Pan Bouyoucas - Portrait of a Husband with the Ashes of His Wife

“I know she’s not interested in medicine any more. Is that why you aren’t speaking?”

“It’s Mélissa who doesn’t want to talk to me. She says she feels like she’s at the bottom of a well and she intends to get out on her own.”

Just like her father, who didn’t talk about his problems until he had solved them, Alma would have said — Alma, the drama queen who at times seemed to get herself into difficult situations so she could talk afterwards and in detail about her woes and anxiety attacks.

“Thanks, Simon.”

He hung up, thinking that his daughter was giving him the cold shoulder and had decided not to talk about her problems with her father either. And while he would rather have mortified his own flesh than see his child suffer, he would do as she wished and not call her friends to find her. Instead he should start to learn how to deal with the void that Alma had left. His lonely evenings had only begun.

HE WENT BACKto work on Monday, convinced that in a few days’ time when Mélissa was not so angry with him, she would be back home. He couldn’t imagine her doing anything else. But when a week went by without a word from her, he called her girlfriends. None of them knew where Mélissa was hiding. He called his sister-in-law too — perhaps Mélissa was hiding out in La Malbaie — but Carmen hadn’t seen her niece since Alma’s funeral. That is when he really started to worry, to imagine everything that a parent with no word from his child could imagine, and he leaped on the telephone every time it rang. His anxiety only faded when he was with a patient, then it came back with a vengeance when he found himself alone in the house. At dinner, it was as though he was eating soap. And when there was a reference on the news to the discovery of a young woman’s body, he would shudder and the colour would drain from his face.

Carmen called every day to ask if he’d had any word about Mélissa. Though he was annoyed at his sister-inlaw, as he was at all the people who had interfered with him in his search, he contained his anger and replied politely. Until his sister-in-law told him that she was coming to Montreal to help him in his investigations. He told her:

“You’ve done enough. I’ll sort things out on my own.”

He began by searching his daughter’s room, but found nothing that could give him clues as to where she might have gone. Next, he called one of his patients, Detective Sergeant Dominic Ferro of the Montreal Police Force, to ask if Ferro could help him out.

“Has your daughter got a cell?” the policeman asked.

“Yes, but I’ve called and called and she never answers.”

“Give me her number. At least I’ll be able to locate her cell.”

Two hours later, Detective Sergeant Ferro called to say that he had located the cell phone: in Saint-Hilaire. More precisely, in a property that now belongs to the Alliance universelle pour la Vie.

“And my brother-in-law didn’t say a word,” Doctor Maras said. “Probably to spite me, because I didn’t leave the ashes to his sect.”

“It’s not a sect, Doctor. I looked it up. The Alliance universelle pour la Vie is a movement founded on justice and peace.”

“Where all creatures are loved and respected for what they are.”

“Those are honourable intentions, aren’t they?”

“They’re all vegetarians.”

“Good for them.”

“Sergeant, they’re vegetarian because like his biblical namesake, their leader, Frère Isaïe, wants to make the lion eat straw with the ox.”

“What are you getting at?”

“If he respects all creatures for what they are, why would he force the lion to eat straw?”

“Hmm. I hadn’t thought of that.”

Doctor Maras phoned Saint-Hilaire and asked for his daughter.

Zak picked up the phone. And told him:

“Mélissa’s not ready to talk to you.”

“When will she be ready?”

“Don’t worry, she’s fine. That’s all I can say for the moment.”

Far from reassuring him, his brother-in-law’s words alarmed him even more, making his memory explode with everything he’d ever heard about certain sects in Quebec and the United States: swindling, confinement, torture and barbarism, even murder. Like the Alliance universelle pour la Vie, those sects were all led by slick sycophants with a capacity for sniffing out a person’s weaknesses, for flattering his ego, for enhancing his self-image, hoodwinking and keeping under their thumbs with their hazy discourse men and women much older and more experienced than Mélissa. Once the fish had taken the hook, he was forbidden any contact with the outside world. Isolated and cloistered, some disciples had even let themselves be persuaded that their guru was the reincarnation of Christ. If he gave in to debauchery every night, it was solely to make him a “sinning Jesus” so that he could be an experienced magistrate when he would have to judge the sinners at the Last Judgment. Even more, one guru had convinced his disciples that there would be a tremendous cataclysm and that the only survivors would be those who would follow him into death. “True life happens afterwards,” he would repeat to them. “And those who go with me will taste the greatest gift of all: immortality.”

Not surprisingly, that night when his body finally let go, Doctor Maras fell into a sleep filled with harrowing dreams. He only remembered the last one, for he had to wake up to escape from it.

He is walking on a deserted beach. A skull lies on the sand. Is it Alma’s? He wants to tell her about his anguish. But as soon as he touches the skull to lift it and talk to it, he finds himself in a large room, round and white like an igloo.

At the centre of the room, Silenus, the half-man and half-goat satyr, endowed with a huge paunch, hooves, and an erection the length of his forearm, is sprawled in a rocking chair.

“Was it you that brought me here?” Doctor Maras asks.

“Me?” Silenus says, bursting into loud drunken laughter — Wahahaha! — that shakes his erection like an enormous finger.

Doctor Maras looks for an exit but doesn’t see a door or even a window.

He turns to the satyr again and, as if he doesn’t notice the erection, tells him:

“Okay, it’s my fault, it’s all my fault. Now show me the door so that I can go and save my child.”

The satyr grabs a remote, presses a button, and Doctor Maras is suddenly propelled into the air where he begins to fly in a circle, like a scale model of a remote-controlled airplane. Dizzy, he shouts to the satyr to turn off the remote and put him down but he is going so fast that his cries emerge from his mouth like a buzzing drone.

ANXIOUS AS HEwas, he was unable to perform his work as ophthalmologist and surgeon with the necessary clear-headedness and composure. He cancelled all his appointments and spent the day at home, reading everything he’d found about Frère Isaïe on the Internet. Above all he wanted to know if any disciples had been able to leave the Alliance universelle pour la Vie and if so why, but he found nothing. He could have called Raymond Cholette, but the film director’s intimacy with the sect made him suspect. So he called Paul Bienvenue, a journalist who had written a book about sects in Quebec. But he couldn’t help him either. At most he repeated what Doctor Maras already dreaded: To better manipulate a young recruit, a guru would control her every thought, every dream, every moment of her life, and the longer he held sway over the recruit, the harder it would be for her to free herself. And so he must act quickly: Vulnerable as Mélissa was just then, it would not take long before she submitted both body and soul to the authority of Frère Isaïe. But how could he persuade her to leave that imposter? She wouldn’t even speak to him.