin that the MRE teacher insulted his intelligence and needed a course in logic, grammar, and spelling and that most of his teachers were only slightly better. Bégin had promised to look into his request. That Friday Bégin had given him his answer: “Who do you think you are? The ministry of education sets the curriculum. The gall! You think you know more than your teachers? You will follow the curriculum set by the ministry of education and no other. Now put your tail between your legs, go back to class, and do the work your teachers set for you.” Paul looked away from me and took a deep breath. He was sitting on the edge of my bed; I sat at my desk. When Paul faced me again, he said: “You know what, Jay: I'm proud of how I handled myself today. I came close to telling Bégin: ‘You know something about tails. They've been going up your arse for a long time.' But I swallowed, took a deep breath, and walked out of his office.”

Shortly afterwards we found out that Paul had joined a gang. Then the maxims became sporadic but more caustic:

Clap for fucking and flying.

Boo for conformity and crawling.

Classifications are misleading:

Wasps trump cattle in all my readings.

Try raising cain;

Guaranteed to grow your brain.

Better to carp than be a harp.

Be a knife. Wait coolly to take

Your user's life.

I appeal to the living:

Let's bury the dead

And kill the half living.

The Easter weekend that year, he had one of his periodic outbursts, and I told him: “When you get to know your inner self, it will disgust you. You want us mortals to be God? First become God and show us the way. You'd better start ignoring what's wrong with others and focus on
finding
and
mending
the cracks in your own psyche.”

“The cracks in
my
psyche, huh! Focus on
your
own cracks? Wanna know an open secret? You're a faggot.” Smirking, teeth clenched, torso rocking. “You take it up the arse, Jay Jackson. You and Jonathan are lovers.”

“In this day and age, there's nothing wrong with Jonathan, me — or you — being gay.”

“Leave me out of it. I knew it! I knew it!” He smiled broadly, open-mouthed. He shouted to Anna in her bedroom. “Ma, there's vermin in the house. C
all
the exterminator.” He bristled with excitement.

“Paul, stop it!” Anna shouted to him from inside her bedroom.

“But, Ma, he's a vector for disease.”

“Oh, my sick little brother,” I said, shaking my head. By now Anna was standing at her bedroom door.

“
Little brother!
Your sense of duty's killing you, man. I'm
not
your little brother. You're duller than cardboard. Jonathan will soon ditch you, and nobody else will want you.
Little brother
. You never cared that much for me anyway. You only wanted to impress Grama, and now Ma. Fuck your sense of duty, man! Go get yourself a fat plantain.”

All three of us were silent for about 30 seconds. Even Paul seemed shocked. Then he said, his tone a trifle apologetic: “Do you ever get angry? What will it take to get you angry?” He came to stand within 30 cm of me.

Anna came into the dinette. I stared at her and shook my head.

“Do I have to like punch you to get something human out of you? Know what: your face looks like a gorilla's butt.” He chuckled.

“Why don't you come let me like teach you how to toke? You'll understand that life — my life, your life, Ma's life — is a huge joke, and we would laugh at all the human ants scurrying everywhere, pulled by invisible strings. Man, don't I understand what Thoreau meant. ‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.'”

“Well, Thoreau's no longer around, so he can't say what lives know-it-all punks lead, or advise them that hurling filth at others is no way to get attention.”

“Why do I like bother talking to you? Why do I like cast my pearls before swine?”

“Right. Just wear them and shut your mouth.”

He balled his fists and shook them. “You drivel on and on about what you don't know. At least that dunderhead” — he indicated Anna with a toss of his chin — “keeps her drivel to herself. Talk like a man! That or go let them chop off your cock. That way you'd be my sister for real. Voice like a violin in F. Like fucking cleats on my soul.”

“Your soul! Where do you hide it?”

“You're
so
pathetic! No wonder those professors have you on a leash. Breaking you in for the plough. Your classmates party night and day and get better grades than you. Education's a con game, man. Sucker! Sucker-r!” He whistled and snapped his fingers. “Hey, Rover. Rover how ya doing? Praise, Rover? Okay. No fucking sleep before 4 am.” He snapped his fingers again. “Read them books, boy.” He laughed, and then, his tone slightly serious: “Know what you make me think of, man? That seal on the West Coast that they like released from captivity, and no matter how far away they carried it, it kept coming back to the aquarium they'd kept it in. Rats, too, man; you and Ma. Rats that come back to their cages and re-imprison themselves for pellets.” He paused to catch his now wheezing breath.

