When X Equals Marylou
by Dobozy, Tamas
a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOF

Back Cover:

"Dobozy's affectionate, sharp, funny story-telling is both entertaining and soberly observant. This is marvelously confident writing -- it has a refreshing swing and verve, a refreshing sophistication. I admire this book tremendously." -- Sharon Thesen

"A brilliant collection; Tamas Dobozy writes great stories. His sentences move like snakes -- fluid, jabbing, biting. I hope When X Equals Marylou gets the attention it deserves." -- Michael Turner

	When X Equals Marylou collects stories about photographers, recycling center directors, game wardens, doppclgangers, bibliophiles, and dystopian subversives, to name but a few. It's a mix not only of characters, but of time, and of worlds -- moving from Russia to Hungary to Canada, from small towns and big cities to the interior of dreams; from faceless suburbia to the Library of Alexandria and all points in between.
	These beguiling missives, from the author of Doggone, unravel the world as we know it, and affirm Tamas Dobozy as a major literary talent.

	
WHEN X EQUALS MARYLOU 
Copyright © 2002 by Tamas Dobozy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or 
used in any form by any means -- graphic, electronic or mechanical -- 
without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a 
reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case 
of photocopying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

ARSENAL PULP PRESS
103-1014 Homer Street
Vancouver, B.C.
Canada V6B 2W9
arsenalpulp.com

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council
for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program,
and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing
Industry Development Program for its publishing activities.

Design: Solo
Cover photography: Grant V. Faint/Getty Images 
Printed and bound in Canada

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons 
either living or deceased is purely coincidental.

NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA
CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA:
Dobozy, Tamas, 1969-
When x equals Marylou

ISBN 1-55152-133-4

I. Title.
PS8557.O2218W43.2002      C813'.54      C2002-911018-1 PR9199.3.D526W43 2002

For Marcy, Without Limit

Contents

	Riverbottom Rag
	Like a Salmon Getting Me Down
	Cages
	Frank's Essentials
	Edwin Tries to Get Help
	Lenin True and/or the Dummy
	After Fat Thursday
	Walt's Wing-Span
	Institutional
	When X Equals Marylou
	Red Love
	In Embers
	Acknowledgments

Riverbottom Rag

	John the teacher said, "Running away needs no theme song, just a little silence." The days in South Pike, spent teaching in classrooms packed with the kids of brakemen, engineers, and other rail yard affiliates, obsessed him with escape. He'd take acid in the backyard and toss a grappling hook tied round his waist toward the clouds, hoping it would catch, and the movement of winds and weather fronts drag him out of there.
	John swore South Pike was a place where chairs broke under you, where wooden fences along ridges ended without reason. Plain and simple, these fences went post to post, with vertical planks connecting them along the top and middle. They fooled nobody; a cripple could climb through. And these fences would suddenly stop -- post, planks, post, planks, post, and then nothing but sky and grass. Speaking to other men condemned to life in South Pike, John suggested: "If you really think about it, fence or open sky, what's the difference? They're both restrictive. One confines you to a specific space; the other doesn't confine you at all, which is just as much of a restriction -- like when there's no rules you don't even know where to start. But the valuable thing is that moment when penned-in becomes wide-open, one possibility becomes another. Now that's cool."
	But John realized this only after a year of South Pike; and it's a story.

	The town seduced him with the security of a fixed income, an attraction in his early twenties -- another transitory point, John wrongly thought: "Twenty-one is a black hole that sucks up and spits out the rest of your life." This teaching job came with a permanent room in a home for CPR amputees, a place notorious for loneliness. Two weeks later, John moved to the "Railwayman's Hotel," a turn-of-the-century building on the Fraser River's less scenic side -- the one with rail yards. In the morning he misted the window pane watching men exit their front doors and walk to work. John included himself among those attracted to buildings where machines are stored and serviced, whose walls gape with missing brick, where people settle in sad shacks, build wharves on pylons sunk unevenly into the riverbed. South Pike housed less than a hundred. An aerial ferry transported passengers across the Fraser to the upscale neighbourhood where management lived; from here, every road led to a better town.
	John watched Pointsman Slim limp through the CPR gates, a paper lunch bag swinging from his fist, heavy with cold, sweat, with all of labour's weight. But Pointsman Slim got revenge, oh yes, and John smiled to see him go smugly back into the workplace the foremen had threatened to fire him from so many times before. Slim got his kicks misdirecting trains so passengers for Toronto alighted in Medicine Hat. He switched points any old way, and bragged at the beer parlour: "How about that! Seniority saved my ass." When the bosses complained, Slim took out his scrapbook of thanks sent by passengers happily shunted from undesirable destinations, the ones who'd tasted the unexpected and loved it. So management routed trains around Slim's points. He stood on his good and bad leg in the middle of the yard, on ground trembling under locomotives outside his control. John turned and walked past shadowboxing Bob, whose bruised knuckles always stopped too near to the wall.
	Bob, a twenty-year-old former street kid who'd outboxed every British Columbian in his age and weight division, owned a left arm three inches longer than the right -- a surprise advantage for busting the opponent one. His head needed a patch of hair three inches square where a friend with a flaming aerosol spray had burnt it to the third degree. Bob's stomach muscles fit large on him. He started to emulate John from leather jacket to shoes of choice: maroon penny loafers. Bob slept in the right and John in the left bed. But when Bob toured the province's boxing rings, John pushed the two together and took queen-sized sleeps. The low-wattage streetlamps and railway lights yellowed their nights like old wallpaper.
	The manager sent Bob to South Pike between matches because the town offered little opportunity for anything except training. But, like God, Bob could create trouble from nothing. A blind man attended the weekly movie screenings at the high school gym, to catch the sound effects and dialogue, but to also stare at the screen more intently than normal. During one film Bob turned and declared the sightless had no right coming to movies. But the blind man replied: "Sit down, smartass; I can't see the show." Bob's sucker punch broke the blackened glasses, exposing the most piercing eyes of all time. Motes floated in the black and white cone of light wedged between the lens and screen.
	Or roses stopped Bob. Jogging with John past a prize flower garden, Bob halted so suddenly John had to double back several yards. "Those sons-of-bitches!" he howled, staring into the red bulbs, slamming his hands on the top of the chain link fence.
	"Yes, beautiful," answered John uncertainly.
	"Way too fucking beautiful. Aww, man!" yelled Bob, hiding his eyes behind his fists. "The miracle of existence!" He climbed over and began crazily uprooting the plants. When the lady of the garden stepped out to wonder what roses had ever done to him, Bob raised a bush in each fist and snarled: "Day after day, the torment of excessive beauty!" John tried to put a mile between himself and Bob, but only ran half as fast.
	"If only I could dream a single dream," Bob whispered by John's bed, "I could sleep. So give me one." Since Bob, experimenting with subconscious suggestion, would probably not take kindly to his victim's wakefulness, John got so holistic with body-control he could regulate everything from his breathing to the REM-roll of his eyeballs. He stayed totally awake and completely still, scared one hundred percent, while Bob whispered hours on end. Daytime trapped them in a daguerreotype, brown and pre-posed: two Joes with a television, in the act of passing the remote control, wondering what to watch. Bob stood in front of the armoire, opened the door, stepped fully inside, and closed it; after a little wait (as if John would forget) he'd jump out and yell, "Boo," like a halfhearted ghost. John would act surprised to avoid any violence.
	John took passionately to bourbon. He went to work drunk. He permitted himself fantasies about the schoolgirls, something he felt bad about, reluctant to give the imagination such leeway, but he needed to think about something while Bob whispered the subliminals.
	At a fourth-floor party in the Railwayman, Bob punched enough holes in the walls and doors to sum up the damage deposit and then some. Pointsman Slim and John, on either side of a wall Bob had finished with, played a game where one man speedily switched his face from hole to hole while the other tried to smash it with a feather duster; someone set a time limit and kept score. This sport caught on to the point where Bob couldn't understand its friendliness, how it magically livened the party he'd almost ruined, and this incomprehension riled him. "Hey, look at the dog," he said, "it has ears like Dumbo." Picking it up, he wondered: "If. . ." Nobody stopped the dog's progress, in the boxer's arms, to the balcony; little protests voiced here and there like gunshots far enough away.
	John realized dream and nightmare will play in real-time the man they can't play in sleep; and if Bob's insomnia kept him awake any longer, he might also begin acting out his own fantasies. "Please don't do it," John grovelled, eyes large even for deer.
	"Fly, Dumbo," advised Bob.
	Dumbo dropped. Each fallen story added its hairline signature to the backbone -- crippling the dog forever.
	John absconded hours after the party. He stared long at the ceiling's stains and watermarks, going wingo thinking of Dumbo's panic while Bob held it over the brink.
	The boxer sat in full lotus, gazing out windows old enough to prove that glass is susceptible to gravity -- panes ridged and dirty, thicker at bottom than top. On the pretext of pouring a whisky, John rose, grabbed the bottle of JD, and shattered it against Bob's head, saying, "There you go. Have a dream, asshole." Transferring his clothes from the armoire to a cardboard suitcase, John dragged down the stairs, putting an envelope with rent through the landlady's mail slot. He tiptoed like a thief of old, looked one last at the streets and rail yards he and Bob had skulked through, heaved the suitcase into the VW van, and beelined for the aerial ferry: to hell with the job and everything. He waited for the boat from two until six am, wishing the trees would take their rustling elsewhere. Q-Tips couldn't swab from his ears the suspicion of Bob's approaching footsteps.
	The VW stalled decidedly on the on-ramp. Ferry workers helped push it forward. On the other side, it refused to jump-start. John left it on the shoulder between the road and the riverbank, where a half-sunken boathouse strained the waves. He packed a little backpack and walked to the train station -- making no explanatory phone calls between South Pike and boarding the eight o'clock train, and certainly none for a while after.
	He stayed two weeks in a friend's basement, ate fresh bread and vegetables, let the early sunrise he woke to purge the bad fantasies. He visited art galleries and appreciated the pictures longer than most. If incomprehensible words rose from the page he promised never again to just gloss them, and, while buying a dictionary to make sure of this, John saw Bob through the bookstore's glass wall.

	Bob, being Bob, picked the glass from his scalp using needle-nose pliers. He expected John to show up two days later, and armed himself with an illegal revolver, a taser stolen from a mental institute, and a mail-order stun gun. Imagine the disappointment when the door didn't open forty-eight hours later. Bob packed the small arms and sunglasses, but the stealth stopped there; unable to fit his key into the two-sided lock, he booted the door from its frame.
	Now, the VW van had turned up roadside, but not the owner. Staring at the broken down boathouse, some cop decided John had jumped from South Pike into the preferable Fraser -- and the RCMP had been dragging a net through the drink ever since.
	When Bob saw the RCMP launch, he threw down and trampled the sunglasses, cursing death for beating him to John. He ran directly into South Pike yelling, "I wanted to kill him! I wanted to kill him!" The town slammed its windows and shutters at the shrieking maniac whose homicidal outrage, at heart, expressed grief in the only shape he knew. After all, what does a street kid turned boxer know but constant opponents: from wind-chill and empty stomach, to 14 indifferent pedestrians and homelessness, to hard-nosed coach and padded fist? Raving the loss of his one friend along alley and avenue, he sprinted from South Pike to exhaustion, sinking where the grassy earth meets the Fraser. He wanted a world of the type John's brain contained, where dogs didn't need to fly because all the necessary magic existed among friends, where the nightly weirdness of dreams and nightmares refreshed the day with ordinariness, where you couldn't over-appreciate the miracle of grass, tree, or rose. The rising water took off with a pair of penny loafers.
	And Bob, of all things, slept.
	He dreamed river bottom dreams. The city in the river seemed a cleansed version, a flipside to the waking world's Vancouver. It took Bob days to walk there, but he took his time with hill and curve. The street corners, dumpsters, and rancid beer parlours of his youth glowed happily the second time around. Bob couldn't believe the beauty of this vision he knew he was dreaming. For once, crowds parted without him having to bump shoulders. Sensing John a discreet half-block behind so enlivened Bob he wanted to show his pal the perfection of this river bottom world, and knew just the place. Bob dropped his shoes and gripped the steel cables of Lion's Gate Bridge with prehensile toes, scaling to the apex.
	John broke the first law of sleepwalking with a holler. Having watched the wet, dirty boxer, watery weeds sticking from his pockets, shamble along Granville to Georgia, speed up in Stanley Park, remove his penny loafers, and climb barefoot to the steeple of Lion's Gate, he chose to shout instead of follow. Bob, hearing his name, broke with his first dream of the decade to plummet thousands of feet. The sea underneath stretched hard as sheet metal.

	John waited for Bob to pass the bookstore by quite a margin before pursuing him. A door revolved him into the outside world and he tailed the man who looked so much like his friend. The three-piece suit, polka-dotted bowtie, and polish on the otherwise rightly coloured loafers seemed uncharacteristic, but block after block John caught profile glimpses which, from any viewing angle, added up to a composite of Bob. But when the Royal Bank manager stepped up, all handshake and premeditated face, and handed the man a briefcase clearly used for packing cash, John decided to check his head.
	"Why is it," he asked the doctor, "that we fill each new city with the faces of friends?"
	"Sublimation of guilt," replied the Freudian, joining two index fingers into a steeple. "Superimposition of the familiar on the universally dissimilar."
	So John, believing this snowflake theory of faces -- that no two look the same -- took his mistaking the unmistakable for a sign of delusional guilt. Conscience forced his call through to the school.
	"Holy shit!" exclaimed the wise and kindly Principal. Wires carried his sigh to yet one more teacher experiencing South Pike's difficulties. The Principal knew how his village lacked the numbers necessary for a newcomer like John to gather friends without defaulting to citizens Slim and Bob; and, once made, you can't just drop people crossing your path ten times a day. Here, vanishing was a last resort rather than a tactic. "We thought you were dead, John! We gave up after the police found your shoes in the river."
	Having lost an opportunity to stay gone, John thought: shit -- and whined: "I had to get out. I was going crazy!"
	The Principal creaked on the office's only swivel chair, trying hard not to beg: "Take some time off, John, all you need; then see."
	"Are you kidding? I can't go back there. After what I did to Bob? He'll kill me."
	"Bob?" the Principal asked, and then said: "Bob's been gone as long as you. We all thought he'd taken off."
	"Maybe I killed him with that bottle. . ." John gasped.
	"The room was empty. Anyway, Bob was seen running around like a maniac a few days after you disappeared. Slim saw it, and Lou Goering and Mabel Jones and Humphery Pinkerton and. . ."
	"Huh," said John, satisfied by the list of eyewitnesses. "Hey, what shoes did they find?"

	A week of Vancouver later, feeling the creep of routine, a day-to-day sameness you'd do anything to quit, John realized the only likable existence, for him, involved transformation, that briefness between conditions. So he switched back, returning to South Pike a minor celebrity, the invisible man everyone could suddenly see.
	When the furor died around John, the town fixated on Bob's unrecovered body. Pointsman Slim advanced the following theory: "You ever seen anything so like a wheel as a tumbling wave? I swear to God that's where cavemen got the wheel from, from watching rivers. Hope to die. Now, what has as many wheels as a river has waves? Trains is what. And you know what the surfers in California say? They say either you get the wave or it gets you. So either Bob caught that train or. . ."
	Lou Goering interrupted with: "Personally, I think it got too hot for him. Boxing's run by Mafia you know, just like every other sport and business in the world. I seen those guys, seen them as far north as Mackenzie. You can tell by the suits and sunglasses. Friend of mine spotted one in Yellowknife! So he's winning all these fights and the bettors are losing money. So they stage his death. They take him to Sicily, set him up. You know. Girls. Big cigars. Everything. . ."
	"Horseshit!" chortled Mabel Jones, a big woman straddling a chair backwards. "It was drugs and I'd bet on it. I saw Bob one time with white powder all over his face! All over! You don't make that big a jackass out of yourself without something on the brain! He stayed at Sandy's place and drank all the vanilla and fell down the stairs and hit his head!"
	"Well, hell. Why did Sandy keep so much vanilla around in the first place?" asked an old and arch Humphrey Pinkerton. "I'll tell you. Because Sandy was the vanilla fiend and you know it! She hit him on the head with a frying pan! For no reason. I saw it. Bob just covered for her. He could be nice sometimes. . ." No gossiper in South Pike really liked Humphrey because he prized truth over embellishment. 
	"I saw white powder! Saw it with my own eyes!" yelled Mabel. 
	"I saw it too," assisted Lou.
	"Fuck! It was flour!" hissed John. "It's no secret Bob liked to bake." Humphrey patted the back of John's head, until that head snapped away. "He's dead, okay? Drowned, for Christ's sake!" He grabbed Humphrey's hand to save himself from further petting. Jackknifed names scarred the wooden pillars to either side of their usual table, Bob's by far the largest, scored deep, carved over lesser signatures.
	Appalled by the booze and John's sudden ill will, the drinking buddies departed.
	John stood in the fog outside. The sound of lapping waves reached to the ends of streets. Humphrey buttoned up his coat. "I think Bob did it for you," he said, "to give you a chance to get out of here." John nodded farewell to the man called "Mr Dinkerton" by students behind his back; Humphrey took this nod for verification.
	But on the riverbank John knew the Fraser's mud and rocks concealed nothing of the boxer. The touch of water convinced John that if Bob's corpse existed it couldn't not turn up. Sitting in a clump of saw grass, John took out a calculator and punched in the odds of Bob managing to physically breach the fourth dimension, every hair intact. The LCD overflowed with the zeroes of a number school kids call "jillions."

	Nobody John knew ever saw Bob again in the waking world. Over the years, John would receive messages coded in nightmares -- their directions to Bob too vague to follow. For instance: Bob on a bridge in that happy moment between firmly planted and freefall.
	A mechanic covered in stove oil and grease attached training wheels to a square of wood, and they strapped the paraplegic dog to this with a cotton seatbelt, its forequarters pulling along the ruined behind. The dog learned to stay away from steep hills and stairways, but the rest of its natural life ran like a Disney classic.
	John finished teaching one year and stayed another. He met Ingrid, and, for a change, got married instead of running away. John and Ingrid left South Pike in the springtime, at the end of year two. It was almost sad. Wildflowers grew along the railways.

Like a Salmon Getting Me Down

	I wanted a home by the sea because I'd quit drinking, and that made me channel energy into the weirdest things. Unless dampened by alcohol I'm a freak. For example, I spent three weeks stretching my ligaments until I could do the splits. For example, I wanted isolation, so I rented a house by the sea.

	The people from AA won't desist. Edna, a barge of a woman but with the beautiful face some fat people have, butts in to watch the eagles off my beach, her every word an allegory I must warp out of proportion.
	"You know," Edna recites, "an eagle's claws work this way." She puts the tips of her thumb, fore- and middle-finger together. "They can't let go of what they catch until it's on solid ground. I once saw an eagle that couldn't get its claws off and the salmon dragged it into the ocean. That's like drinking. You can't let go."
	"I prefer another interpretation," I said. "One day a salmon tried to go for this girl but his buddy got her first, with a pearl. So the salmon had to outdo that. He fattened himself up, found an open space on the ocean's surface. The eagle took the bait. But it couldn't fly away and couldn't let go. The fish dragged it down. The salmon got himself a new hood ornament and the girl."
	Edna's a severe AA activist. Because I don't attend regular meetings they figure I'm a borderline pledge, a zombie waffler. Plus, I'm young compared to those burnt-out, teabag suckers, and they always think youth insubordinate. Edna comes every day to chaperone. She scans for bottles inside my home while trying to keep a conversation going. "You fools, don't you know I could destroy you all?" I sometimes say to Edna.
	"Have you been drinking?" she asks.

	My seclusion isn't for sobriety. A good friend of mine killed himself months back. Drug overdose: "A method," the smirking doctor said, "preferred by women the world over, regardless of ethnicity."
	"So what, you unfeeling fuck?" I berated him.
	"He wasn't manly!" Then I pinned the doctor by the shirt to the coffin. The pallbearers pulled me off him. They kicked me out of the funeral for being disorderly.
	Confronting his femininity might have helped my friend. The prognosis seemed tragically belated. He should have gotten a girlfriend. Virginity is dangerous at twenty-five. Your cock becomes an enemy you grapple with, fist over fist, day in and night out, whenever there's a spare moment, actually. It can't be good for your social life. But get a girl and you have a reason to share. Nothing worse than a sexual skinflint.
	I bake pies. And I don't have to push myself not to suck the vanilla or put my face close to the pan when spraying chemicals. It's easy.

	My AA sponsor takes pride in the fact that I'm her youngest case. I like pride, the way it grates against your backside like Parmesan cheese. I don't phone her at the scheduled times, which worries her. "But I really find the worry exciting," she once said to me, when I ran into her and her husband in a parking lot. "I like unpredictable clients," she allowed. "I love a challenge."
	"You should see how hard it is to get me out of my pyjamas," I barked back. Her husband swung at me. I ducked, laughed, and walked into the liquor store to browse. Looking at liquor is an intense museum.
	Edna nabbed me in the liquor store that same day. She dropped her groceries -- grapefruit rolling everywhere, gooey egg yolk -- and scooted into the store.
	"What the shit are you doing here!" her face up in the red indicator.
	Everyone in the liquor store, the roughnecks and clerks, the housewives and the bootleggers, marshalled in our aisle.
	Edna threw down her purse, big hips jiggling. She's a full foot and a half under the national average, but with fat her body mass nears the golden mean. She started to cry quietly, clutching at my elbow, her face highly attractive.
	"Edna," I whispered to her. "You can look at this two ways: temptation withstood and penance. Let go of my elbow. I don't buy anything. This is how I atone."
	"I don't believe you!"
	"Let me fucking go!" I yelled, wrenching my elbow out of her grasp so hard she fell against the shelf, grabbing at tipping bottles. I began pushing her.
	"Stop your useless crying. I'm going to buy every bottle, smash their necks open, and drown myself." I mimed the accompanying motions, breaking the act only to push Edna.
	One of the employees grabbed both my elbows from behind. I struggled genially. One foot in the small of my back, he accelerated me out the door. Ejected and dejected are God's words for me.
	I walked back to the shanty, picking blackberries off the vine, watching old ladies with cloths on their heads picking flowers. It was cool and somehow quieter in the shade. The last thing I needed was a drink.

	This friend of mine -- more a brother -- tried suicide before. His last five years consisted of unmitigated depression -- despite Prozac -- and drug abuse. He tried to bite it three times before beating his average. The first and third attempts involved drugs while number two involved glass from a broken light bulb above his bed in the psychiatric institute. He showed the nurse the ineffectual incision on his wrist and the nurse rolled his eyes: "So what?" My friend was mad because the nurse didn't care. I think he just didn't get the attention he craved. So he checked out.

	Walking back from the movie place last night a knife hit my lucky rib, the one just over my heart. The four sixteen-year-olds needed straight cash. I couldn't pinpoint the leader. Maybe there was no leader -- just a little republic of petty muggers guided by majority vote. Anyhow, I gave them the money they required. They let me keep my credit cards and cheques. I understand: they needed money. You should give to the needy. But I'd raze them all if I could. These west coast mill towns are one gene pool that should read biohazard. Some move here for the danger, can you believe it? I just wanted some sea. They put the knife into me even after I'd handed over the money.
	Some passersby rushed me to the hospital in their car. The doctor told me being an after-hours pedestrian had side effects. "Who are you, anyways?" he asked, obviously never having seen my face in this negative-population-growth town.
	"I'm visiting," I said.
	"That's not without drawbacks either."
	Bandaged, I went home, scooped the remains of a blackberry pie into my mouth, and fell asleep on the porch before swallowing it all. I awoke choking and earthbound. I'd love to own a UFO.
	I licked dew off my lips and got out of the sun.

	I go to a special movie place. Not only can you rent videos there but they have rooms for viewing. The walls in these rooms are painted black. The white-haired man at the desk offers excerpts from every movie the customers rent. "Then Charlton Heston has a chariot race. Then Humphrey Bogart has leeches all over his back." Sometimes he remembers incorrectly. I tell him which movie I want. He disappears into a room behind the viewing chamber. In a minute his hand comes out the doorframe and points towards the chamber. "Ready to roll," he says. They let you smoke while watching. And I do. One cigarette after another, with long, soul-searching drags, though I don't normally smoke that way, until the room is a miasma of carbon monoxide, and liquid nicotine nearly runs down the walls. I open the door and a huge puff of smoke billows into the main hall of the movie rental store, setting off the smoke alarms. My face sickly green at this point.
	I've been going almost every night. Everyone there spurns me. Fine. It's gotten to the point where I don't even really watch the films anymore. I just sit there smoking. Sometimes I look at the screen and so my impression of the films are scattershot. I sometimes rent two films in a row or epics like Lawrence of Arabia or Ben Hur (just to please the white-haired guy) but don't really have the required attention span. And all that darkness! Just to feel the way he felt, popping pills before embarking. He told me one night: "My soul's so heavy it sits on my shoulder like a shot-put. That's why I walk so lopsided."
	"I always thought it was the drugs," I told him.

	The woman who rents me the shack comes down, informs me the summer is over, obviously pissed that I got most of the blackberries on the seaward slope of her hill. "Okay, next week," I reply. 
	"No later," she grimaces.

	Sometime later that afternoon, Edna waddles onto the beach, knapsack on one shoulder, bucket and shovel in either hand. I climb up onto the roof and watch her dig for clams, the sun like a meltdown above us. The heat tires me out in ten minutes. I feel like I'm wearing a burning tire, and go back inside. Three hours later she's still digging. I can see the red of her skin from my shack. Putting on a big straw hat with plastic fruit arranged around the brim that I found under the bed, I go down to her.
	"Edna," I say. She looks up, eyes narrowed, staggering under the weights and measures of the heat. "You don't have to suffer for me," you know. "I'm sick of this, Edna."
	"You're sick?" she says. And, whether from sunstroke or emotional deprivation, we both laugh.
	In my shack, I show her how I do the splits and she smiles. The fresh clams boil on the stove, the pie saved for dessert. "Who's this?" she asks, pointing to the picture on the mantelpiece above the fireplace.
	"Another statistic," I say.
	"What'd he die of?"
	"Self-administered drug overdose. I mean, suicide."
	"That's terrible," she sympathizes, tucking her long brown hair behind her ears. "How do you feel?"
	"Like shit," I reply, picking up the photograph. Drunk and belligerent I once told him he'd better get off the drugs because he was becoming a snowman. "Have a few more drinks," he yelled at me. "Pass out. Do us all a favour." Edna takes a bottle of wine out of her knapsack and puts it on the coffee table, reaches into the bag and pulls out a corkscrew. "I've never passed tests," I tell her, "unless I could cheat." I open the wine, take a drink out of the bottle. It tastes like a hundred years. I swallow the shot and dump the rest down the sink. "Edna," I turn to her, "I'm not an alcoholic." She doesn't kiss me on the forehead or the cheeks. Her mouth tastes fresh as a sweet onion.
	I never thought a fat woman could be so tender and nimble. She moves those globes of flesh around slow and serene as a blimp. At least she's not old. And she seems to have no problem with the scrawny kid I am. She forces my body around like a pipe cleaner.
	"We used to do drugs." This comes out later, after clams in garlic butter and fresh cherry pie in bed. "I was always a casual user, but he was an addict. He just loved drugs," I tell Edna, my hand somewhere between her breasts. "The only thing that interested him. Even when he was straight he went around buying and stealing books on drugs. He liked the scientific studies and Swiss pharmaceutical listings the best."
	"What did he do?"
	"He worked in a pharmacy in a hospital in Vancouver."
	"Perfect," she says.
	"Yeah, practical. I knew him for nineteen years. We met in elementary school."
	Later that night I pull her onto the rooftop of the shanty. I bring up a couple of beers. She declines my offer. I stare at the beer and before I can open it she's lecturing. "You shouldn't have wasted the time of the organization like that." Jumping up, I throw the beer against a nearby tree. "No, but I had to do something," I yell, putting my hands on her shoulders and shaking. "I did what he should have done, just to know what could have saved him."
	She grabs my hands. "And could it have?"
	"I don't think so," I whisper, swallowing big circles.
	"Don't be such a pathetic example of humanity then," she advises.

	I remember one night we injected morphine he'd stolen from the pharmacy, and we sat on his rooftop in east Vancouver. "Shoot for the stars," he said, in his small way -- he was an undersize man, with all the ensuing self-esteem complications -- pushing the needle into my vein. The city lights blurred gregariously. He pulled out a kite that we tossed up into the night breeze. We sat on his roof at night, high and lowdown on morphine, watching the kite go to the end of its tether. Eventually the kite fell and got tangled in some nearby phone lines. Most of the phone lines had one of his kites tangled on it.
	Early the next morning he pumped a bumper crop of mixed drugs into his arm. Opting for early euthanasia, his suicide note said.

	I phone my sponsor the next morning. "I'm leaving," I tell her.
	"Where?" she asks, her voice breaking into worry and defeat.
	"You poor sport," I tell her. "I'm going back to the city. To drink myself silly. It's time to get stupid again."
	On the way into town I buy a kite and take it to the park. Goddamn, if you're going to fly a kite, fly it right.

