THE VIRGIN’S NOSE

by David Allan Barker

ISBN: 978-0-9869412-8-3

© David Allan Barker, 2014

ARS GRATIA ARTIS

1. DEATH OF A PUBLISHER

WHEN IGOR ENTERED Boris Panofsky’s office, it felt more like he was descending to a crypt than climbing to the pinnacle of a publishing empire. The famous shelves of signed first editions stood in a gloom. The only light came from a banker’s lamp on Panofsky’s desk. The great publisher sat beyond the lamp’s reach, shirt sleeves rolled past the elbows, back hunched so he teetered over the papers scattered across the desk. When Igor shuffled closer, he saw that the papers were covered in numbers. He had worked as Mr. Panofsky’s personal assistant for nearly twenty-five years and never once had he seen Mr. Panofsky pore over such papers. Usually, Mr. Panofsky set before himself papers filled with words:  large words, grandiose words, poetic words, wise words, words of every sort imaginable. It saddened Igor to see the great man reduced to bean-counting. But what choice did the man have? Only yesterday, he had declared that there was nothing for it but to rationalize (itself an interesting word) and so, straightening his bow tie and swilling a shot of single malt whiskey, Mr. Panofsky made the long walk to the accounting department and fired the bookkeeper.

“This is beneath me,” the old man muttered.

Igor shuffled to the faux-antique globe and cracked it open. He poured out three fingers of fifteen year old Balvenie and set the glass within the circle of light on his boss’s desk. The amber liquid refracted the light in rich and complex ways, no doubt mirroring the rich and complex effect it would have on Mr. Panofsky’s palette.

“Thank you, Igor.”

Boris took up the glass and leaned back in his pleather chair. He waved to the shelves which rose to the ceiling, then he waved to the palisades of books that ringed his desk.

“They tell me, Igor, that these are obsolete.”

The old man’s eyes grew moist. He drained the glass and asked for another. As Igor returned to the globe, the old man muttered something about those damned ebooks. “Everything’s changing so fast. A global swill bucket.  A race to the bottom. There was a time, Igor—and you’ve been with me long enough to remember it—there was a time when publishing was an esteemed enterprise. Now, any two-bit hack with a blog can publish something, even if it IS a load of crap.”

Igor set a fresh glass of Scotch by the edge of the desk and slid it to his boss. As Boris took up the glass, he pointed emphatically to the shelves closest to Igor.

“Take something.”

Igor hesitated, knowing their value to the old man.

“Go ahead.  Hell, I never read any of ‘em anyways. Too damned precious.”

Igor found a signed first edition of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. It was the biggest heaviest book he’d ever held. He opened the book to the inside cover and read the inscription:

My dear friend Bores,

All the best, DFW

Igor wondered if his boss had noticed the spelling mistake.

“There was a time…” Boris let his voice get loud, as was his habit after two drinks. “There was a time, my friend, when the book was a great thing. A source of strength. A symbol of empowerment. For the little people.  A rallying cry. A reason to hope. Now, every Tom, Dick and fricken Mary wants to be empowered. Water down a perfectly good symbol. Drink your Scotch neat, my friend. Drink your Scotch neat.” Boris raised his glass, but it was empty. He slammed the glass onto his desk and demanded another.

Igor left his new book on the corner of the desk and returned to the globe. With a third glass of Scotch in hand, Boris waved Igor around to his side of the desk.

“Come, let’s sing one of the old songs.” Boris wanted to sing Waltzing Matilda but Igor didn’t know that one. For him, the old songs were the folk songs of his native Romania. He had no idea who this Matilda was, but he was certain she was nothing compared to his Ivana.

After a couple verses, Waltzing Matilda came to a crashing halt. Boris had slammed his glass onto the desk and some of his beloved Scotch splashed onto the sheets of numbers. The old man scrambled to save his Scotch, holding the papers in a “U” above his open mouth and draining the amber fluid down his gullet. He smiled and declared that it’s a sin to waste good Scotch, then laid out the sheets to dry on his desk.

“You know, Igor,” the old man said, “I didn’t call you in so you could serve me Scotch all evening.”

“Of course not.” Igor picked up the copy of Infinite Jest. “You called me in to give me this.”

“Er, well, whatever.” Boris gave a lopsided smile. “Igor, I called you in to tell you this:  you’re fired.”

The two men stared at one another across the desk, Boris with his tall frame and haughty eyebrows, Igor with his dwarfish mien and hunched back. Igor thought of Ivana. Maybe she would leave him if he could no longer afford to buy her nice gifts. Who would bother with a man like him if he couldn’t also offer gifts? Igor wondered, too, at the abruptness of the announcement. Boris hadn’t couched his words in pleasant euphemisms. Instead, he had drunk himself to a place of courage. He had used the Scotch as a surrogate to say for him the words he was too cowardly to say for himself. Igor felt his panic and bewilderment transform into rage.

“Twenty-five years!” he shouted.

“Actually twenty-four and three quarters.”

“A long time. Half my life. I’ve given half my life to you and your publishing house.”

“Now Igor.”

“Don’t you ‘now Igor’ me.”

Igor’s voice rose to a scream. He felt the blood rush hot to his cheeks. He felt his heart thump loud in his chest. An energy seized his limbs and moved him like a man possessed. He dashed around the desk holding the great book high above his head. Boris tried to get up from his chair but stumbled for all the Scotch in his veins. Igor drew down the book upon the old man’s head and was amazed at how the body went limp and toppled onto the desk. The cheek lay flat against the scattered pages and the comatose eyes stared at the shelves of books.

“You bastard!” Igor screamed. Again, he slammed the book against the old man’s head, and again, and again, so many times he lost count. Blood flowed from under the head, clotting the hair and obscuring all the old man’s precious numbers. Igor took up his signed first edition of Infinite Jest even though it was spattered with blood. Panofsky was right. The old books were a source of empowerment. Feeling strong, Igor ran shuffling with his book into the night.

2. THE WORLD'S MOST BORING STORY

EXPLANATIONS FOLLOW NEW phenomena like tails follow dogs, or so Dean claimed as he did his loquacious best to pitch the idea of a symposium to the chair of the English Department. Dr. Fenton was a portly man twice Dean’s age who had a reputation for driving his underlings to the point of collapse then stepping in to assume credit for their toils. Dean hated Fenton the way an ant hates a dog that has dropped a turd on the ant hill—not the best comparison, to be sure, which might explain why Dean didn’t have tenure yet. Organizing a symposium might help. Even if Fenton took all the credit, enough members of the faculty knew how the game was rigged and resented it enough to ensure that Dean would at least receive credit through unofficial channels. Even if Dean received no credit at all—not even through unofficial channels—that wouldn’t matter to him so long as the symposium created the space for him to execute his plan—a plan of revenge against the inimitable Dr. Fenton.

“A symposium, eh?” Dr. Fenton leaned back in his pleather chair, fingers interlocked across his considerable gut.

On one corner of Fenton’s desk stood a small bust of Lord Byron. Dean entertained a momentary fantasy of using the statuary to bludgeon his superior until the old man’s brains were spattered across the shelves of books. But Dean restrained his violent impulse; it was crude and he would be caught. Besides, when he fingered the bust of Lord Byron, he discovered that it was a plastic bobblehead. Nobody ever died from a bobblehead bludgeoning.

“On what, pray tell?”  Fenton spoke with a smug condescension.

“The Really Long Jest, sir.”

Fenton stared at Dean with a blank expression.

“I see you’re familiar with it”

An obtuse joke, but surely a man of Fenton’s stature would be acquainted with The Really Long Jest.

“Details, Dean. Give me details.”

“Sir, does the Evelyn Cormack affair ring a bell?”

“The poor librarian?”

“Precisely.”

“The one who—”

“From the Nazi collection.”

“No!”  Fenton was incredulous.

“Yes!”

“A symposium on that piece?”

“Precisely.”

“That’s downright dangerous.”

“With all due respect, sir. No one ever built a reputation by playing it safe.”

“True enough.”

Dr. Fenton sucked thoughtfully on the end of a pen, then rested it in the thatch above his upper lip. Dean imagined himself rushing to Fenton’s side and with a swift stroke of his arm, mashing the pen up the man’s left nostril, piercing the cranium and lodging the pretentious writing implement in the man’s frontal lobe. If it didn’t kill the man, then surely it would lobotomize him.

“Whatever happened to the poor woman?”

“Still in an institution, sir.”

“Is she still—you know—”

“Sir?”

“Non compos mentis if you know what I mean.”

“I hear she spends all day staring at a blank wall.”

“A damn shame!” And Fenton shook his head.

“She has to wear an adult diaper.”

“Gehirn-tote geschichte.”

“Gehirn-tote geschichte.”

For a moment, the two men shared what might almost pass for camaraderie.

In 1942, British intelligence caught wind of a German plot code-named Gehirn-tote geschichte. Rumours and hearsay.  Nothing concrete. According to MI6, the German High Command had devoted considerable resources to the development of English language stories. Its aim was to produce a story utterly devoid of meaning. The technical challenges of such a project were enormous. We who live in the age of the internet often fail to appreciate that in 1942 a story with meaningless content was all but inconceivable. The chief barrier, then as now, was that even where a writer kept his mind utterly blank and produced a work of complete drivel, nevertheless his readers might read fresh meaning into the blank work, much as some people today see the Virgin Mary burnt onto a piece of toast.  How, then, to achieve a work of über pointlessness, a work both devoid of meaning and incapable of supporting meanings read into it by the reader?

The project was the brainchild of Goebbels. He had reasoned that an utterly pointless story would incapacitate its reader. It would be so mind-numbing that the reader would stare blankly at the pages in a permanent trance-state. Once the Germans developed their story, they planned to exploit contacts on the editorial board of The Times. Imagine! The sheer gall!  To distribute a story of unadulterated drivel in a newspaper! Such a thing had never been tried before.

Der Führer was delighted at the plan’s efficiency. Even if only two percent of the paper’s subscribers read the story, that would be enough to establish a viral effect. Imagine how it would proceed. Sir High Street would sit to breakfast with the Sunday Times, first reading of the Hun’s terrible progress through France as he slurped up his soft-boiled egg, then shifting to the Times Literary Supplement for something lighter to read with his toast. There, he would spy a curious tale, bland in its cadence and alluringly dull in its point of view. A few minutes later, Lady High Street would enter the room and discover her husband staring blankly at his teacup, unresponsive, as if he had suffered a stroke. Alarmed at first, our Lady High Street would cast about, then settle her gaze upon her husband’s hands still clutching The Times. She would wonder what was so bloody important that her husband continued to clutch it even after the intelligence had faded from his eyes like the light from an extinguished candle. She might then gaze at the story, as her husband had, and find herself likewise seduced by its subliminal deceit. Enter the maid and later the butler. In the afternoon, perhaps the nanny would stumble upon the stupefied quartet, followed by the older children. In the manner of dominoes, Goebbels’ dastardly story would bring down entire British households.

The plan was never executed, and after the first day of May, 1945, when Goebbels committed suicide, no one could say for certain if his crack team of storytellers had developed even a prototype of the Gehirn-tote geschichte. Rumours faded to wisps and the matter was forgotten until several years ago when an obscure New England college became the beneficiary of an estate. The late Fritz Unbelegterkopf had been a member of the faculty, a modest professor of linguistics who, when inebriated at Friday afternoon wine and cheese parties, told stories of his aunt who had served as a stenographer under Goebbels at the Ministry of Propaganda when the lunatic had first conceived of Operation Gehirn-tote geschichte. The aunt was so badly affected by the early drafts that, after Germany’s defeat, she spent most of her time filing her nails and chewing gum. Yes, Gehirn-tote geschichte was real, the old professor slurred. But the college had no evidence until Unbelegterkopf died.

Most of the late professor’s papers went to the German Studies Department to round out its Nazi collection. But the man earmarked one box for the English Department, sealing it with packing tape and labelling it with a bold warning: DO NOT OPEN. Dean had joined the faculty only that year and so was too junior to participate in the debates. To open; or not to open. That was the question.

Opinions ran the gamut, from the historical (was there sufficient evidence to suppose the Gehirn-tote geschichte was real?) to the military (since the Gehirn-tote geschichte had been developed as a weapon, was it properly a matter for study by literary scholars?) to the philosophical (what is the truth value of an imperative sentence?) to the legal (could the note affixed to the box be regarded as a codicil with the force of a testamentary document?).

As one might expect, the lawyers prevailed. The college would have continued unblemished in its long tradition of cover-your-ass scholarship if not for the intrepid Evelyn Cormack, a librarian renowned for her Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, who could no more leave newly received materials uncatalogued than Edith Piaf could sing love songs in Klingon. Staying late one Friday evening, Ms. Cormack sliced through the packing tape and began the painstaking process of logging each item in the library database. On Monday morning, a colleague discovered her sitting in a puddle of her own urine, eyes glazed to a milky white, and muttering meaningless platitudes to herself. It was fortunate for the college that the colleague had attended some of those wine and cheese parties when the drunken professor Unbelegterkopf told his tales of the Gehirn-tote geschichte. Could the tales be true? Daring not even a glance, the librarian stuffed all the papers back into the box and resealed it, storing the box in the darkest corner of the building.

Dean’s symposium was a ripping success. It had a certain cross-discipline cachet and drew academics from all around the globe. Perhaps it was inaccurate to call this event Dean’s symposium. Although Dean was the driving force behind the proceedings, Dr. Fenton took pains to make it his affair. He was worse than a plaid suit. Snatching the microphone from Dean on the first day, Fenton interrupted the welcome message with remarks of his own. Those of Dean’s colleagues who grasped the dynamics of the situation rolled their eyes and groaned but were surprised at Dean’s equanimity. He looked on with an almost beatific smile. Later, at the opening luncheon, when Fenton delivered a few off-the-cuff anecdotes that ran on for half an hour, Dean again surprised his colleagues by maintaining an implacable countenance.

As one would expect, Fenton delivered the opening paper, a piece on the provenance of the Really Long Jest, and effectively wrote himself into the account: it wasn’t the head librarian, but Fenton himself, who had discovered the poor Evelyn Cormack in her state of blethering discombobulation; it was Fenton who recognized the heinous work of the late Joseph Goebbels; it was Fenton who saved civilization as we know it from the viral ravages of the Gehirn-tote geschichte. Even then, Dean held his tongue and smiled.

The next day, Fenton let it be known in a hundred different ways that the symposium was his brainchild. The credit was to him and to no one else. When a neuropsychiatrist from Berlin spoke about the neurological mechanisms which make it possible to develop a story-as-weapon, Fenton leapt to the podium and thanked the man, but not before offering an embarrassing joke about a psychiatrist a rabbi and a hooker. That afternoon, he introduced Noam Chomsky by regaling the delegates with tales of the renowned linguist’s prostate gland. And that evening, at a special performance of Wozzeck mounted by the local opera company, Fenton prepared himself by shaving off his beard and leaving behind only that portion of his moustache immediately below the nose. He made his entrance by goose-stepping down the centre aisle of the theatre.

No one was sad when Dr. Fenton failed to attend the final proceedings on Friday. Nevertheless, because they had grown accustomed to his annoying habits, they voiced curiosity at his absence. Dean assured the delegates that this was a normal Friday for Dr. Fenton and he staved off further questions with a wink and a vague tippling gesture. In fact, Dean knew full well that Dr. Fenton’s incapacity was far more serious than a simple case of inebriation. In fact, Dean knew full well that Dr. Fenton sat splayed on a chair staring at a blank wall in the library basement.

Fenton had been sitting in the same chair since the previous evening when Dean confronted him alone in his office. Dean had cornered him there and, taking up the Lord Byron bobblehead, declared the Gehirn-tote geschichte a hoax.

Fenton was furious. “Bite your tongue, young man.”

But Dean was insistent.

If Fenton had been a priest, he would have accused Dean of blasphemy; he would have excommunicated him; he would have burned the young man at the stake.

Dean returned the bobblehead to its place on the desk and raised his hands in a placating gesture. “I’ll make you a wager,” he said. “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks I can read that story and walk away with all my noodles intact.”

Fenton had been drinking just enough to let his natural belligerence get the best of his common sense. He shook Dean’s hand and together the men crossed the quadrangle to the library. Although the library was closed, Fenton had a key, and they made their way to the basement unimpeded. For the duration of the symposium, the library had placed the lone box on a table in a basement seminar room. While Fenton stood in the doorway, Dean rifled through the yellowed pages, stock paper imprinted with the official seal of the Third Reich and watermarked with a swastika. At last, Dean’s fingers settled on the only pages written in English, a story, the Really Long Jest. Dean held the pages under the florescent lights and began to read the completely pointless story. When he was done, he set the pages face-down on the table, looked up at Fenton and smiled.

“As you can see, I’m not soft in the head.”

Dr. Fenton was stunned. “I thought the story was authentic.”

“Apparently, we’ve been duped.”

“Let me see.” Fenton stepped into the room and the door swung shut behind him. He took up the pages and began to skim.

Dean watched the man’s eyes move line by line down the first page, then on to the second and the third, slowing as they neared the end, then coming to a rest on the final word. The eyes glazed over. The man’s breathing slowed. The hands clutched at the pages and ceased to move.

“Dr. Fenton?”

The chair of the English Department did not answer.

Dean waved a hand before the older man’s unseeing eyes. He eased the man onto a chair, then reached into the man’s jacket pocket and retrieved a billfold. He paid himself one hundred dollars in satisfaction of the wager. Not a penny more. Not a penny less. Dean prided himself on his scrupulous honesty. And, no, he did not regard it as dishonest, when making his wager with Dr. Fenton, to omit the fact that he was dyslexic.

3. NORM THE NAZI HUNTER

THE JUDGE GAVE Jackson time served plus community service. Since Jackson had half an English degree behind him, the judge let him do his community service at the Oak Ridge Rest Home. The staff there needed help with a special project. They wanted to interview all the residents—or at least all the residents who were right in the head—to produce a book of bios and memories and whatnot. It would be therapeutic for all the old folks to reminisce about the good old days. Jackson told the judge he didn’t want to interview the boring ones; he’d only do it if he got to interview a Nazi hunter. The judge told him he’d interview whoever the staff assigned to him and he’d damn well like it. Jackson said thank-you the way his lawyer told him to and left the courtroom a more-or-less free man.

The staff paired him with an old guy named Norm who lived in a tiny apartment, although apartment is probably an exaggeration. It was more like a cubicle, with room for a single bed and shelves full of pictures. There were pictures of children and grandchildren who never visited. And there were pictures of an old woman. Norm said the woman was his wife, Mildred. He didn’t specify whether Mildred was dead or just living down the hall in another cubicle. He didn’t specify whether things belonged to the past or to the present either. Everything blurred together. Norm’s memory turned time into one big lump.

The room was stuffy and it smelled as if Norm hadn’t taken a bath in weeks. Jackson tried to open the window but it stuck. Jackson suggested they go outside for their interview. It was June and warm and the fresh air would do the old man good. Norm shuffled along with his walker and when they passed through the front doors, he slipped Jackson a ten and told him to go across the road for a pack of Marlborough’s.

“I’m dying for a smoke,” Norm said. “They don’t let you smoke in there. They say it isn’t healthy. Like that would make any goddam difference at my age.”

While Jackson went across the road for a pack of cigarettes, Norm shuffled down the road to a parkette where he settled on a bench in the shade. When Jackson got back from the store, he handed Norm the pack of cigarettes and kept the change for himself. Norm didn’t notice. He was too busy trying to get the cellophane wrapping off the pack of cigarettes. He didn’t notice the sun shining on the grass. He didn’t notice the bed of flowers behind the drinking fountain. He didn’t notice the birds twittering overhead in the tree. All he noticed was the pack of cigarettes that fumbled onto his lap and then onto the ground between his feet.

“Damn,” the old man said as he reached through the frame of his walker.

It was more than Jackson could bear. He picked up the pack, tore off the cellophane, whipped out a cigarette and lit it between his own lips before passing it to the old man. “So I’m supposed to interview you,” he said.

“Eh?”

“Your life.”

“What about my life?”

“I’m supposed to interview you about your life.”

“What the hell for?”

“They’re making me do it.”

“Lucky you.” And the old man took a long drag on the cigarette, then exhaled until his head was lost in a cloud of smoke.

“So you were a Nazi hunter?”

“A what?”

“A Nazi hunter.”

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“They promised me a Nazi hunter, like the Jew Bear.”

“Like the what?”

“Like in the movie. You know. Where the guy bashes Nazi heads with a baseball bat.”

“I grew vegetables on my father’s farm.”

“You never saw any action?”

“I grew tomatoes and beets and such.”

“But I thought—”

“And I milked the cows too.”

“So you never killed any Nazis?”

“What? You don’t think growing food helped the war effort? How d’you think our boys would’ve done without any food?”

Jackson shrugged. He took the pack away from the old man and lit a cigarette for himself.

“Then after that I went to normal school.”

“Normal school? What the hell is normal school?” Jackson imagined that’s where they put mental defectives and turned them into ordinary functioning citizens.

“Normal school’s what they used to call teacher’s college.”

“So you taught kids?”

“Thirty-five years.”

“And you never killed any Nazis?”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

The two men—one young, the other old—smoked their cigarettes down to the filter, then stubbed out the butts under their shoes. Norm wanted to smoke another cigarette, but when he went to get it out of the pack, something funny happened to his arm. It flopped around at his side like a rubber hose. He ordered his arm to light another cigarette, but it refused to obey. He asked the boy to help, but all the words came out in a slur, like he was drunk, only worse. The left side of his face felt like melted wax. When he looked up at the tree, and at the sky beyond the tree, it all went fitzy the way an old black and white TV goes when it’s stuck between channels. He slumped over his walker, and even though he knew inside himself that he was still him, he couldn’t do anything to tell this boy that he was still him. The boy stared at him for a while, poking at his shoulder, then pocketed the Marlborough’s for himself and walked away.

After a while—maybe a few minutes, maybe a hundred years—the boy returned to the parkette with a staff member from the Oak Ridge Rest Home. She was a nurse and knew what to do in situations like this. The first thing she did was check Norm’s pulse. She said Norm was still alive.

“We were just sitting here talking,” Jackson said, “then he went all funny.”

The nurse called an ambulance and they carted Norm away to the hospital. They kept him in the hospital for a couple weeks. Even though they let him come back to the Rest Home, he was never right after that. When Jackson visited him, his head lolled to one side, and none of his words made sense. The staff said they could get someone else for Jackson to interview. But Jackson said no. He had enough material from Norm to write up something for the book. He promised he’d have it in time for publication.

Jackson was true to his word. This is how the bio started:

Oak Ridge Rest Home has a hero in its midst. Its very own Norm Woodrow served his country during the war. He belonged to an elite unit that hunted Nazis and brought them to justice. I’m proud to have known Norm. Even though horrible things happened during the war, it’s reassuring to know that there were decent men like Norm protecting our country, making it a safe place for people like me to grow up in.

The staff loved Jackson’s bio. Wasn’t it amazing, they said, how you could work for years with old folks and have no idea what had gone on in their lives when they were young. Mostly, the staff saw wizened has-beens who had frittered away their lives. It just goes to show you, they said, and they thanked Jackson for setting them straight.

Well, that took care of twenty hours. Jackson still had eighty hours of community service left before he was off the hook. He wondered if Oak Ridge had any astronauts. He’d love to interview an astronaut for the next volume.

4. THE MASTERPIECE

WHEN OLIVER WAS a boy, he used to wander with a stick through the family orchard, whacking at the high branches to knock down the best fruit. This is the image that came to mind whenever people asked about his writing. With pen in hand, he meandered through his thoughts, taking swipes at the best ideas, and if they were ripe, they dropped fresh to the page. Oliver knew he had only two novels left in him. As he knocked down those last ideas, he would polish the fruits and give them to his children, one for Jane, and the other for Tarzan. Heh, heh, heh. With one called Jane, it was inevitable that he should sometimes call the other one Tarzan, especially when the boy was so rambunctious, jumping on the good furniture and breaking dishes all the time.

Oliver missed that first doctor’s appointment, the one where the doctor would tell him what he already knew. He missed the appointment because he took the southbound train instead of the northbound train and was halfway downtown before he noticed his mistake. He would have taken his car but had misplaced the keys. At his second appointment, which was really his first, he sat on that chaise longue you find in every doctor’s office, the one with the crinkly white paper on top, and swung his legs back and forth like he was a child. The doctor asked if he had meant to wear two different shoes. He said he hadn’t noticed and asked what earthly difference it made that his shoes didn’t match.

On Saturday evening, Oliver summoned his children to dine with him at the castle. He knew that he lived in a bungalow, but he liked to call it his castle. The meal went wonderfully well even though he forgot the salt, and when it was done, Oliver pushed back his chair and announced to Josh and to Jane that it was time to play Lear and divvy up his kingdom. Josh said: It’s just Dad and more of his crap. Ever since Mom died—He would have gone on with his rant, but Jane told him to shut up and listen for once. Oliver smiled and explained that he had been to the doctor’s and the doctor confirmed for him what he had long suspected: he was beginning a journey down a gentle slope into a world of cognitive befuddlement. Josh said: It’s just Dad and more of his crap. Oliver countered by producing brochures he had taken from the doctor’s office. There were brochures about the changes they could expect, and there were brochures about support services available in the community.

Jane cried. She had long known something was wrong, but used Dad’s grief to explain away the lapses. If he got lost, she said he was lost in his memories with Mom. It was romantic, not clinical. If he forgot names or words, she said he had more important things pressing in on his mind. And if he grew angry or bewildered, she said he was an artist; the usual rules don’t apply to great spirits like his. But when her father laid the brochures on the table, she set aside the excuses. It was time to be honest about his condition. Oh, but Josh was angry. He refused to hear any of it. Before he could trust anything Dad said, he would call the doctor himself.

