The Placebo Effect Page 8

  Decker understood that with Eddie’s valiant, but failed battle to get access to his daughter, his own distance from Seth must appear incomprehensible. All he could say was, “He hates me, Eddie.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  Decker thought about that. A truth: my son hates me.

  “Look—if you can get in touch with him, tell him I’d love to hear from him.”

  “Get an untraceable cell phone, give me the number, I’ll get it to Seth.”

  Decker gently closed his eyes. Nothing—no lines, no squares, nothing. He couldn’t tell whether Eddie was telling him the truth or not. Never had been able to—he cared about Eddie. No, more than that. He needed Eddie to keep him centred—maybe even to keep him safe. Certainly to give him some perspective on how he was living his life.

  “Look, Decker, if he wants to talk to you, he’ll call. He’s nineteen; he makes his own decisions. He’ll be the only one with the number, so if that phone rings, it’ll be him.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier if you just gave me his phone number?”

  Eddie took a deep drag, stood and crossed to the doll on the counter. He pushed back its bristly hair and said, “It would, but then I’d have betrayed your son’s trust—and I’m a lot of things, Decker, but I’m not a betrayer.”

  Decker had never heard anyone, outside of an acting exercise, use that word in a sentence before. He nodded and pulled on his coat.

  “Where are you going?” Eddie asked.

  Decker almost said, “Home,” but stopped himself and said, “I don’t know.”

  Eddie said, “Use my bedroom tonight. I’ll sleep in the guest room.”

  Decker nodded. He was on the sick edge of overtired. He dropped his coat to the floor and headed toward Eddie’s room—his feet seemingly heavier than the six-inch-wide old floorboards upon which they trod.

  “Hey!”

  Decker turned back to Eddie just in time to catch the football Eddie lobbed at him.

  “Tomorrow’s another day.”

  For a moment Decker tried to figure out if Eddie was quoting the musical Annie or Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind. Then he didn’t care.

  He didn’t remember the rest of his short walk to Eddie’s room or crawling beneath the comforter—or where the hell the football had gotten to.

  The tears—for his failures with his son—those he remembered.

  17

  THE DAY AFTER A FIRE

  WHEN DECKER AWOKE, HE DIDN’T KNOW WHERE HE WAS. Then he heard Eddie humming in the kitchen. A lullaby of some sort. He put on some clothes Eddie had left out for him, had a cup of coffee and was at the bank on Bloor West a half hour after it opened.

  After an appropriate amount of folderol he opened his safe-deposit box. He was about to put the remaining $16,290 into it, then decided against it. He extracted his house insurance policy and returned the safe-deposit box to the diffident, evidently put-upon teller.

  Back at Eddie’s he refused to let himself dwell on the fire. He was going to deal with this just as he dealt with other problems he’d encountered: he’d put it into his past as quickly as possible and commit himself to work—if not to forget, at least to move on. He placed a call to his insurance company.

  As he listened to a mutilation of a Van Morrison classic his head filled up with junk. “Beneath the spreading chestnut tree…” bits of doggerel, moments of slanting light that blinked him toward perception then vanished as he turned toward them. A one-legged young black man, toque topped, on crutches crosses a bridge; a Zambian Irish man in Swaziland, cattle meandering the marketplace, gas pumps and a toilet with a key. Brother Malcolm at Chartres asking, “So, Decker, are you staying?” A small bricked-in doorway at the side of the apse that took his breath from him. Single trees on the topmost edge of mountains. And rocks daring a climber to mount their heights—to what? Hope—like the one-legged man—walking toward hope.

  He was about to hang up, thinking he was so scattered that he couldn’t deal with this, when someone picked up.

  “Can I help you?” The voice on the phone could have cut cheddar at forty paces.

  Decker told the receptionist about his house. So coldly, he thought. As if he were talking about someone else’s home.

  He was put on hold for just under five minutes and finally an agent picked up. She took his information—the second time this phone call he’d offered up this data—and told him that an assessor would arrive within the week. Then she added, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Decker said, “Excuse me?”

