The Divide (22 page)

But now he is John, she told herself sternly. The future was always the future, always mysterious. What mattered was that he was John and she was with him now.

He came out of the shower looking stronger, though there was a certain persistent hollowness about his eyes that Susan didn’t like.

“It’s early,” he said. “We haven’t had lunch. Let’s head over to Yonge Street—the place Amelie used to work.”

They braved the cutting wind. Susan was afraid the Goodtime wouldn’t be open; a lot of places had closed because of the weather. But the lights were all on and the sign in the window said, OPEN REGULAR HOURS.

Their waitress was a tiny, timid-looking woman named Tracy; the food was greasy but filling. When Tracy came back with their coffee, John asked about Amelie.

Tracy gave him a wide-eyed stare. “I don’t know anything, anything about that!”

She hurried off with the check still clutched in her hand.

John looked at Susan. Susan shrugged.

It was the manager who brought back the check. He wiped his hands on his apron and said, “What’s this about Amelie?”

“She’s missing,” John said. “We’re looking for her.”

“So? She’s not here.”

“I know that. I thought she might have talked to somebody.”

“Haven’t seen her. Haven’t talked to her.”

“Well, all right.” John stood up. “Your waitress—Tracy—she seemed pretty nervous.”

The manager began an answer, then hesitated and took a closer look at John. John returned it steadily. Susan wondered if this was John’s “hypnotic” power at work, though she could see no sign of it—saw instead maybe a calculated sincerity.

Then the manager seemed to reach a decision. “There was somebody else here asking after Amelie. Tracy’s just skittish… she gets upset.”

“Somebody else?”

“Her brother, Tracy says. Big guy. Kind of strange. But he hasn’t been back for a while.”

Susan said, “It only confirms what we suspected.”

“But that’s important,” John said. “That’s useful.”

He led her back through the snowy streets—not to the hotel, but to the doughnut shop on Wellesley where she had discovered him all those months ago. Susan wondered if this was some kind of deliberate irony… but John was too serious for that. He took the table with the chessboard engraved on its surface; Susan sat opposite him. “What now?”

“We sit here for a while. Carbohydrates and coffee. We look around.” “What are we looking for?”

“I don’t know yet.” He shrugged out of his jacket. “You want a game?”

“Won’t that be distracting?”

“No.”

“All right, then.”

They played twice. The first game was a rout. Susan’s mind wasn’t focused on the board—she was cold, and frightened by what the manager at the Goodtime had said—and John pried out her castled king with a bishop sacrifice; checkmate came quickly.

She took the second game more seriously. She played a King’s Indian defense and pondered each move scrupulously. By playing a combination of aggressive and defensive moves she was able to keep him at arm’s length. Her interest deepened. She saw a chance to open up his king—a knight fork that would force a pawn move; she would lose the knight, but it would leave her bishop and her queen in a single, powerful diagonal aimed at his broken pawn ranks. Was there a flaw in this reasoning? Well, probably… but Susan couldn’t find it. She shrugged and advanced the knight.

John captured it with his pawn.

Susan hunched down over the board. If she brought the bishop down—and then the queen, while his knight was still pinned—

John said, “Look.”

She raised her head.

A man had just come through the door. A short man in a heavy coat, shivering. He bought a doughnut and coffee at the counter, turned and spotted John.

Recognition flashed between them. The man muttered and turned toward the door.

Susan whispered,
“Who is he?”

“His name is Tony Morriseau,” John said, “and we need to talk to him.”

She stood up with John and cast a last glance at the chessboard.

She was a move away from checkmate. He hadn’t noticed.

Chess, John had told her, was mainly a memory trick. The difference between a chess master and a “civilian” player was that the master had stored a vast internal library of potential positions and was able to recognize them as they developed on the board. That, plus a certain finely honed ability to concentrate attention, made all the difference.

