The danger in happiness: Now everything I touch turns out to be wonderful. Now I love any fate that comes along. Who feels like being my fate?

Neitzche’s fate, of course, was to go mad and grow an absurd moustache.

In the evenings I loved Tyger the best. I would often set him upon the piano’s keys to serenade me. Tyger was a fine minimalist. His paws selected notes precisely, though within a small range. He would play nervous tone poems – very Oriental-sounding. I often recited in time with his tinkerings. You had to watch him, though, or he’d go over. One evening after an interminable book launch for two of my former students, I returned to my dark home full of darker spirits. I brought a glass of wine into the moonlit living room and sat brooding. My African-primitive paintings screamed at me. It seemed all of my small creatures were sleeping, but then I heard Tyger’s squeaking and scratching start up in the dining room, where his cage was kept. He seemed eager to play, so I brought him downstairs to the Steinway. He began a slow, rodent blues that immediately splashed joy and sorrow on my smouldering anomie. I moved around the room, dripping wine down the front of my chemise, and began incanting, sans gêne, some of my older poems. I had not thought of them in years: Trudeau’s speeches, as written by Milton; tanks in downtown Montréal; explosive rhythms and exploding mailboxes; muffled cries from a cabinet minister in the trunk. My youth expanded in my chest, filling my lungs.

What is a poet? Kierkegaard asked. An unhappy [woman] who in [her] heart harbors a deep anguish, but whose lips are so fashioned that the moans and cries which pass over them are transformed into ravishing music.

I grew lost in the remembered lines and did not notice that the piano was silent. Tyger had slipped from the keys and was lying on the floor before the pedals. He was stunned for a moment, and I held him and wept and apologized and explained to him, as I have to you many times, that I am the daughter of Milton’s Eve, full of demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, and moon-struck madness. I began to intone the poem again, but more softly, stroking the back of his broad, furry head. He bit into my knuckle and I dropped him angrily. Scrambling on the wood floor, he disappeared under the couch and did not emerge for the rest of the evening. I locked myself in my office.

Iwish that Tyger had scarred me with that bite. The smell of him is still there in that cage in the kitchen. Guinea pee and woodchips. I sometimes ask Ross to smell the cage, after he has taken off his shoes and come glumly into the kitchen in his ludicrous, red socks. Ross is the young man who comes each week to type my poems and journals into the old computer the university bought for me after I told them it was impossible for me to come downtown two days a week just to sit in a hot office. Ross looks to me like a clean-shaven Edgar Allen Poe, or a sober John A. MacDonald. A disarmingly bright young man with a weakness for Jean-Louis Kerouac (he denies it, but I can smell it in the work shirts he wears, the state of his running shoes, his occasional grumpiness). When I am in London or Trieste, I leave Ross with the keys to the house. No matter how detailed the instructions I leave for the care of flora and fauna alike, there is yet always one plant and one animal drooping upon my return. He is at least more dependable than that thirteen-year-old girl, Jocelyn, the niece of a friend, who was reduced to shuddering tears when presented with the evidence of her own incompetence. Again, I had left pages of instructions, and yet I returned to a home littered with dried-out leaves and dyspeptic rodents.

I once again unhook the wire structure and lift the plastic base to my nose: Tyger is there, plastic cannot defeat his lingering odour. The smell is long-since lost to the car seat from which he made his farewell tour. It is lost to the hands that held him in the fading light of his final afternoon. It is lost to the hard wood of the floor on which pooled my tears. But it is still in that cage, still in that small home that was Tyger’s sleeping quarters for two years.

Sabba dukkha, sabba anatta, sabba anikka, said the Bhudda. Sorrow is everywhere, in man is no abiding entity, in things no abiding entity. But perhaps there is a sorrow that abides in a plastic cage?

Tyger and the others had the run of the house during the day. They all got along, most of the time. If I was working at home, I would often hear a scramble and some angry squeaking – one of the others had tread too close to Tyger, once again forgot the bare fact of his dominance. Perhaps it was Gwendolyn, the rabbit with ears like soft wings, and a kick that could silence Alberto the cat. Or perhaps Tiff, my poor, ailing puppy, who is yet with me, though he is blind, and his bark is incomprehensible. Every few months I must have Gabriella clip the matted, foul fur away from his anus. Poor Tiff took the longest to accept Tyger’s rule. “He’s so small,” his eyes would say to me, after being routed yet again. “He is only a rodent. I am a dog. I was bred to lead.” He would then find a warm spot in the kitchen and lay there, head on his paws, sighing like an old queen.

Gabriella scrubbed the cage of the dead with harsh chemicals, poisons that came too late. Gabriella, the cleaning lady whom a wicked friend once said had the soul of poetry but the body of a limerick. She wore buttercup-yellow gloves, slightly nubby along the palms and the fingers for grip. As she prepared to make sterile what was once infected with Tyger’s life, with his contagious squeak, Gabriella let me stroke the thin, textured rubber of the gloves before she dipped her fingers into the bleach. They reminded me of the French condoms my architect friend once threatened to bring me on his next visit to Canada. He used to announce his visits only a day or two before his arrival. Or he would call from the airport, looking for a ride.

My days after his visits were post-colonial. I had to learn to govern myself amid the wreck he left behind. I rebuilt the ruined infrastructure. I expunged his memory from the schools, pulled down his statues, emptied the ministries of his allies.

I must forget how the curved tusk of his cock gored me.

Yet still, says Flaubert, as soon as one abandons one’s chimera, one dies of sadness. One must cling to it tight and hope that it carries one off.

This past week I have had Ross searching through my dream journals, seeking references to ‘blood’, ‘horses,’ and ‘porcelain’. This is for a new song cycle I am preparing for Hibernacula Press. I feel the familiar joy and dread that comes with publishing a new book, with passing the world a cup of hot blood. I am readying myself for this new book with yoga and meditation. Tiff whimpers at my feet. How mad, that his mummy is a poetess! Sometimes she stays like this for a very long time, without talking or eating; then she wakes up – and comes out with marvellous things. (Flaubert again, the fat genius.) Each book is a mad spell I must cast, though the spellbound profess not to feel it. When I am in the grip of creation, the stairs of my old house slope before me. My father’s clock sends out futile ticks – time cannot touch me. Light does not enter through the clear glass windows of my hallowed rooms. Sun does not catch the clumsy smears left by Gabriella (I must speak with her again).

Tyger will not be with me when my book enters the world and recreates it. She was destroyed, like Icarus, by the sun, but the hubris was all mine.

Before Ross, it was Liam who typed out my pages. My architect friend carried his charm, even when stone sober, like a crown worn at an angle. In every situation, he gave off Mozartian insouciance. Liam, on the other hand, entered a room as if he had just been unshackelled and brought up from the cellar. He often struck me as an overgrown child. His clothes never quite fit him. That absurd knapsack. The toes of his socks drifted ahead of his actual toes like deflated balloons. He loved hockey and hated wine. I’d urge him outside into the sun, and he’d only talk about burning, like some clichéd Southern priest.

I hope to never see Liam again. I still sometimes see him and his daughter in the market, but I refuse to speak to him or look at him. Occasionally, he attempts a quiet, ‘Hi, June,’ then looks away and does not dare stop walking. If I am walking with someone, they will ask me why I do not respond.

Liam was there on Tyger’s last day, but he has never said anything. Never said one word, except to call the next day and leave a cruel message saying he would not be able to help me any longer. His hasty, fumbled apology before the final click was a dismissal of my grief, my despair.

I had listened to his message as it was being left, while I sat on the floor of the living room. I could not answer the phone all that day, and for the next day, too. The sun sent light through the house, attempting to find me, then gave up and passed the search to the moon. I did not stir. I did not sleep. The new world without Tyger would not allow me to sleep. For hours I was dumb, insensible. Then I would moan and weep, imploring the ceiling above to drop down and crush me. Scratching at the floor to open a seam and send myself into the basement. And from every corner of the room, the new knowledge, the new truth, propped open my ears and eyes. Scattered notes and chords coalesced into a searing dirge. The awfulness of it. Pain after pain, and woe succeeding woe. I finally fell asleep in the afternoon of the second day and awoke in the dark, my legs stiff. I went to the bathroom in the dark. I could not bear to face my face. Loss must have surely torn the flesh from my skull. Nothing would darken my hair now, it must be as white as a hag’s. Vultures sat on my shoulder throughout the night, chattering and clicking their beaks. A murder of crows sat quietly in the garden. When I did at last allow the bathroom mirror to show me to myself, my face was streaked black with mascara. My tears had become ashes, pouring out from my burnt spirit. Flames still licked at the back of my mouth, and I gagged on my grief.

Though it tasted like wet sand, I forced myself to eat some food. Small strength was gained, and I prepared to do what I knew must be done. I emptied a shoebox of clippings from the Globe and Mail (dark forebodings of war, ancient bones found in ice, a pumpkin parade), then lined it with thin, blue paper I had left over from Christmas. Tyger’s tinkling ball went in, too, and some food pellets. One earring from the pair I was wearing. And then, into the living room to retrieve Tyger’s small corpse. I thought of seeking out gloves from Gabriella’s cleaning supplies, but that would have been an insult. I put him in the box, closed and kissed the lid. Morning had come. In the garden I could hear neighbourhood children playing in the alleyway. A Portuguese voice in the yard next door, behind the tall fence – an older Vasco da Gama, weary of the world and exploration, settled in the lower Annex. There were no more crows, but a solitary seagull slid overhead, making its uncharacteristically quiet way back to the lakeshore. This would have to serve as albatross to my mariner, though the animal I had killed was not fowl. With my garden spade I dug a small grave in the shade of the maple, placed the box inside, and covered it over. And so there lies Tyger: while the Loves all in a ring/ softly stroke the stiffen’d wing – or “paw.” Coleridge again, anyway. I returned to the house. A hot bath.

On my answering machine there were three messages. One was Liam, I knew. I forwarded past it. The next was only a click. The third was Antonia, to whose house I had been travelling with Tyger, on his final trip. Her voice thanked me for the bread and the flowers. She and Sam had just moved into a new house in Riverdale and she had invited me over to christen it with wine. She had offered to take copies of my books to London with her, to pass on to her UK editor, so I had packed a small box and put it in the back seat of my car. My plan had been to bring Tiff, my usual travelling companion, but he was feeling low with worms and would not leave the bedroom, so I chose to bring Tyger instead. The worms had already begun to turn for all of us! I looped the front seat seatbelt through the bars of his cage and was off. It was a hot, sunny Friday. The lunchtime traffic on Dundas was thick and irritable – office troops escaping the city early. Eliot’s crowds of the dead, out looking for life. I was stuck for the moment. I had loaned my cottage in the Kawarthas to an Italian translator with a club foot and a Québecois mistress, and would therefore have to endure summer’s worst in the dead palaces of the city. The sun wrapped its heat tight on me like a wet sari. I thought of Tyger, but he was still adjusting to the novelty of the car. When we finally crossed over the Don Valley, he had fallen asleep under a covering of woodchips. O folly, that I did not turn around immediately and return to our dark, cool home. But it did not seem then like a killing heat. I was blind to the sun’s evil intent. When fate summons, monarchs must obey.

I knew I could not carry the cage and the flowers and the bread, so I left Tyger in the car as I ran into the shops. It was damp and close in the flower shop; I felt none of the usual temptation to ogle pistils and stems. Stout tulips, and I was off. In the bakery, a moustachioed baker offered me samples of cakes and pastries, and tucked a dense marble rye under my arm. The car was dreadful and hot. Tyger had not moved – I had my first pang of worry. I could see the wood chips moving with his breath, but I felt I should hurry.

The sloping, sleeping streets of Riverdale tangled my course, and when I at last fitted the number Antonia had given me to a house, it was almost three o’clock. My architect would have steered me there in half the time, I know. He can barely drive a car, yet, when it is needed, he can master whatever the task at hand. He mastered and massacred my heart with ease. I still send him poems and letters, but the honesty of his replies have become blurred by disinterest. Dying love is a nursing home of the soul. He asks casual questions I have frequently answered. He mentions trips not made with me, memories not shared, gifts bought for another. Once in a while, a small spark of life, a promise of a visit. Then the transmission clouds over, and I am left in my Arctic outpost, left with my polar bears and floating peaks of ice.

Said the fly to the spider, “If you spare me, I will grant you one wish.”

Said the spider to the fly, “If I kill and eat you, then my only wish is granted.”

Antonia’s house was a marvel, a poem of glass and stone. Sam was bringing tiles in from the car, and came over to meet me. Antonia came out the front door wearing a man’s shirt and holding a paint brush. The tree-cooled air was refreshing after the car.

“‘This castle hath a pleasant seat.’”

“Is that from one of your new ones?” Sam asked.

“I’m not sure whether to be flattered or appalled. It’s from Macbeth, darling!”

What terrible luck: I named the play. I was as cursed as any powdered actor.

“You brought us a guinea pig?” Sam asked, looking at the cage in my hands.

“No, I brought you bread and flowers. Sam, meet Tyger. Tyger, meet Sam. Tyger, dear?”

“He’s probably boiling hot. Do you want to bring him inside? You can put him in the basement where it’s cool. I’ll lock Jammy out so she won’t try to stick her nose in the cage. Is he still breathing okay?”

“Of course he is. I can’t wait to see your garden.”

“There’s not much to it yet, June. It certainly will never rival yours. It’s actually cooler in June’s garden, Sam. You forget where you are.”

“I do that here, sometimes,” Sam said, and gave his wife a lascvicious look. The two were like fauns.

“I have been trying to grow a maple tree in the south corner to block out the view of the CN Tower,” I told them. “Then my neighbours’ voices can convince me I’m in Lisbon. Sam, there is a box of my books in the back seat. Could you bring it in?”

“I think we have most of those, don’t we June?”

“It’s for Antonia’s editor, Sam.”

“Does he even publish poetry?”

“Sam.”

“These streets and trees. Oh, I cannot live away from Kensington Market. But if I could . . . I must say hello to Jammy. Oh, Jammy! You fat dog!”

I floated through Antonia’s rooms like a spirit. Each door and hallway was a vision, a mirage. I quietly blessed each room with the words of as many creeds as I could recall. We sat in the garden while Sam piled tiles by the back door. Jammy gave chase to squirrels. Stray clouds wandered the neighbourhood’s skies. Antonia’s hair was held back by an elastic and there was paint on her face and arms, but she was as alluring as Sheba. I felt like sleeping on their mattress of grass, and I did lay down on my back in the shade for a few minutes. At last, I passed Antonia my glass. Liam would be at my house soon. Sam retrieved Tyger from the basement.

“Are you okay to drive, June? I don’t mind driving you.”

“Of course, Sam. Antonia and I were only drinking white wine. I’m fine.”

Tyger had not awoken, but for some cursed reason, this pleased me. As if he would awake when we got back, refreshed. Perhaps he would be a little disappointed at having slept through the entire trip. What sickening foolishness! But I did not pause. Back down through the winding streets and across the Don Valley, back into the grey haze of Toronto. The traffic was even thicker than earlier, and I worried I would not get home before Liam arrived. I felt part of a mass exodus. A flight from the twisted structures we ourselves had built. I longed for Trieste. For Provence. For the Mediterranean. For the Atlantic shore. For the Rockies. I felt I had bound myself to a malevolent machine, blurting black smoke and cutting into flesh and muscle. My architect says that Toronto, from above, looks like a bomb site, with a jagged crater and scattered debris. We are our own terrorists, with slower methods of destruction. The buildings fall of their own accord. And so hot in the summer. A dungeon horrible, on all sides round/ as one great furnace. (Milton.) My skin was slick, the air was hotter than melted glass.

The architect once told me to leave this place. Toronto is no city for a poetess! I told him he was wrong, that he could not see the humming symbols, the radical rhythms that surround me. Here was my darkest loam of meaning. Now I am not so sure – those rhythms may be the rattle of skeletons. Perhaps my poems are merely graveyard whistles.

The car moved along the alleyway behind my street like a dying rhino. Two sets of hockey goal posts were moved aside for this mournful procession. Kids stared in at me as if at a phantom. I had left the garage door open as usual, and its darkness cloaked me with welcome. For a moment, I could not move. It felt as though the garage were a ferry, transporting me back safely across Styx to the world of the living. I dozed for a moment – only a moment: the string quartet on the radio had not even changed movements! – but the lapse let the ferry-driver lose his grip on the tiller, and we drifted back to the netherworld in a red fog.

I went inside and drank a glass of mineral water, then, remembering Tyger, dashed back to the car. The seatbelt snapped like a live wire, catching my forearm. Panic froze my hands. I could not unlatch the cage. I tore at it and lifted Tyger from the damp woodchips. My fingers knew what my mind took a minute to accept. Tyger was lifeless. He sat inert in my hands. No thumping heart stirred his fur. I brought his body to my cheek. Carrying him like a baby brought out from a well, I ran to the living room and placed him gently on the floor and rolled him on his back. I knelt and bowed my face to his. My tears dropped into his fur. I would be the Prince who returned Snow White’s beauty to the world. I would be Christ, who bade Lazarus walk again. I would escort Tyger from the Inferno. I laid my mouth upon his and gave a soft breath. I could feel his teeth on my lips. His whisker brushed my nose. I gave another breath. His form expanded slightly, but refused the life I offered. Death had him in a stubborn grip.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

I was blind with tears. Each breath I gave him came back out, unprocessed. His lungs slept, his life was null. Death blew my breath back into my face with a sneer. But I would not stop. I would blow and lay my ear between his forepaws, listening for an echo of my own throbbing heart.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

I tore the compact from my purse and placed the mirror under his nose, hoping that my panic was making me oblivious to his struggling life. The mirror stayed cruelly clear. Tyger’s reflected eye had the look of taxidermy.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

I thought for a moment of dropping a tiny amount of water down his throat. Perhaps life refused to return to a desert. I attempted to moisten my lips.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

“Holy shit.”

“Liam! Help me! Help poor Tyger! Oh help him!”

“Did you have him in the car? I came around back and your car door was open. The cage was . . . holy shit.”

“Liam! Please! My Tyger!”

I collapsed against the couch as Liam kneeled over Tyger. His placed the flat of his palm on Tyger’s chest. He gave me a quick look, then put his ear to Tyger’s fur. Then slowly, he sat back on his heels and, with vicious sadism, wiped his hand on his jeans, as if poor Tyger’s death were a contagion.

“I’m sorry, I think he’s dead. June? I think he’s dead.”

I could only stare ahead of me. I thought of Orpheus, bringing Eurydice back from Hades, then losing her again in a moment of thoughtlessness. I though of his body torn asunder by the women of Thrace, his lyre silenced. I am both Orpheus and the killer of Orpheus.

Liam stayed for a while. Left a glass of water by the couch that I refused to touch and later discarded, allowing it to shatter in the blue recycling bin on my front step. I did not move Tyger but instead lay beside him, drawing his body against my chest. The taste of his mouth was still upon mine. I savoured our last contact.

For There! Have I drawn or no

Life to that lip?

Do my fingers dip

In a flame which again they throw

On the cheek that break a-glow?

My architect may never read this, may never know what happened. Perhaps he wouldn’t even care, but would only laugh. Maybe it was never for him, anyway. Maybe it’s all been for Tyger, my lost guinea pig. The soul of my bestiary, the spirit of my garden. Maybe, with this creation, he will forgive me for his own destruction, though I will never forgive myself.

Sabba dukkha, sabba anatta, sabba anikka.

Most of the passengers, once they have found their spot, plug in their Walkmans and iPods and begin bobbing heads, snapping fingers and gyrating torsos to some fantastic private rap/disco/hiphop revery. There is, of course, nothing to be heard, and for the spectator the effect is ludicrous and discomposing – hundreds of people moving languidly or spasmodically to the ghostly, autistic rhythms of an inaudible music. I observed one plainly fruitful flirtation that evinced the new mode of conversation, intimacy and seduction among this travelling generation. A man of about thirty and a woman maybe five or six years younger strike up a beautiful friendship. Within an hour they are busy fondling, exchanging compliments and meaningful glances, only they never unhook their respective headphones. Whatever they say to one another has to be shouted at the top of their lungs across nigh-impenetrable walls of interior heavy metal – the contemporary Pyramus and Thisbe. Even the tenderest endearments require megaphonic bellowing and frequent repetition.

“I think you’re really beautiful.”

“What?”

“I SAID I THINK YOU’RE REALLY BEAUTIFUL.”

“WHO?”

“YOU. YOU. I THINK YOU’RE BEAUTIFUL.”

“OH.”

“WHAT?”

It never occurs to these barking lovers to remove the tongs from their ears and talk to one another. But at least they are assured of almost complete privacy as practically everyone else is also plugged into the mysterious current of centripetal, encysted sound. They are like creatures from another world, equipped with alien sensors for transmitting and receiving encoded signals indecipherable by humankind. It seems that speech is rapidly becoming the phantom limb of modern communication.

*

Naoussa is a pleasant town, a smaller and more gemütlich version of Mykonos, with its whitewashed houses and labyrinth of cobbled streets. It is not as developed as the capital of the island, Parikia, but there is no doubt that it has arrived. Tourist shops proliferate and the hills around the town are pocked and scarred by an epidemic of new building sites in the gaps not already filled with hotels and bungalows. Yet there is a gentleness that still clings residually about the place, in the tame sparrows that bustle around the cafe tables inquiring for crumbs, and as usual in the elderly people like the retired capetanios who introduced me to his eighteen-year-old cat Bobbis, affirming that cats are man’s best friend, or the grey-haired cigarette lady who actually remembered me from one day to the next. It is also in the local dialect – my landlady, Kyria Maria, referring to the village (or chorio) as a choriotissa, “little village.” Maria has just opened a new pension but refuses to meet the buses to tout her rooms and is very diffident about prices. Would there were more like her.

Paros is an extremely cultivated island – in both senses of the term – and one of the major tourist depots in the Cyclades. It is at least partially self-subsistent, being comparatively watered and fertile, and enjoying a thriving fishing industry. It is thus unlike the majority of popular islands which are essentially dollar sponges and would simply dry up with the decline or collapse of tourism. I assume that Paros is the “mystery island” that figures in the initial pages of Kevin Andrews’ The Flight of Ikaros. The island which he describes at the time of the Civil War was a hot, inclement, impoverished place, the houses built partly out of calamus poles and the people scraping at the earth for a precarious living. But from the internal evidence – the name Naoussa, calamus, viticulture – it appears to be the same island which is now so flourishing and industrious.

Naoussa sits in a crescent nook formed by two long pincer-like promontories that project northward for several kilometres on either side of the town. The left or western salient is difficult of access, at least on foot, the hiker having to cut back inland for some distance and then circle the inner bay before reaching the root of the peninsula itself. Accordingly, I choose the eastern tang for my morning walk. The road follows the contours of the coastline pretty faithfully and leads past several comfortable but dull beaches. But the view is varied with myriads of brimming and tumbling flowers by the roadside and a scatter of small, humped islets in the bay, like so many sunbathing dolphins. I pass fields thick and gold with unharvested rye, chunky with grazing cows and Pavarotti donkeys, and the usual traffic of barnyard fowl. Another turn in the road and there looms up the Typhonic electric plant giving off billows of black smoke and a low, unbroken, mechanical hum that obliterates every other sound and is itself milled out only a kilometer further on by the grind and crush of the surf. Then the island is restored to itself.

*

There are three Canadian girls in the next room. Their names are Liz, Sherry and Linda, though I am unable to match names to faces even after frequent meetings. I noticed them on the boat, met them on the bus, and once again at Maria’s pension where I provided my customary translation services in making arrangements. A few days have passed and I wish them speedily gone. They are polite, well brought up, friendly, but like so many travellers in their early or mid-twenties, they operate on the assumption of privilege, as if they had a right to whatever advantages and favours might accrue to their mere presence. And so curiously incurious about the country, the island, the village they happen to be visiting. They carry about with them, if not quite an air of flagrant superiority, an attitude of natal pre-eminence and perfect immunity to the complexity and fascination of the world around them.

It is an elusive thing to catch in words. It is as if their world-picture is already complete and there is no space or need for new additions, as if they are not missing anything, are unaware that anything more needs to be “done” apart from slathering on the sunblock. They are cheerful and good-natured and entirely at ease in the cramped, invisible bubbles in which they live. But they have no lateral perception and certainly never look behind them, as is evident from the fecal deposits they leave in the communal toilet, although the cleaning brush stands poised like a moon rocket beside the toilet bowl. I scrub it to spare Maria and to restore my country’s honour. It never occurs to these girls that water is a precious commodity on a Greek island – even on Paros – so they take long, leisurely showers which empty the cistern. When I see them in the port they are generally absorbed in the intricacies of their cameras, spending much of their time photographing one another. Liz is pretty and quiet. Linda is smiling and gregarious. Sherry is tall and independent. Or perhaps Linda is tall and Sherry is gregarious and Liz is independent. It’s hard to tell. But this much seems true: they are part of a generation of which it may be said that repeated exposure to it progressively blurs the difference between individuals.

*

First real swim of the season. About an hour’s walk east of Naoussa a small island reposes in the bay between a forked elbow of land that forms a partial enclosure several kilometres across. This island is joined to one of the land segments by a wide sandbar, thus making it a kind of outcropping, depending on the tide. The semi-bay that results from this formation is broad, shallow and warm. You wade out for a hundred meters or more in knee-deep water, then the bed plunges as you swim around the edge of the island toward the principal bay of the town. It reminds me of Lakka on Paxos, much the same coquillage – sea urchins, cockles, whelks – and the same underwater scape of saffron corrugations. Swimming back I suddenly felt at home, the salt taste on my lips and tingle on the skin, the sense of primal well-being that floods the whole body, the prospect of a grilled supper and a bottle of dopyo krasi or local wine. Where else would one wish to live if only one could?

