The Extinction Club

  Nile grew up in Europe and Asia with cooks, cleaning ladies, chauffeurs & native-speaking nannies. Which explains how he speaks 5 languages (!?) & knows Chinese fairy tales. When he went back to the States & lived on his own he worked as a translator & still does from time to time. He said he saw one of his books at Walmart. When I asked him if he’d give it to me for Christmas, he said no, I wouldn’t like it.

  Nile also collects stamps. I’d never have guessed in a million leap years he’d have a hobby like that. I mean, is there anything nerdier? People call me a nerd for being interested in science & reading all the time but I think he’s topped me. But he says that Edgar Allan Poe & Sherlock Holmes & Julian Barnes were stamp collectors & so were Freddie Mercury, Kurt Cobain, Thom Yorke & the bass player of Arcade Fire.

  Nile listens to classical music a lot. “Its audiences are going grey & will soon die,” he told me one night. He also writes a lot in a journal — a black one with a silver lock & silver pen, which was a gift from his mom. Sometimes he copies stuff from my grandmother’s books & reads them to me at night. Like José Saramago’s line about not knowing whether the tree you plant will end up being the tree you hang yourself from. Is Nile thinking of killing himself too? Has he been reading my journal?

  Not everything is good about Nile (it never is about anyone). There’s something haywire about him. Tilted off centre. A spring-loaded kind of thing. Like he has a wickedly hot temper or fits of madness. I’ll give you an example. After dinner last night (some kind of okra mash, which was totally gross), he drank some Scotch & his personality changed, a Jekyll & Hyde switch. He got funnier, more confident — and then a killer-on-the-loose look in his eyes. I thought things were really going to go sour — until I saw him pour the rest of the bottle down the sink. “A touch of brain fever, that’s all,” he said. “Happens from time to time.” He turned on the tap & the water hit a spoon & bounced back up into his face & I didn’t dare laugh.

  Nile also sees things that aren’t there. Everywhere he looks. Like Osama bin Laden in an icicled cliff, or a wolf biting a deer in a stain in the ceiling, or a brontosaur in the frosted front window … I mean, I see them too, sort of, but only after he goes to great pains to point them out. Is Nile on something?

  I’m starting to feel a bit better, to eat more, and now have an URGENT need for a cigarette. For a carton. Must put in another request.

  Nile asked me today how I knew the “vet” from Ste-Mad & I said what makes him think I know her & he said that when he was getting me my sketchbook & glasses he saw a picture of her. I hemmed & hawed (I’m not a very good actress), then simply said it was none of his business.

  I’ve been snooping around a lot (I’m a terrible snoop, my worst fault, according to my grandmother) & I should stop before Nile catches me in the act & strangles me or something.

  I just found some things in Nile’s duffle bag. As in criminal things. VERY scary …

  More later, I hear some noises out front. Like Gervais’s plow. That’s it for now & maybe forever.

  IX

  I fired up the engine first shot and flew back to the cabin, the speedometer needle juddering to the right of the circle, to a figure well past the limit for paved highways and double the maximum for winding dirt lanes in winter. My cargo shifted about as I pulled some hard G’s on the curves. I used the hazard lane to pass cars, swerved to miss a fatality marker while buzzing Céleste on the two-way. Once, twice, three times, but no answer …

  With the cabin in view I reached under the seat, pulled out a bottle. The cat was now leaning into the windshield with her paws on the dashboard, balancing against the pitching of the terrain. I stopped the van, opened the door and she jumped out. I took a quick belt of Talisker, then another. Rolled down the fogged-up window.

  Black cobras of smoke curled out of the cabin’s chimney, and the light from inside made milky blue patches on the snow. The living room windows, their frames jagged with frost, looked like giant postage stamps. The door was narrowly ajar, its padlock hanging open.

  I pushed it squeaking the rest of the way and looked into the small, dark, perfect circle of the barrel of a high-powered rifle. Céleste was holding it, her finger on the trigger.

