Catherine Leroux - The Party Wall

“One! Two! Three! Four! Five!”

The freight cars speed past, covered with dust, graffiti, and rust stains, every one numbered, every one named. None will be forgotten.

There issomething reassuring about the structure of the horizon here. Of course, a house or a man is completely exposed on the Prairies. But, on the other hand, anyone arriving can be seen a long way off. That is why each morning, even on cold days, Ariel goes out and walks around the house, scanning the vastness of the plains. He counts the foxes and the hares bearing their pale winter fur, and only when he has confirmed that the animals are their sole companions can he go back in to Marie and the aroma of coffee, which has remained unchanged from one existence to the next.

They do not own much furniture. They took what came with the house, which seems to have been abandoned by people fleeing from a sudden apocalypse. Now, weeks after they moved in, a cake with only two or three slices missing still sits majestically in the middle of the table, as neither Marie nor Ariel can bring themselves to throw out the dessert that bespeaks those interrupted lives. Once they had given some clothes found in the cupboards to charity, replaced the curtains and acquired a few dishes from a second-hand dealer in Rockfield, they considered themselves properly moved in.

Marie took the main bedroom, and Ariel, the adjacent room, where he shoved a twin bed with a sagging mattress against the wall. This slender barrier is all that separates them when they go to sleep. Each presses a hand against the wall to wish the other goodnight. Sometimes they wake up at dawn in a state of confusion, failing to recognize the unfamiliar shadows licking at the abstract furniture, their hearts still pounding in fear of what lies in wait outside, of what is lodged in their marrow. Then they remember. The moving, the prairies, the neighbourless house. Everything has already exploded; the world has already been annihilated. That is the advantage of surviving the apocalypse: there is nothing left to either protect or fear.

A family of raccoons has taken up residence in the attic, and, out of respect, neither Ariel nor Marie goes visiting. In the spring, the constant squealing signals the birth of a litter. Marie spends a long time imagining the blind, toothless offspring whiffing the dusty air under the eaves in search of their mother’s milk, and then she places her hand on her breast, which will grow old but never heavy. Like the land where they have come to live, Ariel and she have become sterile, two celibates scraping by on nothing, a worn-out hide salvaged from their past that day after day they manage to stretch enough to make it resonate. A beat of the drum to confirm they are still alive.

The party’s cops were the first to arrive after the disaster. Impelled by an indignation that was amplified by their thirst for revenge, they forced the door of the little house after nightfall. As they no doubt expected denials from Ariel and Marie, they sat them down in separate rooms for questioning. They soon realized their interrogation was futile. He and she immediately admitted the truth, even offering to supply the adoption agency’s documents in support of their statements and as proof that they were unaware of being siblings when the elections took place. Thrown off balance by the confessions, the cops proceeded to the next stage of their plan and ordered Ariel to resign immediately. They drafted a speech for him, which in no way resembled what he would have liked to say, but he came to terms with endorsing it. He readily consented to shut himself away for the following weeks and to refrain from any contact with the media. The reporters, constantly stationed in front of the house, shivered like animals that would rather freeze to death than starve to death.

The next day Marc succeeded in elbowing his way through to them. There were only a few hours left before the press conference, which had been put off long enough for an interim leader to be found whose curriculum vitae did not include incest, procuring, polygamy, or bestiality.

“How?” is all Marc managed to articulate.

“You’re the only one I shared this with,” Ariel replied.

“And you, Marie?”

“My sister found out, but she didn’t tell anyone else about it.”

Marc looks at her in disbelief.

“Everyone knows the Leclerc clan are all hard core independentists. Do you truly believe your sister could have kept something as explosive as this to herself?”

“Yes I do. My sister sets great store on family.”

“There’s no point in playing the blame game,” Ariel decides. “It’s too late.”

It was indeed too late. The global media had latched onto the scandal. Forgetting their fight against modern science, the evangelists were marching in the streets now to demand not just that Ariel step down, but that the marriage be dissolved, that the twins be imprisoned, and that they be subjected to all manner of physical retribution involving fire and white-hot metal instruments. The Left’s reaction was hardly better, as it responded to the attacks by sparing no effort to downplay the situation, arguing that family ties are “a matter of biography and not biology,” and that, since Marie and Ariel had not grown up together, their kinship meant nothing. The party was floundering and the country’s instability had never been greater.

Marie watched Ariel’s resignation alone, dry-eyed and glued to the screen of her laptop. She could never compare their situation to the sexual scandals that shook the world of politics with clockwork regularity. Still, hearing the contrition in her husband’s voice, seeing his wan complexion and his shoulders drooping in mortification, she had to admit he resembled the hundreds of men before him who had seen their careers disintegrate and slip through their fingers as they stood behind a plain lectern, sometimes flanked by a spouse, who clenched her teeth to hold down the bitter pill she was being made to swallow. Such people, no matter their misdeeds, were all to some extent the same; they had been forced, one way or another, to disclose facts that by their very nature should have remained secret. Sex, though socially acceptable, is not supposed to be described in public, detailed, analyzed, dissected. These defeated human beings mourned, not the end of their aspirations, but the fact that a space of intimacy had been forever altered, that a pleasure, wiped out by an avowal, was as dead as a wish uttered out loud. She came to pity all the infidels, closet homosexuals, Sunday nudists and other outsiders, even the most perverted, of which she now was one. Yet she envied them. Once the scandal had blown over, they could go back to a semblance of normality. For her and Ariel no such thing could ever exist again.

At night the northern lights wave like flags and shake the sky with supernatural vibrancy. Still, it’s hard to forgive this firmament, where everything seems to be written, and those distant constellations, which, even before the invention of fire, were recounting their misfortune. Ariel and Marie spend a great deal of time watching the stars, questioning Castor and Pollux.

They might have chosen Patagonia, the Kamtchatka Peninsula, or the Kerguelen Islands, but Ariel refused to leave the country. Unable to persuade him to go into exile, Marc resigned himself to helping them find an adequately remote community, and to weave a discreet security net around them. All that was left for them to do was to fashion new identities for themselves.

Ariel is now known as Albert Morsehead, and Marie has become Anne Leblanc. Marc provided them with false papers, new fingerprints, artificial irises, and other necessary biometric devices. But because their faces had been plastered across the screens of North America for weeks, they had to attend to their more superficial physical attributes. Marie underwent a minor nose reconstruction as well as a reshaping of her eyebrows. With her hair dyed blond and cut short, she was unrecognizable. Ariel’s case was somewhat more complicated. In spite of major plastic surgery, a beard, eyeglasses, and a different accent, something of the former prime minister persisted.