His Tempest would be forced to wait, faute de mieux: he didn’t have the wherewithal. So first he would concentrate on the revenge.
How would it work? Would he lure Tony down into a dank cellar with the promise of a cask of Amontillado, then brick him up in the wall? But Tony wasn’t a foodie. He wasn’t much interested in gourmet eats and drinks for their own sakes: they pleased him only as status markers. And he would never be so stupid as to go down into a dark place with Felix unsupported by a couple of armed guards, since he would be well aware of Felix’s justified resentment.
Would Felix seduce Tony’s wife or, better, hint that some young stud had seduced her? But Tony’s wife was a showpiece made of frozen alabaster: she was most likely a robot, and unseducible. And, even suppose her invisible chastity belt could be safe-cracked, why be unfair to the innocent young stud, whoever he might be? Why bring down upon him the ire of Tony, now the wielder of considerable career-incinerating weaponry? Young studs had a half- life and should be allowed to enjoy their prime time in the swimming pools and scented sheets of the demi-matronly while that time was still theirs to enjoy.
Before wilt set in, before drooping, and an inability to focus.
Would he sneak into Tony’s house/office/favorite restaurant and spike Tony’s lunch with a toxic agent that would give Tony an incurable illness or inflict upon him a lingering and painful death? Then Felix could disguise himself as a doctor and appear in Tony’s hospital room and gloat. He’d read a murder mystery in which the victim had died from eating daffodil bulbs. They’d been disguised in an onion soup, as he recalled.
No, no. Mere fantasizing. Such revenges were far too melodramatic, and in any case well beyond his capabilities. He would have to be more subtle.
Know thine enemy, all the best authorities advised. He began to trace the movements of Tony: where he went, what he was doing, his pronouncements,
his television appearances. His list of achievements; Tony liked accumulating achievements, and was careful to ensure that they were acknowledged.
At first this indirect stalking was easy: all Felix needed to do was get the Makeshiweg papers—of which, in those days, there were two—and look up the theatrical news and the social notes. Tony had been much in demand for soirées and fundraisers at that time, and was an affable granter of interviews. Felix ground his teeth over the Arts Entrepreneur of the Year Award, then over the Scholastic Outreach Award, given to Tony for the Festival program that bussed kids in from the surrounding area and made them sit through Hamlet, whispering and giggling, as the bodies piled up onstage. That program had been Felix’s idea.
In fact, most of the items Tony was getting awards for had originated in the brain of Felix.
In Year Five of Felix’s exile, here was another award: the Order of Ontario.
La-de-da, Felix growled to himself. Another dingbat to wear on your lapel.
Imposter!
In Year Six, Tony changed direction. He resigned from the Festival and ran for political office, right in the town of Makeshiweg, where he was a familiar face in public life, and he won a seat in the provincial legislature and became an Honorable. The Heritage Minister was still Sal O’Nally, so now they were both in the same nest, no doubt assiduously feathering it. How cozy for both of them.
It wouldn’t be long before Tony would wiggle his way into Cabinet, thought Felix. Already he was being spoken of as up-and-coming. In his photographs, he had a ministerial air.
—
Then technology added a new telescope to Felix’s meager arsenal of spyware: the snoop gremlin, Google. Felix had once had a computer, but it had belonged to the Festival and had been impounded when Felix was deposed. For a while he’d lurked around in the Internet café in Wilmot, following Tony’s activities as best he could. He’d closed his work email account when he’d left the Festival— how galling it would have been to receive all those hypocritical messages of commiseration on it—but now he opened two new accounts, one for himself and another one for Mr. Duke, who had acquired a couple of credit cards. He thought about getting Mr. Duke a driver’s licence, but that would’ve been pushing it.
He felt he was becoming too visible in the Wilmot café—he might be suspected of watching porn—so he bought a cheap personal computer, second-
hand. He had a telephone line run into his hovel from the Maude household and used dial-up. But after a while cable was installed along his back road, so he upgraded to an Ethernet connection and a router, which increased both the speed and the privacy of his Internet access.
It was amazing how much you could learn about a person over the Net. There was Felix, alone in his neglected corner reading the Google Alerts, and there were Tony and Sal, bustling about in the world, not suspecting that they had a shadower; a watcher, a waiter, an Internet stalker.
What was Felix waiting for? He hardly knew. A chance opening, a lucky break? A pathway toward a moment of confrontation? A moment when the balance of power would lie with him. It was an impossible thing to wish for, but suppressed rage sustained him. That, and his thirst for justice.
—
He realized that his spying was a little deranged, though only a little. But he’d gradually been opening another space in his life that verged on full-blown lunacy.
It began when he was counting time by how old Miranda would be, had she lived. She’d be five, then six; she’d be losing her baby teeth; she’d be learning to write. That sort of thing. Wistful daydreaming at first.
But it was only a short distance from wistful daydreaming to the half-belief that she was still there with him, only invisible. Call it a conceit, a whimsy, a piece of acting: he didn’t really believe it, but he engaged in this non-reality as if it were real. He returned to his habit of checking out kids’ books from the Wilmot library, only now he read them out loud in the evenings. Partly he enjoyed it—his voice was still as good as it had ever been, it kept him in practice —but partly he was indulging his self-created illusion. Was there a small girl listening to him? No, not really. But it was soothing to think that there was.
When Miranda was five, six, seven, he helped her with her schoolwork; she was home-schooled, naturally. They’d sit at the Formica table, he in one of his old wooden chairs, she in the other one. “Six times nine?” he’d quiz her. She was so sharp! She almost never made a mistake.
They began having their meals together, which was a good thing because otherwise he might sometimes have forgotten about meals. She scolded him gently when he didn’t eat enough. Finish what’s on your plate, she would say to
him. Her own favorite was macaroni and cheese.
When she was eight, he taught her to play chess. She was a quick learner, and was soon beating him two times out of three. How seriously she would study the board, chewing on the end of the long braid she’d learned to make all by herself.
How delighted he would be, secretly, when she won, although he’d pretend to be downhearted. Then she would laugh, because she knew he was only fooling. If he really had been downhearted, she would have been all sympathy. Such an empathetic girl. He tried never to show his anger to her, the anger he was hoarding up against Tony, against Sal: it would have confused her. When he was following their antics on the Internet, muttering out loud to himself, she was always out of the room.
During the day she was often outside, playing in the field beside the house or in the woodlot at the back. He would see a cloud of butterflies lift in the meadow: she must have startled them. When blue jays or crows would make a fuss in the woods, he’d conclude that Miranda had been walking there. Squirrels chattered at her, grouse whirred away at her approach. In the dusk, fireflies marked her path, and owls greeted her with muffled calls.
In the winters, when the snow drifted in the laneway and the wind howled, she’d slip outside without a second thought. She didn’t dress as warmly as she ought to have done, despite his nagging about mittens, but nothing happened as a consequence: no colds, no flu. In fact, she was never ill, unlike himself. When he was sick she tiptoed around him, anxious; but he never had to worry about her, because what harm could possibly come to her? She was beyond harm.
She never asked him how they came to be there together, living in the shanty, apart from everyone else. He never told her. It would have been a shock to her, to learn that she did not exist. Or not in the usual way.
—
One day he heard her singing, right outside the window. He didn’t daydream it, the way he’d been semi-daydreaming up to then. It wasn’t one of his whimsical yet despairing fabrications. He actually heard a voice. It was not a consolation.
Instead, it frightened him.
“This has gone way too far,” he told himself sternly. “Snap out of it, Felix.
Pull yourself together. Break out of your cell. You need a real-world connection.”
