THE BIRDCATCHER A Novel by Alan Conrad Copyright - Alan Conrad |
Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's own daughter
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly
Singing about her head, as she rode by.
- Robert Graves
One is disappointed without having partaken; one still
has desires but no longer any illusions. Imagination is
rich, abundant, and marvelous; life poor, sterile, and
unfulfilling. With a full heart one encounters an empty
world....
- Francois Rene
de Chateaubriand
1802
_______
Chapter I
More than mid-way through this life, I closed the door of my aging Mazda and
looked across the parking lot at the thirteen story glass block that housed the
Toronto office of the Trans National Mutual Insurance Company. The March
sun shone brightly on it, only making the dark glass look still darker, while puffs
of cloud drifted overhead in a blue sky. My mood just didn't match with the
weather. Though I was fifty-two years old and unemployed for the past three
months, badly in need of the job I was going to start that morning, something in
me wished that I wasn't there at all.
Walking towards the entrance, I listened to the wind in the dry fields
surrounding the building and told myself that TNM would be the same as any of
the companies I'd worked for – boasting about their customer service and
devotion to the policyholder while adjusters like me paid those who submitted
claims as little as possible. But who could criticize insurance companies for that?
By that morning early in the year 2000, wasn't hypocrisy accepted procedure
everywhere? At the end of a century that had witnessed another renaissance in
the arts and sciences, when people had begun to learn what it really meant to be
free, when they had, once more, tried to love one another then abandoned the
idea again, when millions had fought and died in every corner of the world for
things they never understood, when wave after wave of riches had been made
and squandered again, weren't we all by that time, our souls exhausted and
bankrupt, down on our knees in the temple of the dollar?
'You've got to stop thinking like that,' I told myself. 'At least this morning.'
But the dark voice wouldn't stop. As I pushed through the revolving glass doors,
it assured me that the adjusters in that building would be as overworked as
adjusters anywhere else. Stressed by the increasing number of files they were
required to handle, more and more complicated company rules and procedures,
and the escalating demands of claimants, they would be up there on the sixth
floor working longer and longer hours, still unable to do the work the way they
knew it should be done.
Three months before, after I'd prematurely left a contract position at
another company, I'd sworn that I would never return to claims work.
I passed the reception desk and went straight to an elevator. The job I was
starting was only a six month contract at thirty dollars an hour, five dollars less
than I'd received in the last one. It could be terminated by either side on one
week's notice. There was no need to feel I was making any commitment, but I
was still uneasy.
I got off at the ninth floor, Human Resources, where I was met by Linda
Maltese, the accident benefit claims manager. A tall brunette in a grey business
suit, she'd come instead of the supervisor I expected.
"Vincent's very busy," she explained.
I'd met them both in my interview. Linda had obviously liked me, but
Vincent Ferraro, a man about forty, had remained cool and noncommittal. That
wasn't an unusual response from a supervisor who was younger and less exper-
ienced than me, but if he was avoiding me that was a bad sign. Linda's reaction
seemed to be linked to her friendship with Debbie Rukeyser, my supervisor at
North American Casualty, the company I'd left three months earlier. Given the
way I'd left North American, it was hard to believe Debbie could have said
anything good about me, but something she'd said had impressed Linda.
Linda took me down to the sixth floor, to a windowless steel door where
she pushed a plastic security card into a slot in the wall. A small red light changed
to green, then she opened the door and we walked through into a busy claims
department.
Men and women, almost all of them young and dressed in what was known
as 'business casual', sat in cubicles working on computers and telephones, or
they stood by photocopiers, printers and fax machines, some-times talking with
one another, sometimes laughing, amid the sounds of the machines, ringing
telephones, and 'soft rock' music playing from speakers in the ceiling.
"It's not Mozart," Linda said with a smile as she led me on. It was a
reference to our conversation a week before when she'd somehow got me to talk
about classical music.
Inside the cubicles, the grey fabric partition walls were papered with the
usual telephone and computer code lists, along with calendars, the artwork of
small children, and photographs of kids, cats and dogs, weddings, vacations and
office parties that refused to be forgotten. The top shelves were well populated
with plants and, among them, looking down on this world of young insurance
mercenaries, were plush animals of every species imaginable.
Oh, how easily that younger generation could make itself at home!
In the office I'd had during the fifteen years I'd worked alone as an
independent, up on the second floor in a dilapidated little strip mall in the east
end, I used to have maps on the walls. There was a bright multi-colored geo-
logical map of Ontario and another very green one of wilderness hiking and
canoe routes. From time to time I alternated them with a set of tall laminated
photo- graphs of the same country seen from space, the land and lakes I'd
traveled, fished and hunted in since I was a boy. When I was on the phone, or
just in a pause from working, I used to muse over them, dreaming about places
I'd been or others I hadn't yet found.
