by risa dickens
the latest incarnation of a tangled bunch of stories i’ve been poking at for a long time, trying to get them to turn into something. i pulled it into this shape and then got some advice that made me look at it another way, and didn’t end up submitting it to the contest i’d been working toward. so bah- it goes online. there’s an earlier incarnation here and then an idea for what to do with a spiral of the story that could be for young adults- here.
Gaelle met John when she was twenty-five and working as a secretary at a telemarketing firm near Square Victoria in Montreal. For one week in 1999 he smiled at her in the mornings on his way into the cold, cubicled call center. Then on Monday, he spent twenty minutes talking to her with his back to the clock and his eyes never leaving her face- astonished by how the crinkles of her smile were already adding new dimensions to his calculations about the things that mattered. Inside she twisted, finally she said: “I’m sorry, but you have to go in, you’re going to be, I mean you’re already late.” And the phone on her desk started to ring.
“It doesn’t matter” he said “This place, what they do here sucks, and I’m awful at it.” He took a big breath and said “I quit last week.” The phone rang again and he blushed, held his breath, raised his eyebrows, but he 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 things are so easy. And they were happy for a perfect while until John went odd, and dark, and then went missing, and Gaelle didn’t know what to do except to just keep going. If you want to you can forget most things.
In the little nook of the city where Gaelle sits alone now there is no wind, and if she doesn’t move at all the sun feels warm. She closes her eyes and, deeply cocooned in layers of wool and down with the sun on her face, she can almost imagine that it’s spring while above her head the bare bones of trees cut across the square flap of 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 and when she opens her eyes the world looks like a watery memory. Like a film about a war.
The white noise of the world is throbbing louder these days. There’s a new war on TV like a new product on the shelves: it’s being pushed on every channel and denounced on every street corner, making people do crazy things. 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, though she doesn’t trust the speakers. War is declared and it’s like something gets unleashed like kicking fear beneath your breastplate. It changes people’s patterns. Guilt and fury hang low over heads and daily life is a series of startling contrasts and reminders. If you love anything it’s difficult to get your head clear.
The background noise of the park by St. Laurent street 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 to the other and trample the carpet of stale soggy bread. Gaelle doesn’t think they can fly, which is why she continues offering her dry crumbs, despite their obvious lack of enthusiasm.
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, as though they didn’t remember the option. They froze, then crowded and counted their numbers and gossiped a bit, and continued hurrying in circles, picking at the ground. Any body so worn into the grooves of city life deserves sympathy. And stale bread bits. She empties the bag of crumbs onto the moldy pile from yesterday at the edge of the park and continues slowly toward work.
The bakery where she works will only open in another twenty minutes and she’s not supposed to get there early, Miguel doesn’t 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 this job for almost 3 years only because of her ability to ride the rules and tensions packed inside the small hot room.
She doesn’t talk about what she sees at work to anyone. She barely talks to anyone anyway. When the door at the back of the bakery half hidden by the giant oven opens, she never lifts her eyes. She has never glanced inside. She is entirely non-threatening. In fact, she’s pretty sure Miguel and his wife Helena think she’s slow. Though what Helena thinks is impossible to know- she’s in the windowless backroom daily from open until close. She just comes out to take a danish sometimes when Miguel is gone.
Gaelle moves slowly because she’s clumsy these days. The work of forgetting can bring with it a lack of focus. She tries to conserve her movements and 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 traced with welts like hot crossed buns. Behind the counter, she keeps her eyes low, but whenever the back door by the ovens opens she can’t help but watch their feet go. This much Gaelle has pieced together- the bakery’s a front for passport forgery. Lonely and desperate men, mostly, driven to disapearing. They all shuffle past surreptitiously, hoping to pass unseen, and Gaelle never makes it worse for them.
Jane, snug and neat in a black coat of pressed wool, wrapped and hatted in soft grey- just another on similar city circuits- rounds the corner of the crumbling duplex that borders the pigeon park just a second too late to see how the man in the red coat manages to seduce the wild thing into his arms. He is already standing in the chattering midst holding a bird when she sees him so she doesn’t know if the bird goes with him willingly or if his hands just come as a surprise out of the air where it was expecting more bread. She is only in time to catch him leaving the park holding the pigeon to his chest. 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. The crowds part before him, far enough to not have to touch him, and there’s something awful about it for all that it’s funny. Jane wants to yell and point and break the spell that holds the fashionable crowds with their eyes averted from the man bird combo, but she doesn’t do it.
