Believing Cedric (21 page)

Then something happened. The rich man paused, stood suddenly still, looking around as if he were gathering critical information of some kind, searching up at the signs, along the street, through the store window. Then he stiffened, petrified, like he knew what was going to happen next, knew that Steven was right behind him and about to take a grimy knife out of his pocket and threaten him with his life. There was something unsettling about this, troubling. But Steven took the knife out of his pocket anyway. Then he squeezed the handle until his fingers were white, and stepped forward. The microseconds ticked by, Steven was growing uneasy, nervous, involuntarily tightening his sphincter. He winced.

Then, all at once, the man spun wildly around and threw his
hands into the air like he was in a bank robbery. “Ohhh . . . nn . . .  uhhh,” he muttered, paralyzed.

Steven wiped his nose with the hand that wasn't holding his knife, though it also panged with the scent of the oxidized blade, of copper pennies melting in his palm. “Give me your wallet.”

The rich guy was frozen, unable to respond.

“I said give me your fuckin' wallet!”

The man whisked it out, held it between them. Steven lunged forward, snatched it, and ran.

On the bus, he picked Cedric's wallet apart, held his driver's licence up to look at the picture. His mind was blank. He thought nothing, felt nothing. Outside the window, flashes of linking towns and sprawling municipalities streaked by, the highway a black thread stitching cities together. Up ahead another city cinched closer. Another city. Steven dropped the emptied wallet onto the Greyhound floor, looked outside.

Another city.

There is a light that emanates from

the limestone bricks of big centres,

a disparate one, singular even, which

you can only catch at the rarest moments,

dusk, dawn, one of those non-rush-hour hours.

When the buildings covet and cradle their

grey stillness so tightly you'd think

it was sacred, and mistake it for being.

Quiet dangling from their walls like ivy, as if,

on the other side, there were a small-town home.

Not like the kind we were born in, or the den

we rebelled to leave, nor even the one we swore

we'd build ourselves, placing everything—just—

so—but instead the one we should have.

The kind of home that knows so well, forgives

so wantonly, that there isn't even blame there

that we didn't.

Melissa's cross-country travelling companion broke one of their rare no-music-or-radio silences just after Medicine Hat. “This just . . . this feels so Canadian. Don't you think?” she asked.

But what Melissa thought was that she was about to come across as a humbug again. Because to be honest, she'd always hated the question, had never seen the point of it really—all the literature and art collectives, the radio programs and television documentaries that explored the query of what it meant to be Canadian. In our scrambling need for an identity, thought Melissa, we'd opted for the worst way of acquiring one: namely by working backwards. We started with the naive idea that we could find a parameter for us all to fit inside, trace a silhouette with all the things we are and aren't, define a “we” by using the paltry measure of our few, few common denominators. Why should we care about the shape of the one paper-thin shell that might encapsulate us all? What kind of culture would be driven by such a manic search for its own confinement? If we spent half as much energy not in concentrating on what this fictitious capsule might look like, but instead on filling it, on cramming it with original art and thought and science and cuisine, on driving forward unimpeded by our own backward clichés and questions, those blurry lines would draw themselves. The truth was that Melissa didn't feel very Canadian, didn't feel moved when she saw her flag rippling in the wind. But she did feel that she liked the wind. And it's there, she knew, that the drawing should really begin. Right there. At the beginning.

“Good question. I don't . . . really know what I'm in the mood for. Think I had the ribs last time . . .” Neil was scanning the George Bigliardi's Dining Lounge menu, a blind hand reaching onto the table in front of him, finding his ice water, fingerprints smudging the condensation along the sides of his glass. “How about you?” he asked, looking up at Cedric.

Neil Murray was a man who had always understood that there were things that permeated quietly, things that leached into our veins from other places we've lived, other skies that we've walked beneath, silently coating our arterial walls like minerals rimming a water pipe, a thin dusting that patiently bloomed into something like frost, slowly thickening, making our future movements less sudden, less sure. Yes, some things permeated quietly. While others, like this lunch hour with Cedric Johnson, did not.