*

Wanting only to trim away the bushiness above my ears, I trusted what’s left of my locks to the village barber, a grim reaper if ever there was one. Kyrios Dimitrios paid no attention to my request, instantly lopping off everything on one side with one fell swoop of his scissors, forcing him to even up on the other side. Before I knew it my ears were sticking out in that earnest Puritan way that exposed ears have. This was followed by oddly geometrical incisions around the sideburns, so that they resembled two small rectangular windows with the shades drawn. All the while Dimitri, stocky, white-haired, obsessive, after asking my nationality, kept chanting, “You are Canadian. Yes. Yes. You are Canadian.” “And you are Greek,” I countered. “Yes. I am Greek. Yes. And you are Canadian.” I emerged looking like a seven-year-old Greek boy in the shape of a middle-aged Canadian adolescent.

*

Tried to track down the Irish poet Desmond O’Grady, who has lived off and on in a house on the west peninsula for fifteen or twenty years. I have no knowledge of his work as yet, but grew interested when I read in the Paros guidebook that he is one of the “old hands” among the foreign population and that the kafeneion he frequents has been dubbed “the university.” The clerk at the tourist office assured me that “he is not only a wonderful poet but a wonderful person,” and hailed an Irish friend of his who, judging from his fluent Greek, is also a fixture. This friend informed me that Desy was expected in a couple of days, that he is published by Oxford and has appeared in the Norton, and is indeed a fine poet. “One day,” he assured me, “he will find his rightful place in the Guinness Book of Records. I am referring, of course, to his heroic bibulations.” He promised to leave a book for me at the tourist office. Apparently, O’Grady is no longer a Parianos, having moved his library back to Ireland, the surest sign of repatriation.

*

Walked to Koloumbithris on the west peninsula to the beach that is considered remarkable for its Cubist-like rock formations. The character of the west peninsula is very different from that of the east: lusher, denser, greener, almost tropical, watered by irrigation ditches, all calamus, palm and pine. The beach itself, which consists of several little rock-enclosed pockets of sand, sprouts an even thicker vegetation of pubic hair than natural foliage. The bathers are laid out haunch to haunch and everwhere rippling dunes of breasts and penises like stranded sea-cucumbers. Took the caique back across the bay.

*

Finally succeeded in getting hold of O’Grady’s work and learning a bit more about him. His house is just across the bay on Mount Vigla and is something of a local shrine. He is famous all over the island for his exuberance, his exclamatory presence and moonlight recitations, his drunken hijinks, and of course for the fact that he is a poet. Richard Winch, an English writer who was also one of the foreign pioneers on Paros, regaled me this morning with anecdotes from the pristine history of Naoussa before the advent of the rented Suzuki. His eyes shimmered as he spoke of the all-night parties, the women, the attempted murders. And he dwelt with relishing attention on the fiasco of O’Grady’s absent first wife, whom the poet had described as a sinuous and elegant Persian princess, unexpectedly stepping off the boat one day, weighing 300 pounds. “She’s gone a tad over the top,” O’Grady said, sheepishly. I spent the afternoon reading through his verse, some of it published in Egypt, of all places, and the Selected put out by Gallery Press, an Irish house.

O’Grady has many faults. For one thing, he is too wordy, even redundant: “like the dorsal fin out of the back of the shark” or “prematurely grey at twenty.” He is also overfond of the construction Northrop Frye called “the adjective noun of noun.” For example: “out of the raised eyebrow line of the wave.” And he can be embarrassingly gushy and sentimental in the “O my country” or “O my friends” manner, an excessive tendency to the vocative justified only by deep drinking.

He certainly can manage the occasional apt expression – “We loot the seafloor’s fleamarket/of small treasures for you” – and is able to run a poem over the long distance, not merely sprint for a couple of lines. The big barrel-chested breath is obviously no problem for him and his poems can huff and puff over pages without pausing for refreshment. He reminds me of Melville’s Yoomi plying the Mardian archipelago. But when he’s good he’s not so bad. Here is one stanza I particularly like from an early piece entitled The Island, even though his editor, deaf to the ambiguity in the grammatical construction of the last line, has dismissed it as chauvinistic:

For I have grown tired of cultivating the soul,
Controlling the flesh, perfecting the mind;
Of working at words through the night
Till the eye’s and the mind’s sight
Give up – it’s all no good, no good at all
When there’s no woman to break and to bind.

Still, on the whole too prosy for my taste and perhaps a touch too derivative of Dylan Thomas. One more thing I find objectionable. The poems are insistently and at times bathetically autobiographical. His subject is, to put it mildly, not Life but His Life. For example, the major theme of a poem called At the Dark Edge of Europe has nothing much to do with Europe or European history and everything to do with the four women he has loved in his lifetime. Or a poem on the Greek dictatorship which is really a litany of personal frustrations and private reminiscences. It’s probably unfair to invoke the gigantic figure of Yeats, but the comparison is instructive because Yeats started in the resolutely personal, the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, and even if he ended there he nevertheless expanded his themes toward universal significance, precisely what O’Grady is too rhetorically and vocationally Gaelic to do. There is a touch of Eastern diffusiveness as well, as if he were trading in Sweet Vjestika Aphrodisia Drops or intent, as a meditationist might say, on prolificating molecular concord. As a result the poems are on the whole neither Irish nor ecumenical, merely confused.

*

Decided to walk rather than caique out to Lageri beach, which is on the further inside lip of the east peninsula. Here the land is pancaked or gently undulating, still reedy in places with blotter-smudges of marsh and mudflat. Overshot the mark and plodded past Santa Maria to the end of the peninsula itself facing the open sea and Naxos hovering blueish and strangely disembodied in the distance. Retraced my steps and branched off onto a small road that eventually dribbled into rubble and thorn. It began to rain and I took shelter in the boat-annex of an empty house, a white, Cycladic cube softened in the Parian manner by arched embrasures and chamfered corners, accompanied by two meditative mountain goats who had somehow found their way down from the craggy interior. A half hour of silent communion until the rain tapered off. Walked back to the main road and then up another cut-off, over a fence marked Private Property, along the top of a low ridge and then down to the bay and the wide sickle of sand which is Lageri. Sea fauna of the standard type: cockles in abundance, a few turkey-wings and cones, crabs, periwinkles. What is more interesting is the seafloor absolutely printed with small starfish, like asterisks on a sepia-coloured page. One has the impression that one is reading as one swims.

*

I am fascinated by the nature and ubiquity of the yawn. Fully half the tourists in Naoussa are couples or quartets in their mid-twenties, and the girls especially are given to frequent and prodigious yawning. I have been observing this manifestation for several days and am truly impressed. It’s not that they’re bored or listless but rather that they form part of a generation that is magnificently unself-conscious. On only two occasions out of the several hundred which I have counted has the yawner covered her mouth. This is the case even at table: attractive young women, in the midst of earnest or bantering conversation over their food, suddenly open their mouths wide, wide, revealing teeth, uvula, gullet, morsels of half-chewed mash, then slowly bring their lips together and continue with the meal and the talk, sublimely unaware that they have committed a breach of table etiquette. It is an expression of supreme physical content, the body taking precedence over the centres of awareness or the simple consciousness of other people. The yawn has become the sign of our modern hedonism – or maybe shedonism would be a better word. It’s true the men yawn as well, but the women clearly out-yawn them by a considerable margin. At supper last night, like Sesame Street’s manic Count, I tallied 38 female yawns and 11 male; at breakfast this morning, 17 female and no male yawns. It seems to have the same significance on the human plane that stretching does in the cat world – a supple, purring narcissism and the mind in conspicuous abeyance.

*

It’s truly mesmerizing to contemplate the depths and complexities of history with which each tiny region in this country, every microdot island, is imbued. I spent more than a year on Paxos, which is six miles long by fewer than two miles wide, and I think I know a considerable amount about it. I walked the island back and forth innumerable times, got to know the people, asked questions, read the available literature, found the sole classical reference (in Plutarch), and yet I’m quite aware that there are secrets, facts, attitudes, which the inhabitants jealously suppress from the foreigner’s inquisitorial gaze. Now I’m visiting Paros for the fourth or fifth time in the last decade, and the only region I am remotely familiar with is Naoussa and the peninsular north. As for the rest of the island, Parikia, Marmara, Marpissa, Piso Livadhi, Drios with its teeming butterflies, it’s a tightly-bound book. And the history of the island as a whole is infinitely laminated, from the proto-Cycladic civilization which once flourished here right up to the present moment.

The Russian naval presence in the middle of the 18th century, its headquarters on an islet in the bay of Naoussa, is still fresh in people’s minds in light of what they call i katastasi (the “situation” or “occasion”), a particularly juicy bit of local history. A Russian carrier, reputedly the largest in the world, was sailing in the evening for the straits between Naoussa and Naxos. It happened that the lighthouse keeper was in his cups celebrating his name day and had forgotten to illumine the lamp before leaving for the tavern. The waters around this part of the coast are notorious for their sunken rocks – major disasters have been recorded, including the recent foundering of a tourist ferry (the Captain was watching a soccer game on TV) – and an international incident was only just averted when someone remembered that the lighthouse was unattended. The keeper was too drunk to do anything about it, so a replacement was found and dispatched hastily by motorboat. What would the most famous Parian of all, the scurrilous Archilochus, have not epoded of this?

*

Greece never makes it easy and I am the perfect accomplice. Yesterday’s storm has built itself into a six beaufort doozy, with the scale rising. The tourist office says the ship may not sail today, which means I would miss my flight tomorrow morning. One traveller’s cheque stands between me and the cast of mercy. The dilemma I’m now in is clearly my own fault. I should have left yesterday and avoided all this unnecessary drama, but I’ve always been a bit obtuse, busy interpreting omens rather than simply reading signs.

Well, it’s only 8 a.m. Maybe the weather will drop unpredictably in the next couple of hours. Departures from this country have always been accompanied by near-panic, near-misses, near-total destitution (once my entire family lived off tomatoes for three days in Pireaus to save taxi fare to the airport). Something always works out – which is the lesson of modern Greece.

*

I leave this time with deep sadness. For the first time since I began coming to Greece, I don’t feel quite so exposed or vulnerable. The foreigner who plans to live here needs two things apart from an income: a sense of detached amusement and a genuine willingness to respond. A modicum of self-confidence also helps, the ability to demand, to pass judgment, and to remain aloof as well, when circumstances require.

I am once again conscious of how inexpressibly beautiful and rich this land and this sea are. Every island I pass or visit strikes me as a possible home. Even Syros, where the boat is presently in harbour, and which I always considered too commercial, too raw and sun-blasted, would suit very nicely. The metropolis to provide goods and services, a cottage on the south coast, and the lighthouse islets to the northeast for what promises to be remarkable swimming and diving. And the time would be all one’s own, the days free for walking, swimming, reading, writing. This is what Karin and I must work for in the coming years. And later, much later, if we make it that far, when we are too old for this country, which is also difficult and steep and unfurnished – a discrete, controlled departure without the degradation of illness or the humiliation of dependence. A possible scenario and by no means a bad one. Christ, this is such a lonely, lovely, terrifying and magnificent life, sometimes I have no more words to embrace it with.

There is nothing in the first room until we get there and that is why we love it.

“This is not a gallery. It’s a hallway,” the guide says. We are both sympathetic towards the guide, who wears trousers one inch too short for her long and spindly legs. Such a trouser-wearer cannot be expected to know the difference between a gallery and a hallway, but having an inch less than us, as she does in several respects – not that we are bragging; we are not those kinds of men – we are inclined to think of her fondly as she studies us, the study in itself proving, among other things, that we are not in a hallway at all. We did not pay twenty dollars to see a hallway. And if we did, we will certainly demand our money back. We confer and decide to see where the gallery that may be a hallway will lead before we launch our tirade of righteous indignation upon a woman who is in need of pants with a longer inseam. We are not unnecessarily cruel. We have questions.

“No, that’s an umbrella stand,” the guide says.

“Yes, for umbrellas,” another woman says, bobbing her head around as though she thinks this is the function of a head on a neck. Her bulgy forehead lolls toward the ground like a slave to gravity, forcing her to snap her head back every once in a while in order to keep up with the conversation. “It’s just not raining today, that’s probably why you were confused,” she explains to us, her fat fingers dancing in a grotesque parody of raindrops, as though we did not speak the same language. Come to think of it, we do not. Come to think of it, we cannot understand a single thing she says, dancing fingers or no. She babbles on incomprehensibly and we exchange knowing glances, because we know that an astonishingly high percentage of New Yorkers are insane. Seventy-nine percent, at last count. It just happens to be the case that we are employed in the business of celebrating that fact. And we are on assignment.

“This way to the second floor,” the guide says with an air of superiority.

“Baa,” you and I say to each other. The insane woman overhears and raises the corners of her mouth, expressing amusement, pleasure, or approval with her face. It is amazing how barnyard animal noises can bridge barriers. Even though I am ready to crucify myself with umbrellas (there are a few) to prove my willingness to suffer for art, we follow our guide. We did not pay twenty dollars to be left behind.

But there is a problem in the hamburger room:

“I don’t get it,” says an old man with a cane. “What is it?”

“It’s a giant hamburger,” his wife says.

“I know it’s a hamburger. I’m not an idiot.”

“Well then, why did you ask me?” she says.

“What do you think of this?” (He is asking us, for he can sense that we are arbiters of taste.) “Is this what passes for art nowadays?”

Some questions answer themselves by being asked. We say nothing except to each other.

“Do you think they have hamburgers in the restaurant here?”

“They have a restaurant here?”

“Yes, and I could really go for a hamburger.” Somebody famous said that. Not the part about the hamburgers. The part about questions answering themselves. I said it. At least I thought it. Being that it is much harder to think something than it is to say it, and also much harder to say a thing than it is to do it, I think it is fairly self-evident that I do a lot of hard work. My position as a contributing member of society cannot be disputed.

“How much do you think this’d sell for?” the old man asks with a persistence that must have been instilled in the Great Depression or the Great War, whenever it was that he ate nothing but cabbage and wore his malnourished flesh like a badge of honour.

“I think I’ll have a cheeseburger,” you say.

“Seriously, this is what passes for art nowadays? Giant hamburgers?” the old man says again to no one in particular.

“Actually,” our guide says, “it’s what passed for art in the eighties.” I have a new appreciation for gallery employees the world over.

“Christ, what’s the point?” the man says. He is obviously missing the apocalyptic connection between the burger and his own mortality, between art and death.

“The point of art is the end of art. Art wants to put itself out of business, out of its own misery!” I shout.

“Shh,” you say.

“I think I’ll have a cheeseburger too,” I whisper back.

We consider another piece. It is a giant plaque. It was generously donated, a little plaque next to it tells us, by someone with a name so aristocratic I can barely make out the letters. Something like, Pierpointmorgansonrockefellersworthberg. The giant plaque, which the little plaque tells me is called “Art” and measures eighteen feet by thirty six feet, says: Ego, by Me.

“Put that in your pipe and smoke it!” I say, not without some malice.

“Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” you say. You light a cigarette for dramatic effect and we are kicked out of the gallery, without enough time to pick up our umbrellas, should we have brought them.

I am at a loss, confounded by the subjectivity of metaphor.

I renew my suggestion for cheeseburgers.

2. Dead Things in the Air and Elsewhere

“I don’t understand the need for this,” you say as you are searched by a fat man with some sort of beeping baton. “This is an indignity. Do you know who I am?”

The fat man does not respond, obviously embarrassed by the fact that he does not know, or possibly the man is a deaf-mute. Possibly this is why his employers have given him a beeping baton.

“Communication technologies are the hallmark of the modern age. You may quote me on that,” I tell the fat, possible deaf-mute as I am asked to remove my shoes.

“For the last time, please remove your shoes, Sir,” a woman in a uniform says. She evidently is not a deaf-mute, just culturally undereducated. There is no excuse for this, and I blame the public school system, the clergy, the government in power, the previous generation, and the general lack of appreciation for the arts.

“This is a travesty of justice,” I say.

“No, Sir,” she says, “this is JFK security.”

I am so glad to be leaving New York, where all the escaped mental patients think they have a sense of humour.

“Destination, Sir?” the woman with my shoes asks.

“Destination?” I say. “Up, most definitely. Up into the cloudless climes and starry skies, or somewhere in the general vicinity, at least.”

“Business or pleasure?” she asks.

“Pleasure, always pleasure. I never conduct any business.” This statement is somewhat truer than I would like. It is degrading to soar among the heavens on one’s way to the glittering galas of Europe when one is lodged in economy seating next to a plaid shirt, overstuffed with skin, connected to a potato chip-smelling mouth that insists on telling all within smelling distance about the tire business in New Jersey. But our magazine is working very hard to increase its readership, and these things take time.

I explain this to the woman who has my shoes, and all she says is, “Have a nice flight.” I start to suspect that everyone in New York is not crazy, but rather that everyone in New York is a robot. This is the new millennium and I am shocked by nothing, least of all by mechanical people. Mechanical people are not new, I suspect. Rather, I’m inclined to believe that the mechanizations have just made their way to the surface. Now we can see what was always there, clanking underneath.

You are waiting at our gate, looking through a dirty window at the jet in which we will be flying. “In some cultures, to travel in the air is to go against the gods,” you say.

“Really, which gods would those be?”

“Dead ones, obviously.”

“Right, God is dead, in both the singular and the plural. But you have a rosary.” I point to the beads twisting wildly in your hands.

“I have a fear of flying, so I prefer not to take chances.”

“I have a fear of flying too.” I walk you over to an airport bar, conveniently located a mere promenade from the machine that will hurtle us into the sky with all the fury of those dead animals that have become increasingly combustible over the past few million years. It is a kind of recycling program: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. This is what our dead gods intended.

“I’ll have a martini,” you say.

“We don’t do martinis here,” the bartender says with a look in his eye that seems to suggest he doesn’t trust fashionably dressed men in Italian leather shoes.

“What do you do?” you ask.

“Beer,” he says proudly. Apparently he invented the drink himself.

We sip our beers and for some strange reason this causes both of us to feel more connected to the earth: rotten plants and dead animals. Planes into air. Bodies into pulp. God into death. Robots with beeping batons. “The circle of life!” I say, and we drink to that. “Speed!” you say, and we drink to that. “Death!” I say, and we drink to that. “ART!” we say together, and drink to that, intoxicated by what we suspect is much more than pilsner lager. As we drink we become our own work of art, writing ourselves with every laugh and slurp, wondering how it is that so many people refuse to be their own authors.

“That’s just it,” you say. “There are no more people. Only robots. And robots can’t write worth a damn!” You smash your glass on the floor, a gesture I respect: you always know how to round out a good idea. The bartender, however, does not appreciate the finer qualities of the English language. There is some suggestion that uniformed robots will be coming soon to deal with us, and as neither of us feels particularly interested in dealing with any more artificial life than is absolutely necessary to sustain our own, we run. This, I suggest, shows that we have a sense of humour and are therefore not robots, but rather animals. Indeed, we run with the reckless abandon of animals who one day will be dead; of animals who will use dead animals to launch themselves, dying as they are, closer to the sun, which is only partially visible from the double-paned window of a jumbo jet with exits located at the front, side, and back. Take note of the safety card in your seat pocket. In the unlikely event of a water landing, put on your lifejacket, slide down one of the rubber slides. Refrain from jumping about like animals close to death.

“I wanted the aisle seat,” you say, and I come to understand sacrilege.

3. Antelopes and Other Fashionable Ladies

Someone famous is now two and a half hours late, and so consequently young people with clipboards and headsets are frantic and a woman with an unseen and exotic pet in her purse is demanding a dish and a bottle of distilled water. Of course, no one is naming names, but we anticipate a lady of a certain age and British accent who will be wearing a short skirt of the style designed to make people say, My God, I wish I had thighs like that, even though nobody has thighs like that, not even the lady in question. But still we want to see her in the hopes that a flake of her shed skin will land on us as she breezes by, and we will imagine that it is a piece of her halo breaking off. Despite the fact that there must be girls backstage taping their breasts into mesh halter tops, we feel compelled to look at the empty chair that is cordoned off with a ribbon of white silk. From our previous experiences with giant hamburgers, we know that a cordon means art. We didn’t fly here defying unknown, potentially dead gods for nothing.

There are protesters outside with placards that read, Faites attention! We are not sure to what, other than the cordoned-off empty chair, but we agree, and so while waiting we join in with the chant that is slipping itself through the doors the clipboard people are opening and closing, opening and closing to the rhythm of their heartbeats: Animals are people, too! People are animals! Suddenly another, somewhat complementary chant springs up: Women are people, too! We object to objectification!

“Repetition is the sincerest form of stupidity,” you say to me between chants.

We continue chanting because we are bored and because we know that eighty-three percent of Parisians are insane. It is fine to shout about wanting to be women who want to be people. We are inside the protective circle of diaphanous gowns and outrageously applied eye shadow. Everything is simply fabulous.

“Simply fabulous,” I say to the craggy-faced woman with the microphone. “I love it because it’s so wearable. I think it really speaks to what women want nowadays, which is to be treated like people.”

“Yes,” you say, “people who are animals!” You embarrass me when you take a sly, claw-like swipe at the camera, but what does it matter. It’s only television.

Then I am no longer embarrassed, or bored, or just pretending to be bored for effect, but I am happy. Happy and I know it. I clap my hands.

The black man is seven feet tall and wearing mink. His walking stick raps along the floor with a noise that sounds like take-that-and-take-that, and take it we do, for who is going to object to the sounds of a seven-foot, mink-clad black man? There is always a chance that I was wrong about the death of the divine.

Out of the penumbra of this Goliath appears a Venus, caressed by a dress the colour of lilies gone bad, and carrying a fan, perhaps to encourage enthusiasm from the nipples of the mesh-shirted models, who are only just beginning to teeter their way around. Yes, the lights are dimmed and the music thumps inside my ribcage, but I cannot turn my attention away from this lady seated eight rows ahead and to my right, behind a silk ribbon.

“It’s starting,” you whisper to me.

“I know,” I say, looking, “but the show must go on.”

Darkness overtakes the crowd, and we are forced to watch the stage. This speaks volumes about the way people think of art: they love the scenery, but can’t find the subject. They aren’t selling art on stage, those hawkers of mesh and tit. They just dress up women who look like antelopes and call it art, attaching a price tag for authenticity. They sell the simulacra, but they are content to let the real thing sit in the darkness with her sunglasses on, when anybody knows that she needs light to shine. I’m putting that in my review. Not the part about the reflection, but the part about the antelopes. This is why I do what I do – I see the truth in advertising. Looking at the male models, I realize they all have the sharp eyes of lynxes. This can’t be an accident. Not in a business where women are girls are antelopes are the antimatter between silk and chiffon.

“La femme, ce n’est jamais ça,” says a woman sitting next to me. She nods as though it were a cultural activity, which it is in certain circles in Paris. To nod is not necessarily to agree, but rather to include oneself in what potentially suggests exclusion. To nod is to accept.

“Why is it the women all look like antelopes?” you ask me, and I suddenly realize why we are such a good match. Professionally. That’s as far as my interest goes, the fact that I fell asleep on your shoulder during the plane ride notwithstanding, though your eyes are very blue.

“Do you think it’s a birth defect,” you continue, “or just some kind of eye-on-the-side-of-the-head aesthetic?”

“These girls are just too modern for their own good.”

“Do they sell hamburgers here, or are the French not very into that?” you ask.

Now the chants are coursing in over the music: fur is murder, leather is death. The antelopes look skittish. The man in the mink coat is on a cellphone, escorting his Wilting Lily out a side entrance, and over a loudspeaker no one knew existed, a voice as deep and as intimidating as a god’s says, “Children of the new generation, do not be afraid.”

For a moment I think people are having seizures, but it turns out that they are dancing, flailing their arms and legs in deliciously reckless abandon, kicking over chairs, roaring with pleasure as they vomit champagne into their handbags, scaring the antelopes. One of the lynxes pounces and brings an antelope to the floor, her tits still snug in her shirt, thanks to the technological miracle of double-sided tape. The lynx and the antelope roll about violently, until the antelope hits the lynx in the head with a folding chair with white silk ribbon on it.

“The animal kingdom,” you say as we watch transfixed. There is a bartender abandoning his post. The champagne bottles sweat dejectedly and we know that some injustices cannot stand. We’ve a long night ahead of us, and a man cannot write without refreshment. We gather the perspiring beauties in our arms and make our way to the dance floor. We have work to do.

“Hello,” I say into my phone as we dance, “Marjorie? Take this down.”

We sip from the bottles and wait for the morning papers. The Word is now ours, Marjorie our secretary-Moses, and we are waiting for our disciples to flock to the magazine sellers and the street vendors. We swagger down the street. We have lost our money and our plane tickets, and forgotten where our hotel is, if we even had a hotel in the first place. But there are much more important things to worry about.

The show, you say to one scandalized old lady walking a dog, must go on.

The single fried egg might be life’s loneliest meal. He listens to the sizzle of unfertilized yolk and waits another second before lifting away from the heat. The timing is important. He wants the skin starting to harden but everything else still shaky and runny inside. It quivers on his spatula before sliding onto the plate slimy and wet, like a living thing. Half a shake of salt, a full shake of pepper and good to go. This is supper. The toaster pops and he looks over. Watches the filament cooling, turning black again. He butters and dips and mops. The room is almost silent. Only the occasional gurgling coming from deep inside the fridge. A single fried egg, he thinks: enough food for one person, as long as they aren’t hungry.

