The Divide

21

In the morning Susan re-packed her luggage (most of it untouched since her return from California) and went looking for Dr. Kyriakides.

She found him in the study. He was bent over his desk, making notes in a loose-leaf binder. He looked up when she opened the door. How old he seems, Susan thought—suddenly old and humorless.

“We’re leaving today,” she said. “John and I. We’re going to find Amelie.”

Dr. Kyriakides did not react at once. Slowly, he peeled away his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. The silence was professorial, devastating; Susan wanted to cringe.

He said, “That’s absurd.”

“You can’t stop us.”

“Of course I can’t. You’re both adults. You can do what you like. But surely you must see—well, for one thing, Susan, consider the weather! You’d be lucky to get a mile down the road. And I’m certain neither of you know where to find Amelie, wherever she might be. We can’t even be certain she wants to be found. All we know is that she left the house without warning last Saturday—which is her privilege, as it is yours.” He shook his head. “It might be understandable that John conceived this idea. He’s ill, after all. He has a neurological illness. But you, Susan! I thought you were interested in his welfare! Not coddling his disease,”

In spite of herself, Susan blushed. “That’s not what I’m doing. John is perfectly lucid.”

“It was his idea?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t it seem a little out of character?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“He has no interest in Amelie! It was Benjamin who cared about her. John is as far beyond Amelie Desjardins as we are advanced beyond the starfish. And you know it. Why would he want to risk his life for her? Because that’s what this would mean, after all. He seems fine, but the crisis could come at any moment. Fever and disorientation and possibly unconsciousness—possibly death. Can you cope with that? Do you want that to happen while your car is buried in a snowdrift miles from here?”

“It’s important to him.”

“Is it? Has he told you why? Or is this your own conclusion?”

Susan shook her head. “I don’t want to have this discussion. I just thought you should know we’re leaving.”

She turned away.

“Wait,” Dr. Kyriakides said, and Susan was embarrassed to discover she could not resist the command.

She hesitated at the doorway.

“John talked about me—didn’t he? That’s what this is all about.”

“He talked about himself,” Susan said.

“You know I never meant this to happen.”

His voice was suddenly chastened and tentative. He stood up, stepped out from behind the desk. He’s a small man, Susan thought. He’s shorter than I am. Another brand-new observation.

“I had no idea things would turn out the way they did. At every step—please try to understand—I made what I thought was the best decision. The wisest decision. Even when I was tampering with John inutero, even when I was dealing with his mother. She was a stupid woman, Susan. She would have had a stupid child and they would have lived stupid, ordinary lives. She was the kind of passive and amoral creature that allowed a Hitler to come to power—a Stalin.” The words were fervent and his expression was utterly sincere; Susan was transfixed. “When I created John,” he said, “I meant to break that chain. I was funded by a mercenary organization for a mercenary purpose, it’s true, but I never believed the government would benefit from my work in any substantial way. If anything, the opposite. I meant to create a better human being, for whom they would therefore have no use. Not just ‘more intelligent’ in the obvious sense. Authentically better.” He shook his head. “But it’s a terrible burden, and I should not have imposed it on John. I understand that now. I—”

“God damn your pious self-pity!”

She had not planned to say this; the words came spilling out. Her fists were clenched and her fingernails bit into her palms. Dr. Kyriakides gaped at her. “That’s all we are to you—all of us—just stupid, ordinary people! You took a child and you fed him all that contempt, that arrogance! Christ, of course it was a burden! Isn’t it obvious? That’s why he had to invent Benjamin.” She turned away. No more hesitation. “That’s why we have to leave.”

She was too shaken to drive. John slid behind the wheel of the Honda. He had excavated the car from a mound of snow, but the driveway was still solid—Susan wondered whether they would get as far as the road. But she put her faith in John and curled up into the private space of her winter coat. The snow tires whined and finally bit against the blacktop; the Honda struggled forward.

According to the radio, the snow might begin again tonight. A second front was pushing in from the high prairies. But for now the sky was a glassy, vacant blue, cold and clear. Susan scrubbed frost from the window next to her and peered out at a frigid rural landscape of frozen ponds and hydroelectric clearances. The highway had been ploughed during the night, but a morning wind had scattered snow back across the tarmac in serpentine dunes.

Now the Honda picked up speed. It occurred to Susan that John was driving too fast for the road—but she looked at him and was reassured. His eyes had taken on an intense, powerful focus; his touch on the wheel was delicate and certain.

The road sped away behind them. Susan was warm and calmer now; she sat up and stretched.

“You told Max we were leaving?”

She nodded. “He says it’s pointless. He says you don’t know how to find Amelie.”

“I don’t, precisely. I think I know where to begin.”

“You don’t really know that much about her, do you?”

“No.”

“But Benjamin does.”

He nodded.

“And you have access to that,” Susan said. “To his memories—his life.”

“More than I used to. That makes it easier. But even Benjamin didn’t know all about Amelie.”

“She told me about her brother,” Susan said. “He tried to kidnap her the day she moved. You think he’s involved in this?”

“That would be an obvious suspicion. Nothing is certain, of course. All we really know is that she left without leaving a message.”

“Maybe she just got tired of us all.”

“That’s possible.”

“But you don’t believe it.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t believe it.”

They crossed the city limits. Coming down Yonge Street, John slowed to deal with traffic. Susan watched a TTC bus slide into an intersection, its wheels locked. A pickup truck swerved to avoid it; John pumped the brake and kept the Honda a carlength back. A brisk wind peppered the windshield with crystals of yesterday’s snow, glittering in the sunlight.

They were well into the city when Susan felt the Honda’s motion grow more erratic; she heard John catch his breath as they fishtailed coming around a curve. Just north of Eglinton he pulled into a parking lot. “Can you drive us the rest of the way? It shouldn’t be too hard. The roads have been cleared since morning.”

He was sweating. Susan frowned. “Are you all right?”

John held up his hand to show her the tremor, which was obvious and pronounced.

Oh, God, Susan thought.