On Monday morning, while Josh was speaking to the doctor, Oliver began the first of his final novels. Each day was the same. He wrote longhand on foolscap until mid-afternoon, then copy typed his work on a computer Jane had helped him buy two years ago. Every evening, Jane stopped by to make sure her father had saved his work and that it had been backed up. This novel was too precious to lose.

Once a week, Jane took her father to visit an occupational therapist and together they worked on strategies to push back the encroaching beast. The occupational therapist suggested a memory box. They would decorate a cardboard box with fancy papers and ribbons, then they would fill it with letters and photos and knick knacks that were meaningful to father. Every day they would sit for a while with the memory box, and as they pulled objects from the box, they would reminisce and tell stories. The objects in the box would anchor powerful associations. In effect, the objects would trap memories that might otherwise drift away.

Oliver wasn’t interested in making a memory box. The occupational therapist worried that this lack of interest signalled a greater deterioration than the doctor had suspected. But Jane thought differently. Oliver was anxious to write. He wanted to whack that fruit onto the page before it turned to rot. As he viewed it, the only use for a memory box was to hold bushels of rotten fruit. Jane didn’t press him to make the memory box. Instead, she spent more time helping him to finish the first novel.

The novel took seven weeks to write. Jane was amazed at how quickly it went. The idea for the novel had been ripening so long in her father’s brain that it was mostly immune to this slow creep of forgetfulness. Writing it wasn’t so much the invention of fresh material as it was the recollection of an old friend from years gone by.

Jane printed a copy of the manuscript and placed it in a box. She took her father to a card shop where he chose a black and white photo of a boy on the front and a blank space on the inside. He wrote “To Josh. With Love. Dad” and taped it to the box. Jane went to Josh’s apartment but he refused to take the manuscript. It was more of Dad’s crap.

But Dad wrote it especially for you.

Bullshit, Josh said.

Sure he did.

I bet there’s another copy off to his agent.

He can’t remember his agent’s name.

Doesn’t matter. The damage is done.

Damage? What are you talking about?

Mining our lives—the intimate details—all for fun and profit.

Oh, Josh.

Even Mom’s death, for crissake.

That was a memoir.

Memoir? Is that what you call it?

When Jane set the box back on her father’s kitchen table, the old man smiled at it. Jane couldn’t read the smile. Did he understand what the return of the box meant?

I’d like a cigar now.

Oliver wasn’t supposed to smoke cigars, but there was still a stash in a humidor hidden underneath the guest bed where Jane now spent most of her nights. Inside the humidor was the last of the Montecristos Oliver had been working through when he finally agreed to stop. What the hell, and Jane fetched a Montecristo. She led her father onto the side porch and clipped and lit the cigar and took a few long drags herself before passing it to her father. Wait here, and she went inside where she poured out two tumblers each with three fingers of Scotch. Returning to the porch, she found her father rocking wistfully from side to side.

He’s my favourite son, you know.

He’s your only son.

I love him.

Oliver fell asleep with the cigar stuck to his lower lip. Jane stubbed out the cigar, then nudged her father up from his chair and inside to bed. She thought she might go back to the porch and finish her father’s cigar. On the way, she passed the box on the kitchen table. She had never read the novel straight through. She had only read it piecemeal as she helped to assemble it. Taking it up, she read until far into the next morning.

Jane couldn’t tell if the novel was any good. Critics looked favourably on her father’s works. They were literary. They were weighty. Although he had never won any major prizes, his work was regarded as solid and reliable. This novel read like all the others, so she presumed it, too, was solid and reliable. The plot drew the reader in like a gracious host. The voice was consistent and engaging. And the characters were full-bodied like the Montecristos and the Scotch. Even so, Jane had expected the novel to have more of Josh in it, or to address him in a more personal way. If the novel was for Josh, if it was crafted out of love, shouldn’t it read more like a memoir? or like an allegory of a father/son relationship? the tale of a dog and a pup, say?

The novel told the story of an ad executive approaching retirement who fears that the most he can say for himself is that he has devoted his life to the telling of lies. Once, he was an idealist. He joined demonstrations for the environment and marched for peace, but his interest in such things flagged as his career gobbled up his free time. Now, the aging ad executive finds himself haunted by an incident when he was a young father. He had a son named James who was rambunctious, jumping on the good furniture and breaking dishes. Exasperated, the young man struck the boy with the back of his hand and sent him howling to his room. In the days and weeks following this incident, the father grew morose and cynical. Mostly, he grew cynical about his own nature. All that marching for peace was hypocrisy. For his part, James forgot the incident. But memory is a funny thing. What we forget with our minds we sometimes remember in other ways. James seemed to remember the incident with a bitterness he carried into all his relationships.

Jane woke to the sound of banging at the front door and a woman’s voice halloo halloo. Jane started from bed—ten o’clock, oh damn—and cursed herself for reading late into the next morning. It was the neighbour three doors down, standing in the front hall and holding Oliver’s hand. Oliver had wandered off in his slippers and bathrobe. When he first woke up, there was no one in the kitchen, so he opened the front door, thinking it was the refrigerator. The neighbour found him rooting through her garbage cans looking for oranges.

Jane made her father a proper breakfast while he waited at the kitchen table and stared at the box that sat open across from him.

I read your novel last night.

Eh?

The book you wrote for Josh.

Josh.

Oliver drifted away. Because he was remembering less and less of recent times, Jane presumed that he had drifted into the world he once inhabited as a young man, or even as a child, maybe the orchard on the farm where he grew up.

Dad?

Eh?

You were going to write two novels.

I was?

One for Josh, and one for me.

Yes. Yes I was.

After breakfast, Oliver began the second novel. Jane sat him at his desk before a pad of foolscap. He took up his pen and, turning to her, said: My masterpiece. Jane was skeptical. The words didn’t flow as they had for the first. The ideas for this novel came from seeds he had sown later, and so they had less time to take root in his mind. Now, his ideas were as sparse as scrub in a desert. Sometimes, after finishing one phrase, he would stare out the window for thirty minutes before starting the next. Sometimes he merely copied a phrase he had already set down. Jane did her best to cross out the repetitions, to prod her father to write more, to keep his days as regimented as when he wrote the first novel, writing longhand on foolscap until mid-afternoon, then copy typing until supper. As the days proceeded, there was less and less to copy type.

The writing itself was odd. Oliver enjoyed periods of great clarity when he whipped off a page or two of cogent prose in a style that hearkened to his early days. But these periods were interrupted, and with increasing frequency, by episodes of disorganization that ran from top to bottom, skewering everything: theme, structure, syntax, even spelling. During these periods, his writing was a blethering mess. The contrast was unsettling to read.

After eight weeks, Oliver had written nearly a hundred pages of mostly unreadable nonsense. In the last several days, he had produced only a few sentences of material and all of it struck Jane as infantile. As with the writing, so with the rest of his life. He dozed more, became restless and argumentative, walked in his sleep, ate sparingly, and although he mostly knew who Jane was, he sometimes mistook her for his late wife, Jane’s mother. The nursing help that came to the house suggested perhaps the time had come to move Oliver into a residence where he could have round-the-clock support. Jane was a grown woman now, and wanted to be mature about the matter, but there was a part of her that resisted the decision, not because of guilt, but for a reason more childish. Josh had his novel; Jane wanted hers. She wanted to force her father to sit at his desk and finish what he had promised to do. She didn’t want a hundred-page record of a man’s last senile rantings; she wanted something with structure and form, with meaning and art. It wasn’t fair. What made things worse was that Josh rejected his gift. Somewhere in that mashed-up brain was a second novel—her father had said so himself—as fully formed as the first. But Jane was afraid she would never read it.

When they moved Oliver into the Oak Ridge Rest Home, Jane took a few things for his room, familiar items so he wouldn’t feel alienated and alone, pictures for his wall, photos for his night table. She also brought the manuscript in a box which she set on the desk, and beside it she set her father’s favourite pen and a fresh pad of foolscap. She understood that her father could no longer write, but it seemed somehow necessary to set out these materials. Necessary both for him and for her.

Oliver lived another year in the residence. Jane visited as often as she could. Every visit was the same. After she had kissed her father hello, she would lift the lid from the box to see if he had written anything new.

When Oliver died, the administrator of the residence arranged for Jane to gather his personal effects from his room. The staff had already boxed most of his things and had stacked the boxes on the desk. When Jane arrived, she experience a momentary flash of panic when she thought the manuscript had gone missing, but there it was, shoved to the back against the wall. As always, Jane removed the lid from the box and looked at the hundred or so sheets of foolscap. She drew out the ream and riffled the pages.  She had hoped her novel would be the masterpiece, the culmination of a life’s work. The first time she had taken up this ream, in the days before she moved her father into the residence, she had tried to persuade herself that this was indeed a masterpiece. That explained why it was so different from everything that had gone before. It was expressionist ultra postmodern something-or-other. It was the very latest of the very latest. It was the manifesto for a movement as yet unnamed. Now, all she could see in it was the jibber jabber of a failing mind.

Jane returned the ream to its box and put the lid in place. She passed the box to the woman who had let her into the room: I don’t need this.

The woman dropped the box into the garbage bin.

Taking up her father’s pen, Jane slipped it into her purse. She could use it for cheques and grocery lists.

5. A CONEY ISLAND OF THE HEART

AFTER THEY PEELED the tape from the door frame and pulled her head from the oven, the cop came at me, hat in hand, with the obvious question.

I felt far away and shrugged. I didn’t speak until the cop rhymed off the cliché about poets and passion. On the coroner’s report, there’s probably a tick box that says “death by poetic temperament”.

“It’s more complicated than that,” I said. As the medics tagged and bagged her, I led the cop to the sitting room where I explained:

She was a great talent. But she could only write the good stuff when she was in her dark moods. In happy moments, the best she could produce was a sing-song rhyming verse fit for lining the diaper pail. When this happened, she grew frustrated, then despondent. She would say: “I’ve lost my touch. I’ll never write a good poem again.” Then the depression would creep over her. When those dark moods roiled her brain, the poems came out fully formed: brilliant treacherous pieces that struck to the very heart. With these poems came a sense of accomplishment. She hadn’t lost her touch after all. The relief brought happiness, but the happiness brought an end to her dark poems. What followed was a succession of banal poetic turds, which in turn plunged her into despair and another series of masterworks.

“It was the roller coaster,” I said. “It was the poetic roller coaster that killed her.”

6. IT'S SUCH A PAIN TO SUFFER

THE MAN SUFFERED. His suffering was average. His suffering wasn’t acute: no terminal brain tumour that left him writhing in agony and screaming for the sweet release of death. But his suffering wasn’t trivial either: no hangnails or gastro-intestinal discomfort. His was a modest suffering that allowed him to smile when he met his friends, but filled him with a private foreboding.

One day his suffering became intolerable.

But how can that be? asked his friends. It’s not as if you have a terminal brain tumour that leaves you writhing in agony and screaming for the sweet release of death.

His friends did not understand. While it was true that his was not an acute suffering, its persistence had a cumulative effect. It was like being stretched on a rack by the Grand Inquisitor. It was impossible to say which turn of the gear would be the turn that finally broke the heretic, but every turn contributed to the torture. The man suffered greatly and begged for an end.

Three of his best friends decided they should collaborate. They would take turns visiting their suffering friend.

When the first friend arrived, he suggested that the suffering was a kind of payment. He used the old expression: paying your dues. Suffering would earn the man something. It would earn him the right to talk about important things. It would earn him authenticity. It would earn him credibility.

You should be a poet, the first friend suggested. Poetry is never any good unless the poet has suffered. Maybe your suffering is a sign that you are destined to become a great poet.

The suffering man tried to write poetry, but his suffering caused his hand to twitch whenever he took up his pen. The man tried to dictate his poems, but his friend winced. The words were clumsy and clattered inside the ear just as his pen had clattered on the floor.

You should sell the story of your suffering, the second friend suggested. People pay a lot of money to hear about the suffering of others.

The suffering man didn’t understand.

His friend bowed his head and tried his best to explain. Think of it as an act of charity, he said. People pay for books and movies about people who suffer as a way to send them money. It unburdens them. If you sold the rights to the story of your suffering, the money might ease your pain, but more importantly it would ease their guilt.

The suffering man was skeptical. He failed to see how money could ease the pain. Nor how it could relieve the guilt of those who live a carefree life. As he viewed it, people pay money to reassure themselves that there are others who suffer more than they do. Any guilt people feel vanishes each night as they sleep.

The third friend listened as the suffering man described what the two previous friends had said. He nodded, then said it was more complicated than that. Suffering is the source of all meaning, he said. The friend laid a sheaf of papers before the suffering man and set a pen upon the sheaf. This is a contract, he said. You’ll be great on reality TV. Our advertisers will love you.  Through your suffering, we will be persuaded to buy more stuff, and that will fill our lives with meaning.

7. THE DRAGON SLAYER

FOR AS LONG as I can remember, my parents told me stories of my uncle John, a knight errant who had slain a dragon. He was a man who ventured forth on noble quests to defend the honour of great ladies. On the morning of my sixteenth birthday, my mother summoned me to the door of our hovel and pointed across the fields to a path that emerged from the woods. A tired nag plodded through the dirt and on it rode a fat old man with a red bulbous nose, the sort of nose I had seen sniffing its way in and out of the Boar’s Head Tavern. When he got closer, I saw how his rheumy eyes were filled with a yellow puss and I heard how he wheezed his death rattle breath. He drew up to the door and nodded to my mother. She might have run to hug him but for his filthy clothes and the stench of his body.

For the rest of the day until suppertime, my uncle John regaled us with tales of his travels, though he never finished any of his accounts, not a one, but instead let his voice trail away as he stared into his empty tankard and wondered where all the drink had gone. By the time supper arrived, he had wondered so much that he could barely keep his head off the table. He roused himself at the smell of cooked meat and ate enough for a family of six, and when he was done, he gave a loud belch and laughed and thanked my mother. He pushed back his chair and rummaged through a sack that lay slung over the nag’s backside. From it he produced a cloth-covered object. It was a gift for me now that I was coming of age. I unwrapped it and found a chalk-white skull.

Uncle John smiled: That is the first dragon I ever slew, or at least its head, or what’s left of its head.

Later in the evening, as Uncle John dozed by the fire, I crept to his side and prodded him. That’s not a real dragon’s head, I said. That’s a dog’s, isn’t it?

The fat old man winked with a crusted eye and smiled. No, he said, it’s not a real dragon’s head.

And you never rescued damsels in distress, did you?

He coughed and smacked his lips. I once saved a cat from a tree. That should count for something.

I tossed the skull on the floor. It’s a stupid gift, I said.

Now, now. And he set a hand on my knee. Those stories I told you. They may not have been true in a factual sense, but there was still truth in them.

The next morning, my uncle John left on his tired nag. Soon, the skull found a special place on a high shelf in the Boar’s Head Tavern. There, I regaled the village drunkards with the legend of my uncle John, the greatest knight errant in all the land, a man who had slain a dragon and rescued great ladies. And my listeners gazed into their empty tankards and were so fraught with where their drink had gone that they never thought to question me. And so my stories became true.

8. ALIEN LANDSCAPES

RICHARD WOKE FROM a flying dream. It wasn’t the flying that bothered him. It was the landscapes whizzing by beneath his wings. Instead of green forests and golden wheat fields, he zoomed over alien mountains that glistened pink and purple. With all the zooming, Richard gasped and it woke Ellie beside him.

Dreaming again? she asked.

Richard said yeah, and swinging his legs off the edge of the bed, he rose to a seated position. He shifted so his underwear didn’t slide so high up his crack.

Wanna talk about it? she asked.

Naw, nothing important. Just images from Coulson’s exhibit.

The alien landscapes?

Yeah.

But that’s okay, isn’t it? I mean, they must be … I mean, to stick themselves inside your head like that …

Richard said: I guess. But he wasn’t so sure. Something about Coulson’s paintings bothered him. They were supposed to evoke alien worlds. But there was something familiar about his pink mountain ridges.

It used to be that when Richard and Ellie woke in the middle of the night, they made love, then spooned naked until first light. But lately, Richard only got up to pee and Ellie blew her nose. Then they settled again onto their separate sides of the bed and closed their eyes.

This time, before they fell asleep, Ellie asked if Richard had made his doctor’s appointment.

Richard said yes and promised himself he would do it in the morning.

After all, you have a birthday coming up. A big one. Then Ellie smacked her lips and gave a couple snorts, signalling that she had gone back to sleep.

Richard lay awake, staring into the darkness. He was back at the gallery. His mind was burbling with conversations from earlier in the evening. Mostly, the people ignored his work and crowded around Coulson’s paintings. They thought Richard was a has-been. Coulson, on the other hand, was an up-and-comer. He was at least fifteen years younger than Richard and it showed in the vitality of his technique and in the vibrancy of his palette. People didn’t say so out loud, but Richard saw it in the way they looked at him: Richard, you’re tired and uninspired; maybe it’s time to try something new.

Richard hadn’t realized that the preparation for his doctor’s appointment would be so onerous. He didn’t like taking laxatives, especially when Ellie was at home with him. She sat up in bed with a novel while he emptied his bowels in the en suite. The next morning, he went to the doctor’s office, feeling light-headed and with a rumble in his belly. When he arrived, a nurse handed him a paper-thin gown and led him to a change room. The doctor reminded him of a pig farmer, the way he carried his big gut out in front of him and massaged it with his thick sausage fingers. He made Richard lie face-down on a black, vinyl-covered table. The gown fell away to either side and exposed his ass to the ceiling. While the doctor scrubbed his hands, his assistant—a girl named Teena—spread a wad of petroleum jelly in circles around his anus. She used her dainty rubber-clad fingers to shove as much of it inside as she could squidge.

You see the game last night? the doctor asked.

Christ no.

You got something against hockey?

No. No, of course not. It’s just—the laxative—you—I—I was on the toilet all evening. Kind of hard to watch when there’s no TV in the bathroom.

Ah. Too bad for you. But here—the doctor slapped the top of a TV screen positioned near Richard’s head—here you can watch the whole show.

Really? Richard groaned.

There’s a camera sends an image.

You don’t post it on YouTube, do you?

The doctor laughed as he unfurled a length of black rubber hose. Hang on tight, he said, and he shoved the end of the hose up Richard’s ass.

Richard could feel it low in his gut, fluttering like an epileptic snake. He could feel it worm through his large intestine and on into his small intestine.

Oh, I almost forgot. And the doctor pushed the power button on the monitor.

As the image came up, the doctor gave another thrust of the hose, and on the monitor, it produced an impression of flying. Richard felt like he was soaring through his own guts, over pink ridges and purple glistening peaks. He was flying through alien landscapes.

9. A CONVERSATION SOME TIME AGO IN LASCAUX FRANCE (IN TRANSLATION)

A: YEAH, WELL, I’ve learned a thing or two in my travels, you know (which, incidentally, are far more extensive than yours), and one of those things I’ve learned is a word, a simple word, and you wanna know what that word I’ve learned is? I’ll tell you what it is. It’s cant. No. Not the contraction of can not, can’t, not an expression of impossibility, but what your hoity-toity ideals are so much of, or (if you want me to be more direct about it) warthog shit. Half the stuff that comes outta your mouth is stuff I’ve already seen coming outta the backside of a warthog. So what’ve you got to say to that?

B: Unh.

A: I’m tryna spark a proper debate here and all you can offer me by way of counterpoint is a grunt? Come on. I appreciate that we’re not all gonna have the same learning style, that some of us, like me, are gonna be more verbal, and others of us, like you, are gonna be more visual (which probably explains why you like to spend so much of your time painting pictures), but, really, you don’t live in isolation, you live in a community, and the word “community” in case you haven’t noticed, has a lot in common with the word “communication” which means that even if you have a visual learning style, even if that’s your primary way of encountering the world around you, nevertheless you have to get along with others who don’t encounter the world that way. You have to push trees across the river and encourage some back and forth with people on the other side. Shit. Now look what you’ve done. You’ve got me talking in clichés.

B: Unh.

A: And don’t tell me that your painting is a kind of communication in its own right, just let it speak for itself, accord the medium the legitimacy it deserves, blah, blah, blah. Oh, oh, oh, and don’t let me forget that obscure corollary: that your swishes and daubs need no explanation, that explanation kills the art, give it the silent respect that will allow it to speak in its own terms. To me, that’s a cop out, an evasion to hide your discomfort with the more verbose amongst us, your fear of argumentation, which itself is a cover for a deeper fear, namely that your side of the argumentation has no substance, that your swishes and daubs are empty, meaningless, useless. You produce these “expressions” of yours, and while they once may have had referents, you know, in the real world of space and time that you and I occupy, you’ve abstracted them so violently from their referents, that it’s impossible to say that they had referents in the first place. You’ve created these “expressions”, these paintings that you call “art”, that are so far removed from the ordinary experience of your viewers, that they occupy an independent discursive space that bears no relation to anything except the interiority of your personal private experience. You fart and that inspires a painting of what it feels like for you and only you to experience a fart.

B: Unh.

A: And that’s just one finger on the hairy-knuckled hand of your cant.

B: Unh.

A: Well, I’ll tell you. The second finger’s implied by the first. Your painting is elitist, you see, because if you legitimize your expression by grounding it in your personal private experience, then you’re privileging that experience while at the same time devaluing the experience of others, or, to take it further, devaluing the experience of otherness, or, if you want to take it to its logical conclusion, devaluing the very idea of Otherness. You end up consigning yourself to alienated solipsism. It’s a power play where you privilege expressions of your private experience of consciousness while treating the immediate verbal expressions of daily life in your community as if they count for nothing. So you tell me that you’ve painted Gor and Rok hunting a bison (and I know from your earlier work that you’re perfectly capable of producing a realistic representation of Gor and Rok hunting a bison) but your present strokes are so cursory that the most we can say of the painting is that it might be your personal impression of what it means to represent hunters like Gor and Rok hunting a bison, but we have no way to be sure because we have no access to your consciousness. You could be lying. For all we know, this could be an expression of your personal impression of what it means to fuck a warthog.

B: Uhn.

A: Really? You want economics to be your middle finger? It’s like you’re scrabbling in the dirt to keep from sliding over the cliff of cant, but you can’t get a grip of anything because your precious fingers are covered in grease from the stag shanks we ate last night, stags, incidentally, that we killed, not you, because you were too busy swishing your mixtures of charcoal, bird’s egg, and blood on the cave walls. Yet you have the gall to suggest that your painting makes a positive contribution to the tribe’s GDP. Yeah, right! Tell me another one. Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that those bird scratches of yours tell our communal story, that they solidify our sense of both personal and corporate identity, that the resulting sense of cohesion gives us an advantage over neighbouring tribes. Meanwhile you take eggs from the mouths of our newborns so you can mix your paints and you end up being one adult unit of labour less on our hunts. The fact is you make a negative contribution to the tribe’s GDP. Your paintings aren’t just useless; they’re worse than useless. They’re a liability.

B: Unh.

A: Don’t give me that mammoth shit. Don’t tell me you’re producing a durable record of life in our community so that future generations will know how we lived and died in this place, and don’t you dare suggest that your durable record is an existential solace in answer to the deep-seated and communally-felt angst that arrives like a vulture and circles the certain knowledge of death. We’re hunter-gatherers for fuck’s sake. We kill to stay alive. After a hunt, we gather around the carcass and know full well that it could just as easily have been one of us as a carcass surrounded by a pack of scavengers. And we’ve been doing this all our lives so we’re reconciled to the certainty of death, not death as some abstraction painted by a loose-boweled coward looking for a way to minimize his risks, but death as a brutal fact that’s gruesome and painful. This is just another hairy finger on your hand of cant. It sounds so noble, painting a durable record, until you smell the cowardice underneath. Let’s be blunt here. This is nothing more than a variation on the “worse-than-useless” theme. And even if you could argue convincingly that your paintings served some socially useful function that produced a positive psychic and economic benefit to the community, it would still be a stretch to suppose that this stuff you do with the charcoal and the boiled roots and the marrow and the blood and the whatnot—I mean, I don’t even know what kind of timeline you’re thinking of when you use the word “durable”. Like, are you talking about lasting through a winter? Or a generation?

B: Unh.

A: That long, eh? If I was in a charitable mood, I’d call you a dreamer, but really you’re just an idiot. Hey! That’s Gor’s spear. When he finds out you put the point in the fire like that, he’s gonna be pissed off, and you know how Gor gets when he’s pissed off. I appreciate that you wanna give a demonstration, scrape some charcoal into a gourd, mix it in with some egg and root and all, but couldn’t you have used an ordinary stick instead of Gor’s special spear?

B: Unh.

A: Aw, fuck. What’d you have to go and do that for? I mean, right into my gut. Is it coming out the other side? I can’t really turn around to see. Why’d you … I mean … I don’t feel so good. Kind of cold and queasy. Get that gourd away from me. Fucking artist. If you wanted blood for your paint, why couldn’t you have killed a warthog or something?

B: Unh.

A: Really? Because you don’t compromise the integrity of your work? That’s your answer? Fuck you. Hey! What the hell are you putting on the wall? I mean, over on that other wall, I can tell they’re elks and hunters and shit, but the stuff you’re doing now, it doesn’t look like anything, just blobs and swishes.

B: Unh.

