He lies back on the bed and runs his tongue over his swollen lip. Bertrand has punched him in the mouth twice now, and he doesn’t even know who Bertrand is. He’s never disliked anyone as much as he dislikes Bertrand. Not even the ladies with smelly feet who insist on trying on shoes two sizes too small, who insist that Albertson pry such shoes on and off their grotesque feet. But even they are nothing compared to Bertrand. The man has physically assaulted him. Twice. He is responsible for the loss of a tooth. And much of his dignity. Albertson hates him.
He could use some food. He’s craving a cheeseburger. And then he understands the craving because he can smell meat. He can smell the fried promise of a casse-croûte close by. He could be on Saint-Jacques. He could be in Brossard or Laval. He could be anywhere. But the smell of the casse-croûte tells him he’s still in Quebec. There’s some comfort in that. Some.
The front door opens and Bertrand walks in. Albertson reflexively sits up.
“I won’t punch you again,” Bertrand says. He grabs a chair and brings it over to the bed and sits before Albertson. “No more punching.”
“Why are you doing this?” Albertson doesn’t expect an answer, or at least one that makes sense.
“The problem is your shoe.”
“What about it?”
Bertrand sighs. “Louis is a very important man. This is what you don’t understand.”
“What does this have to do with the horses?”
“You should shut up about the horses.”
“So there were horses.”
“Of course there were horses. You saw them.”
“But no one else did.”
“That’s not true.”
Albertson relaxes again, despite the man’s proximity. “Do you work for him?”
Bertrand looks around the room. “Do you understand what is happening?”
Albertson considers the question. He considers it ridiculous.
“Mrs. Sen is worried about you, or for you. She knows what Louis can do. His capabilities. How high up this goes. How wide.”
Albertson watches the dust float about the room. It’s a dusty room, as if it’s been empty, devoid of any sort of life, for a very long time. “What’s going to happen to me?” he asks.
“My friend...” Bertrand’s voice fades away, perhaps to a place where he doesn’t have to punch people, strangers, for having seen a herd of horses running down a residential street. Perhaps he doesn’t know the answer. Perhaps he’s not even a cog in this, merely the hired help. Perhaps his not-knowing is all that keeps him innocent. Because knowing would get him in trouble as well, on the receiving end of punches and waking in a dusty motel room on the edge of the city. “You are here for now,” he says. “Safe. You are safe here.”
Albertson wants to laugh. The humor of the thing finally hits him. “This is a weird version of hell,” he says.
Bertrand shrugs. “It’s nothing. It’s Montreal. Are you hungry?”
“I want answers.”
Bertrand stands and heads for the door. “I’m tired of punching people,” he says, and then he is gone.
Albertson wakes up in the back of a car. He has a headache, and as he gropes his head in pain, he realizes he has been struck — he has a giant welt on the back of his head. He is alone in the car. The car is old and smells like the inside of a musty garage. And then he looks around, and sees he’s in a musty garage. It’s dark, and he can’t tell if it’s dark because it’s night or because the lights are out.
He opens the door and stumbles out of the car, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He makes out a wall and heads toward it, slowly, like a toddler learning to walk. He kicks something metallic-sounding, and hears it ricochet off a surface. He finds himself by a wall covered with cobwebs. Albertson thinks that every single awful thing that is ever going to happen to him has happened. He hates spiders.
He reaches along the wall, feeling his way through the cobwebs, over chipped paint and cracked Gyprock. He feels a light switch, and flips it on. A lightbulb casts a jaundiced yellow glow over the place, and yes, he’s in a garage, except it looks like it hasn’t been occupied in a long time. Along the opposite wall is an old worktable and some tools, but other than that, the only thing inside the room is the car. It’s a cab, a rusted Ford Fiesta that looks like it was never a very good cab — surely a Ford Fiesta is too small to be a licensed cab, even in a city like Montreal with such awful taxis.
He sees a spider crawl along the floor. The garage door is weighed down with a concrete weight that’s bolted to a chain. Whoever put him in here — and he’s guessing it was Bertrand — doesn’t want him to leave.
The light goes out. Albertson reaches for the switch, but it doesn’t work now. Where was that spider? he thinks. He hears a sound, like someone turning on a loud stereo system. Suddenly the garage is bathed in a spectacular array of lights, a disco of color; they seem to light the universe. Albertson shields his eyes, but the room is too bright. And then he hears music. Dance music. Electronic, synthetic, pulsating. The lights dance in synchronicity to the beat, and now he is surrounded by both light and music. His body is inside this thing, this aura — he cannot escape what is around him because he has been made a part of it. He runs to the car and gets back in, but there is no relief from the wash of light and ocean of music. He closes his eyes and holds his head, knowing he must escape — it is the only way.
Albertson abandons the car and heads for the garage door, but it is weighted down, far too heavy for him to lift. He’s only one man, alone and under assault, and he’s entered some crazy alternate reality. And for what? Because he saw some horses on the street? More than some, sure, a lot, that was a lot of horses, but what does it matter? Who cares about these horses and what he saw? Where is this garage? Why are these people doing this?
Why haven’t they killed me? he wonders.
Albertson stumbles over to the worktable and peers underneath it. He sees a key. He takes the key and studies the garage door, the chain, the concrete weight. The chain and weight are held together with a lock. Not even a large one at that. He puts the key into the lock and the tension of the chain is released. It whips out, and the garage door flies open.
It is day. Albertson looks around and is running as soon as he is on the street, in a part of town he doesn’t quite know. It’s suburban; the street signs are different. He figures he’s far from home. He runs. He runs past closed office buildings, warehouses, and derelict garages, much like the one he was just in. He turns onto a busy street with buildings inhabited by commerce. There’s traffic on the street, and Albertson hails a cab. When he gets inside, he asks to go home.
He steps into the apartment and of course Mrs. Sen is sitting there, in the dark, on his love seat, waiting for him. At her feet is the bag with the shit-covered shoe.
“I should probably laugh,” Albertson says. He goes to his fridge and grabs a beer, joining Mrs. Sen in the living room. “I should, shouldn’t I?”
Mrs. Sen nudges the bag toward him with her foot. “Tell me about this,” she says.