Immigrant City Read online

  “Nora, it’s our stop,” I said. “Do you want to go home or keep going?”

  “Go home and keep going,” she said.

  How It Used to Be

  FOR THE SIN OF the cross look. For the sin of the terse reply. For the sin of the damp towel on the floor. For the sin of the intemperate purchase. For the sin of the selfish minute. For the sin of undermining my fucking authority with the children. For the sin of repeating yourself for the thousandth time. For the sin of the frigid silence. For the sin of never accepting responsibility. For the sin of not seeing yourself. For the sin of not apologizing and for the sin of apologizing too late. For the sin of treating you like a stranger. For the sin of not showing affection. For the sin of not appreciating me even a little bit. For all these, not to mention others, we stood in the doorway, with my Uber parked outside, its hazards blinking, and the neurotic fever dream of my plane crash reverberating between us in series with my lurid carnal opportunism should the plane not go down.

  From upstairs the littlest one called for “Mama.” The middle one ran to the door, hugged my legs and said she was going to miss me so much. The oldest one was somewhere in the house, squatting on the floor, turning the pages of a graphic novel. Something crashed to the ceiling above our heads. The littlest one called more insistently for “Ma-ma.”

  “I have to go,” my wife said. “Enjoy your trip.”

  For the sin of deliberately misconstruing my trip.

  Reza M, my Uber driver, younger than me, waited by the trunk of his cobalt blue Honda Civic. We engaged in a courteous pantomime over my carry-on, then I took my place in the back seat and looked at my house. It had stood there for ninety years. How many families had filled it with their swirling involvements? I only knew the people we’d bought it from, of whom no instrument could now detect any trace.

  The car moved and my house slid away. Two strollers casually deposited on the porch and a silver scooter flat on the ground. Some rocks the children had collected, painted and named. Beside the garbage and recycling, a red plastic car with a seat and a steering wheel and an orange hood that accumulated rainwater. Yellow dandelions in a lawn that needed cutting. And in the flower beds, our drooping peonies, their frilled heads grazing the dirt.

  I thought, My God, what if it’s really the end this time? Misery and euphoria seized my heart and for a moment I felt like I might be sick. To calm myself I addressed the back of Reza’s head. His dark hair, freshly barbered, was like a solid block between the pink vulnerability of his ears. And his posture was that of a schoolboy from a land where posture was still respected. With so many clues it wasn’t hard to guess the land, but Reza was nevertheless impressed that I had done it. I impressed him further by reciting a few assorted facts about his country. He corrected me on the last.

  “It was wrong of the CIA and the British to meddle in our affairs,” Reza said. “But my countrymen who mourn Mossadegh are very naive. Name me one country that is not Norway where the oil is nationalized and there is democracy. Mossadegh has been made into a martyr, but if he had succeeded he would have been a thief. Other things are also known about him, but they are improper to talk about.”

  Reza then asked for my relevant details. The country of my birth: a place that technically no longer existed and that I’d left before I was old enough to put on the red neckerchief of the Young Pioneers. My profession: a thing I rarely confessed to because of some relation to the sacred, the profane and to doubt—also because the word writer made people feel guilty and confused and caused them to say things they didn’t mean.

  The purpose of my journey: a conference about which I could say little more than that I’d received an invitation from someone I didn’t know representing an organization I’d never heard of. Such things occasionally happened. Because I was always worried about money, every time I checked my email it was with the faint, pathetic wishfulness that it would happen again. This time it was to join a group of “thought leaders” for something called FICNIC, The First Immersive Continuum Narrative Innovation Conference. Travel, accommodation and a $2,500 honorarium were provided—the honorarium applicable in full against a possible engagement contract. I also needed to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

  “Technology,” Reza reflected. In his home country he had studied computers. Now he was back in school pursuing accreditation while also doing IT for a local Persian media company and driving Uber. His wife was at home with their two children and would soon give birth to a third. Every day he thanked God.

  We had arrived at the airport.

  “What’s your secret?” I asked.

  “There is no secret. We are no different from the birds and the fishes.”

  We exchanged a congenial farewell and I went inside the terminal to catch my flight to Montreal. Less than two hours later, I was met at the gate by a man who held a sign with my name on it. He was a short, pot-bellied black man, his hair and beard salted with grey. He wore tan slacks and a tan windbreaker with the emblem for Continuum Visions—the V contained within the C—stitched over his left breast. As I approached he brought his cellphone to his mouth and said, “J’ai le dernier.” He gestured for me to follow him and apologized for his English—“Haiti.”

  We exited the terminal and walked along a line of hotel and car rental shuttles until we reached one painted the same colour as the man’s clothes and with the same emblem inscribed on its side. The doors were open and the Haitian man slid into the driver’s seat. I was greeted by a pretty young woman with a calm, authoritative manner. Behind her were several rows of seats, two each on either side of the aisle. Nearly all the seats were occupied by cerebral, insular and distracted men and women who made no conversation but gazed ahead, read documents or scanned their devices. Pinned to each person’s breast was a round white badge with a bold black upper case B. One was also affixed to the young woman’s blouse. She told me I would find mine in my welcome package. We were Group B. It was a condition of our participation that we wear our badges.

