secret_history (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
secret_history) wrote2006-11-02 12:25 pm
secret_history) wrote2006-11-02 12:25 pm
November 1st, 14:37
Part I: Death By Water
[...] I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
—T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
“Attention: une intervention des services d’urgence nous oblige à interrompre le service sur la ligne verte, entre les stations Angrignon et Honoré Beaugrand. La STM vous remercie de votre compréhension. D’autres messages suivront.”
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me!”
“What’s the holdup? What did they say?”
“They’ve interrupted the service on the green line.”
“Gee, ‘cause the metro slowing down and then coming to a complete halt didn’t tip me off to that. What else did they say?”
“Not much. Anyway, weren’t you listening?”
“Not really. Does anyone listen to those automated recordings?”
“I do.”
“Yeah, but you’re weird about that sort of thing.”
“Shut up, Marco.”
“Whatever you say.”
Marco folded his arms across his chest in that smug way that always made Michaela want to smack him as hard as she could —in the friendliest possible way, of course. She and Marco went way back, all the way to high school. Still, he was looking insufferably smug, his brown eyes twinkling with barely-contained humour in his swarthy face. She blew out her cheeks in a sigh of exasperation and began pulling off her gloves one finger at a time before shoving them unceremoniously into the upper pocket of her burgundy Kanuk coat.
“I don’t understand why you’re so warmly dressed, Mickey,” Marco obviously didn’t know when discretion was the better part of valour. He also blithely ignored the glare she directed at him. “It’s barely the beginning of November, and you’re dressed like it was forty degrees below and January. What are you going to do then?”
“Dress in more layers.”
“I don’t understand how someone born in Canada —in January, might I add— always manages to be cold no matter the weather.”
“It’s a gift from my mother: low blood pressure.”
“You know, if you exercised more, you wouldn’t have circulation problems.”
“I get plenty of exercise running for the bus in the morning. Besides, why exercise when the fine makers of Kanuk outdoors-wear can keep me warm artificially?”
“You may be thin enough now, Mickey, but when you’re forty-five and have some sort of cardio-vascular accident you’ll wish you had spent as much time in the gym as I do.”
“You’ll forgive me if being a wop with rippling muscles and gold chains around my neck isn’t one of my chief desires in life,” she mocked.
Marco managed to look insulted. “Hey, that chain was a present from my mother, and I would thank you not to insult her memory!”
“Your mother is still alive.”
“Well, it’s a crucifix chain, anyway, so, umm, quit mocking my religious beliefs.”
“Your argument is singularly weak, seeing that you removed the crucifix the first chance you got.”
Marco heaved a mock-sigh of resignation. “Fine, have it your way. How did this conversation get to be about me, anyway? I thought I was giving you a hard time for not exercising.”
“It’s a gift,” Michaela looked smug, then removed her woolen cap and shoved it into another pocket, then unzipped her coat. “Okay, now I’m getting really warm. Is this damned metro going to leave already, or what?”
“I don’t know. It’s only been about five minutes since they announced the interruption, right?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Around them, others were getting restless as well. It was too early in the afternoon for there to be a great many people on the metro: too late for the lunch crowd and too early for the hordes of school-aged kids who regularly invaded the public transit system after 3 o’clock with oversized schoolbags and ridiculously loud cell phones with annoying ring tones on which they shouted at their friends or sent text messages that blipped constantly. Now that the local cell phone companies had decided in their infinite wisdom (or, rather, their incessant quest for more money) to install cells inside the metro to give their customers access to the network between Lionel-Groulx and Berri-UQAM stations, the noise at rush hour was constant and overwhelming, not to mention annoying.
Michaela was grateful at least that her bizarre work schedule meant that she mostly avoided rush hour. If she never had to listen to another inane conversaion about boys or hair or how unfair life was, or about which girls were easy and which ones were, like, total ice queens, it would be too soon. Marco was busy stripping off his well-loved and weather-beaten leather jacket, revealing a tight grey t-shirt that stretched alarmingly over his chest muscles and which proudly announced “Foot Locker” in faded letters.
“Umm, excuse me?”
Michaela jumped as a hand brushed gently against her elbow. She turned to face a woman with mousy brown hair streaked with grey, who looked to be in her mid-to-late forties. Michaela had spotted her sitting in the double-seat opposite them, but hadn’t paid her much mind. With her ankle-length dingy grey down coat, shapeless brown cloth sack and her lopsided beret-like hat (also grey), the woman had simply faded to the back of her consciousness. Now she had slid over into the empty seat nearest them, and blinked owlishly at them behind an oversized pair of red-rimmed eyeglasses. Her eyes up close were bright blue, in startling contrast to the rest of her, which was nondescript at best, drab at worst. Her nose and cheeks were a delicate shade of red, perhaps the result of being out in the cold for too long.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. Could you tell me what the announcement said? I’m afraid I don’t speak any French.” Her voice was pretty, Michaela noted to her surprise: lilting and slightly musical, with a trace of an accent that she couldn’t quite place.
