O Fortuna
On a muggy night in Montreal, three days before graduation, Hubert lay face up on his bed, on the quilt his grandmother made, next to the poems he’d written, imagining Lydia’s lips above his, her hot breath drifting down, her long hair like the gauze from a bandage roll unravelling onto his chest. He’d been waiting for hours for an intervention, a call or a text or a knock on the door even though Lydia wasn’t a girl who knocked on doors, she was one who opened them. To Dev and Kev and Obi and Xavier and how many others, he didn’t know. “What’s the point?” he cried, flinging his arms open wide. “All I do is take up space on this planet.” Like a dog, he let out a pitiful whine before he rolled out of bed and trudged down the stairs, past his parents’ matching e-bikes and cannabis plants, through the foyer with the Virgin Mary stained-glass window, out the door and down more stairs, these ones spiraling like a question mark, finally landing on the concrete of the gum-pocked sidewalk.
It was after ten o’clock but not yet dark, only shadowy because it was the time of the solstice, and he walked head down on his way to – where? He had no idea. To the man-made beach at the edge of the Old Port where he’d gone two weeks before with the rest of his class to celebrate the start of life and Lydia had danced like Salome by the fire until a spark had landed in her hair. Which wasn’t good, he’d tried to throw sand on it, to stop the fire, to save her, but she started screaming and then – forget it, it was a disaster. To the back row of the basement cinema on Parc where she’d once joined him and Dev to see a foreign film and her hand had grazed his thigh when she reached for the popcorn, sending an electric shock to his groin then his heart nearly causing cardiac arrest. Which was fine, he would happily have died that way except he didn’t die and afterwards she’d left with Dev on the train from the platform opposite him without even waving good-bye.
If she’s not into you, man –
Shut up! Hubert stamped his foot and when it echoed he looked up and saw he was alone on the street. Monsieur Thibault, the butcher with the hairy fingers, peered out from behind a velvet curtain only something wasn’t right about Monsieur Thibault, his hair was too coiffed or his shirt was too clean or his moustache no longer bled into his side burns. It wasn’t him! On the other side of the street, on the Kilpatricks’ balcony, an albino was playing the saxophone while a girl in a tutu danced the way the ballerina in Hubert’s mother’s jewelry box danced. One by one, the houses on either side of the street came alive with music and lights in sequence like a circuit in one of his science labs. What was this, some kind of off-grid experiment being launched by Russian hackers?
Or maybe it was an elaborate prank being staged by his guidance counsellor.
His guidance counsellor was an ex-hockey coach who doled out advice in a freezing cold office that used to be the janitor’s room and still smelled of ammonia and cigarettes. He made students come in and sit on a stool facing a Wayne Gretzky poster he’d taped to the wall. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Yeah, yeah, we know. In a voice loud enough to hear across an arena, he made them describe their strengths and weaknesses – with examples! – and admit to some burning passion that, if applied, could propel them forward in life. In the last few months, the ball-busting goon had got more worked up about Hubert’s future than Hubert’s own parents had. His parents knew that success for people like them, neither rich nor poor nor brilliant nor daft, boiled down to being in the right place at the right time. Congratulations darling, you made it through high school, now it’s time for higher learning. Or would you rather skip it and become a tech entrepreneur? There are plenty of government programs out there to help fund your first string of failures.
Out of nowhere, an anthem struck up so loud the beat reverberated through his chest. “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana, one of his mother’s favourites. He looked around for an orchestra as he walked towards the park but saw only parked cars and open windows and silhouettes behind velvet curtains. What if Xavier was right and a person could slip inside their own subconscious mind, or fall into an alternate world, or if all of humanity was caught in some kind of endless loop – which is why each person woke up every day until they broke out of the cycle.
But how?
The Chicken Man zoomed by in his little yellow car with the glowing red rooster’s comb on top. The smell, oh the smell! Hubert lifted his nose like a hungry stray to catch a whiff of roast chicken as it sped on by. How Hubert loved the Chicken Man. When he was little, he used to sit in front of the living room window waiting to catch a glimpse of the car. Before he could say “Papa”, his father used to tell friends, he could say “Chicken Man”.
At the top of the street, under the spotlight of the moon, a kind-of circus troupe turned the corner. Out in front, a pair of trapeze artists skipped along in canary-yellow leotards with giant wings protruding from their backs and a trail of plumage behind them. Next came a band of white-gloved musicians, a flock of flamingos, a prickle of porcupines, and a dozen or so meandering clowns who tugged at strings tied to helium balloons that floated like clouds above them.
From a distance, one of them looked like his guidance counsellor.
You want to live in your parents’ basement until you’re forty?
Hubert’s parents didn’t even have a basement but okay – okay! – that was beside the point, he knew he had to figure his life out. But what he could do? What did he know? At his school, they were still teaching algebra and Shakespeare and the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. How was he supposed to teach machines how to learn and advance civilization if he didn’t even know which algorithms got humankind here in the first place?
The circus troupe, if that’s what it was, had crossed the road and was now close enough that he could hear they were speaking neither French nor English. Great. Even his school’s pathetic claim that every graduate was fluent in both official languages was inadequate for real life. Which he already knew, since in his own small circle Dev spoke Hindi, Obi Cree, and Lydia German the way he imagined Claudia Schiffer did.