  The shuttle brought us to a hotel in downtown Montreal, not far from the university campus where I had once been a student. When I’d accepted the invitation, it had also been to return to a place where I’d once been very happy so that I might breathe the mist of residual happiness that still adhered to the buildings and the streets. As we descended from the highway into the city, I perceived myself as I had been, eager for romantic adventure, sometimes bold. Rue du Fort: a girl from another university, whose name I could no longer remember but whom I could see outlined against her bedroom window, anachronistically wearing a slip, a white shoulder set against dark hair. Afterwards, like a hero in an art film, I had walked home in the rain, the only person on Sherbrooke Street as far as the Ritz.

  In my hotel room I leafed through the welcome package. Included with the badge was a glossy brochure about Continuum Visions written in vague, grandiose language. There was a photo and bio of Continuum Visions’s founder, a square-jawed, shaven-headed man who’d made his fortune by starting and selling a company that facilitated something revolutionary and intrusive with email. Later, he compounded his fortune by starting and selling a second company that undermined the first. The names of the companies, those of their illustrious buyers, and the routinely mind-boggling purchase prices were all listed. The package also held a concise conference itinerary, the location of Continuum’s offices, detailed instructions about transport, and staff contact information.

  I sent a text to decline the transport and walked as if following several paces behind my younger self. He descended the steps of the walk-ups in which he’d lived from year to year. He read a book by the window of a small diner run by a family of Greeks. In the bars and restaurants along St. Laurent Boulevard—and the ghosts of those bars and restaurants—he faltered or triumphed in rounds of impassioned talk. Across from Parc du Portugal, he deposited a fan letter in Leonard Cohen’s mailbox. He desperately wanted to become. The yearning was so intense it assumed shape and mass, like a st
one in his hand or upon his chest. At first it was a solitary yearning, then a joint one—the life we would make together—before it was solitary again.

  St. Laurent to St. Joseph Boulevard. St. Joseph to Clark Street. Half a block north and I stood in front of the house where I’d spent hundreds of nights. I could have found it blindfolded. I tried to conjure what it had all felt like. It came back in random fragments:

  Outside, it’s dark. I’m on the black futon couch in my apartment, watching television. I lift the phone from its cradle. Lauren says, “I’m done with my paper. Come over.”

  In the brief warm spell at the beginning of the school year. We are on her stoop. She brushes a strand of hair from her face and teaches me how to roll a cigarette.

  “Elbows on your knees, knees together, close your left eye and hold your breath.”

  “Really?”

  “No.”

  The morning after I first slept in her bed. Her roommate is packing her lunch at the kitchen counter. Frost gleams in the windows. I hang by my fingertips from the moulding above the kitchen door like a contented animal and then pull myself up.

  We sit reading side by side in bed. She wears her high school volleyball jersey, an artifact from another life. Without looking up from the page, I slide a hand under her shirt and cup her breast. It is cool and smooth against my palm.

  It happened, I thought. Years after you left here and ceased to know her, the lofty thing you dreamed of came true. You made it come true. What a comfort it would have been to know that. And what a surprise to learn that in twenty years you’d be standing here looking back with a longing equal to the longing with which you’d once looked ahead.

  The Continuum offices were in Mile End, where tech companies had set up shop in a neighbourhood of students, artists and Hasidic Jews. Fairmount Avenue. A famous bagel shop. St. Viateur Street. Another famous bagel shop and the red brick edifice of St. Michael’s church, with its green-domed campanile. Across the way, Café Olimpico, proclaiming stubborn authenticity.

  I kept on and saw a white limestone building, a converted corner bank branch. From a distance it looked like it had been appropriated by a film shoot. Two heavy black curtains, the width of the sidewalk, hung down to the ground from poles that extended from the roof. They subdivided the building into three sections: along one street, at the apex and along the perpendicular street. A motorcycle cop diverted pedestrians to the opposite sidewalk. As I came closer, a shuttle like the one that brought me from the airport stopped at one side of the building. A young woman with a clipboard descended and watched as the other passengers exited the shuttle and entered the building through a set of double doors. I pinned my badge onto my blazer and crossed the street. In the instant she noticed me, I realized that, though she wore the same outfit and was of similar colouring, height and build as the woman who met me at the airport, she was a different woman. Her badge had an upper case C.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” she said sharply. She drew the curtain away from the wall and peered behind it. She faced me, let the curtain fall and instructed me to follow.

  We skirted the sidewalk, passed through one curtain and saw nobody. The “B” woman from the airport waited beyond the second curtain, looking displeased. The “C” woman regarded her with open scorn. She said nothing to the “B” woman and vanished after delivering me into her care.

  “Transport was not optional,” the “B” woman said. “The others are already inside.”

  She led me briskly into the building. The curtains extended inside as well. To our right, one went from floor to ceiling, from the entrance doors to the open doors of an auditorium and beyond. To our left, a broad glass and steel staircase configured up to the second storey. Visible through it were parallel rows of smoked glass cubes—offices.