“Oh, uh, sure,” Michaela squirmed slightly. She didn’t really like talking to people she didn’t know face-to-face. That was why she had a job that kept all her outside contacts restricted to the telephone. “They just said that they had to stop the service on the green line because emergency services had to intervene somewhere,” she translated roughly.
“Some idiot tried to commit suicide, is what happened,” a punk kid who’d been slouching against the doors of the metro decided to throw in his two cents.
He looked like he ought to be a lot colder than he was, Michaela thought uncharitably, with tattered black BDU pants scuffed black hightops, and a worn black hoodie with crudely-drawn skulls and lightning bolts painted on. It looked like a home job. His hair was bright fuschia, and he looked like he had more metal than skin on his face. The woman in the grey coat shuddered, her cheeks growing more red as she did so.
“Really? How do you know?”
Michaela snorted. “That’s stupid. Some poor guy probably just had a heart attack or something.”
She knew it wasn’t true, but she also knew there was a reason the Société de Transport de Montréal didn’t like announcing metro suicides, and so she wasn’t about to confirm what the punk kid was saying. People who committed suicide in public, or who even just attempted it, usually spawned a slew of copycats in the following days. It was better all around if you kept the suicide under wraps. Metro suicides were particularly bad, she knew from the 911 calls she received once or twice a year: they almost never died, but got themselves electrocuted and mangled and usually damaged themselves for life. It was worse for the train operators, who were usually the first on the scene: they had to deal with the victim, maybe give first aid if they could (and if they weren’t too shocked at having nearly killed someone), and deal with their own feelings of guilt and horror afterward. Sometimes people really had no conception of the other lives they were ruining along with their own.
“No, it’s true,” Marco said, nodding vigorously. “Everyone knows that the ‘intervention of emergency services’ line is really just a euphemism for having to scrape some poor guy off the tracks.”
“Marco, you’re not helping,” Michaela kicked him in the ankle.
“Ow! What the hell, Mickey?”
“Just cut it out, would you? You’re freaking out the lady, here.”
“Oh, sorry.” Marco directed an apologetic glance at the woman in the grey coat, who had retreated with another exaggerated shudder.
She looked at Michaela. “Did they say when the service would start up again?”
Michaela shook her head. “No, sorry. They’ll probably announce it again in about ten minutes. Usually this kind of situation takes about an hour to resolve, though. They might be able to restore the power to one side of the line in about thirty minutes, depending on how serious things are.”
The woman’s bright blue eyes widened. “You certainly seem to know a lot about this sort of thing.”
Michaela felt her cheeks grow warm. “Oh, uh, yeah. I, uh, work for a 911 dispatch centre out in Longueuil. So, you know, we get these calls a few times a year.”
“That’s very impressive,” Michaela had thought that the woman’s eyes couldn’t possibly get any wider, but she was proved wrong. “I don’t think I could ever do that as a job. So many people in distress. It must be terribly stressful.”
“Mickey here thrives on stress,” Marco said proudly. He’d always been absurdly proud of the fact that his friend was an emergency dispatcher, even though Michaela was always telling him that it wasn’t as big a deal as people made it out to be. A lot of the time it was just a whole lot of sitting around and waiting for the phone to ring, or taking crank calls. Marco refused to be dissuaded from the notion that his friend had one of the coolest jobs out there, and if she was honest with herself, Michaela wasn’t all that anxious to dissuade him from it either.
“Is that where you’re going now?” the woman asked Michaela.
She shook her head. “No, I just came off a shift. I’m going to go home and sleep.” She smiled shyly at the woman, finding that she wasn’t quite as intimidated as before. Foxhole bonding, she thought. Soon she’d even be talking to the punk kid, if she wasn’t careful.
“Did you say an hour?”
The voice came from behind her this time. She twisted uncomfortably on the hard plastic metro seat to find a clean-shaven man in his early thirties wearing an expensive brown woolen coat trimmed with something that looked like fur but might well be fake. He was holding a Blackberry in one hand an a stylus in the other, and had obviously just been consulting it. Yuppie, she concluded. Very yuppie. Probably worked as an accountant or a notary or something. He had a look of money about him, but not the kind of money that comes with power, like a CEO or a high-placed lawyer. For one thing, those kinds of people didn’t ride the metro: they had company cars.
“Yeah, about an hour,” she confirmed.
“Dammit.” He began jabbing at his Blackberry with the stylus, then almost as an afterthought turned back to her. “Uh, thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” she said dryly. People like this ass annoyed her even more than the teenagers who invaded her bus line on a regular basis. At least teenagers had the excuse of not knowing any better. Once you hit twenty-five, there was no excuse for being oblivious and rude. She sighed, shook her head, and tried to ignore him.
