The Divide

But the electricity had been restored yesterday. Maxim flicked a switch and the lights winked on. The entrance hall yielded to a kitchen, a living room, a library. These were furnished, though sparsely—valuables had been removed and there were blank, pale spaces where paintings had been taken from the walls.

Well, he thought, that was appropriate, too. We shall all be entering a new, unfamiliar space. All three of us … all four, counting the French-Canadian girl Susan had mentioned. No, even more than that. Five, he thought, if you allowed Benjamin as a separate entity.

Maxim ascended the staircase carefully. He was healthy enough to pass for ten or fifteen years younger than his age. He was large but not fat; he had always walked for pleasure, sometimes great distances, and he supposed that habit had helped preserve his health. Still, he was conscious of his age. At sixty-eight, stairs were a chore to be undertaken with some seriousness. He remembered his Uncle Constantine moving through the house in Macedonia at this same solemn, considered pace. Constantine had been a schoolteacher and a cynical Communist, a friend of the rebel Veloukhiotis. Maxim was then a teenager and already an ideologue; he had read Marx with great determination. Now … is it possible, he wondered, that as children we’re already learning how to be old? Had he been studying for infirmity under his uncle’s slow tutelage?

The second floor of the house on the outskirts of Toronto exuded a closed-in, musty atmosphere. He wanted to open a window but dared not; that would only make it more difficult to heat these rooms when the furnace kicked on again. He stood by a bedroom window and gazed through its double panes across a wooded ravine. The ravine was stark and bare, a swath of perhaps a hundred yards between the house and a housing project crowded up against a major highway. The ravine afforded at least a little privacy, and that was good. The house, he thought, was as close to stateliness as one could achieve in such a prefabricated landscape.

He paused to scold himself for this momentary class snobbery, to which he was not even entitled. Maxim, though no longer a Communist like poor dead Constantine, had once considered himself a socialist; certainly he had never been wealthy.

But the important thing, he thought, is that I can work here.

It was John who had insisted on staying in Toronto. Maxim had wanted him to fly to Chicago with Susan. But John believed he would be safer on this side of the border—which might even be true, though Maxim had no evidence to suggest it—and certainly he would be more comfortable, less disoriented, in a familiar setting. So Maxim had arranged a sudden sabbatical, ostensibly for reasons of health (no one inquired too closely—one of the advantages of seniority and tenure), and borrowed this house from his friend.

Everything was in place except for the people, and they would be arriving tomorrow. Susan, this young woman Amelie … and John, whom Maxim had not set eyes upon for many years.

Resting a moment in the darkened hallway, he silently framed the forbidden words:My son.

Not literally, of course. Maxim had never married, never produced any children. Even his most intimate friends—possibly excepting those in the so-called Network—took him for an elderly bachelor of the generic sort, married to his research and his teaching. And that was, in fact, largely true. But no one’s life is as simple as his friends believe.

In a real sense, Maxim thought, I created John. What else is fatherhood? This was, if anything, even more profound. A virgin fatherhood.

He thought, I could have raised him.

It was one of those thoughts that came to him periodically, unbidden and unwelcome. Ordinarily, he would have shunted it aside. It was not useful. But now, with the prospect of facing John once again, there was no avoiding it.

If they hadn’t taken him away—

If I hadn’t allowed them to take him away—

But, no. He was too old to regret his life. You do what you do. And then you do what you can.

He sat down in a chair in the entranceway to wait for the deliveries he had been told to expect: a few pharmaceuticals, a tape recorder, his notebooks. Bundled in a huge coat and away from the wind, he was warm enough—except for his feet. Warm enough, anyway, to drift toward sleep.

Drifting, he was briefly assailed by a dream-image of John standing before him, John grown u

The afternoon light had dimmed. The house was dark.

He rubbed his face, sighing. Traitorous sleep. But he supposed there was some truth in his dream. He had implied to Susan that there was some treatment available for John; presumably she had passed this implication on. Poor trusting Susan, who believed in his miraculous powers. In fact there was nothing for John in this house but a warm bed in which to endure his crisis. And my notebook, Maxim thought. My obdurate curiosity, and my guilt.

Tests would be run, of course, and there was dopamine, which had relieved some symptoms in the animal studies. But there was nothing to forestall the ultimate resolution. Unwillingly, Maxim recalled his laboratory chimps, the animals prostrate and comatose or consumed by fever. In the initial tests—before John was born—the beasts had not been allowed to live long enough to exhibit symptoms; they were grotesques, capable of understanding a few words of written English and copying the alphabet from children’s books; they were destroyed as a potential embarrassment. But Dr. Kyriakides had allowed his second animals, his private experiment, to live to maturity—caged homunculi with enlarged skulls and wizened, cynical faces. He had watched them live out their truncated lives, scratching apple and orange onto yellow copypaper or probing their fur with the pencils, and dropping into recurrent fevers which he mistook at first for some form of malaria; then battering themselves against their cages and screeching, as if they had suffered some unendurable insight into their own condition—collapsing at last into a febrile unconsciousness.

Most died. Some recovered, but never fully. Never regained their facility with the pencil, never remembered how to operate the infant toys. The ones who survived lived on as lab animals, caged and listless … though an x-ray or an autopsy might reveal certain unusual cerebral lesions. Whatever its outcome, the affliction was universal.

And now John.

I didn’t mean this to happen.

But it had happened anyway.

Maxim stood up, groaning. Old bones. But his feet were not as cold as they had been, and he realized that the gas must have been turned on while he slept; the house had begun to warm around him.

13

Roch said he was going out for the day—looking for work, he said. Amelie watched from the kitchen window as he drove off in his battered green Chevy van. Then she telephoned Susan.

“Today,” she said. “Can you pick me up?”

“All right,” Susan said.

Amelie hurried to pack her things.

Not that there was much to pack. A suitcase full of clothes; the stereo, the TV set. None of the furniture was worth hanging on to; if there had been time she would have sent it back to the Salvation Army depot where she’d found it. But the arrangements had to be made in secret, and quickly, so that Roch wouldn’t find out. He had been in a tolerable mood through Christmas and Amelie didn’t want to provoke anything before she left. Above all, she didn’t want him to find out where she was going.

Susan had said she would come by with the car around noon. At eleven forty-five Amelie hiked her belongings out to the curb where they sat in a small, unimpressive heap. She wrapped herself in a jacket and stood shivering next to the luggage. It was a cold January day and the clouds had begun to wring out a few flakes of snow. The sidewalk was clear but cold; ice stood in pockets in the grassy verge. It was at least not one of those hideously cold days you sometimes get in January and February, when the air steals your breath and even the short walk to the bus stop is an endurance test—but it felt like those days were coming. Amelie decided she would need a new winter coat, not just this jacket. She used to own a parka (from the Thrift Village over on Augusta), but she’d thrown it away when the seams ripped under the arms.