Primary obsessions, p.6
Primary Obsessions, page 6
“Tell Sanjay that he hasn’t done anything wrong. And that he should be as honest with you as he can be.”
For the first time, Supriya’s face turned to anger.
“And what is that supposed to mean? What are you suggesting, Doctor?”
“Sanjay will know what I mean, Supriya. Please trust me.”
“Trust,” Supriya said with an acid smile, as though the very concept were an affront. “I have to take care of my son.”
Supriya moved through the restaurant at the fastest pace possible without running, turned towards her car parked somewhere along Hastings, and was gone. Arwa had made her way over to the table, and she reached a hand out to Annick’s elbow.
“Is everything okay, Annick?”
“No,” Annick said, shaking her head. “No. Things are really, really bad.”
* * *
Rather than booking another car share, Annick decided to take one of the creaking electric cable buses running westbound along Hastings Street, through the sedimentary layers of Vancouver’s history of class war, falling fortunes and renewed leases on life: along the thoroughfare were blocks of the city as it had once been, bruised and bruising, worse for wear, and there were glossed and polished blocks that had largely shed the gravity of the city’s social past, with specialty cheese shops and Italian scooter dealerships, and in between there were aspirational blocks, in transition between the two, with well-guarded convenience stores abutting condo marketing storefronts and juice companies. Along the north side of the street, across from the Finnish steam baths that had been there since 1926—and whose private saunas had been the site of Annick and Philip’s fourth date, and venue for their first physical intimacies (and second and third, depending on how you counted)—Annick caught sight of a thin, stylish neon peach sign spelling, in cursive, “The O.K. Pizza & Ravioli Company: Est. 2017.” Before even realizing what she was doing, Annick pulled the bell.
As the engine noise of the cable-powered bus slowly died, the driver lurching the vehicle towards the bus stop at a slant, Annick felt a pounding in her ears that she tried to ignore. It was true—this wasn’t her business. She had no authority to ask Trevor Manning any questions, nor even any particular reasons to think that he’d done it, despite the recent altercation at the club where Jason and his best friend bounced. Without particularly understanding why, though, she felt like she owed it to Sanjay.
Inside, O.K. Pizza looked like almost every other restaurant in any other part of the world, with found elements from a real or imagined industrial past burnished to decorative beauty. A long-beam counter separated the dining area from an enormous, wood-burning pizza oven done in colourful mosaic, set apart from three large, silver tanks for brewing beer by an open-concept kitchen in the middle. TV screens bore the whimsical, locally inspired names of various craft brews—Ross Street IPA; East Van Cross Pilsner; Michael J. Hops Witbier—as well as ever-dwindling percentage numbers indicating how much of each beer was left.
Annick was approached by an enthusiastic and forgettably beautiful young man with red cheeks and a table towel in his hand.
“Hi! This your first time here?”
“It is, yeah,” said Annick, smiling winningly. “The pizza’s just okay?”
“Naw, we get that all the time. The O.K. stands for Okanagan.”
“Ah, gotcha.”
“The boss is a Kelowna boy.”
“That’s Trevor, right?”
“Yeah! You know Trevor?”
“Actually, I was hoping that maybe I could speak to him?”
The waiter had a face that didn’t much register confusion, because a kind of blank, open, questioning look was its default. He pushed through, his smile faltering only briefly.
“Are you looking for a job?”
“Um,” said Annick, not sure how she planned to approach asking Manning about his altercation with Jason MacGregor, not sure how she would assess whether or not he was capable of murder. “Yeah.”
“Hold on one second,” said the young man, confidently in the saddle again and heading off towards another corner of the large dining area.
She would scrutinize Manning’s physical bearing, his demeanour—any suggestion of seething roughness, of potential violence, even a seething anger, like Supriya’s. She’d try to scan for any signs of the fallout from a fight, black eyes or scraped hands. When she’d exhausted all of that, she would float Jason MacGregor’s name, mention the nightclub, anything that might twig an incriminating response.
