In this little nook of the city there is no wind and if she doesn’t move at all the sun feels warm. She closes her eyes and the city sounds swirl quietly. Deeply cocooned in layers of wool and down with the sun on her face Gaelle can imagine that it is spring while above her head the bare bones of trees cut across the square of frozen blue sky and the heaps of snow blare white light from the rooftops. When the wind stirs again the snow lifts and swirls like fine hard sand, sharp and translucent in the sunlight, it burns her face and draws tears. When she opens her eyes the world looks like a watery memory. Like a film about the war.

The background noise is all pigeons and drunken French and stray beats from the record store on the corner. The pigeons mutter and mingle and hustle from one side of the park to the other and trample the carpet of stale soggy bread. Gaelle doesn’t think they can fly. Once she heard a shot like a gun go off in the house across from the park on Prince Arthur and not a single bird lifted from the ground, which is why she continues her weekly offering of dry crumbs, despite their obvious lack of enthusiasm. They froze, then crowded and counted their numbers and gossiped a bit, and continued hurrying in circles, picking at the cold dust. Any creature so worn into the petty grooves of city life deserves sympathy. She empties the bag of crumbs onto the moldy pile and walks back to the bakery. On her way she passes a large man with a vacant expression lumbering mechanically into the little square.
Jane, snug and neat in a black coat of pressed wool, wrapped and hatted in soft grey, rounds the corner of the crumbling duplex that borders the park just a second behind Gaelle, and just a moment too late to see how the man manages to seduce the wild thing into his arms. He is already standing in their chattering midst holding the bird. Jane thinks it is the birds’ inability to fly that has instigated the Pigeon Man’s behavior. She doesn’t know yet if they go with him willingly or if his hands just come as a surprise out of the air where they were expecting more bread. She has seen him four times now, always leaving this park, always holding a pigeon close to his chest. It is always really, intensely weird. He walks briskly, confidently up St. Laurent smiling in a vague way at the world. And the pigeon sort of nods calmly at the passers-by, as though accustomed to being escorted through the streets of Montreal by a balding man in a dirty red coat. Every time she sees them pass Jane wants to yell and point and break the spell that holds the fashionable crowds in the dark with their eyes averted. They part before him but never look into his glassy eyes, or down into his hands.
Afterwards Jane sits in a small deli up the street eating a mound of tortellini and imagining the pigeon man’s whole life from his dirty coat and empty eyes. She imagines he has gone unseen. Washed out, large and dirty, but stooped and middle aged, destitute enough to be ubiquitous. Schizophrenia claims men in their thirties, this is a fact Jane lives with; it walks them into a cold dark alley anywhere in the world and leaves them there with all their surfaces broken. Jane imagines that he wandered, and watched the world from new angles, until he came to rest among the swirling eddies of birds. And from down in the cracks and valleys of his mind he saw the tragedy of blind, flightless human masses in these birds. So he chose one, became the lord of the pigeons, selected one to leave the filth and alienation of life behind and to journey with him towards…something beautiful. This is Jane’s reading, her vision, and she freezes, pigeon-like, wanting to announce his coming, celebrate the promise of his message, but the door opens and the January wind shakes her back down to the level of tortellini. And she laughs at her own melodrama and shakes her head.
Jane’s mini outburst is casually absorbed; she is a pretty girl alone, her eccentricity therefore is charming. Her coat hangs off the back of her chair and dips in the slush at her feet. In her thick wool sweater, in the heat of the deli, her face is flushed and her eyes dark. The deep thrill of the music being played lends the deli and its patrons an air of mystery and escape, or else it suggests their connection to the unspoken insides of the city. They eat pasta and smoke and drink Italian soda. They are in touch with the underground. There is a meeting going on in the back. The man at the next table is sitting with surveillance equipment and a calzone, cameras with long lenses, laptop, technology. Jane pulls a sketchbook from her bag and begins to pencil a map of the brain. This is an old habit, tracing the simplistic order memorized in high school. Known territory. When she finishes tagging all the layers and nodes she turns the page and writes.

“My family has a careful relationship with madness. We all finger the idea, but don’t look at it directly. My grandmother lay on a couch for ten years. Medicated for anxiety she became too loose and foggy to hold out against the temptation of timelessness. Even though it could be hateful and cruel, she chose the world in her mind. Curled up inside her swimmer’s muscles, her stretch marks, from deep inside her body she let her darkest thoughts and memories slip away. The truth faded and left a tea-stain in her mind. From that bitterness she began the construction of a new narrative.
My grandmother, her name is Kaya, grew up in Copenhagen. When she was still a child her mother took her up into the attic of their home and showed her a pretty little wooden trunk full of dresses of lovely, dusty colours, and a silver backed mirror, and a crumbling, dim photograph of people gathered in front of a dark looming doorway. My grandmother’s mother told her: “This is my family. My father is there, and his brothers, and they are visiting their cousin, the King. We are royal” she told my little grandmother “A high old family. I chose to leave it all behind for the love of a shoemaker, but I bear the mark of aristocracy, of History, in my blood and spine and it will not be forgotten.” And, in that strange peaked room she told Kaya that she was watching her all the time to see which side of her blood would win.
And so, of course, years of terror followed. An adult says something and for the little girl that becomes the key to the world, and it all shows itself to her, and it’s terrible. Awake at night she felt her cells dividing, each side boiling with hate, battling for ownership of her spine. And she would often dream of that photograph in the attic, and of the great darkness behind the door where the King, her cousin, sat singing a great ancient song that was slowly drawing her mother’s mind away.
