CREAM AND SUGAR

by David Allan Barker

ISBN: 978-0-9869412-6-9

© David Allan Barker, 2013

Cream and Sugar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

That means you are free to quote from it, reproduce sections of it, incorporate it into some other work, create a mashup, zombify it, whatever your heart desires, so long as a) you give appropriate attribution, b) don’t use the resulting work for commercial purposes (even if you are a non-profit or registered charity), & c) redistribute the resulting work under the same licensing terms.

The reason I distribute this novel on such terms is that I despise unregulated capitalism. It cannibalizes all our cultural efforts and excretes them as commodities to be bought and sold pro forma in our global marketplace. I ask that you kindly accord Cream and Sugar the respect it deserves as an extended and heartfelt conversation with you, my readers.

This is a work of fiction. All characters are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to real persons living or dead is coincidental.

http://nouspique.com

1. MOCHA LATTE

WHAT HAPPENS TO vampires when they get their period?

That’s the latest in a long string of stupid questions I’ve been asking to throw Giselle off her balance. Ah, Giselle. My lover, mother of our children, author of the Midnight Blood series of vampire novels. At least those are the three things I always mention when I introduce her to acquaintances.

She tosses my first chapter onto the coffee table that divides us. She sits way back in the sofa, legs stuck out straight and spread apart. She's appealing in a whorish way, except she hasn’t shaved her legs in three weeks and hasn’t brushed her teeth since last night. Me, on the other hand, I lean forward in my chair, back straight, unable to relax. Giselle says that in the last few months I've grown more white than when we first married, if such a thing is possible. Once upon a time, she thought it was endearing how I could be so awkward in my priggish white formal way.

But now.

But now.

You can’t be serious!

Maybe she means it as a question, but it comes out somewhere between challenge and mockery.

What?

I know what she’s thinking. I can see it in the way she looks at me. I started out writing copy for print advertising. I manage ad campaigns. Glossy lifestyle magazines. Fifteen second spots. Bus stop shelters. That sort of thing. I used to be a purist, an English grad with literary pretensions, but I made my Faustian pact. Once you sell your soul to the devil, redemption is impossible because there’s nothing left to redeem. Giselle, on the other hand, well, she’s a novelist, which means her soul is intact. Vampire novels! When I point out that she sells her words for money too, she says it’s not the same. She says that when people pay her, they pay for the words; when they pay me, they pay for the illusion. They pay me to trick them into believing an ideology of consumption.

Oh really, I say. And vampires aren’t metaphorical consumers?

This is where Giselle gets all hurt and crinkles her nose. She had always hoped people would read her books as a commentary on race, but reviewers never saw the series as anything but Gothic horror on amphetamines. I tell her to stick a photo of herself on the back cover. Nobody will ever get the race metaphor if they can’t see the colour of her skin. But she once was a purist too and believes that if the meaning isn’t obvious on its face, then it isn’t really there. If people can't see her Vampire tales as a parable for race, then it's her fault. She isn't a good enough writer. Blah, blah, blah goes the self-pitying sulk.

As for me, I’m just a glorified ad man. So when I ask what happens to vampires when they get their period—well, I expect I’ll be sleeping alone tonight.

But you can’t be serious, she says. I mean, I can’t understand a friggin word of it. She flicks the thin sheaf of papers with her big toe.

It’s science fiction.

Yeah? So? Ray Bradbury wrote science fiction and I can understand him.

But my story takes place fourteen thousand years from now. You can’t expect we’ll still be talking like this fourteen thousand years from now.

You’re readers don’t live fourteen thousand years from now.

But I’m trying to be realistic.

And I’m trying to be realistic.

The way we talk across one another would be funny if we were another couple having this conversation. Here I am, the sellout, worried about the art of my writing. There she is, the artist, worried about making money. I guess people obsess most about the things they don’t have. Sometimes I wonder if this habit of talking at cross purposes isn’t the précis to a novel, a short sample of a theme that’s writ large in our marriage. We breeze past one another, exchange information, then go on with our separate lives.

Except for sex. When our bodies touch, something happens. We could be arguing, or misinterpreting one another’s words, or letting our thoughts drift a million miles away, and then we touch. My mind empties and I drop like a stone into a warm pool. When she settles onto my body, I melt. My limbs turn to plastic and wrap themselves around her like cellophane. When I think of us together, I think of those warm August evenings, her dark skin glistening in the candlelight, the tang of her flesh as I trace my tongue up her spine, the deep shadow below the curve of her shoulder blade. I wish there were more Augusts in a year. But this isn’t a candlelit evening alone in the bedroom; it’s a hundred watt morning in the living room while the kids clatter around in the kitchen. And it isn’t August and warm; it’s October and I have goose pimples on my arms.

You can’t make up a language and expect people to read it.

It’s not really made up.

Oh yeah? Well then, what’s this: ‘to dream and drail atwixt the stars?’ What the hell is drail?

How should I know? And it doesn’t matter anyways.

Yes it does. People will want to know.

I just thought it sounded good.

Giselle rolls her eyes. To her, every word has a meaning. It’s a bizarre irony of the ad business that you’re at the top of your game when every word you crank out is pointless. All that matters is that somehow your words strike at your target market. They evoke a feeling or force an irrational association. Ad words are like the balls on a billiard table. You knock them around with mathematical precision, and when you’ve sunk them all, you step away from the table, finish your beer, go home, and the next morning you can’t remember a thing about the game except that it happened. So what? you say to yourself. It’s not like the balls are metaphors for relationships. Nobody’s assigning a Freudian significance to the cues. It’s good enough if people enjoy themselves in the usual way and then move on to something else.

Drail, and she laughs into her mug of coffee.

I don’t know what’s got into me. I decided to write a novel, something with more substance than a slogan. I haven’t thought it through—not the way Giselle maps out her novels from beginning to end before she writes even a word. I have a theory, though. I think everything gets mapped out beforehand in some unconscious way. It’s already there in a Jungian pool where we all slip to the edge and dip our toes. Or maybe my novel already lives inside a dictionary. I should approach it the way a Renaissance sculptor would approach a block of Carrera marble, chipping away the excess words, smoothing the rough edges, until the perfect novel reveals itself.

Planning is a crock. Every weekday, I go to work and plan my words. I strategize. Like a grandmaster chess champion, I move my words across the board to gain a competitive advantage. I’m tired of planning.

The kids are arguing. One of them used up all the milk and now the other one will have to eat toast instead of cereal. They’re old enough that we give them time to resolve their differences before we intervene, but they’re not too old to find a hundred childish reasons for their differences. They started with the milk, but now they’re fighting for the toy in the cereal box. It’s a fucking piece of plastic. My company—or one like it—put the toy in the box along with a promise of fun-filled hours, a smiling face, a slice of the happy pie. Whoever wrote that copy didn’t have kids. That's for sure.

Mocha latte.

That’s a joke I used to crack when Giselle and I first married. I assumed that any babies we made would have skin the colour of mocha latte—not milk white, not coffee brown, but one stirred into the other. What a surprise, then, when Katrine arrived. She had pinky white skin. If it weren’t for the shock of nappy ginger hair, you’d have no idea she came from her mother.

Christ.

That was fifteen years ago. Two years later, waiting in the delivery room for her brother to show his face, I had prepared myself for another Celtic-looking baby. Instead, Griffen was as dark as his mother, with earth-coloured skin and flat nose. When people saw Katrine and Griffen together, they couldn’t believe they were siblings.

They were adopted, right?

No.

Half-siblings, then. Same mother, different fathers?

No.

An affair?

That last theory—that Giselle had an affair—came from Griffin’s grade three teacher who had taught Katrine two years before and couldn’t see a resemblance. Back then, I didn’t share Giselle’s apparent complacency about racial remarks. I was a model of righteous anger and political correctness. I wrote a letter to the principal and cc’d it to the director of education. There were meetings and accusations culminating in an apology. But looking back on the incident, I’m not sure I did Griffin any favour. The principal transferred him to another class and his new teacher was so cautious in handling him that by the end of the year the kid had become unruly. And now he’s a teenager arguing with his sister over the last drops of milk and a plastic toy in a cereal box.

Griffen’s going through a phase. He’s decided he’s black. He walks around doing this thing with his fingers and saying yo and word and listening to hip hop and rap and saving up for a gold chain. He wears a baseball cap sideways on his head and baggy jeans half way to his knees so we can see his boxer shorts riding up on his waist. He spends a lot of time chillin’ wit’ his cousin in da ‘hood. Da ‘hood is just another suburb. Doesn’t matter where as long as it’s not here. If it was another kid I’d think it was funny, but it’s my son, so the sudden distance that wedges itself between us feels like a thorn in my foot. I don’t get it. I don’t understand how a kid can decide one day that he’s black. I never thought it was a matter of choice; either you are or you aren’t. It’s like that block of Carrera marble: you hack away the extraneous chunks to reveal an inner blackness that was always there. But Griffen doesn’t think about it that way. At thirteen, he’s too young to say how he thinks about it. All he says is that he needs to be wit’ his homies, know what I’m sayin’? Then he sticks in his ear buds and swaggers down to the bus stop.

I wonder how I would have felt if it was Griffen who was first to slide out from between Giselle’s thighs. If I saw his dark skin pressed against her dark skin, would I have been suspicious? Would I have been like the grade three teacher and presume an affair? But because it was Katrine who came out first, I was primed to expect anything for a second child.

Giselle gets up from the sofa and goes to the kitchen for another coffee. As she’s stirring in the cream, she tells the kids to stop their fighting. She doesn’t yell, but her voice is stern and it works to subdue them—at least until she’s left the kitchen and is back on the sofa.

I don’t see why you need to invent new words to make your story realistic, she says.

I smile and point to the kitchen. I’ve been saying the same thing to Griff. Have you heard him lately?

She smiles: Yo!

2. ST. GEORGE

I’VE DECIDED TO go to church. I don't know why, although I’m sure my therapist could find a reason. I haven’t been to church since my wedding day. I grew up in a stiff mid-to-high Anglican household, and Giselle’s father is a retired holy-roller Pentecostal preacher. If either of us had stood our ground for the sake of our religion, the wedding would never have happened. Our parents were immovable objects and irresistible forces. To make things work, we compromised; we abandoned religion altogether, leaving both sets of parents to fret about the state of our immortal souls, and leaving us free to raise our children in a household unencumbered by neuroses (or so the theory goes). Yet here I am with an inexplicable desire to plunk my backside onto a hard wooden pew.

If Charles could see me this morning, slapping on a tie and slicking back my hair, he’d beam and say I’ve been infused with the power of the holy spirit. And my mom would offer a platitude like: It just goes to show you. Which explains why I haven’t told anyone my plans. Giselle lies in bed, holding the mug of coffee I brought to her (double cream, no sugar), and smiles at me in that vague, early morning way she has of smiling at me. The smile carries with it more than simple amusement; maybe it also carries a trace of contempt. She doesn’t say, and I don’t ask. As usual, we infer. We guess. We drift through one another’s spheres like tongue-tied ghosts. No. That doesn’t capture it. We aren’t ghostly; we're mechanical. There’s an automated efficiency to our lives. We share information, but it’s perfunctory: Katrine needs money for her yearbook; Griff needs a drive to his soccer practice; Giselle’s having lunch with her editor. Our communication is more like oil in a machine than oxygen in the lungs—it keeps things humming along but it doesn’t buoy us up.

The church is called St. George’s. Giselle laughs when I tell her which church: Isn’t every Anglican church called St. George’s? Again, I detect a hint of contempt. Or maybe it’s condescension: church is a respectable enough thing to do with your Sunday morning, but in the modern world, it’s best to keep it a secret so people don’t assume you’re either superstitious or ignorant.

St. George’s isn’t far from our home, one major street to the west and up a little. I don’t want to get there too early, don’t want to stand around and smile at nice old ladies and try to dream up convincing lies why I’m at church. But I don’t want to get there too late either, or else I’ll draw attention to myself. I arrive at 10:25 and park in the grocery store parking lot across the road. It’s a drab morning that casts a drab light on a drab building. The church has a tired look to it, built with sand-coloured bricks that were probably fired in the fifties, and they haven’t weathered well. As I come around to the front steps, I pass a cornerstone that dedicates the building to the glory of God in 1953. This church once stood on the northernmost limit of suburbia, but after more than half a century, the city has swallowed it up. Now it skulks in the shadows of a condominium canyon. Once upon a time, it shared frontage with two-story buildings, store below, apartment above. But developers snapped up all the shops, razed them, and set gleaming towers of metal and glass in their place. Now the church’s whitewashed steeple looks pathetic in the midst of all the corporate grandeur.

As I pass through the front door, a man shakes my hand and says welcome. He’s an overweight middle-aged man with greasy hair. He points the way to an usher who nods and says something inaudible and holds open a door to the sanctuary. Both men are dressed like me—business casual with a dash of invisibility. I take an order of service from the usher and find an empty pew near the back of the sanctuary. It’s a spare, functional space: bare tiled floor, unadorned wooden pews, plaster ceiling rising to a peak, energy efficient bulbs casting everything in a chalky white. The light gives my hands a leprous pallor. The walls are a mix of brick and wood and decorated with neo-gothic trefoils that make the place look hokey.

At 10:30, the wheezy organ stops and the priest enters from behind the chancel, walking across the dusty blue carpet to the lectern. According to the order of service, this is the Rev. Dr. Richard A. Fellowes, B.A., M.Div., Th.D. As I later discover, many of his parishioners call him pastor Rick because, a couple years ago at their annual variety night, he did a spot-on parody of a fundamentalist preacher. Here, at St. George’s, I’m not about to have my intellect abused by a smarmy religiosity. Then again, Pastor Rick’s dry earnestness might challenge my narcoleptic tendencies.

For the first twenty minutes, I let my eyes wander around the room and I wonder what the hell I’ve been thinking that I would want to subject myself to this. As objectively as possible, I attempt an estimate of the congregation’s average age and I come up with sixty-five. There’s the blue rinse cabal, wrinkled women whispering like school girls, and there’s the picture-perfect family sitting with two-point-four children, and notwithstanding the statement about diversity in their order of service, everybody is white. The choir fusses its way to the chancel steps and squawks and screeches through an introit, then fusses its way back to the pews behind the lectern.

I’m used to the fifteen second spot, story-boarded into a slick succession of cuts, or the poster designed to deliver bone-shattering impact with a two-second glance, fleeting impressions that burrow under the skin and leave eggs that fester and hatch and give you an unaccountable itch to run out and buy stuff. But this? This liturgical correctness? This solemn strut across the chancel? This interminable shtick before reading the Holy Scripture? This is just so fucking boring. I can’t imagine, in the age of YouTube, why anyone under sixty-five would willingly subject himself to this.

Why did I come this morning? That’s something I asked myself every Sunday morning when I was a teenager. Back then, the answer sat stolidly beside me—my father made me come to church, the same way his father made him come to church, and his father before him and so on, probably all the way back to the days when Henry VIII took a shine to someone who wasn’t his wife. My dad was such a Brit, with his hair slicked over his head and a precise part down the side, the stern eyebrows that got bushier with each succeeding year, the spider veins on either side of his nose, the face that turned a bright purplish red when you steamed him. Anyone else would have exploded for all the grief we gave him, but like a true Brit, he was a paragon of restraint, never blowing his top, but instead, letting it work its way into an ulcer. I’ve never had many regrets about Dad, but I do wish, before he died, that I could have asked him if he truly believed all the church shit he forced us to swallow when we were kids. I doubt it would have made any difference. Even if he did entertain doubts, his sense of propriety would have forced him to lie.

I find it remarkable that twenty-five—nearly thirty—years after my dad stopped forcing us to go to church, I return to find that nothing has changed. Is it remarkable I’ve returned? Or remarkable nothing’s changed? Probably both. Sure, this is a different church than the one I knew as a kid, but the forms are the same. The liturgy. The mood. The culture of the place. Even some of the personalities. There’s the officious busy-body; the man who sits to one side in the back pew and thinks he owns the place; the social climber who treats Sunday morning as an opportunity for advancement; the activist with a file folder of petitions for people to sign; even the village idiot, just like the church where I grew up.

The priest steps to the lectern for the gospel reading. He has a nice voice—the sort of voice I could imagine in a vodka commercial—a voice-over voice. He pulls open the big black book and bits of Luke tumble out onto the chancel floor. The crowd presses around. The teacher feels a power go from him. Who touched me?

I’m suppressing a yawn when the minister slaps shut the big black book and says it’s time for announcements. It’s the usual stuff: the women’s group is knitting more tea cozies for starving brown babies in Africa, the choir is on the prowl for more tenors, there’s a call for more muffins to stock next week’s bake sale, they need more drivers for meals on wheels.

And then.

And then.

Why hadn’t I noticed her before? A woman, young and lithe. She leaps up the chancel steps. Black Lycra® pants. Striped cycling jacket. High colour on high cheek bones. Full breasts. Flat stomach. Firm, round buttocks. Involuntarily, instantaneously, intuitively, automatically, autonomically, helplessly, stupidly, slatheringly, I envision her standing alone on the chancel and naked— Okay—let’s clothe her like Eve with a well-placed leaf. Soon, I’ve dimmed the lights and added a brass pole to all the religious paraphernalia. Just as autonomically, there rears from my crotch a quivering ache. She speaks. I can barely hear for the blood rushing through my ears. Cheerful. Heartening. Uplifting. Makes me want to believe in God all over again. The whole room vibrates with her energy. I imagine her in a satin evening gown draped over the hood of a luxury sedan and the caption: A drive that will leave you breathless. No. That would be wrong. She’s talking about an environmental group, how they’re sponsoring a talk by David Suzuki, how we can speak to her after the service if we want tickets. It would be inconsiderate of me to develop a fantasy that placed a cycling environmentalist across the hood of car.

When she finishes, the priest beams and says: Thank you, Liane. I wonder if maybe he’s fighting a hard-on too, although a floor-length cassock makes it easier to hide. The man prays, then offers his homily. I can’t remember what it’s about, only that it’s mercifully short. When he finishes, he gives thanks with another prayer, and while all the other heads are bowed, I scan the room, wondering where Liane has gone, until I reach the pew across the aisle from me where I’m drawn up cold by the hawkish glare of an old woman who wears a pillbox hat. She stares at me with such intensity that I wonder if maybe she can read my mind. I smile but her expression doesn’t change.

After the Eucharist, I join everybody in Fellowship Hall. Who the hell comes up with these names? Fellowship Hall is a grimy tiled gymnasium with a stage at one end, basketball hoop at the other, and kitchen entrance along the far wall. In the middle of the room is a folding table covered in faded linen and on it a coffee urn with a sign in black marker: Fair Trade Regular. I draw a mug of coffee, then stir in a shot of cream and watch how it swirls with the black to form a soft brown. I withdraw to the wall, shifting my weight from one leg to the other, trying to invent useful things to do with my free hand. An older gentleman approaches, rumpled in his taupe suit with a cookie crumb stuck to his lower lip. He smiles at me the way I imagine the Buddha would smile on learning that his underwear is showing. He asks if I’m visiting St. George. He speaks in a low tremulous voice that could invest the most mundane comments with a weird emotional depth. At first, I worry he might cry, but realize that’s just the way his voice works. I try to pay attention, but the cookie crumb is a distraction, although not a fatal distraction. The fatal distraction comes a few seconds later as the gentleman is making a vacuous comment about the weather or the grimy floor. There’s a pause, and embedded in it somewhere I just know there’s a cue to nod or agree or dance a jig, but I can’t find it. I stand like a moron while Liane bursts into the room. She can’t simply be in a place. She moves through the room like a magnet beneath a paper of scattered iron filings. It takes only seconds to flip the polarity of the room in her favour. I feel myself slipping. If I’m not careful, I’ll go like everything else in the room and slide across the floor to her feet.

Liane, I say, and wave my arm in her direction.

Eh? When the man cocks his head sideways, I see a discreet hearing aid. I repeat myself, but too loud. The woman with the pillbox hat hears and pierces me with the same glare she let fly in the sanctuary. If she couldn’t read my mind before, she can read it now.

She belongs to some environmental group?

Eh? Oh yes. Not really connected with the church, the group, though Liane is. They use the building for meetings and such.

But I’m drifting away before he’s finished his sentence. I know I’m being rude but rationalize it by supposing they must get used to it here whenever Liane is in the room. The crowd presses around her, and me with them. She’s a hugger. She treats everyone like her best and favourite friend, gazing deep into their eyes, smiling broadly, listening like she’s about to learn the meaning of life.

I imagine her arms spread wide, wrapping around me, drawing me close against her perfect tear-shaped breasts. I imagine a lot more besides, though nothing I could act on while standing in the middle of Fellowship Hall. I imagine myself going down on my knees, but I’m certain the old lady with the pillbox hat is boring holes through the back of my head.

Hello, and Liane is waving a hand in front of my eyes.

I start. Sorry. Daydreaming. I grin like I’m in grade nine again and watching Mrs. Sokoloff’s hips swish back and forth as she writes on the blackboard.

I’ll say, and she extends a hand. I’m Liane.

I take her hand. The fingers are willowy and the skin is soft, like the chamois I use for my RAV4. Hi, Liane. My IQ feels like it’s dropped somewhere south of a rock.

She smiles a smart, wry smile. And you are?

Oh yeah. I let go of her hand. My name is Elton. Elton Pierce.

Is this your first time?

In an instant, I notice a million things about her. No, I’m not going to list them all here, although a few seem noteworthy: the finger-length brown hair that looks like the touchdown site of an F5 tornado, the warm generous eyes that could melt the heart of a Mogul warlord, the trace of her nipples disturbing the contours of her cycling jacket, the tawny down on her earlobes, the wide full lips, the curve of her hips. But above all I notice her teeth, perfect and white.

She catches me staring and: What?

Nothing. I laugh but it comes out like a confession of guilt.

You’re staring.

You have a beautiful smile.

You’re staring at my mouth?

At your teeth.

I shouldn’t complain. Most men just stare at my boobs.

I guess I would too if it weren’t for your teeth.

Is this some kind of fetish?

Naw. They made me think of my kids.

My teeth remind you of your kids?

The smile thing. I didn’t mean for it to sound like a cheap pick-up line. It’s just that two days ago I handed over a small fortune to a slime ball orthodontist because I happen to have teenagers with teeth that grow in thirty-two different directions. So now when I see perfect teeth ... I have a greater appreciation.

So you appreciate my teeth?

I nod.

I appreciate them too. Liane stops smiling and draws her lips together to hide her perfect teeth. I got these teeth two years ago because I slipped coming up the front steps of this church. Smashed my face on the concrete.

I wince and feel peevish.

Liane shines her smile on me. But you didn’t want to talk teeth with me, did you?

No. For a second, I can’t remember why I wanted to speak to her. Then: I wanted to go to the David Suzuki lecture.

Tickets are thirty-five dollars.

I’ll take one.

And one for your wife? She nods to the wedding band on my left hand.

I’m certain Giselle couldn’t give a shit about environmental causes—not because she’s an irresponsible person—but because ... well ... let’s be blunt—environmentalism is the invention of white middle-class churchgoers. So I decline a second ticket. I’ll go alone to the Suzuki lecture.

That just about wraps up the account of my first visit to a church in nearly twenty years. Only one more detail to mention. The grocery store parking lot isn’t directly across the street from the church; it’s a half block to the north. After I exit the church (and down the steps that smashed Liane’s lovely face) I go around to the far side of the building, cutting across the lawn to the sidewalk. Squinting ahead, I see what looks like three sofa cushions scattered crosswise over the sidewalk. A couple more steps and one of the cushions resolves itself into a tan brief case or overnight case. A couple more steps and I realize that it’s an optical illusion; the cushion/luggage configuration is a man splayed with feet towards the road and head resting on a patch of grass. He’s wearing black shoes. A couple more steps and I see that he isn’t wearing shoes at all. His shoes sit unoccupied on the grass near his head. What I took to be his shoes are his feet. They are black from dirt or poor circulation or both. A couple more steps and I see that the man has weathered leathery skin. The balding scalp is blotchy and sun-burnt. The lips are cracked and bleeding. The man lies with hands behind his head as if he’s lying on a beach. He hears me halt in front of him. I scuff some grit into the sidewalk crack. The man opens one eye like a pirate fixing his mate against the glare reflected from the briny blue.

I want to do something. I want to help. Clearly, something is broken and I stand there ready to fix it.

You okay?

The man grins. The top front teeth are missing. Never been better, thanks.

Seems like a hard place to lie.

It’s actually quite comfy.

He must see the skepticism on my face because he smiles again as if this will somehow reassure me. In the gap between his teeth I see how his tongue is mottled black just like the black that covers his feet.

I shrug. Chacun son gout. Walking around him and across the street, I wonder which feeling has a greater sway over me—shallowness or impotence.

I spend the rest of the afternoon burrowed deep in my office, retreating from the arguments of my teeth-challenged progeny, dreaming up a way to get my novel’s protagonist off his home planet and into the sky.

3. DOUBLE DOUBLE

NEITHER OF US feels like making supper, so we buy take-out chicken instead. I genuflect before the gods of marketing who have magically rebranded a company that once assumed airs of southern gentility—with a Confederate slave master for a founding CEO, a white-suited, string-tied, red-necked son-of-a-bitch. Now, the brand is three simple letters, the kind of letters that Dr. Dre might rap about. But when I step to the counter for my bucket of chicken, it’s still a skinny black kid working for minimum wage who takes my order. The kid asks if I want light meat or dark meat. I shrug, then think for a minute and ask how they make the light meat light and the dark meat dark. The kid shrugs back at me and says, Difference in the manufacturing process I guess.

At home around the kitchen table, the kids tear into the chicken like weasels in a henhouse. I’ve never in my life seen a weasel or a henhouse, but I’m an ad man, so I’ll say anything as long as it sounds good. I yell at them to slow down and Griff looks up with puzzled eyes and a strip of light flesh hanging from the corner of his dark mouth. My voice reverberates too loud from the spare kitchen walls. Katrine and Giselle stop eating too, expecting something more from me. I’m not sure what I meant to say. The food seems disconnected from the rest of our world—spicy meat in a paper bucket. We reach in for the ready-made and that’s all the work we ever have to do to satisfy our hunger.

I think we should give thanks, I say.

Griff rolls his eyes.

Talking about me as if I’m not in the room, Katrine wonders if this isn’t just Dad on some religious freak of his.

Giselle smiles and asks if we should bow our heads.

I’m vague. I splutter. I have a feeling about things but can’t put it into words. For me, giving thanks has nothing to do with prayer, although I’m no theologian so what the hell do I know? For me, giving thanks is about acknowledging sacrifices. Rosa Parks for example—as if she made any fucking difference. I offer thanks for futile gestures. Giselle and the kids have no idea what I mean. I don’t either, but I make my face look grave enough that everyone thinks there are important thoughts lurking in the background.

* * * * *

At work the next day, Mona asks if I want to go to lunch with her: more of the ready-made, and me to give thanks for it. I say sure and when her back is turned, I dump all my cold leftover chicken into the garbage can beneath my desk. Our office is located mid-town, near St. Clair and Yonge, so there are lots of restaurants to choose from, but by default we end up at a pro forma steak house owned by a conglomerate—a client—where you can order the same item at any one of a thousand locations across the country and are guaranteed the same bland meal as shown on the menu, served up in the same bland decor by the same badly dressed waiter with the same scripted banter that they try to pass off as rapport.

Mona’s business card says she’s the VP-Marketing at our firm. You’d think the VP-Marketing at a marketing firm would be hot shit in the ad world, but the truth is: she’s never done any work that I’d rate above mediocre. She’s an oddly proportioned woman. She has a long body, so when she sits, she’s almost a head taller than everybody else. That’s probably why she made VP. But when she stands, she’s an average height because she waddles around on a pair of squat legs like you’d see on a Russian weight lifter.

Mona orders a Manhattan and empties it before the food arrives. By the time she’s gulped the last of it, her tongue is flapping like a flag in a hurricane. She’s bitching about the talent. We’ve been doing a shoot for a lifestyle condo project that features a woman seated on a balcony. The talent is supposed to be older but not worn out, beautiful but professional, sexy but smart. Instead, the agency sends over models who couldn’t fake smart even if we offered them million dollar contracts. They sit with distant looks in their eyes and there’s nothing we can do—no camera angle, no lighting, no digital retouch—to erase the vacuous gaze.

I don’t pay attention to anything Mona says. I never do. She’s single. She’s bored. She’s in her late thirties. She wants to fuck me. Sometimes she tells me she wants to fuck me. Sometimes she tells me how she wants to fuck me. Yet years ago we came to an understanding. I don’t know how it happened. Usually these things go badly, and somebody ends up being let go or feeling compelled to resign. It’s amazing how vulnerable we become when we reveal our desires. But somehow, even as I was saying no, I conveyed to Mona that she was safe. I wanted to preserve her self-respect. That lunch three years ago, when she first laid bare her desire, she had drunk too many Manhattans for us to have a meaningful conversation. So we worked things out later. Maybe it was the note I sent in the mail that did it. I made it positive. I promised discretion. I wouldn’t even tell my wife. A month later, at the Christmas party, Mona found herself face-to-face with Giselle. They spoke for a while and when Mona looked into Giselle’s eyes, she knew I had kept my promise. As Giselle and I were leaving to catch a cab, shaking hands and sharing good-bye hugs, Mona leaned in to me for a kiss on the cheek and whispered Thank-you.

Even though I felt honourable at the Christmas party, and even though I try my best to act well whenever I’m with Mona, nevertheless I sometimes catch myself playing a game of what-if. What if I had said yes and taken a long lunch, booked a hotel room like she had suggested? What would it have been like? I imagine lying with her, kissing her, crawling between her funny thighs, first with my face, then with my hips. As the effect of the pilsner settles on my brain, I wonder what it would be like to suck on her tongue, to kiss her bare back between the shoulder blades, to bend her over a table and enter her from behind, to hear her scream out loud the things she only hints at with a sly grin as we ride together in the elevator. When it comes to Mona, my imagination usually stutters to a halt. But today things are different. Maybe it’s the dark interior of the restaurant, or the alcohol-induced haziness that obscures the landscape, or the way I squint across the table. I imagine that the woman across from me has spiky short hair and tear-shaped breasts and perfect teeth. When she asks if I want that hotel room now, I say yes, then catch myself when I realize it’s only Mona.

For the rest of the afternoon I’m useless. I’m supposed to be proofing mock-ups from the condo shoot to present to our client on Wednesday, but all I can think of are thighs in a Lycra® cycling suit, and breasts that rise from a firm flat belly, and a mellifluous alto voice that issues from smiling lips. I imagine that it’s Liane—and not Mona—who rides up with me, that it’s Liane—and not Mona—who asks if I’ve ever had a woman go down on me in an elevator. Everywhere I look, I see traces of Liane. When I look out the window, I see the outline of her body in the clouds. When I look to the street below, I think I see her disappear around the corner, but the glimpse is fleeting and I can’t be certain. When the phone rings, I imagine it’s her calling about some event at St. George or her environmental group, but I know that can’t be possible because she doesn’t have my number and doesn’t know where I work.

I wonder where she lives. Does she live alone? Even if she lives alone, I doubt she’d be single. Not a woman like that. I bet there are men lined five deep for miles, waiting for their chance, hoping against hope that her current boyfriend has been driven mad by her beauty and has hanged himself. Or maybe she’s a lesbian. God, I hope she’s a lesbian. That would give my obsessing the kind of finality it needs. Maybe I could Google® her name and find out all about her. Maybe she hangs out in chat rooms. Maybe she’s a famous cyber-lesbian. But I don’t know her last name. I try Liane David Suzuki Foundation environment but it turns up nothing about the woman, only information about the speaking engagement on Wednesday evening.

* * * * *

Around about midnight, I’m staring at the bedroom ceiling—or what would be the bedroom ceiling if I could see in the dark—with the bed sheets kicked down to my ankles. Giselle lies beside me in our queen-sized bed, ignoring me as she usually does. Her breathing has settled into shallow regular pants. She lies on her side, facing away, presenting her flannel-covered back to me like the sheer face of a canyon wall. In the darkness, I trace the contours of her body’s geography, the gentle slope from shoulder into waist, the sudden rise of the pelvis, the luxuriant curve of the hip, and the long slow taper to her toes. When she lies on her side like this, it accentuates the curves of her body and takes me back twenty years to a time when we’d stroll on the boardwalk in the summertime, me in boxer shorts and no shirt, her in a bikini and sarong. She could pull it off back then. Now, she’s only ten kilos shy of becoming a mama. I see it sometimes when she gets angry at me and plants her hands on her hips, then I think Oh, god, I never saw this coming.

When I’m certain Giselle is asleep, I pull my shorts down below my balls and start to masturbate. There’s a plastic bottle of baby oil on the night table. We bought it together in a drug store when we were full of good intentions. It used to be that Giselle didn’t need any help. All it took was a simple kiss and she would turn as warm and moist as a clump of moss in a summer rain. Although menopause is a long way off, something has changed. I slather the baby oil all over my penis and pull up and down on it. I imagine Liane working it with her slender fingers, then with her tongue. Then I imagine her climbing on top of me and sliding me in and out of her. Giselle rolls onto her other side, with her light breath brushing across my shoulder. Her eyes pop open. It scares the shit out of me. They’re like the glow-in-the-dark superballs I used to play with when I was a kid.

You having fun? she says.

Yup. I try to make my voice sound natural.

Don’t let me spoil your party.

I pull three or four more times and come into a tube sock. Giselle settles again into her regular shallow breathing. I wipe myself clean, then set the sock on the night table so the dog won’t shred it.

* * * * *

When my alarm goes off at six, I’m up like a shot and into the shower. No dawdling this morning. By the end of the day, everything has to be ready for tomorrow’s presentation to the condo developers. Throw on my clothes and drive down Yonge Street to the office. Pick up a double double and whole wheat bagel with cream cheese from the coffee shop in the building next door. Run upstairs and settle in by seven o’clock for a long day of muted arguments and passive-aggressive wrangling. That’s my plan.

When I step from the shower, Giselle is squatting on the toilet and dribbling into the bowl. There’s something disheartening about finding her in that position, like she’s broken some kind of law. She stands and flushes, and without wiping herself, steps past me into the shower. It’s a law I’ve read a hundred times while standing in line at the grocery checkout, scanning the covers of the women’s magazines: never let your relationship descend into a crass familiarity; never share bodily functions you wouldn’t be comfortable sharing in your bedroom; never remind a man of what comes from places you’d like him to stick his tongue. For the sake of editorial variety, the magazines word it a dozen different ways, but it comes down to the same thing: excrete alone.

As Giselle steps past me, I see how large her breasts have grown, drooping to the top of her belly, and I see how her belly has grown large, too, concealing her navel in layers of fat and rolling down to cover her pubic hair. It used to be that I couldn’t stand naked near her without putting a smile on her face as I got an erection, without wrapping my arms around her, or nibbling on an earlobe, or running my tongue around one of her dark nipples. Now I hang flaccid and stare at her in disbelief. More and more she looks like one of those fertility bubbies they excavated from an archeological dig in Crete or Mesopotamia or the Olduvai Gorge or some other place where they’re always digging up shit. I remember seeing a piece in the paper about it: the oldest known human-made artifact: a stumpy piece of clay: two massive boobs drooping over a giant belly. A man could climb on top of a woman like that and really lose himself. Probably something men have been saying for as long as there’s been speech.

While Giselle is still in the shower, I step in front of the full-length mirror in our bedroom and draw myself up in profile. Christ. Who the hell am I kidding? I’m not much better than my bubbie wife. I suck in my gut, but it’s hard to keep it that way. I’ve never thought of myself as middle-aged. I guess that’s because I’ve never been middle-aged until now. Do I really have to age with a graceful resignation? Or can I be like all those other people I see buzzing around the city streets during the lunch hour, dressed in the latest fashion, striking the latest Brad Pitt pose, downing the latest miracle food guaranteed to add years to their life while subtracting inches from their girth? I put on dark pants and shirt and cinch my belt and try to persuade myself that I’m youthful and athletic, that a younger woman would find me appealing and interesting.

While I’m searching for shoes and car keys, Giselle steps into the room wearing a terrycloth robe, hair wrapped in a towel and tracking puddles across the hardwood floor.

You haven’t dried yourself. I try to sound neutral but it comes out as an admonition.

I know. I wanted to catch you before you leave.

I find my car keys on the night table underneath the tube sock which I pick up and drop into the clothes hamper.

I read your chapter two.

It’s important to her that her opinion be important to me. What did you think?

Not sure. The language is still odd. Not sure why it has to be that way. But I’m seeing some themes coming out, like the idea of intimacy. Anyways, you need to be off. I marked some things in red and left it on your night table.

I return to my side of the bed and see the slender sheaf of papers I had run off for Giselle. My tube sock has lain on it all night. In the wee hours of the morning, my jism seeped through the cotton fabric and onto the first page of my second chapter leaving an irregular splotch like a Rorschach test that wasn’t folded while the ink was still wet.

I pass through the kitchen on my way to the front door and find Katrine bent over with her head in the fridge. She’s dressed only in panties and tank top. Startled, she stands upright and says hello as I squeeze past. She’s still groggy and a springy string of hair hangs across her left eye. I try to hide my surprise at how mature she’s grown—even since the summer. She looks the way her mother did when we were first married.

4. THE HOLLOW WORLD

WEDNESDAY’S PRESENTATION TO the condo developer has gone better than expected. Mona demonstrated a diplomatic side I’ve never seen before. Len is our in-house photographer who would rather be shooting architectural photos and has no patience for bimbo models with IQ’s smaller than their waist size. If Mona hadn’t intervened, he would have hurled the talent through the window and onto the street below. Somehow, Mona interpreted Len’s instructions to the talent who was able to give Len approximately what he asked for, while I got the art department to do the rest. The result was a series of decent “lifestyle” stills. The plan is to mount them on corner panels at the construction site, eight metres high, gazing down at passing motorists: a woman in a business suit standing over a knock-off Bauhaus desk and talking on her cell phone; the same woman in haut couture handing an envelope to a doorman while her rat of a dog waits at the end of a pink leash; a man lounging in a hot tub with a buff, hairless chest and square jaw that looks like it’s been chiseled from a rock; a genteel matron, silver-haired, curled on a divan and reading a book. The life you know you deserve. From $2.5 million.

One of the client’s founders has come for the presentation, a hairy-knuckled thug named Bruno whose family is using the construction industry as a front for a drug cartel. At least that’s the speculation hanging like a toxic cloud over the water cooler. Then again, the water cooler crowd hasn’t dealt with the man; that’s been my job. His greasy palm squeezes my greasy palm. His pasted-on smile beams at my pasted-on smile. And we walk together down the hall in our suits, dreaming our separate dreams of places we’d rather be and people we’d rather be with.

At six, I rush home and change my clothes so I can go out again to the David Suzuki talk. Or is it Al Gore? I can’t remember. The angry one. There are at least two things I ought to be doing instead. Now that Bruno has signed off on the print ads, we’re supposed to be shifting the marketing machinery into high gear, launching it into media orbit, fast-tracking it to the moon, inflicting on the world a thousand more clichés than it deserves. I ought to be there at the office with all the others, ordering in Chinese and drinking Jolt® by the bucket. But I can’t. I just can’t. I’ve been at it for twenty years now. I feed the beast. That’s what I do. I throw shovelfuls of its own excrement into its maw. It can live well enough without me and my shovel for one evening of the week.

The other thing I ought to be doing is spending time with my kids. Giselle can help them with their English homework, but when they pull out their math books, she starts to quake and says: Go get your father. But the truth is: they don’t want my help. Katrine zones out when I’m talking, and Griff is downright hostile. He starts talking smack which makes me want to whack him on the side of the head. His voice changed in the spring and now there isn’t a waking minute he doesn’t remind the whole world dat he da man and what the hell do I know? If we were a pack of wild dogs or a band of mountain gorillas, Griff would be that skinny whelp or young grunt asserting itself for the first time and, as alpha male, I’d be the one to put him back in his place with a snarl or the sharp crack of knuckles across the jaw. But I can’t be bothered with his smack. I just can’t. So I wolf down re-reheated leftovers and throw on a jacket and move towards the front door.

Where you going? Giselle says it with a note of contempt as if it’s impossible that I would have something of my own to do in an evening.

Out.

Where out?

To a lecture.

You taking a course?

It’s David Suzuki.

Oh.

At the Westin Theatre.

Oh.

About the environment.

No shit.

Bye.

Have fun.

Lately, I’ve been wondering what it would be like to walk away from everything, to close the door behind me, to step off the front porch, to disappear into the gloom of the approaching night. Let’s be clear: I would never do such a thing. It’s more a fantasy of mine. I wonder what it would be like to start fresh, alone, somewhere else, maybe in a different country, one where they don’t speak English, one where they’ve never known the touch of ad copy that makes them feel empty in their lives and urges them through desire to fill their empty lives with products, beautiful shining products, in magazines, on radio and TV, on billboards eight metres high. I could give it all up: wife, kids, house, car, pension—the whole damned works—even my name.

Liane’s environmental group rented the Westin Theatre for the evening. This is the biggest event they’ve ever hosted. There’s his name in lights: David Suzuki splashed across the marquee. I park in a municipal lot on Beecroft, then (because I’m early) I walk over to Yonge Street and have a coffee at the Starbucks®. I start to feel self-conscious or squeamish or guilty or something. Is it right to drive to an environmental event? And what’s the true cost for a cup of coffee? How far did the beans travel before they landed in the pot behind the counter? I look at my watch and realize I have to leave, so I gulp the last of the coffee and burn my tongue. But I have to finish it here. There’s no way I could toss a disposable coffee cup in the theatre lobby with so many environmentalists staring at me. They’re like dogs, you know—these environmentalists—like the dogs at the border that sniff out cocaine. Only these ones sniff out hypocrisy. With a single whiff, they can tell which guests are true environmentalists and which guests are suburban wannabes who like the movement in its broad strokes (who doesn’t want to save the planet?) but not at the expense of a cushy middle-class life where bits of waste splash out one way and another like head from a fresh-drawn draught of lager.

I hand my ticket to a young man in a penguin suit—probably a senior from the high school on the other side of Yonge Street. He tears the ticket in two and lets his half flutter to the ground by his feet.

Enjoy the show, he says in a mechanical voice.

Actually, it’s a lecture.

Whatever, and he takes the next person’s ticket.

My seat is on the main floor two-thirds of the way back. Five minutes to go and still at least half the seats are empty. After a quick scan of the audience, I decide there are two kinds of people here. There are the real environmentalists, and there are the curious but uncommitted mostly middle-aged suburbanites. The real environmentalists divide into two subtypes: committed and hard-core. Both wear denim or hemp clothes and canvas high-top shoes, but the hard-cores also wear bandanas and have either one conspicuous tattoo or at least one piercing in an appendage other than an ear, and they carry beat up back packs covered in pins. The hard-cores gravitate towards the foot of the stage and the doorways to either side of the stage. Okay, I exaggerate. Not all the hard-cores are dressed in denim and hemp. Take Liane, for example. There she is, front row centre, wearing her black Lycra® cycling pants with reflective stripes down the side and matching jacket hanging open to reveal a mauve tank top underneath. She’s holding a metal water bottle which she sometimes jerks from side to side to underscore whatever it is she’s saying to the man standing in front of her. I’m too far from her to hear the precise words, but the exchange is animated and intense—the sort of exchange you’d expect from hard-core environmentalists.

The man behaves like the alpha male of the band. He carries himself with a take-charge manner. Other hard-cores approach with questions or greetings; he smiles or talks, then dismisses each in turn and returns his attention to Liane. He’s younger than me—and he’s hip in a way I could never be. For one thing, he wears faded no-name jeans and a black T-shirt. For another thing, he has those long wide sideburns like Wolverine from DC Comics® and dark-framed glasses like Buddy Holly. There’s an obvious chemistry between Liane and him. He hoists himself onto the stage and walks to the wings, stage right, where he disappears from sight for a minute, then returns to the lectern and clears his throat into the mike.

Good evening.

The audience is excited and the talking continues.

Uh. Good evening everybody.

There’s a quaver in his voice. Ah, I think. So the alpha male isn’t invulnerable.

Can you all take your seats? We’re ready to start.

People shush one another into silence. He grips both sides of the lectern and leans heavily into the mike.

My name is Luke Kidrun and I’m the director of ECO, the Environmental Coalition of Ontario. Tonight, we have a special guest who needs no introduction.

I roll my eyes. Whenever an emcee says the speaker needs no introduction, you just know he’s going to give one anyways. I bet he’s the kind of guy who wraps up an introduction by saying: And without further ado, and sure enough, after an exhaustive and embarrassing cv, that’s what he says: Without further ado. Only he says: adieu. To yieu, and yieu, and yieu.

Suzuki doesn’t appear to have patience for long-winded self-aggrandizing introductions and has crept onto the stage, and even before the final words have left Luke’s lips, Suzuki is thanking him and launching into his talk. Suzuki doesn’t appear to have patience for much of anything that smacks of stupid. He wears a wireless headset and drifts back and forth across the stage, speaking without notes. We engage in certain activities that will have horrible consequences for the planet. If we continue to engage in those activities, then we are stupid. There is no argument, only censure. He reminds me of Len who was prepared to hurl the stupid bimbo models out the window.

I don’t hear everything the man says. It’s been a long and stressful day and I’m beginning to fade. But I hear a few phrases that I recognize, sayings that have become part of the movement’s lore. He confirms E. O. Wilson’s claim that if ants suddenly became extinct, then life on the planet would die, whereas if humans suddenly became extinct, then life on the planet would begin to heal. He says that eating meat leaves more of a carbon footprint than driving a Hummer. He says the eco-terrorist label is bullshit; the real terrorist is the corporate polluter who bullies the public with lawyers and then lies to the public with slick media PR people. I sink in my seat and hope no one notices the crimson rush to my cheeks.

Suzuki spends at least half his time in a heated Q & A. Emotions run high. There are catcalls and boos and hissing. And there’s cheering and clapping, especially from the true believers. But at the two-hour mark, he announces that he’s taking only one more question which he dispatches succinctly, then mutters something about getting to the airport to catch the red-eye to Vancouver, and he ambles off the stage to modest applause. Luke offers words of thanks while looking offstage, but you can tell by his hurt expression that Suzuki has already left the building.

While I’m waiting at the coat check, a man steps to the counter. He has a brusque manner but speaks to the attendant with humour. He’s my age and not one of the hard-cores. I recognize him from somewhere. Usually I’m better at remembering names and faces, but the context is all wrong. I put on my non-descript, non-stylish, non-standoutish jacket, drop some change into the tip jar, and pause to stare at the man in profile. There he stands, mid-forties, coal-coloured stubble, strong jaw, full dark hair, well-trimmed hair, enviable hair. A client? Husband to one of Giselle’s innumerable literary contacts? He pulls on a black full-length trench coat, as timeless as Casablanca, and after looking down to tie the belt, he lifts his head and our eyes meet. He reflects to me the same vague recognition, and together we hang suspended in an awkward pause.

Elton Pierce. I offer my hand. I know I’ve— When he reaches out his black arm and ruffles the hem of his black coat, it trips a switch in my brain, but I still can’t remember his name. I was at St. George on Sunday.