  A humming sound began inside my head—the sound of fear? sleep deprivation?—and a voice that seemed to come from a great distance, like the sound of faraway geese. I put my hands above my head, as they do in movies.

  “Why’d you do it?” said Céleste in a small, dry eggshell voice. She was on the bed, sitting up, back against the wall.

  I looked at her in perplexity, as if a dog or cat had just spoken. “But … I thought you—”

  “Yeah, it’s a miracle, I can talk. They’ll make you a saint one day.”

  “But how—”

  “Get down on the floor, face down. Or I’ll blow your head off.”

  Her voice sounded like a stroked balloon, like a young Marge Simpson. I lowered my hands but remained standing. “Why?”

  “Because you tipped him off.”

  “Tipped who off?”

  “Gervais.”

  “Gervais?”

  “The snowplower.”

  “Shit. So he came back?”

  “Take a look at the door, Sherlock.”

  Around the handle were splinters of wood, and the lock was scraped and bent. The only thing I had in common with Sherlock Holmes was dope fiendom. “What’d he want?”

  “To make sure it was me. That’s it. Because he didn’t have a gun on him. And I did. He stayed like, thirty seconds.”

  I put my hands down. “I didn’t tip him off.”

  “Get down on the floor,” she said. “Or else.”

  “Else,” I said. “I’m not getting down on the floor. I didn’t tip him off.”

  “You already said that.”

  “So he’ll be back?”

  “No,” she replied calmly, after a long stare. “But others will. Not today, probably not tomorrow. He’s got to let his cousin know first. His cousin makes the decisions. Gervais’s dumb as a horseshoe.”

  I could easily rush her, take the gun away. “And who … where’s his cousin?”

  “In jail.”

  She’s half my size, a third my age, and weak from injuries. Plus I’m fortified with drink. “When’s he get out?”

  “Soon.”

  With the rifle barrel she pointed to some gilt-tooled letters on my father’s attaché. “These your initials, B.C.N.?”

  “No.”

  Holding the rifle in one arm, she flipped the catches on the case, raised the lid. “You a drug runner?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are there stacks of American cash in here?”

  “Mad money.”

  “Next to a gun.”

  “You take a look at it?”

  “The cash?”

  “The gun.”

  “Why would I?”

  “Because it’s a water pistol.”

  “It … whatever. How about this? She pulled out a slip of yellow paper from an inside sleeve of the case. “You’re on the run, right?”

  You can’t run away—whatever you’re running from, you just bring it with you: my father’s unoriginal words. “Right.”

  “Because you’re a perv? A pedophile?”

  I closed my eyes. “Yeah. I’m the Humbert Humbert of the North.”

  “I want an explanation.”

  “I think I liked it better when you couldn’t talk.”

  “I want to know who you are and what you’re doing here.”

  “I could say the same.”

  “You escape from the pen or something?”

  “No, I was pardoned by the governor. I was strapped in the chair when the power went off. Ice storm. Act of God.”

  Céleste stared at me, unamused. “Is the law hunting you?”

  “Everyone’s hunting me.”

  “What for?

  “Picking up fourteen-year-olds and burying them in the woods.”

&nb
sp; “Because you’re a criminal. On the run.”

  “I’m on the run.”

  “It’s okay, I don’t mind. It’s all right if you were that way once—as long as you aren’t that way now. I know lots of criminals. And ex-criminals. I’m one myself.”

  I thought of what the snowplower had said, that she was a murderer. “Interesting. I didn’t know that about you. What crime did you commit?”

  “There are many interesting things you don’t know about me. I may tell you about those things later and I may not. It all depends. I haven’t decided yet. Whether to confide in a child molester.”

  “Was it murder?”

  A faint look of surprise. “I’m asking the questions. Are you a draft dodger?”

  “There’s no draft where I come from.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “Neptune.”

  She rolled her eyes. “What do you do for a living?”

  “Tennis linesman.”

  She re-rolled her eyes. “Why did you bring your stamp albums? And all the other … stuff.”

  “None of your business.”