Kay’s spine grew tighter and straighter as she lay flattened by fear night after night, and her father would rub her head and say she carried herself like a little princess. And she would cry knowing her blood had betrayed him. So she threw herself into his craft, to balance out her loyalties. She had a gift with her hands, she says she wasn’t pretty but that her small hands were strong and smart and they could make beautiful things. By the time she was thirteen she had mastered the few tools in her father’s workshop and the potter in the downtown square agreed to hire her as his apprentice. Sitting ramrod straight her fingers would weave through spinning wet clay, pulling and clawing it into perfect wholeness. And her nails were always choked with brown dust, and her hands became dry and cracked and stained, and she would smile down at them, knowing she had won back a piece of her body for her father.
My grandmother kept a tight hold on the world with those hands until they were safe, far from the old world that had imploded into violence and silence and secrecy, until they were quietly settled somewhere new and green and her hands began to shake with age, and her muscles became a protective wall, and the doctor in the town said she was a good candidate for hysteria. From history to hysteria all her stories dissipated in the murky depths of her prescriptions. And all that while my father, her small son, would sit by her side, abandoned and betrayed, listening to the streams of unraveling stories. He waited to hear his own name, but he was her youngest and she kept him safe in the silence, untouched by the force pulling her nightmares apart. And so he never heard it.”

At this point Jane stops writing. She doesn’t have a handle on the second half of the story yet, she hasn’t quite been able to make a myth out of her own bit of this life. Or, as she puts it to herself, she needs time to analyze it objectively, to put her own assumptions and emotions a little to the side, to bring the relevant points into focus. She closes the ratty black book and piles her napkins and cutlery on the tray, bundles herself up again, waves goodbye and merci to the girls behind the counter and heads back out into the cold.
She’ll send the letter as is and see what Kate makes of it. Maybe in Toronto, in the quiet room beneath her restful hands Jane will be able to unpack a little more history, a little less hysteria.
…..
Many years ago, before Jane had begun to study the brain and the nervous system, when she was still in high school learning to trace and name the working parts of frogs, an ancient and familiar pain had surfaced in her spine. The doctor dug her fingers under Jane’s bones and drew pictures of her insides with light and particles. Then she held the x-ray film up to the streaked-dry sunlight, end of august, and drew a deep curve cutting down across Jane’s neck, and another jutting out between her shoulder blades. And another curling in towards her stomach, planted in her waist. Jane remembers thinking that the doctor looked like a mother in a movie, sharp and wise. Her skin was warm when she touched her back. While Jane wiggled her cold white toes Dr. Hassan drew the normal proportions, the healthy and pain-free dimensions. Where these human curves were meant to be, holding each fishing-line of nerve delicately in place, Jane’s spine had pulled away. The vertebrae were confused, some stretched and some crowded as her body arched upwards. In the choking stuttered name tagged to her disorder Jane could hear the old language of Kaya’s dreams. In the green and chalky light, naked in her clean, stiff, backless gown Jane’s future narrative was pieced together. She doesn’t remember what was said, which is strange for someone with such an analytical hold on the world. The doctor’s voice was dry and dusty and it brought back a sense of the old stories. Science and memory. This is really when Jane’s intellectual life began, at this moment she caught a glimpse of the usefulness, the poetic practicality of science, the right set of facts could make a story true. History was subjective but science was as solid and reliable as bone structure, frog guts and lab coats.

These days this is Jane’s science: the secret shape Tern is unearthing from beneath the misleading logic of the body. Family myths are breathed into the blood, scrawled in desperate epistles across genetic code. She has her grandmother’s cheekbones and when you come at them from this direction, these years of research and experiments, that fact carries a certain amount of justifiable bombast. In Dr. Tern Jane has found an ally even if she’s not sure yet what they are fighting for.

This is the logic beneath the project: that there are stories that can be inferred from the poetry created by a person’s shoulder blades and spine and pelvic bone. Maybe posture is always a battle between histories and illusions, between the surface and the secret shapes of our lives. The woman walking by the café is balled up in a tight circle, the arch of her back defines the limits of her vision. She whispers gossip to the shuffling admirers that populate her mind, while Jane watches in silence, gripping her coffee cup.

Jane has a soft eye for the poetry and humanity of crazy. She has inherited a knowledge of division and other vision. Sometimes she can spot that certain-coloured fear in the manner and glances of the most unexpected people. This is the talent that Dr. Tern most values.
And as a result of his reliance on her sensitivity she now lives her life broken between two cites.
In Montreal her home is a small, dark apartment with a little balcony in the back and a big one in the front. She looks out on a green square, with a fountain, that is populated by a startling mix of homeless teenagers and middle-aged American tourists. The park is often busied by wild haphazard performers and, these days, elaborate demonstrations. Jane believes that the park is a separate, un-Canadian hallucinatory state. It shakes her up on the way home and at night she can feel its beautiful anarchy strumming the foundations of her apartment block.
In Toronto she lives beneath a three story house that is slowly crumbling down into her apartment. Jane’s life shunts her back and forth between the twin chaos of the Plateau and Kensington market. These days, when she is about waist deep, slogging through her education, the travel lets her step outside her work. The comfortable exhilaration of the train, the bad coffee and the badly pronounced safety messages in the official languages always gives her a fresh perspective. In Montreal Jane Craft is a phd candidate working on her thesis, doing research and working in the hospitals. But in Toronto she is the top research assistant to the brilliant and ridiculous Dr. Tern.