“You were expecting someone else?”
Annick must have let her face show the full range of her surprise when a thin, stern-faced middle-aged man of medium height and conventionally gay presentation put his hand out for a cold and cursory shake.
“Oh, no, sorry, I just—I thought he was going to get Trevor.”
Clinically, without any lust or desire, the man took Annick in head to toe, with a special emphasis on chest to knees, and somehow it felt even more objectifying than if he had seemed to enjoy it.
“How long have you been waitressing?”
“Me? I don’t really—I mean, it’s…”
Her interviewer stretched his eyebrows up impatiently, jutting out his chin.
“Well?”
“I was actually—is Trevor here?”
“No.”
“Oh. Is, um—do you know if he’s coming back soon?”
At this, the manager crossed his arms across his thin chest, his face tightening in a mask of skeptical contempt.
“And sorry, why would I provide private information about the whereabouts of our employees to someone just in off the street?”
“Well, he’s not your employee, he’s your boss,” Annick said, finding her footing now, lofted by the rudeness of her interlocutor into an adrenaline sharpness. “And we grew up together in Kelowna and I was hoping to surprise him. Sorry, can I please have your name?”
The man’s countenance dissolved instantly and reconfigured entirely in obsequious and conspiratorial friendliness. “Oh, I am so sorry—Aiden said you were looking for a job! Meanwhile, I’m thinking, ‘If she can afford a suit this nice, what’s she need this job for?’ Right?”
Annick smiled perfunctorily. “Is he here?”
“Oh no, sweetie—Trevor’s still on the Amalfi.”
“The Amalfi Coast?”
Her eager new friend nodded. “Left a week ago, not back for another two.”
“Shit.”
“Aw, I know. I’d be happy to tell him you came by? What was your name again?”
“Sam,” said Annick, smiling through her frustration at losing the suspect who was never really a suspect, angry at herself again for playing private investigator when she had no business butting in and no idea of what it was she was doing. “Sam Spade.”
9
There was something about a pour-over coffee that felt perversely ecstatic for Annick—an ecumenical mix of the dark, sensual caffeination of Catholic café societies with the deferred gratification of the Protestant ethic. The three minutes during which Annick hung her crewcut over the counter at Calibre Coffee—bleary-eyed and aching with want as a barista still committed to a woolly toque–wearing aesthetic in the midst of summer poured scalding water through the magic beans—were the longest three minutes of her day. The longest, but in some ways the most fulfilling. Here were a body and a mind screaming to her that they couldn’t last another second without coffee, and here she was forcing them to.
Today there was the added wait of the walk to the seats out front, because lo, the heavens had parted: Dr. Annick Boudreau had the morning off, and she was ordering her coffee to stay. She slipped her big tortoiseshell sunglasses over her eyes, triumphantly returned a flirtatious smile from a woman who couldn’t have been more than twenty-two and sat down on a wooden bench just off the eastern wall of the red and yellow Dominion Building, a historic piece of ketchup-and-mustard Edwardian architecture that had once been the tallest building in the British Empire, and whose overhang now kept pot-smokers dry on rainy days.
Annick nearly checked her phone before taking her first sip, then decided that she had delayed gratification for long enough already, and that she had suffered sufficiently in order to enjoy her due. Every one of the tasting notes that, on her more cynical days, she assumed they must be pulling out of the air, today stood up on her tongue and proudly declared its presence: tones of hazelnuts and persimmon, dark chocolate and post-war compromise; lavender, citrus and Mom and Dad getting back together. She must have been showing the full extent of her shuddering enjoyment of those first few sips, because when she looked back at the twenty-two year old, she was blushing.
