My October Read Free

that after, when Hugo was sitting up. He was sweating, but he knew where he was and everything. No worries there. The nurse shone a light in his eyes and checked his skull.”
    â€œEasy skull to check.” Luc hated the concentration-camp look.
    â€œUnlike ours.” Vien took a fistful of his own grey curls and shook them, smiling like a clown. “The nurse also gave him a lecture. Brain damage. Death. Told him in no uncertain terms how lucky he was.”
    â€œHow did he make himself faint?”
    â€œThere’s a whole procedure. You hyperventilate, basically. Then empty the lungs. Hugo can tell you the steps better than I can.”
    â€œRight.” There was a pause. “You got kids, Serge?”
    â€œFifteen hundred of them.”
    In other words, no. Luc frowned. “They’re overrated.”
    Vien honked again. He was wearing shiny black shoes and a cheap tie. His sports jacket was rumpled. He was what passed for authority at the Catholic school where they had once been friends, and now he was teaching Luc’s son. A small world: too small for words.
    So Hugo had pulled a prank. A stupid one, but stupidity was the essence of pranks in high school.
    â€œYou shouldn’t have taken this trouble,” Luc said. “You should have sent Hugo back to his desk and given him a detention. You probably won’t get any lunch now.”
    â€œThere’s a protocol at the school,” Vien explained. “If a kid faints, he gets sent to the infirmary and then home. No one picked up when we called your number. We were going to leave it at that, wait for you to call back, but Hugo told me you never pick up when you’re working.”
    Luc reddened. “My wife usually answers the telephone.”
    â€œBut she’s out of town, Hugo said.”
    â€œIn Toronto. Visiting her parents.”
    There was a pause while Vien digested this, but Luc wasn’tgoing to indulge him with any more personal information. Yes, his lifelong companion and helpmate was an Anglo. Yes, her parents lived in Toronto. Life was a bowl of paradoxes. Surely Vien had lived long enough to understand that.
    â€œYou do that every morning—unplug?”
    â€œAll day, sometimes,” said Luc. “Depending on how it’s going. Otherwise, I don’t get anything done. If someone needs to get in touch, they can do it through my agent.”
    Vien laughed, nodding as if impressed. If he felt guilty about his intrusion into Luc’s working day, it didn’t show. “I love your books,” he said. “I’ve read every one of them. It’s amazing.”
    â€œWhat’s amazing?”
    â€œThat you did it.”
    â€œWrote books?”
    â€œNot just books. Tanneur tanné, La mort d’un rêveur. You’re the voice of Quebec, Luc. That’s what they call you. The voice of a generation. Our generation. Les boomers . And I grew up with you. I knew you way back when.”
    â€œYou did,” said Luc, smiling magnanimously. This type of talk used to make him want to run. Now, he just let it wash over him. Water off a duck’s back. He had a talent, that was all. He could tell a story. But he still woke up at four A.M. worrying about money and the health of his prostate gland. His hair, formerly thick and black, was still going grey. The muscles of his stomach were still thinning and turning incrementally into fat. It wasn’t as though writing saved him from anything. At one time, he’d thought it might.
    This had changed when Hugo was born, so tiny and dark, so utterly foreign, that Luc had actually felt a shiver of revulsion. It shamed him now to remember. The birth of his son hadshown him how little control he had, not merely over extraneous things, but over intimate ones as well. Writing, he’d once thought, sharpened the sensibilities. It rearranged the interior world, making space for empathy and love.
    As he watched Hugo emerge