Gaelle, about a block ahead of the man in the red coat and the pigeon he holds gently to his chest, and unaware of them, approaches the bakery at exactly 11:59. But when she reaches the front door she notices a small hand-written sign taped on the glass door. Inside, the counters are clean and the floor is dusted with 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 lids, would see it. The huge oven on the back wall has been pulled over. With help this could be done in minutes, alone it could take hours. Flour has been swept into the grooves in the floor. That oven might have sat there, covering the door for years.
There is a police car on the corner so Gaelle keeps walking, hoping she’ll pass for a customer. She walks into a bank as though that’s where she was headed and stands still for a minute with her head spinning. She read the note: the bakery’s loyal customers are thanked and wished the best but there’s no word for their one employee. No warning, and no pay for the last two weeks. She heads back out onto the Main, and turns down toward the park and home, twisting the old burns on her hands. Not overly surprised by this sudden disappearance, she’s still stuck wondering where the money will come from. The homeless man on the stoop holding a living thing in his arms like an offering doesn’t even register until a full minute after she’s passed him. And when the image of his face hits her brain and she turns around and throws out her arms, his red coat is going going gone.
Jane sits in the small deli down the street that she ducked into after about a block of following the pigeon man. Eating pasta she imaginatively constructs the his whole life from his dirty coat and empty eyes. Washed out, large and dirty, but stooped and middle aged, he’s destitute enough to be ubiquitous. Schizophrenia claims men in their thirties mostly, that’s what she’s heard. Jane romanticizes, imagines that he lost himself and wandered until he came to rest among the swirling eddies of the city birds. And from down in the cracks and splinters of his mind he saw the easy metaphor, the same one she sees, and thinks that she could easily make a movie or short story out of: the tragedy of the human masses that’s echoed in these birds. In Jane’s version, he chose one to be with him, to leave the filth and alienation of life behind and to journey with him towards…something beautiful. And redemptive. Probably something involving glorious flight in the end. This is just Jane’s reading but she likes it, and she freezes, pigeon-like, wanting to announce his coming and maybe even celebrate the promise of his message, but then the door opens and the January wind shakes her back down to the level of hot tortellini. And she laughs at her own melodrama and shakes her head and thinks of how she’ll call him Lord of the Pigeons to her friends when she tells the story.
Jane’s mini outburst is casually absorbed; she is a pretty girl alone, her eccentricity 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 insider circles of the city. They eat pasta, smoke and drink Italian soda. They feel 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. A girl walks by the window twisting hands with tears on her face, and Jane makes the near-involuntary mental decision that turns off the small painful twist of empathy and concern, because the day has been dark enough already without imagining the sorrows of more strangers. She pulls a sketchbook from her bag and begins to pencil a map of the brain, tracing the order memorized in high school. The mapping of the known territories in the mind is something Jane finds satisfying, calming, and a good distraction. She eats her pasta and draws and finds that soothing.
In the dark of the back bakery room two blocks north, where all escape routes have been sealed and the dust and flour have settled, a man is lying on the floor. And in the small, clean apartment two blocks over on Jeanne Mance, Helena Vinovsky is carefully packing two matching suitcases. Her face is streaked, gaunt and tired, but her spine is straightening. 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. She was the one who gave hundreds of desperates the gift of a second chance, until the possibility of her own escape finally sank in, crashing through the murk of being terrorized by him for decades. “The forgery is my own skill, as were all the recipes,” she says aloud, and it calms her, though it’s not the strongest possible justification for her actions.
The man in the red coat has this one memory that stays clear though not much else does: She is standing in the park with the look of someone who was once well loved, feeding the birds. He stands where she can’t see him. The light of the morning is in the last leaves on the trees and in her hair and everything is very clear. The gun goes off and the people who spent last night on this corner know what’s happened and they shake their heads in pain, but the girl throws her hands out toward the pigeons. She throws her hands out and he sees her think about the birds.