A: Don’t you dare. Don’t you put any of that abstract expressionist crap on the wall, then call it a representation of your private interior experience of what it feels like to run a spear through a critic. You might as well just piss on the wall, or throw shit at it, or hurl the whole gourd full of blood at it. It’d make about as much sense as the crap you’re spreading on it now. At least do me the kindness of using my blood to make something realistic. Give a man his dying wish. Make a smiley face. Anything instead of this crap you’re tryna pass off as art.

URBAN LEGENDS

10. HARLAN'S FINGER

THE VACUUM CLEANER wasn’t working. Back after three weeks on the road, Harlan wanted to clean out the van, get rid of the stray potato chips and gas station receipts and pea gravel tracked in from motel parking lots. He wanted to give the van a real going-over. But when he ran the nozzle across the upholstery, nothing happened. The vacuum cleaner roared the way vacuum cleaners are supposed to roar, but all the suck was gone out of it. Harlan turned off the machine and, popping it open, saw that the bag was full. He went inside where he found Lisa pulling things from the medicine cabinet and dumping them into the sink.

“You seen the toothpaste?” she asked.

Harlan shrugged. “Maybe we left it in the last motel.”

“That’d be the third tube this trip.”

Harlan didn’t understand how Lisa could get so worked up about a tube of toothpaste. It was astonishing how she could be so philosophical when they hit a deer in some prairie backwater and were stuck there for three nights waiting for the body shop to fix the van. But lose a tube of toothpaste and the world might end. Probably it had to do with control. A tube of toothpaste is something we can control. A deer leaping onto the road is more like an act of God. Even Lisa could see that Harlan didn’t have time to brake, so after the initial shock, she got out of the car and, staring at the bloody carcass and the mashed-in grill, said: C’est la vie. But the first time Harlan forgot to pack the toothpaste, she made it sound like a sign of the coming apocalypse.

“You seen the vacuum bags?”

“What for?”

“I wanna do some gardening.”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“Why do you think I’m asking for the vacuum bags?”

“What I meant was: I put in a fresh bag when we left on the trip.”

“Well it’s full.”

“You mean the kids actually used the thing while we were gone?”

“Looks like.”

“Should be a box of them. Linen closet. Top shelf.”

Harlan found the box, but it was empty. That was so like the kids, especially the twins: use something up then put back the empty box without telling anybody it needs replacing. They did this all the time with the breakfast cereal and the Kleenex, and the milk. The milk was the worst. At least once a week, Harlan poured himself a bowl of cereal only to find that one of the kids had put an empty carton of milk back in the fridge. Harlan returned to the garage and tossed the empty box of vacuum bags into the recycling bin.

Harlan didn’t feel like driving to the store. He’d had enough of driving these past weeks. Instead, he drew a stool to the garbage can, put on the mask he used for sanding drywall and finishing the floors and all the other DIY home reno projects that raised a cloud of dust, and he emptied the vacuum bag into the can. The bag’s opening was the width of two fingers. Harlan stuck in his left index finger and his middle finger—the finger Lisa was always after him not to flip as he drove—and used them like tweezers to pull out tufts of dog hair and dirt and bits of food, all of it a dull grey. He wondered if this wasn’t some kind of parable: how all the wild colours of our modern life mix together to produce something bland and colourless. He pulled out pennies, a cork, the tabs from beer cans, a triple-A battery, half a dog biscuit, pine needles, a frayed shoelace, a couple of Jenn’s makeup remover wipes. Digging deeper into the bag, Harlan felt something big and hard, something too big to pull through the opening.

Withdrawing his fingers, he shook the bag over the garbage can until the object fell out. He squinted into the cloud of dust rising from the garbage can. From where he sat, he couldn’t say what it was. It looked the size and shape of a stubby carrot, only not the colour of a carrot. It was mostly black and grimy. Harlan drew the object from the bottom of the can and took it around to the other side of the van where he kept a light above his work bench. Taking off his mask, he turned the object over and over in the light.

It was a human finger. The black was the black of dried blood. The finger couldn’t have been in the bag long because it wasn’t rotten yet. Maybe a day. The whorls of the fingerprint were still intact. It had been severed almost at the knuckle, and by a sharp tool. There was nothing ragged about it like you’d expect if it had been yanked off or bitten by a dog. Harlan got a plastic baggie from the kitchen, and sealing the finger, he stowed it in the freezer compartment of his beer fridge. Then, opening the fridge, he got a can of beer and sat himself behind the garage for a think.

No need to panic. No need to call to the police. It might have been an accident. There might be an easy explanation why someone in his household had vacuumed up a human finger. Maybe he shouldn’t tell Lisa, at least not yet. She had a tendency to overreact. What if one of the kids had done it. Harlan didn’t know much about the law but he was certain that chopping off someone’s finger was a serious business. None of his kids had ever been in trouble with the law and he wasn’t sure Lisa could stand it if any of them went to jail. The twins were sixteen and so they would be treated as young offenders. No serious consequences. But Jenn was nineteen, an adult, at least in the eyes of the law. Then again, Harlan had a hard time believing Jenn could have chopped off someone’s finger. That was more the sort of thing you’d expect from the twins.

Harlan left his can of beer half empty on the patio and went inside. He poked his head into Jenn’s room and found her cross-legged on her bed and yakking on the phone with her boyfriend. Harlan waved. Jenn waved back, all the fingers of her left hand present and accounted for. He squinted at the right hand, noting how comfortably she held the phone with all five digits. Jenn pressed her palm to the phone and asked what he wanted.

“Nothing. Just checking in.”

“Okay, and Jenn rolled her eyes.”

Harlan found the boys in the basement playing video games. He watched how they held the controllers and he counted twenty digits in all.

“I need to talk to you boys.”

When Chas asked what, Wes took advantage of the momentary lapse in attention to blow up Chas’s jeep.

“Boys, just pause it for a minute.” Harlan and Lisa had been back not even half a day and, already, the kids were behaving as if their parents had never been gone. “I want you to tell me straight up: did you two have a party here last night?”

The boys looked at each other, then relaxed their shoulders and admitted that, yeah, they’d had a bit of a party, but only a few friends, nothing wild.

“And Jenn? Was she in on it?”

“It was her, you know,”

“idea.”

“Boys, anything happen at this party of yours? An accident, say? Or a fight? Anybody get hurt?”

The boys looked at each other and shook their heads.

“And if I asked Jenn, she wouldn’t know anything either?’

“I guess not,”

“seeing as we were all together.”

“Boys, I’d like you to come out to the garage with me.”

The three men crept through the house like commandos, looking left and right down each hallway to be sure Lisa didn’t see them. Harlan led the boys to the beer fridge in the garage, and as they stood like worshippers before a shrine, he took the baggie out of the freezer compartment. They gathered beneath the light of the work bench. The dog curled onto the concrete floor by the beer fridge and licked herself in indelicate places. Harlan opened the baggie and, using a pair of barbecue tongs, removed the finger and held it up for inspection. He looked like a surgeon with oversized instruments.

The boys gawked at the finger, saying things like whoa and is that what I think it is?

“I found it in the vacuum cleaner.”

The boys shrugged.

“The bag was empty before your mom and I went away. Which means the finger got sucked up while we were gone.”

No change in their expression.

“So you two have no idea how it got there?”

They shook their heads.

Harlan remembered the beer he’d left behind the garage. It was warmer than he liked, but still drinkable. Beer in one hand, tongs in the other, Harlan contemplated the finger where he’d lain it on the old wooden miter box. He had no idea how to read the boys. Sometimes they looked at one another and he knew they were up to their eyeballs in some kind of conspiracy. But he saw none of that now. He wanted to believe their ignorance was genuine. After another gulp of beer, he sent the boys back to their video games with a promise never to tell their mother what they had seen. When they were back to blowing each other up in hi-def Dolby 7.1 surround sound, Harlan went inside to get their sister. Give Jenn a chance to examine the finger. See if it stirred any recollections from the party the night before. As they stepped into the garage, Harlan told her he was about to show her something nasty and she was not to tell anybody.

“Whatever, Dad.”

Harlan stepped to the work bench, but the finger was gone. Underneath the bench, the dog lay chomping at something. “Queenie!” Harlan grabbed the dog at the back of the jaw and forced open its mouth, but it was too dark underneath the bench. By the time he had dragged the dog into the light, whatever she’d been chomping on had disappeared.

“Damn. She just ate the evidence.”

“Evidence?”

“A finger. A human finger. It was in the vacuum cleaner.”

Jenn gave no indication she knew what her father was talking about. He sent her back to her telephone with the same promise he’d extracted from the boys: don’t tell your mother.

Tossing the empty baggie into the garbage bin, Harlan took a second beer from the fridge and returned to his chair behind the garage. He needed to think about things. Thank God for beer. What is it they say? In vino veritas? In wine, truth? Harlan wasn’t much of a wine drinker, but he found a kind of truth in beer. If he drank enough beer, it smoothed over the ragged edges. It solved life’s mysteries, not by giving answers, but by making them cease to matter. Harlan had no idea how a human finger had ended up in his vacuum cleaner. Harlan swallowed another mouthful of beer. To be truthful, it didn’t seem all that important.

11. THE GREAT DEPRESSION

OUR NEXT CASE study concerns a young man named M. who presented at his family physician’s office complaining of symptoms consistent with a major depressive episode. The physician referred him to a psychiatrist, Dr. N., who prescribed Zoloft and implemented a biweekly course of psychotherapy. Among other things, Dr. N. asked M. to keep a log of his mood and activities. Over two weeks, M. produced a spreadsheet in which he made hourly entries (recording his mood ranked on a scale from one to ten) and providing a one or two word description of what he was doing at the time. So, for example, on his first Tuesday, M. entered:

7:00 a.m. – 2-breakfast

8:00 a.m. – 1-shave

9:00 a.m. – 2-shower

10:00 a.m. – 2-TV

11:00 a.m. – 3-crossword

12:00 p.m. – 4-groceries

1:00 p.m. – 3-sandwich

2:00 p.m. – 3-nap

3:00 p.m. – 2-stare out window

4:00 p.m. – 1-weep

5:00 p.m. – 2-TV

6:00 p.m. – 3-soup

7:00 p.m. – 2-stare at ceiling

8:00 p.m. – 4-TV

9:00 p.m. – 5-popcorn

10:00 p.m. – 5-porn

11:00 p.m. – 4-floss

From the records, Dr. N. produced a line graph tracking time on the x-axis and mood on the y-axis.

It should be noted that Dr. N. was a serious day trader. Each hour, he met with a patient for a fifty minute session, then spent ten minutes tracking his portfolio. It was not uncommon for Dr. N. to receive an automated alert on his cell phone and interrupt his therapy session to place a buy or sell order.

On the day M. delivered his first mood graph, Dr. N. laid it on his desk beside his computer monitor. At the end of the day, when Dr. N. was reviewing the markets, he noted a similarity between the shape of the mood graph and the shape of the graph showing the day’s performance for the Toronto Stock Exchange. Dr. N. thought nothing of the similarity, but at their next session, he again noted a correspondence between M.’s mood graph and the indicators for the TSX.

“You do any trading?” Dr. N. asked.

“Huh?” M. had been slumped in his chair and was gazing at the floor.

“The markets? Do you play the stock market?”

“I don’t know shit about the stock market.”

Nevertheless, M.’s Zoloft had kicked in during the preceding week and the financial and retail sectors reported an unexpected jump in share prices. Although he doubted the existence of a relationship, Dr. N. was curious and, in the spirit of science, decided to conduct an experiment.  He prescribed a mild dose of Adderall—an amphetamine—and by the next session with M., his tech shares were up by more than ten percent and one of the companies had done so well that its Board of Directors decided to pay an extra dividend. Dr. N. dumped his tech stock and, part way through the week, phoned M. and told him to stop taking Adderall. The entire sector reported a major slump. Dr. N. bought back twice as many shares as he had sold, then phoned M. and told him to start in with the Adderall again. Within a couple days, share prices had returned to normal. After the close of trading the next day, they were up by another twenty-five percent. Dr. N. sold all his soup stock and used the proceeds to buy a new Porsche.

Dr. N. thought it best not to promote major shifts in the market, so he prescribed a benzodiazepine to smooth over some of the rough edges. Whenever the markets performed well, Dr. N. liquidated a portion of his portfolio, then instructed M. to cut back one of his meds. When M. went off Zoloft, there was a slump in the mining sector and that presented a huge opportunity. Another time, when M. went off Buspar, the bottom fell out of utilities for a week before he responded to the new prescription—Abilify.

Dr. N. was not wholly self-interested in all of this. He recognized that his primary duty was to his patient. It was great that he was able to buy a cottage in Muskoka, a winter home in the Bahamas, and a boob job for his wife, but M. was well now and it would be unethical to prolong his use of meds. Dr. N. decided to limit his investment strategy to “softer” manipulations. There was nothing wrong with the occasional morning phone call from a concerned mental health care provider. “So how’s your day shaping up? Good, you say? Well, then, excuse me a minute while I place this sell order.” In this way, Dr. N. gradually weaned himself of his dependency on M.

Things would have gone well for M. except for the fact that there was a tiny leak from Dr. N’s office. Word got out about M.’s market-influencing moods. Dr. N. never discovered the source of the leak. It could have been his receptionist, or his secretary, or the cleaning staff. It was impossible to say. And Dr. N. didn’t want to place himself in the embarrassing position of accusing an innocent employee.

Whatever the source of the leak, M. was off his meds not three weeks before a Wall Street investment banker came knocking at his door, professing great concern for his happiness. Although M. treated the man with suspicion, there’s only so much munificence a man can resist. First came the gifts—a giant 3D TV screen, a fancy car, a boob job for his wife. Then came the trips—a resort in Cancun, penthouse in Vegas, suite in the Vatican. M. lived like a rock star. If M. wanted it, the banker ordered him food at three in the morning. Or hookers. Four at a time. Celine Dion even sang to him in a private booth. The markets soared and the banker grew rich.

And then one morning the banker awoke and reviewed the markets abroad as he drank his coffee. In Tokyo, and again in Berlin and London, he saw all the signs of a global economic collapse sweeping like a wave from east to west and swallowing everything in its path. He rushed to M.’s hotel where he found a call girl snoring on the king-sized bed. He shook her and demanded to know where M. had gone. She pointed to the balcony where M. stood bowed and weeping.

“What’s wrong?” the banker asked.

M. shrugged.

“You need to snap out of it.” The banker tried to suppress the hint of panic in his voice.

M. said: “I feel so empty.”

“Empty? That’s absurd. You’ve got everything you could ever hope for. Cars. Jets. Women. Celine Dion.”

“Yeah. Whatever.”

“Come on. Give me a smile.”

“Fuck off.”

M. punched the banker in the face. The banker staunched the blood with a silk handkerchief. While he held his head back, M. kicked him in the stomach and pushed him over the railing. The banker fell thirty floors and struck the pavement in the space between two parked cars, a Lamborghini and a Bentley. M. smiled at the rag-doll body broken below. It was time to go home to his wife.

You might think that the markets recovered after that. They didn’t. At least not with a quick rebound. As anyone with a shred of common sense will tell you, it takes a long time to recover from a depression.

12. THE BABY TREE

HE RAN OVER the baby in his driveway. It was dark and he had been on his way to the grocery store for some potato chips. He liked having something to munch on while he watched movies late at night. The grocery store closed at eleven and he got into his car at ten forty-five. It was going to be tight, whether or not he made it in time to buy his potato chips.

As he backed onto the road, he heard a squawk followed by a squishing sound. At first, he thought he had run over the neighbour’s cat. But when he got the emergency flashlight out of the trunk, he saw that he had run over a baby. He had run over a baby with his right rear tire.

Panic crawled over his skin like a swarm of fire ants. He wondered if any of the neighbours noticed what he had done. He looked up and down the street, but no one else was outside. Most of them were probably sitting in front of big-screens watching reality TV shows. He wondered if the baby belonged to somebody. Of course it belonged to somebody. Somewhere. But he was more interested in specifics. Did the baby specifically belong to somebody in the neighbourhood? He couldn’t think of anybody in the neighbourhood who had a baby. There was Myrna Mapplethorpe five doors down who engaged in the sort of behaviour that produced babies. But as far as he knew, Myrna hadn’t made any extra babies to leave behind on other people’s driveways.

He found a spade and tarp in the garage and used the spade to scoop the little baby carcass onto the tarp. He carried the tarp into the back yard and there, beneath the rising moon, he dug a hole in the vegetable garden. He dumped the dead baby into the hole and covered it with loose clods. After he was done, he hosed down the tarp and washed all the blood from the driveway. When he shut off the water, it was as if nothing had happened. His wife wondered why his pant cuffs were dirty and wet. He said he had watered the garden before coming inside. She asked for her potato chips. He said he hadn’t made it in time to the grocery store. They would have to settle for microwave popcorn. Together, they watched a movie about zombie attacks from Mars while they munched on their extra buttery microwave popcorn.

On the weekend, while he was weeding the garden, he noticed a woody shoot poking up through the dirt. It looked more like a tree than a weed. Although familiar with a variety of weeds, he had never seen such a plant before. Maybe it wasn’t a weed, but a legitimate plant that had accidentally seeded itself in his garden. He decided to let it grow to see what kind of plant it was.

By the end of the growing season, the shoot was a stalk as tall as a man and as thick as an arm. The next spring, after the snow had melted and it was time to seed the garden, he found that the stalk had sprouted branches with buds. It was a sapling and as tall as the house. It put out leaves and offered a cool shade. The young tree flowered in May and by June a fruit was forming on its branches. He had never seen such a fruit. It wasn’t round, like an apple. And it was more irregular than a pear. In July, his wife remarked upon the strange new fruit tree growing in the garden. She thought the fruit looked like those funny black-and-white images you see of ultrasounds, kind of a peanut, only bigger and hanging from a branch. By August, the features of the fruit were more obviously the features of a foetus. Through autumn, the fruit ripened until the tree was laden with baby fruit. There were twenty-five baby fruits in all.

On a warm Indian summer’s morning, sleeping late with the window flung wide, they heard a great thud on the dirt and a wail that broke their morning peace. He ran to the garden and found that the first baby fruit had fallen from the tree.

It’s a baby, he shouted.

His wife stood in the bedroom window, hands on hips and frowning. Don’t be absurd, she said, everybody knows babies don’t grow on trees.

He held the wailing baby in his arms and rocked it back and forth. Well, he said, if it isn’t a baby, it sure looks like a baby.

Nature’s funny that way, said his wife, one thing pretending to be another.

As they spoke, another baby fell from the tree with a whump and the same wailing rose up from the dirt and sent the neighbour’s dog into fits.

We’re going to have two dozen at least of these things, he shouted. What’ll we do with them all?

Maybe we can cook them, said the wife. They look a bit like eggplant. Aubergine. I expect we could whip up something tasty.

But they’re babies, he shouted.

Don’t be silly, she answered. Bring one inside. Let’s look at it.

They laid the thing on the kitchen table, staring at it from either side. It was screaming now, which made a civil conversation difficult. When he turned it over onto its “stomach,” he noticed a brown paste underneath that looked and smelled like shit.

I think we should buy some diapers, he said.

It’s not a baby, she insisted. But her voice quavered, suggesting to him that she might have doubts about her earlier view of the matter.

Through the open window, they heard another four or five thuds in the dirt. He went back to the garden and, gathering up all the baby fruits, tossed them into the wheelbarrow and carted them around to the side door. They squirmed and waved their “limbs” and made a horrible noise. He went inside again and said he didn’t think he could care for a wheelbarrow full of babies.

His wife yelled: They aren’t babies, goddammit! They’re fruit that look like babies. I’ll prove it.

His wife lifted the baby fruit they had lain on the kitchen table and she slid a cutting board underneath. Taking up a cleaver, she chopped off its “head.”

The wailing stopped.

It’s bleeding, he said. He laid out paper towel to keep the crimson fluid from pouring onto the kitchen floor.

This isn’t blood, she said. This is just the juice like you’d find in any fruit—like tomato juice or grapefruit juice.

I dunno, he said. It sure looks like blood.

I’ll prove it.

Taking up a bread knife, the wife sawed through the middle of the baby fruit. When she was done, she pulled apart the two halves and displayed what looked like a severed spine and intestines and liver.

Still looks like a baby to me, he said.

Not wishing to push things with his wife, he went along with her opinion. He helped her gather up all the rest of the baby fruit and, together, they made a variety of recipes. Some, they chopped up for a stew; some, they peeled and boiled and mashed with cinnamon to make a baby fruit sauce. Some, they stuffed with rice and almonds and raisins and dried cranberries. When they were done, they filled the freezer with dozens of single serving containers that they could take to work for lunch and thaw in the microwave. But after all their work, there were eight baby fruits left in the wheelbarrow. While he washed up the kitchen, his wife worked the baby fruits into the compost in the back corner of the garden.

The following year, their baby tree yielded a crop of thirty fresh baby fruits and they found five new shoots sprouting from the compost. What they learned—and they warned all their neighbours—is that the baby fruit tree, once it takes hold, is a tenacious weed and almost impossible to get rid of. Never let baby fruits anywhere near your property unless you are prepared for a lot of work.

13. ADVENTURES IN GROCERYLAND (A PARABLE)

AS I WAS stocking canned goods, Lenora brushed past me and whispered under her breath: Wonder where they got the new girl from. She nodded to the end of the aisle where I saw half a checkout counter and a pair of forearms drawing packages of pasta under the scanner.

I shrugged. As I see it, some things aren’t meant to be known. All I know is: when the store opened this morning, a new girl appeared at the checkout counter as if by magic. The manager never made an announcement. Never explained why the change. Just went about his business as if things had always been like this.

Maybe she comes from the same place as the Customers.

I looked both ways along the aisle and, climbing down from my stool, whispered for Lenora to be quiet.

Maybe it was a mistake opening up to her. It’s just that, sometimes, after the store closes, and after we go down below, it gets lonely sitting there in the dark with these unruly thoughts rolling around inside my head. I like Lenora, and I hoped maybe it would be less lonely if I shared even a few of my thoughts.

One night, when the others were singing songs around a makeshift fire, I had drawn Lenora to a far corner, and there in the darkness we huddled and I talked to her. It’s such a difficult thing to trust people, and I had great hopes for Lenora. I told her how I sometimes feel doubts. Sometimes it seems to me that the employee manual isn’t the last word on things. There are things left out. Not on purpose of course. It’s not like the people who wrote the manual meant to deceive us. But how could they know? How could they anticipate what life would be like in a modern grocery store? Take cash registers for example. In the manual, they wrote about them as if you have to push the keys down instead of using a digital keypad. And absolutely no mention of bar code scanners.

Do you ever wonder what it’s like to be a Customer? I asked.

The Customer’s always right. She rhymed off the platitude like an autonomic response. Like breathing. She didn’t even stop to think maybe it was irrelevant to our conversation.

Yeah. Sure. Whatever. But what do they do?

Lenora looked at me like I was a prize idiot. They shop for food of course.

I know. But after that?

They take their food home and eat it.

And after they’ve finished eating?

Lenora shrugged.

I have such an intimation of things. It’s a powerful feeling that comes over me: there must be more than my straight-forward life in the grocery store. And yet, because it’s all I know, I can’t imagine what that more might be. I don’t even have words to give it shape.

And then the new girl appeared, and when Lenora wondered where she came from, I thought it was logical to suppose that she came from the same place as our Customers.

Lenora thought that was silly. She said: Everyone knows that if you work for the grocery store, it’s because your parents worked for the grocery store, and their parents before them, and so on into the misty past.

Where in the employee manual does it say an employee can’t come from outside?

Lenora shrugged. I don’t think the manual says one thing or another. It’s just not done.

After the store closed, we went down below with everyone else. The new girl was there too, but because no one else was talking to her, we didn’t either. She seemed strange in a lonely sort of way. She sat on her side of the fire and all the rest of us sat on our side. We stared at her through the fire, pretending to focus on the flames, but secretly trying to figure out what she must be like and what she was doing here.

When people weren’t looking, I took Lenora by the hand and led her to the ladder where we climbed back upstairs. We snuck through the darkened aisles of toilet paper and laundry detergent, peanut butter and microwave popcorn. We sat on pallets of sparkling water and gazed out the big front window into the darkness of the world beyond. It’s hard to imagine what life is like amongst the Customers.

Do you ever wonder where the food comes from? I asked.

From the trucks, silly. Haven’t you ever watched them back up to the loading dock?

But before that. How’d the food get into the trucks in the first place?

Lenora shook her head. It’s too much to think about.

I heard a rumour today. I lowered my head and we nestled close to one another. I heard that there are other grocery stores.

No.

Big ones. With fruits we’ve never dreamed of. And flavours of soup we never knew existed.

No.

A voice cried out from the darkness. You two get back down below before someone from outside sees you! The manager caught us. He stood in the light by the trap door and waited with his arms crossed until we passed him and climbed into the caverns beneath the grocery store. I retreated to my hovel where I sat for a time, remembering all that my parents had taught me about the grocery store. When I woke in the morning, I woke from dreams of stocking shelves, but the shelves went on forever, and no matter how many pallets rolled off the truck, there would always be shelves to fill. I was glad to wake up. I like shelves that have an end to them.

The day unfolded like any other. After breakfast around the fire pit, the manager gathered us in a huddle and offered the usual words of encouragement. Customer satisfaction is our top priority. We strive to deliver a memorable shopping experience. A smile as big as a watermelon. Stuff like that. When I wasn’t clicking prices on soup tins, I was cleaning smashed jars of spaghetti sauce in aisle four.

Late in the afternoon, while I was bagging groceries for a Customer, I saw a strange-looking man come into the store. He wore a black coat so long it almost dragged on the ground. He had a grizzled face and dark glasses and a pony tail.