Ah yes. We spoke briefly after the service.

The priest spoke briefly to everybody after the service, so it’s a comment that would be easy to fake, but his look of recognition seems authentic.

Did you enjoy the talk? he asks.

Well, I spent most of it wincing with guilt, so I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it. But it was still a good talk.

I hear you, and he does. For me, guilt is an occupational hazard. But most people aren’t willing to do anything with it. Well—and he snaps upright in an if-I-go-any-further-I’ll-have-to-have-a-deep-conversation-with-a-stranger posture. Gotta go. Gotta get home to my kids.

Mm.

Will I see you on Sunday?

Uh, sure. As soon as I say it, I want to kick myself. I have no desire to commit my weekend time to anything, least of all to religion. Yet I know I’ll feel guilty now if I renege. I’m trapped.

I don’t feel like walking out of the building with the priest because I still can’t remember his name. So far, I’ve managed the awkward encounter with a certain adroitness but don’t want to push it further. I solve the problem by saying I have to go to the bathroom—which is kind of true—and we go off in our different directions. After I’ve washed my hands, I reach into my jacket pocket and pull out the order of service from Sunday. There it is: Rev. Dr. Richard (Rick) Fellowes. I repeat the name ten times and commit it to memory with as much care as I’d give to a business contact.

As I walk back through the lobby, I see that someone has propped open the door to the theatre so ushers can move freely in and out as they pick up discarded programs and scraps of garbage. I peer inside. The house lights are up. Luke sits stage right on the steps that go down to the audience. If his head weren’t propped on his hands, it would probably droop to his toes. Liane sits beside him, an arm across his shoulder, and draws him into her breast. She makes clucking sounds, then cooing sounds. I wonder if she’s practising bird calls. Taken together, the two look like one of Michelangelo’s pietas. They form a wretched tableau of despair.

Liane sees me standing just inside the doors. She waves and jumps to her feet and says: You made it. Her voice echoes from the bare walls and sounds too loud. She hunches a little, self-conscious at the sound of her own greeting. We move towards one another and meet at row L. So glad you could come.

I stand like a teenager, smitten, speechless.

So what’d you think?

Enjoyed it. Very. He was—

Isn’t he amazing though? Sends my head spinning every time I hear him speak.

I point to Luke and ask what’s wrong. Luke looks even more pathetic now that Liane has abandoned him. Things went well, I say. I think he’d be ecstatic.

Oh. Well. She shrugs and creases her brow into a worried expression as she looks back at Luke. Now, Luke is flat on his back, head downstage, feet dangling over the orchestra pit. He holds his forearm pressed against his eyes. All he needs to do is moan and I’ll feel obliged to set a gun to his head and put him out of his misery. The event was great, but we only sold half the tickets. Luke’s worried we won’t cover our costs. And Suzuki left all in a huff because we’d promised a full house.

I look at Liane. Her eyes are luminous, filled with a deep empathy for Luke’s pain. It makes her beautiful.

I want to help. Almost as a reflex, I want to make things better. But I’m like a dog, and not a clever dog either. I salivate when there’s food, and do the one trick I know best. I reach into my pocket and pull out a business card. You know, I say as I finger the card, this is just a matter of marketing. I give her the card. Next time you throw a party like this, why don’t you let me handle the promotion?

Liane stares at the card: Elton Pierce, Senior Vice-President, Feinman Marketing Inc. She looks up at me again as if she’s a cop confirming my identity. The smile has vanished from her face. The eyes have chilled to hard inscrutable dots.

Thank you, she says.

She doesn’t move. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t give me an opening to scoot the conversation along. I scrunch my shoulders and smile and mumble something about having to get home, then, as I turn to leave, I ask if I’ll see her at church on Sunday.

Don’t know, she says. I never know until five minutes beforehand.

When I get to the car, I slap my palms on the roof. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. She thinks I’m one more self-promoting douche bag; environmentalism is just a business opportunity. I slide behind the steering wheel and turn the key in the ignition. Christ. No wonder she gave me that cold stare.

I turn off the engine and get out of the car. I have to tell her. I have to set the record straight. When I gave her the business card, it wasn’t because I wanted business, but only to give her a way to contact me. Time for some damage control—also an important skill in the marketing business. Christ. There I go again. If I go back and explain myself, that will only confirm that I’m a self-promoting douche bag whose first concern is his own image.

I get back into the car and turn the key in the ignition. Fuck it. She thinks I’m a douche bag. So what? I’m a married man. What’s it to me what another woman thinks of me?

When I pull into the driveway, I turn off the engine but I don’t get out of the car right away. Instead, I sit and think. The fall air is cool and feels good against my forehead. The windows fog up so that when I look through them, the whole world is a dark blur. I think of the novel I’ve been trying to write. I think of a hollow world, one that’s been traveling through space for two thousand years, one that’s empty now, and useless, and irrelevant.

5. THE SEEDS OF CHARITY

AGAIN, I PARK in the grocery store parking lot, only this time I’m early. I have a vaguely hatched intention of passing some quiet time before the service, reeling in my thoughts, settling my soul—or whatever you call the part of the self that has spiritual inclinations. This morning, the air is crisp and clear, and the sun strikes the east wall of the church. Last week, the bricks seemed drab, but this week, they’re warm and radiate an earnest glow. Don’t misunderstand. I’m not superstitious enough to believe that the walls have been suffused with a spiritual aura. It’s just that the sunlight makes the building look more inviting.

I climb the front steps to St. George’s and with each step I imagine one of the events they must have witnessed. Wedding parties have stood here, waving as friends and family snap photos. Pall bearers have carried caskets down these steps to the waiting hearse. And here? Liane fell here once. I wince when I think about it.

The sanctuary is dark except above the chancel where the organist rehearses a piece, stopping and starting, scratching notes into the margins of the score. A woman arranges fresh cut spring flowers in a pair of crystal vases that sit on the communion table. I sidestep into a pew near the back and kneel. I don’t pray. I’m not interested in prayer. Instead, my mind hops around like a child who’s eaten too much sugar. I want to slap it on the wrist and tell it to settle down, but like any child in church, it doesn’t listen and seems bent on embarrassing me. It wonders what developing country the flowers have come from and how much fossil fuel was burned to deliver them. Shush. Such an impertinent mind. It wonders if there was ever a time in the church’s history when all the pews were filled on a Sunday morning. Or is the number of pews a reflection of the architect’s wishful thinking? It wonders, too, if Giselle will ever break her silence.

The silence started on Friday evening. To be more precise, the silence started on Saturday morning; it was the yelling that started on Friday evening. I had come home later than usual—seven o’clock—in part because I had taken the subway for the first time in more than five years and had failed to account for the extra time it would take to commute to and from the office. Before stepping inside, I had opened the garage door, dumped the contents of my brief case into the garbage can, and hurled the brief case at the far wall. I don’t recall that my movements had been energized by anger. I do recall a wry certainty as I leapt up the front steps, two at a time, and announced in a voice that made me sound like the man from Glad® that I was home. Giselle had ordered in pizza, but that was nearly an hour beforehand and now the pizza was cold and the pepperoni had turned leathery. I found her sitting with Katrine in front of the TV watching commercials, one about a car that would give you the ultimate thrill, one about a breakfast cereal that guaranteed perfect health, and one about a tooth paste with breath freshener so effective your farts would smell like peppermint. I fitzed open a can of beer and sat down with a wedge of cold pizza balanced on three fingers.

You’re late.

Sorry.

You could’ve called.

I was busy cleaning out my desk.

I chewed on the pizza crust while a man in a white lab coat presented the results of a test to determine which laundry detergent made clothes whiter.

I quit my job today.

Giselle didn’t move. At times like this, some people yell What? even though they know damn well what you’ve said. But not Giselle. She kept her eyes on the shifting images and in a low voice: Twenty years.

Yep.

That’s a lot to give up. She rose from the couch with a magisterial air, then leaned down to Katrine: You keep watching without me, baby. There was an exaggerated calm to her movements as she swished her hips through the doorway of the TV room and buffeted me through the kitchen and into the living room. After she had shut the French doors behind us, she turned to me with her face wound in a knot and lowered her voice until she sounded like a demon child: What the fuck did you do?

Like I said—

But why, after almost twenty years?

I had to.

Did somebody hold a fucking gun to your head?

No.

Then you didn’t have to.

But I just—

And you didn’t talk to me first.

I needed to—

You just went ahead and—

I was losing myself.

She yelled. She spewed. She frothed at the mouth. When she was done, she flopped on the couch, and I, in my own halting stilted way, did my best to justify myself. I confessed: the idea of leaving had been percolating through my bones for some time. But I was afraid. I had grown tired of Feinman’s cockiness. I had grown tired of the arrogant idea that my work contributed something worthwhile to the world. Economists might look at the firm and argue that it contributed something to the GNP, but I’m no economist and I could never follow that line of reasoning. All I could say for myself was that I brokered lies. That was my sole function. I wanted to stand before my children and tell them that I had done something useful with my existence. Instead, all I could say for myself was that I had helped a disposable world sink in its own waste. I felt like a farmer watching a cow drown in a manure lagoon. How could I face Katrine and Griff and explain to them that the world I was bequeathing to them was worse for my efforts than the world my father had bequeathed to me?

I have decided that hell is real. It’s a place hot with flames, but the demons who fan the flames come from marketing agencies; the flames are the flames of desire.

You’re no fucking Dante, Giselle said, when the best you can think to do is quit.

But the decision to quit wasn’t as simple as a snap of the fingers. Instead, it unfolded like this: Mona had come sobbing to me in the afternoon. She had dragged me from my office and downstairs for a walk along a side street to a parkette where we could talk in the ironic privacy of a public space. She swung those funny squat legs of hers back and forth and she wrung her hands and she dabbed tears from her eyes which were red and swollen. It was Feinman, she said. He’d always made lewd comments, but she’d ignored him. The pay was good and he was just a pathetic little dweeb. But that morning, after a few choice suggestions, he followed her onto the elevator and cornered her there.

He touched me, she said. The asshole groped me.

Mona didn’t know what to do. On the one hand, she didn’t feel like working for Feinman anymore. How could she do a proper job when she was forever on her guard against Feinman’s fat oily sausage fingers? On the other hand, she couldn’t afford to quit when she had a substantial credit card balance, a line of credit, car payments, a dog that needed an operation, when she was forever on the verge of an assignment into personal bankruptcy? She felt trapped. She didn’t know what to do.

I did my best to assure her that everything would be okay, that a talented woman like her could find a new job with one arm tied behind her back. I did my best to staunch the tears and to keep the mascara from running down her face. Then I looked at my watch and said I had to run—a three o’clock—the Shirmer account—fighting a halitosis-inducing bacterium that no one had ever heard of until I proclaimed it to the world. Oh lucky world.

At three forty-five, I stepped into Feinman’s office. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was the recollection of Mona sitting alone on the park bench as I walked away. She seemed small and frightened, and her lower lip trembled when she said good-bye. Feinman sat deep in his leather chair with legs crossed and resting on the edge of his desk. There was a Rorschach blotch on the sole of his right shoe where he had stepped on a wad of chewing gum. It looked to me like the face of a clown or maybe Mickey Mouse® with half an ear lopped off. Feinman smiled his usual smug smile. He had orange hair thinning on top and blotchy skin from too much sun.

We argued. Without mentioning Mona, I accused him of being a prick. He asked if the bitch had put me up to it. Like I said, I hadn’t mentioned Mona. So he knew he’d done something wrong. Sol, I said, you don’t corner a girl in an elevator and grab whatever you please.

What? You talkin’ about that funny-assed tramp? And he waved towards Mona’s office.

You know what, Sol?

What?

Fuck it. And I slammed the office keys onto his desk.

Sol’s face turned a pinky mauve. You’ll be sorry, he said.

No I won’t.

You’ll come to me on your knees begging for your job back.

Don’t bet the pot on it.

And you better not touch my clients.

Wouldn’t dream of it, Sol.

Cause if you do—

What? What’ll you do, Sol? Pinch my nipples?

Don’t be an ass.

You? Calling me an ass? Me? Guess you’d know seeing as you’re the prize ass grabber around here.

Go fuck yourself.

I emptied some personal stuff from my desk and I stormed out of Feinman Marketing Inc. and went down the street to the steak place where I’d had lunch with Mona the other day. I stared out the window at all the serious business suits rushing past on the sidewalk and I sucked on a bottle of Corona and I finished it off by puckering my face on a wedge of lime.

That was my explanation. Giselle listened as well as one could expect her to listen. But I could see in her eyes a gathering storm. When the storm broke, there were accusations and recriminations. There were taunts and cruelties. But when it had blown over, what remained was the fact that (in Giselle’s words) I had quit in defense of a woman’s honour, which I suppose would be commendable, except that the woman wasn’t Giselle.

My knees are sore from kneeling and my hands are sore from being clasped together in an angry knot. There’s half an hour before the service and the trickle of early risers who drift in and out of the sanctuary look at me and think I’m crazy to be kneeling so soon before the service. I hear them whispering amongst themselves in the corners and I imagine them pointing in my direction and speculating the way good church gossips do.

I realize that if I can’t get a coffee, I won’t make it through the service. There’s the coffee shop beside the grocery store where I’ve parked my car, so I exit the building and cross the street and order a large continental dark to go. As I stand by the broad counter that stretches the full length of the front window, and as I stir in my cream with a plastic twizzle stick, I gaze out across the parking lot with its scattering of cars and beyond that, Yonge Street with its Sunday morning traffic rumbling north and south, and beyond that, the excavation for a new condo project and the large boards on each corner waiting for Feinman’s lifestyle posters, and abutting the condo project, the northern edge of St. George. On the grass between the church building and the gaping hole in the ground is an indeterminate form that looks like a heap of rags. I snap the lid onto my coffee cup and weave my way through the parking lot, watching the heap of rags as it rolls over onto its side. It’s the same man I saw last week, with the same ragged clothes and the same bare and blackened feet and the same squinty-eyed smile as I ask if he’s all right.

Never been better, he says.

Awfully cool to be leaving your shoes off. I wonder if the black skin comes from poor circulation.

I find it bracing, don’t you?

Yeah. I guess. Can I get you a coffee?

Do I look like I need a handout?

Do I look like I give a shit?

Well thanks but I’m feeding my pigeons.

I don’t see any pigeons.

Then you’re not looking hard enough.

I’m off to church now.

Enjoy the show.

I can’t say that I do enjoy the show. The old bat with the pillbox hat glares in my direction at intervals spaced with quartz precision, and she supplements these with sanctimonious scowls every time I take a sip of coffee. I don’t think she likes the idea that a person can feel comfortable in a church with a cup of coffee and a morning paper spread across his knees. There must be an austere theology behind that sour wizened face. I refuse to heed the glare. I’m tired of bullshit. I’ve stepped in enough bullshit at the office. I refuse to tolerate bullshit in the sanctuary. The next time the woman scowls, I take a leisurely sip from my coffee, nod to the woman, and smile my sunniest smile.

I don’t pay attention to the show. There are too many other things vying for my attention. The week’s events form a veil of white noise that’s difficult to pierce. I’m vaguely aware of a man in a cassock standing behind the veil and waving his arms and offering grand pronouncements, but his words sound like the words of an aphasic. Of all the things that pass through my head during that hour and fifteen minutes, I can remember only a single thought: Where is she? We stand, we sing, we sit; children go to the front for a story; the choir squawks its way through an introit; the pastor shares with his flock all the news of the community. And through it all, I glance from pew to pew in search of Liane. In an austere moment during the prayer of confession, I cast a harsh gaze inward and acknowledge that I have no interest in the community nor in the liturgy nor in the creed. Although scarcely aware of it when I left the house this morning, I’m now prepared to confess to God—or at least to a reasonable facsimile thereof—that my sole motivation for attending the service is the hope of a chance of a wisp of a glimpse of Liane, preferably dressed in something tight like a Lycra® cycling outfit. You will understand my disappointment then when I can’t locate her anywhere in the sanctuary.

Then something odd happens to me. A feeling wells up from within, like champagne bubbles through boiling blood. Strictly speaking, it isn’t anxiety—which I know well enough from encounters with difficult clients—but it’s a close cousin. In fact, it’s a pleasant sensation, and not at all the sort of feeling I would want to blunt by popping benzodiazepines. I savour it in the back of my throat the way I might dwell upon the finish of a good wine. It tastes like high school, class of ‘84. An excellent vintage, or at least no more awkward than any other. Christ. Now I recognize the feeling. I haven’t felt this way for years. I’m having a bout of teen angst. Where is she?

Again I run my eyes systematically from pew to pew. There’s the officious, prim, anal mother scooting her four perfect children off to Sunday School, and the woolly-sweatered activist with a clipboard tucked under his arm, and the stolid elderly couple who stamp themselves upon the place with a seal of middle-class respectability. At last my eyes settle on the old lady wearing the pillbox hat. She stares back at me and I can smell the smoke where her stare has seared a hole clear through to the back of my skull. Where is she?

Liane’s absence throbs a dull ache into my head. I write the script of her life. It’s dazzling, peopled with wild characters most of whom have fucked her at one time or another, and it’s set in exotic locales or at least in gritty venues with cigarette smoke and unfinished wooden floors. She’s off leading the sort of life you read about in biographies of Dorothy Parker or Martha Gellhorn while I sit on a hard wooden bench and ruminate upon my narrow plot in suburbia. I decide I should kill myself. There’d be a cold redemption in such an end.

I linger in the sanctuary long after the final chord of the postlude, a pretentious bit of fluff, and straggle at the end of the line that snakes into the narthex where the priest is shaking everybody’s hand. He takes my hand in a firm clasp and I’m embarrassed by the sweaty feel of it. He gazes up into my face with a congenial look of recognition and greets me by name. Listen, uh ... (I’m the last one out so he can take liberties) ... I’ve seen you out a couple times now, and at the Suzuki thing. Clearly you’re somebody who gives a shit. He makes a conspiratorial glance to left and to right then leans in a bit. Lemme ditch the robes and what say we grab ourselves a bite to eat? Have a chat?

Sure. Why not? I have all the time in the world, which is a lie, as my actuary will tell you. According to his tables, I have approximately thirty-seven years left to enjoy conversations over roast beef on rye bread with the venerable Rev. Dr. Rick Fellowes, which seems like a lot until you start to think of time on the cosmic scale. So I stand in Fellowship Hall sipping away at a horrid cup of coffee waiting for the priest to re-emerge from his vestry. By this time, it’s definitive: Liane didn’t show up for church this morning. As I sip my way to the bitter grounds, my teen angst acquires a new flavour. I remember the sudden collapse of Liane’s expression when I handed her my business card. I remember my regret when I realized she thought I was trolling for a new account. I remember the urgent need I felt to set things right. I remember the priest’s words during the prayer of confession. Something about living in right relation.

Pastor Rick saves me from a mind-numbing conversation with an old geezer who rambles on about the good old days when the faith really meant something. I need to find someone reliable who will enter into a pact with me, promising to put a bullet between my eyes if I ever start to reminisce about the good old days. Shaking hands and incontinence and drool that seeps into the folds of skin below the mouth. I shudder to think of it. Pastor Rick appears from behind the old man. He winks at me and smiles and claps the old man on the back and calls him by name. The old man beams at the attention. After listening for precisely the correct amount of time, Pastor Rick cuts the conversation to a close and leads me by the elbow to the exit.

For a servant of God with intellectual pretensions, Pastor Rick looks fit, certainly moreso than his namesake, which suggests to me that he doesn’t spend all his time behind a desk or with his nose in a book. He looks younger in his casual clothes—no older than me—but he’s trim and he walks with a spring in his step that you see only in those who are devout runners. He carries a leather bomber jacket slung over his shoulder, and as he passes through the streaming light of the windows by the entrance, I see the hint of a star quality about him. This makes me sad. If it weren’t for God, he might have amounted to something.

Wait a sec’. He fumbles for his keys then opens the door to the vestry. When he returns, he passes me a small booklet, like a chapbook. If you spend any time at all with us, you’ll want one of these.

It’s a church phone directory. I fold it and stuff it into my jacket pocket.

North of the church, up Yonge Street, is an Indian restaurant which Pastor Rick frequents for strategic reasons: no one else in the church likes Indian food, so he can spend time with people there without the risk of being recognized by other patrons. But halfway to the restaurant we have to stop. The man in rags sits cross-legged on the sidewalk and, like a sphinx, blocks our path.

Mornin’ George. Rick is loud and gregarious.

The man squints from his place on the sidewalk. I see blackened scabs between the sparse tufts on his head. One of the scabs has split and is glinting red in the sunshine.

Judging by the light, I’d say it’s more like afternoon, Padre.

Fair enough.

He looks at me and: He put on a good show for you?

Yes, I lie.

George, we’re on our way to Taste of India for some lunch. Wanna join us?

The man shades his eyes and sways back and forth like a reed on the wind. Thanks, Padre, but you know how I feel about that stuff. They do horrible things to it. You should be careful. Vindaloo. Toilet wine. They treat your food like sewage. Be careful, Padre. You know I care about you.

Is that your final answer?

‘Fraid so.

The man lets us pass. As we move out of earshot, Pastor Rick tells a parable:

Once there was a man on the road going down to Toronto when he fell among thieves who beat him and stole his clothes and left him lying in rags by the side of the road. A Rabbi passed and his heart was moved to help the man, so he approached and offered his coat, but the man refused and called him a plotting Jew. Next, an Imam passed and his heart was moved to help the man, so he approached and offered all the contents of his wallet, but the man refused and called him a radical terrorist. Finally, an Anglican priest passed and his heart was moved to help the man, so he invited the man to join him for a meal even though the man’s smell and appearance would repulse the other patrons in the restaurant. Again the man refused, and although he didn’t abuse the priest to his face, even so, he made devilish faces behind the priest’s back as the man of God walked away. You see, the man who had been beaten and robbed on his way down to Toronto was a paranoid schizophrenic who was incapable of receiving aid. He could not help but construe offers of kindness as plots to destroy him. The seeds of charity are choked by the weeds of disease.

Pastor Rick holds open the door to Taste of India where a young woman recognizes him and seats us at his usual table by the window. I’ve never eaten Indian food before so I leave the ordering to him—babaji and pekora and vindaloo—and Kingfisher beer (which he says we’ll need with the vindaloo). While we wait for our food, we nibble on giant wafers made from chickpea flour.

We want to help, Rick says, but sometimes the need right in front of our eyes leaves us feeling powerless. Who could have imagined two thousand years ago that it might be better to leave a man to starve on a sidewalk than force him to accept the cruelty of our good intentions? And we’ve spent damn near half a millennium abusing our colonial impulses. But we go on doing it anyways.

Rick quizzes me. What he elicits from me isn’t a confession because he makes disclosures too. Life for Rick is messier than I would have expected for an Anglican priest. He has divorced and remarried, which means he doesn’t carry himself with the sanctimony I’ve come to expect from religious types. He listens and nods as I describe my two children, how I love them despite their teenage foibles. In his turn, Rick describes his teenage children who visit their mother on alternate weekends and sleep in on Sundays when they stay with him at the manse. It’s unlikely I’ll ever meet them, or at least that’s his opinion until I mention that my wife is Giselle Pierce who, even as we speak, is polishing the thirteenth installment of her Midnight Blood series of vampire novels. Rick is thrilled. His kids love those books. That would certainly get them to church—the chance to meet Giselle Pierce. I spare him the story of why that will never happen.

6. MIDNIGHT BLOOD

IT’S PAST TWO when I pull into the driveway. The sun is shining and the sky is blue. I should feel anxious for my future, but I don’t; I turn my face to the sky and its warmth fills me with a strange confidence that belief in a destiny is pointless and that A reaches B whether or not I’m there to help it along. A glorious fall afternoon like this would be perfect for an hour on the deck with a book. At least that’s what I’m telling myself as I leap up the front steps to the waiting figure of Giselle in the shadows beyond the screen door. Oh shit, I think. Guess I’m not sitting on the deck this aft’. Giselle has her feet planted shoulder-width apart on the tile floor and her hands balled into beefy knots that she grinds into her hips.

Where the hell’ve you been?

Having lunch with Rick.

Who the hell is Rick?

The priest.

You been eating lunch with a priest?

I nod like a primary student being interrogated by his teacher.

And what’d I tell you before you left this morning?

I look up to the sky and try to remember. Good-bye?

She frowns. I said: ‘Don’t you forget about Ashley’s birthday party.’

I shake my head, saying Christ! to myself and trying to remember when I forgot. I can’t remember if I even knew it in the first place. If I push the matter, Giselle will insist that I did, that she told me this morning, that my brain either turned to mush with dementia or got so preoccupied with its own concerns that there’s no room left in it for thoughts of anyone else. If I give Giselle an opening, I just know there’s a harangue craving to splash onto the floor at my feet. So I keep my mouth shut. But that glowering of hers is harangue enough: it’s not possible that this is a simple misunderstanding; instead, it’s evidence of a moral defect worming its way from so deep within my heart that it must have been mapped onto my DNA by Satan’s personal geneticist. I’m selfish, self-absorbed, narcissistic. There may be overlap in those descriptions, but lumped together, they provide a fair translation of Giselle’s look at times like this. I don’t give her an opening, so she yells for the kids to get their asses to the front door while I back onto the porch and try to avoid her glare.

Giselle drives. It’s twenty-five minutes to her brother Jermaine’s and no one speaks for twenty-four and a half of those minutes. There’s a dark cloud hovering just below the roof of the car. The kids sense the electric tension. Ordinarily, they’d argue about something stupid like which one of them is invading the other’s space. This afternoon, they know—just as I know—that silence is important for our survival. We listen to the oldies station: Ian and Sylvia, Sonny and Cher, Tina and Ike. Half way into the twenty-fifth minute, we turn onto Jermaine’s street, a cul-de-sac in the west end near the airport, and Katrine asks what we got Ashley for her birthday. We got her jeans, two T-shirts, and something a little dressier, all featured in a catalogue that Feinman’s shot four months ago.

If it weren’t for the numbers, I wouldn’t be able to tell one house from another: row upon row of starter homes set on thirty-three and a third foot lots, cross-eyed windows staring down at shrub-enclosed hydrants, garages stuck way out in front like lopsided tongues lolling from the mouths of lopsided clowns. I can’t believe it. There’s at least one fucking minivan in every driveway. Red. Silver. Green. Blue. And not a mature tree for miles around. All of this—the houses, the curbs, the parks, the sidewalks, the asphalt—all of this has been steamrolled across two hundred year old farmsteads. Where corn stalks once stood row on row, and cows grazed on pastureland, now basketball hoops stand idle and kids sit indoors and play video games. This is Da Hood that Griff talks about. Makes me want to rethink my view on nukes. A couple well-positioned bombs would put this place out of its misery.

Giselle points to all the cars parked along the curb and in the driveway, and: I expect everyone else’s been here at least an hour. Jermaine and Roselea’s Dodge Caravan® is parked in front of the garage because the garage is too full of bicycles and skateboards and free weights to fit a vehicle. Beside the Caravan®, half on, half off the driveway, is Jermaine’s ‘67 Mustang® convertible. Go figure: a black dude with a white redneck muscle car. It doesn’t run and half the parts come from the wrecking yard, but it’s Jermaine’s baby so he keeps it under a powder-blue tarp. Parked behind the Caravan® and blocking the sidewalk is a shiny black Cadillac®. It belongs to Charles and Doris. There must be a law that retired Pentecostal preachers have to own Cadillacs®. Maybe God owns shares in GM®. On the road to the left of the driveway is Cecelia’s red Mazda Miata®. Cecelia is Giselle’s and Jermaine’s younger sister. She’s young. She’s single. She’s beautiful. She’s spoiled. And she has a lisp. The minute Griff got his growth spurt, he discovered he could tease his aunt with impunity. With the sweetest expression, he told her she should change her name to Sissy. Thithy? Why would I change my name to Thithy? Griff and Katrine were in convulsions and it only made things worse when their aunt told them to thut up. On the road to the right of the driveway is an old Buick Regal® with tail fins, a classic blackmobile belonging to Roselea’s parents whose names I can never remember. He straightens his hair and looks like James Brown and has to step outside every fifteen minutes for a cigarette. She always wears a hat with a feather in it and finishes every other sentence with Praise be or Glory-ory. Behind the Buick® is another car I recognize—a Plymouth®—one of those stupid-looking cars modeled on the gangster sedans from the thirties. This one is a deep maroon except for the driver’s door which is blue. It belongs to Roselea’s sister, Julienne, and her husband, Julian. I think the only reason they’re still together is because of their names. I’m willing to wager my right arm that when they first met and exchanged names, they took the similarity for a cosmic sign that they should be together for all eternity. Sadly, they failed to read the hundred other signs that said otherwise. Apart from names, they share three children, and even that’s an open question. There are the three-year-old twin screamers named Mildred and Millicent, and there’s an older brother named—nobody knows his real name—we call him Gonzo because he’s ADHD and barrels headlong from one room to the next. Gonzo is the reason we refuse to host these gatherings; if we did, our house would be demolished. Jermaine and Roselea are easygoing and don’t seem to mind living in the aftermath of hurricane Gonzo, plus none of their furniture is worth anything so the holes in upholstery and the broken lamps don’t matter so much.

There. Now I remember why I forgot about this afternoon.

We draw ourselves up in front of the glass of the outer door and stare at our reflections.

How old is Ash?

Ten.

Katrine stands to the left of Giselle while Griff stands to my right. We can hear muffled laughter inside. Katrine presses the button for the doorbell. In the instant before the door swings open, I stare at Giselle’s reflection. It’s the first time I’ve noticed her all week. There’s something about the way she looks. I’m not sure what. I drink her in: the jeans, the smart-looking blouse, the sprig in her hair, the wide sunglasses with white plastic frames. The inner door swings open and Jermaine appears in place of Giselle’s reflection.

Finally, he roars.

Roselea steps to his side. Look at you. The perfect family.

On cue, a switch trips inside Giselle’s brain and she starts to life, smiling, loquacious, all bubbles and spritz. I catch the reflection of Katrine rolling her eyes and mouthing phony to her brother. There’s a phase in the life of a fifteen-year-old when every grown-up is a phony. The phase lasts a month and coincides with the appearance of J.D. Salinger on the high school English curriculum. Fuck that bastard anyways.

Ashley is at the door wondering where her present is. Grandma Doris is marveling at what a grown woman Katrine has become. Griff says Sup to T. J. and T. J. says Sup wit’ chu and the two of them do their walk with jeans almost to their ankles and they strut down the sidewalk to the park by the school. Jermaine asks me what took us so long, and that sets off a chain reaction like falling dominos. Katrine says: Dad was having lunch with a priest. That gets Charles to his feet with: You going over to them Catholics? And my answer comes out like a reflex: Anglican, sir. It was an Anglican—

Still one of them tight-assed white boy churches all the same, and he laughs a big belly laugh until he starts to wheeze and choke, then hacks some phlegm that ends up in a cotton handkerchief. Not like that Reverend Jefferson, eh Doris?

Doris shouts Amen like she’s still at the morning service.

When you stick that Reverend Jefferson with that choir of his, especially that whatsername—Amanda?

Amy.

Amy. Yessiree. Amy Jones. Why then the whole house is shaking with the power of the Spirit. Isn’t that so, Doris?

But Doris is fussing over Katrine now and doesn’t hear a word her husband says.

Charles beams up at me from the arm of the sofa where he leans forward with both hands wrapped around the onyx knob of a walking stick. He doesn’t need a walking stick, but ever since he packed away his clerical collar, he’s needed to distinguish himself. There’s his hair in oily cherry-curls pressed close to his scalp, the pencil-thin mustache, and the rheumy eyes that have yellowed with age. There’s the fine wool suit with vest that went out of style three decades ago, and the purple silk tie and silk pouf tucked in the left breast pocket, and the watch in the right vest pocket with a gold chain looping down to his waist.

Did I mention it’s good to see you, sir? and I proffer a hand.

Charles lets the walking stick slide along the edge of the sofa until it clatters against the wall. He folds my hand into both of his. All the while, a broad smile lights his face. Elton, you’re a good man. He holds my hand a second longer, then releases.

There’s a smashing sound from the kitchen. I’m the only one who starts. Everyone else laughs and makes Gonzo jokes.

Jermaine smacks me on the arm below the shoulder and points with a thumb to the driveway. Hey. Got something to show you. Every time I visit, Jermaine shows me under the hood of his ‘67 Mustang® regardless of whether he’s done any work on it since my last visit. I’m certain that, by now, Giselle has told him I don’t know a damn thing about cars. I couldn’t tell a cam from a tail pipe. Maybe Jermaine has taken that as his cue to educate me: Hey. Here’s something my lily-white-assed smart-mouthed brother-in-law don’t know—that and how to dance. Or maybe he just does it to torment me. But when we step outside, it doesn’t seem so bad to spend time with him. For one thing, it’s a lot quieter without the kids screaming at one another and Gonzo crashing from room to room. For another thing, I’d tear off my ears if I had to listen to any more Jesus lessons from Reverend Shake-the-house-down. I suspect Jermaine feels the same way, but being the son of a preacher man, he keeps a polite face.

Jermaine whips off the tarp like he’s a toreador flourishing a cape. The car is forest green with white racing stripes. The hood is fastened shut with twin padlocks. While Jermaine fishes for the key which hangs from a chain around his neck, I walk a circuit around the car, tracing a finger along the white detailing and ending my circuit back at the grill with Nice. I’ve done the same thing each of twenty times, and always, I end with Nice. Not once have I ever thought of an original thing to say. Whenever I’m in the presence of a car, it’s as if the metal sucks dry my imagination and leaves behind an empty dusty shell. Jermaine’s got the hood propped open with a cut off length from the shaft of a hockey stick and he’s rambling on about cylinders and spark plugs and timing belts and pistons and transmissions. I nod and smile like I understand what he’s talking about, but today my acting is off. Jermaine senses something and calls me on it. I shrug and say I’m sorry.

It’s like you’re on another planet. Things okay between you and Giselle?

Yeah, yeah. Things are fine. Great. Really. Just great. I try my best to look straight at Jermaine when I speak. I try to avoid that drift of the eyes down and left —always a giveaway when people are lying or evasive. It’s amusing to look at Jermaine. Although he thinks his father’s profession is bullshit, there are a lot of ways he’s like his father, from the superficial things like the razored part and pencil-thin mustache, to the deeper things like his sincere interest in the people around him. He’s a social worker who helps at-risk youth. The pay is dreadful but I don’t think he’d have it any other way. I don’t think he’s got a thick enough skin to make it in the world of business as, for instance, an ad executive.

It’s just ... well ... you see ... I quit my job.

Ah geez, I’m sorry. Or maybe it’s a good thing. Is it?

I guess. Good for my soul. Not so much for my marriage.

Roselea’s father has crept around from behind the garage and is sauntering towards us. The cigarette hanging from his lower lip is down almost to the filter.

Jermaine? I say under my breath.

Jermaine looks back from his father-in-law. Just you and me, man.

Thanks.

Milton! he calls out.

Ah, that’s the man’s name. Milton walks with a stooped shoulder and looks up from an angle, like he’s peering at me from under a window shade. Flecks of ash have scattered across an old wool sweater that looks like it was last washed in the Great Depression. He wears polyester trousers that draw up too short above the incongruous sight of shiny new Nike Air® running shoes.

Hello, boys. Whoa. Now that’s some piece of machine.

The three of us stand before this 390 cubic inch engine with its 320 horsepowers and 600cfm Holley four-barrel carburetor like we’re the Magi come to honour the messiah. We shoot the shit for a while. My disclosure to Jermaine has brought me a feeling of relief, so I find it easier to pretend with Milton that I know something about cars. I’m not an imposter after all.

Jermaine lets the hood fall shut and slides the length of hockey stick underneath the car, tucking it inside the front left wheel. After he locks the hood, I help him pull the tarp over his baby and smooth out the folds. Jermaine kisses two fingers of his left hand and presses the kiss into the hood, then the three of us go back inside, though this time we go in the other way, through the door behind the garage so we can grab ourselves each a beer from the cooler as we pass. Into the living room with beers in hand, and there, Charles calls out again from the couch: Elton. I hear you’ve quit your job.

The colour spreads across my face the way blood might ooze across the floor from a puncture wound. A silence has fallen over the room and everybody gapes at me, even Ashley, even Gonzo. I glare at Giselle for what I take as her betrayal and she can feel the accusation in my eyes. I know she does—just by how she snaps her head away from me and returns with furtive glances. Don’t think I’m angry though. The moment isn’t working me that way. Instead, what I feel is shock, or maybe panic, a black hole growing in my gut and swallowing up the rest of my body. I’m worried I’ll disappear. Maybe I’ll wink out of existence like a speck of cosmic dust that gets sucked through the surface of the sun and consumed in a fusion reaction at twenty million degrees. Until this moment, it had been nothing more than a handful of words: I quit my job. I could toss them around the way I might toss around a football with Griff. Until this moment, it had been the logical outcome of a position, the sort of thing a philosopher could work out in the abstract space beneath his skull. But now, when Charles says it out loud, he makes it real, and I’m experiencing my first intimations of dread. Tomorrow morning, after the kids have left for school, what will I do? Who will I be?

The rest of the afternoon is a blur. There’s beer and chips and cake and candles and singing. Ashley has to open her presents of course. She wants to wait for Griff and T. J. to come back from the park, but after half an hour, she goes ahead without them. The boys saunter into the living room as Giselle and Katrine are stuffing wrapping paper into a green garbage bag. Roselea gives them both a lecture, but it doesn’t do any good; the boys smirk, then shut themselves in T. J.’s room and turn on the stereo. I can see that Charles is looking for an opening to say more, but I avoid him, drifting through the house like a ghost at twilight, gazing out each window in succession, studying the photos on every wall in every room, until Gonzo provides my escape by breaking one of Ashley’s new toys. While Charles consoles Ashley by bouncing her on a knee and singing songs about crickets and fireflies, I draw Gonzo into the back yard and make up contests for him that involve lots of running.

The drive home is painful. The kids cringe in the back seat while Giselle and I argue. In truth, we don’t argue so much as vent. The details don’t matter; it all reduces to a simple question: which of us has the right to be angrier. According to Giselle, I’ve got no business yelling at her for telling everybody about quitting when it’s me who quit in the first place and me who didn’t even consult her when I was making my decision. According to me, she’s got no business blabbing to her family when she and I haven’t even talked yet about what I’ll do next, and as for consulting, she knows damn well it was a spur-of-the-moment thing: when CEO gropes colleague, don’t wait around to be named co-defendant in lawsuit. Logical. No-brainer. Thought you’d be proud I don’t put up with sexual harassment shit.

How the hell can you be named co-defendant unless you’ve been groping her too?

Oh for chrissake.

And so it goes.

We drive past a Harvey’s® and Griff says he wants a burger for supper, but Katrine says Harvey’s® sucks and she wants Swiss Chalet®. Griff says Swiss Chalet® sucks and he wants Harvey’s®.

Swiss Chalet®.

Harvey’s®.

Swiss Chalet®.

Harvey’s®.

Would the two of you ... Just. Shut. Up. They’re subsidiaries of the same fucking company that serves up the same bland same pre-packaged same pro forma shit. Makes no difference what sign you see out front, all the meat comes from the same factory farms. Some of the most putrid fucking hell-holes on the face of the planet.

There’s a second of silence, the merest whiff of shock, then:

Yeah, but I still want Harvey’s®.

Swiss Chalet®.

Harvey’s®.

Swiss Chalet®.

We end up with a take-out meal from each. When we get home, the kids tear off to their rooms with their factory farmed meat entrées while Giselle heats a bowl of soup for herself. Having nibbled on chips and cake and peanuts all afternoon, I don’t feel like a meal. What I feel like is a walk outside in the cool evening air.

I walk my brisk angry walk to a pub at the city limits where I plop myself on a stool in front of a pint from the tap. The city limits isn’t at the limits of the city. Maybe once before I was born. But now it sits on the crest of a hill overlooking another twenty sprawling kilometers of asphalt and luxury condos and box stores and drive-thru coffee shops and exclusive neighbourhoods like all the others and malls with the same shops you’d find in Vancouver or New York or London or Madrid or Hong Kong. Suburbia! Stretching twenty kilometers beyond what was once the city limits, burying what was once the most fertile land on the continent, and before the white man’s farms, what was once a lush network of forests and streams. Suburbia! I watch its thousand lights wink on as dusk descends. Strangely beautiful, but who would notice? All these big-screen-watching, benzodiazepine-popping, buttered-popcorn-munching, earbud-wearing, bubblegum-smacking denizens? Not bloody likely. I turn away from the window and back to my pint, and then to another, and sink myself into a pleasant haze that softens the stark limits of the tiny problems of my tiny life.

Fumbling through my jacket pockets, I pull out a pen and draw a fresh napkin from a stack that sits beside a bowl of extra salty peanuts. With a flair for the obvious, I scratch “Notes” at the top and underline it with sharp strokes that tear the paper. Then I scribble:

When the ship, Suzuki, finally falls into orbit around Earth and when it passes around the night side of the planet, the surface will look like it’s on fire for all the lights that blaze into every corner of the darkness. It’s a sign of fear, no different than the fear we have of silence. And when the crew goes planetside for its long-awaited furlough, they will see what I see now only moreso: pavement wrapping its way around whole continents, and gleaming buildings, and lights everywhere. I’m not sure what to think of it yet. Will my planet be beautiful? Or will it be terrible? Maybe both.

By the time I return home, I’m in an amiable mood, philosophical, prepared to view the world (and my life with it) from a proper perspective. It’s after eleven. Katrine has gone to bed and Griff is brushing his teeth. Giselle sits propped in our bed and she’s reading a novel.

None of the intervening time has made a difference. As soon as I enter the bedroom, Giselle is on her feet and at me. She says I’m a damned fool. How dare I talk the way I did in front of the children. I’m acting on impulse. No thought for the future. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. She keeps her voice low and there’s something menacing about it, moreso than if she had screamed at me. I come back at her with talk of how she hasn’t been the least bit supportive or empathetic, how the best she can do is blab to her family and subject me to their judgment. She pounds me on the chest. I take a wrist in one hand and a tuft of hair in the other. There, with her head pulled back and me hovering over her, I see a glimmer of something I remember, maybe in the trace of her jaw line, maybe in the smoldering of her iris, something that recalls to me the woman I fell in love with. She pisses me off but I want her sorely. I set my mouth full on her lips. At first she pushes me away, but it isn’t convincing. If she had wanted me off, there would have been an impression of my head in the ceiling. Her tongue probes my mouth and she wraps her arms around my head. I claw at her pajamas and a button pops off. Giselle is a 44 DD and the loss of a button means there’s nothing to support her significant breasts. Her left breast pushes out from her pajama top and, with a Pavlovian inevitability, I find myself drawing a brown areola into my mouth and sucking a nipple while Giselle whispers Oh Elton. She unbuckles my belt, tearing at the zipper, going down on me, sucking me. I bend her over the side of the bed and press my face into her ass with my tongue striving for her clit. She moans and topples face down onto the mattress. I climb onto her back and push my way inside her.

Our lovemaking has changed over the years. When we were young, there was an overpowering urgency to it. We would rush into each other’s arms and be done in five minutes. I might unload myself with a few quick thrusts and leave her worked up for nothing. Or she might shudder into that heated night while I was still fumbling with the buttons on my 501’s®. It was fun. There was an athleticism to it. But I’m happy to have done with it. There’s an insistence that dominates the thoughts and makes any real loving impossible until the testicles get their ransom. Now I can move forward in a leisurely way. Together, we have freedom to play, to explore, to observe. Now we roll around into other positions, or move to other rooms, or switch roles, or stop for a bite of food or a chat about some arcane thought or other. Now we can draw things out for hours. Maybe it’s a sign of maturity that we can do precisely that: draw things out for hours and resist the demand for immediate gratification. I don’t feel any less capable of the five-minute hump on the rug. I don’t feel that my libido has waned. But I do feel a heightened sense of self-control. I’ve noticed the same thing with Giselle in her writing: a willingness to draw things out, a greater subtlety with each new volume. The first of the Midnight Blood books was all action and gore, a thrill a page with a plot that followed a predictable arc to a clear resolution. But the latest in her series has a different tone, a shift from action to suspense, an elevation of the hidden over the obvious. It makes me wonder if a book is better for all the things that it doesn’t say, or that it does say but only after endless deferral. I wonder if the same principle applies to marriage. Or does it apply only to sex?

Giselle climbs astride me. She’s big and strong. I thrust up far inside her. She leans forward and presses her lips against mine. I smother myself between her breasts while she slides her hips back and forth, drawing me deeper inside until I feel the tip of my penis against her cervix. I snuffle and snort like a barnyard animal. Giselle punctures the skin of my pecs with her fingernails and she screams. I grab the flesh of her hips and come.

Do you love me?

Yes, I love you.

Do you need me?

Yes, I need you

Do you love my body?

Yes, I love your body?

Do you love the glistening curve of my spine?

Yes, I love the glistening curve of your spine.

Do you love the salty taste of the sweat on my breast?

Yes, I love the salty taste of the sweat on your breast.

Does your tongue love the smoothness of my penis?

Yes, my tongue loves the smoothness of your penis.

Do you love to suck my toes?

Yes, I love to suck your toes.

Do you love to taste the tang of my wet pudenda?

Yes, I love to taste the tang of your wet pudenda.

Do you want to fall asleep with me in your arms?

Yes, I want to fall asleep with you in my arms.

Do you want to fall asleep with your head on my chest?

Yes, I want to fall asleep with my head on your chest.

So it unwinds, like a liturgy or a catechism. Maybe Charles is right. Maybe I am turning Catholic.

7. PLANET OF THE APES

I’M AMAZED AT how I can split my brain down the middle, how I can utter two contradictory statements and believe them both. Each half of my brain can live on its own, then pause and stare in disbelief across the corpus callosum at the other half, the same way a Christmas shopper can stare at a store window and scarcely recognize the person looking back, covered in snow and tottering beneath a mound of parcels. How is it that on a Sunday evening I can make to-the-moon-and-back declarations to a sensuous full-bodied woman, yet by Wednesday can imagine myself entwined by willowy Lycra® covered thighs while still believing in those first declarations with the absoluteness of a religious creed?

I’ve spent all day in the living room banging away on my laptop. I haven’t shaved and I’m still wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a bathrobe. Time to get myself spiffied up for another Wednesday installment of ECO. What’s that short for? Extremely Caring Organisms? Extra Creepy Oglers? I’m terrible at remembering acronyms. I shower and shave then slap on fresh clothes. Nothing fancy. Jeans and a hemp shirt I bought on Monday while I was waiting for the boys at Moe’s to service the RAV4. I snatch leftovers from the fridge, then I’m out the door with a faint good-bye.

Now that fall has arrived, it gets dark earlier. The sun has sunk below the neighbourhood rooftops, but shafts of light rise from the west and stoke the clouds a flaming orange. I catch a bus to the subway station and rumble north two stops. When I emerge again, the shafts of light have disappeared and the fire in the sky has burnt itself out. Now, everything settles into an ashen gloom. St. George lies a few streets north of the subway station. I can see it even from here. The building is dark except for a swath of brick beneath a solitary street light. I check my watch: 7:05. I’m late for the meeting. I had hoped to get there just as the meeting was called to order. As a newcomer, I’d rather not draw attention to myself.