He felt a bump as he walked directly into a clown. “Sorry,” he mumbled, trying to re-gain his balance, but the clown seemed offended. He said something incomprehensible to one of the others who drew the rest of them near until Hubert was surrounded. “Hey!” Hubert said, refusing to be intimidated by a bunch of clowns. Very quickly their smiling faces turned menacing and he felt a push between his shoulder blades. “Hey!” he said again, louder this time, hoping someone might hear, one of his neighbours, Monsieur Thibault, or anyone who was walking nearby. Nobody heard him. A white-gloved hand slipped over his mouth as a kick to the back of his knee brought him down and the last thing he saw was a fresh ball of gum that had not yet been flattened on the sidewalk.
When he woke, Hubert was lying on a mattress beneath a white marquee strung with lights and tightrope wires. Above him several layers of tangerine-coloured sarees shielded his eyes from the glare. “You had a fall,” Lydia said and he turned to see her sitting on the floor behind him. Like a warrior princess, her long hair was braided and she’d draped a velvet cloak around her bare shoulders. So beautiful was she, he thought she might be a photo-shopped version of herself. “Where am I?” he asked. Lydia offered him a cup of tea. Taking the cup from her hands, he fought the urge to throw it on the floor and pull her to him.
“Young man,” their guidance counsellor said, pushing aside the sarees and joining them uninvited. “To begin your journey, you must enter a destination.” His face was dark beneath an old Habs jersey and his voice sounded like a GPS. “In 200 meters, take the roundabout. Despite heavy traffic, this is the fastest route. Do you understand?”
Hubert’s tea quivered slightly in his cup as if an earthquake were coming. He looked at Lydia, who nodded and took his hand and with her fingers, squeezed it gently. Dev once told him, there’s magic in those fingers, but the way he’d laughed had made Hubert want to throw a punch.
“Let’s see,” the guidance counsellor said, sitting down on a stool and consulting a tablet. “You have no special talents or academic strengths, you should probably take the first exit.” He stabbed at the screen then scrolled down the page. “You also lack discipline and tenacity, better turn around. No, wait! Your emotional intelligence has never been demonstrated. Recalculating. Recalculating.”
Hubert opened his mouth to object.
“Furthermore,” he continued, his voice normal again, “you don’t have Obi’s confidence or Xavier’s creativity or anything like Dev’s charm.” He smiled at Lydia and winked. “The boy is lost. What should we do with him?”
“He could become an accountant,” Lydia said.
Hubert looked at her like she’d betrayed him.
“Hmm,” their guidance counsellor said. “That’s not a bad idea.”
“But I don’t want to become an accountant.”
Lydia sighed. “With everyone else becoming tech entrepreneurs,” she said, “the world will need more accountants.” She withdrew her hand, gathered up her cloak, and turned to leave with their guidance counsellor.
“Wait!” Hubert cried as they ducked under the sarees. Beneath him, the mattress turned damp then wet then ceased being a mattress at all and became an inflatable raft flowing down a river, teetering, spinning, surging forward, heading for Niagara Falls. There was nothing he could do, he was going down! He balled his hands into fists, threw himself back, and wailed like a spoiled child.
Was he a spoiled child?
A vision came forward from the back of his mind: his mother comforting him on a rainy night, holding him in the crook of her arm. “There, there,” she’d whispered, her lips grazing his temple as they stared out the living room window together. She’d held him close until his tears dried, until he caught a glimpse of a little yellow car with a glowing red rooster’s comb on top. Zoom, zoom. “Mama!” he’d lifted his head from her shoulder. “Chicken Man!” he’d shouted, pointing out through the glass.
Hubert sat straight up on the mattress. That was it! Why hadn’t he thought of it before? If all he had to do was follow his passion, he should become the next Chicken Man. Every day for the rest of his life he would cook up and deliver rotisserie chickens, half chickens, quarter chickens, wings, waffles, poutine on the side. It wouldn’t feel like work if he loved what he was doing. Besides, it was time for the old Chicken Man to retire. The old Chicken Man couldn’t cope with the new imitations cropping up, the start-ups trying to topple his empire, and Hubert could transition him out. Hubert understood about changing consumer tastes and he had ideas for scaling the business: he’d crowd-source an expansion, get celebrity endorsements, and begin delivering meals all over the country – no, all over the planet!
He jumped from the mattress and exited the marquee, finding himself back on the street again. The music had stopped, it was finally dark, his neighbours had gone in from their balconies. Something cool fluttered over his skin, a sensation like a celestial whisper. Jesus, Mary – could it actually have been the Holy Ghost who’d visited? Wait till he told his friends about this. Wait till he told Lydia…
But could he tell Lydia?
Could he call up the warrior princess and invite her out for a carbonated Italian soda made from the juice of the myrtle-leaved clementine tree? He took out his phone and found her number but only stared at her photograph on the screen. Soon, she’d be going away to study and it wouldn’t be possible to go out anymore. It would be as if they lived in different worlds, or as if Lydia didn’t exist anymore. Did she exist now if she wouldn’t exist later? Was existence dependent on time or place or proximity to carbonated Italian soda?
He put his phone back into his pocket, felt the warmth of it slide down his thigh. As he neared the park, a crowd of people cheered and coloured lights flashed into the sky. Before his brain could talk his legs out of it, he began running towards the chaos and the spectacle. Like moments that might pass him by, a thousand balloons floated up and away until he lunged at a string and felt his feet leave the ground and disappeared like a lark in the night.
