The Divide

Hopes for an equal, she thought. Hopes for recognition, for understanding. Hopes for a touch, for a contact, miraculously, across that divide.

What matters, Susan thought, is that he had never really abandoned that hope. Even now, deep in this killing winter. It was alive inside him.

She took a last look at the chessboard, then followed him toward the door.

22

John followed Tony Morriseau out into the cold afternoon.

A bank of snowclouds had rolled in from the west; the sunlight was fading into winter dusk. Strange how vivid all this seemed. It was true, what he had told Susan: since childhood he had lived in a world of Platonic abstraction. Schema and essence, the word behind the shadow. It was Benjamin who had inhabited the universe of surfaces and colors.

But that was changing. He felt it now, and he felt it accelerating. He stepped into the biting winter air in a shower of snow crystals, and he was stu

He was deluged by dusk and snowdunes, by the amber glow of the streetlights so cold and melancholy they seemed to burn into his sight. The knife of the wind. The hiss of his breath.

How meaningful it all seemed: a new and ancient language …

“John?”

Susan’s voice was crystalline and intimate. He turned to look at her. She was beautiful. She was frowning. “Are you all right?”

He shook his head. Maybe he wasn’t. He started to say, “I—” But the word itself hovered in the air, a pure and absurd syllable. It had no antecedent. He was as hollow as the sky.

Please, not now, he thought.

“Just a little dizzy,” he said.

“He turned the comer south of here,” Susan said.

John hurried after the retreating figure of Tony Morriseau, forcing recollection on himself. Tony Morriseau who had sold him the Corvette …

Tony Morriseau the drug dealer, who might know something about Amelie.

Amelie whom he must find, because he had assigned himself this task. For Benjamin, it was the repayment of a debt. For John … say, an experiment with an idea. An idea about lineage. An idea about descent.

Tony was too proud to run and John caught up with him in the blank whiteness of a parking lot, the streetlights splaying out weird shadows all around them. Tony whirled and said, “Fuck off!”

“We need to talk,” John said. He heard Susan behind him now: her cold breath and the squeal of her boob against the snow.

“We don’t have anything to talk about,” Tony said.

“About Roch. About Amelie.”

“I don’t know anything about them.”

But Tony was lying. John heard it in the angle of his words, brittle phonemes like tiny shards of ice. Tony knew Roch and Amelie from their street days: John remembered Amelie talking about it. “Tell the truth,” John said.

“Go fuck yourself,” Tony said.

But John possessed the key to Tony’s soul. Tony was a small, pale, undefended thing under his shell of skin and it was not difficult to trick him out. He had done it before. “You talked to Roch.”

Tony looked suddenly doubtful. “Yes …”

“What did he want?”

But now Tony frowned and canted his head. “Why should I tell you?”

And John was startled.

“Because—” he began.

But the words weren’t there.

They had always been there before.

“Asshole,” Tony said.

Susan stepped forward. She looked small and delicate in the snow. “Please,” she said.

Tony shifted to look at her.

“Amelie’s in trouble,” Susan went on. “If you know Roch, you know the kind of trouble I mean. All we want is to find her.”

“What are you, her social worker?”

“Her friend.”

“I talked to Roch,” Tony said, “but not about Amelie.”

“He bought something from you?”

“Not from me. A guy I know. What he wanted, I don’t have. All right? That’s it, that’s all I have to say.”

John collected himself. “Did he tell you where he was going?”

Tony regarded him with instant contempt; he began to speak, then hesitated. John was co

He turned and was gone across the parking lot toward the lights on Yonge Street.

John was suddenly dizzy. Susan put a steadying arm around him.

“John? Can you make it back to the hotel?”

He felt her warm presence against the cold dark and decided he could.

23

Susan wrapped her arm around John’s waist and helped him through the hotel lobby, ignoring the hostile stare of the desk clerk; maneuvered him up the elevator and through the door of the room. He was cooperative but loose-jointed; his body radiated a feverish heat.

She stretched him out across the bed. “John? Can you hear me?”

He turned his face toward her. His eyes were glazed but attentive. He nodded.

She put her hand across his forehead and drew it quickly back. The fever was intense and Susan felt a surge of panic. She couldn’t deal with this! She wasn’t trained for it! He needed a doctor, a hospital—

He reached up suddenly and took her wrist in a clamping grip.

“I need aspirin,” he said. “Maybe cold compresses. This will pass.”

She nodded until her agreement registered and his hand slipped away.

She undressed him and pulled blankets over him, then hurried down to the hotel’s convenience shop for a bottle of Bayer’s. When she got back, he was shivering and moaning. She fed him three tablets with a glass of tap water and pulled up a chair by the bedside.

The snow that had been predicted all day had settled in by nine o’clock. Susan watched it through the hotel window. It was a picturesque, gentle, persistent snowfall; the big flakes danced against the window and drifted onto the ledge outside. The snow obscured the city lights and softened the murmur of the traffic.

With the snowfall, John’s fever began to retreat.

Susan pressed a damp washcloth against his forehead. He had been sleeping restlessly for the last two hours; it was only forty-five minutes since the fever had broken and his temperature had dropped back to normal. He needs the rest, Susan thought. But when she took the cloth away, he sat up.

“I did what you told me,” Susan said.

“You did fine.”

“Are you better now?”

“Better than I was a little while ago.”

“Is this it?” Susan asked. “Is this what Dr. Kyriakides said would happen?”

“Let’s not talk about it now.”

She took a shower. She immersed herself in the hot rush of the water. Washing away the fear, she thought. Washing away today and washing away tomorrow.

She wrapped herself in a towel and entered the darkened bedroom. John was propped up in the bed, a faint silhouette. Susan toweled her shoulders a last time, then climbed in beside him.

The bed was hot and faintly damp. A sickroom bed. She didn’t care. His body was warm, but it was an ordinary warmth now. Because she was afraid, Susan pressed herself against him; he turned to face her.

“This might happen again,” she guessed.

He nodded. She felt the motion against her cheek.

“Might be worse the next time?”

“It might be.”

She absorbed this information.