  “Is that how you make your money?”

  “Once upon a time.”

  “Are you an addict?”

  My legs and arms still jerked involuntarily now and again, especially in bed, hypnagogic and hypnopompic lurches. She must have noticed. “Recovered.”

  “Cocaine? Heroin?”

  Crack, crank, X, special K, LSD, you name it. I drew the line only at bleach, Sterno, gasoline, formaldehyde, glue and cleaning products. “Mostly alcohol.”

  “And you quit?”

  A friend of mine quit for two years, then out of curiosity or nostalgia did one single binge and died of an overdose. I knew the same could happen to me. I stared at Céleste in silence.

  “Talk. Pretend I’m an adult.”

  She had a point. “Eleven years, maybe not all that time but most of it, I’ve been trying to quit. It’s a high ladder.” The twelve-step ritual, the curriculum of deprivation and pain. Struggling to not give in, to keep everything in balance, to see pleasure not as an end but an accident. “After my father dies? I stop on a dime. No AA, no NA.”

  Céleste put down the rifle, deftly removed the cartridge. She began talking about symbols and Freud, but I wasn’t following; my thoughts were miles to the southeast. If I wanted symbolism I’d go watch early Bergman. The next thing I knew she was flicking out a thumb and four fingers.

  “I have … three, four, five more questions,” she said. “All right?”

  “If I get five.”

  “One. What’s this?” She held up a photocopy of a legal document, a complaint for damages served by my ex’s lawyer.

  “An extortion attempt. By someone more screwed up than I am.”

  “Your wife?”

  “Ex-girlfriend.” In all fairness, my ex’s lawyer is probably more screwed up than she is.

  With her hand Céleste made a gun, aiming it at the attaché. “Where’d all the money come from?”

  “From a bank.”

  “As in bank robbery?”

  “Sort of. It used to be in my father’s account.” I sighed, wondering how much I should add to this. “I didn’t feel like leaving an AmEx trail a mile wide, okay?”

  “Who’s trailing you?”

  “My ex’s lawyer, for one.”

  “What does he want?”

  “She. The money in the bank. Or as much of it as she can get.”

  “And you’re not going to give it to her.”

  “No.” The hardest part was losing Brooklyn. She wasn’t mine, I wasn’t married to her mother, I had no legal rights. “But I might give some to her daughter.”

  “Brooklyn Jessica Martin? The girl you abducted and molested?”

  Sex charges have become a hackneyed form of revenge, yet they’re still effective, always believed—you can destroy anyone that way. Once that poison gets into the air, it never really goes away. “Allegedly.”

  She snapped the attaché lid down, the reports of the catches like distant gunshot. “So you’re going to pay her off?”

  Not that’s it provable, not that it has any weight in a court of law, but if you asked Brooklyn who she loved more, who she really wanted to be with, she’d have said me. “No, she’ll tell the truth eventually.” I flashed to the first time she took my hand as we walked on the boards, by the sea, the way she tugged on my coat to get my attention. Young girls are like old cats: if they don’t like you, nothing on God’s green earth will make them pretend they do.

  I could see in Céleste’s eyes that she still believed I was a perverted swine who’d bear watching. “That’s more than five questions, isn’t it?” I said.

  “One last one?”

  “If I get five.”

  “Why weren’t you afraid? I was pointing a rifle at you. I scared seven shades of shit out of Gervais.”

  What could I say? That I didn’t care about living? That with every day of life more and more is being subtracted from less and less? Minus this second. Minus this second. That I was tired of collecting the millions of minutes, killing the idle thousands of hours? That the end years, awaiting AD or the big C, would not be golden but tin?

  “I’ve led a long pointless life,” I said finally, “with more behind me than in front. So what’s to be afraid of?”

  To my surprise, Céleste’s eyes began to moisten. This wasn’t my aim. She turned her head so I wouldn’t see. “You’re old,” she said, “but you’re not that old.”