You work here, son? he said to me.

I nodded uh-huh but was too afraid to say much else. He tossed a chewed-up toothpick onto the ground. Climbing onto the checkout counter , he shouted for everyone to listen up because he had something important to say. A new day has come to Groceryland, he proclaimed.

The manager stepped forward and told us to get back to work. Turning to the man in the long coat, he said: You’re being disruptive. If you don’t stop, I’ll have to call the authorities.

The man in the long coat laughed and clapped a hand over the manager’s mouth. Are you gonna listen to this man? Are you gonna go down below every night and shiver around your puny little fire? Why do that when you could live up here all the time? Or better yet, smash the windows and live in the fresh air and the sunlight?

I raised my hand, timid at first, but he didn’t seem to mind me asking questions: Uh, I heard—it may just be silly, but—I heard—please don’t laugh—but, is it true that there are other grocery stores?

The man in the long coat laughed, but not in a way that was condescending. Of course there are, he said. But it’s better than that. Why go to a grocery store when you can go right to the source? Have you ever had an apple, son?

I’ve heard of applesauce. Comes mushed up in a jar.

Ha! Where do you think that mush comes from?

A truck?

Wrong. It comes from apples. And apples grow on trees. And if you want, you can climb an apple tree and pull off an apple and eat it right then and there. Ever seen a tree, son?

No, sir. Except pictures on packaging.

Oranges grow on trees. And pears, and cherries.

How about rutabagas?

No, they’re something altogether different. But let’s not get distracted. The point is: you don’t have to live your whole life in a grocery store.

After the man left, chaos erupted. The manager lost control of the situation. Jeff on the express register closed his till and heaved an empty cart through the front window. Maddie at the deli counter went berserk with ketchup bottles, squirting graffiti messages on all the walls. Randy, who worked mostly at the loading dock, well, Randy said he was standing by the manager on this one and he was damned if he’d let anyone out of the grocery store. He tried to build a barrier from pop cases, but as fast as he stacked them, others pulled them down. Rita in the bakery refused to go down below ever again and cleared a space in the produce section for the evening fire.

This is the sad part of my story:

There comes a time in every grocery clerk’s life when he has to make a choice. Either settle in for a lifetime of stocking shelves and serving Customers. Or step through the front doors and explore the world beyond the grocery store. Ever since this afternoon, when the stranger in the long coat arrived at the store and told me about apples, well, I had made my choice. I decided I want to eat apples straight from the tree. And I want to do a thousand other things besides. So I gathered my things into a couple eco-friendly shopping bags and stood by the smashed front window to say my good-byes. I didn’t leave right away because I was hoping Lenora would see what I was doing and ask to come along too.

Lenora did see what I was doing, but instead of asking to come along too, she got angry. She yelled at me and beat her fists on my chest. Tears ran down her cheeks and she told me I was a coward. I was abandoning my home, my friends. I was betraying my grocery store heritage. When she was done, I asked one more time if she would come with me, but as she got close to the open window, she began to tremble and she pulled away. I turned and walked into the night with all the stars shining their wonder down on me. And I couldn’t help but note a strangeness in my heart. Even though I felt a lift at the prospect of a new adventure, it was tainted by a feeling of regret. If Lenora couldn’t come with me, why couldn’t she be happy for me? Why did she have to be so angry?

14. OLD SCHOOL

GEORGE FOUND IT amusing, Martha’s attachment to old technologies. There was the grandfather clock in the living room with its big brass pendulum and the Latin inscription on its face—tempus fugit—or as Giuseppe the barber liked to say: Time, she fly. There was the old electric typewriter and pack of postage stamps at her work desk: neither rain nor sleet…etc. And then, of course, there was her telephone, an old-fashioned rotary dial phone with its pig-tail cord and dial that clicked and whirred as it went around. Martha had expressed no interest in wireless phones, and cellphones were beyond her ken. They belonged to the realm of magic. Too bad for her she hadn’t gotten a cellphone. She might not be in her present pickle, staring at the garden with her blank, unseeing eyes. George unwound the telephone cord from her neck and returned the receiver to its cradle. He mustn’t dawdle. Best to take what he’d come for and vanish before it was too late. As Giuseppe liked to say: Time, she fly.

15. THE VOLUME KNOB

WHEN THE MAN woke, he turned to see the woman mouthing words at him from across their pillows. He could see the lips moving, and the tongue pushing the words out between the teeth, but he heard nothing. Maybe he had gone deaf in his sleep. But he recalled the jarring buzz from his clock radio. If he had gone deaf in his sleep, he would have slept through the alarm. He looked again at the woman’s lips and listened. He heard the furnace start with a clunk. He heard his feet pad across the hardwood floor. He heard the creaks of the floor as his weight stressed the tongue-and-groove joints. He heard the plash of water in the toilet and the gurgle as it all went down the drain. He heard the drizzle of the shower on the slate tile. He heard the dribble of milk across his cereal. He heard the swish of the tie he wrapped around his neck.

But when the woman spoke to him at the front door, he only noticed because he saw the lips move.

You’ll have to speak up, honey, he said.

The woman’s expression passed from affection to distress. She mouthed something again, this time with more vigour, as if the words she had mouthed now needed underlining.

I can’t hear you, the man shouted.

By the woman’s frightened look, the man surmised that she couldn’t hear him either.

The couple rode the subway together to their separate offices where they worked as professionals in their professional world. All the way downtown, they shouted at one another. Although the train was crowded, no one noticed how they shouted. The train rattled through the stations. The bell dinged when the doors opened and closed. The wheels screeched on the curves. A thousand footsteps shuffled across the platforms. But they could hear nothing of their own voices. When they paused to catch their breath—shouting is an exhausting thing to do—they saw how all the others around them were shouting too. Or at least going through the motions, for no sound came from their lips. Everyone was shouting, but no one could hear, so everyone shouted louder. By the time the man reached his stop, the people around him were slumped in their chairs, or clinging to the poles, worn out from all their shouting.

It was the same in his office. The man said hello to the receptionist, but she didn’t notice him. He began his workday with mild tones, but as those around him appeared not to hear, he spoke louder and louder until he screeched at his colleagues.

As the work day drew to a close, the man’s boss, who wore a blue suit, called him into the corner office where the man was summarily dismissed. The man asked why, but the man’s boss did not understand the question. In an impromptu game of charades and made-up signs, the man’s boss conveyed that the man was not very good at communicating. In recent days, he had contributed nothing fresh, but instead grew shrill by the minute. It was intolerable. Waving his arms, the man asked how his boss could say such things when the boss couldn’t—or wouldn’t—hear him in any event? What choice did he have but to shout? The man’s boss had turned away and didn’t notice the questions.

Over dinner, the man told the woman what had happened. Some of it he signed. Some of it he scratched onto pieces of paper. The woman was angry and after shouting her silent recriminations, she stomped from the room.

It seemed little time before the woman petitioned for a divorce. In the supporting affidavit, the petitioner complained about the respondent’s verbal abuse. The man answered that this was ludicrous; this was yet another instance of the woman’s habitual lying. So it went, back and forth, but nobody ever read the documents. The court house already stored mountains of such exchanges. There was nothing the couple could allege that hadn’t been alleged before.

Alone in his new apartment, the man turned on his TV. He kept the volume soft at first, but couldn’t hear what anybody said. He had no problem hearing the car chases and laugh tracks and creepy music and Foley artist bone-crunching sound effects, but when the actors spoke, there was no sound, only lips opening and closing. It reminded him of fish in a bowl. He watched the evening news and it was the same. He cranked up the volume, hoping he could hear what the news anchors reported, but it made no difference.

One morning, the man found an eviction notice taped to his door. All the neighbours had complained to the landlord about the noise coming from the man’s apartment. The man tried to explain to the landlord that he hadn’t meant to disturb anybody; it was a problem with his TV. The landlord couldn’t hear a word the man said. The man screamed at him. He called the landlord a prick and a dirty capitalist. Although the landlord didn’t understand the precise words, he understood the gist of the harangue. By now, the man had become adept at reading lips. The landlord called the man a no-good socialist freeloader and tossed him onto the street.

The man lay on the pavement and stared at the sky. He heard the rush of warm air from a vent beside his head. He heard the caw of crows wheeling on the updrafts. He heard the rumble of traffic all around him. But there was one thing the man didn’t hear. He didn’t hear the cries of a woman warning him to look out for the streetcar.

16. THE SIX SHEET RULE

IT STARTED WITH a three-day blackout. They got the grid online again, but never back to the way it was. From then on, there were rolling blackouts, at least a couple hours each day. There was talk of crumbling infrastructure, but that was only half the problem. When the no-nukes started rioting, the authorities shut down all the reactors as a precaution. The no-coals had blown up some of the power plants. If the no-nukes followed no-coal tactics, there might be melt-downs and radiation leakages. The no-winds pulled down most of the wind-mills. That left a handful of hydro-electric generators—hardly enough to meet the ever-rising demand for power.

It was hard to know what was going on. With the rolling blackouts, news became sporadic, and the internet was unreliable. Cellular services worked intermittently, but with limited TV and internet, people got bored and joined the no-cell riots. Roving gangs pulled down the cell towers and others claimed them for scrap metal. When the no-oils blew up the pipelines, supply chains unraveled and ordinary consumers couldn’t get even basic supplies. People could line up for hours at a grocery store and come away with only a box of Cheerios and a rotten head of lettuce. Manufacturing ground to a halt and soon the roads were littered with abandoned cars because their owners couldn’t source replacement parts after the cars broke down. Increasingly, Western cities looked like bombed-out towns from World War Two or the aftermath of Shock and Awe.

Jared wasn’t worried about the state of the world. Some people used words like post-apocalyptic. Jared thought that was absurd. In his view, the world was engulfed in a forest fire. He’d read that certain pine cones couldn’t open and spread their seeds except in the heat of a forest fire. Jared thought of himself as a seed, and he’d take root in the conflagration that was sweeping the globe.

Jared would never describe himself as clairvoyant, but he could see the fire coming from a hundred miles away. He had a sense that something like this would happen and he prepared himself for it. That meant setting up a panic room and stocking it with supplies. There were shelves and shelves of canned goods, barrels of water, batteries, flashlights, a generator, solar panels, a ham radio, medical supplies, books, pens, firearms and ammo, and most important of all … a hundred rolls of toilet paper. Jared was determined to hunker down with his wife, Cecile, and the twins, Todd and Jeff, and wait for the crisis to burn itself out.

At first, Jared assumed it would be a short-term problem. The army would come in and calm the riots. Then the engineers would get all the power plants back online and things would return to normal. On that assumption, Jared instituted the eight-sheet rule: after going to the bathroom, they were allowed to use a total of eight sheets of toilet paper to wipe themselves. They could use those eight sheets in any combination they pleased. Jared himself preferred to wipe with three, three and two, reasoning that, by the third wipe, two sheets was all he needed. Cecile went with four and four. She was of the view that a four-sheet wipe was ideal for comfort and it minimized the possibility of contact between fingers and human waste. Todd usually went with two, two, two and two. That way, if he didn’t have everything clean by the third wipe, he still had two sheets in reserve. Jeff took a more flexible approach, preferring to adopt a wiping pattern based on the circumstances. On this basis, the family went through two rolls in the first week.

In the second week, while Jared was scrounging for food, he overheard his neighbour, Floyd Crenshaw, complaining about how he and his wife, Margery, were running out of toilet paper. If they didn’t score some TP real soon, he didn’t know what they’d do. He was damned if he’d wipe with his bare hand, like some kind of savage. He’d probably have to gather up leaves from the park or napkins from the abandoned Starbucks. When Jared heard this, he realized that he could earn some decent money selling his surplus TP. The next day, he loaded a backpack with rolls of cottony-soft two-ply TP and went into the streets to see what price he could get for them. As he suspected, people were desperate. They’d run out and it was disgusting. Some paid as much as twenty dollars a roll.

Jared didn’t get the response he’d expected. When he laid five hundred dollars on the counter, Cecile screamed that he was selling their future. While Jared was out hawking their wiping comfort to complete strangers, his own son, their dear Todd, had developed a case of diarrhea and went through an entire roll all on his own. With two rolls last week, two rolls this week, Todd’s case of the runs, and Jared’s business venture, they were down to seventy rolls.

Jared insisted that seventy rolls was a lot of toilet paper. True enough in normal times. But Cecile heard that the military had completely disbanded and there was no hope of restoring law and order before the end of summer. That was twenty weeks, at least forty rolls, not including further cases of diarrhea. And what then? With twenty-five or thirty rolls left, what then?

That was when Jared instituted the six-sheet rule. Without the flexibility that eight sheets gave them, everyone in the family followed the two, two and two wiping pattern. The situation could have become demoralizing, but Jared exhorted his wife and sons with his passionate words. Toilet paper was the hallmark of civilization. Even now, with barbarians banging at the door, they’d push them back and hold high their rolls of toilet paper. They’d make a stand for civilization.

Mid-way through the summer, while Jared was out on one of his foraging expeditions, he noted that people had begun to walk funny. It was a tight-assed shuffle, like you see in zombie movies, only nobody was foaming at the mouth or dropping puss-oozing eyeballs. It was clear to Jared that they were chafing thanks to all the coarse materials they were using to wipe themselves.

While he was salvaging copper wire from an abandoned car, he heard a familiar voice from behind:

— Hey, Jared, you got any of that toilet paper left?

— Oh hi, Floyd.

— Cuz Margery’s so sore now, she can’t hardly sit no more. And me. Well, I’m not much better.

Jared saw how difficult it was for Floyd to walk towards him.

— So whadya think? Can you spare me a coupla rolls? I’d pay. Haven’t got much, but I think I could make it worth your while.

— Gee, Floyd. I dunno. I got Cecile to think of. And Todd. Well, he’s got a real sensitive stomach. Every morning it’s like a brown river.

— Then you still have some rolls, doncha?

— Oh, now, Floyd. Not really.

— But you got some?

— Only a few more.

— That’s good enough for me.

Floyd waved his hands and called to all the people in the intersection.

— Hey everybody, he screamed, Jared here’s still got toilet paper.

People clamoured to grab him and hold him down. Jared was nimble enough to deke through the closing circle of sore-assed stiffs. Still, they knew where he lived and followed him. At home, Jared scooted Cecile and the boys into the panic room and they waited for the angry mob to arrive. In the short term, they’d be safe; the panic room was impregnable. But if the mob laid in a good siege, Jared might run out of food and water before he ran out of toilet paper, and then he’d have to surrender.

When the mob arrived, leering faces pressed flat against the small window in the door. Jared answered by waving rolls of toilet paper under their noses and dancing a jig. Later, he mooned them to show how smooth his skin had remained through the crisis. When the mob was especially unruly, Jared sacrificed a roll, tossing it like a grenade into their midst and watching how they tore one another apart just to lay hands on a few sheets of the precious stuff. Even at that, he lost another roll to Todd’s dysentery.

That evening, as the family sat around the narrow table eating cold tins of beans and diced peaches, and as the angry hoard banged fists against the door, Jeff asked if this wasn’t the end.

— The end? Whadya mean “The end”?

— You know.

His voice was tender and it shook.

— We’ll run out of stuff and they’ll come in and kill us.

— Oh, no, honey.

Cecile put an arm around her son as the tears began to stream down his cheeks.

— Son, Jared said, we don’t have a thing to worry about.

He stood and walked to the far corner of the panic room, and he reached to the highest shelf and shoved his hand to the very back behind all the supplies, and he drew out a thick black book.

— It’s all been prophesied. Right here in the Book of Revelation. Listen to this. ‘And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”‘ That bit about the throne? That’s talking about us. ‘But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination…’ Or how about this? ‘Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.’ So, you see? The unclean ones can’t get in here.

— But what if we run out of toilet paper?

— Run out? Don’t be silly.

Jared tossed the black book and it landed with a loud thunk on the table.

— Lookit all that paper. It’ll last us for months.

It was true. The Bible would be their salvation.

17. NESSIE!

NIELS BOHR HAD nine items, one too many for the express line, so he had to wait in a regular line behind a woman with five snot-nosed kids and two buggies overflowing with groceries. Bohr wondered if something had happened to the space-time continuum to make his wait in line seem more interminable than it already was. With nothing better to do, he scanned the rack of tabloids and noted the latest issue of the International Enquirer from that damned Carl Jung and his publishing house, the Unconscious Collective. Jung was at it again. This week, the front page featured shocking new photos of the Loch Ness Monster. The photos (allegedly) came from a German nanny on vacation with her employers in the Scottish Highlands. In an exclusive interview, she said that after putting the children down for their nap, she went to the banks of the lake for some time alone, and on her third beer, heard a great splash and turned to see a giant beast rising from the water. The way it’s neck curved, it looked like a cross between a swan and a brontosaurus. The nanny was lucky to have a camera with her, and even though she wasn’t able to get it in focus, the photo was good enough to give an impression of the beast and its enormity.

When it came his turn to pay, Niels Bohr pointed to the Enquirer and frowned. “Can you believe what Jung has the gall to print?”

“That one about Nessie?” And the kid behind the counter smiled.

“I am a man of reason. All my life I’ve dedicated my life to the cause of reason. And I can assure you: there is no such thing as the Loch Ness Monster.”

“Whatever.” And the kid took his money.

All his professional life, Bohr had fought Jung tooth and claw. When Jung first formed the Unconscious Collective, Bohr responded by forming the Society of Reason. When Jung published an early piece on Yeti sightings in the Himalayas, Bohr responded by mounting an expedition that debunked all Jung’s claims and definitively established the Yeti as a hoax. Even so, Jung countered that, as a man of reason, Bohr should be well versed in the elementary principle of logic that it is impossible to prove a negative proposition. This proved to be a frustrating and persistent move on Jung’s part.  When he published an article about how Aztecs had invented spaceships and flew to Mars during the Stone Age, he answered Bohr’s laughter by saying that Bohr couldn’t disprove such a reading of the ancient Aztec hieroglyphs. What surprised Bohr was how the public supported Jung’s wild theories, and how quick they were to attack Bohr, calling him a bully and a bad sport for trying to disprove Jung.

Bohr brought a copy of the Enquirer back the office to show everybody the latest outlandish theory, but when he got there, he found his colleagues already huddled around a copy spread across the lunch table. The new fellow, Max Planck, had brought a copy with him to work. In fact, Planck had done a lot of thinking about the matter and had come up with an approach that he believed would both permanently debunk the Loch Ness myth, and put to rest any of Jung’s you-can’t-prove-a-negative-proposition nonsense.

As Planck pointed out, there were enough members of the Society of Reason who had served with the Manhattan Project that they could develop an atomic bomb in-house. Even a modest thermonuclear device—100 megatons, say—strategically positioned somewhere near Inverness, would be enough to wipe northern Scotland from the face of the Earth. No Scotland, no Loch Ness. No Loch Ness, no monster. Just a bleak hole and a boiling sea. QED. Problem solved.

Niels Bohr was shocked at first, but the idea did have a certain panache. There’s nothing quite like a bold statement to drive home your point. Still, there was the incidental matter of ethics: such a detonation could kill upwards of a million people. But when Werner Heisenberg suggested they could lure people from their homes with the promise of a whiskey tasting in Glasgow, the matter was settled. They’d blow up the Loch Ness and make it irrefutable: there’s no such thing as the Loch Ness monster.

While the bomb was still in development, Bohr bumped into Jung at the gym and teased him about his fine journalism on the piece about Nessie. Jung was on the Stairmaster and his thighs were burning so he only smiled his acknowledgment.

“What’s next? UFOs?”

“Interesting you should mention UFOs.” Jung paused to catch his breath. “Maybe that indicates a latent fear of anal probes, ja?”

In most encounters like this, Bohr brought conversation to an abrupt end with a string of expletives, but this time Bohr held his tongue and congratulated himself on his self control. After all, he and the boys at the Society of Reason would soon be blowing that Nessie mutherfucker to kingdom come.

It turns out you can’t detonate a 100 megaton thermonuclear device without attracting attention. Nevertheless, Niels Bohr expressed surprise at how quickly authorities drew a connection between the obliteration of northern Scotland and his band of scientists. Although there were no deaths in the incident, the property destruction was incalculable. Authorities decided the Society of Reason was a criminal conspiracy and charged its members with committing acts of terror.

In the next issue of the International Enquirer, the headline read:

Found! The Loch Ness Monster

and beneath it, a photo of Niels Bohr.

THE POLITICS OF TESTES

18. LINGUA FRANCA

THE HUSBAND WALKED the dog. A power-walking woman overtook them. She glanced backward and paused.

May I pet your dog? she asked with the breathy voice of a power-walker who has just paused. The husband said yes. The woman knelt before the dog and cooed and petted it. She looked up at the husband and, rising, asked if she might kiss him.

The husband was taken aback. Are you a temptress—or a sprite? he asked. If the woman’s request hadn’t been so sudden, the husband might have come up with something better to say.

Of course not, the woman laughed. It was an impulsive thing. I looked up and thought: I would love to kiss this man.

The husband admitted that it was a flattering request. But really—

Then what’s the harm? the woman laughed. I get tired of living in a world of strangers who never connect with one another. Sometimes it would be so much better, you know, if people connected more … what?

But kissing? Oh, what the hell.

They kissed. It started as a simple kiss on the lips. But it was pleasurable and the husband lingered longer than he had intended. Their tongues met between their lips. The dog sat dutifully and watched. After the woman had given the husband her tongue, he gave her his. The woman clamped shut her jaw and bit off the man’s tongue.

Jevuv! He screamed.

The woman spat out the tongue and continued on her power walk.

Tears had filled the husband’s eyes and he couldn’t see which way the woman went. He thrashed where he stood and grew dizzy with the pain. Blood flowed over his chin and dribbled onto his shoes. The dog danced around the husband’s feet, lapping the blood from his toes. Seagulls fought in the middle of the road. The largest and loudest warned the others away and took off into the morning sun with the husband’s tongue in its beak.

The husband stumbled home but didn’t go inside. His wife was in the kitchen and would wonder how he lost his tongue. The husband needed time to think up a plausible story. Accident at a construction site? Wild dog? Confrontation with a mad seamstress? He didn’t know what to say. Instead, he sat in the car with a wad of Kleenex pressed against the stump of his tongue. On the way to the local emergency ward, he tossed the bloody wad onto the road and stuffed another into his mouth.

At the hospital, the doctor on duty asked awkward questions, but it’s difficult to answer questions, awkward or not, without a tongue. The doctor injected something into the stump of the tongue and the pain vanished. After the stitches, the police arrived with awkward questions of their own. They offered a pen and pad of paper, but the husband only doodled.

Look, said one of the police officers.

The husband looked and saw a hulking man with a puffed-out chest of Kevlar.

Look, said the hulking officer, you’re not the first. And I understand it’s embarrassing. We know how she operates. Targets a dude with a ring. Asks for a kiss. Then a little tongue action. Bam. Chews it off. Dude’s too embarrassed to say anything, so she gets away with it. Does it again. Before you know it, dudes all across the city are registering for signing lessons.

The husband refused to volunteer information. After he filled his prescription for painkillers, he went home to face his wife. Although the husband faced his wife, he admitted nothing. With waves of his arm and scrawls on a pad of paper, he indicated that he didn’t want to talk about it.

Aw he wawa oo ee lie ee beh.

The husband lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling. The dog chewed on the bloody wads the husband had spat into the garbage can before he lay down. A plate shattered against the kitchen wall. Although the husband refused to tell what had happened, the wife wasn’t stupid. There were stories circulating through the neighbourhood. Myrna Mapplethorpe’s husband hadn’t spoken to her in months. And there were others, too. Men who grunted when they used to chat.  Men who wandered through the neighbourhood with heads bowed in shame, humming and mumbling but never speaking aloud.

She got you, didn’t she?

Later in the evening, when the dishes stopped crashing against the kitchen wall, the wife came to the bedroom. She lay beside her husband and apologized. It must be a horrible thing, to lose your tongue like that. So painful. So humiliating. She kissed her husband on the cheek. She unbuttoned his shirt and played with the hairs on his chest. She caressed the inside of his thigh.

Would you like me to suck you? she asked.

The husband was taken aback. Are you a temptress—or a sprite? he tried to ask.

Of course not, the woman laughed.

19. NOTHING EVER HAPPENED

BRIAN SAID IT first. Nothing ever happened. That’s what he said. Brian was two years older than me, but not old enough to get a real summer job that paid money and stuff. Him and me, we hung out together all summer doing not much of anything but looking busy whenever one of our moms wanted to give us a chore. Mostly we watched TV. There were shows about spies or kids discovering bodies and solving murders or finding out that the old guy living next door had superpowers or something. When we weren’t watching TV, then mostly we played in a fort that took up the whole of Brian’s basement. We were commandos and we crawled around in the dark on our bellies and fired BB guns at each other’s legs. Sometimes it hurt and our moms told us not to do it cuz somebody could lose an eye, but we did it anyways. Brian and I both still have both our eyes, so I guess it was okay. We went the whole summer and never once caught a spy or found a body or met anyone with superpowers. Brian was the first to say what we both were thinking: nothing ever happened. It was one boring day after the next until school started up again in September.

That’s not quite true. There was one thing that happened once a week. My mom had signed me up for a summer course at the Royal Conservatory of Music. It was boring crap about the history of music and I was supposed to take it cuz of the piano lessons I took during the regular year. Mom said it would improve me. So once a week I took the subway downtown and learned about how Schumann went crazy with syphilis and about how Brahms had the hots for Schumann’s wife and about how Tchaikovsky was gay so the people in charge made him drink poison. I’m not sure the course improved me the way my mom thought it would, but I learned lots of interesting stuff.