Cages

	Feigning death is ineffective; neither teeth nor nails nor skin offers adequate safety; neither a huge IQ nor three years of university; neither a suave personality. Neither the final shriek. Grizzly bears avoid arbitration. When trapped, cornered, or annoyed, they opt to rend their way towards release.
	She once saw a backyard scrap where a dog pulled the bone from the leg of a cat. The pair had been cordial for years but something proved irreconcilable. That day she went to bed in the afternoon to dream off the shock. But there's no possibility for sleep now. She's so scared she's gone beyond fright into regions of calm. What if she put the grizzly's head in her lap and stroked its hair? What if it woke up like that, to her heavy petting?
	It had been four months' easy withdrawal, even with the skimpy diet of nicotine gum, but now anything for the perfection of smoke, for the tang of tobacco. The wispy shadows of hair squirm all over her sunburnt cheeks. Skin snaps and peels along the bridge of her freckled nose. In her skull there is a panicked mass of brain cells -- the chemistry of inopportune memories. "Why do you feel driven to disappoint us?" Mother and Father had said. They never wanted her to exist outside of a marriage. They wanted her to breed -- in a virginal kind of way -- to breast-feed, to nurture.
	She and the grizzly share a cage able to withstand six hundred pounds plus of berserk maternal instinct. The tag is in her hand, the park warden uniform on her body. The grizzly's claws are packed with the remains of grubs, yellow jackets, rot. The hide is oily spikes of hair. Blackberry juice smears its dopey snout, its misleadingly mild-mannered eyebrows. The bear's soft eyelids waver. Sometimes a white slit of eyeball appears. What's the tranquilizer's duration? she wonders, not aloud, trying to avoid pinpointing the exact second.
	The abortion had been a minor detail. It interfered and then stopped interfering with the schedule. Father brought his fist down on the fine bone china, tossed a jar of peach jam at her. Before leaving the room he shouted: "I don't think I'm being unreasonable." Mother's eyes were tearless by practice. She tried to be tactful. No matter what defence her daughter brought up, Mother had more rebuttals than an index of ethics. "How can you decide on someone else's life?" Mother had asked, her face overflowing for her aborted grandchild.
	Into the park the road was stony, washed out, culverts missing, a tunnel of leaves. An overburden of thunderheads grumbled in the sky without unleashing rain or lightning. When it thunders, God takes his cart to the market. Lightning is the sparks of its metal wheels hitting rocks in the road. That's how Father explained the reality of the storm -- truth and tempest.
	Her co-worker, who was driving, tried to hit every robin, startled from the ditch by the truck, that flew in front of them. "Fly, birdie, fly," he'd say. When a bird went under, he'd cluck: "Not fast enough, little birdie." A winged carpet of robins stretched behind. He was going further up the map while she was to tag the bears further down. "That way we can be back around two. Call it a day. Hit the bar and hammer up. What do you say?" 
	"Sounds good," she'd said.
	While she approached that day's second specimen, the sun hit its zenith, the cloud cover burning off to leave painful light. The bear cage was imploding with muscle and fury, with the hyper-kinetics of fur and fang. They'd trapped a sow whose instincts had gone berserk over separation from her cubs. She loaded the gun, but the dart that should have completely sedated only brought the sow's shriek down to a howl. It took three darts over the recommended dosage to make the sow sleep. The cubs hugged nearby trees. "Don't worry," she said to them, "it's just new jewelry for mom."
	Dropping the gun, she went inside with the tag. It was a mischievous bear cub, down from the trees, which tripped the spring and slammed the door locked, unopenable from the inside. Now, in remission from the first surge of adrenalin, she deduces: this is why we work in partners. Fear feasts parasitical on her stomach.
	Over the mountains are suburbs -- orderly plots and gardens, how-to books, barbecues -- where hats and dirty hands are not present for dinner. It is a wilderness of duties and behaviour, a wilderness lacking fringes.
	After the abortion, Mother and Father disowned her. The announcement put in the paper, severing familial association, was never retracted, even after she birthed a son. She'd wanted one by then, just a son, that's all. The doctor knotted her fallopian tubes upon request.
	Despite this sudden drawback of being mauled by a grizzly, the job had satisfaction. Reaching past compass and knife, she goes for nicotine gum. Past the knife. . . Reversing the search, she picks out the Swiss Army knife, a compact prayer in her pocket. Such a short blade, and so much meat, muscle, and hide to sever. And if the pain interferes with the bear's sleep?
	The knife cuts into the neck. Her hand sinks into fur, into the crumbs and drippings from the grizzly's chin that collect on its collar. This is the basic ritual, the one other fights diverge from. Tenderly she pokes the knife blade down, glancing at the cubs, wanting to kill the bear and let it live, wanting the paradox, and no blood comes. Deeper now, until hand hits flesh, she jabs the knife. The blade catches and gouts pour. The bear mutters for life. She saws the steel and makes tracks of blood.
	When it's done, when the mother's killed, when the blade snaps shut, her hair catches on the wind. The sun starts going down. There are no refreshments. She waits for her partner while the sow's blood seeps past the flattened flowers and grasses under the cage, past fertile topsoil, past places of root systems, past strata no longer familiar. She lays her hand on the carcass and the valley becomes shadow around her. The cubs sense something amiss and come to the cage. Her hair is still tangled up in the wind while the carcass bleeds -- a drop of blood for every shadow, and for every shadow, another.

Frank's Essentials

	There are nights when the liquor cabinet will keep William Newsome awake. He can hear it downstairs, rattling in the dark like a milk truck on a corduroy road, the bottles pressing against the glass, bending it outward. It was his idea, not Edwina's, to keep booze in the house -- to show her there was no part of his world he couldn't control.
	But the house morphs. It never stays the same. So that when he gets up and is running with sweat and needs to get something for his migraine, it's never the usual hallway he steps into, never the hallway as it was an hour ago. He stumbles out of the bedroom and is lost. The route he used to take -- to get to the Aspirin behind the bathroom mirror -- isn't there. That hallway was straight; this one forks.
	Nor are the possessions in the house what they were. Where once sat a beat-up vase now sits a stack of old National Geographics. And William thinks to himself: "Has Edwina recycled our things?"
	It leads him on. No matter which hallway he chooses, he ends up downstairs. He can try to avoid it. He can try to outthink the shifting architecture, figure out which hallway he wants to take and then take the other one; or try to resist the pull of interesting items, follow the ones he isn't tempted to pick up or see where they lead -- the hairbrushes, the globes, all those Gideon's Bibles brought to the centre from demolished hotels. But, in the end, he'll be standing there, led by desire or negative logic -- it doesn't matter -- right to the cabinet.
	And when and if he gets to the bathroom, he can never remember whether he's taken an Aspirin or not, so that in the morning, when the house reverts to its usual floor plan, when all the objects and furniture become recognizable again, Edwina will come upon the empty Aspirin bottle, and look at William, at the bags under his eyes, and wonder how he manages to keep his stomach lining.

	It's been two weeks of such nights. Now, when he stumbles into the kitchen, she looks at him and waits, then, "You can't just stop drinking like that."
	He looks at her from his coffee. "I've stopped, haven't I? It's been a year."
	"But you need to talk to. . . It doesn't just go. . ." He notices that she's spinning the wedding band on her finger; they met long ago, before the recycling centre, before serious work, before they had to worry, and in those days William used to propose things spontaneously, kneeling right down in the mud.
	Edwina lifts her hand to observe the ring's loose fit. "I think I put yours on by accident this morning."
	"They're both mine," he chuckles. "I paid for them." The joke stands between them like a punching bag. She notices, these days, that he almost never wears his ring.
	"Don't change the subject," she sighs. "You've stopped, but you haven't stopped."
	"Edwina, we have half an hour to get to work," he says. "It's almost seven."
	"What's the rush?" She observes his anxiousness. "Nothing happens until nine."
	"We have to be there at seven-thirty. Sharp." He smiles tiredly.

	On the mornings after those nights, William often falls asleep at work. And in his dreams there is a man made of glass, and that man is Frank Edward. When William wakes he shudders and holds his ears to block the sound of shattering bottles and windows and mirrors.
	There's a knock at the door, and he sits himself up, straightens his tie. He knows: this is what directors do to pull themselves together; calm and order are created from the outside in; if the clothes are straight, so is the man.
	Charles comes in with a box full of books with old leather covers, many of them caked in dust and cobwebs. Charles has a look in his eye, the kind you might see on a trained crocodile -- gleaming but with the lids half-lowered.
	"You want these?" says William, suddenly smug, the words coming out by rote -- though what he's really thinking about is "Amendment 59" in the policy handbook he put together when he took over as director. It says: No employee will take home goods or items from the work-site without due permission from the director. William tilts his chin up.
	He looks through the books, opening each carefully, going through them page by page. Looking for what? Nothing really, though he'd be happy enough to come upon a picture of a goldfish bowl, so old it's in sepia; or maybe a pressed rose, with handwriting on the petals saying, "I Hate You." Something incongruous. But what he really just likes is the process, knowing he can take his time, that Charles will just have to wait politely, that he has the power to confiscate anything he finds.
	Meanwhile, above William's head there's a photograph, taken at the Recycling Centre's one-year anniversary. In it, the Director of Operations is standing on a chair behind the assembled employees, arms outstretched above them like an eagle -- that's what William thinks when he looks at it -- standing above its hatchlings, as if posing for an artist who's painting a new commemorative stamp. The picture is almost perfect, except that the shadow cast by his left hand falls over and obliterates the face of Frank Edwards, a flaw that drives William crazy.
	But William's not annoyed now. In fact, he's in ecstasy, because Charles has begun to plead: "C'mon, Bill. Nobody would want those books. They're old oilers' manuals from the mill, for Christ's sake!"
	"What's the magic word?" replies William, half-jokingly.
	"Please?" begs his employee.
	"I'm just kidding, Charles. Jesus!" laughs William.
	He puts the books back into the box, opens the thick ledger on his desk to the name "Charles Tittleworth," and marks down, in the "debit" column, the title and condition of each of the books. Then he hands the box across. "There you go, Charles. Enjoy."
	"Looks like I owe you another one, Bill."
	"Yes."

	When Charles has left, William pages through each of the employee files, scanning the lists of all the stuff he's let them take home. The stuff he's granted them. Until he comes to the Frank Edwards section, where he abruptly stops, and slams the book shut. For one second, on that blank page, there was something horribly transparent there, floating above the surface, as if to flaunt what was visible, but out of reach, on the other side.
	On the way down the stairs from his office, located in a loft built at the top of the recycling centre, William passes the second stage office -- Edwina's -- and nods quickly when she turns to him with a look of concern. William's boots drop heavily.
	On the main floor, in the sorting area, he surveys the other workers -- Charles, Joe, Marilyn, Mabel -- as they go through the dropoff bins and sort what comes out onto various pallets: newspaper, tin cans, plastic bottles -- everything except glass. The fluorescent bulbs overhead strike them with a cold white light.
	And in this light the interior of the recycling centre glints like the corrugated tin half-pipe it is. MacMillan Bloedel -- who built monster culverts with such half-pipes -- donated it to the centre, and a local building contractor, who owed the mayor a favour, slapped on walls and windows front and back to keep the weather from flowing through, also building the lofts where Edwina and William have their offices. It looks like a segment cut from a tunnel and sealed at either end.
	William already knows what everyone wants, knows what kind of presents make each of them happy or sad or indifferent.
	Joe, for instance, will scrounge, after hours, through boxes and boxes of magazines, one eye out for Playboy, for rare bits of vintage pornography. Marilyn is a china freak. William knows; he's been inside her house, so fragile you walk through it holding your breath. Charles, on the other hand, is practical, and passes on any reading material not related, in some way, to his dream of rebuilding civilization after the ecological holocaust that's for sure on its way.
	There is a minor rage for artefacts here, and it's William's managing principle, as he will admit: "I know the people who work for me by what they want."
	There's also the procedure of bundling and boxing and bagging and hauling. This, too, keeps William happy -- keeps him from watching the clock tick towards nightfall.

	Outside, it's a different story. Outside, there are several huge garbage bins marked "non-refundable glass," and sometimes William, when he's feeling brave, when he thinks he can face his fear and not grow fascinated by it, will go out there to watch Frank Edwards do his magic. As he does now.
	Here, between the concrete walls meant to prevent ricochets, a sledgehammer swings from Frank's fist, pulverizing an old windshield into a million splinters. Frank's Plexiglas face shield likewise scatters the sun in a million directions.
	Frank reaches down into a box and pulls out, by the stem, a crystal wine glass, holding it up into the light, as if he might read the world better this way, through a fisheye lens. But Frank tends not to read.
	He looks over at William with a question on his face. And painful as it is, William shrugs, as if he could possibly be indifferent.
	So Frank smashes all five of the wine glasses.
	It takes William a second to get over the nausea, to turn and head back inside, to the first aid station, where they keep the Aspirin.

	There was always the problem of Frank Edwards. Right from the start.
	For one, he came with rumours instead of a history. What people testified to was this: "Men died horribly." Those who testified were from all walks of life -- patrons of the recycling centre, or mill workers, or a bank teller or two, or the mailman -- but they all told the same story: Frank had informed the four electricians that he'd deactivated the grid, but he hadn't, and all four of them died.
	There are certain staff members -- Charles, Mabel, and Marilyn -- who believe this story, while certain others -- Edwina, William, and Joe -- don't believe a word.
	What William knows for sure is that Frank arrived one autumn day, as if looking for a job, and that his resume listed the mill under "previous employment," though his "reason for leaving" was, simply, "Job ended." When asked why he'd left, Frank just repeated that -- "Job ended," "Job ended," "Job ended" -- twitching his face left and right like a bird that couldn't figure out where to peck.
	And when William did his research, calling references, looking up records, he found that the managers Frank had worked for had either died or moved away after retirement. The fire that gutted the mill warehouse eight years ago destroyed decades' worth of employee records, Frank's included. Quite simply, there was nothing there for William to grasp; it was beyond him. And so, naturally, he said one night to Edwina: "I am intrigued." Frank was hired the next day.
	That was a Tuesday. By Thursday, Frank was already driving William crazy. He'd arrive in the morning with his mess of hair, telling everyone, when asked, "Yes, I've washed it," and then later that day, when asked, saying, "No, I never wash my hair." Then, the following week, Charles showed up with a worn newspaper clipping, given him by "some old-timer who used to work at the mill," that corroborated the story about the electricians and Frank's negligence. Only when William tried to find the source of this clipping, thinking it might be from one of the local or regional papers, he came up empty. The clipping could have been printed up that morning and made to look old with a crumple and a rub of the thumb.
	By week two, William wasn't looking at but rather into Frank, and what he saw there was, as he told Edwina, "layers." One layer and then another and another and another. So that by week three, Frank looked to William like a container, though the fact was it didn't really feel that way; rather, it felt as if Frank's oily skin didn't contain Frank so much as it contained William, as if it were a barrier that prevented him from accessing what he most needed. It still feels that way.
	Thus, on week four, William offered Frank the job of "glass." Nobody else wanted to do it: too dangerous, too strenuous, too noisy. Frank just shrugged and said, "If you like."
	These days, what William wants more than anything is to terminate Frank, because, as he tells Edwina, "he doesn't respect anything." But, to William's annoyance, and as Edwina constantly points out, Frank has "never done anything to justify laying him off."
	"He's not a team player," William will say.
	"That's not true," she'll reply. "Everyone likes him. I like him. It's just you that he bothers."
	"Why can't he be like the rest, grateful, you know? Why can't he ever say, 'That's another one I owe you, Bill'?"
	"Because he doesn't. He's not like Charles or Joe, or Mabel or Marilyn, always taking things. He just does his job, and you pay him. Everything equal at the end of the day."

	Edwina comes into his office, sneaks up on him as he's sitting in the swivel chair facing the window that overlooks Frank's bins of glass, and begins to massage his temples. He likes her to do this: sneak up, massage. He likes her to surprise him. It's Edwina's assignment.
	Though it bothers William that Edwina knows what happens when his urges become unmanageable. Like last May, when William decided, one afternoon following lunch -- just as she was in the middle of taking a memo -- that since he was now fully done with the booze he might as well get done with the tobacco too. He ripped off his suit, his tie, his shirt, and then started to rip off the nicotine patches stuck to his neck and back and chest, throwing them down onto the rug like jellyfish.
	Later that same afternoon, she came back into his office and he was frantic. The place was in total disarray. Easy chairs and sofa overturned. Filing cabinets emptied on the floor. Desk drawers ejected from their tracks. Pens, files, notepads, and carbons strewn all over the coffee table. Legal manuals, policy restrictions, union regulations jerked off the shelves.
	And sitting cross-legged in the middle of it was William, with a massive bottle of Johnnie Walker, writing, on little squares of paper, words such as "precious" or "useful" or "collectible" or "worthless" or "interesting," plus the word "mine" -- always that -- mine.
	Standing over him, she looked around the room and noticed that these tags were tied to everything -- to every pen, paper, cup, coin, shoe. Even the goldfish, most of them dead from overhandling, had tags attached.
	She got him out unnoticed that day. Called his sponsor, dumped a pitcher of ice water on his head, picked him up off the floor, dragged him out the back way, and hustled him to the hospital. Later, she told him how, rushing back to clean up before anyone noticed, she passed a pet store and, even with all the worry and stress, remembered to stop there and stock up on new Neon Tetras.
	He knows she knows he gets up at night. He knows she knows he loses his way in their house. He knows she knows he prefers her to say the same sort of thing every single day.

	So today she says, "Don't worry, Bill. It'll be okay."
	"The wine glasses were nothing to him," he replies.
	"Don't worry. It'll be okay."
	"Whatever happened to that antique chandelier brought in from the Rodmay Hotel?"
	"It's under the stairs, right where you told Joe to put it." She pats his shoulder with a whole lot of goodwill, hoping to distract him.
	"Please have it transferred to glass," he says like a cyborg, quickly removing her hand.
	She leaves the room and William guesses at what she's thinking: how it's such a shame that he doesn't know how much of a boss he is.

	In the lunchroom that day, like any other day, huge bites of bologna sandwich fill up Frank's mouth. It sickens William to watch the way food almost leaps of its own volition into the man's mouth.
	"You like bologna, Frank?" asks Charles.
	"When it's in my mouth, I guess," answers Frank, his cheeks bulging, glass glittering in his tangled hair. William watches him out of the corners of his eyes as he dumps Coffee Mate into his seventh cup of the day, thinking that if Frank would stop, just once, and look at his reflection in any number of the mirrors he shatters, then maybe he'd realize why birds are so attracted to his head.
	"Do you ever want to try salami?" Charles continues the interrogation.
	"If salami ever ends up between the bread," replies Frank.
	Everyone laughs except William.
	"So you're telling me you could go years with nothing but bologna?"
	"I never said that," says Frank.
	"Sometimes you don't even bring a lunch, silly bunny," says Edwina.
	"You have a bad appetite?" badgers Charles.
	"It comes, it goes," replies Frank, looking strangely at Edwina's smile.
	"Edwina, please come see me later this afternoon," interrupts William on the way out, managing the words even though he's got his tongue between his teeth.

	When Edwina arrives, she sees a large leather-bound book on William's desk. She looks around the office, trying to ignore what's in front of her, and its implications. But her gaze always comes back to the book, the concentric centre of the room.
	"Found this in the top drawer of your desk," says William, bearing hard right in his swivel chair, away from the window to face her. He grabs the book, places it on the table, hits it with his fist, and the lock on it springs open.
	She shakes her head. "You're a monster, William." 
	"Have a seat, Edwina."
	She sits.
	Now comes William's favourite sport: interrogation. "I'm wondering what it would take to get Frank to come to our yearly Christmas party."
	Edwina looks at the floor.
	"You must know what makes him tick. Let's put our work aside for a moment." William leans forward and knits his fingers together like a fire blanket. "Listen, it's no secret. I've seen how you smile at him in the lunchroom. You didn't like him at first, did you?"
	"It wasn't until you asked me to take that glass lantern out to him!" She blurts this out, and then stops, wondering why she's so nervous.
	"I'm sorry, I don't remember that," says William, embarrassed at her memory, her knowledge of him.
	"You must remember. An antique. You told me to tell him it was a gift. He brought it back here and recycled it."
	"Oh. . . that," says William, waving the information violently away.
	Edwina pauses. Then, very carefully, she retraces her conversational steps. "He lives. . . He's strange. But I. . ."
	"Let me guess. . ." says William, turning in his chair. But here he stops. Outside the window he sees Frank lift the chandelier in the air, twirling it around in his fist, tiny spots of light, spectrums, whizzing over his face, the ground, the concrete walls, spinning, spinning. "C'mon, you bastard," he hisses under his breath, "bite, goddamnit!"
	But Frank raises his visor and walks instead into the recycling centre.
	"Pardon?" asks Edwina.
	"Just a minute," shouts William, jumping from his chair, pausing in the doorway to shake a finger at her. "Don't you move! Don't you move from here!"
	He races down the stairs, boots clomping.
	Frank is downstairs, shifting the chandelier from hand to hand. "Anyone want this? Bill and Edwina, you want this?" he yells into the metal confines of the recycling centre, the words echoing from wall to wall.
	William barges down to the bottom of the stairs. "No! Nobody wants it!" he booms back.
	"As you like," says Frank, retreating to the door.
	As William drags his feet back up to his office he can hear the chandelier, outside, crunching down.
	He closes the door behind him and turns towards Edwina, who's reclaimed her diary. "I can guess what the sex is like," he hisses. "I can." He comes up right close to her face. "I'll bet he dreams of you, too, dreams that you're forcing him to fuck you, over and over and over. Until he's tired, until he falls asleep in his own dream. I'll bet he has to wake up to rest from the dreams you give him. And when you really have sex. When it really happens. Then. Oh, then. His dream self sits in a reclining chair, fast asleep, until you awaken him in the dream to fuck some more!"
	"He reminded me of you," says Edwina, calmly. "Not so long ago, when you weren't drunk -- just drinking. You were like him a little bit. But that was. . ."
	"Oh, shut up," he says, waving his hands at her, and turning away in disgust. He walks back to the window, wanting to see what he can't stand seeing, seduced by Frank down there, breaking glass.
	But when Edwina tries to rise, he runs over and bars the door.
	"You. . . you tell me what it's like out there. You tell me what it's like," he hisses at her, his face raw as steak.
	Edwina murmurs a description. "The doors, the windows, they're. . . sometimes they're open," she starts. "Last fall the apples fell off the tree and they rolled right inside, into his living room."
	"Yes?" says William, leaning back against the door and folding his arms.
	"Um. . . there's leaves on the kitchen tiles. He smells, sometimes, you know, in the spring, like. . . pollen. It's from the garden. He's covered in it."
	"He's a gardener?"
	"It's a wild garden. . . I don't think he, he. . ." 
	"Yes, I know, he does nothing. It just grows." William makes a gesture meant to indicate flourishing vegetation. "Then what?"
	"He gets colds." 
	William rolls his eyes.
	"No, I mean with the seasons. Like last winter when it was snowing. I saw him at work, his teeth were chattering. So I gave him a ride home, and that's when I noticed the open doors and windows. There wasn't any wood in his stove. I made soup. When it got too stuffy I opened some of the windows again. But when I gave him a ride the next day the stove was cold. And he'd left those windows the way they were. So, then --"
	"So then you just decided to stay," nods William. 
	"Well, that's what you get for working late every goddamn night!" she cries, slamming her diary down on his desk (the lock again popping open). "I took him to see my doctor. He didn't have one." 
	"And what did he say?"
	"She. She told him we had houses for a reason. But he gave her these weird answers. He told her the outside 'seduced' him too. And when she told him he should figure out his needs and wants he just looked confused. Like he didn't understand what the words meant."
	William could just see Frank's response. "Want?" he would say. "Need?"
	"Get out of here," he says, stepping away from the door. When she's halfway through, he calls out to her, pointing at the diary left behind. "Hey, don't forget."
	"Fuck you," she says, running down the steps and out the recycling centre. He has lost an employee. The thought hurts. And William bends with it.
	Then he's down the steps, moving after her.

	There are huge fishing nets strung above Frank's area, and they sway slightly, as if trying to catch the breeze, or to strain from it something of value. What they keep out, actually, are the crows, who are lured to the bins by the infinite sparkle of broken glass, like an antidote to the blackness of their feathers. William walks down the steps, through the hush of employees, who've stopped working. He ignores them and moves between the stacks and heaps and containers, grit grinding into the concrete under his boots.
	Outside, a pickup truck has backed into Frank's area, and two men are in the back, lifting up huge sheets of glass encrusted with dried lichen and moss, brought in from a greenhouse operation outside of town that went bust. "Too much work to clean and cut to size," says one of the men to Frank, who's down on the ground, shattering each pane as it's lowered down. Edwina has paused here, either to watch (which William doubts), or because she needs to speak with Frank, or because she's trying to figure out who belongs with whom.
	But just as she comes to a halt (and William behind her), one of the men reaches for his cigarette in the midst of lowering a pane, his feet slipping on a bit of fallen slime, and releases his hold on half the glass. The wind pushes the pane too hard for the other man to restrain it. And it falls.
	William wishes he could see this from a bird's perspective -- this transparent sheet falling towards Frank -- who must look, from up there, like a crab in a tank.
	And in that second -- a moment Frank will describe as a vacuum, an inability to breathe that brought his arms up reflexively -- the sledgehammer swings high, smashing the clear pane, shards falling over Frank, slicing future scars along his cheeks, obscuring him in a cloud of fragments. And then, in that moment, William thinks -- a thought so quick he won't remember it -- how the sun seems everywhere, unified and divided, sparkling on him and Edwina and on no one at all. He will think that, and in thinking forget it, as the sorting and tagging and classifying start up again, and Frank moves past, driven by that sledgehammer across a planet of glass.

Edwin Tries to Get Help

	Fire and he developed mutual interests early on. At six years Edwin tampered with the fuse box -- crossed a few wires, messed up the circuitry -- until the whole system overheated, starting the fire that made cinders of his sleeping parents.
	Edwin couldn't help coming back to fire after that. Or it came to him: the psychiatrist and his constantly burning cigarette, the toaster in his aunt's place torching slices of bread, the barrel for incinerating garbage behind the cottage. But it wasn't one of those horror story friendships. Edwin couldn't make fire from nothing, by telekinesis, or rubbing wood onto tinder like a pioneer. He liked matches. In the beginning he went into the basement and lit little blazes, trying to reclaim from them some upbringing he'd missed, an upbringing fire had kept to itself, the flames whispering so quietly. The fact that you couldn't undo fire didn't bother Edwin.

	It was his sixth summer out at the cottage with his new legal guardians, Aunt Nancy and Uncle Gilbert. His uncle did accounting. His aunt, a part-time housewife, spent the free half of her time cradling a portable TV for the best reception. When Edwin entered the situation she added a few hours onto the housekeeping. Neither of them had any part of their reproductive systems tied up, but they had no kids, a detail understandably lost on Edwin, who was usually too busy in the closet, holding lit matches up to his face. Most other kids at that age masturbate, or steal pocket change, but Edwin had fire. Later in life he'd grab a sleeping bag, drop it into the back of the rusty truck and just go, looking for a wide road and a lot of neutral colour, but at that age fire was his mainstay.
	The cottage sat on a hill sloping down to a lake and adjacent to an apple orchard, the ground everywhere filled with flat red stones which people spent years digging out of the earth to make vegetable patches. They embedded the stones in walls that divided the properties. Edwin thought of those videos with a gothic/medieval theme where the lead guitarist staggers by such walls, except with screaming faces set into them instead of rocks. Those wa-wa peddle, tremolo-laden guitar solos, that sport metal, that jock rock, which put all the emphasis on speed, the fifty-metre sprint of the musical world. And the grotesque faces in the wall screamed the chorus. And fire, lots of fire.
	They came to the cottage for two months only. Exhausted in advance, his Aunt Nancy had said: "No more than two months." Uncle Gilbert nodded, jumping out of the car, changing his suit for shorts, hailing the neighbour.
	A casino opened five blocks up. Night after night cars streamed past at four AM, the drunks, losers, one-time winners, pros walking home, making many complaints and little exultation. These three particular drunks -- a fat man and his two pokey, half-equal partners -- passed Edwin's every night, arguing on topics from ways to measure the stakes against the odds, local plant life, or the best kind of skin-mags. They wasted words, climbed phone poles, their fingers sketching in the dirt to illustrate a point. That's a type of rose. No that's no rose, bonehead. The chicks in there have the biggest tits, hands down. Aw, that's nothing. They became a breath of morning for Edwin, comforting swear words in the late hours.

	Edwin met the three gamblers for the first time at the start of summer. Gilbert had taken him for a walk to discuss sex and the sad state of union within the household, though keeping secrets was the real agenda. Halfway along the country stroll they ran into the three men heading home with scads of winnings. Tokens to the eyelids, they'd obviously had to dig themselves out of the blue and red chips, getting hard currency from the bank by the wheelbarrow. "Nice little boy," they complimented him. The fat one marched by and the two thin guys sprang at his uncle, fists up. They got cost for the shock because his uncle jumped back. They laughed and walked on. Rattled, Gilbert returned to the talk.
	Way past bedtime, Edwin had used the bird-watching binoculars to spy on his uncle and their neighbour, Sam, behind the woodpile. The two men dancing to some melody on a tape deck, smoking weed, smoking some more. Dancing. Kissing. Bending over the woodpile. Penetration.
	Edwin could see Sam staring up at him and smiling, as if the boy's voyeurism was helping him right down to the last drop. One night, after the sex was over, Edwin saw him turn to Uncle Gilbert, say something, and nod towards the window. Gilbert rapped on Sam's head with his knuckles, turning up towards Edwin. Then Gilbert had harsh words with Sam, his lips back against his teeth.
	So they needed to speak, the country miles under their feet supposed to help roll the dialogue along. "I get two months of the year to see the person I love, Edwin. The rest of the time I'm alone. I'd prefer to make love in the house, but if you knew your aunt the way I do you'd know how impossible that is."
	"What about Aunt Nancy?"
	"I don't think she knows about Sam exactly. She suspects."
	"No. I mean how can you be alone if you're with her?"
	"That's different." Edwin reached up and put his hand into his uncle's. "It's a different friendship, Edwin. I can't tell your aunt about it. It's mine and just mine. You have to help me."
	"Can we just walk now?" His uncle stopped, knelt down, grabbed Edwin by the shoulders. And then, without saying anything, he got up again. They continued the stroll in silence, sun blazing in their eyes.

	Edwin resumed his own friendship in the tool-shed. He went out for a walk every night afterwards, letting the wind draft the fumes from his lungs. Edwin stumbled onto his uncle and Sam naked on a picnic cloth. The river ran below the apple orchard. They'd stripped a branch, slipping the end through the gills and out the mouths of three trout they'd caught, then speared the branch into the ground beside the blanket. The heads of the fish piled on each other, close as three women singing into one microphone. The two men were covered in goose bumps, lying on their backs, smoking, tweaking each other's nipples once in a while. The sound of rapids in the distance, the smell of white water. Edwin stood just behind them, trying not to give himself away, feeling like he'd just called himself collect. Sam saw Edwin first. Edwin bolted, but his uncle caught up, grabbed him, put the boy on his shoulders, and began skipping around. Sam followed behind, smacking Gilbert's ass. Both men hooted until Edwin began to laugh and hiccup from bouncing up and down. They climbed into a wild apple tree to eat the red spots out of green, unripe apples, throwing the rest of the fruit into the river, where they floated down, bruised and each missing a bite. His uncle climbed to the branch where Sam sat. "Why don't you go home now, Edwin." Edwin understood that Gilbert and Sam didn't want to play with him anymore. He ran.
	His aunt was caressing her face on the porch. Her hands paused at places on her face and then continued shifting. She looked artistic and bothered.
	In the shed Edwin took a live crow out of the cardboard box, a crow grounded now for days with a broken wing. Birds needed hangars in Edwin's world, and those beyond repair -- this little "chickadee," for instance -- a permanent retirement. Edwin let the crow peck his finger and then reject it. He threw the bird into a handmade chicken-wire cage, poured on gasoline, which the bird tried to flap and shudder off. When the match touched it, the crow went up with a squawk, lashing out against the wire mesh. Edwin opened the window to ventilate the space. The bird fell over, sagged as it burned. Edwin waited for the flames to die down. He doused it in water and dropped the half-baked carcass into the bottom of the old oil barrel where he kept the toasted mice, kittens, and rats. Edwin thought about a dog, torching a dog. He sat and cried.
	I love them, I love them not, Edwin thought about his uncle and aunt while pulling burnt feathers from where they'd stuck to the bottom of the cage.