Over the years, Annick had had to train herself to allow for moments of complete liberation from the suffering of others, so that she could more effectively attend to it in the other hours of the day. It was a lesson she had learned years ago from her practicum supervisor, Dr. Philomena Conte, a woman who’d been at it so long she’d practically been able to tell Jung he was too soft on the Nazis in real time. Dr. Conte had held on fiercely to the non-sentimentality of her weather-beaten Calabrian grandparents, trying to replicate the steady hand with which they had slaughtered beloved pigs in the course of her own more emotionally sensitive labours. Annick had reported to her supervisor that she’d found herself crying, hours after a session with a young woman whose equally young husband had died. Dr. Conte had been less than indulgent in her reply.
“You try to carry the ocean with you, all you’re gonna do is drown,” Philomena had told her, and Annick had never had the courage to ask if that was a certified, heirloom aphorism or just a diamond that she had squeezed by force out of the coal of psychological practice. Regardless, the lesson had stuck. Some of the time.
Halfway through her cup, though, Annick allowed herself to think it all through one more time. If someone who was neither Sanjay nor Jason nor the avenging millionaire Trevor Manning had bled in the room, that person was almost certainly the one who’d opened Jason’s throat. Supriya hadn’t mentioned anything about them having found a murder weapon, and clearly that would be in Sanjay’s favour. It would have been someone that Jason would have let into the house, someone he knew. Someone he would have struggled with, been able to briefly overpower, or at least wound badly. She smiled ruefully, feeling idiotic. Of course.
Manning had seemed such an obvious candidate that Annick had entirely overlooked Jason’s girlfriend, his partner in their mutually destructive amour fou. Given the dramatic cleavages between the couple, the thunderstorm clashes and recouplings that Sanjay had recounted, didn’t it stand to reason that the girl might finally have snapped off from the tether that had provided all that magical tension? Statistically, it was much more likely to have started in the other direction, and that was still possible: say the girl came over, they went to the bedroom for some grab-ass, and along the way, it melted into one of their operatic confrontations. This time, though, it turned physical. Maybe he had attacked her with the knife, stopped in his tracks when he saw the blood, dropped the knife and begged forgiveness just long enough for her to stick him in the neck.
That may not have been exactly how it had happened, but if Annick could come up with it, surely the girl’s lawyer could spin something similarly convincing. The poor thing was probably hiding, terrified, but once Sanjay explained his OCD and allowed his lawyer to call Annick in to clarify the thought journal, they would find her and the truth would get out—or a version of it that might even allow the girlfriend to claim that she had acted in self-defence. The more she played it over in her mind, the more sense it made.
At the end of the thought, Annick heard a surreal ping, as though she’d guessed something correctly in a cartoon; it was a full two seconds before she realized that it had been an incoming email on her phone.
The message had the subject line COMMENT? and it came from Ryan Devlin, the CBC producer who had arranged the panel with the screenwriter. Reading the body of the email, Annick had the same instant, painful nausea she’d experienced the time the handle end of a hockey stick had speared her stomach in the corner of the elementary school gym.
Hi Dr. Boudreau—
Wondering if you are available to speak on a panel this afternoon, preceded by a radio one-on-one if we could, about the whole Sanjay Desai mental health thing?
Please give me a ring,
Ryan
Just exactly what fucking Sanjay Desai mental health thing was he talking about? Annick was across Hastings Street in seconds, shooting past the World War I memorial at Victory Square before she even realized that she was running to the CBC building. She hadn’t even told Cedric, hadn’t even told Philip, that Sanjay Desai was her patient. How in sweet hell was it possible that a journalist from the public broadcasting corporation was now asking her to speak on TV and radio about his mental health? As she sped up Cambie Street, past the Queen Elizabeth Theatre and into the shadow of the Roman Colosseum–shaped library building, Annick could see Dr. Conte shaking her head derisively.
“You’re losing it, kid.”
