Robert Wilson - The Divide

The warehouse …

The property had been in litigation for years. It was worthless. Someday the building would be torn down. For now, it was abandoned and dangerous. Even when they came here during their time on the street, Amelie would never venture very far inside. There were bats living in the old cold-storage chambers; there were drippy, ancient pipes and wild raccoons and bad smells. Since then, apparently, Roch had explored the building. He had a big Eveready flashlight in one hand, and he pulled Amelie stumbling after him with the other. There were rooms and corridors so deep inside this building that no light penetrated from the outside; cracked linoleum or bare concrete floors drifted with sawdust and animal droppings. Roch put her over his shoulder, took the handle of the flashlight in his teeth, and climbed a narrow wooden ladder to a higher, darker level. In a small room here at the heart of the building, he dumped her against the chipped plaster wall and started a small Sterno fire. The smoke wafted up to the ceiling and dissipated through a hole there, up and up in lazy curls. The room did not warm appreciably.

Amelie was a spectator to all this. She felt abstracted from her body. What had Roch put into her? A drug, she thought. Something lazy, distancing, and slightly nauseating. She lifted her hand and looked at it: it seemed to be floating in midair.

She watched Roch pace the room, checking the entrance and fiddling with the Sterno. There was a question she wanted to ask. It was on the tip of her tongue. She worked hard to recall it.

“Roch … what is it you want? What do you want from me?”

He turned his face toward her, but only briefly. His eyes were blank with indifference. He stood up briskly.

“This isn’t about you,” he said. “You don’t matter anymore.”

The snow had paralyzed the city. Overnight, a winter blizzard had accumulated drifts and depths that the snowplows could not shunt aside, at least not quickly or efficiently. The main arteries were reduced to a single lane; the subways were running but the buses were not. Susan awoke to an absolute silence: the traffic outside the hotel had been utterly stilled.

John was in the bathroom—she could hear the shower running.

She went to the window. Outside, the streets were transformed The city was white, unsullied, and motionless. The snow had stopped falling but the sky was a uniform grey.

Good, she thought. We can’t go anywhere today. It wasn’t a blizzard; it was a reprieve.

She turned when she heard the water stop. John appeared a: the bathroom door in his Levis: skinny, pale, a little shaky…but his eyes were bright and lucid.

“Get dressed,” he said. “We don’t have time to waste.”

I should have expected this, Susan thought. There was no reprieve. It wasn’t possible.

He couldn’t afford one. He didn’t have the time.

“It’s an old building down by the lakeshore,” John said over breakfast. “Amelie showed me one time when we were out walking.”

Susan hesitated over her eggs. “Showed you?”

He was momentarily puzzled. “Showed Benjamin, I mean.”

“An abandoned building,” Susan repeated. “You think Amelie’s there—Roch took her there?”

“I’m almost certain of it.”

“Is it safe to go there?”

“No. It’s not safe at all.”

“We could call the police,” Susan said. “We don’t even have to tell them about Roch. Say we spotted some vagrants on the premises.”

John shook his head. “Maybe that would flush him out. But I think, if he were cornered, he might just kill her. It’s pointless, but it’s the kind of gesture Roch might make.”

“How can you know that? You never met him.”

“I met him once,” John corrected her.

“And you know that about him?”

“I know that about him.”

“You’re just going to walk in and take her away from him?”

“If I can.”

“Maybe he wants you to come. Maybe he’s jealous, he’s out there waiting for you … that’s why he told Tony Morriseau where he was going.”

“Maybe,” John admitted.

“How can you just walk into that?”

“Because I have to. It’s a debt. I want to pay it off. Not just a debt to Amelie.” He regarded Susan solemnly across the table. “I’ll tell you another secret. There are lives I could have saved. Thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands. But I didn’t. So I have to save this life, Amelie’s life. It’s not just one more experiment, Susan. It’s the only experiment that matters.”

She didn’t know what he meant, but it was impossible to ask—there was a ferocity under the words that she was afraid to provoke.

He stood up suddenly, put down money for the bill. “The roads should be clear by now,” he said.

They stopped at a Home Hardware outlet off Yonge Street, miraculously open for business although there was only one clerk inside. John bought a heavy-duty flashlight and fresh batteries and assembled them as Susan drove south and west through the snowbound streets.

She followed his directions toward the lakeshore west of the city, over the railroad tracks and into a labyrinth of warehouses and crumbling brick factories where the snow lay in pristine mountains and the little Honda labored like a crippled pack-mule She parked when he told her to park. The silence was sudden and absolute. “We walk from here,” he said.

Susan was dressed in high boots, a ski jacket, jeans. She tore the jacket sleeve while climbing through a hole in the fence that defined the railroad right-of-way. Now we’re trespassing, she thought. Now the police will come and arrest us. But there were no police; there was only the snow clinging to the tree branches and the soft sound it made when it fell; the glitter of the track where an early morning train had polished the rails.

She followed John along the arc of the railway for a hundred yards or more, then scrambled after him up an embankment.

“There,” he said. “That’s the building.”

Susan stood panting and looked up.

The building was huge. It was an old black brick building on an abandoned railway siding, sooty and Victorian. There were no windows, but the open loading bay gaped like a toothless mouth. The snow had not softened or warmed this building, Susan thought, it was big and indifferent and it frightened her.

John’s gaze was fixed on it. “I want you to stay here.” he said. “If I bring Amelie oat, help me get her to the car. Give me twenty minutes inside. If I’m not out by then, find a phone and call the police. Understand?”

“Yes.” She looked at him critically. “John? Are you sure—I mean, are you all right?”

He shrugged.

“For now,” he said.

She watched him walk away from her, toward the building; and she understood with a sudden, aching finality that she had been afraid of this place all along, even before she knew it existed—this dark chamber where he was determined to go—and that she could not stop him or bring him back.

Roch was pretty comfortable in the warehouse.

Sure, it was cold. Of course. But the Sterno fire helped. More important, he was alone here … except for Amelie, and he was able to keep Amelie sufficiently blissed out that she was not a real presence.

He was alone in this vast, empty building and it occurred to him that this was his natural state; that he had discovered his ideal habitat. His problems had always been with other people—their prudishness and their nasty glances. He was a stranger out there in the world. What he needed was what he had found: his own kingdom, this place. He moved down these dark and windowless corridors with the flashlight in his hand, king of the lightbeams, his pockets stuffed with a treasury of D batteries, and when he laughed his breath smoked out in front of him.