Читать книгу The Slip - Mark Sampson - Страница 6

I would have run to little Naomi when she cried out, except I had to get the poppy to stay on. That seemed paramount as I stood in the master bedroom at 4 Metcalfe Street, getting ready for my TV appearance. The producer at CBC’s Power Today had emailed us all with her fourth reminder since Friday morning. Okay, folks: We’re in Remembrance Day mode as of Monday, so we ask all on-air guests to have the poppy prominently displayed for broadcast. We won’t have a box of them in the studio yet, so please bring your own. Should go on the left, over your heart. Yes, yes. I had a track record for being one of these careless dolts who loses four or five poppies to the wind and just gives up somewhere around November 7. I im­agined hundreds of those plastic-and-felt florets I’d bought over the years clogging the gutters of Cabbagetown and the Annex, and the goddamn veterans counting up their gold like Scrooge McDuck. The things were clearly engineered to fall off. It became critical, in that moment, to get it fastened correctly. More critical than whatever else I planned to wear — brown tweed over blue shirt and some pleasantly centrist slacks — or my efforts to sooth the ginger flare of comb-over that sprang across my skull like the facehugger from Alien. (Cheryl Sneed, my fellow panellist and long-time nemesis on the Right, would make some green room remark about it, regardless. Either that or the wisp of PEI accent that still warped my rhotics — which I hammed up whenever I was in her presence, because I knew it annoyed her.) And, perhaps, more critical even than what my three-year-old daughter was screaming about down the hall in the bathroom. Grace was on it, anyway. I heard her fly out of Naomi’s bedroom with a panicked Sweetie, are you OKAY? followed by a quick gush from the faucet. I plucked the poppy off my bureau, fluttered it like a parasol in the mirror. Wait — where was my tweed? Oh right, of course. I hurried into the hallway.

“Philip. Philip, are you there?”

I was not. I bounded up the stairs to my third-floor office, zagging around the Dora the Explorer doll lying on the hardwood beneath my feet. Entering my office, I found the tweed where I last left it: thrown over the arm of the futon. I nabbed the jacket and laid it flat across my desk, moving manuscript printouts from my next book (tentatively called “Christianity and Its Dissidents”) out of the way. I bent over and manoeuvred the flower over the lapel. I poked the steel pin into the pure virgin wool and pressed the poppy in as deep as it would go. Then I raised the jacket up and looked at it. Already the plastic blossom had slid a few millimetres out of the lapel.

Grace’s voice echoed from the hall and through the open office door.

“Philip — seriously, are you there or not?”

Just a minute, dear. I returned the jacket to the futon arm and then moved to the overflowing bookshelf on the opposite wall. I pulled down my author copy of Corporate Canada Today (Tuxedo House, 2014) and quickly confirmed a few facts about ODS Financial Group, which would be the subject of this afternoon’s Power Today interview. Yes, yes. Managing partner since ’99: Viktor Grozni. CFO: the lovely and talented Glenda Harkins-Smith. Market cap before the 2008 crash. Market cap just before Friday’s announcement. Number of Canadians with pensions directly managed by. Number of ancillary businesses shareholders had no idea existed. Amount of direct subsidy from the Harper Conservatives since 2011. Yes, yes. It was already there, all of it, in my head. Cheryl Sneed didn’t stand a chance.

Time to throw the jacket on and quickly help Grace with whatever she and Naomi were dealing with in the bathroom (the child had stopped screaming, but continued with a kind of hiccupy crying that seemed to reverberate through the whole house) before heading downtown. I turned and reached for my tweed, only to have my gaze hauled to the floor. There on the hardwood lay my poppy, face down like a drunkard.

Oh, that is it, I thought. Fucking veterans.

I grabbed the tweed and picked up the poppy before storming back down the stairs. Time for Plan B.

“Philip — Philip can you please come here.”

I hustled down to the main floor. Stole a glance at the clock on the kitchen wall. Oh God. I hurried to the door leading to our basement. My basement, since Grace and the kids rarely went down there. More oubliette than man cave, it had a set of stairs that descended almost vertically into that dark, unfinished gizzard. I marched down and popped on the light, which only marginally diminished the darkness, then went to my small workbench with the poppy and jacket in tow. I rested the tweed flat and placed the scarlet bloom onto the lapel. Then I grabbed the industrial stapler I had bought at Canadian Tire to assemble some rather complicated birthday party decorations for my stepdaughter, Simone, when she turned thirteen a few weeks ago. The tool was heavy in my hand, like a weapon. I clamped one end of the nozzle over the flower and tucked the other under the tweed.