A black man leans against the wall by the entrance to the subway station. He’s my height, although he appears shorter because he’s leaning. He keeps his head shaved smooth and wears a gold earring in each lobe. When he smiles, he pulls back his upper lip to reveal a gold-capped front tooth. He holds up a thin sheaf of letter-sized papers, but it’s too dark to read the title on the front page.

Hey, you wanna support Black History Month?

I stop. It’s October.

Yeah. So?

Black History Month isn’t for another—what?—four?—five months?

Yeah. Well. I ... uh ... I’m thinking ahead.

I laugh a cynical laugh, then point to the sheaf. What’s that?

This? Oh, this here’s a list of, you know, prominent black writers. You know. A reading list.

Let’s see. I hold out a hand.

You ever read any black authors?

You got Harriet Tubman on your list?

Of course.

Alice Walker?

Naturally.

Toni Morrison?

Goes without saying.

James Cone?

Not sure. What’d he write?

God Is Black.

Oh. Yeah. Sure.

How ‘bout Colson Whitehead?

Lemme check. Yeah. Right here.

And what about Giselle Pierce?

Never heard—wait a minute—she’s that vampire writer. Zat who you mean?

Yeah.

She black?

Yeah.

You sure?

Yeah.

Cuz if she’s black, I’m pretty sure they’d’ve put her on the list. He scratches his scalp. You sure now?

Pretty damn sure.

Still, I better check.

Yeah, you should.

So how ‘bout a donation?

I smile and walk away.

Have a nice night, he calls after me.

I see that the Condo developer has put up boards around the excavation on the north side of the church. Feinman’s people have installed eight-metre high posters on each corner of the project. On the nearest corner, a mature woman in business couture smiles down at me over reading glasses. I imagine a day ten thousand years from now when an archeologist from an as-yet-undreamt-of civilization unearths these posters and marvels that once, long ago, giants roamed the earth—and they wore smart-fitting clothes and stylish hair, and they did important things with documents which they held poised above expensive faux-marble desks. I hope such a civilization has a better sense of humour than ours.

Traffic is heavy, as it always is along Yonge Street, and it fills the air with a dull roar and a sooty grimy dusty smell that you can taste when you breathe it in. Three teenagers roll past me on their skateboards, bump, bump, bumping at each crack in the sidewalk. They laugh and they swear at each other and one of them has an unlit cigarette wedged behind an ear. It seems all of a sudden the street has exploded in a mess of colour, neon above every shop and amber street lights and the blinding white of halogen headlights approaching and the blood red of taillights receding and pale bands from entire floors of office buildings, deceiving hapless birds to their deaths, light splashed everywhere so that when I tilt back my head I can’t see a single star. Hell, I can’t even be sure there’s a sky above. A cabbie blares his horn. A man looks the other way while his dog pisses on a newspaper box. A woman pulls up the collar on her jacket and shudders.

Crossing the street to the southeast corner of the church lot, I hear a kerfuffle, a brouhaha, a hullabaloo, a—you get the idea. It’s coming from further along the sidewalk adjacent to the construction site. Squabbling voices spill out from the passageway of scaffolding and boards and plywood that encloses the sidewalk. Some of it is incoherent and desperate, some of it, insistent and officious. From where I stand, it’s impossible to see what’s happening. The whole stretch of sidewalk is enclosed and cast in a deep blackness like you’d find in a cave or a womb. I stand paralyzed, caught between a voyeuristic curiosity and a religiously held belief in the suburbanite’s right to stay uninvolved. One of the voices clarifies into a distinctive Don’t. You. Touch. Me. which shakes me loose. Although I can’t place the voice, I know I’ve heard it before and should recognize it. I continue past the church and burrow into the enclosure. Halfway along, the space widens for a fire hydrant, and on either side of the hydrant stands a security guard. When they hear my footfalls, they stiffen and turn their heads to stare at me, then rise to their full heights. They were stooped over a third form, a man, tucked in behind the hydrant, and standing now, they block my view of the man.

Gentlemen, and I nod. I should be wearing a top hat and morning coat.

I can’t see much, but every so often a car whizzes past and the headlights throw a sliver across the scene. One of the security guards is a skinny beanpole of a kid with lanky arms and a goofy grin that threatens to swallow the whole of his acne-pocked face. The other one is a real bruiser, a stocky fellow with fat upper arms, the kind you’d never want to meet in a bar fight. They both wear Kevlar® vests underneath dark nylon jackets with insignia on each shoulder—a corny design with swords and a sphinx.

So what’s going on? I ask.

It’s a private matter. You just keep moving along.

Sidewalk’s public property, my friend. Then calling to the form behind the hydrant: George, izat you?

Before he can answer, the two security guys are leaning in to get a good hold of George.

Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty apes! he shouts.

I guess in a week or so this will seem funny, especially when I tell it as a story to people like Pastor Rick, but here in the midst of it, with two goons who have no sense of humour and even less sense of cultural history, it’s starting to set me on edge. I can feel the rise of adrenaline and the thud of my heartbeat. I don’t want to see them manhandle George, but I don’t want to see them manhandle me either. There’s something grossly out of balance here, two big guys in their uniforms and their armor, pointing flashlights and packing TasersTM and mace, while below them George cowers in his sleeping bag, dressed in stinking clothes and clutching at his shoes.

What to do?

That well-intentioned middle-class white liberal impulse to reach in to the elbows and fix things seizes me like a migratory instinct or a gag reflex. I can’t help but feel compelled to need to want to make things right. What would a good ad exec do? I stuff my hands into my jacket pockets and hunch my shoulders. An ad exec would want publicity; an ad exec would want to draw as much attention as possible to the scene of the injustice; an ad exec would use the polarizing sensationalizing catastrophizing effects of flash mobs and public confrontation, anything at all to shame the two gorillas back into their forest.

In each hand, I feel a wad of paper. From my right pocket I pull the Black History Month reading list and toss it onto the sidewalk. From my left pocket I pull the phone directory which Pastor Rick gave me on Sunday. I lean through a gap on the street side of the scaffolding and tilt the open pages one way and then another, trying to read the entries by the light of the coffee shop window across the street and the amber street light on the corner. Supplemented by the glow from my cell phone, I scan the listings for St. George membership. Liane, Liane. I don’t know your last name. If I were to find her listing, and if it included a mobile number, and if a signal could reach her phone way down there in the church basement, and if she were sitting within earshot of her phone, then maybe, just maybe, I could persuade her to assemble her ready-made band of activists and call them to action. Liane, Liane. The confrontation beside me is mounting. They’ve pulled some of George’s bags from behind the hydrant and have tossed them further along the sidewalk. One of the bags was full of empty beer bottles and they shattered when the bag struck the ground. Now, George is saying Oh my, oh my, oh my, and rocking on his buttocks. One of the guards grunts orders while the other rummages behind the hydrant for more belongings.

What began as an orderly search for a name has devolved into a random frantic rifling, chilled fingers fumbling with stuck pages, a dropped cell phone skittering across the ground. There. Liane Gordon. That must be her. Bus. Res. Cell. Email. I crouch and grope and, returning to my feet, punch the numbers into my cell phone keypad. As I listen to the ringing in one ear, I catch George moaning and whining in the other. You’re disturbing the order of—It’s easier to be kind to the less fortunate when they have pleasant sounding voices and smell of subtle cologne and attend to the usual daily routines like teeth-brushing and hair-combing. If homeless schizophrenics looked like Liane, charity would be easy. A good deed would leap from the heart like a song from a thrush’s throat. But it’s different when the downtrodden don’t make any sense and they smell like rotting meat and their feet are black and bleeding. “Hello, you have reached the voice mail box of ... Liane ... who cannot—I snap shut the phone and press redial. This time Liane answers, breathless and breathy, traces of laughter still in her voice.

Liane?

Hello?

Liane?

Who is this?

Elton.

Elton? Do I know an Elton?

I explain how we met in Fellowship Hall a few Sundays ago and again at the Suzuki lecture. I almost add that I was the disingenuous loser who gave her the business card.

Look, Liane, I’m just outside the church, and there’s a situation.

A situation?

Yes, a situation. George is out here and—

George? Do I know a George?

Sometimes I wish I could take a thought and hurl it at others the way I throw a baseball, and they’d sit crouched like back catchers and take it smack in the glove, an instantaneous apprehension, none of this fumbling back and forth between half explanations and half understandings, shadows on a cave wall, visions through a glass darkly and all that. But my own clumsy mouth is all I’ve got, stumbling and coughing its way through a description of George’s situation. On her end, Liane struggles to construct an image of what’s happening. Once she reaches that aha moment, she holds the phone away from her mouth and yells for everybody to drop everything, put on a jacket, and follow her outside. Within a minute, fifteen people are on the sidewalk and approaching at a trot. Some have raised scarves over their faces so they look vaguely Muslim. Some hold cameras or phonecams overhead. One even holds a camcorder at shoulder height and struggles to keep it steady while he runs along with the others. As the ECO people converge on the scene, I browse through my cell directory. I still have the Condo developer’s cell number entered in my phone. What the hell. Interrupt his coitus if I have to. Maybe he’s doing his executive assistant on one of those faux-marble desks he was so pleased to see in his posters.

His voice comes on the phone all gruff and tired and neanderthalensis.

Bruno is not far up the road at a French restaurant, but he has no desire to leave his table and drive the three blocks south to the construction site. Already this evening he’s probably sucked back half a liter of wine and, as a consequence, his mood vacillates from dopey to belligerent. He doesn’t see why there would be a public relations problem if his security guards were caught on camera throwing a homeless man onto the street.

When I was a kid, we did dat sorta ting alla da time, he says.

And when you were a kid, there wasn’t this invention called Youtube.

So? he says.

So ... and I tell him he could leverage this as a public relations opportunity, come down to the site and smile and face the cameras and tell the world that he’s a developer with a difference, a developer with a heart. In the pause, I hear the smacking of lips and the chaw, chaw, chawing of meat, then the clatter of cutlery on a plate and the scrape of a chair.

Fuck me, he says. I’ll come down an’ tro him outta dere myself.

This is going better than I could have hoped.

When Bruno hangs up, I call a friend at CityTV® who promises he’ll do his best to get a mobile unit to my location.

I’d like to think that what I’ve done is to release forces that will collide and expend themselves according to natural laws, the algebra of vectors and the calculus of tangents. I’m helping to unleash pent up kinetic energy in the same way that I might push a rock off a cliff and watch it smash into passing cars on the road below. There is a godlike satisfaction in assuming a distant perspective. This is hubris of course and I will be punished for it. That's how these things play out. But I can’t see yet how the punishment will arrive.

The activists are loud and aggressive. Some have squirmed around the hydrant to form a protective barrier between George and the security guards. The two young men wear expressions which range from bewilderment to anger. There’s a light on the camcorder and it shifts from one guard’s face to the other’s and back again. They squint and swat at the air as if that will make the light go away. George is as bewildered as the guards and has stuck each hand into a shoe and is pressing them against his ears. Hail Mary, full of grace. Let me vanish from this place. Here, in the shadows, Liane and I have a brief meeting of the eyes. It’s difficult to read her look, a faint upturn from the corner of her mouth, maybe the smile of a co-conspirator in the fight against oppression. Maybe nothing.

A car screeches to a stop further along the road, then backs up until it’s adjacent to us. It’s a big black Lincoln Continental® with tinted windows and a glossy metal sheen that makes it look like a spaceship. Bruno steps from the driver’s side. A passing car honks. Bruno raises both his middle fingers and yells at the driver to go fuck himself. As he moves around to the other side of his car, he hikes his trousers up underneath his stomach. He’s a squat man dressed in a charcoal suit. His shirt is open at the neck and the knot of his tie hangs loose. He steps onto the curb and, leaning through a gap in the scaffolding, grabs the skinny guard by the arm and yanks so hard the guard almost falls through and onto the road.

Whaddafuckisgoinonhere?

I dunno. They just come outta nowheres.

Bruno lets the guard go with a shove and a grunt, then he sees me standing in the shadows. You. Make dem go away. He waves his arms like a choral conductor having a seizure. Get da fuck offa my property.

Liane steps to my side while Luke yells an inane slogan about corporate power stepping on the little guy.

Well? You gonna do someting?

I cough and clear my throat and hobble from side to side. If we were doing this in the daylight, people would see how my face and scalp are glowing a bright pink. While the darkness can hide my colour, it can’t hide the quaver in my voice, and it can’t hide the uneasiness in my posture. My brain is empty except for the thought: Liane is watching; Liane is listening. Words tumble over my lips as if they have a life of their own. I stand apart from them, astounded at their coherence. Modest at first, they gain confidence. Uh ... Bruno ... uh ... Ladies and gentleman. The words return to my ears with the intonation of a carnival barker. Allow me to introduce to you Mr. Bruno Genovesi. Mr. Genovesi is senior vice president of Gentri Incorporated, but don’t let the VP title fool you. There’s no one above Mr. Genovesi except on paper. That’s because Gentri is owned by a numbered company and that numbered company is owned by the Genovesi brothers. There’s Bruno and Giuseppe and Rocco. Bruno’s job is to handle all of Gentri’s condo projects, like this one. Oh Bruno may be a little rough around the edges, but he’s a decent guy once you get to know him. I mean, this is a guy who—his mother’s still alive, you know—and he visits her every Sunday afternoon. Brings her flowers. A guy can’t be all bad if he visits his mom and brings her flowers. And he has two border collies. He just loves those border collies.

A modest cadre of onlookers has gathered. In addition to the ECO people, there’s the black man from the subway station and the man whose dog was pissing on the newspaper box and the three teenagers with their skateboards. There’s also a middle-aged couple who look like they’ve come from the adult video store and a balding man dressed in a suit that he bought from an off-the-rack discount clothing store. They lurk in the shadows a safe distance from the stench of George’s clothes.

Bruno raises his fingers and points them at me as if he’s firing a pistol. At the same time, his face contorts through a hundred different expressions until it hardens itself into a cast of angry restraint. A Ford Explorer® stops behind the Lincoln Continental®. It’s white with a TV Station logo splashed across each door and a satellite dish on the roof. Bruno rolls his eyes. Great. Just fucking great. He points at me again. I’m calling Feinman’s in the morning and cancelling our contract.

I quit there last week, I shout.

I want to add: So I don’t give a flying fuck what you do. But I say nothing. Instead, I leave my mouth to hang open, and I pant, and I feel a minty freshness in my mouth as I draw cool night air in and out across my tongue. I’d like to think that my reluctance to swear is a sign of maturity, but it’s more likely the sign of a paralysis operating in concert with a racing heartbeat, and a trickle of sweat dribbling down my spine to soak the band of my underwear, and a dark wobbly feeling in my gut that threatens to make me evacuate my bowels. It bothers me that on Sunday I found it easy to swear at my children, but now I show such scruples with an asshole like Bruno. Maybe I’m a coward.

Bruno throws up his hands and returns to his car muttering to himself in Italian. Luke hurries to the Ford Explorer® and talks to the pair from CityTV® while they test their mike and video camera. The two security guards stand stupefied and do nothing. Some of the people from ECO gather up George’s belongings and settle them in a heap behind the hydrant. George stands in the middle of the sidewalk with a hand stuck down his pants, rearranging his genitals.

Liane touches my elbow and looks at me with her luminous eyes. Are you okay?

I feel a rush. It’s the adrenaline. It’s the biting wind on my cheek. It’s the warmth of Liane’s gaze. When I speak, my voice is too loud and everything comes out too fast. My teeth chatter. I clamp shut my mouth but can’t control the chattering. I laugh when I want to cry and I smile when I want scream. It feels as if the world is spinning too fast and my body might fly apart.

Let’s get out of here, I say.

I’m high. If I had megalomaniacal tendencies, I’m sure this is what it would feel like. I’d march my armies over the countryside, trampling everything in my path and to hell with the consequences. I’m charismatic. If I had demagogical tendencies, I’d whip crowds to a frenzy and persuade them to do outrageous things like hack off the foreskin their first-born males and drink Kool-Aid®. All at once I’m a man of action and it’s sexy. I can see it in the way Liane responds to me with her eyes. At this instant, she would follow me anywhere. Let’s get a coffee, I say. I need something to calm me down.

She trails me across the road to the Starbucks®, and as we walk through the parking lot, she suggests herbal tea instead because a coffee would only keep me hepped up. I order two chai teas and carry them to the corner table where Liane waits for me. We’ve exchanged words before, but this is the first time we’ve talked the sort of talk that involves looking into one another’s eyes. She tells me she’s amazed at what I’ve done. She tells me that last week, when I handed her my business card, she was sooooo disappointed. When she looked at the logo on my business card, then at me standing in the theatre wearing my dress pants and Italian leather shoes, she decided I was just another greenwashing corporate suit looking to take advantage of sincere (but otherwise naïve) activists for fun and profit. But there I stood, not minutes ago, confronting a corporate client, risking everything, even my job.

Why’d you quit? she asks.

Don’t look for any deep principles at play here, I say. I got pissed off at my boss is all it was. Then I tell her about Mona, how she came running to me in tears after Feinman groped her on the elevator, how I confronted Feinman, how we yelled, how I couldn’t stomach working at that place anymore, how I felt slimy and needed to wash myself clean.

And you don’t think deep principles were at play? and she smiles a mocking smile.

Not like: ‘Let’s sit down and think this through.’ It was a gut reaction kind of thing. Just like tonight. I saw how those two apes were treating George and they reminded me of Feinman back when he was younger. Christ. That was twenty years ago I started working with him.

And your wife? Liane nods at the ring on my finger. What’s she think of you quitting?

Damn. Why does she have to go and spoil the mood? I’m sitting across the table from a gorgeous girl who’s in her early thirties, single, suitably impressed with me notwithstanding the subtle layer of flab around my waist. I’m hatching a soothing fantasy that involves a sandy beach, suntan lotion, and not a stitch of clothing. Then she has to go and prick the bubble. Either she doesn’t understand the rules, or she understands them too well.

Oh, well, it was a shock, of course: me coming home and announcing we’re a one-income household now. And she frets. She always frets about money. But it’s more psychological than real. I mean, she’s got a good income. It’s not like we’re going to starve if I take a year or two to find something new. Something better.

What’s she do?

She writes.

Like magazine articles?

No, she writes books. Novels. Young adult fiction. In the real world, she doesn’t make great wads of cash. But in the world of writing, she’s wildly successful.

Liane sips at her tea, lips set delicately to the edge of the cup, taking care not to scald herself. I imagine myself sucking on those lips, biting them, feeling them pressed against mine. I want those lips. They’re not full lips like the Botox® lips I used to see on the talent walking through Feinman’s photo studio, and they’re not those thin lips that make you want to toss bird seed to librarians. Instead, her lips are perfect for her face, ruddy and substantial, glistening in the half light of the coffee shop. As I stare at her, I resolve to taste those lips. The mood from this evening’s confrontation lingers and it fills me with a triumphal certainty that I will one day fulfill my resolution. I don’t know how. I have no plan. In fact, there’s little in my life right now that’s unfolding with so much as an intention much less a plan, and yet things are unfolding in my favour. I see no reason why such an unfolding shouldn’t include Liane’s lips.

I study Liane’s face, her ears, her eyes, perfectly proportioned in relation to her nose and lips, the sort of face the art department would love because it would require so little retouching in Photoshop®. I catch myself in the act of thinking that thought and smile, half in amusement, half in self-disgust.

What is it? she asks.

Just thinking.

Obviously.

I was looking at you.

You were doing that before, when we first met. Haven’t your eyes got anything better to look at?

No. I caught myself thinking something stupid. Reminded me how much my work has infected the way I look at people. I tell her how, since the advent of digital photography, every photo of a model has been manipulated in Photoshop® to conform to a woolly standard of beauty which everybody claims to understand but nobody can explain. Although I started in advertising as a copy writer, like everybody else, I have become infected by the culture of an industry which assumes that people are as manipulable as wet mud. I was thinking your face wouldn’t need much retouching in Photoshop®.

She smiles and shrugs. I don’t get what you’re trying to say.

I feel the colour rise to my cheeks. How can she not get my point? I wonder. I guess I’m trying to tell you how beautiful you are.

Liane laughs a choked awkward laugh and avoids my eyes by concentrating on her cup of tea which she sips with those perfect lips of hers until she drives me nearly to a frenzy. She draws her lips into an O and blows onto the tea, and I observe that her cheeks are almost translucent, starkly at odds with my image of a hardened activist.

Your wife. You said books in the plural. So she’s written more than one book?

I sigh and resign myself to an existence with a wife and a house and children and debt and a car and a dog and a shared story that has taken the two of us from our days together in the summer after high school to this place we occupy now on an evening in suburbia. Yeah, I say. She’s written a whole series of them. Gothic horror. Vampires. Werewolves. Things that bite.

Like the Midnight Blood series?

You’ve read Midnight Blood?

Yeah, after high school. Oh you should’ve seen me then. Dyed my hair black. Wore black lipstick. Even got some tattoos. Someday maybe I’ll show you pictures of me from back then. I was so into Carla. She was so ... I don’t know ... she’s what I needed at that time of my life.

So you’ve read Midnight Blood?

Yeah.

Giselle Pierce is my wife.

Shut up. The Giselle Pierce? Liane’s voice is loud and she draws stares to herself, although it doesn’t matter what Liane does, she always draws stares to herself. She could be trudging through snow drifts wearing ski pants and a parka and heads would still turn to gawk.

For my part, I’m annoyed that, yet again and without being present, Giselle has hijacked a conversation that was supposed to belong to me. Liane sees the annoyance on my face and pulls back. She apologizes for being stupid. It’s clear there’s stuff going on. It must be complicated. Things always are. She doesn’t mean to raise something sensitive for me. She draws her face into a pout and even in that she’s beautiful. I’m supposed to tell her that everything’s okay, which is what I do, and although I know I’m being manipulated, and although I usually resist manipulation with a fury, I submit to it. There is something about Liane that tears down all my defenses and leaves me writhing helpless.

We spend an hour in the coffee shop and by the end of our chat I have recovered a sense of calm. As we leave, I wonder where Liane goes when she’s not at St. George’s, and I wonder whether she goes there with anybody. I don’t ask and she doesn’t say, but as we make our good-byes on the street corner, I have an intuition she will return across the road to Luke. Where does my sudden jealousy come from? I’m astonished. I’ve been married nearly twenty years and have a life of my own. What right have I to begrudge someone else her life? Yet there it is. I don’t want to think of Luke—the tearful pitiable Luke—tasting those lips, touching those breasts, loving that body. I want those things for myself. I know it’s greedy. Yet there it is.

I walk to the subway station and ride the two stops home. It’s not late, but Giselle has already gone to bed. I sit for a while in front of the TV, clicking through each of the five hundred channels in our satellite subscription, but nothing interests me. It’s all package and no content. Even the commercial-free channels want to sell me something: a gaudy glossy life of big cars and bigger homes and poolside vacations. I switch off and go to the fridge, but when I pull open the door, my appetite drifts away. It’s all prepared foods rolled up in shiny wrappers with photos of smiling moms feeding their perky hyper-active kids. Instead of watching TV or eating a snack, I flick off all the lights and feel my way upstairs to the bedroom. I strip to my underwear and slide in beside Giselle. What has my life become that I crawl into bed with a fat woman who snores and splays herself over all the bed so there’s no room left for me, with a giant bra slung over one of the bed posts, with a dog stretched over a stinky cushion on the floor, with a broken ceiling fan that sits motionless and leaves me to sweat on my sheets? What has my life become?

8. SCIENCE FICTION

I SPEND THE morning trying to write but it isn’t working for me because the events of last night are still clattering around inside my head. I stand. I sit. I boil a pot of tea. I change a light bulb above the kitchen sink. I write a shopping list for the grocery store. I try to teach the dog to roll over, but she’s too stupid to learn. I search for a metaphorical lesson in the failure of my stupid dog tricks, but nothing comes to mind. The discovery of a metaphorical lesson would give me something of substance to write about. That way I could justify time otherwise wasted. By eleven o’clock, I’ve popped open a bag of potato chips, but as I return to the living room where my laptop waits for me, I pass my reflection in the French doors and decide instead to dump all the potato chips into the garbage can under the kitchen sink. I contemplate masturbating but Giselle is in her office at the back of the house and I may not be able to accomplish the deed without her knowing—not that her knowing has ever stopped me before. What I don’t want her to know is that I find it so difficult to write. If I’ve quit my job to write, then I should write, not masturbate. If Giselle catches me masturbating when I should be writing, then she’ll pounce on me with all the reasons why this is the most ill-conceived plan that ever entered a man’s head.

I’ve never told Giselle this, but I admire her—maybe even envy her. From my seat in the living room I can hear her at work: sometimes an efficient tap-tap-tap on her keyboard, sometimes a muffled voice on the telephone, then back to her keyboard. She has always impressed me with the discipline she applies to everything she undertakes. I know I shouldn’t make comparisons (we are, after all, different people with different personalities), but comparisons seem inevitable now that I’ve decided to write. It doesn’t help that I have no office of my own and will have to float from room to room. Each day, as I search for a place to settle myself, I’ll have to pass the door to her office and glance in at the orderly world she has made for herself. It’s a world of boundaries like dawn and dusk, good and evil, and it’s a world of inviolable rules which govern the use of rosebuds and garlic, crosses and holy water, reflections and silver bullets. In Giselle’s world, the vampires are sympathetic. They are the outcasts. They are the hunted. Sometimes, not even the bonds of love are strong enough to overcome the revulsion and fear people hold for vampires.

I can hear the roar and grind of a garbage truck approaching. From my place on the couch, I reach up to the louvered slats of the window shades and tilt them so I can see out to the street. Here comes the truck, blue with a yellow cab, and spilling a stream of stinky liquid that glistens on the pavement and refracts the sunlight in shades of mauve and orange. If I squint until the scene blurs, the liquid looks beautiful like the abstract background for an ad. It used to be that two men worked a garbage truck: one would drive and the other would swing off the back even before the truck had pulled to a halt and would hoist cans and green garbage bags, then throw back the empty cans before moving on to the next driveway. If I was home when they drove past, I would nod and wave or say hello, and if they had to pause to compact the trash, I might chat for a minute with the man on the back. But now, they’ve automated even our waste collection. Automation came first to production when Henry Ford built his assembly line. Now the circle is complete. Automation has embraced the whole life-cycle of our products even unto death, or at least unto landfill. Now the man in the cab does everything. He pulls up to the driveway, then engages an arm which extends its claws and grabs hold of the plastic garbage container, tipping it up and dumping its contents, shaking the container up and down—bang, bang, bang—to make sure every last drop of our biweekly excrescence has fallen into the belly of the beast. Now there’s no human contact in the process. The man stays in his cab and looks out only when he needs to be sure that he’s lined up the claws with the container.

More than a loss of human contact, what I notice is that a measure of violence has seeped into the process. The machinery is noisier. Parts bang and clang and wheeze and moan. And when it’s done, the plastic container lies on its side with lid wide open, looking for all the world like a dog that’s been struck by a car and left to die on the lawn.

Note: on my future planet Earth, waste collection will be wholly automated. There won’t even be trucks and drivers. Instead, all garbage will disappear the way our sewage does now—through an infrastructure below the ground that no one sees and no one thinks about. But all of it has to go somewhere. What will happen to it? Where will it go? Landfill? The ocean? Incineration? Catapults flinging it into Québec?

The phone rings and a few seconds later Giselle’s feet come padding through the kitchen and into the living room: It’s that priest of yours.

I take the phone from her and say hello. Pastor Rick’s voice returns to me in a polished baritone and it sets me to wondering whether, once upon a time, he sang as a professional. He says he’s just gotten word. He says I’m quite a character. Really something else. Liane called him this morning and told him all about my escapade last night. At first I worry that he’s going to yell at me for interfering with something I don’t understand. I shouldn’t be helping homeless schizophrenics when the issues are so complex that they stymie even the most seasoned mental health advocates. What arrogance, then, for me to intervene. But that’s not what Pastor Rick has called to say. Instead, he’s called to gush. He thinks it’s wonderful, just wonderful, that someone from the church should stand up for George. The poor man has so few friends in the world, etc., etc., etc. Meanwhile another voice is chattering inside my head and it gets so loud I wonder if maybe I’ve caught some of George’s schizophrenia: so Liane called; she must have been impressed; I hope nobody gets the wrong idea and thinks I’m nice; I hope people realize that my motives are as banal as the plastic baggies for picking up dog shit; I bet when Martin Luther King Jr. was giving his I-have-a-dream speech he was thinking: I’m so gonna get laid after this one.

After I hang up, I try to recover my focus, but my stomach is gurgling so I go to the kitchen and make myself a BLT, but with peanut butter in place of mayonnaise and cheese slices in place of lettuce. I add two more items to the grocery list and stick it to the fridge with a fat magnet. Back in the living room with a can of Coke®, I peck away at the keyboard until I’ve laid out my first complete sentence for the day. Looking up at the mantle clock, I see that half an hour has passed since I began the sentence. That prompts some rough math: 100,000 words in a novel. What’s the average word length for a sentence? Let’s say fifteen. That makes what? I open the calculator app on my laptop and come up with 6666.6666666666667 sentences. At half an hour per sentence, that makes 3333.3333333333333 hours to finish a first draft and probably as much time again thrown away on procrastination.

The phone rings again and a few seconds later Giselle’s feet come plunking across the kitchen tiles and onto the hardwood floor of the living room. I’m not your answering service, you know. Next time, you pick up the phone. I’m trying to write.

This time it’s Feinman. Even before he placed the call, he must have gotten himself wound into a state of apoplexy. Now, when I answer the phone, the sound of my voice is like a finger pulled from a dike and it releases a torrent that I can’t stop up until the reservoir is empty. I have to hold the phone away from my ear during the screechier parts. Because of all his frothing at the mouth, there isn’t much he says that’s intelligible, although a few key words here and there give me enough to piece together a coherent message. He’s received a letter by express courier from Gentri’s lawyer cancelling their account for breach of contract and, in the alternative, for interference with economic relations. The letter is full of heretofores and aforesaids and whatsoevers that puff the whole thing up to a shrill pomposity and the words leave Feinman quaking with bowel-loosening shudders. There’s stuff about me inciting a riot, me with ostensible authority, me assaulting employees, me leading armies into battle against the poor defenseless Bruno. You don’t seriously believe that shit, do you? is what I try to say, but the screeching has thrown up an impenetrable wall of sound. Feinman goes on about how he’ll third-party me if Gentri sues him, how he’ll sue me even if Gentri doesn’t sue him, how I’m the absolute worst fucking thing that’s ever happened to him. When he pauses to take a breath, I tell him to set it all down in a letter or better yet, send it by smoke signal. I tell him I don’t really care what he does, then I hang up.

I didn’t notice that for the duration of Feinman’s call Giselle has been standing in the doorway of the living room, arms crossed, shoulder pressed into the frame. What was that all about?

Nothing.

She frowns, then throws up her hands and walks away. I try to parse her expression, her posture, her stormy whirl away from me, her retreat to her office. The most I can discern is frustration that I’m not explaining myself. I’m not communicating. Maybe she’s angry that I’m not sharing my feelings. But if she were sensitive to my feelings, she’d know that my apparent refusal to communicate is really an attempt to carve out a space for myself. These past few days, it’s felt to me like I’m fading away to a trail of mist. It’s only when I do things alone, apart from the family, that I notice the flesh on my bones.

Christ. Everything about this afternoon has put me off: the peanut butter instead of mayonnaise, the call from Feinman, and now this cloud of resentment that billows from Giselle’s office. I stare at the screen-saver that swirls around in a nerdy version of psychedelia. Maybe if I stare at it long enough I’ll get a nerdy version of inspiration. I try to type another sentence but the predicate is stubborn. As for the subject, it reads like one more shill from a twenty-year veteran of the ad industry. For two decades I’ve written about products that end their days making the journey from garbage cans to landfill, and always I’ve written about them with a you-can’t-live-without-it urgency.

Until now, my purpose in life has been to stoke desire for bits of polished packaged trash, persuading consumers any way I can that these useless baubles are the most desirable possessions they’ll ever own. Now that I’ve cut myself loose from the industry, I can’t craft a single phrase that doesn’t reek of the advertising taint. Maybe I need the verbal equivalent of a sweat lodge to work all the toxins out of my pores where I can scrub them away and down the drain.

The phone rings a third time. I want to scream at the interruptions.

Yeah, what is it? I’m gruff and curt.

Hi Daddy.

I look at the clock on the mantle. It’s 3:15 and school’s out. Katrine wants a lift home because she has a knapsack full of school books and a gym bag full of cleats and shin pads and smelly sweaty socks and her shoulder is sore where she ran into the goal post during gym class and could I please, please, please come and get her. I do my best to push down my annoyance and I yell to Giselle that I’m off to pick up Katrine. Giselle goes on typing as if I’m not there.

The school isn’t far, only a ten minute drive, one short block in from Yonge Street near the theatre where I heard David Suzuki talk about the likely demise of our species. I ease through the roundabout and pull to the curb and let the RAV4 idle while I look for Katrine among the students who cluster around the front door. There she is, off to one side, but she hasn’t seen me yet. She’s grown tall and has a pretty face. She could pass for a model in Feinman’s studio. No, that’s not true: she looks too healthy to be a model. Without exception, the talent was wan and emaciated, and when we did bikini shoots for glossy travel brochures, we could see the tawny down that had sprouted in unsightly places—one of those quirks of evolutionary biology that helps to keep starving mammals from getting cold. Unlike the talent, Katrine is robust and has high colour, and what makes her easy to spot in a crowd is her ginger hair that twists out like Gorgon. She tries to keep the frizziness in check by forcing it down with hair bands and by pulling it back and knotting it with scrunchies, but when she talks the way she loves to talk, waving her arms and swaying her torso like a dancer, then tufts spring out above her ears and over her forehead. When she’s in a self-conscious mood, she straightens her hair, but on a humid day like today, it knots up as sproingy as it ever was.

Katrine doesn’t see me because she’s engrossed in a conversation with a boy, a lean lanky white kid with a mop of dirty blond hair who stands a head taller than her. Kids are funny at this age: the girls could pass for twenty-five, but the boys look awkward, as if they haven’t yet grown used to their new bodies. I remember how it was for us in high school. Even when we were teenagers, I thought of Giselle as a woman; there was never a time when she seemed to me girlish or immature. I had always regarded myself as grown up enough to be her equal. And yet, looking now at this gangly boy, I must have been no different—just a kid struggling to pass as a man. I wonder if this kid realizes that the struggle never ends.

Katrine recognizes the car and waves to me. I hadn’t noticed before, but she and the boy have been holding hands. As she steps away from the boy, their arms extend to form a fragile bridge, maybe not a bridge, maybe an elastic band, because once their arms are fully stretched, she snaps back to the boy and plants a light kiss on his cheek, then turns away and runs to the car. The boy stands with arms dangling to his knees and with a mooning gutted look of pain on his face. I’m not sure whether to laugh at him or to mourn with him. When Katrine is settled into the passenger seat and has caught her breath, I nod to the front door of the school and ask who the boyfriend is.

Oh, that’s Richard.

I’m surprised she doesn’t protest my use of the word boyfriend. Something has changed. The signs are subtle but I know that Katrine has passed a milestone. Things will never be the same for her. And more pointedly things will never be the same for me. Now, she will have secrets and a life apart, and I will stand as an outsider looking in.

After the pleasantries, an oppressive silence seeps into the car the way water might if the car had run off a bridge and plunged into the river below. Neither of us knows what to do. Maybe there should be frantic bailing. Instead, we lean back into our seats and resign ourselves to death by drowning. I cough once or twice. Katrine sticks in her earbuds. I run my fingers through the thinning hair on my head. Katrine stares out the window at friends on the sidewalk.

Our route home passes the middle school. As with the high school, kids are streaming from the doors and onto the front lawn and sidewalk. I slow to scan the mobs of kids. Beyond the school and crossing the street in front of us is Griff with two of his friends. There they go, the school’s three black kids, talking smack, gangsta, dawg, fuck dis, sharing earbuds, dancing, baseball caps, baggy jeans, jerseys slung to the knees, papers flying out of their knapsacks. I roll down my window and call out Griff’s name. He hears me. I know he hears me. I can tell by the pause in his gait. Then comes the low Keep on walkin’, man. The three boys strut and roll down the road, kicking at toppled garbage cans, leaving me to watch their waddling backsides through the passenger window. I catch Katrine glancing at me. She wears an embarrassed, almost pained, expression.

I know, Daddy. He doesn’t talk to me either. If it wasn’t for my hair, he wouldn’t say a word.

She’s twirling her nappy frizzy ginger hair around her index finger. She pulls it straight, then let’s go so that it recoils like a spring.

9. PORTAL TO ANOTHER DIMENSION

THE NEXT WEEK, I show up at the ECO meeting without incident, without confrontation, without fanfare, without expectation, without food in my stomach. Since last week, I’ve bought myself all kinds of accessories that will guarantee my entrance into environmental circles wherever I go. Here’s my shopping list:

- steel water bottle (duly branded to ensure its radical authenticity)

- coffee mug (with fair trade logo on the side, declaring to all the world that I don’t kill trees every time I satisfy my caffeine addiction)

- vegetable-dyed shirt made by fair labour (as certified by the union label sewn into the seam)

- allergen-free scent-free hand sanitizer (dispensed through a convenient plastic squirt spout, patent owned by one of the world’s largest purveyors of domestic care brands)

Now that I have all my environmental shit spilling from my pockets, the people at ECO embrace me like a brother, all except a kid named Randy, the in-house conspiracy theorist who thinks I’m a spy from The Corporation, and Luke whose reaction to me is so patent I’m tempted to sit him down and explain the facts of life. Luke thinks my stunt last week was nothing more than a self-aggrandizing attempt to impress Liane. He looks to Randy for confirmation: Uh-huh, uh-huh, it was a plot, a clever plot, there’s more than him that’s in it. Everyone else takes my stunt as a sign that I’m a kindred spirit, a fellow traveler, a comrade-in-arms, another galley oarsman grunting and sweating in the boat of life. (Tick whichever cliché strikes you as most apt.) They talk in animated voices and it stirs in me the memory of last week’s adrenaline rush. Liane greets me with an excited hug and gives me a peck on the cheek. I suppose she doesn’t mean anything by it, but I feel special, and I judge from Luke’s scowl that he also invests the kiss with more significance than it deserves.

I overhear debate about whether the issue of homelessness falls within the goals of the organization. There’s a consensus that we have to take a macro view of issues. A young guy named Roy sits cross-legged on his chair, almost lotus-like, with shaved head and the smile of Gautama. He says everything is interconnected. If we look at the issues of homelessness and the environment, we can see strands of interconnectedness running all over the place, but the most important strand is compassion. This George guy is a creature just like any other creature who needs our compassion. A squat girl named Teena bounces in her chair, waving her hand like a five-year-old. With a big gap between her front teeth, she’s a dentist’s wildest fantasy, and when she talks, she blows air through the gap and it produces a whistling. As she rambles on about another connection—corporate oppression—I imagine dogs going insane on the lawn of St. George, writhing and begging for the whistling to stop.

Liane speaks too, but when she speaks, it’s different. The room falls silent and people turn their heads to gaze, mesmerized at her lips, and the dogs cease their writhing and begging and the lamb lies down with the lion and God sighs and gets a cosmic hard-on. She’s writing a paper for some journal or other—a big-picture paper about underlying cultural assumptions that drive the environmental movement. She says there’s a thread you can weave through five hundred years of history, through the Reformation, Kepler and Newton and the rise of modern science, Cartesian dualism which long ago hacked mind away from body just like Livingston hacked through bush on the Dark Continent, colonialism, the slave-trade, the Industrial Revolution, the assembly line, the rise of post-war consumer culture—all of it premised on what she terms a dis-integrated self-concept. The world is outside us. We stand over it in mastery, with a sense of entitlement that would be impossible if we had an integrated self-concept, one in which we understand ourselves as animals embedded in and dependent upon the ecosystems we inhabit. Instead, we stand above in mastery and assume the same posture as the serial rapist about to have his way with his next victim. When she finishes, people hoot and clap and there’s whistling quite apart from the whistling in the gap between Teena’s front teeth.

In the break, when people rise to top up their coffees and stare at a display Luke has assembled, I approach Liane from behind and, in a low voice, speak over her shoulder: I see you’re more than just a pretty face. What a pathetic opener. Liane gives a modest blushing smile. Even though she doesn’t wear makeup, she has a lovely profile: clear, strong jaw line, straight nose to a rounded tip, a silver hoop through the earlobe that sets off her dark hair. She turns to me with her ambiguous hazel-coloured eyes and demurs, saying it astonishes her how little she knows. But humility is the beginning of true knowledge. And my corny cliché coefficient is through the roof and halfway to the moon.

Luke catches us speaking to one another and takes a grim relish in interrupting our conversation by calling everyone to assemble again for the second half of the meeting. It’s time for the debriefing. The group would have discussed the Suzuki lecture last week if it weren’t for the interruption that hijacked proceedings. Luke nods in my direction and tries his best to smile, but there’s a hint of something in the way he twists up the corner of his mouth, and it undermines what would otherwise be a magnanimous acknowledgment. He walks from person to person handing out a single sheet of paper, a financial statement, or an eighth grade facsimile thereof. Despite its crudeness, the point is obvious: after Suzuki’s fee and rental of the hall, ECO has lost a thousand dollars on the inaugural evening of what is supposed to be an annual distinguished speaker event. They want to fly in people like E. O. Wilson and Derek Jensen and David Foreman, but not if they’re going to lose money each time. Luke reads the statement aloud and I detect a quaver in his voice when he gets to the part about losing money each time. My God, the little dweeb might cry. And she’ll fawn all over him thinking tears are the sign of a sensitive soul. I want to slap the twit (what does Griff say? smack him upside da head?) and tell him to grow a pair.

I clear my throat. I can’t help myself. I have to speak. I say there’s no reason ECO can’t net ten thousand on a gig like this. They sold only half the seats. Sell them all and they double their revenue. And their price point is too low. Double the ticket price and that doubles the revenue again. So if my math’s correct, I say, that means ECO could have pocketed ten thou from the Suzuki thing.

Luke is skeptical and almost sneers. Liane comes to my defense by pointing out that I’m a marketing specialist and may know what I’m talking about. There’s something that passes between them, something dark and angry, the psychic equivalent of a whirling brick of soap in a stocking. Liane’s is a smoldering ferocity that leaves Luke indignant but cowed. Has Luke forgotten what happened last week? Has he forgotten how it was me who engineered the confrontation? How it was me who called the TV station so Luke could yak away on air and bring ECO more publicity in thirty seconds than in the last five years? Has he forgotten already? Nobody says any of this out loud, of course, but it’s implied in Liane’s look.

Somebody alleviates the awkwardness by asking how I could guarantee a sell-out when I want to double ticket prices. I explain that this sort of thing follows a standard procedure in the biz, almost a science, the logic of checkers, guaranteed outcome, etc. You start by announcing a sold-out venue. You manipulate desire. People desire most what they think they can’t have. Two weeks before the engagement, you announce that a limited block of seats has come available but people better hurry to avoid disappointment. Doesn’t matter that the limited block of seats is the whole damned theatre. Even more than what they can’t have, people desire what they think other people can’t have. If I can get a ticket and my neighbour can’t, it makes me feel special. People are willing to pay double for that special feeling. The exclusive affair. The rest is press releases, social media, radio spots. Piece of cake. Pizza pie.

What follows is an intense debate about whether it’s ethical to use standard marketing practices when part of ECO’s mission is to challenge consumer culture, to move us as social beings to organize ourselves in ways that acknowledge and respect our relationship with the planet we inhabit, whereas the adoption of standard marketing practices affirms the capitalist presumption that all the world’s a market and all the people in it merely consumers. The room splits down the middle with natural rights people on one side and utilitarians on the other, with a smattering of Marxists for colour (and one conspiracy theorist just because). If I squint so the room assumes a soft, blurry, hazy, glow, I can almost persuade myself that I’ve been time-shifted to the nineteenth century. Does no one in the room have a thought they can call their own? It sounds like the blathering of an undergrad common room where the students try on new vocabularies they’ve learned in their intro courses the same way they try on new clothes they’ve found in the local vintage shop. Or maybe, after twenty years in the marketing business, I’ve grown jaded. Maybe I’ll find it refreshing to open myself to the idealism I feel all around me. I doubt it.

My stomach is growling so I step to the side table where plates of cookies and donuts have been laid out alongside a coffee urn and pot of tepid tea. I wish they had set out fresh fruit, but the food people couldn’t find organic in time for the meeting and ECO serves only organic. You know, I say as my stomach gives a floor-shaking rumble, it’s a little late for this kind of talk. You already committed to speaker fees and a professional theatre and selling tickets and the marketing that goes with. That’s what is the case. Now deal with it.

I have forgotten how little idealists care to deal with what is the case. Luke and several others bristle at my Now-deal-with-it statement.

I used to be like Luke. There he stands, thin as talent from the modeling agency, with a furnace for a metabolism. Since I arrived this evening, I’ve watched him chomp through five donuts and half a bushel of cookies. He’s all nervous energy that would consume itself if he didn’t keep the furnace stoked. Even now he’s chewing a fingernail to the quick. There’s a hipness to him, with his jeans and sweater and scarf, with his blue-black stubble and hair draped across the left eye, with the canvas high-tops that squeak on the bare tile floor. But something undermines the look. He’s trying too hard. With Liane, it’s unaffected. She is what she is and not even a thousand kilos of bling would make a difference. I used to be like Luke, aspiring to be things I could only pretend to: cool white dude, Gene Gene the dance machine, enlightened liberal suburbanite. Things have changed. I’m the same person I was back then; that's the gift of memory; it gives me a feeling of continuity as I slip my way through time. But now I worry less about how I look. It doesn’t matter how hard I try to keep up appearances, my children will sneer at me anyways. More than physical appearance, I find that I care less and less for the good opinion of others. Once, I was obsessive in my concern that others think well of me. Now, I’m more inclined to say Who gives a fuck? These people whose good opinion once mattered so much, one day they’ll all be dead just like me. Instead, love and do what you will. Can’t remember who said that, but good advice all the same. So, while I feel bristling from various points in the room, I answer it with a grin as I stir cream into the coffee I’ve poured into my new mug.

As the meeting breaks up, I lean in close to Liane and Hey, I’m starving. Wanna go get a bite to eat? To my astonishment, she says yes.

I stand there like a fool while she connects with others at the meeting, then I busy myself stacking chairs in the corner and folding the food table. It looks to me as if Luke has made the same suggestion, but judging by the nod in my direction and the smiling eyes, Liane has brushed him off. I feel as triumphant as Horatio Nelson at Waterloo. I feel like I’m fifteen all over again. I feel like bragging to strangers.