He checks the cordless telephone again but there is no change. The phone is a smug little bird that refuses to sing. Words on its tiny screen say No new messages. There is a button for Talk and a button for End. Redial and Flash and Clear and Mute. Nothing from it all day. He looks at the calendar. One day until the day. Already one year. It goes and comes so fast. Only these hours left. You better call. He says it out loud. You better know what you need to do.

The house is too big for him now. He feels like the marble in one of those tilting wooden labyrinths and he has to try not to bang off the walls or fall through the holes. The space is crowded with things that should have disappeared, a thousand items that should have been wiped away and deleted, all at the exact same moment, while the body was flying through the air. Instead, they stayed and registered nothing.

When it gets like this, the kitchen is worse than the bedroom. More intimate. Always something else waiting behind a cupboard or rolling loose in a drawer. The World’s Greatest Mom mug – a last-minute gift from a lazy kid – hanging on its hook. And stuck behind a magnet is the reminder card for a dentist’s appointment they never made it to. The secretary from that office left messages for a month, trying to reschedule a semi-annual cleaning. The boy’s favourite deep cereal bowl and her preferred paring knife, the only one that stays sharp.

Scattered clothes and mismatched socks. Filthy T-shirts he washed only eight months later when the last of the smell was gone. The bristles of their toothbrushes, fanned by his thumb. Her half-completed plan for renovating the basement. Magazines flopping through the slot every two weeks. Style at Home and Canadian Living. His son’s password-protected laptop. He knows there are messages in there.

His daughter, the one who wasn’t there, the one still left, says he needs to get out. Find something smaller, something more manageable. Maybe a condo downtown. A place where no one has lived before. Walking distance to everything from there. Think how much better that would be.

When it was all over and they finally let him out of the hospital, she took a semester off from her school in Kitchener. They tried to fill in the blanks and get their rhythm back, tried to live as close to the original pattern as possible, but even while it was happening, he knew it couldn’t last. A girl, a woman in her early twenties, must go back to what she is. Things have to be done when they need to be done and the somewhere-else schedule will not wait. Friends and paper deadlines, she says. Assignments and exams. Picking up extra shifts at the restaurant. Been very, very busy these last few days.

She calls twice a week now. Usually Wednesday nights and Sunday afternoons. Usually on her cellphone. How are you, Dad? He hears other voices in the background. Are you in a car? he asks. Are you driving? Don’t talk to me while you’re driving. I’m hanging up right now. Pull over and stop and talk to me then. Not driving she says. God. Just a bad signal. Sitting in a restaurant. Poor reception. Then five dutiful minutes of their voices passing each other on a satellite network. I have to go, she says. Love you.

He picks up the receiver and hits Talk. They say it works both ways, but this is different. He would go with her if she came to pick him up. He would make an exception for her. Tomorrow will always be a different day. The dial tone comes through steady and clear and he puts the sound up on the speaker. If you listen carefully you hear a clacking in the background, behind the tone, something like a train. He puts his ear toward it, straining. Feels like he is getting close to something before a quick ring cuts in. A ring inside the dial tone. A message from the phone itself. A stranger’s voice, a man who seems official. He says: If you would like to make a call, please dial a number. If you need help, please hang up and dial your operator. The voice starts to say it again, but the phone cuts him off. The phone cuts itself off. The phone is frustrated with this situation and cannot allow it to continue. A high pitched squealing rises. Like talking to a fax machine. Then a hard, extra loud busy signal. Bomp bomp bomp bomp. He hangs up. Pushes Off.

Anniversary, he thinks. It makes him so angry. Parents and their kids, nothing can be done. Connected and separated, different ages at different times. They can never really live together. By the time they are who they are going to be, they’re gone. He thinks about the fundamental difference between remembering and being reminded. The next time they talk, she will say something about how she lost track of time, how she was in the middle of it, squeezed up against an immediate pressure that blotted out everything else and she simply forgot. She will likely cry and she will be so, so sorry, but it already makes him feel sick. Jesus Christ. A person should know where they need to be and when they need to be there.

He listens to the forecast, takes out his map of the county and studies the Number Three. An inch here is equal to two miles there. He measures with a ruler, estimates distance, and considers the problem of travel. How to pull it off. Probably close to thirty miles, definitely more than twenty-five. It will take some doing, but if she doesn’t call by tonight, then that is it. He will go by himself.

*

It felt like rescue in the beginning. Ninety days in and a chance at safety for the rest of their lives. A guaranteed spot on the seniority list as long as he kept up his end of the deal. Collective bargaining, the way work works. It meant everything for them. Getting in and hooking up for the steady ride and a reliable flow. Pure blind luck. He was hired off the street, plucked away from the rest of the world and delivered from what other people have to do to make a living.

We can go for another now, can’t we? She whispered it in his ear. It was the night of the ninetieth day. Their girl just three years old, still sleeping in a toddler bed. Yes, he said. Her hand moving under the sheets. Tingling in her voice. His eyes on the ceiling before he rolled his knee against her thigh. Yes, he said. It was the night of the ninetieth day. I think we’re going to be okay.

Around here, nineteen-eighty-three is the year that counts and that is where the line should go if they ever write a history of this place. This was long before he started, years before they got in, but nineteen-eighty-three matters for everybody. The way it came along and shook up the whole domestic side of the business. Lee Iaccoca taking a risk. The famous picture. His not-so-confident smile as he stands there at the Auto Show in front of the first generation. The paint they used to have. That in-between shade of maroon and a strip of Woodgrain paneling running down the side. It was the last of the real game-changers and they decided to build it here. Somebody’s arm got twisted on that, a face was pushed up against a wall. He knows that, thinks about it sometimes, the question of origins. Why it is where it is. The first one, the one in the picture, it’s in the Smithsonian now.

It goes by different names. The Magic Wagon or the Grand Caravan. The Voyager or the Town and Country. Chrysler, Dodge and Plymouth. The customer picks the model and the trim package. A hood ornament that holds the eye. Chrysler looks like a star that lives inside your house. His daughter used to say that. His son drew pictures of the long-horned sheep. A Dodge is Ram Tough and always red. Plymouth is more mysterious: a silver ship with wind in its sails. What is that supposed to be exactly? The Mayflower, he thinks. The Mayflower landing on Plymouth Rock. A car for pilgrims. Word associations that don’t quite hook up. None of it matters. The company will sell it any way you like, but it is always the same underneath. You do not fool around with a machine that works.

He has seen enough of them to know that there is no secret behind the Grand Caravan. It is exactly what it appears to be, an object designed to fulfill a basic need for a reasonable price. In the beginning, the sliding door was its signature. The way the whole side of the car could detach and roll along its track to give you such a large opening, even with only six inches of clearance on the side. A big door that wouldn’t bang against all the other doors in the mall parking lot and enough room inside for seven people and all their stuff. Those were the original brute facts, the Caravan’s simplest truths. Parents and kids piling in and out all the time – the soccer mom, yes, the soccer mom – but a seat for the visitor, too. A place for grandma when she has to be picked up at the airport. The driver and passenger up front and two benches in the back. You click down and the rows pop out. No points for style, but versatility has always mattered for this segment of the market. You take out the seats and there’s enough space back there for a 4×8 sheet of plywood. A plan for all the standard dimensions. He knows nothing fits together like that by accident.

People in the city feel the car in different ways. The Caravan goes past the men and women who work in the plant, beyond Chrysler and the CAW and Local 444. It moves over his family to reach everybody else. The guy who sells carpeting or the orthopaedic surgeon or the lady who teaches grade two French immersion. They all know. They can tell when things are going well and when they aren’t. They understand the way it sits on every bottom line.

It was the number-one selling minivan all by itself for more than a decade. The number-one selling vehicle for the whole country. Took years before the Asians caught up. Millions rolling away from this spot. They build it on the S-platform, then the AS, then the NS, then the RS and the RT. It started with a piece of crap 2.2 litre in-line 4 with barely 85 hp and that weakling would whine and complain and shake like you were re-entering the earth’s atmosphere every time you pulled into the passing lane. Now you go for the optional 4-litre turbo-charged V6 with 251 hp and that monster can pull your whole crew and all their bikes and your little hard-top camper up a mountain in the middle of July. He liked to watch the temperature gauge whenever he took theirs out on a long trip. The way it never budged and always stayed straight up, right in the middle, balanced between the red hot H and the cool blue C. He used to think that was all a person could ask from a car. An engine that was ready when you called.

The way it comes together is something to see and he has never taken it for granted. The interconnecting lines of yellow and orange conveyors, bodies and chasses moving separately before they mate. The bright white lights in paint, the orange robots swivelling in for their welds. The flash and the flash again. He used to think you could count the individual sparks and always arrive at the same number.

People outside think people inside must hate the machines, but it’s not like that. The Local has to fight for every job, but precision is precision and a person working on something likes to see it done right. When he watched those hydraulic shoulders rotating, lifting 1,300 pounds and holding it perfectly still, always within the same range of a hundredth of a millimetre, he felt something, but it wasn’t hatred; it was more like confusion or a stab of deep-down uncertainty. It gets confusing after awhile if you have to watch a robot work and you watch it and you watch it again. The repeating sequences start to blur and it seems like time stops and there is only this one task left in the whole world, this one job, separated from everything else, and it has to be done again and again, forever. The robot sees a hundred divisions in a millimetre and it always hits the same spot. The same weld. The same number of sparks.

A standard dash assembly comes as a single unit. It moves on a hydraulic but has to be guided into its spot by hand. You need to feel it in. An engineer told him once that they were decades away from creating a robot that could mimic the instinctive muscular adjustments of the human wrist. The engineer swivelled his hand around a couple of times. Think about this thing, he said. The wrist. You can’t imagine the number of interrelated calculations. The way it pulls together force and angle and time, the way it cross-references. Makes it look easy, but never the same way twice. Can’t replicate intuition. A bolt. An infinity of bolts tightened just enough. Not too far and not not far enough. A car is held together, fastened more than assembled.

They think of everything. The big stuff and small stuff, it all matters. Subtle cosmetic redesigns for the interior and complete retoolings. Power windows and locks. ABS. The new transmission. The second sliding door. Keyless entry and remote starter. The new suspension. Standard air bags – multistage and curtain – even in the base model. Five-star safety. Side impact beams. Always tweaking the engines to find a little extra. Before the gas got crazy, 20 miles a gallon in the city wasn’t so bad. Stow n’ Go seats rolling straight into the floor. Swivel n’ Go seats spinning around. A built-in card table. Two different DVD players for the kids showing two different movies. Everybody gets their own headphones. Nine cupholders. Chrome accents. They move the shifter off the column. They fix the clock. Put in the MP3. The GPS. Every small change in the finished product is a bigger change on his end.

He liked to ride along sometimes as the next one rolled off the line and into the world. He liked to be the first person to read the cooing odometers with all their 0’s in a line. A fully loaded special edition Town and Country with the windows that go down in the back to let the fresh air get in. One minute in there and you know. They flick the wipers, honk the horn two times and flash the brights just before it leaves. When it passes the last inspection, it gets the all clear and begins its life. He liked moving inside his work and feeling it moving around him. He liked understanding the interconnected parts and being the first to look through a clean windshield and see everything from this point of view. You cannot beat a brand new minivan. Ask around. Ask anybody. A person appreciates being up high when they’re driving.

There are gaps built into the process. A couple of extra seconds before this one goes and the next one comes. Sometimes, in that space where nothing is supposed to happen, he used to take off his glove and press his palm flat against the glass or the body. Then he’d pull away quickly and watch the print flash up clear and detailed. A perfect outline of his hand visible for one second against the new paint or the dark tint, even the individual grooves of his thumb coming through. Whenever he did that, he used to imagine a detective. A smart person, somewhere far away, working with a magnifying glass and a light and a fine brush, dusting for clues. He used to imagine a person who could trace this car all the way back to him, back to this spot and this moment. A detective who could follow the chain of material evidence and find all the linkages and establish an incontrovertible proof.

The pay and the benefits are all that anybody else ever talks about and most of what they say is wrong. Massive inflation in all their numbers. Anti-union spin. He has done the real comparisons, added everything up and come out slightly ahead. To make the real money, you need to understand the complexity of the system and you need to think about taxes and shifting brackets. You need to figure out how to live with the overtime and how to get in there for the stat holidays. When the kids were small, he used to scramble for the possibility of a double-time shift or for the perfect conditions that came around twice a year on Good Friday or Christmas.

It is more difficult to calculate the value of the benefits. The kids’ braces and top-of-the-line Green Shield for their prescriptions. The education fund. He marched for those things. They walked arm in arm carrying the banner. Campaigned for the need to make progress, to look out for working families, to stand up against the big guys. Ken and Buzz and Bob making their speeches. A union puts you inside of something larger. Tickets for Tiger games and a rented bus. Tickets to the Wings and the Spitfires. Everyone sitting in the same section. All the good money his daughter picked up working TPT – Temporary Part-Time – in the summer. The card tournaments. The Christmas party and the Christmas bonus. The employee incentive plan. It was impossible to say no to the deal they gave you if you just bought what you built. Straight out of Henry Ford and the original Model T. Make enough to drive what you make. Four in a row. They went through four different vans before the last one. Hundreds of thousands of miles piled up. The kids grew up riding back there. It was their sole means of transportation.

*

He remembers turning around and telling the boy to shut up. The only clear part left. Hand on the wheel, craning his neck around. Looking at him closely. Wife sleeping in the passenger seat. Daughter already away at school.

His son. The teenage slacker called up from central casting. Lying down sideways in the back seat, high-tops up against the window. Head on the armrest. Game Boy. Ear phones. Distortion coming out of his head. Tight jeans. Black hooded sweatshirt. Hair in his eyes.

What a kid can do to a parent. A wave of disappointment washing through him as he drives. Bitterness, like the taste of ammonia, coursing through his mouth and his entire bloodstream. He feels it in his feet. It has been nothing but continuous argument for months. The boy talking even though he can’t hear his own voice through the music. How it all sucks. His parents are hypocrites. They say one thing and do another. Smart teenager with bad grades and stupid friends. Comes home one day with an idiot tattoo on his shoulder blade. A tide of complaint that will not stop. How he doesn‘t want to be here. How this is stupid. How he’s going to run away. How he’s going to move out the minute, the minute, he turns sixteen. You think you own me. You don’t own me.

They cannot make him understand why it is important for a family to do the same thing every year. Why you have to hold on to your little traditions. It’s only one day, his mother says. A trip to the county in the fall. Follow the Number Three and go to Ruthven. Joe Colosanti’s Tropical Garden and then Jack Miner’s Bird Sanctuary. Plants and birds. Muck and Cluck, his wife used to call it. Maybe this weekend we’ll go for the muck and cluck. What do you say?

At Colosanti’s Tropical Garden they will sell you a miniature cactus in its own clay pot for two dollars. Get the one with the purple head. It can live on nothing. Push your finger against the needles for fun. There is no threat from a Colosanti’s cactus. It is what the kids will remember. The greenhouses. The turtles and a little alligator swimming in its pond. The humidity and the baby animals wandering around, goats and chickens. They will remember that you have to keep your palm flat when you feed an apple to a pony.

Then on to Miner’s. Every year the same thing. Canadian Geese by the thousands returning to Crazy Jack. A hundred years of banding and tracing routes and charting schedules. A warmer fall means a later departure. It doesn’t take long. You drive by and it’s over. You hear and you smell. The sound and the stink: incessant honking and acres of bird shit. That is what you get from a visit to Jack Miner’s.

But there is something else, too. Something a person has to see at least once. The way an entire field can take off at the same time. The land deciding to become the sky. Everything lifting at once. Tight formations and instinctive patterns. That V writing itself on the clouds. You look at that and you don’t forget you saw it. It can make you believe in order if you are the kind of person who wants to believe in order.

He remembers turning around and telling the boy to shut up. Last words. I’m getting so sick of your bullshit. Watch, he said. You watch. A couple of years down the road, you’ll be thanking us for this.

Turning back, he catches a glimpse of his face as it passes the rear-view. The sneer. An angry man caught in a bit of glass. The red glint of the breaklight comes through first, starts in the corner of his eye, then straight ahead. The back end of the flatbed. Too close. Already there. No chance to slow down. He tries to swerve, but they hit full tilt. Then rolling. They are strapped inside a rolling metal object. The V6 with 251 hp – a fire burning in the middle of a metal cube – the new fuel injection system. The driver’s side airbag explodes out of the steering wheel, knocking him back against his chair. The back of his head slams into the rest. Bad twist in his neck. Sharp pain and an instant numbness in his legs. Powder burning in his eyes. His vision blurs. It happens fast but he sees it slowly before the total black comes down. Two seconds worth of action is more than enough to fill in all the rest of the time that follows.

The airbags on her side do not deploy. The bags on the whole right-hand side of the vehicle do not deploy. They do not do what they are meant to do. Instead, they sit patient and useless, like a pile of neatly folded white towels in a linen closet.

Almost no visible change in her body. She is sleeping before her head goes against the window frame. Too hard. He knows it. The unnatural angle of her neck. The end of his wife. The way her ear moves too far to the side and her chin hangs too far down. One beat later, something flying past, about the size of a black hockey bag, thrown through the side window. He watches it move, following a smooth trajectory, an arc in the sky. That movement is the last thing he sees. It can’t be processed. Elegant, he thinks, or something like that. The curve in the air.

*

Two days later he wakes up in the hospital. Can’t feel his legs. His daughter holding his hand. She looks thin. His first thought. You need to eat more. Take better care of yourself.

There are six airbags in the Dodge Grand Caravan. Standard equipment, even on the base model. Safety sells. Front, side, and rear impact zones. They were the first to make it to market with protection like that. Went from design to production in an eighteen-month turnaround and caught everyone by surprise. Brought a little momentum back into sales. The car met or exceeded all standards set by the National Highway Transportation Safety Association. New sensors woven into the bumpers and the panels and the doors. Scored above average on all the tests. You watch the crash test videos and see what you see. Those are the standard factory models.

In the videos it all works. Everything and every time. The bumper touches the test obstacle – the same immovable cube for all vehicles – and the bags deploy. Long before structural damage. Long before the crumpling of the frame dissipates and redirects the force of the impact. The dummies inside get tossed around. Sturdy back coils of spring in their necks wobble back and forth. Their fibreglass arms and legs extend, but you can tell they are going to be okay. If they were alive they would be okay. Everything behaves as it should. The touch on the bumper, the explosion of compressed gas inside the cabin. No hard surfaces left. No space at all. Nowhere to move. The vehicle becomes a solid mass. A wrecked exterior with a safe place at its core.

An electrical short, he figures. One circuit. A single wire that did not carry current the way it is supposed to. Failure of design or manufacture or installation. Everything is possible. Corrosion, perhaps. Not enough consideration made for the deteriorating affects of road salt. The back of the flatbed too high. Again, not standard. Higher than the test cube. The boy’s unbuckled seatbelt. Nothing anybody could have done about that. A flaw outside of everything else. Mentioned in all the reports. Passengers are rarely thrown from a moving vehicle when seatbelts are used properly. Cops and their cameras. Images of everything. Pictures you shouldn’t be allowed to take. A stranger’s finger pushing down on a button. Numbered evidence. Accident recreation teams. Investigations. Measuring tapes. Insurance people with their duplicate sets of forms. The length of skid marks. Indexed to tread wear. The angle of impact. Angle the car left the road. They work backwards with their calculations. Crumple zones. Vectors. Radius of broken glass. Distance from the car to the body in the field.

Twelve weeks in the hospital. Then twenty weeks of physio after that. The benefits covered everything and an officer at the Local made sure the paperwork moved along and the claims were filed on time. He had to learn to walk again, how to wiggle his toes, make his bowels churn on command. He lost almost half his weight and his hands callused against the railings. Messages sent from his brain and only slowly received. Twitching toes, half-bent knees, hips that took months before they remembered how to work right.

There was a moment to choose. An opening that wouldn’t last long they said. Everybody talking about the same things. The Big Three going down. For real this time. Bankrupt and bailed out. Negotiations and concessions. The new deal and its different terms. Never going to be like it was before. Peak oil. Calculations that depended on the shifting value of a Mexican peso. Rising interest rates. The Environmental Protection Agency. Californian emission targets. Household debt levels. Burning wells in the Middle East. Security for a pipeline in Nigeria. Drilling in the arctic. What the average person in India does in their spare time. They said it all mattered.

He wasn’t sure how it fit together, but when Essex Engine went down and the Foundry disappeared, he’d paid attention. When the fire in the Foundry went out for good – after burning for sixty years or whatever – that was important news. Ford guys told him that when they pulled the plug on the Foundry, even when they cut it off, the smelter burned hot for another week all by itself, with no external source of power, like a star, like the sun, generating its own heat and living on its own internal explosions. Then they went in with the heavy artillery and tore the whole thing down. You go to the Foundry now and it’s gone.

A visitor sitting in the chair in his hospital room said, If they could get rid of us all and start again, that’s what they’d do. You know that, right? That’s what I’d do anyway. If I was in their shoes? I’d blow up the whole goddamn operation and blank slate it. Get all younger people to come in for less and do more. A fucking mess is what it is. Big fucking mess.

He signed as quickly as he could. Scribbled his name on the line and wrote the date like it was yesterday. You wait till it happens to you and see which way you go. Only an idiot says no to a buyout. Need to consider the facts. The numbers the company will put down to make you go away. This much to come to work tomorrow and tomorrow like usual. Or this much to stay home. You add in the pension, the best in the business, the RRSP’s, the insurance, and the value of a big empty house. You get a figure. He read the statements, the digits and the commas spreading out beside his name. Couldn’t quite catch the full meaning. Everything, everywhere in the world is falling apart, but he is okay. It will be like the depression they say, 30 percent unemployment and food rations, but it never comes. He has more than enough, more than he will ever need. Money like a foreign language he used to know but doesn’t understand anymore.

*

After they cut his body out of the wreckage and lifted him away, he never touched the car again. The insurance company wrote the thing off as a totalled vehicle and he wondered what that meant. The total seemed like a raw number completely added up, the figure they reach for when they need to make something go away. He imagined the end of the van’s life. Thought about those compacted cubes of metal he’d seen on TV and about the conveyors and the cranes and the incinerators at Zalev Brothers. He’d looked through the fence there once and watched the smokestacks and the bulldozers moving their mountains of ore. An unmaking as systematic as manufacture. It scared him. Metal turned back into a ferrous dust and smoke. The remains of 12 million Magic Wagons absorbed into the ground, secreted into the river, or floating in the sky to become a microscopic coating of ash inside your lungs.

The same transformations for us, he thinks. A person is one thing and one thing and one thing. Then he is something else. There is a pivot, a before and an after, a shifting. The day he decided to take the buyout. That was it for him. Not the accident. Not the day he left the hospital or the week when his daughter went back to her own life. Not even today, the day she forgot. Everything else is second to the moment when he decided to really walk away, to move exclusively under his own power. Walk and never drive again. Walk and not even allow himself to be carried in another car or taxi or bus. This was the one connection he needed to break. His life fused to the internal combustion engine, almost since the beginning. He wanted them not to touch anymore.

It has been almost a year now and he thinks he has managed it well enough. The groceries and the doctor’s appointments and the bank. He leaves himself plenty of time and is never late. Follows a regular routine. A network of well-worn paths through his contracted orbit and a different way of understanding the city. He has his short cuts and his tangents, places he doesn’t go anymore. It has been doable so far, but this will be something different. The map says it is thirty miles.

Before he goes to bed, he packs his bag. A raincoat, just in case, and different layers for the way the temperature shifts during the day. A stack of six sandwiches and a water bottle. He sets the alarm for 5:30 and puts his head against the pillow. Then he gets up again and goes down to the kitchen. Digs out a flashlight and some extra batteries. It is going to be dark, he reminds himself. It will be dark at the beginning and the end.

University to Huron Church. Huron Church all the way out to the fork where the 401 begins and the Number Three branches off. Then follow the Number Three to the spot. He will know it when he gets there. The way is simple, a long diagonal cut. University to Huron Church to the Number Three. He repeats it as he falls asleep. It will take all day. Even if he starts early, it will take the full day, but he will get there. He will be where he needs to be.

In the morning, he wakes ahead of the alarm. Gets up and eats another egg and even washes the pan and his plate. He pulls on a toque and a pair of gloves, and shrugs a backpack over his shoulders before reaching for the doorknob. Outside, his breath fogs against the darkness and he turns and squeezes a note into the space between the door and the frame. If she checks, she will know where to find him. He turns the key and slips it into his pocket.

In the early stages, it goes faster than he expected. The longer distance he has to cover makes his normal routes seem shorter. The left leg is worse than the right – he cannot bend it enough to ride a bike – but the humidity is not bad and once he warms up, he finds a regular stride and moves steadily. University passes quickly before he makes the turn onto Huron Church. The spire of Assumption and the old buildings of the school stand on his left across from the massive concrete foundations of the bridge on his right. There is only one block left meant for people and even that is fading as everything clears out to make way for the second span. This is the issue of the day. A second bridge and where it will go and what it will mean and what it will cost and who will pay. Politicians and businessmen arguing on both sides of the border. They say the traffic demands a second span and that it must go here or it must go there. The single most important crossing on the continent, the lifeline of two economies. Delays that must be stopped. The flow of goods over the line. Free Trade and the Autopact. They repeat and repeat. The traffic demands a second span. The traffic demands a second span, as though traffic sets its own course free of human interference. He thinks of the twisted arms and the faces pushed up against the wall and the backroom payouts. Boarded-up houses on Indian road where his kids’ friends used to live. All of them gone now, purposely flooded and left to rot until demolition is the only option. It is hard for him to even look at it. Almost like the other side, he thinks. Almost as bad as Detroit itself.