BLAM! BLAM!

There. Perfect. Well, not perfect. I held the jacket up once more. Hopefully the CBC’s cameras were not so HD that they would pick up the tiny planks of metal that now held the poppy in place.

I hiked back up to the main floor, throwing the jacket on as I did. Moving to holler upstairs to Grace, I turned to see that she and Naomi were already in the kitchen, waiting for me. My wife leaned against the counter, arms folded over her chest, her bottom lip tucked under her top teeth, her head tilted. Oh, she was mad. I briefly scanned the kitchen for the source of her rage. Surely I hadn’t forgotten to clean up the wreckage of the Bloody Joseph (my third since breakfast): the inedible stump of celery sequestered in the compost, the tin of tomato juice washed out and blue-binned, the celery salt resuming its place in the spice rack, and various other accoutrements returned to their sentry posts in my bar fridge. But no. The kitchen was spotless, as per our agreement.

“Oh, hey,” I ventured. “Look, I’m running late but would you mind —”

“Did you not hear me calling you?”

What was I to say to that?

“I’m pretty sure you did hear me calling you, Philip,” she went on, “because I could hear you shuffling in the hallway outside the bathroom as I did.”

“I wasn’t ‘shuffling,’” I said. “I was getting ready for this CBC thing. Look —”

“The tub faucet upstairs still isn’t working right.”

“Yes, it is,” I disagreed, stupidly. I had showered earlier in the day, as had Simone before she’d gone to school. (It wasn’t apparent whether Grace had had her shower yet.) But she was, technically, right — the tub faucet was still plagued with a peculiar problem: the cold water tap would spew piping-hot water for nearly a minute after you turned it on. It was the latest in a series of bathroom issues we’d been having. You’d think that for the ungodly sum I paid for 4 Metcalfe Street six years ago when we got married, we’d have a fully functional bathroom — not to mention a finished basement. But no, no.

“You were supposed to get it fixed,” Grace said, “like, three weeks ago. And now —”

“It’s on my list. You know it’s on my list.”

“And now what I feared would happen — what I knew would happen if you didn’t get it fixed — has happened. Naomi went in there before I realized and turned on the tap and scalded herself.”

“I had to take a pewp,” Naomi informed me with a sniffle, and displayed her reddened right wrist.

I looked at her. “Did, did you poop in the tub, sweetie?”

“She didn’t poop in the tub,” Grace barked. “Philip, you’re missing the point. Did you not hear your daughter scream out and start crying?”

I did. Of course I did. But I knew — or at least assumed — that Grace had things well in hand. Which she did.

My eyes flicked to the wall clock. Jesus.

“Look, what do you want from me?” I tried a half smile. “I fixed the sink up there, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you fixed the sink — after I nagged you about it for five months. What, do you want a medal for that?”

“Grace —”

“I’m serious, Philip. Would you like a prize for fixing the sink? We could write to the French government and get them to create a new international award for plumbing, and give it to you. They could call it the Douche d’Or.”

“You’re hilarious,” I deadpanned, but then chuckled on the inside. She must have been sitting on that joke for weeks.

I shrugged at her. “Look, what can I say? I’m not handy. You know that. This kind of stuff stresses me out, and I have enough stress in my life right now. I’m teaching two courses this term. I’ve got the new book. I’ve got the thesis defence I’m chairing in a few weeks, and …” My eyes floated back to the clock. “I’ve got this CBC thing this afternoon.”

“So you don’t have time to pick up the phone and call a plumber, is what you’re saying.”

“It’s not about calling a plumber, Grace. It’s about having the headspace to figure out if there are any plumbers left in this city who haven’t screwed us over.”

“You weren’t teaching in the summer,” she pointed out. “You could have done it then.”