He turned to stare at Anna. “Can't live without handcuffs, eh? Look at you! Had to go back to your superstitions. Now, if you'd gone there to find a man.” He laughed. “What a foolish woman” — he shook his head slowly — “you belong to a religion that believed you were born to be white people's slave!” A monstrous smirk deforming his face, his voice clanking. “Know what I call you in my journal? Felicity Foil, devotee of Serena Joy.”

Grinning, he looked from Anna to me, then walked to the coat closet, put on his windbreaker, and slammed the door as he left.

A week later, around 2 pm, I was sitting at the dining table desperately trying to finish a paper I was late handing in. Anna, dressed for work, came out of her bedroom and was putting her coat on when Paul, who was stretched out on the sofa said: “Ma, I'm going to spend this summer with Grama. You can afford to pay my plane fare.”

“I know what I can afford, and your plane fare is not included,” she told him, then walked to the phone on a side table, dialled Grama's number, and told her, in Paul's presence, not to send Paul any money for him to travel to St. Vincent. He got up with a sprint, glared at her, then went to the kitchen counter and began hurling the dishes from the drain board at her, aiming them to miss, the pieces of crockery clattering and scattering over the wooden floor.

“For God's sake, stop! Enough! Leave! Go for a walk! Calm down!” I told him, frightened, worried that he'd gone insane.

“And if I don't leave?”

I said nothing.

“You'll throw me out, right?” He gave a feral, high-pitched laugh. “And I'll pop your faggoty ass like a dry twig.” He balled his fists and gestured the popping; his eyes became small and piercing, his body odour rank. “One of these days you all will drive me so mad, I'll show up here with a Uzi and blow your asses to smithereens.”

We were too shocked to respond.

Seconds later he left the apartment.

A
NNA RETURNED TO
fundamentalist religion a week after Paul turned 14. Twice I had heard her wondering out loud whether Paul's “unruli­ness” was God's way of chastising her for leaving the Church of the Elect. “Once you're of the elect, you must return to the fold,” she later told me with conviction. Her conversion had come suddenly. One of the nurses she worked with, a half-Chinese Jamaican woman called Princessa Chung, had something to do it. Anna had taken us to a party at her house — somewhere on the West Island — Kirkland probably — during our second year here. It took us two hours to get there; to a house stuffed with dollar-store figurines, doilies, and plaster and plastic plaques with inscriptions that read: GOD IS THE HEAD OF THIS HOUSE and THE FAMILY THAT PRAYS TOGETHER STAYS TOGETHER. There were three sofas in the living room, three unmatched armchairs, cabinets, several unmatched lamps, and plastic plants and plastic flowers in vases scattered all over the living-and-dining room. “She's tired of shift work and amassing stuff to start a junk business,” Paul said. Thereafter he referred to her as Madam-Junk-Ma's-Friend, eventually shortening it to Madam J. She'd set up a sound system on her quite spacious lawn at the back of her house. It blasted the neighbours' ears well past 11 pm, causing Paul to quip: “They also bray.” The house was crammed with residents too: sisters with their children, nieces and nephews from Jamaica going to university —enough to constitute a town — explaining, no doubt, the three sofas in the living room.

Anna joined Madam J's church following months of tribulations with Paul. Things had begun to go seriously wrong in July. On a dare, he'd tried to steal a gold chain from a jeweller in the Côte des Neiges Plaza. By the beginning of September Anna had made four trips to get him out of police custody. His gang vandalized bus shelters, spray-painted graffiti on people's homes and fences and in the metro and on buses —
throwing up, bombing,
they called it — and gathered in Van Horne Park to smoke grass. One morning in August, around 2 am, the police caught him putting graffiti on one of the doors to the Plamondon metro station. He carried no ID, and told them his name was Don Giovanni. They took him to the police station. He suffered an asthma attack while they were administering the “workover,” and had to be rushed to the emergency at St. Mary's. Two evenings later — Anna was at work — I caught him smoking pot in his bedroom. He grinned and handed me the joint. “It will unplug you.”

I shook my head.

“See? You're corked, man. Corked e
n hostie!
Just don't rupture; they'll have to evacuate the whole goddamn neighbourhood.” He guffawed and slapped the bed with his free hand.

“Focus on who's seeing you and your boys rolling and passing around joints in Van Horne Park,” I told him.

***

Of course there were times too when he was helpful.
That Christmas, Ma worked, and Paul actually offered to help with the cooking. He creamed the butter, broke the eggs and threw them into the mixer followed by the various ingredients for the pound cake I was making. It would have been simpler if I had done it myself — I had to interrupt what I was doing to get each ingredient for him — but I was happy that we were doing something together, instead of fighting. And he'd vacuumed the entire apartment without my asking him. On Christmas evening he greeted Ma when she arrived at the door around 7:30 and told her to sit at the table and let him serve her. She had just completed a twelve-hour shift.