John was not technically a master because he had not played in enough tournaments to acquire a significant rating. His chess playing had been an amusement. (“An experiment,” he once called it.) He had played, at least in those days, to relish his easy superiority over his competitors. It was a cruel, private entertainment. Or so he claimed. But Susan remembered what he had said when they first met, across this table, when she asked why he went on playing when it was obvious that he would win:
“One hopes,”
he had said.

Hopes for an equal, she thought. Hopes for recognition, for understanding. Hopes for a touch, for a contact, miraculously, across that divide.

What matters, Susan thought, is that he had never really abandoned that hope. Even now, deep in this killing winter. It was alive inside him.

She took a last look at the chessboard, then followed him toward the door.

John followed Tony Morriseau out into the cold afternoon.

A bank of snowclouds had rolled in from the west; the sunlight was fading into winter dusk. Strange how vivid all this seemed. It was true, what he had told Susan: since childhood he had lived in a world of Platonic abstraction. Schema and essence, the word behind the shadow. It was Benjamin who had inhabited the universe of surfaces and colors.

But that was changing. He felt it now, and he felt it accelerating. He stepped into the biting winter air in a shower of snow crystals, and he was stunned by the immediacy of it all. Was this how Susan experienced things? All sense and no
cogitans
—this playground of perception? Made it hard to think.

He was deluged by dusk and snowdunes, by the amber glow of the streetlights so cold and melancholy they seemed to burn into his sight. The knife of the wind. The hiss of his breath.

How
meaningful
it all seemed: a new and ancient language…

“John?”

Susan’s voice was crystalline and intimate. He turned to look at her. She was beautiful. She was frowning. “Are you all right?”

He shook his head. Maybe he wasn’t. He started to say, “I—” But the word itself hovered in the air, a pure and absurd syllable. It had no antecedent. He was as hollow as the sky.

Please, not now, he thought.

“Just a little dizzy,” he said.

“He turned the comer south of here,” Susan said.

John hurried after the retreating figure of Tony Morriseau, forcing recollection on himself. Tony Morriseau who had sold him the Corvette… Tony Morriseau the drug dealer, who might know something about Amelie.

Amelie whom he must find, because he had assigned himself this task. For Benjamin, it was the repayment of a debt. For John… say, an experiment with an idea. An idea about lineage. An idea about descent.

Tony was too proud to run and John caught up with him in the blank whiteness of a parking lot, the streetlights splaying out weird shadows all around them. Tony whirled and said, “Fuck off!”

“We need to talk,” John said. He heard Susan behind him now: her cold breath and the squeal of her boob against the snow.

“We don’t have anything to talk about,” Tony said.

“About Roch. About Amelie.”

“I don’t know anything about them.”

But Tony was lying. John heard it in the angle of his words, brittle phonemes like tiny shards of ice. Tony knew Roch and Amelie from their street days: John remembered Amelie talking about it. “Tell the truth,” John said.

“Go fuck yourself,” Tony said.

But John possessed the key to Tony’s soul. Tony was a small, pale, undefended thing under his shell of skin and it was not difficult to trick him out. He had done it before. “You talked to Roch.”

Tony looked suddenly doubtful. “Yes…”

“What did he want?”

But now Tony frowned and canted his head. “Why should I tell you?”

And John was startled.

“Because—” he began.

But the words weren’t there.

They had always been there before.

“Asshole,” Tony said.

Susan stepped forward. She looked small and delicate in the snow. “Please,” she said.

Tony shifted to look at her.

“Amelie’s in trouble,” Susan went on. “If you know Roch, you know the kind of trouble I mean. All we want is to find her.”

“What are you, her social worker?”

“Her friend.”

“I talked to Roch,” Tony said, “but not about Amelie.”

“He bought something from you?”

“Not from me. A guy I know. What he wanted, I don’t have. All right? That’s it, that’s all I have to say.”

John collected himself. “Did he tell you where he was going?”

Tony regarded him with instant contempt; he began to speak, then hesitated. John was connecting, but only sporadically. “No,” Tony said. “Except—he mentioned something about ”the warehouse.“ He said he was ”going to sleep in the fucking warehouse tonight.“ That was last week. I don’t know what it means.” Tony frowned massively. “Just get the hell away from me, all right? I would really appreciate that.”