“Yes, but I had a breakthrough with the book, and …” I pinched my nose, sighed. In that moment, I longed for my old life, before we bought this huge, and hugely expensive, house in Cabbagetown. For sixteen years prior to marrying Grace, I had lived in a loft in the Annex. If the sink broke, the landlord came and fixed it. Which felt like something that only happened in fairy tales, now.

“Look,” I went on, “just because I wasn’t teaching doesn’t mean I had the capacity to deal with …” And yes, I said it then; the words just flew out of me. “… a bunch of domestic trifles.”

“Wow,” she said, long and slow, and blinked at me. “So I guess what you’re saying is it’s really my responsibility, because you’ve got all that,” and here she mock-furrowed her brow at me, “deep thinking to do.”

“Oh, come on, Grace.”

But she took a step toward me then, her backside leaving the counter. In one fluid motion, she jutted her hip out, picked up Naomi, and parked the child upon it. Engaging, she was, in that most basic act of motherwork: to hold her child close. Then Grace threw back her thick, curly hair — sporting a henna dye job she’d acquired a few months ago, one I thoroughly approved of when she first modelled it for me, burying my face in its waves later that night, in bed — and looked at me with those wild, emerald eyes of hers.

“I guess what I’m saying, Philip,” she said, “is that I don’t much care about the tub. Or the sink. What I care about is that you don’t really seem all that plugged in to what’s happening in your own house.”

“Grace, do I need to remind you that I’m appearing on national television this afternoon?” I felt a more echt emotion than the one I’d been feigning for the last five minutes swell up inside me. “Do I need to remind you that what happened on Friday is going to make the 2008 crash look like a bad cocktail party? The CBC wants my commentary on it, and they’ve pitted me against —”

“I don’t care,” she said. “Philip, your daughter scalded herself. And obviously you consider the tub issue to be a ‘domestic trifle.’”

“I shouldn’t have said that —”

“But you did. You did say it.”

“And obviously, you don’t care that I’m now very late for this CBC thing.”

“You know, you’re not the only one with a public persona to worry about,” she said. “You’re not the only one whose writing is important.”

“Is that what this is about?” I asked. “That I’ve somehow disrespected your work by leaving you to deal with Naomi while I got ready? Well, I’m sorry, Grace. I’m sorry I can’t just satisfy your ego whenever you want.”

“Well, Philip,” she said, “I’m getting pretty used to your inability to satisfy me whenever I want.”

In shock, my jaw sort of unhinged then, like a python’s, and my eyes grew wide. “Oh,” I said, twisting my neck as if testing it for sprain. “Oh!” I looked at her, and she looked at me. “I … I can’t believe you said that.”

She set Naomi back down and the child scampered off. This was clearly getting out of hand. The flesh around Grace’s throat and collarbones had turned an intense red — as if she were aroused rather than infuriated by our exchange. Which was, of course, possible: stranger things had turned my wife on in the past.

“I can’t believe you said that to me,” I repeated.

“Look, I can only talk about one of your inadequacies at a time,” she said. “I need you to focus. What I have a problem with — right now — is that you don’t seem all that interested in what goes on around here. You have trouble remembering things I tell you, or ask you to do.”

“I remember lots of things,” I said.

“Really?” she asked. “What are you doing on Wednesday night?”

Quick — scan your brain! Scan your brain! “I’m … I’m taking Simone to that dance recital at the place up the street. She’s really looking forward to it.” I grinned, intensely proud of myself.

“And what are we doing next Sunday?”

The smirk slipped from my lips. Oh shit.

“Philip — what are we doing on Sunday?”

Something huge. Something important. I scoured hard, dug deep, but it wasn’t there. Just a big blank space where what it was should’ve been.

“Look, I have to go. I’m extremely late.”

She refolded her arms over her breasts and sneered at me. “What are we doing on Sunday, Philip?”

“Look, we’ll talk about this when I get back,” I said.

She gave her head a slight jiggle, her hennaed hair flapping, as if to say, I guess I made my point.

“Look, I have to go. Wish me luck, okay?”

But she looked away then, staring off into whatever galaxy of indignation floated before her mind’s eye.

“Grace, wish me luck.”

But she wouldn’t.

So I left her there, and made my way to the front entry. Dug a decent pair of Payless shoes from the hall closet and stepped into them. Then I was out the door, finally, and onto Metcalfe Street. Down Carlton and over to the west side of Parliament. Raised my hand to hail a Beck taxi. Miraculously, one pulled up right away.

