The Origin of Species (50 page)

Someone had typed up a report by the time they got back to the station. It was the merest paragraph, a jumble, from what Alex could see, words crossed out and written over in pen and barely a capital or period in the lot. Desmond’s name had been spelled
Desman
, with a blank left for the surname.

Alex’s name didn’t appear.

“You must sign,” the older man said. “I can translate.”

It was just a heap of words.

“That’s fine,” Alex said, and signed.

They had to bring up Desmond’s bags from the boat. The policemen went through them, lingering over items of particular interest, the binoculars, the battered camera. It seemed unlikely that any of the stuff would ever leave this place.

“Do I need to stay here?” Alex said. “On the islands, I mean.”

The man smiled as if at some needless courtesy.

“Is not necessary,” he said.

A boy came into the station, barefoot, not more than ten, and handed the policeman a manila envelope wrapped in elastic bands. The policeman handed it to Santos.

“
Sus documentos
,” he said.

There was that casual flourish in his gesture of someone conscious of having done, generously but without breaking a sweat, the remarkable.

“
Muchas gracias, señor
,” Santos said, with his deferential bow, deeper this time and maybe more heartfelt. “
Muchas gracias
.”

They walked back to the boat in silence. Alex grabbed his pack. Desmond’s
The Voyage of the Beagle
was sticking out from one of the pockets.

Santos had already set about putting his goods in order.

“
Vaya
,” he said, as if to be rid of him. “
Vaya con Dios
.”

Alex couldn’t bear the thought of facing Mara again and took a bed in a fleabag place in the upper town, his window hard up against the street. There was a plane the next day. He awoke early to catch the bus out to Baltra, expecting the whole time he was waiting for it that someone would come to tap his shoulder.
I’m sorry. There are still questions
. They hadn’t even taken his address, if family wanted to reach him.

Neither had he offered it.

Santos’s boat was still in the harbor but he turned away from it and never looked back.

The same
WANTED
poster hung in the airport, staring out. The same moonscape waited outside. Alex tried to feel some relief when the plane left the tarmac, but relief was for children, it seemed now, for innocents.

In Quito, for the first time, he had a problem with his ticket.

“
Es inválido
,” the woman kept saying. “
El boleto es inválido
.”

He lost his temper and began to shout, in a bastard mix of Italian and Spanish and French.

“
Qué pasa?
”

A soldier was suddenly standing beside him, a submachine gun draped over his shoulder. Now they’d arrest him, he thought. Now they would shoot him.

“
Tranquilo, señor
,” the soldier said. “
Tranquilo
.”

Some sort of supervisor came out and puzzled over the ticket.

“Very sorry, sir. Is no problem.”

Three hours later he was on a plane heading home. He had enough money for a bus from Toronto, for a decent meal. Everything had worked out. The plane rose over the mountains and came out to the sea, which stretched out like a maw to the end of the earth.

—
April
1987 —

… it is difficult to imagine that access to the possibility of road maps is not at the same time access to writing.

JACQUES DERRIDA
Of Grammatology

S
tephen’s son was playing down by the water. Alex couldn’t remember the last time he’d been here, to the lake—with Liz, maybe, in their first days, back when they’d made a point of walking on the mountain.

“You have to look at what the place would have been like without him,” Stephen was saying. “More like Haiti than Florida.”

Alex had learned by now that it was usually best to cut his losses early in these arguments with Stephen, who had the disconcerting habit of bringing actual facts to bear on them.

“Don’t you think Ariel’s a little too close to the water?”

“He’s fine. The water’s barely a foot deep. And he can swim.” But then he called out, “Ariel, careful by the water please!”

Ariel didn’t so much as twitch to show he’d heard or in any way alter the frog squat in which he was hunched, rather precariously, Alex thought, over the curb that encircled the lake. He was an elfin child, as ethereal and pale as a changeling, polite enough, in that adult way of children, and yet never quite present, as if following some train of thought only his own five-year-old brain could know the mysteries of. Alex couldn’t figure how Stephen, man of reason and order, had given life to this fairy creature.