	The neighbours came over for dinner. Aunt Nancy never said a whole lot, didn't look at the other wife. Mary sat and patted her hair carefully, like any move might open wounds, then brought her fingers down to feel for Sam's hand along his leg. Edwin had one eye out for events under the table -- like a periscope between his aunt's world above and his uncle's beneath -- and watched Mary's hand grope along one of Sam's thighs while Uncle Gilbert's slid up the other. Their hands grazed just over Sam's crotch; both Gilbert and Mary jerked suddenly back. His uncle's hand hit the edge of the table and he bent over, alternately putting the knuckle in his mouth or trying to shake the pain out of it. Aunt Nancy sat the whole time with dimes between her knees, millions of them, dimes to spare, but she wouldn't open up a millimetre. Her years were a rubbish heap, the years that had made her frigid, unwillingly, through the escalation of grudges.
	After dinner, Nancy called him to the porch. "Do you see what's happening, Edwin? Because she doesn't see it. Something is going on between her husband and mine, something deviant. And she doesn't see it!"
	Edwin watched a white rabbit poke its head out of a warren by the shed. "May I be excused, Auntie? May I be excused?" he asked. Flint sparks; it spits a star of fire. Edwin knew it.
	He ran after the rabbit with a fishnet, over clumps and rocks, and finally caught it. Edwin put the trembling rabbit into the blackened cage, threw in some carrot chunks, covered it with a garbage bag. Birds go into hangars; he didn't know about bunnies. Rabbits kill their own kids so Edwin didn't feel bad making it wait. Saved for later.

	The couples got together for a game of Hearts. His uncle and Sam dipped into the whiskey like fiends, passing the bottle from one end of the table to the other. Nancy pulled the cards up from the deck one by one, as if picking the keys out of a piano. Ice rattled.
	Halfway through the game the alcohol ran out, so the men made plans to drive. Edwin watched from the loft jutting over the kitchen. Aunt Nancy said nothing while Gilbert got the car keys, trying to keep his smile in line. Finally she said no. The men looked at each other for a minute. Uncle Gilbert held out an explanatory hand, pursed his lips under his bushy moustache, trying to think of a reason. "Okay, just go," Nancy spat. She cut the deck and then rammed the two halves together, forcing them to mix.
	Mary got up to do the dishes. "I don't think I need you doing that," Nancy scowled.
	"What should I do?" the other wife whispered, her face averted, as if speaking to the fork she held.
	"Every summer the same," Nancy said.
	Mary snarled: "I don't like you any more than you like me, Nancy." She picked up her cards, threw them in his aunt's lap, and left the back way, slamming the gate so hard the lock couldn't catch and it rebounded open, bouncing off its hinges.
	Edwin scurried over to the open window on the other side of the loft, eavesdropping on Gilbert and Sam. The men had just opened the car doors when the three drunks came into the light over the street, patrolling in trinity. They'd spent too long at poker, and were short-tempered, as if their losing streak had broken them one hand short of the lucky draw. "Hey, look at this," the fat one in front said. "Looks like we got a ride into town." He walked over to Edwin's uncle, who leaned back into the open door space. The fat one adjusted Gilbert's tie for him, the other two leering over his shoulder. "I guess we could give you a ride," his uncle said. "I'll drive," the fat one nodded. "I've got a car of my own. But I don't bring it because I don't like to drink and drive." All the doors slammed. Edwin closed his window and lay down.
	They came back injured: his uncle missing a pant leg from the thigh down, Sam's nose broken and bent to one side, pieces of glass glittering in his hair. Mosquitoes followed them into the house. His aunt got up from the television. Edwin crawled along the floor of the loft to watch them play it out. His uncle took the deck of cards from the table. "Pick a card," he said to Sam. His aunt entered the kitchen. Sam sombrely took one. Edwin saw the nine of diamonds from up above. Sam gave the card back. Gilbert shuffled, pulling out the nine of diamonds. "That it?"
	"No," Sam said. "It was the king of clubs." His uncle looked down at the deck, the backing on the cards advertising a hotel in Reno. Sam looked apprehensively at Nancy over Gilbert's shoulder. She was already smoking, the cigarette in her hand burning unused down by her hip. Edwin's uncle turned around.
	"What happened to the car?"
	"We had a little accident, dear." His aunt reached up to rub her forehead, smoke wafting back and forth over her eyes.
	"You two are like a couple of. . . of. . . homosexuals!"
	Sam left without his coat. The car never returned to the driveway.

	"Don't you ever think of anything except playing pals with that poor excuse for a neighbour?" screamed Nancy. They stopped talking. They reminded Edwin of his dead parents, just as uncommunicative -- the deceased parents who didn't even call once in a while to say hello.
	His aunt noticed Edwin didn't take her side. Later, she stopped taking the skin off the top of the boy's hot chocolate, served tepid soup, left his underwear unfolded. Edwin started carrying matches at all times, making triple-decker sandwiches which he wouldn't share with his uncle. The two women never went next door anymore and forbade their husbands the same. So Gilbert got Edwin to stand lookout while he and Sam had their rendezvous in the apple orchard. Sometimes people came by carrying ladders and sacks, their hands sticky from apple juice. Edwin would run down to tell Gilbert the pickers were coming.
	His uncle and Edwin walked back to the house -- seeds overflowing from stalks and pods snowing around them. His uncle spoke, but not to anyone in particular. He might as well have carried his head under his arm, or buried inside his chest. Gilbert's mouth talked continuously, nattering, shooting echolocation through his heart. This is the web. Pro: Nancy loves me; I know she does. Con: I cant stand having sex with her. Con: her brother knows I'm gay. Phones me once a year to threaten my life if I shame Nancy. Phones me at Christmas! Some kind of seasons greeting. . . Big con, that one. Very big con indeed. He's a fucking policeman. My mother and her heart condition. Makes me promise to get married. Dad's he-man reputation. All that family pride he drilled into me. Con. Con. Con. Pro: Nancy and the powerful family connections, the will, the club register. Con: her father wants me to stay an accountant. He knows my inclinations. That look in his eyes scares me more than her brother hissing over the telephone with "Jingle Bells" in the background. Pro: Sam has hands, very good hands, adept at every kind of touch, every level of sensation. Con: he loves his wife, would never leave her. Pro and Con: suicide scares me. Last but not least, a divorce wouldn't leave me a cent. However, obvious disadvantages arising from the current set-up. . . You better not tell your aunt any of this. You listening. . .?
	Stories lay buried inside of stories like a piece of paper folded more times than possible. Edwin knew this. His uncle tried to pull a fast one on himself, and did it admirably, succeeding with ease.

	Edwin went into the shed when they arrived home, ripped off the garbage bag, threw the starving rabbit out the window onto its head; it recovered after a few minutes and bounced away. He took the cage down from the table and stomped it flat.
	Edwin was sick of being his own best friend, but he didn't know how to confess.

	Noise came from all quarters, especially his uncle, who snored like a rocket launch in progress. Edwin watched a fly jigging above Gilbert's rumbling lips. A street lamp shone through the skylight, lessening the dark, glinting off the fly's blue coat when it crossed into certain spaces. This is like an endless dentist appointment, he thought, a lot of waiting without promise of release. The pillow was too small to wrap his head in, but Edwin tried regardless. Gilbert had slept in Edwin's room since the car crash, when Nancy sent him to the doghouse.
	The three drunken men stood outside the front gate, arguing again, arguing as usual. Sometimes they bickered together. Sometimes the other two let the fat guy be a bigmouth all by himself.
	They'd been on the same topic for the last twenty minutes:
	"If I had all the luck tonight, how come there isn't a cent in my pocket?" the fatso rambled.
	"But it was good for you too. . ." one of his friends said.
	"You're my great friend, right? So where's the money?"
	"Don't be such a stupid animal." This time the third drunk jeered.
	"Shut up. I should slap you, you know that? It's the money. Just someone tell me, if you're both my best buddies, how it's possible my wallet's empty?"
	Edwin suddenly missed the fly. Its drone of varying intensity somehow irritated him more than everything else, like the sore throat in the man who's just lost his fingers. First his uncle stopped making noise and the drunks came in more clearly: "Let me get this straight," the fat man said, "I could have done no wrong tonight, right?"
	"Right!" his friends echoed.
	"Okay, then there's the money."
	"Right! Next comes the money."
	His uncle coughed. He inhaled powerfully like a vacuum cleaner sucking on a bathtub plug; when the plug sticks halfway up, the vacuum changes pitch, like his uncle did, going from consistent suction to a thin whistle and then a dry gasp. By the time Gilbert sat up, he couldn't cough anymore. His uncle made a peace symbol with his fingers and stuck them to either side of his own voice box, eyes like a toad's under pressure. Edwin jumped up to help, but Gilbert waved him off.
	The drunks began to scuffle outside. "You. . . you are supposed to look after my money and instead you got your hand in my pocket the whole time."
	"No. How could I? I was sitting across from you. Stop it! What are you trying to do, asshole, break my skull open?"
	Feet tripping on panic, Edwin clambered downstairs to his aunt, who had been mainlining television, morning, noon, and night, for the last three weeks. He could only pant: "Uncle's choking!" By the time they found him he'd changed colour, coming into the blue stage of airlessness. His wife forced him to the ground, began to hit his chest furiously with her fists, yelling louder than the drunks, crying. "God, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." Then, a bit illogically, she got up and began pounding his back. Uncle Gilbert, now a vivid but dispassionate blue, tried to crawl away from the abuse. "Go next door and call an ambulance!" Nancy yelled at Edwin.
	The kid jumped into his runners and jacket, the box of matches in the pocket slapping against his side. Edwin despised lighters; lighters were for people who clean under their nails -- mechanical, artless, impersonal. Edwin knew nothing about the flicking of Zippos against the thigh.
	Two of the three drunks -- one obese, one thin -- sat facing each other in the dust, their faces scratched up. The third one squatted on his heels, listening. The fat one pointed a thick finger.
	"By rights, I should have at least one thousand dollars in my pocket!"
	"Wait a minute, it wasn't that much! No way it could have been that much!"
	"You saw it," the fatso belched, got to his feet and spat. He put a hand into his pocket. "Nobody could touch me!" After a great struggle, where Edwin couldn't tell if the hand would get sucked in or turn the lining out, the fat man finally proved that his pockets were empty. "See! Not a fucking thing left."
	They stood right outside the gate, blocking Edwin's way. When he snuck into the street they turned towards the boy in pyjamas, windbreaker, and running shoes. The sound of breaking glass came from the house.
	"What do you want?" the fat one asked, his face lumpy and mottled from little sleep and thick cigars.
	"I have to make a phone call. Fast," Edwin blurted.
	The two men dusted off their knees. Now a sound like a body tumbling down stairs came from the house. "Something happening in there?" the second one asked, a broken pen in his breast pocket and an amoeba of blue ink spreading across his shirt.
	"My uncle's choking. Got to call an ambulance," Edwin obstinately said, trying to get through them. The fat guy, swift for a hulk, hooked him around the forehead just when it seemed like he'd made it. Edwin struggled and the fat guy pinned him up against the wall. Edwin kicked at the fat man's gut, shouting to be let go.
	"I'll let you down if you stop," the fat guy laughed. Edwin looked at him, a lick of dirt on his cheek.
	"We'll go get the ambulance," the fat man affirmed. "Come with us. The payphone's busted."
	"But I only have to go to the neighbours!" They wouldn't listen to him. Edwin felt the box of matches against his chest like a charm.
	The muscle car had deep seats, the interior smelling of beery aluminum and fast food gone bad. "I have to call," said Edwin.
	"You don't get it," the fat one, who was driving, shouted back over the rumbling of the engine. "The phone's out of order." He pointed to his pal. "This son of a bitch ripped it right out."
	"You hit me," his friend whined. "I was falling down." Turning to Edwin: "I had to grab onto something." He looked like he'd been caught masturbating to pictures of kitchen appliances again.
	"It's true," said the one in the back, beside Edwin. "Stop the car. Show the kid."
	"The booth's just around the corner," the fat guy mumbled, lighting a cigarette.
	The receiver lay on the ground still attached to the box, but the wire connecting it had been stretched into long easy spirals. The phone box perched on its short pole reminded Edwin of a fool with one arm as long as an uncoiled length of fire hose. The three leaned against the hood of the car while the boy desperately plunked the hook down, ten, twenty times, without a dial tone coming up.
	"We better get to the hospital," they said. Edwin looked up at them, cheeks shining. They all got back into the car. The first minute of the drive went by quietly. Then the fat man exploded, raging. "Look at that fucking gauge!" he said to his friend, slapping him on the side of the head. "How the hell am I going to fill it up when I don't have money? And why, why don't I have money?"
	"Because. . ."
	"Shut up! I'll tell you why I don't have any money. I had all the luck tonight. Oh yeah, yeah. Great night. Once in a lifetime. Dollars dropping into my pockets. But my friends. . ."
	Edwin watched the eyes of the drunk in the seat beside him waver open and shut. The blue pen ink had spread into a fixed splotch over the shirt pocket.
	"Why don't you just shut the fuck up?" the one in the front passenger seat said. "All night I've got to listen to you whining. . ."
	"That's it."
	"No, don't stop," Edwin begged. "We've got to get to the hospital."
	"Fuck the fucking hospital."
	The fat guy pulled the car over to the curb, got out, strutted over to the passenger side. Meanwhile, his friend reached over to hit the master controls, locking all the doors, and sat back to laugh and watch the fat man.
	The fat man ranted for a few minutes outside the window. Then he found a large stone. Glass imploded into the car. He reached in and nearly ripped the handle right out of the door panel. He hauled his friend out by the hair. The one in the back seat had passed out. The fat man threw his friend down in the dirt and put a foot on him.
	Edwin knew about time: a forever count of numbers had gone by since Nancy had sent him to the telephone. The lights of stained glass windows fell onto the pavement in front of him. They'd parked outside a church, where sinners can advance through the ranks, and even saints improve on themselves, where "try harder" is more important than success. That much Edwin had gotten down, committed to memory, during the service he attended with Aunt Nancy. The fat man slowly transferred his weight onto the foot he'd placed on his friend. Edwin looked up at the church, midnight taking the clock by storm, cubing the speed of light. The hospital stood in the opposite direction, a mile of walking. Edwin dipped his fingers into the pocket of the windbreaker. Nancy had recommended church more than once, though for Edwin, whose parents had been non-practising, it had flawed Sunday for all time. She told him to kneel down before the sacrament. Why not? Who's it going to hurt? You do something wrong, you tell it to the priest. Just go in and let him know. As long as you're open and sorry about it, the Holy Ghost forgives.
	Edwin pulled the matchbox out of his pocket, knowing the smell of sulphur, knowing how to flick a match off the lighting strip so that it burst into flame while flying to its target. The fat guy let his friend up, who moaned, rubbing his head: "I'll pay for the gas."
	They drove on patched road, various textures of pavement making the tires sing variously. His hands gripped the matchbox. The drunks stopped talking their nonsense and sat back in their brains, trying to pick up on the lost meaning of the hour. Edwin gave his uncle up for meat. Shops blinked in and out of the windows. Edwin remembered spaghetti, swallowing most of the noodle then grabbing onto the tail end and pulling the whole string up and out of his throat; Gilbert and Nancy laughed when he sputtered and nearly heaved. Then he thought about his uncle again, and trying to save his life, of that face carved up by lack of air and the acid of tears.
	They got to the gas station. A gas-pumper stood around in the plain light, his orange uniform sporting black racing stripes down the side and a name badge with "Dave" stitched on it in gothic. But they stopped by the self-serve pumps, the fat driver muttering: "It's cheaper." Edwin jumped out, grabbed the nozzle of the "Premium" pump, screwed off the cap, slipping the aluminum pipe into the hole. The fat guy squeezed out and came over. "What the fuck do you think you're doing? Give that to me!" Edwin turned, the nozzle sloshing gas all down the front of the fat guy. The fatso looked down like someone who's suddenly lost control of his bladder. "Look what the fuck you did!" he yelled, grabbing the hose out of Edwin's hands. He began to pump fuel back into the car. Edwin pulled out his matches, nicking one onto the fat man's leg, where the fire thrived. The fat man skipped back on the balls of his feet, slapping at the licking tongues Edwin reached for the nozzle, dousing the fat man until he shed a little light on everything, brightening Edwin's night. And he held on in the orange glow, adding gas, happy to be exactly himself -- in this moment before everything went up.

Lenin True and/or the Dummy

	I can't tell you how surprised I am to find you literate. How did this war let you learn? I saw soldiers shoot their horses and use the corpses as shields from enemy fire, beautiful horses those soldiers loved as much as their mothers. I saw guards slide hack doors on a cattle car and standing corpses tumble out like pylons that shattered into arms and legs when they hit the hardened mud. "Es gibt nur Platz zum Stehen," a soldier laughed. I made love to the Italian journalist, Curzio, last night. He refused to tell me his surname. "It's a fake," he said. Curzio still took the time for regret, and the eastern front only ten miles away! It takes something smaller than a spark to amaze me now. His Fiat buzzed among burnt-out tanks that reminded me of dead horseflies on the radiator. We parked under trees, lit up by search flares. Rain flashed by outside. He whispered: "This is no time for aliases, Maria." Tell me, Joseph, can anyone be literate? Yet I continue to write.

	Joe met Maryann ten thousand feet above sea level. His third or fourth sentence to her went: "Why? Well, you can blame it on Mumbo." After her requisite incomprehension, and after flagging down the KLM stewardess for two more of the same, Joe told her that Mumbo -- real name uncertain -- was Vancouver's reigning belly-flop champion. "Ask any belly-flopper in Seattle; they shake like twigs at the mention of his name."
	Mumbo was instrumental in getting Joe to Russia -- Mumbo, who raised more than motes of dust while demonstrating his award-winning form on Larry's chesterfield. He'd paused, arms spread-eagled, on a stool, and then plummeted. Vases rattled; Larry's piano hummed discords to itself; a TV documentary showing Yeltsin atop a tank -- fist raised -- fuzzed and blinked. Larry and Fran tilted their heads so far back with laughing their necks looked broken.
	"That's when I delivered my speech," Joe told Maryann.
	Joe had watched Mumbo extricate himself from the quicksand of cushions, turned to take in the years-old footage of Yeltsin, then stood up, apologizing: "Larry, Fran. . . Mumbo. This isn't enough. I'm sorry. Please don't blame yourselves, but," he pointed at Mumbo's bulbous mouth -- lips as if collagen-inflated -- "this isn't enough. I need more lawlessness. I need a vacation from this. . ." He pointed more emphatically at Mumbo, ". . . this kind of fate." Joe rubbed his forehead with one finger, like a pencil eraser coming across indelible ink. "It's so predictable. I'm tired of the same old physical laws and possibilities." All three looked worriedly at Joe. On the threshold he mumbled: "Nice to meet you, Mumbo."
	"That's why you're going to Russia?" asked Maryann. Joe nodded, hailing more big drinks.
	Because Joe did not request the background to her trip, Maryann just blurted out the information: "I'm going because my father died in Russia. I want to see his, our, country. The communists killed him and other dissenters in prison."
	"No shit?" Joe's mouth rebounded off the rim of his caesar.
	"So my mother's story goes. I was too young to remember. She gave me nightmares talking about him, and about a man called Ivan, high up in the party, my father's personal enemy." Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and the rest all featured in her bad dreams; since childhood, Ivan had dominated this part of her atlas. "Maybe this trip will finally help me get over my bogeyman."
	"Nothing like the real thing to cure an overactive imagination." And with that sentence, Joe dispensed all the wisdom he owned.

	On the Amsterdam layover Joe reclined on the fake leather of waiting room chairs, mirages from jet lag playing behind his tinted Wayfarers.
	Maryann threw a silver object into his lap and he lifted the sunglasses to look at it. "I'm sitting down, over there," she pointed to a spot a few rows distant. Joe examined the trinket -- a four-inch skeleton with working joints and a pin soldered to its back. "Sterling silver right in the ass," she complained, rubbing. Joe reached forward to give it back. "Keep it," she offered. "It's disgusting." Joe pinned the accidental insignia onto his lapel.
	"Why don't you join me?" he offered. "There are no needles in the seat beside me." Maryann's eyes tested him. "What?" he asked, removing his glasses. "Look, I promise I won't hit on you," he said, slipping his Wayfarers back into place. "We'll be brother and sister."
	"I just always meet such creeps on trips, so I'm suspicious, right?"
	She shifted her feet, preparing to drop down when a man with cheeks so blue -- a pattern of stubble that looked tattooed onto his face -- with safety pins for buttons, wire in place of shoelaces -- slid deftly under her ass. Joe tensed. The tramp took a pull from a miniature bottle of Johnnie Walker, and then said, in one of those sharp Eastern European accents: "I've been on the run forever, children." With the neck of the tiny bottle clasped between his front teeth, he lifted the dangling legs of Joe's brooch; when his eyes widened in recognition, the little bottle dropped into his lap. "You could be twins. You are not, of course. As we never were. But you could be." He noted aloud how they both had heart-shaped nostrils. He shook his head to shake the bottomless falsetto out of his voice, then stood, reached into his deep pockets, and pressed a grubby stack of letters tied with twine to Maryann's chest; Maryann reflexively snapped up her hand and held the bundle between her breasts. The tramp leaned in towards both of them: "Take them to him -- her, I mean. Say I'm in Amsterdam. Tell her the waiting was worse than the war." Then the tramp scuffed away, down to and through the ladies room door.
	Like a hack journalist rooting through a movie star's trash, Joe retrieved the letters from the garbage can Maryann had lobbed them into. "Okay," she said, frowning, "but open them somewhere else. Weirdness follows me around." Joe took her through customs into the airport boutiques, where they dumped pricey perfumes on themselves to mask the sour stink of travel. Maryann painted her nails orange. They indulged for an hour in best sellers and homely European pornography. The Dutch clerk coughed, according to polite custom, when Joe cracked the bullwhip in the shop; then the clerk told Joe off, with a string of noisy invectives.
	Joe pulled a silk tie out of Maryann's pocket at the stand-up coffee bar.
	"Shoplifting is a crime, Madam," he said, enviously. Maryann's mocha sloshed down the wrong pipe and she hacked, afterwards demanding to know whether Joe or fate had put the tie in her pocket. "I planned so carefully to stop the usual things from happening. . . Tell me it's your joke?" Joe admitted to the prank not because it was true, but because he saw that her equilibrium depended on it. He owned a small fortune in lies.
	Joe returned through customs, but they stopped Maryann for failing to present a passport, ticket, boarding pass, or any foreign currency. She looked frantically around her. "Oh my God, where's my carry-on?" She patted various parts of her body, as if the right sequence of ass, chest, arm could make the bag of luggage materialize. Finally, Joe had to abandon Maryann, and her accompanying riddles, to make his departure time.

	Enthroned on a Finnish toilet, he held his head with the realization that a nation's character resided in its toilets: in the super-silent vortex of Nordic plumbing, the door handles you merely turned up to lock, the gold-knobbed plunger you pulled up from the top of the tank. Joe understood the monochrome colours of the Legoland housing-blocks only after the hostel clerk explained: "You apply for the colours to paint your house. You apply for the design of the house. The neighbourhood board must approve everything." Earlier that day, he'd taken the rainiest route to the inner harbour, passing (and retracing his steps to) a window-display of porn -- no cardboard over the breasts, vaginas, or asses to jam the visual signals; all this lust arranged like butterflies pinned to a labelled board. Even the inner harbour's litter of fishtails, seashells, and straw seemed prepared in advance. Joe whispered while an Algerian backpacker pounded on the door: To everything a plan, to everything a horrific plan.
	But the white nights comforted Joe with sufficient disorientation, and the Neo-Romantic architecture of the national museum dulled his feeling that all was predictable, determined in advance. Drunks ambled under his bedroom window in the milky light; it could have been any morning in the working world.

	I don't think we could meet anywhere but Tallinn. I know its medieval walls, the fragment of the Dansen Macabre inside the smooth cathedral. We could have a drink on the ramparts while shells explode. I no longer consider myself brave, Joseph, because bravery is only for those who fear. I've become the woman in Curzio's photograph, arms folded, fending off the sky. The dead soldiers taught me death in a hundred wounds. I found two torn-off hands in the forest, both lefts, and no corpses anywhere. After Curzio left, a division of German soldiers captured me. "This part of the forest is verboten! Verboten!" I pretended not to speak German, for there would be too many questions to answer. A young boy guarded me. He didn't care if I saw him cry at night. I asked what made him sad and he replied: "The Russians will kill us." He cried because he never said goodbye to his mother. When the Russians found us, he came and freed me. I hid in a ditch and hung onto the back of an escaping Russian tank. It is the safest place! Nobody inside the tank can see you there, sitting, riding along, whistling Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. I jumped into the first river we came to, slept under the bridge. Don't worry if you no longer look the same. We should be unrecognizable. I'll know your widow's peak, and if you wear the brooch I'll know the silver bones. Dear Joseph, I can't wait to show you all these letters.

	Half a week later Joe and Maryann collided in Viborg, the historically contested city, annexed over centuries by Germans, Danes, Swedes, Russians. Clicking and chittering in Russian, two guards marched a Chechen (despite his papers being in mint condition) from a first-class railway carriage through a door on which a black X had been painted over the hammer and sickle logo. Joe pursued the guards and Chechen no further. When he heard shouting and blows beyond the official door he backed up -- right into Maryann's lap. Astonished, Joe looked at the girl acting as his chair, while her shout -- "Joe!" -- reverberated between the station's grimy marble steps, concrete columns, and brass chandeliers. The other scruffy travelers, lined up for tickets, turned their heads. But apart from this, Joe and Maryann never spoke to one another in Viborg, for in that instant his train tooted a final warning and Joe jumped up to race for it, shouting over his shoulder: "St Petersburg, at Hostel Holiday."
	Lenin's locomotive gleamed on its rails at the Finland Station, and the man sent by the hostel to greet them said, "The Wehrmacht shipped him back hoping he'd spark a revolution, get Russia out of the war." He guided the guests past women hawking plastic bottles of Ajax and Windex, off sidewalks onto a pitted road, where dirty water sloshed in furrows, and they jaywalked like everyone else, feet stumbling on worn tram tracks. A three-day-old summer storm broke out in new torrents. "All the old communist monuments stand," the guide said, pointing out the rusty plaques and tired, iron effigies of Lenin. "We can't afford to take them down." He shrugged.
	The hostel's assistant manager, a Russian-American named Artyom, greeted them at the front desk and digressed on aspects of Saint Petersburg, such as the prison beside the hostel. Architecturally, it looked like a hybrid of Orthodox church and brownstone dungeon. The designing architect, apparently, had been the first inmate. "They bricked him up in a cell so he'd never reveal the layout," Artyom said. "Never mind his ghost; it gets around." He warned against buying name-brand vodka from kiosks: "The vendors replace the original vodka with grain alcohol. You can tell by the bubbles. In vodka they rise straight up, in the bad stuff they slide side to side. Don't go blind."
	Joe overlooked the Neva from the hostel's balcony, Baltika beer number three -- with its vaguely peanut-butter bouquet -- in hand. Afterwards, he swatted mosquitoes in his room, swearing never to visit another city built over top of a swamp.
	Later that night, a knock on the door announced Maryann, who slumped, backpack and all, on the bed beside his and cried. "It wasn't supposed to go like this," she slobbered. Joe covered her bulk -- besides the backpack, she was wearing a baseball cap, boots, and jacket -- with a blanket. Two hours later her callused hands tentatively brushed at his face, reaching for him.
	"What happened, Maryann?"
	"The Dutch are threatening me with deportation when this Italian arrives. He's wearing a camouflage tie. And he has my passport and plane ticket and carry-on! And he turns to me and says, 'Let's go rebook you fly,' this funny accent, you know, like he's missing letters out of his words, and he takes me through customs to the KLM counter. He's got this stupid story about how the pouch fell out of my pants in the magazine store, and he was following after us, wanting to see how long it would take me to notice. But he helps me get the ticket all sorted out and then tells me to have a good flight. By the time I get on the plane, though, I'm almost bent over. I guess it was a bladder infection, because I spent the whole flight sitting on the toilet. So when we land I go into the overhead compartment and someone has stolen my carry-on. I get out and my luggage isn't there either, and I'm crying and the airline officials can't figure out where it's gone. 'It's in transit,' they say, but they don't know from where to where. I get all the way to customs before my carry-on shows up: the guards are busting the guy who stole it for smuggling drugs in the liner! They're whispering 'Heroin' and 'Cocaine' and I just get out of there, don't even try and claim it, and I'm stopped in the middle of a crosswalk talking to myself when a Porsche nearly runs me over, driven by this guy called Jori, who sees me crying and gives me a lift back to his place, sort of a condo, where he's got all this smoked salmon in freezers. It's what he does, he says. I tell him about what's happened and I guess he feels sorry for me. Agrees to run me over to Russia. Goes there a lot himself on business, he says. Really nice guy. Really. Lets me stay at his place; doesn't even try anything. Except we get to the border the next day and they make me get out of the car. This Russian official takes me to a room -- he's got his eyes closed, he's shaking his head -- and tells me there was a girl murdered in Russia last weekend. He's fingering the buttons of the blouse Jori lent me. 'We find only buttons of her shirt. No shirt!' The Russian is laughing, says Jori brings women over because it's easier to get away with it. 'Someone will take you to Viborg, from there you take train Saint Petersburg. You have good passport.' "
	Maryann mimicked the Russian voice, and forced out a little laugh, pushing her face into Joe's neck, forcing out a few more laughs. She whispered on, flooding his ears with a story that seemed more memorized than recalled: "You know, while I was waiting this Russian guard opened up with a machine gun on a flock of geese flying over the station. Everyone in line's running for cover. Three bullet holes punched in the side of a tour bus. And the guard beside me was just laughing -- really busting a gut! -- turned and said to me they had orders to shoot anyone crossing without a visa."
	A second later Joe could feel Maryann kissing his neck, but it felt like sexual intimacy between blood relations, and he pushed her away. "I promised myself that on this trip I wouldn't do the typical thing. That means taking advantage of you."
	She heaved out of bed. A blurb of noise from a party downstairs slipped through the door as Maryann opened and closed it, leaving Joe to listen to the bugs whizzing past his ear, to rub his itchy, mosquito-bitten hand along the springs under the mattress. The white light of the white nights smothered the windows like glue.
	In the morning, Joe opened the window and breathed Saint Petersburg's air, which smelled always of recent demolitions. Women stood in the mud below, flagging elaborate signals towards the jail with pieces of handkerchief or doily. Some of the women threw their arms into configurations, sweating from the callisthenics. The prisoners waved pieces of toilet paper, returning the gestures from between the high bars. He watched this rudimentary communication go on all morning, the women covered in dew, silent except for the sound of fabric rubbing on fabric.
	Suddenly Joe needed to pee like never before; it was a white-hot burning urge, and a second later he ran out, leaving the gauze curtains waving lonely in the room, perturbed by the speed of his exit. At the urinal a hundred little devils marauded through his urethra with pitchforks, blood and pus squirting onto the porcelain, his visible tremors and beaded sweat attracting the attention of the guy one urinal over, who leaned a look over where the drain was sucking away the last of Joe's red-tinted piss. He put a hand on Joe's shoulder while Joe was agonizingly zipping up. "Problem?" he asked. Joe grimaced. "My name's Kent. I've got the fix."
	Back in room 217 Kent tossed Joe a plastic container of tetracycline. "Not an instant cure, but they'll see you home." Joe dextrously snatched the antibiotics out of the air, his other hand still cradling himself. "Guy in Moscow," said Kent, "works at the hostel, sells the stuff for American dollars. You sleep with anyone here?"
	"No."
	Maryann's luck had saved her once again.