We—Liane and me—We! We leave together, me holding the door for her, me drawn up like I’m seven feet tall, me strutting my plumage down Yonge Street the three blocks to a Thai restaurant I pretend never to have visited. I want to be seen. I don’t want to be seen. I want to be seen. I don’t want to be seen. I may as well be plucking petals from a daisy and eating them as I go. An intimate table for two, a tea light candle between us, a half liter of the house red poured out into two wide-bodied glasses, in the window the faint reflection of a handsome couple lost in one another’s eyes. I want to clasp her hands in mine then draw them to my mouth and suck on each of her fingers. The waiter arrives to take our order which is mostly my order because Liane ate too many cookies at the ECO meeting and needs to watch her figure. The waiter leaves as I make a corny crack about how I need to watch her figure. Liane blushes and tells me don’t be silly. Liane sits before me like the portal to another dimension where an alternate life stretches ahead if I but choose to enter. I don’t remember much of the conversation—mostly awkward pauses which we both understood would not be happening if this were an ordinary conversation between two ordinary adults. Although I haven’t taken much wine, I feel drunk. It must be her scent. It’s soft and sweet and feminine—probably one of those pheromone concoctions deliberately engineered to fill me with desire. We eat, we talk, she fumbles with her chop sticks, I laugh, then apologize. Turns out she has a degree in environmental science with a minor in social anthropology. After five years working for a non-profit, she went to grad school and is finishing her thesis, something about environmentalism and ethics, or maybe Buddhism and the definition of sentience. I can’t remember. Hard to remember anything after such a head-spinning evening. Turns out she and Luke once had a thing. In her mind it’s over, but because she strives to preserve love affairs as friendships, Luke isn’t persuaded it’s over, has trouble with boundaries, ends up on her doorstep, mostly asking for sex, sometimes getting it. I mean, when your sex life is as pathetic as mine ... But it’s less and less with Luke these days because he can be such a sulky downer at times. Then she wonders why she’s telling me all this. Must be the wine. In fact, it’s more than the wine; it’s the wine mixed with benzodiazepines. Turns out Liane has an anxiety disorder or two hanging around her neck. Fear dominates her life—an ever-modulating, always-present, relentless, chameleon, brutish, undermining, passive-aggressive, surreptitious, soul-sucking fear. Sometimes she’s afraid to leave her apartment. Sometimes it’s riding elevators. Sometimes it’s more generalized—the kind of fear you get when you read about all the horrible things we’ve done to our planet and all the devastating consequences that might rear up from our stupidity. But mostly it’s social anxiety. I’m a friggin’ extravert but I’m afraid of people. Although it sounds like an paradox, there’s a kind of sense to it and I tell her so. She’s grateful for the empathy. What she values more than anything from a man is empathy. As we wait for the bill, and then for the receipt, and as we fumble with our jackets and make our way to the door, Liane pours out a litany of fears—not irrational fears like you’d hear from a paranoid or a psychotic. Taken singly, hers are legitimate fears. But taken together in long lists, they become overwhelming. All of Greenland’s ice could go sliding into the sea and drown half the world. The ocean’s thermohaline conveyor could stop in the blink of an eye and plunge the North Atlantic into another ice age. And then there’s a new one she’s just read about. With the melting of Arctic ice, sequestered methane is gurgling to the surface. We could all be asphyxiated within a decade. By the time Liane and I are between the two sets of doors on our way out, Liane has wound herself into a frazzled knot.

Liane. She doesn’t hear me, so I repeat myself but louder. She looks up at me with wide eyes. I feel a danger inside me rising through my body like a devil in heat. I would feel more at ease committing murder or storming a machine gun nest on a ridge of The Somme. Liane, you are beautiful.

She stops talking. I take hold of her elbow and she turns to face me.

Liane, I’m falling for you.

But—

I shut her up by pressing my lips against hers. They’re soft and sweet, and her scent has overpowered me. I can’t think straight. I’m disappointed that Liane doesn’t kiss me back, but she doesn’t push me away either. She receives me passively. Maybe she’s shocked, maybe afraid. When I pull away, she says she has to go. She pushes through the door and charges onto the sidewalk. I follow and watch her half run half walk south to the subway station. A gust whips grit across my cheek and brings a tear to each eye. I pop an after dinner mint into my mouth and suck on it while thinking what I should do next. It seems impolite to follow too closely on Liane, and yet I’m headed in the same direction. I linger beside a newspaper box that’s chained to a utility pole that supports a street lamp that casts an amber cone of light that makes the skin of my hands look sickly like it would if I had contracted a liver disease.

When enough time has passed, I head south too, moving first through the noise and glare and general thrum, then cutting in through residential streets with trees on either side that join overhead to form a throat that swallows me whole to stew in a pool of digestive juices. Every fifty feet a new lot, a manicured lawn and driveway with fresh blacktop or interlocking brick, every fifty feet, barrel-sized paper bags of fresh-blown leaves, basketball hoops and hockey nets, precision-edged flower beds and scissor-groomed shrubberies, every fifty feet another fuel-efficient seats-seven-for-the-soccer-game GPS-driven Blu-ray®- playing minivan. All the many mansions of this house roll down their slippery dew-chilled lawns to concrete curbs laid out upon laser-guided survey lines: streets drawn out straight or intersecting at precise right angles to form a perfect grid mapped on the brain like the diamonds of a chain-link fence or the grill on a prison window. Peristalsis pumps me further into the guts of this gloomy regimentation and I marvel at the bland uniformity that our freedoms have purchased. It makes me want to tear out my eyes and eat them.

Running in counterpoint is another theme: a warmth in the limbs, a feeling of floating, an elation that can bear me to a better life. I regret the after dinner mint and spit it onto the pavement. It destroyed the sweet taste of Liane’s lips and all that remains now is its receding memory. Another life is possible. I repeat it like a mantra. Four beats. Four strokes of the legs. And then I arrive at the far end of our street, the low end, the foot of a long rise to our house which sits on the crest and gazes down over the neighbourhood in haughtiness and judgment. Hallowe’en is coming—this weekend in fact—and the foam-stuffed witches we string from our eaves will fly over the streets and cast down the neighbours’ demons and our ghouls will spring from the ground and stomp their children into the mud and our red-eyed hounds will lap up whatever blood remains.

I begin the climb home. The closer I get, the more leaden my legs feel. My shoes scrape along the grit of the sidewalk and they sound the way it sounds when I draw the back of my hand across the stubble on my jaw. There’s a coarseness to it that makes me think of a soldier’s boots after a day’s march over dirt and gravel. But the comparison only makes me feel pathetic. What have I made of any moment in this life? I’ve never fought in a war. Never served in anyone’s government. I’ve never held a dying man’s hand. I can’t even say that I’ve rescued a dog or testified in court on someone’s behalf. The most I can say for myself is that I’ve built a house in suburbia and have passed all my life in the shadow of this false peace.

I pause at the foot of my front steps. To either side is a large terra cotta flower pot. In the summer, they stood full of petunias and alyssum and vines, but now with the cooler weather those flowers have been pulled up and thrown at the curb in brown paper bags to make room for kale and marigolds. Something takes hold of my innards. I can’t say what it is. Something deep and pernicious. It feels as if a troll has reached inside my guts and is wringing my intestines the way he’d wring his socks after washing them in the river. There’s a lurch, then a cough and a splutter. I lean over one of the flower pots, gripping either side, and vomit on the marigolds. It’s purple from the wine, with chewed up carrot and broccoli shafts from the pad thai.

Inside the house, I rinse my mouth and brush my teeth, but the putrid taste lingers. It’s late and I’d rather not disturb Giselle. Instead, I stretch across the living room sofa and drift into an uneasy uncomfortable sleep where people long dead visit me in the half light of my half dreams. Most notable is my father who assumes that major domo air of his with starched shirt and clean part through his hair. He gazes at me with his hard eyes. His jaw tenses. He speaks nothing in judgment but I can read it in his looks.

10. FUCKING UP YOUR MIDLIFE FOR DUMMIES

THERE ARE DIFFERENT states of fogginess you can wake to, like the fog of grounded planes that comes from alcohol or the fog of early morning Muskoka lakes that comes from fatigue, but neither captures the feeling that creeps over me now, this aimless fog. The Beatles were wrong. It’s not a magic feeling; it’s the kind of feeling which, if I dwelt on it too long, would breed imagined catastrophes and paranoia. I rise to consciousness with the muted kitchen-talk of my family exchanging indistinct mwah mwah mwah’s like Charlie Brown’s teacher. It’s the sort of talk I hear in my dreams, a vague murmuring from an agnostic cloud of saints who pour their uncertainty into my ears and vanish when the morning comes. There’s a patch of drool on the cushion, and when I shift to an upright position and when I face my reflection in the window, I see lines across my cheek and I see stray eyebrow hairs that make me look like a warlock. No one has bothered to take in the garbage bin. Its gaping maw grins me a mocking grin. I’d kick it if I weren’t so stiff through all my body, especially through my chest muscles, from retching on the marigolds. I collapse onto the cushion again with a despairing whump and rolling eye and an Oh God, not more of this. The dog leaves her bowl in the kitchen and comes dripping into the living room and hovers a safe distance, displaying the instincts of a hyena or a coyote, a scavenger circling its fallen quarry, smelling the weakness in my bones, waiting to snap them in its jaws and chew out the marrow. There’s a rustling at my feet where Griff and Katrine pass the entrance to the living room and on to the front hall, throwing down knap sacks while they tie their shoes. Katrine gives a bright Hi Daddy but Griff only grunts and turns away, thinking it’s stupid his sister should even try to connect with this loser dad of theirs. When the screen door has shut behind them and the dog has come back to the kitchen to lick the plates clean, I become aware of a fresh presence at my feet, a slow heat passing through the toes and rising through the body to chest and lips. I open my eyes by slits. Giselle is standing in a white terry cloth robe, camisole underneath, silent, unmoving, fists on hips, staring down at me. Floating around inside my brain is a misty recollection of a scene much like this one, but a few hours earlier and in darkness. Giselle had appeared before me as if by magic, lit only by amber shafts cutting through the slats behind the sofa.

Why didn’t you come to bed?

I threw up.

Silence. Then sniffing the night air like a Nazgul: You’ve been drinking.

Not much. A glass of wine.

You had wine?

With dinner.

You had dinner?

After the meeting.

Why didn’t you come home?

I remember shrugging in the darkness. I dunno. Hungry I guess.

So went the interrogation. I don’t remember it ending. I guess I drifted off to the lulling tones of my wife cataloguing all my defects. I must have started to snore, leaving Giselle to stomp back to the bedroom in a huff. Maybe she feels she didn’t do a proper job of the interrogation last night and has come back to finish it off. Maybe it’s part of a larger strategy to break me—sleep deprivation, intermittent random questioning, bright lights in the eyes, implied threats, hungry dogs pacing in the next room.

I see you threw up in the flower pot.

Thai.

Oh, so you ate Thai?

I smile and feel a crinkle of crusted drool on my chin.

When you get up, remember to clean it. What would the postman think?

I couldn’t give a flying squirrel’s ass what the postman thinks. The man talks to himself and when you say hello or comment on the weather, the most he can think to say in reply is how the world is going to hell and all of us with it. Since he’s already consigned us to the flames, I fail to see how a stomach’s worth of vomitus will make a bit of difference to his good opinion. When I hear Giselle step under the water for her morning shower, I shoo the dog out the front door and watch from the porch as she licks the marigolds clean and chews on some of the bigger chunks from last night’s dinner. When she’s done, she jitters in circles around the yard and back and forth and in and out, looking for the perfect spot. She squeezes down on her haunches and plops a steaming brown turd onto the frosty grass. For my part, I squeeze shut my eyes and offer a prayer to the god of all things soft and mushy that the postman will step slip-sliding through the shit and land splat on his ass. Vindictive perhaps, but I’m in a vengeful mood.

While Giselle is blow drying her hair, I sit at the kitchen table and pour myself a bowl of Kap’n Krunch® cereal and soak it in milk that comes sloshing over the rim and onto the table. According to the newspaper spread out before me (but upside down), there have been more casualties in Afghanistan, the rising price of oil will hurt us at the pumps, and the finalists for a reality TV show will be competing tonight for the title of America’s Next Top Exhibitionist Asshole. I flip through the paper and do the Sudoku puzzle while I wait for the coffee maker to do whatever it needs to do in order to make me a fresh pot of coffee. Upstairs, Giselle jangles clothes hangers, searching through her closet for something fresh and fallish to wear. Although most days she works at home, she still dresses up, saying it’s important to maintain an attitude of professionalism throughout the creative process. As for me, well, I’m still in last night’s clothes with a spatter of vomitus on my collar and the feral smell of body odor wafting from my armpits.

I’m swirling cream into my coffee when the phone rings. The clanging rattles my bones. I start in a panic and splash coffee boiling onto my hand. What if it’s Liane? Why don’t we have call display? What if she wants to talk to me? How can we converse with my voice rising up the stairs to Giselle’s ears? I lunge for the phone but say nothing when I pick it up.

Elton? Izat you?

Christ. It’s Feinman. He sounds like that guy. Whatzizname from the comics. The guy with the flat top and cigar who runs the Daily Bugle and has it in for Spiderman®. Feinman sounds like him. Irascible. Relentless. Cantankerous. Clueless. He says he’s going to sue me. He says he’s going to nail me to the cross. He says thanks to me they’ve lost a third of their revenue. He says he’s gonna make me pay. He says sometimes he gets so mad he feels like bashing in my fucking head.

You may think it’s a sign of virtue that I don’t give Feinman the satisfaction of a response—no smartass remarks, no threats in return—but the truth is: there’s no virtue in me at all. I’m struck dumb by a perverse mix of stupefaction and fear. I’m stupefied that anybody could be so ignorant, and in a backhanded way, I feel reassured because his ignorance confirms to me that I did the right thing by quitting. It’s the fear that’s more difficult to define. I’m not afraid of Feinman or his threats. What sends me cringing is the raw emotion of our confrontation. I’m afraid my voice will quaver, that he’ll see the gaps in my Kevlar®. Before he’s finished, I set the phone on its cradle but it falls clattering to the floor. I stare at the coffee mug in my hand and watch how a brown tsunami splashes against the rim. I sit and grip the edge of the table and listen to my heart thudding in my chest and feel the blood rising beneath my skin like the rush of fire ants over a fresh carcass.

Giselle steps into the kitchen, and what a sight she is in her dark slacks and purple silk blouse and necklace with matching earrings—amethyst in silver settings—that we bought last year from a new age shop in the Distillery District. All this to work at home in front of a desk where no one but me will see her. Who was it, baby?

Feinman.

What’d he want?

Said he wanted to bash in my head.

Then call the cops.

He isn’t worth the trouble.

I want to sit down and write, I want to be serious about this, demonstrate some resolve, some organization. But the call from Feinman has put me off and I can’t think straight. Maybe a shower and shave will help, but between Giselle and the kids, they’ve used up all the hot water, so when I stand under the showerhead, I scream with the cold. I give my armpits and my dick a once over, then me and my shriveled scrotum leap from the shower and wrap ourselves in a waiting towel. Shaving is even less successful. Halfway around my jaw, the electric razor’s foil develops a tear and it gnaws a chunk of skin from my cheek. I have to quit and leave my face shaven on one side and stubbled on the other. Doesn’t matter anyways since I’m not going out.

In the living room, I settle myself on the sofa where I spent the night and there I boot my laptop. The first thing I do is check my email. There’s something from Pastor Rick with the subject line: Is this for real? In the body of the message is a link to an online newspaper article and underneath it, this note: Take a look @ the photo & tell what u think. Bear in mind, G is a paranoid schizo and germaphobe who (to my knowledge) has never let anyone touch him. Ever!!!!! Rick

I click the link and it opens an article in my browser with the bold caption: Gentri Apologizes For Homeless Mishap. The gist of the article is: Bruno Genovesi stumbled on two security guards evicting one George Griswold, of no fixed address, from a new development site; the security guards misunderstood instructions; they should have referred Mr. Griswold to a shelter where he could receive appropriate care; after Genovesi arrived on the scene, that’s what happened; Gentri is committed to strong community values and the well-being of everyone its projects affect. Alongside the article is a 320 x 240 colour photo of Bruno Genovesi, gorilla in a man-suit, jacket buttoned to bursting around his gut, arm slung over the shoulder of a hapless George, who stands there with his bald head burnt and cracked, lips blistered and running red, but smiling all the same. A response seems important:

To: letterstoeditor@—

Subject: Gentri and Homelessness

Dear Sirs:

Physicists have declared the perpetual motion machine an impossibility, but your bullshit generator comes close. Your article on Gentri and the homeless man named George Griswold is one of the most egregious nuggets it has yet squeezed out. Your photo is doctored. Mr. Griswold suffers a disease of the mind which makes him impossible to touch. If Mr. Genovesi had tried to pose as pictured in your photo, Mr. Griswold would have torn off his arm. As for Mr. Genovesi’s account of the matter? When I summoned him to the site, he told me he would throw Griswold onto the street himself if necessary. A camera crew from CityTV kept him honest. What did he do when the cameras were rolling? He left. He didn’t help Mr. Griswold. I repeat: Mr. Griswold has a disease of the mind. He refuses all assistance. It would have been impossible to refer him to a homeless shelter. There are multiple video records of the event which verify my version. Do your fact-checking before you publish shit like this. And be sure to portray Mr. Genovesi in a more accurate light: a corporate thug willing to say anything to get what he wants.

Elton Pierce

I proofread the letter and click send.

There’s a carnivorous lip-licking sensation that comes from knowing you’re right, especially when you get to wave your rightness like a flag. It would be wrong to say this sensation springs from childishness. While this looks a lot like the I’m right/You’re wrong polarity you find in any kindergarten playground, it isn’t childishness that drives my behaviour; it’s something instinctual, primal, pre-conscious. It comes from the animal desire to tear flesh from my rival and consume it until all that remains is a taste on the tongue and a bloody scent in the sinus cavity. It’s the Jurassic call to dominate, to declare myself the alpha (and my prey’s omega if necessary). My dilemma—maybe the dilemma of all men—is that, while there is a part of me which sits above all this in insight and judgment, there is another part of me compelled to obey it. I remember attending a seminar once where a puffed up self-appointed marketing pundit thought he was being clever when he declared: I consume therefore I am. He was wrong. I am therefore I consume. I can’t help but try to devour assholes like Feinman and Genovesi.

My laptop dings the arrival of two fresh emails, one from Liane, the other from Mona. When I see Liane’s name, something dark leaps in my viscera and my heart starts to race. I open Mona’s email first:

Hey Elton,

How bout lunch? On me. Not on me literally tho that wd b fun 2 :-) U no what I mean. Anyhoo ... feel badly about how things went 4 u w/ Fuckman. Want to thank u in person standing up 4 me like that. No ones ever done that 4 me b4. Ur my hero. Mona Mona.

I smile and suggest one o’clock at a steak house near the office. Then I turn to Liane’s email:

Hey there,

I’m feeling awkward. What happened last night ... well ... it shouldn’t have happened. I guess. It was my fault. I’m sorry. I must have sent out weird signals or something. I’m bad that way. Don’t get me wrong. I mean, I’m flattered you find me attractive. But you’re a married man. I’ve got no business getting myself involved with a married man. I’m going to assume it was a lapse, you know, like a one-time thing, something we can shrug our shoulders and laugh about. I look forward to seeing you around—at ECO and stuff. Maybe the next time we see each other we can shake hands, make things more formal.

Take care of yourself, L.

I don’t know how to answer her. There’s a part of me knows she’s right but there’s another part of me knows nothing at all and simply wants her.

I don’t have much to report from my lunch with Mona. She’s glad to see me and says again how sorry she is that things between Sol and me have soured. I tell her not to worry about it. She laughs at my half-shaven face and wonders if it’s a new style she hasn’t heard about. I tell her about Sol’s threatening phone call over the Gentri account. Office gossip flies back and forth across the table. After her second Manhattan, Mona declares that a lunch is a pathetic reward; the reward I deserve is something she can only deliver in a room with a bed and a pair of handcuffs hanging from each post. I tell her not to drink so many Manhattans. She laughs but there are tears in her eyes. She calls me Mr. Faithful. She hates the horrible heart-twisting paradox of it all: the quality that makes me so desirable is the quality that guarantees she can never have me.

It’s just another lunch with Mona—sad Mona—who sits at home on a Saturday night, dreaming of the life she would have with me if it weren’t for the life I already have, summoning Martinis to bear away the heartache, sometimes picking up men in bars, then waking sober the next morning, disoriented and ashamed. What makes this lunch different for me is not the lunch itself but the role that the fact of the lunch plays in all that follows when I return home and announce to Giselle that I want a divorce.

Does this seem abrupt? I hope so. How else will you understand Giselle’s shock? I think it would be easier for her if I lobbed a grenade into her office, blowing out the windows and leaving her to scream at her shrapnel wounds. But this business of tossing around sharp words, it leaves no obvious injuries. At first Giselle thinks I’m joking. My joke is in bad taste. I’ve done things in bad taste before, so it’s possible this is one more in a growing list of innocuous stupidities I’m prone to commit. Giselle swivels around in her chair—an office chair on castors that the children loved to ride up and down the hall when they were young—and she breaks out in a choked guffaw. Her hair is perfect. That’s all I notice about her: the perfect fucking hair, freshly straightened and wrapped around the sides of her face, black and gleaming from the light in the window, like a polished motorcycle helmet. I tell her it’s no joke. Our marriage is over. It’s been over for months, maybe years. The motorcycle helmet bobs up and down. Uh-huh? Uh-huh? Then nothing.

I find it remarkable that two minions of media—an ad executive and an author of young adult fiction—are so appalling in their communication with each other. As our marriage has proceeded, silence has become our default mode. The explosions are rare now and come from mines we planted earlier in our life together. A habit once endearing now grows so annoying it provokes physical pain. Boom. I trip the wire and limbs go flying. But most of the time we’re too tired to engage in tactics like this and choose instead to ignore one another. Silence can be a curious thing. We both have found that our most creative work comes after long stretches of silent reflection. Out of the deep and all that. But we deploy silence in destructive ways too. Into the silent well of her soul I pour my infected imagination and what rises are creatures of my own creating that never came from her: petty suspicions and jealousy at her success (she, a rival I never had until now), anger at imagined sleights, recriminations for crossed lines that never existed until I laid them down. But I would be cruel to suggest that we use silence in any great measure as a weapon. The truth is: our silence is mostly a symptom of bored familiarity, silence is all that remains after we oil our mechanical lives and slide them into their well-used grooves.

We stare at one another for a while, breathing in and breathing out. I lean against the door frame, shuffling a foot across the hardwood floor and sometimes pausing to pick gunk from under my cuticles. Giselle rearranges the photos on her desk, picking up each in turn, dusting it with a sleeve, then returning it to its place. There’s one of Griff when he was five smiling through the middle of an old tire we strung from the maple in the back yard. There’s Katrine in a school photo, orange hair frizzing out like a blaxploitation afro from the seventies, brown freckles and missing front teeth. And there, of course, is our wedding photo: Giselle, stunning in her knee-length, and me, too young, stiff like a penguin with hemorrhoids.

The phone rings. It’s business and draws Giselle into an animated debate about cover art or corrections to galley proofs, stuff I’ll probably never have to worry about. She turns away from me to her phone console and computer monitor and for a minute I empathize as she lashes out at the prude on the other end who thinks the cover art is too suggestive for the American market. But when Giselle turns shrill, she sounds too much like the wife I want to leave, so I go upstairs to the bedroom and stuff clothes into my suitcase. I don’t know what to bring, how long I’ll be gone, what to wear in a situation like this. I wish someone would write a self-help book on the simple mechanics of separation, Fucking up your Midlife for Dummies:

- wear Nikes® but bring dressier shoes too because you’ll be eating out a lot

- if it comes down to a choice between an extra pair of pants and a bottle of single malt, pack the Scotch; you can always drink in your skivvies, but you’ll never be able to stand tall in your pants without a stiff drink first

- buy a backup razor because if the foil goes in the electric before you’ve shaved the right half of your face then the hotel clerk will stare at you with sorry-bastard-laughter in his eyes

When I hump the suitcase down to the front door, Giselle is standing at the foot of the stairs gripping the banister as if she’s strangling it. What’s this? she asks. I think she’s trying to keep her voice casual, but it comes out all choked and distorted.

Thought I’d check into a hotel for a couple nights. Give you time to absorb all this.

Absorb? You’re having an affair. Aren’t you? It’s that funny-assed bitch you ate lunch with, isn’t it?

Mona?

That’s the one.

Giselle is oil and water, irreconcilable liquids that have leaked into the same chamber of her heart. At first, you think she’s angry black woman bearing down with all the fury of a storm on the gulf coast, but beading up through the raging swells are bubbles of little-girl insecurity.

You’ve got someone else now.

No I don’t.

You don’t like how things are going here. But you keep your mouth shut ‘til you find someone else. Then you make your leap.

No.

Trading in. Trading up. Like I’m a used car.

No.

We need to talk. We know we need to talk. All the magazines at the supermarket checkout say we need to talk. Cosmo says we need to talk. O says we need to talk. But what’s the point of talking when the best we can manage are long stretches of silence broken by angry conjecture? Since there is no real talking, I hurl myself into her silence and read her there. What angers her most, I suspect, is that I don’t hate her; I don’t burst into rants about how intolerable she’s become, how it’s all her fault things have gotten this way. It would be easier if one of us were wholly to blame, poisoning the other’s food, for example, or secretly keeping sex slaves locked in the basement. Even in extreme cases like these, behaviours might not be blameworthy so much as symptoms of a mutual disease. It’s the things akin to silence that trouble me, the things that aren’t there anymore, like the sense of a shared purpose, the feeling we once had that we were partners bound on a grand adventure. Why did that feeling evaporate? Where did it go?

I tell her I’ll take a hotel for a week, something nearby, something with a kitchenette. I tell her I’ll be back after I check in. Maybe I can pick up supper for everyone—Swiss Chalet® or Harvey’s® or KFC®—so Giselle doesn’t have to worry about what to feed the kids.

When I stand on the front porch with the door locked behind me, I feel empty, like I’ve been tipped on my side and poured out onto the lawn until all that remains is a fragile paper skin. A wind blows hollow through me. My head detaches itself from the neck and floats away. Looking down from the stratosphere, we are ants tugging at a leaf. A million years from now, when a more evolved species unearths evidence of our crude attempts at a civilized existence, there will be no one who cares enough to note the messy details, and so these cares of ours will be swept away with the dust, and the future archeologists will dig on. A billion years from now, when the sun is a gas giant, the Earth will have been swallowed up and incinerated, so even the dust will have vanished.

On the way to the hotel I run a red light and nearly get myself T-boned by a delivery truck. The driver slams on his brakes and blares his horn. I see him in the cab waving his arms and mouthing obscenities, but I’m looking at the scene from an asteroid beyond Mars so it doesn’t bother me. In the hotel parking lot, I discover that I’ve left my suitcase and laptop on the front porch so I book my room ($1500 plus taxes plus gratuities for a week) then go back home for my things. The hotel is a four-story art deco knock-off probably built in the late thirties when art deco was already passé in places like Paris and New York. It’s a tired-looking building that knows its remaining days are few. Probably the owner is waiting for an outfit like Gentri to make an offer, then the property will be redeveloped as a thirty story condominium. In the meantime, the owner will try to squeeze as much as he can from the property, charging exorbitant room rates, doing nothing but essential maintenance, and staffing the place with illegal aliens. There’s a red carpet in the halls, probably as old as me, smells of cigarette smoke and cleaning products. Beside each door is a cascading wall sconce. No doubt they were elegant in their day, but now their glass is grimy and most are missing their bulbs. The room is spare and smells like the hall. There’s a double bed in front of a TV set, a writing table by the window where I can stare at a brick wall or down at garbage whirling in the alley below while I write my characters on their journey to a shit-hole in the future called planet Earth. What passes for a kitchenette is a three-quarters fridge beside the bed, and beside that, a sink and cupboard with a pot, a skillet, toaster and hot plate. There’s a drawer beside the sink and in it, a knife and fork, a paring knife, and (inexplicably) a garlic press. I decide not to unpack my suitcase. I’d rather not keep my clothes in the hotel’s drawers or closet. I worry about what might be living in them.

Supper is horrible. It’s the worst supper of my life. The hardest part is getting started. How do we explain to the kids that the family is falling apart? How will they understand? Hell, we barely understand. Even before we begin, the kids sense something is wrong. I’ve never before spontaneously arrived at the door carrying a bucket of takeout food. So they’re sensitized to the situation. Their ears are keen. They watch us in apprehension as we nibble at our food. They pierce our thin pleasantries and already detect the darker exchange underneath. When Giselle finally clears her throat and announces that we have something important to tell them, they’ve already guessed. They may not know the details but they’ve guessed the gist. It’s hardest to watch Katrine’s reaction. There’s no yelling or hysterical sobbing. She sits at the table, shifting her gaze from one of us to the other then back again, her face growing hot with tears. She throws back her chair and runs upstairs to her room. Later I tap on her door and ask to come in, but she tells me to go away. All my pat set-pieces get flung out the window: all my promises that we’ll still see one another all the time, and I’ll still help with homework, all my assurances that we still love her dearly, this has nothing to do with her or Griff, it’s not their fault. All the clichés get tossed. With Griff it’s different. We have no idea how to read his reaction. He sits at the table tearing chicken off the bone and licking his fingers.

Afterwards, Giselle follows me out to the car, standing barefoot on the cold lawn and shivering. I hope you’re happy with all you’ve done, she says, ripping us apart like this. I think she says other things too, but I’m not sure what because her teeth are chattering and I’m feeling severely disengaged. I think she calls me a bastard, a son-of-a-bitch, a prick and an ass. Probably some other things too. She pounds me on the chest then walks back inside.

There you have it: the complete account of how I manage to quit my job, get myself embroiled in at least one law suit (maybe two), flush my marriage down the toilet, move out, and alienate my children, all within two weeks.

Have you ever read those self-help articles in magazines like Readers’ Digest and Psychology Today, the ones that give you a test to rate stress in your life? Too much stress and you’re in danger of something nasty like a heart attack or acne. They list major life events that cause stress. You tick off all those that apply then add up the points assigned to each in order to figure out your prognosis. Apart from death of a loved one, I could tick off every stressor on the list. In short, I’m at risk of being overwhelmed. At times like this, extraordinary measures are necessary. I go back to my hotel room and rummage through my suitcase until I find the bottle of Balvenie. I search through the cupboards for a glass or a mug or even a measuring cup. Finding nothing, I pull out the cork, lie back on the bed with my shirt unbuttoned, and drink myself loose and diffuse straight from the bottle.

11. ONE CREAM NO SUGAR

A LIGHT SCREAMS at my eyes. I must’ve fallen asleep with the overhead on. The hosts of a breakfast talk show do their stupid banter with their perfect hair and their perfect teeth and their wonderful smiling cheerful evanescent faces. Makes me want to take a tire iron and bash in their heads. Wafting through my brain are vague strands of infomercial spiel: big-breasted women who sell exercise equipment, oily-palmed men in leisure suits who promise millions if I sign up for their foolproof system. Wedged in between infomercials and morning chit-chat are the televangelists, oily-palmed men and big-breasted sidekicks who promise the love of Jesus Christ Almighty, Our Lord and Fucking Saviour, if I but surrender my heart to the cross and $19.95 to their merchant account for an anointed prayer cloth.

All through the night I’ve lain with the bottle of scotch between my thighs, fingers wrapped around the neck like I’m holding my dick. There’s a taste in my mouth like the taste of wet moss. I go to the washroom and lean on the sink, an old porcelain pedestal sink with cracked caulking where it once stood flush to the wall. Now the seam gapes and water tumbles over the backsplash and down to the floor. There’s a mirror the size of a foolscap pad fastened to the black and white tiles. A charcoal-grey mold grows in the grout, fuzzy in some places, and I worry that maybe microscopic spores shook loose while I slept and floated into my gaping mouth and sprouted roots into my tongue. There’s a video I’ve seen online of ants in the jungle who play host to a parasitic fungus that bores into their brains and makes them do crazy self-destructive things. Maybe that’s my story. I cup cold water into my hands and splash it onto my face. A man stares at me from the mirror but he’s not as familiar as he used to be, dark circles under the eyes almost the shade you see when a boxer has taken a good pummeling, thinning hair pasted to the forehead, hole in the cheek that’s crusted over with a red scab the shape and size of a small cockroach, and stubble more stubbly on one side of the face than on the other, black tending to silver when the light strikes it just so. I pat my face dry with a musty hand towel.

After I jam a stick of antiperspirant into each armpit, I go downstairs to the street and up to the corner drug store. There’s a cold wind that blows fallen leaves across the pavement. I want razors and shaving cream. The checkout clerk is eighteen or nineteen, fresh out of high school, plump, a real butterball, perfect for Thanksgiving dinner. She asks if I wouldn’t prefer a different razor.

What’s wrong with these?

She lowers her voice as if she’s sharing a dirty secret: They’re for ladies.

How can you tell?

The handles is pink.

But they shave hair, right?

She looks at me like I’m her grade twelve English teacher asking a trick question. Yeah. But they’re for, like, legs and armpits and stuff.

So you think the hair on a man’s face is different than the hair on a woman’s armpit?

She shrugs, then her face lights with a new thought: It’s like in The Fly when that guy, like, is turning into a fly and sprouts fly hair and it’s like, tough as steel and he needs wire cutters to snip it.

So you think these won’t do my face? and I wave the package of razors in front of her nose.

Well I dunno. Probably. Only it’ll dull the blades.

Would it make you happier if I bought something different?

It’s no skin offa my face. It’s you’s gotta be happy.

I say I’ll stick with the pink, then I make a silent note: tell Katrine to stay in school and get a decent education.

Back in the hotel room, I break open the blister pack and pop out one of the razors, but after I’ve run the water hot and soaked the hand towel and steamed my face, I realize I’ve left the shaving cream sitting on the counter of the drug store. By the time I retrieve the shaving cream, I’ve given up on the idea of a shaven face and I’m entertaining the prospect of life with a beard. Rather than return to the hotel, I find a greasy spoon tucked between two upscale restaurants. It’s no wider than its own front door and advertises a world famous Breakfast Artery Clogger, oil on your grease, fat on your lipids, and a certificate of authenticity written in catsup and cholesterol. I order a BAC and sit at a table by the window, scanning headlines and sipping from a mug of coffee, one cream, no sugar. The newspaper says a man dressed as Colonel Saunders slipped past security at New York’s United Nations headquarters and posed for photos with various dignitaries before staff realized the southern gentleman has been dead for nearly thirty years. The estimated market value of a global H1N1 (pronounced heine) pandemic is eighteen billion dollars. And rising waters around the Maldives signal the beginning of a new trend—climate change refugees. I know I should care about these things, but in my current state I can barely hold a knife and fork to slice through the bacon and sausages on my plate. As I mop up the runny yellow glup with my batter-soaked toast, I realize I’ve forgotten to pack a toothbrush and toothpaste. I return to the drug store and when I get to the checkout counter, the clerk rolls her eyes and: You sure this time? You don’t wanna take a deep breath and think about it for a minute?

I feel lost. I’m not sure it’s possible anymore to explain the kind of lost I feel. Once upon a time I could have used a navigation metaphor, like a mariner on a cloudy night who accidentally drops his sextant overboard. But now that we all walk around with GPS-equipped cell phones, our metaphors for lost are vanishing. Twenty years from now, GPS devices will be ubiquitous. Fifty years from now they’ll be embedded beneath the skin and lost will become a quaint memory like outhouses and floppy drives. Then, the psychic dysphoria I feel will require a new word. It’s a mixture of loneliness and aimlessness. Let's call it laimliness.

In the hotel room, I sit in front of my laptop, but nothing happens. It’s not for lack of ideas that nothing happens; there are lots of thoughts rolling around inside my head. It’s more a problem of being alone with myself. My head full of ideas has to compete with a head full of voices: self-recrimination, the recollection of my own stupidities, a wincing I feel as I face accounts of myself I’d rather avoid. Maybe it would be easier if I packed up my laptop and hauled it down the street to a coffee shop, a good idea seeing as I had only one coffee with my breakfast. Things go well for a time—two paragraphs in half an hour—when the phone rings. It’s Giselle, breathless, distraught, annoyed. She just got a call from the school. It’s Griff. They want a meeting after school today—the French teacher and the VP. Giselle can’t go because she has a photo shoot booked for the back cover and there’d be a fee to cancel.

Since when have you agreed to put your photo on the back cover?

She ignores me and goes on explaining the circumstances. Something about Griff acting out, calling the French teacher a—she pauses, maybe reading from notes—a skanky-assed cock-sucking ho.

Ho? He called her a ho? That’s not even a word.

Giselle tells me to get serious here. They’re talking about expelling him for a week and there’s no fucking way—she’s swearing so she really means it—no fucking way on God’s green Earth she’ll have a sulky teenager underfoot when she’s got so much work piling up. The Walrus is sending someone around for an interview on Monday and that’s just what she needs—Griff upstairs blasting Jay-Z through the house while she’s trying to keep up a civil conversation downstairs. My mission—and I have no choice but to accept—is to attend the meeting at Griff’s school and persuade them to drop the expulsion idea, otherwise I get to look after Griff all next week.

This is all your fault, she says. He wouldn’t be acting out like this if you hadn’t dropped this bomb of yours on the family.

I’ll grant her the second part, but not the first. Talking about fault in the context of marriage is like talking about nuclear physics at a convention of chicken farmers. One has nothing to do with the other. Fault is about law or morals or ethics or doing good. But marriage? That’s about something else. Christ. I don’t know what it’s about. Insanity maybe—the crazy notion that we can institutionalize our passions. Fault is what you use when you want to feel right, when you want to have it over on someone else. But I don’t want to feel right; I want to feel alive.

We both hang up. It’s hard to say who hangs up first because we both want to be able to say that we hung up on the other. What we both get is a widening gulf of silence. It seems not long ago we found it impossible to hang up on one another. Our conversations would stretch for hours until we couldn’t keep our eyes open.

I’m tired; I need to go to sleep.

Then hang up.

You hang up.

You first.

No you.

I suppose it was children that brought those conversations to an end. Halfway through her book tour, Giselle would call from some strip motel in the Ozarks and me, exhausted from cleaning up after kids and I-want-mommy and resolving pointless squabbles, well, there wasn’t much left for tender phone calls. Things decayed into a perfunctory domestic liturgy:

I love you.

I love you too.

‘Night. And the sound of a click.

I guess our phone conversations have followed a trajectory that leads inevitably to silence.

Griff’s school is typical of those functional brick bunkers built during the post-war expansion into suburbia. Its design is bleak and unimaginative—a single long corridor with a gymnasium at one end and an assembly hall/cafeteria at the other. Viewed from above, it would look like a dumbbell. If you pause on the front lawn and listen closely, you can hear the echoes from an earlier time when weekly drills sent the children scurrying under their desks to hide from a pretend nuclear fallout and (as it turns out) an equally pretend Commie threat. Beside the entrance is a flagpole where a faded maple leaf snaps and flutters overhead. Sometimes it makes a sound like laughter. In the corner where the corridor intersects with the gymnasium, leaves, yellow, brown and red, swirl in erratic arcs. They sound an applause in answer to the flag. I arrive at three-thirty when the bell sounds. Within a minute, children are pouring onto the front lawn. It’s not like Katrine’s school where most students try to act sophisticated, adult even; here at the middle school, most run around and play like kids, and only a handful attempt the look, the strut, the cigarette, the makeup. If I weren’t so tired, I’d be laughing along with the flag.

At the reception desk, there’s a student volunteer, a porky kid, just like the one I met this morning at the drug store, who’s filling in while the real receptionist is off getting a coffee or taking a pee or tonguing the janitor. The porky kid doesn’t know anything, so I sit on an old sofa with foam-stuffed cushions and for the next ten minutes I sink and sink and sink until I’ve all but disappeared. By the time Angela, the receptionist, returns from wherever, I feel like a circus midget whose gotten his ass wedged in a bucket; I wave my squat little appendages and squirm out into an upright position. The circus idea isn’t far from the mark. Angela is sixtyish and round, with hair dyed red and scarlet lipstick that she’s pasted beyond the edge of her lips. At any minute I expect she’ll pull out an oversized hammer and whack me on the head or shoot me with a cork popgun that says bang on a banner.

I tell the receptionist I’m here for Griffin Pierce. She looks me over with a skeptical eye and says, Right. She pushes a button and a buzzer sounds in the next room. For all the distance between here and there, she could have raised her voice and simply called for whoever it is she’s calling. Looking over her desk, I can see through an opening in the doorway. There’s a slice of Griff’s arm, the tip of his nose, the visor of his ball cap slung sideways and pointing down to a shoulder out of view. A voice answers the buzzer, a little nasal, a little gruff, and Angela the receptionist tells this man, this Jean Tremblay (as the sign on his door proclaims), this Vice-Principal of the public school system, she tells him that Griffin’s father is here. The man pulls back his door and emerges from his office, head bowed, plowing to the reception desk the way a train pushes along the track in a snowstorm. His head looks like a model of the northern hemisphere, with a barren patch above the tree line and more growth as you move south until you reach a thick thatch under the chin. He wears a pair of reading glasses draped around his neck and it reminds me of my grandmother, dead now these fifteen years. His garb is what you'd expect—a discount off-the-rack suit in navy blue with buttons on trousers and jacket that strain against his paunch. I can’t help but compare myself to this dull-looking man. If he’s fat, that means I’m merely soft. It wouldn’t take much for me to harden myself around the edges, reclaim that firm body I enjoyed when I was younger. Even a woman like Liane could find me attractive. But this man? He raises his head to me as he chugs past, excusing himself, saying he’ll be with me in a minute. He slaps his hands on the desk and leans in towards Angela. So. Where’s our guest?

Angela has an embarrassed look on her face and pulls her oversized lips into a cartoonish smile. If it weren’t for all the greasepaint, she’d probably be blushing. She does this thing with her eyes, flicking them towards me, then down to her hands folded on the desk, flicking them towards me, then down again.

Oh. Oh I see. The man stiffens and turns to face me. You must be Griffin’s parent ... or guardian.

He offers a hand but I don’t take it. Instead, I give a hard steely squint and a false false smile. Just as he paused after the word parent, so I pause for an instant, but in my case, it’s to consider whether I should knee this bozo in the groin.

Jean, I say. May I call you Jean?

He nods.

Jean, let’s be clear here, just so there isn’t any awkwardness. Okay?

He nods.

Jean, Griffin is my son. Flesh of my flesh. Bone of my bone. I hope you weren’t making an assumption based on skin colour.

No, of course not.

Good. Shall we? I reward him with a warm smile and usher him into his own office. I’m working the poor bastard with timeless sales tactics. Years ago, before I ever rose through the ranks at Feinman’s, I sold cars for my brother and learned the unsubtle craft of getting people to say whatever I suggested. By the time I was done there, Lawson had transformed me into a Jedi Master of car sales:

You don’t want standard transmission. You want automatic.

We don’t want standard transmission. We want automatic.

This isn’t the car you’re looking for.

This isn’t the car we’re looking for.

It is my hope that by the time our interview is done, Mr. Jean Tremblay, Vice-Principal, B.A., B.Ed., M.A. will feel like a complete shit for all the manipulation I force on him, no less than if he rolled down his pants and leaned over that cheap chipboard MACtac® desk of his. He deserves it. I know his type: the pudgy white middle-class liberal professional who shops organic on the weekend, salves his conscience by giving to a smorgasbord of charities, and declares himself a champion of equality, especially the sort you read about in newspapers or gawk at in Hollywood films. But I know his type, staring at the wall after the article is done or shuffling away after the credits have rolled, out for a latte with biscotti, or a glass of chardonnay by the pier, joining Friends of the Symphony, all the while proclaiming his love of diversity, which is fine until he has to smell it, then he moves his chair a little further off, draws another sip of his wine, and goes on with his declarations. I know his type.

Jean says Mlle DuBois is on her way down. Just a minute or two, then we can get on with the meeting.

In Jean’s office is the mate to the sofa in the reception area, and it has swallowed up half of Griff. There’s his head and neck and arms, and there’s his legs up to the knees but scrunched against the chest so he looks like a foreshortened little man with squat legs coming out beside his armpits. Instead of sinking into the sofa, I sit on the far arm, anticipating the rise I’ll have to make when Mlle DuBois enters the room. I don’t want to compromise my advantage with a humiliating wriggle out of the sofa.

Griff looks up at me. You look like shit, Dad.

Jean is watching me. He’s going to mark me on my performance. I’m supposed to chastise Griff for using a swear word, but the truth is: I wouldn’t have noticed if it weren’t for the twitch of Jean’s eyebrows. I could care less. I’m exhausted. That’s the problem with most parents these days. They’re well-meaning and want the best for their children, but they have to work sixteen-hour days to keep up with the payments on all the things they don’t need but can’t live without. Even their entertainment has become a task for their Day-Timer®. God help them at the water cooler if they don’t know the latest Idol or don’t know what Brie said to Gaby because they fell asleep on the La-Z-Boy®. Yet this fat officious man wants me to rap my son’s knuckles because he used the word shit in a sentence which, to be honest, is the only personable thing the boy has said to me in months. This is a classic case of form over substance. But I guess that’s the mood of our times. Better to retouch in Photoshop® than to print the RAW file in all its rawness.

This takes me back a couple decades to the days when our provincial premier staked out his own place in the pantheon of lunatics by declaring a Common Sense Revolution. He reworked public education so it looked more like the assembly line at a Ford® plant than the academy of ancient Athens. There would be fiscal accountability and quality control. There would be inputs and productivity and fancy graphs with lines that always zoomed off the top right corner. At the age of five, a child would enter the plant like a bare chassis and over the next thirteen years, parts would be bolted in place, welded on, painted over, a rear door for History, a transmission for English, maybe a tinted windshield for Civics & Careers. To either side on the shop floor the teachers would stand, no longer hands-on, there simply to ensure that the machinery ran smoothly, the new province-wide curriculum, laid on and inviolable, the uniform testing to protect the integrity of the system, the tick-box automated reporting, Levels 1, 2, 3, 4. And when the manufacturing process was done, shiny educational products rolled off the line ready to take their place in the competitive machinery otherwise known as the global economy. The rhetoric has been thrown at us for so long we don’t know any other way to think. It makes me want to hurl shit at blackboards. It’s been a generation now. I wonder if there are any teachers left at Griff’s school who remember a time when people felt free to learn for the sheer joy of it.

I look down at Griff, swallowed up in that big whale of a sofa, and I feel sorry for him. Griff, I say.

Yeah? He looks up at me with those big brown eyes. He has beautiful long lashes like his mom.

Was that a simile or a metaphor?

Huh?

When you said I look like shit, was that a simile or a metaphor?

He has this puzzled is-my-old-man-for-real? look on his face. Uh, simile?

Oh, come on. You could’ve guessed. I wanna know if you’ve been paying attention in English class.

So I was right?

But why?

Griff doesn’t get a chance to answer because Mlle DuBois comes bursting into the room all smiles and bonjours. Holy shit. I nearly fall off the arm of the sofa. She is not at all the wizened, sexually repressed prune of a French teacher I had been expecting. She is long legs covered in black tights, and a wool skirt wrapped around the curves of her hips and extending only halfway down her thighs. She is skin-tight turtleneck underneath a button-down sweater that’s mostly unbuttoned so I can’t help but notice the flat stomach rising to full cantaloupe-shaped breasts. She is brilliant hazel-coloured eyes and moussed hair that flies in a thousand directions and although she wears no make-up, she is young enough that there’s still a high colour in her cheeks. Whenever she moves, she jangles a dozen or so metal bracelets, and throughout the interview, they slide down to her wrists and she slides them back to her elbows, up and down, up and down, the same way you’d handle an uncooperative condom. This woman could be Liane’s younger sister. If I came to the interview with plans of manipulating the situation or controlling the outcome, I’ve tossed them out the window and, instead, preoccupy myself with those full unpainted lips. The glistening flesh unmoors my brain and sets it drifting back to Wednesday evening. I remember the taste on my lips and the scent drawn high into my nostrils.