“The CBC building on Front Street,” I said to the driver as I climbed in, then shut the door and sank into the leathery lung of his back seat. I inhaled a long, wheezy breath and tried to relax as we sailed southward. Took a moment to straighten myself and inspect my attire. And it was only then that my eyes fell onto the vast, empty pampa that was my jacket’s left lapel.

Oh for Christsake!

It’s love that sends me to bed every night, but it’s hate that gets me up in the morning.

The love is, I hope, obvious to you, dear reader, despite the row I just described. There really aren’t adequate words in the English language to relay the kind of passion that consumes Grace and me, the unspoken timbre we share when even the longest, most tiring day is done. I often think it’s the passion that causes us to have such intense squabbles. Fire can, after all, burn in all sorts of directions. Which made her dig at my inconsistencies in the boudoir so out of left field. I mean — come on. Why would she say something so heinous to me?

But let’s talk about the hate — the hate that gets me going every day. A term that, I admit, seems overly harsh coming from a self-described deontologist and centrist thinker. But it’s true: I often frame myself as the lone katechon against what Canada has become in recent years: a hotbed of anti-intellectualism, religious extremism, neo-conservativism and privatization. It’s why I dedicated nearly a third of Corporate Canada Today to profiling ODS Financial Group, and agreed to share my thoughts on the firm’s collapse with the CBC. I was prepared to express my indignation over how its C-suite had made off like bandits — golden handshakes for all! — and I relished the chance to lock horns with my fellow pundit, the grotesquely conservative Cheryl Sneed. Despite holding a mere B.A. in basket weaving earned in 1972, Cheryl has been a top columnist for the Toronto Times for nearly thirty-five years now, writing about politics, economics, religion, literature, gender issues, and various other topics she knows nothing about. She ran afoul of me after unfavourably reviewing two of my books — Capitalism and Other Pathologies (University of Guelph Press, 2005) and the short, scathing Stephen Harper: A Biography (Tuxedo House, 2010) — and we’d been exchanging barbs in the media ever since. Until Friday afternoon, she had been a kind of inverse Chicken Little about the ODS situation, and I looked forward to exposing her various blind spots and hyp­ocrisies. And though there was a wholesale lack of depth to her intellect, she was cagey, often bringing a homespun folksiness to her right-wing arguments. And I had to be mindful of that.

Of course, I wasn’t thinking of any of this during the ride downtown. Instead I was thinking: What the fuck are we doing on Sunday? Grace had put the bug in my brain and I just couldn’t shake it. I knew it was something we had discussed, planned, maybe bickered over a little. But it was now hidden in the fog of my mind. What was it? What. Was. It?

The Beck deposited me at the Canadian Broadcasting Centre — the CBC’s imposing Front Street edifice with its blue pillars and red-framed windows and larger-than-life photos of network personalities — and I marched through the doors and made my way to the atrium’s front desk. The receptionist paged Power Today’s producer, and within moments she came hustling out of the elevators toward me. I expected the first words out of her mouth to be, You’re late! but instead she said:

“You’re not wearing a poppy.”

“I know. It must have fallen off on my way over. I —”

“I sent, like, four emails about it.”

“I know, I’m sorry. Look, is there anywhere I can —”

“No, there isn’t. And there’s no time, anyway.”

She signed me in and then the elevator whisked us to the upper floors. I’d been on the show before but hadn’t met this particular producer. Her name was Lori, a whip-smart twentysomething with a look that balanced sporty with haggard: dark hair pulled into a tight ponytail; bags under her eyes from doing what would have been three people’s jobs twenty years ago; nice bum. We came out of the elevators and started Sorkining down a busy hallway as she explained the lineup to me.

“You guys are up first. The ODS story is just too big not to lead with. We’re doing two eighters —”

“Meaning?”

“Two eight-minute segments. There’ll be a commercial break in between if you need to collect your thoughts.”

“I won’t. Can’t speak for Cheryl, though.”

“Sal was going to walk you through his intro and outro but there’s no time.”

“How is Sal, anyway?”

