Catherine Leroux - The Party Wall

Marie asks for sick leave. For weeks she trails after Wretch, who, even in January, finds a way to bring back bloody carcasses she does not have the strength to dispose of. She sleeps, cries, grows thinner, prostrated in front of a screen that, like the cat, manages to deliver the daily carnage of the outside world. The southwest of the country is buried in snow; in Toronto, it reaches to the second floor of buildings. Eight people die of asphyxiation. Army helicopters hover continuously, on the lookout for residents in distress, yet every day two or three victims vanish, swallowed up by the winter. In the West, the cities are paralyzed by protesting Christian fundamentalists. Using burnished crosses, the Protestants smash store windows and car windshields. They are opposed to the reintroduction of biology courses in the high-school curriculum, an election promise that Ariel has just fulfilled. It seems to Marie that she sees him in every thirty-second clip. She imagines the decisions he must make, his hesitations, his sweaty hands at 11 p.m. and the magnificent lines that crease his forehead in moments of conflict. At times she goes so far as to offer advice, as if he were there, sharing his concerns. They are not made to be apart. That is the frightening conclusion she has drawn from the disclosure of their origins.

Ariel, meanwhile, can’t sleep. His nights are populated by monsters, prehistoric birds that devour his liver. To escape them he throws himself into his work, keeping tabs on the rescue operations in Toronto. He addresses the evangelist protestors on a daily basis. He feverishly prepares for the new parliamentary session and insists on tracking the progress of every ministerial issue. He overdoes it, but this is ascribed to beginner’s zeal. No one suspects that a head of state’s workaholism conceals a personal calamity.

A week before the opening of Parliament, an outburst of violence in Quebec makes it imperative to hold an emergency meeting. In Montreal, automobiles are being blown up. The pattern is always the same: unemployed youths from regions outside the big city target non-francophone institutions. In reaction to these attacks, neo-Loyalist organizations issue countervailing threats. Street fighting proliferates. Within the Labour cabinet there is no lack of good ideas to calm things down.

“Goldstein, I think a tour of Quebec is needed.”

“It’s time for you and your lovely wife to launch a charm offensive to douse the torches of our perennial angry hicks.”

“With language like that, we’re sure to charm them,” Ariel snaps back.

“You may want to start in Marie’s native region. To show that you’re a local boy by marriage. What do you think?”

“A few photos with the in-laws would be even better! Nothing beats a schmooze with separatists when it comes to outsmarting the mad dogs.”

“I’m sure the Leclercs will be delighted.”

Ariel’s half-hearted sarcasm is lost on his advisers, who go away pleased with their leader’s cooperation. As soon as his office door closes behind them, Ariel collapses. Marc is completely taken aback.

“Come on! You knew very well things would be dicey in Quebec!”

Ariel shakes his head.

“There’s something I have to tell you. I need your help and your absolute discretion. We could lose everything.”

Marie is distressed by the explosions. At this rate, politicians will be targeted next. A few days after the second bombing of the new year, her sister shows up, intending to take her out of the big city and harm’s way.

“You’re on sick leave? Come to Saint-Roch to recuperate. You’re not going to get better with all the bombs going off. What’s the matter, anyway?”

Marie sighs. She hasn’t the slightest wish to leave her home, whose every corner reminds her of Ariel. She can spend hours stretched out in a closet, sniffing the clothes he’ll no longer wear, brushing against the walls he’s leaned on and through which their love came to life. Dusting is out of the question. Every particle contains a little of him, of his DNA, so close to her own. If she can’t see him, she wants at least to wallow in his dust, to coat herself with what’s left of him.

Rachel frowns as she contemplates Marie’s pallor. She is aware of just three remedies for existential woes: exercise, a T-bone steak, and good night’s sleep. This is the treatment she sets out to inflict, in that order, on her neurasthenic sister over the six days she has decided to spend in the chaos of the city. Marie wobbles when they take a walk, vomits at the mere sight of red meat, and paces back and forth at night, but Rachel remains unfazed. Until the morning she finds her sister unconscious on the bathroom floor, with an empty bottle of pills beside her.

In her imagination, the colour of death’s door was white; what she discovers is just the opposite. For forty-eight hours, she feels as though she’s being attacked by a Jackson Pollock painting. A network of agitated veins tightens around her, torments her arms and legs as if to drown her, as if to smother the part of her that still wants to live and damn the part trying to die. That is why she decides to fight. She would like to end it all, but not like this, not like the last beluga caught in a filthy net.

She wakes up in her bed, with Rachel to her right and a doctor to her left. Their first words amount to amorphous mumbling. Her answers are hardly any clearer. Words and ambient sounds come to her like gently lapping water, as though her head were submerged. The doctor stammers a few words of advice before giving her an injection. This time she plunges into a sea of molten gold. For hours, it seems to her she’s swimming in honey, waving her limbs about with a heavy, delicious slowness and finding comfort in that movement. She will not die. Her life does not end here.

When she resurfaces the morning light is like a benevolent blanket that someone has thrown over the house, as when a piece of furniture needs to be protected during a long period of disuse. Rachel, her face twitching, is asleep beside her, deep in conversation with someone in her dream.

“Where is Ariel?” Marie manages to utter.

Her sister rouses and, true to her habit, is instantly awake, clear-minded and ready for action.

“I haven’t called him. He’s not aware of what happened. I haven’t told anyone, actually, except the doctor.”

Dismayed, Marie turns her head away. Her tongue feels coated. She reaches for a glass of water standing on the night table, but her arms flop down like a sail gone slack. Rachel helps her take a sip, then she stands up and pulls a sheaf of papers from the drawer. The documents, the damned files. Eva Volant. A surge of blood revives Marie’s limbs and she straightens up.

“While you were unconscious, I found this. I’ve decided to keep your suicide attempt under wraps for the time being. So as not to bring all the journalists running. Ariel’s family. Our family.”

There is no way of telling whether her tone of voice is disgusted, accusatory, or indulgent. Or none of the above. When confronted with tragedies or moral dilemmas, Rachel generally stays neutral. Cool headed. Torn between resentment at her sister’s prying and gratitude for her presence of mind, Marie says nothing. Except:

“I think I’d like some red meat now.”

In February, a man sneaks onto the grounds of the official residence in the middle of the night and starts firing bullets at the windows. The bodyguards shoot him down just as the fifth windowpane shatters. Ariel, who was taking a shower, is not even aware of the attack. The assailant is identified as Rachad Maliki, a man beset with psychiatric problems. Security at 24 Sussex Drive is tightened as well as the surveillance of white supremacist militias, which see the incident as additional justification for stalking any man whose face is darker than theirs. But the episode acts as a spur on Ariel, just as Marie’s suicide attempt brings her back to the world of the living. She resumes her impassioned advocacy of intergenerational justice; Ariel is able to sleep, eat, and function like a man and not just a statesman. They manage to appear together at official events. To look at them, there is nothing amiss. The tremor inside them is undetectable. They say very little to each other, do not touch, hardly look at each other. Too dangerous. Like Tristan and Iseult, they need a sword, a blade to keep them from falling on one another like the particles of a collapsing star.