	Kent and Joe scarfed back the per-guest allotment of hostel pancakes and strolled Saint Petersburg. Beside the Neva a fisherman whisked a fish off the hook and dropped it, still wriggling, into his pocket; he gave them a wink as long as Siberia. They hit the Peter and Paul Fortress, the cells detaining both pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary anarchists. (Joe saw Maryann holding hands with someone whose face he couldn't make out, both of them shifting in and out of the crowd; she wore new tangles in her hair, a discolouration like a hickey on her bare shoulder.) On the Nevsky Prospekt, Joe and Kent tried to follow a tourist map that designated streets in the Roman alphabet, whereas the street signs were all in Cyrillic -- so Kent memorized one set of frequent letters, Joe another, and they put their heads together to form words. At the Kazan church, Joe again sighted Maryann and her friend, whom he finally identified as the hostel's assistant manager, Artyom. They were hugging on a park bench, and he pointed her out to Kent. "Well I'll be," chortled Kent, "a woman with your build. Plus tits." A gypsy boy knelt by Kent, hands clasped as in prayer, but his eyes bored, elsewhere. No matter how many times Kent said "No," the kid wouldn't quit. Kent turned to Joe: "If I give him money, his parents'll take it and spend it on booze. I know; I read National Geographic, I won't support alcoholism and child neglect. It's a moral imperative not to give these snotty little beggars one cent." Joe called Kent Socrates, while Russian anarchists gathered to wave banners and agitate in front of the church, formerly the Museum of the History of Atheism.
	Kent and Joe shadowed Maryann and Artyom to an Armenian restaurant, and took a table behind a pillar, where they could watch them without being seen. Joe handed over the package of letters the tramp had given Maryann back in Amsterdam, all of them dated between 1939 and 1945. "I've been reading them here and there. Some are illegible from blood, water, or fire. Written by some woman called Maria to some guy called Joseph. Don't you think that's weird -- her name's Maryann, mine's Joe?"
	"A coincidence," snorted Kent, slicing into fatty lamb roasted in goat's milk. "I've been traveling with you two days; you don't care about history. She's just good looking -- that's all."
	"Read one." Joe shoved the letters across.

	The anticipation of seeing you overwhelms Tallinn. Even in a war this city seems joyful. I sometimes forget the Russian prisoners I saw the Germans use for target practice. I sometimes forget Romania, the Jewish girls forced into whorehouses until they became too thin for the purpose. I sometimes forget all these places I ran to, while the Nazis chased and chased, like dogs. Instead I remember Estonia, the street we played on as children. Even while bombs fall I remember blossoms blown off trees like large snowflakes. I have gone too far to return, but I remember. How naïve my father's talk of anarchy now seems, that talk which I'm sure has claimed his life, which I hope will not claim mine. What is this, dear father, if not anarchy? At least the war helps the soldiers and police mistake me for a simple refugee, but if either the Russians or Germans win and order return. . . I've seen my picture in the hands of enemies. I skulk in streets after curfew, trying to find a trace of you, the one face I've not forgotten, the childhood friend with hands safe enough for my photograph.

	"Phoney baloney," said doubting Kent.
	Joe dealt out Maria's various stationery -- toilet paper, torn maps, loose-leaf pages bearing Third Reich watermarks, sheets from a mortar instruction manual, passport pages -- across the table like a fortune teller. "How elaborate do you need it before you believe?" he asked Kent. "You think I have the time, the enormity of time, for a joke this elaborate?" Straining his shirt, Joe twisted violently on the squeaky chair to peek past the pillar at Maryann, then turned face front to pile and square the letters. "Whatever these may be," he slapped the papers lightly against Kent's face, "that girl behind that post rules coincidence like a plan. Stick with her and," he snapped, "adventure arrives on a platter." He thought of Mumbo and the chesterfield and then laughed in mad excitement.
	The waitress plonked down the bill, startling Joe and Kent, and then startling them again when they read the total. "That's a hundred times what the menu says," blustered Kent. "I knew we shouldn't have ordered that appetizer plate; every goddamn guidebook in the world says don't order the appetizer plate." The waitress shook her fist in Kent's face and bared her browned teeth when he asked her to reconcile items with prices. Russian hurtled out of her mouth. She picked up and slammed plates down so hard they nearly shattered.
	It was Artyom, finally, alerted by the noise, who came around the pillar, brushed a bug off Joe's shoulder, and addressed the waitress, who disgorged dirty words all over Joe and Kent. "Pay half and she says okay," he advised, Kent and Joe hurrying to get into their wallets. Once the requisite rubles were on the tablecloth, the assistant manager and Maryann pried the humbled diners past the waitress and into evening Saint Petersburg. Introductions went around: "Joe, Artyom; Artyom, Joe. Kent, Artyom; Artyom, Kent." Maryann failed to introduce herself. "Yes, jazz. Saint Petersburg Dixieland," Artyom proudly announced. Later, on the metro, as Maryann nuzzled Artyom's neck, Joe nudged Kent and winked, "Prepare for the bizarre." The two boys let go of the overhead straps and surfed the swaying and jolting subway car to the end of line.
	They emerged into the weak glow of night, crossed communist housing projects modeled after military bunkers. The white nights seemed paler here, in low tunnels connecting inner courtyards. Walls donned shadows for the occasion like black ties; a silence stacked sky-high threatened to topple; broken gates scraped the asphalt. "First we get Maya," Artyom indicated -- Maya, living on the third floor of a pre-revolutionary building accessed by damp, wooden stairs, a walnut banister rubbed hard as steel by passing hands. Four families shared the four-room apartment. They waited hours for a bath, the kitchen closet-sized. A hundred candles flickered with a light far cheaper than the electric variety. "I live here all my life," Maya said.
	In the club, five guys, in blue suits with matching red and white-striped ties, were blowing Dixieland horns in a room bulging with youth. The dancers rocked and pumped in a style totally unlike the Dixieland standard. "They might as well be playing heavy metal," Kent shouted.
	Artyom informed them: "Skinheads and punks come too, for mocking. They fight. I one time put this hand over where one stab another in the neck. But they have other clubs. Lucky." While ordering gins, Joe could hear English being spoken by career expatriates, their syntax slightly out of touch with current inflections. "Mafia run every place," Artyom told Joe. "At hostel we pay former KGB to protect." He laughed: "An alternative that is same as rest."
	Minutes past midnight -- at the brassy height of the set -- the music stopped dead as eight policemen, panty hose over their faces and submachine guns in hand, barged through the street-side entrance. "It's OMAN," Maryann yelped. "Artyom warned me about them." Artyom had warned them all. OMAN -- a special task force for squashing mobsters, granted unlimited jurisdiction to seize, arrest, and destroy, answering directly to the president -- were used as shock troops in Chechnya, where rebels had massacred two of their contingents -- which, of course, necessitated OMAN hostility towards visible minorities. The policeman with the most spangles and badges barked sharp Russian imperatives, to which the crowd responded by dropping prone. One cop shoved Kent. Joe was already crouched halfway, unsure of the minimum indignity that would let him go unnoticed. Kent fell back three paces but recovered them in under a second.
	"Don't push me, asshole. I'm from America!" The cop slammed the flat of a handgun into Kent's face. Joe rose involuntarily, on a wave of spontaneous altruism, but someone grabbed his arms from behind and a cop kicked him in the chest; Joe's vision went cosmic -- all stars and supernovas. Artyom, face to the sticky floor, quibbled with the cops in Russian. A policeman punched Joe, who blacked out for two minutes. They grabbed Artyom by the back of the hair, raising his face for a viewing and bruising. A cop, sweating through the nylon mesh, yelled at Artyom, Maryann only comprehending the word, "Chechen." Then the policeman worked his fists, in one-two combos, into Artyom's chest and face; the other cop, pinning Artyom's arms from behind, screamed into the captive's ear through the entire beating. Joe and Kent groaned and rocked slightly on the floor; Maryann jumped up, grabbing the cop's arm in mid-punch.
	"He hasn't done anything! He's not Chechen." With astounding agility the cop transferred the momentum of his fist from one target to another, and, very soon, the squad led a battered Maryann and Artyom out the back entrance.
	The bar shut down. Joe and Kent, arms hugging their bruised ribs, shuffled silently through the roadside debris, along shredded ruts, past boarded-up shells of buildings. It was said that OMAN took dark-skinned men into holding tanks, beat them with metal rods, wooden clubs, chairs, and chains, and then announced that these were just preliminaries; they chose their tortures from the countless files of diagrams, photographs, and procedures improvised and implemented by the Soviets. Light glowered in the pale sky as Kent and Joe walked, and they parted to their separate rooms without the softest goodbye.

	Your message came this morning, inspiring me with new possibilities. When we meet will we have enough time to exchange letters? Or even speak? People talk of streets by the number of bombed out buildings. I live alone, on street twenty-four. I found a tunnel in the rubble of a flattened apartment. Unlike lightning, they say bombs strike twice, but even the planes must see this building has no new destruction to offer. I can't wait to see you again, Joseph. You know what I need -- a new face. A new face, a new sex, a new identity. Only then can I escape. Dear Joseph, I need to become you.

	Joe left Saint Petersburg with a lurch. Kent had said to always bring a bicycle chain when traveling by train. But when you share a sleeper with two men belching and slugging vodka, plus a swarthy guy visually casing every shred of luggage, locking yourself in seems superfluous. Joe accepted a hit from the vodka bottle a bunk down. In return the two gentlemen expected him to laugh at something in Russian; when Joe complied, they offered another. Complied, offered; complied, offered. Fresh bottles kept materializing from bags and satchels under the mattress. At one point he tried to explain Maryann to his traveling companions, and this time they giggled.
	Joe awoke from a jagged, metallic sleep. With his luggage surprisingly intact, he stumbled into Moscow's smoggy, human comedy, crushed between departures and arrivals, uniformed conductors, women with brooms and chickens under their arms, travelers carting boxes of vegetables. His vodka migraine inducing astigmatism, Joe thought he saw a hairdo with a suspiciously familiar widow's peak, like Maryann's, like his. The girl was wearing a blue coat and a mini-skirt, patent-leather slip-ons, while a well-built man in a light trench coat held a Mercedes door for her.
	Leaving the Leningradski Station he walked past a curb-side rag-fire, under a viaduct, past kiosks at the bottom of an embankment on which slept seventy or more gypsies wound in blankets, sleeping bags, and cast-off clothing; three mongrels yapped at him and he kicked one in the head to get by, another in the ass. Stalin's legacy remained visible in the neo-gothic skyscrapers before his eyes. The Man of Steel's preferred architectural style favoured stern lines, solid representations of power and control. No matter where Moscow took Joe, one of these thirteen monoliths was always throwing its shadow over him. They kept an eye on you.
	Joe handed his passport over in the Moscow hostel. "There's a message for you," said the desk clerk. Joe carried the yellow envelope to his room on the sixth floor, the most roach-infested of the hostel's eight. Nobody lived on the first five of the building, which had formerly belonged to a housing project. Joe threw the backpack on his bed, swallowed Aspirin and the last of Kent's antibiotics. The drawn curtains filtered the outside light into a form of nausea. The letter read: Dear Joe, managed to get lucky. Sort of. Met an official who invited me to Moscow at his expense. Saved Artyom's butt too. Call me at 5 42 73 64. Maryann.
	"Kent Salisbury? I remember the name. He had a problem common to a certain class of traveler," said the hostel's director. When Joe waved aside the extended soft-pack of Marlboros, the director dropped them back into a silver tray on the desk. "Wise choice. I don't smoke either." He paused in Joe's face and began clearing the grime from under his fingernails with a match-end. "Antibiotics are available. And not just tetracycline." He rubbed the match back and forth under each fingernail. "But can I trust you to take them properly?"
	"What do you care?" snickered Joe. "As long as I pay up it's really none of your business."
	"Your business," he pointed with the matchstick at Joe, a black glob on the non-flammatory end, "is my business." The director stood, shifted the weight of his leather Columbia University jacket on his shoulders. He paced. "What if you pass your venereal germs onto another guest?" He began picking, with the matchstick, at the spaces between his teeth. "Next thing I know my hostel has the rep of a fifth-rate bordello." Tilting back his head, the director gazed into the distances behind his closed eyelids. "Yes, I can see it now, Let's Go 1995: 'Beware the Moscow hostel for its atmosphere of unrestrained venereal disease.' " He shook his eyes open. "No, that would not do." With the match jutting from mouth, he turned to Joe: "Promise me."
	"Okay, I promise."
	The director retrieved a minuscule container from the padlocked fridge and threw it to Joe: "Four times a day, an hour before meals. No alcohol of any kind."
	"I promise, I promise."
	"That'll be fifty bucks, American."

	Some say Ivan works for the right, others for the left, but he always worked for himself. My father and he took an ideological enmity and made it personal. As a child my mother used the name Ivan to scare me. He hunts me, Joseph, through war-torn countries I remember only as landscape that never stopped vanishing; that ran past me constantly. My mother said the death of an enemy never satisfies a man like Ivan, only total eradication of his opponent from history, all vestiges: writings, photographs, friends and, especially, progeny. I feel his eyes on me everywhere, in forests, in fields, even amidst the debris of cities; he always knows my location. Not even America would be far enough. I must erase myself from this city before he erases me. Only you can help me escape.

	Inside the Kremlin Joe admired the walls of Russian Orthodox churches, every inch covered in representations of saints and angels, in ornamentation. The stone coffins of tsars weighed in with death's heaviness. Gold cupolas danced the sun around. Faberge eggs disclosed their inner secrets of miniature ships and soldiers. The signs and guides left many tourists craving English, any English at all, though they got none, neither from the women stamping tickets nor the curators milling with the crowds; only a very few made out the function of the arcane instruments inside the cabinets.
	He walked by the places where Lenin and the other communist kings rested in mausoleums and grassy plots outside the red walls.
	The street called Arbat ran past Pushkin's home. For a fee, a man with a live bald eagle would photograph tourists with the raptor perched on their arms. A woman down the street exploited a monkey for similar purposes. Further down a man held a python. Tourists could sit atop a zebra. But at the very end of the walkway a humble entertainer stood staring out of a gorilla mask, as if waiting for the time when he'd have enough rubles saved up to buy himself the real thing.
	Joe scorned McDonald's for kiosk-bought gyros smelling of botulism; he chewed his meat well, remembering that every restaurant owner wanted to wring him for money. Under Mayakovsky's statue a skinny and a fat thug fought each other with knives, in broad daylight, over a wad of cash, until six camouflaged soldiers toting AKRs showed up, whereupon the thugs split the cash fifty-fifty and ran. Muscovite women smiled, their mouths glinting with full sets of shiny golden teeth. Did they go through beatings or bad hygiene to get that way? Did the thieves of wild capitalism trail them from the shadows, pliers in hand, or were the women themselves con artists, their teeth the extracted incisors of men drugged in bed? They reminded Joe of Peterhof's fountains and Maryann's misadventures.
	He gorged on darkness in Tolstoy's unlit house, old women posted at every door to every room, more intimate with the place than Tolstoy had ever been. The writer's spectacles watched Joe from atop a bureau. The chessboard sat permanently at checkmate. On the desk a page-proof from The Resurrection waited for the rest. One of the guardian babushkas amazed Joe with her English: "He learn to ride bicycle at sixty years. He start making shoes. You know who? Tolstoy? Chekhov and he play chess." He nodded. "You like Moscow?" Joe nodded again.
	"I'll try to see Lenin next," he said.
	The woman shook her head sadly and unleashed two perfectly English sentences: "Two boys dreamed -- one dreamed Tolstoy, one dreamed Lenin -- and that's who they became. My god, what a difference!" She crossed herself. Joe bought a postcard picture of her messiah and rushed for the first subway to the hostel.
	The subway sped like mercury through the blind tunnels. Joe took no stops. He'd already seen the waiting platforms, with their ornate bronze grillworks, chandeliers, enamelled columns, mosaics narrating stout workers, tractors, and airplanes, all of them constructed during those years -- '28, '36, '47 -- when millions were dying from starvation, from forced famine. At the university he gazed down from the lookout over the city of twelve million, over its brown, winding rivers, eight-lane traffic, wall-to-wall commuters. He'd heard a British tourist ask a tour guide whether Stalin ever suffered from melancholy, while clouds traveled overhead, selling the mystery of areas further east. He'd already seen enough soldiers keeping beggars company in the park, the lines of buses from every place -- Volgograd, Kiev, even Vladivostok -- their passengers with skins white, yellow, and brown, various slants to the corners of their eyes. He'd watched as the chaos of the city become intentional before him -- deliberate, a form of order.
	Two stops from the hostel, he unwound the string around the letters to find out exactly what Maryann needed.

	If you asked, Joseph, who my teacher was, you would not hear "My father," nor "My mother," nor history itself. I would say Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and the rest. The geography told me its only secret. It seems such a long way to have gone for the one simple lesson: everyone you meet, you create; every story you hear, you tell; every history you read, you've written. Ivan watched me today, under cover of night, while I skipped along to this place. You will appear any minute and what Ivan dreamed into me I will dream into you. What you imagined of me you will imagine of you. For me you will both disappear until the war or the world ends -- unless we meet again.

	Joe quickly dialed the number at the front desk. Maryann answered in a hushed voice: "Joe? God, I've been waiting for you to call. I'm in big trouble."
	"I know, I know. It's in the letters. I figured it out." Joe felt for the letters, tied with old twine, in a pocket next to his breast -- intelligence from a still active front. Maryann needed two hours to get everything ready, and named a western-style restaurant on Gorky. Joe gathered his gear and left it with the train station's one official porter, already trying to sound more girlish, trying to raise his voice a few octaves in case Maryann came to claim his stuff.
	Shamefully, he ordered a hamburger in the only North American restaurant he'd have to visit. The waitresses spoke English, and the menu boldly declared: "This menu does not contain any hidden charges, neither for parking, seating, condiments, or service. What you see is what you pay."
	A long black car, of the type he'd seen upon entering Moscow, sidled into a parking spot outside the restaurant; Maryann stepped out nervously, on heels too high for fight or flight. Trying to keep her face free of worry, she pushed open the door and tapped over the floor to Joe's table. She'd had her hair cut to resemble Joe's page-boy hairdo, her widow's peak as prominent as his; except for the clothes the waitress couldn't differentiate between the two of them, and she took their orders as if listening to clones. "I take it that's Ivan?" Joe motioned at the limo with his nose; Maryann's eyes widened. "You better eat," Joe said. "It's a long train ride to Tallinn. I've left my stuff for you." Surreptitiously, Maryann and he exchanged passports. "If my shoes fit big, bunch newspaper in the toes." The waitress slid a chicken burger under Maryann's nose. Joe again urged her to eat.
	"Don't you wonder how I got here?" she asked. Joe swallowed with difficulty, sending his tongue probing between his cheek and gums for morsels. He took a wild guess at her narrative and invented a white OMAN holding cell, Artyom's face beaten into the shape of an over-stewed tomato, the guard with his hand up Maryann's shirt; then, the sudden entrance of the old soldier who reprimanded the soldiers and offered Artyom's release as a sign of good faith.
	Maryann broke down into her fries. "He won't let me go." Joe extended his hand across to her, but she flinched: "Don't; he's watching."
	Joe uncomfortably slid his fork along his knife. "Has he, you know. . ." Maryann looked up and nodded; she lifted the sleeve of her dress and showed him rope burns. Joe shook his head, "And they warn you to always carry your passport around so they can identify you." Sometimes it's better to have no identity, he thought. "Maryann, why can't you tell me the truth? You don't think I believe this counterrevolutionary bullshit story about your father? The coincidence with those letters. Ivan's not your bogeyman; he's your. . ." 
	Maryann rose suddenly, saying, "Follow me." 
	During the whole time he was walking after her, and while they traded clothes and identities and names, Joe imagined what the old man might might have been doing in the back of the limousine -- stretching his fingers over a knee, watching Maryann and her companion get up from the table and disappear. The chauffeur-slash-bodyguard would turn, Joe guessed, but the old man would shake his head, ordering him to wait, so sure was he that they could track Maryann wherever she went. While Joe became Maryann, while Maryann became Joe, the old man waited.
	Then, after a few minutes, Joe returned to the table, trying not to swing his hips as he walked, sat down, slowly raised his head, and extended his fist in the direction of the limousine -- his middle finger emerging as slow and deliberate as landing gear. Tires squealing, the chauffeur backed out of the parking lot. Joe rose, nudged past the cooks, past the kitchen's dangling pans, through the alleyway entrance -- where Maryann, trying hard to swing her hips as she walked, had boarded a cab a minute ago -- where the limo whooshed by, garbage and newspaper in its slipstream. After it rounded the corner he ran, melding with the nearest crowd.
	To throw off any surveillance he window-shopped in the Goom, trying to figure out what kind of stores would interest a boy named Joe. Mannequins stood at random in an empty department store like a crowd frozen in an atomic flash. He wondered how he'd arrange them, provided a chance to arrange things again. Crowds towed him toward Lenin's mausoleum during one of its rare unscheduled openings. In the cold, vaguely lit vault, Joe made out the glass-ensconced revolutionary -- the black toenails and peaceful face -- incorruptible as any refrigerated saint. He stopped to gawk, but a guard tapped him roughly on the shoulder to move on. Somewhere else, somewhere earlier that day -- now unbeknownst to Joe -- an old woman had spoken of waking dreams, the refitting of realities, how to sanctify a mundane history, like one based on bread, shelter, and land; or on escape from an old and dreary affair ended and restarted in half a dozen eastern countries. But no matter how careful your engineering of the past -- the golden exploitation of contingency and coincidence, of the illusory and the real -- you always reverted to Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, to questions of flesh and blood, in the end. As time lent itself to alterations and reversals, it lent itself to returns. And before you knew it you were spun out again, weaving the tale out of the available threads.
	Awake in the coupe all night, waiting for shadowed hands to rise from under the bed and around his mouth, Joe listened to one of the four sleepers mutter in Russian for hours, and caught the whole story. The lights from villages and industrial towns reverberated off the compartment's glass; in the dawn, stacks of rusty rails, and locomotives stalled on sidings glided by. Half conscious by then, he barely raised his head for the border patrol, hoping the twilight would help his face match with the photograph in the passport; they stamped him through.
	In Estonia he felt safe enough to dream a fate for Maryann.
	The cab dropped her off at the American Embassy, and she ran through the entrance with the gait of a soccer player, barely ahead of the black limousine. Days later, at a dinner for embassy refugees, she met a girl named Edith, who turned out to be the ambassador's daughter. "Well, my dad says if they can get your problems with the police sorted out you can come to Tallinn." Maryann smiled and mentioned that she'd never visited Estonia before. "Must be the only country around here," Edith said, enviously. "My dad says your passport's like a stamp collection, and I thought I traveled a lot! You probably speak a lot of languages." Maryann just smiled her assent.
	They left at six AM in the embassy Volvo, so smooth it swooped over roads, past fields of buttercups, thin cows baring their ribs to the air. They stopped neither for gas nor food. "Wait for Tallinn," Edith recommended. "Everyone smiles there. The food's delicious and cheap. Ha," she laughed, "even the sun's different."
	They stopped only once. Maryann jumped over a ditch and into a small grove of trees where, unseen by the other two passengers, she peed standing up, the wind nearly blowing her dress over her head; they'd passed the border over a half hour ago.
	And, satisfied with the outcome of this dream, Joe slept off his last thought: an image of Ivan superimposing the pictures of Joe and Maryann, realizing they'd all been chasing themselves, turning history into whatever they needed.

	The following week, or perhaps two weeks later, Joe stood on the hydrofoil dock overlooking the Bay of Finland, waiting to ride the waterway out of the Baltics. The chance always existed that he'd meet Maryann again, maybe here in Tallinn, or Amsterdam, or even Vancouver. Reverently, he wrapped the letters in a plastic bag and dropped them off the edge of the quay. They drifted a few metres away, to the feet of an old woman so stiff with memory she no longer cast her thoughts beyond the city limits, or thought of climbing out of her black dress, content to just sit by the sea. That day in Tallinn, both Joe and the old woman contemplated the waves, but any further likeness would not have stood up to scrutiny.

After Fat Thursday

	Welfare office employees had been calling the first Thursday of every month "Mardi Gras" since the term's coinage over twenty years ago, in 1985, by caseworker Nathan Franks, who, in a nervous breakdown typical of the profession, began to discern behind every social-assistance applicant a "rich pig" in disguise.
	"Don't talk to me about the filth," Nathan had screamed. "The only filth is the stain of too much money on you, you," he reached across the desk to rattle a crestfallen hobo, "Mardi Gras parade boy!"
	Despite the incorrect translation, Franks' term stuck.
	Mardi Gras, whispered baggy-eyed welfare workers when the cheques and first crush of recipients arrived. This first crush involved those lacking fixed addresses, or addicts, or both. The next wave -- those who could afford to wait a day, or who'd failed to penetrate yesterday's mob -- followed Mardi Gras by twenty-four hours.
	On those first Fridays Tom the photographer needed the problems of the dispossessed like a cigarette. They had this magical despair that melted comfort and privilege. Put any of these peoples' picture into a frame, hang it on a gallery wall, and the rich nocked right up, slapping down cash-cards to satisfy that reality fetish, to reconnect with what's primal. They lived such insulated, simulated lives. As heat and liquid transform heroin into a substance that satisfies a junkie's craving, so too did Tom's camerawork take the despair of Mardi Gras and flatten it into palatable artwork, a 2D image you could stare at without feeling reprehensible. These pictures didn't beg for money when you looked at them, and so his rich patrons couldn't get enough.
	And neither could he.

	The clock read ten AM. He scanned the bars on the windows, the linoleum curling away from the dirt. One half of the building space housed the United Workers' Compensation Syndicate, the other side a federal welfare bureau. Between these two departments (independent of one another but for some reason always housed together) ran a thin partition that transmitted every whisper and shout from "the other side."
	Tom sat in the welfare half. He didn't have to wait long to start snapping pictures. Someone was already pulling a spaz attack, this early in the morning. Surreptitiously aiming the digital camera resting on his knee, Tom pretended to read his newspaper: the headline announced fractures in the Queer Front over the diversion of federal funds from aids research to breast cancer. Some said the politicians had done it on purpose to divide the enemy.
	Up at the front desk the ex-con complained, "I've just gotten out of jail! How the hell do you expect me to go home without bus fare? I need money. It's not my fault I just got out!" The caseworker kept three pairs of eyewear on the desk: short, medium, and long-range.
	"I'd like to help you. Believe me." She pointed helplessly to the dossier. "It's new regulations: no money for ex-cons. Blame the Prime Minister. No, better yet, blame the voting majority. They think it's a good way to go on punishing people like you." The guy lunged, but the guards grabbed both his arms, lifted his kicking body off the floor, and boosted him out the entryway. The rain did the opposite of cool the guy down; he booted the Plexiglas window, necessitating a guard going out to punch his head. After that the ex-con surrendered unconditionally, jaywalking off across the street.
	Listening through the partition between welfare and Workers' Compensation, Tom eavesdropped on the conversations of union men.
	"John. They call me that."
	"John? Pleasure. Mine's Ed."
	"Nice to meet you, Ed. So, as I'm saying, I go into the doctor's office and there's some girl there. Can't be more than twenty-five. 'This is Theresa. She's an intern.' Great, I think. 'So, John,' the doctor says. 'I guess we might as well get it over with. Drop your pants and bend over the bed.' Great. So I'm bending over the bed and the doctor asks her, 'Any preliminary remarks, Theresa?' I hear nothing, just her nylons rubbing against each other. 'Come now, Theresa,' the doctor says, 'you don't notice anything right off, about this man?' She shifts some more -- shy or nervous or something -- says 'No.' She pauses right? Then repeats: 'No, nothing really.' And you think the goddamn doctor would let up? 'C'mon,' he pushes. 'Surely you must notice something?' She just stands there muttering: 'I really couldn't say.' 'Well,' the doctor shouts, so loud the whole clinic probably hears. 'Well, for one thing, he has an extremely hairy ass.' "
	The two men chuckled. Fun and banter went on over the partition. Normally, those on the other side suffered nicks and scratches, the loss of something better off lost, like a toenail or unscarred face, with the strained back heading the list of most frequently reported injuries. Big traumas never walked through the door, getting called-in, instead, by lawyers, doctors, or next of kin. "John, you gotta be the only guy I know on compo from sitting too much on his ass."
	"Hey, you try it, pal." The conversation stopped. "Well," he coughed, "at least I'm not over there."
	Union workers had been on the right side, too, around 2006, when the union magnates encouraged mill workers, truck drivers, clerks, to vote for tax reduction (meaning: against welfare). During the electoral race of '04, the most savvy candidate (now local incumbent) flattered the unions' self-sufficiency, their responsibility to their working membership, all of whom deserved tax breaks, and money previously flowing into general taxes now funnelled into union bankrolls, on whom fell the onus for covering UI, Workers' Comp, and Medicare. As payback, the unions now wielded a powerful lobby, influencing policies from immigration to hunting quotas. "At least we see where the money goes now," someone responded in every lunchroom, reacting to the criticism that collectives had become corporations.
	Tom paid dues, too -- to the artists' union -- at rates a bit higher than most, to cover the cost of printing socialist pamphlets handed out in the lobbies of rat-traps.
	Putting the camera strap around his neck, Tom bent down to tie a shoelace; the camera swung down in front of his face, blocking his vision. A single mother quietly lectured her twelve-year-old boy on adopting the "welfare bums" seated around them as role models, blowing hard every third word to get her frizzy hair out of her mouth. The boy sat pale and thin, posture like a lazy question mark. "They all need a good kick in the ass, is all. Put them to work. You and I are a different case." She lightly caressed her strained, veiny neck. "We are a single mother." Her slurred, baby-girl voice seemed a dream production, except for the occasional too-soft sentence that projected violence: "You remember that when your turn comes, and show that certificate, or I'll kill you."
	Tom had a nose for this: the stench of antiseptic cleanser, the white tile walls with grime in the grooves, tobacco's aftertaste wafting on the air-conditioning. The smell fit his nose like a two-by-four. The bars on the windows left the odour of iron on the hands of those grabbing them in exasperation. The lingering BO reeked worst of all, sponged up into the carpet and seats. Even the bright lighting smelled of a last effort. Tabloids had spread a rumour that the current administration had contracted an interior decorator to make such offices as dispirited and displeasing as aesthetically possible. Tom loved the grainy photographs this decor produced, much like landscape under heavy cloud-cover. Taxes and cash were increasingly electronic -- transactions entered into and closed over cable -- leaving few public institutions of the interpersonal variety. The welfare office's antiquated teller/clerk system further denigrated social assistance as medieval, a throwback, and Tom thrived on yesterday's rituals. He visited certain stores, ones that stubbornly refused to relinquish dollars and cents for barcode readers, frequented by fanatics who believed vinyl sounded better than CD.
	Years back, when Tom tried full-time poetry as a vocation, he'd come down and enlisted for free earnings. The worker assigned him turned out to be the aunt of a high school friend. When he admitted owning immature savings bonds in a safety deposit box, she'd wished he'd lied. "But I won't put it down, okay? If anyone asks, you didn't tell me." Tom felt ashamed during their interview -- what if she told his friend? -- but free money in the mail buoyed him. He wrote very little poetry overall, worked those three months under the table. A girlfriend's ultimatum finally got him off the circuit, and even instilled the seeds of shame, which grew into an almost unmanageable self-recrimination over the years. Now, in public and in private, he swore he'd never go back, not while there was a job anywhere. But paradoxically, Tom did revisit welfare, if only because it took great photographs, which sold at admittedly inflated rates in galleries around town.

