Madame Victoria Page 11

  On his table lies a gleaming collection of photos, with the halogen glare bouncing off their glossy finish. The portraits stare back at him. Women with auburn hair, blonds, a few redheads, Slavs, Hispanics, blacks, and an appalling number of Indigenous women. They all seem to belong to the same family, united by an elusive commonality: they’re unaware of what awaits them, they’re carefree yet somehow haunted. Unless it’s just Loïc projecting this feeling onto the pictures. Most of these missing women probably had good reason to be sad, but also a thousand reasons to unbridle their joy, their hope, their delight at being young and having a whole life of experiences, errors, and exploits still ahead of them.

  Edgar, Loïc’s supervisor, pops in unannounced, walks over to Loïc’s desk, and glances at the series of photos fanned out on it.

  “They’ve started the shoot with Léon?”

  “Yes, and with Céleste Hippolyte,” Loïc answers.

  “Excellent. What about you? Still leaving for Victoria tomorrow?”

  “Vancouver, not Victoria.”

  “Right. That’s what I meant.”

  The two men quickly go over Loïc’s next report, an assignment that will let him move on without moving on. Instead of an unidentified corpse, he’ll be investigating women whose names are known but whose bodies have never been found, a negative of the Victoria case. She may not have died a violent death, but the fact remains there’s something violent about her solitude, an oblique kind of cruelty that Loïc is trying to delineate.

  While Loïc gathers his papers, Edgar goes back to scanning the pictures.

  “What exactly is the point of collecting all these headshots?”

  Loïc shrugs. For days now, he’s been evasive, hoping he can avoid explaining to his manager that his investigation is turning into a sort of art project, his analyses into meditations. That he’s looking for meaning in these faces captured on paper rather than in the police reports. That he’s yet another boy from a maimed family looking for answers in the wrong places.

  He’s just about to stammer out some lame justification when he’s saved by the telephone. As soon as he catches sight of the regional code on the display he claps his hand over the receiver and signals to Edgar that he has to take the call.

  The serial killer’s ex-wife speaks with a tired voice, as if she’s been dragging a dead body for a long time. No introductions, no explanation. Like an old acquaintance, she says:

  “It’s Deborah. You wanted to talk to me about Rob?”

  Loïc immerses himself again in the case of the trucker locked away for multiple murders of young female hitchhikers, one of the worst serial killings in the history of the United States. He tries to imagine the person at the other end. This woman, breathing slowly, had she known what kind of man she’d married? The first time she heard the charges brought against him, did she believe them? Was she a victim of his violent personality? The questions Loïc would like to ask vie with those he must ask. But before he can come out with the first one, Deborah stops him.

  “Listen,” she says, “there’s just one thing I’m going to tell you about my ex. About what he did. Just a little story, actually. Do what you want with it.”

  Loïc reaches for his notepad, rummages for a pen in the clutter of his desk. Deborah has already gone ahead.

  “When we were still married—before Rob got arrested—I sometimes rode along with him on his runs. One time we were at a highway truck stop. A teenager walked past us, you know, a ragged girl in army boots, lugging a huge backpack. Rob watched her walk away. After a bit he says to me: ‘Y’see that? That girl—she’s one of the invisible people.’ That’s what Rob had to say about those women he hunted down. That’s what I had to say about Rob.”

  With that, Deborah hangs up. Loïc realizes he’s been holding his breath since the conversation began. “The invisible people,” he mutters. He turns to his gallery of photos, examines them closely and recalls those names: Robert Ben Rhoades, William Fyfe, Paul Bernardo, Ted Bundy, Robert Pickton. Then he sits down, grabs a sheet of paper, a pencil. What he wants to do can’t be done on a computer. It takes the rasp of a pen on a page, the scraping, the abrasion. It means feeling, eyes closed, the letters being etched into the paper. While Germain Léon and Céleste Hippolyte, each in their own way, describe the black hole that has run through their lives, while his colleagues tap away at their keyboards and drone into their mics, while one more woman vanishes and the long Road of Tears grows longer, Loïc writes down the first name on the list.

  There are thousands.