[...] I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
—T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
“Attention: une intervention des services d’urgence nous oblige à interrompre le service sur la ligne verte, entre les stations Angrignon et Honoré Beaugrand. La STM vous remercie de votre compréhension. D’autres messages suivront.”
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me!”
“What’s the holdup? What did they say?”
“They’ve interrupted the service on the green line.”
“Gee, ‘cause the metro slowing down and then coming to a complete halt didn’t tip me off to that. What else did they say?”
“Not much. Anyway, weren’t you listening?”
“Not really. Does anyone listen to those automated recordings?”
“I do.”
“Yeah, but you’re weird about that sort of thing.”
“Shut up, Marco.”
“Whatever you say.”
Marco folded his arms across his chest in that smug way that always made Michaela want to smack him as hard as she could —in the friendliest possible way, of course. She and Marco went way back, all the way to high school. Still, he was looking insufferably smug, his brown eyes twinkling with barely-contained humour in his swarthy face. She blew out her cheeks in a sigh of exasperation and began pulling off her gloves one finger at a time before shoving them unceremoniously into the upper pocket of her burgundy Kanuk coat.
“I don’t understand why you’re so warmly dressed, Mickey,” Marco obviously didn’t know when discretion was the better part of valour. He also blithely ignored the glare she directed at him. “It’s barely the beginning of November, and you’re dressed like it was forty degrees below and January. What are you going to do then?”
“Dress in more layers.”
“I don’t understand how someone born in Canada —in January, might I add— always manages to be cold no matter the weather.”
“It’s a gift from my mother: low blood pressure.”
“You know, if you exercised more, you wouldn’t have circulation problems.”
“I get plenty of exercise running for the bus in the morning. Besides, why exercise when the fine makers of Kanuk outdoors-wear can keep me warm artificially?”
“You may be thin enough now, Mickey, but when you’re forty-five and have some sort of cardio-vascular accident you’ll wish you had spent as much time in the gym as I do.”
“You’ll forgive me if being a wop with rippling muscles and gold chains around my neck isn’t one of my chief desires in life,” she mocked.
Marco managed to look insulted. “Hey, that chain was a present from my mother, and I would thank you not to insult her memory!”
“Your mother is still alive.”
“Well, it’s a crucifix chain, anyway, so, umm, quit mocking my religious beliefs.”
“Your argument is singularly weak, seeing that you removed the crucifix the first chance you got.”
Marco heaved a mock-sigh of resignation. “Fine, have it your way. How did this conversation get to be about me, anyway? I thought I was giving you a hard time for not exercising.”
“It’s a gift,” Michaela looked smug, then removed her woolen cap and shoved it into another pocket, then unzipped her coat. “Okay, now I’m getting really warm. Is this damned metro going to leave already, or what?”
“I don’t know. It’s only been about five minutes since they announced the interruption, right?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Around them, others were getting restless as well. It was too early in the afternoon for there to be a great many people on the metro: too late for the lunch crowd and too early for the hordes of school-aged kids who regularly invaded the public transit system after 3 o’clock with oversized schoolbags and ridiculously loud cell phones with annoying ring tones on which they shouted at their friends or sent text messages that blipped constantly. Now that the local cell phone companies had decided in their infinite wisdom (or, rather, their incessant quest for more money) to install cells inside the metro to give their customers access to the network between Lionel-Groulx and Berri-UQAM stations, the noise at rush hour was constant and overwhelming, not to mention annoying.
Michaela was grateful at least that her bizarre work schedule meant that she mostly avoided rush hour. If she never had to listen to another inane conversaion about boys or hair or how unfair life was, or about which girls were easy and which ones were, like, total ice queens, it would be too soon. Marco was busy stripping off his well-loved and weather-beaten leather jacket, revealing a tight grey t-shirt that stretched alarmingly over his chest muscles and which proudly announced “Foot Locker” in faded letters.
“Umm, excuse me?”
Michaela jumped as a hand brushed gently against her elbow. She turned to face a woman with mousy brown hair streaked with grey, who looked to be in her mid-to-late forties. Michaela had spotted her sitting in the double-seat opposite them, but hadn’t paid her much mind. With her ankle-length dingy grey down coat, shapeless brown cloth sack and her lopsided beret-like hat (also grey), the woman had simply faded to the back of her consciousness. Now she had slid over into the empty seat nearest them, and blinked owlishly at them behind an oversized pair of red-rimmed eyeglasses. Her eyes up close were bright blue, in startling contrast to the rest of her, which was nondescript at best, drab at worst. Her nose and cheeks were a delicate shade of red, perhaps the result of being out in the cold for too long.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. Could you tell me what the announcement said? I’m afraid I don’t speak any French.” Her voice was pretty, Michaela noted to her surprise: lilting and slightly musical, with a trace of an accent that she couldn’t quite place.
