Light Years Away From Jacques Cartier

There’s a gas station on the other side of the street, looking especially abandoned past closing hours. It flanks a weird street that feels quite normal these days. Comes in wide and bold on a diagonal angle from the slums that sprawl all the way up to the Metropolitan. The street lights were difficult to follow even when they worked. You never knew when something was going to run you over the second you stepped into the pedestrian crossing. The nerves and high tension haven’t changed one bit. It’s just quieter now.

Yielding to the dead silence I turn and go back inside. I can’t say that the place looks lived-in. It’s the stench gives it away. Ed doesn’t mind. He keeps saying I can smoke indoors. He doesn’t get how much freedom is found standing on that second-floor balcony.

He doesn’t go out much. That’s the first thing he ever told me. The second thing I learned back in April was that he’s been trying to finish his Secondary 4. Algebra’s the hard part. Finding enough daylight and motivation to open the graph paper notebook is another story. The schools have been closed for so long that I wonder what’s the point of going through the exercises in the book, much less show up at his place to help at all. It keeps him busy I guess. At least his mind, whatever is left.

I flip the light switch in the living room half-expecting to see the unkept man sitting on his couch. Nothing comes out of it. A public power company is still a power company. The voltage is only as good as the payments. Time after time I flip the switch. The fact that it’s ON when it feels like it should be OFF is always more annoying than the mundane challenges of living in a blackout. I keep telling myself that one day it will all feel right. As long as I keep flipping those switches. One day it should be alright.

“Hey Ed,” I reach out.

“Hello Frances,” a husky voice meets me halfway.

“Doing okay?”

“Yeah.”

It’s only after I trip over the propane bottles on the kitchen floor and nearly fall off the stool I’m trying to sit on that the moon finally shows up in the window pane. The clouds have pulled away like a curtain. No doubt God is risking a peek at the earthly shit show below. I glimpse shadows of Ed’s thinning toupet and hollow cheeks. An archipelago of silver facial hair glimmers faintly. I can't blame him. Buying razors is harder than finding needles in a landfill. Even if they make it to a pharmacy that isn’t closed, subterranean miscreants don’t last very long in the blue glare of neon tubes before getting kicked out. Never mind the scathing pilgrimage it takes to get there. And they say sunlight is the best disinfectant… For all I know, after hours of ultraviolet bombardment, sneaking a busted trolley past crooks and peddlers under cruel azure skies, that one place you hear about in Rockland could still be a dud.

There’s no place like home. The one-bedroom apartment fades to black. Looks like God is keeping the moonlight all to himself tonight. I hear Ed stirring in his seat.

“Would be nice to put on the old suit again, eh Frances?” he mumbles.

I nod.

“I was at the coffee place yesterday. My niece messaged me, she still wants to get married in June. I told her to send me a ticket. Hasn’t answered yet… What else am I supposed to do? You know I don’t like asking things. Planes are hard to get onto these days, you know that.”

I nod again.

“Can’t wait to tell her about school. I’m at the end of the book, see?”

Clubbed hands grasp for a notebook on the plastic cup-filled, dust-ridden, roach-infested coffee table.

“You see the book, Frances?”

In the void of night I can’t tell whether the scribbles are math problems or the onset of dementia.

I nod, the battery-powered clock ticking away in the background. A cold draught washes over the building. Wooden beams groan, wishing they could just crumble into ruin.

“I really need to get going," I tell him.

I can’t see, but I know Ed is nodding.

“There’s something I have to show you,” he mutters.

Rocking back and forth to build momentum, he lurches weakly out of the couch and wobbles on his feet. He shuffles towards the bathroom. Echoes of sloshing reach my ears. I wonder what is it now.

The “gifts” he “gets” for visitors have seen a sharp decline in quality lately. A month ago, during the “honeymoon” period, it was a carton of cigarettes. He had an entire corner store’s worth stashed in his pantries. I figured it was a clever way to fill the vacancy. I knew better than ask how he got it. Last week it was a local grocer’s worth of brie. That time I couldn’t help myself. Nothing came out of the question, so I asked where he kept it: under the sink. For how long? Again, no dice. The stench gave it away.

“What’ve you got back there, Ed?” I raise my voice, hopping quietly off the stool.

“Hold on just a minute,” his feeble voice rattles out of the flat’s underbelly. “Got to be careful, don’t want stains on the bath carpet. There’s just so much in there, you know?”

A thin plastic pellicle crinkles in the bathroom. I walk over to the kitchen counter. There’s still brie left under the sink, just enough to make me retch. I grope the hoarded litter and dirty dishes on the counter and come in contact with the greasy handle of a frigid frying pan sitting on a table-top stove. Reaching into the pan I find a leftover morsel of something that feels like tenderloin. There's a piece of bone that has been picked clean. From the dimensions of the marrowy core the piece must’ve been quite thick.

“How long has it been there, Ed?”

When you expect nothing every answer feels like a miracle.

“Err, Sunday.”

“This Sunday?”

“Yeah, yeah, Sunday… Only a minute now.”

Isabel was the one who called me in the early hours of this morning. She’d woken up in the middle of the night to gunshots in the street, right next to her window. Then steps were heard up and down the spiral stairs. Heavy steps, then heavy things being moved around on the second floor. I told her I was going to call again in the afternoon. When I did, she told me what he said at the mailboxes the next morning: "People talk too much at night, you know?"

“You’ll never guess where it came from,” he chuckles, slowly making his way back to the living room with a garbage bag in his hand.

So much for being a good samaritan. I’ve memorized the way out by now. It takes me exactly three seconds to get back to the balcony. Lighting up and having a drag is tempting. Freedom is always tempting: the satisfaction of popping smoke and vanishing or knocking on Isabel’s door, drinking in the fear and coffee breath seeping through the narrow space allowed by the rusty chain lock just to ground the paranoia of yet another shut-in freak.

I’ve had enough of St-Michel. I go down the stairs and onto the sidewalk. The road snakes off towards the Metropolitan one way. It will take me back to the river if I go in the other direction. In the pitch black canvas of my imagination I can feel the waves tumbling and crashing under the bridge as the sea gulls squeal overhead, droves of them landing in the wild grass to bicker over cardboard straws and paper wrappers.

I hear Ed calling my name from the second floor balcony.

It's time to go home.