“I think we’d be safer,” John said calmly, “if you took over for a while.”

There was this to deal with, too: his “change.”

They rented a room at a downtown hotel not far from Yonge Street. They unpacked the few things they had brought, including the Woodward guitar Susan had carried back from Chicago. Meager fractions of their lives. She rested on the bed while John showered.

“The change” was something she didn’t really want to think about. Dr. Kyriakides had intimated that John might die. John said that wasn’t really likely … but the question was open. And there was nothing that Susan or anyone else could do about it: no real treatment apart from the bottle of pills Dr. Collingwood had prescribed. There were questions she would have to begin to face, unpleasant as they were, such as: What would happen if John collapsed? Should she take him to a hospital?

This was all beyond her.

For now she was simply accommodating John’s wishes, helping him find Amelie. After that … well, it was impossible to predict. She remembered Dr. Kyriakides describing John’s illness as “a radical neurological retrenchment, a shedding of the induced growth … a one-time event, which he might survive in one form or another.”

One form or another. As John or Benjamin. Or some unpredictable amalgamation of the two.

And the event would be traumatic, Dr. Kyriakides had said: like a fever, it would run its course, would peak, would then be finished and its effects irrevocable.

He’ll be different, Susan thought. He’ll want me with him. Or he won’t.

He won’t be the same: something new will have been born … something will have died.

But now he is John, she told herself sternly. The future was always the future, always mysterious. What mattered was that he was John and she was with him now.

He came out of the shower looking stronger, though there was a certain persistent hollowness about his eyes that Susan didn’t like.

“It’s early,” he said. “We haven’t had lunch. Let’s head over to Yonge Street—the place Amelie used to work.”

They braved the cutting wind. Susan was afraid the Goodtime wouldn’t be open; a lot of places had closed because of the weather. But the lights were all on and the sign in the window said, OPEN REGULAR HOURS.

Their waitress was a tiny, timid-looking woman named Tracy; the food was greasy but filling. When Tracy came back with their coffee, John asked about Amelie.

Tracy gave him a wide-eyed stare. “I don’t know anything, anything about that!”

She hurried off with the check still clutched in her hand.

John looked at Susan. Susan shrugged.

It was the manager who brought back the check. He wiped his hands on his apron and said, “What’s this about Amelie?”

“She’s missing,” John said. “We’re looking for her.”

“So? She’s not here.”

“I know that. I thought she might have talked to somebody.”

“Haven’t seen her. Haven’t talked to her.”

“Well, all right.” John stood up. “Your waitress—Tracy—she seemed pretty nervous.”

The manager began an answer, then hesitated and took a closer look at John. John returned it steadily. Susan wondered if this was John’s “hypnotic” power at work, though she could see no sign of it—saw instead maybe a calculated sincerity.

Then the manager seemed to reach a decision. “There was somebody else here asking after Amelie. Tracy’s just skittish … she gets upset.”

“Somebody else?”

“Her brother, Tracy says. Big guy. Kind of strange. But he hasn’t been back for a while.”

Susan said, “It only confirms what we suspected.”

“But that’s important,” John said. “That’s useful.”

He led her back through the snowy streets—not to the hotel, but to the doughnut shop on Wellesley where she had discovered him all those months ago. Susan wondered if this was some kind of deliberate irony … but John was too serious for that. He took the table with the chessboard engraved on its surface; Susan sat opposite him. “What now?”

“We sit here for a while. Carbohydrates and coffee. We look around.” “What are we looking for?”

“I don’t know yet.” He shrugged out of his jacket. “You want a game?”

“Won’t that be distracting?”

“No.”

“All right, then.”

They played twice. The first game was a rout. Susan’s mind wasn’t focused on the board—she was cold, and frightened by what the manager at the Goodtime had said—and John pried out her castled king with a bishop sacrifice; checkmate came quickly.

She took the second game more seriously. She played a King’s Indian defense and pondered each move scrupulously. By playing a combination of aggressive and defensive moves she was able to keep him at arm’s length. Her interest deepened. She saw a chance to open up his king—a knight fork that would force a pawn move; she would lose the knight, but it would leave her bishop and her queen in a single, powerful diagonal aimed at his broken pawn ranks. Was there a flaw in this reasoning? Well, probably … but Susan couldn’t find it. She shrugged and advanced the knight.

John captured it with his pawn.

Susan hunched down over the board. If she brought the bishop down—and then the queen, while his knight was still pinned—

John said, “Look.”

She raised her head.

A man had just come through the door. A short man in a heavy coat, shivering. He bought a doughnut and coffee at the counter, turned and spotted John.

Recognition flashed between them. The man muttered and turned toward the door.

Susan whispered, “Who is he?”

“His name is Tony Morriseau,” John said, “and we need to talk to him.”

She stood up with John and cast a last glance at the chessboard.

She was a move away from checkmate. He hadn’t noticed.

Chess, John had told her, was mainly a memory trick. The difference between a chess master and a “civilian” player was that the master had stored a vast internal library of potential positions and was able to recognize them as they developed on the board. That, plus a certain finely honed ability to concentrate attention, made all the difference.

John was not technically a master because he had not played in enough tournaments to acquire a significant rating. His chess playing had been an amusement. (“An experiment,” he once called it.) He had played, at least in those days, to relish his easy superiority over his competitors. It was a cruel, private entertainment. Or so he claimed. But Susan remembered what he had said when they first met, across this table, when she asked why he went on playing when it was obvious that he would win: “One hopes,” he had said.

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 stunned by the immediacy of it all. Was this how Susan experienced things? All sense and no cogitans—this playground of perception? Made it hard to think.

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 connecting, but only sporadically. “No,” Tony said. “Except—he mentioned something about ‘the warehouse.’ He said he was ‘going to sleep in the fucking warehouse tonight.’ That was last week. I don’t know what it means.” Tony frowned massively. “Just get the hell away from me, all right? I would really appreciate that.”

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.