There was this one day when I was walking to the subway station when a taxicab pulled up beside me and this old dude called out the open window wondering where I was headed. I told him I was headed to the subway station. He said he was headed that way too and asked if I wanted a lift. I told him I didn’t have money for a cab. He said that’s not what he meant; it was just a courtesy ride cuz we were going the same way. I said okay and went for the back seat but he told me to get in the front beside him so people wouldn’t think he had a fare. Whatever, and I threw my knapsack onto the floor of the passenger side and got into the taxicab.

There was the briefest moment when I heard my mom’s voice inside my head, in that annoying lecture voice of hers, telling me not to take rides from strangers. But the voice went away. With the window down, there was a nice breeze, and the feel of it across my cheeks made me wonder why grownups worry so much.

When I say the cabbie was an old dude, I mean he was my dad’s age—a hundred and fifty or two hundred years old. He was older than my brain could comprehend. Almost as old as Schumann or Tchaikovsky. He was an immigrant but spoke pretty good English, a little clipped, like he might have come from Germany or Russia or some place like that. He had a bushy moustache that looked as if it had nose hairs worked into it.

— You goin’ downtown? he asked.

— Yeah, I said.

— Not just to hang out, I hope.

— Naw, I’m takin’ a music course.

— So you’re a good kid, no?

— Yeah, I guess.

— You look like a good kid.

— Thanks, I guess.

— Stay out of trouble?

— That’s me.

The cabbie took me around the back entrance to the subway where there isn’t so much traffic. He reached across me as if he was gonna pop open the door for me, but once he set his hand on the door, he held it there like he’d been hit with a trance.

— Before you go, I want you to do something for me.

He turned in to me. Way too close.

— What? I whispered.

— Give me a kiss.

— What?

— A kiss. Give me a kiss.

Driving along with the window down, the air had felt clean and cool, but now that we were parked, the air was still and it felt close. The man’s breath was warm on my face and I smelled a trace of aftershave on the skin.

— A kiss and you’ll let me go?

— Of course. Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you.

I wanted to yell but I was afraid of what he might do. My heart thudded. All I could hear was Beethoven. I closed my eyes and gave him a peck on the cheek, hardly enough time to register the feel of stubble against my lips. When I opened my eyes, the cabbie was frowning.

— No, he said. On the lips.

— What?

— A proper kiss

I did what he asked. It was wet and it was gross and he put his tongue in my mouth. When I stumbled out of the car, I spat on the ground and then went around to the front of the subway station where there’s a hotdog stand and I bought a bottle of Coke and I swished some Coke around inside my mouth like it was mouthwash and I spat it onto the pavement and took another swig and kept doing this until the gross taste was gone.

I went to the class like I usually did, but I couldn’t think straight and didn’t hear anything the teacher said. Come to think of it, I skipped the next couple classes and ended up flunking the course, which was odd for me, seeing as I was pretty good at that kind of thing. Mom got all mad and wondered why she bothered wasting money on me like that. In the fall, when I started back with the piano lessons, my teacher tried to get me to learn a Haydn sonata, but something about it didn’t click. Not just the sonata, but the whole music thing. It’s like the whole idea of music went limp inside my body.

I haven’t thought about this stuff for years. Don’t know why it’s come up now. My therapist says maybe it has to do with a whole spate of news reports these past weeks. Men coming forward to talk about things the coach did years ago in the locker room; the youth group leader in the parking lot; the Sunday school teacher in the storage room.

I snort at my therapist’s suggestion. What happened between the cabbie and me, that wasn’t at all like what you hear in the news. I mean, really, nothing ever happened.

20. THE HOOKERS OF WAL*MART

I WAS STANDING there with a box of Lucky Charms and a pack of dental floss when Joe pulls me outta line. Says: “Hey, Sam, you gotta come see this.” And he drags me down an aisle like there’s no tomorrow. And you should see him move. He’s been spry since he got his knee replaced, but this takes the chili dog. I says to him, I says: “Joe, what’s your hurry.” And he says to me, he says: “Sam, you aren’t gonna believe this.” He’s moving like a—like a—well I don’t know what but he’s moving fast. He yanks me past the breakfast cereals and past the ladies underwear. He yanks me past the camping gear and the underarm deodorant, until I’m standing in the far corner of the store, about to enter an aisle I’ve never been down before. There looks to be mannequins on either side, all dressed in lingerie, though that can’t be, seeing as we rushed through the lingerie aisle on our way over here. When I step into the aisle, the mannequins come to life, which is when I realize they aren’t mannequins at all but women dressed in next to nothing. They twitter and coo and ask how I like it. They ask if I like it rough, or with leather, or in a three-way, or tied up. I call to Joe and ask what the hell he’s got me into. He smiles back at me: “It’s a new product line,” he says. “Pay less, live better.” I’d like to think Joe’s onto something here, but I know from experience—like with that push mower I bought, and the lawn furniture too—that it’s a false economy. You buy something cheap and use it the leastwise rough and the product breaks apart like straw. Better to get yourself something sturdy that’ll last you over the long haul.

21. PERVERT

I’VE NEVER BEEN called a pervert but once, and that once was yesterday when I went downstairs for a swim. The building’s got a nice pool that hardly anyone uses. Most afternoons I do a few lengths. It helps settle my mind and, theoretically, helps to keep the blubber from gathering around my middle. When I’m done, I turn on the hot tub and let the jets massage my muscles. I like to close my eyes and sink low in the water until everything below the nostrils is submerged.

That’s what I was doing yesterday when this guy comes into the pool area from the men’s change room, this middle-aged guy, this guy with a gut like mine, and a comb-over, and flip-flops. And this guy’s carrying a three year old girl with water-wings on her arms, and this girl laughs at him and calls him daddy. Holy shit! This guy—with his banker’s haircut and his retirement portfolio—this guy’s a new dad. It seems wrong to me—me with my kids away at university and my vasectomy—it seems wrong that a man my age should be breeding. Nevertheless, this guy seems happy the way he slips into the pool and coaxes his little girl to jump into his arms. Who am I to judge a guy for wanting to be happy whatever his age?

After I’m done with the hot tub, I walk the length of the pool to the change room. As I pass the guy and his daughter, I suck in my gut and nod. He sucks in his gut and nods back. The daughter’s too busy having fun to notice either of us and our guts. I try not to laugh at the guy’s comb-over which has come unstuck from his scalp and hangs like a drowned rat off the side of his head.

In the change room, I have myself a shower and tamp myself dry with a the beach towel Andrea gave me last Christmas. It was a hint that never took. Once I’m mostly dry, I set my bum on the bench beside my locker and work the towel between each of my toes. I hate putting on socks when my toes are wet. It’s a sure recipe for foot rot, like what the soldiers got in both World Wars.

While I’m powdering my toes, I hear the door from the pool open, and a high-pitched laugh, and a man’s voice calling from around the corner:

— Is everything okay in here?

My toes look clean and dry, so I shout back:

— Everything’s hunky dory, thanks.

The little girl scampers into the change room and halts in front of me, staring between my legs at the middle-aged dong hanging off the edge of the bench. Her father follows, and when he sees his daughter staring at me in all my revealed glory, he makes a sound like a raccoon and a hound stuck together in a sac.

— I asked if everything is okay in here.

— And I said yes.

— But you’re stark naked.

— It’s a change room. People get naked in change rooms.

— You’re exposing yourself to a three year old girl.

— You make it sound so dirty.

— I’m trying to protect her. The world’s full of smut and porn and all that.

— So sitting here in the body God gave me, that’s smut and porn?

— It’s indecent.

The guy’s getting pretty steamed at me. I can tell by the way the pitch of his voice gets higher and higher. Even so, I was sitting here minding my own business, doing whatever I’m entitled to do. I don’t see how he has the right to talk to me like this; I need to say something.

— Smut and porn isn’t about naked; it’s about how naked gets used. I read somewhere that it’s, like, all about power.

— For crissake, cover yourself.

— You’re a righteous tool, you know that?

— My daughter’s gonna have nightmares.

And he lobs a balled up towel at my crotch.

I’m not sure how things go after that, or at least not the order of things. What I do know is that he gets off the first punch, a sharp crack across the jaw. Afterwards, I tell the cops it was unprovoked, but in the heat of things, I may have called him a couple names, and both of them a notch or two up the scale from “righteous tool”. He says it’s one thing for me to be waggling my wiener at his daughter, but quite another to be using foul language in front of her. That’s when the first punch flies. I make a point of learning from my mistakes, so when the second punch comes zooming at my nose, I do a feint-jab-uppercut combo that gets the blood flowing from his left nostril.

While he dabs the blood, he says that, for doing what I’ve just done, I’m the most totally shit-fucked man on the planet.

— Daddy, and his daughter stares up at him with bright saucer eyes. Daddy, what’s shit-fucked?

— Do you see? Do you see? This is how it happens. You expose yourself and before you know it, she’s saying stuff like that.

He lumbers at me like a bear and tries to jam me bodily into the corner. But I’m in pretty good shape from all my swimming, so I dodge left and knee him in the nuts. While he’s writhing on the floor and gasping, he motions to his daughter.

— Honey.

— Daddy?

— Honey. In a couple minutes, Daddy’s gonna call the cops on the pervert. But first I need to get changed. Bring me the bag with the clothes. That’s a good girl. Now come over here and help Daddy take off his swim suit.

22. LUST

I CAN’T REMEMBER how I got here, but it feels like I’m in a TV series. Maybe you know the one. A plane crashes near an uncharted island in the middle of an unspecified ocean. The survivors confront various challenges, including their own sordid pasts. One of the challenges is another group that lives on the island. This isn’t a group of natives or cannibals; it’s a group of white people, which means they’re all sociopaths or total dickheads. They do horrible things to the crash survivors. For example, in one episode, they kidnap this guy and torture him by performing a surgical procedure on him. They implant a pacemaker that contains a charge of C-4 explosive. It monitors his heart rate. If it goes above 140 beats per minute, it sounds a warning. If it goes above 150 beats per minute, the pacemaker detonates and the guy’s chest explodes.

The reason I mention the TV series is that I feel a lot like the guy who has a pacemaker implanted in his chest. I can’t remember how I got here. I wake up and find myself in an antiseptic room, bright lights, porcelain walls. Beside me is a rolling table covered in white cloth, and on the cloth, surgical instruments in a precise arrangement. I can’t move my arms. They’ve been strapped to my sides. A white sheet covers my body and has been drawn all the way to my chin. Behind my head, double doors swing open and footsteps approach. Upside down eyes gaze at me over a surgical mask. I see raised hands in latex gloves.

The woman calls my name and asks how I’m feeling. I tell her I’m feeling fine but would feel a lot better if she let me go. She says the anaesthetist will be here shortly.

When the anaesthetist arrives, I realize that they really mean to operate on me.  I protest. I tell them I have rights, you know. They can’t operate without my consent.

The woman laughs. Consent? she says. Why would we want your consent? We’re terrorists.

But what are you going to do?

The surgeon motions to a nurse who steps from the shadows and pulls the sheet up from my feet and rolls it towards my chin. The air is cold against my bare flesh. The anaesthetist comes forward with an enormous needle and inserts it into my exposed crotch. Within a couple minutes, everything is numb down there and I don’t notice the cold air anymore.

The surgeon calls for a scalpel and the nurse sets it expertly into her palm.

But what are you going to do?

As the surgeon sets to work, she explains that she’ll be inserting a special device into my penis. It’s a clever invention that the terrorists have been working on. They wire it directly into my central nervous system, not into my cerebral cortex, not straight into my consciousness, but lower down into the primitive part of my brain. Once the device is activated, whenever I see something, like a nice ass or long legs or—you get the idea—a signal will set off a balloon mechanism that causes the penis to expand and stiffen. The surgeon chuckles and says: who thinks of such things? The problem is: I won’t be able to help myself. I’ll go out into crowded places where there are lots of asses and legs—you get the idea—and it will happen right there in public. My penis will grow and get stiff. What the terrorists are aiming for is maximum humiliation.

When the surgeon is done describing the dastardly plan, I scream and thrash against my restraints. The anaesthetist places a mask over my face and turns on the gas. I go somewhere deeper than sleep, somewhere without dreams or memory.

When I wake up, the world doesn’t seem drastically different. I feel a minor throbbing. There are bandages covering my crotch. But I’m not so badly off. They feed me three meals a day. They give me painkillers whenever I need them. And they clean me and change my bandages at least once a day to be sure the incision doesn’t get infected. I can watch TV or read a book and the sheets smell fresh.

After a week, I’m wearing street clothes again and can walk with only the hint of a stoop to guard my groin. A nurse summons me to a special consulting room where the surgeon waits for me. She isn’t wearing her mask today and smiles at me with teeth as white as her overcoat. Sitting beside her in an overcoat just as white is a man I’ve never seen before. He is stern and remote.

The nurse waves in two hulking orderlies who strap me to a chair. They attach electrodes to my head and to my chest and to my groin. They swivel the chair to face a screen and then, after they’ve lowered the lights in the room, they project a succession of images onto the screen. With each image, I hear the scratch of needles on graph paper. The images are run-of-the-mill. You can get them in any magazine on the top shelf of a convenience store. I can see what they’re doing. They’re trying to figure out if their surgery was successful. They’re trying to see if their sexy images will trigger the device to make my penis expand and stiffen. I’m heroic in the way I resist my captors. When the lights come up, nothing has changed between my legs. The man frowns at the surgeon then rises and stomps from the room.

The surgeon isn’t smiling anymore. It should’ve worked, she says. I did everything exactly how it shows in the manual.

The surgeon leaves and I sit alone, strapped to my chair. The lights go out. Someone draws a hood over my head while someone else binds my wrists and ankles with zip ties. Big arms pick me up like a sack of potatoes and drag me through halls and up stairs and through more halls. For half an hour, I bounce around in the back of a van until it skids to a halt and the same big arms pull me out the back and hurl me down a hill.

Another half hour passes before a family with young children discovers me while hunting for a lost ball. They pull off my hood so my head doesn’t roast in the heat. But they don’t cut the zip ties; I might be dangerous. I don’t get my freedom until the police arrive.

There’s the usual debriefing and I help the police in whatever way I can. They offer free counselling. They say I’ve suffered a horrible trauma and will need help readjusting to normal life. To be honest, I don’t see the point. My captors treated me well enough. The worst of it was the boredom waiting for the incision to heal. Boredom isn’t exactly a traumatic thing. The answer to boredom isn’t therapy; it’s doing stuff.

I make a point of keeping busy, restoring my old routines, holding the boredom at bay. I go back to work. I do grocery shopping. I take the car in for a tune up. On Saturday, I eat lunch at an outdoor café where I have soup and an open-faced sandwich and a pint of my favourite.

While I’m enjoying the last of my lager, a friend approaches on the sidewalk and hanging off his arm is a woman I’ve never seen before. When he sees me, his eyes light up and he stops, drawing the woman around to face me over the railing that marks the café’s boundary. He’s all: how are you? I heard all about it. Such a dreadful thing to be kidnapped like that. But you’re none the worse for wear. He says other things too, but I don’t hear any of it. I’m staring at this woman I’ve never seen before. I’m staring at her boobs. And I’m staring at her calves. And I’m staring at her lips. My imagination has never been so inventive. The fantasies cascade over one another. Meanwhile, my old self, the self before the kidnapping, the self that believed in citified ways and liberal thinking, that believed a good man shouldn’t objectify a woman, that old self is locked in a death cage wrestling match with the new self, the self of surgical implants and wires that burrow into my primitive brain. My two selves have their hands wrapped around each other’s throats. They’ve thrown each other into the mud and are kicking each other in the stomach.

My primitive brain wins the fight, and once it raises its dirty fists, a switch trips, a motor whirs, and my penis grows to the size of a prize zucchini at a fall fair. I feel it under the table straining against the inseam of my pants.

My friend calls my name. The tone of annoyance suggests that he’s been calling my name repeatedly. He’s been introducing the woman hanging off his arm. But I haven’t heard any of it. He expects me to stand, to shake the woman’s hand, maybe give her a hug or a kiss on the cheek. But how can I? Everyone will see the outward sign of my mind’s inward workings. They’ll know what kind of thoughts I have. My humiliation will be complete.

It will be an admission of defeat at the hands of the terrorists.

23. MEETURMATCH.COM

SO, YEAH, I pulled her profile off the dating site and it was, like, wowza! The photo, I mean. It was really something. Now I know (and from personal experience) that the way a girl looks in a 320 by 240 pixel photo posted on a dating site and the way she looks in a coffee shop on Queen Street on a Thursday evening can be two completely different … uh … ways.

Whatever.

What really made the difference in this case was something in the overall profile, a total impression, you know, like, a sense I got in everything from the words she chose to the way she smiled in the photo that she was the sort of person who would never try to deceive another person by manipulating a photo or talking herself up. She gave off an aura of overall sincerity. Is that the right word? Maybe authenticity. You get exactly what you pay for, if you know what I mean.

Anyways.

We chatted online for a couple weeks, and when that went well, and when we both felt ready, we set up a meeting, a safe neutral locale. Whenever I do the online dating thing, I try my best to keep it all as non-threatening as possible. I want the girl to know that I care about, you know, the kind of concerns feminists have: keep everything on an equal footing, be conscious of power in our hook-ups, don’t objectify, acknowledge the girl’s agency in everything from chit-chats to (if it goes that far) sex.

So.

We agreed to meet at a coffee shop on Queen Street West, The Coffee Haus. Maybe you know the place? Kind of trendy, but a good setting, vibe-wise, for a first date. I was coming from a photo shoot on Parliament Street, riding the eastbound streetcar along Queen, early evening with the sun low in the sky, sitting toward the back by an open window on the left side, enjoying the cool air rushing over my face after a day stuck in a studio with hot lights. I’m enjoying a vaguely dreamy feel to the ride. Know what I’m saying? How the wheels rumble on the track and the whole car sways a bit as you’re rolling along? I’ve got 4G on my tablet and I’m looking at the photo of this girl and I’m thinking holy shit she’s got a look to her and I’m looking forward to our date, not in a super excited way, but just in a pleasant dreamy early evening way. I mean, it’s not like I’m thinking oh I’m gonna get laid (though that would be nice), but more that I’m thinking it would be fun to chit-chat with a good-looking girl and flirt and laugh and then see where things go from there.

Or what?

The only problem with travelling by streetcar in the early evening is that you’re catching the tail end of rush hour and, with all the construction downtown right now, that tail end stretches out for an extra hour or two before you get the more relaxed evening traffic. That means there’s less rumbling along and more stopping and starting, waiting at lights for drivers to make illegal left turns while the streetcar driver clangs his bell and leans out the window and calls the driver ahead of him a selfish dick, etc. Somewhere west of University Avenue, where the trendy stuff starts, the streetcar stutters to a stop while we wait for just such a selfish dick to make his illegal left turn. Meanwhile, an eastbound streetcar has stuttered to a stop beside us for exactly the same reason, only in the other direction. So there you have two streetcars, side by side, head to tail, like two Cliffords, the giant red dogs, sniffing each others’ butts, or public transit lovers sixty-nining each other. Whatever image turns you on. Take your pick. I’m sitting, minding my own business, enjoying the open window, and not two feet away is some guy in the other streetcar doing the same. Once our eyes meet, we feel obliged to acknowledge one another. We nod. Then he says: Whuzzup?

Now?

Let me finish first. Christ, where was I? Oh yeah. He says: Whuzzup? I say: Not much. He says: Just broke up with my girl. Can you imagine? Just like that to a stranger riding an opposite-bound streetcar. We have the phrase TMI for a reason, you know. Is that what TMI is? A phrase?

Anyhow.

He asks me how it’s going for me with the ladies. I tell him I’m on my way to a hook-up at the Coffee Haus, a girl I connected with online. He says: lucky you. I say: I hope so.  He says: bring protection. I say: it’s not gonna be that kind of a hook-up. He winks and says: whatever you say, boss. In both directions, the left-turning cars are still waiting for a gap in the traffic and behind them drivers are honking their horns and shouting for them to get their self-centred asses off the road. I look to my lap where I’ve laid my tablet with the girl’s image saved to my photo album app. I hear hey and look to the guy in the other streetcar. He says: I know what you could do. I say: what’s that? He says: you could give her a message.

No shit.

They say it’s all in the delivery, and if that’s true, then this guy’s delivery is, like, impeccable. I stare across the two-foot gap between the streetcars, mouth open in anticipation, expecting him to give me some words of wisdom or at least a decent joke. Instead, the guy hawks up a solid loogie and shoots it like a bullet through the barrel of his O-shaped lips. It’s trajectory reminds me of a basketball when LeBron James shoots from the foul line: straight into the net without ever touching the rim. In the case of the loogie, it goes straight to the back of my throat without touching anything else on the way, no lips, no teeth, no tongue. It flies splat to the back of my throat. He says: give her that! And he laughs. Both streetcars lurch forward and the guy disappears. Reflexively, I swallow and feel the solid ball of mucus slide down my throat.

Don’t remind me.

Another two blocks west along Queen Street and a putrid aftertaste rises to the back of my tongue, the sort of aftertaste you might get from swallowing rotten meat on a moldy hamburger bun slathered in motor oil. I ding the bell for the streetcar to stop, then stumble onto the street, staggering between cars until I double over and retch into a catch basin. Flecks of vomitus spackle my tie enveloping me in an odour that’s a combination of loogie aftertaste (see above) and gastric acid vapour, but pulling off the tie and dumping it in a garbage can and walking two blocks to the west does nothing to get rid of the odour. It’s as if the putrid loogie/gastric acid/vomitus smell is somehow keyed to my DNA and so can’t help but follow me wherever I go.

Exactly.

There’s the Coffee Haus across the road and, although I’m ten minutes late for our hook-up, I figure I’d better go to the nearest drugstore and buy a bottle of mouthwash. There’s nowhere to discreetly rinse and spit, so I slink down the alley beside the drugstore and, between two waste bins, I unscrew the cap and swill mouthwash straight from the bottle. After a good swish and spit on the pavement, I screw the cap back on and stuff the bottle into my rear pants pocket. I do my best to tuck in my shirt and I pause in front of a shop window to paste my hair down with a daub of spit on my palms. As soon as I go into the Coffee Haus, I recognize the girl from the photo, now staring out the window and glancing at her watch. I step to the empty chair and, maybe a little too loud, maybe a little too confident, I tell her I’m the guy from the online dating site. Pulling out the chair, I sit. The bottle of mouthwash explodes. The chair is a puddle of mouthwash and my ass stews in it.

Typical.

In the photo, she has a beautiful smile, but I never once get to see that smile in the flesh. What I see, instead, is an upturned disdain. She smells the alcohol-tinged mouthwash—hell, everyone in the Coffee Haus can smell the alcohol-tinged mouthwash—and she smells the trace flecks of vomitus I hadn’t noticed on my shirt and (in spite of all the mouthwash I’ve swallowed) she smells something else besides which she can’t name but which I know full well is the persistent aftertaste of loogie mixed with gastric juices and me exhaling the noxious mix into the room until the Coffee Haus manager comes out from behind the counter and asks me to kindly leave the premises or she will be forced to call the police. The girl stands and, in a voice of generic politeness, says this is a no-go. Before she can step out from behind the table, I say I’m sorry but there’s a perfectly good explanation for the loogie/vomitus/mouthwash smell combo and I beg for her to stay just a couple minutes and hear me out. But the girl is firm and she elbows past me. She says it hasn’t got anything to do with the way I smell. She says it has to do with the fact that I don’t look one bit like the photo I posted on the web site. She says she’s looking for authenticity and I obviously don’t have what she’s looking for.

Bitch.

24. THE THREE BODY PROBLEM

ALL DOWN THE street we’d been fighting ’til we passed the drug store where Mandy saw the ads in the window and they reminded her that she was having a certain female problem with itchiness so she told me to wait outside with the dog while she ran inside to buy whatever it was she needed that was advertised on special in the window. She yelled at me how her itchiness was probably my fault anyways, that I probably caught it from the bitch she was accusing me of carrying on with, that I probably passed it on to her, that it was probably one of those sexually transmitted bugs, that she was mad as hell, etc. etc. You know how they get. I settled myself on the edge of a big decorative stone planter and, noticing the dark clouds gathering in the sky, I told Mandy she’d better hurry up so we could get back to the apartment before the storm broke, while I thought to myself how this was just like one of those pathetic fallacy thingies where the weather in the external world is a projection of a character’s internal state, like Lear raging on the heath, only here it was Mandy pissed off at me on the sidewalk in front of Jeff’s Drug Mart.

There’d been a chalk artist working a patch of sidewalk further along, only he’d seen the weather turning and was packing his things. The way he moved reminded me of the Kansas farm hands in Wizard Of Oz, scurrying around, tying things down before the tornado swooshes the house away. I squinted to make out what the guy’d been drawing, but Mandy stepped in my way, one hand on her hip, the other held out in front of her. I told her to hurry up and get her anti-fungal hoo haw potion; I didn’t want to be stuck outside when the storm ripped. But she didn’t budge; she just stood there with her hand held out in front of her. Money. That’s what she was after. If I was dumb enough to spread a case of fungal rot, then I could bloody well pay for the cure. Whatever. I dug into my pocket and pulled out a wad of crumpled bills and as I flattened them on the corner of the stone planter and as I counted them out for Mandy, I noticed something peculiar about the chalk drawings on the sidewalk. Normally, when a chalk artist lays something out on the pavement, it’s either a (really infantile) copy of a famous work, like a chalky big-lipped Mona Lisa or a busty cartoonish Birth of Venus, or else it’s a tromp l’oeil, a play with perspective where the drawing only makes sense if you’re standing on your head exactly 10.2 feet due west. But in this case, the drawing didn’t seem to be of anything at all, more a scribble of letters, symbols, and numbers. Granted, the whole thing had a flow to it and an overall visual appeal, but still, you couldn’t call it art in any conventional sense.