  “I said, sir, that I am sorry for your loss.”

  The words didn’t make sense to him. Decker understood that she was offering condolences, but houses don’t die. They burn or are sold or fall apart. People die. Feelings die. Suddenly he ached to talk to his son. If only he knew where he was. Somewhere out west. As far away from here as he could get and still stay in Canada.

  “Sir? Are you all right?”

  Decker wondered about that. He knew he was probably in some sort of shock or post-traumatic something or other, but he said, “Yes. Yes I am. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

  “Do?”

  “Until the assessor arrives. What do I do?”

  “See if there’s anything that can be retrieved from the fire. Then continue your life—that’s my suggestion.”

  And that’s what Decker tried to do.

  It had begun to rain—predictably, it would. As he walked west toward what used to be his home the rain pelted the few remaining leaves from the trees. Fall was ending and the ugly season was approaching. He felt it more than saw it.

  There’s something skulking about the Junction in the rain. Something hunched, hidden. The proliferation of Protestant and Catholic churches along the short stretch of Annette Street along with the half-dozen storefront Pentecostal holy-roller outlets a mere hundred yards north on Dundas bespeak a truth that Decker had always believed: that there was something complicated that needed to be kept in check out here.

  It was what gave him the idea for a Ken Burns–style documentary that he’d sold to Trish Spence’s production company. The working title was At the Junction.

  He’d begun to research the idea by attending a meeting of the Masonic Temple on Annette beside the old library—business attire please. Instantly a queasiness came over him as these well-dressed old Torontonians turned back the clock to the good old days when there were no Caribbeans or South Asians or Jews in their city.

  Across Jane Street—known throughout the metropolitan area as a “bad” street, bad meaning Jamaican—is yet another secret of the Junction: Baby Point. A wealthy enclave that if you didn’t know it was there, you would never find it. In the midst of the multimillion-dollar older homes is a private park with four tennis courts and a lawn bowling green. Like so many wealthy people, they had managed a private club on public land—ah, so very old Toronto that.

  Up on Dundas the remains of an American film shoot still have a block of storefronts painted to look like Brooklyn. They even had a three-sided subway entrance put on the small park at the corner of St. John’s Road to complete the look.

  But there were other secrets here. One of the local high schools is the most highly rated secondary school in the region. Another school, just a few blocks away, is absolutely at the bottom of that list. The highly rated school is almost entirely white and Asian—the low ranking, almost entirely black. How do they manage this? Well, the highly ranked school made freshman year so hard and so math intensive that… well, you can fill in the rest.

  Determined to “get on with his life” he found a pay phone on Bloor Street and called Trish Spence’s number. After a half ring he was promptly put on hold. While he waited for Trish to pick up he decided he needed to replace the computer he’d lost in the fire. He organized his life on his two Gmail accounts, and he couldn’t imagine not being able to access the synaesthetes website. Eddie was a computer genius, but Decker only needed a sim
ple machine that Eddie could soup up, password it to safety, then encrypt it to within an inch of the edge of the digital world.

  “Trish Spence here, sorry for making you wait.” The voice on the other end of the phone hadn’t changed much over the years.

  “Hey Trish, it’s me.”

  “Decker! What’s shakin’?”

  He loved that. From fuck-you black-business-suit woman to California beach bikini girl in two lines. He could almost hear her smack her lips. She had to be in her early forties now, but when she spoke it was like talking to a young Joni Mitchell—California, I’m comin’ home. He liked it. He liked her, he always had. “I need a meeting,” he said.

  “Got new material for At the Junction? Or you just anxious to see me again?”

  “Always. Can your company lend me a computer?”

  “What happened to…”

  “My house burnt down.” It startled him how easy it was to say that.

  “What?”

  “Yeah. Can I borrow a notebook for a few weeks until my insurance claim gets settled?”

  “Sure. Just come by.”

  “When?”

  “Five o’clock at Rancho Relaxo on College by Spadina—evil mojitos.”

  “I teach tonight.”