Barely able to speak as she struggled for breath, Annick asked the security guard first in French, then in English, then in French again, to call Ryan to the front lobby, regardless of what he was doing. A few minutes later, after she’d very nearly caught up to all of her breathing, her heart rate now slightly below that of a hummingbird, Ryan waltzed into the front lobby with a look of relaxation and calm on his face that was almost offensive.
“Hey, look at this—panellist is here in thirty minutes or it’s free…”
“Ryan, what the hell was that email about?”
In an instant, Ryan’s face was no longer offensive.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean what do I mean? How does my name come up in conjunction with Sanjay Desai?”
“I mean, no particular reason, except that you’re our mental health gal,” Ryan answered, then realized he’d said “gal.” “Expert. You’re—you always, you’re the first call we make when we need an expert to come in and talk about mental health, or mental health stigma. And this other guy’s Facebook post, the victim’s friend? It’s already gone viral. It’s insane.”
Annick winced as hard as she could, but no second coffee materialized in her hands—she would have to cut through her obliterating confusion by other means.
“Ryan, I don’t know what you are talking about. What friend? What Facebook post?”
“You telling me you haven’t checked the news this morning?”
“I had the morning off. It’ll be my last one until I retire, I promise. Just start at the beginning and pretend I’m coming out of a coma.”
“The kid they arrested the other day, he killed his roommate—allegedly killed his roommate. The kid’s name is Sanjay Desai, mid-twenties, student out at UBC. They’re holding him because they figure it’s open and shut. He’d written down violent fantasies in a diary, and he was washing off when the cops got there.”
Relief flooded into every corner of Annick’s body. Ryan seemed to have no idea that he was her patient.
“But the kid who got killed, he worked at a club, downtown, Babylon Rivers? Basically it’s like a part nightclub, part strip club and, unofficially, it sounds like basically a brothel maybe, anyway sex parties and all of it.”
“Okay. I feel like maybe we’re getting off course here…”
“Hey, not fair. You said coma.”
Annick gave a concessionary nod.
“Anyway, the kid who got killed was a doorman at this club, and one of the other bouncers, his buddy, has posted this absolutely venomous, like, screed on Facebook about how our society coddles people with mental illness, refuses to protect normal people—the thing’s been liked by twenty thousand people, re-shared like five thousand times.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
Ryan fished his cellphone out of the front pocket of his tan jeans. “Here,” he said, offering it to Annick. She took it in her hands, and read. The status was next to a profile photo of a man named Mike Collis, who looked big even in a thumbnail image, wearing dark sunglasses and holding a large fish.
I have had it political correctness can absolutely go fuck it self because I just lost the best buddy I ever had in my life to a ***violent*** *****mentally ill scumbag murderer. O sorry I forgot on the news your supposed to say “allegedly” but fuck that Ill say his name****** Sanjay Desai murdered my best friend Jason Macgregor RIP. Slit his throat open like godamed lamm to the sloghter. I dont care if some guys say crying is fagot fuck that I cried my eyes out all damm night. If theres one thing worse than loosing a friend to death or should I say *********murder****** its knowing that they could of stopped it before it ever happened. Ya thats right Sanjay ““scumbag’’’’Desai is fucked in the head and Jason knew it and told it to his landlord this guy is mentally ill officially. Sorry I guess thats the politically correct way of saying nut job but even tho Jason was scared of this pysco the landlord said his human rights were in viollation if they kicked him out. Sorry this is where political correctness landed us too where mentally ills have more rights than a normal person and we are at there disposure plane and simple. When are the rest of us gonna just say enough I hope that day will soon to come but its already too late for my best friend. *********RIP***** my brother Jason will never forget you or the life you lead. Your loved in are hearts and maybe Canada will finally get the wake up call that its not mental illness its just plane crazy and the rest of us have rights to and thats defending ourselves I miss you brother
Annick stared at the phone for a few seconds after she’d read the status a third time. Without looking up, she handed it back to Ryan.
“So… can you do the panel?”
