The Divide

He was alone in the dark and his ribs hurt and he had been humiliated.

And he was angry.

He thought about getting drunk. But, oddly, the impulse wasn’t really there. When he thought about drinking he pictured his father coming home on winter nights like this, screaming out curses in peasant French and beating Roch with his stubby fists. Big man’s hands with dark hair and callused knuckles: Roch remembered those hands.

Lying in bed, he looked at his own right-hand fist—a shadow in the dim light. It was his best friend, his lover, the instrument of justice.

His anger was like a cold, uncomfortable stone that had lodged in his chest.

And he understood, then, why he didn’t want to get drunk. This was a pressure that drinking would not have relieved. He needed all his energy for pla

And he was good at that. It was the only kind of abstract thinking Roch enjoyed. It shut out the night sounds of the city. He could spend hours working out the details and the necessary steps, the payoff being some act … it was not yet specific … some final and irretrievable moment of equalization. An orgasm of justice.

This new purpose seemed to seize him all at once, utterly.

He was not smart, but he had a goal. And he was methodical. And determined. And perhaps best of all, he knew a secret. He thought of all those people out there in the lively darkness of the city, thought about how they were bound to one another with sticky ropes of loyalty, love, duty, guilt—how these impediments constrained them and restricted their movement. And Roch smiled in the dark, because here was his deepest and most profound knowledge about himself: that he was not bound by any of these things. He could do things that ordinary people could not even imagine. He was utterly alone, and therefore he was utterly free.

The first step was to locate Amelie.

He had never been to the restaurant where she used to work, the Goodtime Grill, mainly because her employment there had always rankled him. It was scutwork and she deserved it, but it had given her an independence from him that Roch resented deeply. This was back when they were on the street, when she was shaving her hair and wearing that old leather jacket with the sleeves down over her hands so that only her fingers poked out, how whorish she had looked and how she resented it when he suggested the logical and obvious way of bringing in some money. As if she liked sleeping in abandoned buildings, for Christ’s sake. He savored for a moment the memory of her in that jacket and how the cars would cruise by and sometimes stop and men would call her over and how she would come back sometimes with a little money and that expression on her face, which he could not decipher—of some deep, secret grief. But then she got the restaurant job and the crappy St. Jamestown apartment, and Roch got involved with some guys boosting cars out in the suburbs, and he forgot about her for a while. That was the basic mistake he’d made—letting her get away from him.

So he’d never been inside this particular restaurant. But maybe that was a good thing. Nobody here would know him.

He stood a second on the Yonge Street sidewalk staring up at the “Goodtime” sign. Cold noon sun on cheap faded plastic, picture windows with bead curtains and a menu taped up: Souvlaki, Fish Chips, Burger Platter. Roch pushed his way through the door.

He took a table by the window. This was the hard part, he thought. Anything involving deception was difficult for him. He could not predict what people would say, and the thing she said often provoked strange, hostile reactions. But there was no need to hurry. This was only the first, the most basic step.

One of the waitresses brought him water. She was a tiny small-breasted woman who looked vaguely Oriental. According to the tag on her uniform, her name was TRACY. In a voice so timorous he barely made out the words, she asked him if he was ready to order.

He asked for the burger plate and a beer.

When she came back with the food, he said, “Tracy—is that your name?”

She ducked her head, which Roch took for a nod.

He said, “Tracy, listen, is Amelie around?”

“Oh—Amelie? Oh—she doesn’t work here anymore.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.”

“Are you one of her regulars? ’Cause I don’t recognize you. But I’ve only been here since summer.”

“I’m her brother,” Roch said.

He watched her face carefully. She narrowed her eyes and tensed up a little. Obviously this information meant something to her. Amelie had been talking.

Loudmouthed bitch.

But Roch felt a tingle of excitement.

“Oh, her brother, okay,” Tracy said, and turned away. Roch let her go. Slowly now, he instructed himself. He forced himself to eat, even though he wasn’t hungry. The food was tasteless; it had the texture of styrofoam.

When Tracy came back with his coffee, Roch smiled at her. “You a friend of Amelie’s?”

“I can’t talk,” she said. Her voice sounded like it had died in her throat. “I have other tables.”

“I know I haven’t been on good terms with her. Maybe she mentioned that? The thing is, she’s gone off and I don’t know where to find her.”

Tracy only stared at him, the carafe somewhat slack in her hands.

“Look, I’m not trying to hassle her. Is that the problem? You don’t have to tell me where she is. The thing is that I have some of her stuff. Mail and things like that. She didn’t leave a forwarding address. I just want to know whether, if I gave you some of this stuff, you could maybe get it to her.”

There was a long, delicate silence.

“I don’t know,” Tracy said finally.

But Roch had to struggle to contain his excitement, because this was all the confirmation he needed. Tracy knew how to find Amelie. Otherwise she would have said, “No,” or “I’m sorry.”

But he was improvising now. He didn’t really have a plan; only the glimmer of a possibility—an idea begi

“And bring it here to the restaurant?” Tracy said. “Because I can’t give out my address or anything.”

Christ, Roch thought, she thinks I’m after her! It was laughable. He imagined pi

“Well, maybe, I don’t know,” Tracy said, and put down the check and scurried away.

Roch left his money and a generous tip and went out into the street. He walked aimlessly for a while, breathing frost into the cold air. Really, this was turning out terrifically well. But he still had a lot of thinking to do.

Some days passed while he pondered the problem of extracting Amelie’s whereabouts from Tracy the waitress.

Roch approached the problem by stocking up on food, mainly TV di