	"Hey, look after my kid while I go up there?" The woman's request too closely resembled a command.
	"Uh," he answered awkwardly. "Me and kids. . . uhhh, it's a chemistry thing."
	"I don't want to stay. I want to come," the boy whined.
	Tom watched her spindly wrists come inches out of oversized sleeves, her blanched, sunken face grimaced hatefully, dry hair electrified with static. She growled, wired nasty: "Do you want to take a nap?" The boy folded his arms across his chest in a protective rather than resistant gesture. "Am I going to have to send you to dreamland?" The frightened boy slowly shook his head. The mother sighed, wiped her forehead, and looked back at Tom, her lidded eyes a giveaway for narcotics. "Johnny doesn't mind you, do you Johnny?" she said in a sugary voice. Johnny answered as permitted.
	"Uh, okay," replied Tom, but nonetheless lifted his feet off the floor and lowered them. "But you've got to do something for me."
	"What?"
	He lifted the camera like evidence. "I'm a photographer. I want to take your picture."
	"Whatever," she mumbled.
	To occupy the distressed child, Tom pulled out a packet of photographs, rolled off the elastic band and unfolded the brown wrapper. The first snapshot revealed a man laying out a jacket as if he was still in it, the next a three-piece suit in bed like it needed a nap more than its owner. He peeled two pictures apart and, in the one underneath, a barefooted man -- Tom himself -- stood beside a pair of empty shoes, treating them like the life of the party. In every photo Tom had desperately tried to make himself missing, to deflect the viewer's attention, but the absence only made him more conspicuous. Since then, the welfare office had taught him that only glaring visibility lets you go totally unnoticed, and only poverty fits you for such visibility. People turn from the presence of bums on the street, from the presence of freaks. Tom fantasized: I'd like that too, except with the food.
	He handed the photos across to the boy, adjusted his black leather cap, and scratched yesterday's five o'clock shadow. The kid shuffled quickly through the pictures.
	"What do you think they mean?" Tom asked. 
	"Pictures don't mean anything, Mister." 
	"That's the attitude," Tom commended.
	"Are you here for a cheque too?" the kid asked. The look he now turned on Tom -- with nauseous and sedate eyes -- was a glance he'd have given his shoes, upon finding them filled with broken glass.
	Tom explained that his net income, but not personal habits, prohibited welfare; the kid did not warm to this. Tom's default explanation, that he prowled such sites for photogenic moments, only raised more perplexity. "Why do you need to find something photogenic?" the kid asked.
	"So I can take a picture of it." 
	"Why?"
	Tom had advance answers for questions slightly more sophisticated; this gruelling simplicity stymied him. " 'Cause I said so," he replied, with a condescending smile he'd promised never to show these people.
	A septuagenarian entered in a plastic windbreaker, dress shorts, argyle socks, and tennis shoes. He jogged on the spot for seconds, rain trickling off, then sat. The kid whispered in Tom's ear: "That old man runs around our block a hundred times a day. He's always dressed so weird. Look at his socks. That's photogenic, right?"
	Tom nodded. "Whereabouts do you live?"
	The boy reached down to pick something off his shoes. "On 12th Avenue. Rat-traps." The boy stopped, his brain involuntarily downloading excuses. "Mom says we live there for our own protection."
	Tom snapped a secret photograph of the jogger straight out of Sears menswear. The old man missed the flash amidst the overhead lighting, which shone so strongly that it etched shadows into the floor like a nuclear blast. Does King Loser mean you're the losingest loser, or the best of the losers? Tom wondered. Or do those distinctions matter at all to royalty? Better to rule in Hell than toil in Heaven: maybe, maybe not; it depends on the nights and days and how they break, just like anyplace else. Tom took a notebook out of his photo case and jotted down: photo number six, King Loser at seventy or so, shutter 11, F-stop 125.
	Tom asked the boy: "How does your mom think living in the rat-traps provides protection? Exactly the opposite, I'd say."
	The kid's mouth listed to one side. "I don't know. She says everyone there looks after each other."
	"You mean helps out?"
	"No. She says we all live together so nobody has to worry about neighbours spying and phoning in about what we do all day."
	Ah, right, thought Tom. The rat-line, established in Ontario circa 1995, allowed citizens to anonymously phone in the "welfare violations" of their neighbours; it had so awesomely reduced social spending (by 15, then 20, then 35 percent, as restrictions increased, and more and more people got kicked off the network) that every province wanted one; that's when the federal government initiated its "National Social System." Tom had taken part in some protests against this, especially when rat-lines left no option but for "welfare bums" to move together into "rat-traps," as the "National Social System" lead to the "National Ghetto System." He'd punched the federal rat-line number before, hoping to tape the operator as part of the soundtrack for a multimedia work still in progress, but she was savvy enough to disconnect him; and he habitually thought of visiting 12th Avenue's rat-traps when those habitual thoughts of heroin-purchase kicked in. Any door's a dealer's door, or so said the streetwise.
	"Nice place?" asked Tom.
	"I got friends," the kid replied, unswerved by facetiousness.

	"What do you mean I'm cancelled?" the boy's mother yelled, with the kind of energy that only possessed her when kicking -- when a heroin drought meant mandatory cold turkey for anyone under the poverty line. Tom heard the caseworker mumble ". . . boy should be in school. . . we could get you a job. . ." The social workers' theme followed this line: Yes, single mothers are top priority, but you must prove unemployability. The mother, for her part, had this attitude: I don't care if we disagree, just hand over the money. The edgy guards closed in, sensing the woman threatened to go snake, like the ex-con, but her fit went differently. The oversize shirt covered the ugly way her arms fit into her shoulders. She stood all of a silent five minutes before lifting her sleeves to expose the winning combination of track marks and abscesses. The welfare worker gazed for a long time at this terrain of addiction, as if mentally noting every wound. "Want to see my legs too?" the woman asked.
	"No. That's not necessary," the worker sighed, pulling cap from pen. "You could have saved us a lot of haggling if you just showed me right away." She rapidly dropped numbers and codes into appropriate slots on the form. "I'm going to need to see the boy's papers."
	"Oh man, my arms aren't enough?"
	"Lady, you know as well as I do that we get tons of 'mothers' in here with kids that they bought or stole off someone else."
	The woman scowled: "And you say society's got a drug problem. You ever wonder why? Ever wonder whose fault that is? You think people do this for fun?"
	Tom burst out laughing, but only him, and within one second he'd recomposed his features.
	"Come here," the woman quietly told the boy, who dutifully endured the ritual questions and answers; his sweater's oversized sleeves hung past his hands. More numbers and codes entered designated brackets. "Satisfied now?" The mother's sneer buckled under the weight of her lips.
	The caseworker rubbed both her eyes with a pair of well-worn knuckles, then laid her hands onto the tabletop, palms upward. "Look, I'm really tired, really, really tired. I deal with people just as needy as you thirty times a day and I still don't have any say in policy. You think if I had the choice. . . forget it." Medically approved training courses helped caseworkers differentiate between fake and authentic track-marks, but the combination of exhaustion and wraparound migraines, from the lighting and clientele, sapped the energy needed for that specific an examination. "Just sign, okay?"

	Tom followed mother and child into the parking lot. Weakly, the woman shoved the boy: "Are you going or do I have to poke you?" They posed together for Tom's camera beside the stucco wall. The sickly kid took off his sweater as the sun shimmered and steamed water straight off the tarmac; on Tom's prodding the mother also stripped down to a T-shirt.
	"It's pretty humiliating, all that rigmarole. You ever wonder if it's worth it?" asked Tom.
	"What other choice do I got?" shivered the woman.
	"The Catholic church over on main. . ."
	"Bread and soup! What about a roof over my head? What about clothes? What about bus credit? What about a computer for my resume? They won't even let you in the door if it's not on disk," she snapped.
	"You could get off heroin," Tom suggested. She looked crossly at him, trying to fuse her facial features into a giant dot. No matter how closely her tone approached Muzak, she always seemed to berate you.
	Phrases poured out of her hoarse throat: "Look, I've been a junkie for a long time, not like those phonies in the rat-trap. They cop just to get welfare, but I've been using since even before the residency requirement, before the big cutbacks, before you had to prove anything, never mind actually pass a real drug test. And if they hadn't of legalized prostitution -- with their doctors, bureaucrats, sales tax and cheap, 'risk-free' women -- I wouldn't even need this." Her hand passed a broad condemnation over the building behind. "So tell it to them, because they're nothing. I'm the only real junkie in the whole fucking place!"
	"Forget it," Tom recanted, taking the long way to apologize. He lowered his camera and offered a cigarette the woman took; the boy's eyes and hands begged and the mother shrugged, relieving Tom of another smoke.
	"Must be nice to have enough money to not worry about the smoking fine," she commented.
	"Yeah, it's serious. Two hundred bucks outside, a night in jail if they catch you indoors!" He made conversation while they puffed in the welfare office's shade. "Didn't you find it funny when they legalized dope and made smoking illegal?"
	The woman spoke for the first time without bitterness: "I can't exactly keep up on the news. Information is only for people who pay."
	"It's like these two movements just blindsided each other." Tom French-inhaled. "At least tobacco's cheaper now -- no taxes."
	The woman shrugged, shoulder blades traveling up the back of her shirt like armour. "I couldn't even afford it for free."
	Tom tried to maintain the flow of dialogue: "I worked at a high-school from '95 to '99. Some guy called Frank Woolstone ran this employee self-improvement course everyone had to attend. I fucking hated it. We all did. He always had us play these stupid 'personal enhancement' games. Anyhow, Frank had this really morbid motto. He used to say, 'My friends, life consists of choices. And you always have a choice, even if it's death.' " Both woman and boy shot him a glance. "Sorry," Tom murmured, suddenly transfixed by the burning end of his smoke. "I didn't mean to make fun of you."
	"Just take the picture."
	One hurried point and shoot later, all three waited at the crosswalk for the light to change. The kid examined a yellow fish painted on the pavement beside the sewer grate. Tom pulled all bills over five dollars from his wallet.
	"Take this," he offered and then handed anything under five to the boy. The woman's hand closed around the money and jammed it into her back pocket.
	"Uh, watch out, that pocket has a hole." The woman shrugged. Tom reached around, removed the crumpled bits of coloured paper with his fingertips, placed them in her breast pocket.
	"Do you think I could get another picture?" Both woman and boy hung their arms down loose and limp, like people no longer capable of resistance. The traffic lights changed twice before Tom photographed them exactly the way he wanted the image.
	The light glowed green again and she asked, stepping off, "The guy kill himself?"
	"Who?"
	"The self-improvement guy. He killed himself."
	Tom laughed unsteadily. "I was saving that for a punch line. But it didn't seem appropriate."
	The woman smiled, showing her complete set of brown teeth, not for Tom's sake but for another cigarette. Tom handed over his whole stash. She lit up, exhaling words with smoke. "It's okay. I'll bank the laugh, if you don't mind. I might need it later." She twisted the kid's shoulder and pushed him across the road. Tom wondered if the photos told a story other than welfare.

	He developed the negatives that night in the darkroom. The resolution on her track marks was poster-print quality. Inside a certain frame even a collapsed vein can look famous. Tom believed he saw a dot -- a track or scab -- in the crook of the boy's arm, but who could inspect bravely enough with a magnifying glass to make sure? What morbid interest required that much proof? The picture disturbed Tom enough to send rare shivers down his spine; "Nothing quite like it," the gallery owner would say, as another buyer lined up, already running his cash-card's magnetic strip along the Interac slit. Tom's photos all came with the following recommendations: "Take this photo home. Turn off your air conditioning. Disconnect your television and stereo channels. Open your windows to the smog and traffic noise. Get someone in the next room to scream and shout continuously. Strip to your underwear. Scratch yourself with a few tacks. And kneel down in front of the photograph for one whole night without sleeping. The image will do the rest."

Walt's Wing-Span

	There was rain at three am the night Edit left, and Walt rolled out of their half-empty bed, grabbed a hacksaw from the shed, and crawled to the end of a branch in the oak tree out front -- eyes shut the whole time. Then Walt started sawing the limb between him and the oak. But nine-tenths of the way through he paused to reconsider, and a sparrow landed next to him, adding enough feather and bone to snap that last splinter holding him aloft. The branches he hit on the way down slowed the fall and saved his spinal chord, but Walt's back was broken.
	That was November; now it's the end of March. And Walt can finally manoeuvre back into those business suits he loves so much -- black wool in the winter, black linen in the summer. Walt's in one of those suits now, sitting on a vinyl couch in the therapist's office. He checks the shirt cuffs, straightens his tie, and admits that sitting on a swaying branch in autumn's wind and rain still appeals to him; it's like "Strange Folly," that etching by Goya he loves so much, the one showing a bunch of grotesques in a tree.
	The therapist asks if he's ever masturbated while playing "dress up."
	This pisses off Walt so much he never goes back. Instead, he starts tying flies, using a little kit of hooks, a vice that screws onto the coffee table, peacock feathers, tinsel, squirrel tail, and multicoloured threads, turning his home into an archive of sticklebacks, muddler minnows, torn thumbs, woolly buggers, waterboatmen. When the flies accumulate, Walt goes to the office and hands them out to the guys who go fishing regularly. One of the engineers, Barry (whom Walt suspects had sex with Edit), kids Walt about his hobby, but then invites him out for a fly-fishing weekend. Walt declines. "Hey I'm trying to do you a favour," says Barry, hurt; nobody refuses Barry, ever (including Edit -- though that's just rumour).
	After this, Walt decides to dust off the rod and see if he can't catch a fish. He buys a Discman because ever since the oak tree incident the sound of birds has unnerved him. He's only safe from them at home, where the city's smog and asphalt keep out or kill most bird-life, but out in the countryside, on the forest's edge, there are enough beaks to whistle and sing him crazy. He slips sombre music, say Arvö Part's Arbos, into the Discman and gets out of the truck near Phelan Lake, hoping the notes will drown out other noises. According to Frank Solomon's A Beginner's Manual on the How-To's of Flyfishing, a beginner should first practice the basics on a sandbar or spit, or in hip-waders, far from trees or rushes that might snag the line as it loops forward and back. Walt finds an old rotted jetty far from the tree-line and follows Solomon's instructions; but every time Edit comes to mind he whips the line so hard the fly snaps off the end, and he has to snip the leader shorter and shorter to tie on each new hook.
	An hour later he's caught the first cutthroat, but bringing in the fish and seeing its gills gasping, its body convulsing on contact with human skin, is enough to make him release it. Walt becomes a catch-and-release man, a teller of fish stories without any evidence to back them up.
	Late at night, eyes too tired for the minuteness of tying flies but needing an activity to stop him from falling asleep, Walt takes out the photos of his college boxing days (the only sport he ever cared for) and examines the trophies of two inter-campus championships. And in the early AM Walt stands in his underwear in front of the full-length mirror Edit left and boxes his image to a standstill.
	In this way he's ready when Barry begs, "Come fishing with me." Walt declines. "Why not?" Walt has no answer, just a feeling without a word, until the day Barry announces to the packed lunchroom that Walt always refuses the invite out of the fear that he isn't man enough to catch a fish, as he wasn't man enough to keep Edit. Walt's uppercut breaks three of Barry's teeth and sends the man sprawling, unconscious for five minutes with a concussion bad enough to put him on workers' compensation for a week.
	The next day, choking on tears, Walt phones in sick to work, takes out six weeks accumulated vacation time.
	Now Goya's etchings fascinate him more than ever, and he looks at them for hours wishing his life was half as macabre as "Contrary to the General Interest" and "The Day is Breaking, Away." One particular image in The Proverbs, called "One Way to Fly," shows men in fantastical flying gear -- in mechanical wings and helmets shaped like vultures' heads; he lingers over this etching longer than the rest, wanting to fly in that outfit -- but the engineering is all wrong: there's no way you could get the leverage to pull and push those guy wires and still stay in flight.
	On day five of his vacation, Walt visits Chelsea in her leaky condo on 12th near Granville. He looks around the apartment. "Is she gone?" Chelsea nods. Edit had stayed at Chelsea's for a few weeks after the separation until she got a place of her own. The two women had liked each other from their first introduction (though Chelsea had originally been Walt's friend) and it pleased Chelsea both to assist Edit's independence and to take care of Walt -- visiting, cooking, even staying over -- when his broken back immobilized him.
	"Don't you want to know whether she left a forwarding address?" Walt shakes his head, glances at the TV -- where a football game is playing -- sits down and turns it off angrily. Chelsea brings him a coffee. "You'll have to talk about Edit eventually. You can't keep it bottled up forever."
	Walt thinks of telling her to spare the New Age platitudes, but she's too nice, and says instead, "Ah, well. . . I'll risk it."
	His response brings a grim twist to her lips, reminding Walt that for all her frivolity Chelsea's worth listening to. He remembers how she'd always come to their place, his place now (it hurts to think of it that way, to think of Edit's refusal to claim anything), always dressed appropriately for a walk in the snow when he and Edit never got it right, either sweating or shivering from too many or too few layers, and having to turn home by the first lamppost, retreating through the silent drift of snowflakes, under a starless sky (and he'd wonder: how could darkness precipitate such serenity?). Walt judges people by such traits: their ability to dress for the weather, improvise a variety of salad dressings, remember that two dimes and a nickel work as well as a quarter in the payphone.
	Chelsea pops two vitamin B-12s. "Hangover?" he asks. 
	"Wicked costume party last night," she answers. That's a funny coincidence, Walt thinks, because he spent last night designing a costume of his own in the shed: a life-size set of wings along the improbable lines of Goya's "One Way to Fly."
	"Sounds like fun," mumbles Walt, glancing out the window to catch a Mercedes rear end one of those new Volkswagen bugs. The two drivers argue in the street. Several witnesses get involved. For two full minutes their voices come through the open window like the screeching of birds. Walt blocks his ears, but the sound penetrates the flesh and bone of his hands and even pierces his eardrum. Chelsea's yelling "Are you okay?" over a helpless and deafened Walt for a full five minutes before the warbles, whistles, and titters fade enough to admit her voice into his ear, distantly at first, then louder and louder until it reaches normal conversational pitch. 
	"Are you alright?"
	He drains the coffee mug, hot as it is. "I'm fine. Fine. Just a bit of a migraine."
	"Maybe it has to do with your back. Maybe you should go see a doctor."
	But doctors, in Walt's quite vocal opinion, wield the power of specialized lies; their waiting rooms are too well-lit, too filled with the wrong types of magazines, oversupplied with a music that professes nothing. Besides, his back's fully healed. "No. I'll be okay."
	Chelsea frowns again. "Do you want to spend the night on my couch?" Walt says he'd like that, as there's nothing at home but artificial flies, sombre music, and Goya to pore over while trying to transform himself into an insomniac. "For an engineer, you always were weird," says Chelsea, getting a refill of coffee. "Hey, I'm going to a party tonight," she yells from the kitchen. "Maybe you'd like to come?"
	"Will Edit be there?" Chelsea walks back into the room shaking her head. "Then I'll come. Maybe I'll have a nap right now."
	"Sure. I've got a few things I need to get done around here anyhow. I'll try and be quiet." They make up the couch together.
	Watching Walt lie down and tuck in, Chelsea remembers how he was in high school: the tough loser whom everyone continued to tease though he could (and sometimes did) take anyone in a fight. Maybe, she thinks, that's where he got this Byronic/Childe Harolde vision of himself -- resourceful, outcast, too busy with his pleasing nightmares to spare time for life.
	Before going to sleep, Walt asks God to just let him sleep, a prayer he has made every night for as long as he can remember. When Walt was younger his parents took him to a psychoanalyst who diagnosed too many morbid interests -- horror movies, comic books, Dungeons and Dragons -- as the reason their boy couldn't get proper rest. Over the years Walt's "interests" have shifted from pop to high-brow culture, but the subject matter remains the same: Verdi's bloody haunted operas and John Zorn's screaming Naked City, Edgar Allen Poe and Goya, Goya, Goya (though he still likes a good comic, especially those old EC horror titles).

	Walt sits up on the couch. His eyes are closed, his eyelids blank and staring pointedly at the television. "Hey, isn't there a football game on?" he asks in a voice gruffer than normal. Walt rises from the couch and goes to the fridge -- Chelsea jumps out of the way -- opens the door, scans inside, grabs a beer, pops the tab, and chugs it halfway, then turns and holds the can at arm's length, as if reading the label (his eyes are still closed though), and makes a face: "Christ! Lite beer! I hate lite beer!" Walt dumps the can in the sink and returns to the couch, reaches for the remote control, and sits down in front of the football game.
	"I didn't know you liked sports," Chelsea says, following him.
	"Well, you're like all the rest," he replies. "You just don't get it." Still sleeping, Walt concentrates on the television. "Heeeeeey! See that field goal? Amazing!"
	"How can you see anything when your eyes are closed?" 
	"X-ray vision," he retorts, sharply. "Oh! See that tackle?" He sighs, watches intently, the muscles in his forearms twitching, his mouth twisting to the side when either team makes a good play, as if he were restraining himself from climbing into the TV and joining the game. When a commercial comes on he quickly switches channels, landing with the first click on the Knowledge Network, showing a documentary on Edgard Varèse. He snorts and turns to Chelsea, pointing at the screen with the remote control. "You know why they call it 'experimental music?' Because it's failed is why. Nobody ever calls anything successful an 'experiment.' " He listens a while longer to an excerpt from "Arcana," then makes a performance of shuddering and cupping his ears. "Who listens to this stuff? You'd have to be drinking antifreeze." He flips back to the football game.
	Chelsea crosses her arms under her breasts. "You were talking about me and Edit not getting it."
	Walt slashes his hand through the air between them. "Let's not spoil the party by bringing up Edit. I'm just starting to enjoy being single again." Then he starts to make moves towards Chelsea on the couch, but she can't stand that slack sleeping face and turns away. Walt edges closer until his breath quivers the hairs on Chelsea's neck, forcing her to rise and go into the kitchen for a glass of water that shakes so much in her hand half of it sloshes off the rim. Walt follows robotically, arms straight out in front, hands dangling from limp wrists, an expression of tenderness on his face.
	"Stay away from me!" Chelsea backs into a corner between the wall and water dispenser.
	He ambles forward, giggles. "How do you like my Frankenstein act? Pretty funny, huh? I learned it from some guy in the fraternity."
	"Walt, I knew you in university, and you weren't in a fraternity."
	"Sure I was," he says angrily. "All engineers are in fraternities."
	His closeness is now a violation, so Chelsea launches the water; it splashes against Walt's face and he stops, steps back. Chelsea wonders whether she's broken the cardinal rule: never awaken a sleepwalker. Would all hell break loose now, as the daytime psyche, on its way into consciousness, encounters the sleepwalker, on its way out, in a meeting of opposites that rips Walt in two with no hope of ever putting him back together?
	Shocked, Walt looks around and starts to cry, squeezing tears out from under his shut and fastened eyelids. "Just because his eyes are open everyone thinks that he's the real one. And now he's going to quit being an engineer. I just know it. There'll be no room for me at all, and he'll just fly away. . ." He picks up a dishcloth, presses it to his face, blubbers and blows his nose.
	Chelsea takes his elbow and leads him back to the couch. "You just need a little sleep."
	Once he's motionless and snoring, Chelsea picks up the phone. "Hi, Edit, hi. Look, he's here. Yes, sleeping now. And you were right, it's creepy. . ."

	Three hours later, Walt wakes from a nightmare in which he's devoted his life to the normalcy of work, beers, and football. He gets up sweaty, vertebrae popping.
	Chelsea's sitting across from the couch, staring at him. She slides her hands back and forth along the arms of her chair. "You were sleepwalking." Walt lowers back down, runs both hands through his hair.
	"How bad was it?"
	"Bad. Belligerent."
	Outside the window gale force winds blow mist through the pines around the condo's parking lot. "Whenever I had that dream, that dream of being so normal, it was a sure bet I'd wake in the morning to find that Edit had locked herself in the spare bedroom. Protection from me. I've been to all the doctors. . ." Walt raises a pair of trembling hands to his eyes and tries and fails to steady them. "It's the worst dream! I feel so goddamn normal, locked into this pattern, these habits! And what's really terrible is that part of me likes it." 
	"Are you sure you should be coming with me to this party?" 
	"No. No, I'm not. But I don't see people anymore and maybe it'll help."

	Walt heads into the bathroom and turns the shower to lukewarm, remembering that Edit also liked it at this temperature, despite the fact that normally she craved heat, always putting on a heavier sweater or sleeping with a hot water bottle. (The one perfect compatibility in their marriage, thinks Walt, was that they could always shower together after sex.)
	He steps in and the showerhead blasts water with twice the PSI Walt's used to, and the pressure grows and grows until finally the water stings, then bites, then threatens to flay him alive, forcing Wait to cup a hand over the showerhead to ease the flow; but that too is so painful, he can't keep the hand there for long. And the sound! The noise of the spraying liquid is a thousand times amplified. Holding his head like a basketball, Walt backs into a corner against the cold tiles. A few jets hit his toes with the force of hammers, and the noise continues to rise until it sounds like furious birds. He huddles in the bottom of the bathtub for fifteen minutes, until the volume and pressure drop to normal and he can crawl back under the water. Gingerly cleaning his ears, Walt soaps himself down, washes off the sweat of dreams and sleepwalking.
	Chelsea prepares burritos, refried beans, rice. Walt eats standing up, over the sink, while she gets ready to go, looking out at the few streetlights in the blackness and feeling relieved that only bats fly at night, that human ears can't pick up the sound of radar.
	"Finish up. We should go," says Chelsea.
	As they head out she grabs a huge umbrella that covers both of them. Rain runs off the fabric around them like a circular curtain. Chelsea takes a mouthful from a flask of Scotch, baring tiny almost baby teeth.
	They stop at a twenty-four-hour corner store to buy munchies for the party. Walt waits outside. Something flies by as he reads advertisements for perfume, cars, and canned soup on a rotating billboard. Something twitters, brushes the back of his head, utters another two-note call. This is insane, Walt thinks, Hitchcock territory. But in another minute -- and before Walt has a chance to find cover -- the sparrows are dive-bombing him, not with their bodies (at best, they just graze a shoulder or forehead) but with their songs, flying so fast he can't predict the next angle of attack. He crouches, hands up and empty like a magician proving there's nothing up his sleeve, but the birds' voices grow more shrill, forcing him to drive both index fingers deep into his ears, almost to the first knuckle, before he remembers the Discman in his coat pocket. Walt puts on the earphones, turns the volume to maximum, and the drone of "Pari Intervalo" chases away the birds.
	Chelsea emerges from the corner store and finds her friend sitting pale-faced on the newspaper box, his headphones so loud anyone in a ten-foot radius can hear Arvö Part. "Are you okay?" she yells. Walt nods but doesn't look healthy.
	They begin walking. Chelsea raises her voice to out-shout Arvö. Walt, meanwhile, turns in every direction, scanning the air for incoming sparrows. Finally, Chelsea asks: "Are you going to mellow out and take those off by the time we get to the party?"
	Walt eases back on the headphones. The city's car horns, swishing trees, ambulance sirens, and muzak from gas stations and 7-Elevens never felt so symphonic.
	At the party, Chelsea drops her umbrella into a stand with the others. Walt keeps his coat on in order to keep the Discman nearby.
	Chelsea's gone almost the instant they enter the place, lingering long enough to hand Walt a martini glass full of blue liquid while busily scanning the crowd for someone else to talk to.
	Walt skulks in the entrance a while before noticing an old man, forty years over the average age at the party, his bald head creased like a newspaper clipping carried too long in a wallet, but the eyes are still boyish. "I usually check the art first thing at a party," says the man, noticing Walt's stare, "then the books."
	The old man looks over the milling guests, rubs his hanging jowls and says: "Folly."
	"Pardon me?" asks Walt.
	"Sorry," says the old man, "ever since I lost my hearing I've been more or less stuck making rather than partaking in conversation. Though, given a frontal view of the face, I'm not bad at reading lips." Walt looks at him. "My hearing," the old man fans his ear, "has grown hot. Instead of hearing nothing I hear too much. In my brain," and here he shakes his head, "there's a horror of noise." He looks up at Walt. "But I've learned to accept it." The old man runs a big, worn thumb along the spines of books shelved in front of him. "If I resist it," he continues, "the noise will crush me against the earth."
	The old man stops at a volume and hooks it out. "Aha! Here's some work." He opens an edition of Goya's etchings. Grabbing the book by the spine, he turns it upside down and flaps the covers like wings in front of Walt's face. When he brings the book right side up again it falls open to "One Way to Fly."
	Ever polite, Walt wants to say how much this piece means to him, but a piercing birdcall shoots from his throat instead. Walt closes his mouth and claps a hand over it to keep out the noise, but it rises from his lungs and voice-box, resonates right into his cranium, and when he tries to say "Sorry" the pent-up sparrow's scream bursts out again. The old man sees the word "Sorry" form on Walt's lips, then Walt pressing both hands to his mouth like the third monkey in the "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" illustration.
	He grabs Walt's elbow and guides him to the far side of the shelves, where, hidden behind potted ferns and a stereo system, he says, "Give it a little try." But when Walt parts the fingers over his mouth a shrill voice comes out, listing equations for drag and lift, thrust, and g-force -- the mathematics of flight he memorized for his BSc. Out come logarithms and algebra, that language of numbers he once found so seductive, and which lured him into a profession whose clichés he's been trying to live up to ever since (as if he were mathematical himself) -- codes his passions keep infecting, breaking down. Walt closes his fingers and the stream of math dries up.
	Swallowing hard, Walt opens his fingers again; with an artery-popping effort, he holds back the rattle and hum, silently moving his lips for the deaf man to read: "I'm amazed at you. Seventeen when you left Fuendetodos after a street-fight left three men dead. You worked for Carlos III, the Catholic Board of works, then swore allegiance to Napoleon; you painted the Duke of Wellington, Napoleon's enemy, then left Spain when Fernando VII began the persecution of liberals. You lived for years on Calle del Desengaño -- 'the street of disillusion' -- and even saw your son, Javier, come to claim his inheritance before your death. You were everywhere and nowhere. And in your own privacy you put it all down: horror and cynicism, misanthropy, pessimism. There was no standard measure, no consistency, but you still achieved what was beautiful and balanced and normal: 'The Milkmaid of Bordeaux.' " Walt pauses, closes his eyes, and pushes back the building tremor of birdsong in his throat; this is the most he's spoken in years. "But me, I'm still stuck in The Proverbs. . . I had this wife. . . my wife. . . and I was trying to get to her past my. . . fascinations. But I wasn't in time. She said it would be easier to be myself if she left. But I didn't want that. To be myself. I just couldn't help it."
	The old man rubs at the flecks of paint on his hands. "You're wrong," he says, "I worked for Carlos, for Joseph, for the Catholics, the Liberals, and ended up painting not the horror of my times (as everyone thinks), but the horror the times made of me. And when I painted the milkmaid it wasn't because I needed something beautiful to look at, but because I wanted something beautiful to look at me. I felt that if I could be possessed by that gaze I could happily die." 
	"But. . . the milkmaid. . . she's not. . . she isn't looking out." 
	"She's looking off to one side," says the old man sadly, "and I painted her."
	The birds have built to a rumble inside Walt. He closes his fingers.
	"Listen," says the old man. "I served diverse interests until I could no longer stand the ground I was standing on and had to leave Spain." He opens the Goya book again, unerringly finds the etching of "One Way to Fly," and points to the strings and wings on the men already ahead of Walt in being aloft, fluttering up and down in the darkened sky. "Remember the title." He slowly closes the book. "It's a different kind of math, Walt: the equation of you. I thought I'd rise after I'd divested myself of so many portraits, landscapes, etchings -- cleared their conflicting babble from my head, but it is together that they formed the formula." The old man pauses and points at his feet, then leans into Walt's ear. "Getting the milkmaid to look at you has nothing to do with your position, the problem is with the frame of your painting, with what you want her to be looking at."
	Walt gazes at the old man, eyes sliding back and forth over the hands pressed to his mouth; but instead of getting out that last question, Walt steps out from behind the potted ferns and stereo, the birdcall in his throat shaking him like a locomotive engine, like a small earthquake.
	And he runs -- a tall, fit man, bent over as if from appendicitis -- hands strangling his mouth, cheeks bulging as if there are hard words wanting out. He shuffles in pain along the floor towards the entrance. Chelsea turns with the rest of the guests to watch. Halfway down the loft Walt reaches into his jacket pocket with one hand (the other kept clapped over his mouth), draws out the headphones, and slips them into either ear. Now infused with music, Walt continues towards the entrance. Nobody helps, including Chelsea (who's immobilized with embarrassment); the crowd parts for Walt, and by the time he's at the front door everyone has cleared to the other side of the apartment. He stops in the vestibule, grabs an armful of black umbrellas, and escapes.
	Chelsea goes for the phone: "Edit, Walt's totally lost it."