Ryan regretted the question the moment Annick met his gaze, everything perfectly still and calm except for the wall of rage covering each of her eyes like cataracts.
For the first time, Supriya’s face turned to anger.
“And what is that supposed to mean? What are you suggesting, Doctor?”
“Sanjay will know what I mean, Supriya. Please trust me.”
“Trust,” Supriya said with an acid smile, as though the very concept were an affront. “I have to take care of my son.”
Supriya moved through the restaurant at the fastest pace possible without running, turned towards her car parked somewhere along Hastings, and was gone. Arwa had made her way over to the table, and she reached a hand out to Annick’s elbow.
“Is everything okay, Annick?”
“No,” Annick said, shaking her head. “No. Things are really, really bad.”
* * *
Rather than booking another car share, Annick decided to take one of the creaking electric cable buses running westbound along Hastings Street, through the sedimentary layers of Vancouver’s history of class war, falling fortunes and renewed leases on life: along the thoroughfare were blocks of the city as it had once been, bruised and bruising, worse for wear, and there were glossed and polished blocks that had largely shed the gravity of the city’s social past, with specialty cheese shops and Italian scooter dealerships, and in between there were aspirational blocks, in transition between the two, with well-guarded convenience stores abutting condo marketing storefronts and juice companies. Along the north side of the street, across from the Finnish steam baths that had been there since 1926—and whose private saunas had been the site of Annick and Philip’s fourth date, and venue for their first physical intimacies (and second and third, depending on how you counted)—Annick caught sight of a thin, stylish neon peach sign spelling, in cursive, “The O.K. Pizza & Ravioli Company: Est. 2017.” Before even realizing what she was doing, Annick pulled the bell.
As the engine noise of the cable-powered bus slowly died, the driver lurching the vehicle towards the bus stop at a slant, Annick felt a pounding in her ears that she tried to ignore. It was true—this wasn’t her business. She had no authority to ask Trevor Manning any questions, nor even any particular reasons to think that he’d done it, despite the recent altercation at the club where Jason and his best friend bounced. Without particularly understanding why, though, she felt like she owed it to Sanjay.
Inside, O.K. Pizza looked like almost every other restaurant in any other part of the world, with found elements from a real or imagined industrial past burnished to decorative beauty. A long-beam counter separated the dining area from an enormous, wood-burning pizza oven done in colourful mosaic, set apart from three large, silver tanks for brewing beer by an open-concept kitchen in the middle. TV screens bore the whimsical, locally inspired names of various craft brews—Ross Street IPA; East Van Cross Pilsner; Michael J. Hops Witbier—as well as ever-dwindling percentage numbers indicating how much of each beer was left.
Annick was approached by an enthusiastic and forgettably beautiful young man with red cheeks and a table towel in his hand.
“Hi! This your first time here?”
“It is, yeah,” said Annick, smiling winningly. “The pizza’s just okay?”
“Naw, we get that all the time. The O.K. stands for Okanagan.”
“Ah, gotcha.”
“The boss is a Kelowna boy.”
“That’s Trevor, right?”
“Yeah! You know Trevor?”
“Actually, I was hoping that maybe I could speak to him?”
The waiter had a face that didn’t much register confusion, because a kind of blank, open, questioning look was its default. He pushed through, his smile faltering only briefly.
“Are you looking for a job?”
“Um,” said Annick, not sure how she planned to approach asking Manning about his altercation with Jason MacGregor, not sure how she would assess whether or not he was capable of murder. “Yeah.”
“Hold on one second,” said the young man, confidently in the saddle again and heading off towards another corner of the large dining area.
She would scrutinize Manning’s physical bearing, his demeanour—any suggestion of seething roughness, of potential violence, even a seething anger, like Supriya’s. She’d try to scan for any signs of the fallout from a fight, black eyes or scraped hands. When she’d exhausted all of that, she would float Jason MacGregor’s name, mention the nightclub, anything that might twig an incriminating response.
