The Origin of Species Page 19

  Alex checked his mailbox. The weekly specials at Steinberg’s; a discount coupon from Hakim Optical; a solicitation from the Red Cross. Into the planter. But then—he could barely bring himself to actually sort it from the rest—a blue airmail envelope, with the telltale looping script. Tunvägen 3, Engelström. His heart was pounding. The letter had an uncommon bulk to it, a thickness, though rather than opening it at once he slipped it into his back pocket, not sure whether to heighten his anticipation or lessen his terror.

  One of the elevators had been out of service for nearly a week. Still out, he saw now, the door open into nothingness, a wooden barrier set in front of the exposed shaft and a vile odor drifting up from whatever abyss it led down to. The workmen he’d noticed earlier had vanished: it was positively Kafkaesque, how often these days Alex came across bits of disorder like this abandoned in medias res, as if all the work going on in the building was really just some elaborate piece of theater.

  He pressed the call button for the other elevator and waited a minute, then another, before beginning to itch with impatience. The air in the lobby felt muggy and close. Already Alex’s provisions, which had set him back nearly seventeen dollars, seemed to be teetering past the point of freshness.

  Alex knocked on the super’s door across from the elevators, then again.

  “Hold on to your knickers!”

  The door opened and Tony, the new super, stood smiling before him in a plaid bathrobe, spindly white legs poking out the bottom of it.

  At the sight of Alex his smile hardened: Alex was one of the troublemakers.

  “How can I help you, son?”

  Every time he saw Tony, Alex got the same bad taste in his mouth. He could see back into the suburban tidiness and faux-wood decorum of Tony’s apartment, the only place, it seemed, where he exercised anything like custodial aptitude. Back in Guy’s day the apartment had spewed smoke like a tire fire and the hall had been crammed with Molson empties, but the rest of the building had always looked as if Guy had just hosed it down with a power washer.

  “It’s the elevator,” Alex said, more petulantly than he’d wanted.

  “I’m afraid it’s still out.”

  “Not that one. The other one.”

  “Ah. It’s on service.”

  Alex tried to contain himself.

  “How can you put it on service when it’s the only one working?”

  Tony put on a little frown of affront.

  “Someone’s moving out, son. I’d have to do the same for yourself.”

  The bastard was rubbing it in his face. Every departure now, Alex knew, was one more lost from the cause.

  He couldn’t stop himself from asking.

  “Who is it?”

  “Some girl on the eighth.” Casually, as if it were a matter of no more than passing interest. “Lois, I think her name is.”

  Alex started up the stairs in disbelief. Lois was one of the last of the sane in the tenants’ association—if she’d cut a deal he’d never forgive her. There had been a moment at the beginning of this whole rental debacle when it had seemed the perfect political action, local, winnable, discrete, but instead it was turning into a kind of moral goulash, so that Alex wasn’t even sure anymore who the enemy was.

  By the third floor he’d taken off his jacket. The stairwell was featureless and gray, like a stairwell in a gulag prison or a nuclear silo. At the fourth, he heard a racket of hammering and drilling and tried to make out whether it was coming from his corner of the building—with the water, it had been just his column of apartments that had been affected, top to bottom, as if the building had had a stroke.

  That was how Alex thought of the place now, as this ailing body, though somehow the more work that was done, the worse things seemed to become. He was still clinging to the theory that this was all part of some strategy of harassment the new owners had, though it was getting harder and harder to distinguish between the malicious and the merely incompetent. Even the cash grab they’d tried when they’d taken over, sending out renewal notices with increases of fifteen or twenty percent, had seemed remarkably crude, almost naïve. Alex had felt a nice rush of socialist indignation when he’d got his own, and had gone so far as to call the Régie du logement and then to post a notice in the lobby. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE AN INCREASE! He guessed a lot of people might not realize that. There was a box right there on the renewal form you could check, and then it was up to the landlords to take their case to the Régie.

  Alex had more or less put the matter from his mind afterward, pleased with himself for actually having done his duty for once. But one evening a man appeared at his door in an ill-fitting sports coat and blue pants looking like a character out of a Beckett play. There was a thin film of sweat on his forehead.

  “We speak in English, yes?” he said, too amenably, which at once put Alex on his guard.

  Somehow the man—M. Cournoyer—managed to insinuate himself into Alex’s apartment. He had come to discuss Alex’s refusal of the proposed increase, he said, then immediately put up his hands to stay any protest.

  “Yes, yes, it’s very ’igh, of course, too ’igh maybe. But the building ’as many problems.”

  Alex did not like having this man in his apartment, did not like that, to avoid confrontation, he might end up making some compromise he had no wish to make.

  “I’d just like the Régie to decide,” he said. “I think that’s fair.”

  “Yes, the Régie, sometimes they say five percent instead of ten, but then sometimes they say twenty-five, you don’t know. It’s all depend on the building, you know, on the problems.”

  It was just talk, of course. But it was true that Alex hadn’t considered this twist.

