You will be neither swayed nor compromised by the modest honorarium attached for your kindness. However, there may be satisfaction in the sum to be administered at your discretion for the benefit of others.
Should you decline, these bequests shall be subsumed residual to my estate and distributed as the court deems appropriate.
I hope your placement within the line of largess will allow you to find in your heart the generosity to forgive me.
The enclosed document has been signed and witnessed. The notarized application of your signature will make it legal and binding.
Yours truly,
(Signed) Robert Griffin, LL.B, Ph.D.
All this for accepting her share of a scholarship! A macabre joke? Or had a dead man given her the power of absolution for unspecified wrongs?
Unfolding the legal document, she skimmed through. It seemed authentic. She was named sole executor, and her name was repeated throughout. Griffin’s signature was witnessed by Eleanor Drummond and dated the day before yesterday. The full will would be made accessible to her upon signing. Contingent to her acceptance, respective parcels of ten and twenty-five million dollars (Canadian) were designated for the Policemen’s Benevolent Fund and to establish the Mary Bingham Carter-Griffin Institute of Semiology.
Nothing for a koi sanctuary!
She picked up the Bakelite telephone receiver from its antique cradle, the first rotary-dial phone to be installed in her mother’s family home. It still bore a label with the original number: OLive 3, 4231. This was from a time apparently before people had the mnemonic capacity to remember seven digits. We push buttons now, she thought, and still say “dial.” She remembered her father’s number from when he was a child: 557-J. He had once asked the operator to speak to his grandmother — no other information than that — and she had put him through. Every call with this phone, its innards updated, invoked a rich fluttering of images and thoughts. It was like a talisman of ancestral memories.
“Morgan,” she said when he answered.
“What?” His voice was thick with sleep.
“I’ve got to talk —”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, but —”
He hung up.
She called back. “Morgan, listen —”
“You’re not hurt, not in danger?”
“No, but —”
He hung up again.
She had once called him in the small hours of the night after wakening from a nightmare; she was weeping and residual images of violence were still flooding her mind, refusing to coalesce into the shattered narrative from which she had emerged, refusing to fade. “Morgan,” she had said into the phone beside her bed, into the darkness. “Help me.”
“Turn on the lights,” he had told her. How had he known? She was afraid the walls might be drenched in blood; she was afraid of the light.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Turn on the lights, Miranda. You’ve been dreaming.”
She tried to tell him about the nightmare. Her voice was tremulous. She could only remember shrieking, and terrible silence, fragments of horror, images of shattered flesh.
“I’ve been there,” he said. “We see too much. You can’t suppress horror forever, Miranda. Are you in bed? You relax and just listen. Did you ever consider, during surgery maybe you feel the scalpel at work? Anaesthetic isn’t a painkiller. It just snuffs out the memories of what you’ve been through. Dreams are like that — they absorb the pain. It isn’t the nightmare. It’s waking up in the middle. Doctors have nightmares about patients on the operating table becoming suddenly conscious. Ambulance drivers and firemen…”
He let his voice drone, reassuring her with empathy and morbid detachment, and then he told her to lie back with the phone on the pillow beside her and try to empty her mind.
After a while she wasn’t sure whether the sounds of breathing were her own. “Are you still there, Morgan?”
“Yeah, you go to sleep.”
And she did. And when the natural light of morning filled the room, she awoke with no recollection of further violence. She mumbled into the phone beside her, “You still there?”
“Yeah. You have morning breath.”
“Thanks, Morgan. It’s okay now. See you at work.”
“G’night,” he said, and a dial tone displaced the open line.
“Good morning,” she had said into the room. “Good morning, David.”
Now she grabbed the black receiver again and dialled his number. It rang for a long time, then he picked up.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was taking a pee. So what’s the crisis?”
Morgan listened, envisioning his partner in bed. It made him feel lonely. He was sitting on the blue sofa in his living room in boxers and a T-shirt. The city through open blinds loomed under a canopy of dismal light that erased the stars.
“He doesn’t say who’s going to do it? He doesn’t say why?”
“No,” she said.
“He doesn’t say how he knows?”
“No.”
“The mistress, Eleanor Drummond, she said nothing?”
“No.”
“She witnessed a bizarre codicil to her lover’s will. He dies. She says nothing?”
“Yes.”
“He couldn’t anticipate you’d be on the case, Miranda.”
“I wonder if he knew how he would die?”
“Surrounded by koi?”
“He seems almost to welcome it.”
“He accepts — there’s a difference.”
“He doesn’t say why he’s picked me or how we connect.”
“You don’t remember him? Nothing?”
“Complete blank. When I heard his name today — I mean, WASP names are always familiar, you know what I mean? There are only so many to go around. But I never saw him before. His face in the class photo is indistinct. It was a grad course and I was an undergraduate. Everyone was older. He must have been in his forties if he’s the guy in the pond. Morgan, I was the only undergraduate in linguistics to receive a graduate award. I noticed everything, everything.”
“I got a philosophy scholarship in my last year. I didn’t use it, either.”
“But this is not about you.” She waited for a response, then decided to override his silence in case he was sulking. “Griffin wants the Institute to be Semiology not Semiotics — in deference to Sandhu’s Continental bent, I assume.”
“It’s extortion, you know.”
“If I’m not onside, the Benevolent Fund loses big and the Canadian future of signifiers and signs is in peril. Morgan, maybe he didn’t want to save himself.”
“Or maybe that’s what this is all about — saving himself.” They both considered the implications; the quiet of their shared breathing held them together. “Chateau Mouton Rothschild came out with a Balthus line drawing on the label of its 1993 vintage — a naked prepubescent vixen, and a threat to neo-puritan propriety. Outside of Europe the vintage was marketed with a blank label. And that’s the one collectors want. Not the Balthus. They covet the empty label.”
“Which only has meaning if you know