The Higher the Monkey Climbs Read online

  Gord looked at Tony, who seeing a solution at hand, seemed more relaxed.

  “Friday. Okay, Tony?”

  “Sure,” Tony said. “I appreciate this. Really.”

  My father stood and then Tony stood and they brought their hands together with a full-flesh sound and shook. Walking him to the front door, my father wrapped an arm across Tony’s shoulders and between them there passed some kind of understanding I was not privy to.

  “I get why you did what you did. But you can’t let anything like this happen again,” Gord said. “You’ve got too much to lose here. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Tony wrote the letter. In correcting his spelling and grammar, his word choices and phrasing, I was arbitrary, even merciless. When he gave me the second draft, I changed some words back, this time to what he had originally written. He completed a third draft to show Gord. But the appeal was never made because on the following Thursday afternoon at ten past one, a city bus ran through a red light and my father was dead.

  And then everything fell apart for a while.

  Yes, I thought, riding up the escalator to the ground floor of the glass tower where my firm’s office occupied the 32ND floor. He must have slugged someone. Assault but without a weapon. Tony Langlois had always considered weapons dishonourable in a fight (another lesson from Gord). Assault One (or whatever it was called). Without any actual facts to interrupt my thinking, I figured that if he had hit someone, it would not have been without provocation. Which probably mattered. On an uncomplicated assault case, I figured I could help my cousin out. I figured it was the least I could do.

  Up the elevator and down a long hallway, I arrived at the low-rent section of the office. The older lawyers called it ‘the ghetto’ until a young black associate lodged a human rights complaint, won, and forced the early retirements of three of the firms’ senior ­partners. I hung my coat on the back of the chair. Lydia, the admin assistant I shared with three other associates came in carrying a coffee in a mug stamped with the illuminated image of the Notre Dame Cathedral.

  “You’re a life saver, Lydia,” I said.

  “I know it. And my talents are being wasted.”

  “Maybe so. But do I ever need this.” In fact, I didn’t. I don’t ever drink coffee. I tried for a while but could never get rid of the unpleasant taste that lingers in the mouth for the rest of the day. What I liked, though, what kept me appreciative, is that someone brought me a cup each morning and, after faking a sip (‘Mmm,’ I might say, ‘Why would anyone who can have coffee this good pay four bucks somewhere else?”), I’d put the mug on my desk where it would sit for a few hours until Lydia took a break. Then I would whisk it into the kitchen or bathroom and send it down a sink.

  Lydia returned to her desk and I picked up the handset, ­conjuring concern and reassurance. It should have come more naturally, more directly from my heart. Tony had once been my most steadfast friend, most loyal supporter, even during a time I neither deserved nor returned the honour. I could certainly grant the simple favour of mounting his defence.

  That wasn’t all, of course. There was also this: Fresh from this professional humiliation with the Salvadorian priest-killer, I was hatching the idea of returning to my hometown, winning an easy case and then, the judge’s gavel having pounded Tony’s freedom, marching arm-in-arm with my cousin down the courthouse steps. Like a Caesar returned to Rome after a decisive victory in the hinterlands. I liked the idea very much and continued with it, imagining us celebrating at a bar, drinking beer and whiskey, getting into the champagne even, and feeling the distance that had grown between us evaporating with each round.

  After a few more minutes of this kind of hopeful thinking, I dialled.

  “Arson,” Tony said. “That’s what I got picked up for.”

  “What? Did you say arson?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like setting something on fire?” I said, stupidly.

  “That’s right,” he said. “But it’s more complicated. There are circumstances that matter here.”

  “Were you drunk?”

  “I knew what I was doing,” he said.

  “That wasn’t my question.”

  “I don’t know if I should talk about that on the phone, should I?”

  I told him that I thought calls with lawyers were protected. “They might be,” I said. “Aw hell, maybe you’re right.”

  “Think you could come down?”

  “Of course.”

  “How about tomorrow?”

