Part Three: Chapter 1

PART THREE

I

I settle for fairly basic accommodations at the Chateau Frontenac, a modest room with a queen-sized bed, a dresser, desk, and chair, and a smallish sitting area with two upholstered chairs and a coffee table at the foot of the bed. I empty the contents of my duffel bag into two drawers of the dresser, turn on the television to a French-language version of MTV, and fall asleep when my head hits the pillow.

Twelve hours later I order a room-service meal of breakfast of coffee, eggs, and toast. I switch to CNN and listen to some political pundits ridicule some other political pundits for suggesting that John Kerry should select John McCain as his vice-presidential running mate. This is the kind of topic that ordinarily stimulates my interest, but I find that I do not care in the least. I click back to the French-speaking music station.

After a shower I take a walk out into the old city. Children are playing hopscotch with colored chalk on the sidewalk. They call out to each other in French, with enchanting little rhyming conventions of their game. They do not seem like MTV children. I stand and watch them from a safe distance across the street.

I yearn for my life again. When I think of fugitives in movies or literature, or even in real life, they are usually on a mission. Political fugitives living underground. The original TV fugitive trying to track down the one-armed man who killed his wife. Red diaper babies who left Bryn Mawr to become revolutionary bombers and bank robbers. What mission is available to me? I doubt I could be enchanted even by those missions, if I were to find myself in their shoes, but the real point is that I am not in their shoes, and the notion that there is anything to recapture in the thing that I have lost – that thing being, in elemental form, only myself – hovers shapelessly around me without quite engaging me.

I have a serviceable new (yet familiar) identity, a decent head start, and apparent access to all the money any sensible person would ever want, but none of it has much appeal for me. I could spend the next ten or twenty years traveling wherever I want in this world, sleeping in beachside luxury cabanas, swimming in blue water twelve months a year, sipping colorful drinks with little umbrellas in them, and enjoying or at least sampling the sexual benefits of wealth, anonymity, and a reasonably well-preserved physical presence in a world where straight, single men with any real financial underpinnings are few and far between.

No sale.

What I want is my life back. My family. My dog. My hammock. My runs with Rachel and Shadow around Fresh Pond.

Sam and I have an expeditionary game wherein we look for spaceships. A spaceship can be anything from an oil drum to a barbecue grille to an external air conditioning unit. We look around the neighborhood, or sometimes we go for a little drive and pull over near an office building, motel, or condo complex that might provide useful terrain for scouting around. Once we find a likely spaceship, the next step is to look for footprints, preferably Martian footprints. We have found them occasionally.

I look around the little back streets of Quebec’s Old City looking for spaceships, and there are none. I imagine Sam sitting on the edge of his little blue sports car bed in his Scooby Doo underoos, still wearing his Red Sox cap, wondering where his Daddy has gone, wondering when the next spaceship expedition will be, wondering if his Daddy will get home sooner if he wears his baseball cap turned around backwards like his Daddy sometimes turns it. Shadow licks his toes and he starts to giggle, but then he whisks the dog away and his face starts to crumple and contort into angry sobs over missing me.

I want to kill Bruce Gibbs, but he has taken away my chance. It pisses me off even more that in addition to everything else he has stolen from me, his cowardly suicide has robbed me of the chance to exact any righteous revenge on his sorry ass.

Am I paying the price now for my lack of a killer instinct forty years ago in the boys’ room? For walking back into town that day to buy a roll of electrical tape so he could repair his eyeglasses? For walking away from him disdainfully and giving him a life when I should have finished him off, when I should have pummeled him into the existential realization that he had no place in my world and I had no place in his, that whatever I claimed for myself, whether it was my physical space or my girlfriend or my wife, was mine and mine alone and he would touch it or contaminate it with his cooties, with the evil horrors of his personal world, only at the greatest peril?

I left the door cracked open for him then – it was not only that I did not perceive a Darwinian world but that I was seeking to fashion for myself a belief system that would stand in stark opposition to such a world – and he has not only walked through it, but it is far worse than that. He has inhabited and taken over my life, and he has destroyed it and apparently made it uninhabitable for me. After all, if it is impossible for me to reach out to Sam or to Rachel or to Diana without making things worse, this is simply not recognizable as my life. And if this is not my life, how can I be anyone I recognize?

He has rendered me a walking zombie, holed up in a foreign city grasping for any glimmer of hope or home – as if they might appear at the other end of some cosmic chute or trap door – and finding none. He has taken not only my future but my past by telling me what I think he has told me about Mary Kate and Rachel.

After I eat I walk a mile or so into the newer city until I find an office supply store. I spend almost two thousand dollars Canadian on a notebook computer and the necessary connectors. I use Chet’s American Express card. I get the store clerk to help me take the computer out of its packaging so that I can easily lug it back to my hotel room where I hook it up and begin to type.