Robert Wilson - The Divide

She set her wristwatch alarm for 5 a.m. and slept with it under her pillow.

By the time it annoyed her awake there was morning light coming through the big plate-glass window. Not sunlight, but only a grey, tepid half-light and a few flakes of snow. She stood under the hot water of the shower until her skin hurt, then dressed in Levis, a cotton shirt, and a jacket. She rode the elevator down to the parking level, coaxed the Volvo to life, and drove into St. Jamestown.

She parked in front of the rooming house where John Shaw lived.

The snow evolved into a cold, steady drizzle as Susan shivered in the car. She watched the people who emerged from the rooming house, made ghostly by the condensation on the Volvo’s windows. None of them was John Shaw—or Benjamin. Seven o’clock slid past. At seven-thirty she was beginning to feel not merely misguided but embarrassed—playing espionage games before breakfast. She pulled her jacket closer around her and decided she would go for coffee and a croissant—she had seen a place on Yonge Street—at, say, eight o’clock. If nothing had happened.

Moments before her deadline, Benjamin left the rooming house.

She almost missed him. Dr. Kyriakides had warned her about the possibility that Benjamin might not look much like John Shaw. Obviously his features were the same, but there were subtler clues of posture and style and movement, and from this distance—through the rain—he might have been another person altogether. He walked differently. He held himself differently. He stepped into the October morning, his face disguised by the hood of a yellow raincoat, and this was not John’s long, impatient stride but something more diffident, careful, reserved. He paused at the sidewalk and looked both ways. His glance slid over the little Volvo without hesitation, but Susan pressed herself back into the seat.

He turned and walked westward through the rain.

Susan waited until he reached the corner; then she turned the key in the ignition and eased the Volvo into traffic.

He walked to work, which made it easier. By negotiating slowly through a couple of troublesome intersections she was able to follow him all the way to University Avenue, where he vanished into the lobby of a tall, anonymous Government of Ontario building.

She continued up the street, parked, bought herself breakfast at a fast-food restaurant. A sign on the wall announced a thirty-minute limit, but Susan found the table attendant, a Jamaican woman, and said she had an appointment at eleven-thirty—was it okay if she sat here out of the rain? The woman smiled and said, “We don’t get a big rush till noon. Make yourself comfortable, dear.”

She finished the Travis McGee while nursing a cup of coffee. A steady rain washed over the tinted atrium-style windows. The air was steamy and warm.

At ten she ran across the street for a copy of Time magazine, came back for a second coffee and left the lid on.

At eleven-thirty she left the restaurant and walked a block and a half to the building where Benjamin worked.

She stationed herself in the lobby as the lunch crowd began to flow past. No sign of Benjamin. She wondered if there was a second exit. But she hadn’t seen one.

At twelve-ten she asked the guard by the elevator whether there was a cafeteria in the building.

“Third floor,” he said.

“Do I need a badge?”

He smiled. “No, ma’am. I don’t believe it’s considered a privilege to eat there.”

She took a deep breath and punched the Up button.

“You’re not yourself today, Benjamin,” the secretary at Unemployment Insurance said; but Benjamin sailed on past, deaf to the obvious, pushing his mail cart. It was true, he was not himself; he was full of disquieting thoughts, thoughts he could barely contain.

He had missed a lot of work recently—more evidence that things were not as they should be. Today he had noticed his supervisor Mr. Gill eyeing him from the office behind the mail desk … maybe wondering whether to launch a complaint or to say something to Benjamin first; in the Provincial Government, with its labyrinths of employee protection, the process of firing someone could be tortuous. The absences were unusual, though, because Benjamin genuinely liked his job. He liked sorting the mail and pushing the cart twice a day; when the work ended he liked coming home to Amelie, at least when she had the evening off. He had fallen into the routines of his life like a sleepwalker caught up in an especially happy, luminous dream, and he would have been content to dream on forever. But something had begun to interfere with the dream—a waking-up; or perhaps a deeper, dreamless sleep.

Trouble, Benjamin thought. Trouble all around him, trouble inside him. He felt its pulse beat at his temples with every step. Trouble trouble trouble.

All the office clocks were creeping toward noon. He had nearly finished his run, half of the building on Bay Street, room to room and up the elevators, dropping off mail with the pretty, brightly dressed secretaries who smiled and thanked him from behind their reception desks, their barricades of computer terminals and hanging plants—their perfume mingling with the smell of broadloom and Xerography to create what Benjamin thought of as the Government Office Smell. Shouldering past the men in suits who nodded or ignored him, he was rendered invisible by his open collar: the Invisible Man. He wheeled down the corridor from Unemployment Insurance to Social Welfare with the unanswered statement now echoing in his head (I’m not myself—I’m not —I’m not myself) in time with the squeak of the left rear wheel of the cart (must oil that). It was not the sort of idea he was accustomed to having. It was troubling and strange, and he knew (but did not want to acknowledge) its obvious source.

John.

The name arose unbidden, a sort of greyness. The name John Shaw was associated in Benjamin’s mind with things hard, drab, and unyielding. Asphalt, concrete, slate. John was a dim memory, a ghost impulse, as ephemeral as the sense of deja vu. But he was also a real presence, suddenly more real than he had been for years, a demanding presence … dangerous. Not just because I might lose my job, Benjamin thought, but because I might lose, might lose … no, but oh well, admit it, might lose Amelie.

Might lose that touch, voice, smile, night presence, that (yes, say it) love, which had entered into his life so suddenly … those eyes, which regarded him and in some sense created him: confirmed his suspicion that he existed. If Amelie can love Benjamin then Benjamin is real. He understood this about himself. He possessed only a few scraps of a past, some of them illusory. But the present was real. This moment, this now. And especially his moments with Amelie. What he felt for her was uncreated, was whole, was beyond suspicion.

He didn’t want to lose her.

He would not allow her to be taken away…

But how to stop it?

Things were happening. Things beyond his control.

Trouble, he thought, as he parked the mail cart behind the sorting desk in the basement. He rode the elevator up to the employee cafeteria, bought himself a ham-on-a-kaiser and a carton of milk; then stood petrified with the tray in his hand, staring at the woman across the room, familiar but unfamiliar, who was staring at him—and the only thought in his head was trouble trouble trouble.

Trembling, he carried his tray to her table. She gestured for him to sit down.

They regarded each other for a long moment, Benjamin arriving at the understanding that she was frightened, too; though he couldn’t guess why. She was a small, nervous woman with short dark hair and brittle eyeglasses and a can of Diet Pepsi in front of her. “I’m Susan,” she said.