But they were gone now. During the five years since I'd abandoned my own
business, in each company I'd worked in, the walls of my cubicles had remained
empty of maps or anything else.
Walking beside Linda, I was dismayed to find that I was still trying to hide
my limp, the old injury to my left foot.
We passed through a section where the files on the desks were bright red,
through another where they were yellow, and finally into one where they were
green. Here many of them had grown thicker over time until they'd been stuffed
into brown expansion folders, many of those now faded, torn and split, some-
times bandaged back together with clear packing tape, sometimes left to continue
falling apart. I recognized them immediately as accident benefit files, the kind
that I now specialized in.
Because it was labor intensive, with a lot of legislated deadlines, accident
benefit or 'AB' work, that is the handling of benefit claims arising from motor
vehicle accident injuries, was known for its high pressure. In the insurance
world, adjusters who did it were looked on with a combination of skepticism and
respect, not unlike the way marines and other special forces are perceived by
members of a regular army. There weren't enough people willing to do AB work,
so AB departments were usually understaffed and companies were often forced
to hire temporary contract people for them - the reason I was there.
We found our destination, a rectangular section of six cubicles. I saw only
three adjusters, two young women and a young man. Beyond them, in a larger
cubicle next to the window, we found Vincent Ferraro. He was on the phone, so
Linda waited with me.
"How many AB adjusters do you have?" I asked her.
"Counting the four supervisors, twenty-eight, at least when we're at full
staff. We still need two adjusters for this unit."
She was referring to permanent staff, an unintentional reminder that I was
only there temporarily. Companies rarely hired people over fifty for permanent
positions. But I preferred contract work, for it allowed me at least the illusion of
freedom.
I looked out over Vincent's little domain. Of the three empty cubicles, two
were definitely unoccupied. Both had a computer and telephone on the desks,
but one was otherwise bare, while the other, in the middle of the aisle, had files
on it, most of them big ones in brown folders. They and every-thing else in the
cubicle had a neglected look. The 'in tray' was overloaded with mail and a
collection of message slips were tucked under the phone, probably unanswered,
so I guessed that that cubicle was mine.
Directly across the aisle, wearing a navy blue corduroy jacket and pants, a
young woman with short dark blonde hair leaned back in her chair, one shoe up
on the edge of her desk while she talked on the phone. Though only her profile
was visible, I saw already how beautiful she was.
Vincent put down his phone and stood up. He was the same height as me,
six feet, and again had the look in his eyes that I'd noticed during our interview a
week earlier. He'd reminded me then of a predator that had been caught in a
trap, that had struggled for a while to get free and had only temporarily given up.
"I've got to get over to Dunigan's," he said to Linda without looking at me.
He gathered sections of a file from his desk and put them in a large black leather
case while he and Linda had a conversation in tones too low for me to hear.
Linda left, then Vincent, lifting the case in one hand, motioned for me to follow
as he walked over to the young blonde.
"Katya," he said, "this is the new contract adjuster, Christopher Stone."
"Hi," she said, turning in her seat to give me a direct stare. Her eyes were a
startling blue.
"I have to go to a pre-hearing Katya," Vincent said. "Can you help
Christopher set up his computer?"
"Sure," she said. She had a husky voice, stronger than you expected.
"And take him around to meet everyone?"
"Get lost Vincent, we'll take care of him."
Looking uncomfortable, Vincent turned to me and confirmed that the
cubicle opposite Katya's was mine. The files there would be mine too and he
went on at some length about the need for them to be brought up to date, making
me wonder just how bad they were. Then he left, walking quickly toward the
elevators. I noticed Katya's impish smile as she watched him go.
"Don't worry Christopher, you'll get used to him."
"Just Chris," I said.
"I hope someone warned you about this place."
"They're all the same," I said.
"What a depressing thought. Well, let's show you around."
Katya took me through all four units, meeting adjusters and clerical support.
She did most of the talking. Almost everyone called her 'Kat'. It was obvious that
she was popular. Recalling how poorly I'd integrated myself at other companies,
I did my best to exchange a few pleasantries and remember names, though by
the time we returned to our unit I'd forgotten most of them. Names had never
meant much to me, even my own.
Besides Katya, the unit included David, a tall slim young man with steel-
rimmed glasses who sat to the right of her, and Martha, a stocky brunette with
big sincere eyes who sat across the aisle from David, next to the cubicle that
would be mine. Out on calls that morning was Tony, their 'road adjuster', who
did the unit's outside work. His cubicle was the one to the left of Katya.
"Now we've got more men in this unit than women," David said. "That's a
first."