She said, “Did it mean anything to you, what that man said about ‘the warehouse?’ ”

“It’s an empty building down by the lakeshore—Amelie told me about it. He might have taken her there. We’ll go tomorrow and have a look.”

“In the snow?”

“In the snow. I’ll be all right.”

The snow fell steadily far into the night. Susan heard it tapping against the pane of the window. Begging admittance, she thought. But it can’t come in.

Neither of them slept. The silence was a vast tapestry, stitched with the sound of their voices.

“Why me?” Susan asked. “Why did you choose me?”

To be with him in this bed, she meant. To touch him in the darkness.

He said, “Because we’re alike.”

“Are we?”

“In a way.”

“What way?”

“Because both of us have lost something. A certain kind of connection.”

“I don’t understand.” The wind rattled the window.

“We’re orphans,” he said. “Isn’t that obvious? We’re feral children. We don’t know how to be human.” He touched her cheek. “That’s what we have in common.”

Susan was too sleepy to explore this in all its nuances.

She said, “What we have in common is what we don’t have.”

“Yes.”

“A father.”

“Lineage,” John said. “Ancestry.”

“A father,” Susan confirmed. In the tranquility of the snowbound darkness she was able to admit it. She had been looking for a father ever since her father died; she had found a sort of father—at least temporarily—in Dr. Kyriakides.

She was embarrassed to realize she had said this out loud.

“But you want more than that,” John said. “Something finer and better.”

She nodded.

He said, “You would have slept with him—if he’d asked.”

“Yes. I guess I would have. I almost did. Isn’t that strange? There was one time … he took me to dinner … but he said he’s not interested in women. In men, once, but even that was a long time ago.” She rolled over and felt John’s hand slide up her shoulder. “He’s not a good man, is he? But still … at least he’s been able to help you.”

“No,” John said. “I’m sorry, Susan. No, he hasn’t.”

“Not cure you. But he said he gave you a prescription—”

“He gave me dopamine. It’s what they give Alzheimer’s patients. In my case, it’s not much more than a placebo.” Susan turned to face him. He smiled in the dark. “Max can’t do anything to help me. He never could. That’s not why he came looking for me.”

“Why, then?”

“Guilt,” John said. “Remorse. And to finish the experiment.”

Later, he said he was thirsty. Susan brought him a glass of water from the bathroom tap. He sipped it in the dark.

She said, “Do you know everything about me?”

“Yes,” he said solemnly. “And you know everything about me.”

But not really. Not everything.

Curled against him, she whispered: “Will you die?”

She strained to hear his answer against the hissing of the wind.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I’ve thought about it. What’s happening to me is very powerful, a powerful process. I feel it. It’s like an engine running inside me. Very strong. It’s not something you can simply resist. You have to bend—this way or that. But that’s the hard part. Even if I can bargain with it, I’m not sure … I don’t know if it’s a deal I want to make.”

He held her against him; but Susan was wordless in the dark, and this time the silence lingered.

24

Amelie knew where her brother had taken her: it was the place they called “the warehouse.”

At least, she and Roch had called it that. It wasn’t really a warehouse. It was a big abandoned building beside the railway tracks, where the CPR line ran along the lakeshore west of the city. Many years ago, Roch once told her, the building had contained a fur-storage business. Now it was a cold, dark warren of cavernous rooms and windowless chambers. And she was confined in it.

She remembered how she had come here—but dimly, dimly.

She had gone into the city to meet her mother, but it turned out that there was no bus from Montreal scheduled at that hour. So she had milled around through the crowded, oppressively hot terminal for almost an hour … and then Roch put his hand on her shoulder, and she knew it was Roch, knew it instinctively and immediately. He took her arm. She wanted to break free but couldn’t. He led her out to his van and then he locked her in the back.

They drove to a vacant lot by the CPR line and Roch parked and climbed in back with her. He had something in his hand: a syringe—

Memory clouded. But she remembered him carrying her through the snow at dusk, his strong arms enfolding her. She had recognized the way to the warehouse, where they used to go when there was nowhere else to sleep. But only in summer. It was winter now, and cold, and the snow was deep and getting deeper. Someone will see us, she thought. The railroad police will see us for sure. But the railroad police, who sometimes parked along these tracks, weren’t here now. The snow was too deep and recent. Everybody had gone home. Everybody had found a warm place to stay.

The warehouse …

The property had been in litigation for years. It was worthless. Someday the building would be torn down. For now, it was abandoned and dangerous. Even when they came here during their time on the street, Amelie would never venture very far inside. There were bats living in the old cold-storage chambers; there were drippy, ancient pipes and wild raccoons and bad smells. Since then, apparently, Roch had explored the building. He had a big Eveready flashlight in one hand, and he pulled Amelie stumbling after him with the other. There were rooms and corridors so deep inside this building that no light penetrated from the outside; cracked linoleum or bare concrete floors drifted with sawdust and animal droppings. Roch put her over his shoulder, took the handle of the flashlight in his teeth, and climbed a narrow wooden ladder to a higher, darker level. In a small room here at the heart of the building, he dumped her against the chipped plaster wall and started a small Sterno fire. The smoke wafted up to the ceiling and dissipated through a hole there, up and up in lazy curls. The room did not warm appreciably.

Amelie was a spectator to all this. She felt abstracted from her body. What had Roch put into her? A drug, she thought. Something lazy, distancing, and slightly nauseating. She lifted her hand and looked at it: it seemed to be floating in midair.

She watched Roch pace the room, checking the entrance and fiddling with the Sterno. There was a question she wanted to ask. It was on the tip of her tongue. She worked hard to recall it.

“Roch … what is it you want? What do you want from me?”

He turned his face toward her, but only briefly. His eyes were blank with indifference. He stood up briskly.

“This isn’t about you,” he said. “You don’t matter anymore.”

25

The snow had paralyzed the city. Overnight, a winter blizzard had accumulated drifts and depths that the snowplows could not shunt aside, at least not quickly or efficiently. The main arteries were reduced to a single lane; the subways were running but the buses were not. Susan awoke to an absolute silence: the traffic outside the hotel had been utterly stilled.