“There is. No. Time. Once we get you in the chair, I need you to —”

“Philip Sharpe, you whiskey-swilling so-and-so!” I heard someone yell to me. I turned to see my friend Raj approach us through a nest of cubicles and camera stands. “You carpetbagging Maritimer! You salt-stained scallywag! How the hell are ya?” Raj was a freelance videographer, clearly on one of his intermittent contracts with the CBC. I had met him years ago, and would occasionally run into him while doing press chores for my books. Though roughly my age — fifty this year, gawd — Raj always struck me as younger, more vital, more unmoored. He was just as likely to be hanging off a cliff-face in Borneo with a camera on his shoulder as he was to be filming downtown Toronto biz-knobs with their jayus senses of humour for a corporate video. He and I weren’t particularly close. Yet in that moment, I was deeply relieved to spot his familiar face, and I hugged him clumsily when he came over.

“It’s so good to see you,” I said.

“Likewise — it’s been like, two years. I heard you were in the hot seat this afternoon.”

“I am. They need an expert opinion on this ODS situation, plus Cheryl Sneed’s.”

He laughed. “I hear that. You know, Rick Mercer was asking about you the other day.”

“I know, I owe Rick an email. Do you know if he’s —”

“Dr. Sharpe,” said Lori, “I really need you to come with me.”

“You better do what she says,” Raj smirked, and whacked me on the shoulder. “We’ll talk later. Go eat ’em up. I’ll watch you from the booth.”

Within minutes I was prepped for the stage: Lori clipped a microphone to my shirt like a prosthesis, then tucked its battery into the ass of my pants with completely non-sexual efficiency. Someone came by to give my brow and cheekbones a light dusting of powder. When finished, Lori shoved me out to the Power Today set.

I staggered onto the rise, and there she was: stout, unsmiling Cheryl Sneed, already seated at the large glass table under the klieg lights. She wore a very blousy blouse, but had done something different — and dare I say appealing? — with her hair since I’d last seen her: a certain sensual swirl to her grey-blond locks, a truly noble attempt at attractiveness for a woman of her vintage. Above her left breast sat a pristinely fastened poppy.

“Hello, Cheryl,” I said, sitting down in the chair a stagehand steered me into.

“Philip.”

“Good to see you.”

Her eyes flashed to my tweed. “You not get the emails about the poppy?”

“I lost mine on the way over.”

“Understandable,” she said. “The things are engineered to fall off. It’s how the veterans make their money.”

We were soon joined by Sal Porter, the impossibly handsome host of Power Today, who also wore a poppy. He shook my hand and took his seat at the end. “Running late today, Philip? We all missed you in the green room.”

“Sorry, I was waylaid by …” What to say? An annoyed wife. Domestic trifles. A yearning vagina. A lapse in memory. What were we doing on Sunday, goddamn it? “… stuff at home,” I said. Yes, yes. Stuff at home. By now Simone would’ve gotten in the door from school, and Grace would be asking about her day, verifying homework assignments and partaking in other bits of motherwork before dinner. Wait, what had she wanted me to do with Simone on Wednesday night? Oh shit, I’d already forgotten. What was it? What was it?

The final preparatory rituals for live TV unfurled around us — countdowns and cameramen call-outs and such. Lori popped by with a small metallic claw and pried the empty staples out of my lapel without bothering to ask how they’d gotten there. It seemed an overly finicky act, considering she did nothing about the strand of comb-over that was (I would learn later) standing almost completely vertically off my head.

“Are we ready?” Sal asked.

A dance recital! I nearly yelled out. That’s what it was! I ran a hand over my bushy red beard. Of course. I was taking my stepdaughter to a dance recital. Grace wanted me to —

The room filled with electric guitar and synthesized trumpets, and a camera came swinging toward us on a crane.