In 1984 Joseph Tern published his interpretation of the reams of data he had helped collect as a doctoral candidate. He suggested a complete overhaul of the mind body system that neurologists had been tweaking for decades. He drew in heavily contested evolutionary theory, human history and psychoanalysis to create a plausible brain narrative. His portrait of the human mind was like a kid blowing a raspberry at the established intellectual community, but despite countless concerted attempts to discredit the renegade, no research had cast reasonable doubt on Tern’s theory.
With his ears blocked and his eyes closed Joseph can hold his hands above the vibrating strings of a guitar and tell you what chord is playing. When he was a baby he could speak French and English and Arabic and climb trees so high his father would stand underneath ready to catch him for hours.
Once Jane had been invited to visit the boat Tern kept jealously guarded at his small cottage on Toronto Island. Once out on the water Jane could see his shoulders drop and he moved his lips and fluttered the fingers on his right hand when he wasn’t busy guiding the boat across the water. Finally, in the quiet between the waves, she realized he was counting. Counting birds, and rhythm in the wind or water. He used the joints on his fingers like an abacus. She watched his face open like he was hearing a harmony, distant but perfect. In the bright sun the grey in his hair took over. He looked hammered out of iron and light. When Jane has nightmares she pictures his face like that: counting. Keeping things in order.
…
“In Montreal I am nobody’s baby…hmm yah…nobady’s baby but ma ownn” Jane stretches with the freedom of an empty bed. Granted, the piles of clean laundry take up more room than anybody’s lumpy body, but they scrunch so obligingly and still smell nice in the morning. Jane’s been sleeping between these mounds for two nights, avoiding the useless repetition: putting them away just to take them out tomorrow and pack would be a waste of time and energy and brain power. “I refuse to be bound by your cleanliness conventions.” She announces to the floors above waving a handful of socks and things. “I wear these. They are no dirtier for my having slept with them.” She lies in the little patch of sunlight that manages to find its way down to her nook for an hour in the morning. Days when you wake up singing should be savoured slowly, even if the song that stumbles out raises uncomfortable questions about one’s life choices, life’s double directions.

There are two Jane’s. Two cities, two Jane’s, it seems fair. Why not imagine two sides to the science? There are facts and interpretations. In a domain like cognitive neuro. psych. ideas are slippery and so are identities. Jane is the kind of scientist that has seen the end of science, the bridge that stops mid-air leaving questions, illusions, narratives trailing with all the blood and wires exposed. The other students in her lab at McGill have disconnected the chaos of real people from the brain wave patterns, sites of neural trauma and the synaptic behavior of case studies. Jane thinks she is more awake then them, but then she can’t see herself there. Beneath the fluorescents, face open to the green light on the screens, steel and electricity and power in her hands, she is no less cold. Her image captured on the monitoring cams melts into other lab coats. Similarly, the therapist she sees in Toronto refrains from telling her how her tragedies and discoveries echo every human story. As far as Kate is concerned everyone is allowed their own myth. Maybe there are as many Jane’s as there are versions of the same old stories.
Kate has heard a lot about Dr. Joseph Tern, and Jane’s mother, and the smeared and crumbly myth of Jane’s father.
When Jane was an undergrad her mother drove all over the city to be with her clients. She helped people find an order, a meaning in their lives after they had lost everything, after they had even lost the world. People with all kinds of mental disorders, in various stages of vicious circles. Jane’s mother could reach out over the edge of the island and pull people back into the world. She would fill their fridges, clean out ancient cupboards while talking like old family, and in the midst of her support and advice a question like “Where do you want this ironing board” could just make something click. She would cook meals for the week and they would begin to see life taking a shape. Antonia Craft’s small shoulders, round edges, could defy the weight that stifled her patients until…until…they couldn’t anymore.
Antonia used to drive every day over the small bridge off the island to see clients in Hudson, and the water would be green, or muddy, or white, or deep and quiet. Her clients would scream and shake, or else stare quietly, and sometimes function for a while before slipping back through the cracks in their medication. Once, when Jane was visiting the house, before the old house started to give up the ghost, Antonia came home shaking. She had a client who was too young. A client whose voice had slipped through her own cracks to the secret source of her strength. She sat in the kitchen with one small, soft hand lifting and falling on the table. “He wouldn’t take his medication. He wants to fight off the clouds in is head on his own, like a man, he said, he spat the word at me.” He told her he would fail because his parents didn’t try, didn’t stay with him, follow him in disguise, wear hero costumes under their clothes. If they loved him enough he wouldn’t need medicine to trick him into feeling safe because he would be safe. And he threw her poisonous pills in her face. And he screamed at her to stop turning his family against him, and her pushed her out the door and to the ground. In his eyes and in the old echo of his words she saw and heard another person’s scary anger. Jane’s father, when his love had twisted and broke its own back with the fear of his illness and loneliness, and all of a sudden, it seemed like, all there was was hate, and all that was left of the man he had been was the knowledge that he had to get far away from Antonia and baby Jane before he crushed them and poisoned them and broke them the way that they were breaking him.
And by the time Antonia got home from her first face to face encounter with that memory, her strength to resist had drained away and the frozen, muddy waters were rising.