John was in the bathroom—she could hear the shower running.

She went to the window. Outside, the streets were transformed The city was white, unsullied, and motionless. The snow had stopped falling but the sky was a uniform grey.

Good, she thought. We can’t go anywhere today. It wasn’t a blizzard; it was a reprieve.

She turned when she heard the water stop. John appeared a: the bathroom door in his Levis: skinny, pale, a little shaky…but his eyes were bright and lucid.

“Get dressed,” he said. “We don’t have time to waste.”

I should have expected this, Susan thought. There was no reprieve. It wasn’t possible.

He couldn’t afford one. He didn’t have the time.

“It’s an old building down by the lakeshore,” John said over breakfast. “Amelie showed me one time when we were out walking.”

Susan hesitated over her eggs. “Showed you?”

He was momentarily puzzled. “Showed Benjamin, I mean.”

“An abandoned building,” Susan repeated. “You think Amelie’s there—Roch took her there?”

“I’m almost certain of it.”

“Is it safe to go there?”

“No. It’s not safe at all.”

“We could call the police,” Susan said. “We don’t even have to tell them about Roch. Say we spotted some vagrants on the premises.”

John shook his head. “Maybe that would flush him out. But I think, if he were cornered, he might just kill her. It’s pointless, but it’s the kind of gesture Roch might make.”

“How can you know that? You never met him.”

“I met him once,” John corrected her.

“And you know that about him?”

“I know that about him.”

“You’re just going to walk in and take her away from him?”

“If I can.”

“Maybe he wants you to come. Maybe he’s jealous, he’s out there waiting for you … that’s why he told Tony Morriseau where he was going.”

“Maybe,” John admitted.

“How can you just walk into that?”

“Because I have to. It’s a debt. I want to pay it off. Not just a debt to Amelie.” He regarded Susan solemnly across the table. “I’ll tell you another secret. There are lives I could have saved. Thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands. But I didn’t. So I have to save this life, Amelie’s life. It’s not just one more experiment, Susan. It’s the only experiment that matters.”

She didn’t know what he meant, but it was impossible to ask—there was a ferocity under the words that she was afraid to provoke.

He stood up suddenly, put down money for the bill. “The roads should be clear by now,” he said.

They stopped at a Home Hardware outlet off Yonge Street, miraculously open for business although there was only one clerk inside. John bought a heavy-duty flashlight and fresh batteries and assembled them as Susan drove south and west through the snowbound streets.

She followed his directions toward the lakeshore west of the city, over the railroad tracks and into a labyrinth of warehouses and crumbling brick factories where the snow lay in pristine mountains and the little Honda labored like a crippled pack-mule She parked when he told her to park. The silence was sudden and absolute. “We walk from here,” he said.

Susan was dressed in high boots, a ski jacket, jeans. She tore the jacket sleeve while climbing through a hole in the fence that defined the railroad right-of-way. Now we’re trespassing, she thought. Now the police will come and arrest us. But there were no police; there was only the snow clinging to the tree branches and the soft sound it made when it fell; the glitter of the track where an early morning train had polished the rails.

She followed John along the arc of the railway for a hundred yards or more, then scrambled after him up an embankment.

“There,” he said. “That’s the building.”

Susan stood panting and looked up.

The building was huge. It was an old black brick building on an abandoned railway siding, sooty and Victorian. There were no windows, but the open loading bay gaped like a toothless mouth. The snow had not softened or warmed this building, Susan thought, it was big and indifferent and it frightened her.

John’s gaze was fixed on it. “I want you to stay here.” he said. “If I bring Amelie oat, help me get her to the car. Give me twenty minutes inside. If I’m not out by then, find a phone and call the police. Understand?”

“Yes.” She looked at him critically. “John? Are you sure—I mean, are you all right?”

He shrugged.

“For now,” he said.

She watched him walk away from her, toward the building; and she understood with a sudden, aching finality that she had been afraid of this place all along, even before she knew it existed—this dark chamber where he was determined to go—and that she could not stop him or bring him back.

26

Roch was pretty comfortable in the warehouse.

Sure, it was cold. Of course. But the Sterno fire helped. More important, he was alone here … except for Amelie, and he was able to keep Amelie sufficiently blissed out that she was not a real presence.

He was alone in this vast, empty building and it occurred to him that this was his natural state; that he had discovered his ideal habitat. His problems had always been with other people—their prudishness and their nasty glances. He was a stranger out there in the world. What he needed was what he had found: his own kingdom, this place. He moved down these dark and windowless corridors with the flashlight in his hand, king of the lightbeams, his pockets stuffed with a treasury of D batteries, and when he laughed his breath smoked out in front of him.

Of course, he had a purpose here. None of this was random motion. He was waiting for the man Amelie used to live with. No, more than that. He was waiting for justice.

He had left a trail and he believed the man would follow it. If not, maybe Roch would wheedle an address or a phone number from Amelie—she was cooperative, in her present condition—and the challenge could be issued more formally. But it would be better simply to lure the man here. “Benjamin,” Amelie had said his name was. (She whispered it to the air from time to time.) But the name didn’t matter. What mattered was the humiliation Roch had suffered in Amelie’s apartment, months ago, and its sequel, his humiliation at Cherry Beach, both events now blurring into a long history of similar humiliations for which they had become emblematic. Roch understood that his life was an arrow, with moment following moment like the points of a trajectory toward some target not wholly of his own choosing. But he was happy in that service and he was happy to have found a home here.

He explored the snowbound building in great detail. He avoided the ground level, where there had been extensive vandalism and where the walls were emblazoned with vulgar graffiti. He preferred the lightless upper regions, closed to the world, a wooden ladder and the Eveready flashlight his admittance into a pure and angular wilderness. He also liked the cold-storage chambers at the rear, where the furs used to hang behind the loading bays, though these were less hospitable: bleak caverns where snowmelt dripped from corroded freon pipes and animal dung lay thick on the floor.