“I just don’t think he’s some kind of hero, that’s all,” Alex finished up lamely. “Even with all the health care and stuff.”

He had seen quite a bit of Stephen since the fall. Despite the history with Katherine, he’d found himself warming to him more and more—he’d thought him a prig, with his lofty manner and his fussy little finger movements, but instead had discovered in him an unexpected humanity.
His mind seemed to Alex like some pleasant city in Northern Europe, pristine and well aired and well swept but full of promising turnings and cobbled alleys. Then there was something else that drew them together: they’d both slept with Amanda.

From health care, they had somehow veered off into nationalism.

“We’re the big success story, not them,” Stephen said. “They’ve never gotten over the Big Lie. You can’t be a slave state and say you’re founded on freedom.”

The topic depressed Alex—it made him feel unpatriotic, deficient, clichéd, because he felt, like most everyone else, that his country was boring.

“If we’re so great, why isn’t everyone flocking to come here?” he said, thinking of all the people he’d met traveling who’d treated him like a quaint halfwit the instant they’d found out where he was from.

Stephen paused, warming to the kill.

“If you mean the five percent of the world with disposable incomes who’d rather go to Paris for their holidays than Regina,” he said, “then I suppose you’re right. About the only thing keeping out the other ninety-five percent is Customs and Immigration.”

That Stephen had slept with Amanda had only come out through Katherine, to whom he’d confessed. Alex doubted if, in the awful aftermath of things, he himself would ever have done anything more with the information than let it fester. But a few weeks after the event, Stephen had phoned him.

“I think it might be good if we talked.”

Amanda had taken an overdose of Tylenol. It had seemed just the sort of thing Amanda would do, Tylenol, of all things, so scattershot and prosaic, though the method turned out to be a lot more common than Alex would have suspected. Just a few extra pills of the stuff with a bit of alcohol, apparently, and you sent your liver into toxic shock. All over North America, people with a bit of medical expertise but no access to handguns were reaching for their headache pills and a bottle of Scotch when the black dogs circled. What troubled Alex was whether Amanda had known that. Maybe the whole thing had just been a stupid mistake.

Though Amanda had drawn him and Stephen together, it was rare that she actually came up between them.

“Sometimes I think people should just stay in their own countries,” Alex said. “At least they’d be warmer.”

It was warm today, though. The sun was out, the snow had melted, and some of the flowers around the lake were poking out their timid heads. A young woman went by in a skimpy sweater and Alex found himself staring after her, before the thought police intervened.

Stephen was looking too.

“Like the man said.” He pulled his cigarettes out of his blazer. “April is the cruelest month.”

It was Katherine who had found her, that night she had called. They’d had a date for drinks, and Amanda hadn’t shown up. After waiting for her and trying again and again to get her on the phone, Katherine had gone by her place. She’d had to get the super out of bed to open Amanda’s door. There was already a smell by then, though no one in the building, a run-down low-rise on one of the seedier stretches of St. Denis, appeared to have noticed.

By the time Alex arrived, Amanda had already been taken away and Katherine was sitting alone outside the apartment on the dirty hallway floor. She looked broken, completely unlike herself, her clothes askew and her face puffy from crying.

“Tell me this isn’t my fault,” she said. “Tell me I couldn’t have known.”

Under his horror, Alex felt a small, shamed relief that he wasn’t alone in this.

“It wasn’t anyone’s fault. We did what we could.”

The super stood hunched beside the elevator in his pyjamas and slippers, puffing furtively on a cigarette. The apartment was open. Through the doorway, Alex saw a couple of policemen nosing around inside.

“I should have called her,” Katherine said. “I should have called.”

It was all too familiar, this black anguish, this circling back and back to find the right moment, the one that would change things.

Each thing he told her, he knew, was a lie.

“You couldn’t have known,” he said.

The policemen took down their numbers when they’d finished. They were polite, in their broken English, but didn’t seem much interested in them after they learned they weren’t family.