This much Jane remembers with a guilty stomach echo all the time, the thought that came to her seeing her mother blank and sorrowful: that sickness and fear are contagious. that some missing man she just had fragments of could still slap her mother in the face, that because of the way he left he would never really be gone, and now I have their fucking sickness in me.
…

Gaelle met Jack when she was twenty-five working as a secretary at a telemarketing firm. For one week he smiled at her in the mornings on his way into the cold, cubicled call center. Then, on Monday, he spent twenty minutes talking with her, his back to the clock and his eyes never left her face. Inside she twisted thinking she should tell him how late it was; just wanting to keep him there, his kind face tilted over her. Finally she said: “I’m sorry, but you have to go in, you’re going to be, I mean you’re already so late.” And the phone on her desk started to ring. “It doesn’t matter” he said “This place, what they do here is so dirty, and I’m awful at it, I don’t think I’ll ever make money doing this. I quit last week.” The phone rang again and he blushed but didn’t look away. And neither did she, you know, when she said “Well. Then let’s not waste anymore time here. On y vas.” And they just walked out like that, laughing. Some stories tell themselves. Some people find some way to live life without letting the air of a century of trauma sicken their hopes. Jack and Gaelle have a baby now, a princess with a language all her own. Even in this old world some things are brand new.
…

At the park the next morning Jane watches for the pigeon man, but he doesn’t show. She wanted to make contact with him before leaving for Toronto, try and talk with him, buy him a coffee. It’s cold today, and last night was extreme even for Montreal. Her fingers are numb in the thin grey gloves and she opens and closes her hands while she stands with her face to the sun. Maybe he found somewhere inside to spend the day. She imagines him looming in the narrow streets, crowding doorways. She cannot picture him slumped over a shopping cart, crumpled in an alleyway, or with his hand outstretched. He has to remain standing.
In the dark streets of Jane’s mind the pigeon man is gathering the birds, keeping something in order. Today, in the bright cold sunshine, the birds flutter and hustle in the prescribed circles mulching stale bread into ice with their wizened and fleshly claws.“Christ I mean, why would anyone add more, there are decades worth of bread crumbs there, and they never eat it. Who are these people blindly piling the shit up? Craziness. This is what the pigeon man takes them away from, this mindlessness, he’s got his own logic,” Jane, imagining under her breath.
Across from the park a small, bent man with white tufts of hair and layers of thick sweaters flashes a mouthful of empties at the passersby that nod at him. He sweeps that block and a half every day, so he’s recognized. It’s generally accepted that he does not belong in the same category as the countless faceless men that provide background to this trendy district. He’s just confused, old world, maybe simple. When Gaelle passes this way she smiles at him and always sort of doubtfully wishes him a good morning. His reply is serious, and gracious, and foreign, but once, in the early spring, he gave her a daffodil, and so she knows they understand each other.

The man with the broom is another witness, but his eyes have been bleached by the raw sunlight of another place. His view of this story is all watercolour and light. I can catch glimpses of it in the shadows behind his eyes, and in the shape of his hands on the broom, his back bent over the street, but I have never seen the world in his language. So some doors remain closed.
Anyway, Jane leaves the park from the other side, goes back to her apartment to throw clothes in a bag quickly before hailing a cab from her corner and heading off to the station, to Toronto, back to a life lived inside out and at high speeds, where the stories are being compiled.
The train is half empty; Jane travels at odd hours to guarantee herself an empty two-seater. These days the precaution is hardly necessary, the trans-Canadian railway was the dream of another era or another empire. When the service was still quaint and jovial and slow many people chose the nostalgia. The train was always full of students and laborers and business people enjoying the time and savings. Dr Tern told her he used to travel with a large button that he would stick on his lapel when boarding the train, heading for some conference somewhere. The button was his guarantee of a comfortable ride, in bright confident capitals it said: Ask Me About Jesus. Tern’s educated Arab atheism allows for a certain kind of surprising irony. Jane thinks this story is hilarious but also a tiny bit sad. She’s not the kind of person that would Ask, but still. She likes the idea that people still believe in the old stories, still want to jabber with their neighbor about Good News.
The Jesus button would be unnecessary today, the train is sparsely populated and everyone that wants it has the room to be alone. Jane makes a cluttered nest out of her seat pulling sweaters and snacks and books out of her bag. She tucks her feet up and leans her head against the window as the train’s muted thunder reaches the bridge, echoes over the green frozen water, and leaves the island behind.
She’s traveling with the collected data from one hundred and fifty other people, results from the past four months of research. Every candidate for the study has been subjected to a bombardment of scans, surveys, tests. They’ve been photographed from the inside out, had their temperature monitored and their blood flow. What’s worse, they’ve all singed over their confidential medical and psychiatric records. All the secrets they have told in the safety of doctor confidentiality, they have now sold to Joseph Tern. Jane is Tern’s blind accomplice in this dark venture. She is kept from the stories, from the transcripts of each candidate’s session, locked outside each patient’s version of the past. She travels with a packed suitcase and a locked box. She does not have access to the key. It’s her job to read the evidence unconsciously supplied by the body: brain waves, pulses, heat, and sometimes to be the blind transport. She manages the technology required to read the mind in the body. At least that’s the idea. Somewhere in her reams of data, in her tapes of sessions dissected by a small army of research assistants is a key to a code. To prove the dark heart of Tern’s theory she must piece together each patient’s story without access to his secrets. At least that was the plan. Now she is traveling to Toronto to tell him that the patterns are untraceable.