When I looked up from the sidewalk, Mandy was still there with her hand stuck out like I hadn’t given her enough money or something. I dug into my pocket again but that wasn’t it. She wanted my cell phone. I figured she wanted it so she could have a vapid conversation with one of her vapid friends, but she said no, she wanted it so she could scan bar codes and look for sales on stuff. I asked why she couldn’t use her own goddam cell phone but she whined that she’d left it back at the apartment on the side of the tub beside the toilet. So much for communication in the modern age.

Mandy disappeared through the revolving doors and it got me wondering what if, instead of doors, the revolving doors came equipped with the rotor blades from an industrial blender. People step inside and get chewed to a pulp. Everything gets strained and collected underneath, then served up as meat nuggets at the fast food place beside Jeff’s Drug Mart. When my fantasy had played itself out, I went back to the chalk scrawls at my feet. A gob-sized rain drop fell splat in the centre of the scribbles, obliterating a single digit and the lower half of a sigma. I smiled at the tug of a philosophical thought: funny how ephemeral life can be; a piece of street art gets scoured away by the elements, beauty for an instant, then nothing, the same way life has its end in death. La-de-fucking-da.

I saw it in a flash. Given the black clouds bearing down on us, one might think I saw a flash of lightning, but that’s not what I mean when I say I saw it in a flash. What I mean is more that I had kind of an epiphany. No, that’s not it either; that just sounds corny. It was more an instant apprehension of things. I looked down at the scribbles on the sidewalk and realized all at once, even with the growing spatter of rain drops, that this wasn’t some artist trying to create the look of mathematical equations like you sometimes see on blackboards in movies. No. These were honest-to-God true-as-Jesus mathematical equations that followed a logical progression from propositions to ineluctable conclusions. No. It wasn’t as vague as that either. My flash included the purpose and content of the equations. They were Newtonian equations—algebra, calculus—describing the motion of planetary bodies in relation to one another: body1, body2, b1, b2. There it was again: b1, b2. And again: b1, b2, b3. B3? The three body problem? Oh my god. This was an algebraic solution to the three body problem.

The rain was picking up and some of the equations began to smear the same way makeup smears when a woman cries. I felt all my pockets for my cell phone, thinking I could use the phone-cam to record the equations, but my pockets were empty. Shit, I gave the phone to Mandy. I leapt to the window of Jeff’s Drug Mart and banged on the glass until Mandy noticed and shrugged in a way that asks: What gives? Every time I heard the splat of a rain drop on the sidewalk, it sounded to my ears like the crackle of fire burning a pile of books or the chuff of bullets as troops looted museums. Mandy stared at me with a vacant look. Too late. Aw shit. I stepped from the window and let the rain soak my clothes.

After Mandy had paid for her anti-fungal kit, we stood outside together, sheltered by the overhang above the revolving doors. We watched the chalky water swirling down the drain and I explained that all those equations had detailed an algebraic solution to the three body problem. Mandy cupped a hand behind my neck and said what I expected her to say: that it was impossible; that Poincaré had proven at the end of the 19th century that the three body problem couldn’t be described in such a way. I said that’s what made the chalk scrawls all the more extraordinary but she only scowled. She said: some things defy description and that’s all there is to it; I just have a case of wish-fulfillment syndrome or another of her made up conditions.

When the rain stopped, Mandy held up the box she’d bought at Jeff’s and said she had to get back to the apartment; she was itchy as hell. I loitered under the overhang, waiting for Mandy to disappear before I checked my phone messages. The first thing I noticed was that, while she was in the drug store, Mandy had used the browser to surf the web. She’d left a page open at listings for one bedroom apartments. I have no idea how that makes me feel. Some things defy description.

25. I HAVE A THING FOR GOSPEL MUSIC

JACKSON HAD IT bad for a Russian girl named Olenka. She spoke hardly a word of English and he spoke hardly a word of Russian. Jackson figured this was probably a good arrangement. His last girl had left him because she understood too much of his English. He had said to her: “Look, honey. I’m not saying you’re heavy, but I do feel sorry for your shoes.” She had said “fuck you” and walked out the door in those burdened shoes of hers. Sometimes there can be too much communication in a relationship. With Olenka, things were simple. Because they had nothing to say to one another, they spent most of their time touching, and most of that touching happened in bed. Jackson never had so much sex as he had with Olenka.

It would be inaccurate to say that Olenka spoke no English. Sometimes, while they were going at it under the covers, she would say: “I have a thing for gospel music.” Jackson had no idea why she said this. It wasn’t an orgasmic declaration; it was quieter. She would nestle in close, nibble on a lobe, and whisper: “I have a thing for gospel music.” Sometimes she even said it with a southern twang.

As far as Jackson could tell, Olenka wasn’t a religious girl. She never went to church. She never wore crosses or hung pictures of Jesus on the wall. She drank. She smoked. She fucked like a rabbit in heat. There was nothing in her habits to suggest a religious upbringing.

Jackson wondered if it was just a mistake. What she really liked was country and western music, but had the wrong word for it. There’s a lot of gospel music that comes from the same place as country and western music; it’s easy to see how a person could confuse the two. But Olenka seemed pretty sure about her music. One night, while she was playing rodeo clown to Jackson’s buckaroo, she turned on the radio she had stuck on the floor beside the bed. She twisted the knob past the hurtin’ songs and the line dancing and went straight on to the freaks who wail their love of Jesus like wolves howling at the moon. Then, with their coitus interrupted thanks to the good lord and savior of all tarnation, they lay back onto their pillows and Olenka whispered: “I have a thing for gospel music.”

Jackson couldn’t stand it. He leapt naked from the bed and paced, sometimes pointing an accusing finger at the radio, as if it was the radio’s fault for filling the room with gospel music. “Do you even know what this shit means?” he shouted.

Olenka knew what the word “shit” means. It’s a cold blunt word and it made her cry.

Jackson tried to touch her on the shoulder, but she drew away from him. That only made him angrier.

A tinny wail came up from the floor:

Oh, I gave myself to Jesus,
Yes, I gave myself to Jesus.
Oh, I gave myself to Jesus.
Now I’m washed in the blood of the Lamb.

“Do you even know what this means?”

Olenka smiled between the tears: “Varsht.”

“Washed.”

“Varsht inta blud ofta lamp.”

“Washed.” Jackson made a scrubbing motion with his hands. Olenka didn’t get it, so Jackson went to the bathroom and turned on the tap. “Look at me,” he called. “I’m washing.” His voice rang from the porcelain tiles. “I’m washing my hands.”

“Blud.”

“Yes, blood.” Jackson pulled a tampon from Olenka’s purse and stuck it between his legs. “In the blood.” Again, Olenka gave no indication that she understood Jackson’s charade. Richard took cuticle scissors from his night table and pricked his arm. “Blood.” Jackson smeared the blood on his arm. “Washed in the blood.”

“Ofta lamp?”

“Of the lamb.” Jackson looked around for something he could use to illustrate a lamb going to the slaughter. He called up Google images on his computer and found a picture of Little Bo-Peep with a lamb. He pointed to the lamb, then mimed a lamb between his legs and made a crosswise motion as if he was slitting its throat. “Washed in the blood of the lamb.” In quick succession, he washed his hands, rubbed blood around on his arm, then slit an imaginary lamb’s throat.

“Varsht…”

“Washed…” Jackson smiled at Olenka.

An expression of horror filled Olenka’s eyes. She screamed and ran naked from the apartment.

The next morning, Dmitri and Sergei showed up with a van. They said they were Olenka’s brother and uncle and had come to pick up her things.

“But she didn’t live here,” Jackson said. “She didn’t leave any things. She had her own place.”

“She had things.” Dmitri spoke it like a command.

Both men were big and Jackson didn’t want any trouble. He went inside and returned with a box of tampons and a radio set to the local gospel music station. That seemed to satisfy the men.

“Did she tell you anything?”

Sergei didn’t understand, but Dmitri spoke pretty good English. He smiled at Jackson. “You shock her.”

“Me?”

“She say something about animal sacrifice.”

“Oh, no. No. That’s just religious shit.”

“She say you American boys all a bunch of savages.”

THE SOCIAL CONDITION

26. THE SOCIAL CONDITION

JANINE WAS IN the bathroom when a guy sat down at the next table. The waitress took his order right away, but he was particular about his omelet and gave confusing instructions. It took a couple tries before the waitress got it right. When she left for the kitchen, the guy winked at me. He leaned forward on his elbows and said: “I’m not prejudiced or anything, but…” He looked behind to make sure the waitress was out of earshot. “Those black girls can be so damned slow. I mean, it’s not like it’s their fault or anything. It’s just the social condition, eh? But still, you’d think a restaurant could hire kids with more on the ball.”

I wanted to tell the guy that I thought he was a pig, but I didn’t. I don’t like confrontation. I’m the kind of person who wants everyone to get along. Instead of telling him what I thought, I gave a faint smile and used a potato wedge to dredge the lake of ketchup I’d poured on my plate.

The waitress set a cup of coffee and a glass of orange juice in front of the man, then walked away. While he poured cream into his coffee, the man told me a joke. It was a joke about black people and watermelons and big lips. The only thing missing from the joke was the word “nigger”. But I could hear it filling the silence after the punch line.

Janine came back from the bathroom and sat across the table from me, blocking my view of the man at the next table.

The man at the next table pushed back his chair and rose so he could see me over Janine’s afro. “Oh, this is just great,” he said. The man’s face was bright pink, like he’d been holding his breath. “This is so fucking rude, how you let me go on and on when you know full well…” He pointed to Janine and her dark skin. The man was like a boiler. If he didn’t let off some steam, he’d explode. He stood, clenching and unclenching his fists. If it weren’t for all the people watching, he would have let off steam by cracking me across the jaw. Instead, he grabbed a bottle of ketchup and squeezed a stream of it into my face. As I spluttered, the man tossed the empty bottle under the table and stomped from the restaurant. I turned to watch the man leave, and as I returned to face Janine, I saw my reflection in the front window. I was covered in ketchup. I was redder than an Indian. I smiled at Janine and said: “I’m not prejudiced or anything but…” and I went on to tell her a joke I’d heard when I was a kid. It was a joke about Indians, an eagle feather, and antifreeze.

27. THE VIRGIN'S NOSE

WE AREN’T CATHOLIC, so you’ll understand my shock when my mom told me to go get a priest. She had something to confess. The doctor said there wasn’t time for me to be looking for a priest. She was ready for the great heave-ho and I’d better stick close to the bed. I dunno. Did I deny a dying woman her last request? If so, maybe I’m going to hell. If I believed in hell. If I believed in anything.

I found a chaplain. A Lutheran, I think. At least he looked like a Lutheran. He agreed to pose as a priest and take mom’s confession. It wasn’t much of a confession. Mom motioned to the table beside her bed. She could barely move for all the tubes and wires and whatnot stuck into her body. She gave a vague wave of her hand and the chaplain pulled open the drawer. Inside was a balled-up wad of tissue.

Take it, she said.

The chaplain held the wad so she could see it.

Give it back, she said. Tell them I’m sorry.

The chaplain peeled away the layers of tissue. Inside was a white pebble, or half a white pebble. On one side, it was smoothed to a polished semi-circle; on the other side, it was rough like rocks from the moon. The chaplain held the pebble to the light, then lowered it so mom could see it.

It’s just a pebble, he said.

It’s weighed so heavy on me.

This little thing?

Mom, what the hell …

I snatched the pebble from the chaplain’s hand and started a good look at it. I didn’t get to finish my look until later because that’s the very moment mom decided to go into respiratory failure. An alarm sounded. A disembodied voice called out: Code Blue. People arrived with those electric paddles. Someone ordered me and the fake priest to step back. Give them room to do their jobs.

But she’s almost ninety, I said.

No one cared. There was no power of attorney for personal care. No living will. No DNR order. So I had no say in any of this. They zapped her and zapped her. She danced her lifeless dance. They banged away at her chest. I looked down at the pebble in my hand, then looked up and watched their arms fall in great hammer strokes. They battered her and beat her silly before they decided she was gone. I looked down again at the pebble and, like a zap from the doctor’s electrified paddles, I remembered the pebble. I had seen it once before. A different place. A different time. I had been a young man then.

Ten days later, after I had buried mom and had begun the chore of administering her estate, I drafted a letter to the Vatican. This is what it said:

Dear sir [I left out the “or madam” part seeing as the Vatican isn’t much of a place for madams],

I don’t know who to address this to, so after you’ve read it, please direct it to the appropriate department.

My name is George O’Connor. I am the executor for the estate of Mildred O’Connor, deceased. Mildred was my mom.

Just before my mom died, she made a confession and a request. I write this letter in fulfillment of her request. As for her confession, I hope she has her peace.

Forty years ago, when I was a young man recently graduated from university, I went with mom on an extended trip through Europe. My dad had just died and it seemed like a good way to keep her from wallowing in grief. On Sunday May 21st, 1972, we went to mass at St. Peter’s Basilica. I don’t know why we went. We’re not Catholic. Call it curiosity. Call it voyeurism. I don’t know. But we went. We stood in the chapel with Michelangelo’s Pieta. We gawked with everyone else. I was young enough still to be impressionable, and the sculpture’s beauty most definitely left an impression. It was as if the stone itself had a soul.

We stood in silence when a man burst out. He shouted all kinds of gibberish. The next day, we bought an English newspaper which said that he had been shouting “I am Jesus Christ.” But there in the middle of it, things happened so fast, the shouts melded into one roar. People rose up in panic. It was chaos and confusion. The man held his hands above his head. It looked like he held a weapon in one hand. Again, reading in the newspaper the next day, we learned that it was a geologist’s hammer. He smashed repeatedly at the sculpture. Bits of it exploded into the air and were lost in the crowd.

It would appear that my mom stuffed a piece of that sculpture in her pocket. I have read that during the reconstruction, when art restoration people assembled all the pieces, Mary’s nose was missing. I believe that is the piece my mom took. It certainly looks to me like the tip of Mary’s nose. I don’t know how I know. Call it faith. I just know.

I would have enclosed the nose along with this letter. But I want to be certain that the nose gets into the right hands. And so I want to deliver it in person. I am willing to do this at my own expense. Please give me the name of a contact so I can arrange a meeting.

Yours truly, George O’Connor

The response came after months of waiting: a letter in a linen envelope with a Vatican post mark. The language was a bit formal, but the gist was straight-forward. They were glad I had contacted them and they wished to meet with me to negotiate the terms on which I would surrender the Virgin’s nose. It was an odd way of putting things. I didn’t know I could have terms. I had thought that, because my mom had pinched the nose, her estate had to give it back. That was it. No terms. The letter was signed by Arturo Grimaldi, Secretary of the Standing Committee for the Conservation of Historical and Artistic Monuments of the Holy See. He suggested a time and a place for our meeting. A week hence at a café in Rome beside the river. No sense getting all stuffy. Our meeting should be relaxed and collegial, he said.

I spent the week wondering what my terms should be. The Pieta was a priceless work of art. It was even more priceless because it had become an object of veneration in its own right. Could one really put a price on access to God? How about a million bucks? That seemed fine for a while. Then I saw an image of Mother Teresa in a magazine and a million bucks for a stupid piece of rock seemed greedy. Think of all the Calcutta orphans a million bucks could help. I decided that ten thousand would be enough. It would cover the cost of my flight and hotel, meals, meeting with Arturo Whatshisface, and a little extra left over for a new suit. That seemed fine for a while. Then I looked at the clunker sitting in my driveway and the balance on my line of credit and the amount outstanding on my mortgage. How about we split it down the middle? Midway across the Atlantic, while fingering the nose in my pocket, I decided to ask for five hundred thousand.

We met early on a weekday morning. Jibber-jabber all around me. Why can’t foreigners learn English like normal people? I was finishing my second espresso when Arturo Whatshisface showed up. I don’t know why, but I had expected him to be a priest. Instead, he was a slick-looking man in a business suit and fancy shoes. We shook hands. He spoke some of that jibber-jabber to a waiter and then sat down at the table. We shot the shit for a while. He said he was sorry about my mother. I said I was sorry for those pedophiles who were ruining it for all the decent, hard-working priests. He told me not to worry; the Church would have no difficulty negotiating the crisis.

When I heard the word “negotiating”, that set me off like a dog after a squirrel. It was time for us to negotiate. I told Arty that I wanted half a mil. I expected him to shout and wave his arms and say it was too much. Impossible. Unthinkable. Etc. But he kept his cool and thanked the waiter for delivering some weird-looking Italian breakfast shit. He said it was a lot to ask. I delivered my set-piece about how it wasn’t too much for a piece from a conduit to God.

Arty wiped his mouth on his handkerchief and set it to the side of his plate. He reached to an inside pocket of his jacket. I thought he was going to pull out his cheque book but, instead, he pulled out a loupe-thingy that jewellers use and set it to his eye. He said he couldn’t possibly discuss terms until he had authenticated the piece. Please, and he tapped his finger on the table. Mirroring his motions, I reached into the inside pocket of my jacket and pulled out the wad of Kleenex from my late mother’s night stand. I unwrapped the wad and laid the tip of the Virgin’s nose on the table.

Arty took it up with a pair of oversized tweezer thingys and held it to the loupe. He didn’t say anything for the longest time. He rotated it. He tipped it one way and another. He made funny grunting noises that could have been either approval or disapproval. When he was done, he set the nose tip between us on the table. He pulled the loupe from his eye and put it back in his pocket.

Well?

It is authentic.

Then let’s talk about a price.

Mr. O’Connor, let’s get one thing clear, the word “price” suggests that we are engaged in a purchase and sale. That would require you to have title to the item in question. But you don’t. It’s a stolen artifact.

So you think half a mil’s too much?

Mr. O’Connor, do you know how much my principals have authorized me to offer?

I shook my head.

Zero. Nil. Nada. However, I am prepared to offer you our thanks for doing the right thing.

Are you shitting me?

Please, Mr. Connor. The offence is graver than you think. Your mother didn’t steal the nose from the Vatican; she stole it from God.

Get off it.

I’ll tell you what. Along with our thanks, we’ll throw in some forgiveness. We’ve got a minor cardinal who’s willing to preside over a mass for your mother.

Oh come on. At least cover the cost of my flight here and the hotel bill. And how about the meals? Oh yeah, I bought this new suit so I could be respectful when I met with you.

Arty shook his head. I’m sorry, but you yourself said you were willing to cover those expenses. Do I need to read your letter back to you?

Jesus! How about some common courtesy here?

Mr. O’Connor, why don’t I make things easier for the both of us?

Really? How’re you gonna do that?

Arty picked up the Virgin’s nose and whipped it across the road and into the river. It sank into the murky waters and was gone.

You fucker!

Really, Mr. O’Connor, you were trying to extort God. We couldn’t possibly allow that.

I was so angry I didn’t know what to do with myself. I’d paid nearly eight hundred dollars for my suit. The rage rolled around inside me like a molten glob of jelly. I yelled at the man and balled my fists and raised my arms above my head. Before I knew what I was doing, I brought my arms down like a hammer stroke and smashed my fists into his face. The man howled and blood spurted everywhere. He pressed his hands against his nose and stumbled to the railing.

My node! he screamed. You broke my node!

I figured it was fitting. Isn’t there something in the Bible about a nose for a nose?

28. HR

IN A STACK of resumés that listed personal accomplishments like “graduated from high school” and “completed administrative assistant program at such-and-such business college”, it took Adams by surprise to discover at the bottom of the stack a late application from a certain Maria Grüber who claimed to have done a five-year stint working for Mother Teresa at her orphanage in Calcutta. Adams placed the resumé on top and carried the stack to Wembley’s office where he dropped the stack on the desk and waited for his partner to finish a phone call. When the call was done, Wembley looked over the top of his computer monitor and asked if they had a new receptionist.

— Maybe. Adams pointed to the stack of resumés.

— Any stand-outs?

— Just one. Adams handed over the resumé from Maria Grüber.

Wembley scanned the two pages of cramped text, then smiled at Adams.

— You’re so naïve, he said. This is resumé-padding at its worst.

— Really? How can you tell?

— Oh, come on. She knows we’re never gonna call Calcutta. Her alleged former employer just died. I mean, how convenient is that?

— I guess I figured nobody’d put something like that on a resumé unless it was true.

— Yeah, that’s what she wants you to think. But let’s be realistic here: with experience like that, who’d wanna work for a couple number crunchers like us?

— I see your point. Even so, I’d like to believe there are still people in the world who, you know, help other people.

Adams and Wembley stared at one another across the desk. Adams noted that Wembley’s hairline was starting to recede. Adams also noted that the photo of Wembley had fallen over—the one of him posing in front of a Maserati. It wasn’t Wembley’s Maserati, but he said one day he’d own a model just like it. Wembley’s gym bag lay open in the corner and smelled of workout sweat.

— So. Thoughts?

Adams answered by taking the resumé from Wembley and feeding it to the paper shredder.

— Agreed.

They moved on to the next resumé in the stack: “graduated from high school” and “completed administrative assistant program at such-and-such business college”.

29. COCKROACH-MAN

LIKE ALL OTHER superheroes, Cockroach-man had a special power, which was the power to endure. He could endure the worst trials, and even when his enemies had been swallowed up in the mists of time, he would scamper along the broken ground and find his way back into the light while poignant violins wept in the background. Oh yeah, he also had a talent for crawling into tight places, which explains how he ended up in a hole on the back forty of his mom’s farm. He’d done something he shouldn’t and was running away from The Hound when he slipped under the root of a big maple tree and down he went. What started as a crevice turned into a burrow turned into a tunnel turned into a cave. Cockroach-man slid all the way down, falling the last ten feet onto a bed of rocks beside an underground aquifer. The fall had bunged his knee so it hurt to walk, but he didn’t need to walk; all he needed was to endure.

Hound The Bounty Hunter arrived for his wedding in the specially outfitted jeep he drove on his reality TV show. He had asked the rest of the cast to be in the wedding party and they followed him just like on the show, roaring up the drive to Harriet’s farm in their pickup trucks and SUV’s and skidding to a halt in front of the old farm house. The wedding wasn’t for another three hours, but Harriet had invited them all for a brunch where they could exchange gifts and sing songs and tell stories, the usual yokel stuff that people on farms do. They’d all been whooping it up around the big harvest table when Hound remembered that he had a present in the jeep. It would be nice to give it to Harriet when everyone was watching. He excused himself from the table and went outside to get the present. The windshield was smashed. The tires were slashed. The whole jeep was spray painted in graffiti and signed above the right rear wheel: COCKROACH-MAN.

For as long as Greg could remember, he had been moved by intimations of greatness. He would be the next Stan Lee. Everyday, he had practised drawing Spider-man, and after he mastered all the poses—swinging, crouching, kicking, punching, brooding—he moved on to stories, working cell by cell through five-page sequences. Then he read somewhere about copyright and trademark infringement and how Stan Lee and Marvel Comics had been bought by Disney Corporation which might not take kindly to Greg doodling with their property. That was the inspiration for Cockroach-man, a way to keep drawing action heroes without getting the pants sued off him. The first step was the backstory: the hero was an ordinary guy named Johnny Montana who grew up on a farm in Nebraska but moved to the big city to work as a young lab technician at Manosnot Inc., the world’s leading manufacturer of genetically modified organisms. Their main product line was bug-resistant crop seeds. But there was a problem: the seeds worked. The bugs couldn’t eat the crops and so they starved to death and the farmers didn’t need their product anymore. To keep from going out of business, Manosnot developed the myth of the superbug. They said that bugs had adapted to the genetically modified seeds and were resistant to the resistance. Therefore they had to develop a new strain of seed that was resistant to the bugs that were resistant to the resistance. Everybody knows there’s no such thing as evolution; it’s just a story made up by liberals to sell more text books. But in this case, the story of evolution was useful because it gave Manosnot some cover. They could say superbugs had evolved, and then they could secretly introduce their own genetically modified bugs to create a demand for a new line of seeds. One night, while working late at the lab, Johnny accidentally pricked himself with a needle that had been exposed to a virus being used in a delivery mechanism for newly manufactured superbug DNA. The virus replicated the DNA inside Johnny’s medulla oblongata and the result was Cockroach-man with the power to endure and to squeeze into tight places.

Hound The Bounty Hunter was fair-haired and fair-skinned which meant that when he was angry, he turned the colour of a beet soaked in tomato sauce. He wanted to grab that skinny little twerp by the throat and squeeze the life out of him. Harriet called to him from the porch and he tried his best to pretend that he was the master of his anger. He showed her what Greg had done to his jeep and said that all he wanted was a good step-fatherly chat with the boy. Harriet confessed that Greg had been having troubles adapting to their marriage plans. Hound promised he’d track the boy down—after all, tracking people down was what he did for a living—and then they’d sort everything out. By “sort everything out” Hound meant that he’d chain the boy to the rear bumper of his jeep and drag him to Tennessee and back, but he kept that to himself. Hound started by gathering his posse in Greg’s bedroom. Like any good tracker, he’d begin the hunt by getting to know his quarry. That’s how he discovered Cockroach-man vs. The Hound, twenty pages, six cells to a page except the cover which was a full colour drawing of someone who looked a bit like Greg (apart from the cockroach suit) with one foot on a prone figure who looked a bit like The Hound (apart from an almost canine snout). The comic told the story of a mild-mannered farm boy protecting his mother from an unscrupulous suitor who professed his love but only wanted to marry the woman so he could get his grubby paws on her land and turn it into a Monster Truck Extravaganza. The Hound looked up from the comic and laughed. Monster Truck Extravaganza! Quelle blague! He had no idea what the boy was talking about.