He moves on and the Caravan follows him everywhere. Parked along the curb and sleeping in driveways and overnight lots, idling at the McDonald’s pick-up window and blinking in the left-turn lane. It is always close by, bumper humming just six inches from his repaired knee as he passes inside the crosswalk. Every make and model. Some twelve or fifteen years old, rumbling by, exhaling exhaust and pulling in the air. He can see what the drivers don’t know. Those struts are done, my friend. All the ninety-eights had the same problem. And that hint of rust around the wheel well? Looks like nothing right now, but wait one year. Should have sprung for the metallic paint. The telltale wobbles. The bad alignments and the burning oil. The faulty ignitions and the squealing timing belts. Bald tires and bad brakes. He remembers the big radiator recall.

After Wyandotte, after he passes beneath the bridge, the American-bound transports take over. A person walking in this place takes matters into his own hands. The toll plaza and the duty free. The University Stadium, the High School. Two different malls. The strip bar and the fast food. The motels and the fruit stands. They all rise in front and he walks them down. Six lanes running on his right. Trucks backed up and waiting. Petunias planted in the middle of a median strip.

He takes a break at the cloverleaf where Huron Church passes under the Expressway. Four lanes running full tilt on the ground and four more running perpendicular over his head. A place that makes its own air currents. He sits on the hill, eats a sandwich and feels good about his progress. Watches the newspapers and plastic bags swirling always in the same pattern. Sucked upwards and sideways. After the expressway, there are houses with neat hedges set back from the road and then Saint Clair College and the outlet centres and cemeteries lined up on the right. Heavenly Rest waits near the junction where the 401 begins and ends and the Number Three branches off. His wife and his son are in there and it has all been paid for, but he has never seen the graves and cannot stop now to check. The daylight needs to be preserved.

As he moves along the Number Three, he thinks about all the other times he came this way before the accident. There are only two lanes and he remembers how the slower drivers used to frustrate him. It was always easy enough to blow by one of them, but impossible if you ever got stuck behind two or three in a row, especially at night. The way he used to stare at the speedometer and announce the pace. Sixty-three kilometres an hour, he’d say. Sixty-three. Are they all going to church? And he’d gesture through the windshield and calculate the risk of a sudden passing attempt. How fast he’d have to go and how long he’d have to spend on the wrong side of a busy road. He usually took his shot because he trusted the guts of the van. How surprisingly nimble it could be if he had to pick it up for a short burst. He’d hit the signal and drive his foot to the floor and swerve out over the dotted line to take down four stragglers in one go before cutting back to avoid a head-on collision. Whenever they were out there on the wrong side, his wife used to put her hand out and touch his chest and tell him to go back. Stop it, she’d say. Stop it. You know I don’t like this. You’re going to get us all killed for nothing.

As he walks along the shoulder, he faces the traffic and tries to make eye-contact with each driver. He thinks about all the other kinds of accidents. The big hundred-car pileup that shut down the whole 401 for a week. That wasn’t far from here. A diesel fire that burned so hot it melted the road down to the bare earth and welded all the cars together. And all the little side-swipes and fender-benders and the rigs that end up wrapped around hydro poles or flipped on their backs with their wheels spinning in the air. You can count on a car accident. The next one and the next one and the next one. Steady and reliable and always arriving on schedule and in the same places. Rush hour and the dark drunk interval between one and four in the morning. The night after the prom. The poorly engineered curve and the bad intersection and the nasty stretch between Chatham and the Bridge. Ask a 9-1-1 operator, ask the person who dispatches the cops and the ambulance. She will tell you. Nothing surprising ever happens on her regular shift.

He can’t walk twenty minutes on the Number Three without seeing another homemade memorial. The white wooden crosses – three feet high and hung with faded artificial flowers – are almost as frequent as kilometre markers. He pulls himself in and out of the ditches and reads every one. Dates and ages scribbled in black. Some are impossible and faded and some are twenty-years-old and still bright. He thinks of the hand coming back to re-paint and re-write the same words every spring and fall. People holding on to their rituals. There are vases and ragged teddy bears and laminated photographs and small piles of rocks that can’t be random.

After the high heat of the afternoon, his head begins to feel fuzzy and a sunburn cracks his lips. The last of his water is gone and he knows he must be a little dehydrated, but he recognizes the spot immediately. It is impossible to make a mistake when you approach this gradually. The traces of tread are still there and they point the way, directing him back. He steps clearly into what passed so quickly the first time and everything is as it was. He thinks he can almost see the space he opened in last year’s corn. He goes in, parts the stalks like coats on a rack. From the road, the field looks scattered, but inside everything is straight and the rows are evenly planted. It is all the space he needs.

Good, he says. Good enough. He lies down with them. Palms flat on the ground and his cheek turned. This is what he came to do. The shadow from a cloud passes over and a tide of deep fatigue rises. Dizziness and a regular throbbing in his legs now that he has stopped. There is no next move. He rests his head on the backpack and closes his eyes. One quiet hour here with them. A bit of time spent together and then he will head back. Maybe he will get a motel on the way home.

His body rests in the cornfield and a crowd of stalks stands over him. Waning sunlight, green warmth, insects and silence. An ant crawling on the back of his hand. Mosquitoes and then a single Monarch butterfly. Almost time for you to go, he thinks. He remembers a visit to Point Pelee, something the guide said about their incredible migration. The amount of time it takes to make it down to Mexico every year, their repeating cycles and the long distances and short lifespans. Four rounds before they get through. Whole generations born and giving out while still en route.

There is a whirring when he opens his eyes. He hears the road but can’t see it. It is dark and cold and he is stiff. His watch says 8:30 but the night is already full black. More than four hours of sleep and he is still exhausted. He tries to stand but his joints feel calcified and arthritic. A swollen knee and puffy fluid he can squeeze through his jeans. Tough going from here . Need to be careful and take it easy. He limps out of the field and up the ditch. Grabs at a tangle of grass to get some leverage. There is a pain in his foot when he pushes off and something wrong with his breathing, a soreness behind his ear. He emerges onto the shoulder and crosses over.

A single ray of light cuts the dark and comes down on him fast. He hears a high-pitched drone and watches the light approach. There is nothing reflective on his body and the kid is almost on top of him before he sees and makes his adjustment. There is a quick cut away from the side and a fading waaaaaaaaah. He catches only the first syllable of the boy swearing at him. Ninety miles an hour, he thinks, at least. Wearing only a billowing T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Skinny arms and bare elbows and his legs wrapped around the engine of a purple Kawasaki. A yellow helmet with a fire decal, streak of colour in the night. Maybe a hundred, he reconsiders. That kid might be moving a hundred miles an hour.

He keeps the flashlight pointed at his feet and walks with one foot on the asphalt and one foot on the gravel. There is a white line that separates the road from everything else and he tries to follow it, but the pavement crumbles in spots and comes apart. He turns his back and pushes his palm against his eyes whenever a car approaches. Needs to keep his pupils from dilating if he wants to hold his night vision. There are no stars in the sky and he remembers a smog warning from the forecast, high rates of particulate matter in the air.

He is not certain if this is the right direction anymore. Could be mixed-up and turned around and moving out instead of back. There is wetness in his socks and dryness in his mouth. He thinks there must be one sandwich left, but it isn’t in the bag. Should have brought more water. He feels himself weaving across the line, but can’t adjust in time and comes back too far, rolls his ankle, and falls into a swampy culvert. People with their high beams on and the slipstream from every passing vehicle. Always this wind knocking him around. The biggest trucks create a vacuum that takes everything away, even the air. He has no idea how long he has been out here.

It would be easier to stop and take three steps to the left. He knows this. No one would be surprised. Just time it right and close his eyes and move laterally and open his arms. He could wait for the next Plymouth Voyager. Select the one he wants, identify its approaching headlights and press himself against the oncoming grill. He could feel the sails of the ship and sink all the way through. Penetrate directly to the core and meld with the moving parts. The option is always there.

Another pair of lights rises up, but they seem different and more threatening. The beams aim and come directly and the horn wails from too far out. He covers his eyes and turns his back. Hears the tires as they hit the gravel. He makes himself small. Crouches. Feels the skidding up through the ground. There is a hot smell of exhaust and burning rubber. He puts his chin on his knees and waits for the blow, but it doesn’t come. A door opens and slams shut. He hears footsteps and sees a darkness in front of the light. Then a hand sweeping his face, fingers on his cheek. The voice from the telephone. A weak connection, but the signal coming through. I’m here, she says.

Fresh water pouring over his head. She puts the bottle to his mouth. You need to drink. Drink this.

His eyes adjust. She is coming back and, at first, he is not sure if this is real. It could be a stranger, just another person in a car. Perhaps he is making himself see something. It takes a second before he knows. She is there and it is true. He puts both his hands on her shoulders, tests it, and then transfers some of his weight over.

Where have you been? she yells at him. There is no apology in her voice. The forgotten phone call happened years ago. Her eyes are bright and scared and she is spitting the words.

I’ve been going back and forth on this road for hours. You know that? Just looking and looking and hoping I’d find you before something happened. Driving past that same spot again and again. I didn’t know what you’d do out here by yourself. I almost called the police, Dad. You almost made me call the police.

She pulls her hands through her hair and looks far off to the side. The cars roar by and each one makes her wince. She seems exhausted. Older than he remembers from the last time.

She leads him over to her car, engine still running.

Get in, she says, and she opens the door. We need to go home. We need to get you into a bed.

She waves her hand into the space at the passenger’s side but he will not enter. He is standing in the mouth of the car, the V between the open door and the interior, and he tells her no. Tells her he won’t.

A motel, he says. How much farther? The idea is there, but the words slur a little. A motel in Essex. I need to get there. Just for tonight. Then we see.

She shakes her head, no. No. We need to stop this right now, okay? I’ve been out here for hours and I want to go home. Please stop this. Just get in. Please get in. Please.

He hears a hint of alarm in her voice and knows she is trying to cover it up. She likely thinks he isn’t right in the head anymore. Her hand goes to his shoulder and she pushes him down, tries to lower his body onto the seat.

He resists, feels his feet set hard on the ground. A sense of clarity returning and some strength. The shock of water helping. Everything is coming back to him now. Her hand on his shoulder. The right place at the right time and they are here together. This has always been the plan.

I am going to a motel tonight, he says. And you can come or you can go. Just tell me how much farther.

I don’t know, she screams. How am I supposed to know? Why are you doing this? Maybe a couple of miles that way. Her hand waves in the dark. Let me bring you at least. It will take us five minutes.

The still moment of confrontation. They stand one foot apart on the side of the road. He sways from the ankles and she looks at his hair and his clothes and his feet. Streaks of filth running behind his ears and down his neck. She shakes her head, stares at the space between his eyes and then looks away. He can see it when she turns. A tremor moving through, the crack in this hard performance. Her cheeks flush and he watches the anger and frustration mix with something else he can recognize. There are things we must allow each other that have nothing to do with kindness.

This doesn’t change anything, she says and she spreads both her arms wide as if to absorb the whole scene. A muscle ripples in her cheek. You know that, right? This won’t change what you did.

She pushes the heels of her hands hard against her eye sockets and then she shakes her head again and leans over to kiss him on the cheek. She walks back to the car, puts it in gear, checks over her shoulder, and sweeps through a U-turn. When she pulls up beside him, she hits the hazards and he looks to her through the window. She flicks her wrist and waves him ahead and he nods and starts to walk. She follows with her tires rotating to match his pace, a half-turn at a time. The four-ways flash and her headlights shine up on his back. He walks on the shoulder, then on the side, then in the middle of the lane and his shadow stretches out in front, the outline of a human body cast down onto the pavement, but still moving. Other cars come up from behind, slow down and almost crawl. There is a moment of confusion, a pause. A string of red tail lights extends back into the darkness and the whole strange parade inches forward.

photo courtesy of pietroizzo

It used to be said of the Souq al-Arawam that business there was so tough whenever Satan walked through it he’d roll up his trouser legs so as not to get them soiled. If you met a girl and fancied her, it was best to tell a white lie and say your shop was just around the corner, in the Souq al-H.amīdiyya, because to be from the Souq al-Arawam was akin to having a mark on your forehead. It was also where one found only the very best carpets and antiques. The villagers would gravitate there, trading in their old hand-woven carpets for machine-made. Competition was fierce. And even today, at the annual market, there are fisticuffs when pilgrims from afar bring goods with them to cover their fare to Mecca. Damascus is a difficult place in which to survive at the best of times, but to have survived the Souq al-Arawam in its heyday was to have survived the world. The area has become relatively tame, which no doubt had to do with the spread of similar businesses throughout Damascus in order to meet a growing tourist trade.

The souq, even at its most savage, or maybe especially at its most savage, is conducive to a certain poetic. One imagines the markets of Shakespeare’s London were alive with a rich demotic, just as, not so long ago, Spitalfields Market was. The disappearance of such places amounts to the death of human drama. What replaces them is the shopping centre, and it was fear of the emergence of such sterile palaces that crept into the nightmare that I had earlier. Things have not sunk that far. The souq is still a place where one fights to survive, and it is also where one does so with the munitions of language. The souq is full of stories. I asked Yasser to tell me his.

‘I don’t sell carpets. I sell kilims. Did I ever tell you why? When we worked for our uncle there were just us three kids and a foreman in charge. Only the boss and this foreman were allowed to handle the carpets, which were expensive. We were allowed only to fold them and place them neatly in piles. Kilims, on the other hand, were okay. The boss would turn a blind eye if I showed a kilim to a customer without consulting him first. This was what took me in the direction of kilims. They were close to me. I could handle them. I come from a family, which had a rich and a poor branch. Mine was the poor, well, to be honest, from somewhere in the middle. There were poorer people than us and, in the other direction, there were wealthy aristocrats. I always hated the attitude of the rich towards us and this, in my thinking, was also the carpet’s attitude towards me. The kilim, on the other hand, was somehow friendly. We would spend whole days in the shop, with our boss, and he would never speak to us. This was the tradition in Damascus, and he was the last of a conservative school in which a boss maintained his pride by never addressing his inferiors. If I were sitting there, and the foreman was there, he’d ask the foreman to tell me to do this or that, but he would never talk directly to me. And he was my uncle, from my mother’s side! We lived fairly close to his house and in the mornings when we went to work with him by car we had to sit in the back seat and never look into the mirror which was for his eyes alone. These were serious rules. We weren’t even allowed to tell customers our names. If a customer asked mine, I’d have to say, “I work for Mr So-and-so.” At the beginning it wasn’t such a big deal but it got to the point that I was a university graduate who could not speak his own name. It’s like when you read Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, where the man in it has a number, and it’s as if you do not own your own being. There was some logic behind this. Our boss would think, “What if he leaves and goes and works in another shop, then people might follow his name.”

‘When it came time for me to have a shop, I said to myself, “No carpets.” My neighbour warned me, saying I could never survive on kilims alone. Adham, my assistant, always says we should try carpets. It was tempting at first to buy the workshop products because they looked so perfect but now that I have sufficient clientele, I’m going more in the direction of things that were made for authentic purposes. I have very little that would satisfy, say, Americans. I know what they want, but it’s not a direction I wish to take. You need to be all the more knowledgeable. You must have an eye. You require not only the enthusiasm but the passion to go and look for these things because they are not readily available. This is their poetic for me. The other rule, which is a  strict one, and this is my weakest point, which I’d never admit to another dealer, is I decide whether or not I’ll buy a piece even before hearing the price. There have been many times I bought a kilim at ten times what anyone else in the market would pay for it, but because I loved it I always managed to sell it.’

‘And when it comes to selling what you like to someone you don’t like?’

§

A couple of days before, I had been sitting in Yasser’s shop when a group of eight Americans came in, four couples, and although all of them were in their twenties, they seemed to occupy positions of responsibility quite beyond their years and experience. There was a married couple, one of whom, the female of the species, was attached to the State Department in Washington; another was an NGO who struck me as pretty vacant, and his wife who seemed to harbour a ghost of intelligence, who had eyes one might look into for maybe more than a minute; a third couple I took to be a soldier on account of his shaved head and his GI muscles and his wife or girlfriend who had a face that never left the floor upon which it first gazed, which no spark of curiosity ever threatened to ignite; and the remaining couple were so impenetrable I could glean nothing about them whatsoever except that one of them was called Charlie. They were all en route to Iraq. They positioned themselves in a semicircle at one end of the room and Yasser stood at the other where he displayed his wares and I sat cross-legged at the middle of one side of the room, which was close to where the door was, quite prepared to make my escape, except that I got hooked, observing the curious manners of the eight people. One of them grabbed a woven camel halter which he tied about his waist, and then did an obscene wiggle, thrusting his hips back and forth, making the coloured tassels dance, saying he’d wear it naked to the disco. The others, except for the woman with the intelligent eyes, squealed with delight. Yasser smiled the arrested smile of one watching the end of the world come. He then displayed a deep red and blue Turkmen oven cover and when he explained its purpose, which was to preserve the heat of the food underneath, two of the women replied, ‘Cool, cool’ and again Yasser smiled, this time a different kind of smile. And then he held up a small prayer rug and explained the significance in its design of the mihrab, saying it should be pointed always in the direction of Mecca when one of them, the NGO, shouted, pointing to that sacred spot, ‘Say, Charlie, you can stick your photo in there!’ Yasser froze. Any smile he had pretended to was in an instant gone.

The couple from the State Department were about to make the purchase of a small kilim from Afghanistan, a handsome piece, which is not to say it was rare or expensive, but, to cite Yasser, it was ‘honest’ and from where I was it scooped up light from distant places. I greatly liked it and I wondered what it was about this particular rug that so appealed to the couple. Or did they even know they liked it? And if they did like it, did they like it because of what it was or because it fitted their domestic scheme? And what of whoever made this, could he or she have pictured such a fate, the journey it would soon make? I couldn’t bear it anymore. Without saying a word I got up, crossed the room, folded the kilim twice, tucked it under my arm and walked out, saying not a word to anyone, not even to Yasser who produced yet another kind of smile, this one visible only to me. Apparently, immediately after I left, one of the Americans asked, ‘Who in the hell’s that, Jack the Ripper?’

The above passage was almost too easy to write, and the reasonable side of me questions whether these people ought to be allowed to represent anything other than themselves, and yet, considering the deadly game of consequences, which is what the politics of whom they serve has become, one need look no further than their faces for what a poet friend of mine calls ‘the small fascisms of the spirit.’ What also troubled me is that they seemed to exude confidence of a kind I had not witnessed before. The victory they smelled, however, was already the stench of failure. The Afghan kilim is close to the desk where I write, and, looking at it, at this object which I might not have bought otherwise, may Allāh forgive me, but I feel not a little proud to have wrested beauty away from ignorance.

§

‘What of those people who buy beauty and cannot see it?’ I asked Yasser. ‘You must develop a relationship with these objects.’

‘Yes, on the other hand if you have such a relationship with the things you love, you’ll never become rich. Did I ever tell you about the man who runs a brothel in Trebizond? Trebizond for a long time was the capital of prostitution in Turkey. All the wealthy businessmen from Istanbul, Bursa and Ankara would go there. As you know, in our Islamic culture this is shameful. We daren’t speak to each other of such things. This is Turkey’s so-called “Russian” city, and, especially after the opening up of the border, Russian prostitutes go there to work full- or part-time. Many girls work in the shops by day and then go to their hotel where they can stay in return for having sex with one customer a night. The people who run these places, cheap hotels designed for this purpose, and the more obvious brothels too, are mafia-rich. They all have miserable lives, but also they drive the biggest cars, wear the most expensive suits. There was one brothel-keeper, however, who was dirt poor. This brothel had fantastic girls. Everyone said this about him, that he had the best prostitutes. One day we were sitting in a café, smoking a nargileh, and the others there were making fun of him, saying, “You’re no good at this business.” I asked him, “How did you end up like this?” The man replied, “What do you do?” I told him I dealt with kilims. “Are you rich?” I said no. “Do you love your business?” I said yes. “Well, then,” he said, “there’s your mistake. You’ll end up like me. Every time I bring a prostitute to my brothel I fall in love with her. And it is painful for me to see her making love with someone else. And it is painful to take money for it and sometimes the meaner the guy who makes love to her the more difficult it is for me to take money from him. I’ll never make it. If you love your business, you’ll never make it.” This has always rung true with me. If I buy something I love, I never make good money from it.’

I wondered how Yasser’s parallel between kilims and whores would go down with a western audience. I wondered whether I really cared. What I appreciated most in my many conversations with him was his ability to illustrate his arguments with analogies. And these he could pluck from his beloved Qur’ān and its many surrounding hadiths and also from the mundane. There had always to be a story and the souq remains a live culture for stories. There were some things modernity had not yet squeezed lifeless.

Yasser then told me when he opened his shop he had only two carpets, the sale of which was absolutely essential to his being able to continue. It was all he could do to pay for the space, which is the one he still occupies, which one must step down into, as if into a cave. On that first day, over a decade ago, a woman from Argentina, attached, so she said, to her country’s embassy in Amman, said she would purchase both carpets but only if she could have them at a discount. Desperate though he was for a sale, Yasser had already decided he’d fix his prices, a policy from which still he refuses to deviate. She said she’d return with the money half an hour later. Two hours passed and she returned, paid the asking figure for the carpets, and then handed him an envelope, saying it contained a message for him but that under no circumstances was he to open it until the following day after she had gone. Yasser, a man of honour, kept his promise. When he opened the envelope he discovered a thousand American dollars, the receipt of which would put him on a steady course. Yasser immediately phoned the Argentine Embassy in Amman only to be informed that no such woman worked there. What this says about her is anyone’s guess, but what it says about Yasser is that he draws women who are quite inscrutable.

§

We continued our conversation later.

‘A friend of mine gave me a book that was written in the mid-1700s by a barber in Damascus. The barber was the place where people talked. He was a dentist too. If you wanted to buy a house, you went to him. The stereotype of the barber is that of a talkative person, the Reuters of the place. Ah.mad Budayri al-Hallaq or, more simply, Ibn Budayr, wrote this yawmīya, which means “the daybook of a worker.” The history of this book is almost more interesting than its contents. It was sold as a manuscript at the Umayyad mosque and was not taken seriously until the beginning of the twentieth century. Only its future editor saw its value, thinking, “Who else but a barber would give me the average man’s history of Damascus?” Arabic histories concentrate only on great people. Barbers, normally, never wrote, but this one did, day by day, and he wrote about so many things, especially the prices of meat, bread and coal and how they’d change according to the situation in the country. If, for example, a new governor arrived the prices might change. He documented everything.

‘This inspired me to write one. I am writing this for myself and, if he ever takes over the shop, for my son. I love the history of this city. Always I want to know who was here before. It is like fixing one’s frame. I decided I’d write about this street from its beginning to its end. People here are willing to talk to me. Although I am an outsider, I’m originally from this neighbourhood, my grandfather was a highly respected man, and also I mind my own business. I am here when my neighbours need something translated into English. I wanted originally to document the Souq Arawam where, remember, the devil walks with rolled-up trousers, but it has completely changed after twenty years, so I’m writing about here instead, my street, starting from the Umayyad Mosque and going towards Bāb Tūmā. If you are a Muslim you always start from the right-hand side, so I begin with the first shop on that side. Yesterday, however, I realised I missed the most important thing, which is the Nofara Café. Whereas in Ibn Budayr’s book he tried to write in general, what I need to do is make a microcosm. This souq is a mirror to Damascus. You have almost everything here – we have all the different sects – Shī‘a, Sunni, Christians. The Jews have mostly gone. In old times this souq was mostly Damascene but now it has people from all over. It also has all kinds of people, educated, many of them with university degrees, and then the completely illiterate who can’t even write their own names. Also we have the most religiously conservative people and then we have those, mostly young, people, who ask foreigners, “Do I look Italian?” The shops here cover everything from luxuries to basics such as bread and sugar. What this book will capture is a moment of time in the city’s history. The traditional mercantile life of this part of the city is vanishing and being replaced by tourist shops.

‘So I start with the young people at the beginning of the street, who are illiterate in English but they can speak it because they grew up in the market. In my youth, even if you worked for ten years in the same shop, you were still a boy. You could not start a shop and be a boss until you had maybe fifteen or twenty years of experience. Your boss would then vouch for your character. Now these guys come and work in a shop for one year, they see what the boss sells, they speak a bit of English, they know about selling to foreigners, and the next day they rent a shop at a huge price they can’t really afford even if they are doing well, and then get themselves into debt. It used to be that getting into debt was considered a deep shame. If you did not have the money, you waited until you had it. Say these newcomers have 100,000 lira to spend, they’ll buy a million lira’s worth. They pay it back week by week. They spend money on expensive clothes with brand names, Diesel, Armani. They start a shop, which goes in a very new rhythm. On Saturdays the prices are high whereas on Thursday the prices may be lower than cost because of their jam’īya or money that is due. If they can’t pay they’ll sell off their goods cheaply to another dealer and they go bankrupt and disappear. People ask after them. They might start up somewhere else in Damascus or even in another city. I am talking about a society that is still trying to hold onto whatever is left of its social values. We say here that one’s reputation is half of what one has. People must trust you.’

‘So what you describe is a tearing away at the very fabric of society?’