  I looked at my calendar and though I saw a blank page, I said: “I’ll have to check with my secretary. Maybe shuffle some things around. But I think I can make it.”

  “So you can help me out, then?”

  As I assured him that I could, I believe I must have known even then that there was nothing in my abilities that could possibly help Tony. I had figured I’d be able to handle an assault case, but arson was a serious criminal matter and, except for the compulsory course in first-year law school, I had never touched that area. It was tricky stuff, full of procedures, particular rules, the domain of the specialist. Imagine a psychiatrist asked to perform heart surgery: He might know the right place to make the first cut, but after that? Carnage. I should have told Tony this, offered to make some phone calls, find him the right person for the job. In the end, it would have been the smart thing to do.

  So? Why didn’t I? Why didn’t I back off when I should have? I think I had the feeling that helping my cousin with his case would satisfy in me this strange longing I’d been feeling more intensely in recent years. This feeling that I was an adult now and there should be more. Maybe ‘longing’ isn’t the right way to describe it. It was more like a kind of gnawing dissatisfaction. Or incompleteness. No. Not those either.

  (If I knew how to describe it, I suppose I might have resolved it. So there.)

  Also, I fell victim to the classic illusion about selectively parsed memories. We deceive ourselves, sometimes willingly I think, into viewing the past as a simpler time, when people and their problems were easier to understand, their puzzles more ­easily solved. And for me, now deep into this wrong-headed mindset, Tony’s problems seemed like something I could solve without trouble, like a remedial math test.

  2

  While not quite superstitious, I am a person who will gratefully accept an omen when it suits me, and so when the clerk at the rental desk told me he had no more Accents, forcing an upgrade to a Jetta, I embraced the positive sign.

  After parking at the Green P nearest to the townhouse, I walked the three blocks home, briskly past the usual downtown neighbourhood crowd: panhandlers outside the liquor store, slumped smokers in the donut shop doorway, dog walkers gathered awkwardly together as their leashed pooches sniffed each other out. I didn’t even slow when I passed The Barrington, my cozy neighbourhood bar where Lena, who contributed nightly to the neighbourliness of the place, tended to a single customer I had met a few times but whose name I could never remember.

  A right and a left and three salt-sprinkled steps later and I was in the front hall, removing my coat and boots, and calling out a happy, end-of-day greeting. In return, an answer from the kitchen. Sagipa, my stepson, sat on his usual stool at the counter, a white wire strung between a bud in his ear and an iPod in his hand, tuned into the day’s Mandarin tutorial, the lessons provided to him and the rest of the world free of charge by the Confucius Institute.

  “Wo juede gintian keneng huì shia shu,” he recited. And then repeated it, placing a different emphasis on the final syllable.

  Behind him, his mother, my wife, paced from one wall to the other, a brief, three-step journey in our narrow kitchen. Inés wore a forest green sweat shirt with white panties and bare legs on bottom. Her dark straight hair was gathered into a shiny, floppy pony tail, tied with an ordinary elastic band. I intercepted her for a kiss, bending to meet
her cheek.

  “Do you know how late I am?” she said.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “What’s wrong?” She turned to me and held out her arms. “What’s wrong?”

  Sagipa looked at me as though he’d recently asked the same question. “She’s not wearing any pants,” he said. “That’s a clue.”

  “Because the damn dryer isn’t working again, that’s why.”

  “But I just fixed it,” I said.

  “My pants have been in there for over an hour. I should have been gone by now.”

  “Jeans always take longer,” I said.

  “Shing tai shing wen wah,” Sagipa said, repeating the same a moment later.

  “Over an hour, Richard. At least, seventy minutes. Carajo!”