Cockroach-man might endure, but he hadn’t anticipated how boring it would be to wait for the enduring to end. And damp. And dark. And uncomfortable. His knee was beginning to throb. It didn’t feel like it was broken, but he’d given it a good wrench. Maybe something to do with the cartilage or the ligaments. Touching his knee in the dark, it felt like there was a grapefruit growing under the skin. Grapefruit. Now there was a weird word. Why would anybody think a big yellow ball looks like a grape? It doesn’t look anything like a grape; more like an anemic orange on steroids. Greg’s stomach rumbled, and in the dark, the rumbling sounded like an earthquake. That was the flaw in his plan: he should have waited until after breakfast before he decorated Hound’s jeep. With an empty stomach, he wouldn’t be able to endure as long as he’d hoped. His mom made great flapjacks and, slathered in butter and maple syrup, there wasn’t anything better, except maybe the final scene of Cockroach-man vs. The Hound when good confronts evil and the truth is revealed and the naïve mom is saved at the last minute from making a huge mistake. After the final confrontation, when evil has run away with its tail between its legs, good goes home to his mom and she makes him flapjacks and bacon and eggs overeasy and fresh squeezed grapefruit juice.

Cockroach-man vs. The Hound? What kind of a loser spends all his time holed up in his room drawing comics? That’s what Hound wanted to know, although he kept the question to himself because Harriet was watching from the doorway. Instead, he laughed at the part about the Monster Truck Extravaganza and acted all chuckle jolly and pretended no such thought had ever entered his head. He promised he’d bring the boy back in time for the wedding. Tracking the boy was just about the easiest thing Hound had ever done. What with a club foot and a tendency to drag it behind the good foot, the boy might as well’ve drawn a line in the dirt and left a note saying come get me. When the posse reached the big maple and saw where the boy had fallen down the hole, Hound changed his mind. He wasn’t going to throttle the kid, or even manhandle him. The whole business was too pathetic. Instead, he’d rescue the kid like he’d promised and take him back to the farm and get him into the tuxedo they’d rented for him, the one they’d had to get fitted special. Hound motioned to his second, the guy they listed in the credits as Weasel, and told him to look down the hole with a flashlight. Weasel knelt in the dirt and stuck his head under the root, but he couldn’t see anything.

When Greg heard voices murmuring overhead, his first impulse was to cry out. Then he remembered that they were the enemy and not to be trusted. A sliver of light jittered across the roof of the cave and a voice called his name. He yelled that his name was Cockroach-man, not Greg, and he’d still be crawling over the face of the earth long after they’d all turned to rot. The voice said that was fine; all he wanted was to make sure the boy was okay and to tell him that his mom really hoped he’d make it back in time for the wedding. As the voice spoke, clods dislodged from the roof and splashed into the aquifer. The voice gave a whoop and something big came down with a splash and whump. Other voices called out from above: Weasel, Weasel. Cockroach-man snatched the flashlight from the water and shone it first at the roof, which showed him nothing, then at the riverbed, which showed him Weasel, or what used to be Weasel. Something bad had happened in the fall and now Weasel’s head was twisted all the way around, like in the movies when a person’s been possessed by the devil. Only Weasel wasn’t possessed by any devil. Weasel was dead. Cockroach-man had never seen anybody dead, excepting his dad, and that had been a few years ago and had seemed clinical and far away. This was messy and close up. The shock of it stunned Cockroach-man into silence. He shone the light at the dead eyes and stared. He heard two voices overhead wondering what had happened. They called again, Weasel Weasel, and added Greg Greg, but neither Weasel nor Greg existed anymore; there was only Cockroach-man and, like all true superheroes, he was inclined to silence. Next came the one they call the Rabbit, and when the earth gave way, Rabbit fell onto the rocks beside the aquifer, just as Cockroach-man had fallen. But Rabbit wasn’t as lucky as Cockroach-man and couldn’t move except for one arm which he used to drag himself over the rocks. Cockroach-man put an end to that with a well-aimed rock to the temple. The last thing he needed was a one-armed rabbit dragging itself through the dark.

Hound had never encountered anything like this. The silence, first of Weasel, then of Rabbit, spooked him. Most of the time, these two gave a commentary on every last thing they did and saw. Hound understood that they were playing to the camera, but sometimes they got so obnoxious he wished they’d shut up. Maybe that’s what had happened. Without a camera, they had nothing to say. Hound hollered into the hole, then again, but got nothing back from either of them. He shone a light into the hole but couldn’t see a thing. As a former WWF heavyweight champion of the world, Hound was too big across the chest to fit into your average hole in the ground. Even so, if he took off his shirt, let out his breath, and sucked in his gut, he might just squeeze underneath the maple root. He gave himself an extra shove by taking a run at it and leaping head first into the hole. He got himself wedged in up to his navel, legs kicking at the sky, arms pressed flat against his sides. After he spluttered to get the dirt out of his mouth, he called into the dark: Son, you down here? A flashlight flicked on and shone in his eyes: I’m not your son. That was true, but the kid was being a bit literal about things. After all, they called him Hound, but he wasn’t an actual dog. Which reminded him: Where’s Weasel and Rabbit? Cockroach-man shone the light on Weasel’s twisted neck, then moved to Rabbit’s bashed-in skull. (Because this ebook is on a seven-second delay, Hound’s next statement has been *****’d. Needless to say, he registered considerable shock at what he saw.) Now, son, we’re gonna get you out of here. Cockroach-man didn’t say anything. My arms are kinda smushed against my sides; actually, I think I’m stuck. Cockroach-man didn’t say anything. You don’t suppose you could give me a shove, do you? Cockroach-man didn’t say anything. Oh, come on, your mom’s expecting the two of us for the wedding. At last, Cockroach-man said: Open wide. When Hound asked Huh? Cockroach-man jammed the butt of his flashlight into Hound’s open mouth and with his free hand, squeezed Hound’s nostrils shut. Cockroach-man almost lost his hold as Hound thrashed to free himself, but it wasn’t even a minute before the thrashing subsided and Hound’s body fell limp. Cockroach-man pulled out the flashlight and wiped off the spittle. He clambered over the bodies of Weasel and Rabbit and followed the aquifer into the darkness. He didn’t know where he was going, but it didn’t matter. He was Cockroach-man. Whatever happened, he would endure.

30. THE CHEETOS TEN

RALPH MERIWETHER LED the tactical team that stormed the Cheetos factory. He had vowed never to move without proper intelligence, but after a hundred days, he knew little more than he did when the terrorists first seized the plant. There were ten of them. That much he did know. And they were well-armed and heavily organized. They didn’t make the usual demands. No calls for money or flights to South America. Instead, they described themselves as revolutionaries, rising up on behalf of workers everywhere. Meriwether was at the bullhorn when they made that claim and he blasted his voice back to them from the command center: “Are you talking about all workers everywhere or just workers in Cheetos factories?” According to their leader, it was a matter of solidarity; they were acting for all workers everywhere. “We want proper health care,” they shouted. “A living wage. The right to organize.” They were unionistas.

By nature, Meriwether was a peaceful man and he had hoped that patience would break the stand-off. As long as the terrorists didn’t threaten to kill the hostages, he would keep them talking. It would dwindle their supplies. But after a hundred days, it was clear that they were well stocked. When Meriwether cut off the power, the lights flickered on again after only a minute of darkness. When he shut off the water, they put a hostage in each window with a squeegee and a bucket as if to say: “Look. Look at us. We have water enough to waste.” As for food, Meriwether had no idea how they fed themselves. All he could say for certain was that nothing came in from the outside.

The media marked a hundred days in captivity with headlines on the front page of papers all across the country and with special television reports on the Comedy Channel. Pundits questioned whether Meriwether had the balls to bring down the terrorists. But they didn’t foist all the responsibility on him. They asked the same question of the Department of Homeland Security. Even of the White House. Although Meriwether winced at the negative publicity, he took a secret pleasure at hearing his name mentioned in the same sentence with the president’s. Now, when he yelled through the bullhorn, his voice crackled with authority. And when he walked from his car to the command center, he did so with a certain swagger.

Homeland Security decided to end the nonsense. While they began talks about acceptable losses, Meriwether developed a strategy. Everything was optimized for the local news cycle. At 13:00 hours, Meriwether’s team stormed the Cheetos factory. The commandos had been trained by the same Navy Seals who brought down Osama Bin Laden. Their orders were to shoot all the terrorists. If any terrorists survived, it would be inconvenient. They would have to be questioned and there would be trials. Everybody knows that a trial is just a forum for the guilty to get public sympathy. Meriwether’s people went in with guns blazing. Hardly any hostages died.

Initial reaction was favourable. Where, before, the media had criticized Meriwether as bumbling and indecisive, now they called him a hero. There was even talk of a ticker tape parade. But media adulation is a fickle thing. In the case of Meriwether, it lasted until all the hostages had been debriefed and were released to the care of their families. Many gave interviews and invariably they spoke out against Meriwether.

“He killed the Cheetos Ten,” they said. “They were some of the nicest people!” and the screen would show photos of the Cheetos Ten with vignette filters and poignant violin music in the background.

Meriwether lost his temper. How naïve could people be! A bunch of liberal softees with mush for brains. That’s what they were. He tried to explain the effects of Stockholm Syndrome, but he got bogged down in technical language, so the interviewer broke for a commercial before it got too boring.

Something he noticed: the hostages all looked the same. Every one of them was obese—at least three hundred and fifty pounds.

“Wasn’t it horrible?” people asked of the hostages.

“No way,” they answered. “We had a great time, you know, these last hundred days.”

“And what did you live on?”

“Cheetos, of course. Our friends, they let us eat as much as we wanted.”

“But no variety in your diet?”

“Are you kidding? There was lots of variety. Cheetos. Cheesie Puffs. Curly-Cues. Twisties. And we washed it all down with as much pop as we could drink.”

“Seriously?”

“A light refreshing snack.”

After the commando raid, public backlash struck with a fury. People wanted Meriwether’s head served up on a platter. They loved the terrorists and were tired of the patronizing commentary. Reporters stood on street corners and conducted impromptu interviews. They wanted to know what the average guy on the street thought. They spoke to fat men in orange bandanas: “They’re just like us, these terrorists.” Obese women on orange reflective vests screamed into the camera: “They were only defending our right to eat junk food.” The terrorists became the so-called terrorists became the martyrs. What was their crime? All they’d done was give a few ordinary Americans what they wanted.

Meriwether turned off the TV and shook his head. It was like the whole fucking country had been taken hostage and was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. The way people talked, it was like Cheetos were goddamed communion wafers. Leaning way back in his easy chair, he fitzed open another can of beer and balanced it on his stomach, watching the condensation dribble onto the patch of shirt just above his belly button. Sucking the foam off the top, he wondered if he would have felt differently if the terrorists had taken over a brewery.

31. PLOWSHARES AND PRUNING HOOKS

THERE’S A WAR coming. That’s what Brian’s mom said when she gave us some of the cookies she’d baked. We’d been playing in the fort Brian made in his basement, shooting each other in the legs with our BB guns. While we ate our cookies, Brian’s mom told us about the Book of Revelation and how, inside that book, it said there’s a war coming.

At suppertime, I told my mom and dad about this Book of Revelation and how it says there’s a war coming and how we need to be prepared. Mom looked at me with a funny smile on her face and said that’s just what you’d expect from Rachel and that nutty religion of hers.

— So we don’t believe in that stuff?

— Oh, honey, we’re liberals.

Dad said there’s more to the Bible than all that Revelation hoo-haw. Like the part about beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. What he wanted to know was how those apocalypse nutbars account for people like Isaiah who prophesied peace.

— I mean, they can’t both be right.

— So, if we’re liberals, it means we side more with this Isaiah guy?

— Exactly.

I didn’t tell my mom and dad, but I liked the stuff in the Book of Revelation. We knew, just from playing commando in Brian’s basement, that it’s a lot more fun to prepare for war than to turn all your stuff into tools for gardening. Growing vegetables is boring. I imagined Isaiah duking it out with the guy who wrote this Book of Revelation; I bet he’d get his nose mashed in.

To prepare for the war, Brian and me, we went to Soles Sporting Goods Inc. and bought ourselves bows and practice arrows. Because Brian’s older than me and stronger, he bought a bow with a forty-five pound draw weight. Mine was only forty pounds. Plus that was all I could afford. My mom and dad made me do chores to earn my money and I was too busy playing commando to earn much money. Brian’s mom and dad gave him however much he asked for. My mom and dad said if Brian got money that easy, then he’d never grow up to value his stuff. All my mom and dad taught me is how much I hate chores.

After we bought the bows, we spent at least a couple hours each day shooting arrows at targets we staked in the dirt down the slope behind Brian’s house. We practised until our arms ached, then we unstrung our bows and spent the rest of the afternoon making lists of provisions we’d need for when the war comes. My mom and dad worried we might hurt ourselves and they made us promise not to aim at one another.

Whenever we practised our archery, we had an audience. Marco d’Angelo would lean on his fence and watch the arrows to the targets. Mr. d’Angelo owned the property that ran behind Brian’s yard and my yard. He had kids that was older than Brian and me and they had nothing to do with us. Dad said Mr. d’Angelo’d just retired in the spring. He was an immigrant. Dad said retirement didn’t agree with him. Dad said Mr. d’Angelo was bored. He had too much time on his hands.

According to my mom, there’s three kinds of people in this world. There’s people like us—the normal people—aka the liberals. There’s people like Brian’s mom, aka the religious nutbars. And there’s people like Marco d’Angelo, aka the Italians. Once, I asked why an Italian couldn’t be both an Italian and a liberal or Italian and a religious nutbar, but mom said that Italians were just Italians and that was that. I have no idea what she meant.

Mom didn’t like Marco d’Angelo. I guess he was nice enough. But he kept a big vegetable garden full of tomatoes and zucchinis and grape vines and lettuce. There was nothing wrong with the vegetable garden, but he kept a great mound of compost against the fence between our yards, and in the summer heat, it sometimes stank real bad. He put eggshells in it, too, and that got the skunks coming around for a visit. There was one time, after mom got home from the supermarket with special shampoo for my little brother, that she called him a skunk-baiting wop. I know you’re not supposed to use words like that, and I apologize, but if I used the acceptable words and said that my mom called him a skunk-baiting person of Italian origin, it wouldn’t sound right. Plus it would be a lie. My mom said what she said and there’s no way around that.

After we’d had the bows for two or three weeks and were getting pretty good at hitting the targets, Mr. d’Angelo waved me over to the fence. I hadn’t noticed him standing there. For all I knew, he could’ve been watching for an hour. He wore a big floppy straw hat and was working a stem of long grass between his teeth.

— So what’s a coupla mangia cakes like you doing with bows and arrows?

I shrugged.

— It’s something to do, I guess.

I didn’t think it was such a good idea to tell him about the war that’s coming.

— Let’s see that thing. Zit hard to pull?

I passed my bow over the fence. I told him not to let the string go when you pull it back, not without an arrow, otherwise it could shatter the bow. That’s what the sales guy at Soles told us when we bought our bows. He said it has something to do with physics. When you pull back the bow, you’re giving it potential energy. And when you let it go, you’re turning all that potential energy into real energy. It can be the real energy in an arrow zinging through the air, or it can be the real energy of vibrations breaking up the bow.

Mr. d’Angelo tried to pull back the string but shouted mio dio and kissed his fingers. I showed him the shooting glove I wore on my right hand to protect the skin on my fingertips.

— For a couple skinny mangia cakes, you two must be pretty strong.

He passed back the bow.

— Hey, how’s about you shoot an arrow in the air. Straight up. See how high it goes.

— Uh, these things can go pretty far, you know.

I figured a clean shot could probably go three hundred yards if I was shooting horizontally. Straight up, maybe not so far, but still pretty high. I’d probably lose my arrow.

— Oh, come on. Just to see.

— I don’t think it’s such a good idea.

— Just an experiment.

— I don’t—

— You think I’m just some dumb wop, don’t you?

— That’s got nothing to do with it.

— See what I mean?

— That came out wrong.

— I know how your mom talks about me.

— No.

— I know what you’re thinking.

— You do?

— He’s just a goddam wop asking me to do some goddam thing like you’d expect from some goddam wop. That’s what you’re thinking.

— No I’m not.

— Then prove it.

— Fine.

I braced the arrow, drew the string to my right ear, raised my left arm to the sky, and released. There was a rush of air and the arrow was gone. There was a hum from the string. Mr. d’Angelo stared into the sky until he lost his balance and had to steady himself against the fence.

— There, it’s gone.

— Jesus, that’s really up there.

— Yeah, I lost my arrow.

— Hey wait. Where you going?

— Back to practice shooting.

— You not even gonna wait for the arrow to come back down?

— What’s the point? It’s gone. You saw with your own eyes.

I took my bow and walked back to Brian’s yard. Brian had unstrung his bow and was using the back of a target to work on a list of supplies for when the war comes. In between the arrow holes: back pack, matches, waterproof match case, hunting knife, soup stock, canteen, hatchet, tent, bug spray, sun tan lotion, comic books, bubble gum, baseball cap, compass, watch (the kind with hands), mini shovel (for burying poop), twine, beans …

— Jesus Christ. Jesus Mary and Joseph. Goddam mangia cake. Come back here you skinny mangia cake prick.

I turned and saw Marco d’Angelo thrashing in his compost heap. His straw hat flew off his head and floated into our yard. Chunks of rotten zucchini sprayed across the fence. He flailed his arms like a sick bird trying to take flight. When he spun around to face me, I saw how his left shirt sleeve was soaked in blood. My arrow had gone clean through his upper arm.

— You shot me. Jesus, you shot me.

— I didn’t mean to.

It sounded a little thin, but hey, I was just a kid; whaddyexpect? Besides, he’s the one who kept pushing me to shoot the arrow. Mr. d’Angelo’s arm really hurt, and the more it hurt, the more he yelled, and the more he yelled, the more the feather end of the shaft waggled back and forth, and the more the shaft waggled back and forth, the more it hurt. It was a vicious circle. And being Italian, Mr. d’Angelo couldn’t help but talk with his arms, so he wasn’t about to break the vicious circle any time soon.

When Mom and Dad heard the screaming, they ran into the backyard to see what was up with the angry wop. Mom’s real quick when it comes to thinking on her feet and as soon as she saw the feathers and the arrow shaft and the blood, she yelled for me to unstring my bow, which I did, and she used the string to tourniquet Mr. d’Angelo’s arm. When she was done, her hands dripped red, but she laughed and said it was worse than it looked. Most of it was rotten tomatoes. Marco d’Angelo had made a mess of himself thrashing around in the compost.

— Your boy shot me, he screamed.

— Is that true, son?

Dad glared at me with those stern day-of-judgment eyes. Given that I was holding a bow and there was an arrow sticking out of Mr. d’Angelo’s arm, it was kind of hard to pretend I had nothing to do with the situation.

— Uh, I guess.

I tried to explain that none of this would’ve happened if it weren’t for Mr. d’Angelo pressuring me to do it, but any way I tried to put things, my dad kept coming back to the fact that I shot the arrow and the arrow ended up in Mr. d’Angelo’s arm. I tried to explain that it was his idea, that I was the one who didn’t want to do it.

— Then why didn’t you not do it?

— Huh?

I hate arguing with my parents; they always make things so confusing.

— I expect consequences.

I had never heard a human voice so loud. When dad assured him there would be consequences, oh yes, indeedy, and looked straight at me, d’Angelo exploded: He knew how these things worked. We’d go away and sit around our mangia cake dinner table and have ourselves a good laugh about the stupid wop their boy had shot. And then they’d do nothing. And he’d—meaning me—he’d get away with it.

Dad tried to calm the man and told him that no, indeedy, that’s not how things would work.

— You see, Dad said, we’re liberals, and that means we’ll make sure things get handled fairly.

— I can’t believe you’d even let a boy have a bow. That’s just asking for trouble.

I tried to object by asking why, if he thought it was such a bad idea, why he told me to shoot the arrow in the first place, but my dad wasn’t hearing any of it. He had his own idea of how things should be handled and there wasn’t a thing I could say that would ever sway him. He went to the tool shed, and after rummaging for a couple minutes, came back with a hand saw.

— Son, he said, Mr. d’Angelo’s right. We can’t be letting you shoot arrows wherever you please. You need to take responsibility for your actions.

He passed me the hand saw.

— I need you to cut your bow in half.

That’s the toughest thing I ever had to do. So far. I mean, something harder might come along when I’m older. Like I might have to pull the plug on a dying parent someday. Actually, that might not be so hard. Anyways, I set the teeth against the wooden grip of the bow and drew the saw back and forth and felt how the teeth chewed through the wood and I thought of all the money I’d saved up and how it was turning into sawdust in the grass.

I was never so angry as I was when my bow split down the middle. I didn’t know who made me angriest. There was Marco d’Angelo for asking me to shoot the arrow. And me for listening to Marco d’Angelo. And there was my dad for his stupid ideas about being fair. And my mom for worrying about whether or not we might offend Italians and nutbar religious types. And I was angry at Brian, too, because he’d seen everything but just stood there with his mouth shut.

Yeah, there’s a war coming all right. I can feel it getting close. I’m a bow in the middle of it. And I’m gonna make sure I have a quiver full of arrows. Because I sure as heck don’t wanna vibrate ’til I shatter.

32. CONSPIRACY THEORY

THROUGH AN ACT of subterfuge, Mandy got Lloyd into emerge. She sat him down in a waiting room of scraped knees and moaning bandaged heads and said she had to go to the counter and request an old x-ray she’d forgotten to pick up. When she stepped to the counter, she passed a note to the triage nurse:

Please help me. My husband is ABSOLUTELY CRAZY. I’ve tricked him to come here, but don’t let on what I’m doing. If he finds out, there’s no telling what he’ll do. I want him admitted for a 72-hour psych evaluation. I know you can do that. I also know that once you examine him, you’ll never let him out again. He’s TOTALLY NUTS!!!!!!

After the nurse had finished reading the note, she nodded to Mandy. She flipped her eyes to the left, indicating a grizzled middle-aged man in flip-flops and a Justin Bieber T-shirt. Mandy nodded back; that was Lloyd. The nurse placed a call and, within seconds, two security guards had positioned themselves by the entrance. Within a few more seconds, a woman in a white coat appeared behind the triage nurse and motioned for Mandy to join her in a consulting room.

The woman introduced herself as Dr. Heimlich, the psychiatrist on call for the night shift. Mandy thought the woman was too young and too hip-looking to be a staff psychiatrist. She wore her hair close-cropped like a marine’s. She had a ruby stud in her left nostril. And there was an ankh tattooed on her neck. Even so, her ID card said she was a psychiatrist (not a resident either, but a full-fledged psychiatrist), and everybody knows ID cards never lie.

— So tell me about your husband.

— Lloyd? Mandy said it as a question, then realized that was silly. Of course the psychiatrist meant Lloyd. Who else would she have meant?

— I see you’re nervous. Just take a deep breath and we’ll ease into things.

— I’ve never done anything like this before. I mean, I love Lloyd.

— Of course you do.

— I’d never do anything to hurt him. But tricking him to come here. This feels like betrayal.

— You want to help him. That’s not betrayal.

— I guess not.

— Are you afraid he might hurt you?

— Oh, no, not Lloyd. He’s a sweet man. I’m worried about HIS safety. Not mine. I’m worried he’ll say something stupid. Get himself into trouble. Get himself beat up or worse.

— What sort of things does he say?

— Oh, he suffers so much. He’s so afflicted. It’s paranoia. He’s obsessed with conspiracies. People watching him, trying to control him.

— Is it anything specific, or more a generalized fear that everybody’s out to get him?

— Oh, it’s very specific. Lloyd believes the world is controlled by middle-aged rich white men.

— Uhhhhhhhh.

The psychiatrist stared at Mandy and blinked a couple extra times to be sure Mandy was for real.

— Uh, here’s the thing, uh, Mrs. uh … The psychiatrist stared at the sheet of paper she’d pulled from the printer in the nursing station.

— Mandy. Just called me Mandy.

— Here’s the thing, Mandy. You can’t say your husband’s suffering from a psychosis if the content of his alleged psychosis actually describes the real world.

— Huh?

— The world really is controlled by middle-aged rich white men.

— No.

A hospital’s emergency ward is a place where medical professionals often deliver difficult news, but Dr. Heimlich had never witnessed a person so troubled by the hard facts of a case. Mandy drifted from the consulting room in a dysphoric cloud and Dr. Heimlich feared that the woman would become dissociative. Dr. Heimlich offered words of reassurance and suggested that, in time, Mandy would come to accept the disturbing news. Maybe it was a matter of empiricism; Mandy should trust the evidence of her own eyes. Mandy shook her head NO NO NO and ran crying toward the entrance. Dr. Heimlich nodded to the security guards and they restrained the patient before she could leave the hospital. Lloyd rose from his seat, mouth wide, and demanded to know what was wrong with his wife.

— Follow me.

Dr. Heimlich led Lloyd down a hallway while the security guards dragged Mandy thrashing behind. They found an empty room with a gurney, and while the guards strapped Mandy onto the gurney, Dr. Heimlich explained:

— Your wife has experienced a psychotic split caused by the shock of a challenge to her world view. I could offer something more technical, but it all comes down to a simple word: grief. Your wife is grieving the loss of something cherished. But she’ll get through it. Don’t you worry. We all do.