	Edit works as a cashier in the classical music section of a downtown music store. When it's her turn to choose in-store background music, she picks Vivaldi or Palestrina. Edit's also quite at home in her bachelor listening to nothing but the muffled sounds of neighbours behind walls, the splashing of water in the bubble-baths she takes at night, and the cordless phone jumping and ringing on the bathtub's porcelain edge (as it does now).
	"Thank God you're home!" Chelsea speaks in a panic, and relates all that's happened. Edit gets off the phone and rises from the water, drips suds all over the floor, towels off, and walks naked into her bedroom to put on tracksuit pants, running shoes, and a rough sweater, to grab wallet and keys and take the stairs down to street level, where she's parked the Volkswagen bug, thirty years old, that Walt helped finance. She steps calmly out of her brick, tile, and chandelier-lit lobby (her building dates back to the 1920s). A dog's bark carries from Arbutus and 16th. She always leaves the bug open as an encouragement to thieves to take a look inside and see for themselves that there's really nothing worth stealing (instead of breaking a window to arrive at the same conclusion).
	Edit drives east. The house is exactly as it was in November: a squat 1970s stucco, two-storey walk-up with a flat roof. She remembers that Walt tried to make it more nineteenth century by adding a many-arrowed weather vane, and to complicate its silhouette with a tangle of television aerials and a satellite dish (though he barely watched TV). She opens the gate, walks in, shudders at the thick branch on the ground under the oak tree, the hacksaw cut still fresh in the wood. Walt had been sleepwalking when he climbed the oak, responding to her departure irrationally. In the hospital bed Walt had mumbled about a sparrow landing on the branch, but it was idiotic -- sparrows don't fly at night.
	Edit walks to the front door and presses the doorbell. Waiting for Walt to answer, she reflects on ten years of marriage. Contrary to Walt's perception, she didn't leave because of the music -- that mix of medieval chant and minimalism -- or because of the dark, heavy etchings -- Goya, Piranesi, Da Vinci -- on the walls, or the weekly marathon of art films -- Tarkovsky, Bergman, Fellini. No, these made him interesting, different. She left because of all the things he blamed himself for not being: a sports fan, a beer drinker, a neighbourly guy with tons of friends and associates, someone who enjoys dirty jokes, a rednecky engineer who votes Alliance, reads Sports Illustrated, and who prefers silence to music. She was in fine arts when she met him: the lonely physics whiz paging through facsimiles of Leonardo's notebooks, more intrigued by the man's imagination than the feasibility of his designs, then so embarrassed about it when she confronted him.
	Nobody comes to the door. Edit walks around the house, looks down at the garden fallow for winter, at the stubs of snipped-off annuals, at shrubs and trees weatherworn, dripping rain. There's a light on in the shed. Edit tiptoes up and peers in. Walt's inside, wearing headphones, the cord swinging in front of his stomach, the Discman attached to his belt. The remains of dismantled umbrellas are scattered across the floor. He wears black trousers, jacket, turtleneck, a helmet that looks like a vulture's head, and attached to the arms he's flapping are wings made from the spokes and nylon fabric of stolen umbrellas. The wings are fastened by little hooks to the underside of each sleeve and down the left and right sides of the coat, folding up neatly along the spokes like twin accordions when his arms fall against his body. Walt sticks his chest out, his forehead up in the air, flaps the wings up and down. He opens his eyes, takes off the headphones, and turns his head right and left to listen for the sound he's managed to accept. He climbs out of the suit and holds it up, smiles shyly. Edit watches him, admiring how Walt, for the first time, seems unperturbed in his isolation, happy with its limits, not even bothered by the fact that the wings will need a jet-pack attached, or a hurricane, before they lift him into the air.
	She knows there's no sense in going in. It's over for her here. All along she was just one more of Walt's attempts at achieving the status quo. Edit looks in on him and memorizes the scene, as if knowing that in a year, when the settlement comes through and Walt disappears -- no forwarding address, no telephone call, no farewell -- into a silence that will not speak, this will be what she keeps.

Institutional

	Authorities on the subjects will call him Tom the Teacher, Tom the Photographer, Tom the Pensioner, or Tom the Corpse. But splashing into the doctor's latex gloves at 2:36 AM, he's none other than Tom the Newborn. Two orderlies sit on his mother's stomach for added push -- doctor's orders. Her eyes swim in blood. Nurses take the baby off her chest and hand over orange juice. She looks like somebody playing on a swing.
	Tom's father flaked out on a hospital cot and prayed to Jesus for late-night courage. Now he gets to his feet, stares out of streaked windows at the tilted city. No type of vending-machine coffee pleases him, the kind of man he is. The kind of man he is: behind his back, the farmhands never say it simply: "A nutcase"; they call him, "A religious nutcase."
	Tom's father collars the nurse coming off shift. He takes her smile for an invitation to indulge in a monologue: "I thought, when my wife inherited land from her parents, great, now it's that much harder for me to get into Heaven." (His tone leaves no doubt that Heaven begins with a capital.) "You understand what I mean? You don't? Well, God is perfectly fair. Everyone gets perfect justice. You do something good? You get rewarded in equal measure. You do bad, He punishes you according to the crime, not a jot more. Now, there's two ways He goes about it. Either He rewards you after you die for the good you did by sending you to Heaven, or He rewards you here and now -- with cash bonuses, or good luck, or happiness, or whatever -- so that after you die He's free to damn you straight to Hell, no questions asked, for your evil. My wife inherits property. Great, I think, another damn reward in this life. One step closer to Hell. I get a promotion. Great! I might as well be in Hell already. So I won't mind if my kid's retarded. I'm not like most people. If my kid's retarded it'll be so painful to me that I've basically got a free ride to do anything I want with the rest of my life, because no reward God gives me on this earth could ever make up for that suffering."
	The nurse makes a disapproving sound with her tongue and Tom's father catches it. "I'm sorry. I don't know what I'm saying. Look, I'm sorry." He sits on the floor. "But she's been in labour for, like," checks his watch, "shit! At least twelve hours! At least!"
	The doctor comes through toweling his hands, not slowing as he tells the brand-new dad about his baby boy. His back is already to Tom's father as he enunciates the last words. "What's your goddamn rush," Tom's father yells after him. "You can't play golf at night anyhow!"

	His mother cradles the baby and whispers, "Tom," while the incubator turns over and hums.
	Two weeks later, Father Dominic -- stubbly hair, square jaw -- does his weekly browse through the maternity ward. He stops beside Tom's incubator because the baby stares up at him with what the priest would refer to in a sermon as "an affinity." Father Dominic bends over the glass, taps it with his fingernails. "You remember," he says. "I know you remember. I remember, too." The priest whispers that he too has forgotten his nativity -- going from embryo to ten-fingered boy, spinning in the uterus like an astronaut, the difficult birth (not wanting out, but not getting his way). All he knows about birth is what the scientists and mothers of the world have revealed. "But," Father Dominic continues, "before conception is another thing." The priest recalls "the beforeworld": a time when he didn't have a ME on his hands, a nice stupid time, floating, gathering blackness, not needing information. "Oblivion is paradise!" the priest shouts, getting ready to run from the nurses. "You remember!"

	At Tom's baptism, Father Sinclair -- the pastor, Father Dominic's senior and Tom's father's favourite priest (light with the penance, short with the sermons, a good guest with a scotch) -- nearly dunks Tom's head fully under the holy water and, like most babies, Tom couldn't care less, but when Father pronounces, "I baptize you Thomas. . ." the baby howls long and hard. His mother rushes to dry Tom's forehead. Father Dominic understands the true source of the trauma.
	"It's not the water," he says. "It's getting taken off the nothing list." 
	"What?" Tom's father asks.
	"He's crying because getting a name splits you from yourself. First you get a name, then you learn to speak and read. It's like simultaneously having a self given to and taken away from you."
	"Dominic, you're contradicting yourself again," says Father Sinclair tentatively (Father Dominic's known to freak out when he's disagreed with), handing the baby to the godparents. "Humour Father Dominic," Father Sinclair advises, back turned to the younger priest, rubbing his temple with an index finger and winking.
	"If it contradicts, it must be true," answers Father Dominic and everyone very carefully watches how he never blinks two eyelids at once.

	Tom goes to live on a Fraser Valley farm, where his father is attempting tobacco cultivation. There's also livestock like chickens, cows, horses, pigs. They live in an old frame house built in Queen Victoria's day -- gables and eaves and a widow's walk worn by boxy heels. His father praises God morning, noon, and night.
	He also yells: "You stupid woman! You're eating me out of house and home!" He ties the pantry key to a string running around his neck. "From now on, you want the key, you ask for it!"
	"Bastard, bastard, bastard." His wife kneads tears into a mound of dough that she leaves looking like a brain to go answer the doorbell.
	Tom pushes himself backwards along the floor and his mouth sucks air -- turning kisses inside out. He finds a felt marker rolled off the table and begins to scribble with it on the linoleum. When Father Dominic and his mother come into the kitchen, Tom has already covered half the floor with squiggles and lines. "Tom!" his mother screeches, but the priest bends down, not interfering with the series of zigzags.
	"Look," the priest says to Tom's mother, pointing out a section of the artwork. "That's a picture of his father!" The priest twists his head and then really opens his eyes. "Incredible! It's your husband, under the wheels of a truck." The priest doesn't add that Tom's father's neck is broken and his face distorted into death's big blank smile. "And here," the priest points. "It's his father again! Drowning in a toilet!" The priest describes a certain section as a mural of Tom senior getting pecked to death by geese. Tom's mother takes the Jiffy marker out of her baby's hands.
	"I don't know where you get all that from, Father. It's just cat-scratch."
	The priest helps her wipe up before the ink dries and her husband re-enters the kitchen.

	When Tom crawls outside of the house he still sees and hears too much diversity -- green juice on the lips of cattle, birds singing a new song every time, cougar prints in the soft ground by the new fence. The francophone woman next door addresses her dog in the formal tense: "Artur, ou etes-vous?" His mother scoops him up when she's not lying in the hayloft with Emeric -- farmhand for hire and number one follower and favourite of Father Dominic. Emeric and Tom's mother have discussed the utter impossibility of ever falling in love with each other, but lust is easier to cover. Nobody must know.
	Emeric heads home and puts on his only necktie, then goes down to the local Catholic casino, held on the odd Wednesday in the rectory basement -- fundraising to cover parish upkeep and overhead. Emeric ignores the blackjack and bingo, walks between the tables to the improvised roulette mounted on the wall. Father Dominic mans the big wheel. The two men make the least amount of eye contact needed to communicate. Emeric drops his chips anywhere, almost scattering them without a care. Father Dominic takes note, adjusts the muscles in his arm, and sends a message from his brain to his hand that says, "Spin and release just so." The wheel lands on Emeric's bet every single time.
	Father Dominic and Emeric trade off after the floor has closed. Emeric exchanges the money for a blessing. "This will go to a good cause," the priest says. Emeric nods like he knows.
	"You have such an incredible arm, Father."
	"It's just practice, Emeric. I use no devices."

	Tom's father padlocks the chicken coop and saws a hole in the door so only chickens can enter and leave, as opposed to his wife. Out of total sympathy for Tom's mother, Emeric calls Tom's father an asshole for treating her this way. Before anyone can breathe, Tom's father tells him: "You're fired."
	Emeric punches Tom's father in the face and kicks him in the ribs. Tom's father cups his cracked nose, sitting in the sagging chicken-wire fence like a hammock. "You can't fire me; I quit," Emeric says. "I feel sorry for your woman."
	The next morning in confession Emeric tells Father Dominic about his little foray into physical violence. Father Dominic wants all the particulars.
	That same morning Tom's mother walks around the chicken coop, fingers clenching the chicken wire, trying to pull the door open, rip out the fence stakes, tear a hole, fly over and in, anything. The francophone neighbour squeezes through the gap in the hedge: "I see what your old man's doing. But it's easily solved, so don't work yourself into a fit." The two women grab the chickens as they come through the hole, insert a finger into the asshole of each to check for eggs.
	Tom climbs the chesterfield to watch them anally violate the chickens.
	"No sweat," the neighbour woman says to her. The ones reading positive receive a sprinkling of salt on the bunghole, which makes them immediately want to lay their eggs. The women have blocked the entrance to the coop with a board, leaving the chickens no alternative but to lay their eggs in a nearby coal bin. Tom's mother collects the eggs afterwards. At night they let the chickens back into the pen.
	"I don't understand why the yield of eggs has dropped so drastically," Tom's father will say in the upcoming months. By then, Tom has learned enough language (though not yet uttered the infamous "first word") to have lost the art of abstract thinking. He constructs his first mental sentence: "You're such a dumb asshole."
	His mother keeps the eggs among her linen, using the money from their sale to buy needles and thread, a winter coat for herself, clothes for Tom, a new frying pan, sugar, and flour.

	"Come on, say 'Mommy,' you little bastard," his father shouts, shaking Tom's tiny shoulders in a room full of aunts, uncles, and grandparents trying to restrain him.
	Father Sinclair and Dominic are over for dinner too, the former telling Tom's father to go easy on the kid and the other trying to shake the tears, talking just low enough to not be heard. "I've been here before. I've gone through this." Tom's father plows ahead through the interference.
	"Don't tell me you can't speak; I can see it in your eyes, goddamnit. Don't you hold out on me!"
	"Mommy," Tom falters, but Father Dominic sees the intention in Tom's eyes like a script: I'm gonna get you for this. "This was my biggest trauma too," Father Dominic whispers. I tried not to become rational, but everyone teamed up against me. Maybe it's only the recently experienced taste of butter, strawberry, and butterscotch pudding -- like it was for Father Dominic at that age -- that keeps Tom from taking a rope, crawling up the stairs, throwing a noose over the shower rod, fixing it around his neck, and stepping off the toilet bowl to become the world's youngest suicide.
	"Did you hear that? 'Mommy!' That's my boy!" A grandmother rushes in and takes Tom from his father.
	"I hope you're happy, you big brute!" she shouts.
	"What?" Tom's father asks, totally baffled. "What did I do wrong?"

	His dad goes to St Luke the Evangelist's every morning of the week except Saturday, when he sleeps in. He goes to confession once a week. While his mother goes to milk the cows, Tom wiggles through the wet grass, up onto a spare tire his father's taking into town to patch, and through the open door into the cab of the Fargo. He falls asleep on the passenger side. His father throws a woollen jacket through the open door without looking and bends down to heave the tire into the bed of the truck. The jacket covers Tom, who doesn't wake to the slamming door, engine rumble, or squeak of brakes.
	His father goes into the church.
	Father Dominic slides the window open in the confessional. "Yes?" he asks.
	"Isn't this Father Sinclair's day for confession?"
	"He's busy. Asked me to fill in," Father Dominic answers. "What difference does it make?" Tom's father rattles behind his buttons, but there's no way out of the pine-board box. He's committed.
	"I lost my temper, Father. I swore. I wasn't wise with my money."
	"Never mind all that," the priest responds. "How come I see you in church every day from six until one?"
	"I'm praying, Father."
	"But you have a family, don't you?"
	"Yeah? So?"
	"Right. And who does all the work in the morning, while you're sitting here?"
	"My wife cooks breakfast. I tell her what to tell the farmhands. She looks after things until I get back."
	Father Dominic yawns contagiously. "Yeah, I know she tells the farmhands what to do. They come to confession as well. They tell me she does all the work. I hear you tried to keep your wife from the chicken eggs!"
	"Tried? I succeeded! You don't know her like I do, Father. She'll just sell them and blow the money on dresses or high-heeled shoes or something."
	Father Dominic sighs the only fresh air of the confessional. "For your penance I want you to stop sitting around on a pew all day and go do your duty. People have been seeing your wife around, selling eggs so she can put clothes on Tom."
	Tom's father steps out of the confessional before the priest finishes. The priest rips open the door and yells: "Nobody leaves the confessional before I'm finished!"
	"Screw you!" Tom's father shouts back. "I want a second opinion. Father Sinclair never talks to me that way! I won't stand for it!" He swings at the priest, who ducks and knocks him down with a flamboyant uppercut. Tom's father falls down and rolls slightly under a pew, where all the dust, pennies, and broken shoelaces collect.

	Tom wakes and crawls out from under the jacket, goes to the window, strains against it with all his baby fat. Tom rolls off the seat, under the steering wheel, grabs the safety brake release with both hands. The brake peddle disengages and kicks up. While the truck starts to roll, Tom climbs back up on the seat and, standing, grabs the steering wheel.
	The truck rolls down the hill, gathering energy. Tom's father exits the church at a gallop, blood dribbling from one eyebrow. His father stares back at the priest -- who's not raising his fist in anger anymore but in warning, and isn't yelling, "You get back here and finish your confession!" but rather, "Watch out for the truck, you fool!" The truck smashes him right in the chest and flings Tom's father into the nearby ditch; his head blacks out against a rock, and he experiences exactly that dumb darkness, where you don't have to know anything, especially yourself, that Father Dominic's so pissed off about losing. The truck plows into the dirt a few feet to his left. Tom's soft skull, not even fully grown together yet, connects with the windshield and it hurts. He tumbles onto the floor, howling.

	The doctors stick Tom and his father into the same hospital room -- his father in a full body cast, legs jacked up and swinging from various heights, Tom with a bandage wrapped around his head. "Don't suck your goddamn thumb," his immobile father shouts from his bed to Tom's. The boy sucks harder.
	Father Dominic visits the hospital, his face like a ladder towards the best vacuum outer space can offer. He speaks directly to Tom: "I don't think it's a good idea to kill your father, no matter how bad you want it. You've got no choice but to accept that you were unlucky enough to get plucked out of a good place and forced into birth. Now you have to make some kind of individual of yourself."
	Tom's father yells for the nurse, furiously ringing the bell they've given him. "Help! Nurse! This freak's talking to my son about killing me." He tries to move his legs, the pulleys and wires pop and stretch, sending his plaster-coated legs down to the sheets. He howls with pain.
	"You must stop being such an asshole," shouts Father Dominic at Tom's father. Tom sucks his thumb and watches the priest rush to the other bed. Tom's father struggles among tangles of wire and thread, flailing his casts around. Father Dominic grabs his heavy white arm and yells into his face: "You have to reform yourself, or your son's going to murder you!" The nurses and orderlies rush in, grab hold of the priest, who keeps raging: "Reform yourself! Mend your ways!" While they're dragging him from the room he turns back to Tom: "The place before conception is a beautiful place. I know that. You know that. You have to earn your way back there. Stop yourself from becoming. Be good!" And with a last kick, the orderlies bash his fingers from the doorframe and drag him out.

	Father Dominic gets certified crazy -- crazy from way back. His file shows how he talked to birds. "To budgies," he protests. "I was trying to get my budgies to speak." How he wouldn't bet on a coin toss because "I have perfect timing and I can catch it out of the air so heads always comes up." Searching his room in the rectory, they discover secret files, bank accounts, investments. Emeric's name comes up. They put the farmhand on the stand and make him swear on the Bible. All the gambling money went toward Father Dominic's plans for an institution serving the maladjusted needs of those who remember the "beforeworld, a time," Father Dominic's pamphlet describes as, "before the uniting of sperm and egg, when the self was one and whole, in a unity destroyed by contingencies of place, perception, conditioning and, most importantly, language." He has a list of correspondents all over North America. They give him years of electricity. When finished he is an upgraded, next-generation Frankenstein. He sits in a chair and stares at the wall, deactivated, waiting for commands. When the pastor tells him to set the table, he does it, no problem. He even starts chatting pleasantly when told to entertain the guests: "Nice weather we're having. Pretty nice cardigan you got there."

	Tom's father fails at tobacco, discovers Emeric and his wife in the hay, fires Emeric again, sells the farm, moves to Vancouver, and begins pushing a pencil around for a living.
	Tom probably takes Father Dominic's advice, because he talks more and more over the years, even going through a phase where he's impossible to shut up. He starts avoiding his father's rages the way his mother does. He never again tries to off the old man, either with a truck or by exciting a gaggle of geese into murder. Best of all, he begins to forget what it was like in that safe dark ignorant place that predates the womb, where he was happy before hitting the world.

When X Equals Marylou

	Confined to a white apartment, Henrik spends three lonely years writing a thousand stories. Needing a human voice, he turns on the radio, needing a face, the TV. The stories run to three or four paragraphs each, with titles like "A Bottle of Cash," "The Beekeeper's Apprentice," "The Erotic Acupuncturist," and occupy an entire notebook, but no matter how Henrik tries, the stories won't congeal -- won't add up -- and for two years more he chases the larger narrative until it eludes him in an ocean of rough drafts.
	In November someone burglarizes the apartment. The following February, police apprehend Manny, a street kid who, when not in custody or a foster home, sleeps in the security tunnels of a mall on the outskirts of Edmonton. For the record, Manny tells Henrik and the police that he gave the notebook to his ex-girlfriend, Marylou, whom he broke up with, in fact, because she was a reader; books bug Manny.
	The search begins for Marylou. Suddenly, there are hundreds of people to see: dealers, crack-heads, hookers, street kids, the city's roofless residents. Some of the street kids help each other out, some carry knives. It's time for Henrik to fall back on half-forgotten social skills. Twenty-five pounds of beer flab disappear from his midsection, along with the drinking habit that sustained them. Migraines arrive, dense and concentrated as radiation shields. Sleep catches him unawares, when it's least expected: behind the wheel, during an interview, while trying (unsuccessfully) to masturbate. The doctor assures him it isn't narcolepsy, just a recluse's schedule he's gotten used to: sleeping and eating whenever it feels right. "C'mon," Henrik says, "don't tell me it's normal to fall asleep while I'm masturbating?"
	The doctor shrugs. "Maybe you're trying too hard." But inside he's thinking: You know you're in trouble when you bore yourself in bed.
	After fruitless months, Henrik's agent, Nadine, says: "You must have other books planned?" But inside she's thinking: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
	"Yes," Henrik grumbles, sipping a double espresso, "but they're waiting in line. It's not that I don't want to move on; it's that I can't." Now Henrik's a liar, too.
	Nadine wishes he'd do for sales figures what he does for her blood pressure. "I've been more than patient, Henrik." She scowls. "It's been eight years since you started this book! You want another advance? Get me a manuscript!"
	Inside she's thinking: How come this never happens with the guys who write spy novels?

	A map of Edmonton spreads across the wall, its streets, buildings, monuments, and public spaces obscured by millions of coloured pins. "Are you still alive, Marylou?" Henrik asks the map, removing all the blue tacks over avenues where kids die every winter. They freeze, shedding degrees of body heat like skin cells. Snowdrifts tuck them in. They die in the steaming of laundromat ventilation ducts, icicles clicking on their bodies like castanets.
	He finds all of Marylou's discarded friends; most of them are ex-boyfriends like Manny, or like Frankie Malone, who accepts the coffee Henrik pays for, takes a bite from his first croissant ever. Frankie's glasses are missing a lens, but when Henrik offers to take him to an optometrist, the boy gets nervous. The invitation is just the sort of trick social services uses to lure you into their confidence; next thing you know, you're in a foster home (and foster homes, as Frankie now recalls, are a series of beatings, rope burns, and nights spent locked in a closet). He likes his glasses fine, thanks. Henrik hands him a fifty.
	"She went to Vancouver!" says Frankie. "Said she loved me. But she was too much, you know? All this weird shit always happening. I could tell you some stories!"
	"I'll bet you could," mutters Henrik.
	He remembers Frankie on the two-hour flight to Vancouver: the thin triangular face Henrik could write about for three more years and still miss the story. And somewhere in Edmonton the other lens cracks in Frankie's glasses, and he remembers Henrik.

	The room at the Hotel Vancouver costs more than the flight, but what a jolt, going from the ionized, Muzak-enhanced lobby to the lower east side's kiddie stroll, where child prostitutes, aged nine to eighteen, loiter on corners like public sculptures worn thinner with every season of rain. Henrik wades through parades of addicts yapping for change, scrapping over crack crumbs, and who ripped off who. Heroin trips them up. A woman injects smack, driving the needle through the upper of her shoe into the foot; she knows the map of her body's veins blindfolded. Henrik blows his last advance handing out twenties. Two winos bop each other in the head with empty plastic two-litre Coke bottles; they fence along sidewalks, bottles brandished like swords.
	A grubby, scabby fourteen-year-old, scavenging a jacket out of an Army & Navy dumpster, replies to his question: "Marylou Garvey? Sure, I know her. She's with Jank at the moment, conductor-man, runs an orchestra. Called A Function of X." A long, jagged scar runs from the corner of the boy's mouth halfway into the cheek.

	Henrik's handsome. Most of his curly hair has retained a lifetime grip on his scalp; it's just slightly grey. When age came, it etched corrective wrinkles into a face innocent and youthful to a fault. By the time Henrik hit forty, last year, strangers started smiling at him. They winked and let him get away with late charges on video returns, extra pounds in his luggage at the airport check-in, administrative exceptions without the correct paperwork. His grin became the universal ticket. So, although the sticker pasted over the band's poster says "Sold Out," the woman in the booth finds an extra ticket.
	The notebook is close now; its proximity depresses him. Finding it just means getting back to work.
	The promo leaflets piled on a vintage radiator by the coat-check promise a show of "jazz-metal." Entering the auditorium, he crashes through a wall of music. Screeches, wails, and feedback topple on him like bricks. The orchestra plays a dark brown, scarred, antique stage. Black velvet curtains flutter in the breeze of a smoke machine. Ultraviolet spotlights swarm over the band. The fans get an hour and a half of original tunes -- "Black and Bluebird," "Porn Show Credit Roll," "Story of a Lonesome Skinhead" -- blasted, wailed, and strummed from cracked woodwinds, tarnished brass, and loose six-strings. There are thirteen guys in A Function of X, thirteen tempos and styles, thirteen flies buzzing at thirteen different stages of dying on a sticky-strip. The drums are minimal -- a high-hat, two cymbals, bass, snare, and a conga. They play three sets each of saxophones, clarinets, and trumpets. The band veers from cacophony to cacophony, notes clattering in the air like iron birds.
	After the encore, Henrik strolls backstage, perfect grin in place, building confidence everywhere he beams it, and introduces himself with an expired press pass left over from his journalism days. "Oh yeah, writers are cool," replies Jank, a lean-faced impresario with sweat stains on the back and armpits of his cheap suit, and shadows swinging in the hollows of his cheeks. Jank cleans a conductor's wand with an old scrap of suede until, held up to the light, it sparkles. "So are you, like, thinking of doing an article on us?" Henrik nods, pulls out a pad of paper, takes down the pen placed strategically behind his ear a minute before knocking on the dressing room door.
	Halfway through the interview, with Jank relating tales of females, Marylou walks in -- torn cargo pants, frayed jean jacket under a puffy, down-filled coat open at the zipper, short spiky hair. Jank skips a sixteenth-note in his narrative to acknowledge her and then continues. "Hey, Jank! Remember me? Your girlfriend?" She brushes a kiss from her lips to his. Jank makes the gestural equivalent of "not now" and goes on: "You see, Henrik my friend, the ladies are, like, sick of punk rock, those boring beats and chords, the same shitty attitude on and off the stage. They like the big band thing. So do we." The rest of the thirteen just stand around, commiserate or shake their heads depending on how far their bandleader stretches the truth, but Jank barrels along regardless. He speaks in seamless sound bites, each one dreamed up and polished to perfection during those long hours touring provincial roads, making sure he'd be ready for future interviews.
	But when Marylou yells, she yells -- "You know what happened to me?" -- and everybody must listen. "You guys know the refinery? That pipe pouring yellow water out, that makes a whirlpool, bringing all that shit from the strait back to shore? There's these bottles there and sometimes there's notes inside. Me and Gavin went down there tonight. He's got a litre and we're sipping and checking out the bottles and know what?" Edward Gore (violin) snorts. "I'm serious, Ed. We found, like, two hundred dollars! So Gavin took me to the Crocodile." Marylou giggles. "They hated us in there, our clothes and hair and stuff, but we had the cash and you can't argue with that!" She lifts up her skirt to show how a normally slack and concave belly protrudes, swollen, when stuffed with food.
	"Man, Marylou, you've got horseshoes in your ass!" She smiles, hugs Jank, kisses his cheek; Jank barely accepts the affection before shaking her off and returning to Henrik, who flips the pad shut and shrugs. This treatment rankles Marylou, and she delivers Henrik the look of a rival, of a lover who's unable to compete with fame for a permanent place next to Jank in the warm bed she's slept in these past four weeks, heating a space reserved for the ladies who'll come after the band lands a recording deal. If only his place wasn't so superior to life on the street.
	"I've got to go," Henrik says. "Maybe I could see you play again?"
	"Well, we're in Victoria tomorrow night." Jank rubs the back of his head with the same hand that's holding a cigarette, and everyone, aware of the amount of airplane glue in that pompadour, steps back three to four feet. "Why don't you come along?" Jank looks up. "You could do an article about our life on the road!"