  Victoria Redacted

  Rage was something Victoria had never felt until she became invisible.

  Yes, she had lost control at times and had vented her anger. Like everyone else, she had hated her share of foes and former lovers. But ever since her metamorphosis, her fury has reached heights that she hadn’t thought possible. In fact, many things she hadn’t thought possible have come true. Her transparency, for one. Her existence in this hospital’s absurd ecology, for another.

  For months, she has ranged over the Royal Victoria’s twisted passageways, its diagonal elevators, its secret mezzanines leading from the eighth floor of one building to the ground floor of a different wing. She has explored the balconies precariously perched on roofs skewed by the wind, climbed staircases that catapulted her from Monday to the previous Sunday. She has found herself suddenly outside, stuck between a stone wall and the slope of the mountain or plunged in a ditch littered with old bandages and crumbs of life. She spent three days locked inside a closet banging on a pipe until someone from maintenance opened the door. At the Royal Victoria it’s easy to be forgotten. To disappear.

  Occasionally, she follows the people ambling down the corridors adorned with Gothic moulding; they act as a kind of Ariadne’s thread guiding her through the labyrinth. She silently breathes in the conversations of the regulars, their whispers full of innuendos. The story she hears most often is the ghost legend. The ghost of the nurse murdered in the west block. The ghost of the mad chef who cooked elderly patients. The ghost of the gardener who had his throat ripped open by a wolf a hundred years ago. The ghost of the young mother who died giving birth to quintuplets. The ghost of the schizophrenic who drowned in the hospital swimming pool. The ghost of every neglected, malnourished, unloved patient who came back to settle accounts. Rubbish—all of it! There’s only one ghost in this hospital, and it’s Victoria.

  Every morning, in the nook where she’s taken up residence, her hatred awakens when she does. Victoria wends her way among the convalescents, snatches a spongy egg or two in the cafeteria right under the cashier’s nose, and starts her daily quest, reciting an inaudible refrain that reminds her of everything she has lost. A reasonably functional family. Muscular legs. An underpaid job. A proud demeanour. Eccentric friends. A charming smile. A passion for hip-hop and origami. An unruly head of hair. A university degree. Freckles. Five credit cards. A healthy BMI. A predilection for dance floors. A shadow that lengthened through the day and faded at nightfall.

  The advertisement had said: Our tests meet the highest safety standards. Participants will not undergo any process that has not been certified risk-free. Victoria was reassured. And there was more: Volunteers receive from $1,000 to $2,250 in financial compensation. Open to non-smokers only. That was all she needed to know. Two thousand two hundred and fifty dollars would cover a year’s tuition for the master’s degree she was hoping to pursue. It represented half of her outstanding credit card balance. It meant eating meat and vegetables until the end of the winter.

  She went to the laboratory tucked away in a basement in the McGill Ghetto district hard by the Royal Victoria. She shook the left hands of the other participants—their right hands had been punctured by syringes—and munched on the cookies handed out to the volunteers while a company representative explained the tests they were about to undergo. She wondered why there was no
company sign on the door and why the place had no windows. She tried not to think about the eventual side effects, and repeated to herself the promised sum of money.

  She knows now that not all laboratory rats are confined to cages. Some are found in the hospital that has become her home. She learned that they are not all compensated and some of them had not even given their consent. That their illness goes deeper than the worst kind of cancer because it was produced by practitioners who don’t respect the Hippocratic oath any more than thieves respect the Eighth Commandment. When she looks at them she feels pain in her arms, her cheeks, every spot where she had received unproven drugs or incomplete treatments. At night she strokes their damp foreheads, sometimes resisting the urge to shake these people who thoughtlessly swallow whatever they’re offered, never questioning, and to thrash the nurses, perfectly oblivious to what’s going on. It’s a lesson she learned at great cost: one person is cured at the expense of hundreds of others.