‘Yes. This one guy disappeared with a debt of two million lira, which would take me six years to make. This he lost in a single year. People say, “Oh, he’s just a boy working for someone else” but he told me many times, “I gave a hundred dollars to sleep with a Japanese girl.” He is seventeen years old. A bit of what he says may be true, but probably most of it is bullshit. He spends money on restaurants, girls and clothes, yet the shop costs him 2000 lira a day, which is more than my average daily takings. He pays this to the owner and then he closes the shop to be with a girl! Once someone came by and sold me an ordinary kilim, which cost me 1000 lira, which I then sold for 1700 lira. So one of the boys says to the customer who bought it from me, “What did you buy? What did you pay for it?” Such behaviour in our business is really shameful. This is like going uninvited into someone’s house. This boy then sells him the same kilim for 1000 lira, which I know for a fact cost him 1500 lira. So the customer returns the piece to me. I may sound like an angry businessman and although at this level I am, I am much angrier at the violation of the rules of the game – the social game, the business game. After all, the greater part of our life is a game. I am angrier about this than about losing a customer, especially when the profit we are talking about doesn’t even cover the price of a meal.

‘Another man here sells shawarma and he represents a particular mentality in Damascus. For the longest time, he was the only one here to sell falafels. All the tourist guides mentioned him as being the only falafel shop in the area. He was really successful, as was his father and grandfather before him. This guy across the street opens a shawarma shop and this, too, was successful. The owner of the falafel shop then decides he will sell shawarma as well. The shawarma he sells is seriously disgusting. Meanwhile, he has lost his reputation as a falafel shop, which was named everywhere. And now, most of the time, he smokes and kills himself with envy at seeing his neighbour’s success. You’ll now see three falafel shops which are doing quite well. Isn’t it sad? The next shop sells sugar and tea and all the things we need. He is too busy to get dressed properly, and although he looks poor he is hugely successful – he changes money, rents houses, and is one of the people who control the shares market in Damascus. If the dollar is about to go up, he buys all the dollars available. You see again the mentality; he is rich in the true sense of the word. And then there is another man who sells batteries, etc, but where he makes his money is selling tea to Iranians, which is a big smuggling business. Syrian candies have a good reputation too, so his shop is always crowded with Iranians.

‘The most educated house in this street is also the poorest. The people in it are all educated, all the men and women have university degrees, they are always clean but dress poorly, and yet none of them can afford to make it through to the end of the month. They are the poorest people here and in this respect they reflect the value of education in this country. One of these kids I spoke about earlier makes ten times what these people make. One of them works for the foreign ministry, another for the city council. Any one of them, if he were to use his position to manipulate others, could make money. Even the father has a key position where by altering just one line of what he writes he could have made big money at a time when corruption was rife here. They live miserably in two rooms, half the house theirs and the other half rented to a bastard. This reflects the situation of many people in this country who refuse corruption. They can’t survive. For how long do you think they could survive? One of them is my age, 36 years old. When he comes from work he stops to say hello. I say to him jokingly, “When will you be happy in your wedding?” He answers, “Well, if I calculate my salary now until I reach zero when I have paid all my debts, I will need another four years salary but ten years after, with maybe a salary increase, then I might be able to ask the hand of a girl but by then I will be fifty and no woman will be interested in me.” This is so painful, even though he said it in a comical way. You can’t afford to marry here. The minimal rent for a house where there is room for a wife is 8,000 lira, which is the average salary. I would say fifty percent of women are not working and even if they were, they are not supposed to pay whereas men have to. 8,000 lira! Tell me, how can one be expected to pay the rent? They are not pushing you, but they are actually putting you on top of a mountain and telling you to go and steal and be corrupt. This is what they expect you to do.’

§

After what Yasser told me about his street and the breakdown of a business code, all I could hear was a flapping of wings, and although the analogy is something I would rather suggest than force, I began to see pigeons everywhere. The danger here was that I would make my argument fit, even if it meant making adjustments to the world as it actually is, and indeed there’s nothing so full of holes as a literary scheme. One falls deepest into those which one takes to be projections of one’s own intelligence.

Always to be avoided are those forced unions, the idea or image pushed into the service of a bigger scheme, which result in ungainly convolutions, although here, too, one might find pigeon analogies. The experienced pigeon fancier knew, well before genetics was ever on the syllabus, that putting just any male and female in the same cage was less productive than allowing pigeons to have mates of their own choosing. So there we have it: the songwriter ambles back to his score. The best pigeons come only of true love.

There is even more to startle a permissive age. Breeders have also noted that forced unions can also alter a pigeon’s sexual preferences, so you get males that want to be only with other males. And you get females that bed down with females. And then further confusion enters the picture: sometimes females mount males but refuse to be mounted themselves, and others are so docile they’ll allow themselves to be mounted by anyone. Would that it stopped there, but in such artificial relationships pigeons will often lay ‘clear’ eggs, eggs that are not fertilised, and which, in Arabic, are referred to as ‘eggs of the wind’ (bayd. al-rīh.). One might think this a neat Arabic turn of phrase, but despite the pleasant noise it makes the wording was invented not by pigeon fanciers, nor was it ever in the Arab demotic, but in all likelihood goes back to antiquity in ancient Greece. Aristotle’s Generatione animalium was translated into Arabic under the title Fī kawn al-h.ayawān and there one finds the word hypenemien meaning ‘windy’ which, when capitalised, appears also in Rabelais in a context too obvious to repeat here. The ancient breeders wouldn’t allow nature to take its course, but forced only the best pigeons to mate so as to preserve the pedigree. The Arabs took the opposite stance and would never allow interbreeding between close relatives for fear of poor results. The Mogul emperor, Akbar, also a fancier, was the first to cross different pedigrees. Ordinary pigeons mate for life, but when pent up together they look towards their neighbours’ wives.

Rebecca Rosenblum

Syl had put up pictures of Brian in every room in the house – she had the ones Evan and Angie emailed printed at Blacks because she wanted the baby around all the time, as if he lived in their house instead of so far away. The snapshot in the kitchen was from the boy’s first moments on earth, flushed and scrunched, pink and blue, wailing and naked. Even Laurence could admit he smiled at the little striver whenever he opened the fridge.

Under the gaze of the magneted picture, Syl had been cooking all day. Margarine tubs of stew, lasagna, and taco casserole, labeled in ballpoint on masking tape, were bricked in the freezer, fortifications against her husband’s ruin.

When Laurence finally, slowly came downstairs from the office, Syl was at the counter, chopping vegetables. The room smelled of unseen fruit and sugar. “Get everything done?” She began plopping celery sticks into an orange Tupperware half-full of water.

He sat awkwardly at the kitchen table: left hip canted up, weight on the cane, watching her. “Mainly. Muellers’ dog barked for a while. Got a couple emails to write up tonight.”

“I hate that damn dog. Those boys take advantage of you; you retired so you wouldn’t have to write emails in the evenings.”

Laurence grunted.

Syl sighed. “So there’s celery in the orange and carrots in the blue one, and I’ll do just one salad because that will wilt after the second day . . .”

“The travel agent got back to you?”

“It’s booked.” She hacked sharply through the flared part of a celery stalk. “Direct to Seoul. The lady said I got a good deal for $1200.”

Laurence whistled. “If you say so. I still don’t see – ”

“It’s not like we can’t afford it.” Syl waved her hand, seemingly dismissing the whole abundant house, thick drapes and satellite radio and all. “Angie called me in tears, Laurence, and Evan could barely form a sentence, he was so tired. Brian cried nearly the whole night. Again. At least I can sit up with him.”

“Evan and Angie are almost 30. They’ll survive.”

“Well, of course. But we could help them do a little better than that.”

Laurence watched her snap the lid onto the orange container. “We?”

“There’s still room on the flight . . .?”

He pictured his webmail homepage, all those bold-faced unread messages, the nuclear-bright streets of Korea.

“I’m still healing.” He gestured down at the knob of swell and bandages bulging through the knee of his trousers. “And the boys at the office, you know . . .”

“It’s been healing a while now. And Ev is your own boy.”

“Sanjeet and Mark ask for my help. Ev, thus far, has not.”

The oven timer dinged, turning her towards it.

“You’re really going to go, just cross the world? Do you even know about the lunatic in the north and his missiles? How are you going to get to Evan’s place? You can’t just expect everyone to understand English.” He imagined Seoul ominous and vague, narrow streets, shouted strangeness, labyrinthine confusion.

She gripped the oven door. Blue veins showed in her thin white skin, but it was still smooth. She was three years younger than Laurence; if she’d worked, she wouldn’t have been retired yet. “Ev will meet me at the airport.” She opened the oven, bent her round bottom towards him. “Well, at least the pie turned out.”

“You know I’ve never cared for sweets.” For some reason, this had always been a lie he enjoyed telling. “And if I needed something, I’m sure I could make it myself.” That one was new.

“Well.” Syl straightened with the pie and hipped the oven shut, hard. “This one cherry pie is for Mr. Carbone. Not sweets, just sweet.”

“Corey Carbone?”

“You can take it over tomorrow. I saw him go out this morning, and with the Muellers’ cats around, I hate to leave it on the step.”

Laurence leaned back in the chair and a gentle pain swabbed at his knee. “Those cats are a menace – should be able to leave a pie for a few hours without fear. I’m gonna plant some marigolds next year.”

“It’s bugs that hate marigolds. You’ll take the pie to Mr. Carbone?”

“Fine. But what do cats hate, then?”

“You, I’d imagine. We have to leave in three hours.”

*

The afternoon was cool and bright, deep sunny fall. He couldn’t drive her with the knee still weak, but he went along in the taxi, through baggage check and all the way to customs. When they came to the “Passengers with boarding passes only” sign, Syl had a crisis of conscience. Laurence sighed and fiddled with her carry-on. Always when things were paid for, she regretted.

“You know you can’t put the margarine tubs in the microwave, right? You have to dump them out on a plate, and then drape a paper towel over so it doesn’t splatter.”

“I live in the house, Sylvia. I know how things work.”

“Are you sure you’ll manage? I mean – ” she held up a hand “ – with your knee and all.”

He was bent over, one hand raised above his head to grip the cane, the other tugging her bag’s zipper tight. He gazed up innocently. “And if I wouldn’t?”

She relaxed at this, rolled her eyes. Then he straightened and hugged her with his hands tight at her shoulderblades. When she walked away down the long blue-carpeted hallway, he felt as if the plane had crashed into the sea.

*

The evening was much the same as any. He showered and checked his email in his bathrobe (his brother updating his birding life list; lawyer-joke forward from former colleague; thanks from the young turks at the office for projections he’d sent). Then he watched The National while sitting on the foot of the bed, until there was a story about Kim Jong Il’s plutonium stores. Laurence shivered, and flipped off the set before the human-interest story about llamas, which weren’t human anyway, and slept quietly on his side of the bed. He dreamt of kimchi, a food he had never eaten but was surely vile.

But it was only the next morning that things really started to go to hell.

He did seven crossword clues waiting for toast before recalling that Syl kept the toaster was unplugged for fear of electrical fires. Straight from the fridge, the butter was hard and punctured the bread. He forgot to make the tea until he wanted to drink it, and then the first bag he found turned out to be utterly not Earl Grey but something gingery that promised, upon inspection of the packet, to ease gas pains with natural effectiveness. He didn’t know what that meant or what this product was doing in his home.

Tea slopped down the sink, Laurence was halfway to the door and a roll-up-the-rim-to-win tea before he recalled he’d had his right knee replaced six weeks ago and couldn’t press the gas or brake. He was, as usual, devastated.

After the newly found and brewed Earl Grey (in the back of the cupboard, behind the celery salt – why?) and torn-up cold toast, the day clenched before him, thick and dense as rain forest. He did ten across – “megaton” – read a few lines of a movie review – “compelling fluff.” Finally Laurence hauled himself up, nodded at enraged and distant Brian (in actual fact, he spoke to the baby, as he often did when alone. This time it was, “Why you gotta cause us all such heartache, huh?”) and went to the kitchen window.

On both sides of the street, neighbours were departing on their days of useful employment. He could only see a few driveways through the oak leaves, but with the dual-income trend, he got to witness seven individuals striding down their driveways with purpose, energy, briefcases.

Then it was 9:30, on a weekday morning in Indian summer. His inbox had no new messages and he couldn’t walk even as far as Tim Hortons and everyone he loved was in Korea, where it was the middle of the night. Laurence Brunswick was a 66-year-old man with all of his mental faculties, and most of his physical ones, intact, who was only 4 crossword clues away from utter redundancy.

Corey Carbone lived four houses down from the Brunwicks. He was in his eighties, though Laurence couldn’t fathom who in the 1920s would have named a boy-child Corey. The Carbone mailbox, with an orange cardinal painted on it, seemed to have always been a fixture of the street, but in decades of four-houses-downness, the two men had only exchanged half-waves over car roofs and muttered apologies over windblown recycle bins. Syl took the neighbours all their misdirected mail, did all the chatting about tulip bulbs, all the neighbourly surveillance from the veranda. She had always been more than equal to all the block parties and yard sales and, until retirement, Laurence’s work had been so richly complex and demanding that his own four walls were as much beyond it as he could handle.

One summer morning about eight years prior, Syl had been watering the freesia when she realized that Corey Carbone had not come out to check his hummingbird feeder by 11:30, an event that traditionally marked the endpoint in her gardening mornings. Syl had noted over the past several years that the gentleman four houses down had become, if not infirm, then perhaps “less active.” But he always minded the birdfeeders – hummingbird syrup in summer, finch seeds in winter – once before noon and once after. Until the day that he didn’t.

Syl had sat on a lawnchair with a glass of lemonade (Laurence was imagining now; he didn’t know this part of the story) waiting for Corey Carbone to emerge. And he hadn’t and he hadn’t and that afternoon Sylvia Brunswick chopped extra apples and kneaded extra pastry and baked an extra pie for Corey Carbone. And extended her lunch break long enough to bring it over to him, and discovered him lying behind the azaleas, having suffered a stroke on the way to the bird feeder. His clothes were covered with sticky red syrup.

Laurence came to know of this only because that night at dinner, their own pie seemed less full of apples than usual. Syl replied that the doubled recipe had not quite worked out, and that she had spent three hours in the emergency room with the man four houses down because he’d had a medium-severity stroke. This, in addition to causing Laurence to doubt his wife’s arithmetic skills, had given him some confusion. The other pie, it turned out, had been left at the nurses’ station.

Laurence accepted a tiny piece of pie, to calm her. He could not imagine his wife at the bedside of a stranger – would she be teary, or as firmly practical as she was on family vacations? He pictured the same sort of chaos, uncertainty, with gurneys instead of roller-coasters.

When Laurence had been wheeled down the hall with a cartilage knee and returned with a plastic one, he learned how Syl behaved in a hospital – just as he’d suspected, as she did at Disneyworld – but he still could not picture her with this stranger, Corey Carbone. But this was not a comment on Corey Carbone; Laurence had difficulty seeing Syl anywhere he himself was not present.

Now, Laurence was accountable to this stranger for one pie. He peered into the fridge at slightly fogged saran over the pink-and-white lattice. Syl’s handiwork was solid and elegant, both saran and pastry. The kitchen still smelled of ginger. At Disneyworld she clutched the purple-shaded map and grinned at Evan’s excitement and refused to go on any of the rides herself. He missed her.

He shut the fridge and did a limping lap of the house, observing the dead hang of curtains, mounds of molted shoes in the bottoms of closets. Syl’s white handbag, the summer one, was on top of the hamper in the guest bathroom, like hidden treasure. He sat down on the toilet lid to open it, but it was only fully of bobby pins.

One more lap and back to the kitchen window to gaze at Syl’s dead fall flowerbed, of all the years past, until he was good and depressed. Back at the fridge, Brian silently shrieked at the injustice of his exile from his homeland, his people, his grandfather. Laurence balanced the pie on his free palm, and, leaning heavily on his cane, shuffled to the door.

*

Corey Carbone’s lawn was smooth as a tucked-in bedsheet, but the flowerbeds were all woodchipped over, the birdfeeder empty, and the cement of the third stairs had cracked. By the time Laurence reached the porch, Corey Carbone was standing behind his screen-door, leaning leftwards on something out of view, watching him.

“Hello, Brunswick.” Corey Carbone was short, jowly and bald; it was hard to make out finer details through the screen. The hem of his fawn-coloured bowling shirt hung several inches in front of his fly, suspended by a stiff spherical gut. His voice was nervous, high-pitched, and slightly slurred; like a drunk waiting to get hit. “What brings you by?”

“Well, I don’t mean to bother you, Mr. Carbone.”

“Oh, oh, no.” He still did not open the door.

“You know how Syl loves to bake.” Laurence gestured with the pie, but the head beyond the screen remained impassive. Suddenly furious for Syl’s wasted effort, his own wasted painful walk, Laurence bent awkwardly to set the pie on a Muskoka chair. “She baked you this pie, asked me to drop it off. The pie is from Syl. Hope you enjoy.”

“Thank you,” said Corey Carbone, voice even squeakier than before.

Laurence nodded sharply, pivoted on the canetip, and called, “You’re welcome. It’s cherry,” as he staggered down the steps. For all he knew, Corey Carbone watched him stump all the way to the sidewalk. So what if he did?

*

Once the pie was gone, that and his family became all that Laurence craved. He regretted letting Syl’s beautiful pastry go to that ingrate with the silly name, and he regretted Brian’s unseen colic across the ocean, and his son and daughter-in-law’s stress and distress. He regretted the boys at the office, Mark and Sanjeet, their nervous idiocy driving the company closer and closer to ordinary. He supposed his own life had been ordinary, in some ways. Many ways. It hadn’t seemed so at the time.

He thought about all the cakes and pies Syl had baked for Evan. There was so much less after the boy moved out, because of Laurence’s insistence on not liking sweets. Now he pictured sloppy swirls of blue icing on a birthday cupcake, imagined the creamy grit of cocoanut cream. He remembered Evan sticky and greedy, reaching for more while Laurence nibbled unnoticed on a “sliver.”

To Brian’s snapshot, he revealed his years of sugar dishonesty. “Chocolate-chip cake, gingersnaps, black-bottom pie, peach coffee cake . . .they’re all sublime, when she makes them. Every birthday, she made herself a lemon pie, shaved little bits of the rind onto the meringue.” The microwave pinged, interrupting Laurence’s chat with the fridge door and embarrassing him somehow. He silently took his reheated lasagna to the table. Throughout the meal, Laurence mourned the pie he could not eat for dessert. There was nothing suitably sweet in the pantry, not even boxed cookies or a tin of pears – he’d already checked.

When Syl called – he had just closed his still-empty inbox – he was spellbound at his desk for 45 minutes, listening to her tales of flight delays, kimchi, baby wipes. He could hear Brian rioting in the background, a fierce soprano siren. She described this fat angry grandson, then her emaciated son and his 80-hour workweeks, exhausted Angie’s obsession with Dr. Spock.

Despite knowing the per-minute costs, Laurence asked about the city, the luggage, her health (but not the ginger tea), their meals. Then he asked, casually, chattily, almost academically, about pie. It was only when she said the baby was spitting up that Laurence consented to let her go.

The next morning, he dug through the basement deep freeze, frost beading his cheeks, until he found the cottage-cheese container marked “Pie cherr. 09” in Syl’s tight cursive. The pastry recipe on the back of the lard box took most of the morning, but it finally cohered into something resembling a pie shell. It was early afternoon before Laurence finally put the fruit into a saucepan. After twenty minutes of ardent stirring, medium heat, and a half pound of sugar, the cherries showed no evidence of a will to be pie. There was a tap at the back door.

Once again, Laurence saw Corey Carbone’s big baby face through a screen door. This time, though, his arm was draped around a small Filipina woman.

It was Laurence’s turn to say, “Yeesss?”

The woman beamed blankly until Corey Carbone said, “Came to thank you. For the pie.”

“It was from Syl.” Laurence waved his wooden spoon absently.

The woman took this as invitation to open the door wide and gracefully pilot the big man through. She looked like a nymph dancing with a tree. Laurence let his irritation go as soon as he saw the sweat glistening on the side of Corey Carbone’s neck.

Laurence set the spoon in the spoon rest, and padded (still barefoot at 2pm, with company!) over to the woman who was manipulating Corey Carbone into the kitchen chair closest to the stove. It was not Laurence’s dinner seat, but it was the one he sat in when Syl was cooking and he was watching her. His guest looked so thankful to finally be safely seated that Laurence could not begrudge him the spot. The woman began backing away.

“I come later?”

“Yes, Ciara, thanks.” Corey Carbone leaned back cautiously Without the screen door intervening, Laurence could see that Corey Carbone’s face was smooth-shaven as a baby’s, with the right side mannequin-still. If there were such things as old-man mannequins.

“When I come back? How long?”

“I won’t stay long, Brunswick.”

Laurence breathed in deeply through his nose. “I’ll take you home, Mr. Carbone. No need to trouble . . . her.” He had forgotten the name already. Pathetic.

When the woman was gone, Corey Carbone shrugged and smiled, and his tiny voice said, “ Sorry about this. She tries to get me out of the house regular. But she don’t think too much about where besides out. Sorry.”

Laurence smiled – the second apology was all he needed to feel generous. “No trouble at all. Syl’s more the stickler for scheduling than I am.” Another lie from the clear blue. Laurence felt like cupping it fondly in his palm.

“Whatcha making? Another pie?”

Laurence considered. Finally: “Bake sale. Church. Syl wouldn’t want them to miss the donation, just because she had to go out of town.” He was staring into the pot of bubbling watery cherries. It looked liquid, drinkable, utterly unpielike.

A shift of chair legs. “Things all right, Brunswick? Syl’s ok?”

He saw an expectation of tragedy in Corey Carbone’s leftside features – not smug, only fearful “A celebration, actually. Our first granbaby got born. How ’bout that?” Where had the slang come from? To match Corey Carbone’s happy-hour slur, perhaps.

“How ’bout that? Fantastic, Brunswick.” Corey Carbone slapped his right knee and Laurence winced. “Boy or girl?”

“Boy. Brian. Seven weeks.” Laurence pointed at the fridge picture – the fat mottled face and blue-veined skull. All children were ugly at birth, but Brian looked like a champion anyway. The cherries were making little splashing noises. “Syl’s gone to help out a bit.” When Laurence bent over the pot, red bubbles popped and splattered his arm.

“Glad for the quiet? Or you miss ’er?”

Laurence turned down the burner, frowning.

“I could never stand it, myself. Rysa and I spent maybe ten nights apart, all told. Maybe less.”

“Rysa?” Laurence searched his mind for an image of a woman in the Carbone driveway, but he came up empty. It was another strange name, or perhaps only a standard one that Corey Carbone’s tongue could no longer render. He hoped she wouldn’t turn out to be a Doberman as he asked, “You folks were married a long time?”

“Thirty-five years, but that don’t seem long when you start at eighteen.”

Laurence did the math from the apparent age of the man – Corey Carbone had likely been a widower for twenty years. The cherries were starting to sink in the goop. He stirred forlornly. “In all those years of married life, Rysa ever tell you how to make a cherry pie?”

“Well, no, not that I . . . . Why?”

“Why? What do you – That’s what I’m doing here. Trying to do.”

Silence. Laurence looked up. Corey Carbone sat with both legs kicked forwards, one elbow on the chair arm, the other hand rested atop his cane, which was leaning on his thigh. It should have been a casual pose, but for Corey Carbone’s stiff body, it looked like the rack. “Sorry, Brunswick.” He shrugged; only the left shoulder rose.

Laurence sighed. “Sorry, man, sorry. Tough morning.”

“What’s gone wrong? Smells good.”

Laurence sniffed dismissively. To him, the smell was oversweet, syrupy, wrong. “Thank you. But it’s not like a pie filling. From here, it’s like cherry soup.”

“Such a thing, y’know. Cherry soup. Had it on a cruise once.”

“A cruise?” Laurence abandoned the question. “I don’t want soup. I want pie. I was trying to boil down the juice to . . . gel, you know. But it won’t.”

Corey Carbone shook his head, and his jowls wobbled equally on both sides. “Too much juice? Or not enough thickner?”

Laurence stood completely still and felt his neck crack. “Thickener?”

Corey Carbone’s good eye squinted. “Whaddya put in?”

“Cherries. Frozen ones.” The pebbly piecrust looked grayish in the slight sun through the kitchen window.

“And . . . ?” Corey Carbone nodded stiffly, left-leaning, encouraging.

“Sugar. Because they weren’t all that sweet.”

“Pie cherries are, uh, sour cherries, yeah. You hafta add the sugar . . .and . . .”

“And . . . ?” Laurence asked. He set the spoon on the spoonrest. A little of pink dripped on the white stovetop.

“Dunno . . .flour?” Another uneven shrug.

“Flour? Flour goes in the crust, I found a recipe for the crust.”

“Didja find one for the filling?”

Laurence turned off the stove. “I don’t think she uses one. Anyway, I couldn’t find it. Her files are a mess.” He went over and took a seat at the table.

“First time she’s been away in how long?”

“Not that long.” Laurence slouched forward, arms on the placemat, chest pressing down. “I used to travel a lot, on business. I only just retired.”

“Ah.” Corey Carbone grinned. His eyelid and mouth stayed flaccid on the right, but both eyes were bright. “First time she’s been away in . . . ?”

Laurence whistled. “Ever, I suppose.”

“Why didn’t you go?”

The pink smell of cherries was starting to stifle. Laurence wondered if it would be rude to open a window. “I had work to . . . cover.”

“I thought you retired.”

“The new team, they need a little saving, sometimes.” Laurence had said this dozens of times, always in a hearty, resigned tone. Today, the words sounded almost violent.

Laurence had a momentary flash of Syl’s perfect puff of white hair wandering down an ugly alley of thugs and thieves. “Plus, it’s hard to travel, laid up like this.” He waved his cane, then glanced at Carbone’s own and felt bizarrely guilty.

“Oh, well, I’m sure you’ve seen enough of the world.” Corey Carbone squirmed in his chair, both hands pressed on the cane top as he hauled his butt forward, then shifted his weight onto his left hip.

“You all right?”