Then Mlle DuBois shatters the illusion and I’m back in the present, prepared to chew up and spit out these pencil-pushing administrators. The woman raises her arms, then flops them to her sides and turns to M. Jean Tremblay: So. Where’s Griffin’s fahder? The Vice-Principal does this funny thing with his eyes, the same thing Angela did to him when we were at the reception desk: flicking them in my direction, then down to his hands folded on his lap, flicking them again at me, then down. Oh. Oops. And she swings around, hand extended, face alight with smiles. I lean back on the arm of the sofa and leave her standing there with her arm floating in the middle of the office. Monsieur, uh, Pierce?

I launch right into it: You phoned my wife about Griff’s unfortunate vocabulary choices, and I think it’s important we talk about that, but she also mentioned something about expulsion. What was it? Five days? That seems excessive.

Well now. Jean has settled his fat butt onto the corner of his desk and he’s buried a row of neatly arranged pens under the squidge of it. To get comfortable, he hikes up his trousers and draws his junk into a knot that squeezes out over his thigh. The man has one foot planted on the floor, but the other dangles over the side of the desk, and I can see a strip of hairy calf exposed between the hem of his trousers and the top of his tube socks. Under the circumstances, five days is just about right. You have to bear in mind here, Mister ... uh ... Pierce, we take words as seriously as actions. You know how it is. Sometimes the fist fight is nothing compared to the name-calling that set it off.

So what are the circumstances?

Eh?

You said ‘Under the circumstances.’ What are the circumstances?

Well. He scratches a patch of skin behind his ear. I think the words speak for themselves, don’t you? They were nasty. They were sexual in nature.

But those aren’t the circumstances.

He turns to the French teacher. Madeleine?

It was unpleasant. Especially de way all de boys, dey stare at me.

I have a few suggestions about how she could prevent all de boys from staring at her, but I keep those to myself because I don’t want to interfere with their education. Instead, I say: I get that it would be humiliating, I really do. And I agree that Griff needs to take responsibility. But you still haven’t explained the circumstances that make this a five day expulsion kind of thing instead of, say, a letter of apology kind of thing.

The Vice-Principal screws his face into a knot. His expression reminds me of my father, not a good thing, since this is the kind of reminder that flips my innate anti-authority switch to the on position. Mr. Pierce, he says, drawing himself up so his junk gets twisted tighter than ever, we’re not going to get anywhere with this if you keep repeating yourself.

Repeating myself? All I did was ask a question. When I hear circumstances I think context; I think reasons, intentions, motivations. What pushed him?

I’m teetering on a fulcrum here. Tipping one way, it seems important that I disclose how Griff’s mom and I have split; how Griff is merely venting his anger and confusion, not the most constructive behaviour, but understandable. Tipping the other way, I’d rather my first public confession of a broken marriage not take place in this cinder block hole of an office, staring through aluminum blinds at trees that stand stark against a darkening sky, and not to this worn out administrator and this young piece of fluff Griff has described more accurately than anyone would care to acknowledge. It comes down to a choice between Griff’s self-respect and mine. I opt for Griff’s. Screw the embarrassment. I’ll never see these people again. I stare directly into M. Jean Tremblay’s eyes and explain the circumstances, or at least the circumstances as I view them.

I feel exposed, as if I’ve made a public confession of sin. In the public eye there are varying qualities of sin. Confessions of murder or the embezzlement of millions from rich investors, these are crimes that carry a certain cachet: murder can have its justification or at least can make for an interesting story, and stealing from the rich doesn’t seem so terribly wrong since nobody suffers for it, but my sin, or the sin implicit in my confession, is unforgivable. I have revealed the ordinariness of my life and there is no redemption for ordinariness. This is my life, rolled out for you on a moral assembly line. When you yawn, I will lay it like a wafer on your tongue. M. Tremblay looks at me as if to say: Your conventional marriage is falling to shambles? You would publicly admit such a thing? How commonplace! And you expect special consideration for your son? Do you know how often parents come whining to our offices with their diseases and emotional wreckages and existential traumas? It’s a daily ritual. I budget time for it: meet with parents to discuss the underlying causes of Johnny’s outburst. Ho hum.

The sad thing about my confession is that even Griffin appears bored by it, not surprising given that half his friends have parents who are splitting up or shacking up or smoking up or just plain fucking up. He’s grown desensitized to the relationship carnage all around him, and his eyes glaze over the same way they go after hours of paramilitary RPG’s on his XBOX®, bodies blown to bits and human gore splashed across the screen.

I wonder aloud to the air, to the ceiling, to the gods, if anyone has bothered to talk directly to Griff about this. As long as I’ve been present, we’ve been carrying on about him as if he weren’t in the room. Before I arrived, did anybody ask for his input? The pair look away. I suppose it doesn’t matter what Griff says, they won’t give it any weight. Even so: Griff, I’d love to know what was going through your head when you called your teacher a ... you know.

Griff squirms to attention, but the sofa hampers his movements so that he looks like a worm wriggling in molasses. He gives his best approximation of a shrug and it wobbles his feet out in front of him. I dunno. His voice is low and I have to lean in close to hear him. He struggles. I can see how he struggles. I have no precedent for this. When I was his age, I’d get a pat on the back and a fatherly smile and a Now son. There was never any of this administrative weight bearing down on kids back then. If Griff asked me now how to push it up and crawl out from underneath, I’d have nothing to say. There are words gurgling around in his throat, but they won’t come. The Vice-Principal looks at his watch. The machine will roll on, with or without Griff’s words.

It isn’t until later, after I’ve gone back to the hotel room, when Griff is sitting in the kitchen with his mother, that his words tumble out. It’s cuz of Jason, he says. This doesn’t make sense, of course; it isn’t as if Jason held a gun to Griff’s head and forced him to say whatever he said to his teacher. Instead, Jason used words. Mlle DuBois had put the two boys together to work on a project, but when the teacher turned her back and spoke to another pair, Jason said things to him. Griff went to Mlle DuBois and said he didn’t want to work with Jason, but Mlle DuBois wasn’t interested in Griff’s whining, so Griff went back and sat with Jason. Again, the teacher turned her back, so Jason took the opportunity to lean in close and repeat himself. Griff complained again to the teacher, but she was frustrated and yelled at him to get back to his seat; the boy needed to learn how to get along with other people. That’s when Griff lost his temper and called Mlle DuBois a skanky-assed cock-sucking ho. Giselle can be soft at times, and it’s into this softness that Griff now retreats. There’s a safety in her arms and I’ve known it too. In the evening, when night has fallen and they’ve all eaten supper, Giselle coaxes the rest of the story from him. She asks what it was that Jason kept repeating that got him so worked up. Griff is quiet at first, mumbling and looking down at his toes, but underneath is anger and it gives his voice more energy as he talks. He says it almost like rap: Yo, dawg, you a wiggah. Wannabe niggah. Oreo cookie. Ain’t nevah goin’ git no black nookie. I go to the Doobie, sorry, Mlle DuBois. I go to her but she don’t listen. Says go back. So I go back and: Yo, dawg, you a wiggah. Wannabe niggah. Oreo cookie. Ain’t nevah goin’ git no black nookie. (As an aside, only a white kid could come up with something this lame and call it rap.) So I go up again but she still don’t listen and there’s no way I’m goin’ back for more so either I’m gonna smack Jason or shoot my mouth off. By the time he’s finished, there are tears out the corners of his eyes and running down his cheeks.

These are the circumstances.

By the time Griff gets his words out, it’s too late. M. Jean Tremblay has already passed a guilty verdict and sentenced Griff to a five-day expulsion for sexual harassment of a female teacher—a serious business, the man says, and something that needs to be nipped in the bud so Griff doesn’t get the idea that it’s okay to say demeaning things to people. It would be ideal if there were a father-and-son moment as the Vice Principal gives his little lecture, a meeting of the eyes, a shared understanding that these are the words of a pompous fart, but Griff never looks at me, not even when I take his arm and pull him out of the sofa. The only father-and-son moment we share is a feeling that comes over us as we leave the school—the feeling of being small.

12. HALLOWE'EN

YESTERDAY I WENT grocery shopping. I had resolved that on Saturday morning I would make myself a pancake breakfast, which meant I had to get staples like sugar and flour and baking soda, and I had to get utensils like a spatula and a flipper. The grocery store was full of old people, somnolent and glassy-eyed, leaning on their carts, rolling ghostlike through the aisles, staring up at brightly labeled tins, perhaps adding the cost to their mounting bill or fretting about the waste of opening a tin, eating only half, then throwing away the rest. I wondered if they were widows who would take their food back to a dingy apartment and eat it cold on TV trays while the flicker of commercials and the mechanical cachinnations of the laugh track would momentarily fill the room with the illusion of joy. I remember feeling an urgent need to get out of there, to expose my head to the open sky. The canned music creeped me out the way it bounced between the hard bare floor and the corrugated metal ceiling. They were playing a sappy orchestrated cover of a Bob Dylan song. I remember thinking how sad that a food conglomerate can buy the rights to a cultural call to arms and transform it into a processed pappy goo no different than their food products—shelves stocked with spreadable cheese in a tube and ready-to-serve microwavable meals stewed in the genuine taste of cardboard. I tried to run to the checkout, but the wheels on my cart kept sticking. A lot of filmmakers use grocery stores as a stock setting for their brain-sucking zombie horror flicks, but my taste runs more to the sci-fi dystopian nightmare genre. It’s closer to the life I know. I think the difference is intelligence. Zombies are too stupid to organize. If you’re quick and smart, you can outfox them. But the dystopian nightmare is an intelligent system. It’s run by real people with real goals, but you can’t see them and you don’t know who they are. It’s the unknown in the dystopian scenario that makes it so frightening.

Now it’s Saturday morning and the promise to myself—the one about a pancake breakfast—seems more trouble than it’s worth. I lie on the bed with the sheets kicked back. I’ve just woken from a dream. It’s rare that I remember a dream, but in this instance, there is a clarity to the images that lingers long after I wake. What makes the dream doubly rare is that it’s meaningless. Most dreams I remember are a rehashing of my previous day—meetings, phone conversations, chance encounters in the elevator—and as for those that aren’t obvious rehashings, the Freudians tell me they are symbolic messages bubbling up from my subconscious mind, but I’m disinclined to believe that everything passing through my brain deserves analysis. There’s a great big universe out there and its cogs and gears will grind on whether or not we’re there to watch it. There’s a great big universe inside our heads, too, and I’m persuaded that it’s made of the same stuff, and its cogs and gears will grind on whether or not we’re there to analyze it. If every second there are billions of chemical reactions and synaptic firings and neuronal pulses, then it seems plausible that, at least once in a while, all those events go off in an utterly random way that leaves our heads blistering with a dream like the one I have:

I’m a child and standing on the driveway of the house where I grew up, a modest patch of fresh suburban land that my father staked in the year I was born. The community isn’t finished yet. In a few years there will be sidewalks and clean-edged curbs that give the world an orderly appearance, but for the time being we make do with ditches and culverts and, on the shoulders, pea gravel that gets whipped up by the lawn mower blades. I’m alone on the street. The cars are in their garages, or their owners (the fathers) have driven them to work. All the other kids have gone to the playground. A car squeals around the corner and roars down the street. It’s a Peugeot Citroën®, a rare sight in this land of box-shaped Crown Royals® and Ford® station wagons with fake wooden siding. The Citroën® fishtails, then swings around so its rear bumper is headed towards me. I watch dispassionately as the tires crunch through the pea gravel and into the ditch. The Citroën® rolls onto its roof, tires pointing at the sky like a dead dog turned stiff. A man’s torso emerges from an open window, wriggling like a fat garden worm. When the man gets halfway out, I see that his hands are cuffed behind his back, although I’m too young to trouble myself with technical details like the challenge of driving a car with standard transmission when your arms are cuffed behind your back. Then again, it’s my dream, so fuck off. Once seated on the grass, the man leans his back against the car and pushes with his legs until he’s standing. Another car squeals around the corner and roars down the street. Like the first car, it’s a Citroën® and, like the first car, it ends up on its roof in a ditch with a handcuffed driver wriggling like a worm from the open window. It’s hard for me to say whether these men are fugitives from the law or lunatics escaped from the local asylum or creatures of a different ilk altogether. Because they wear handcuffs, I suspect the authorities will want to know their whereabouts. I pull a cell phone from my pocket. You may wonder why a five-year-old has a cell phone in his pocket, especially when it’s 1970 and cellular technology hasn’t been invented yet, but once again, this is my dream. The men see me with the device pressed to my ear, and while they may not understand the nature of my device, they understand my intent to rat them out. In fact, these men may well understand this device because it’s possible they come from the future. One can never tell in cases like this. I can’t complete the call because the men chase me. I don’t feel afraid as long as I keep moving. Without the use of their arms, these men trip and slip, and even on a level stretch of ground, they aren’t fast.

At the end of the road is the playground. Part of the playground is sheltered by a big, open-air building, a giant slab of concrete laid across two upright slabs of concrete, the kind of building I imagine the Druids would have built if they had used concrete instead of Flintstone boulders.

Underneath the shelter is a snack bar and washrooms and rows and rows of benches where mothers sit with strollers—not the kind of ergonomic aerodynamic strollers we have today, but those clunky-looking pram jobs with wheels that roll on thin layers of solid rubber and squeaky springs that bounce the baby as much as the suspension in one of those tumbled Citroëns®. The shelter overlooks two swimming pools, one full of water, the other full of skateboarders. Every exposed inch of surface—the shelter walls, washroom stalls, sides of the drinking fountain, insides of the swimming pool—every inch is covered by graffiti, sprayed on in hot pinks and neon greens, orange that would set your hair on fire, and red fit for a host of demons. Yet the young mothers seem not to notice how the city has crept north and infected their neighbourhood. They sit in their kerchiefs and horn-rimmed glasses, rocking their strollers and watching the older children swarming all around. The place is thick with mothers and their children. I dive in and disappear from view. I see the men scanning the crowd, but it’s useless. They shrug and walk away.

That’s it for the dream. I don’t remember anything else. It doesn’t leave me frightened or paranoid. The crowd is a warm place where I feel safe. There, when I lose myself, I save my life. Crowds can be ambivalent that way.

I need to get out of bed. I promised myself pancakes and if I make a habit of breaking promises to myself, then I’ll sink into a hole where I do nothing at all and fritter away my time. Staring into the bathroom mirror, I see that the discrepancy between the left and right sides of my face is not so pronounced anymore. The scab is ripening, but I need to exercise self-discipline and resist the urge to pick it. I feel embarrassed, like a teenager with acne, but I know from experience that a modest measure of embarrassment now will spare me prolonged embarrassment if I keep picking at it. Besides, the fuzz on my face has obscured it. The pancakes are a success except that I forgot to buy syrup so I slather them in warm butter and that works well enough. I wash myself, and notwithstanding the cold water that comes in dribbles from the showerhead, it feels good. After I clean up the dishes—a surprising feat of anal something-or-other—I pack my laptop and go to the coffee shop. There is no coffee maker in the hotel room, which strikes me as sacrilegious. I suspect a previous guest has swiped it because there’s a solitary coffee mug in the cupboard above the fridge that looks like it once had an engaging and purposeful existence.

It’s a different crowd at the coffee shop on a Saturday morning, more domesticated, more prone to distracting talk and the rustle of newspapers. I see that leaders from the G20 nations are meeting to discuss caps on the emission of greenhouse gasses. A student in Europe mooned patrons of a rail station but got his lowered pants caught on a passing train and was dragged two hundred metres without serious consequence (except the exorbitant fine because he delayed rail service for thousands of passengers). I suspect these stories are related but, maybe because of my decaffeinated state, I can’t see what the connection is. The coffee shop is too noisy so I burn my throat rushing to swallow the last of the coffee and then I move on. I try working in the branch library at Lawrence Avenue, but there I suffer the opposite problem: the place is too quiet and all the garbage from my sorry life intrudes upon my thoughts. Why would I want to create an imaginary world when I can barely cope with the one I already inhabit? I go on like this, moving to a restaurant that serves dim sum, then on to a tea shop, until late in the afternoon it occurs to me that maybe I keep switching my environs to create the illusion of a varied and interesting life. With that depressing thought, I move on to a pub and order something stronger than tea.

It gets dark earlier these days. The sun is going down and soon it will be dinnertime. I phone Katrine and ask if she wants to go with me to a restaurant.

Daddy? The inflection in her voice borders on ridicule. You know what night this is.

In fact, I don’t know what night this is. I know it’s a Saturday, but I’ve lost track of the date.

It’s Hallowe’en, she says.

As if to punctuate her words, a mother walks past the window with two children straggling behind, maybe seven and nine, the older, the boy, dressed as a vampire with pasty face and ruddy lips and long incisors, and the younger, the girl, dressed as the bride of Frankenstein with an electric shock of white hair zipping through a mound of black. They each carry a plastic orange pumpkin that soon will be stuffed with candy. Tonight the great host of the dead will rise from the grave and wander over all the earth reminding the living that, one day, we too will lie down with them in the cold ground. Best to enjoy ourselves in the little time we have remaining to us. Carpe diem and all that.

But you’re fifteen.

I’m going to a party.

Oh. Oh, I see.

There’s something in her voice I can’t name, maybe scorn or disgust. And she’s thrown up a barrier. I can feel it, as thick as the concrete you see on a highway median.

I order fish and chips and a pint of lager, and when I’m finished and the basket is empty and all the lager is gone, I order another pint and pull out my laptop. The battery probably has another hour left. Maybe I can squeeze out a few more sentences this evening, some beer-inspired science fiction. But the hockey game starts and the patrons at the bar get noisy after the first goal against. They make an angry-noisy noise and it’s impossible to concentrate. Who the hell writes in a pub on a Saturday night anyways? I put away the laptop, but I’m still in enough of a sci-fi frame of mind that when I stare at the bubbles rising in my glass, I can’t help but look at them and wonder: what if each bubble is its own universe? What if each atom inside each bubble is a star system? And each electron whizzing around its nucleus, a planet? Imagine how, in the blink of an eye, civilizations would rise and fall on that planet, how its subatomic inhabitants would war with one another, and live and die, and murder and make love, how none of it would make the slightest difference to any other bubble in the glass. Then I move in the opposite direction, projecting outwards to our universe, a bubble in an extracosmic lager, that pops out of existence when a supragod pours us down its throat then falls asleep and burps us all into the eleventh dimension. It’s a good thing lager makes me feel relaxed, otherwise these bubbles would put me into a morbid state of fear.

When the hockey game is over, I pay my bill and throw on my jacket, the same jacket I’ve been wearing everywhere these days, a leather bomber jacket Giselle gave me for Christmas five or six years ago. I jangle through the pockets for change, wondering whether the waitress has been too foul-tempered for a tip or is one more lost soul whose story, if I took the time to listen, would liquefy my heart. Adopting the lost soul theory, I plunk down all the change in my pocket. I hoist the bag over my shoulder and step out into the cool night air. All the trick or treaters have gone home, even the older ones, even the ones Griff’s age whose voices have changed but who can’t say good-bye to their childhood. Even they have gone home. But there are still a few grown-ups, on the street or whizzing past in cars, who wear capes or wigs or masks or feathers or face paint and who, in the few hours remaining until dawn, revel in a new identity. I look at them all and wish I could change too. I wish I could be someone more awake to the world, someone more inclined to joy. Instead, I feel like I’m bearing a subtle grief for a world that has died, subtle because the world didn’t die all at once but slipped away like sand through my fingers.

I have no place I care to go, so I wander. Hallowe’en is a good night for wandering. Everybody assumes your face is a mask that you’ll peel off and hang behind the door when you return home. Nobody condemns you to wear the same face forever. I wander down Yonge Street for a few blocks, then cut in to a residential neighbourhood. On some porches, the candles still burn in the Jack O’ Lanterns, but most have burnt out or the pumpkins have been smashed on the tops of fence posts. I gaze through front windows at lamps on end tables and mirrors over mantles, at pianos opened for playing and portraits hung on walls, and I wonder what kinds of families live in these houses. Are they as happy as the figures in their portraits? Or are those smiling faces masks?

On impulse, I phone Liane. The action proves Einstein’s special theory of relativity. As I wait for Liane to answer, time becomes elastic. I’m passing some kind of schwarzschild radius and falling into a black hole. This is a stupid idea, I think to myself. But it’s too late. Even if I hang up, she probably has call display and she’ll know that it was me. I hear the ringing and think: She’s probably at a party, having a good time, drinking fancy cocktails, dancing in a club or walking through a starlit field, meeting single men; she probably thinks I’m pathetic.

The ringing stops and a tired voice comes on: Hello? I stumble over my tongue and splutter and the voice says, Elton? Zat you? I stumble and splutter some more and finally make myself coherent enough to ask what she’s doing. Oh ... I was watching a Hallowe’en special, some zombie thing in black and white. She yawns. But I fell asleep halfway through. How ‘bout you? What are you doing?

Me? Oh I was just out for a walk. Then I thought of you and—you wanna grab a coffee somewhere?

Liane doesn’t know. There’s part of her that would like to, but it’s getting late. What time is it? Eleven thirty? And then there’s what happened on Wednesday. That should never have happened. It was pleasant and all, and it was her fault (she knows that), but it was a dangerous thing to do, it crossed some kind of line, and she knows herself too well, how she’s weak, how she could melt away if she weren’t careful. Besides, she says, you’re married.

That’s when I tell Liane I’ve left my wife. The whole conversation flips on its head. Liane turns into an empathetic mother hen who clucks her concern and wants to shelter me under her wing. Are you okay? Do you want to talk?

We agree to meet at a twenty-four hour coffee shop close to her apartment. I lie and say I’m not far away, it’s no trouble at all to meet there, then I sprint to Yonge Street and catch a cab. By the time the cab has pulled to the curb in front of the coffee shop, my heart rate has returned almost to normal but I’m still sweating in all the awkward places.

The coffee shop is nothing special, a franchise of a B-list chain that’s done a second-rate job of branding itself: no in-house product line, no cross marketing with a music label, no green initiative with reusable mugs and recycling bins. It’s a bare-bones coffee shop, two pots warming, regular and decaf, hot water for three flavours of tea, a hot chocolate machine, and racks of donuts that went stale hours ago. I sit by the window and wait, and again time turns elastic. What is probably no more than five minutes becomes a thousand years, and into that thousand years I pour a world’s worth of fears and irrational thoughts and strange associations that make me wonder if I’m going squirrelly. By the time she raps on the window, I’ve imagined her attacked in an alley, suffocated by a gas leak, struck down by a car while crossing the street, leaving me to weep by the curb, wondering at what might have been. But here she is. She pulls off her coat and my heart leaps. She’s lovely. She’s perfect. I want her. I want her wholly. I want her past. I want her future. I want her body in bed beside me after I’ve possessed her utterly.

With the light inside and the dark outside, the window is more reflective than transparent and it presents to me a clear image of myself: grizzled beard over harsh lines in the cheeks. The eyes seem deeper set. I wonder if I’ve lost weight over the past week, which is likely given that I’ve skipped a meal each day. I feel self-conscious, so I apologize for my appearance. Liane tells me not to be silly. She likes the new look. She likes the roughness. It’s sexy, she says.

I buy two chai teas and we talk. I’m amazed at how easy it is to talk, how we lose ourselves in the conversation. It begins in awkwardness with probing questions about my wife, our crumbling marriage, the kids, their coping (or not), the split, and so on, but she feels my reluctance to talk about these things so she backs off. What follows is a game that all new lovers play, a game as old, maybe, as the evolution of articulate speech. We share stories of ourselves that let the other into our past. It begins with simple information (birthday, home town, parents, siblings, childhood vacations, pets, favourite foods, movies, music, books, shoes, teachers, hobbies, obsessions, fetishes, teams, celebrity sightings, restaurants) then it moves to something more confessional and therefore more intimate (embarrassing moments, broken bones and scars, including a scar on the inside of Liane’s right thigh, tattoos, most notably a butterfly on Liane’s left ankle and a dove stretched across the small of her back, schoolyard fights, undergraduate loneliness, episodes of drunken stupidity, the celebration of achievements, opportunities taken and the regret for opportunities missed, chance meetings, photo ops, renewed acquaintances, grief for the dead and for the living whose tragedies have not yet killed them, indignation at unjust traffic tickets and administrative boorishness, anger at the advancement of fools and politicians, a lament for prophets ignored and causes trampled over by the engines of corporate America, first kisses and first loves, broken hearts and tasteless jokes, an overnight at summer camp, piano lessons that came to nothing, the driving test failed for nervousness, sleeping bags under the stars, vindictive neighbours who refuse to get along, garbage strikes and maggot-covered bins, credit card debts and humourless bank managers who don’t know how to dress, the raving man on the subway who smells and won’t shut up).

When we sip our tea again, it’s turned cold and the clock above the donut racks says it’s two-thirty. Liane feigns astonishment although I remind her that tonight’s the night we turn back our clocks so we aren’t as tired as we think. I walk her to her apartment, a four-story brownstone building. At the front door, Liane turns to face me. I stare at her lips. They’re lovely. I want them. I can feel my heart thud in my chest. Liane extends her hand and: Well, this is it. I take hold of her hand and tug it to my lips, kissing each of the knuckles, then pressing the back of her hand against the bristles on my chin. Tugging again, I draw her whole body towards me. She says don’t but her body says do. Her posture folds into me and she lets out a sigh that mingles despair and desire. I set my lips against hers and this time she returns the kiss; she wraps her arms around my neck and thrusts her tongue into my mouth. It’s soft and fresh. The kiss runs its course, then she pulls away and says, That’s enough. I hear a silent for now tacked onto the end of it. Liane seems incapable of conveying to me a singular message. Her eyes shine bright with warmth but with astonishment too; she smiles but the pleasure is mingled with fear; and while there’s an inviting softness to her body, she sometimes moves it with a curt abruptness that suggests anger. If not for her tongue and the hands around my neck, I would have no idea what to make of her response. It’s so all-of-a-sudden, she says. After she disappears, I stand for a minute or an hour or a decade at the front door, staring into the lobby’s dim interior, wishing I could follow her into the elevator then up to her apartment and into her bedroom.

13. OFFICER GWEN

EVERYTHING IS GLOWING. The whole world seems brighter, not the garish bright of signs and cars and street lights, but soft and warm. When I inhale, my head swims with the scent of Liane’s body drawn close to mine. I hear music in my head and when I walk it feels as if I’m dancing. I’m in one of those rare moments when I enjoy being in my body. It’s on fire with an excitement I haven’t felt since I was in high school. The moment is like a rich merlot, with a nose and body and finish, with a hundred different subtleties that float across the palette and linger in the memory even after all the wine is drunk.

The subway isn’t running now and if I want to go back to my hotel I’ll have to catch a cab or walk to Yonge Street and ride the all-night bus. I don’t want to take a cab; the closed-in space will spoil the mood, and banal conversation with a cabbie will jar against the sweet timbre of Liane’s voice. So I walk. I savour bits of conversation and don’t notice how the time passes until I find myself at the western gates of York Cemetery. I’ve covered four or five kilometers. The gates are locked, but to either side is a chain link fence that’s easy to climb. Once inside, I can follow the motorway up the hill to the cenotaph, a granite phallus set against the dark sky, then down the lea side maybe half a kilometer to the eastern gates which stand across the road from the rear entrance to the theatre where I heard David Suzuki speak.

I swing my bag over the fence and lower it to the grass. Although the grass is damp from condensation and the ground is soft, it hasn’t rained in a few days so the ground isn’t that dank muddy ground typical of autumn. As I go over the fence, I hear a tear and feel something bite into my ankle. I twist around and tuck in my head so I strike the ground with my shoulders. I’ve caught the cuff of my jeans on the fence and I hang there, one leg stuck to the fence, the other dangling. Tearing the cuff free, I drop to the ground. I can’t see my ankle but I can feel a stickiness where I’ve cut it, not deeply and not badly, but enough that I’ll get blood on my shoe. I pick up my bag and walk. The gash isn’t troublesome enough for a limp, but the tatters of the cuff drag along the ground and sometimes get caught underfoot. When I get beyond the cenotaph, I can see down the broad stretch—two ribbons of asphalt divided by a grassy median—to the lights of Beecroft Avenue which flicker as the trees sway in the breeze. The humped silhouette of a raccoon scampers from one side to the other and disappears down a row of headstones. The polished granite reflects the moonlight. Some of the headstones give up their epitaphs: Cyrillic, Mandarin, Arabic, Urdu, Spanish. Here lie the descendants of people who once waged war with one another, now shoulder-to-shoulder staring up at the moon and at the threads of cloud that sometimes obscure its light. I can’t understand a single word of the inscriptions.

At the eastern gate, I do a better job of climbing the fence. The light is good here and when I wipe the blood from my ankle, I see that it’s nothing, a minor cut that will heal on its own. On the other hand, my jeans are shredded around the right ankle and aren’t worth repairing. I walk out to Yonge Street and wait at the bus stop but, growing impatient, I leave the stop and meander in a vague southerly direction. I prefer the residential streets; they have a calm that's missing on the busy thoroughfares. On Yonge Street, the night air shatters with the sound of motorcycles and punctured mufflers, but here, the world has settled for the night. The candles are cold. The Jack O’ Lanterns grin their dark empty grins. The fake cotton cobwebs whip back and forth.

I’m smiling to myself, lost in the recollection of intimate words, when I hear tires draw close to the curb and the throb of an idling engine. A woman’s voice calls: Hi there. Friendly but professional. A police cruiser is keeping pace with me and driving it is a woman, youngish and pretty in a crisp police-uniform way, like a nurse, or a proctological technician with blue rubber gloves. She wears a plastic police constable smile that’s probably too big for her face, although I can’t tell because she keeps her hair pulled tight behind her head. She could be petite or she could be a hundred kilos, but with the Kevlar® vest pushing her chest up almost to her chin, it’s hard to know how big she is.

Whatchya doin’? she calls.

I stop walking and step to the curb, doing my best to be civil, but I draw up short against this nagging problem I have with authority. As improbable as it seems, this woman reminds me of Feinman. There’s something about her officious propriety, its patent falseness, that drives me bonkers.

I’m walking ... obviously. I must make a note to myself to avoid the use of snide adverbs at the end of sentences, especially when talking to police officers.

It’s after three in the morning. She isn’t smiling anymore. Where are you coming from?

I was at a coffee shop chatting with a friend.

How’d you hurt yourself? She points at my ankle. Maybe I’m favouring it more than I thought.

Cut it hopping a fence.

Somebody’s back yard?

Christ. She thinks I’m a burglar. Naw, the graveyard. Okay, I confess. I was trespassing. But it’s Hallowe’en.

Have you been drinking? she asks.

Hell no! I mean ... with supper, fish and chips. But that was a while ago—when the Leafs were losing the game.

I see, and she nods up and down, up and down, like a bobblehead, and I can see that she’s sizing me up, wondering whether I'm a tear in the social fabric which needs to be sewn up or just another sorry-assed sports bar drunk lumbering home. What’s your name?

Elton Pierce.

So tell me, Mr. Pierce—

I stand glassy-eyed at the curb and stretch high my arms and let fly with a ragged yawn.

Mr. Pierce, do you have any ID?

That’s when I get a little tiny wee slight infinitesimal bit obnoxious. I think I’m in the right here, but because I’m not sure of myself on this point, I compensate with volume and broad animated gestures. I cook up a rant about Oliver Stone and Salvador and sedulas and the fact that we don’t live in a place where police disappear you if you don’t have a sedula, then I stir in some Fahrenheit 451 and how people in our world are free to walk in the night air whenever they want, add a dash of civil liberties, a pinch of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, fold in some Thomas Paine and John Locke, then lightly glaze with a harangue of indignant citizenship, none of which I take too seriously, and the police officer can see how the grin spreads across my face the more I stir my pot.

Gimme a break, she says. Hallowe’en’s a busy night for us and I’m just tryna make it through my shift. I’ll make you a deal, and she smiles and I’m sure by the look on her face that she thinks it’s a winning smile, but the truth is that her front teeth stick out and it makes her look like Bugs Bunny. Show me your ID and I’ll give you a courtesy ride home.

Courtesy ride my ass. Then again, my feet are sore and my ankle is throbbing, so I accept the offer. But when I reach to my back pocket, it’s empty. After I gulp down a momentary rush of panic, I dip into my memory and retrace my steps—had it in the pub, had it in the coffee shop. The fence. That’s where I lost it. I was hanging upside down. I explain to the police officer. I was hanging upside down with my leg caught on the fence and it must have fallen onto the ground when I was trying to unstick myself.

Get in. She rolls her eyes.

The back seat of the cruiser has a weird plasticky feel to it. I try my best not to touch it. Who knows what kind of criminal germs have infected the surface: pimps and hookers, junkies with spoons and dirty needles, puking sickos and lunatics who rant to the air. We drive up Senlac to the cemetery’s western gate. The police officer—whose name is Gwen—pulls out a flashlight and walks along the fence running south from the gate, shining her light onto the ground on the far side of the fence. By the way she jabbers on about orthotics for her boots and her five-year-old daughter’s asthma and trying to get highlights in her hair but never having enough time between shifts, it’s apparent she’s given up on the theory that I’m either weird or dangerous. Instead, I’m stupid, like 98% of the other people she meets on any given eight hour shift. I show her where I think I hopped the fence and, sure enough, there’s my wallet open on the ground with the credit cards reflecting the moonlight. After I retrieve the wallet, she holds out her hand and says, Driver’s license. She shines her light at the license, then at my face, then back to the license. Well, Elton Pierce, let’s get in the car and drive you home.

I tumble into the back seat, and the car’s gentle bump and sway sets me dozing. Street lights flick past my eyes through the passenger window and I imagine myself in a shuttle, racing down the mother ship’s launch tube and flinging into space. There’s the pop and crackle of voices as the pilot gets clearance from mission control. Then I shoot into the black, weightless and free. I dream myself floating above a bright blue planet with its blurred biosphere stretching along the curved surface. From this distance, everything is its proper size and no one thing is more important than any other—marriages and governments, children and leaders, guns and pens, toads and sequoias, germs and oceans, journals and fictions—all have an equal rank. I wonder if Griff knows I love him. Then I think of the scar on the inside of Liane’s thigh (was it the right?) and I wonder if I’ll ever get to kiss it.

I don’t remember pulling into the driveway. Gwen coaxes me from the back seat, and with a strong arm under my elbow, she accompanies me up the porch steps to the front door. That’s when I wake up. That’s when I realize we’re standing on a front porch instead of in a hotel lobby. I say I need to get out of here, but Gwen tightens her grip and blocks my way. She tells me to take it easy, everything will be all right.

But you don’t understand, I say.

She asks if my wife is going to show up at the door with a twelve gauge shotgun and blow off my balls but I say no. Then she asks if I’m planning to bash in my wife’s head but I say no. So she bangs again on the door and I explain that I have a room in a hotel and should go back, but Gwen says she isn’t a taxi service; if I want to go somewhere else for the night, then I’ll have to get there on my own. She tells me to get out my door key, but after fumbling through my pockets, I remember that I surrendered it to Giselle when we fought on Thursday. Strategically, that was a stupid thing for me to do, but at the time, it seemed less demeaning than listening for another ten minutes as Giselle enumerated my many many failings. As Gwen bangs on the door for a third time, we hear a fumbling at the lock and the door opens by a crack. Giselle stands deep in the darkness, cautious, and all we see is a single white eyeball and the glisten from the bridge of her nose. She rubs her one eye and wonders what anybody’d be doing at nearly four in the goddam morning—or is it three with the time change? Doesn’t matter anyways since she’s gonna sleep in no matter what. With her one eye she looks at me, then she looks at Gwen, then she looks again at me and wonders what’s going on. I’m still too groggy from dozing in the police cruiser. That’s what happens to me whenever I sleep for a few minutes: a layer of fuzz grows on my brain and I have to scrub it clean with a splash of cold water or a slap across the cheek. Gwen steps up for me and explains that I’m not drunk, I’m not in trouble, I’m not disturbing the peace, she found me out walking with a banged up ankle looking for a missing wallet, helped me find my missing wallet, gave me a courtesy ride home, understands that we’re not exactly getting along but would appreciate it if Giselle put me up for the night, maybe on the couch. Giselle opens the door by another grudging crack and lets me past and says thank-you and good-night to Gwen, and she follows me into the kitchen where we stare at one another in silence. There’s a lingering resentment and the bare cold fact of my departure, and there’s still that petty need to feel right about everything. There it is, floating over both our heads.

Maybe I should look at your ankle.

It’s the warmest thing she’s said in weeks.

I follow her upstairs to the bathroom and, rather than turn on the bright overhead light, Giselle turns on a low-watt lamp that sits by the entrance. She orders me to take off my jeans and sit on the toilet seat. She kneels in front of me and examines the cut, kissing it even though it’s crusted in dried blood, then tamping it with a moist cloth and disinfecting it with iodine. She says the kids are out for the night; Katrine is at a friend’s and Griff is sleeping over at T. J.’s. She stands and kisses me on the lips, then kneels again and tugs off my underwear. I stiffen until it hurts, and she smiles. She tells me I’m a mess and fills the tub with warm water while pulling off the rest of my clothes. After I’ve sunk into the water, Giselle pulls off her night gown and joins me, kissing me on the lips, sucking me, straddling me. I enjoy the feel of it. Of course I enjoy the feel of it. It’s sex and I’m a man. At a time like this, there’s nothing simpler for me than to shut off my brain and allow myself to be guided by the demands of my testicles. But there’s something unsatisfying about this. Physically it’s wonderful. Giselle knows every inch of my body, she knows how to draw me out, how to turn our sex into a beautiful torture. But emotionally it’s tainted. I can feel Giselle’s insecurity. There in the bathtub, she curls at my feet with her lips hovering above the water. There in the bathtub, I come in her mouth. She never lets me do this. She says it disgusting and degrading. Yet tonight she lets me. Later, when she’s spat it into the toilet and we’ve dried ourselves off, I stare at her and wonder whether she’s sensual or simply fat. She doesn’t object when I follow her to the bedroom and crawl under the sheets with her. There, we go further, her making love to me in the darkness and me closing my eyes, imagining that it’s Liane I press into, Liane’s moist clit I run beneath my tongue, Liane’s nipples I suck, Liane’s body I draw to a keen point of pleasure until she screams.

For the first time in our marriage, I feel cruel. Giselle says Oh God. She says it was wonderful. She says it was the best sex we’ve ever had. Meanwhile I’m ten clicks away in another woman’s apartment and the only time I’m present to Giselle, the only time I’m right there with her in the bedroom, is the time I dig my fingers into the flesh of her hips and flip her onto her stomach, the way a butcher flips a slab of beef, and I settle onto her buttocks and thrust inside her again and again and again until she comes and I come and she whumps on the bed and I roll off her onto my back, staring up at the ceiling, feeling satisfied and guilty and stupid. Even before I’ve caught my breath, I’m back in the apartment ten clicks away.

After that, I fall asleep, not much of a sleep, a dozy indeterminate sleep, the kind of sleep that isn’t deep enough for dreams but only for shadows. There’s a light breaking in the east, but it no longer comes through a bright crisp autumn sky the way it has for the last few days; instead, it gathers in a murky cloud cover, fitting for the first day of November. I stare through the curtain into our back yard. The maple has dropped all its leaves. Now its branches claw the gloom. Giselle is naked beside me. She snorts and licks her lips. I can’t find anything in myself for her that resembles love and it makes me wonder if I’ve ever loved her. Then I go another turn of the screw and wonder if my problem isn’t a more generalized incapacity to love. Maybe the problem is entirely mine. Maybe I was bred this way. I think of my father and his stiff WASP world. Is that what I’ve become? Am I a piece of cardboard like those life-sized stand-up posters we used to make for basketball players and car dealerships? Have I become that joyless middle-aged man who sat remote from his boys and thought of his business associates as his closest friends? I remember the first time Giselle took me home to meet her parents. It was a revelation, like landing on a brand new planet. It was impossible to meet only her parents. I met siblings and their friends, members of Charles’ congregation who had dropped by for tea and a chat, Doris’ friends from the sewing circle, uncles, aunts and cousins, long lost friends passing through on their way to somewhere else—and me, a skinny bewildered white kid standing in the middle of it all, amazed that so much warmth could come from so much chaos. People have always stood at the centre of life for Charles and Doris. Gonzo could break all the plates in the universe and they’d still love him. Even Julain, with his prowling around, even he gets a seat at the table. They broke me open and made me human. With them I could relax, drink a beer, sing a song. Most of all, I didn’t feel I was being judged for all my awkwardness. Now, I wonder if, instead of Giselle, I fell in love with her family.

I’m exhausted but I can’t sleep. I root through my drawers for any socks and underwear I might have left behind and I find an old pair of argyle socks and a pair of boxer shorts that look like they were last used in World War II to wipe down the cockpit of a bomber. My jeans are a sodden dirty bloody mess, so I find a fresh pair (loose around the waist and saggy in the butt) and a casual shirt that doesn’t go badly. The dog follows me downstairs where I put on a pot of coffee and lean against the edge of the table while the coffee maker gurgles and splutters and drips. The aroma is a healing aroma. I draw it into my lungs and enjoy the earthy smell of it. The dog nuzzles against my thigh and I oblige her with a good scratching under the chin. She’s never been my dog; she belongs to Giselle. When it comes to affection, I’m the source of last resort, the alpha male, swift to rebuke the upstarts who would muddle what is otherwise a clear social order. When I’m finished scratching, the dog noses into the corner. Later, when I’ve poured cream and sugar into my coffee, I let the dog out by the back and I stand on the deck in my argyled feet and smell the leaves on the grass and the damp earth of the garden where the hostas have turned to a brown mush. It annoys me that I’ll be the one who has to clean up the yard. It would never occur to Giselle that the yard needs to be cleaned. For all she knows, the yard magically cleans itself. But I don’t want to clean the yard. Not anymore. I want to sell the yard and divide the proceeds. I want to get the fuck out of here, out of this marriage, this place, this life. I want out of this lie.

I regret having sex this morning. A storm is about to break. I can feel it in the air. Giselle will come downstairs in her bathrobe and she’ll be beaming that beam that women beam, the one they get after they’ve felt the earth tremble and a pair of strong arms raise them up to the altar on some secret mountaintop that only post-orgasmic women know. She’ll rush around telling everybody that we’re back together. I guess she can tell people whatever the hell she likes, except when she gets to the children and tells them Daddy’s coming home, then everything will fall to shit. Daddy never intended to come home, and if Mommy were honest, she would already have admitted to herself that Daddy never intended to come home. But that’s not how it works. When the kids cry because Daddy hasn’t come home yet, Mommy will blame Daddy for being a dolt and Daddy will blame Mommy for making promises contingent on factors beyond her control. But kids don’t understand words like contingent and factors; they’re more comfortable with words like dolt. I can feel it in the air. I’m about to become a dolt.

I wonder if there are any men who take the time to explain to their women in excruciating and clinical detail what it’s like to walk around with a pair of functioning testicles. Quite apart from the biological imperative, have these men ever explained why every single accretion to the myth of romantic love, from Guillermo de Lorris to Shania Twain, is a naïve piece of goo with as much relation to the world today as Egyptian fertility rites to 18-speed racing bikes? Men don’t want to give women roses, not unless there’s a bed nearby. And as for candlelight and wine, for some, the dimming and blurring of eyes is the only hope they’ve ever got of getting laid. In the end, it comes down to reproduction, and we’ve gotten so damned good at it, the planet is groaning under our weight.

There you have it: the line of my thought tracing its way from sex to planetary collapse.

I want to pour myself a bowl of Kap’n Krunch® but there’s no milk, so I search for eggs but there are no eggs either, no bread, no jam, no English muffins, no bacon, no oranges, no nothing. Without me around, this place will go to hell. Is that how I’m supposed to feel? Has the fridge been cleverly arranged so I’ll feel guilty? Ice dispensed on one side? Despair on the other? I leave the open box of pirate shit on the kitchen table and walk out the front door.

14. ALL SAINTS' DAY

THERE’S NO POINT going back to the hotel room when the only thing to do there is to fall asleep, and I don’t feel like falling asleep. It’s not that I don’t want to sleep. I’m exhausted and would love to get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. But there’s something wrong with me. I’m on edge, like the soldier who’s supposed to sleep while his comrade keeps watch, but can’t because he knows deep in his bones that this is the watch when the enemy will attack. I’m filled with a dread that something terrible will happen, like one of my children will die of the plague, or an explosion will leave a crater where my house once stood.

I sit at the window of the breakfast nook across from the hotel, poking at a cold Breakfast Artery Clogger and scanning the morning’s headlines. The Prime Minister refuses to talk about emission caps unless developing countries are subject to the same restrictions since anything less would put the West at an economic disadvantage. And a twenty-two year old Christian beauty pageant fame-whore is leveraging the revelation of a sex tape to promote her memoir. She’s twenty-two, for fuck’s sake. It used to be you had to live before you wrote a memoir, and even then, your life had to be interesting. Here I sit, more than twice her age, wondering if I’ve lived at all, and there she sits, persuaded she’s lived enough already to fill four hundred pages. It’s amazing how confident a girl can feel with a boob job, a publicist, and a Christian pastor who assures her that blond hair and strong cheekbones are a sign of the Lord’s blessing. I, on the other hand, am a humble sinner. How else can you account for the encroaching layer of fat and the thinning hairline?

I finish my coffee, the third of the morning, and leave a healthy tip to one side of the saucer, then, taking up my bag, I nod to the waitress and amble outside into the grey morning light. It’s ten o’clock. If I hurry I can make it for the start of church. I’m not dressed for the occasion, but I doubt it’s God who cares how I’m dressed. Walking to Lawrence station, I take the subway north three stops. It feels like I’m returning to the scene of a crime. See where the body lay on the ground (if you look closely you can see the remnants of a chalk outline) and see where I hid the weapon in the shrubs, and there, the path where I ran with dogs at my heels. Things are quiet now—an occasional car rushing past or the bark of a dog, but when I close my eyes I’m afraid I’ll hear screeching tires and the exchange of anxious voices. Even now, as I stare down the sidewalk to the dark overhang of plywood and scaffolding, I worry that some fresh argument will shatter the Sunday morning calm.

I slip into the sanctuary as pastor Rick is leading the Collect, hands raised high, head bowed low, impressive in his black vestments. He invokes the divine this and the blessed that and his sonorous voice rises high above the pews, floating there like a balloon, and he squidges his lips as if he’s talking with a mouthful of food which—as it turns out—is close to the truth: as he tells me later, he’s probing with his tongue to dislodge a raspberry seed which came from the breakfast he was eating in the vestry only moments before the service began.