/*That no math she knows, no theory she has learnt or imagined can turn her mountains of data into a narrative. A life may leave discernable traces but she is not equipped to read it. She cannot hear music in vibrations. Faced with a fact her mind explodes with explanations, impossible possibilities. Visions and revisions. She does not want to be a novelist trying to fabricate something close to human. She wants to read the transcripts. */
….
Gaelle leaves the square and walks up St. Laurent slowly despite the cold. The bakery where she works will only open in another twenty minutes. She is not supposed to get there early, Miguel does not allow loitering in front of his place. It is not good to draw attention. Of course, it is also unacceptable for her to be late. She has survived at this job for almost 3 years only because of her ability to understand the subtle tensions packed inside the small hot room. When the door opens at the back of the bakery, the door half hidden by the giant ovens, she does not lift her eyes. She has never glanced inside. She does not inquire, she is not threatening. In fact, she’s pretty sure Miguel and his wife Helena think she’s slow, they think she keeps her eyes down and her voice quiet and lilting because her world does not include the quick and secret. Gaelle moves slowly because she’s clumsy, she tries to conserve her movements, to keep her hands close. In the bakery every surface is hard and hot and sharp beneath the fine layer of flour. The backs of her hands are no longer smooth and young; instead they’re traced with welts like hot crossed buns. Inside the bakery, behind the counter, Gaelle keeps her eyes low to watch for hot surfaces but whenever the back door opens she can’t help but watch their feet as they leave. Lonely and desperate men driven to the secret depths, begging for papers to stay. This much Gaelle has pieced together. Their shoes are foreign, cheap, plastic, or else expensive, leather, foreign. They shuffle in surreptitiously, hoping to pass unseen, and Gaelle never lifts her face, never makes them more nervous. On the way out they shuffle quickly. They know that they are close to escaping into the safe streets of this young white country with legitimating things, but they also know that they have betrayed the simple rules of the place. They are holding proof of their unsuitability and a solid justification for deportation. It is always when they are just out that Gaelle’s eyes lift and her hands shake.
She approaches the bakery at exactly (11:59) shaking her head and smiling at the spare exterior. But when she reaches the front door she notices a small hand written sign taped onto the inside of the glass. Inside the counters are clean and the floor is dusty and white just as she left it late last night. The only thing different is so subtle that only someone who had worked there for years, watching quietly from under lowered eyelids, would have seen it. The huge oven on the back wall has been pulled over just two feet. Flour has been swept into the grooves in the floor. The oven might have sat there, covering the door for years. That door might never have been there. There is a police car on the corner so she keeps walking, hoping that she’ll pass for a customer. She read the note; the bakery’s loyal customers were thanked and wished all the best. No word for their one employee. No warning, and no pay for the last two weeks. She keeps walking, wringing her hands, twisting open the old wounds. Not overly surprised by this sudden disappearance she’s still stuck wondering where the money will come from.
In the dark of the back room where all escape routes have been sealed and the dust has settled, a man is lying on the floor. A man Gaelle would recognize if she ever saw him again, if anyone were ever going to see him again. And in the small, clean apartment two blocks over on Jeanne Mance that has served as battleground for this unseen, immigrant reinactment of the battle of the sexes, Helena Vinovsky is carefully packing two matching suitcases. Her face is streaked and gaunt and tired, but her spine is straightening. She gave hundreds of desperate men the gift of a second chance, a new world, until the possibility of escape finally sank into her skin. She could create for them a new, legitimate identity, why not her own? The forgery is my own skill, as were all the recipes. She tucks her train ticket into her purse and closes her suitcase. When she is far enough away, across rivers and white fields and deep forests, she will mail the envelope in her purse, pressed next to her new papers. She would not leave the poor, stupid French girl with nothing. She could be a good person without a gun to her head.
…

Some people are smuggled into this country, somewhere someone is climbing stooped and shaking out of a dark place into a life with other promises. Once upon a time the Tern family had another name and they came here through secret gaps, not in the darkness of a ship’s hold, but in the maneuverable chaos of paperwork. Until the age of thirteen Joseph’s life was lived in near seclusion. His family hoped their wealth and their position among the intellectual elite would suffice to keep their son’s differences unchallenged and unfeared. But when he was found by the regional military commander of their quiet country home stretched beneath the cypresses with a local boy in his arms, their position became dangerous. Today Joseph Tern, weighted in this white world by history and hysteria, can’t understand how his parents found the strength to turn against their religion, their culture, to abandon their society and its expectations to protect their deviant son. He never saw himself through their eyes, though he manages to see truths embedded in the quietest depths of the world. All he really remembers from those years is this feeling of having to be hid. He held his fearlessness close to him as a protection against suffocation. And he climbed the trees as high as he could, understanding the strength and the sense of the tree without ever looking down. And eventually his father realized he wasn’t going to fall, and when Joseph came back down, waiting where his father had always been was a friend from the sun-marked riverbanks. In the long grass he showed the boy the hum he knew that made the hair on your neck and arms stand on end. And the boy held his throat and taught him an ancient ululation. In their matched voices, matched bodies, lying side by side, surrounded by secret patterns they were safe. Then, a moment later, everything was gone and broken. Before Joseph could understand what was being decided the palms has been crossed with silver. The family left the country before news of Joseph’s transgression could reach the right officials. The boy though, the one abandoned on the riverbank, his parents were not rich, not westernized. You know, cold truth of this world, he lived the nightmare Joseph’s parents saved him from. One goes on, however unwillingly, and one is left behind. It’s that old story, and Joseph can’t escape the patterns just because he can see them.