He turned and was gone across the parking lot toward the lights on Yonge Street.

John was suddenly dizzy. Susan put a steadying arm around him.

“John? Can you make it back to the hotel?”

He felt her warm presence against the cold dark and decided he could.

Susan wrapped her arm around John’s waist and helped him through the hotel lobby, ignoring the hostile stare of the desk clerk; maneuvered him up the elevator and through the door of the room. He was cooperative but loose-jointed; his body radiated a feverish heat.

She stretched him out across the bed. “John? Can you hear me?”

He turned his face toward her. His eyes were glazed but attentive. He nodded.

She put her hand across his forehead and drew it quickly back. The fever was intense and Susan felt a surge of panic. She couldn’t deal with this! She wasn’t trained for it! He needed a doctor, a hospital—

He reached up suddenly and took her wrist in a clamping grip.

“I need aspirin,” he said. “Maybe cold compresses. This will pass.”

She nodded until her agreement registered and his hand slipped away.

She undressed him and pulled blankets over him, then hurried down to the hotel’s convenience shop for a bottle of Bayer’s. When she got back, he was shivering and moaning. She fed him three tablets with a glass of tap water and pulled up a chair by the bedside.

The snow that had been predicted all day had settled in by nine o’clock. Susan watched it through the hotel window. It was a picturesque, gentle, persistent snowfall; the big flakes danced against the window and drifted onto the ledge outside. The snow obscured the city lights and softened the murmur of the traffic.

With the snowfall, John’s fever began to retreat.

Susan pressed a damp washcloth against his forehead. He had been sleeping restlessly for the last two hours; it was only forty-five minutes since the fever had broken and his temperature had dropped back to normal. He needs the rest, Susan thought. But when she took the cloth away, he sat up.

“I did what you told me,” Susan said.

“You did fine.”

“Are you better now?”

“Better than I was a little while ago.”

“Is this it?” Susan asked. “Is this what Dr. Kyriakides said would happen?”

“Let’s not talk about it now.”

She took a shower. She immersed herself in the hot rush of the water. Washing away the fear, she thought. Washing away today and washing away tomorrow.

She wrapped herself in a towel and entered the darkened bedroom. John was propped up in the bed, a faint silhouette. Susan toweled her shoulders a last time, then climbed in beside him.

The bed was hot and faintly damp. A sickroom bed. She didn’t care. His body was warm, but it was an ordinary warmth now. Because she was afraid, Susan pressed herself against him; he turned to face her.

“This might happen again,” she guessed.

He nodded. She felt the motion against her cheek.

“Might be worse the next time?”

“It might be.”

She absorbed this information.

She said, “Did it mean anything to you, what that man said about ”the warehouse?“”

“It’s an empty building down by the lakeshore—Amelie told me about it. He might have taken her there. We’ll go tomorrow and have a look.”

“In the snow?”

“In the snow. I’ll be all right.”

The snow fell steadily far into the night. Susan heard it tapping against the pane of the window. Begging admittance, she thought. But it can’t come in.

Neither of them slept. The silence was a vast tapestry, stitched with the sound of their voices.

“Why me?” Susan asked. “Why did you choose me?”

To be with him in this bed, she meant. To touch him in the darkness.

He said, “Because we’re alike.”

“Are we?”

“In a way.”

“What way?”

“Because both of us have lost something. A certain kind of connection.”

“I don’t understand.” The wind rattled the window.

“We’re orphans,” he said. “Isn’t that obvious? We’re feral children. We don’t know how to be human.” He touched her cheek. “That’s what we have in common.”

Susan was too sleepy to explore this in all its nuances.

She said, “What we have in common is what we
don’t
have.”

“Yes.”

“A father.”

“Lineage,” John said. “Ancestry.”

“A father,” Susan confirmed. In the tranquility of the snowbound darkness she was able to admit it. She had been looking for a father ever since her father died; she had found a sort of father —at least temporarily—in Dr. Kyriakides.