Time was nearly meaningless here … or would have been, save for the periodic demands of his body and the ticking clock of Amelie. Now he ambled past a shuttered window where rags of winter light penetrated from the west. Afternoon, therefore. He circled back to the room where Amelie, bound at the ankles, had crawled closer to the Sterno fire, some instinct for warmth operating through the narcotic haze. She seemed to be asleep; her breathing was shallow and periodic. Roch considered giving her another injection, then decided not to. It would be too easy to kill her. This was a ticklish business. Still … even if he did kill her … hadn’t she served her purpose already? Assuming “Benjamin” showed up. She was disposable, really, except as a potential hostage against some emergency Roch could not entirely frame or predict. Dead, she would only have to be disposed of.

Still—

But he hesitated in his deliberation, startled to a new level of alertness by the distant but distinct sound of footsteps in the cavernous space of the warehouse.

It was a cue. He recognized it. Time had resumed its forward march. His heart began to batter against his ribs.

He picked up a fifteen-inch copper pipe segment he had set aside in rehearsal for this moment. A weapon in one hand, the Eveready flashlight in the other. Be prepared. The Boy Scout’s Motto, ha-ha. A smile formed on his lips.

27

Passing into the shadow of the building, John felt its presence as a physical chill.

He didn’t know this building, but Amelie had told him about it. (Told him, told Benjamin: in memory the merger was already complete.) It was a huge, cold, black-brick nautilus shell and she hated it. He understood why.

But that was pathology, John thought, his sense of the building’s soullessness. Because buildings don’t have souls, ever. He had read extensively in abnormal psychology, not psychoanalytic case histories but the infinitely subtler literature of brain dysfunction. And it struck him that what he felt now was like the “heightened significance” in the intrarictal consciousness of temporal lobe epileptics. The limbic system bleeding into perception … animal foreboding injected into the loom and bulk of this stony Victorian structure. But then, he knew what might be inside.

He took a step up onto the ancient loading bay. The wooden platform creaked ominously. He could smell the damp interior now. Animals had died in there. Hard to imagine even a homeless person sheltering here, even in summer. But Amelie had said nobody went inside much. Just lingered here out of the rain. Brief shelter. Still.

He remembered Amelie telling him about a TV show she’d seen, about dream interpretation. If you dream about a house or a building, Amelie said, you’re really dreaming about yourself—your mind. “And the attic or the basement is sort of your unconscious self. Maybe you don’t like what you find there, or maybe it’s something great you forgot about. But either way, it’s part of you. It’s your secret self.” Maybe, he thought, I dreamed this building. It would be appropriate. Down into his jerrybuilt and crumbling soul, echoes of his own voice rumbling through these ruined corridors.

Moving into the darkness, he thumbed the switch on his flashlight. The beam lanced out ahead.

Soon he was aware of another human presence—of the distant, stealthy tread of feet, faint echoes at the threshold of perception: a whisper in this frigid air, but revealing. He didn’t doubt that the presence was Roch. Too many signs had pointed this way; the truth was too obvious. He tried to track the distant footfalls as he moved, to range on them … this was his uniqueness after all, his secret weapon…

But he was sidetracked by his thoughts. It was as if the sound of his own thinking had grown intolerably loud, a din that drowned out the external world. He recognized this as akin to the feverishness that had overtaken him last night, or maybe the same feverishness, a dementia that had never entirely retreated. He was dying, after all. Or, if not dying, then retreating into some utterly new form, a dim shape just emerging from the darkness. Which was, when you came right down to it, a kind of dying.

He stumbled against a damp concrete wall. Vertigo. This wouldn’t do at all. He had entered the world of Greek and Latin nouns: vertigo, dementia, kinaesthesia, aphasia…Too soon, he thought.

He thought about Roch.

There was a skittering from a dark room beyond the reach of his flashlight beam. Not Roch: some animal, maybe a rat; he hurried past.

He remembered Roch from their confrontation in Amelie’s apartment. A big man, muscular, no real threat—not then—but John recalled also his deeper sense of the man as a fierce kettle of hostility, at explosive pressure. But “hostility,” what an inadequate word! It was an anger as purified and symmetrical as a laser beam, far more potent than any physical threat and more difficult to overcome. John was, at this moment, more than a little frightened of it.

He had counted on his old abilities here, the superhuman edge, but since last night that surety had blurred. The edges of things ran together, events happened too quickly, some internal clock had slowed down. His impression of the corridor now, in the sway of his flashlight beam over concrete and blackened ceiling beams, was more vivid than it ought to be but less informative: he was hard-pressed to extract the implications of a footprint or an echo. Where was Roch? Where was Amelie?

Moving deeper now, he discovered a wooden ladder leading up through a gap in the ceiling where a staircase might once have been. The rungs of the ladder were not dusty but seemed almost polished, and this, at least, he could interpret. He switched off the flashlight and in the darkness detected a fainter light flickering above him. It wasn’t much, but it was something to follow.

At the top of the ladder he groped his way onto a horizontal surface and flicked the flashlight back on. He was in a narrower, older corridor; the wallboard had been pried away in places and the yellow lathing peeked through. The flashlight beam paled away in an atmosphere of dust motes. He moved still deeper, approaching the heart of the building.

He was totally enclosed now—the thought inspired a new, nauseating wave of vertigo. He heard faint sounds lost in their own echoes, which might be voices, or water dripping down these old posts and columns, or the sound of whimpering. His own footsteps seemed impossibly loud, and the dust was choking.

Then, without warning, he turned a corner into a long windowless room which was not empty. First he saw the flickering Sterno fire, then Amelie bound at the wrists and ankles and squirming against the floor. She was wearing grimy jeans and a striped top, a soiled ski jacket; her eyes were vague but she looked at him pleadingly.