  M. Cournoyer had arranged himself, uninvited, at Alex’s dining table. He took out Alex’s renewal notice.

  “You settle now,” he said, “instead of fifty dollar, only forty. It’s reasonable.” And right there in front of Alex he put a stroke through the new rent the landlords had proposed and scribbled in the lower amount.

  Alex shifted.

  “I think I’d rather just wait for the Régie.”

  M. Cournoyer made another stroke.

  “There. Thirty-five. That’s the last.”

  “I’d still rather wait.”

  The forced friendliness was wearing thin.

  “You wait, maybe it’s not good for you.”

  “All the same.”

  Cournoyer put the form back in his briefcase.

  “You are the one who put up the sign,” he said.

  “What?” But Alex felt suddenly panicked. “What sign?”

  “About the increase.”

  Alex was taken completely off guard. How could he have known that?

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Cournoyer motioned to the fridge, where Alex had taped a copy of the notice as a sort of trophy. Cournoyer had clearly seen it from the start.

  “It’s not permitted,” he said.

  “Sorry?”

  “To put up posters. It’s the building’s property. You can be evicted for that.”

  “You’ve got to be joking.”

  “We’ll see it, who’s joking. You sign now, it’s okay, otherwise it’s your problem.”

  Alex was practically trembling by now, though whether with rage or apprehension he wasn’t sure. Some part of him was ready to give in, to cut his losses. He could offer thirty.

  “I’d like you to leave now,” he said.

  Cournoyer stood.

  “You think it’s smart, what you’re doing, but we see it. You don’t sign, it’s okay, but I don’t know, maybe one day your water goes off, or the electricity, or the heat. We can make trouble for you, sir, you’re gonna see it.”

  When he’d gone Alex felt a strange mix of outrage and exhilaration. Surely the man had made a mistake, had handed Alex a case against him on a platter. But over the next few days, stories went around of people who’d actually signed
. The whole thing started to seem a lot more insidious then. They could pick people off like that, one by one; vulnerable people. Alex put another call in to the Régie, but after twenty minutes on hold he was informed, by someone clearly put out at having to speak English, that there were routines that had to be followed, forms that had to be submitted, rules of evidence that had to be adhered to. He’d been so proud of himself, putting up his little notice, but he saw now how out of his depth he’d been.

  He’d asked Esther about her renewal, but her father had already taken care of it.

  “He didn’t agree to the increase, did he?”

  “Oh, he knows about these things. He has apartments of his own.”

  And Alex hadn’t liked to pursue the matter after that, afraid her father might turn out to be some slumlord himself or, worse, just a reasonable businessman who had seen at once that the matter wasn’t worth wasting time over.

  He might just have crawled back into his hole at this point if the tenants’ association hadn’t started up. An organizer from a tenants’ advocacy group, a real Rosa Luxemburg type, called a meeting in the building and made it seem as if they were at the front lines of an all-out class war.

  “This sort of thing is happening all over the city. They jack the rents up, so right away the building’s worth twenty or thirty percent more than they paid for it, and then they flip it. But they have to have the signed agreements. They can’t sell the place if everything’s tied up at the rental board.”

  Everyone at the meeting had some story about Cournoyer. Alex thought someone might mention the notice he’d put up, but nobody did.

  “You should keep a record of everything,” the organizer said. “You’ve got this strong-arming, that’s good, is there anything else? Anything you can use?”

  Alex hadn’t said a word yet.

  “I think they discriminate,” he said.

  “How do you mean?”

  Already he regretted opening his mouth.

  “Just something the super said once. That he didn’t let blacks in and so on.”

  “He actually said that?”

  This was from a high-strung redhead who looked to be in the advanced stages of anorexia.

  “Something like that. I mean, he put it a bit more crudely.”

  “I can’t believe it. He actually said that?”

  “I’d be careful with something like this,” the organizer said. “It’s not that easy to prove. You’d have to build a case.”

  “How hard can it be?” the anorexic said. “You know, I’ve noticed that. That you never see blacks here.”

  Alex kept his head down when they were choosing an executive. He signed up for the membership drive, but then was surprised when he went around to his allotted floors at how resistant people were to him. More of them than he would have suspected had already signed after the original notice; others had actually cut deals with Cournoyer. It was clear at the next tenants’ meeting that the story was the same through the whole building. Some people had signed because they were old or they were afraid or they thought the increases reasonable, others didn’t care because they were moving out. The forty or so who’d come out to the first meeting had been whittled down to maybe half.

  The anorexic, Brenda, had finagled her way into the presidency.

  “It’s like they’re getting away with it. Maybe we should push on this discrimination thing.”

  “I dunno,” Alex said, uneasy. “That organizer wasn’t very enthusiastic.”

  “Yeah, I was actually a little surprised at that. I mean, she was Jewish, wasn’t she? You’d think she’d sympathize.”

  He should never have brought the matter up. For months his only relationship with the super had been to note from a distance the little subculture he formed in the building, but since Esther had entered Alex’s life, Guy had become a regular presence. He had all the charm of a Rottweiler, a manner no doubt calculated to ward off frivolous complaints, though with Esther, who called him almost daily, because a window had jammed or a tap was sticking or the toilet was making a funny noise, he retained a kind of journeyman’s commitment to service.