“Oh, uh, sure,” Michaela squirmed slightly. She didn’t really like talking to people she didn’t know face-to-face. That was why she had a job that kept all her outside contacts restricted to the telephone. “They just said that they had to stop the service on the green line because emergency services had to intervene somewhere,” she translated roughly.
“Some idiot tried to commit suicide, is what happened,” a punk kid who’d been slouching against the doors of the metro decided to throw in his two cents.
He looked like he ought to be a lot colder than he was, Michaela thought uncharitably, with tattered black BDU pants scuffed black hightops, and a worn black hoodie with crudely-drawn skulls and lightning bolts painted on. It looked like a home job. His hair was bright fuschia, and he looked like he had more metal than skin on his face. The woman in the grey coat shuddered, her cheeks growing more red as she did so.
“Really? How do you know?”
Michaela snorted. “That’s stupid. Some poor guy probably just had a heart attack or something.”
She knew it wasn’t true, but she also knew there was a reason the Société de Transport de Montréal didn’t like announcing metro suicides, and so she wasn’t about to confirm what the punk kid was saying. People who committed suicide in public, or who even just attempted it, usually spawned a slew of copycats in the following days. It was better all around if you kept the suicide under wraps. Metro suicides were particularly bad, she knew from the 911 calls she received once or twice a year: they almost never died, but got themselves electrocuted and mangled and usually damaged themselves for life. It was worse for the train operators, who were usually the first on the scene: they had to deal with the victim, maybe give first aid if they could (and if they weren’t too shocked at having nearly killed someone), and deal with their own feelings of guilt and horror afterward. Sometimes people really had no conception of the other lives they were ruining along with their own.
“No, it’s true,” Marco said, nodding vigorously. “Everyone knows that the ‘intervention of emergency services’ line is really just a euphemism for having to scrape some poor guy off the tracks.”
“Marco, you’re not helping,” Michaela kicked him in the ankle.
“Ow! What the hell, Mickey?”
“Just cut it out, would you? You’re freaking out the lady, here.”
“Oh, sorry.” Marco directed an apologetic glance at the woman in the grey coat, who had retreated with another exaggerated shudder.
She looked at Michaela. “Did they say when the service would start up again?”
Michaela shook her head. “No, sorry. They’ll probably announce it again in about ten minutes. Usually this kind of situation takes about an hour to resolve, though. They might be able to restore the power to one side of the line in about thirty minutes, depending on how serious things are.”
The woman’s bright blue eyes widened. “You certainly seem to know a lot about this sort of thing.”
Michaela felt her cheeks grow warm. “Oh, uh, yeah. I, uh, work for a 911 dispatch centre out in Longueuil. So, you know, we get these calls a few times a year.”
“That’s very impressive,” Michaela had thought that the woman’s eyes couldn’t possibly get any wider, but she was proved wrong. “I don’t think I could ever do that as a job. So many people in distress. It must be terribly stressful.”
“Mickey here thrives on stress,” Marco said proudly. He’d always been absurdly proud of the fact that his friend was an emergency dispatcher, even though Michaela was always telling him that it wasn’t as big a deal as people made it out to be. A lot of the time it was just a whole lot of sitting around and waiting for the phone to ring, or taking crank calls. Marco refused to be dissuaded from the notion that his friend had one of the coolest jobs out there, and if she was honest with herself, Michaela wasn’t all that anxious to dissuade him from it either.
“Is that where you’re going now?” the woman asked Michaela.
She shook her head. “No, I just came off a shift. I’m going to go home and sleep.” She smiled shyly at the woman, finding that she wasn’t quite as intimidated as before. Foxhole bonding, she thought. Soon she’d even be talking to the punk kid, if she wasn’t careful.
“Did you say an hour?”
The voice came from behind her this time. She twisted uncomfortably on the hard plastic metro seat to find a clean-shaven man in his early thirties wearing an expensive brown woolen coat trimmed with something that looked like fur but might well be fake. He was holding a Blackberry in one hand an a stylus in the other, and had obviously just been consulting it. Yuppie, she concluded. Very yuppie. Probably worked as an accountant or a notary or something. He had a look of money about him, but not the kind of money that comes with power, like a CEO or a high-placed lawyer. For one thing, those kinds of people didn’t ride the metro: they had company cars.
“Yeah, about an hour,” she confirmed.
“Dammit.” He began jabbing at his Blackberry with the stylus, then almost as an afterthought turned back to her. “Uh, thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” she said dryly. People like this ass annoyed her even more than the teenagers who invaded her bus line on a regular basis. At least teenagers had the excuse of not knowing any better. Once you hit twenty-five, there was no excuse for being oblivious and rude. She sighed, shook her head, and tried to ignore him.