Robert Wilson - The Divide

“God damn your pious self-pity!”

She had not planned to say this; the words came spilling out. Her fists were clenched and her fingernails bit into her palms. Dr. Kyriakides gaped at her. “That’s all we are to you—all of us—just stupid, ordinary people! You took a child and you fed him all that contempt, that arrogance! Christ, of course it was a burden! Isn’t it obvious? That’s why he had to invent Benjamin.” She turned away. No more hesitation. “That’s why we have to leave.”

She was too shaken to drive. John slid behind the wheel of the Honda. He had excavated the car from a mound of snow, but the driveway was still solid—Susan wondered whether they would get as far as the road. But she put her faith in John and curled up into the private space of her winter coat. The snow tires whined and finally bit against the blacktop; the Honda struggled forward.

According to the radio, the snow might begin again tonight. A second front was pushing in from the high prairies. But for now the sky was a glassy, vacant blue, cold and clear. Susan scrubbed frost from the window next to her and peered out at a frigid rural landscape of frozen ponds and hydroelectric clearances. The highway had been ploughed during the night, but a morning wind had scattered snow back across the tarmac in serpentine dunes.

Now the Honda picked up speed. It occurred to Susan that John was driving too fast for the road—but she looked at him and was reassured. His eyes had taken on an intense, powerful focus; his touch on the wheel was delicate and certain.

The road sped away behind them. Susan was warm and calmer now; she sat up and stretched.

“You told Max we were leaving?”

She nodded. “He says it’s pointless. He says you don’t know how to find Amelie.”

“I don’t, precisely. I think I know where to begin.”

“You don’t really know that much about her, do you?”

“No.”

“But Benjamin does.”

He nodded.

“And you have access to that,” Susan said. “To his memories—his life.”

“More than I used to. That makes it easier. But even Benjamin didn’t know all about Amelie.”

“She told me about her brother,” Susan said. “He tried to kidnap her the day she moved. You think he’s involved in this?”

“That would be an obvious suspicion. Nothing is certain, of course. All we really know is that she left without leaving a message.”

“Maybe she just got tired of us all.”

“That’s possible.”

“But you don’t believe it.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t believe it.”

They crossed the city limits. Coming down Yonge Street, John slowed to deal with traffic. Susan watched a TTC bus slide into an intersection, its wheels locked. A pickup truck swerved to avoid it; John pumped the brake and kept the Honda a carlength back. A brisk wind peppered the windshield with crystals of yesterday’s snow, glittering in the sunlight.

They were well into the city when Susan felt the Honda’s motion grow more erratic; she heard John catch his breath as they fishtailed coming around a curve. Just north of Eglinton he pulled into a parking lot. “Can you drive us the rest of the way? It shouldn’t be too hard. The roads have been cleared since morning.”

He was sweating. Susan frowned. “Are you all right?”

John held up his hand to show her the tremor, which was obvious and pronounced.

Oh, God, Susan thought.

“I think we’d be safer,” John said calmly, “if you took over for a while.”

There was this to deal with, too: his “change.”

They rented a room at a downtown hotel not far from Yonge Street. They unpacked the few things they had brought, including the Woodward guitar Susan had carried back from Chicago. Meager fractions of their lives. She rested on the bed while John showered.

“The change” was something she didn’t really want to think about. Dr. Kyriakides had intimated that John might die. John said that wasn’t really likely … but the question was open. And there was nothing that Susan or anyone else could do about it: no real treatment apart from the bottle of pills Dr. Collingwood had prescribed. There were questions she would have to begin to face, unpleasant as they were, such as: What would happen if John collapsed? Should she take him to a hospital?

This was all beyond her.

For now she was simply accommodating John’s wishes, helping him find Amelie. After that … well, it was impossible to predict. She remembered Dr. Kyriakides describing John’s illness as “a radical neurological retrenchment, a shedding of the induced growth … a one-time event, which he might survive in one form or another.”

One form or another. As John or Benjamin. Or some unpredictable amalgamation of the two.

And the event would be traumatic, Dr. Kyriakides had said: like a fever, it would run its course, would peak, would then be finished and its effects irrevocable.

He’ll be different, Susan thought. He’ll want me with him. Or he won’t.

He won’t be the same: something new will have been born … something will have died.

But now he is John, she told herself sternly. The future was always the future, always mysterious. What mattered was that he was John and she was with him now.

He came out of the shower looking stronger, though there was a certain persistent hollowness about his eyes that Susan didn’t like.

“It’s early,” he said. “We haven’t had lunch. Let’s head over to Yonge Street—the place Amelie used to work.”

They braved the cutting wind. Susan was afraid the Goodtime wouldn’t be open; a lot of places had closed because of the weather. But the lights were all on and the sign in the window said, OPEN REGULAR HOURS.

Their waitress was a tiny, timid-looking woman named Tracy; the food was greasy but filling. When Tracy came back with their coffee, John asked about Amelie.

Tracy gave him a wide-eyed stare. “I don’t know anything, anything about that!”

She hurried off with the check still clutched in her hand.

John looked at Susan. Susan shrugged.

It was the manager who brought back the check. He wiped his hands on his apron and said, “What’s this about Amelie?”

“She’s missing,” John said. “We’re looking for her.”

“So? She’s not here.”

“I know that. I thought she might have talked to somebody.”

“Haven’t seen her. Haven’t talked to her.”

“Well, all right.” John stood up. “Your waitress—Tracy—she seemed pretty nervous.”

The manager began an answer, then hesitated and took a closer look at John. John returned it steadily. Susan wondered if this was John’s “hypnotic” power at work, though she could see no sign of it—saw instead maybe a calculated sincerity.

Then the manager seemed to reach a decision. “There was somebody else here asking after Amelie. Tracy’s just skittish … she gets upset.”

“Somebody else?”

“Her brother, Tracy says. Big guy. Kind of strange. But he hasn’t been back for a while.”

Susan said, “It only confirms what we suspected.”

“But that’s important,” John said. “That’s useful.”

He led her back through the snowy streets—not to the hotel, but to the doughnut shop on Wellesley where she had discovered him all those months ago. Susan wondered if this was some kind of deliberate irony … but John was too serious for that. He took the table with the chessboard engraved on its surface; Susan sat opposite him. “What now?”

“We sit here for a while. Carbohydrates and coffee. We look around.” “What are we looking for?”