In Toronto Tern sits at his thick oak desk. The wood is untreated but worn soft by forty years of paperwork and hands. His office looks out over the neighbor’s backyard piled with snow. Beneath the heaps you see a sandbox, a tricycle. Tern rubs his hand over his head with an unconscious sigh. This strange white country has been shelter and safe haven and inspiration, but still. It is so cold here. And while his sexuality is relatively safe here, he’s never lost the sense of being an outsider. If he could understand that basic human relationship, man to woman, husband to wife, that one that is right because it’s natural then, Joseph believes, the gaps in his life and his theories would close like a curtain drawn across old memories. He presses his head into his hands and feels his pulse across his forehead. He is a genius obsessed with what he believes are his own flaws and so he distances himself from his work fearing that the gaps in his personal equations will taint the outcome. So Jane is stuck interpreting the codes he knows are there. As far as he can tell, from what he’s seen, her life obeys the normal order, and so it all should speak to her, because she’s included in it while he stands outside reading the files.
…
The white noise of the world is throbbing louder these days. There is a new war on the market like a new product on the shelves, it’s being pushed on every channel and denounced on every street corner. John’s job becomes more difficult when political tension mounts. The kids at the education and employment center are angry and because the center focuses on creative expression as a tool for resistance they feel a responsibility. They have voted unanimously to shift their efforts away from the usual session project and toward a series of pieces to enliven the anti-war. The staff at the center is supportive but worried. The changes may defy the conditions of their government funding and, worst case scenario, threaten the future of the program. The small group of staff members, already overworked and underpaid, has begun working on a plan. Thus far the plan involves everyone being in at least two places at once, but that’s what they’re going to try and work out tonight.
Gaelle is home this evening since the bakery went under so at least they didn’t have to pay another sitter. John’s had a lot of experience surviving, and he knows Gaelle can talk her way into some job that will ease the pressure off for a bit, but Emilie’s face hangs in front of his eyes like a promise and he feels his insides clench with love and worry. When it was just his own life swinging by a wire, dumpster diving for dinner, sleeping where he could, then it was all an adventure, a gamble that only threatened a person he hardly valued, a person he hardly knew at all. But since he met Gaelle everyone has begun to carry a new weight in his mind. Through her he can see people’s feelings and the reasons for their actions, he can understand their stories, and he felt his life tied to theirs through her sweet eyes. And when the baby was born it all became real. His tie to the world and all its pain and mess and joy and heartbreak was as solid as Emilie. Over the course of these two years he’s become a real person, an adult no less, with a reflection of himself in the real world. When he holds his baby girl he feels the weight of the whole world- everything that’s wrong with it that he wants to fix for her and everything good he wants to give. Everyday Emilie gets older and her horizons widen, and thinking about it John feels the surge and twist in his belly and the soft dry pain in his side that’s begun to accompany his thoughts.
But then the kids erupt into laughter; from behind the sliding walls dividing the kitchen from the rehearsal space John can hear that their brainstorming session has turned silly and as tension leaks out of that room on a wave of relieved guffaws the pain slips back and he breathes in and out. And the smell from the kitchen brings him back to work. He just has to finish up the supper and clean up with the kids on duty, and then survive this meeting, and then he can go home.
…
From the kitchen where she and Emilie are eating bananas and yogurt Gaelle can hear the scuffle, bump and jangle at the door as John muddles with his ring of keys and maneuvers his way into the narrow front hall.
“Hallo halloo!” she sings down the hallway while releasing the squirming sticky kid from her booster seat.
“Dad! Hey! Hey! Dad! Banana and lift me up please!” Emilie commands and narrates- these are her two major tactics these days. Gaelle smiles and shakes her head a bit. She can’t figure out where Em got that ‘Dad’ from. She dismissed the cutesy forms of words as soon as she could talk, without it her speech sounds strange and stilted and weirdly grown up despite her sweet baby voice. John thinks it might have something to do with her early mix of French and English, and while that hodge podge has definitely contributed to Emilie’s creative languaging, Gaelle thinks her daughter’s precision is a deliberate choice, not so much a side effect.
John walks into the room holding Emilie and obligingly gobbling the mushy banana she’d saved for him, and listening to the list she’d compiled for him of her day.
“Bed! Bath! and bench and boy and Brenda and Banana!” said Emilie.
“And Baba Ghanough! And Bien sur que oui and bellyrings” added her mum, laughing. Emilie turned to her seriously “What is it?”
“Don’t mind yer mum, she’s just a beautiful bumptious babe and you are a busy and bubbly bug”
“Yep and your daddy’s a bear, so there”
“You are a bear so there Dad.” Says Emilie, checking for his reaction. John made a very serious face and said “Yes dear, if your mother says so.”
Gaelle smiled at her husband and began to tidy up her snack. “I am the boss and the boss has big news, but it can wait until daughter and dad have had a play. Now get out of my way!”
