Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [110]
She runs her fingers over Billy’s forehead, his nose, his gently smiling mouth; he doesn’t know it, but this touching she does is not only tender, not only compassionate, but possessive. Although he is not a prisoner, he is in a way a prisoner of war. It’s war that has brought him here, war that keeps him in hiding, war that makes him stay put. She can’t help thinking of him as a captive; her captive, because his very existence here depends on her. He is hers, to do with as she will, as much hers as if he were a traveller from another planet, trapped on Earth in this dome of artificial interplanetary air that is her house. If she were to ask him to leave, what would happen to him? He’d be caught, deported, sent back, to where the air is heavier. He would implode.
He might as well be from another planet, because he’s from the United States; not only that, but from some dim and esoteric part of it, as mysterious to Charis as the dark side of the moon. Kentucky? Maryland? Virginia? He’s lived in all three places, but what do those words mean? Nothing to Charis, except that they verge on the South, a word also lacking in solid content. Charis has a few images connected with it – mansions, wisteria, and, once upon a time, segregation – she has seen movies, back in her other life, before she was Charis – but Billy does not seem to have lived in a mansion or to have segregated anybody. On the contrary, his father was almost run out of town (which town?) for being what Billy calls a “liberal,” which is not at all the same thing as the solid, the orthodox, the bland-faced and interchangeable Liberals that appear on Toronto election posters with such stultifying monotony.
The United States is just across the lake, of course, and on clear days you can almost see it – a sort of line, a sort of haze. Charis has even been there, on a high-school day trip to Niagara Falls, but that part of it looked disappointingly similar; not like the part Billy comes from, which must be very strange. Strange, and more dangerous – that much is clear – and maybe because of that, superior. The things that happen there are said to matter in the world. Unlike the things that happen here.
So Charis runs her fingers over Billy, gloating a little, because here he is, in her bed, in her hands, her very own mythological creature, odd as unicorns, her very own captive draft dodger, part of a thousand headline stories, part of history, tucked away in secret in her house, the house for which she alone has had to sign the rental lease because nobody must know Billy’s name or where he is. Some of the draft dodgers have visas, but others – such as Billy – don’t, and once you’re inside this country you can’t get a visa, you’d have to go back across the border and apply from there, and then you’d be nabbed for sure.
Billy has explained all this; also that the Mounties are not really the Mounties of Charis’s childhood, not the picturesque men on horseback, in red uniforms, upright and true, who always get their man. Instead they are devious and cunning and in cahoots with the U.S. government, and if they put their finger on Billy he’s a dead duck, because – and she must never tell this to anyone, even his friends here don’t know about it – dodging the draft wasn’t the only thing he did. What else? He blew things up. A couple of people too, but they were an accident. That’s why the Mounties are after him.
If he’s lucky they’ll go through the extradition process, and he might have a chance. If unlucky they’ll just tip off the CIA and Billy will be kidnapped, some dark night,