“You were expecting someone else?”
Annick must have let her face show the full range of her surprise when a thin, stern-faced middle-aged man of medium height and conventionally gay presentation put his hand out for a cold and cursory shake.
“Oh, no, sorry, I just—I thought he was going to get Trevor.”
Clinically, without any lust or desire, the man took Annick in head to toe, with a special emphasis on chest to knees, and somehow it felt even more objectifying than if he had seemed to enjoy it.
“How long have you been waitressing?”
“Me? I don’t really—I mean, it’s…”
Her interviewer stretched his eyebrows up impatiently, jutting out his chin.
“Well?”
“I was actually—is Trevor here?”
“No.”
“Oh. Is, um—do you know if he’s coming back soon?”
At this, the manager crossed his arms across his thin chest, his face tightening in a mask of skeptical contempt.
“And sorry, why would I provide private information about the whereabouts of our employees to someone just in off the street?”
“Well, he’s not your employee, he’s your boss,” Annick said, finding her footing now, lofted by the rudeness of her interlocutor into an adrenaline sharpness. “And we grew up together in Kelowna and I was hoping to surprise him. Sorry, can I please have your name?”
The man’s countenance dissolved instantly and reconfigured entirely in obsequious and conspiratorial friendliness. “Oh, I am so sorry—Aiden said you were looking for a job! Meanwhile, I’m thinking, ‘If she can afford a suit this nice, what’s she need this job for?’ Right?”
Annick smiled perfunctorily. “Is he here?”
“Oh no, sweetie—Trevor’s still on the Amalfi.”
“The Amalfi Coast?”
Her eager new friend nodded. “Left a week ago, not back for another two.”
“Shit.”
“Aw, I know. I’d be happy to tell him you came by? What was your name again?”
“Sam,” said Annick, smiling through her frustration at losing the suspect who was never really a suspect, angry at herself again for playing private investigator when she had no business butting in and no idea of what it was she was doing. “Sam Spade.”
9
There was something about a pour-over coffee that felt perversely ecstatic for Annick—an ecumenical mix of the dark, sensual caffeination of Catholic café societies with the deferred gratification of the Protestant ethic. The three minutes during which Annick hung her crewcut over the counter at Calibre Coffee—bleary-eyed and aching with want as a barista still committed to a woolly toque–wearing aesthetic in the midst of summer poured scalding water through the magic beans—were the longest three minutes of her day. The longest, but in some ways the most fulfilling. Here were a body and a mind screaming to her that they couldn’t last another second without coffee, and here she was forcing them to.
Today there was the added wait of the walk to the seats out front, because lo, the heavens had parted: Dr. Annick Boudreau had the morning off, and she was ordering her coffee to stay. She slipped her big tortoiseshell sunglasses over her eyes, triumphantly returned a flirtatious smile from a woman who couldn’t have been more than twenty-two and sat down on a wooden bench just off the eastern wall of the red and yellow Dominion Building, a historic piece of ketchup-and-mustard Edwardian architecture that had once been the tallest building in the British Empire, and whose overhang now kept pot-smokers dry on rainy days.
Annick nearly checked her phone before taking her first sip, then decided that she had delayed gratification for long enough already, and that she had suffered sufficiently in order to enjoy her due. Every one of the tasting notes that, on her more cynical days, she assumed they must be pulling out of the air, today stood up on her tongue and proudly declared its presence: tones of hazelnuts and persimmon, dark chocolate and post-war compromise; lavender, citrus and Mom and Dad getting back together. She must have been showing the full extent of her shuddering enjoyment of those first few sips, because when she looked back at the twenty-two year old, she was blushing.