My cell phone buzzes. Even though I’ve got the thing set to vibrate, it’s noisy enough that people in the pews around me notice. Nobody says hsssst to me or touches me on the elbow and whispers for me to be quiet, but I can tell by subtle shifts in posture, by furtive looks from half-closed pretend-pray eyes, that people don’t approve of vibrating electronic devices in a place of worship. I see from call display that Giselle is trying to reach me. I knew this would happen. She would rise from the deepest sleep she’s had in weeks, smiling her pleasured-woman smile, stretching her arms across the whole of the bed and feeling my absence pressed into the sheets. She would stumble down the stairs and see the cooling pot of coffee and the empty mug beside the sink, and from these she would deduce that I had done whatever I had come to do, then disappeared with the first light, that I am just another man using a woman for sex, that I am no more interested in taking responsibility for my actions than an adrenal gland for the broken jaw in a barroom fight. I imagine her compiling a list of my many faults and delivering them via voice mail. Maybe that’s what our life will reduce to: a series of messages retrieved in passing: emails, voice mails, text messages, lawyer’s letters and court documents. My client requires that you cease and desist from seducing her in the evening, then disappearing in the morning; failure to comply with said request will result in your emasculation.

What the hell am I doing here? What self-abusing impulse drove me to subject myself to the judgmental gaze of God’s imaginary eye. What a sadistic bastard God must be to say not only that an intention is as culpable as an action, but also that the culpability applies even to an intention which is involuntary. After all, wasn’t it God (or at least the great JC) who said we commit adultery even if the most we do is have lustful thoughts? Yet there is no such thing as a man whose mind is free from lustful thoughts. Hell, I read somewhere that the average male thinks about sex once every fifty-two seconds. But if that’s true, then all men are adulterous. JC to the rescue with his redeeming grace. Am I the only one who thinks there’s something perverse about this arrangement? Like pharmaceutical companies infecting a population to create a market for their antidote? Or marketing firms creating toilet-seat bacteria where none lived before so they can sell pine-scented disinfectant? Confession of Sin. Assurance of Pardon. What a cynical thing faith can be, yet here I am. What the hell am I doing here?

When we raise our heads, I scan the congregation for a wild nest of hair, tawny earlobes, silver hoops, a slender ivory neck bent towards the altar. My eyes flit from pew to pew in an anxious scattered search that grows more anxious the more obvious it becomes that Liane is not at church this morning. Where is she? The not knowing sends my mind down dead-end alleyways. My imagination is diseased. I can see her waking with her head on Luke’s chest, and as much as the image fills me with revulsion, I can’t toss it out of my head. I can see all the others: the model of propriety with her brood of four, the middle-aged, middle-class respectables, the doddering hoary heads, the officious committee chairs, the hyper-alert activist, the hand-shaking city councilor. Their vague tableau does nothing to get rid of the horrifying vision of lips pressed against another man’s lips and hips pressed against another man’s hips.

Pastor Rick introduces the gospel reading, a passage more familiar at Easter. He says it's something known as the Quem Queritis (Whom do you seek?) from the Book of John, Mary Magdalene weeping before the gardener who says: Don’t touch me, a passage (Rick says) equally fitting on All Saints’ Day, when we witness the uneasy drift of spirits between this world and the next. Pastor Rick calls us to remember those who have gone before, and as much as I resist the pull of hokey liturgies, I find my thoughts turning to the memory of my father. He was not a large man, but there was a hardness to him and a fierceness in his blue eyes that made him seem more intimidating than his size would warrant. I remember rare occasions when he softened. I remember standing in our unfinished basement when I was five or six and watching as Dad raised a spruce stud wall and wedged it into place beneath the joists. He turned away for an instant—I can’t remember why; maybe to grab a handful of nails—and he relaxed his grip. The wall came crashing down around my head. As I saw it teeter towards me, I closed my eyes and drew up my shoulders tight against my ears. The boards clattered on the concrete but all I felt of them was the breeze they made as they swished past my arms. The studs were spaced according to code—sixteen inches apart, center to center—and I happened to be standing in the fourteen and a half inch gap between two studs when the wall toppled. Had I been standing a few inches to left or to right, it would have split open my head. I stood untouched and opened my eyes to an expression I’d never seen from my father: a mixture of astonishment, relief, and affection. In that moment, I discovered that my existence mattered to the man. There were other moments like that, but no more than I can count on the fingers of one hand. Dad was never an expressive man.

That isn’t entirely correct; he could be expressive when he felt anger. His was never a stormy frothy raging anger. It was a seething restraint, probably more frightening for all that remained unrevealed. Although I expected him to act on it, he never let the anger show. He never struck me, not even once, and so far as I recall, he never raised a hand against Mom or Lawson either. Instead, he let the anger fester, and it worked its way inward, first with an ulcer, then with depression and alcohol, still later with mild MI’s, and finally with a stroke which left him paralysed and silent until, after three months, he died in a hospital bed when no one was looking. Before he died, the doctors said he was vegetative and had no idea what was happening around him. We could talk to him if we liked, but it would make no difference. I didn’t believe the doctors. There were times I sat with him to give Mom a break and he stared at me with those blue eyes of his and I could still see their ferocity. Even now I can feel the pressure of his gaze pinning me to my place in the pew. He doesn’t disapprove; he judges and condemns. I imagine us in conversation, but it’s less a debate and more like a courtroom defense. Or a drowning. He brings the full weight of his leaden morality to bear upon my tenuous sense of self and I flail and splutter and do my best to keep my head above the water. As he views it, marriage stands as its own justification, an absolute, and my willingness to toss aside twenty years of it demonstrates that I’m shallow or immoral or both. It doesn’t matter how empty or miserable I may claim to feel in my marriage, duty comes before happiness and duty dictates that I do what I must, not what I will. I complain to him that this is circular reasoning. It’s not good enough to say: I must do my duty because my duty is what I must do. And I refuse to believe that my duty includes toughing it out for the children. How is it my duty to keep up a façade? And for what? So we can present as a happy family even though, underneath, we seethe? How does that serve my children? It would be better, then, if I simply told my children it’s okay to lie. At least then they would have an example of integrity. It would be a backhanded integrity, but it would be better than this seething.

You aren’t helping things, you know.

I’ve shouted this out loud, or at least it seems like I’ve shouted because I’ve let the words loose in a big silent space where they can bounce around like pinballs ricocheting from the white-washed ceiling and the hard tile floor and the wooden pews. People turn to stare. Christ. I’ve been carrying on a conversation with my dead father and blurted some of it out for everyone to hear. I’m not embarrassed, although I am surprised at myself. Rather than embarrassment, what I feel is concern for the people around me. I want to assure them that I’m not weird or dangerous; I’m just tired and caffeine-addled. I smile at the woman in front of me who’s sent her children forward for the story before they go out to Sunday School. There’s a man to the left who glares at me like I’m a circus freak. I ignore him. Then I turn my head to the right. Staring back at me from across the aisle is the old lady who wears the pillbox hat. Why does she always fix me that way? What is it she sees? She makes me feel uncomfortable so I snap my head back and stare to the front.

Giselle and I were married in a church like this, a brick building from the post-war boom, a monument to suburban piety that celebrated function and efficiency and stood as a response to a kick-ass demand curve like nothing the Church had seen since the days of Constantine. The church was neither Pentecostal nor Anglican, but a compromise we hoped would appease both our families. It was United, a denomination noted for marrying anything that moves. The ceremony was the least contentious part of our wedding day. At the reception, Dad stood in a corner, bristling, dressed in a tuxedo, looking like he had been installed there on loan from Mme Tussaud’s. He kept a steely jaw and gave the impression he was in control, but I could tell he was overwhelmed and used that tight-assed restraint of his as a defense. Katrine’s family crashed over him like a rogue wave. They were big and gregarious. They were black and white and everything else all mixed together. They came from all over—from the UK and Jamaica, the west coast, the Carolinas, Argentina, and just down the road. They were rich and they were poor. They were god-fearing and they were atheist. They were noisy and they were solemn. For most of the evening, Dad stayed fixed to his spot in the corner, moving only for dinner and for regular trips to the bar. Not once did he approach the dance floor, not even for those times he was expected to dance. He drank his Scotch neat, and sometime after midnight, still standing at his place in the corner, watery-eyed not from emotion but from the ten or more shots he’d tossed back, my father swept up all the room, the lights bouncing off the ceiling, the dresses reflected in the polished parquet floor, the table linen and crystal goblets, he swept it all up and leaned in to me and, shouting above the music, he said: They’re like a pack of monkeys.

I wanted to kill my father. I was bigger than him and more sober, so I could have leveled him, but Giselle breezed to my side, tugging me to meet yet another relative from somewhere or other. The old man, who wasn’t so old, looked at me and smiled, then he looked at Giselle and smiled some more, then he returned to me and gave a choked simpering laugh. I didn’t speak to him for months. When it came to my father, I don’t think any of that Oedipal shit applied. I didn’t want to kill my father because he was a rival; I wanted to kill him because he was an idiot. Only twenty years later am I beginning to warm again to him, but now he’s dead so I have to do the talking for both of us. I don’t think he was so horrible. He was insecure, just like the rest of us, and he had his defenses, just like we do, and there were things about him that were complicated, as there are for all of us. He wasn’t one way or another; he was a little of everything all mixed together. I’m less inclined now to condemn him for being the man he was. Many of the qualities which defined him are qualities he bequeathed to me. That pisses me off, but there it is. I know, for example, that if it weren’t for that stubborn prick, I wouldn’t have the mental toughness to survive and thrive in a place like Feinman’s for so many years.

After the service, I line up like everybody else and when my turn comes to shake pastor Rick’s hand, he leans in close (just like my father did) and he says: You look like shit. I smile and pretend that it’s funny, but I’m not in the mood. I’m tired. I’m jittery. My father is telling me I’m irresponsible. And now my cell phone is vibrating in my pocket with a message from my wife, probably that I’m the biggest asshole who ever walked on the face of the Earth. When I tell him Giselle and I have split up, he says: Quit your job and now your marriage? Geez, Elton, should I be worried? I wave my hand and tell him Naw but that doesn’t keep him from hiking up his cassock and digging into his pocket for a fistful of keys. As he drops them into my palm, he tells me the big one is for the vestry; why don’t I make myself comfy and after he’s spoken to everyone he needs to speak to, he’ll come join me for a chat.

I’ve never been in a vestry before and I wonder if there’s something magical about it—like C.S. Lewis’ wardrobe. I’ll enter, turn around three times, and then, when I step back out, I’ll find myself in an alternate world where midgets teach the Kama Sutra and police hunt you down if they suspect you practise the dark art of political correctness. I don’t know what I was expecting—maybe something more learned with oak shelves to the ceiling and leather-bound books, or maybe something more English, a fireplace and dark paneling, a trolley with a tea service and a brass letter opener. Instead, pastor Rick’s vestry feels like a blend of locker room and ice fishing hut. There’s an open gym bag on the floor with street clothes tumbling out, and T-shirts and old running shoes under a bare metal desk jammed into one corner. In another corner and spread on an old tarp is a disassembled lawn mower and tools laid out beside nuts and cotter pins and grease-smeared washers. Later, he’ll apologize for the mess, saying that one day he’ll clean things up so people can have a proper meeting in his vestry, but I suspect he’s been saying that for years now, a mess of good intentions that never bears fruit. In the middle of it all is an anomaly, a wing-backed chair upholstered with a floral pattern and better suited to a proper drawing room. I sit in it and sink like a stone. When I wake again, pastor Rick is standing there in jeans and T-shirt and leather jacket and he’s prodding my shoulder. He must have changed while I was sleeping. With that groggy murky feeling still clouding my brain, I step out onto the sidewalk. Rick suggests Thai, a small restaurant only two or three streets south, but I say I’m not in the mood for Thai so we go to the Indian restaurant instead.

On the way to the restaurant, we don’t see George, although we see evidence of him as we pass the fire hydrant: a sleeping bag, a bundle buggy full of plastic bags, and at the foot of the buggy, a pair of shoes.

Pastor Rick tells me another of his stupid parables:

Once there was a man who built his house on sand and when the rains came they washed it away and left him with nothing. Another man built his house on rock. Being short-sighted, he built it on rock located in a gully and when the rains came they deluged the house and drowned the man. However, there was a third man who had observed the other two and had found a way to avoid the terrible outcomes that had plagued the earlier efforts. He chose to be flexible, using a sleeping bag for a bed and keeping all his possessions in a bundle buggy he could trail behind him wherever he went. If he made his bed on sandy ground and it began to rain, he could roll it up and move elsewhere until the storm had passed. And if he made his bed on rocky ground, he could move to higher terrain when the waters rose. For a time, this third man’s life seemed blessed. While others were driven from their homes or lost their lives, this third man appeared to thrive. Although he knew neither riches nor poverty, he enjoyed a remarkable sense of peace. However, when others saw that he was a happy man, they grew suspicious and resentful. They gossiped amongst themselves, speculating that the man lied about his happiness to make the rest of them feel badly about their rotten situations. They said he was rootless. They called him a shiftless criminal and blamed him for all sorts of misfortunes, from hangnails to stillborn children. Forgetting at last that he had grown up in their midst, they called him a gypsy. They descended upon him in the night and they beat him and they drove him away, saying that if he should ever return, they would chain him to a rock and leave him there for the crows. Who knows why they did such a thing. There was something about the way the man lived that roused a fear in their bones.

As we take our seats in the restaurant, pastor Rick wonders if my decision makes me afraid.

I shrug. I don’t know anything. Mostly it makes me tired, I say.

I remember when I split with Linda. Oh boy. I went days, weeks maybe, without a decent night’s sleep.

But more than fatigue, Rick remembers a feeling of fear. At first, he was too busy to feel much of anything. There were custody arrangements and lawyer’s meetings. There were arguments about wedding gifts that were motivated not by the desire to possess the wedding gifts, but by the desire to prevent the other from possessing the wedding gifts. There was the matter of moving Linda and the kids out of the manse. And, of course, there were the pastoral duties. One of the benefits of having a pastoral charge is that when your own problems overwhelm you, then you can hide in the problems of two hundred families. You can always find others whose problems are worse than your own, and you can find solace in their misery. If you’re lucky, you might find others whose problems are downright freakish, in which case you can enjoy the added comfort of telling jokes at their expense. Then came the divorce and Rick’s frenetic dating to persuade himself that he wasn’t lonely. After all that rushing around, then the fear arrived. It came two years after the divorce, on a Sunday afternoon not much different than this, when Rick was settling himself in front of the TV to watch the football game. The phone rang. It was Linda. She didn’t want Rick to hear from the usual church gossip-mongers—she was getting married again. After the first quarter, Rick punched a hole through the kitchen wall. He didn’t realize it until the next morning, but he had broken his hand and had to get it casted at the hospital. During half time, Rick threw up in the toilet. By the end of the third quarter, he was rocking back and forth on the floor, bawling like a baby. When the gun went off to signal the end of the game, Rick knew he still loved Linda, had always loved Linda, even in the moments when he had driven her away, had argued stupidly about crystal and had smashed china plates against the wall, even then he had been in love with his ex-wife. It was then that the true fear set in, when he realized that he might never share another intimate moment with the woman he loved. After that, he did some stupid things. He doesn’t tell me what, but says only that without those stupid things he would never have discovered that Linda was never coming back. She was really gone. At the time of separation, he had thought he was grieving, but that was nothing compared to the black hole that tore through his life when Linda announced her engagement. Even now, he says. Even now, I have twinges, especially on a Sunday afternoon which, I guess, is why I like to go out for lunch all the time.

Then he apologizes. He’s been talking too much about himself. It’s me who’s in the middle of things and me who needs to lay down my troubles. At least that’s his opinion. He asks me a lot of questions, each more awkward than the last, until he asks: Is there someone else?

I say no, but there must be a hesitancy in my voice because he keeps pressing me. Almost all men are too insecure simply to leave and to live on their own. At least that’s his opinion. He seems to think that a man who’s had a woman in his bed every night for twenty years has a powerful incentive to find a substitute on short order. I tell him he’s a cynical man. Not at all, he says. I’ve got a working pair, just like you. Fact is, you can be the most high-minded idealistic saint in the known universe, but if you’ve got a set of balls, that makes you as susceptible as anybody else. And don’t say otherwise. Or else you’re either deluded or lying.

He says he has two pieces of advice for me. He’s abrupt and too loud for a small restaurant. I worry that others will overhear our conversation. The first—and he grabs a finger from his left hand—the first is: don’t be going back for sex. You’ll go for the sex and she’ll think it’s love. For women, it’s so complicated. But for men—well, for men, sex is like a visit by a blind man to an art gallery. He can get in no problem. They’ll even let him grope around a little if his hands are clean. And he knows there’s good stuff on display. He can tell from the rave reviews and the way everyone else talks about it. But there are things about it that he’ll never understand. In fact, most of the time, he doesn’t understand that there are things he’ll never understand.

I laugh and shake my head, not in disagreement, but at the obvious logical problem: pastor Rick is a man and therefore can never know if what he says is true. I mean, it’s not as if you can crawl inside a woman’s skin and feel things the way she feels them.

True, he says.

So you can’t know if sex is so very different for them.

Maybe not, he says, but I still know when a man is using a woman for sex—even if she’s his wife.

I grin a stupid peevish grin and he looks at me and I can see in his eyes that he knows.

Geez, Elton.

I shrug.

Try not to do it again. Be honourable.

Fine. I’ll do my best. I feel like that five-year-old who was caught stealing coin from the old wooden church they passed around in Sunday School when they were taking up the weekly offering. And your other piece of advice?

Rick leans forward on his elbows and stares me straight in the eye. Elton, he says, be good to her.

Giselle?

No.

Damn him. He knows that too. I haven’t done a fucking thing yet, and still he knows what I’m thinking. I stare into his eyes and try to discern there how much he knows. At first I wonder if he knows who, but it becomes obvious, even without mentioning a name, that she has spoken to Rick, has probably unburdened herself to him with a frightening candor. I feel naked before Rick. He’ll probably tell me I’m a trivial, shallow person who’s grown bored of his wife, who’s thrown her over for no better reason than fifteen extra kilos, who’s stalking a sweet young thing for no better reason than to say he possessed her the same way he possessed his car or his watch. But Rick says nothing. When I scrutinize his eyes again, I find no judgment in them.

As a pastor, he says, it’s my privilege to carry the stories of many many people. I get to share with them—maybe even walk for a time in the story. But it’s their story, not mine. There’s a story here, too, and you know almost nothing about it. This is a special woman. Don’t you dare — He points a finger, moving his arms up and down as if he’s lining up a hatchet before he strikes the blow. His voice quavers and his eyes moisten. If you hurt her—If you—I’ll—I’ll—Listen, I can’t tell you what to do, but please, Elton, do right by her. Be honourable.

15. STEWED TOMATOES

BY THE TIME I get settled into my hotel room, there are three messages on my voice mail, the most recent, from Mona, the other two, from Giselle. I listen to Mona’s first:

Hi Elton. Mona here. I ... uh ... I got this weird phone call from your wife. I mean, I don’t really know her at all and she’s like: ‘You stay the fuck away from my husband’ and ‘we’ve been together twenty years and you think you can waltz into our lives’ on and on like that, getting screechier and screechier ‘til I had to hold the phone away from my head and when I said ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she calls me a lying bitch and—and—Elton, it was sooooo upsetting. My hands are still shaking. I had to have a cigarette. I know, I know, I quit, but for this I had to have a cigarette. I mean, I’ve never had a phone call like that before, not in all my life. She’s like ‘you lying bitch’ and I’m like ‘I barely know you.’ Anyways, I’m worried about you. Please call me when you get a chance. I’m still shaking. Please call and say something calm to me. Bye now.

And I do call, and throughout our conversation I hear a measured exhale that is only possible on the breath of a woman who is puffing her way through one then two then three cigarettes. Having worked with her for ten years, I know how she smokes and I can visualize it even now from my hotel bed—the nervous flick of ash and the restless pacing. Mona can be quite stylish when she smokes a cigarette, the way she folds her right forearm across her midriff with the hand tucked beneath the left elbow, and her other hand held off to one side of her face, cigarette wedged between two fingers, smoke curling into the light. She can be quite beautiful at moments like that, especially if you’re looking at her only from the waist up. Then I imagine what she’ll look like in fifteen or twenty years—tired eyes and the deep lines in her face, the thick makeup to cover the ashen skin. And I imagine what her voice will sound like too—a husky lounge-singer alto, sexy at first, but well on its way to becoming an emphysema hack.

I explain the situation. I tell her Giselle and I split up, I’m staying in a hotel suite, it’s still early, we haven’t formalized anything yet, it’s all quite bewildering, I’m not doing badly all things considered, chin up, positive attitude, bright side. I say all these things as I swill around the last two fingers of Scotch in the bottle and realize I need to make a run to the liquor store; this won’t even get me through the afternoon. Mona’s response is predictable. First comes the maternal concern: You poor thing; oh, that’s awful. Next comes the therapist: Do you wanna talk? They say talking’s good for you. I heard it on Oprah or something. Then comes the pragmatist: Hotel’s expensive. Money’s not gonna last long without a job. Why don’t you crash at my place? Finally comes the thing I was expecting from Mona all along: Winter’s coming. It’s warm in my bed—you know—if you ever feel the need. Doesn’t have to mean anything. Maybe just for the comfort.

I agree to meet Mona for dinner. At least she’s good company and I hate the idea of eating alone. What I find most difficult is the quiet. After twenty years of domesticity, I’ve grown accustomed to noise—or at least to a certain quality of noise—the noise of girls laughing on the telephone, footsteps clomping up and down the stairs, car keys jangling in the hall, the blare of television after supper, the smoke alarm when the kids burn cheese pops in the oven, the dog barking to be let out for a pee, the ding of new test messages. I used to think these were the noises of distraction, and sometimes they were, but they also reminded me that I was never alone. Now, most of the noises I hear reinforce my sudden change in status. There’s a drip in the bathroom sink. I hear muffled voices coming through the wall from the next room. And if I eat alone in a restaurant, conversations swirl all around and drown me in loneliness.

I look forward to dinner with Mona, but first I have to be a responsible adult and deal with the messages from Giselle. My fingers shake as I punch in the numbers. The first message is really the second:

Your mother called. She was all chatty, wondering what everybody’s doing. She has no idea, does she? And I don’t think it’s my job to tell her. So ... please inform her. I don’t like being put in this position.

Yes, Giselle uses the word inform. I am to inform my mother. I am to call my dear seventy-five year old mother who sits hapless in her stale Ottawa apartment on plastic-covered chairs surrounded by her Hummel figurines and I am to say: Hello, mother. I’m calling to inform you that I left Giselle. She thinks you’ve raised an asshole for a son. But don’t worry. I’ll blame Dad.

The second message—which is really the first—isn’t so cool and doesn’t use legal-sounding language like inform. Instead, it’s wild and free-wheeling and uses words like fuck and phrases like son-of-a-bitch and makes accusations and issues warnings and calls me names I haven’t heard since I was a scrappy kid in the school yard. I’m the worst fucking thing that’s ever happened to her. She doesn’t care if she never sees me again. If I dropped off the face of the Earth and disappeared forever, that would be just fine with her. Half way through the message, I start to laugh, but by the end, I have a queasy feeling in my gut and my eyes are misting; I had no idea I could hurt someone that much.

Now it’s time to make the call. My innards have turned all fluttery—not fluttery the way they were the first time I asked her out on a date, but fluttery the way they’d feel if I swallowed a bag of razor blades. I take a couple swigs of Balvenie—not dainty sips but big gulps that burn all the way down my throat and slosh around inside my gut with the razor blades. Giselle comes on, soft at first, until she hears it’s me, then she turns loud and aggressive. I hate when it gets like this, when the only way I can make myself heard is to shout her down, but I have to; I can’t allow her to inflict her jealous obsessions on people who are innocent in all this. It’s abusive to them; in fact, it’s a criminal offence; it’s harassment. Besides, it exposes her as irrational and insecure. I say all this to her, and of course it makes her angry, but I press on. I tell her I’m taking Mona to dinner tonight. I tell her I feel obliged to take her to dinner tonight. It’s the least I can do by way of apology. I wonder: does it give me a strategic advantage to tell about dinner with Mona? I hate thinking this way, yet strategy seems to be all that’s left in our communication. Our marriage has turned into a chess game.

So you are having an affair.

Don’t be ridiculous.

You’re going out with another woman.

To apologize for your behaviour.

So I’m not good looking enough for you anymore? Is that it?

Don’t.

I bet this Mona is—what?—ten years younger than me?

Don’t.

And she’s white too, isn’t she?

Jesus Christ. Do not do this.

You want some sweet young white tail, don’t you?

I hang up. I feel a hot rage, but when it subsides, calmer thoughts settle on my mind. It occurs to me that Giselle loves me desperately, that her desperate love makes her vulnerable, and that she might be vulnerable enough to benefit from therapy. But it’s not for me to tell her such a thing. Imagine how she’d react. No. While it pisses me off that she tosses race into the pot, it can’t possibly be real. It’s just one of her passive-aggressive stratagems. She’ll try to guilt me back into her bed, but I refuse to be manipulated.

Eventually I make it to my dinner date with Mona, but before that, I suck every last drop of Scotch from the bottle on my bed and lay back for a good long think about things. That’s a problem for me: I overthink things. Right now, the thought I’m overthinking is a question about my motives. I wonder if maybe the main reason I left Giselle was for the hope of a chance of a possibility of having Liane. I can’t remember the order of things anymore. I’m tired and it’s all a blur. Did I leave first and then decide I wanted Liane? Or did I want Liane first and then leave? Or did each happen all on its own? If the desire for Liane came first, then that makes me a fool, though no less a fool than the heroes of ancient Greece who laid siege to Troy for the sake of a woman. At least I’m in good company. That last thought—the one where I compare myself to classical heroes—that’s the thought that launches a thousand rationalizations, most of them aimed at rewriting my story so it sounds like I left Giselle for well-considered reasons. I’d like to think there was more to it than a lurch in my pants.

Mona looks stunning and nervous. I can tell she’s spent the afternoon fussing over her hair and her face. She’s probably tried on ten different outfits before arriving at this ensemble: black slacks and white shirt beneath a wool sweater of creams and greens and mauves. Add to it a black leather jacket and she looks as smart as any of the talent they shoot at Feinman’s, especially when she sits across the table from me so I can’t see her squat, funny-looking legs. She chaws away on a stick of gum—maybe to hide the inevitable cigarette smell— and the first thing she does when we sit is order a margarita which she drains by the time the busboy has dropped a basket of bread on our table. But who am I to judge? Me with my stomach sloshing in Balvenie?

As the dinner progresses, we both descend into a foggy twilight of alcohol and broken conversation. Mona is insecure, but she knows she’s insecure, and there still hover around her the traces of an unaffected sweetness. When I squint and look at her in the hazy restaurant lights, I think I can see Mona the twelve year old, Mona the innocent, Mona the playful. We chat about memories, about life before Feinman’s, about life after Feinman’s, about the novel I’ve begun and my newfound interest in environmental causes, about Mona’s search for a better job, maybe something more on the creative side of the business, maybe something in television. I tell her she should host a talk show. She laughs and pats my hand and tells me to get real.

No really, I say. You’re good looking. You’re smart. You’re well spoken. I bet in front of a camera you’re a natural.

She fakes a modest blush and laughs. Back and forth, back and forth with pointless banter until I look at my watch and see that it’s almost ten o’clock. This is just what I needed—a few hours to forget myself and my problems.

There’s an awkward moment when dessert arrives. We’re sharing a plate of cheesecake and each sipping a cup of coffee, mine a double double, hers a cream no sugar. I’m looking at her over the brim of my cup when I notice that tears have formed in the corners of her eyes. I ask what’s the matter and touch my free hand to hers, but she withdraws and takes up the serviette she had crumpled and cast to the side of her plate. She dabs the corner of each eye and looks away, pained, and shakes her head when I ask again what’s the matter. I’m no good at this touchy-feely stuff. I inherited some of my father’s stiff WASPishness and have since stirred in some of my mother’s medicated numbness to create my very own special blend of emotional stupidity. But at least I know my limitations and I know enough to keep my mouth shut at times like this. If Mona feels like talking, then she’ll talk. If not, then it was none of my business in the first place. I watch the cream swirl around in my coffee. I watch how the makeup runs on Mona’s cheeks. I see the pain in her eyes and I see how it makes her poignant. I read somewhere that in Japanese the word for sad is the same as the word for beautiful. Now, as I watch Mona’s face, I think the Japanese must know a truth that we’re only beginning to discover here in the West.

Mona looks at me and says my name. I’ve never heard her say it that way before. She says it with affection. I hate feeling this way, she says. She looks small, like a five year old, and her lower lip trembles. I know we joke around a lot and I know, for you, that’s all it is, but for me—for me—oh, Elton.

I take both her hands in mine and: I know.

Ever since that day I first met you. I still remember it. You looked at me and I just melted, and it’s never gotten any easier for me.

Mona.

You know, I still mark that day on my calendar, the day I first met you. You’re gonna think I’m some kind of crazy stalker chick, but know what I do? Every September fourteenth know what I do? I light a candle. It sounds stupid. I know. I light a candle and put it in my window. Elton, I love you. I’ve always loved you.

I’m not sure the word embarrassed quite captures how I feel at this instant. Maybe I feel more burdened than embarrassed. Mona has exposed herself in a way that makes me feel obliged to protect her from herself. She’ll wake up alone tomorrow with a vague memory of how she drank one cosmo too many and bared her heart’s desire to an indifferent middle-aged man. Then she’ll spend the rest of the week grieving the loss of her self-respect.

Most of the men I meet, like Feinman and the rest of the assholes at the office, I know what they say about me—tramp and slut and easy. Meanwhile they go off fucking, like it’s ... like it’s—

Like it’s a sport?

Yeah, exactly. Like it’s a sport. And they don’t understand. They don’t understand how it gets so lonely. There are times I just want to be held. Just have some tenderness. Know what I’m saying? Of course you do. You’ve always been different. You’ve always treated me like I’m a real person. And then ... and then ... you stood up for me. You treated me the way every woman wants to be treated. It’s like in a fairy tale and you’re the white knight. Only that made everything worse. Now I go on a date and when it’s over, I say to myself, ‘Well, he was nice, but no Elton, that’s for sure.’ I go to bed with a man and all I can think of is how I wish it was you. I can’t believe how things have turned out for me. You’ve ruined everything and I hate you for it. And then ... and then ... I hear you’ve left your wife and I think: ‘Maybe, just maybe, there’s a chance for me now.’ Then here we sit. We eat. We talk. We laugh. It’s easy. It’s comfortable. And more than that, it feels safe. But I look into you eyes, and I know. I just know. You’ll never feel for me what I feel for you. Then I think to myself: ‘Well, I can’t have his heart, but maybe I can still have his body.’ I would love it if you came home to bed with me tonight.

I shake my head. Mona is gazing into the dregs of her coffee so she doesn’t see me shaking my head, but she doesn’t have to; she already knows I won’t go to bed with her.

I don’t understand, she says. I don’t think I’ll ever understand. The things that make you so desirable to me—like your sense of honour and your sense of fair play—they’re the same things that mean I’ll never have you. It just drives me crazy to think about it.

Mona’s apartment is close to the restaurant, so I walk her to the front doors. We walk mostly in silence, and in that silence I entertain the question whether or not I would go to bed with Mona if she asked me up. A month ago, the question would never have entered my head; I would have said it was absolutely impossible. But with all that’s happened in the last two weeks, I no longer think I can say anything absolutely about myself. In fact, as we sat down to the table this evening, I was imagining what it would be like to take off her clothes. Then she ruined everything by mentioning my sense of honour. I’ve never thought of myself as having a sense of honour; it makes me think of my father and of his stiff formal airs; it makes me think of the public pretensions that mask a thousand private sins. I don’t want a sense of honour. I can’t think of a word yet for what I want, but I know it must be a slippery word, the kind of word moral philosophers have fought over for a millennium to no particular conclusion.

When we reach the front doors to her apartment building, Mona throws herself at me. Did I mention that Mona is beautiful? One of the things that makes her beautiful is a pair of full red lips, and it’s these lips that she throws at me, smacking me on the side of the face like a wet fish, then shifting and settling onto my mouth. In fairness, Mona is a fabulous kisser. In fact, I would go so far as to say that her kiss is the best kiss I’ve ever had, and it leaves me breathless. But that’s nothing more than a technical assessment, because it also leaves me cold. It stirs nothing in me. I pull away from her and, still holding her hand, I say that, while we’ll never be lovers, I will always be there for her— not exactly what she was hoping to hear. As I step away, the tears are welling in her eyes.

On the way back to the hotel room, I think of Liane, wondering where she was this morning, wondering how she spent the rest of her day, wondering what she’s doing right now. When this obsession of mine first took hold, I would imagine the vivacious Liane, the charismatic Liane, the Liane who drew people to her, pilgrims to a shrine, and this imagining of mine would fill me with anxiety because, by comparison, I’m dull and my life is empty. I imagined Liane with her parties and her dancing and her lovers and it intimidated me. But the Liane I’ve since discovered is a Liane held hostage by fear—not the sharp fear of a single pointed threat that sends her cowering beneath her bed, but a generalized fear, an existential fear, a fear that no matter how big she makes herself she’ll never be more than a pin prick, and so she chooses to do nothing. She waits. She fritters away her time stewing organic tomatoes and freezing the bloody consequences. She naps in the afternoon and wakes at dinner time to the sound of her neighbour’s television and she wonders why she can’t laugh the way they do on the laugh tracks. She wants to read the classics, but at her current pace of a page a day she knows she’ll be wrinkled and grey by the time she finishes even Dostoevsky, never mind Tolstoy and Dickens and Austen and a hundred others besides, so she gives up before she begins, dropping the unread novels into the bin for the church book sale where they remain for years, unpurchased and unread. This is my new version of Liane—call her Liane 2.0—and while I can’t be certain of it, I suspect this is a more accurate version than Liane 1.0.

The evening has grown cold, not freezing, but the air is damp so it feels colder than it really is. But when I return, the hotel room is steamy. The owners never converted the building to gas, and it still uses hot water radiators. I can’t turn the heat down because the knob is stuck so I prop open the window with the Gideon bible and strip to my boxer shorts. Flopping onto the bed, I call Liane. Her voice is sweet and soft. We talk for hours. I tell her I missed her at church this morning. She says she was tired; she wanted to see me but couldn’t drag herself from bed and into the shower. Instead, she did some cleaning, washing dishes and putting things away and tidying up the kitchen, at least for a while, until she got distracted, although she can’t remember what distracted her, but it mustn’t have been important if she can’t remember, and then late in the afternoon she made a big pot of chili and cooked a squash casserole and divvied everything into single-serving containers which she froze so she’ll have lots of healthy lunches she can take to work and reheat in the microwave and after that she read some articles online about Arctic thaw and polar bears and posted some of them to Facebook and Twitter, then she looked around her apartment and realized she’d let a whole day go by without making the slightest dint in her cleaning.

I’m so friggin disorganized it’s pathetic.

I’m sure you exaggerate, says I.

Oh no, says she.

I’m sure if I came over, it wouldn’t be half as bad as you say.

Oh no, says she, besides which you’ll never come over.

Why not?

Because it’s so friggin embarrassing. Plus ...

Plus?

Plus ...

Plus what?

Plus if you come over ...

Yes?

If you come over, I’d be helpless.

What do you mean ‘helpless’?

I mean I wouldn’t be able to help myself. You know. You could do absolutely anything to me and I’d let you.

And what would be so wrong with that?

So wrong? Everything. I mean, you’re a married man.

Separated, says I.

Married, says she.

But on my way to a divorce.

You don’t know that.

Yes I do.

You’ve only been separated for how many days? Not even a week. You’re still in the honeymoon phase.

Separation has a honeymoon phase?

You know what I mean. For all you know, you’ll have a passionate reconciliation next week and end up on a boat in the Riviera.

I doubt it.

I don’t wanna be the other woman.

Of course not.

I’ve been the other woman.

You have?

And there’s no friggin way I’ll do that again.

I guess not.

And I’d never let you into my apartment unless I knew.

Unless you knew?

Unless I knew I was it.

It?

The one.

The one?

The one and only.

Of course.

I understand what she’s saying. She doesn’t want to be with a guy who’s interested in her only because she’s hot or athletic or flexible or experienced. She wants a guy who’s interested in her because she’s what? What is she? Who knows? The problem is: I don’t think she understands what she’s saying. She thinks she’s telling me something about what she desires in a man, but what she doesn’t understand is that, as a man, I hear her words differently. She wants me to honour her for who she really is, to nurture her, to hold her, to acknowledge her feelings. However, my ears, being a man’s ears, are mysteriously attached to my testicles and they receive her words as a challenge: somehow I have to inveigle myself into her apartment.

It reminds me of Freddy. I can’t remember his last name anymore. We used to play chess in grade school. Grade six, I think. Freddy was this nerdy awkward kid who wore glasses and braces, and we’d stay after school and play chess. Sometimes, if we stayed late, they’d kick us out, so if the weather was clear, we’d move our game to the benches beside the playground. Freddy’s parents phoned my parents and gushed their delight that Freddy had me for a friend since everybody else either beat him up or ignored him. What his parents didn’t understand was that I was like all the other kids and couldn’t give a shit about Freddy. I was there for the chess and Freddy happened to be the only other kid who could play a decent game. You may be wondering what kind of a kid I was to be playing chess after school. I guess Freddy and I deserved each other. The point is—uh—Christ, I can’t remember the point. Oh wait. The point is: I’m in it for the apartment, especially the bedroom part of the apartment, and as hard as I try to be a good man and to listen attentively to her words and to care deeply for her feelings, nevertheless my mind drifts.

I construct an elaborate fantasy of her apartment. She rambles on about ice caps and activism and cooking and relationships, and I arrange furniture: a futon here and a computer desk there, clothes heaped in a corner, books scattered across the floor, dishes piled high on the coffee table and on the kitchen table and on the counters, sappy romantic prints on the walls, and the walls themselves a faded mauve or fuchsia and, most important of all, a double bed heaped with pillows and cushions and comforters and a night table with a lamp and a bottle of lubricant.

And how was your day?

Mmm?

I asked how was your day?

Fine.

Fine?

Yeah, fine.

That’s it? I go on for half an hour and all you can give me is one word?

I’m good at summarizing things, says I.

You think you’re doing me a favour? says she.

I laugh.

Why don’t you try to be less considerate for a change?

That’s when I tell her about my dinner with Mona. It feels weird telling Liane about Mona and her obsessive love for me. There’s an immature part of me that hopes this will make Liane jealous, but if Liane is jealous she hides it well. Instead, she demonstrates a canny empathy. She’s never met the woman, but it’s as if they’re fucking soul sisters. I don’t get it. I don’t get how Liane can care like that. Maybe I’m reading her all wrong. Maybe if I talk to her long enough I’ll have to release Liane 3.0.

Liane knows what it’s like to love a man with all your heart, yet know at the same time that he can never return your love. Liane knows that agony first hand. She’s known it for at least five years. Even now she feels twinges of pain when she lets down her guard.

Luke? asks I.

No, says she.

Luke is an incidental subplot. He’s Dr. Frankenstein’s first experiment, the one where the head fell off and the heart got mangled. When at last Liane acknowledged to herself that she could never have whoever it is she can’t have (she won’t say his name), she realized she was no Ophelia; she was disinclined to get herself to a nunnery. She wants intimacy and craves sex. But the question that dogs her is: how honest should she be with her men? She hates hurting people and she doesn’t want others to feel the pain she feels. With Luke, she dumped her whole closet onto the floor. She let him see everything, even the fact that he could never have the better part of her heart. Luke said he understood. Luke said he didn’t care. Luke said he’d love her no matter what. Luke, it turns out, is an idiot. Notwithstanding his assurances and his heartfelt words, Luke couldn’t cope with the thought that his woman’s heart belonged to someone else. He wanted her all to himself or not at all, and because he couldn’t have her all to himself, he stormed out in a rage never to return. Well ... never to return until a week later when he’d grown tired of masturbation. He came back with flowers and declared that it was better to have some of her than none of her, and the whole thing played itself out again and he stormed out in a rage never to return until the next time. With other men, Liane was more discreet, omitting the incidental detail that she was in love with someone else. Those who were sensitive discovered this fact all on their own and those who weren’t didn’t interest her in any event.

And me? says I. What category do I fit into?

I don’t know, says she. I may have to invent a new category.

Then the conversation takes a turn I would not have expected. The two of us lie in silence, me on my bed, Liane on hers, each staring at the ceiling, each listening to the other draw breath, each racking up minutes on a cell phone plan. In the silence, I can hear both of us chewing on our concerns—our loves, our griefs, our compromises, our shared fear of growing jaded as we age. Enter my imagination with its surprising luster:

Close your eyes, says I. Are they closed?

Mmm, says she.

I take her on a journey: I go to her kitchen where I rummage through her cupboards for a bowl which I fill with warm water, then I swirl in scented bath oils. Carrying it to the bedroom, I set it on the floor at the foot of her bed. I shift her on the bed, positioning her sideways with legs over the edge of the bed and dangling above the floor. Taking each foot in turn, I remove the sock then dip the foot into the oiled water and tamp it dry with a warm towel. I raise each foot to my mouth sucking on the toes from smallest to largest—a leisurely wet sloppy slurping sucking—swirling my tongue around each toe, probing into the spaces between. From there I move to the arch, running my tongue moist along the skin and over the top of the foot and kissing the ankle, continuing upward, savouring the meat of the calf and tracing its sensuous curve to the knee pit. When I can’t roll up her pant legs any more, I roll them down again, then pull them off along with the panties and drop them on the floor. I taste the knees, then lick the outsides of the thighs up to the hips and return again to the knees so I can run my tongue along the smooth skin on the insides of the thighs. Tracing upward to the hair, I take a tuft between my teeth and give a gentle tug, then press inward with my tongue, feeling the moisture, tasting the richness, pressing my lips to the labia, sucking the clit, feeling the thighs press against my ears.

Even as the words leave my lips, I can’t believe I’m saying these things. More than that: I can’t believe I’m getting away with it. At any minute, I expect Liane to yell at me or to hang up, but she does neither and instead I hear from her a low moaning sound sometimes punctuated by short shallow breaths and fluttery sighs. I continue on my journey:

I press my lips into the soft layer of fat on the flat of her stomach and rest my head there while I draw my fingers along the path my lips have already followed, along the insides of her thighs, playing with her clit, pushing inside, pressing her until she arches her back with the pleasure. I run my tongue around her breasts and suck on her nipples, then I burrow my lips into the hollow at the base of her neck. I kiss her lips. I suck her tongue. I linger over the tip of her nose. I kiss each of her eyelids.

By the time I’m done my journey, another two hours have passed and Liane has had at least one orgasm, maybe more, it’s hard to tell.

Things have changed between us.

16. TWO LITTLE MUTHA FUCKAS

MONDAY MORNING: A brand new week. I wake late in the morning to a buzz from my cell phone, the buzz it makes when there’s a text message waiting for me. The message is from Liane. This is the first time Liane has initiated anything with me:

Hi E. Thk u. Lst nt was 1dfl. Just wht i needed. Luv L

Have I crossed a sexual Rubicon? It’s not like I touched her. Yet if anyone who knew nothing about the encounter were to read Liane’s text message, they would assume I had spent the night in her bed. If I apply religious standards, then I may as well walk the streets with a scarlet A pinned to my jacket. It feels as if I’ve spent the night with her. Nevertheless, I’m a stickler for technicalities and the stickler part of me wants to believe I’m in the clear.

I hate when the waters turn muddy. If things were one way or another and nothing in between, it would be easier. Even if things were wholly wrong, that would be easier than wading through this murky water. Then, at least I would know what I am. Maybe that’s why I went to a church—to see if religious answers have gotten any clearer since I was a kid. What I’m discovering is that religious types who offer clear answers are vacuous. But those who don’t, they end up offering nothing more than I could gather while I’m mucking around on my own.

Later, when I’m having breakfast at the nook across the road, a voice mail message appears on my phone. How could I have missed the call? I guess I need a more obnoxious ring tone so I can hear my phone. I retrieve the message:

Hey fuckwad. I oughta bash your fuckin’ head in. What you wrote inna paper, you got no bizniz. You watch yourself cuz you got no bizniz. It’s like fuckin’ slander. Just so’s you know, I’m gonna call my legals an’ dere gonna sue you ‘til all you gots left is your underpants and your dick in your hand.

I press 9: Your message will be saved for seven days.

They must have printed my letter to the editor. The man who had been sitting beside me has left behind his paper, so I take it up and thumb through it to the letters-to-the-editor page. There it is, pared for politeness but otherwise true to the spirit in which I had intended it.

I’m expecting a third message today, but it never comes and I do nothing to provoke it. I’m expecting Giselle to call about Griff. Today is the first day of his expulsion. It also marks the first day of what might become a drawn-out custody battle. She said something about an interview at home, how she’s damned if she’ll have Griff upstairs blasting his music or poking his head into the office when she needs to stay focused for the press. I don’t want him around either, not while he’s in this surly hip hop phase of his. But Giselle will never call. It’s all part of the chess game. She wants to play the martyr and me, the irresponsible father who abandons his wife and children and foists everything on her. She wants to plug us into our stereotypes.

I wonder if Giselle masturbates. I wonder if she even fantasizes about other men. You would think that a woman who writes tales of vampires and werewolves would have a rich fantasy life that was physical and sensuous. The problem is: this is her thirteenth offering and, to be blunt, her work has grown formulaic, as if she’s running an assembly line with Lego® characters who snap onto grey grid plots. She needs to do something fucked up—like find Jesus—so she’ll have fresh material to write about. I wish things weren’t so safe. I wish we could—what could we do?—sell the house, buy a boat and sail around the world. But the kids—But the kids—Hell, we could take the kids too. They’d learn more from sailing around the world than they’d ever learn from that cookie-cutter education factory that cranks out good consumer citizens and expels the lost causes. We could hike across Eurasia, come out at the Bering Strait and paddle across to Alaska. We could parachute into Brazil and float on a raft down the Amazon to the ocean. We could cycle down the backbone of South America to Tierra del Fuego. We could do anything we wanted if we didn’t fetter our imaginations with TV and lifestyle magazines.

It’s a productive day for me. By dinner time there are fifteen hundred more words in the universe than there were at breakfast. My aliens are metaphorical, my humans are humane, and my plot thickens like corn starch in broth. Already I’m planning another novel, one about cannibals who eat the brains of their adversaries but have difficulty adjusting to the modern world which expects them to wear coats fashioned from cow remains, gather in large buildings to worship dead ancestors, and burn offerings to the gods made from tree waste that’s lain compressed for millions of years.

In the evening, Liane and I chat on the phone. It’s easy and relaxed. We’re like kids running hand in hand through a park. She loved last night’s phone call; no one has ever spoken to her like that before. I tell her I’ve never spoken to anyone like that before. And then:

Not even your wife?

Not even my wife, says I.

What’s it like with her? says she.

How do you mean?

You know. Sex. What’s it like with her?

Why are you asking me this?

I’m curious.

But why?

I’m trying to understand you.

By asking about sex with my wife?

There’s something I don’t understand.

Are you sure you want to do this to yourself?