“We ’ave to call, eh? For de body. It’s only dey who can say.”

The super was still slouching unhappily nearby as if waiting for some sort of instruction from him and Katherine, though Alex couldn’t
think what it might be. He felt compelled to go inside the apartment but wasn’t sure why, if it was just morbid curiosity or the need to know this thing, to face up to it.

The smell hit him at once, an odor of rot and of something more foul, more forbidden. He’d never been in the place: it was tiny, just a single room, though it looked as if a great wind had whipped through it, a bookshelf knocked over, broken dishes scattered on the floor, food spilled on the counter and moldering. There was a mattress in the corner, the sheets a tangle; there was a little desk in gray metal under the single window. He expected a chalk outline somewhere, as in a police show, but there was no sign of where she’d been found, curled up in her bed or sprawled frozen in some death throe across the floor.

There were smears on the wall and on the bedsheets of what looked like blood.

“She must have cut herself,” Katherine said. She stood at the doorway but wouldn’t come in. “You get delirious in the end. That’s what they said. It might have gone on for days.”

It was too horrible to think about. It felt obscene, somehow, to be looking at the place, like watching a snuff film.

It occurred to him what the super probably wanted from them.

“We’ll clean the place up,” he said. “For when her family comes.”

The super shifted, looked heartened.

“It’s no hurry, eh. She still got ’er last month.”

They brought boxes the next day to pack the place up. They both seemed to be hoping for a purging, a revelation perhaps, but all the place betrayed of Amanda’s life was the strange poverty of it. There were no photo albums; no journals. The only books were her course books, barely a novel or a grocery store flyer outside the required texts, though most of these were carefully underlined and annotated, with notes like “compare to Derrida’s notion of difference,” behind which her real self seemed hopelessly occluded.

There was a stack of photocopied journal articles on her little Salvation Army–issue desk and next to them a yellow writing pad with a few heavily corrected paragraphs of what looked like the start of an essay. “Julia Kristeva, in her article ‘Woman’s Time,’” it began, and went on in that vein, jargon-laden and hanging always at the edges of intelligibility but not in any remarkable way for its subject matter. No sudden
turn into delusion or strangeness, no final Kurtzian scrawl, just a trailing off in mid-sentence as if the kettle had boiled or someone had knocked at the door. He couldn’t picture it, how the thought might have formed from that trailing away,
Now I will do it
.

“It was the last thing we talked about,” Katherine said. “That paper. It makes it all look so stupid.”

“Maybe she was having problems with it,” Alex said, but at once the thought felt banal. You didn’t kill yourself over an essay.

Amanda had crossed out a word and replaced it, then crossed out the replacement and gone back to the original. Nothing that he hadn’t done. In the margin she’d written, “Check references to Joyce.”

“We should finish,” Katherine said. Already there was an edge to her, a hardness. The night before, he had held her, but that seemed forbidden now. “So we don’t have to come back.”

They had left the door open to air the place out. There was a knock, and three people were standing in the entrance, an older couple and a young woman, dark-haired and stocky. It took Alex a moment to recognize Amanda in them.

The man was broad-shouldered and tall, towering over the women like the mast of a ship.

“The super said you’d be up here.” He motioned out awkwardly. “We’ve just come to see about her things.”

The father took a seat at the kitchen table, but the mother stood at the counter, half-turned to it as if to some chore there. She was the smallest of them, a wisp. They were like Russian dolls in not quite the right order, mother, daughter, father.

He and Katherine had got the mess cleaned up, at least—they hadn’t had to see that.

“You’re the ones found her, I guess,” the father said. “We thank you for it.”

There seemed no clue here. Alex had hoped for some ogre, not this gentle giant. The mother stood, still half-turned, avoiding their gaze, clutching her hands together as if she held something fragile in them. It was too much, the weight of these people, it seemed to press down on him like a continent. And yet there was a strange decorum to them, not so much of something suppressed as of something contained.