Dad and daughter shouted “Yes Boss!” and headed off into the living room to play with the comfortable mess in there. Gaelle washed the dishes from dinner listening to their prattle and thinking about the job she’d managed to get that day- the boss’s big news. The job was a good one compared to the bakery; she would spend her days in quiet order shelving books and files in the McGill law library, she would even get a bit of a raise from the change. But the available shifts were all during the day until exams started and Emilie would have to spend more time with Brenda, the sitter.
Thank God that woman is so lovely, thank God Emilie loves her and gets a kick out of being at her house. Their money problems would get sorted out, but it seemed as though their time ones never would. All they wanted, the three of them, was to spend time in their little house, to read and laugh and eat and play together, and instead they spent their days at opposite ends of the city just filling in the time, jumping through hoops until they could be together again. It makes Gaelle exhausted. Being with other people, even people she likes, makes her uneasy. The effort of social performance seems to weigh heavier on her now that she has found the people with whom happiness is effortless.
And the weight and worry attached to the new job is compounded by its location. The easiest way to get there is through the park, over the side of the green hill Montrealers fondly call the mountain, past the monument, through the campus and down Penfield and then Peel. She likes to walk, and she knows she can’t justify the expense of a bus pass just because she’s afraid. Mais quand meme, c’est vrai qu’elle a peur. And her fear haunts the trees and paths of the hillside. When she walks past the monument these days, even now, four years later, her legs tremble and she walks rigidly keeping her thighs and insides tight together.
…
As Jane turned out of the long tunnel leading away from the train she scanned the small crowd of Torontonians half hoping there would be no face there she recognized.
“So, good, you are here, perfect and not even late this time, excellent. Let me take your bag.” Tern took the black case from Jane before she could switch hands to offer him her suitcase. She was feeling possessive of that case and all that it contained, especially now that she was so close to the man who held the keys to the other half.
“You didn’t have to meet me Sir, though I appreciate it. I am sort of used to cabbing back and forth,” she said, shouldering her traveling wardrobe. She was quietly happy to see him; nevertheless she always sort of resented an interruption to her re-emersion in one of her cities. She needed to adjust herself to the subtle differences. If she had been on her own she would have walked a bit before hailing a cab, letting Toronto sink into her skin.
Suddenly, from the way he turned his head, cleared his throat, from the way, she now realized, his hand had shook when he reached to take her bag, she knew something had happened. Watching the thick grey countryside trundle past, secure in the padded vacuum of the train, she had not given a thought to the mounting tension in the world. Now she remembered. There was a deadline, some clock had wound down somewhere in the five hours she had been aboard, in the 24 hours she had been oblivious.
“Dr Tern? I’m sorry, I’ve been..” she paused as accumulated facts and family history rose to the surface. Softer now she said “Sir, has there been any news?”
“Yes, Jane. They have decided to go to war. It’s all begun in the past few hours. The time for diplomacy has past and all that.” He felt the awkwardness of her confusion and pity and curiosity but he couldn’t raise the energy necessary to smooth back the surrounding static. There was a stiffness like nausea in his heart. All day today when he closed his eyes he saw the people hiding in trucks finding a way over the border away from the bombing and toward a fearful and unmoored life. And every face he pictured looked the same one, sun dappled and still humming.
He said “Come, my car is out front with the taxis. Would you like to rest before we meet?” But he knew they both wanted to get back into the work. A little time in the thick of life is a good distraction from war.

War is declared and it’s like something is unleashed. Guilt hangs low over our heads here, daily life is a series of startling contrasts and reminders. Digital footage of missile fire and burning lakes of oil is followed by a commercial for bathroom tissue that will make women love you, cars that will empower you, exotic destinations that will give you back your youth. In the days that follow the end of diplomacy Gaelle watches the news with horror, she cries at the right times in the broadcast and is moved by the bombastic speeches in spite of her self. It is so hard not to get drawn in to these versions of the story, and there is a draught coming from the window above her head and she begins to feel as though her house is a frail collage of plaster and plywood holding out against a trembling and heaving world. She pictures landmasses colliding, mountain ranges shooting up from the ocean, cities burning. The cold air runs down her neck and she turns to meet the eyes she feels burning into the fragile safety of her living room. All the hungry, angry people of the world are roaming the streets tonight. The world is at war and so many promises have been made and broken that we can no longer believe the rhetoric of the rallying call. Gaelle is scared of the people with the angry, fervent eyes that hate what has been done in the name of her way of life, and yet, and still, she hates the people she now stands alongside as a North American. A war draws a line through a question, makes a person like Gaelle think the word hate, and puts an end to certain middles tones, greys and blues and subtle pragmatic solutions.
John reads the news on the internet, it’s less glossy, less airbrushed, but he’s reassured by the fact that fewer hands seem to have touched it, fewer interests seem involved in the mediation, and there’s room for so many more voices. The focus is on the organization of the Anti-War demonstrations. Even in this forum the medium can’t do the story justice.
This morning the kids only came in to the center to announce that they wouldn’t be staying. They had to be in the streets, there wasn’t time for research or even to construct some sort of symbol, masks or props, to give voice to their take on the complexity of the issue. They were upset and they wanted to be swallowed up and justified by fellow feeling.
At the demonstration John watched them. All around him people were high on group excitement, high on self-righteous and well-justified anger, even a little high on the sharp thrill of winter wind. They would walk, and smile at the loudest individuals, and raise their eyebrows at the most insulting placards until they turned a corner and saw the size of the crowd and they shook themselves, ashamed of their own confusion and boredom, they grabbed hold of the simple rhythm of the chant that surged towards them through the crowd until their hearts shook and their voices cracked and their fists pumped in perfect passionate time. And even John felt swept up in it until he saw the protestors’ faces twist with anger and hatred and he thought he could sense the push and slur of senselessness around him.
