The Homeless Millionaire

I spent the next day in a daze. It felt as if I had been transported into a different reality. Familiar objects—the toilet bowl when taking a piss, espresso machine, picnic table—all seemed to acquire a new significance, as if I were seeing them for the first time. I didn’t know what my face looked like. I didn't want to look at myself in the mirror. I was afraid I'd see a helpless, scared kid.

Robbing the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts was a big step up from shoplifting. It wasn't just a step up, it was a whole fucking staircase. Both metaphorically and literally, because we were to break in through a skylight in the Museum's roof.

Roch and Michel claimed to have hit on the whole idea by pure chance. A few weeks earlier, they’d consumed some magic mushrooms, and subsequently went for a walk that took them past the Museum.

They saw a long builder's ladder propped up against the side of the building. Inspired by the mushrooms, Michel or Roch (they both claimed credit) decided it would be cool to smoke a cigarette on the roof. They stole a couple of folding chairs from a pavement cafe nearby, and climbed the ladder. Then they unfolded the chairs on the roof and had a smoke, admiring the view.

Their idyll was interrupted by a young guy wearing builders overalls. He poked his head out of a nearby skylight and asked what they thought they were doing. They truthfully told him they were having a smoke, and offered him a cigarette. He declined, and disappeared.

Roch and Michel felt hurt that their offer had been rejected. As Michel had put it, the mood was gone. So they made themselves scarce and climbed down the ladder and replaced the chairs they'd taken. They took special care to put them back in their spots at the correct tables.

Michel had a brainwave later that very day. If they could wander around on the Museum's roof, Michel said, if workmen could unexpectedly poke their heads out of skylights, that could mean only one thing: the alarm system in that part of the building had been turned off.

Roch was sure that it was turned on again at night. They argued about it for a couple of days. Then Roch's old man informed him that he was about to officially become the owner of his house, and that officially owning a house meant paying insurance and taxes on the said house. This had escaped Roch's attention until then, and caused him to reconsider Michel's proposal.

In the meantime, Michel had recruited a third guy, a guy that thrived on danger in all of its shapes and forms. The two of them ganged up on Roch, and persuaded him to join them. At least that was the way Roch described it when the three of us were sitting at the kitchen table. Michel had laughed at this, and rolled his eyes. He said:

"Just listen to this guy. A moment ago he was saying he was the one that had the idea in the first place."

"To go on the roof and smoke a cigarette," Roch said.

"Yeah. And I remember what you said when we were sitting there, smoking. You said, it would be so easy to rob this place."

Roch did not say anything to that. He sipped coffee, looking into his mug. I guessed that meant Michel's memory served him right.

Anyway, just a couple of days after the Gang of Three was officially formed, it turned into a gang of two. The daredevil guy Michel had recruited took a spill on his motorbike. He didn't jump off the bike in time, and the footrest crushed his ankle. It would be many months before he could walk properly, and possibly years before he could climb onto roofs and slither through skylights. Michel and Roch agreed that their plan still required a third guy, and Roch had proposed me.

"Did you?" I asked Roch, when were sitting at the kitchen table.

" I just said I thought you'd be capable of doing something like that," he said. "Because you are, aren't you?"

"I'm not sure of that."

That was the horrifying truth: I wasn't sure. I should have rejected it outright. I didn't; maybe the gun on the table played a part in that. But there was no gun around the next day. Roch and Michel had left, I was all by myself, and I was still undecided.

I was scared shitless. But I didn’t mind being scared shitless, in fact I enjoyed it if I knew everything was going to turn out all right in the end. Everyone enjoyed being scared as long as they knew they were going to be all right in the end. Not stressed, scared. There was a huge difference. Stress didn’t provide an adrenaline rush, it just fucked people up.

The Rembrandt I could own was also a huge consideration. I knew that the Museum owned a Rembrandt. It was a small oil painting on a wooden panel, called Landscape with Cottages. For me, it captured an essential truth about human existence. I was biased though, because I adored Rembrandt. I thought he was the greatest painter ever. Van Gogh and a couple of others came close, but they still came second.