  “Oh, be that way. My place in two hours. You okay, Decker?”

  Decker didn’t answer her question. He didn’t know the answer to her question.

  Decker ducked under the police tape and stood in what remained of the front hall of his home.

  The sleet had turned to snow. The first snow of the year drifted through the charred roof beams.

  After a divorce or a death—or a fire—you get to see everything anew. As if a light that had always been off was suddenly turned on. It removes the shadows, throwing a sodium-harsh light on the emptiness.

  Fire doesn’t annihilate a house—it eviscerates it. It leaves the biggest of the bones while immolating the vital organs within. It reminded Decker of all the apartments in New York City he had left—how after he had moved out all the furniture but had to stay the last night to return the phone to Ma Bell. How sleeping on an air mattress those final nights he always was amazed how small the apartment felt without the furniture—and its occupants.

  How small a house is after a fire.

  Something glinted in the fading light, and Decker knelt to get a better look. A silver picture frame—charred and twisted. Despite his best efforts he couldn’t remember what photograph had filled the now empty frame.

  He stood, brushed the ashes from his knees, and left the property. It was surprisingly easy to do. It shocked him. Like a three-legged dog, he thought. When a dog loses a leg it doesn’t pine for its missing limb. It simply becomes a three-legged dog. Decker knew he should move forward—out of his old burnt house—into whatever future awaited him. But unlike a three-legged dog, Decker knew that he could never really free himself from his past—a past that had two failed Broadway shows, the awful death of his wife and a fourteen-month memory gap in it.

  He crossed the street to where his ’99 Passat was parked. He was lucky that he’d had no garage and that his three-year battle with city hall to allow him to park on his own property had failed. Otherwise his car would have gone the way of his house.

  He opened the trunk and the CD changer there. In 1999, CD player theft was evidently quite popular, so Volkswagen had installed a CD changer in the trunk. Ever so convenient if you’re driving and you want to change to a selection you didn’t happen to load into the changer. He scanned the numerous disks he had borrowed from the city’s fabulous—truly fabulous—library system.

  Decker flipped through the jewel cases. T. S. Eliot reading his own poems, sounding a wee bit like Monty Python’s impersonation of an Etonian snot-nosed silly walker—too bad. Decker loved the words—just not, in this case, the speaker. Besides, ol’ T.S. was from St. Louis, Missouri—what was he doing talking like that? There were also CDs of Elliott Gould reading Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake and Tim Robbins reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. He popped in the latter, got back in the car and as Fitzgerald’s revolutionary cadences began he allowed the car to dictate his course.

  Much to his surprise he ended up less than a mile away at George Bell Arena, where he had taught Seth how to skate, and where he had watched his talented son play dozens and dozens of hockey games. For a moment he remembered Seth’s open face and huge smile after scoring a winning goal.

  He entered the cold arena.

  Like all cinder-block buildings, it echoed. In this case, with the thud of pucks smashing against wooden rink boards. Decker pulled his coat tightly around himself to fend off the dank cold of the place and climbed the steps to the seating area.

  On the rink a pickup game was in progress. Most of the players were men in their mid to late thirties. One of them clearly knew what he was doing out there. He probably had managed a brief career in the national game and just as likely had fallen prey to injury—inevitable in a game played literally at breakneck speed.

  Decker sat and watched the fluid carving and movement on the rink.

  The arena echoed but he felt private there—safe—like he had as a kid inside the snow-pile igloo he’d built. He’d slowly carved away the ceiling so that he could see light outside but no one could see in—to his privacy.

  A shout from the rink brought him crashing back to the present as a puck sailed past his left shoulder and rattled on the seat two rows behind him.

  With a shock he realized that he had slipped back into layers of his past without consciously intending to. He knew it was not a good sign. Maybe a result of the lingering shock from the fire, he hoped. But he knew he had to be careful of such behaviour. Unless he wanted to be like those others—incapable of being part of the world; freaks with strange abilities but nothing really more than embarrassments; kids who peed their pants when they stood to answer questions in class.