“Amelie.” He was hardly aware of saying it. Maybe it was Benjamin who spoke. Benjamin’s memories were powerfully present as he stooped to untie her. Their conversations, meals together, arguments, their lovemaking. She was tied with nylon clothesline and his fingers were too numb to manage the knots; but he had a Swiss Army knife in his pocket and he pulled it out and fumbled open the blade. Amelie watched curiously, as if she couldn’t quite decide who he was; which was reasonable, after all, because he wasn’t entirely certain himself … he had lost track of his own name. Words were suddenly elusive; he imagined them (the vision was crystalline in his mind) as a flock of birds startled into a cold blue sky.

The blade parted the cords. Her hands, faintly blue, sprang apart. But maybe Amelie had lost her words, too. She was pointing and gasping, backing away…

Too late, John understood her wild gesturing. He turned in time to see Roch rush forward from the doorway. Roch had a length of pipe in his right hand and John focused briefly on it, on the islands of verdigris laced across the copper, green in the flickering firelight. In its own way it was beautiful. Mesmerizing.

Roch smiled.

“Get out of here,” John told Amelie.

Roch brought the pipe down. John managed to catch the first blow against the open palm of his left hand, but the shock traveled up his arm to the shoulder and seemed to unhinge something there. The arm fell limp as Amelie scurried past. Passing, she slipped and kicked the burning Sterno across the floor. It spilled against an exposed spruce stud; the light was briefly dim and then flared much brighter … but John’s attention was on Roch, who had reared back for a second blow. John tried to veer away, but something was wrong here: the weapon came down too fast, or his legs were unsteady—everything happened too fast—and he was aware of the miscalculation but helpless to correct it as Roch brought the pipe down in a clean trajectory that intersected precisely with John’s skull; the impact was explosive. He felt as if he were flying away in every direction at once—and then there was only the darkness.

28

The blow connected solidly.

Roch allowed himself a brief rush of satisfaction, then turned and ran after Amelie.

Running, he transferred the pipe to a loop in his belt and took the flashlight in his right hand. He trained the beam on her; but she was already a surprising distance down the corridor … he must have been too cautious with the narcotics, must have let the time get away from him.

He tripped over a spur of concrete and almost dropped the flashlight; he managed to recover, but it gained Amelie some critical time. He stabbed the flashlight forward and saw her disappear down the empty stairwell—a miracle she had found the ladder in this darkness, but of course it was his own light, his own trusty Eveready, that had led her there. “Bitch!” he screamed, and drew out the copper pipe and bounced it against an aluminum conduit suspended horn the ceiling. The sound rang out around him like a bell, metallic and cacophonous in this closed space. Amelie ducked her head down below the floor … but Roch didn’t follow.

He was frozen in place … paralyzed by the sudden and terrible suspicion that he had done something momentous, something irrevocable … that he had jackknifed off the high board into an empty pool. How had he arrived in this dark, cavernous hallway? Basically, what the fuck was hedoing here?

But there was no answer, only the keening of the ventilator shafts down these blind, scabbed walls.

He clenched his teeth and suppressed the doubt. Maybe there was some truth to it, maybe hehad taken the dive without looking; but when you get this far, he thought, it just doesn’t matter anymore. You’re up there in the spotlight and you tuck and spin because it’s the focal point of your entire life even if you don’t understand it, you just know, so fuck all that pain and death that’s rushing up at you; that’s after. Now is now.

He hefted the copper pipe and turned back to the burning room.

29

Susan saw Amelie stumble away from the shadow of the building and knew at once that something had gone terribly wrong.

Amelie was sick or hurt. She took five lunging steps into the snow and then seemed to lose momentum—stopped, wobbled, and fell forward.

Susan ran out from the cover of the trees. The snow hindered every step; it was like running in a nightmare. She looked up briefly as she passed into the shadow of the warehouse. The building seemed to generate its own chill, potent even in the still winter air.

She put her arms around Amelie and lifted her up. Amelie was trembling. She was cold to the touch, and her eyes wandered aimlessly… Susan guessed some kind of drug might be involved.

“Amelie!” Some recognition flickered in her eyes. “Amelie, is John inside? Is he all right?”

“He’s in there,” Amelie managed.

“Is he hurt?”

“He’s with Roch.”

Susan stifled a powerful urge to go in after him. She took a deep breath. Do what you have to. “I’ll take you to the car,” she said. “Then we can call the police.”

They crossed the railroad tracks and ducked under the link fence toward the Honda, both of them breathless and gasping by the time they reached the car. Amelie doubled over against the lid of the trunk, her cheek pressed to the cold metal. Susan turned back toward the warehouse, one edge of it still visible over a stand of snowy pine trees. She shielded her eyes and frowned at what she saw: a thick plume of white smoke had begun to waft upward from the western corner of the building.

30

The warehouse had been stripped bare years ago. Everything even remotely valuable had been sold or stolen. There was no furniture left to burn; the floor was pressed concrete; the exterior walls were brick. But there were ancient kiln-dried spruce studs: there were pressboard dividing walls where these lofty spaces had been partitioned into offices; there was an immense volume of sub-code insulation that had been installed by the contractor as a cost-cutting measure during a 1965 renovation. Altogether, there was plenty to burn.

John awoke to the burning.

The Sterno can had spilled flaming jelly across the floor, the bulk of it next to three exposed wooden structural studs.

The wood was porous and spectacularly dry. The flames licked at it, paused as if to gather strength, then ran upward to the ceiling beams and through an open airway to the third floor, where they encountered a five-foot-high stack of the Saturday edition of the Toronto Sun dated through 1981.

The flames relished it.

Awake now—dimly—John rolled away from the heat. A glowing ember flaked down from the ceiling and scorched the skin of his wrist. His lungs felt raw, sandpapered. He opened his eyes.

He saw the flames running across the ceiling in freshets, like water. Where the room had been dark, it was now bright with a sinister light. He lifted a hand to shade his vision.

His head hurt. When he moved, the pain was dizzying; nausea constricted his throat. The agony was so generalized as to seem sourceless; then he touched his head above his left ear and felt the pulpy texture of the skin there. The hair was matted and wet. His hand, when he pulled it away, glistened in the firelight. This wetness was blood.

Blood and fire all around him.

He remembered Roch.