"No," Martha said. "Counting Tony there were already more men, at least
since Vashti left."
"Tony's not a man."
"More of a man than you are," Katya said.
"Size, that's all Tony has."
"That's all he needs."
"You should know."
Katya's face flushed.
"At least he doesn't come in hung over every morning," she said.
"More men," David said smugly.
"More hard-ons, just what we need."
"Kat!" Martha exclaimed, looking at me.
Katya turned to me, looking as if she'd forgotten I was there. Her lips
pursed together mischievously, trying to prevent a smile. It was something I
would see her do many times, something I would never want to forget.
"I'm sure Chris has heard worse than that before," she said.
They were all watching me.
"What happened to your leg?" David asked.
"A motorcycle accident, a long time ago."
"Did you have a claim?" Martha asked.
"No, it was my own fault."
How could I have explained to them why a twenty year old Canadian had
crossed the border in January 1969 to go to that recruitment centre in Buffalo,
hoping to get to Vietnam? How could I have talked to them about a war they all
knew had been a stupid mistake and a terrible waste of lives, when I still didn't
know if that was true? When I still, sometimes night after night, thought about
things that had happened there, things that I'd never talked about with anyone.
No, it wasn't vanity that made me try to conceal the foot. I wasn't ashamed of it,
but I didn't want to find out again how little people knew or cared about the war.
The foot was something I had to keep to myself.
Two phones were ringing.
"We better get back to work," said Katya. "I've got to help Chris set up his
computer."
______
Chapter II
With her chair next to mine, Katya taught me to log into TNM's system and
maneuver through the screens used for claim information, loss reserves, pay-
ments, underwriting, log notes, and the collection of statistics for the provincial
government. She worked the keys deftly, while I repeated each step slowly and
methodically, making notes as we went. I wanted to get it all down the first time,
since the ability to use a computer quickly was something an adjuster couldn't
do without.
She was Katya Levytsky, the twenty-nine year old daughter of Polish
immigrants. Her hair, the clear skin of her neck and hands, every sign of her
unmistakable youth, were so close to me, yet I seemed to feel nothing.
During my life, I had crossed paths with many beautiful women and none
had left me unmoved. Was I really so detached now? That ability of mine to
separate myself, to put emotion aside, had protected me so often from pain and
humiliation when I was a boy. During the war, and through twenty-five years of
work and married life, it had always been a shield and a source of strength. Had
it now become a prison?
But Katya was soon back at her desk and I was left alone at mine. I looked
at the massive files on the shelves, knowing how disorganized they were likely to
be, how full of errors, how many documents would be missing and how many
unforeseen traps would be waiting for me. They looked back at me with a heavy
impenetrable contempt. The computer monitor, awake and watching me through
the blue and white Claim Search screen, seemed in doubt whether I would be
able to do what was required of me. Even the telephone regarded me with
suspicion.
My best chance was to find an interesting file, one that might help me forget
why I didn't want to be there. I chose one labeled 'McCaskill II', the most recent
of two large volumes devoted to one claimant.
You don't read old accident benefit files from the beginning. They average
one volume for each year they've been open, approximately a thousand pages in
each accordion folder. Since some of them remain open for years, they easily
exceed the length of the longest novels. But unlike novels, their pages are usually
out of order and the last chapters are yet to be written, those being left to you.
Because you have to start writing before you've had a chance to read much of
the file, you do it by reading the most recent material first, working your way
back until you think you know enough to begin.
Novelists have the advantage that their characters exist only in their
imaginations. The characters in claim files are out there in the world, very much
alive, determined to write the rest of the book themselves, and they often have
skilled lawyers to help them.
Donald McCaskill, a young man employed at the time as a roofer, lost
control of his motorcycle one rainy night on a local expressway. The bike hit the
guardrail, destroying itself and leaving him with no use of his legs, forty per cent
use of one arm and hand, seventy per cent of the other. Only twenty-seven years
old, he was now a quadriplegic, or a 'quad' as we usually referred to them, con-
fined for the rest of his life to a wheelchair. Though people with serious injuries
still had a right to a law suit in Ontario, McCaskill had no one to sue. His future
depended mostly on the benefits he could collect from TNM.
I was tempted to put the file away. I knew too well what was waiting for me
in it – the painful, humiliating details of pressure sores, bladder infections, diapers
and catheterizations, combined with depression and other psychological fallout -
all the unrelenting suffering from a disability that affects every part of living,
twenty-four hours a day. Some quadriplegics manage to maintain their spirits in
the face of it, and those who do are among the few heroes the modern world
produces. But I didn't know if I had the courage to face such a file on my first
day.