  I had the weariness of the old. A struggling spentwing drifting through the universe: my father’s words. Death had been a faint dirge inside me since my teens; it was now a loudening song, like the one sung only once by a dying swan. I was 44—the Chinese double digit for death—and knew I wouldn’t see 45.

  “I feel old. Felt that way most of my life. You wouldn’t understand, Céleste, not at your age.”

  She continued to avert her gaze, staring hard at the floor. “I do understand,” she said, almost inaudibly. I moved closer to hear her and saw tears popping in the corner of her eyes like glass beads. “Really I do. I’ve already gone through it. What Grand-maman called le réveil mortel.”

  Réveil mortel. The wake-up call to death, to the reality of death. The recognition, the acceptance, of your own mortality that marks the end of childhood. My mother used the same phrase … I must pretend to be alive, I thought to myself, to have hope, spirit, for the sake of Céleste, so that she won’t give up. She’s fourteen, for Christ’s sake. I considered and dismissed four or five things to say, then did something that surprised us both: I put my arm around her. Gently at first, but when she threw her arms around me and sobbed against my chest I held her as tight as I’d held anyone. I then lowered her head onto the pillow and watched her curl up, foetally, with a clump of sheet in her mouth. I pulled the wool blanket up to her chin and sat in an armchair beside her until she drifted off.

  I picked up the coverless novel I had found next door, which one critic called “pure poetry.” A half-hour later, a half-page in, Céleste turned to face me, palming her blotched eyes. She was awake and ready to talk, she said, ready to answer what she knew would be my questions. Her voice was little more than a whisper but I hung on her every word.

  X

  Let’s be clear about something. I’m not writing this to attract attention to myself or tell you every last detail about my stupid private life — it’s not like a blog or something. My grandmother said that kids today have no sense of shame, no sense of privacy, that they’re showoffs, fame whores who post their diaries, cell numbers, stupid poetry & nude photos online. Who talk in illiterate instant messages. I’m not like that. My grandmother wouldn’t let me be like that. She wouldn’t even let me watch TV. Which may be why I have no friends & no one talks to me.

  No, I’m writing this journal so that others will know the truth after I’m gone. I hope that even useless, powerless people like me can leave something usefu
l & powerful behind. I want to feel that my life has amounted to more than just taking up space, breathing in oxygen, consuming products & generating garbage.

  It all started with a total accident. I was walking in the forest in the fall with my binoculars & motion-sensitive camera (both gifts from Gran), trying to spot a wolverine or lynx — two of my favourite animals because they’re very rare & very beautiful. Gran said she’d seen both animals in the northeast woods around this time last year. Two women hunters shot a lynx in this area, she said, because they thought it would make a good rug. I’d like to make a good rug out of them. Anyway, on my way home, after not seeing a trace of either a lynx or a wolverine (no footprints, no scat), I took a shortcut that I hardly ever take because it’s rough & dangerous. Hunters & bikers hang out along this path.

  They’d probably kill me on the spot if they caught me doing the things I do. For example, not too long ago I found the body of a cottontail rabbit & when I went to bury the poor thing I saw a tube buried in the ground beside it. It’s called an M-44 cartridge & it’s illegal. It’s a spring-loaded device & comes with smelly bait. When an animal tugs on the bait, the spring shoots a pellet of sodium cyanide into its mouth. When cyanide mixes with moisture, it turns into a deadly gas. I showed it to my grandmother & we took it to Inspecteur Déry, who’s a wildlife officer, and he said he’d look after it but he didn’t seem to care & he didn’t do a thing about it. More on him later.

  I was following what looked like cougar tracks (?!), which look a bit like a dog’s but are bigger. Obviously. Here’s how to tell the difference:

  Nobody has seen a cougar in these parts for years, so I was probably wrong. Along the way, though, I found two things, a leg-hold trap, which I smashed with a rock, and then some “dirty bait” under a birch tree, with a wooden platform nailed to the branches above it. The bait was made of anise seed, gummy bears & chocolate-covered raisins. I buried everything in a dried-up creek bed, scared out of my mind that someone would see me but no one did.