Over the years, Annick had had to train herself to allow for moments of complete liberation from the suffering of others, so that she could more effectively attend to it in the other hours of the day. It was a lesson she had learned years ago from her practicum supervisor, Dr. Philomena Conte, a woman who’d been at it so long she’d practically been able to tell Jung he was too soft on the Nazis in real time. Dr. Conte had held on fiercely to the non-sentimentality of her weather-beaten Calabrian grandparents, trying to replicate the steady hand with which they had slaughtered beloved pigs in the course of her own more emotionally sensitive labours. Annick had reported to her supervisor that she’d found herself crying, hours after a session with a young woman whose equally young husband had died. Dr. Conte had been less than indulgent in her reply.
“You try to carry the ocean with you, all you’re gonna do is drown,” Philomena had told her, and Annick had never had the courage to ask if that was a certified, heirloom aphorism or just a diamond that she had squeezed by force out of the coal of psychological practice. Regardless, the lesson had stuck. Some of the time.
Halfway through her cup, though, Annick allowed herself to think it all through one more time. If someone who was neither Sanjay nor Jason nor the avenging millionaire Trevor Manning had bled in the room, that person was almost certainly the one who’d opened Jason’s throat. Supriya hadn’t mentioned anything about them having found a murder weapon, and clearly that would be in Sanjay’s favour. It would have been someone that Jason would have let into the house, someone he knew. Someone he would have struggled with, been able to briefly overpower, or at least wound badly. She smiled ruefully, feeling idiotic. Of course.
Manning had seemed such an obvious candidate that Annick had entirely overlooked Jason’s girlfriend, his partner in their mutually destructive amour fou. Given the dramatic cleavages between the couple, the thunderstorm clashes and recouplings that Sanjay had recounted, didn’t it stand to reason that the girl might finally have snapped off from the tether that had provided all that magical tension? Statistically, it was much more likely to have started in the other direction, and that was still possible: say the girl came over, they went to the bedroom for some grab-ass, and along the way, it melted into one of their operatic confrontations. This time, though, it turned physical. Maybe he had attacked her with the knife, stopped in his tracks when he saw the blood, dropped the knife and begged forgiveness just long enough for her to stick him in the neck.
That may not have been exactly how it had happened, but if Annick could come up with it, surely the girl’s lawyer could spin something similarly convincing. The poor thing was probably hiding, terrified, but once Sanjay explained his OCD and allowed his lawyer to call Annick in to clarify the thought journal, they would find her and the truth would get out—or a version of it that might even allow the girlfriend to claim that she had acted in self-defence. The more she played it over in her mind, the more sense it made.
At the end of the thought, Annick heard a surreal ping, as though she’d guessed something correctly in a cartoon; it was a full two seconds before she realized that it had been an incoming email on her phone.
The message had the subject line COMMENT? and it came from Ryan Devlin, the CBC producer who had arranged the panel with the screenwriter. Reading the body of the email, Annick had the same instant, painful nausea she’d experienced the time the handle end of a hockey stick had speared her stomach in the corner of the elementary school gym.
Hi Dr. Boudreau—
Wondering if you are available to speak on a panel this afternoon, preceded by a radio one-on-one if we could, about the whole Sanjay Desai mental health thing?
Please give me a ring,
Ryan
Just exactly what fucking Sanjay Desai mental health thing was he talking about? Annick was across Hastings Street in seconds, shooting past the World War I memorial at Victory Square before she even realized that she was running to the CBC building. She hadn’t even told Cedric, hadn’t even told Philip, that Sanjay Desai was her patient. How in sweet hell was it possible that a journalist from the public broadcasting corporation was now asking her to speak on TV and radio about his mental health? As she sped up Cambie Street, past the Queen Elizabeth Theatre and into the shadow of the Roman Colosseum–shaped library building, Annick could see Dr. Conte shaking her head derisively.
“You’re losing it, kid.”
Barely able to speak as she struggled for breath, Annick asked the security guard first in French, then in English, then in French again, to call Ryan to the front lobby, regardless of what he was doing. A few minutes later, after she’d very nearly caught up to all of her breathing, her heart rate now slightly below that of a hummingbird, Ryan waltzed into the front lobby with a look of relaxation and calm on his face that was almost offensive.