It was a comment in a psychologist's report that kept me from putting it
back. The doctor said McCaskill's inability to maintain relationships, a difficult
enough problem for any quadriplegic, had been reinforced by his autistic nature.
He was a 'high functioning autistic', the term now used for someone who was
solitary by nature but possessed with enough intelligence to pass grades in school.
He had the three main characteristics of autism – difficulty with or reluctance to
use spoken language, social ineptitude, and, most important of all, a profound
sense of aloneness.
A couple of years earlier I'd stumbled on a discussion of autism in the book
of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars. Since then I'd been
reading everything I could find about the disorder. Like most people, I had
thought autism was a form of mental retardation, unaware that it could include
people of normal intelligence.
The term autism seemed to explain something that 'introvert' missed. To be
introverted implied a turning inward, a withdrawal not only from people but from
the world as well. "Autism', derived from the same Latin root as 'autonomous',
didn't refer to withdrawal at all, only to the fact that these people stood alone.
I was interested in this grudging recognition that people existed whose
fundamental nature was solitary, for it offered something I'd sought all my life –
a better understanding of my own character.
Reading about McCaskill's childhood in the psychologist's report, I
remembered again my own first day at school, that morning in September, 1953
when I crouched in a corner of the school's old brick walls, instinctively protect-
ing my back, waiting for the doors of the school to open. I remembered the yard
full of children, the pushing, teasing, shouting and hitting that were going on all
around me. Though I couldn't have put it into words then, I felt like an alien
child, an orphan from some far away star inexplicably left behind on a strange
and unfriendly planet. Only five years old, I was already contemplating what
would be the central problem of my life.
That I would soon have to fight some of those kids simply because I didn't
want to talk to them was a surprise still to come. I had no appetite for fighting. I
wanted as little contact with them as possible. But I did have an instinct to de-
fend myself and I would learn to understand fists better than words. In those
fights I was usually surrounded by a mass of screaming kids, all of them pressing
in, whether to urge on my opponent or just to be sure they didn't miss any of the
action. In the midst of that and the blows I was receiving, I sometimes couldn't
hold back my tears, but I always fought silently, determined to ignore my pain
and inflict as much as possible in return. Whether I was winning or losing, every
punch I landed was proof, at least to me, that I was right to insist on remaining
apart.
In the long run, the fighting wasn't as difficult to deal with as the efforts of
well meaning teachers to get me to 'come out of my shell', to be part of groups
and teams, to be like everyone else. In spite of the kindness and concern in their
words, those teachers only confused me. They seemed to care, but they always
wanted me to do exactly what I didn't want to do.
The other kids understood that I was not one of them. They never volun-
tarily took me into their company. When teachers forced them to include me,
their discomfort and suspicion were always evident. They knew the truth as well
as I did. Only teachers and other adults didn't understand.
Like the ugly duckling in the fairy tale, I felt, and I was made to feel, how
profoundly I didn't belong. I didn't argue with the teachers – I didn't know how –
but I was convinced that they were wrong and for a long time I remained sullenly
the way I was. In high school I would learn to pretend that I was like the others,
to behave more like them, but I never lost the conviction that I was different in
some fundamental way.
So McCaskill's file would be interesting. Here was a man like me, except
that he had fallen into an abyss of misfortune beyond anything I'd ever known.
I'd handled the files of quadriplegics before, so I knew the problems he would
face. But I also knew that he would have strengths beyond those of most people
– independence, a strong will, and no fear of loneliness. His medicals confirmed
just that.
This personality hadn't endeared him to the adjusters and rehabilitation
workers assigned to his case. His anger, his silences, his reluctance to accept the
help that was offered him and his insistence on doing everything his way, had
quickly alienated everyone and got him into disputes that you wouldn't normally
have seen.
The rehab case manager assigned by TNM was Audrey Granger, a woman I
hadn't encountered before, but I did know that she was one who got most of her
work from insurers. That meant she was going to be paying more attention to the
wishes of TNM than those of Donald McCaskill.
Vincent seemed to have an unusual presence on the file. All of Audrey's
reports had been addressed to him, and TNM's written responses to her were
often from him. That looked odd. Though it was an important file where a lot
was at stake for TNM financially, my predecessor Vashti had been an exper-
ienced adjuster and the file had been in her name from its inception.
The most recent dispute had been over a home gym with a price tag of six
thousand dollars. Audrey and Vincent thought it was too much to pay for a piece
of equipment that McCaskill might never use. They decided that he would be
better served with a supervised program at a gym. If he actually went to the gym
regularly, which he would be entitled to do for the rest of his life, the cost of it
would pass six thousand dollars long before the exercise equipment would wear
out. But I suspected that they knew McCaskill wouldn't go to a gym. He was
said to be a recluse now, living alone in a small house in the east end with his
grandmother, only going out if he had to.
