To have stood before her Mother's door
like an eavesdropper, to have quietly passed the others with their Christmas decorations—sleigh bells,
pine cones and Macintosh bows, a quilted Santa Claus with reindeer, a
Joyeux Noël garden gnome, snowmen silhouettes, a crèche vignette
carved out of linden wood (the result of personal choice or that of
their offspring?)—and to have listened to the piped-in music of
Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire, she'd felt she'd emerged from the elevator to a level where everything was monitored,
and silence—an evocation of death—was forbidden; the music, like
a psychotropic drug, massaging her consciousness into docility. The
hallway with its blue patterned carpeting, upholstered chairs,
occasional tables, lamps, mirrors and framed prints of happy
landscapes and flowering glades, had seemed to her a facsimile refuge
from true reality. Sitting beside her Mother now, she imagined
herself trapped in this warm, dry environment of meals, medications,
overhead announcements, games and activities like a captive on an
endless cruise over a waveless sea. Once more the sounds of Christmas
carols, this time nature inspired—Good King Wenscelas with
the distant cawing of crows—seeped under the door from the hallway
while her Mother laughed in response to a witty remark on the
television by Pénélope McQuade. Isabelle smiled and casually
glanced towards the entrance where a strip of light on the carpeting
projected from the ever-lit hallway made her think of a chalk line on
a running track. The start? The finish?
“Tu es pressé Isabelle?” her
Mother asked, holding the television remote like a weapon holding her
hostage.
Isabelle reassured her she wasn't in a
hurry and had only been stretching her neck.
“Elle est si drôle ce Pénélope,”
her Mother said, placing the remote between her thigh and the arm of
the chair. “Si mignonne.”
Isabelle restrained herself from
telling her Mother how Pénélope's pixie hairstyles had influenced
young women viewers. Hadn't she too once had her hair trimmed and
styled much like the television host? She recalled now that
Pénélope's father's first name was Winston, an unusual name, and
wondered if the source had been the character in that famous book
she'd read while in private school. She always got the books mixed
up. Was it Nineteen Eighty Four, or Brave New World? It
seemed so long ago. Winston something or other. Winston Churchill.
Winston Graham. Winston cigarettes. Winston . . . .
She glanced at the white and red
poinsettia plants she'd brought as a gift. They would soon dry out
and drop their leaves to become spindly skeletons of themselves. Her
Mother would then ask to have them taken away. Revivified or tossed
she'd never know. Just another marketed tradition. She wondered if
white poinsettias had made inroads in the funeral business. Her
Mother had already outlined her preferences for her own funeral,
large triangular shaped floral arrangements in vases with white and
mauve blooms, and for the reception, floral tributes with a greater
variety of colours and shapes. Much the same for her own funeral she
thought if she pursued the David Ashemore case. What would it be? A
car accident? A poison induced heart attack? A staged suicide? A
mugging? She could see her sisters going through her belongings, her
dresses, shoes, sweaters, jewelry, keeping desired items before
hiring an estate company to take over the undesired contents. They
would use her kitchen, her bathroom, perhaps even use her old
toothbrush to clean the built-up dust on certain owl figurines and
sculptures. Jokes would be made about an owl fetish. Small talk about
collecting manias and stories of people who collected oddities like
combination locks with forgotten combinations, or the exuviae of
cicadas and scorpions. Her own treasures would be dispersed at
discount prices and the remnant filtered through the Salvation Army
system, picked over, judged.
And her ex-husband Nick? Would he show
up at the funeral with but another fresh-faced limpet barely into her
twenties? Maybe one on each arm, a blonde and a brunette. They
flocked to him like fruit flies to an ageing banana. He was a walking
cliché of virility. She recalled the day she'd met him while on Mount
Royal sitting on a bench reading a psychology textbook. He'd come
jogging towards her, stopped to catch his breath, caught her eye, and
joked about how he had to work off that spanakopita. Next thing she
knew, he'd invited her to his Greek restaurant. She always remembered
the sight of his powerful calves, the first thing she'd observed when
she'd raised her eyes. His dark-toned skin, hairy forearms, that two
o'clock shadow, those playful eyes. Of course her Mother thought it
was her fault for losing him. What could she do? Nick was a ladies
man. It was his genetic disposition. The restaurant provided him with
a constant supply of young women. Word of mouth did the rest. She
would see them walking by the restaurant, stopping to read the menu,
but really looking through the glass to see if he was there. That was
his lot in life. Being Nick's wife wasn't hers. Though she did miss
his spanakopita.