“Hey, look at this—panellist is here in thirty minutes or it’s free…”
“Ryan, what the hell was that email about?”
In an instant, Ryan’s face was no longer offensive.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean what do I mean? How does my name come up in conjunction with Sanjay Desai?”
“I mean, no particular reason, except that you’re our mental health gal,” Ryan answered, then realized he’d said “gal.” “Expert. You’re—you always, you’re the first call we make when we need an expert to come in and talk about mental health, or mental health stigma. And this other guy’s Facebook post, the victim’s friend? It’s already gone viral. It’s insane.”
Annick winced as hard as she could, but no second coffee materialized in her hands—she would have to cut through her obliterating confusion by other means.
“Ryan, I don’t know what you are talking about. What friend? What Facebook post?”
“You telling me you haven’t checked the news this morning?”
“I had the morning off. It’ll be my last one until I retire, I promise. Just start at the beginning and pretend I’m coming out of a coma.”
“The kid they arrested the other day, he killed his roommate—allegedly killed his roommate. The kid’s name is Sanjay Desai, mid-twenties, student out at UBC. They’re holding him because they figure it’s open and shut. He’d written down violent fantasies in a diary, and he was washing off when the cops got there.”
Relief flooded into every corner of Annick’s body. Ryan seemed to have no idea that he was her patient.
“But the kid who got killed, he worked at a club, downtown, Babylon Rivers? Basically it’s like a part nightclub, part strip club and, unofficially, it sounds like basically a brothel maybe, anyway sex parties and all of it.”
“Okay. I feel like maybe we’re getting off course here…”
“Hey, not fair. You said coma.”
Annick gave a concessionary nod.
“Anyway, the kid who got killed was a doorman at this club, and one of the other bouncers, his buddy, has posted this absolutely venomous, like, screed on Facebook about how our society coddles people with mental illness, refuses to protect normal people—the thing’s been liked by twenty thousand people, re-shared like five thousand times.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
Ryan fished his cellphone out of the front pocket of his tan jeans. “Here,” he said, offering it to Annick. She took it in her hands, and read. The status was next to a profile photo of a man named Mike Collis, who looked big even in a thumbnail image, wearing dark sunglasses and holding a large fish.
I have had it political correctness can absolutely go fuck it self because I just lost the best buddy I ever had in my life to a ***violent*** *****mentally ill scumbag murderer. O sorry I forgot on the news your supposed to say “allegedly” but fuck that Ill say his name****** Sanjay Desai murdered my best friend Jason Macgregor RIP. Slit his throat open like godamed lamm to the sloghter. I dont care if some guys say crying is fagot fuck that I cried my eyes out all damm night. If theres one thing worse than loosing a friend to death or should I say *********murder****** its knowing that they could of stopped it before it ever happened. Ya thats right Sanjay ““scumbag’’’’Desai is fucked in the head and Jason knew it and told it to his landlord this guy is mentally ill officially. Sorry I guess thats the politically correct way of saying nut job but even tho Jason was scared of this pysco the landlord said his human rights were in viollation if they kicked him out. Sorry this is where political correctness landed us too where mentally ills have more rights than a normal person and we are at there disposure plane and simple. When are the rest of us gonna just say enough I hope that day will soon to come but its already too late for my best friend. *********RIP***** my brother Jason will never forget you or the life you lead. Your loved in are hearts and maybe Canada will finally get the wake up call that its not mental illness its just plane crazy and the rest of us have rights to and thats defending ourselves I miss you brother
Annick stared at the phone for a few seconds after she’d read the status a third time. Without looking up, she handed it back to Ryan.
“So… can you do the panel?”
Ryan regretted the question the moment Annick met his gaze, everything perfectly still and calm except for the wall of rage covering each of her eyes like cataracts.