Mandy struggled against the straps and screamed:

— Don’t listen to her, Lloyd, she’s a crazy bitch!

Flinging her head back and forth, hair had fallen across her eyes, and spittle was dribbling from the corner of her mouth.

Dr. Heimlich looked at her watch:

— Almost 7:30. Dr. Andrews is coming on shift. I’ll leave it for him to give your wife a sedative.

Lloyd nodded and thanked Dr. Heimlich for all her help.

A couple minutes later, a middle-aged man in a white coat entered the room and introduced himself as Dr. Andrews. When he took up Mandy’s chart, his coat-sleeve fell back to reveal a Rolex.

— Who are you? Mandy demanded.

— I’m the chief of psychiatry.

— You?

— Of course.

— Why not Dr. Heimlich?

— You can’t be serious. She’s only a woman.

Dr. Andrews gave Mandy a cocktail of benzodiazepines, phenobarbital, and Haldol. He didn’t leave the room until she was unconsciousness. While he waited for her eyes to close, he stood in the doorway with Lloyd and they talked about what a hardship it is to get a loan for a new Porsche.

33. SLEEPING GIANT

— ARMANI. NICE.

The man caressed my shoulder as I stepped toward his makeshift change room. He spoke in a nasal sing-song that sounded to me more like put-on immigrant than real Punjab or Mumbai or wherever the hell he’d come from.

— So why dese?

The man nodded to two pairs of cargo pants that cost me maybe thirty dollars each at the discount outlet.

— Just something rough to wear when I’m—

— Rough? Wanna know rough?

He shoved me into his change room and the plywood door swung shut like a coffin lid. I wriggled out of my jacket and trousers and imagined I was Harry Houdini locked in a cage suspended over a raging river.

— Business. Dat’s rough. I have been in de cleaning business, yaar, twenty-two year. Twenty-two. And not a single holiday. Well, maybe one. I went to Tunder Bay. Sleeping Giant. Ever see?

— Huh?

I was struggling with the zipper on the first pair of pants.

— Ever see de Sleeping Giant?

— No. What’s that?

— Rock. A great big rock in de lake. But let me tell you about rough. Business. Now, everybody, dey want green cleaning. What de hell is dis? But dey want it. Dey tink it some great ting, but don’t want to pay any more for it. Dat’s rough. Rough for me. Got to clean witout cleaner. Save de earth. Stinky clothes.

With the zipper up, I pushed open the door and stepped into the space beside the man’s sewing machine. I would’ve asked my mom to hem the pants, but there’d been a long stretch of rain and the rheumatoid in her knuckles had flared up.

— No more Armani. What you do dat you need such a suit?

The man knelt by my shoes and fiddled with the hems.

— I’m in bonds.

— Look to me like you in Guccis.

— No. You asked—

— I pull your leg, yaar.

— I’m a bond trader.

— So you a big whig banker.

— Medium whig. The big whigs make all the money. The medium whigs just get to wear the clothes.

The man tacked the hem with a pin and told me to put on the other pair of pants. While I was performing my contortionist act in the plywood box, the man went on about how people would leave their clothes for him to clean then forget to pick them up. Not once in a blue moon with a cherry on top, but all the time. I couldn’t conceive of forgetting clothes at the cleaners. My life depended on accounting for every last detail. My work demanded a granular approach to the markets. And my personal life wasn’t much different. I had to keep track of my mom’s meds with an exacting eye. Once, she took too much of one thing and not enough of another and ended up in the hospital with heart palpitations and a rash.

— What am I supposed to do wit so many clothes?

— Give ‘em to charity I guess.

— Exactly. But let me tell you what happens.

He fiddled with the second pair of cuffs, rolling them up and tacking them in place. When he’d finished, he rose from his knees and peered at me over his glasses.

— Here’s what happens. I wait a year. Dis is no storage house. Look at de space I have. But I hold dis suit a year. And after a year, I do exactly what you say. I give it to one of dose places dat sells clothes, like, seconds, like, to raise money for whatever. De day after. De very day after, de man shows up wit de ticket for his suit. Screams like a girl getting raped. You leave it for a year, I say. But he won’t listen to reason. Calls me a brown cunt. And all kinds of udder names. Sometimes. Sometimes. Oh, I need a holiday.

— Go back to the Sleeping Giant.

— What you say, it’s a good idea. Lie back like de Sleeping Giant. Eyes closed. Float on de lake. Forget de world.

The man wrote up an invoice and handed me the duplicate.

— Come back tomorrow after five.

— I won’t forget.

— I’m not here, it means I’m in Tunder Bay asleep on my backside.

After I tucked the invoice into my wallet and left the shop, I forgot the man and his cleaning problems. It had been a simple commercial transaction like any other: in exchange for the man’s pant-hemming skill, I gave him a nominal sum of money and the appearance of a sympathetic ear. That’s it. Twenty paces from the shop, I was steeling myself for a day of commercial transactions on a different order. I’m good at my job and make my employer a lot of money. It goes without saying that my employer is a bank. It also goes without saying that no one leaves clothes behind in a bank, or if they do, the bank quickly liquidates them and turns them to profit. Pants in a closet never made anybody money.

After work the next day, I picked up my two pairs of pants, took them upstairs to my penthouse suite, and forgot about them until the weekend. I had more important things to do than think about pants, like arranging my mom’s meds in a plastic pill manager and arguing on the phone with my ex-wife. She was threatening to apply to the court for bigger support payments. I told her more money for her meant less money for my mom; she was as much as threatening to steal from old ladies. She told me I was full of shit. That’s pretty much how all our conversations have gone since the day we got married. Our wedding is the only transaction I’ve ever fucked up and I still can’t figure out why. It has me worried that one day I may lose my touch at work.

On the weekend, with Mr. Armani stowed in my closet, I tried on the first of the pants the talkative cleaner man had hemmed. They were perfect. I wheeled my mom to the park and not once did I trip on the cuffs. At the same time, they didn’t ride high on my ankles. My argyle socks stayed hidden underneath. On Sunday, I tried on the second pair of pants, but the fit wasn’t so happy. Once or twice, I felt the cuffs dragging through the pea gravel as I pushed my mom along our usual path. If this happened too often, they’d fray and people would think I couldn’t afford a decent pair of pants. People would look down at me. At first, I worried that the man hadn’t measured properly, but by the end of my walk, a more desperate thought took hold: maybe he hadn’t bothered to hem them at all. Maybe he had tried to pass them off as hemmed when, really, he hadn’t done any work. I tried to rationalize my pants situation by telling myself that this sort of thing could happen to anyone; the man was busy; he probably forgot. But there was a possibility that nagged me like a thorn in my flesh: maybe his failure was on purpose. Maybe he resented me for some reason and wanted to stick it to me. Even as I helped Mom scatter bread crumbs through a flock of pigeons, I could see the man sitting behind his sewing machine, hemming my first pair of pants and saying: I’m going to fuck over dat Armani-wearing bond-trading prick by not hemming his second pair of his pants; see if he even notices.

I was determined not to let him get away with it. I’d confront him. I’d hold him to account. I’d force him to do the work he was contracted to do.

On Monday morning, I stepped into the man’s cleaning store with the maliciously unhemmed pair of pants hanging over my left arm. Like a toreador, I whipped the pants from my arm and spread them on the counter.

— You were supposed to hem these pants.

The man rose from his stool and inspected a pant leg.

— Yah, and so I did.

— No. They’re still too long.

— Well, try dem on and we’ll look at dem.

— I’m in a hurry; I have to get to work.

— Just two minutes.

I crawled into his plywood box and did my David Copperfield stunt, emerging in khaki cargo pants and Saville Row shirt. The man knelt and examined how the cuff bunched up on the top of my foot.

— See what I mean?

— Hmmm. Maybe de pants have stretched?

— Pants don’t stretch. If anything, they shrink.

— Maybe you shrink.

— That’s absurd.

— One thing dat’s certain … I hem dese pants. Dat’s my signature stitch.

— Well if you did, you hemmed them the same length as before.

— No, dat impossible.

— That very possible.

— My signature stitch. It’s a magic stitch. You watch. In a minute, you get all puffed up bigger dan you are and den de pants, dey fit.

I sneered at the little man, sitting smug on his stool. I rose to my full height and glared down at the man. He smiled, implacable, and gazed back at me. I demanded a refund but he shook his head and said I was being impatient.

— Look.

I slapped my hand on the counter, as if, somehow, I didn’t already have enough of the man’s attention.

— Look, you little brown cunt, you’re just trying to cheat me.

Again, the man smiled.

— It’s just like I say.

He motioned to the mirror.

— Look at yourself.

Damn, but the man was right. I was at least three inches taller than the day before and a couple inches broader across the chest.

— See, yaar? I knew from de minute you come in here wearing dat Armani suit. I says to myself: now dere’s a man who gets all puffed up like a proper righteous prick. And so you have. Your pants fit just fine now.

34. ROAD TRIP WITH MY DAD

I JUST GOT back from a road trip with my dad. We drove the northern route through Ontario i.e. we started on Yonge Street in Toronto and pointed the car north. Theoretically, if you keep your foot on the accelerator and don’t hit a moose, a couple days later you’ll end up in Rainy River on the Minnesota border. The first night of our trip, we stayed at the Best Western in Cochrane, eating at a bar and grill called the Ice Hut. The meal was surprisingly good for being in a place halfway to nowhere. We hadn’t been in Cochrane for more than 40 years. When I was seven or eight, my parents took my brother and me up there for a holiday and we caught the Polar Bear Express to Moosonee. Forty years later, it’s nice to see all the changes. They have some 3-story sky-scrapers now. (I know, I know, that’s just the sort of thing a smart-mouthed city boy living on the 33rd floor of a condo in downtown Toronto would say, but I can’t help myself; it’s in my nature to be smart-mouthed.) The next morning we passed through places like Smooth Rock Falls, Fauquier, Kapuskasing, Hearst, Long Lac, Geraldton, and Beardmore. Our goal was the Pijtawabik Palisades 40 km north of Nipigon. I’d driven past them two years ago but the weather had been wild with lightning and sheets of rain sweeping across the highway. I’d promised myself I’d come back in better weather with my camera and hike the Palisades Trail. On a whim, I called my dad to see if he wanted to join me. I thought it might give us a shot at one of those heartwarming father and son bonding times that you read about on TV. As with most things on TV, the real life version was messier. My dad used the time to disclose a family secret that he’d never, until then, worked up the gumption to share with me. I haven’t decided yet whether the experience totally ruined my life or only left me sorely damaged.

There are only two notable geological formations in the province of Ontario, a remarkable fact considering that Ontario spans two time zones and is larger in area than the UK, France, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands combined. One of the notable formations is famous. It’s the Niagara Escarpment which runs through Ontario from Niagara Falls in the south to Manitoulin Island in the north. The other, and arguably more spectacular, is not. It’s the Pijtawabik Palisades, but no one bothers much about it because it’s somewhere way the hell up north and you have to leave the Trans-Canada highway to get to it. The Palisades is a big 140 metre high granite mesa formed some 1.2 billion years ago and scoured bare during the last ice age. It’s home to more than 100 waterfalls and, because the waterfalls freeze solid in the winter, it provides some of the best ice climbing east of the Rockies. I took my dad to hike a 7 km trail that ascends the mesa and then winds across the top of it. On one of the hiking web sites, they describe the trail as “difficult” so I told my dad to buy a pair of good hiking boots and bring a back pack for water and lunch.

On the morning of the hike, we woke up at 5:30. We got up early because, as they say, the early photographer gets the light. Actually, we got up early because we were staying at a Days Inn in Thunder Bay and it would take at least an hour and a half to drive to the trail head. I had tried to book a room in Nipigon, which is an hour closer, but everything was booked solid with hunters and fishing types. Seeing as it was a Saturday morning and all, and seeing as it was brilliant weather and all, and seeing as all the nearby motels were booked solid and all, I assumed we’d be elbowing our way past hoards of hikers and photography types as we climbed the Palisades. With an early start, we could avoid the rush.

After a couple photo stops along the shores of Lake Helen (early morning glassy water surface type shot and mist through the hills type shot) I parked the Prius in the little scrotum-shaped cul-de-sac parking area. Yes, I drove a Prius through northern Ontario. Yes, it was the only Prius within a thousand click radius. What can I say? I’m a city boy; even so, once I’d put on my hiking boots and had shouldered my pack, you could hardly tell. I was like a real honest-to-god Canadian hiker, eh.

In retrospect, it was inappropriate for me to bring along a seventy-seven year old man. The first two kilometres were mostly vertical and damned near killed him/us. Nevertheless, my dad was hell-bent on getting to the top. I wondered what would happen if he fell and cracked his skull on a rock. There’s no cell service up there so I wouldn’t be able to call 9-1-1. And there’s no way I’d be able to sling him over a shoulder and carry him back down to the car. I’d have to leave him there, then scramble my way back to the highway and wave down a passing truck. By the time I got back to my dad, maybe a bear would have got him. I could hear my mom’s voice in my head telling us we were a pair of idiots.

We took things sensibly. We’d climb for a bit then pause. Climb then pause. Along the way, I’d pull out my camera and force the pace to a crawl while I took time to compose a shot or track the peregrine falcon that circled overhead. When we knew the top was close, we stopped for lunch. We’d packed apples, cherries, granola bars and Sweet Maries. Again, I heard my mom’s voice in my head telling us we might as well be eating bear poop for all the nutritional good our lunch would do. But what can I say? It was the sort of lunch a father and son should eat while they’re sharing a bonding experience. We dropped all our apple cores and cherry pits and wrappers into a zip-lock baggie to carry back down with us. Zero footprint. That was our by-word. Dad stuffed the zip-lock baggie into his back pack and pulled out a little bottle of that hand sanitizer that you have to take a squirt of when you visit someone in an old folks home. This wasn’t the sort of thing my dad would’ve done all on his own but was an obvious consequence of his training (read: indoctrination) by my mom. We were sitting between clumps of moss on a bare sheet of granite. The sun shone warm on our heads and filled us with a feeling of benevolence. We swatted away the occasional mosquito and listened to the hum of dragon flies whuzzing over the rocky ground. While my dad leaned back and closed his eyes, I picked a handful of wild blueberries and savoured them the same way you savour a fine wine.

I had assumed my dad was dozing but, still with his eyes closed, he spoke. He and my mom had been setting their affairs in order (again). They had gone to their lawyer and updated their wills. Nothing surprising to report on the legal front. The only change involved removing some of the trust provisions now that their youngest grandchild had reached the age of majority. I told him he shouldn’t be so hasty; I might have a midlife crisis and run off to start a second family. He smiled and shook his head; he was the one who had driven me to my vasectomy. In addition to the revised wills, my parents had consulted a funeral director. They had bought a plot, had made detailed arrangements for their services, had even commissioned a headstone. Dad pulled up a photo on his cell phone and passed it to me (presumably) for approval. There it was, in pink granite like the rock underneath our butts, names and birth dates at the top, loving parents of … me and my brother, grandparents of … a list of the grandchildren. Whatever. I passed the cell phone back to him.

It was time to keep moving. I slung the pack over my shoulder and helped dad to his feet. It wasn’t so far to the top and it wasn’t so steep either, just a couple more twists in the trail before it levelled off and took us back along the edge of the Palisades. We were walking along an unsanitized path at the top of a sheer cliff face 140 metres above the highway. I say “unsanitized” because there were none of the safeguards you find at the more touristy sites like Kakebeka Falls or High Falls on Pigeon River. They drive iron railings into the rock for fear of being sued by people too stupid to keep from slipping over the edge. But not here. Atop the Palisades there’s nothing to betray a human presence. In fact, the whole time we were on the trail to the top, we didn’t encounter another soul. At the first lookout, we drew to the edge in silence, feeling that odd lurch in our bowels that always comes when you look out unprotected from a great height. I set up my tripod and camera and took shots of the landscape that unfurled beneath our feet. It was a better view than from my condo balcony back in Toronto. While, a thousand kilometres to the south, busloads of tourists gathered each hour to watch water pour over a sanitized cliff little more than a third this height, my dad and I stood in silence, the only people through the whole day to face this wonder. We went on to the next lookout and so on until we reached the point of no return, i.e. the point at which we estimated that if we didn’t turn back then we couldn’t reach our car before dark.

As we returned to the place where we’d eaten lunch, dad said there was something he needed to tell me. He and mom had discussed it and had decided that if they were getting their affairs in order then they’d better get all their affairs in order. That meant coming right out and telling me the truth. I deserved to know. We set down our packs and took out our water bottles. I’d worn a long-sleeved shirt for the mosquitos but the shirt was hot and made me sweat like a beast. I needed to rehydrate. While I finished my first water bottle and started in on the second, dad spoke to me plain. Son, he said, you’re not my son. I mean, you’re my son in every way that matters, you know, in the emotional sense but, biologically-speaking, you’re not my son.

Reason first. Emotions later. That’s how it always goes for me. In my head, I knew exactly what my father had said. But in my gut, I had no clue how to respond. I guess that’s why I’m writing about it now, long after the fact, with the benefit of time to reflect on what the man had said to me. In a way, I wish I’d enjoyed the time right then to sit alone on that billion year old chunk of rock and gather my thoughts to myself. What a place that could have been for me to come to terms with such a thing. But reason first. And reason was nattering in my head that we had to hurry up or night would fall and screw us over.

Whenever we paused for him to catch his breath, he added a few more words to flesh out his announcement. My father—my biological father—was named Bill McBean, a kid who’d grown up on the farm behind the farm where my mom grew up. He’d been a wild one and, from mom’s perspective, it’d probably been a case of “bad boy syndrome”. He didn’t know about such things but figured a lot of young women go through it, especially if, like mom, they come from a strict background where the temptation to rebel is almost irresistible. He’d been smitten by my mom from the day he first laid eyes on her, so it nearly shattered his heart the night she tore off with Bill McBean in that souped up ’57 Chevy of his. One night was all it took. One night for Bill McBean to toss her aside like a used coat. One night for her to realize what a fool she’d been. And one night … well … one night for me to be conceived. It didn’t take him long to figure out that she’d gotten herself pregnant by Bill McBean, and, since he couldn’t find it in his heart to fall out of love with her, he did the only thing possible. He told everyone it was him who got my mom pregnant. He took the anger and shame of two families and swallowed all of it. Soon they were married and starting a family and at the centre of it all was this man’s vow to treat me as his own for as long as he lived and beyond (which would be obvious if I knew the terms of his will).

Further down the trail, while capturing an oddly shaped fungus in the late afternoon light, I asked what had happened to my real, my biological, father, the illustrious Bill McBean. The story goes that he’d been a small time grifter, gambler, cigarette smuggler, forger, liar, cheat, beater of wives, abuser of children, in and out of prison on petty charges, killed in ’95 when he ran a red light, probably impaired at the time, struck down (fittingly enough) by a young mother with a baby in a car seat behind her. I could read through a modest folder of newspaper clippings when we got back to Toronto.

I’ve read stories like this, typically in Readers’ Digest, where an adopted woman tracks down the mother who, as a teenager, left her on the doorstep of an orphanage, or a university student, feeling depressed and empty inside, who learns by chance that he has a twin brother. Always, the story ends with a sense of emotional completion. The last piece of a puzzle clicks into place and life is beautiful. The truth makes these people whole. But that’s not how it felt for me. There was no click. No moment when I could say to myself: aha, that explains why I don’t feel any close kinship to my brother—now my half brother—or: aha, that explains all those funny looks I got from the man I used to call my dad that time, years ago, when he caught me pilfering money from his drawer. Only I’ve never had any feelings like that. I’ve always felt a close kinship to my brother—now my half brother—despite our differences, and I never noticed funny looks from the man I used to call my dad even when he caught me pilfering money from his drawer. Instead, everything about our relations has been overwhelmingly normal. That’s what makes the revelation so difficult to understand. It’s almost a betrayal of our normalcy. I thought my dad was Jimmy Stewart but now I find out he’s really Dennis Hopper. There was never a missing piece to the puzzle; someone’s just gone to an already finished puzzle and swiped a piece from it.

The stolen puzzle piece has something to do with the whole personal identity issue. At least that’s the way I’ve decided to think about it. For all my life until that moment on top of the Pijtawabik Palisades, I had understood myself as a fairly conventional guy raised by a fairly conventional family in a fairly conventional city. If everything about my nurture can be described as conventional, and if everything about my nature appears to fall in line with that, what am I supposed to do with the fact that half my genetic code comes from a rebel and a criminal? Am I only my nurture and none of my nature? I didn’t think it was possible for anybody to be totally lopsided in favour of nurture. Could this man I call dad have conditioned all my natural tendencies out of me? Or have I only forgotten my natural tendencies? Maybe I can remember my true self if I trip whatever mnemonic switch will restore the suppressed genetic memories of my criminal nature.

For the rest of our road trip, I called my compadre Paul instead of Dad. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings but, at the same time, what could he expect? He’s the one who had lied to me for all my life about the true nature of my identity. Paul said that, while he could understand how this little revelation would come to me as a shock, it wasn’t as if I’d discovered a secret super power which had suddenly foisted on me an awesome responsibility for the human race. As far as he was concerned, this was pretty humble stuff. As far as he was concerned, I was still his son and he was still my dad; I could always depend on him; I could always look to him for advice. Yeah, whatever.

Paul and I didn’t go back the way we’d come; we took the TransCanada Highway along the north shore of Lake Superior. Again, we woke up at 5:30 in the morning, hoping to make it to the Cascades as the sun was rising, then we’d continue until we got tired of driving. I stuffed all my clothes in a grey gym bag then, in answer to a vague urge, I threw in one of the hotel’s large fluffy towels and a bar of soap. Was I on the verge of a slippery slope? I smiled at the thought of it. We filled the car with gas at the Husky station across from the hotel and, when I went inside to pay, stuffed a Sweet Marie into my jacket pocket. When we made it to the highway, I ripped the wrapper open with my teeth and grinned to myself all the way to the Cascades. The chocolate bar tasted sweeter for being stolen.

The Cascades is a set of rapids/waterfalls in a conservation area at the end of Balsam Street to the northeast of Thunder Bay. Paul and I sat on big granite rocks, watching the sky lighten over the roaring waters and sipping the coffees we’d bought at a Tim Horton’s drive-thru. I tossed my empty cup into the rapids and watched it disappear downstream. Paul looked at me but clenched his jaws rather than comment. I let out a whoop that echoed through the trees. It felt exhilarating to break the rules. At last it felt like we were on a real road trip. Like we were in the movie Thelma and Louise or something.

When we got back on the highway, I didn’t worry so much about how fast I was going, sometimes putting my foot all the way down on the accelerator when I wanted to pass an 18-wheeler on a grade. I whistled as the highway breezed by. Paul said my levity was forced. He said a self-conscious happiness has nothing to do with real happiness and everything to do with insecurity. I smiled sideways at him and asked what lying to a child has to do with. He frowned: that was a low thing for me to say. I didn’t respond. Instead, I let the car drift over the centre line and waited to see how long it would take for Paul to say something. When he caught me headed straight for an oncoming pickup truck, he yelled and told me to grow up. He said: sure your father—your biological father—was a rebel and a law-breaker, but there are some laws you just can’t break, not without paying a price; and your father—your biological father—paid the ultimate price the night he tried to run a red light and break the laws of physics; now, you can go testing the laws of physics if you like, but not with me in the car. He told me to pull over. He’d rather walk home.

I did as he said and veered to the shoulder. When I put the car into park, he told me to smarten up. The way his voice sounded, it was as if he was my dad all over again. Nothing had really changed. He was still my dad and I was still his son.

I said sorry.

He smiled and set his hand on my shoulder. He said: Let’s keep going, son.

That was fine. But first I had to go pee.

This would be the last rebel thing I did on the trip. The rules say you’re supposed to pee at designated rest areas, but the coffee I’d drunk at the Cascades had worked its way into my bladder and I was desperate to let it back into the world. I stepped to the other side of the car and down an embankment then past a line of jack pines that concealed me from the road. The ground was spongy with pine needles and moss. A flock of Canada Geese flew their instinctive V formation overhead, honking and flapping and reminding everything else in the forest, including me, that winter was coming. Halfway through my business, a crashing sound pushed through the brush to my right and a black bear ambled into view. Oh shit. I squeezed tight and halted the stream of piss. In general, black bears are harmless the way bees are harmless: leave them alone and they’ll leave you alone. Except the day before there’d been a news report of a camper, a man my age, seriously mauled by a black bear. They’re a force of nature. There’s no reasoning with them. They do what they do and you can’t account for it, no more than you can account for a lightning strike. Still exposed, a mosquito landed on my flesh, but I was too afraid to move so I let the mosquito feast away. The bear didn’t appear to know I was watching; it lumbered in front of me from right to left beyond the next row of trees. I felt a breeze against my face; it was blowing back toward the highway so at least the bear wouldn’t have my scent. The thump of my heart sounded so loud in my chest I was sure the bear could hear it. All I can remember thinking was: the Latin for bear is ursus. That’s it.

When the bear had passed out of sight, I zipped myself up and raced to the car. I slammed the door and shut my eyes and clamped a hand over my mouth to work my breathing back to a normal rhythm. My heart was still thumping when I put the car into drive. I wanted to get out of there. I miss my view of the lights from the thirty-third floor. I miss the roar of the traffic and the yells of the crazy street people. I miss the chaos of the city. It feels natural to me. I want to go home.