Despite being quadriplegic, he was, with some help from his grandmother,
doing much of his own care. He only allowed an attendant in twice a day, a
couple of hours each time. He still had good strength in his arms and torso, with
which he had learned to move himself in bed at night, and he'd devised a way of
getting himself in and out of wheelchairs too. TNM had received a substantial
saving from this desire for independence, yet there was no sign that McCaskill
was getting any credit for it.
Except for a couple of invoices that I paid, I couldn't find anything else on
the file that required immediate attention, so I decided not to spend more time on
it. I was just putting it back on the shelf when I heard David behind me.
"Want to join us for coffee?"
He was standing in the entrance to my cubicle with Ken Rampersad, a
slim, dark complexioned adjuster who worked in the next unit. Nearing forty,
originally from the island of Trinidad where he'd first entered the claims busi-
ness, Ken was destined to become one of two male friends I would have at
TNM. David would not be one of them.
I joined them and the three of us walked to the elevator.
"So you're an independent," David said.
"Used to be."
"With who?"
There had been a lot of independent offices in Toronto, including some big
North American chains. All of them, big and small, had been hurt badly by the
introduction of 'no fault' auto insurance in 1990. The reduced ability to sue
drastically lowered the number of claims, while the new accident benefit work
was so labor intensive that insurers couldn't afford to pay independents ninety
dollars an hour to do it. Instead, they hired an army of young people and trained
them to handle the claims 'in house'. To get some of the work back, the big
independents then began a price war, cutting their rates drastically, which they
were able to do because there was no shortage of young adjusters willing to work
for lower wages, often working extra hours without pay, in hope of establishing
themselves in the supposedly glamorous independent field. It didn't matter that
most of them were burnt out within a year, for there were always more waiting
to take their place. In my case, it wasn't money that had drawn me into indep-
endent work, but the collapse in rates and the reduction in new files had helped
drive me out.
"I was on my own," I said. "For a few years I had a young guy working
with me, but I had to let him go."
"Who was that?" David asked.
"Colin Jameson."
"I know him."
"Wasn't he here last year?" Ken asked.
"Right, he was with us in Vincent's unit." David said. "He's with Canutti,
Smyrnoff now."
Colin was a young man from a black Jamaican family in the west end. I'd
trained him from scratch. He'd learned fast and had been scrupulously honest in
a business filled with temptations. I'd been able to depend on him in the worst of
times. I was dismayed to find that I'd lost track of him.
"He was here?"
"Yeah, but he didn't stay long. He and Vincent didn't get along."
I wondered if that had something to do with Vincent's cool reception of me.
"Colin's a good adjuster," I said
We were downstairs now, walking across the big lobby towards the
restaurant. David already had a cigarette in his hand.
"I hope you smoke," he said.
"I don't, but it doesn't bother me."
We entered a cafeteria line, got our coffee, paid the cashier, then walked
through rattan chairs and glass tables to the smoking section at the back. David's
cigarette was lit before he sat down. Ken started to search the pockets of his
jacket for his own.
"Sure you don't mind?" David asked, blowing smoke out over the table.
"I've seen a lot of smoke."
"You know what they say about second hand smoke," Ken said.
"But you inhale both, first hand and second hand, so you still die before I
do."
They laughed, pleased at this response. Ken visibly enjoyed his cigarette,
while David inspected the women at nearby tables, until he turned to me.
"So what files have you looked at?" he asked.
"Donald McCaskill."
"Not exactly the one I'd start with."
"TNM's been giving him a rough ride," I said.
"That's Vincent. You may think it's your file, but it's one of his favorites."
"Because of Audrey," Ken added.
"The case manager?"
They both nodded.
"She and Vincent are friends?"
"Like that," Ken said, holding up two fingers together.
They didn't have to tell me that such a friendship would be partly financial.
Corruption had been a chronic disease in the insurance industry as long as I could
remember, but since the eighties the infection had been spreading in an unprece-
dented way. Recently I'd heard that the under the table price – the payoff to an
adjuster or supervisor - for a rehab referral of a quadriplegic file like McCaskill's
was eight hundred dollars.
Some of the people who did this, who offered money for referrals, were
good people who didn't want to do it. But they were convinced that it was the
only way to survive in business now, and I wasn't sure they were wrong.
"Is that why Vashti left?" I asked.
"It was a factor," Ken said. "Not the only one."
"She bailed out," David said.
There was a silence while they smoked their cigarettes and I thought about
Vashti.
"What do you think of him?" David asked.
"Who?"
"Vincent. Our illustrious leader."
"He's a hard man to read."