“It’s Monday, November 2, 2015, and you’re watching Power Today,” Sal said. “I’m your host, Sal Porter. On this program: evidence is mounting that last month’s bus disaster in Italy was in fact an act of terrorism. We’ll be on the line with an official in Rome with the latest. Also: Canada’s new foreign affairs minister is here to discuss Vladimir Putin and the worsen­ing situation in Ukraine. But first: there’s only one story that every Canadian is talking about and that is last Friday’s collapse of ODS Financial Group. Its sixty-five hundred employees are out of work, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. With so many directly managed pensions and other financial assets vanishing overnight, the impact on Bay Street — as well as Main Street — could be enormous. To discuss the issue, we’re joined by two guests:

“Cheryl Sneed is a long-time columnist with the Toronto Times who’s been covering the ODS situation for months. She won a national newspaper award earlier this year for her profile of ODS’s chief financial officer, Glenda Harkins-Smith. Cheryl has just published her first book, entitled How Feminism Fails Women. Cheryl, thanks for joining us.”

“Thank you for having me.”

“And, making his eleventh appearance on our show, Dr. Philip Sharpe. Philip is a professor of philosophy and economics at the University of Toronto and the author of ten books. His latest is called Under the Guidance of Secret Motives: Corporate Canada Today. Philip, welcome.”

“Yes, thanks,” I muttered.

“Philip, I want to start with you because you dedicate a large portion of your latest book to profiling ODS, and how a toxic corporate culture there contributed to its problems. In fact, you spent part of your last sabbatical working undercover in its communications department.”

“That’s not entirely true,” I said. “They knew I was there; granted me several interviews with the C-suite, in fact. They just didn’t care. But I want to correct something from your intro, Sal: you said the impact of Friday’s announcement could be enormous. I would change ‘could’ to ‘will,’ and by ‘enormous’ we mean ‘cataclysmic.’”

“There’s no evidence of that,” Cheryl excreted.

“Look —”

“No, Philip. You and others have been arguing that this is 2008 all over again, and it’s just not true. Most of ODS’s assets were either shielded by new federal regulations — regulations brought in by your bogeyman, Stephen Harper, I should point out — or they were insured. Only a small sliver was tied up with the securities foreclosed on Friday.”

“Cheryl, 37.8 billion dollars is about to vanish from the Canadian economy. I wouldn’t call that a ‘sliver.’”

“Where are you getting that number from, Philip? Because every economist on Bay Street disputes it. And I mean every economist.”

“Of course they dispute it. They’re not exactly inde —”

“Okay, okay,” Sal said. “Let’s back up here.” As he provided a bit more background for his audience and lobbed a couple of questions at Cheryl, I glanced out briefly beyond the cameras and spotted Raj in the control booth. His hands were on his hips but he was still smiling — a good sign that I was doing well. I wondered in that moment if Grace had bothered to turn on the TV at home to watch me. Or was she still seething about the tub faucet or that I couldn’t bloody remember what we were doing next Sunday? What was it? Goddamn it, what was it?

“Now Philip, you’re coming at these issues as a philosopher,” Sal went on. “I mean, it’s well-documented that your area of specialty is moral duty — a kind of categorical sense of right and wrong. So in that context, what was it about ODS that piqued your interest to start with?”

“Well, it comes right back to corporate culture,” I said. “The firm began a century ago as one of these genteel and cautious fund managers. But like a lot of corporate entities — law firms and professional services companies and such — it became plagued with an ideology of internal competition, starting around the turn of the millennium. Suddenly everyone was slitting everyone else’s throat — within the organization — to elevate themselves and squeeze a bit more bonus out. From the senior leadership downward, backstabbing practically became a requirement for everyone who worked there. So I grew fascinated by how quickly ODS would betray or even reverse its own business plans, not to mention mission statements or ‘core values.’ By the end, purge-style coups d’état at the senior management level were a weekly occurrence. In the short time I was there, I witnessed whole careers expunged overnight from its corporate history. It was like something out of Stalinist Russia.”

“God, I can’t believe the melodrama you get away with!” Cheryl piped up.

“It’s not melodrama,” I said. “It’s fact. The —”

“If I could just interject here —” Sal attempted.

“It is. You know, Philip, your book is so typical of left-wing myopia. You went in to ODS with a thesis statement already calcified in your brain and then you cherry-picked the ‘facts’ that verified it, ignoring everything else.”

“That is not true.”

“It is.”

“Look, Cheryl —”

“No, it is. You went in there convinced that ODS was pure and unmitigated evil. A soulless multinational so driven by short-term profits that it lost any sense of a moral compass. So let me ask you this: in two hundred and seventy-eight pages, why did you make no mention of its Briefcase Moms program?”