  He calmed himself as he had done so many times in the past by reciting a simple mantra—“You are from them, but not of them.”

  He picked up the puck and tossed it back to the ice. The talented player he had spotted earlier batted it from the air and in one graceful motion headed back up ice. The game continued. Decker smiled. Sure it does; the game continues.

  Metro fire captain Hugh Highlander was thinking about the Bantam girl’s hockey team he coached. How they really needed a scorer. Girl’s hockey, even at the high rep level at which he coached, seldom had more than four or five goals a game. And he was tired of losing 2–0, 2–1, 1–0—he needed a scorer.

  “Over here, Captain,” the young fire department tech called from behind a charred upright.

  “Coming,” Hugh called as he hoisted a leg over a fallen beam and moved deeper into the charred wreck of Decker’s house. He’d seen way too many of these old houses—now so prized—go up in flames. They were never built with any thought to fire, or even comfort. On the whole, what this city referred to as century houses were built for workers by their employers. They were made cheaply and not intended to last. But yuppies or yippies or Generation Xers fancied them and gussied them up—but seldom did they go deeply enough into the intrinsic problems of the houses’ design to solve any real issues. Like so much renovation, their efforts just plastered over troubles. Especially when it came to fire. And these old things burned hot and fast—and often. But then again he knew that there had been suspicious fires in this very neighbourhood in the past sixteen months. As Hugh maneuvered his now growing bulk deeper into the wreck he took a deep breath and attempted to sharpen his focus. Arson was a serious crime, he reminded himself. If it was arson.

  The young fire tech pointed at a V scorch mark on the remaining standing wall. When an object catches fire it leaves such a mark—the bottom of the V pointing to the source of the fire. The young tech pointed out three more V marks. They were none too subtle. Each blocked a potential exit.

  Hugh’s expression darkened, but he made himself speak s
lowly. “The kitchen was there?” The fire tech brought out the house blueprints and nodded. “We dealing with a gas fireplace?”

  “No sir. Gas for the drier in the basement, but that’s it.”

  “And the gas line is…”

  “Nowhere near those,” the young firefighter said, pointing at the V scorch marks.

  Hugh turned from the tech and within five minutes found the telltale pour patterns that arson specialists called puddles on the cement stoops outside both the front and back doors. A flammable liquid when poured on a floor will cause fire to concentrate in these puddles. Hugh took a deep breath and looked for the final signifier of arson. He found it in the back of the house where one of the few remaining windows had a spiderweb pattern of cracks, ‘crazed glass.’ He turned to the men around him and shouted, “Watch where you put your feet. I want pictures of everything. This is now a crime scene.”

  18

  ARSON

  IT WAS AN ORDINARY SUNDAY AT THE THIRTY-SEVENTH PRECINCT in the city’s west end. A robbery at a convenience store around Keele and Eglinton. A disturbance near one of the box stores on St. Clair. A noise complaint from the rich folks of Baby Point—they just didn’t want the kids playing street hockey in front of their homes. What country did these people think they lived in? And, as it had been for the past five months, the booming thump thump thump as the commuter train system rammed new pilons deep into the soggy ground up at the old depot. And just for a bit of added multicultural spice Tamil protesters were sitting on the expressway that joined the city west to east along the waterfront, blocking traffic for three miles in either direction.

  Garreth McLean—twelve-year veteran of the Metropolitan Toronto Police Service—had drawn Sunday duty. Since his divorce he often volunteered for Sunday stints to allow the married guys time with their kids. As he did his paperwork he kept his police radio turned up to full volume, just to keep in touch. He overheard radio chatter from the riot-geared cops who were monitoring the protest on the expressway. The demonstrators had just unfurled a Tamil Tigers banner and draped it across the roadway. The Tigers penchant for using suicide bombers to press their claims for a homeland hadn’t gone over well with the citizenry, despite the large Tamil population in the city, the largest outside of Sri Lanka proper. The Tigers had been named a terrorist organization by the federal government more than a decade ago, and few people—except those currently blocking traffic—disagreed with that assessment.