Neil wavered. Shifted in his seat, anxious. He sipped his water again. Put the glass back on the table. “Cedric? You okay?”

“Neil,” Cedric declared, his pupils wide and glossy, holding his closed menu like a plaque he'd just been presented with much custom and import. He placed it gently onto the white of the tablecloth in front of him. “Neil, I am
so
glad to see you.”

Neil picked up his water again, sipped from it. As a rule, Cedric wasn't an odd man, wasn't given to unpredictable episodes or capricious outbursts. And the fact that he'd just said he was
glad
to see Neil, of all things, was an undeniable red flag. Because Neil happened to know that, this noon hour more than ever, he was the last person in the world Cedric was glad to see.

“Oh. Well.” Another sip. “I'm glad to see you too.” He lied unconvincingly, looking around the room. One of the restaurant hosts was leading an older couple to a spot against the wall. Brass railings divided the chain of tables, the antique light fixtures refracting only a slight sheen off the dark-wood panelling, creating a cave-black dim that was difficult to adjust to when stepping in from the bright streetscape of fresh snow outside. Three other businessmen were settling into their chairs nearby. “So then,” Neil ventured, looking over his business partner (
ex
-business partner now) with circumspection, “what are you gonna have? The ribs?”

Cedric rested his hands on his closed menu, slid forward in his chair. “Neil. Listen. You remember when I was mugged, by one of those greasy . . . hoodlum . . . 
vagrants
? Remember that?”

Neil smacked his lips, eyeing the upper reaches of Cedric's potbelly, the blond of his hair tarnished with strands of grey, the upper corners of his forehead beginning their sparse, patient climb. His expression was utterly sincere. “Uh, yeah. Yeah I think it was right after we met, at a gas station around Jane and Finch, right? Must have been five, six years ago now?” Neil shook his head regrettably at his glass on the table, which, he noticed, at this rate, would need refilling soon—immediately, in fact. He picked it up and took a final noisy gulp, tossing it back like a tequila shooter.

“Exactly,” Cedric agreed. “And you wanna know something crazy? I just, seconds ago, went through the same thing. The exact same shit.”

Neil feigned shock. “My god, in the bathroom . . . or . . . ?” knowing that Cedric had been in front of him over the last “few seconds,” along with the entire morning for that matter. They'd been making phone calls, moving the last of Neil's files into the back of his
SUV
, finalizing the mini-takeover. He glanced around for the waiter, not knowing what to do with his hands, wishing he had more water.

“And you know what's even crazier? Even though I knew everything about it,
knew
that he wouldn't stab me or . . . even hurt me, I was just as scared the second time around. Scared shitless. I mean, this is all,” he held up his hands to indicate the dining lounge around him, “all so real. You know? Just as real as that greasy little . . .” he cut himself short as the waiter had appeared abruptly, interjecting.

“Sorry, gentlemen. Can I get you something from the bar to start off?”

“Look.” Cedric made another gesture with his hand, shooing the man away, rolling his fingers out to another part of the room, seemingly a faraway corner. “Could you just . . . screw off for a bit? I've only got a couple seconds here.”

Neil and the waiter both hung in the moment, stunned, not knowing what to do, watching him closely.

Cedric leaned farther into the table, the crease at the centre of his forehead etching a rift down his face, a blue eye pinned to each side, a kind of dividing line, Neil had once thought—half the man that he'd liked and half he despised. How similar the two looked.

Cedric continued in a lowered voice, undeterred by the waiter still standing by, still dumbfounded. “I'm having the strangest experience of my life, Neil. And I know this'll . . . this'll sound crazy. I know. But . . . I'm having these flashing
moments
, where I'm back, in my own skin, during these—I don't know—
instances
in my life that were . . . big, I guess. And I mean that I'm physically, actually, there, reliving them.”