“Sok,” Corey Carbone said tightly. It was several seconds before he finally leaned back again and relaxed his grip on the cane. “If yer giving up on that pie, we could just eat the cherries, you know. With spoons.”

“Pretty sad thing to offer a guest.”

“Well, I’ll take what I can get. Be a proper dessert with a little ice-cream, if you got it.”

Laurence got obediently to his feet, though he felt himself listing far more leftward than usual, white-knuckling his own cane. An apology for inhospitality fished around in his brain, but all that came out was, “I think we might have, not ice-cream but sherbet – ” he opened the freezer and foam-white air fogged his glasses “ – shoot, sorry, Corey Carbone, it’s raspberry.” He shut the freezer with a sad thump.

“You think I care about clashing shades of pink?”

“Right.” Laurence nodded and reopened the freezer.

“And whatcha call me by my full name for? Think some other Corey will pop in, demand ice cream – sherbet?”

Laurence jolted again. “No, sorry, Carbone. Your name just sorta slides off the tongue all in one piece, you know?”

“Never heard that one. Course, nothing slides off my tongue, these days.”

Laurence tried to picture the pre-stroke Corery Carbone, sober-spoken and smooth, or at least not sounding quite so boozily meek. He couldn’t.The thin red juice dribbled to the bottom of the bowl, and the cherries clung like slugs to the sherbet. It looked revolting. Laurence took the dishes and spoons to the table, sat and asked, “What was your profession, Carbone? Before you retired?”

Corey Carbone swallowed his first bite and smiled. “Professor. Physics. Quantum. The way I worked, no one does any more. But then, I don’t do it either.”

The cherries were sickeningly sweet; Laurence figured he’d overdone the sugar in his frustration. Corey Carbone’s pants were a shade of an unripe banana, pulled up topside of his gut. He did not look like an intellectual. “You miss it?”

“Must’ve, once, I guess. Twenty years ago now. Too much else to miss, in the meantime. I miss Rysa, smartest lady in Weston and a damn fine ornithologist. I miss walking to the can without having to hang off that little girl like a lecher.” Corey Carbone dug his spoon into his pink mess again. “This is damn good, like that spun sugar crap kids get at the fair.” His speech was smoothing out, slightly.

“Cotton candy.”

They were silent a moment, eating. Finally, Laurence had to ask, “Corey Carbone, do you remember what happened when you had that stroke, and Syl came over, all that? Could you see her?”

“Sure I remember, sure I saw her, sorta.” Corey Carbone smacked his lips, glanced down at his empty bowl, then over at Laurence’s, still mainly full. “Sorta long to explain, I guess.”

Laurence pushed the pink swirl towards him. “Me, I got nothing but time. You don’t mind?”

There was a pink drip of raspberry on Corey Carbone’s lower lip that he made no move to lick. It seemed suitable just there, like a beauty mark or a freckle. “You got it right – nothing but time.”

It was after lunch. I’d grabbed a gyro at Eugene’s, and it was coming back on me. The line to check out books was a long one. I hated the idea of losing my place just to use the washroom, but it was either that or ruin everybody’s day. There’s something wrong with my pyloric valve. The doctor explained it to me once: the flap at the back of my throat that keeps all the acid and food and enzymes down doesn’t work. I should’ve known Greek was a bad idea. It was a year of bad ideas. I had pretty much made up my mind to lose my dinner down the toilet when my first girlfriend walked by.

Puke was crawling up the back of my throat. The bathroom was on the second floor. My old girlfriend was flipping through CDs, the classical music she never used to like. I left my books on the counter and ran up some stairs, past people reading local papers and down an aisle of stacks I thought would never end.

The bathroom door’s hydraulic closer was broken, and, as I slammed it open, I was thinking I might not make it to the toilet in time and how it was twenty years since I’d last seen her and what a pain it would be to have to look up those books all over again, when BAM, the door hit the tiled wall and the noise nearly blew out my ears. What the guy in the first cubicle was thinking, I couldn’t say. A dinner that took ten minutes to eat flew out of my mouth in less than thirty seconds. I was washing my hands when he finally left the safety of his stall.

“You all right?” he asked

“I am now,” I said.

But of course I wasn’t. I threw a bit of water on my face and slicked some through my hair and walked out the door and back along the stacks to the top of the stairs. First girlfriends are a kind of religion with most men I know. Something sacred. A dream they never stop having. It was no different with me. I was looking down from the mezzanine where she was flipping through the bins of music, and my two hands gripped the banister like it was the guardrail of a bridge and I was working up the courage to throw myself over. There ought to be some kind of electric current in the air that prevents a person from running into past lovers, the way some homeowners have wireless electric fences to keep their dogs from wandering into the road and getting killed by a passing truck. A hundred volts right through the collar and into the dog’s neck every time it tries to poke its dumb nose out of the yard. I could see how something like that would come in handy for a man in my situation, except maybe they should wrap the dog’s collar around the man’s dick instead of his neck.

My books were still sitting on the librarian’s desk. I could just walk down the stairs and check them out and leave. Keep my head down, eyes on my own business. She probably wouldn’t recognize me, anyway. Twenty years was a long time for both of us. Even from where I stood, I could see the grey in her hair, how she was having second thoughts about hiding it, the colour growing out.

People can say what they want about artists and grants and the public purse, but the truth is nobody gets rich. At best, I can swear off part-time shifts at the liquor store for a while. No pressure to take sessional work this term at the college, either. Other than that, not much changes. Rent gets paid, groceries get bought. And I can keep thinking of myself as a journalist, a local historian, someone whose two university degrees weren’t a total waste. I didn’t use to think this way, but what a person is at any given moment rarely has to contend with what he once was. He forgets. I’ve always thought of myself as a mole, the kind of creature that digs his way in the dark, pushing the dirt behind him as he goes. The past gets buried. Unless it walks right by.
More school was the last thing on my mind when I was with Christine, and that was what was so hard to remember. By hard I mean painful, the sort of pain those high school years always seem to carry for people once they’re past thirty, what it feels like to remember a time when days flipped by one after the other like a deck of cards with a thousand suits. We were together until we were eighteen – though, really, she was nineteen. Sometimes she made me feel how critical those extra nine months were, and that’s part of why we didn’t last. It seemed like she was always waiting for me to catch up to her, or at least that’s how I remember it.

Anyone who’s put his fingers around the handle of a fire alarm will know what I was feeling, the urge to be perverse, to see how easily a normal day could crumble to shit. Or not. Isn’t that the dream? Turn back the clock?

I kissed my research good-bye and walked down the stairs to the music department, an arm’s length from where she was standing. The idea was for her to turn to me and make the connection, but things didn’t work out the way I planned. I’d say they never do, but that would make me sound depressive, which I’m not. I’m just realistic. I could have stood there all night waiting for her to look my way, and the novelty of coincidence was wearing off as I watched. Funny gear she was wearing. Layers, a long dress with a pair of black silky trousers underneath. Nothing franchised. No brand names showing, elegant. The shoes added height which she didn’t need, but they looked good, too. I never need much to recognize someone, the tip of a nose, a chin, a hand holding a glass. This was overkill. She was reading liner notes like they were some kind of code, encrypted instructions to whatever it is middle-aged women dream about. Like I would know. Patience was never my long suit, so I coughed and looked over at her.

“Hey!” I said. The tone of surprise in my voice was as genuine as I could make it.

“Dennis,” she said, after a glance in my direction. “I was wondering when you’d get up the courage to walk over here.”

“You saw me?”

“An hour ago. You were sitting at the microfiche talking to yourself.”

“It’s a bad habit,” I said.

“An old one, too.”

“All my habits are old ones,” I said. It was a little disappointing not to have had the effect I was hoping for. Made sense, though. She was a sharp one, always had been. In one way, I was even a little more excited. It was a crazy thought, but isn’t there some part in every guy that says maybe he can get back in with a woman, any woman, no matter what he’s done in the past, no matter what bridge he’s burned? I asked if she wanted to get some coffee, but she said she didn’t have a lot of time. She didn’t say why, but she didn’t have to. Married people have a look about them, like basketball players who decide it’s time to become a coach. Married people also wear rings, and hers was a big one. So, we walked over to an empty reading room and sat on one of the couches by a window. The rain outside was streaking the glass, and the radiators underneath the sill were pumping out heat. It was the closest to cozy I’d felt in years.
When I see high-school girls now, they all seem beautiful in a kind of wholesome and clean way, but my eyes have changed. Anyone young looks good now, and by good I mean pure, unspoiled, no matter how sexy the girl thinks she looks. It didn’t use to be that way. The first time I saw Christine, it felt like a crime just to be staring. We were on the third floor of our high school, and she did nothing more than walk down the hall with a couple of friends. Just walked, one foot in front of another, but she crippled me. It was her graduating year, and I still had one to go. After that I looked for her everywhere. I wanted to speak to her, get her attention somehow, but the words I thought of saying to her sounded moronic. They were moronic. Whatever motives a kid like me had for speaking to a girl like that –- beauty, romance, love –- there was really only one reason and it was sex. Part of me knew that, and I hated that scene, the sports talk that reduced girls to pieces of meat, something to be fucked and forgotten. Ask me about it now, and I’d say so what? That’s the way things are. But I was a bit of a prig back then. I wanted my life to be “different.” Not an original idea, I know. Knew it then, too. In fact I’d heard it in a film I’d seen, something with Dustin Hoffman or Robert Redford. Like I said, it was a long time ago. One day, the pointlessness got to be too much for me, and when Christine walked past this time I banged my head on the wall just the way my film hero did. It was the gesture of a desperate mind, but it worked.
“It’s good to see you,” I said.

“You, too,” she said. “I’ve been away a long time.”

“I never thought it would happen,” I said. “Not like this. I’d sort of imagined running into you somewhere else. I wondered what happened to you, what you were up to, but I never thought it would be here. I was thinking an airport or a French restaurant. A restaurant in France, I mean.”

“This is a better bet,” she said. “I don’t eat out that much, and I hate flying.”

“I remember.”

“We never flew anywhere together, did we?”

“No, but you were afraid of heights,” I said. “Did you ever think you’d run into me in a library?”

“I guess I thought I would run into you somewhere, especially now I’m back, but that’s about as far as it went.”

I had no idea what she was implying by that, but in the years we were together, she’d always held her cards pretty close to her chest. Inscrutable was a word I didn’t know back then. I remember the time someone first told me what it meant, though, and I immediately thought of her. To see her again like this was a strange experience, a kind of real-time hallucination. For a few moments, it was as though I was talking to someone who was impersonating Christine, someone who had her mannerisms, her way of speaking. There were creases I’d never seen before, and the folds of flesh around her throat were something that would have horrified me at sixteen. But after a while my eyes adjusted to the years, and time just kind of rolled back. She was the same. She was beautiful. Of course, while I was looking at her, I was wondering what she saw when she looked at me. Was there any magic stripping away the wrinkles from my face, filling in the missing hair?

“So,” she said. “Is this a regular thing?”

“It’s a living,” I said.

“Reading?” she said. “Must be nice.”

“Research,” I said. “I’m a writer.”

“Christ,” she said, “who isn’t in this town?”

“Ouch!”

“But, really,” she said. “Does anybody have a real job here? All I hear about are writing retreats, evening courses in writing, weekend workshops for amateurs. It’s an industry.”

“A harmless one.”

“I think it’s repulsive, all these people putting their sorry little lives on paper.”

“They have to dream,” I said.

“Why don’t they do something useful? It’s all so narcissistic. I know you work in the business, and maybe that’s a different thing, but all this navel gazing depresses me.”

“You haven’t changed,” I said.

“Now, I’m really depressed.”

“I mean it. You never could stand self-centred people.”

“You weren’t self-centred.”

“Everyone’s self-centred,” I said. “Some people just hide it better.”
A difference of a year in high school is a big deal, especially when the girl is the older one. These days the younger guy thing is all the rage, but that’s more about sex and performance. If she’s fifty, she wants forty. If she’s forty, she wants thirty. If she’s thirty, thirty will do for a while. But any teenage boy can deliver the goods. Truth is, they perform a little too well. Like nitro-glycerine. Even a look will set them off.

I was working late shifts at a hotel restaurant, as a busboy first and, when I knew more, a waiter. The shift would finish around midnight and I would drive my scooter by Christine’s house on the way home. She had a room in the basement and her own private entrance, which she’d leave unlocked. I’d turn the engine off and roll down the street to her house. If there was a light on, it was okay to come in. But sometimes she’d fall asleep waiting for me and I’d have to wake her up. This would have been okay, except she was a bit of a somnambulist, more a sleeptalker than sleepwalker, but it still meant she was out of it. She would sit up, eyes open and gab away for an hour and not remember a thing about it the next day. At first, I thought she was lying, but after a while I could tell when she wasn’t all there. Maybe it was because of what she was reading before I arrived, but her sentences sounded as though they came from a novel, something from the 19^{th century, one of those morality tales by Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy.}

“Hey, Chris,” I’d say. “Wake up.”

And she’d open her eyes and say something like, “I am no more asleep than you, my good fellow, so I advise you not to try to take advantage of the situation.”

The following September, Christine went to the local college and I was stuck in high school. It was a bad time for both of us. Friends thought I was a big man on campus because I was dating a girl in first year, but they didn’t know the grief a situation like that could bring. I was worried all the time.
“You have no idea how kinky things were in this town back in the day.”

I was telling Christine about the project I was working on. As lame as it all turned out to be, I was pretty excited about some of the stories I was finding. “This place was the drug capital of the west coast for a while,” I told her. “There are tunnels under half the streets of downtown.”

“You make it sound glamorous,” she said.

“That’s my job,” I said, “but opium was their Ecstasy. There were a lot of rich men with very bored wives”

“The streets were just like our streets,” she said. “Things weren’t any more romantic back then than they are now. Look a little harder. You’ll see.”

“Maybe so,” I said, “but history’s not about the victims. It’s about the makers and shakers. These people on the street today, the junkies, the crackheads, nobody’s going to remember them.”

“And that’s why things never change.”

I’d forgotten how hard Christine could be, how little patience she had for popular culture, the music that was so important for everyone when we were growing up, the musicians and their sordid lives. She hated the whole cult of personality, the way people focused on things that didn’t matter. But it didn’t stop there.

“Frivolous shit,” she said one day after coming home from an art history lecture. I’d dropped by after school on my way to work. “Like one man’s suicide is worse than another’s.” She tore down every poster from her wall and stuffed them in the garbage. She wouldn’t even let me rescue the ones I’d always liked.

“You touch those and we’re through,” she said.

I couldn’t see the big deal, but the posters stayed where they were. I said I’d come back later, but she didn’t hear me. My big worry was all the older guys in her classes at the college. Any idiot could see it wouldn’t be long before one of them would get her in his sights. With any woman, it’s a question of access, and I didn’t have as much as I wanted. Two people hang around each other long enough, they begin to take notice. Proximity, that’s all any relationship is in the end. Love the one you’re with.

Sex holds things together, at least for a while. I knew that much. And I was working on it with Christine. Virginity seems quaint now. Kids these days have sex before they’re out of elementary school. For me it was a bit of a curse, and I was doing my best to be rid of it. Some nights we came pretty close, too, the sort of thing you’re supposed to laugh about years later, but it never seemed funny to me. There was some kind of battle going on, and we were both fighting it. I wanted to win so badly, but sometimes right in the middle of it she would look at me, as though she was saying, Okay. I give up. Is that what you want? Because I can’t do this any more. And I’d get scared, call a halt and head home on my scooter. If the night was a warm one, I wouldn’t wear my helmet and the air would blow the scent of her from my hair, my face. The next morning, though, I could still smell her on me, and I’d feel like shit, like I’d worked a double shift while I was asleep. I suppose what I couldn’t bear was the thought that she would give it up with someone else, that whoever he was would take her at her word when she finally threw in the towel.
The rain was coming down outside, and whoever it was Christine was supposed to be meeting seemed less of a priority. She was getting animated, and I was looking for a way to change the subject.

“What about yourself?” I said. “Why did you come back here?”

“My mother,” she said. “She could use a little help now. There was a ministry posting and I applied for it.”

“Good benefits?” I asked.

“People say they are,” she said.

“Hey,” I said. “Why didn’t you say hello right away, when I was looking through that microfilm? Why did you wait?”

“Just coming across each other like that after so long. I wasn’t even sure it was you for a while. But then I could see it was. It was a shock.”

“It occurred to me I could just leave and you’d never know.”

“But I would have,” she said.

“And what did you mean by ‘getting up the courage to come over? That’s a hell of a thing to say to someone.”

“You were pretty fucked up back then. So was I. We didn’t really leave on the best of terms.”

“People break up,” I said. “It wasn’t the end of the world.”

“For a while I thought it was,” she said.
I don’t remember if it was the night she threw out the posters, but in my head it was. One night not long after that, anyway. It had been frantic at work. Summer service, four sittings a night. I couldn’t concentrate and it showed. I’d get table numbers mixed up in my head, confuse the orders, and every time I went to call Christine, the line was busy. Women have told me I’ve got radar for this sort of thing, but I think that’s a crock. It’s not radar, it’s just fear, and ninety percent of the time, what you’re afraid of comes true. Turns out I was wrong on the specifics, but it would have happened sooner or later.

I came by late and her light was on. She wasn’t asleep, or at least her eyes weren’t closed.

“I tried phoning you,” I said.

“There is no end to the annoyance I am feeling right now,” she said, and I knew she was gone.

Normally, I wouldn’t have tried anything when she was in a state like that, but I started in anyway. I needed a little reassurance, but what I was looking for was revenge. I wanted a piece of what she was going to take away from me. It’s hard to say whether she knew what was going on, but any woman I’ve asked since – and I always ask – has said it’s impossible to sleep through sex, no matter how bad it is. If sex is what you’d call it. I looked down afterwards, and the mess I’d made was all mine, but that didn’t mean anything. It was how I felt about it that mattered. Christine’s eyes were closed, and there was a kind of smile on her face. It annoyed me, as though she knew something I didn’t, something I’d never know. Then I said goodbye. If she said anything back, I didn’t hear it.

I stayed away for almost two weeks after that night. What if she were pregnant? I had no idea how things like that worked, but it seemed from what I could remember that I’d done exactly what I had set out to do. The idea kept me awake at night, and there’s no better solution to a problem than running from it. The next time I saw her, it was clear she had done a little sabotage of her own, by which I mean she stared right through me for the five minutes we kept the conversation going.
Whatever lunch I’d had was well on its way down the sewer, and I knew I would have to work late to make up for all the research that was probably back in the stacks by now. I asked if she wanted to get something to eat, and she said she could use a walk.

“There really is somewhere I have to be,” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “Just a walk. In the rain. We used to do things like that, didn’t we?”

“Your memory must be better than mine,” she said.

Except the rain had let up by this point, so we headed down toward the park and the duck ponds. It was a novelty just to be outside, something I never did unless I needed to find a bus stop or a supermarket or a bar. This was November, so there were no cherry blossoms, no flowers to scent the air. Government workers had lined up outside one of the downtown pubs, happy it was Friday, smoking their way into the weekend. I was thinking there was a good chance I had walked down this street with Christine before, probably on our way to the park, too. It’s a small town. The odds were good. How strange would that be, I was thinking. Flick a switch and twenty years disappear, a bad splice in a film. I’d say it was like a dream, only I don’t remember dreams. The streets hadn’t changed all that much. Christine’s long strides pushed us along at a pace I had almost forgotten, and there was some kind of adolescent gravity about us that I recognised, about the walk, its purpose, like we were going to break up all over again, even though we hadn’t seen each other in decades. We were passing behind the hotel I used to work in, the town’s signature landmark, an ugly jumble of brick and copper and ivy.

“Fucked up how?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Those were your words. I wondered what you meant.”

“Come on, Dennis. That was years ago. We were kids.”

“Kids don’t feel like kids. At least I didn’t.”

“Sex changes people, that’s all. Boys were like vampires, one minute so normal and the next completely out of control. Like they couldn’t help themselves. After a while I just felt sorry for them.”

“You must have gotten over it eventually,” I said.

“How so?”

I pointed to her hand. “That’s a big ring. Hard not to notice something like that.”

She held out her hand. “It’s my mother’s. I’ve worn it for years. She gave it to me when my dad left, said it would keep away evil spirits. She was joking, but it’s amazing what kind of effect it has on men. They just back right off.”

I should have twigged earlier, back at the library. No children, nobody pulling at her skirt, telling her to get on with it. Everything about her said handfuls: public library, alone, borrowing music anybody with a decent income would buy. Clothes that had come off some rack second hand. Our roads hadn’t been so different after all.

“There are some men who wouldn’t.”

“You for one.”

“I know you. It’s different.”

“Sometimes, the ones you know are the worst.”

I turned a little to look at her. It was hard to tell if she’d directed her words at me or if she was just talking. Her head tilted down a bit as she walked, and she’d pulled her coat in tight to her body. There was no real way of knowing without asking her.

“Have you ever taken it off?” I asked.

“A few times.”

“But it’s back on now,” I said.

“Maybe for good,” she said.

Under the streetlights, the sidewalk seemed to smoke a little, as though there was a warm world underneath. I was thinking how stupid to take her to the park. The ducks were all asleep and the woods were black. My stomach was so empty, it hurt.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s not as bad as all that,” she said. “Look at you. You’re doing all right.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said.

She stopped and looked at me. “Well,” she said. Then she glanced at her watch and said she really had to go. We made a promise to meet again for a longer chat over dinner or lunch, but I knew it would never happen. It sounded good at the time, but people rarely mean what they say. The things they hope for are the things they know will never come true.
That morning, I couldn’t sleep after coming home from her house. The grey sky turned to blue outside my window. A dog up the street wouldn’t stop barking. I had to be at school in a couple of hours, and the thought of it – the teachers, their scribblings and deadlines and reading assignments, everybody writing everything down as though they cared. Even then I knew all I had to do was pick up the phone and call her.

What fools men are, with their logic and their techniques, what arrogance, what presumption.  And doctors…

The towels lay warm and golden upon their rack above the radiator.  One she wrapped about her head, a larger one she held to her body, patting the water away.

Doctors are the worst.  A small growth perhaps, madame, but I know he meant cancer.

Rubbing, buffing to bring the red life to her skin (avoiding the long mirror), massaging, slapping the oils in, oils from the tropics, from the sea, one for her body, one for her hands and arms, one for her face and throat.

‘We must leave by seven-thirty, Gwen.’

‘What is it now?’

‘Seven-oh-five.’

‘Don’t worry.’

They worry about the wrong things, pay no attention to the right ones.  They think time builds like bricks, but a woman knows it ebbs and flows like the sea.

‘Your hair is wet, dear.  You’ll catch your death.’

She stepped from the bathroom and picked the blow-dryer from her suitcase.

‘Miracle of modern technology,’ with a smile.

‘Well…Venice at this time of year…’

‘Don’t worry.’

He sits there reading a report which no doubt predicts a better world through technology, yet doesn’t trust it to dry my hair.  He thinks it a god, not a convenience.

A quick once-through got out most of the moisture and the rest would come when she styled it.  She reached into the suitcase for a packet of evening sheer tights and the slippery lingerie in midnight blue, all new this morning from her favourite boutique in the Rue du Rhône before they left Geneva.

No, he has never been cheap about clothes or anything else.  He hardly thinks of money.  And with the children out in the world he has more than ever, so I can spend as much as I like… a rampage!  A credit card rampage along the Rue du Marché and the Rue du Stand… and surely there must be wonderful things here in Venice… tomorrow… why not?

As she bent to pull the black shimmer onto her legs, she felt the pain again, brief, sharp, flickering beneath her ribs.

A small growth, madame.

Meaning cancer.

But I know it is not cancer, but something worse, worse.

***The ten-minute walk from their hotel to the one in which the reception was being held took them along several narrow lanes, under arches, over arched bridges, across squares, through more lanes, some bright with shops, some dim, mysterious, then into the great square, the Piazza San Marco, where they walked under a colonnade, then through an archway…

‘It leaves one… speechless… breathless.’

‘Yes, Venice is remarkable, especially in spring or fall, I hear.  Why these fools decided to hold their conference here in January is beyond me.  We can thank heaven it’s not pouring rain.’

Tomorrow she would explore, do some shopping, look for an art gallery perhaps.

Tonight the reception.

And dinner.

No dance, that was a relief.

‘Most of the financing for the project is American, of course, that’s Belmer, you’ve met them.

‘The wife is… Linda.  Three children in their twenties, at least two on drugs, and the other daughter attending university in Paris the last I heard.’

‘Gone revolutionary, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh dear, no mention of the Belmer kiddies.’

‘The Dutch are also in on it.’

‘Let me guess, Kees Rietsma?’

‘Yes, and wife Tieneke.’

A routine briefing, the small change of the semi-diplomatic world of international agencies.  After nearly thirty years of this life, they went through it effortlessly.

‘Oh… and Jean-Claude Thévenaz, you must remember him?’

To her left ran a narrow lane twinkling with lights from shops and cafés, lights glowing on the faces of shoppers, blue, gold, and red, a warm, vivacious scene, and in the distance the golden dome of a church.

‘Yes…’

Thank heaven for the scarf at her throat and shoulder, her own fashion accent lately, for the flounce of the skirt which would show off her legs in their sheer black, for the slingbacks, only three months old, for the new lingerie, slippery underneath.

‘Yes, of course.’

The glimpse along the lane was gone, but thinking about it, forcing herself to think about it, she realized there had been a great darkness between the shoppers and the distant church.  Water?  Some canal or harbour or lagoon?  Some water to throw herself into.

She stopped abruptly to look into a shop window.  Purses.  Rather nice ones.  Very nice ones.  Tomorrow.

‘Gwen?  Aren’t you feeling well?’

‘A little stich in my side.’