"Yes, there's a lot that needs to be read," Ken said, "but no one can find the
book."
They were near the end of their cigarettes and I had finished my coffee.
"What do you think of Kat?" David asked.
"She's nice," I said, immediately regretting the inadequacy of the description.
"Not as nice as she pretends to be."
There was another silence. I wasn't going to follow that up.
"They say Vincent used to be a priest," David continued.
As strange as it sounded, it fit the man.
"What does he say?"
"He never talks about it," Ken said. "But I don't think he ever got to be a
priest. I think he dropped out of a seminary."
We contemplated that as they drank what was left of their coffee.
"He's hiding from God," Ken said.
David stood up, butting out the remains of his cigarette.
"Could you find a more godless place than an accident benefit claims
department?" he asked as we left the table.
_______
With her chair next to mine, Katya taught me to log into TNM's system and
maneuver through the screens used for claim information, loss reserves, pay-
ments, underwriting, log notes, and the collection of statistics for the provincial
government. She worked the keys deftly, while I repeated each step slowly and
methodically, making notes as we went. I wanted to get it all down the first time,
since the ability to use a computer quickly was something an adjuster couldn't
do without.
She was Katya Levytsky, the twenty-nine year old daughter of Polish
immigrants. Her hair, the clear skin of her neck and hands, every sign of her
unmistakable youth, were so close to me, yet I seemed to feel nothing.
During my life, I had crossed paths with many beautiful women and none
had left me unmoved. Was I really so detached now? That ability of mine to
separate myself, to put emotion aside, had protected me so often from pain and
humiliation when I was a boy. During the war, and through twenty-five years of
work and married life, it had always been a shield and a source of strength. Had
it now become a prison?
But Katya was soon back at her desk and I was left alone at mine. I looked
at the massive files on the shelves, knowing how disorganized they were likely to
be, how full of errors, how many documents would be missing and how many
unforeseen traps would be waiting for me. They looked back at me with a heavy
impenetrable contempt. The computer monitor, awake and watching me through
the blue and white Claim Search screen, seemed in doubt whether I would be
able to do what was required of me. Even the telephone regarded me with
suspicion.
My best chance was to find an interesting file, one that might help me forget
why I didn't want to be there. I chose one labeled 'McCaskill II', the most recent
of two large volumes devoted to one claimant.
You don't read old accident benefit files from the beginning. They average
one volume for each year they've been open, approximately a thousand pages in
each accordion folder. Since some of them remain open for years, they easily
exceed the length of the longest novels. But unlike novels, their pages are usually
out of order and the last chapters are yet to be written, those being left to you.
Because you have to start writing before you've had a chance to read much of
the file, you do it by reading the most recent material first, working your way
back until you think you know enough to begin.
Novelists have the advantage that their characters exist only in their
imaginations. The characters in claim files are out there in the world, very much
alive, determined to write the rest of the book themselves, and they often have
skilled lawyers to help them.
Donald McCaskill, a young man employed at the time as a roofer, lost
control of his motorcycle one rainy night on a local expressway. The bike hit the
guardrail, destroying itself and leaving him with no use of his legs, forty per cent
use of one arm and hand, seventy per cent of the other. Only twenty-seven years
old, he was now a quadriplegic, or a 'quad' as we usually referred to them, con-
fined for the rest of his life to a wheelchair. Though people with serious injuries
still had a right to a law suit in Ontario, McCaskill had no one to sue. His future
depended mostly on the benefits he could collect from TNM.
I was tempted to put the file away. I knew too well what was waiting for me
in it – the painful, humiliating details of pressure sores, bladder infections, diapers
and catheterizations, combined with depression and other psychological fallout -
all the unrelenting suffering from a disability that affects every part of living,
twenty-four hours a day. Some quadriplegics manage to maintain their spirits in
the face of it, and those who do are among the few heroes the modern world
produces. But I didn't know if I had the courage to face such a file on my first
day.
It was a comment in a psychologist's report that kept me from putting it
back. The doctor said McCaskill's inability to maintain relationships, a difficult
enough problem for any quadriplegic, had been reinforced by his autistic nature.
He was a 'high functioning autistic', the term now used for someone who was
solitary by nature but possessed with enough intelligence to pass grades in school.
He had the three main characteristics of autism – difficulty with or reluctance to
use spoken language, social ineptitude, and, most important of all, a profound
sense of aloneness.
A couple of years earlier I'd stumbled on a discussion of autism in the book
of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars. Since then I'd been
reading everything I could find about the disorder. Like most people, I had
thought autism was a form of mental retardation, unaware that it could include
people of normal intelligence.