  She was otherwise ready for work, the simple green sweatshirt, no make-up and a heavy application of a perfume that reminded me of my mother’s bridge parties. Inés was employed by a branch agency of the National Association for the Blind that arranged for on-site readings of novels and magazine articles to the elderly and sightless. For the past few weeks, she’d been forced to take a long ride on public transit to Mississauga for a specialty job. A man who, as a sighted adolescent, had lived in Mexico and liked Inés to read him pornographic novels with the salty bits translated into Spanish. (‘Yes, yes, yes,’ became ‘Sí, sí, sí’; ‘oh, ohs’ flipped to ‘Ay, ays’.)

  Inés inserted an arm into the dryer, then shut the door and pushed the button to get the machine going again. “This is ridiculous,” she said. “I’m going to call a repairman.”

  The doorbell rang. With a twitch, Sagipa leapt from his seat and ran to the front. He wore a peculiar outfit but one that had recently become a daily choice: a full-body, hooded white hazmat suit like you’d see on the news when some building is threatened with anthrax attack. Over his chest, via lapel pin, the flags of China and Canada were crossed at the staffs.

  “Don’t call a repairman,” I said. “I’ll fix it.”

  An easy job, it was also unpleasant. Through forces unknown, the exhaust tube became twisted and great gobs of sopping grey lint accumulated, restricting the airflow. There was no other way to remove it except by hand.

  Sagipa returned carrying a bag of food and aromas of ginger and garlic. He pulled a pair of white bowls from a cupboard and two sets of chopsticks from a drawer.

  “Mind if I use a fork tonight?” I said.

  “Suit yourself. But you’ll have to learn someday.”

  He unpacked the styrofoam cartons, the boxes of spring rolls, the black plastic containers with clear plastic lids, their contents hidden by steam. Despite a feed like this, not atypical for a weeknight in our house, Sagipa was an awfully skinny kid, bean-poley even. And not that tall, either. In the hazmat suit, his bent elbows protruded like the rounded tips of pool cues. His virtual weightlessness made me think him a natural for long-distance running but he had never shown any interest. At the barbershop he ordered his dark hair cropped close, the clippers fixed with a number two attachment. Somewhere along the way, he had convinced an optometrist he needed glasses (he didn’t) and always kept a pair of round, austere frames hooked to the hazmat suit’s zipper.

  I picked up a pair of stapled pages he had printed from that morning’s online English edition of Le Monde. Sagipa often came to dinner with articles that demonstrated western bias against China.

  “Let me save you the trouble,” he said. “A blogger in Gejiu got ten years for attempting to subvert state power. But don’t expect to get the whole story from Le Monde. They say it’s a question of freedom of speech. I’ve said it before: Here in the west there are plenty of restrictions on freedom of speech. Libel. Hate. Insubordination. There are even legislated invasions of privacy, thank you very much NSA, thank you very much CSEC. The lines are different in China, that’s all. At this crucial juncture in history, it does us no good to be confrontational.”

  “You have said that before,” I said.

  “Not over such a subjective question at least,” he said. “And don’t think they aren’t paying attention,” he added.

  Inés checked her pants again in the dryer, clicked disapproval, then glanced at her watch.

  “To hell with it,” she said. “Now I have to sit in these things for the next four hours. My skin will be like the skin of a fish before the night is over.”

  “I’ll fix it tomorrow,” I said. And then, remembering. “Except I can’t. I have to go to Wanstead tomorrow. To meet with a client.”

  “What kind of client?” Sagipa asked.

  “I’m calling a repairman,” Inés said. “I can’t be late like this again.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Give me until Thursday.”

  “What kind of client?” Sagipa asked again.

  “An arsonist.” After saying so, I decided to leave out the fact that the accused was also my cousin.

  “Don’t you mean ‘alleged’ arsonist?” Inés said. Once a ­victim of injustice herself, she remained a big believer in innocent-until-proven-guilty. Now she was struggling to get into her damp jeans. Her face scrunched, as though she were touching something dead. She paused, the waist of the jeans around her light brown thighs which, like the rest of her, were flushed from the exertion and annoyance. The tone of her skin reminded me briefly of the way her cheeks looked when our sex went well for her.