‘Then you should see Dr. Wenger as soon as we get back to Geneva.’

‘It’s nothing, really, a little nothing,’

‘We’re not getting any younger, old girl.’

‘I know.’

‘Come along then, the hotel’s just around the corner.’

***The reception room had as its proudest feature a triple-casement gothic window with a view of the water and the golden dome she had glimpsed earlier.

‘The Grand Canal and Santa Maria della Salute,’ intoned one of the hosts, and Gwen tried to be impressed, tried to ignore the couple framed by the centre window, Jean-Claude slim, handsome, impeccably dressed, glancing from under his dark lashes, turning to his companion, murmuring to her, a blonde in a bit of a red dress, much of her cow-like front hanging out, her head tilted up in a chuckle, lips open, wet red lips, a beauty, the slut.

As they did the diplomatic quadrille toward one another (the blonde went a different route) twenty minutes of chat, joke, sip, turn, slip on to the next group, their eyes met occasionally, noncommitally.  She thought him rather harder, but gradually resolved the discrepancy with the reflection that he was older, his jaw darker despite the recent shave (he always shaved before appearing in public, sometimes three times a day) and his eyes more webbed round with lines.  His eyes… and gradually she was lost in his eyes again, as he had been those… years ago, lost in their dark, limpid depths, drowning in his eyes.

‘Jean-Claude!  What a pleasant surprise.  When Bill told me…’

‘I was too… you can well imagine…’

I certainly can, you bastard.  Thought you’d skip in for the conference, then back to New York or wherever you’re posted these days.

‘Washington, actually, but it doesn’t matter where one lives in America, the streets are a jungle, one is always under siege, locked in.’

‘Perhaps you should request a transfer home to Geneva.’

‘Budget, my dear, budget,’ said her husband.  ‘I’m afraid extended postings are the rule rather than the exception these days, so that…’

Another figure in the quadrille and everyone moved on.  Presently their progress brought Gwen and Bill to the windows so that she was able to turn with some relief to the night, the golden dome, the fairy lights in the palazzi across the Grand Canal, the dancing lights upon the water.  But when she looked instead at the reflection of the room she saw Jean-Claude in huddled conference with the blonde.  The blonde was nodding.

No, you shameless bitch, don’t nod that you understand, you understand nothing, you think because you are young and beautiful that truth is as obvious as those tits slopping out of your frock, and because I am small and flat and buttoned up in this long-sleeved thing that I know nothing.  Well, we shall see, my dear, we shall just see.

The dinner was over, the speeches done, and the first people leaving when she got her opportunity.  At that, she had to stalk him through a maze of halls, the prey elusive and much practiced as hunter and hunted both, one then the other now striding boldly, now creeping, now slipping through a door (and all the time the red-clad blonde sat upon a bar stool, swingling the long leg, smiling, smiling, then smiling rather less) until Gwen, in a slightly sarcastic mood, ran him to the ground.

‘There is a little picture of a man on the door, here.  Was he meant to be you, my dear, my darling Jean-Claude?’

‘Gwen, I beg of you, don’t make a scene.’

‘But we are in Venice, a city of spectacle, of drama, of emotion.  Surely a scene is exactly what I should make, something to warm that cold Genevois heart of yours.’

‘Really, this is impossible.  It has been fifteen years…’

‘But isn’t our love forever?  That’s what you used to say.’

‘Can we not put aside the past?  You must leave at once.  Can you not see…’

‘That you want to poke that scarlet woman of yours?  Oh yes, but I want you first, I deserve you, I deserve something in return for all the lessons I gave you, for the misery you put me through when you left me.’

‘This is neither the time nor the place to open old wounds.’

‘When is the time… to open old wounds?’

‘Really, I must get back.  People will notice.’

‘When is the time?  Later tonight?  Tomorrow?  You look desperate.’

‘I am desperate.  I had no idea…’

‘That I would be here?  I’m sure you didn’t.  When?  Tomorrow?’

‘All right.  In the afternoon, after the shops have re-opened.  I’ll be free for an hour or so.’

‘Five?  Here, write down your room number… thank you.  And now…’

‘No, not now, tomorrow.’

‘But you always said that I was a genius, the most talented, the most inventive, the most daring.  Did you not say those things?’

‘You know I did.’

‘Then… take these.’

‘Nail scissors?  What am I to do with these?’

‘I certainly don’t have time to undress, so must cut your way to me.’

‘This is absurd.’

‘The sooner you begin, the sooner you end.’

‘But I may hurt you.’

‘It would not be the first time.’

‘But…’

‘Pretend I’m a virgin.  Cut.’

He bent, cut.

Snip, snip, snip.

***She locked the door behind him when he left.  Her brutal exercise of power had left her drained, brought tears.  She stemmed the tears with a concentrated concern for her make-up and its repair, she stemmed the welling humiliation with a totemic reversion to thought of her mother, losing herself in a contemplation which had for years been her dearest secret and, however distressing, a solace.  For her mother had died when Gwen was not yet two and a half, and she barely remembered her, might not really remember her, she had long had to admit, confusing memory with photographs and the tart remarks of her Aunt Prudence.

‘A flapper?  Wherever did you hear such a word?’  (Gwen perhaps seven.)  ‘But it is apt.  Constance was indeed a flapper, Gwendolyn.  That is perhaps the politest word one could use to describe her.’

Other terms which Aunt Pru used from time to time Gwendolyn collected and locked away in that room in her soul where the ghost of her mother lived, a room of hidden lights, heavy perfumes, jungles of hanging, flowing silks.  Bohemian clearly meant artistic, and minx and vixen were still perhaps kind words, carrying with them the possible sense of a titian-haired beauty with a sly or shrewd sense of humour and a quick tongue, while fast and loose, and a bit free and easy might just barely betoken a lively party-girl of generous nature, but of the words which became more frequent as Gwen got closer to maturity there could be no doubt.  Harlot, strumpet slattern, slut, and trollop, although largely archaic are brutally direct.  Then, when Gwen was sixteen, Aunt Pru had said,

‘There is no point in our being polite about it: your mother was a whore.  Perhaps if she had stayed here in Hampshire, but, no, she had to go up to London to flitter about.  I can hardly think of a less appropriate name for my sister than Constance.  She should have been called Inconstance.’

Gwen rather liked the idea of flittering about London… or even Winchester… Basingstoke would do for a start.

‘For what it is worth, and that is nothing at all, I’m afraid, she claimed your father was a rich American.  But how could she know?  She was as promiscuous as a barn cat.’

But Gwen knew, was sure she knew the truth.  What others called promiscuity was in fact love, a fullness of love spilling out of her.

And men too stupid, too narrow to absorb it all.  Light and bright and sparkling.  She was lucky to have died in her twenties, still sought after, a beauty, fresh and laughing.

And floating in this dream, the smiles and whispers, the floating silks of reverie drifting about her like perfume, a haze of golden light, she returned, serene, to her husband, and they strolled away through the glowing night of Venice, itself a reverie, most serene.

***Bright sun of morning, bright chill which bothered her not in her Swiss winter clothes, and she strolled out, comfortable, receptive, bemused, wandering at will, by chance, directionless by calle and campo, ponte and sottoportego through Venice, Venedig, Venezia, Bride of the Sea, exquisite, preposterous, beguiling, most feminine of cities, oh! greatly loved, a soul upon the waters, amazing, a maze, reticulated, decorated, Gwen drifted, orphaned waif, wanderer of continents, adventurer, Englishwoman, woman, homeless, home at last.

At first she found herself in abrupt dead ends, rounding corners to find her walkway ending at water, perhaps a bridge to the door of a home (why can’t I live there?) but she gradually saw that by walking in the light stream of people (that peculiar, forward-tilted quickstep of Venetians) she got along further, nowhere, but somewhere she had not been, a little marble church by the water, a grand, stark church on a square with a statue of a serious old man on a horse, the man having the face and neck of a turtle, and little streets of small shopping where she bought, desultorily, as if in practice, a few souvenirs, and stopped for coffee and smiles, per favore, grazie, prego.

By and by, however, she found herself distracted by that bar of blue above the narrow lanes, corners of her vision tweaked, her body drawn by the promise of sun, and she went seeking the open light.  Shadowed lane, archway, small square, lane, and turn, abruptly, there, ten paces before her in a frame, sea and sky with horizon lost in haze of pearl.  She stepped slowly through the frame, into the light, a soul in Paradise, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

The great dome of blue, clear blue as the eye of a young winter’s nun, the sea below flashing blue spangles of giggles, blue ripples of laughter, horizon the luminous flesh of cut lemon, sunward was richer, pale golden of peach, while just there in the distance, domes, towers of churches, domes golden and glinting across the bright water, and off to her right the great curve of the quayside, the Riva, the sea-face of Venice, Venezia, Bride of the Sea.

Gwen spun, stunned, buffeted by beauty.

Caught her balance, turned seaward again.

Oh, Exultation!

(A quick catch of pain.)

This, this is why we live, and all of me, this beauty, here, now, alive!

***‘Yes indeed,’ said the red-nosed Englishman seated across from her at the lunch table, ‘Venice is a remarkably beautiful city.  I first saw her when I was with the occupying forces in the spring of ‘45, and I can tell you it was love at first sight.’

‘Ahh, springtime, certainly,’ said the long-nosed Frenchman, ‘but in winter she is not at her best.  The snow on the domes of San Marco looked, last night, like the powder on the cheeks of an aging actress.’

‘A bit tawdry, agreed, but at least the canals don’t reek.  And if we had had the luck to have been here next month we could have seen her all tarted up for Carnival.’

‘Of course, the sewage problem has been with the city since the beginning,’ said Gwen’s husband.  ‘It’s in the nature of the place.  The Venetians seem incapable of organizing a solution.’

The three nodded sagely.

‘Yet the Venetians have always been supremely efficient at what they have considered important, haven’t they,’ said the Englishman.

The Frenchman supplied the answer by rubbing his thumb and forefinger together.

‘Exactly.’

‘But only when they had a monopoly,’ Gwen’s husband remarked.  ‘Any fool can make money that way.  Once Vasco da Gama got around the Cape…’

‘They have also been efficient thieves,’ added the Frenchman.  ‘The body of St. Mark they stole from Alexandria, the body of St. Roch from Montpellier, the famous bronze horses from Constantinople…’

‘Didn’t they steal the winged lion on the Molo?’

‘Doubtless.  And, do you know, I believe they also stole the columns on which the lion and St. Theodore stand…’

‘Heavens, I don’t suppose a stone or bronze lion anywhere in the Mediterranean was safe from the covetous agents of La Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia.’

Gwen coughed.

‘But surely they were just stealing to show how much they loved their beloved?’

The three stared at her, open-mouthed.

Her husband recovered first.

‘It is still theft, my dear.’

‘Looting,’ said the Frenchman.

‘In any case,’ said the Englishman, ‘the Venetians seem to have thought of Venice as masculine.  In the Marriage of the Sea, the Adriatic was the wife, the doge threw her a wedding ring and declared Venice had dominion.’

‘Then the doge was wrong.  The sea was masculine and Venice was the bride.  You yourselves were saying she.’

‘She has a point,’ said the Frenchman.  ‘Certainly there is something feminine about Venice, although bride carries the wrong sense.  There is something… louche about her, something suspicious, false, not quite…’

The Englishman held up his hand, nodded to the Frenchman.

‘I see what you’re getting at.’

He turned to Gwen.

‘When the princes of Europe were trying to organize one of the crusades, they sent emissaries to the Venetians, asking for help.  ‘You have the greatest fleet of ships in the world,’ they said.  ‘The Sacred Shrines of the Holy Land are being defiled by the infidels.  We are willing to spill our blood to avenge these insults to our Lord Jesus Christ, but we can only get there with your help.  Will you transport these soldiers of Christ to the Holy Land?  And the doge replied…’

Again the Frenchman supplied the answer.

‘On what terms?’

‘You see,’ began her husband, ‘If Venice really is feminine…’

‘Then,’ continued the Frenchman, ‘ the Venetians have never been better than pimps…’

The Englishman concluded softly:

‘And Venice is their whore.’

***

At mid-afternoon, as the shops began to open again, she wandered about, following the people, her sense of place, doing her serious shopping, earring of silver filagree, shamefully frivolous shoes in black patent leather (how vain she was of her feet and legs!)  at a price so much better than in Geneva that she bought another pair in beige, and matching purses, and several blouses in limpid silk, and as a replacement for what had been damaged the night before a set of lingerie, black with écru lace.  This she changed into when she took her purchases back to her hotel.

‘Gone shopping, back at seven,’ she noted for her husband, then left for her rendezvous.  She was rather early, but her sense of direction had never been good and she wanted to give herself ample time.  If she arrived much too soon, she could step into a bar, for it was the cocktail hour, she was feeling none too calm, and the pain jabbed at her side as she walked.

Then, as she approached his hotel, she saw the blonde bounce of Jean-Claude’s cow arriving from the opposite direction, laden down with parcels.  In quick panic, Gwen slipped into the first turning, tripping along until she was safely, more than safely, away.

Wait now, girl, why run?  You’re twenty minutes early, he said five, she’ll be going out again soon, the spendthrift bitch, so everything is all right, have a drink, calm down, phone him at five.  Yes.  All right.  Now.  Slow and steady, over this bridge, bear left, I think…

She was in an obscure campiello, a tiny square, off the beaten track, one of the modest, unexpected delights of Venice.  Here fruits and vegetables in neat piles of green, orange, white, and red, here the minuscule tobacconist’s with magazines hanging around the window, here meat, here fish, and opposite, stationery, shoes, prints and maps, and, when she stepped toward the prints, a small dusty display window through which was visible a mask, a lady’s mask, a beautiful mask of a beautiful face in black with lips of gold and, reaching down over the temples, two golden hands in black net gloves, the hands making, between thumb and forefinger, ovals for the eyes.  A hand-lettered card pointed to a rough door next along.  She had seen masks in a number of shops, but no mask quite so elegant, quite so alluring, quite so mysterious as this one.  She pushed open the door, stepped through an archway into a courtyard, and there through a large window she saw the shop, a jumble of materials and masks in various state of completion.  Through the dusty glass a young woman smiled and beckoned.  Gwen opened the door and stepped inside.

‘Buon giorno, signora.’

‘Buon giorno, signorina.’

Gwen had little Italian, so after a few tries they settled on French as the most convenient.

‘The masks are for carnival next month.  A year of work for a few weeks of business.  Silly, isn’t it?’

‘I noticed others in the shops, but none so beautiful as the one in your window.’

‘Thank you.  The form of the mask is common enough, but the combination of black face and gold features is new.  I think it a little interesting, no?’

‘Indeed, yes.’

The girl continued with her work, explaining the process, the layers of plaster, the sanding, varnishing, painting, all the while lightly sanding a succession of masks, seemingly in no hurry to make a sale.

‘Most do not go through each step, but I believe it must be done right.’

‘Yes.’

‘I would not sit if I were you, the dust gets on everything.  But if you wipe that stool…’

The girl was blonde, with heavy-lidded brown eyes, full lips, and high cheekbones in a rather flat, almost Slavic face.  Under the smock she seemed to have a generous figure.  Sensing the frank appraisal, she glanced up with a smile and the shadow of a shrug which Gwen read as saying, ‘Yes, many people think me beautiful, and that makes things go more smoothly sometimes, but there are other things in life as well.’  Immediately Gwen fell in love with her and, for the two dozenth time that weekend, with Venice.

‘Those are made from ancient designs from the commedia dell’arte…’

She pointed out great-beaked Pulchinella, the black half-mask of Arlecchino, Pedrolino with the tear falling from his eye, angry Pantalone, the cuckolded merchant.

‘He is truly Venetian, Pantalone.  But there are not really any proper ladies’ masks from the commedia.  A lady’s face is beautiful enough as it is.  Make-up was enough, even when the female parts were taken by travesties…  But for the Carnival there must be masks for the ladies, so we make them.  Mostly they are as you see there.  They are the most comfortable to wear.’

On the wall hung a variety of cloth half-masks with riots of beads, sequins, plumes.  As she imagined a costume ball, Gwen found herself becoming dizzy with the exoticism of anonymity, of the elaboration and exposure of the gown one could wear, of the danger.

‘And the one in your display window, is it for Carnival?  Do women wear it?’

‘Well, it is made with strings so it can be worn, and some do wear it, I know.  But it has no mouth, so after a while the breath may soften the plaster, and perhaps she will put it aside.  Also, it is rather expensive.  I think most people just put it on the wall.’

‘Yes, it is certainly decorative.’

It could be had in variations of white, black, and gold, the face one colour, the hands and lips a second, with mesh gloves usually the first colour.  The white face Gwen found too bland, the gold face too garish, so she settled on the version with black face, gold hands and lips, and black mesh gloves like the one in the window.

‘The gold is put on with leaf,’ explained the girl as she offered half a dozen, each slightly different.  ‘Though it is not, of course, real gold.’

She wrapped the chosen one in tissue paper and warned about packing it too tightly in a suitcase.  Gwen paid but lingered yet.  The girl stood still, smiling, seeming content whether Gwen should stay or should go.

‘I have enjoyed this so much… you have made something beautiful…’

Impulsively, she kissed the girl on both cheeks.

‘So feminine,’ she added.

‘Yes.’

***

When she called from the house phone in the lobby, he seemed a long time answering and was cold when he spoke.  Yet he told her to come up and opened the door readily enough when she knocked.

Mellowed by her encounter with the girl of the masks, she smiled with genuine warmth which he could not help but feel.  He returned the smile and the embrace, if a trifle reluctantly.

‘Oh, Jean-Claude, don’t be frightened of me, I’ll not make a scene.  Let us have a nostalgic hour and then I’ll be gone.  Copains?’

‘Certainly, Gwen.  Copains.’

‘A large room… and a view,’ trying to ignore the stack of fresh shopping bags in the corner, ‘much more grand than ours.  We overlook a tiny courtyard with cooking smells.’

‘Everyone knows Bill hates to waste agency money on frills.  Is the room really that bad?’

‘No, of course not.  And the smell was a peppery shrimp last evening.  It was mouth-watering.’

‘Well then…’

‘Oh yes, he’s a wonderful man, his virtues are manifold, and he’s very dear to me… if only he had been a little bad from time to time, just a bit naughty.  But at least he brought me here.  I have something to show you… first the lights down low… yes, you get that one… and get into bed, I’m just going in here… I’ll be quick… a surprise.’

She stepped back into the bedroom a few moments later wearing the teddy from today’s lingerie, the black lingerie with the écru lace, with stockings rather than tights, an archaic notion, a fantasy, a scarf about her neck and over one shoulder, and the mask of black and gold.  Silently, arms held behind her, she paced slowly forward.

‘Beautiful… truly…’

She sat beside him on the edge of the bed, crossing her legs, sitting tall, turning her torso, posing, a seductress.

‘As beautiful,’ she asked in a whisper, ‘as the nymph of Carouge?’

‘As beautiful, take off your clothes.’

‘As alluring?’

‘As alluring. Take off your clothes.’

‘Tell me of this nymph of Carouge, tell me of your love for her, your passion for her.’

He fell into the game reluctantly, but he did play, telling how he, a shy university student, had fallen in love with the young wife (well, not so young perhaps, for she had been in her mid-thirties, but he did not mention this) and of their meetings in that little bar in the slightly naughty Geneva suburb of Carouge, of oysters and chanterelles and wild strawberries, of borrowed flats and rooms, of cruises on the lake steamer to Thonon, to Evian, of their day trips to Annency and Aix-les-Bains, of the great and massively sinful long weekend in Paris after his graduation, of the education he got from her.

‘And did your nymph teach you to slough off the cares of the day?’

‘Yes.  Take off your clothes.’

‘Did she teach you to float in your sensations as an island floats between sea and sky?’

‘Yes.  Take off your clothes.’

‘And was that an enchanted island?’

‘Yes.  Take off your clothes.’

‘Yes, the isle was full of noises, sweet sounds and airs that gave delight and hurt not.  Was it not so?’

‘Yes, Gwen…’

‘Hush, Gwen is not here.  And was that island like an enchanted dream, so that when you woke, you cried to dream again?’

‘Yes. Gwen, we must hurry.  We don’t have all night.’

‘And did you desert the island?  Did you sail away, leaving the nymph to weep alone?’

Dead silence.

The mask stared, mute.

‘I doubt she was alone.’

Serenity faltering.

‘The nymph was busier than she pretended.  Or pretends today, it seems.’

The mask turned toward the window.

‘Your mistake was getting your husband to find me that job with the Agency.  Everyone knew, of course, everyone except Bill.  A good man.  Generous, intelligent, conscientious, and without suspicion.  But not passionate enough, so you betrayed him.’

The golden lips were sealed, the eye sockets blank.

‘But I wasn’t the only one.  Not even one of the few.  Everyone had sailed across to the little island, hadn’t they?  The entire Agency staff as far as I could tell.  The poor, the maimed, the halt, and the blind.  Not, perhaps, the senile.  And, of course, the Agency’s clients, let us not forget them.  The imperialist conquest of Africa in the last century had nothing on your campaigns.  Do know the name they had for you around the Agency in your African years?’

Did the mask waver?

‘The Black Man’s Burden.’

The mask slumped, the torso bowed forward.

‘How many have there been over the years?  Hundreds?  Thousands, more likely.  You have shown the discrimination of a public urinal.’

Hand slipped inside the mask, covering the face, the sobs.

‘How many, Gwen?  I suppose you have no idea how many?’

How masculine of him to demand numbers when what mattered was amount.

‘How many?’

She slipped the mask up to the top of her head, wiped her eyes, sat straight, head high.  She directed all her will to the words of her answer, to their soft dignity.

‘I have been greatly loved.’

She turned her eyes to his.

‘Greatly… loved.’

The silence which floated about them was so thick the air might have been water and they at the bottom of a lagoon.

***

The rattle of the key in the door was abrupt, noisy, violent, terrifying, as was the entry of the blonde, as was the demolition which followed.

‘Bloody hell, if it isn’t the office bike!’

An Australian accent, unexpected, harsh.  Its metallic edge was a particular pain to Gwen’s ears.  She had lived with some equanimity among the various drawls and rasps of American, had learned to bear her husband’s dreary, nasal Canadian, but she had never been able to abide Australian, and now she tried to block it from her ears, to concentrate instead on the pain in her side, for the voice went on and on in a refrain of questions and answers, asides, tried to ignore the pain of the sounds, the pain of the meanings.  She also tried to hide her body, pulling the sheets to herself, curling up, but the woman was having none of it.

‘Get up you bitch, get off my bloody bed and let go my bloody sheets.’

Gwen started to make a rush for the washroom, but the woman caught her arm and slapped her head, sending the mask bouncing, skittering into the corner.

‘Bloody tart.  Christ, Jean-Claude, I don’t know how you ever managed.  I mean look at her, wearing stockings like a five-dollar whore trying to attract dirty old men.  And do you know why she’s wearing them?  Because her legs are all soft.  Look…’

‘Leave it, Coreen.’

‘And look at the scarf, she was wearing one last night too, as if no one knew why.  But look at her neck, get your hands down, you old hag, there, see?  Turkey neck.  And how many kids has she spawned?  Two, wasn’t it?  And both out and gone years ago.  So let’s see your body, dearie, get that thing off, come along then, let’s have it off.’

The woman was so much bigger, younger, stronger.  Gwen stopped struggling.  She stood in the middle of the floor as the Australian grabbed the bodice of the wispy teddy and ripped it from her body.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it? Look at the stretch marks, you’d think she had ten brats.  And what about your norks, darling?’

‘Coreen, enough.’

‘Enough, hell, did I ask her to start taking off her clothes?  Here, let’s have a look.’

The long red fingernails cut a gash over Gwen’s breastbone as the hand snaked out and ripped away the bra.

‘Christ, they look like a pair of flounders lying there, I think I’m going to puke.  I mean, how did you think you were going to get it up for her?  My God, I leave you alone for two hours and you drag this up to our room.  It’s degrading, disgusting, look at her, the pathetic slut.’

‘Coreen, leave her alone.’

‘Scrawny wrinkled thing.  Get her out of here before I tear her apart.’

Not sure that it was really over, Gwen stood still with head bowed and arms at her sides, that pain again, wearing only the absurd suspender belt and stockings, waiting for the blows, cringing, shrunken.

‘Go dress yourself,’ said Jean-Claude softly.  ‘It’s all over now.  She won’t hurt you.’

‘I bloody will if she’s not out of here in two minutes.  I have to get ready for that banquet.’

‘Coreen, stop, now.’

And indeed the cutting whine was not audible through the closed door as Gwen pulled the dress on over her nakedness, and when she returned to the bedroom the Australian was staring out the window, a cigarette in her cocked hand.  Jean-Claude arose from the chair and stood near the door, holding out her handbag and the shopping bag, his head bowed with, just possibly, a touch of apology.

‘I wrapped the mask in your other things.  That will protect it.  I didn’t see any scratches.’

She took the bags and stood waiting like a convict for the door to be opened for her.

‘It’s a beautiful mask.’

‘Don’t fawn over her, it’s disgusting.’

‘Coreen, have pity on her…’

He pulled the door open and stood aside:

‘She’s just an old woman.’

***

She found the restaurant by instinct and luck, by avoiding San Marco and the Rialto, by walking away from the crowd.  A few local youths around the pinball machine in the outer bar room and six tables of dinners in the restaurant.  She allowed herself to be led to a table by the window overlooking the glimmering little canyon of canal.  In summer the view would be prized, but now, she knew, it would mean sitting in a chilly draught.  It was, however, the only small table left and she could leave her coat draped over her chair.

‘Grazie.  Cinzano rosso, per favore.’