The term autism seemed to explain something that 'introvert' missed. To be
introverted implied a turning inward, a withdrawal not only from people but from
the world as well. "Autism', derived from the same Latin root as 'autonomous',
didn't refer to withdrawal at all, only to the fact that these people stood alone.
I was interested in this grudging recognition that people existed whose
fundamental nature was solitary, for it offered something I'd sought all my life –
a better understanding of my own character.
Reading about McCaskill's childhood in the psychologist's report, I
remembered again my own first day at school, that morning in September, 1953
when I crouched in a corner of the school's old brick walls, instinctively protect-
ing my back, waiting for the doors of the school to open. I remembered the yard
full of children, the pushing, teasing, shouting and hitting that were going on all
around me. Though I couldn't have put it into words then, I felt like an alien
child, an orphan from some far away star inexplicably left behind on a strange
and unfriendly planet. Only five years old, I was already contemplating what
would be the central problem of my life.
That I would soon have to fight some of those kids simply because I didn't
want to talk to them was a surprise still to come. I had no appetite for fighting. I
wanted as little contact with them as possible. But I did have an instinct to de-
fend myself and I would learn to understand fists better than words. In those
fights I was usually surrounded by a mass of screaming kids, all of them pressing
in, whether to urge on my opponent or just to be sure they didn't miss any of the
action. In the midst of that and the blows I was receiving, I sometimes couldn't
hold back my tears, but I always fought silently, determined to ignore my pain
and inflict as much as possible in return. Whether I was winning or losing, every
punch I landed was proof, at least to me, that I was right to insist on remaining
apart.
In the long run, the fighting wasn't as difficult to deal with as the efforts of
well meaning teachers to get me to 'come out of my shell', to be part of groups
and teams, to be like everyone else. In spite of the kindness and concern in their
words, those teachers only confused me. They seemed to care, but they always
wanted me to do exactly what I didn't want to do.
The other kids understood that I was not one of them. They never volun-
tarily took me into their company. When teachers forced them to include me,
their discomfort and suspicion were always evident. They knew the truth as well
as I did. Only teachers and other adults didn't understand.
Like the ugly duckling in the fairy tale, I felt, and I was made to feel, how
profoundly I didn't belong. I didn't argue with the teachers – I didn't know how –
but I was convinced that they were wrong and for a long time I remained sullenly
the way I was. In high school I would learn to pretend that I was like the others,
to behave more like them, but I never lost the conviction that I was different in
some fundamental way.
So McCaskill's file would be interesting. Here was a man like me, except
that he had fallen into an abyss of misfortune beyond anything I'd ever known.
I'd handled the files of quadriplegics before, so I knew the problems he would
face. But I also knew that he would have strengths beyond those of most people
– independence, a strong will, and no fear of loneliness. His medicals confirmed
just that.
This personality hadn't endeared him to the adjusters and rehabilitation
workers assigned to his case. His anger, his silences, his reluctance to accept the
help that was offered him and his insistence on doing everything his way, had
quickly alienated everyone and got him into disputes that you wouldn't normally
have seen.
The rehab case manager assigned by TNM was Audrey Granger, a woman I
hadn't encountered before, but I did know that she was one who got most of her
work from insurers. That meant she was going to be paying more attention to the
wishes of TNM than those of Donald McCaskill.
Vincent seemed to have an unusual presence on the file. All of Audrey's
reports had been addressed to him, and TNM's written responses to her were
often from him. That looked odd. Though it was an important file where a lot
was at stake for TNM financially, my predecessor Vashti had been an exper-
ienced adjuster and the file had been in her name from its inception.
The most recent dispute had been over a home gym with a price tag of six
thousand dollars. Audrey and Vincent thought it was too much to pay for a piece
of equipment that McCaskill might never use. They decided that he would be
better served with a supervised program at a gym. If he actually went to the gym
regularly, which he would be entitled to do for the rest of his life, the cost of it
would pass six thousand dollars long before the exercise equipment would wear
out. But I suspected that they knew McCaskill wouldn't go to a gym. He was
said to be a recluse now, living alone in a small house in the east end with his
grandmother, only going out if he had to.
Despite being quadriplegic, he was, with some help from his grandmother,
doing much of his own care. He only allowed an attendant in twice a day, a
couple of hours each time. He still had good strength in his arms and torso, with
which he had learned to move himself in bed at night, and he'd devised a way of
getting himself in and out of wheelchairs too. TNM had received a substantial
saving from this desire for independence, yet there was no sign that McCaskill
was getting any credit for it.
Except for a couple of invoices that I paid, I couldn't find anything else on
the file that required immediate attention, so I decided not to spend more time on
it. I was just putting it back on the shelf when I heard David behind me.
"Want to join us for coffee?"