I looked at her. “I don’t see how that is relevant to Friday’s —”

“You make no mention of Briefcase Moms — an initiative that Harkins-Smith herself was a direct beneficiary of. Why did you not mention that ODS has been a major sponsor of amateur athletics in Canada? Or that it’s been a platinum sponsor of the LGBT community’s Out On Bay Street conference? Or that it had work-life balance policies that a daily journalist would kill for?”

“Okay,” Sal jumped in, “maybe we should switch gears and —”

“Look,” I said, unwilling to let him rescue me. “We can talk about all the smokescreens the company threw up to hide its true nature —”

“Oh please.”

“— but the truth is. No, Cheryl, the truth is: sixty-five hundred people are out of work, billions have been vaporized from the economy, and the C-suite has made off like criminals. We’re talking eight-figure payouts, each. Money sheltered using complex financial instruments and a level of obscurantism unseen in the history of corporate Canada.”

“Well I know from your book, Philip,” Cheryl said, “that you interviewed the firm’s chief lawyer. What would he say now? Did the senior leadership do anything illegal?”

“That’s not the point.”

“It is the point.”

“Okay, we need to —” Sal said.

“Answer the question, Philip: Did they do anything illegal?”

“Cheryl —”

“Because you’re the one calling them criminals.”

“I said they were like criminals.”

“So answer the question: Did they do anything illegal?”

“They walked off with millions while leaving an economic catastrophe in their wake.”

“Did they do anything illegal?”

I turned away from her then. This grilling infused me with a sense of déjà vu from earlier. In fact, it felt as if Grace, not Cheryl, was sitting there at the Power Today desk, administering this third degree to me — making that horrific dig about my sexual prowess and then dragging me over the coals about forgetting what we were doing on Sunday. What was it? God, I wish I could remember.

“Okay,” Sal said, “we’re just coming up to our first commercial break, and when we come back we should discuss …” and he read a few lines from his outro. But as I turned toward them again, I saw the gesture that Cheryl made at me. I’m not even sure the cameras caught it. It was that exact same jiggle of the head, that I guess I made my point flap of her hair, that Grace had made at me earlier. The exact same one. I felt the bile rise up in me.

“What they did should be made illegal,” I said.

Sal stopped suddenly, and he and Cheryl just sort of stared at me.

“I beg your pardon?” she said.

“What they did should be made illegal.” The words blundered out of me again before I could stop them. And so did these: “The government should pass a law making what happened on Friday illegal.”

Cheryl let out a smug, choky guffaw. “You can’t be serio —”

“I am dead serious,” I said. It was like a fever had overtaken my brain, burning behind my eyes and clouding everything around me. “The scope of the catastrophe is such that the government needs to take tough and — dare I say it? — punitive action.”

“Really?” Cheryl said, twisting her girth around in her chair. “Really, Philip? You honestly think —”

“All right, guys, we do need to go to —” Sal tried to interject.

“You honestly think that would be the moral thing to do? Really? Okay, so the government takes months or even years passing new laws to make what they did illegal. And then what? What happens to your diabolical C-suite?”

“And then they should be charged retroactively.”

“Oh my God,” she said, swaying in her chair like a buoy.

“I’m serious,” I retorted. “The magnitude of this is —”

“Is what?” she barked. “Enough to override centuries of judicial law? I mean, this is really beyond the pale, Philip — even for you.”

And just like that, the fever broke and I came out of it. My eyes passed back to the control booth, and I could see Raj through the window. He was no longer smiling. His own eyes were wide, his cheeks sunken. And in that instant, I was convinced that Grace was watching me on the television. She and the kids. And also my faculty colleagues at the university. And my students. Everyone.

Oh God — what did I just say? Did I just imply that people should be arrested for breaking a law that does not yet exist? Did I just undermine centuries of enlightened liberal values, values that I had been teaching — and defending, against the barbarism of both the Right and the Left — for more than twenty years, all for the sake of sending a handful of corporate types to jail? Did I just do that — on national television?

“Look,” I sputtered, “what I’m trying to say is —”

“Okay, we have to go to commercial,” Sal said. “We’ll be back, we’ll be back.”

“Well,” Cheryl huffed as we faded out, “talk about Stalinist Russia …”