	The bus motors onto the ferry's lower car deck. Working past the rusty doors that no longer fold back properly, watching that last step to the iron decking, Hank Jones (1st bass) smacks against a sign that prohibits the transport of honeybees on ferries. Edward Gore (violin), the only band member with a post-secondary education (up to and including a half-finished PhD) checks out the sign alongside Hank, and then comments: "You know, my friend, if our world wasn't so hysterically fragmented and simulated, we'd actually be able to catch some of the foreshadowing that's, like, going on around us at all times." Hank's got no idea what Edward's on about, so he plays smart and keeps his reply to himself. The two musicians step onto the escalator.
	Henrik listens, jots down mental notes. Everywhere Marylou goes, she carries a small, worn leather backpack off one shoulder, a large square notebook-sized shape poking at the fabric, stretching it outward from within. Jank curls his lip like Sid Vicious whenever Marylou speaks of his apartment as their place, once even going so far as to remind her that she owns nothing, contributes zip to rent, and doesn't even clean or do dishes. "But I tell you stories," she says, "and then you write music." Jank scowls. He hasn't a clue as to what he's abusing in the effort to get to where Henrik is.
	After A Function of X, Henrik, and Marylou have slurped up fifteen clam chowders and ninety Premium Plus crackers, they settle into a game of crazy eights. The guys play like sharks, taking it that seriously, with poker faces, sideline bets, and low tolerance for wisecracks. So it's no surprise when Marylou, tired of Jank screwing her with a two or jack every time her cards get low, yells: "For fuck's sakes, guys, it's only crazy eights!" She throws down the cards and stomps off.
	"Aren't you going to go after her?" Henrik asks Jank.
	"Hey, I can't step out midway through a hand!"
	Styrofoam mugs go up and down from the orchestra's mouths. The shipboard intercom announces wallets found and license plate numbers for cars with their lights left on. Henrik excuses himself with a lame sentence about the men's room and walks off in search of Marylou.
	She's not on the lower or upper car decks. He stumbles outside, braced for wind and rain, lurches along the deck, gripping the railing and calling her name. On the sea, sunlight plays through the clouds, illuminating and skimming across patches of broken and jagged water. Finally, Henrik sees where someone's untucked the edge of a tarp fastened over a lifeboat. He tiptoes close, his footfalls lost amid the patter of rain and the horn's blowing as the ship enters a channel between the Gulf Islands. Marylou is singing from within: "Dancing city /now you're talking/but where's your soul/ -- you've a thousand faces/I'll never know" -- the tune and words to Roxy Music's "True to Life," a song Henrik used to like before most music got old, along with most artwork, most writing. He'd overdosed on culture in his loneliness, compensating for the lack of human contact with the little glow of life offered by art. And looking at Marylou now, he sees how tempting it all is. He sees how easy it would be to feed on the lives of these runaways, to steal their pain, their immediacy -- the way they gobble up food as soon as they get it, the way they find a better pair of shoes in a field and put them on right away, ass to the grass -- how the intensity of their moments might enter his writing without him ever having to set foot on a single one of their streets. Marylou pokes her head from under the tarp and they appraise each other. He smiles and retreats, desire in his throat like a chicken bone. And he'd always thought himself so ethical, but his craving is that of a man shut-up too long, a recluse who overstayed his isolation and did himself permanent harm.
	A woman's voice announces over the PA system, "We are now approaching Swartz Bay ferry terminal. All passengers, please prepare to disembark"; Henrik rejoins the band, pessimistic about Marylou coming back. Jeff Klugman (1st saxophone) recalls how a Vietnamese committed suicide by jumping off the upper deck a few years ago. "It's the motors," says Jeff. "You can't swim away from the boat. They suck you under. Mulch you up." Everyone except Henrik, but including Jank, laughs at this. They clamber aboard the bus and wait for the ferry worker's signal to go.
	Bighead Macintosh (2nd trumpet) takes out his horn after they've off-loaded into traffic and blows a slow, note-by-note lamentation that perfectly fits Henrik's frustration. Jank mutters about a "blue period" corning on, and everyone nods and sighs, because, as Edward explains to Henrik, a "blue period" means months of sad concerts where they play one long, muffled dirge after another -- Jank's darkest pieces, like "Interlunar Interlude," "Spider in the Drain," and "Blues, One Million Ten."
	Marylou strolls the sidewalk, knapsack dangling, turning now and again to squint and scan the convoy of traffic driving along the ferry's off ramp. They pull up alongside her and she refuses to get in. So crabby Jank jumps out and grabs her, shouting how she'll make them late for the show, how she should smarten up. "Where the fuck have you been?" he yells after pushing Marylou in through the sliding doors.
	"Don't yell at me! And what do you care anyhow?" Her eyes flash on Henrik before resuming their lock on Jank -- "It's not like you came to look for me!" The orchestra and Henrik peer from over and under various seats in the back of the bus.
	"So where were you?"
	"I was on the lower car deck." Bighead stops trumpeting. Jank pulls out a lighter and sparks up a cigarette. "Hey, it's not what you think, Jank." Marylou rolls her eyes and tells a story Henrik knows by heart.
	She descended to the lower car deck to have a smoke.
	"Lady, you're not supposed to smoke on the car deck." An old man got out of a van.
	"Mister," she responded, "it's 'fuck' and it's 'you.' Just put them together."
	"Now listen here, young lady."
	"Now listen here, old man." She mimicked his voice in a way that made him laugh.
	"You wanna know why I don't like the smoke?" He put a finger to his lips. The lower car deck's clank of machinery, smell of stove oil and steam, gongs and chirpings from the engine room were like the workings of an enormous iron heart. The atmosphere was pure nineteenth-century industrial: pistons and power, nuts and bolts, dangerous intermeshing of moving parts -- the surrounding architecture a ringing fifty-foot high cavern of I-beams, thick hoses, sheets of reinforced concrete. The sliding door of the van slipped open and Marylou pressed her eyeball to the crack; inside, she saw half a dozen wooden beehives. A loud buzz bounced off the alloy walls of the van, making it seem warm inside, glowing from the insect hum.
	"Are you sure it's the thrill of a lifetime'?" Marylou asked inside the van, finger on her shirt's last done-up button. The old man nodded. She finished stripping from the waist up. "Okay," said the old man. She felt sugary water drying on her skin, a stickiness near the joints. He delicately opened the drawers. Soon, bees covered her whole upper torso. Marylou laughed as they crawled up and down her breasts and neck, collecting the sugar off her skin. Eventually, the beekeeper opened the drawers and the insects flew back to their honeycombs, leaving Marylou cold. She replaced her shirt and thick cable-knit sweater.
	"He asked me to become his apprentice," Marylou smiles. 
	"Hold on," interrupts Jank. "You went to the lower car deck, got into some stranger's van, took off your shirt, and let a bunch of bees crawl all over your body?" Marylou nods. "Then the verdict is. . ." Jank pounds his fist on the dashboard like a gavel ". . . that you're a total idiot." Marylou's chin wobbles. "Don't look at me like that, Marylou; you know goddamn well you're an idiot." She settles into the chair with a wiggle, arms folded over her chest.
	"If I may say something," adds Edward. Everyone shifts their attention to him. Henrik closes his eyes, shakes his head, seeing how totally the stories belong to Marylou. Instead of feeling ripped off, he feels happy for her, happy that his stories have found a home. "Considering the illegality of transporting such. . ." Edward starts ". . . bees. (Note my earlier remark, Hank.) Considering also, Marylou, and no offence, some of the past stories you've told us. Considering also the context of this discussion (i.e., you two were fighting when last you saw each other). All these factors in mind, I -- a word to the wise, Jank -- would not be too concerned with the seriousness of Marylou's words."
	"Are you calling me a liar, Edward?" she shrieks, her big hands already in fists.
	"Uh, no," says Edward, scared. "I was speaking more, uh, statistically."
	"What's that supposed to mean?"
	"It means, Marylou," sneers Jank, "the odds of your story being true are, like, fractions."
	"Is that so?" The whole orchestra nods. "What do you think, Henrik?"
	"I believe you," he says, earnestly. Marylou smiles radiantly at the man, her teeth slightly blue (which is perhaps an effect of her aquamarine eyes); Henrik's passed the test.
	"Then you're the one who gets the gift." Marylou reaches into a pocket, extends her hand towards him, opening a fist to reveal fourteen dead bees for the orchestra's inspection. "That improve my odds any?" she asks.
	Henrik bursts out laughing. The orchestra falls silent, except for the in and out of breath and Jank's clean index finger squeaking as it writes in the steam on the window.

	Coming through Sidney, they stop at a McDonald's drive-thru and place so many orders the take-out girl gets confused; everyone starts laughing and they drown out Jank's corrections. It takes forever. Afterwards, Gaby Norton Pawlowksi (2nd bass) sparks up a joint, passing it round. Only Bighead and Henrik refrain. Marylou wishes she'd done the same, because the dope's so killer. She thinks that nobody believes her story about the bees, that a truth can become a lie in the form of its telling, and that fiction's ugly twin, untruth, is clinging to her like an evil baby who can't suck enough milk. A street kid's paranoia kicks in, and every word, every look from the orchestra, especially Jank, spells abandonment; so she waits, waiting for the bus to stop, for the boys to kick her out on some roadside; she's afraid to get out and go to the bathroom when they stop at a gas station because they might leave without her. Four weeks is definitely too long for Jank not to have fallen in love with her; by that time any other guy would have. Jank just loves her stories, and not even those so much anymore. Rain spatters against the windshield, one for each note played by Duke Ellington's Orchestra on the dashboard CD. The bus passes a mound of seashells piled by a roadside shanty with a sign, "Shellfish for Sale," tacked to its weather-beaten door. A pier extends over miles of mudflats at low tide.

	Arriving at Victoria's Cross and Arms, she flops on the bed. The dope stone subsides. Jank applies make-up while humming the prototype of a tune that will evolve -- long after Marylou's moved on -- into a song called "The Beekeeper's Girl." After Jank leaves for the sound-check Marylou turns out her pocket onto the bed, spilling a handful of yellow jackets. She unzips the knapsack, thinking of Henrik and his commitment to the story, wondering about the man. She pulls out plastic bags, each one filled with different articles -- buttons, chicken bones, pieces of polished jade, a voodoo doll, vintage hockey cards, a sloughed-off snakeskin -- until finding one that says "Bumblebees" on the tab, into which she slips the insects' corpses.
	The rest of her possessions fall from the knapsack: socks, panties, bra, pants, T-shirt, a sweater -- enough clothes for an overnighter. Finally, she peels the cloth knapsack from around a large, hard-bound artist's sketchbook, takes a pen from the hotel room nightstand, leafs to a story, "The Beekeeper's Apprentice," and scrawls in the margin beside it, "Jank, November 3, 1998." There are several names there already. She scans the pages to find a story for tonight.

	A Function of X plays to a capacity crowd. Jank windmills in front of the band, baton waving like a droopy stick of licorice. The band wears the suits Marylou painted with fluorescent hieroglyphics; they turn and gyrate, flashing a hundred signals from ancient Egypt. The music pours from their horns like tap water. The crowd tries to dance but ends up moshing. Henrik sits in the back, behind Marylou, his perfect platonic love. She's rows ahead, knapsack over a shoulder, head tilted in the direction of the speakers. Over on the stage, Jank bends low, flings sweat to either side with a shake of the head, springs into the air, arms and legs to either side, brings the conductor's wand up as he hovers, and then tucks it into his stomach upon landing, which coincides with the closing note. Intermission is announced.
	The girl beside Marylou is brushing her hair. Marylou turns and says, "That's my boyfriend up there conducting."
	"Wow. He's like so hot. I hear he likes groupies, too." 
	"Bitch!"
	Marylou grips the other girl's face and climbs on top; nails tear into flesh, rip out an earring, pull up chunks of hair. The girl smacks Marylou's face with the bristles of her brush. They roll off the bleachers into a crowd of guys snorting coke, scattering the stash everywhere. Marylou rides it out, stays above, pounds the back of the girl's head into the floor tiles. The coke guys pull them apart. Marylou scrams to the bathroom, wipes her face carefully, checking a battered reflection in a mirror flecked with suds and spit.
	Henrik waits by the yellow, peeling door to the women's washroom, leans against the wall. A neon beer sign flickers by the makeshift bar. He tries to guess which story she'll use.
	Marylou goes from the bathroom straight backstage, a no-nonsense walk that takes her by Henrik without noticing him. He follows to the swinging doors where he stops to eavesdrop and spy through the Plexiglas window.
	"What the hell happened to you?" Jank asks, running a towel around his neck in the dressing room, the stub of a roach on the edge of his chapped lower lip.
	"I made a mistake, Jank."
	"No kidding." He steps back from her, worried about blood on his suit, about the latest shit she's in, how her constant adventures tire him. It's inspiring, but also an incredible pain and worry that Jank would rather miss.
	"I needed to go outside, Jank," says Marylou. "Get some air. It was so smoky in there." She snags the towel he tosses her and spins the yarn.
	Since the concert hall neighboured Chinatown, Marylou crossed the street for cultural reasons. Paper lanterns dangled from the awning of a twenty-four-hour corner store. Barbecued ducks hung from hooks in butchers' shops. Men and women played mah-jong in second story balconies. The labels on cans stacked in the windows of local stores showed pictures of exotic fruit.
	Large red Chinese characters covered a lit window of a shop just off Fan Tan Alley. The door stood slightly ajar. Marylou stepped into a room containing a secretary's desk and filing cabinets. She parted the heads hanging from a doorway into the white treatment room. An old shrivelled Chinese man in a white lab coat slept on a chair. His snores rattled the canisters and vials in a wooden cabinet beside the bed. The old man held the end of a scroll that had fallen and unrolled along the floor. Marylou gently took the end from him and spread out the seven feet of brittle paper. The scroll contained thirty drawings of a human face, each stuck with a different constellation of acupuncture needles; beneath, and corresponding to, each of these sat a smaller drawing of a man and woman in various sexual positions. Chinese characters ran in thick strips along the top and bottom margins.
	"Mrs Manson?" The physician's voice startled her; she fell from her haunches to her ass. He squinted through rheumy eyes. "I dream you not come. Good dream, good dream." He sighed, helping Marylou onto the bed. "But I keep my part of deal; you keep yours, eh?" His hand scrounged in a pocket for a bunch of needles.
	("I was scared," she says to a sneering Jank.) 
	The first needle went under the skin above her eyebrows and caused a tingling in Marylou's groin. "For this: blood," the physician said, his voice steeped in guilt, this forbidden art amounting to a betrayal of his vocation, a misuse of it -- bloodletting being the opposite of acupuncture. Needle after needle went in until, pattern achieved, sweat-drenched and convulsive, Marylou orgasmed. The physician sat back in the creaky chair, staring through Marylou, fat tears streaming down his face. She plucked the needles out and wiped the blood away. The physician buried his face in his hands.
	Jank pushes Marylou so hard she stumbles and falls. "You expect me to believe that? You just want me to worry about you all the time!" Jank's biggest fear, more than anything to do with her settling into his apartment (which he can always vacate), is Marylou taking permanent residence in his head.
	Bighead comes into the room: "Jank, man, you're wanted."
	Jank scowls at her as he goes out. "But Jank. . ." she begs. He shakes her off, twitches his conductor's baton, and jumps out stage left in front of the band. The crowd screams. Marylou collapses into the couch. She frenzies, whips out the notebook, and begins smashing it against the edge of the table, pulling up, slamming down, over and over, then just whips the book backhand, like a Frisbee, away from herself; it skates along the floor to stop at Henrik's feet.
	He picks it up. Marylou turns to face him from the couch. "I believe you," he says, resisting an urge to flip through the book to note the boys' names inscribed by his stories, Marylou's annotations finally providing that thousand and first narrative he'd agonized over, despaired at ever finding. He stands there thinking of the trust required before a stray lets you get near enough to help. Though Henrik rejects the idea of epiphanies, he suddenly acquires a truth: he needs to hear the stories from Marylou. This is narcissism, this craving: to have the world throw his stories back at him, improved out of all comparison with the original.
	Marylou crouches on the couch, arms and legs drawn to her chest in a position of potential. He wants to tell her how he killed the muse by neglect, by denying it access to life, to the people, places, and experiences needed to replenish it; instead, he locked himself up and wrote and wrote until his reservoirs of material and emotion ran dry. He'd like to say he wants no muse, that he never believed in it from the start, putting faith in hard work over inspiration. But the contrariness of these two statements silences him. Henrik shrugs, raising his eyebrows to Marylou, and then hands the notebook back, not because he wants her to have it but because it's hers, because she authored it. Henrik knows he's starting wrong, but he starts anyway: "After ten novels," he wets his lips, "words lose that 3D feeling." He stops, licks his lips. After a minute, Henrik starts again.

Red Love

	My immigrant grandmother bestowed her good drugs upon me just to show she loved me most. When I visited her I often toked up strutting along the sidewalk to the hospital, blithe and clear as a gentlemanly stroller. Five months pregnant, my wife was processing our second child, like mail order. She said, "I'm going to give you another baby," like saying, "No refund." During the first pregnancy she stopped indulging in drinks and drugs during gestation, but the second one was an accident she didn't care to cherish. We kept at the booze, inhaling and washing down all manner of narcotics, falling over the furniture, giggling like little boys, waking the baby and then arguing -- until my wife got too rotund to manipulate; then we called some of my music students over, watched videos and drank immaturely.
	After they left I'd put my nose to the rug, rooting for dropped coke like a Russian boar. I'd wring out bottles of scotch, lick residue off cooled hot knives. Then I'd sit and mark some essays. When the words began to shift -- when "Bach's cello tunes are too tranquilizing" became "Back to chewing two tranquilizers" -- I'd flip to the last page and assign a grade based on what drugs the student had supplied; quality, quantity, price -- my kind of bell curve. When the stuff was free they got an A.
	And when there were no drugs around I didn't assign grades at all.

	One day the school board phoned to say they'd found me unethical. The next morning, I took a Walkman to Grandmother's bedside. Her three grandkids were on a rotation: each of us was obliged to visit her every third day. My brother, sister, and I thought this the best schedule, since it was the least company we'd have to keep her. We all had money to make, lives to work on.
	Three days. Sometimes it seemed like an eternity. Sometimes I was carefree, nicely supplied. Sometimes I had the shakes, and couldn't wait.
	I'd play Mascagni's intermezzo through the headphones to her on the deathbed. Too bad I got high beforehand, because I might have understood the experience. It was as if the music delayed her death for a couple of hours more. She forgot all spectres. "The most beautiful night of my life," she'd say. "The most beautiful man." Her face, changed by the music, always gave me the crawlies. But she just slammed death into its cupboard like a wooden monkey, and smiled at the night. "Good music can keep death slow," she'd say, in the mother tongue, Hungarian.

	Like stories, my grandmother's life had high points, separated by decade-long chasms. I'd say "climaxes" instead of "high points," but that suggests orgasms. Orgasms played no part in Grandmother's life. 
	The intermezzo from Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana figured largely in Granny's good times. You must understand what that piece of music represents. You can revile opera and still appreciate the piece. Scorcese did it best. I'd show my students Raging Bull and play the opening where DeNiro, bouncing on his toes, warms up in the boxing ring. Imagine it: boing, boing, up and down, fists jabbing in slow-mo, while the auditorium roils silently around, a black and white mulch of cigar-chomping bitches and frail bastards with umbrellas. But DeNiro blinks their funny faces away. What concerns the boxer also concerned -- no joke -- Mascagni when he dredged the only piece of genius from his mediocre soul: the fighter (in this case, Grandmother) alone in the ring is at once adversary and defender.
	Sometimes you hold your own hand. Sometimes you punch yourself in the mouth.

	"How's Milly, Istvan?"
	"Milly's good," I said, "the last time I saw her."
	"And the baby?"
	My grandmother didn't know about the second pregnancy. "Nagyi," I said, "do you think I could borrow some more of those pills? I still have that pain in my neck." I craned my head this way and that, showing off bulging tendons, my veins, and stress.
	The farce in your neck, her expression as much as said. "I don't have any more. I gave them all to you before."
	I got up, started rummaging in her bathroom's cabinet, spilling containers into the sink, checking them anyhow. I usually jammed anything fun into my pockets, but the prescriptions that day gave no hope. If only my students could have seen me. I sweated in an offhand way. "There's nothing there," she yelled. "You took it all last time." I came out before the nurses heard her. Then she started telling her love story.
	Piling my posture into a chair, holding it hurtfully straight, I wondered if the government had a program for people like me, and why I wasn't on it; not that I minded relying on the old notion of family ties. At times, I thought, strangling her would be easier, but too often my hands didn't work; and when they were capable of encircling her neck, and exerting the required pressure, I didn't want her dead. It was an addict's paradox.

	Grandmother began.
	"I loved my adultery. The church let me separate, but no divorce. You know why I left your grandfather? Because of his sins. Not making enough, hitting me, taking food from my children, being selfish. Such a boring man in bed! But I never made love to anyone else. No. No place to go except in alleys on the lids of garbage cans and I wasn't raised in the military mansions of Vienna to act like a prostitute. I never made love to any of my cavaliers."
	"Dudes," I said to her, "call them dudes, please. Are you sure you don't have any more drugs?"
	"The doctor is a Jew," she said, dismissively. "You know how Jews are."
	"That's racism!" I tried to smother the anger. "You Austrian!"
	"I'm not an Austrian!" she screeched.
	"Sure you are. You were born in Vienna."
	"Capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire! My parents were both Hungarian. You don't know how big a Hungarian I am!"
	"Okay, okay, don't get excited, Nagyi." Anything to extract even the smallest dosage out of her. "Go on."

	She went, as usual, into the highlight of the highlights -- with factual overtones.
	"He was like a Hungarian Errol Flynn."
	"Don't you mean Rudy Valentino, Nagyi?"
	"Too girlie," she said tartly. "Errol Flynn was man enough to not be a homosexual on screen."
	"What do you mean? Man enough!" I got indignant all over.
	"Just listen," she said, and I did not want to get into another argument that would end with her comparing contemporary society to the Roman Empire in decline.

	The guy looked like Errol Flynn -- the kind of man who refuses to be photographed unless he could put one foot up on a chair and lean forward, both arms on the knee, flashing a grand piano's worth of white teeth.
	He'd married long before. My grandmother and he met in cafés or echoing train stations. They'd clasp, kiss, and blab their private feelings. He wore eau de cologne. She managed a bath. The conductor stood in the background, his red hat and armband the only colour around. A local busker, head pointing down, his back to a pillar, would be grating a favourite off the fiddle strings.
	They met in her workplace. He was inspecting it for some communist council. Delving into their political integrity. From the gold of his tie clip, she could tell he was into socialism for the bucks. The people in the office shoved one another aside to greet him affably, but Nagyi refused to shake the Soviet puppet's hand. He kissed her on each cheek anyhow, saying: "From each according to his means to each according to her needs." Then he walked off haughtily. Hate purred inside Nagyi.
	My grandmother slept on her desk some nights. Her mother looked after the four children. She got paid extra for overtime and always accepted the hours. The forms, their duplicates, the carbons, and ledgers made splendid bedding. She had a beat-up crucifix in her pocket.
	Then one of the kids caught a cold that worsened seriously. The doctors told her only a caustic mixture of honey and lemon juice would scrape the phlegm from her daughter's windpipe. At that time, Hungary didn't have any honey or lemons among its commodities. She wept to the drivers working at the transport company. The next day she woke to a pot of honey between her legs.
	"Those whole-hearted proles!" she said, still astounded. 
	I snapped back, distracted, from where I'd been examining her night table drawer, clean of even a stray capsule. "Oh yeah?" 
	She shook her head. "I can't help you, Istvan." 
	I crossed my arms and rubbed my shoulders. I was living in two kinds of time: a present defined by want, a future defined by disaster. Combined, they left me no time to consider the past, to gather its lessons.
	"You need to take care of yourself," she said, reaching towards my face.
	"The story," I said, recoiling, and gripping the ends of my shirt sleeves and pulling them down.
	"Something's wrong with work, isn't it? With Milly." 
	"Just go on with it!" I shouted, sociopathically, hunkering down in the chair again. "Or give me what I want," I murmured, the words snagging in my teeth like flies. She pulled her hand back to her mouth, looked to the side, brushed away some hairs fallen into her eyes. When she went back to speaking, she was quieter, subdued, unwilling to look at me.

	There were two lemons as well. A tag attached to them said: Marxism is the opiate of the working class (but tell anyone I said that and I'll deny it). "Normally I wouldn't have taken a fillér from him. But anything, anything for my children."
	She could build him from sound. That's my metaphor. But she said his leather soles pattered in a distinguished way, and from that sound she guessed the shape of his feet, the roundness of ankles, thin, bone-fronted shins, thick thighs, cock, gut, chest, neck, head. So she materialized him from the floor up with her back turned, by relying on sound over sight. Spinning away from him she stripped everything off as it had gone on, until his footsteps faded away. 
	But they kept being on the same streets. 
	After she took the lemons the debt owed became a relationship. The nurses mixed the honey and lemon juice, heated them over low flame and spoon-fed it to her daughter. The syrup scoured out the phlegm. Grandmother started saying hello to him. Going out for lunch.

	The school board wanted to see me for "fraternizing" with the students. So they saw me. Then they decided to hold a hearing.
	"Your present wife was once a student of yours, wasn't she?" the vice-principal asked me. She jotted down my answer, paused, amended her shorthand, read it to herself. Then she looked at me, pushed the frame of her glasses up her nose, and said: "We are aware of the date on the marriage certificate and when she dropped out." She wrinkled her nose. "Just as we are aware of allegations circulating when she was still your pupil." The vice-principal did not note my next response. "We are aware," she went on, changing the subject, "that, since your employment here, you have been arrested, but not charged, for narcotics-related activities, once concerning trafficking. . . Yes, I know. The point is that two of those 'supposed' arrests were in the company of present and former students of yours. Now," she folded her hands and the committee leaned forward with her, "we have a reputation. . ."
	They wanted to see me again today. I decided to go to Grandmother's and get the kind of aid that comes first.

	"He took me to his home one night," Grandmother sighed. On the balcony he pulled a silver whistle from his pocket and blew it without a sound. The dogs in the street, for miles, wouldn't let up barking.
	"A real master of the pack," I snickered, checking my watch, noting the hour between now and soon. "I don't have all day, dear Nagyi."
	I tried to be sweet, and I tried to make my tremors and spasms appear intentional. When my head snapped to the side I'd complete the motion, like someone suspicious of rats. When my arm went straight I'd windmill it up and around to scratch the small of my back. When my elbow clamped shut, I'd raise my watch, over and over again.
	The whole time I looked like a man being repeatedly struck by lightning.

	"What's the rush?" she asked.
	"I have an appointment."
	"Why are you so sweaty?"
	"I'm hot." I spoke like talking lard. She could hear everything, even with Mascagni crashing through the earphones. "Can't you help me?"

	"He was dignified, but not a snob," she said.
	He could drink. Drink it all. In fact, he slammed palinka with a half-gypsy lounge pianist and Holocaust survivor called Rudy. After one such night he went home, took one of his wife's furs, showed up at my grandmother's place, tears in his eyes, promising a divorce. She told him he'd wake the children. "Go home. Don't make love to your wife," she instructed. He promised and walked home, placing his dress shoes in one wheel rut on the road, the mink coat the party had confiscated from the former elite dangling off his arm.
	"His wife was human too," Grandmother said, reaching forward to put her hand on my forehead. "You have a fever. Milly doesn't cook well. Not like me."
	"Milly orders fine food, Nagyi. . ."
	She shook her head. "He told me his wife fed him grapes on their honeymoon in the Bulgarian resort. Seedless grapes," she intoned. "A delicacy! She was too human to know you pay for subservience twice," my grandmother pontificated. "I hated that woman."
	I pulled her hand off my forehead. "Please, Nagyi? I promise I'll listen to the whole story if you give me something now."
	"I didn't kiss him back for months."