I want us to be honest and open with each other.

But still—

You live with a woman for twenty years. You have sex with her all the time. Then one day you realize you don’t love her. But you still have sex with her. Right?

Why?

That’s my question.

I mean: why do you want to know this?

I want to know how you can have sex with a woman you don’t love.

Oh.

If I let you have sex with me, I want it to be because you love me. But how will I know? Especially since you’re in the habit for years of having sex with a woman you don’t love.

Oh.

See, when I have sex, I want to give myself completely to my partner. My body. Not just a part of my body, but every last bit of it, a complete surrender. My mind. And not just the shining part of my intellect, but unreserved, even the secret places. And my heart too. Not just the parts I share with the world, but the darker chambers too. When I have sex I want to pour myself into my partner and him into me. When I have sex with you, that’s what I want. So tell me: can I really expect you to give me that when you’re used to having sex with a woman you don’t love?

This woman is confusing me. And I forgot to go to the liquor store today. I can think of lots of things to say to Liane, but I have the good sense to keep my mouth shut, a fact which, all on its own, is sufficient reason to suspect that Liane is insane. We—not Liane and me, but everybody—we keep things to ourselves and never share them, not because we’re liars and frauds, but because, if everyone knew all the sewage that flows through our heads, we’d live in a state of perpetual war. We’d take offense at every turn and wouldn’t have the grace or guile to hide our monstrous responses.

I’m beginning to think that Liane lives in a Disney feature animation filled with twittering bluebirds and singing dwarves, and while the cherry-bud princess wears a merry widow instead of an ankle-length skirt and while the apple is laden with agribusiness pesticides instead of a witch’s poison, what remains unchanged is the belief that only with a kiss can the prince rouse his love, but if those CG artists could animate the inner workings of the prince’s brain, they’d bring to light all sorts of unruly thoughts and plots, most notably 1) a plan to blow up the dwarves and their mine in protest of extraction methods and tailing pools that destroy the forest ecosystem and 2) a desire to bring the day’s activism to a symbolic close by kneeling before the princess and engaging her in a hearty session of cunnilingus; only in a cartoon does the princess get to have a prince whose brain is blank and pure and waiting for its love to fill it with the song of twittering bluebirds. I’m beginning to think that Liane can insist on absolute surrender only when the love she feels is stripped of its imagination. As for the rest of us, we live as much in our imaginations as we live in the world. We would live as animals if we lived wholly in the world, and as cartoons if we lived wholly in our imaginations. This is the sin of Jesus: he loved with empathy but without imagination, and so he felt justified in demanding that we suppress our fantasies when we look at one another. His failure of imagination meant that he couldn’t know that he didn’t understand the impossibility of his demands. And Liane, so wrapped up in stories of her church, shares in that failure of imagination. She infuriates me. I feel such ambivalence. Part of me wants her with an aching and part of me wants to knock out her teeth. All I know for certain is that it’s impossible to be indifferent to her. Even so, I suppress it all and go on listening in silence to her crazy love theories.

And then it happens: the blossoming of doom’s flower, the dark finger of destiny, the drowning cataract, the burst dam, Beethoven’s first four notes banging on my tympanum. In fact, it arrives with a beeping on my cell phone that indicates another call. I ask Liane to wait while I answer. It’s Giselle, blubbering, emotional, all but incoherent. When I return to Liane, I tell her I have to go.

What’s wrong?

It’s Griff.

Your son?

Sounds like he crashed a car.

I didn’t know you had kids that old.

Neither did I.

Is he okay?

He’s in the hospital. That’s all I know. I’ve gotta go.

Call me when you know more.

Sure.

Even if it’s four in the morning.

Sure.

Adrenaline launches me into orbit. There’s a dark panic in my gut, a visceral lurch more primal than sex that summons me to the flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. I’m hyper-alert and see everything with a godlike clarity: keys, wallet, wait, car’s at home, catch cab, drive Giselle, she’s in no state to drive a car, thank god I wasn’t drinking otherwise she’d despise me forever. Have to drive to a hospital in the west end. What the hell was Griff doing in the west end? Wait. Giselle said it was Jermaine who called from the hospital. Griff was probably with T. J., the two of them doing something they shouldn’t. Christ. Just imagine the two of them together. Laughing. No seat belts. Immortal. Delusional the way all teenagers are delusional. Hepped up on testosterone. Egging each other on. What the hell were they doing?

The cab ride home from the hotel takes only ten minutes. I sit in the back seat and try not to touch anything. Who knows what may have happened in the back seat of this car—a drunken ride home from an office party that ends in a puke fest, an executive who sprays himself as he pulls to the curb outside his secretary’s apartment, a mother with her snot-nosed kid who upends a sticky juice box. The street lights rush past as we make the long descent into Hogg’s Hollow and, looking up the far slope, I see the lights above the highway and the red taillights of a thousand cars whizzing east and west across the city. In this state of unknowing, it seems unreal. Although common sense tells me not to, I imagine the worst. I can’t help it. My brain does what it wants. I imagine we arrive at the hospital and find a sheet over Griff’s head. Or we’re ushered to the morgue to ID the body. I imagine the funeral, an open casket, the Reverend Charles intoning an expansive holy roller prayer over the body, Doris in the choir, wailing away with all her sisters, me, a pariah, sitting in the back pew and feeling lost. I imagine the epitaph chiseled on granite, maybe a quote from Snoop Dogg or K’naan.

When the cab pulls up in front of the house, Giselle and Katrine are waiting on the porch steps. Katrine is frantic and I have to hold her close and shush her and tell her she needs to be calm or we can’t leave for the hospital. Katrine wipes her eyes and sniffles and promises to hold it in while we’re driving. When I step to the driver’s side of the RAV4, Giselle is already there and rummaging through her purse for the keys. We’re like two kids fighting for a toy. In the end, I throw up my hands and switch to the passenger side. We haven’t time for this nonsense. Because Katrine is present, we negotiate a truce, although I can still feel a storm cloud hovering just below the roof of the car. Whenever Giselle looks at me, I can feel her recriminations: None of this would have happened if it weren’t for you and your stupidity. It’s all your fault. I want to explain to her that, like me, Griff has a pair of testicles and whatever trouble he got himself into, he did it all on his own. I want to explain something about the nature of testicles, too, but there doesn’t seem to be any point; she’ll believe whatever she feels inclined to believe and there will be no changing her mind. Instead, I ask for more information, but she knows only what she already told me (most of which was an incoherent blubbering). I don’t want to spark an argument by telling her she was incomprehensible so I ride along in ignorance. I ask how her interview went, but all she does is grunt so I keep my mouth shut for the rest of the ride.

I’ve never been to this hospital, but that doesn’t matter; once I’m inside, it’s indistinguishable from any other hospital I’ve visited. Hospitals are supposed to be places for healing, but they feel more like places for repair and disposal. The antiseptic chemical smell, the stark fluorescent lights, the green uniforms, the chrome rails on walls and bathrooms and beds, all of it has the feel of a factory or a garage. I read somewhere that all the food for all the patients in all the hospitals in Ontario is prepared at one site in Ottawa. Even the toast. If you’re a patient eating toast for breakfast in Toronto, that slice of toast has already traveled four and a half hours in a truck before you get to chew on it. Economists say it’s more efficient than making the toast in the next room. I wonder how long it will take before some clever expert finally announces that economics is the study of our collective insanity. I’ve never spent much time in hospitals. Giselle was adamant that the kids be born at home. So, apart from my own birth and a visit to Feinman when he had his heart attack, the only significant time I spent in a hospital was after Dad’s stroke. His was a case of maintenance and disposal. It sounds crass, but I think that’s a fair description. We did annual reports and print advertising for a couple hospital boards and it was nothing more than products and services in glossy packages—the health care industry. It could just as easily have been the auto industry or the oil industry. Profits. Losses. Transaction costs. Externalities. All the usual bullshit. Dad’s maintenance and disposal was one more service with its pre-determined margin of profit.

We enter through the ER doors, but there’s no one at the counter to help us. There’s no one at any of the counters anywhere. Giselle calls Jermaine on her cell phone. Her voice is high-pitched and frantic. This way, she shouts, and she pushes through double doors and into a long hall with shorter halls running perpendicular from it: triage, then cardio, orthopaedic, even a hall for the crazies. Jermaine stands at the end of the orthopaedic hall, smiling and waving, and I can tell by the look on his face that everything will be all right, or at least non-fatal. What does the news call it? Serious but non-life-threatening? But Giselle doesn’t see the look on his face, quickening her pace and, My baby. Oh my baby, like she’s Mary at the foot of the cross. Jermaine treats her the way I treated Katrine on the front lawn, holding her close and saying shush and telling her everything’s all right. The boys will be fine. He pulls back the curtains and there’s Griff and beyond him, in the next bed, T. J., and circling around them are Roselea and Cecelia, Charles and Doris, and I’m wondering what the hell is wrong with this family that they have to be so close.

Both boys look pretty beat up with black eyes and bruises on their cheek bones and split lips. Griff’s right arm is propped up on some kind of board. They think the ulna is fractured and probably the growth plates in both wrists when he struck them against the glove compartment. T. J. was driving and cracked some ribs on the steering wheel. The two boys thought it would be a good idea to boost the Mustang® and take it for a joy ride through the neighbourhood. Jermaine had taken vacation time last week to rebuild the engine and get the car ready to be certified and insured. He was waiting for insurance quotes when the boys nabbed the keys. The boys didn’t get far, lost control in the dark, ran it off the road and into a living room. Five minutes earlier and the owners of the home would have been sitting there watching the evening news, but they had turned off the lights and gone to bed. The boys totaled the car, a fully refurbished, fully restored ‘67 Mustang®. Jermaine says: At least the kids are okay. However, I’m certain there was at least one minute there when he wished the kids had died in the crash so he’d be spared the challenge of forgiving them.

Then, from behind, in a big voice: Well look who it is?

I turn around and standing not two metres away, grinning a broad grin and holding a cup of coffee, is the police officer named Gwen. Don’t tell me you’re the investigating officer?

Darned tootin’. How’s the ankle?

Haven’t given it another thought.

So does one of these Bobby Allisons belong to you?

Griff.

Uh-huh. Guess he’s a midnight rambler like his old man.

If you were to join us here and examine for yourself the directions of all our glances and if you were to use the same equipment that crime scene investigators use to examine the trajectories of bullets, you’d find lines criss-crossing the scene like a gangland shootout: Gwen firing off a quick one at me, then at Giselle when I call her over to say hi to the nice police officer who gave me a lift on Hallowe’en, then at Griff laid out hazy-eyed on the hospital bed; Giselle glaring puzzled at Gwen then at me then again at Gwen with recognition; Jermaine at me and me back at Jermaine, me wondering if he knows yet about Giselle and me (did Griff spend the day yakking to T. J. about our split?); lolly-headed Griff at me with a blissed-out smile that could come only from Demerol or Tylenol-3’s or Percocet; T. J. at Roselea with the same lolly-headed grin; Doris and Charles at their grandsons back and forth from bed to bed, torn by the wish to give them equal attention and, as a consequence, giving none to either; Cecelia, tucked in the corner beyond T. J.’s bed and holding in her arms a sleeping Ashley, at Giselle and Roselea, maybe wondering what it’s like to care about someone enough that when you fear for their life you feel their pain as if it lived inside your own body; Katrine at Griff, having stowed her tears and distress and replaced them with a more sisterly disdain, calling him stoopid and ijit and snapping a photo on her phonecam and posting it to her Facebook account. A young intern with rugged good looks, unshaven, thin like a CK underwear model, white coat and stethoscope, checks in on both boys, asking about pain, shining a light into eyes, scribbling on charts, judiciously avoiding the jaw-on-the-floor stares from Cecelia and Katrine, who, when he’s gone, stare at one another and giggle. The intern has announced that the boys are lucky, and constable Gwen takes up that theme, saying that if the wheels had been a little to the left, the car would have fallen into a swimming pool that hadn’t been drained yet, and, well, if the car had ended up on its roof at the bottom of a swimming pool, there’s no way those boys could have squirmed out in time. This is just what Giselle needs to hear (note the irony) and it pushes her to the edge of hysterics with those loud wails she probably learned in her father’s church when she was a girl. When Giselle gets going, she sets off Roselea, and the two of them keep each other stoked for the next five minutes while Jermaine and I smile at each other and say shush and try our best to calm them. Jermaine holds Roselea and runs a hand through her hair but Giselle won’t let me touch her. It’s this physical distance that gives Charles (and maybe Doris, too) his first intimation that something is wrong. There’s more to this detachment than me being my typical closed-off anal WASPish self.

Gwen draws the parents aside and explains the situation: she has to charge the boys. She realizes they’re just kids being stupid the way kids can be when they get together. She realizes this even more now that she sees who their families are (with a nod to me and Giselle). She realizes the car belongs to uncle Jermaine and the family could probably deal with things on their own. If the boys had driven the car off the shoulder and into a farmer’s field, or even if they had crashed it into an advertising bench by the side of the road, then she would have left it for the family to resolve. But the boys drove the car into the side of a house and could have killed the occupants. Right now there’s an older couple still in shock about what’s happened to their home and there’s an insurance adjuster already on the phone asking when he’ll get a copy of the police report. She has to charge the boys.

According to Gwen, it’s not as bad as it sounds, a less formal process when young offenders are involved. The kids will be discharged from hospital in the morning and released into our custody after that. They’ll have to appear for an arraignment probably some time next week. The court date? No. The trial will be a few months from now, but it won’t amount to much. They’ll probably end up pleading guilty and doing some community service. They’ll end up with a criminal record, but they’re young offenders so they get a fresh start when they turn eighteen. Gwen talks away in that breezy voice of hers like she’s talking about her daughter’s birthday party or a trip to the zoo. She must encounter situations like this two or three times a week. What seems to us a tectonic shift must seem to her no more extraordinary than a trip to the corner store for a jug of milk.

Gwen draws Giselle and I further aside and explains some more of the situation: she knows we’re having difficulty. The police won’t release Griff into our custody if they think he’ll be released into a chaotic household where he’s likely to reoffend before the arraignment or is likely to miss the arraignment altogether. Instead, they’ll keep him in custody for a bail hearing and leave it for a judge to decide what to do with him, maybe with some advice from children’s services. I’m not sure if I’ve got all the procedural details clear in my head; Gwen speaks fast, it’s late, and we’re stressed, so all the words run together. But the upshot is simple to understand: things will go easier (and cheaper) if Giselle and I get our shit together. As long as I’m living out of a suitcase in a hotel room, and as long as Giselle is shutting herself inside her office all day, Griff will go on looking for ways to get our attention.

I could check out of the hotel in the morning. I look at Giselle.

She nods.

We can work things out, I say.

Gwen looks pleased and touches me on the elbow and smiles and says: Everything’s gonna be all right.

While everyone is fussing over the boys, I return to the waiting room by the entrance to the ER. It's a big open space with rows of vinyl chairs near the triage booths. On TV shows, hospital ER’s are frenzied places where crash carts fly down halls like torpedoes and blood-drenched personnel bark technical words at one another, but so far my experience has been of a somnolent cave run by bureaucrats. There are probably as many deaths from paper cuts as from heart attacks and motor vehicle accidents. There aren’t many people here; it’s probably too late for a rush of people. There’s a man standing at the reception desk with his hand wrapped in a blood-soaked towel but he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry. Another man, maybe my age, lies stretched across four chairs, arms crossed, eyes closed, wearing a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache that makes him look like Joseph Stalin lying in state. Seated beside him on one of those multi-purpose walkers is an elderly woman—maybe his mother—who dozes with her head on her chest, one of those babushka women with her head in a scarf and boobs that hang to her waist. Across from them is a young mother with a car seat at her feet. I assume there’s an infant in the car seat and I assume the infant is her infant (hence my decision to call her a mother), but I could be wrong; she could be a sister or a friend who is guarding the car seat while the mother is somewhere else with the infant. My latter theory seems more plausible because this woman shows no interest in the car seat or its contents and instead stares zombie-eyed at a flat screen TV hanging from the ceiling. They’ve set the TV to a twenty-four hour news channel which displays a news feed, weather, sports scores, lottery numbers, and a talking head that never shuts up. George Orwell was wrong. Big Brother isn’t watching you. Big Brother is pitching you. Leaning against a wall and talking on a cell phone underneath the No-Talking-On-Cell-Phones sign is a scaled-down model of Mike Tyson. Scaled-down means that if he got angry at me he might bite off my fingernail instead of my ear. He carries off the look that Griff and T. J. aspire to but never quite manage, maybe because he’s a few years older than them: black hoodie over white T-shirt, jeans with crotch around the knees, baseball cap hung sideways off the head, fuck-you attitude in the shoulders, kiss-my-ass smirk on the face. I wonder if there’s a real person on the other end of his phone conversation, or if it’s all part of the look.

In the last two weeks, before I quit Feinman’s, when I decided to take public transit instead of a car, I would walk to the end of our street and catch a bus to the subway station. On the first morning, there was a black kid standing at the bus stop wearing a Bluetooth device over his ear. Mostly, I see these things on middle-aged geeks, and it confers on them a mixed aura of self-importance and psychosis. They talk their technical language to invisible people. But this kid was talking street: at da club man, at da club and popped a cap in his head and blood on da floor and git da fuck out. It sounded like he was reading from a dumbed down version of a Quentin Tarantino screenplay. When the bus arrived, he got on and kept talking in a big voice so everybody on the bus could hear him. My first impression was: Wow, somebody has a real life, the raw stuff. Two days later, the same kid was at the same stop talking the same street telling the same story. I gave him the benefit of the doubt: Okay, he’s telling his story to more than one friend. He saw something traumatic and it’s important that he talk it out. But the third time, I knew there was no one on the other end of the phone. I read somewhere that forty percent of all cell phone calls are to imaginary people. I have no opinion one way or the other about that statistic. I guess if it helps, why not? Hell, I masturbate all the time and that’s not much different than talking to fake people. In fact, the cell phone trick is probably cleaner. Maybe I should try it myself sometime.

I pull out my cell phone and call the very real Liane Gordon. As I wait for her to answer, I listen to Iron Mike. He talks mostly in clipped two or three word phrases, nods, uh-huhs, smiles, frowns, eyebrows up then down, arms waving, fingers picking at paint on the wall. If there’s no one on the other end, he does a convincing job of pretending there is. Maybe he’s an actor. Liane answers. She’s tired but diligent about waiting by the phone. I explain the situation, but after every couple sentences, Liane interrupts and quizzes me about the details, and the further this goes on, the more obvious it becomes that I never listened to half of what Gwen said. Is there a difference between an arraignment and a bail hearing or do the two happen at the same time? Do they happen in a real courtroom or in something less formal when it’s youth involved? Do I need to get a lawyer right away or just for the trial? Will I have to pay for any of the damage to the house or will insurance cover that? Did my brother-in-law have insurance on the car? Shit, I don’t know. She’s asking me all these questions that I never thought to ask, so it makes me feel like an idiot.

I pause and suck in my breath. I’m thinking. I’m thinking. The Tyson look-alike is still talking on his phone. Yeah, two little muthafuckas—Yeah, like you said—Yeah, cruise by for a look—Yeah, fuckin’ useless—Yeah, got a look at ‘em ‘fore—

Elton?

It’s Liane trying to get my attention.

There’s something I don’t understand. In fact, I understand so little of it that I can’t even name what I don’t understand. It’s like trying to point to a pain when all I feel is a vague and persistent ache that sometimes throbs but mostly simmers below the skin. All I know is that there is something in the world tonight that isn’t sitting four square. In the summertime, Jermaine had drawn me outside onto the driveway and there, with the hood of the now-wrecked Mustang® propped open and with the two of us drinking our beers and staring at the hole where an engine soon would sit, Jermaine spoke to me with as much tact as he could summon: there was one way in which I could never be a father to Griffen, one piece of wisdom I could never hand down to the boy, one experience we could never share. At the time, I didn’t listen. Like a good white liberal, I told myself: empathy is always possible. But now I’m not so sure. The man on the cell phone sees me watching him. His skin is light enough that I can see the tattoo on his face—a teardrop beside the corner of his left eye. Although I don’t know what it means, I know that it means something, and whatever that something, it can’t be good. The man glares at me.

Elton? Where have you gone?

Nowhere. I’m still here. I avert my eyes from the man and stare instead at the stream of information scrolling down the flat screen TV.

Of course. I didn’t mean literally. I meant spiritually. I feel this distance between us.

No, says I.

Yes, says she. It’s real. I feel it.

When I was in high school, before I started going out with Giselle, I saw her father on TV sometimes. He was more than a preacher; he was a local personality, an advocate, a sometimes fierce political ally, sometimes fierce critic. He had a rhythm, a rhetoric, a presence that he had honed on the chancel, and drew it with him into public life, and it made him enormously popular. He never ran for public office, but local pundits speculated that if he had, he would have done well at the polls. Mayoralty candidates worried that he might make a last-minute decision and join the electoral race, and when he didn’t, they did their best to win his endorsement. He never gave it to anyone. He said his job was to boost everybody no matter what their politics. But he made an exception for one kind of man.

As an outspoken public personality and a black who wasn’t afraid of friction, you’d expect him to receive a few threats each year. The thing is, all the threats came from blacks, all of them men who had been convicted of weapons offences. Charles had no patience for these men and sometimes lost his temper on TV. He said that if you wanted to hurt the cause of blacks everywhere, be black and get caught with a gun. If you got in a little trouble, he’d forgive you.

If you got caught with drugs, he’d understand. But get caught with a gun and there was no end to the vitriol that came from Charles’ mouth. Famously, he once said: You wanna get caught with something? Next time a cop pulls you over, get caught with a book. That statement did the rounds for a week on local TV and the police chief gave him some kind of a civic award at the end of the year. This guy—the one who’s trying to stare me down in the ER waiting room—he’s the kind of guy Charles would heap with shame. He’d call him a coward and a worm, someone his mother would be ashamed to say she had wasted her efforts squeezing into this world. I, of course, would never say such a thing; only Charles could get away with something like that. Even so, just to look at him, I know something is off.

Oh Griff, I think to myself, what the hell have you gotten yourself into?

We can’t have distance like this. We need to talk.

Not now.

What’s wrong?

Not now.

It’s her. She’s standing right beside you, isn’t she?

No.

Then what? I don’t understand.

I’ve got this weird feeling.

About us?

Nothing to do with us.

Then what? This is so frustrating.

I just called to tell you everything’s okay. The boys are fine. But I have to go now.

I hang up without waiting for a response. Holding the cell phone a discreet distance from my face, I snap a photo of the man. Somehow this seems important.

It seems even more important the next afternoon, after we’ve taken Griff home from the hospital, after we’ve picked up paperwork from the police station, after we’ve settled him onto his bed for a snooze. As I’m leaving for the hotel to retrieve my things, I notice a white Dodge Charger® idling by the curb in front of our house. Stepping from the porch and onto the lawn, I see the black hoodie, collar of a white T-shirt, brown skin with the tattoo of a teardrop beside the left eye. I pull out my cell phone with a flourish and hope he’ll see. What I hope he won’t see is how my hands shake. I’d make a lousy cop. I’d make a lousy politician. I’d make a lousy prophet. I’d make a lousy anything that would require me to engage in public confrontation. I snap a photo, facing the front grill so the license plate will be visible, then I step around the side so I can get a clean shot of the driver. I thought he might shy from the phonecam, maybe pull the hood over his face. Instead, he rolls down the window and snarls and bares his canines. He shifts into gear and eases the car from the curb, unhurried, glaring at me, smiling, then facing forward to offer his profile. When I turn back to the house, I see the empty garbage can still lying by the juniper shrub. Griff was supposed to put it in the garage. I open the garage door and hurl the can inside with a noisy plastic clatter.

17. PRINCESS JASMINE

I DON’T TELL Giselle about the man in the hospital waiting room and again in the Dodge Charger® in front of the house. If I told her, that would give her another reason to avoid dealing with the confrontation we both know (or ought to know) is coming: the one about where I'm going to sleep. After I settle my account with the hotel, I bring all my stuff home and lug it to the basement. Years ago, when we redid the kitchen, we asked the plumber to go downstairs and rough in for a sink and toilet, anticipating a day when we would finish the basement as an extra apartment, say, where my mother could stay when she visited, or where I could set up my own office. Then, recognizing that such a day would never come, I bought a cheap toilet and pedestal sink and installed them as a project for a Labour Day weekend. Although neither of the girls will use the toilet (because it’s sitting in the open), Griff and I have found it useful when the two women are engrossed in their endless hair-straightening sessions. There’s a roll-away bed down here with a bendable mattress that’s all springs and no foam. When I lay it out and sit on it, the springs creak and the wires underneath the mattress groan like a ghost with emphysema. The bed sits on a grey concrete floor that’s dry and mostly bug free, and there’s a cinder block wall running through the middle of the basement to support the joists of the floor above. The furnace is on the other side of the wall, so its fits and starts shouldn’t keep me awake through the cool nights. Then there’s the usual junk you find in a basement: an Alfred Hitchcock freezer (where we keep the body), an old fridge with a motor that goes rattle, rattle, rattle when we open the door, a row of bicycles the kids have outgrown, four pairs of skis and boots from our hearty-sports-family phase (which died because of all the complaining the kids did during the drives to and from Blue Mountain), big plastic containers full of old clothes, a work bench littered with power tools (many from my father’s workshop), exercise equipment from a shopping channel and left to gather dust, snow shovels waiting for the weather to turn, a matching washer and dryer with folding table and ironing board and heaps of clothes that have probably lain there for weeks, shelves of sanitizing, deodorizing, moisturizing, anaesthetizing, metastasizing, clysterizing, pressurizing, bowdlerizing cleaning products which, if refined by a skilled chemist, could provide the raw materials for a enough explosives to bring down an office tower.

I need sheets for the bed, so I go upstairs to the linen closet, then back downstairs to the bed. These sheets are for a double bed and I need sheets for a single, so I go upstairs to the linen closet then back downstairs to the bed and make it up in as domestic a fashion as I know how. I decide I need a blanket and a pillow too, so I go upstairs to the linen closet then back down to the bed. I need fresh socks and underwear so I go upstairs to the bedroom and empty my drawers into the laundry basket then go back downstairs and sit on the bed, wondering where I’ll store all my clothes. I need toilet paper, but as I start up the stairs, I see Giselle standing at the top in silhouette, hands on hips, asking about all the clomp, clomp, clomping on the stairs and whether I’ve joined some new exercise cult where the only thing the people do is run up and down stairs. Then she sees the roll-away behind me.

The clouds open.

The lightning strikes.

The winds blow.

When we agreed I was moving in, she thought that meant I was moving into the master bedroom. When we agreed to work things out, she thought that meant we would work things out in our relationship, not in our sleeping arrangements. Where the hell do I get off thinking I can sleep under the same roof with the rest of the family if I have no intention of living like I belong to the rest of the family? What an arrogant ass I am. How dare I? And not even bother to talk it over first. So like a man. Just an irresponsible—

In his medicated stupor, Griff doesn’t hear Giselle’s yelling. And Katrine is still at school. So when I leave, neither knows I was ever home. I hole myself up in the pub at the city limits, me and my laptop and a view of the planet from fourteen thousand years in the future when all of this will have been swept up with the dust, and here I sit through a dinner of meatloaf and an evening of five beers, two with the meat loaf and one with each period of the hockey game (which the Leafs lose), then I amble my way home, with a pause to piss by the statue of G. S. Henry. Sitting again on my roll-away, I try to phone Liane, but I can’t get a signal in the basement and don’t want to place the call upstairs where Giselle might overhear.

I lie on the bed and stare at the bare joists overhead and, thrusting my hips up and down, up and down, I set the bed on a bouncing rhythmic squeaking journey inch by inch across the floor. Coupled with the euphoric haze of beer, the bed’s motion makes me feel like I’m swirling on a white-capped river. It makes me think of Feinman’s which seems an odd association until I remember how I used to think of Feinman’s as an inferno circling ever inward to the pits of hell. When I first started there, it was Lev Feinman who was my mentor. Lev had founded the firm back in the sixties when the talent wore muumuus and beehives and layouts looked like acid trips. There are still pictures of Lev on the wall as you enter the offices, Lev with dark-framed glasses and black sideburns, Lev with a paisley tie and chewing gum twins hanging off his arms.

The first circle of advertising hell was, is, and ever shall be desire, a compulsive and insatiable wanting no different from the thirst of merchant marines adrift on an ocean of salt water that only makes the thirst more acute. Everybody knows about desire. That is why desire is the outer circle of advertising hell: everyone can see it. Lev clapped me on the shoulder and led me down the hall to an office with broad windows that overlooked the street, and there he revealed to me the second circle of advertising hell. By then, I’d been working at Feinman’s for eight years. Feinman’s had survived the energy crisis and Reaganomics, Black Monday and the Gulf War. Advertising had changed along with the world and needed capital just like everything else. If I’m gonna make you a junior partner, he said, then you gotta stop thinking goyim on me.

The second circle of advertising hell was, is, and ever shall be guilt. After desire, there’s nothing quite like guilt to make us engage in irrational spending. Guilt in advertising is like biological warfare. Before you unleash the germ, make sure you’re immune. That’s why Jews are so good at advertising. When Lev told me about the secret of Jews in advertising, he laughed and laughed and hacked that smoker’s hack that, five years later, would fell him with paroxysms of emphysema. Jews have their mothers to thank for that, he said. A Jewish mother hasn’t done a proper job of raising her son if she hasn’t taught him about guilt, this keen and crazy guilt, and all of it focused on her. God forbid a son should feel guilty about something else, like the axe he put in his wife’s head, because if he felt guilty about that, then he wouldn’t be feeling guilty about his mother. But not to worry. She would pester him again and again and again about not feeling guilty, until soon enough he’d feel guilty about not feeling guilty and all would sit right again in the world. A good Jewish ad man learns to ignore all other guilt. Sol there — he motioned to Sol’s office where his son sat poring over the books — he’d put a knife in your back if he thought it would be to his advantage. He’s immune. That way he can’t get caught in his own traps. But you? We’ve gotta turn you into a good Jew.

According to Lev, my mother had raised me all wrong. I could be made to feel guilty about anything. Show me an ad for an inner city charity that runs shelters for battered women and my arm would twitch to my back pocket in a Pavlovian reflex. Show me an ad that includes ethnic minorities and retards and I’d assume the product was better than the product from the competitor whose ads featured white non-retarded models. How the fuck do you expect—you have kids, right?—how the fuck you gonna save for their college education if you’re always giving money to the poor and buying useless shit from immigrant-loving retailers?

Lev revealed to me the third circle of advertising hell and he called it liberalism. He said that liberalism was, is and ever shall be that strangest blend of desire and guilt. A liberal, he said, is somebody who desires stuff just like all of us normal people but feels guilty about actually owning it. God forbid I should ever be a liberal because that would mean my head was so twisted into knots you could use my brain for bungee cord, not that there have to be knots in bungee cord, but, well, you know what I mean. Liberals are the easiest marks in the world because they already have more money than they need so it’s always easy to shake some of it loose. You shake it loose by selling products that create and assuage the guilt all at the same time. It’s called market efficiency. When you sell wooden furniture, you pledge to plant a tree with each purchase. When you sell a slinky number with low-cut cleavage and slit up the thigh, you pledge a dollar to the women’s shelter that keeps girls off the street. When you sell a Mercedes Benz, you promise long-term R & D into alternative fuel sources. It’s not as if these gestures make a difference; they’re what we in the biz call marketing to liberals who are also known as rich white goyim or RWG’s for short: Hey, it’s an RWG. Let’s sell him something by making him think he’s helping little brown babies in Africa.

Lev thought I made a passable Jew because I didn’t allow myself to get sucked into the liberal sentimentality that had been engendered by my deficient upbringing, and so he invited me to be a junior partner in Feinman Marketing Inc. Plus he met my father, an experience which must have persuaded him that his theories of my upbringing were wrong in any event; although my father was an RWG, he could no more be swayed by sentimental pandering than a rock. Immunity to liberalism had nothing to do with religious or cultural viewpoints and everything to do with the asshole factor. After Lev met my father, he realized the asshole factor runs strong in my family and that made him comfortable relinquishing a small measure of control in the business. Things went fine for a while until Lev’s emphysema did him in. Sol inherited his father’s share of the firm and bullied me into selling back my interest—not a bad thing because it allowed me to pay off our mortgage, but it meant that I was at Sol’s mercy and, as you may already have surmised, the asshole factor runs even stronger in his family.

I’m not thinking about the concentric circles of advertising hell, not really, nor about Feinman Marketing Inc. nor about paying down mortgages. What I’m really thinking about is a beautiful white woman who’s in the express aisle to becoming my lover. But she is emphatically not my mistress. I overheard someone use the word mistress at the pub and it struck me as an archaic word, like spinster or debutante, a word more fitting on the mouths of nineteenth century prigs for whom petticoats and submission were a breath apart and riding crops had a rightful place by the side of every bed. But then I have no word for her. All I have is another set of concentric circles which follow the familiar pattern of desire, guilt and liberalism. Desire. My body is filled with it and sometimes feels like it will dissolve, but I’m helpless to do anything about it. And guilt. It’s not simply that I’m poised to betray my wife; I’m also poised to betray a lifetime of ingrained expectations. I had assumed that I am one of those men, the respectable kind with a house in the suburbs, a Scotch in the hand, and the beginnings of a paunch pushing over the belt, the kind of man who stands by his woman even as her boobs sag, and helps her raise the children while he grills flank steaks on the barbecue. And then, of course, there’s liberalism which, of all the circles whirling into hell, is the circle drawn tightest around my neck, or is it around my balls? To betray a black full-bodied mama for the sake of a sweet young white reed makes my sin acutely heinous. When people find out, as they will if I continue to swirl down this toilet bowl, their shining liberal minds will spawn all sorts of reviling commentary, shit about my innate racism coming to light, how my marriage was not simply a sham, but a cover up. Mine is not a tragic flaw like Hamlet’s indecision or Othello’s jealousy where an essentially noble creature finds himself unraveled by the tiniest of threads; instead, mine is a genetic flaw, a switch that flips at the appropriate time of life, like male pattern baldness or that swelling of the prostate gland that wakes you in the night, not with a case of the moral sweats, but with an urge to piss. But Lev Feinman has trained me well to resist the liberal eddies into hell, eddies which are stirred to a froth by political correctness. I refuse to be coerced by guilt. I refuse to allow a petty liberalism to keep me from doing what I have to do. What’s wrong with wanting happiness? Isn’t happiness what this is all about? This isn’t desire, is it? At least not that trivial desire you feel while passing shop windows or browsing web pages on eBay. This is a longing for durable happiness, something strong, threads of steel. So goes my mind, whirling around as I fall asleep.

Without an awareness of ever having fallen asleep, I find myself awake, still wearing my clothes, but in darkness and staring into the deep shadows of the basement. I don’t stir although I hear footsteps padding down the basement stairs. Giselle stands beside the bed. It’s too dark for her to see that I’m watching her. She holds her head bowed over me. I can hear the soft rasping of her breath, a rhythmic in and out that signals neither calm nor distress. She hovers there, watching, watching. I wonder what the hell she’s doing. More than that, I wonder what the hell she’s thinking. I wonder if she can read my mind. That is the most horrible thing I can imagine: that I should be so naked even my inmost thoughts lie exposed. I wonder if she knows how unhappy I am. And if she does, I wonder if she realizes that this is not a passing thing, but an unhappiness that eats away at me like acid through the skin and into the bone. I wonder how she feels. Does she hold as much unhappiness in her heart as I do in mine?

There was once a time when we were allies, when it felt like we were sharing an adventure. I had my partnership in Feinman’s. She had the success of her first novel. There were other things that drew us together too, like the feeling sometimes of being besieged. A few days after we had moved into our new house, Giselle crumpled into my arms in tears. She had been out for a walk with Katrine in the stroller and had stopped to talk to a neighbour when another mother approached with her stroller and the two of them, neighbour and mother, talked past Giselle as if she didn’t exist. They assumed she was the nanny for the nice white couple who had moved in down the road. They heard he was in advertising and she wrote novels. Or there was that time when Ola Grazic went to the PTA on a crusade to ban To Kill A Mockingbird from the school library because it included a word that no one dared to speak, or even to write as became apparent from the meeting’s minutes. By then, Giselle had a reputation and two children in the local school system. Honey, she said at the meeting, the day I need your help protecting my kids’ poor black ears from words like nigger, I’ll be sure to let you know. Giselle was never bound to win the community popularity contest, but she did win the quiet admiration of many who were tired of Grazic’s whining rectitude. But the most galvanizing time came on a family vacation to Disney World in Orlando. It was supposed to be our dream vacation, a time to forge special memories with the kids who were five and seven. We stayed at that hotel, the one with the monorail running through the middle of it. What do they call it? The Contemporary Resort? And we spent our days chasing Mickey Mouse and Tigger for photos. Everywhere we walked we drew stares. It took us by surprise. At the end of the first day, when the kids were in bed, Giselle and I talked about it. Maybe we were being too sensitive. Maybe it had happened two or three times early in the day and then we had projected the feeling of being stared at onto every subsequent encounter. Maybe we were making too much of it. We started the next day with a blank slate, but there it was again: stares from every quarter. Even princess Jasmine stared at us, gawking first at Giselle, then at me, then at the kids, then back to Giselle. It was on our trip to Disney World that Katrine discovered she has a race. Griff was too young to sense any of this, but he soon learned everything he needed to know from his older sister. I wonder if maybe the discovery of race was more traumatic for them than the pubescent discovery of sexuality.

There she stands now, still save for the faint rise and fall of her breasts, and dark, almost impossible to see save for traces of a silver light that shines down the stairs from the hallway above. There’s a rustle as she raises her arms overhead. With a quick jerking motion, she brings down her arms. I hear a muffled whumping noise as a pillow strikes me full on the face. You bastard, she says in a choked whisper. I laugh. She moves to strike me again and I let her. There’s probably something therapeutic in venting her anger like this. You fucking bastard. Whump. This time I grab her wrist and keep her from winding up for a third swing. The thing is: she doesn’t struggle from my grip. Instead, she does this weird mix of laughing and crying. Yes, she could be a scary woman if she were wielding an axe, but with a pillow she’s funny. She flops onto the edge of the bed beside me and we laugh about it. Before I understand what’s happening, Giselle is kissing me and running her fingers through my hair and sticking her hands down my pants. Like a timid teenaged girl, I say Don’t! but she ignores me and presses on. Before I understand what’s happening, we’re naked together on the roll-away, bouncing up and down, straining the springs almost to breaking, pawing one another, grunting and sweating, chewing up little bits of each other’s body. When I wake up, light is coming through a basement window and Giselle is naked and nestled against me on the roll-away.

18. SEX IN THE SEVENTH DIMENSION

THIS IS A warning: you are about to read the climax of my story. The word climax is apt because the broad arc of this story looks a lot like the male experience of sex. There’s a remarkable amount of fussing up front, flowers and throat-clearings, dinner dates and compliments, an enormous effort to arrive at even the first moment of intimacy, there are soft words and a rich wine, the beginnings of a seduction, but when at last the clothes are off, the covers thrown back, the limbs entwined, then things move quickly. A man comes in an instant and the feeling is gone. There’s little by way of denouement. Maybe he wipes himself clean. Maybe he sets things in order. And then he’s done. This story is like that. It gives you a glimpse of my life and the people in it. It shows you why those people are important in my life and how they connect to me and sometimes to each other. It also shows you that these connections are not fixed like the wire in a chain link fence, but instead they breathe. Sometimes they stretch and almost break, and other times they contract and draw people close. But it should be obvious by now that desire has infected me, that desire will break the connection to my wife and will draw me into an intimate connection with someone else. I didn’t plan for things to happen this way. They just did. I don’t know why. If I could step outside my own situation the way astronauts can step off the planet, if I could seize that higher perspective, I’m not sure it would do any good. I might whirl around in orbit for a while, but eventually I’d have to re-enter the atmosphere and I’d only burn and crash. Better I should learn to live with the perspective I already know. Sooner or later that perspective has to translate into choices on the ground anyways.

The day arrives when Liane invites me to her apartment. There’s a pretense of course; there has to be a pretense because Liane couldn’t live with herself if she thought she were somehow implicated in the dissolution of a marriage. She’s afraid people might call her home wrecker or the other woman. Her fears notwithstanding, the encounter will happen and the pretense will crumble. I will step across her threshold and we will be powerless. We know this but say nothing about it. Instead, we tell ourselves that I’m going over to help her prepare copy for some brochures ECO wants to print. There’s been a bitter debate about whether or not an environmental group should produce print advertising. The decision to move forward came with restrictions on the kind of paper and inks we could use. It has fallen to Liane to worry about copy and layout and, because she doesn’t know what she’s doing, she calls on me for advice. She says she’ll repay me with a meal. I say that because I’m a member of the group and committed to the cause, I don’t need repayment. She laughs and says she’ll eat alone and I can sit and watch.

The day doesn’t arrive all at once but only after obstacles have appeared and have been removed. The most obvious of these obstacles is the fact that I have given up my hotel room and have returned to live under the same roof as my estranged wife. You have no intention of leaving her, says she. You’re just like every other man, says she. You just want me for sex, says she.

Yes! I yell. I do want you for sex, but I want you for so much more besides.

She isn’t expecting that, and it shocks her into silence so that I can say a few more things before she recovers enough to throw up more obstacles. I say beautiful things to her. I talk her to the moon and back. Pretty words, says she. Pretty words to undress me with.

Yes! I yell. And pretty words to adore you with whether you’re naked or fully clothed.

I explain that I moved back into the house, the so-called matrimonial residence, not because I was suffering a loss of resolve, but because I was suffering the loss of a son. The police said it would go better for him if we presented as a stable family unit. We worry that Griff is being drawn into something he doesn’t understand, something we barely understand, and if I’m close at hand, I can watch to make sure he’s safe. I’ve moved back home for Griff, not for Giselle.

At first, Liane’s heart melts at the thought of my altruism, but soon she throws up another obstacle. You’re having sex with her, aren’t you? I just know you are.

No I’m not. My answer is curt and verges on contemptuous.

It’s okay, says she. She’s your wife, after all. I’m okay with it.

I don’t believe her. I’m inclined to believe that when she gets all magnanimous and claims to feel not the slightest twinge of jealousy, what she’s really doing is claiming sex points. The more I have sex with Giselle, the more Liane can have sex with other men, Luke for instance. She can screw Luke all she wants and there isn’t a damn thing I can say because she can always throw Giselle in my face. The only solution is to lie. I lie egregiously. I lie monstrously. I lie deliciously. Liane begins to believe I lead the chaste life of a monk, sleeping alone on my uncomfortable bed above a cold basement floor. For all she knows, I wander the city wearing a hair shirt and flogging myself as I go. The truth is: sex with Giselle has never been better and I’ve never gotten so much of it. The threat of my departure has prodded her to become more assertive, almost a dominatrix in her style. Just yesterday, she stood above me naked, one foot on my chest, and pinned me to the bed. If you know anything about the dynamics of domination, then you’ll recognize that I was the one in control. By the end of the evening, Giselle had degraded and defiled herself in countless ways while I was filled with the same feeling of power I might have felt if I had eaten her heart raw. The evening ended with a screaming orgasm. I’ve never heard Giselle like that before. I’m sure she woke the children. By the sound of it, she could have been possessed by the spirit of a wild animal.

The more raucous my sex with Giselle, the more I moan to Liane about my state of deprivation. She pities me and yearns to give me relief. How have I come to find myself in this position, leading my life as if I have two distinct brains? Each expresses itself with an earnestness, the one earnestly seeking a conventional respectability, the other earnestly longing to explode everything and live free in the rubble. How long can I go on like this, letting both brains have a say in the way my life plays out? If I don’t make a choice, how long before both voices overwhelm and leave me cowering in a corner?

When I push the buzzer to Liane’s apartment, it makes a decisive sound. It’s five in the afternoon and dark, and I’m prepared to stay the night if that’s what it takes to still the brain that clamours for conventional respectability. I’ve been to the drug store and have a pocket full of condoms, three strips of four and the box in a garbage can on the way here. I’ve been to the local fruit market and have a paper-wrapped bunch of spring flowers that spray their pollen as I tremble by the doorway and they tease my nostrils almost to the point of sneezing. When Liane opens the door, I don’t say anything because I’m trying to suppress a sneeze. Instead, I hold out the bouquet. Liane is beautiful. There’s a soft light from within the apartment that hazes around her hair and produces an effect that Feinman’s art department would be hard-pressed to duplicate in Photoshop®. Liane isn’t wearing makeup, but there’s a naturalness in her look that leaves me wobbly in the knees. She looks at the bouquet, then at me, then again at the bouquet. What’d you get those for? My heart sinks. What have I done wrong? She drops them onto the boot tray on top of a pair of canvas high tops and some dressier shoes I’ve never seen her wear. When the door clicks to, Liane grabs my collar and pulls me close while she slaps a wet sloppy kiss onto my lips. I’d take more, but she pushes me away and tells me to relax; she tells me we’ve got all evening.

Liane has a cat. I hate cats. Apart from the fact that cats are useless, I’m afraid to fall asleep near cats; I worry that I’ll wake up with a cat on my face and clawing out my eyeballs. A cat would do that sort of thing. I wind my coat into a tight ball with the condoms deep in the centre of the ball where a cat’s claws won’t be able to puncture them. The last thing I need is another heir or some bizarre Luke disease. That would be catastrophic. That would be cataclysmic. That would be—oh, never mind; it’s an old joke.

The apartment is two rooms, a living/dining room and a bedroom. There’s a kitchenette that looks onto the living/dining room and a bathroomette that may as well look onto the bedroom because the door doesn’t shut. Liane can hear me loud as Niagara Falls when I take a whizz there later in the evening. The building was built in the same era as the hotel where I stayed when everything first broke loose. I can tell its age from the pattern of the ceramic tiles on the kitchen counter and the backsplash in the bathroom: one inch squares, black and white, with dingy grout. If you look at it from a distance, the pattern looks like it was punched out with one of those old-style dot-matrix printers. When I step out of the hallway and into the living/dining room, I call Liane Dorothy but she doesn’t get the allusion so I ratchet things up by mentioning the weather in Kansas. The room is worse than her hair. She could be breeding legions of rats and never know it. There’s a couch that’s pretty much buried except for one arm. There’s a table, too, but you’d know it only by the general form of tableness in the far corner. This is the sort of room you’d need an archaeologist to clean.