  We proceeded into the auditorium, which was the size of a small-town movie theatre. A floor of exposed concrete sloped gently down to a circular stage of pale wood, which was where the curtain ended. Blended, unintelligible speech sounded from behind it. The woman indicated for me to find a seat among my group. There were quite a few empty seats. Clipped to the back of each one was a curved, mirrored face shield, as for a cosmic welder.

  I took the nearest seat, beside an imperious, dark-haired woman in a black sleeveless top and jeans. She wore heavy silver bracelets and a large hammered gold ring. Lines of text in an alphabet I didn’t recognize were tattooed on her inner forearms.

  She raised an eyebrow in allusion to the general oddity.

  “Performance art or sociological study?”

  “Or a diversion for a rich man.”

  “Yet here we are.”

  “So it seems.”

  “And what offence did you commit?”

  “Probably something I wrote.”

  “Let me guess, you’re a grovelist?”

  “Grovel, grovel. And you?”

  “A poet and playwright. Mainly of the Armenian diaspora.”

  The lights dimmed with their hushing effect and a real or simulated female voice welcomed us to the conference and invited us to put on our visors. I freed mine from the back of the seat and found it nearly weightless, like a promise of the future. I brought it down over my brow, causing something within it to awaken and form an impalpable band around my head such that it hovered there by mysterious means. Two white rubbery crocus tips emerged, which I inserted into my ears and felt intuitively expand to fill the cavities. The sensation was comforting, not disturbing. Our youngest daughter had lately developed a tic of putting her index fingers in her ears before she performed an action. Fingers in ears; cover the doll with the dishtowel. Fingers in ears; add another blueberry to the line on the plate. Without ever trying it ourselves, we feared what it would portend if she didn’t outgrow it. We’d become adult, quick to condemn harmless pleasures.

  Through my visor I looked at the Armenian poet and playwright, who now seemed crisper, better articulated, as when the correct lens is snapped into place at the optometrist’s. Reflected in her visor, I saw my own otherworldly head, and hers reflected, Escher-like, in mine. She turned away to look around the room, and a kind of eruption coalesced around me in the form of a crowd on a barren hill. A scorching sun beat down upon us. Men dressed in caftans and rags shouted, wailed and surged toward a cordon of implacable Roman legionaries. An emaciated cripple lay on a wooden pallet by my feet. A group of lepers, their faces gnawed by disease, moaned deliriously and offered their hands to the sky. I recoiled as a filthy bandage brushed my cheek, but nobody noticed me. I felt like an onlooker at the spectacle, present but immaterial, while still myself, with my critical mind, wearing the visor, in the auditorium, in Montreal. I gazed up and saw the three crucified men, the middle one in the crown of thorns and with the sign above his head, Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum. The nails had been driven into his palms and his crossed feet. Blood streamed from those wounds and the places on his body where he had been scourged. I saw his face framed by the lank hair, the eyes blue and terribly lucid, the features somehow familiar. Bearded men of higher rank, their garments trimmed in indigo, shouted in the Talmudic language I had learned poorly as a boy and mostly forgotten. But it didn’t matter since an English translation was superimposed in the sky.

  “You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself.”

  “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.”

  A crucified man beside Jesus derided. “You trusted in God, let him deliver you now, if he will have you.”

  Jesus looked to the heavens and cried out. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

  A navigation interface appeared above my left shoulder. It read:

  Matthew

  Mark

  Luke

  John

  And then switched to:

  Matthew

  Mark

  Luke

  John

  The scene before me was halted and reset. Once again, the lepers moaned and
offered their hands to the sky. The filthy bandage brushed my cheek. The Sadducees and the Pharisees railed.

  The criminal beside Jesus spoke. “If you are Christ, save yourself and us.”

  “Where is your humility?” demanded the second criminal. “Do you not fear God? We are getting our just rewards, but this man has done nothing wrong.” He appealed to Jesus. “Remember me, Lord, when you come into your kingdom.”

  “Today you shall be with me in paradise,” Jesus said.

  Supernatural clouds gathered and blotted out the sun.

  In a strong, clear voice, Christ called out. “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

  The breath of life left him and his head fell to his chest.

  The scene froze and another index appeared listing the Christian denominations. In quick succession, I saw before me the Christ of Byzantine iconography; Russian; Ethiopian. Anatolia, Rus and Kush cast their mark upon his flesh. Under “Catholics,” subcategories rendered the scene in the high reverent style of Michelangelo, the sober precision of van Eyck, the tragic malevolence of Caravaggio and the golden derangement of Lippi.

  A heading for “Jews” and Christ disappeared entirely, leaving only two crosses on the hill.

  A heading for “Atheists” and I was on a street in ancient Galilee, looking through the window of a modest house. Inside, Jesus planed a cedar board. Shavings dropped to the ground where a small boy handled intricately carved animals—a horse, a lion, a hare. A young, pregnant woman entered the room, carrying a meal of bread, olives, cheese and wine. She glanced down at the child, who sprinkled shavings onto his toys and conducted a private, polyphonous dialogue with them.