The waiter stepped back, smoothly slipping away into the din of the restaurant, watching Cedric over his shoulder as he walked to the bar.

“I see,” Neil muttered, sitting back in his chair. “Moments . . . like . . . now?”

“Yes. Moments like now. Because this is pretty much the last time we speak, isn't it? We leave here, without saying a word of what we're both thinking through this entire lunch, and we walk away.”

Neil's expression was a concerned one. “Hmm.” He'd recently read about a rare form of epilepsy where, instead of going into a grand or petit mal seizure, the person experienced “a slipping” into another personality or reference of time. Though he wasn't sure where he'd read it, could have been a cursory glimpse over the tabloid rack while he was waiting in line somewhere. “So . . . let's just pretend for a second that . . . this isn't crazy, and that you're really sitting here . . . again. For the second time.”

“I am, Neil.”

“Right.” Neil rubbed the back of his head. “So, when . . . I mean, how old are you?”

Cedric squinted, looked at the carpet. “I . . . don't know. What year is it?”

Neil noticed that the melting ice in his glass had produced a few more millimetres of water. He sucked what he could out of it, placed it back on the table, and lowered his voice, almost to a whisper, “The year is 1991.”

Cedric looked back down at the carpet, more busily this time. “I . . .  don't really know how old I was in '91; I'd have to figure it out. But, I mean, how does that matter? If I
could
tell you how old I was back then . . . offhand . . . how would that help?”

Neil sank back into his chair again, though this time very slowly, the dark wood of it pressing along his spine, his sides.

The candle lamp on the table fluttered for a moment, then, as if to compensate for its transitory quavering, continued to glow with an even brighter, steady flame.

“So then . . .” Neil began after his drawn-out silence, “tell me, now that you're here, reliving this, are you . . . gonna do anything different, say anything different . . . the second time around? I mean, do you think you're here to—I don't know—change things? Do something right . . . for once?”

“No,” Cedric said, clearly smarting a bit from the jab. “No, it doesn't seem to work that way. I can't really
change
anything . . . except the moment I'm reliving. And no matter how radically I change it, it doesn't seem to have any effect on . . . on things that happen afterwards.”

“Hmm. Right. Yeah. Guess that makes sense.” And it did to Neil. He thought about himself in the past, as a boy, in South Africa. And in looking back, he could only see himself as a fated individual, fated to move to Canada, marry, have a daughter, divorce, get screwed over by his business partner. Now that he thought of it, it was intriguing to consider that fate couldn't exist in our present or future, but that it could in our past. Which was apparently the case for Cedric, in this experience he was having. While he might be able to revisit a past moment, a past self, he would have to be doing so as a self who had an unalterable future. The past we can visit. But we can only do so
as
visitors; our itineraries already printed, stamped, and unredeemable. Like a tourist in an old photo—already destined. Already damned.

“So if you
can
, as you say, at least change these moments you're reliving,” Neil posited, “what're you gonna change about this one?”

“Well . . . I guess . . . I guess to start with, I just . . . I'd want you to know that I—you know—felt bad that . . . we . . . our little agency . . . uhm . . .”

“That you fucked me over?”

“No. Neil. I
didn't
fuck you over. I mean . . . it was just . . . it was a clear and simple business decision. And one that, believe me, you would've made yourself. If the tables were turned.”

“Really? You happen to know what I would've done? That's great. You're a regular clairvoyant, in all kinds of ways, it sounds.”

“Look, what I'm saying is . . . I'm saying . . . well. I guess I'm trying to say I'm sorry. Okay? I'm sorry for the way it all turned out, for you, between us. I mean . . . it was . . . it was unfortunate.”

“Well, I'll agree with you there.” Neil hadn't meant for his tone to be quite as icy as it was. He
was
being apologized to. Though at the same time, he was glad for the effect his cynicism was producing.

“Yeah.” Cedric sighed, looking down at the cover of his menu. He ran a slow, thoughtful hand along its surface. “Yeah.”