The overheated air created by the flames was vastly lighter than the cold, stagnant air surrounding it. It shot upward almost volcanically, coursing through the abandoned building like a river cut loose from the restraints of gravity. Where stairways had fallen, it rose through the gaping spaces. It discovered flues and airways. It was merely warm by the time it reached the top of the building, but still hot enough to seek out an icy five-foot gap where the ceiling had collapsed and to rise, lazily at first, into the still afternoon air.

This was how Susan saw it from the Honda: a waft of almost pure white smoke.

It gathered strength.

John understood that something was broken inside him. That was the way it felt, and it might be literally true; Roch had hit him pretty hard. He was confused about this place and he was confused about whether he was “John” or “Benjamin”—or what these names implied—and just about the only thing he was not confused about was the urgency of getting out of the building. The building was on fire; it was burning; he could be trapped here. That much was clear.

He managed to stand up.

He saw the flashlight on the floor and picked it up. He could see well enough in the firelight but he might need this later. There was a thin veil of acrid smoke all around him—fortunately, most of it was still being drawn up by the rising heat. That might change, however. And even this faint haze was choking. Combustion products. Toxic gases. These words floated up from memory, briefly vivid in his mind: he could read them, like printed words on paper, in the space behind his eyelids. But the danger was real and imminent.

He staggered into the hallway, where Roch was waiting for hire.

Roch came forward in a lunge with the copper pipe extended, grinning hugely. John knew that Roch meant to kill him and leave him here where the fire would consume his body. He understood this by the expression on Roch’s face. There was nothing mysterious about it. Blunt, burning hatred. Once again he watched the slow ballistic swing of the pipe above Roch’s head and the arc it would follow downward: this was familiar, too.

The ballet of his own death.

But not yet, John decided.

It was not even a thought. It was a denial so absolute that it felt like a seizure. He took a step back, hefted the big hardware-store flashlight and threw it at Roch. The flashlight whirled as it flew, end over end, and it seemed to John that Roch was staring at it, perplexed and wholly attentive, as it impacted squarely against his forehead.

Roch teetered on his heels, lunging forward with the pipe-section for ballast. No good. He sat down hard on the concrete floor. A line of blood seeped out from the impact point on his forehead.

He looked at John with mute, angry amazement.

“Son of a bitch!” he managed.

Began climbing to his feet again, pipe in hand.

John turned and ran.

But who had thrown the flashlight?

This question occupied a brightly lit corner of his mind as he staggered down the increasingly dark and smoky corridor.

Because, he felt different.

Not John or Benjamin.

Some third thing.

It rose and shifted inside him even now. It was large and still wordless. It didn’t have a name; it had never had a name. Some new presence. Or maybe not: not new at all.

Maybe, John thought, it had been there all along.

Roch had cut him off from the ladder where he had climbed up to the second floor; John ran in the opposite direction.

The fire was large and potent now, able to leapfrog the stony breaks between oases of wood and insulation. No part of the building was safe. Already, on the floor above, two of the tiny wire-reinforced windows had been blown out of their frames by the pressure of the burning. Flame jetted from the empty spaces, a newly crowned infant king surveying his kingdom.

The fire created its own weather. Throughout the eastern half of the structure, air that had lain stagnant for years began to stir. Locked or boarded doors groaned against their restraints. Shuttered windows rattled. The sour dust of limestone and decayed animal droppings stirred and lifted. The fire drew in gusts of clean air from the winter afternoon, and for one paradoxical moment it seemed as if a kind of spring had come.

John felt the air on his face, a good sign. It meant he was moving away from the main body of the fire. He had decided there must be another way down; it was only a question of finding it. But the light had dimmed to a smoky nimbus; he had lost the flashlight and soon he would be groping on his hands and knees. And Roch was close behind him. He heard the footsteps, though he could no longer calculate direction and distance.

He understood, too, that the fire had grown large enough that it might encircle him. That if it did, he would be helpless.

Strange, he thought, to die without knowing his own name.

The darkness now was absolute, interrupted in rare moments by the flicker of Roch’s flashlight from behind. John toiled onward as quickly as he dared. But the air was warm and choking. He didn’t have much margin anymore, and he knew it.

When he saw a glimmer of light down the corridor he was afraid that it might be the fire circling around from the front. He slowed to a walk, groped ahead cautiously, then stood for a moment surrounded by this dim aurora before it registered as window-light.

The windows were tiny glass rectangles set in a wickerwork of framing. They rose from waist level to the ceiling, and they were so thickly crusted with grime that he hadn’t recognized them at first for what they were.

He pushed against one of the panes with both hands, but it didn’t yield. This was carpentry as old as the building itself, Victorian and hugely solid. He took away his hands and carried enough dirt with them that the prints let through a brighter beam of light, hand-shaped in the smoky air.

He looked around. He wanted a brick, a pipe like Roch’s, anything … but the corridor was bare.

Roch’s flashlight flickered behind him.

Sighing, John pulled off his jacket and wrapped it around his right hand. Bracing himself, he drove his fist directly into the thick glass.

It was like punching rock—bruising, even through the cloth. But the glass splintered and fell away, leaving a razor-toothed space where cool air came flooding in.

The panes of glass were maybe twelve inches square, and he knocked out ten of them so rapidly that there was no time to notice the shards that ripped through the lining of the jacket and pierced his hand and wrist. The pain was momentary and irrelevant. When the glass was gone, he kicked and ripped at the wooden latticework until there was a hole big enough to fit through.

He heard Roch almost directly behind him now, but there was time to ascertain that he himself was directly above the old loading bay; that there was a roof below him, two-by-fours covered with lathing and tarry shingles, some of this eroded by the weather … not exactly a firm footing; time enough, too, to see that the fire had reached the west end of the loading-bay roof and was spreading wildly.

He turned his head and saw Roch running down the corridor toward him, his features clenched in a concentration so total that John was reminded of a master chess-player—the same all-consuming focus. The copper pipe-length was cocked at an angle, ready. John leaped forward and down onto the canted roof of the loading bay and then spread-eagled himself against it. The shingles were already warm where his cheek pressed against them. Something was burning down below. But the air was clean.