The bedroom isn’t much better, although there are a few distinctive features about the bedroom that set my mind spinning. The most obvious is the futon which I hope to use in due course. The second is a bookcase with a complete twelve-volume set of the Midnight Blood series by Giselle Pierce. At first it annoys me to think that my wife has intruded even into my lover’s bedroom. But it occurs to me that the intrusion works in the other direction too. There she is, Giselle Pierce, launching her career and establishing her professional identity with my name, assuming that all her life she will be able to fix that name to her work with comfort and even with pride. How does she feel, I wonder, knowing that she can never shed that name without destroying her career? Long after we’ve parted company, I’ll still be there, or at least my name, on book covers, at signings and readings, on contracts and royalty cheques. But intruding here, I see volume one on Liane’s bookcase, published when she was fourteen or fifteen. She’s bought them all, which means she’s been buying them even into her thirties. Christ. There’s Giselle getting into Liane’s head. The Band. The faithful Band of the Midnight Blood, dwindling in numbers as they are pursued unto death by the Children of Light. That inversion of metaphors where the righteous are dark and light illuminates the forces of evil. I wonder who the Band is. For Giselle it’s her extended family and, whether she admits it or not, her Band is black. For Griff, the Band is even more emphatically black. What is Liane’s Band? A bunch of tattooed Goths from her teens? A group of thirty-something environmental activists? I wonder if Liane will buy the thirteenth volume, the one where Giselle finally puts a photo of herself on the back cover, the one where Giselle finally reveals her true identity. Of course she will. Giselle has hinted that this will be the last installment. In her Walrus interview, she said it’s time for a fresh challenge. Maybe she’ll join the advertising business.

The other distinctive feature about the bedroom is a sewing machine underneath the window.

I didn’t know you could sew.

There’s a lot about me you don’t know.

I bet.

That’s when I realize that all the material on the floor and couch and table and futon isn’t dirty laundry but scraps of cloth, and panels cut out for shirts and pants, and basting ready to be stitched, and bolts of cloth waiting to be measured and cut. It’s like a sweatshop here. It turns out Liane has developed a lucrative sideline. It began as an attempt to ensure that her outfits came from cloth manufactured without toxic dyes and was sewn in fair working conditions, but it grew into a cottage industry that supplies the members of ECO with half their wardrobe.

We order Thai food from the place where we ate our first dinner together (or I ate and she watched) the place where I first kissed her. While we wait, I scan some of her ECO brochure mock-ups, but I can’t think of anything to say. I can’t think of anything at all. Liane’s scent has hijacked my brain and makes me want to tear off her clothes and have children with her. In fact, as soon as the pad thai, egg rolls and mango salad arrive, we are well on our way to completing that scenario. Liane sets the bag of food on the kitchen counter. I’m looking away at all the bolts of cloth and when I turn back to face her, she’s already undone half the buttons to her shirt, a Liane original. She isn’t wearing a bra. Her breasts leave me gobsmacked. I know I shouldn’t do this, but comparisons are inevitable. I think of Giselle’s great dark fleshy melons. You could lose yourself between them and turn up dead three days later. Liane’s breasts are different. I feel obliged to approach them with an aesthetic sensibility because their proportions are classical. They’re the sort of breasts an ancient Athenian sculptor would want for a model. They’re the sort of breasts that ought to endure for ten thousand years. I sit on the arm of the couch and gaze at Liane’s breasts with the detachment of a curator. I want to keep staring at them but Liane won’t let me because she approaches. I want there to be a velvet rope around her so I can’t touch without attracting the censure of a guard, but Liane comes closer and closer until the nipple of her right breast brushes my cheek. I take the nipple into my mouth while she smiles down at me and runs her fingers through my hair.

From there to the bedroom is a blur. Somehow our clothes come off. Somehow we find ourselves on her futon, skin against skin, me fumbling to open a condom packet, she fumbling to roll it onto me. She’s on her back and I’m touching her, running my hand over the scar on her thigh, feeling her moistness and knowing this will be delicious. Then I’m on my back pointing to the ceiling and she’s straddling me, kneeling, getting closer, me about to penetrate when I feel a jab in my back.

Jesus H. Christ. I start forward and run my head into her breasts.

What is it?

I dunno.

I feel a cold shocky shiver through my body. I sit upright and twist around to see what I can see. There’s something sticking out of my back and a bead of blood dribbling down onto my butt cheek.

It’s a sewing needle, says she. Oh god. I’m so sorry. You must’ve rolled over onto it.

She pulls it out and sets it by the sewing machine, and when she returns she laughs because I’ve turned as flaccid as a piece of three-day-old broccoli and the condom has slipped off and fallen in amongst all the swatches of cloth. I shiver again and she leads me by the hand to the bathroom. On the way, she picks up my shirt and puts it on. She looks a sizzling sexy and I don’t notice the sting when she wipes down the puncture with disinfectant and puts on a band-aid. That’s never happened to me before, says she.

I should hope not, says I.

We agree to break for something to eat, so we sit on the floor with our chopsticks, naked except for the blankets over our backs. I’m not sure how we get onto this, but fair is fair, says I, and if she can quiz me about what it’s like with Giselle, then I can quiz her about her past too. I admit I’m jealous of her past. I imagine it filled with lovers, hundreds of them, the littered wreckage of broken hearts and trampled dreams. Liane rolls her eyes and says I’m nuts.

Seriously, says I, you could snap your fingers.

You’re nuts, says she.

You could have anyone.

I’ve only had a handful. I guess I’m choosy.

Should I feel honoured?

I guess you should.

I ask her what makes a good man good. For her at least. What is it she looks for? What is it she needs? She thinks for a bit, sets chopsticks to her lips, gazes to the ceiling, then to my eyes, then to my crotch and smiles.

I need that, says she.

That hardly narrows things, says I.

She lists the usual soft stuff you hear from Oprah: a kind heart, an empathic soul, a love of animals, a thoughtful manner, consideration, a kind of strength (not physical strength, maybe moral strength). Then she moves to the physical. There has to be a sensuousness. He has to be a good kisser too. Nice smile. Warm eyes. Also, says she, I don’t think there’s anything to this. It’s just a personal thing for me. He has to be white. You know? I couldn’t imagine myself with a black man. I could never be like Heidi Klum. I don’t see how it could ever work. For me. She picks up some slivers of mango and chews. After she swallows:

How about you?

Huh?

How about you? Would you ever have sex with a black woman?

I stuff my mouth with pad thai to keep deformed things from tumbling out.

I mean, it’s not like I’m prejudiced or anything. If two people, whatever their race, black, white, purple, blue, if they want to have sex, hey, go ahead. It’s all right by me. But I wouldn’t want to do that. It’s a personal preference thing. Know what I’m saying?

I don’t know if I know what she’s saying, but I do know what I’m feeling. It’s a cold silver feeling of detachment, as if a hook has caught me through the mouth and the line has snapped taut and jerked me out of the water so I’m dangling above the surface, eyes bulging, disoriented, flapping and desperate for air, twirling on the end of the line. I stare across the cartons of food at Liane with blanket falling away from her shoulders. She looks anemic. Her skin looks thin as paper, thin enough I could light it with a match and its ashes would blow away in the resulting updraft.

I need my shirt, I say.

If you’re cold, I can get you a sweater or a blanket, she says.

No, I need my shirt.

She scowls, probably thinking I’m childish and possessive. While she pulls it off, I paw around in the swatches of cloth for my socks and underwear. She stands naked in the middle of the room, holding out the shirt, and I look up at her from my kneeling position on the floor and I know then that the spell is broken. I should be laid low by her beauty. I should be blinded by her radiance. Instead, I feel like the farm hand in a Brothers Grimm story who spends a night in the woods with a mysterious seductress and awakes in the morning to discover that lying beside him is a toothless hag.

What’s wrong? she says.

I pull on my pants. Nothing.

Nothing?

I take the shirt from her. Nothing. I have to go is all.

Go? You said you could stay all evening, all night if need be.

I mumble a string of excuses, none of them any good. I don’t care. My excuses don’t have to be convincing. I tell her I’m feeling claustrophobic and need to get outside under the stars, I’m feeling short of breath and need to draw in the fresh air, I’m feeling dizzy and need solid ground beneath my feet. Not heaps of this sewing shit. Not the cloying scent of Liane’s perfume. And not the walls of a small apartment closing in around my head.

It amazes me how, in an instant, the world can flip on its head or, in my case, how a world already flipped on its head can right itself. When I first met Liane, everything around her, everything she touched, everything she looked at, all of it reflected a brilliant and dazzling light, and everything around me seemed dark and dull by comparison. I wanted to move myself into her proximity so I could be brilliant and dazzling too. Maybe if I got close enough to her, so close I occupied the same space, crawled inside her skin, then I could learn the secret of a brilliant and dazzling life. But my wish exploded in my eyes like the flash bulb in a camera and left me more clumsy and helpless than if I’d stayed in the darkness.

Leaving Liane’s apartment, it’s early enough in the evening that I could take public transit home, but I prefer to walk. I need to clear my mind. I take the same route I took on Hallowe’en, even hopping the fence at the cemetery, though without injuring myself. Half way to the eastern gate my cell phone rings and I see on call display that Liane is trying to reach me. I don’t answer. I have no desire to speak to her. I wonder if this has ever happened to her before. Undoubtedly, it’s a rare thing in Liane’s experience to stab a lover with a sewing needle as she’s about to consummate the relationship, but I suspect it’s rarer for Liane to find herself in the position of pursuer. I wonder if Liane has ever stepped from the passive. I wonder if she has ever needed to step from the passive. I expect I’ve jolted her awake.

Hopping the fence on the east side of the cemetery, I cross Beecroft and go down to the subway station. The rumble of the train sways me from side to side and sets me at ease. Things feel right. For weeks now everything has felt upended, but now things feel right. Two stops later, I find myself walking up the hill towards the house and feeling optimistic. The optimism follows me to the basement where I stand by the roll-away bed and take off my shirt. It stinks of Liane’s sweat so I hurl it into the washing machine and douse it in liquid detergent. I’ll put it through the wash later, but first I need a shower. I need to get rid of the stink. It’s on my skin; it’s even in my armpits. The hot water feels good. I let it soothe the skin around the tiny puncture wound in my back. I work the shampoo into a good lather then soak my head. I do the same with the soap on my armpits and crotch. Time for a good cleansing. I do it all again and watch the suds swirl between my feet and down the drain. By the time I’m finished, the bathroom is steamy so I can’t see myself in the mirror or dry myself properly. Wrapping a towel around my waist, I throw open the door to let in a draft of cooler air, then I wipe down the mirror and give myself a decent shave. The beard has grown out by a centimeter, mostly dark but with flecks of grey here and there. One day I may look distinguished like Shaw or even rugged like Hemmingway, but for the time being my mottled look has got to go. The scab has come off, so all the skin underneath the beard is smooth and pink.

When I’m finished, I walk into the bedroom, bare-footed and bare-chested, wet-haired and towel-skirted, shining and smooth and smiling, and there I present myself to Giselle who lies propped on the bed reading the review copy of a colleague’s latest effort, the tale of a paranormal love affair or sex in the seventh dimension or psychic bikers from hell or god-knows-what-shit these people dream up. I smile a smile much like the smile I smiled when I proposed to Giselle. There’s something about the way she looks up from her reading and gazes at me, a warmth in her eyes that I haven’t seen there for months, that returns me to those early days before we were married. I must look ridiculous to her, at least when compared to the hard-edged looks of a CK underwear model, me with my soft pink belly flab and knobbly knees and flaccid triceps. And yet she looks at me with love in her eyes.

I was thinking—

She smiles at me, not smug, but wise. I wonder if she knows more.

Maybe I should sleep here with you tonight.

Just tonight? Or every night?

Every night.

She sets down the book and folds her arms across her lap.

Well now, she says. In all of this, there’s only one thing that you and I have known for certain, and that’s that I love you.

The towel comes loose and drops to the floor. Except for the slippers on my feet, I’m standing naked before Giselle. She continues to talk as if nothing has happened.

But you seem confused, like you don’t know what you feel. How do I know tomorrow you won’t change your mind again?

It’s gotten cold outside and there’s a wooing sound under the soffits. Somehow the cold has penetrated into the bedroom and my scrotum has shriveled to the size and texture of a walnut.

I don’t think we should be in a hurry, she says. Why don’t you put on your pajamas and go downstairs? We can talk about it in the morning.

Where has the crazy desperate Giselle gone? Where has this strong and self-respecting woman come from? This is the woman I married, the one I fell in love with, and although I am about to be denied, this is the woman I prefer. Note that I use the word prefer instead of the word desire. Although I do find her desirable, what I need now are softer words that express a gentle respect: this is a woman I could spend the rest of my life with. How strangely things turn. As I step to her side and lean to kiss her on the forehead, I feel silly, me in my slippers and nothing else, me dangling shriveled. I shuffle away and downstairs to the basement. There, I turn on the washing machine and as it swishes and shakes and groans, I lie back on the roll-away bed and fall asleep.

19. THE VIOLENCE OF PHOTOSHOP

DESPITE THE UNCOMFORTABLE bed, and the furnace nearby with its klanks and kerfuffles, I sleep well through the night. So well, in fact, that I don’t wake up in darkness as I usually do, but in a brilliant morning light that streams through the basement windows and reflects from the washer and dryer. Upstairs and to the right, the other three make klanks and kerfuffles all their own, with a skillet on the stovetop and plates laid out on the table and a toaster popping and a coffee maker dripping into its Pyrex® pot. I join them in my slippers and bathrobe and everything feels right. Katrine is dressy casual, breezy chatter, excited about her day and obviously in love. Griff is baggy sweats, dressed down for the final day of his expulsion, balancing a plate on the flat part of his cast as he stands in front of the open fridge wondering what else he can eat while he waits for his grandparents to arrive and take him on whatever outing they have planned for him. Nobody cares where he goes as long as it’s far away from trouble. As tough as he likes to seem and as annoyed as he likes to appear at the prospect of a day with his grandparents, we sense in him relief. There’s no need for pretending, for posturing, for strutting, not while he’s with his grandparents. Giselle is like me, slippers and bathrobe. We kiss beside the sink, not a perfunctory domestic morning-breath bleary-eyed please-clean-the-toilet-and-walk-the-dog kind of kiss, but a real kiss, the sort of kiss that takes time for looking into each other’s eyes, for holding each other close, and for acknowledging the right of each to impinge irrevocably upon the other’s life. The kids know something has changed. They can see it in the way the anger has dissipated from my shoulders and the hurt has melted from their mother’s eyes. They hear it in a laughter that percolates below our words. And they feel it in the way an air of forgiveness envelopes everything. The change in me effects a change in Giselle and that in turn translates to the children who are relaxed, no longer afraid their world will fall to pieces.

After breakfast and after the children have left, I begin my migration from the basement to the bedroom. I gather up my socks and underwear and I clomp upstairs to the bedroom where I put them away in their proper drawers, then downstairs for more: for pants and shirts and toiletries and books and magazines. I pull the sheets from the bed and throw them in the washing machine, then fold up the roll-away and stow it in its corner behind the furnace. When I go back upstairs, Giselle is waiting for me in lingerie.

I’m assuming you won’t object, says she.

You’re a good assumer, says I.

She wears white, silk or satin (I can’t tell the difference), something with a sheen that’s smooth and slippery to the touch. There are three pieces: pants, a top with string straps over the shoulders, and a kind of jacket with lace around the collar and a plunging V neck. We kiss and she feels me stiffen beneath my bathrobe. She removes the silk belt from around her waist and wraps it around my genitals, tying a flouncy bow that hangs down on either side like Goofy’s ears with a long nose in between. Pulling on the ears, Giselle draws me to the bed and we make love. It isn’t urgent. It isn’t desperate. It isn’t angry or insecure. Instead, it’s gentle and drawn out. We play through the whole morning and then share lunch in bed. Giselle says I love you but I don’t return a knee-jerk I love you too and Giselle doesn’t press me. It would be easy to fall into our old routines, but what would be the point? If they didn’t work before, they’re not going to work any better now. Who was it said the unexamined life isn’t worth living? I’d say something similar: the unexamined marriage isn’t worth keeping. It makes no sense for me to say I love you too when I have no idea what I feel. Certainly, it’s not the clear love that Giselle feels for me. I feel something, but it’s murky, like water after the riverbed has been stirred up; it will take time for the silt to settle.

As we nibble on our lunch, the inevitable question arises: Tell me, Elton, why the sudden change of heart?

I stop chewing my food. I wasn’t prepared for this. Do you remember when you were a kid and some well-intentioned grown-up told you that lying is wrong? Or worse yet, that lying is a sin? It’s at moments like this when you realize that your childhood mentors were a bunch of boneheads. The last thing Giselle needs from me now is the true tale of how I found myself naked with a condom on my prick preparing to nail Gorgeous Young White Woman when an unexpected insight revealed to me the error of my ways. Instead, she needs to hear from me a few simple platitudes which, however true in their own way, neatly conceal the hard facts of the matter. The only problem with uttering a few simple platitudes is that I’m not a platitudinous person. Platitudes require a gooey, syrupy, sentimental language that eludes me. It reminds me of a time in grade five when Mrs. Dempster gave the kids an in-class writing assignment: imagine you’re a blade of grass pushing up through the last of the snow in springtime. I couldn’t think of anything to write. Mrs. Dempster knelt beside me and asked what was wrong. She was so pretty and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that her assignment was a giant platt of bullshit. If she had asked me to imagine that I’m walking through a forest, carrying a machete, and stumble upon a troll who guards the bridge, and I slay the troll and write a warning on the side of the bridge in the troll’s blood, then I would have had no problem completing the assignment. But ask me to identify with a blade of grass that can’t move from its place and can only poke away at the snow? Not bloody likely. I guess with the blade and the poking there was masculine imagery in the assignment, but I was only ten at the time and didn’t have a grasp of phallic symbolism. I didn’t start in on that kind of grasping until I was eleven. It’s going to be a challenge to offer the kind of lie Giselle needs to hear from me.

Working in my favour is something known as POD which could stand for Pain Of Death or Print On Demand but, in this instance, stands for Power Of Denial, as in never underestimate the ~. At this point I refer you to earlier comments concerning the astonishing power of testicles to render the human male thoroughly stupid. What is more remarkable is that women are blessed with a complementary stupidity. When they are alone and can consider the matter objectively, or when they gather in groups and share their stories, they know well enough the stupidity of men and they acknowledge it freely, but when singly they come face to face with a man, they lose all memory of the stupidities they have suffered and fall prey to their innate power of denial. POD may be an evolved trait essential to human reproduction. Even now Giselle sits in its thrall and lets me crawl between her thighs. She has no idea how close I came to tossing our marriage into the garbage bin (and she never will). She thinks I’m a decent enough man who got a little confused, who spent too much time in pubs drinking beer and watching hockey games, who wandered through the streets late at night, lost in his own thoughts and hopping graveyard fences, who got involved in an environmental group so he could feel part of a larger purpose. As for the rest of it, she’ll deny to herself even the possibility that I was walking on such a path. That’s how power of denial works to complement masculine stupidity and to save countless marriages.

But there has to be more to this change of heart, doesn’t there? Otherwise the most that can be said for me is that when I realized my lover was a twit, I went running back to my wife so I could safeguard a steady supply of sex. But I have to be better than that, don’t I? It feels to me that I’m better than that, but I can’t put the why of it into words. I know I’m back in Giselle’s arms for more than just sex. Even in the sex there’s more than a simple sharing of our bodies. When she touches me, the merest brush of a finger over my abdomen sets my whole body on fire. I can’t explain it and it has never happened with anyone else. That fact alone must mean something. She sits before me now, smiling at me, and even in the act of smiling, she can see more than the simple body in front of her on the bed. I know she can. I can see it in her eyes. She knows me deeply, maybe in a way that I’m too selfish and too stupid to understand. And in knowing me deeply, she holds me safe. Maybe the more is in being known and in feeling safe in being known.

As I’m dressing, the phone rings. I worry that maybe Liane is incensed enough to call me on the land line instead of using my cell phone. Giselle answers the phone and there’s an Uh-huh and a Just a minute please before she enters the bedroom and passes the phone to me. I mouth Who is it? but she shrugs and walks away.

Hello?

Elton. It’s Pastor Rick, but his voice isn’t the put-on voice of an amiable pastoral chat; it’s the angry voice of a fire-and-brimstone dressing down. Elton, I thought I told you to treat her with respect.

Hi, uh, Rick—

I’ve had a couple calls, one last night and another this morning. I’ve had a couple calls from a young woman who’s distraught and puzzled. Did I not tell you? Was it not the last thing I said to you? How you’ve got to treat her with respect? Did I not?

Yeah, I—

And she tells me you walked out on her mid-sentence. Poof. Vanished. No explanation. No nothing.

Something like that.

And you’ve no thought to how that makes her feel?

Why don’t we get together for a chat?

Was that your wife who answered? Is that what’s going on here? Liane’s just a cheap affair to you? Geez, Elton, you’re not the man I thought you were.

Let’s do this in person.

Fine. My vestry at seven.

Rick’s phone call puts me off my writing for the afternoon. It’s impossible for me to focus. I keep rolling Rick’s soap opera assumptions around inside my head, thinking of rebuttals, justifications, arguments, corrections, parry and thrusts, dodge and burns. I wonder if Rick’s vestry will end up being the Bikini Atoll of my flirtation with Liane: I’ve escaped the explosion, but when I sit in that ludicrous chair of his, I’ll suffer aftershocks and radiation sickness. However, Rick’s voice isn’t the only thing to put me off my afternoon. There’s also a call from Feinman. I tell Sol that if he calls again I’ll apply for a restraining order. He says not to bother; he’ll get the first jab in; he’s just calling to tell me he plans to screw me over but proper, buddy-boy. I call him an elevator boob fetishist and hang up, wondering who the hell in the third millennium calls people buddy-boy. What really puts me off my writing, more than the calls from Rick and Feinman, is the glimpse I get out the front window of a white Dodge Charger® cruising past our house. It gives me a bad feeling. It fills me with dread. The dread I feel is not for myself, but something more generalized, a feeling that at the foundation of everything there lies an unsearchable instability. The great pyramid of Cheops has stood for thousands of years, but only by chance, because the cornerstone, a monumental block on which everything else depends, is cracked through the centre and a feather stroke at the precise angle is all it would take to crumble the whole structure to dust. That is how I feel when the Dodge Charger® moves on down the hill and out of sight. I try my best to write. I try to imagine alien worlds. I try to imagine creatures with a bizarre physiognomy, creatures that swim like fish in magma through the planet’s core and have heat-resistant scales, and other creatures that can soar beyond the stratosphere and have evolved a collective vision that turns all their eyes into a single powerful telescope that can see into the furthest reaches of the universe. But all my thoughts fall flat.

There’s a plan floating around the house that we should sit down to a proper family dinner. That’s Giselle’s plan but, as happens more often than not, circumstances thwart her plan. Charles calls to say that Griff will be spending dinner with them. As soon as the lasagna is heaped on Katrine’s plate, she retreats to her room to chat via webcam with her new boyfriend. That leaves Giselle and me to face each other across the kitchen table while the dog crunches on kibbles at our feet. Giselle complains that when she was growing up, dinner was a sacred time for all the members of the family to sit down together and share their day. Nowadays everybody’s too busy with hyperstructured lives and a million distractions; we never get to sit for family time. I tell her she sounds old. I tell her a hazy nostalgia has infected her brain. As I recall it, Giselle’s household was a whirlwind of parishioners and friends and extended family. There were large boisterous gatherings and comings and goings and laughter and singing and even shouting matches, but there was rarely intimate conversation. I expect she can count on the fingers of one hand the times her mother sat her down at the dinner table and said, Now tell me about your day, honey. But those were the precious times and the ones she remembers most acutely. My experience of family dinner time is the opposite. It was dominated by my father’s severe and pathological demand for silence while we ate. He said the silence aided in digestion which is ironic given that it spawned an ulcer. Although we had family dinners almost every night of the week, these were never times of intimate exchange. Lawson and I would give a solemn thanks to whatever deity we chose to acknowledge so long as it was a male deity and sufficiently invisible that it would let us go about our daily affairs with a minimum of interference, then after the amen, we would chew each bite the requisite number of times and, when our plates were empty and we hadn’t left any food behind which could otherwise be packaged and shipped to starving children in India, we would excuse ourselves from the table, slide back our chairs, and raise absolute hell through the rest of the neighbourhood until bedtime. We were the Pierce demons. That’s what Mrs. Drake called us and the name stuck. Giselle’s wish that we all sit together for a proper family meal has no pleasant associations for me and I’m happy to plough through her lasagna and wash it down with five large gulps of water.

I have to meet with pastor Rick, I say.

How come?

Dunno. She gives me her bullshit look so I have to come up with more. Stuff about ECO.

Can’t he tell you on the phone?

Naw. It’s landlord and tenant stuff. He’s not happy with the way ECO’s using the building. Wants to show me stuff.

I hope that is the last lie I’ll ever have to tell Giselle.

* * * * *

If memory serves me (although I can’t be sure), I never make it to my appointment with Rick at his vestry. Some things I can remember with clarity. I can remember wiping the corners of my mouth with a serviette and setting the crumpled paper on my dirty plate. I can remember smiling at Giselle and giving her a kiss good-bye. I’m not sure if I get there by car or by subway, but I suspect it’s by subway because I can remember a cold wind rushing up the hill from Hoggs Hollow and I can remember the man I saw before, the man hawking his reading list for Black History Month. He only stands at the entrance to subway stations, so it must be true that I take the subway. He recognizes me. And why shouldn’t he since I’m the guy who created all the fuss two or three weeks ago when they were going to throw George onto the street? I remember something else too: a pair of eyes staring down at me. The eyes belong to the silver-haired woman who stands next to her faux-marble desk, hand poised above the desk, holding an important document. The woman stands nearly eight metres tall above the southeast corner of the condo excavation. The woman is successful, competent, a little too perfect to be interested in a man like me. Such is the violence of Photoshop®. The document she holds is probably a statement of claim alleging interference with economic relations, breach of contract, libel and slander, media chicanery, evil thoughts, sheer nonsense. In this wind, I imagine her skirt blowing up to reveal varicose veins, maybe a colostomy bag, she’s not so glamorous underneath. I see the light from the vestry window but it’s faint compared to the light that shines up from the woman’s feet and illuminates her whole body. I approach the giant poster and wonder if it’s possible to manipulate the light the way children hiding under the bedcovers can wiggle a flashlight to play with the red of blood in their faces and the dark hollows of their sinus cavities. I’d like to do that with this woman, get at some of the stuff below the flesh, pierce the airbrushed surface. I imagine that she stares down at me in judgment. She thinks I have no right to be so sanctimonious about her looks when I’ve been carrying on as I have. You know what they say about judgment and casting the first stone and all that. I admire the line of her eyebrows, the way it rises with the nose and arches over the eye sockets to produce a haughty expression, as if she stands above me, detached from the moral squalor of an ordinary suburban life. She must know something I don’t.

Standing at her feet, I face the entrance to the cavern formed of plywood and scaffolding that surrounds the construction site. As before, the path along the sidewalk lies in darkness. It looks as if they’ve rigged a series of wire-covered bulbs and conduit but they haven’t got it attached to a power source yet or maybe they have but have forgotten to switch it on. A wind whistles through the boards and rattles a few of the panels. I wonder if George is in there, huddled in the concave behind the fire hydrant. With the wind, it’s going to get fiercely cold tonight. I pass underneath the woman’s feet and walk towards the sheltered fire hydrant. I can hear movement ahead and I can see the indistinct outline of a dark form approaching.

George? You okay?

Elton? It’s a man’s voice but it doesn’t sound like George. Elton Pierce?

Yeah?

I have a message for you.

Out here?

Yeah, out here.

I hear a whistling sound.

I hear a crunching sound.

I see a flash of light exploding in my head.

I feel a pain like none I’ve ever felt, as if every cell in my brain has been stretched on its own rack, ten billion tiny screams cascading to a roar.

The last sensation I remember as I crumple to the ground is the taste of blood sloshing around in my mouth and down the back of my throat along with a couple of my teeth—oh yes, and a vibration at my hip, my cell phone buzzing.

Is that you, Liane?

Is that you, Giselle?

20. EXPOSURE

I NEED TO revise my novel, or at least a part of it, the part about hypoanimatic chambers. The idea is that if we ever want to travel between the stars, we’ll have to give up our fantasies about warp drives and portals and wormholes, and instead we’ll have to revisit notions that have fallen out of fashion, notions like patience and solitude and silence. If we are realistic about interstellar travel, then we have to confront the likelihood that we will never attain a significant fraction of light speed. That means that if a man is to see both the beginning and the end of his journey, then he must spend most of it in a state of absolute stasis. He must, in effect, be dead. I tried to write about this absolute stasis, this living death; I tried to give it depth; I tried to perform the sleight-of-hand that science fiction writers do when they trick their readers into believing that something that has never existed is as real as the book they hold in their hands. But in light of recent experience, I see that I failed to perform this sleight-of-hand and need to revise my story.

What I described in my novel is nothing like the living death I experienced for real. I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t held in suspended animation or freeze dried or given voodoo drugs extracted from poisonous toads in the Amazon rainforest. But I was in a coma and I stayed that way for days and none of the doctors could offer a credible prognosis. For all they knew, I might descend into a vegetative state and lie on my hospital bed to rot with a feeding tube in my stomach until such time as Giselle and the kids made their peace, removed the tube and buried my remains in York Cemetery with my English headstone lined up alongside all those in Cyrillic and Mandarin and Arabic. The state I described in my novel (what I call the hypoanimatic slumber to give it a technical ring) was supposed to be the utter absence of consciousness, a hollow nothing, the kind of emptiness one can find in that lonely space midway between two stars. But the state I experienced in the hospital was far from an emptiness. There were moments that approached emptiness, like the times I was under anaesthetic during maxillofacial surgery to reconstruct my lower jaw and my right eye socket. But most of it was a drifting in and out, a vague awareness of awareness, a lurking on the edge of consciousness. There were times when I couldn’t see anything but was aware of an indistinct murmuring in the background, as if ghosts were trying to tell me secrets but couldn’t find their mouths. There were other times when I saw things that would rival the visions of St. Anthony, things so fantastic they couldn’t have been real, and yet, because I was aware of these things, I was also aware of the I that was seeing them, and that was a reassurance. Then there was the pain. Lurking behind every other awareness was an awareness of pain.

Giselle tells me I was in a coma for seven days and then I woke up, although I have no perception of crossing a distinct threshold from unconsciousness to a full awareness. Instead, I experienced it as a gradual ascent, like a diver rising through the waters. In part, the blurring of boundaries was the result of powerful painkillers. Even now I experience a dull ache in my jaw and right side of the head, and it’s punctuated by blistering headaches that visit me at least once a day. The painkillers give everything a hazy quality which I would describe as ethereal if it weren’t that my angels of mercy are dressed in a pukey green/blue instead of the usual white. A fair number of visitors have come and gone, but a world suffused in haziness gives their visits an odd quality, as if they belong to a medieval pageant or the chorus of a Greek tragedy where the choristers have forgotten important lines and mumble banalities instead.

I rely on Giselle to keep track of my visitors. This becomes more important as I grow to suspect that not all my visitors are real. It’s Giselle who points this out to me when I tell her my father came to pay his respects. He arrived in the evening after Giselle had gone home. That in itself should have tipped me off, because visiting hours were over and if my father had been real, the nurses would have told him to leave. Clearly it was my father. I recognized the pasted-down and reddish hair with the precise part along the side, the trimmed mustache, the formal clothes that made him look like a cross between a bellhop and a bond trader. But there was something different about him, something more relaxed. He sat beside me. He even took my hand. Ah, now I remember, the thing that was so different: he was smiling at me. He said he was delighted that I have moved beyond anger and he hoped that I’ll go further.

What could be further than anger? I remember asking.

His answer surprised me. You were angry at a man who doesn’t exist.

Of course you don’t exist. You’re dead.

That’s not what I mean. You were angry at a work of fiction.

What are you talking about?

You had no idea who I was. So you invented someone to be angry at. You didn’t remember me because you wanted to remember your father; you remembered me because you needed to be angry.

That’s not true.

And now that you don’t need to be angry anymore, maybe it’s time you acknowledged a different father.

Different like how?

I was warmer than you remember.

You were?

I gave a damn about things.

You did?

I loved your mother.

Oh.

There was a lot between us you never saw.

What good is love if you never show it?

How could you ever see it if you were angry all the time?

Why should I listen to you? You’re not even real.

I’m as real to you as your own children.

Is that a sly dig?

It’s whatever you want.

Fuck off.

See? See what I mean? The anger’s never far away.

So went the visit, me trying to pierce the veil between this weird half-lit world of dreams and the bright glare of consciousness, him trying to pierce a veil of a different sort.

I remember other visitors too, and Giselle confirms that these were real. The most problematic of these was my mother. Her visit wasn’t problematic for me because I was asleep most of the time. It was problematic for Giselle. My mom took the train in from Ottawa and announced that she was going to stay with Giselle to help out with the kids. She must have had a notion that the kids were still eight and ten. She presented herself on the front porch while Giselle was at the hospital amusing me by reading the draft of a story she had finished the day before. When the door opened, Mom found herself facing a big black kid in a muscle shirt and baggy jeans. Even though he said Hi Grandma, she asked, Who are you? She assumed Grandma was what they called elderly white women. I guess my mom had entertained a fantasy of cooking and cleaning and coddling young grandchildren in their grief and bewilderment. What she got was a fifteen year old necking with her new boyfriend on the living room sofa, and a wannabe rapper talking in ways she could barely understand. She came to the hospital for one hour one morning when we shared a conversation of pleasantries and silences. I had never seen her look so old. Afterwards, Giselle drove her to the train station and, upon her return to Ottawa, she restricted her concern to occasional phone calls which were just as heavy with pleasantries and silences.

Mona visited three times. The first time, I was still in a coma, and Giselle tells me that when Mona saw me lying there with my jaw wired shut and tubes up my nose, she turned into a blubbering mass of jelly. Giselle was surprised at how free Mona was in sharing her feelings for me. He’s such a good man. I’ve always been envious of you, finding such a good man. He’s always been there for me, standing up for me. Such a good man.

Talking to Mona, Giselle discovered two things: the first is that Mona loves me, and the second is that Giselle has nothing to fear from Mona. On Mona’s second visit, I was conscious but my recollection of it is poor. We spoke, or rather, she spoke and I listened; I scribbled notes to communicate because I still hadn’t the use of my jaw. The floor around my bed had become littered with one-word scrawls torn off a courtesy pad from a real estate agent: No. Fine. OK. Good. Congrats. She said something about quitting Feinman’s. I can’t remember what precipitated the decision. Maybe me. Maybe news of the assault. Maybe Feinman’s delight when he heard the news. Maybe Feinman’s utter absence of compassion. She decided he was a monster and so she quit.

On the third visit, I still hadn’t the use of my jaw. I rose from my sleep to the sound of a conversation between Mona and Giselle. There was laughter and bright words. I’ve witnessed in Giselle a transformation from a defensive guardian who tried enclosing me in a possessive bubble to a relaxed and open woman who feels free enough to release me. Admittedly, that’s easier to do when I’m lying immobile, an IV needle stuck into the top of my hand, a halo bolted in place to keep me from dislodging all the puzzle pieces of my head, a tube stuck up my nose, lips dried and cracked and useless. It’s easier for her to be moved by pity and to adopt a magnanimous attitude when I’m stuck here, silent, and brain baffled with painkillers. But I wonder if this will continue when I’m recovered and walking on my own. Will Giselle feel so relaxed in six months if I choose to meet Mona alone for lunch?

The children visit too. Katrine finds it easy to hop on the subway after school, but Griff has to walk home from his school and wait for Giselle to drive him. For both, it’s a matter of duty; Giselle has told them they have to visit their father. Katrine is polite, but I can tell by the way she sighs and stares out the window that she’d rather be with her new boyfriend. Griff doesn’t try to be polite and says outright that he’s bored. Talking across me, Giselle scolds him, saying that if he’s bored, then imagine what it must be like to be me, unable to hold a book in my hand for any length of time, unable to concentrate, plagued by headaches. At least he can watch TV, Griff says. This is true, but I find it more numbing than Percocet to watch the daily parade of vapid pundits and fifteen-second shills. People think they’re doing me a favour by switching on the set, then return later to find it off and switch it on again, assuming that it must have switched off by itself. I don’t begrudge Griff his blunt words. I want to tell him it’s okay; I understand why a thirteen-year-old boy would find a hospital visit boring; but my cramped hand and stolen pad can’t find the right words.

In the evenings, after all the visitors have left me alone with my thoughts, it occurs to me I should write a letter to Giselle, or to the whole family, or to everyone I’ve ever known. Each evening it goes the same way. Pricked by guilt, I resolve to write my letter, then drifting into that netherworld between wakefulness and sleep, I lose myself in a debate about what kind of a letter it should be. Should I make it apologetic? Confessional? Explanatory? Lyrical? Should I write a love letter? Should I make promises? Undertake a quest? Seek atonement? But as the possibilities float through my mind and as the first words of the first sentence present themselves to me, the world fades from view and I sink like a stone into the ocean. And so I write nothing until the next evening when I write nothing all over again.

Rick visits, and while officially it’s a pastoral visit, he won’t leave me alone about the way I ran out on Liane. I’m sure that on most visits he’s a good listener, but I’m sure too that on most visits the patients can talk. It starts innocuously enough with him picking up the chart from the end of my bed and reading bits of it aloud, things about blunt force trauma to the head and surgery and medication. He fills the room with his voice and it’s nearly five minutes before he notices that I haven’t spoken.

Later, I scribble.

What’s this?

Don’t assume what UDK.

What’s this?

That’s when Giselle returns from the bathroom or the cafeteria or the nursing station or wherever the hell she’s gone. She and Rick greet one another across the bed, shaking hands above the lump in the linen that signals the location of my catheterized penis. Rick had no idea the Giselle Pierce, author of his daughters’ favourite novels, was black (or should he say woman of colour? hard to know what to say these days), and you can see the surprise in the rise of his eyebrows. For her part, Giselle had no idea a priest could be good-looking and fit, and she mirrors the rise of his eyebrows. There’s the usual chit-chat beginning with Giselle’s well-rehearsed account of things: the injuries and police speculation about how they were inflicted, the surgeries and medical speculation about how I’ll heal, rounded out with a lament for my inability to speak. Embarrassed, Rick draws his visit to a close with the usual platitudes, not the mindless ones of the conservative televangelist, but the carefully constructed ones of the liberal seminary. The brilliant thing about wearing a halo and having your jaw wired shut is that you can mumble all sorts of things that commit you to nothing while giving your listeners the freedom to assume you agree with them. So, with pastor Rick, when he offers the promise to pray for me, I mumble a response and give up a glistening eye which could be interpreted equally as an expression of gratitude or as a shout of indignation. In truth, it may be both.

Giselle’s parents visit, and Jermaine and Roselea, and T. J. with his cast and Ashley. If pastor Rick seemed embarrassed about his promise to pray for me, Charles is unabashed. With all the family gathered around the bed, Charles stands at my feet, arms raised over his head, walking stick held high like the staff of Moses, and he gives out a great roaring prayer that summons down all the healing powers of God. Then he has everyone gather at the head of the bed and extend their arms almost until they’re touching my halo and the whole family channels the healing power of Jesus into my head. This is another instance when my mumbling glued-shut jaw comes in handy. I don’t believe any of this nonsense about miracles and a personal Jesus, so if my jaw were free to move, I’m certain something inappropriate would tumble out. Nevertheless, for all my unbelief, there is something healing about the ritual, though perhaps not in the way Charles intended. Beneath this laying on of hands I feel strangely at ease. I look at all the shining faces, at Charles and Dorothy, Jermaine and Roselea, Griff and T. J., Katrine and Ashley, and most especially Giselle, and I know I belong to them, and they belong to me. There is, indeed, healing in those hands.

Early in my hospitalization I had a visit from Gwen and another constable and their note pads. They came into the room dressed in their gun metal blue uniforms with their batons swishing against their thighs and they tried their best to interview me, but I was flying on Percocet® back then and could barely hold a pen. They expressed considerable interest in my cell phone and from that they developed a comprehensive list of suspects. Based on the hey fuckwad voice mail message, they put Bruno Genovesi at the top of their list. With Mona’s frequent calls and text messages, and with Genovesi’s reference to an advertising account, they used a process of triangulation to identify Sol Feinman as a viable suspect. Then, of course, there was Liane’s lst nt was 1dfl text message which raised the possibility of a jealous rival, which in turn led them to Luke Kidrun and the Rev. Dr. Richard A. Fellowes, B.A., M.Div., Th.D.

R? I scrawled.

Gwen rolled her eyes and told me not to be so naive; Rick was in this up to his eyeballs; why did I think he got divorced in the first place? To deflect attention from himself, Rick pointed the finger at George Griswold, and George ... well, George didn’t have much to contribute to the investigation that couldn’t be discovered more reliably from a video taken on a cold October night at, surprise, surprise, the scene of the assault. That took Gwen and her partner to two security guards in the employ of Bruno Genovesi. Oh yes, and there were some interesting photos on the cell phone too: a white Dodge Charger® and its driver, a character well known to the police and no one I would ever want to mess with, a man whose most recent accomplishment was five years (out in eighteen months) for aggravated assault which he served in Millhaven. His weapon of choice? A baseball bat.

Gwen laid it out for me: eight suspects, no leads. The best they could do was shake the tree and hope something fell out. That’s what they did. They got nothing.

Not knowing can be a challenge. I’ve decided there are two kinds of not knowing. There’s a mechanical kind of not knowing. I don’t know who did it. I don’t even know how they did it. Gwen says the police don’t even know what was used to strike me on the side of the head. Maybe a baseball bat. Maybe a tire iron. I scribble: I thot u guys had CSI types 2 figur out this stuff. She smiles and says those TV shows are science fiction. Mostly, police rely on horse sense. Following leads is like walking in a fog.

There’s also an emotional kind of not knowing. I’d like to know why this happened to me. It’s not as if a bolt of lightning struck me down. In the case of a lightning strike (and assuming I was a religious man), I could take it to my God in prayer and ask what place my suffering has in the grand order of His creation, yada, yada, yada. But it was a human being who caused this, so if I can’t answer the who or the how, then I’ll never know why. The motive will remain hidden. I want to know the motive. I would hate to think this was a random act. Even rational malevolence is better than indifferent randomness.

I think of the time when Jermaine took me aside and said there are some things I will never understand. Maybe he was speaking about more than the obvious.

With so much time to lie on my back and gaze at the ceiling, this not knowing gains traction in my brain, shoving out my other thoughts and setting in their place a single obsessive desire to know why. If I were mobile, I could defuse the obsessive thinking by going for a long walk or passing an evening in the pub with a pint of ale and a game on the big screen. But trapped like this, the thought ricochets from the inside of my skull, tearing through my brain like a piece of shrapnel.

I do achieve a sense of calm, but it comes from an unexpected quarter, not from the professionalism of the attending nurses, not from the soothing voice of Giselle who sits close to my head and reads aloud from a novel, and certainly not from the distracting arguments that Katrine and Griff carry on across my bed. It comes from a visit I could not have anticipated. Because it happens at about the same time as my father’s visit, I assume that it is just as unreal, but I am assured by the nurses that it is a real visit. I’m lying there on a dull afternoon. Giselle has gone home to make dinner for the kids. I’m heavily medicated and fading in and out. I open my eyes and there beside me, where Giselle sat earlier in the afternoon, is a woman’s form, a soft pink skirt and jacket, a smiling face, a matching hat.

Hello, says the woman.

I blink at the distorted blurry image, but can’t make out the face. I try to turn my head, which is impossible given the halo, so the blurriness is compounded by the fact that the image remains in my peripheral vision.

Lie still, says the woman.

I don’t recognize the voice. It has the same frail quality as my mother’s, as if the vocal chords are made from straw, but unlike my mother’s, this voice speaks with assurance. The woman notes that I can’t speak, but that’s no cause to worry since there is no law, either of Parliament or of nature, which says that two people have to carry on a lively conversation for there to be a meaningful exchange. Don’t you think? and she sets a hand on my bare arm. It’s the hand of an old woman, skin parched and white, blue veins spidering over the tendons. Rising from the chair, she speaks with a slow deliberation. We haven’t actually spoken before, she says, but we’ve exchanged glances from time to time on a Sunday morning at St. George. She leans into view and I see that it’s the elderly woman who always wears the pillbox hat, the one I presume can read my mind and disapproves of all she’s found there, the one who can sear a hole through my head with nothing more than the severity of her gaze. I reach for my pen but she settles her hand on mine and tells me not to worry about a thing. She releases her grip on my hand when she feels me release my grip on the pen.

She says: When I heard that you’d been hurt, well I just had to come and make sure you were okay. I heard you had a wife and children and I thought it would be just awful for them with you in here. And when I thought of what those awful people had done to you, it’s like I could feel the pain myself, just dreadful, just something dreadful. I had to see you. I had to be sure—you know—that you’re okay. The nurses tell me you’ll be just fine. Good as new. And I’m happy for your children. And for your wife. They need you.

She goes around to the end of the bed and stares at me straight on. You know, every time I see you ... She’s tearing up and it makes me feel awkward. You look so like Geoffrey. Uncanny, really. It’s been thirty years now since he passed. In a hospital bed like this. Though he wasn’t so lucky. You’ll do fine. The nurses said you’ll—It was a car wreck. He was the kind of man you just knew it’d be a car wreck. He was a good man, you know. And we had a good life together. Funny how I can say that now. How I realize when it’s all over. We had a good life. Of course, when we were living it, right in the middle of things, there were times—let me tell you—It’s not like Geoffrey was a saint. Even there, you kind of remind me of—ohhh don’t you be raising your arms like that. No objections allowed. I can tell. You didn’t deserve what was done to you. That’s for sure. But it’s like my mother used to say when she was warning me of Geoffrey: ‘Trouble goes where trouble is.’ Nobody’d’ve split your head open like that if you weren’t in trouble to begin with. One way or another.

And don’t you be trying to tell me otherwise. It’s not like I’m judging you. No more than I could judge Geoffrey. Lord knows, the worse he got, the more I loved him. But I do think you need to hear something. I suppose it would have been nice if someone had said the same thing to Geoffrey while he was still a young man. Then again, I don’t suppose it makes any difference, seeing as a car had something else important to say to him.

You see, Geoffrey enlisted in forty-three. Today, they’d say we were just kids, but back then people grew up so much faster. We were sweethearts and he promised he’d come home and he’d marry me and we’d have our life together. And he kept that promise. Mostly. I knew while he was away ...

A silence unfurls, then billows out to fill the room. The silence behaves like a vacuum, drawing in other sounds to fill the emptiness: the soft padding of crepe-soled shoes in the hallway, the scrape of drapery rings on the metal rail as a privacy curtain is pulled close in the next room, the hum of fluorescent lights at the threshold of hearing, gusts against the window pane and the low thrum of traffic beyond.

I never asked. He never volunteered. If I had pressed him, it would have driven us both mad. So I let it go. I don’t know. Maybe ‘forgive and forget’ is the sweater on back-to-front. Maybe you need forgetting first. I don’t know. What I do know is this: you’ve been whacked on the head, and you can’t open your mouth. I can’t think of a better opportunity.

When the woman leaves, I think to myself: What an odd lady. I don’t even know her name. I wonder if that will be one more thing I go through life not knowing. She seems to know plenty about me. That’s the thing about lying immobile in a hospital: you become naked in every sense. The nurse comes to change your catheter and you discover there’s no such thing as privacy. The police confiscate your cell phone and you no longer have secrets to call your own. An old lady comes around for a visit and you learn that the things you have lived are only borrowed from those who lived before. So you lie beneath the pale glare as I do now, wholly exposed, and you trust that people will treat you with fairness, or at least will do you the courtesy of suppressing their sniggering long enough to step out of earshot.