Three days into the New Year, I entered the apartment in the middle of a dispute he and Anna were having in time to hear him say: “Ma, you're too old to remember some things, and I'm too young to know some things. And some things I won't learn. Because other people are dumb and obedient doesn't mean I have to be dumb and obedient too.” He grinned at her, that grin with his tongue half-extended that exasperates her, then added: “Treat me like an equal and you'll be surprised the things I'll teach you.” She swallowed, looked at her fingers, which she was opening and closing, then went into her bedroom.

If that was a window, it closed, and the abusive language, one-upmanship, and swagger returned. Once after that, almost a year later, he offered to make tea for us. From the gleam in his eyes and his hands kneading his chin and caressing the back of his head, I sensed that something wasn't right. I opened the teapot and saw two stainless steel balls in it. I lowered my head and sniffed. Marijuana. Paul's fingers went to his lips. I removed the balls, gave them to Paul, rinsed the pot, and put teabags in.

***

On baring her bosom to Madam J, Anna found out that Paul was a pusher at the English secondary school some distance from where we lived. One of Madam J's nieces attended the school. She'd remembered Paul from the party and had relayed the information to her aunt. “That boy, Anna, that boy going kill you unless the Lord make ‘im see the herror of him ways.”

The very next day, a Saturday, someone phoned the house three times and hung up each time I picked up the receiver. When the phone rang a fourth time, I screamed at Paul to pick it up. Paul was trembling. I picked up the handset and yelled: “Answer the damn phone, Paul.” The caller spoke then. “Tell Meatman I book him for heaven the minute he step outside. I warn him one time too much to keep fucking clear of my turf.”

Next day Anna went to Madam J's church and announced on her return home that she had “re-entered the fold.” She began praying at meal times, asking God to intervene in all sorts of ways. Grama used to say about the women in Havre who got beaten by the men in their lives — most were — “they should do like your mother: chuck the good-for-nothings, and chuck the damn religion they say authorizes them to.” She never needed to say that she'd set the example for Anna.

Grama had a long journal entry about a woman called Lena, whose partner, Henry — they'd been living together for 12 years — was about to leave her to marry someone in England. Lena gave him something to drink, most likely a neurotoxin, that left him a zombie. Grama disapproved of her going to get potions from the obeah man, but wrote: “I would have burned the passport and the plane ticket and put the ashes in the envelope, and written on it: ‘BON VOYAGE, HENRY.'”

When Anna announced the news of her ‘conversion,' I asked her if she'd fled Caleb's fists only to go looking for them again in fundamentalist religion.

She replied: “When your travels take you to dangerous places, you're wise to return to safe ones.”

“Safe?”

“Yes, better the devil you know . . . Anyway a plane can't stay up in the air forever.”

“So you're only refuelling?”

“No. I'm ‘safe in the arms of Jesus — safe on his gentle breast. There, by his love o'ershadowed, sweetly my soul shall rest.'”

Thereafter I knew I'd simply have to accommodate her religiosity.

Not so Paul. The threat of execution having receded, his truculence returned. When Anna confronted him about his drug involvement, he turned it into humour.

“I want a straight answer from you,” she insisted.

“I can give you a gay one.” He grinned and changed the subject. “So, Ma, you've ‘re-entered the fold.' Doesn't that make you sheep? Lemme see if I can get my head around this.
You
are saved from
sin
! Get real, Ma. You don't need to be saved from sin. You
need
to s
in
.”

“We are in the last days,” she said. “The Bible predicted all this. Disobedient children. All this tribulation. We're definitely in the last days.”

“Then pack in all the living you can.” He scrutinized her, an ironic smile playing over his face, his tongue twirling slowly in his half-open mouth. “Come clean with us, Ma. Fess up. You joined that church hoping to find a husband. Admit it, Ma. Admit it.”

“Don't talk to me like that!”

“Oh, Ma, come off it.”

“You're disrespectful!”

“Disrespectful! Which planet you live on, Ma? I have a classmate my age, 14, who'll soon be a father. You know, Ma, there's this girl, buddy o' mine. Her mother, Ma, went back to Jamaica for three weeks and — holy Moses — brought back a man. You should like let her coach you, Ma.”

Anna went into her bedroom and closed the door.

The next day she let out to us that God's way was the only way, that God had charged her with the responsibility of saving our souls. “Especially yours, Paul. The blood of Christ can root out all that's causing havoc in you.”

“So what's your religion called?” Paul asked.

She didn't answer.

“My mother has a new incarnation.” He giggled. “Anna Kirton, BDMD? Aka Felicity Foil, lifelong member, chief benefactor, of the Serena Joy Sorority.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“BDMD? bedevilled by delusions of mass deception.”