He began inching downward. With luck, he might make it to the edge before the flames caught up with him. Then he could swing down to ground level. If there wasn’t time—he could let himself roll and tumble, take his chances on what might be down below.

In the distance—already audible, though it escaped John’s awareness—the firetrucks howled their sirens.

The smoke that had drifted up lazily only minutes before was darker, and it boiled skyward in massive gouts. The roof of the building had drifted over with snow, but that was melting—a sudden waterfall developed where the roof sagged toward the southeast corner—while the snow nearest the flames was simply vaporized by the heat. The hissing was as loud as the crackle of the fire; Susan, running back down the tracks from the pay-phone and the Honda, was startled by the sound.

The makeshift roof over the loading bay was just twelve feet above the ground at the lowest point of its slope. What John had contemplated doing might have been safe: to let himself tumble down and hope the snow would cushion his fall. But he was transfixed by the sight of Roch stepping up into the frame of the broken window, a mist of smoke writhing after him; clinging to the frame to keep himself from falling, shards of glass piercing his hands as John’s hands had been pierced, the copper pipe fallen and rolling away—missing John’s head by three or four inches—over the roof and out of sight.

Hanging there, Roch looked down at John in a blaze of distilled hatred—and then across at the western edge of the roof, where the flames had begun to creep forward.

He braced his feet and took his hands off the window frame.

The roof was old and weathered. It had been designed to carry a calculated weight of snow—barely. In the years since it was erected, dry rot had invaded the studs; ice and water had pried up the shingles and rusted the nails. It could not support more than a fraction of its calculated load.

In particular, it couldn’t support Roch.

His left foot pierced the shingles first. Roch’s eyes widened as he slipped to thigh-level, like a man in quicksand, his right leg buckling under him and the shingles peeling away with sharp, successive snaps. His right knee penetrated similarly, and then he seemed to hesitate for a moment, straddling a joist, hands clawing at open air … and then the joist separated with a sound like a gunshot and Roch simply disappeared.

There was a sickening moment of absolute silence, then the thud as Roch impacted against the loading-bay platform below.

John raised his head.

He could see Susan running toward the building, Amelie not far behind her. Those two were safe. That was good.

He could have joined them. He knew what to do. Let go, tuck and roll, let his momentum carry him away from the loading dock and hope that the snowdrift would break his fall. He was aware of the beat of his heart and the onrushing eagerness of the flames—how could he do anything else?

But he felt himself inching forward, up the angle of the roof toward the hole Roch had made.

He braced his fingers against the shingles at the edge and looked down.

Roch was lying motionless, his hips at an unnatural angle and his eyes closed, the flames advancing from the western end of the loading bay and already hot enough to singe his eyebrows.

One more experiment, John thought.

Just one.

But maybe it wasn’t an experiment. Maybe it was something more important.

He felt himself straddling a cross-joist and wrapping his arms around it, then levering himself out over this high vacant space, swinging down toward Roch and the burning platform, and he understood with a sudden piercing clarity that he wasn’t John or Benjamin anymore. Some new being had grown into the vacuum of his skin, nurtured by his fever and the sudden desert heat of the flames—a fragment of self so fundamental that it had lurked undiscovered beneath all the latticework of words. It had existed even before he learned the word I; an uninvented self.

He let go of the creaking joist and dropped in a crouch next to Roch, feeling a sudden pain in his ankles and knees and spine but still able to stand.

His vision blurred in the smoke. He was aware of the blood on his hands, the cuts circling his wrists, the throbbing in his temple where Roch had struck him with the pipe. He was not sure he had the strength for this.

For this experiment.

He kneeled against the hot floorboards and slipped his arm around Roch.

Roch was not wholly unconscious. His eyelids flickered open as John lifted him up. Briefly, he struggled; but his legs dangled limp and useless and the pain of his injuries must have been excruciating—his eyes riveted shut again.

The flames closed in from the western edge of the loading bay and began to lick out from the warehouse doors. John glanced up and it was like staring into a furnace; his skin prickled and itched. Overhead, the joists were popping their nails with a sound like gunfire. Embers rained down all around him.

He should leave this burden and simply run—

But the thought was evanescent; it vanished into the tindery air.

Roch’s legs would not support him; it was like hefting a two-hundred-pound sack of sand. Roch opened his eyes once more as John hauled him up. He did not struggle; seemed only to watch, almost impassively … his eyes were fixed on John’s eyes and his face, now, was only inches away. His eyes seemed to radiate the single blunt message: “I’m not one of you!”—and John understood, in a final flash of inhuman insight, that Roch had willfully set himself apart; that when he looked at other human beings he saw protoplasm, bags of flesh, vessels that might contain the elements of hatred or contempt … but never anything of Roch.

Roch was only Roch, the only one of his kind, alone in his uniqueness. And across that vast escarpment there was no bridge or road or trail: the divide was as absolute as a vacuum. And John perceived that this was not some flaw of character or nurture; it was more profound, a trick of gestation, a stitch in the glial network … somehow, it was built in… My God, John thought, he’s not even altogether human. …

He pinned Roch’s arms in his own and dragged him toward the snow. Roch was stunningly heavy, a dead weight. But the fire was close enough to raise smoke from their clothes and John drew some strength from that. He pulled Roch along with his heels dragging against the steaming floorboards. He felt Roch’s breath against his neck. Roch opened his eyes again, now two blank wells of unimaginable hostility—and maybe something else.

Maybe a question.

“Because I don’t want to be what you are,” John said. The words came out punctuated by his gasping, overwhelmed by the roar of the flames; but patient, gentle. “Because I’m tired of that.”

He carried Roch away from the burning platform of the loading bay, into the steaming snow and beyond into the thick snow that had not yet melted and where the reflection of the fire was gaudy and strange.

In the end, he was only dimly aware of Amelie as she pried at his fingers. His embrace of Roch was fierce and hysterical. But he gave it up at last.