He was standing in the entrance to my cubicle with Ken Rampersad, a
slim, dark complexioned adjuster who worked in the next unit. Nearing forty,
originally from the island of Trinidad where he'd first entered the claims busi-
ness, Ken was destined to become one of two male friends I would have at
TNM. David would not be one of them.
I joined them and the three of us walked to the elevator.
"So you're an independent," David said.
"Used to be."
"With who?"
There had been a lot of independent offices in Toronto, including some big
North American chains. All of them, big and small, had been hurt badly by the
introduction of 'no fault' auto insurance in 1990. The reduced ability to sue
drastically lowered the number of claims, while the new accident benefit work
was so labor intensive that insurers couldn't afford to pay independents ninety
dollars an hour to do it. Instead, they hired an army of young people and trained
them to handle the claims 'in house'. To get some of the work back, the big
independents then began a price war, cutting their rates drastically, which they
were able to do because there was no shortage of young adjusters willing to work
for lower wages, often working extra hours without pay, in hope of establishing
themselves in the supposedly glamorous independent field. It didn't matter that
most of them were burnt out within a year, for there were always more waiting
to take their place. In my case, it wasn't money that had drawn me into indep-
endent work, but the collapse in rates and the reduction in new files had helped
drive me out.
"I was on my own," I said. "For a few years I had a young guy working
with me, but I had to let him go."
"Who was that?" David asked.
"Colin Jameson."
"I know him."
"Wasn't he here last year?" Ken asked.
"Right, he was with us in Vincent's unit." David said. "He's with Canutti,
Smyrnoff now."
Colin was a young man from a black Jamaican family in the west end. I'd
trained him from scratch. He'd learned fast and had been scrupulously honest in
a business filled with temptations. I'd been able to depend on him in the worst of
times. I was dismayed to find that I'd lost track of him.
"He was here?"
"Yeah, but he didn't stay long. He and Vincent didn't get along."
I wondered if that had something to do with Vincent's cool reception of me.
"Colin's a good adjuster," I said
We were downstairs now, walking across the big lobby towards the
restaurant. David already had a cigarette in his hand.
"I hope you smoke," he said.
"I don't, but it doesn't bother me."
We entered a cafeteria line, got our coffee, paid the cashier, then walked
through rattan chairs and glass tables to the smoking section at the back. David's
cigarette was lit before he sat down. Ken started to search the pockets of his
jacket for his own.
"Sure you don't mind?" David asked, blowing smoke out over the table.
"I've seen a lot of smoke."
"You know what they say about second hand smoke," Ken said.
"But you inhale both, first hand and second hand, so you still die before I
do."
They laughed, pleased at this response. Ken visibly enjoyed his cigarette,
while David inspected the women at nearby tables, until he turned to me.
"So what files have you looked at?" he asked.
"Donald McCaskill."
"Not exactly the one I'd start with."
"TNM's been giving him a rough ride," I said.
"That's Vincent. You may think it's your file, but it's one of his favorites."
"Because of Audrey," Ken added.
"The case manager?"
They both nodded.
"She and Vincent are friends?"
"Like that," Ken said, holding up two fingers together.
They didn't have to tell me that such a friendship would be partly financial.
Corruption had been a chronic disease in the insurance industry as long as I could
remember, but since the eighties the infection had been spreading in an unprece-
dented way. Recently I'd heard that the under the table price – the payoff to an
adjuster or supervisor - for a rehab referral of a quadriplegic file like McCaskill's
was eight hundred dollars.
Some of the people who did this, who offered money for referrals, were
good people who didn't want to do it. But they were convinced that it was the
only way to survive in business now, and I wasn't sure they were wrong.
"Is that why Vashti left?" I asked.
"It was a factor," Ken said. "Not the only one."
"She bailed out," David said.
There was a silence while they smoked their cigarettes and I thought about
Vashti.
"What do you think of him?" David asked.
"Who?"
"Vincent. Our illustrious leader."
"He's a hard man to read."
"Yes, there's a lot that needs to be read," Ken said, "but no one can find the
book."
They were near the end of their cigarettes and I had finished my coffee.
"What do you think of Kat?" David asked.
"She's nice," I said, immediately regretting the inadequacy of the description.
"Not as nice as she pretends to be."
There was another silence. I wasn't going to follow that up.
"They say Vincent used to be a priest," David continued.
As strange as it sounded, it fit the man.
"What does he say?"
"He never talks about it," Ken said. "But I don't think he ever got to be a
priest. I think he dropped out of a seminary."
We contemplated that as they drank what was left of their coffee.
"He's hiding from God," Ken said.
David stood up, butting out the remains of his cigarette.
"Could you find a more godless place than an accident benefit claims
department?" he asked as we left the table.
_______