  Yet for all the horrors she has witnessed at the Royal Victoria, she has also discovered inexhaustible kindness running through the actions of the weary staff. She can taste the calmness emanating from the patients waiting for remission or death or the good-heartedness of their fellows. She watches alongside them as the IV slowly drips from a transparent bag like a jellyfish. The time of the illness calculated in drops of solution. The acquiescence of those for whom the system is always too slow. This hospital has a knack for deflating the vindictive moods of those in its care. Except for Victoria’s, of course. Revenge is her sole raison d’être. Without it she would have evaporated altogether.

  The first trials went well. She spent a few days in a clinic together with other students, unemployed workers, and a handful of lunatics convinced that they were taking part in a grand scientific odyssey. She submitted to examinations, blood pressure tests, blood samples, an array of questionnaires, and went back home with a greater awareness of her body and the networks underlying her breathing, her digestion, her existence. Dr. Eon, who coordinated the tests, was quite pleased with her participation. He said she had a “very reactive” system and “eloquent” vital signs. Victoria smiled at these strange compliments without paying much attention to this dreary-aged man. As soon as the examinations were over she pocketed her phenomenal cheque and returned home.

  When Dr. Eon contacted her about a new research protocol that he was in charge of, she was unsuspicious. This trial required, in his words, a “broader degree of consent” than the previous ones. When Victoria asked if it was dangerous, Eon gave a little cough that was his version of laughter and assured her that no drug designed to treat a condition as benign as acne could harm a woman radiating health like her. He added that the compensation would be twice the usual amount. Victoria thought of the upcoming spring break, of the rich kids at the university who were planning trips to the Caribbean, and agreed.

  The time when she was consumed with bitter anger toward herself, toward her recklessness back then, that time had long passed. She was young, she was eager, she had been fooled. As she strides along the hospital corridors, her rage is an arrow pointing due north. It’s Eon she wants to destroy, torture, devour so she can spit him out as food for the most loathsome creatures, the ones unable to hunt anymore and that stupidly wait for another animal to throw them a bone, a nail, a useless appendage.

  But even with the advantages of invisibility, Victoria hasn’t been able to catch the doctor, whose right eye says blue, while his left eye says green. When she does manage to get her hands on a vague schedule, a shifting appointment, she always arrives too late. She loses her way or learns that an emergency has taken Eon somewhere else. She runs through the sprawling buildings only to discover that from one day to the next the dermatology clinic has been moved to the other end of the hospital, which she reaches, out of breath, a minute after the department’s constantly changing office hours have ended.

  One day, a card appears at her feet, as jarring as an unexpected lump of salt on the tongue: Dr. Eon, room 303, 12th floor, Pavilion E. Victoria triumphantly takes off, regretting only that she doesn’t have time to lay hands on a knife or the poisoned cocktail that she dreams of administering to the doctor. Doesn’t matter, she tells herself as she runs down the windy corridors. Her fury makes all sorts of murders possible; even the most innocuous-looking weapon can deal out a brutal death.

  But before she even tries to activate the antiquated machinery of the E block elevator, Victoria realizes the Royal Victoria’s peculiarities have thwarted her once again. There is no button for number 12 on the panel because Pavilion E does not have a twelfth floor. In her exasperation, she punches the elevator door so hard that the passengers inside jump in terror and pull the emergency lever. Powerless to overcome the ghosts, the alarm keeps on sounding in the E wing to no effect. It seems to have been ringing forever. Since the day Victoria vanished.

  As she sat down in the room where the tests were performed, she found it odd that she was the only participant. Equally bizarre, she thought, was that the person administering the treatment was Dr. Eon himself rather than an assistant, as was usually the case. While he coated Victoria’s body with a bluish substance, the silence in the research centre grew heavy and oppressive. The doctor’s fingers rubbed every centimetre of skin, digging into the flesh, worming into the slightest folds. Naked and shivering under the greasy glaze, Victoria clenched her teeth and pressed her knees together. After what seemed like an eternity, Eon pulled off his gloves. “And now, stage number two.”

  The day wore on in an endless series of alchemical manoeuvres to which Victoria submitted, shivering the whole time, unable to get over her anxiety, which was out of character for her. The one thing that kept her from bolting naked down the freezing air-conditioned corridors was the promise of five thousand dollars in hard cash. That night, without saying a word, Eon pointed her to a bed, more like a stretcher, and went away. Although she was alone, Victoria thought she could hear the laboured breathing of another patient, someone heavy and worn out. Terrified, she gnawed at the belly of the night until she found her way to sleep.