“And the Serena Joy Sorority?”

“For that, you'll have to pay me. It will cost you. Fifty bucks, Bro. I'm tired of educating you for free.”

But he was more interested in taunting Anna. “Really now, Ma
.
Why all this foolishness?”

“‘The fool says in his heart there is no God.'”

“And the wise woman parrots all she hears and dimly understands. Which god did you have in mind?”

“There's only one: the true and living one. You better stop your blasphemy. You think God is asleep, but he isn't. If you keep this up, God himself will deal with you. It's clear in the bible: ‘Honour thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.'”

“Yes, Mrs. Cohen, or is it Mrs. Stein? You parrot! That's a Jewish statement. What sort of land God ever gave to us descendants of slaves? Africa that should be ours is controlled by Europeans. Look at your church sisters. Most of them are cleaning White people's dirt, and you're just a cut above.” He said nothing for a while. Then resumed. “So you want honour. You want
me
to honour
you
. What have you done to deserve it? And you want
me
to honour the
nincompoop
in St. Vincent. Hold your breath, Ma.”

He stared at me. “Boy it's a good thing this isn't 1978 or she'd have had us at Jonestown drinking Jim Jones Kool-Aid.” He stopped talking and gave me a mischievous grin. “You'd have downed it without a peep.” Returning to Anna, he continued: “You believe that everything in the bible is there because God put it there. Right?”

She said nothing.

“Answer me, Ma. I'm serious. You believe God is just and ethical. Right?”

“Yes. God is certainly that. You got that right.”

“I
did.
Hold on a
minute
.” He got up, went into her bedroom, and returned flipping the pages of her bible. He sat at the dining table. “Here it is.” He began to quote: “‘Ye shall not eat of anything that dieth of itself. Thou shalt give it to the stranger that is in thy gates that he may eat it, or thou mayest sell it unto an alien.' Ma, this according to your belief, this is God advising his chosen people to sell diseased meat to strangers.”

“Paul! You've gone too far. You made that up.”

He rolled his eyes and tossed his head and looked up at the ceiling. He tapped the floor with both feet. When he looked at her again, he said: “Ma, here's your bible. Read it for yourself: Deuteronomy 14:21.” He walked to the sofa where she was sitting, his thumb marking the spot, and handed her the bible.

“It can't mean that,” she said after reading it. “It can't. I know it can't. I will ask Pastor Billings about it. It can't mean that.”

Paul giggled and gave a loud handclap. “You're intoxicated, Ma. You've been dining on diseased meat for a long time, since you were 13, I once heard Grama say; so long you no longer smell it. There's a lot more in Deuteronomy. I could go on and on, but what difference would it make?” He shrugged his shoulders and for a few seconds stared hard at her with the corners of his mouth pulled down. “Imagine! Of all the mothers on this earth, I have to have
this
one!
” He gave a drawn-out sigh. “There are thousands of gods in this world, Ma. Thousands! A shyster named Constantine, a Roman emperor, imposed Christianity on the entire Roman Empire just as Islam is imposed in some countries today, and killed all who resisted. The Europeans who captured Africans and Native Americans forced Christianity on them, but it doesn't mean that they killed off all the other gods in the world. In any event, Ma, god is only what powerful people say god is. They create god and heaven so they can enslave and rob people here and tell them they'll be paid after death. And people are so damn stupid, they swallow that shit. Even First Nations: people stripped of their land, language, and culture and beaten and buggered in Christian residential schools they were forced to attend — even they swallow that shit. Practise your foolishness if you want to; eat all the diseased meat you want to, Ma, but don't try to feed me any. Do your dining at the Serena Joy Sorority. Don't bring it home. Consider yourself warned.”

Around 4 pm, Anna went down to the laundry room, and I confronted Paul.

“So Ma is BDMD. And you are what?”

“Paul Jackson, PP.”

I scowled.

“Perennially Persecuted.”

You must mean pampered and paranoid
. “The gall! How about Loki?”

“What?”

“Loki. L-o-k-i.”

“Explain.”

I shook my head. “You already know everything. And
my
name?”

“Jay Jackson, MMDD: McGill's Most Docile Donkey.” He laughed and punched the air with both fists. “Man, when those professors finish with you, all you'll be good for is to sweep the fucking floor.”

I took a deep breath. “Paul, why are you so cruel to Ma? People join religions for all sorts of reasons. People, even the educated and powerful, are always looking for safe spaces, places where they feel at peace. If Ma's beliefs make her happy and don't meddle with our lives, we should just let her be. It's pretty clear she finds something in her church that enriches her life.”