	She let him slobber his lips over hers, sloppily for someone so debonair, but didn't help him make it. "Return my mouth to me," he told her one night along Andrassy Boulevard, beside the neo-classical mansions of an era consigned to ideological quarantine. So she kissed him right. He whispered afterwards: "Workers of the world unite!"
	Coming to and from work, passersby stared at her. Not cowed by notions of secret police surveillance, she twirled every time someone in a black suit with a notepad went past. She'd heard of Siberia. The guys in trench coats kept copying down their notes. Often those certain footsteps approached, only to waver off when government agent look-alikes showed. But his footsteps always returned, closer.
	They offered her a promotion if she joined the party. She told them she couldn't miss Sunday mass. They decreased her pay, put some incompetent in the position feathered for her. She didn't help her blacklisting by standing at a compulsory workers' meeting, after the boss proclaimed Communism the peak of human accomplishment, and asking: "If it's the peak then how come the Austrians live better than we do?" She left to find other labour. 
	"Stinking Slav atheists," she said.
	I raised my eyes to the heavens, my body waxy as a side of bacon. "Are you sure? Haven't they prescribed marijuana for your glaucoma?"
	"No. You're sick, Istvan." She leaned forward and took my fallen hand. "You have to get better. You have to stop."
	I dragged my hand to my chest. "I have problems, Nagyi."
	"I have a pill," she said, raising a capsule between her thumb and forefinger, into my light.
	I prepared to pounce.
	"No, no, no," she stuttered, distraught for me. "What am I doing?"
	"Tell me the rest of the story," I whispered, pouring honey into her ears.

	Red wine gave him red, itchy bumps under the armpits.
	He kept drinking anyhow -- not only depressed from lack of consummation but because the higher-ups had "accidentally" put him on a list of questionable softies, whose number had increased, threatening the party and state. He didn't know who'd labelled him but he signed everything -- every retraction, every oath, every character assassination against his colleagues -- hoping for reprieve -- as if cynicism was a tool he could pick up and put away.
	He and Rudy wallowed in sorrow the night the party notified him of their concerns for his health, of their suggestion he go to Russia for medical treatment. Rudy sat by the piano and played Claire de Lune. Such decadent music had been forbidden, but now, with the verdict, who cared? "No more of that fucking Shostakovich," he told Rudy. The two of them laughed until Rudy, grabbing the bottle by the neck, broke it over the piano keys. Red wine seeped between the ivories.
	"When's your flight?" Rudy asked. But Errol Flynn put on his hat and lurched out.
	He had tickets to Cavalleria Rusticana that night on Margit's Island. Grandmother found him morose when he picked her up, but she didn't ask about it. The opera took place in an outdoor theatre. The crowd flexed and wobbled a million tuxedos and gowns. As the Easter Chorus came on she snuggled under his tense arm and they floated, his cheek against her head.
	During the intermezzo two men appeared in the aisle and whispered something to Errol Flynn, who was nodding before they finished. The two agents went out before them. He took Grandmother by the arm to the back of the theatre, told her to go home, and goodbye. "Why?" she asked, totally naïve.
	"I've been recalled by the state. I'm politically defective. They're going to take my health into their own hands."
	She put her arms around him. "It was me, wasn't it? You tell them this for me," she said. "Will you?" He nodded. "Bread and land are not the same as happiness."
	The intermezzo played and she grabbed for him. A minute of their time went past.
	"I wish we could have made love just once," he said. "I guess we didn't have the means."
	"Or the needs," she replied.

	"I left in '56," she said, rolling the pill in her palm, almost hypnotizing me. "Some of us were leftover Nazis, some Orthodox Christians, some of us just plain."
	Some who beat their wives, I thought, some who slapped their husbands, some who kept Daddy's little girls and Mommy's little boys -- nobody unblemished or divine. "Were there even dissidents named Igor?" I asked, eager to humour her.
	"We baked someone a birthday cake after we got over the border," she said.
	"Nagyi," I lifted my watch again, but didn't check the position of the big and little hands, "I have to go in two minutes."
	"I have never been as happy." She looked out the window, one face in an appendix to the anti-Communist martyrology, a book whose main pages are compiled with those who stayed to die, strewn with lips that defied, limbs that didn't goose bump at threats, resolute brain matter.
	"They're all dead," she affirmed.
	Then she took the pill, held it out, and pushed it down onto my outstretched tongue.

In Embers

1.
	When Cassandra was growing up, there was a room that was never referred to, neither by her mother, who'd look away when her husband rose from the table, nor by her father, who'd just say, "I've work to do," and disappear behind a door at the end of the hall.
	It became Cassandra's desire to get behind the locked door and find out why her mother always yelled, "You think studying is going to make it better?" when her father came to bed at three AM, both parents thinking their daughter long asleep. She couldn't understand the silences between them, her father fidgeting after dinner (this was long before the word "bibliophile" entered Cassandra's vocabulary) and then, angry from denying himself, storm off to "the room." Cassandra would help collect the dishes and then watch her mother wash them, plate by plate, gazing into the window over the sink while night pressed in from the other side.
	And when she stayed up late, hiding under the table set into the hallway alcove, she noticed how her father was growing paler and paler, in anticipation of the day he'd take on the colour of air and vanish altogether.
	At twelve, a friend showed Cassandra how to pick locks with a hairpin, and so she entered the room one afternoon while her father was at work at the university. The room seemed larger from the inside. All four walls were covered to the ceiling in shelves crammed end to end with books layered in dust. By a desk stood a chair, well-worn and creased, its leather rubbed to suede in places. The top was bare except for the imprint where her father must have put his feet up. The drawers contained nothing.
	She turned to the shelves next, pulling out books at random and sneezing at the dust that flew into her face, opening covers, hoping to find something other than print: a pressed rose, saved letters, a list of priorities. But she found nothing, neither in the books, nor in the wall behind the shelves -- no secret compartments or doors, nothing to suggest this room allowed her father a better life away from his family.
	(Later, Cassandra would try to remember if there was anything at all in the room to suggest why her father might have preferred it -- a stash of love-letters, pornography, drugs, anything she might have overlooked -- but there were no clues.)
	So what was this place? As she returned again and again, twisting the hairpin in the lock, it seemed as if the library was an extension of her parents' silence; it became the thing about which they would not speak; and then it became the centre of what she could not know about them. Then the hours in the room turned delicious, tantalizing moments close to the mystery. And, finally, Cassandra turned her attention to the books themselves, thinking that what her mother and father wouldn't tell her was here, somewhere in the print.
	But as she read, she grew confused. There was too much knowledge. There were too many approaches to the same subjects: God, life, the world. Half of what she read seemed incomprehensible (at moments like that she felt she was at least on the right track, proceeding into the mystery), and the other half seemed obvious, unimportant. As she grew older the number of books she didn't understand diminished and the number of books she did increased. The room had become banal.
	And when her parents divorced and Cassandra and her mother found a new home, what she missed most were the days before she'd learned the trick with the hairpin. When she thought of her father -- now disappeared, elsewhere -- she missed the locked door.

2.
	Charlie Westmoreland, on the other hand, was an accessible man. He was up from New York, a visiting professor. The graduate students called him "Alphabet Veins" because he could take questions from any angle -- Poststructuralist, Psychoanalytic, Marxist -- and absorb them seamlessly into the flow of his lecture. Cassandra imagined piercing his flesh and getting a red stream of text.
	She would cock her head at him from one end of the seminar room during his course on "The Metaphysical Detective Story." She was preparing a thesis on Borges and Auster, and finally asked Charlie to sit in on her committee.
	He never made a move to jump the table between them during her visits. By then, of course, she was in love with his library, which she'd seen on the many occasions when she went to discuss her thesis, the ceiling of the office supported by solid columns of books.
	After Cassandra graduated -- and was at last on the outside of those professor/student restrictions -- she sent him a pince-nez, a symbolic gesture that said: you should get out more. Then came the regular visits, on campus and off. She bought him shirts because the ones he wore were ink-stained. She bought wine.
	Their term for it became "office sex" -- their secret -- her arm sweeping the papers and books off the surface of the desk.
	When there were three days left in the visiting professorship, he begged her, "Come to New York."
	"No," Cassandra shook her head, ponytail wagging. "You stay here. You know they'd love to have you." They did.

	Marriage came next. The minister had little to say, so it was over in fifteen minutes on the cliffs of East Sooke Park, pet students and some faculty in attendance. The two of them went home to a living room packed solid with texts. "I thought you had a lot of books before," she said.

	For six months of her pregnancy Cassandra got lost in Boccaccio, checking translations against the original, but it didn't seem the proper reading material for a pregnant woman. She switched to Jane Austen the way smokers change cigarette brands, hoping the new type will cure the addiction.
	Charlie was convinced she'd made the change just to infuriate him. "Why are you reading that? You hate Jane Austen."
	"You don't understand."
	"No, I understand."
	Mostly, she sat staring at the other books in their library, Pride and Prejudice splayed, face down, on one of her knees.

	After Melinda's birth, Cassandra was transfixed by Charlie's classics, turning through Pliny's nature, or confirming reality via Aristotle, rereading chapters of Heroditus. The baby's cries and screams faded to silence as she walked the ruins of classical texts, thinking of articles she'd planned and neglected. Cassandra began to write again, figuring out what it was she wanted to say in the very act of putting down the words, though the moment her meaning came clear she always lost interest.
	Charlie read the rough drafts. They were great. What worried him, instead -- coming home at six PM, his eyes bleary from bad undergraduate sentences -- was the baby's cry, so loud it hit him in the driveway. Inside, he'd find Cassandra nesting in piles of papers and books. She was distracted, wrote notes on matchbook covers, napkins, her skin, whatever was available when inspiration came. She wore an old pair of varsity shorts. And there were two circles of moisture over her nipples where excess breast milk leaked through her shirt. In the bedroom was a hungry, unclean baby testing her lungs' capacity for distress.
	They talked enough to fill volumes. "Why not continue with your studies, Cass? We can hire a nanny, a maid, a cook. Whatever you want."
	"No," she said. "I want to be a mother. I want to know it."
	So Charlie substituted for mother when Cassandra wasn't looking. She saw him growing ragged, but couldn't figure out why. He hardly slept. He mixed formula while Cassandra studied. He cuddled Melinda when the teething started and Cassandra was out attending public lectures. But he couldn't be there twenty-four hours a day.
	Cassandra could write motherhood down. Diapers. Tolerance. Affection. And that's just what she was working on when Charlie came home. "I was just looking into Cixous," she said, holding up a mint edition -- she took such care with books -- of The Newly Born Woman, "for a personal essay on motherhood." She used those very words -- diapers, tolerance, affection -- as subheads in a project she spoke to Charlie about in a quiet moment. These words were as foreign to her as Boccaccio, and so she loved them.
	There were snatches of peace, relaxation. Charlie never got tired of talking to Cassandra, late at night, when exhaustion gave way to insomnia, when their arguing was done for the day. And there was his body, inexhaustible to her, yielding new information every time she bent to it. There was a simple devotion between them. After the day-to-day complexity of staying in intellectual style, keeping up with academia's kaleidoscope of fads, Charlie liked simple things, the little flourishes: him untying her shoes and washing her feet while she explained a thesis; her tucking a napkin into his collar, smoothing it against his food-stained shirt; laughter.
	But because insomnia is contagious, because you can catch it from touching the beds of sleepless men and babies, Charlie would sometimes find her awake at three AM, out in the library, stalking knowledge through printer's ink. He'd ask Cassandra again: "Don't you want to go back to school?"
	"Am I not doing a good job with the baby?"
	"Better. You're doing better," he'd say.

	When it ended, Cassandra was sitting in front of the fireplace counting non-stressed syllables in an Elizabethan drama she wanted to prove was structurally indeterminate (as much to herself as the rest of the scholarly community). She took notes, tiny and precise, on a piece of loose-leaf.
	When arriving home, Charlie, by training, always checked first on Melinda. He found the baby drenched and feverish. The window was open. This was a night of horizontal rain; it blew right in, sideways. Charlie lifted his daughter, inhaling and exhaling with a colicky rasp, stripped off the soaked pyjamas, and wrapped her in the zippered cardigan Cassandra had taken off and left in the room, before opening the window for a blast of fresh air.
	"You left the window open!" he said, already in the vestibule, getting his jacket back on. Though his voice was measured, sea-calm, he wouldn't let Cassandra touch the baby. "No, no." He twisted away from her, grabbed his keys. "How can you be so ignorant of what's going on? Huh?"
	"I just don't know how to do it," she murmured. "It's beyond me."
	"You want it to be beyond."
	This was the only wrong thing she'd ever remember him saying. Meanwhile, shadows of fire gyrated on the wall, in a ballet so different from the one she and Charlie and Melinda enacted that it only reminded Cassandra of how many stories there were other than theirs, stories with more enigmatic parts for them to play. She backed against the chimney, grabbed the fire poker.
	"I'm going, Cassandra. Any situation is better for Melinda than this one." The poker swished centimetres above the rug, like a putter. "You may not know now," he said. "Not now. But later. You'll know. . ."
	"Get the fuck out," she whispered, the poker swinging.

	Charlie left the door open, and invited the hurricane in. It pulled pictures off nails, pulled the nails out of the walls. It threw vases and glasses off shelves, upended chesterfields, easy chairs, beds. Mirrors shattered under the air pressure. And Cassandra walked through the damage as it happened, her shirt and skirt ripping out of their hooks and buttons, winging off her body, broken glass and cutlery swirling around her. She crawled through the dying winds to sit in the centre of it. To her, it was all happening so that later, in the morning, when Charlie called, she'd present the perfect image of a broken woman: sitting cross-legged in a bra and underwear, on top of sharp debris that cut into her thighs, her hand lifting the receiver.
	Seagulls cried in the background of Charlie's telephone call. A train whistled. "I wanted to say I'm sorry."
	"My father never really disappeared, Charlie. He died, you know? My parents, they were protecting me."
	"Look, Cassandra. . ."
	"It's not okay, Charlie."
	But when she got off the phone, dressed, and began immediately clearing out the broken junk, sipping a beer as she went along, the neighbours saw only a quiet, industrious woman carrying garbage bags to the curb. Turning, Cassandra saw the elderly couple on their porch and waved to them, smiling and tucking loose hairs behind her ears, making a show of the work by pumping her elbows and walking hips first.
	The hurricane hadn't touched the library.

3.
	One of the few PhD students Cassandra likes is Maxfeld Johnstone, also one of the few other over-thirty, "mature" students in the program. She's slept with him. Cassandra can still see herself, naked, in a leather swivel chair, jamming her bare feet between the ribs of the old-fashioned radiator to heat them. The chair creaked on its castors. And Maxfeld made a comment about her body, which looked, to him, "really muscley." It was admiration, but she'd responded like this: "Max, don't you think we should start acting our designation?" He looked quizzical. "I mean, like 'mature students.' " After all, they'd gotten drunk last night in the student pub and picked each other up -- as if he were a frat boy and she a co-ed, all of twenty-one -- then traipsed home to a bit of dry, droopy sex followed by a drunken coma. "I mean, I can't remember the last time I was hungover." In an hour she'd gotten into his shower, even let him wash her down, but then she was gone.
	Right now they're at a lecture called: "The Bibliography of Desire: The Lost Manuscripts of the Library of Alexandria." Maxfeld's thinking. He's seated three rows back of Cassandra, looking down at her, worried that their one-night stand, now months back, might be all the sex they'll ever have. The least he can do, then, Maxfeld supposes, is keep Cassandra's memory of him active, and maybe prove her wrong about this "acting your age" business. So he hits her with a spitball. And Maxfeld looks nerdy enough, what with his white, sparse, and spiky haircut, and with the horn-rims that make him look, from most people's perspective, like a teacher of high school physics, circa 1950.
	"You've got to be younger than that," she mouths to him, peeling the wad of wet paper out from behind her ear.
	This movement brings her across the face of Blake Cameron, her favourite man in the program so far, and probably favourite man, period. Blake is notorious in the program, maybe even better known than Cassandra, whose reputation itself is enough to attract curiosity and unwanted friends. Cassandra's the "lady" writing a dissertation on cultural holocausts, everything from the torching of Sappho's poetry to Beatles records being burned in the US during the '60s. She's famous for her indifference: neither praising nor damning censorship, not caring to make much of a judgment either way, and it's rumoured that the only thing she loves more than the disappearance of information is the information that doesn't show up in the first place. "There are some things we're better off not knowing," is what she says. But it's an easy image to maintain -- nihilism costs her nothing.
	Blake, on the other hand, is Mr Enigma. He's in a league she can't even pretend to.
	Cassandra lingers on Blake, and it's a look Maxfeld would kill to receive. Blake's wearing headphones. He's always wearing headphones. Always. In class, out of class -- probably in the shower as well. He's the heir apparent: the last of the grads who can still hope for tenure track. Blake wears baggy garbageman chic, big pants and sneakers, torn up T-shirts. You'd never know he had a Killam Fellowship. His essays are brilliant: A-plus-plus. He's already produced a list of published articles, gotten distinction on the comprehensive exams, an outstanding Curriculum Vitae. There are stories of him walking into a seminar and pointing a finger at each student as he obliterated their arguments in turn; he left them naked. But the headphones stay on his head.
	After the slideshow, the overheads, drawing attention to bits of image and text with a laser pointer, the lecturer folds one hand into the other, and prepares to take questions. Blake raises his hand. "Yes?" the lecturer asks.
	"Don't you think that if society really didn't want its libraries to be burned down, that they'd have come up with some fire-retardant paper and building supplies? It's almost as if society unconsciously desires, and maybe needs, a periodic destruction of knowledge."
	And Cassandra can't hear the answer, because just as the lecturer shakes his head in disbelief and retorts, Blake cranks up the volume on his Discman. Everyone within a fifteen-foot radius is suddenly listening to a Massive Attack song called "Inertia Creeps." Blake nods at whatever the lecturer said.

	She'd met Blake before, a number of times. He attended every grad student social, though he didn't have any friends, and profs found it even harder to talk to him in person than in class. He stood alone, with a pint, leaning back into a corner of the room. She'd approached him with a plate of food. "You look hungry."
	" 'Let Them Eat Grass: Malnutrition in Graduate Students,' by Ivan Stankowicz," he said, "not a bad article, biology-wise. The statistics are totally wrong, though."
	"Is there anything you don't read?"
	"Instructions," he said, biting into a tiny wedge of Camembert. "I just can't bring myself to read instructions. Of any kind. I'm sure there's a lot more to my VCR than I could begin to guess. By the way, have we met?"
	"Cassandra Westmoreland. . . Bosco."
	" 'From Whence the Maiden Name: Return to Paternity,' by Allison Fromm. It's a critique of last names in general. Mine's Cameron. Blake Cameron."
	They went from there. At the end of the party, she asked him: "Blake, would you do me a favour?"
	" 'Flavours of Favour: Patronage and Drama During the Jacobin Period,' by Geoffrey Furlong. Careful with what you ask. And whom you ask it from. That's the implicit moral."
	"I'm serious, Blake. Would you show me your place?" He pondered the question with his hands dangling. Most grad students would have fingered their chins, but the movies hadn't taught Blake anything. His eyes twitched in a flash of processing, but no real information came up. "It's because nobody in this department knows you. Are you aware of that?"
	"Then you'll have to do something for me."
	"What?"
	"When we get there."
	They descended six floors by elevator. It was night by the time they stepped outside. Blake took a jack-splitter and another set of headphones from his pocket, wired things tight, and Cassandra put the receivers in either ear. The age difference between them was evident in the music, some hybrid of dub and electronica, slowed-down reggae, washes of synthesized sound over break-beats, a Rastafarian repeatedly chanting praise to Haile Sellasie. She was surrounded by Blake's soundtrack, and it made his geography easier, more traversable. They walked across parking lots in what seemed night's slow-time. He took her along a worn trail between a golf course's sand traps. When the CD came to the end, it repeated itself. They tramped back alleys, emerged into the vacant-eyed nightlife of Broadway Avenue -- the sushi shops white with fluorescence. Chinese lanterns dangled from awnings, brushed their heads. People jostled them, but there was no eye contact. After five blocks of restaurants and bars, used bookstores, the rattle of loose mufflers along the strip, people yelling out of high-speed windows, they turned off again.
	Within another half-block, they'd arrived. His building was brick, four storeys, what realtors called a "walk-up." There were cross grids in the double windows, large ferns and tarnished brass floor lamps behind the glass. The place was generic student housing.
	"Okay," he said. "There you go." She wanted an invitation inside, but it wasn't forthcoming. "What did you expect?" he asked.
	"Something. . . some," Cassandra tapped her forehead, "some. . . answer to. . ." She shook her head, thinking of Charlie, of Melinda. "No, not that." Blake waited by the iron gateway. The intercom buttons were wet on the rusted panel, the names of tenants either worn away or empty. "You know my dissertation. I'm talking, in it, of things. . . libraries burning down." She snapped a twig poking through a railing. "What I'm trying to say is how mystery attracts us. We imagine the books that went up in flames with Alexandria. We marvel at all that knowledge gone. See, the facts hidden in mystery are what attract us." And all she can think about, these days, is how badly she wants to reverse understanding, to send the facts tumbling back into questions, into bafflement. She wants a solar eclipse to be an occasion for astonishment. "Do you think there's anything redemptive about mystery?"
	"It depends on how long you're willing to wait out here, guessing at me."
	"I'm not willing," she pulled the shoulder of her sweater back where it belonged. "I'm not willing to wait at all. I've left it too long already." The sidewalk was stained by summer's berries, fallen off the tree Cassandra had broken the twig from. "What did you want me to do for you?"
	"Oh," he said, halfway through the entryway. He'd buzzed up and the gate buzzed back. Someone inside was letting him in, another delicious rumour -- wife? girlfriend? mother? -- for Cassandra to spread. "Please." He reached into his bag and took out a frayed booklet. "I've never read this," he said, "and there are things in it I need to know."
	It was instructions on how to use the Discman.

	Halloween came, and then Christmas, then New Year's, Saint Valentine's Day. They didn't speak on any of these occasions, or any of the days in between. Now they're a week clear of Easter.
	The audience files out of the auditorium, murmuring about burning libraries, about Blake's weird question on the destruction of knowledge. Cassandra grabs Blake somewhere near the minimalist architecture that is the building's entrance, by the chrome and glass turnstile. Responding to the design in style, he makes the barest turn towards her, Cassandra's image dragging his eyes to the absolute corners of his squint. "Was that question for my benefit?"
	" 'Answers in Questions: Inhabiting the Riddle,' by Xiu T'Chan. A Confucian reading of Biblical parables."
	"Don't quote me titles, Blake. Answer me."
	" 'Lacrimae Christi: The Gospel According to de Sade and Masoch,' by. . ."
	Her hand falls over his mouth, muffling the words. Blake scrambles to replace an earphone knocked loose. He pushes her through the turnstile. "Punchdrunk Pappy: Younger Men as Father Figures in Ibsen and Freud."
	"Don't you dare!" she yells, struggling to get free. He almost lifts Cassandra off the ground, carrying her around the backside of the building, where she drops onto her heels with a jolt that travels right up her spine.
	"Night's coming on," he says. "I've got a present for you."
	Cassandra adjusts her hems, three layers' worth. And it's dusk, sure enough. There's a graininess to the air, particles of dark, like pixels, between the grey light. "I want to show you something. . ."
	"Look," says Cassandra, smoothing hair back from her forehead with the flat of a hand. "I didn't mean to drag you into my personal stuff, back then, in September. That stuff about my husband. . ."
	"Who said you were talking about your husband?"
	"You know damn well that's what it was about."
	"The thing we know, Cassandra, us other students, is what we tell each other. And I, for one, am not willing to trace any rumour. It takes too long. But we know this, correct or incorrect: your husband left, he abducted your little girl, and you did nothing."
	She winces. There aren't fingers to stop the information she's leaked, drunk or sober, when she's needed someone to talk to, usually Maxfeld; there are other students, too, who've heard the relevant bits of her biography over after-class beers.
	"Let's go," he says, handing her a pair of earphones. And she slips back into his audio, back into his terrain. But it's different now, spring rather than autumn; there are flowers, for instance. Blake leads her on. With the routes he takes, offbeat paths and secret shortcuts, it seems another campus, less concrete than forest and field, less urban than pastoral.
	"I caught that lecture you gave at the 'Random Access' conference last month. What was it called? 'John Donne's Fractal Surfaces: The Part and the Whole in the Sermons.' " His mouth moves in response to this, but she can't hear; the music's too loud for Cassandra to catch anything. She continues speaking anyhow. "That conference made me re-evaluate things. All that 'interdisciplinary' stuff. Nobody knew what anyone else was talking about. Everyone's a faculty of one now. Everything going through four or five filters. Atomization." She removes an earphone this time.
	" 'Academic Entropy: A Formula for Interdisciplinarity,' by Howard Benjamin. He's already said what you're saying." The smile on his lips is not disturbed by the information, as if he welcomes the news.
	"So you don't mind, then," she says, pissed off, "walking in the stacks down in the library and seeing all those journals published by professors so that professors will have a place to publish? You don't ever wonder about the tower of journals? It reminds me of Babel, everyone with his or her unique jargon. We spend months and years working on papers, for what? So our colleagues can publish them? Not read them, Blake; that's not what I'm talking about. Publish them. You know the statistics on how many people read the average scholarly article? Three." She's smiling now, too, happy to be finally divulging these criticisms to Blake, Mr Model Student. "We make all this paper. Cover it in ink. Stack them unread on industrial shelving, and when they slide apart, we bind them and toss them in the basement. Why? So when it comes time for handing out tenure, the guys from the P&T committee can come down and scan the table of contents to make sure that you actually did publish where you said you'd published. Then they close the book and re-shelve it."
	" 'Overpublish or Perish: Academia as a Glut of Virginal Texts,' by Elise Morton." Then, noticing she's been strolling with only one earphone in, Blake stops, grabs the dangling wire, and presses the little speaker back into her ear. He signals an end to the conversation.
	They walk. Night sets in, slab by slab, in all its geology. They're in the darkest layer, off in forest trails, skirting the faculty golf course, plodding the sand of beaches deserted except for a few teens and their bootlegged mickeys. There's a lighter band of night along the sidewalks lit by streetlamps, and the sky itself glows rosy from the city lights. Blake stops to switch batteries, but the CD stays the same, a music between jazz and classical -- notes, then silence, then a few more notes, a cascade of piano, and more quiet.
	They walk through an abandoned lot, grass up to their necks, then down a short hill. They climb a fence, careful not to disengage either of their Discman wires. Over the fence, they toddle down a hill, boggy surf sucking at their shoes, to a soccer field. The soccer and football goalposts are a simple, unforgiving geometry, giant white insects caught in mid-stride on the darkest part of the trek. An exit sign shines over the gym doors of an elementary school in the distance.
	Blake leads Cassandra up to the school, around the perimeter, to a brick and glass wall. He speaks, points things out. She pulls out an earphone.
	"This was my elementary school. That's not so important. This is, though," he says, indicating a date of construction scrawled in the concrete. Stepping back, Cassandra notices that the style of this section of the school seems off, newer than the rest of the building.
	"Me and some friends burned down the library. We were kids. They had to rebuild it." Cassandra crosses her arms. "It was an accident. We were just fucking around, playing with matches. It was the cliché of every parental warning."
	"So what happened?"
	"We were caught, of course. For the next four years we had to do fundraising, sell tickets, help organize events, all that. . . shit. . . to help rebuild and restock the library. No more free afternoons. No more snacks and cartoons. I hated it so much I went crazy. The kind of despair that turns you frantic. I sold more tickets than anybody. I stayed up nights drawing flyers. I made a million phone calls to sponsors. And all I was thinking the whole time was how I was going to fill that library with books. Fill it, fill it, fill it -- to bursting! I was going to crack the walls apart by stuffing so much text inside."
	Cassandra pulls the chord and the other headphone pops out of her ear. "Is that the best you can do?" she asks, disappointed.
	In response Blake turns up the volume.
	So he doesn't see Cassandra's eyes widen, doesn't hear her say: "I never really wanted to know where they went."
	Blake's story is a lie of course, and ridiculous, his attempt at saying something that would please her, unaware that what would have pleased her most -- and kept pleasing her -- was saying nothing at all, since her question was superior to any answer he could give. But he does not see Cassandra's disappointment, the disbelief on her face, how she wishes he'd left it hanging.

	Blake doesn't occur to Cassandra much after that. She doesn't finish her PhD. Maybe she even remarries -- to someone like Maxfeld. Cassandra realizes that nobody will ever imagine her as she imagined Charlie the day he went away, the day her father went away, thinking of both men in a field of oil wells. Charlie's getting on a train with Melinda in a dusty state, in an American railway station. She thinks of the cities the father and daughter might have traveled through. American cities have such magical names. Des Moines. New Orleans. Los Angeles. Incantatory sounds, bottomless content. Names that never expose themselves, words you can't unpack. Charlie has given back to her what she lost: the image of a little girl and her father in an unknown country.
	And when her life gets worse with work, regular, forty hours a week of it, and so mundane, Cassandra realizes that what she'd wanted from Blake that night was the same irrational thrill she'd received thinking of Charlie and Melinda wrapped in the mystery of unknown destinations. The thought was beautiful; it was a feeling. And she purposefully refrains from tracking them down out of the fear that she'll lose it. What would she find anyhow? More terminal facts. Single-parent fathers. Abducted children. Abandoned mothers. Recriminations. Death. Only more unwanted information.

Acknowledgments

	The following stories have appeared elsewhere. 

	"Riverbottom Rag" in Queen's Quarterly 
	"Like a Salmon Getting Me Down" won the 1995 sub-TERRAIN short fiction contest, and appeared in print in that magazine 
	"Cages" under the title "Not a Soul" in sub-TERRAIN 
	"Frank's Essentials," in a considerably different version, in Windsor Review 
	"Edwin Tries to Get Help" in Grain 
	"Lenin True And/Or the Dummy" in Chicago Review 
	"After Fat Thursday," as "Following Fat Thursday, 2006," in The Fiddlehead 
	"Walt's Wing-Span" in Wascana Review 
	"Institutional" in Prism International
	"When X Equals Marylou" in the anthology, The I. V. Lounge Reader 
	"Red Love" in Chicago Review

	I would like to thank the readers and editors of all these journals and books -- they know who they are -- without whom I would have crawled to a halt a long time ago. Thanks for the fuel.

	I would also like to thank my Hungarian editor, Zsuszi Gartner, for her perceptive and thorough comments, and for making me double check on whether what I was doing was really what I was doing. Thanks also to my family -- my son, Benjamin, my mother and father, Eva and Tom, my sister, Kinga, and brother, Peter, and my in-laws, Joanne and Steve -- for all the inspiration, encouragement, and support over the years. And, finally, unending gratitude to my grandmother, Eva Cserei, in whose Budapest apartment I first stumbled upon the magic. You are, all of you, everything.

	Tamas Dobozy was born in Nanaimo, B.C., and has spent much of his life on the West Coast of Canada, in Powell River, Victoria, and Vancouver. He has also lived in Toronto, Montreal, and Budapest, Hungary. His work has been published in journals throughout North America, and in 1995 he won the annual sub-TERRAIN short fiction contest. After receiving his PhD in English from the University of British Columbia, he moved to St John's, Newfoundland, to teach full time in the Department of English Language and Literature at Memorial University.

Scan Notes, v3.0: Proofed carefully against DT.