  “She’s a pain in the ass but she’s a good girl,” he’d said to Alex, in what seemed to pass for friendliness. “The Jews I don’t mind, but niggers, Arabs, people like that, I don’t let them in.”

  Alex doubted that Guy had even noticed the stony silence he had greeted this with. He ought to have said something, made his position clear, except that Esther was so dependent on Guy.

  “It didn’t exactly sound as if it was building policy,” he said at the meeting. “Just something the super did on his own.”

  “That doesn’t make it any better,” Brenda said.

  “I’m just saying it doesn’t really help us much.”

  All the same, Brenda managed to bully the issue through, and a letter was drafted to be sent to the owners. At least Alex’s name wasn’t mentioned—the last thing he needed was to have Guy coming after him with a crowbar. Alex figured the matter would just end up on a back burner like everything else, but instead the owners reacted with a moral swiftness that gave him pause: within a matter of days, a reply had come back saying Guy had been let go. No denials, no defense, just total capitulation. In the same letter the owners announced the dismissal of M. Cournoyer, based, as they said, on the complaints they’d received about him. In one fell swoop, they had effectively undermined the entire case against them.

  “But he was so nice,” Esther said, bereft at Guy’s departure. “He always came when I called.”

  “Maybe not so nice,” Alex said, but without much conviction. Guy had certainly been nice in the terms that made any sense to Esther: he showed up. Tony, on the other hand, she might call down to twice, three times, then again, and each time get only the same cheery assurance that he’d be by soon.

  The whole matter left him with such a sick feeling that he was all but ready to drop right out of the association. But that was when the troubles started. In a single week the power went out three times, wreaking havoc on Alex’s just-out-of-the-box Exec. Partner portable; then the water began to go off, for hours at a stretch, without notice or even a discernible pattern. All this was so eerily close to what Cournoyer had threatened that it seemed too obvious to be intentional. And yet; and yet. On July 1, the official date for lease renewals to take effect, there was a sudden mass exodus from the building, amidst rumors of buyouts, and the outages began to seem part of a careful plan to drive out the refuseniks.

  In the meantime the secretary of the tenants’ association had resigned, under mysterious circumstances, though it was clear she had clashed with Brenda. Alex ought to have given the whole matter a wide berth, but he was dating María by then, and had started his Amnesty work, and he couldn’t muster the complacence he would have needed to stay inert. It was logical that he should be secretary—he was an English major; he had his Exec. Partner—and it wasn’t long before he was firing off letters to the building’s owners in the same tone of dignified outrage as in his Amnesty letters. Brenda had managed to get hold of the owners’ actual names, though using them made him uneasy: Ruby, Shapiro, and Schwarz.

  With every letter he plodded off to the post office to send it double-registered, though all he ever got in reply was the pink proof-of-delivery card that came back, scribbled with what Alex assumed was some minor underling’s signature. But one day he got a phone call.

  “Is that Alex? It’s Richard Shapiro here.”

  It was as if one of the tyrants he sent his Amnesty letters to had phoned him. Shapiro, it seemed, wanted to meet.

  “I have to say your letters are pretty articulate compared to some of the ones I get.”

  Alex tried to gather his thoughts.

  “Maybe you should come to one of our tenant meetings.”

  “I don’t know. You know how those things are, it just turns into confrontation. I get the sense you’re someone reasonable.”

  Alex knew it was a mistake to a
gree to meet privately. But then he pictured Shapiro at one of their meetings, with the madwoman Brenda and the measly half-dozen others who usually showed up.

  “Nothing official,” Shapiro said. “Just, you know, to get a few things on the table.”

  They met not in the sort of glitzy downtown office Alex had imagined but in Alex’s building, in a room off the pool mezzanine that was little more than a storage closet, windowless and crammed with cleaning equipment and boxes of chemicals. Rather than some slick St. James Street type Shapiro was a baby-faced man, balding and a bit fleshy, who looked like he’d just stepped away from barbecuing in the back yard.

  “I appreciate you coming down,” he said, rising from a little metal desk to take Alex’s hand.

  He had a bunch of forms on his desk next to a half-eaten sub, including, Alex saw, his own renewal form, still with the strokes Cournoyer had made on it.

  “So what are you, an English major?”

  Alex felt put out at being so easily pegged.

  “Something like that.”

  “I did my Master’s here at Concordia, poli-sci. We were the ones who threw the computer stuff out the windows. I don’t know if you heard about that.”

  So he was an old hippie, then. Alex looked for some sign of sheepishness in him at what he’d become, but couldn’t spot any.

  “All that stuff with Cournoyer,” he was saying, “that was bad. We didn’t have any idea.”

  “So you’re willing to renegotiate with the people who signed?”

  “We’re open to that, sure. If it’s reasonable.”

  Alex didn’t know what he’d expected, exactly, what piece of his mind he’d been hoping to give to this man.