She covered her mouth and quietly
burped. Dinner tonight—overcooked pork chops, boiled potatoes,
carrot and turnip mash, followed by apple pie with a dollop of
vanilla ice cream (an English chef?)—if not memorable, had at least
kept her busy while trying to choose subjects of conversation mundane
enough to avoid gossipy neighbouring ears. Dinner with her Mother was
always contentious. Other daughters visited with their husbands,
their children. Residents would nod to her and say hello, but she
could read their minds: ah, yes, the single one, the divorcée, the
forensic something or other. There was the bald man in an old grey
suit who always sat by himself in the middle of the dining room
staring ahead as if he was watching a film on a big screen. Everyone
else were in groups of three, four or five. When she stayed for
dinner she would sit at the special tables for visitors and her
Mother's companions would wave from their table, a trio instead of
the usual quartette. The first, the tiny Mrs. Gagnon with her
pleasant smile, couldn't hear very well, the second, Mrs. Castonquay,
tall and stern, rarely talked, and the third, the healthy, red
cheeked Miss Clement never stopped talking, “fatiguant” her
Mother would say, manipulating her hand like a puppet. She often
scanned the tables and could imagine the cliques and cabals much like
in high school, though a hubristic inversion had occurred. No longer
was it how much money one's Father made, the circle of self-esteem
was now a mathematical formula consisting of the number of children
one had and their levels of achievement, combined with the number of
grandchildren, multiplied by the number of visits and demonstrations
of affection which provided the fluctuating lines on the graph of
pecking order prestige. Pilots for major airlines still held a
tremendous caché she'd learnt in that casual confinement of trifling
conversations otherwise known as an elevator. She'd been entertained
by an elderly Mr. Forget in his sweater vest and soup-stained tie
informing her, with the occasional wink and a touch on her forearm,
of his apartment view over the old grounds to the south east where
the great poet Emile Nelligan had spent his last years in the old
asylum for troubled minds. Wasn't a day, he'd said, that he didn't
think of him. She had listened to the elderly gentleman, looked him
in the eyes, even touched his hand with a show of empathy, and seeing
the wrinkled loose skin between his thumb and fingers, had been
reminded of the soft ripples of Bahamian sand that she and Nick had
walked upon during their honeymoon, a stroll in the shallows, a
shoreline emblematic of their challenging relationship, the back and
forth, the rise and fall, the warmth and the cold, the pleasures and
the dangers, the very diastole and systole of Mother earth. Her
Mother had later informed her that Mr. Forget's son was a pilot, and
the envy of them all. When he visited there was always a rise in
attention levels. Jacques Forget, pilot, not a crease out of place,
his blue black hair perfectly coiffed like a young Cary Grant. He
could very well have been the pilot who few them to the Caribbean for
their honeymoon years ago. She could see the elderly Mr. Forget now,
shuffling down the hall towards his room, a departure sans adieu, his
soft voice reciting a poem by Nelligan—at least she supposed—the
words spoken half to himself and half to the ghosts around him.
Ghosts. Perhaps the ghost of David Ashemore had accompanied him down
the hallway, a brief lyrical diversion from haunting her thoughts
with his unfinished business concerning Jarvis Whitehorne.
Since receiving the note from what she
assumed was Thérèse Laflamme, she'd researched Whitehorne only to
discover that his company had been purchased by a large American
conglomerate over six months ago, and his yacht, Revenant IX,
had been recovered off the coast of Antigua five weeks ago, listing
heavily to the starboard having taken on water. No one aboard. The
whereabouts of Whitehorne still under investigation. Clive Saunders
who'd taken over Ashemore's job had told her—off the record, you
didn't hear it from me—that he'd learnt of Whitehorne's shady
international connections selling biotech. They had arranged to meet
at a dépanneur, and he had talked quietly while holding a tin of baked
beans with maple syrup as if discussing the delicacy of the after
taste. Whitehorne had developed an implant device, he'd told her.
Nano-technology. A sort of fail-safe button: “Remote activation
providing termination of host.” Cold phraseology for distance
execution. Saunders had left her with the rumour that future
applications could be introduced like a vaccine. If the individual
became problematic later in life, “File, delete. In a future world
facing climate change, overpopulation, scarcity of food, fuel and
clean water . . . “ he'd shrugged his shoulders as if to indicate
human life would be cheap. It made Whitehorne's other methods, his
acronyms of aggression, positively sophomoric: FIST:
fabricate, isolate, slander, traduce. THAW: thwart, hinder,
annul, wither. “In the future,” Saunders had said, “prisons
would no longer be affordable. Cheap labour would be replaced by
robots. Unrest and criminality nipped in the bud.”
Standing in the aisle of a convenience
store listening to these theoretical projections while pretending
interest in cheap spaghetti sauce and cans of beef vegetable soup all
to the soundtrack of Owner of a Lonely Heart coming from the
store speakers had drained her of all hope, and made her feel as chipped
and cracked as the stained linoleum beneath her feet. A prolonged
silence that could be interpreted as defeat had left her numb with the sense of how easy such an implant could be abused. Just who would
be the ultimate file manager?
She looked at her Mother, safe,
content, well taken care of, holding on to the shirt tails of world
affairs in her battle against irrelevance; and yet her daily news fix
was but a surface skim, a pure injection would probably finish her
off. It strangely made Isabelle think of an incident on a nearby lawn last
summer, a cat attacking a mourning dove, and her attempts to save the
bloodied winged bird from what appeared to be a lovely white domestic
short-haired with a collar, yet as wild eyed and transfixed
as someone before a computer screen. Her chasing the cat away had
been a mere interlude of unreality to the feline brain feeding on its
depths of instinct. There she had stood, a woman in the middle,
between the cat and the pigeon, challenged by the nature of morals,
and the morals of nature. Whosoever will be saved?
Listless and overcome with fatigue, Isabelle stared vacantly ahead, bathed in the cerulean glow of civilization.
© Ralph Patrick Mackay
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the product of my imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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