John left the rally before lunchtime, he allowed himself to be detached from his group and bumped and jostled towards the edges of the herd, and then instead of returning to the center to shuffle through paperwork or stare blankly at meal plans for the week he turned up through the McGill gates and headed toward Parc avenue. Emilie was with Brenda Mei at or around her apartment on L’Esplanade. He would steal some time, an afternoon with his gal, and save them a little babysitting money.
Brenda was a total god-send of a baby-sitter. She was in her early thirties, she had moved to Montreal from Manila seven years ago. She spoke English and French but she still managed to teach all the kids she cared for some Philippino. From her first day with Brenda Emilie had been smitten. She loved her long black hair and her shelves full of glass figurines and her gift of new words and strange stories. Brenda lived with her ancient aunt in a beautiful apartment that cost them hardly anything. As John walked away from the low thunder of the crowd his troubled stoop unclenched a bit and his surroundings pushed themselves into view.
Rows and rows of funky, brightly painted apartments cover this city. People who had held onto their leases in the Plateau area from the time before its trendy boom were the luckiest victims of Montreal’s erratic real estate market. Brenda’s aunt Su had found the place ten years ago through friends in her night class, and she had settled in to the neighborhood, found a job in a local restaurant and never stopped to notice that her new neighbors weren’t cab drivers or factory workers but musicians and sculptors and then university professors. Brenda had begun by baby-sitting the neighbors’ children when she first arrived. After a while she organized the front rooms of the house to meet semi-professional standards and was one of the few recipients of government financing for affordable daycare. Gaelle and Emilie had met her and her gaggle of kids in the park one sunny afternoon. Emilie was just a little bit of a thing at the time, but she had already begun to shape language into her own thing. A smile crosses John’s face quickly as he catches a memory of the kid as a baby. Gaelle said that when Em heard Brenda’s dialect her face lit up. The two polylinguists were fast friends in a matter of minutes and when, a month later, Gaelle got her job at the bakery Brenda had agreed to make a little room in her brood for Em’s afternoons.
And John was certainly thankful for the smile she brought to his girl’s face and for the relief finding her had been to Gaelle. But he could never totally shake an irrational resentment. Walking in the street towards her house his forehead crumpled and clouded, darker this time, not political but personal. She got to spend hours with their kid. Period, and that’s enough let me tell you. He could never believe Em was perfectly safe or happy with her, and when he arrived at Brenda’s house and found the windows dark and the door locked part of his mind immediately assumed that they had all been kidnapped. Of course. He thought to himself, this is a premonition. There is no reason for me to think that she is gone and yet I feel the heart pounding panic of her loss because the windows are closed and the sky is grey. And now I’ll never see her again and Gaelle will fade away with a broken heart. He stood absolutely desolate in the chaotic and toy-strewn front yard. Then sounds from the playground sunk through his heavy worry and he shook himself and headed across the street and into the park where they sometimes spent the morning.
He crossed the field and climbed the steps and there was Brenda sitting on a bench by the swings chatting with a woman rocking a baby carriage and a man swinging a red plastic shovel. Across the park six kids were bumbling about in their snowsuits. They sort of looked like they were trying to build something out of snow but they mostly kept getting stuck in the foot high powder, or falling over and rolling around for a bit, their arms too short to be much use. John spotted Emilie sprawled out by the jungle gym wriggling around on her back. Oh the little useless bugs, what would they do without us, he chuckled to himself as he hustled over to her rescue. He stood at her feet, grabbed the padding around her shoulders and yanked her up out of the snow, surprised as always by how light she was.
“Hey! Dad! Qu’est ce que tu fait! Surprise! Hi! How come t’est la Dad?” She said flipping from startled to delighted. She wavered in her boots for a second then leaned her head against his leg. “Can we have lunch Dad? Je veux pas de Macaroni but Brenda says yes. Eoni and blop, okay? I want it.” And she lifted her arms as much as she could in her down filled restraints and he picked her up, settled her on his hip, and crunched through the snow over to Brenda. He was half listening to Em’s story about a snow house when he realized that Brenda still hadn’t noticed his presence. A strange man had walked into the park and picked up one of the kids and she wasn’t even looking in his direction. He was shocked and appalled and self-righteous. He was about to say something sharp when Brenda turned and smiled and nodded without missing a beat, as though she’d seen him there all along and said “Salut le papa d’Emilie, did you get the afternoon off? I know one little girl that must be relieved. I don’t think she was looking forward to my lunch menu today. Do you think Dad will let you have Balony lil’ miss?” Emilie wrapped her arms around his neck and said, very seriously “I always always like food my dad makes. Say Bonjour Brenda, Mahal Kita, we’re going home now.”
She lay her head down on his shoulder with a regal and tragic gaze across the park and all its pitiable occupants, people that didn’t live in her house or have dad’s that came and surprised them at lunchtime. John felt a giddy rush to his head; he never got over her strange little acts of love. Yes! He felt like cheering! She loves me the most of anyone in this whole park! She still thinks I am the best dad! Yes! I am pulling this off! Out loud he said “Yep, I’ll take miss picky home and make her anything she likes. I’m a softy for a girl in a purple snow suit.”