I'd formed that belief at a very early age. I was visiting the Louvre with my parents and they had a traveling exposition of Rembrandt's drawings on display. They were all small pieces, many weren't larger than the average hand. Each of those small pieces of paper was covered by hundreds, thousands of very fine lines drawn with utmost precision. Rembrandt must have used a magnifying glass, there was just no way he could have done it without a magnifying glass. Each shadow, each semi-dark area was created by a web of those fine lines that merged into each other when viewed from a distance greater than a couple of inches. My eight-year-old mind somehow instinctively understood that this was how the whole world was put together: gazillions of tiny lines and specks interwoven into one magnificent whole.

Had someone walked up to me and offered me this deal: a genuine Rembrandt painting or drawing in exchange for one of your fingers, I would have gone for it. That's how much I admired his work.

I had three days to make up my mind: Roch and Michel had told me they would return on Thursday. It was Sunday; I would have preferred them to return the very next day, on Monday. That would make me all fucked up for just for a single day instead of four.

I needed some sort of therapy, and I decided to weed Roch's parents famous vegetable patch sometime in the afternoon: it was a constructive physical activity. I spent half an hour looking for the gardening tools, and when I found them I was also rewarded with a pair of worn but workable canvas gloves.

Properly equipped and mentally prepared for any surprises hidden in the overgrown vegetable patch, I proceeded outside. I had this intense feeling that I was being watched. I probably was, after all I was surrounded by all sorts of birds and beasts and had interrupted their humping, killing, eating, or maybe just lazing around. They all had good reasons to be fearful of having a human being in their midst.

A small insect started buzzing around my face when I stopped by the patch. The little thing had a lifespan of maybe three weeks, and it was stupid enough to land on my cheek. Swat! It had to have been a mosquito, the canvas glove was spotted red between the soil stains. Maybe half a lifetime extinguished with a single slap. That was one hell of an unlucky mosquito.

Then I thought: maybe it was lucky, maybe most eggs didn't even get to hatch and when they did, ninety per cent of those guys perished within a single day. Eaten by ants, birds, mosquito egg/larvae lovers of all kinds. Maybe it was actually a kind of distinction to be killed by a human. It always felt better to lose against a superior intelligence.

The weeds were heavy going, and I felt like a murderer when I was uprooting them from the sacred soil of the vegetable patch. It wasn’t their fault, was it? A seed happened to end up in a particular spot, and developed into a plant. Now I was killing it just because it happened to be there. Wrong place, wrong time.

I got all heavy and philosophical over that vegetable patch, because dirty and tiring work tended to do that to me. I did an excellent job: got rid of all the weeds, loosened the soil, raked it.

When I was done, I took off the dirty gloves and and took out my dick and pissed on the patch to complete the ceremony. I could see part of the house across the lake from where I stood, and suddenly it occurred to me that she could see me from there, too.

I quickly went back inside the house and cleaned up a little. Then I got the binoculars, and went roundabout to a spot on the shore maybe a hundred steps from the cottage.

I crouched behind a bush and put the binoculars to my eyes. I could see the house across the lake as clearly as if it was within shouting distance. I also saw her. She was standing on the deck, leaning against the wall next to the door. She was holding a pair of binoculars, too! She was looking through them in my direction!

There was a gaggle of ducks fooling around it the water close to the pier belonging to Roch’s parents’ cottage. She could have been looking at the ducks, or she could have been looking at the cottage. Either way, she had a pair of binoculars she could use. She could spy on me just like I’d spied on her.

I backed off from the shore and made sure I was hidden by the trees before I walked back to the house. Then I spent some time figuring all the angles at which she could look into the living room with her binoculars. The glass doors that led to the front deck were huge, basically a third of the wall was glass. And there were no blinds or curtains. Roch's old man simply hadn't gotten around to installing any.

I wondered if she had been watching the three of us – Roch, Michel, myself – partying and talking on the deck. Then I wondered what kind of impression it would have made on her. We'd basically acted like a bunch of drunk, stoned kids. That definitely wasn't an image I wanted her to have.

That evening, I swore to myself I’d go and visit her the next day.