  “Why would an arsonist call you?” she asked.

  “Because he needs a lawyer,” I said and then, should there be any doubt, added: “Obviously.”

  “What’d he burn down?” Sagipa asked.

  “That’s privileged,” I said.

  “Why is it privileged?” Sagipa said. “Wouldn’t it be in the arrest record? Anyone can read that. Wouldn’t you get the arrest record first? To see if you have a case?”

  I tried to raise an eyebrow, attempting to will the muscles of my eye socket into an expression of mild consternation. Instead, I believe it came out more like quizzical constipation. Either way, Sagipa was unmoved.

  Inés, her not-dry-enough jeans buttoned at the waist, looked out the window. “It must be twenty below,” she said. And I’m about to walk out there in wet pants.”

  “Can you call in sick?” I said.

  “Not if you want me to get paid,” she said. She had her coat and hat on now and was wrapping a long wool scarf around her neck two times and then upwards until it covered her mouth, leaving only her seething eyes visible.

  I picked up the article from Le Monde.

  “Ten years for blogging,” I said. “Imagine.”

  “I told you not to bother,” Sagipa said. He had finished with his dinner, leaving nothing in his bowl. With a napkin wrapped like a bandage around his finger, he wiped his mouth in two swipes, each from left to right. Then he put on his unnecessary glasses and lit a cigarette. After blowing the first mouthful of smoke in the air, he held the thing upright, like a dim torch, twisting it in his fingers at the filter.

  I was never sure about allowing a thirteen-year-old to smoke but Inés didn’t mind and she was the mother. Still, it didn’t seem right, I often told her. When I was thirteen, I was trying to hide those pretences to adulthood from my parents and I thought that was pretty much the way it ought to be. There were times I thought I should say something to him or at least make him puff away outside. But each time the idea came to me, I said nothing and afterwards, I wondered if I would care more intensely if Sagipa were my son by biology and not by marriage.

  I continued to read the article telling Sagipa that I wanted to see for myself.

  “It’s the same old bullshit.”

  “Language, please.” (Because, somehow, I had decided to draw the line at swearing.)

  “It’s the same old crap,” Sagipa said.

  “It’s important to keep up,” I said.

  Inés made a s
ound as she passed us on her way out the front door.

  Once again, I returned to the article on the Gejiu blogger and, despite my efforts to remain neutral, easily recognized what Sagipa called the ‘patronizing, passive subjectivity’ western journalists often use when they write about the developing world. The tone was impatient, judgemental, irreverent.

  For the past couple of years, Sagipa had been concentrating a good deal of his thinking about the consequences of China supplanting the United States as the world’s superpower and dominant culture. He predicted cataclysmic changes. (In fact, he seemed to be looking forward to them.) He foresaw fundamental shifts in everyday thinking. Institutions once considered eternal would crumble to dust, relegated to quaint histories, the stuff HBO producers like to turn into shows (except it won’t be HBO, it’ll be some network based in China). It had all happened before, he said, and history showed it. Think of the Athenian assembly. Think of the Inquisition.

  “Think of slavery,” Sagipa once posited.

  “What about slavery?” I replied.

  “Up until less than two hundred years ago, it was acceptable all over the world to buy and sell a human being. The way you would buy a Mercedes today.”

  “If I could afford one,” I said.

  “A slave?”

  “The car!”

  “Anyway, enough people figured out that it was wrong to enslave another human being.”

  “Are you saying there’s something wrong with that?”

  “Not at all. But the point is this: With such radical changes in our past, from one thing to another, how can anyone say how we’ll think in two centuries?”

  “My faith in progress?”

  “Progress? What’s progress? Listen, in two centuries, there’re things we accept now that will be considered criminal and I reject the arrogance of anyone who says they know what’ll be allowed and what’ll get you locked up, what will make you a saint and what will make you a villain. Who was Guy Fawkes?”