  The next day she awoke with no idea of the time, certain that Eon had come to observe her while she slept. There was a cold meal on a platter but she wasn’t hungry. Her limbs felt limp and hollow, as if every cell of her body had emptied out. She put a hand to her forehead, to her knee, and the too-smooth texture of her skin made her dizzy. “Is anyone there?” she wanted to say. But no sound came out of her mouth, and she couldn’t see her fingers when she grasped the doorknob. She looked down at her body. In the place where, yesterday, her chest rose and fell in time with her breathing, there was nothing. In the place where her feet should have trodden the floor, there was the floor and nothing else. In a panic, she hit the fire alarm. Despite the deafening noise, no help appeared, nor did her body. Eon had erased her.

  The following months were divided between grieving and struggling to convince her relations of her existence. In their bereavement, they had come to believe in ghosts rather than an unseeable Victoria. Her helplessness drove her into frenzied efforts to persuade them that she was shouting despite her silence, and that her invisibility had not expunged her from the world. But what followed confirmed what she had always somehow intuited: the spirit is nothing, the body is everything. To be unseen is to be nonexistent.

  No matter how much she moved the furniture around in her mother’s house or banged on things in classrooms or grabbed her friends’ pencils to write desperate messages, all she managed to do was terrify the people she wished to comfort. She therefore decided to distance herself from her loved ones, feeling more comfortable in the company of strangers than among those to whom she could no longer convey either distress or affection. Only occasionally did she make an exception and watch the lights in her parents’ windows or those of her former lovers, her exhausted eyes shedding dry tears.

  Her hopes that the effects of Dr. Eon’s treatment would
be temporary faded as well. Victoria was definitely and irremediably invisible. True, she could douse herself with paint, or wear clothes, something she had persisted in doing out of habit for some time after the calamity. There again, her efforts did nothing but arouse a keen sense of horror in others as well as herself. Even now, her transparency stifles her. She often thinks of the sci-fi films and comics she devoured as a teenager, where invisibility was an enviable power. But the fact is it’s not a gift; it’s a curse.

  When she lies down in pitch darkness, she touches her arms, her legs, which, though absent, have remained solid and muscular; she cups her breasts and notes how they’ve changed shape over the years. Sometimes out of desperation as much as need, she steals into the room of a young comatose man who has retained certain reflexes, draws back his sheets, strokes him through his hospital gown, and then silently straddles him behind the warm curtains, trembling and nervous, as if someone could surprise her. Her partner ejaculates, she tumbles down into the gorge of her own orgasm, and for a brief instant she wants for nothing. She leaves the alcove trying to believe it did her victim as much good as it did her. Then she returns to her closet downright disgusted with herself.

  Over time, she’s grown used to the Royal Victoria, its dusty hallways, the red-faced medical students, the snarling wives demanding answers, and all those sighs, the prodigious first breaths and the painful last gasps of the patients. She envies those who are touched, hugged, gazed at so that their image might never be forgotten. The ones looked at with love or even with contempt—what does it matter? At least they feel the touch of someone’s eyes, a kind of caress all the same.

  Each day the hospital reveals a new side of itself to her. Sometimes it’s a dilapidated gym or a dormitory for tired emergency doctors or a storeroom full of cribs from another era. Then, one morning, the institution that has thrown so many obstacles in her path finally hands her a treasure. A wall in its most austere wing is dominated by a bronze and polished oak board, gleaming brightly, a sun in the clinical caverns. It shows the names of doctors with the words IN and OUT beside each one. A sliding wooden slat is positioned to indicate whether the doctor is present or not. Exultant, Victoria spots Eon’s name beside a shining IN. Her thoughts are racing, her invisible canine teeth grow longer. Her mind’s eye sees the scalpels on the third floor. The electrodes in the intensive care unit. The wire of a lamp snatched from a lounge. She’s got him at last.