‘Prego, signora.’

And she would have her left cheek away from the other dinners.

‘Cinzano… and the menu, signora.’

The slight astringency amid the fullness of the drink was pleasant on the roof of her mouth.  She had brushed her teeth in the washroom of a bar, but the drink renewed it somehow, masked the lingering taste of blood.

From behind on the right, German was being spoken by a family of five, and another northern language from the young couple near the door.  Everyone else seemed to be Italian.  No one was paying her any attention.  She might just make it through.

She ordered by pointing at items on the little menu card, not quite sure what she was getting or how it would be prepared, not much caring.  In the event, the first course was a plate of cold seafood antipasto, tasty and mysterious, the bodies of tiny shellfish, curled up, little bunched tentacles.  It renewed her vigour somewhat, reminded her that she hadn’t eaten for six hours.

The waiter took away her plate, filled her glass with white wine.

Her husband had been understanding when she explained over the telephone.

‘Not at all, my dear, I know you loathe banquets.  I’m afraid I may be back late tonight.  I have to talk to Belmer about the Mombasa job and he’s going to insist on a visit to the Casino.  Ridiculous.  If you would care to join us, go to the Rialto vaporetto…’ and the useless directions.

‘Thank you, Bill, I understand exactly.’

‘I’m told Venice is not a violent city,’ he assured her, ‘and that it is safe for a woman to walk about at night.’

How many similar conversations had they had over the years?  The telephone in the bar, the restaurant, the strange apartment, the backstreet hotel, and the apology, a headache, shopping not done, an old friend, the Bill’s assurance, he understood, had a meeting, a report to finish.  Had he really believed, all these years?  Well, the pain reminded her, it wouldn’t matter much longer.

Not cancer, never mind their modern science, this was something out of Africa, something mysterious, dark, contracted during her adventures, sweat on hot afternoons, rumbles of deep voices, like distant thunder, black skin like velvet over hunched muscles, gods from the secret dark of the soul, gods alive, above her, she had been greatly loved, but now she was being punished, and her mother’s name was not Constance, there was a secret name, she whispered it in my ear when Aunt Pru took me to see her that last time, in the white room, she whispered her name in my ear, but I forgot it, forgive me, Mother, I forgot your real name.

‘Scusi, signora, is…’ and in a jumble of language she heard ‘terminate’ or something like it.

‘Yes, it was very nice, but…’ and gestured about her narrow waist.  Relieved, he took away the plate of gnocchi, barely touched.  They had been light and fluffy enough, but not tonight.  She looked at her reflection in the window: a tiny bird-like thing she was.

The little sparrow, Jean-Claude used to call me, meaning I was like Piaf, which was no compliment as far as looks go, poor tiny wreck Piaf was those last years, but meaning character, meaning passion, courage.

La vie en rose.

Poor tiny wreck of a thing.

A sip of wine.

Pity all the wrecks of little old women, cast off, no one needs them any more.

A toast to them, every one.

Colette, there was another one, all crabbed up with arthritis those last years, her face devastated, like an African village after the passage of an incomprehensible gang of men in uniform.

Despoiled.

No, not despoiled, Piaf and Colette had triumphant faces, had grown the faces of women who had lived.  Lived greatly, loved greatly.

So they were made to pay?

As am I?

‘Grazie.’

‘Prego.’

Cuttlefish in its own ink, dark, daunting, an adventure.

Like Africa, like the mask.

Thank heavens it had not been scratched.

In that earlier bar, in the washroom for repairs.  Pull on the cheap new undies bought in the first shop she had come to, do her make-up again, careful, not too much, then take the mask carefully from the bag, throw out the torn things, Venice, it seems, is hell on lingerie, but the mask is unharmed.  Truth to tell, she wants to put it over her face for the rest of the evening, the rest of her life.  Hastily she wraps it in paper towels.

Now it is safely hidden in its bag on the other chair.

The taste of the cuttlefish, rich, heavy, dark brown like the ink sauce.

As she chewed it, a soreness in her jaw, reminder of the big horrible woman, cow.  More than cow.  Dairy.

And he lay there in bed like a sultan, letting her hit me, letting her tear the clothes from my body, my pretty things.  How much had he planned?  ‘I leave you alone for two hours,’ she said.  But she was only gone twenty minutes, half an hour.  She had shopping bags when I saw her in the street and they were in the room when I arrived, so she only went out long enough for him to get my clothes off…

And that’s why he kept asking me…

To undress more…

And when I kept my pretty things on…

She tore them from me…

‘No, grazie, but I’ll have a cappuccino in there.’

She pulled her coat over her shoulders, shook out another cigarette, took a table in the bright bar, set the bag with the mask carefully on the floor against the wall.

‘Your coffee, signora.’

Two boys remained, standing at the end of the bar talking, sneaking a brief look at her, turning in upon themselves again.

‘And I’ll have a grappa, per favore.’

‘Prego.’

‘And…’

She nodded at the two boys, questioned the waiter with her eyebrow.

‘Why not, signora.’

‘And have one yourself.’

He was amused, they were surprised, confused briefly.  The waiter lined up the four glasses, poured the yellow liquor, they all raised their glasses. What did one say in Italian?  Yes,

‘Salute.’

‘Cheers, madame.’  And awkwardly, formally, from the older of the two boys, ‘Thank you very much.’

‘Cheers.  Where did you study English?’

The ancient game, the rules, the moves repetitive as ritual, variations on a theme, plus ça change, more drinks as the boys strut and display, dancing forward like painted warriors, tribe of the lion, Viva San Marco! retreating, giggling, unsure, untested, not blooded in battle…

‘See what I bought today.  Mask of Venice.’

The mask, more serene, pure ritual, play, their courage could handle.

The mask selected, beckoned.

In the dim toilet, light from the canal, soft light of Venice.

‘Signora?’

‘There, how does that feel?’

‘Signora, I am a poor boy.’

‘And I am a poor woman…’

‘Signora…’

‘But I have been greatly loved.’

‘You understand…’

‘Yet this evening my soul was harrowed.’

‘No work, signora, so…’

‘So here,’ gaily, the mask hiding her tears, a bunch of bills into his pocket, the pain again,  ‘After what that creature did to me, it’s nothing, my pleasure, a gift.’

‘Thank you, signora.’

‘For I have been greatly loved.’

The Mask, and the Woman, and Venice.

Greatly loved.

Most Serene.

Serenissima.

“You coming, Prammy?”

“I’m thinking,” I say. What goes on in her little brain? It must be like the birds, hopping and chirping. Actually, I do know. It’s sex, sex, sex.

A year ago, towards dusk, I was walking by this same place. A grey veil, like a frayed blanket, had moved up from the gutter and across the sidewalk. Birds were dive-bombing. As I got closer, the blanket dissolved into moving parts. Hundreds of mice, or maybe moles, were making a dash up from the sewers and across the naked sidewalk to their burrows under the hedge. It reminded me of a nature film, like wildebeest on their migration, attacked by crocodiles, or hatchling turtles pecked by sea gulls.

We die and decompose. We never return and we will never sleep with virgins in a perfumed garden, or go to heaven or hell no matter what our sins or virtues, or drop into the airless nirvana my mother prays for. But this afternoon, the combination of birds and ants and tufts of grass makes me see that something of us does return. Our chemical shell is reabsorbed. It’s as simple as the Law of Conservation of Matter. The elements keep going on, and on, and on and they recombine randomly, making birds and mice, grass and trees, and sometimes, even, every few thousands years I guess, a dog or a human being. Life is a default position. Wherever the promise of sustainability exists, something will find a way to inhabit it.

“Prammy?”

How many lives before I’m a self-conscious person again? There’s no end to it until the sun quits, but then our elements are blasted into space and we drift in the dark for a few million years, like dandelion fluff, and our cells start splitting and a few billion years later we slither onto alien rocks in a galaxy far, far away. Without a gram of religious feeling in me, I’m suddenly a believer in eternal life. This is seriously weird.

The ice surface is a polished pearl, and I start by laying down a long, lazy sum, the ffrom the Calculus, running the length of the rink, edge to edge. It’s my signature: Pramila Waldekar was here. Nothing is hard if it can be reduced to numbers and everything, sooner or later, is just numbers. So long as I do my spins and axels inside the sum, I’ll be safe. Today he’s going to be hard on me, maybe because Tiffy is with me. “My Gods, you are not Aeroflot taking off from SFO, you are artist. You must rise from nuthink. From ice. All rise coiled inside.”

And I wonder if there is not a coefficient that includes speed, drag, and vertical lift. It’s a matter of directing energy.

Poor Borya thinks it’s an invocation to the ?-hole on the top of a violin, a subtle dedication to his marvelous self. Back in Minsk, he played the cello. Sometimes he plays for me.

People are prime numbers, or they’re not. The Beast is eighteen, which factors to 3×3x2, a perfect expression of his mental age. I’m thirteen: prime. Tiffy Hu is twelve, 3×2x2: what more to say? Borya is thirty-seven: prime. We are irreducible. Borya hasn’t been prime since he was thirty-one and he won’t be prime again till he’s forty-one. What will I be like in my next prime, at seventeen? A fat cow, says Borya. A woman is never stronger than she is at twelve or thirteen. We are designed for our maximum speed and strength, before the distraction of breasts and hips. He only takes on girls between eight and ten; after that their contours change, their centres of gravity, their strength. That’s Borya’s philosophy, and I endorse it.

He also says a thirteen-year-old woman will never be more desirable. It’s a Russian thing, maybe. I’ve read Lolita. On a normal practice day, after skating, we drive to his place in Palo Alto and do it in his basement apartment, in the house of Madame Skojewska. Madame is the widow of Marius Skojewski, a Slavic Studies professor at Stanford. Borya says Polish ladies are “very tender, very sophisticated. Russian people very narrow, very brutal.” In order to explain my comings-and-goings in Palo Alto, I asked Daddy to pay for Russian lessons, which he was happy to do.

Borya was surprised I wasn’t a virgin. No girl with a brother like The Beast can be a virgin. No one watching us at the rink, listening to Borya’s berating, his picking apart of my motivation, my technique, my discipline, would think us anything but bashful student and demanding teacher. With Tiffy Hu watching and waiting her turn, it’s only skate, skate, skate: leap and twist and turn and spin, work up a sweat and then take her home with me for dinner.

The Beast is in. “Tiffy Hu!” he shouts, charming as always. “Hu’s on first?” Tiffy doesn’t get it. “Or should I be asking, who’s first on Hu?”

“Ignore him,” I tell her. “How’s your Russian?” I ask. It’s a test. If he suspected anything about Borya and me, he’d ask, how’s yours?

He’s got a Russian secret-girlfriend, a big golden Stanford sophomore goddess, too good for his sorry UC-Santa Cruz freshman ass. I’m starting at Stanford next year, skipping the entire, doubtless illuminating, American high school experience. I’ll be the youngest they’ve ever admitted. I’ll be thirteen years, ten months.

The Golden Goddess used to go with the big Stanford tennis payer, Mike (that is, Mukesh) Mahulkar. The Beast used to be his lob-and-volley partner. The Beast was a decent high school player – he even won the state finals. Golden Goddess would spread a towel on the grass and watch them slug it out. Those long, golden legs, those skimpy tops – I could see The Beast was a little distracted. Then suddenly Mike and GG were no longer a couple – Mike’s parents said she was just another practice partner – and Mike was engaged to a proper caste-and-class appropriate Bombay cutie. The Beast, just a senior in high school, started hanging out with GG. Our parents would have nailed his door shut if they’d known. At least it left me free to explore other options.

My father and The Beast think Mike Mahulkar is going to be the next Big Name in international tennis. No way, I say. I charted two of Mike’s games. He’s totally predictable. Backhand, forehand, lob, rush the net. So many balls to the net, so many deep volleys, side to side, in a sequence even Mike doesn’t know that is mathematically predictable. You can lure him to the net and set him up for a passing shot. Of course The Beast can’t, and so far no one on the amateur and college ranks can, but some Swede or Russian will humiliate him. I showed The Beast my pages of calculations. “Even you can beat him,” I said. “Here’s the probabalistic algorithm for beating Mike Mahulkar,” and he said to me, “just go back to the ice.”

The Beast thinks the only difference between him and Mike is Mike’s superior coaching and Stanford’s weight room and flexibility training. Since we didn’t have our own gym and staff of coaches, he doesn’t stand a chance against the famous Mike Mahulkar. So Mike is strong and determined, but just forget that his game is boring and he’ll meet someone out there who matches him in strength and see into his game and send him spinning back to country club status and an eventual MBA.

We sit in silence around the dinner table. We always sit in silence. I cannot remember a time when anyone spoke. We’re not like Americans, grabbing a bite here and there, stuffing ourselves with processed foods, injecting our flaccid bodies with empty calories in front of a television feeding us empty images. Therefore we are better than Americans with beef blood dripping from their fangs.

We never miss a meal. We are family. We are Indian. We are vegetarian. Every meal is a small production. Chop-chop, spice and dice, then fry, always fry. Even our bread and desserts are fried. Our walls glisten from airborne globules. My forehead glows. We sweat it. We practically bathe in vegetable oil. Our lifetime vegetable oil consumption, expressed as a function of water-use, is rising.

Of course I am the only true American in the family. The Beast was born in Bombay. He conveniently forgets this fact. I have my sliced red pepper, celery and carrots. Tiffy is scarfing the fried food down.

She breaks the silence. “This is really good!” and my mother is pleased. This is the daughter she should have had. “All we get at home is greasy soup with noodles and pieces of vegetables swimming around in it.”

I could say all we get is the same stuff, chopped and fried in the same spices, every day for all eternity. I stopped last year. His Lordship is drinking a beer. The Beast has a Coke; Tiff, Her Ladyship and I have iced tea.

“Chinese food is very good. I have many Chinese friends,” says His Lordship. So far as I know, all he has is Al Wong, his friend since graduate school, and Al and Mitzi come over once a month and they go to Al and Mitzi’s once a month, and they play bridge.

“Chinese food very healthy,” says my mother.

“Especially deep-fried egg roll,” says The Beast. Don’t say it, I pray, but out it comes: “I mean egg loll and fly-lice.” He never disappoints. Tiff doesn’t get it.

“Chinese people are like Indian people,” His Lordship explains. “Very loyal to family. Children very loyal to parents, parents very protective of their children.”

Tiff looks to me for help. “I never thought of that,” she says.

“I think we’re very Greek, actually,” I say.

Mother says, “Greek people eat meat wrapped in leaves.”

“Greek myths,” I say.

“What myths?” His Lordship weighs in. “All European myths are comic book versions of Indian myths.”

“I was thinking of Atreus,” I say, to deafening silence.

On the walk back, Tiff asks, “What’s that Atreus thing you said?” Just the usual incest and slaughter, I answer. Gross, says Tiff. Then she says, “Your dad and Al Wong actually rented a house in Palo Alto? Lots of hot action, I’ll bet.” Among Chinese, Al Wong is a little bit famous.

But she doesn’t know my father. My father and hot action – in the linguistic interstices, all things are possible, I guess. And the third guy, a Parsi, went back to India. But then she says, “You won’t get mad if I ask a personal question?” My life is nothing but very personal secrets.

“Go ahead,” I say.

“You and Borya, you’re getting it on, aren’t you?”

“Getting it on? What does that mean, exactly?”

“I don’t care if you are or if you aren’t. I was wondering about, you know, his thing. How big is it?”

“Big, meaning long, or wide, or what? It’s a meaningless question, Tiff. Big as a function of his pinky finger? Big as a function of his arm?”

“Forget about it,” she says. And I wonder if she already knows that she’s next. And Tanya Ping is lined up, just after her. “Just, what’s sex like?”

It’s like a puppy of some rough, large breed that just keeps jumping up and licking your face. It’s shaped like a candle, without a wick. Of course, Borya’s Jewish, so the shape’s a little off. “It makes you sleepy,” I say and Tiff nods, “that’s what I thought.”

Maja Skojewska was Maja Pinska. “I grew up in a very liberal Jewish family,” she told me, in our informal Russian “classes,” and when I’m her age I’ll probably be saying, “I grew up in a Hindu family.” Madame’s idea of Russian lessons is to talk of her life, in Russian, interjecting Polish and English and before too many weeks she says, “See? You just asked me that in Russian!”

Her father was a schoolteacher, a great admirer of India. That’s why she and her sister, Uma, have Indian names. When the Germans came to the school to get him, the priest said, we already turned him over. And there he was all along, working in the same school, only sooty black from shoveling coal. The Germans couldn’t imagine a Jew working like a Pole, dirtying his hands like a Pole. Her husband-to-be was also a schoolteacher, a Polish Catholic (not to be redundant) but after the war he went to university, then to Moscow State for more study and after two books, he was invited to Oxford, and that’s when they made their escape. The idea that little Maja Pinska would be eighty years old and tending her garden in California is testimony, she says, to a kind of stubborn life force.

On her table are bananas so unblemished that I thought they were wax. “That’s the first thing I noticed when we got to England,” she says. Bananas! And the thrill of peeling a banana has never left her, after fifty years. And we sit a few minutes in silence, and she leans towards me and says (I’m sure it’s in Russian, but it’s as clear to me as English), “You know, Borya will drop you.”

“I know,” I say.

“I don’t approve of what he does, but then I say, it’s better you learn from him than from these boys I see on the streets.”

“Yes,” I say.

Sometimes I think of Madame’s life, and mine, and that it’s all a kind of trigonometry of history. Her life is a skyscraper, mine is just a thimbleful of ashes, but our angles are the same. My adjacent side is just a squiggle, and my opposite side barely rises above the horizon. But the angle is there. I feel that I can achieve monumental things if I can just live long enough.

Even with all his money, it took Al and Mitzi fifteen years to leave their cottage in Cupertino and splurge on a 23rd-floor, apartment in downtown San Francisco. It’s all glass, 360° panoramic views of the city, the Bay, the bridges, the Marin Headlands, Berkeley and Oakland. No interior walls, but for the bathroom and two bedrooms. They also have a country estate in Napa. Some evenings when the fog rolls in, we’re suspended in a dream, disrupted only by bridge-table small talk. Other nights, the city sparkles. Al pours me a small glass of plum wine. Tonight, my father complains of his job. He’s in nanotechnology, and his responsibilities are shrinking fast.

“Have you thought about something new?” Al asks. “I mean really new.”

“Yes, I have,” His Lordship responds. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard such a thing. He always defends continuity. His father spent forty years in Maharashtra State Government service. What really new thing could he possibly do?

Every now and then, when Mitzi and Her Ladyship are out of the room, Al Wong will say, “What do you hear from our old friend?” He’s got a needle, and he uses it. I can tell it’s a jab to my father’s self-esteem, but I don’t know what it means. I think there’s a lot of sado-masochism, not nostalgia, in their friendship. Sometimes it’s good to be a quiet, studious, Indian daughter; I’m just furniture. Except for Borya and Madame, I’m accustomed to being ignored.

Most of the time, they just sit and complain, drink some wine and play their bridge. After half a glass, my mother will say, “What was the bid? I’m feeling so light-headed!” Al and my father were in grad school together and started out at PacBell together, and my father’s still there. Al decided to go entrepreneur, and bought a computer franchise. He sold that at just the right time and bought and sold a few more things at their peak, and then he bought a hotel in Napa. He built it up with spas and a gourmet restaurant and hiking trails, and then he opened a winery: AW Estates. The hotel is where young Bay Area Chinese professionals want to get married, or at least honeymoon or go on weekend getaways. He says there are so many young Bay Area Asians at his hotel that it’s like a second Google campus. AW Estates pinot is what young Chinese professionals drink. He’s even got a line of plum wine for the older folks, a girl like me. Every thing he touches turns to gold.

I don’t know how it started, but tonight there’s an edge, an identifiable complaint, coming from my father. “I’ve been thinking,” he starts, and he leans forward, perhaps aware that I’m sitting ten feet away. “I’m thinking my children disrespect me.”

That’s the news? Al says, “Mitzi and I never wanted children.” Once they made that decision, she went to law school and now she’s a major litigator.

“I blame this country,” says my father.

“It’s in the culture,” says Al. He came from Hong Kong. “We can’t live their lives.”

“I believe my son is dating a person without my permission. I believe he is involved with a most inappropriate young lady.”

That’s when Al says, maybe to break up the seriousness, “By the way, guess who’s back from the East? Now she’s an accountant. I’ve hired her to do my books.”

And then, just from His Lordship’s grimace, it all makes sense. There was someone in those days of hot action in Palo Alto. Tiffy Hu smelled it out, and I’ve spent thirteen years in a fog. It’s so exciting, so unexpected, I want to jump up and pump my fist.

“I think…” my father says, then pauses, “I think that we must leave this country.”

If furniture could speak, it would shout, “What?!”

“Hey, man, that’s an extreme reaction,” says Al.

“I’m not talking of that one. I have been a bad father. Things have been going on under my nose, outside my control. Asian children should never be allowed to stay in this country past their childhood. I may have already lost my son, but I can still protect my daughter. If I can save one from shame and humiliation I will at least have done half my job.”

I clear my throat. “May I speak?”

His Lordship stares across the living room, as though an alarm clock he’d set and forgotten about had just gone off. Truly, I am invisible to him. “Pardon me, but that train has left the station.”

“We’re not talking of trains,” he snaps.

“Okay. That horse has left the barn.”

I never thought I would, under any circumstance, defend my brother. His Lordship, says, “Kindly keep your opinions to yourself. You are not part of this conversation. This is about your brother.”

I’m up against something that is irrational. I can’t argue against it. “No, it’s not! It’s not about him. That genie is out of the bottle. It’s about me, isn’t it?”

Al Wong passes his hand between my father’s frozen gaze, and me. “Vivek,” he says, “she has a point.”
Some day I want to ask Al Wong, what was it that happened in that house in Palo Alto? What caused my father to cast a lifelong shadow on this family?

“Go to your mother,” my father says.

I don’t go directly to my mother. My fate in this family is, as they say, fungible. I approach the sofa where His Lordship is seated. “Let me say one more thing. If you try to make me go back to India and if you stop me from going to Stanford and you try to arrange a marriage with some dusty little file clerk, I’ll kill myself.”
Things have been frosty these past few days. The Beast is back in Santa Cruz. While I’m at work on my AP History, and my parents are watching a rented Bollywood musical, the phone rings and my father picks it up, frowns, then holds it out towards me. “It’s your teacher,” he says, and I expect a message from school, maybe an unearned day off, but it’s Borya. He says, “Madame is asking for you.”

I tell him I have no way of getting there. And why would she be asking for me?

“I am driving,” he says, an amazing concession. He is not a hop-in-the-car Californian. He’s a skater, not a driver. I didn’t even know he has a license.

Normally, I would never ask to leave the house after dark, but when I say, “Madame Skojewska is asking to see me. Mr. Borisov will pick me up,” my father barely lifts his eyes from the television.

“Where will you be?” he asks.

I write down Madame’s address and phone number. They don’t know that Borya lives in her basement.

I recognize the car as Madame’s, usually parked and dusty in her garage. She revs the engine once a week. It’s been over a year since she bought a gallon. “A gallon a year, if I need it or not,” she joked.

Borya starts out in English, “We go to Stanford Hospital. Madame has…” he strikes his chest, “heart.” Stanford Hospital is where I was born, but this doesn’t seem a commemorative moment. And then, it must have occurred to him that we are not at the ice rink and that no one is watching, and that my months of Russian instruction permits adult interaction; he grabs my hand, kisses it, and says, “you know how she loves her bananas. She walked down to Real Foods, bought two bunches, and on her walk back home she suddenly collapsed.”

When we arrive at the hospital, he says, “They said she was going, tonight.”

She’s in the ICU, under a plastic tent. It reminds me of the flaps on babystrollers, the plastic visors, the baby warm, secure and sleeping while rain is pelting. Just like that, sweet mystery of life and death; one day we are chatting like old friends, see, you just asked me that in Russian! and I felt I belonged in a time and place I’ll never see. I’ve never had a student like you, you sit so quietly, you don’t repeat words, you don’t ask why we say it the way we do; you just start speaking it like a native, like someone reborn.

A student like me is accustomed to praise from her teachers. But that’s not the point; the point is, I impressed her and she’s the only teacher I’m likely to remember. I remember years of teachers’ meetings, standing alone at the edge of the classroom while a teacher pulls my parents aside. I see her gesturing, and my parents shaking their heads. What did she say about me? I ask when we’re back home and my mother says, Some nonsense, and my father says You have a good head, but you are prone to dreaming and you must work harder, or you will fail. I know it’s about the Evil Eye; I might accidentally hear some praise that will turn my head from proper feminine modesty.

“You know what she said about you, even today? Even this morning when she was headed out to buy her bananas? She said, ‘Borya, living long enough to teach that girl Russian is the greatest privilege of my life.’”
We stand behind the glass and it seems that Madame’s eyes are open, and shining. I raise my hand and flutter my fingers; it’s all I can do. Do svidaniya, Maja.

I think I know what it was, back in that rented house in Palo Alto when my father and Al Wong and the Parsi guy were Stanford students and my mother and The Baby Beast were still in India. Al knows, Mitzi knows, my mother knows. He wants to go back to India because some mysterious woman has suddenly come back. Some long shadow of shame that has shaped our lives. It’s about him, not me, though I’m the one who will pay the price.

When Madame died, I started thinking of other teachers.

When I was very young – five, I’d guess, in pre-school – I discovered algebra. First, it was the word itself, it tasted good in the mouth, like something to eat or drink. Fortunately, I had a teacher, “Miss Zinny” we called her (I think her good name was Zainab, and we were the only two South Asians in that class), who didn’t laugh when I asked her what algebra was. The next day she brought her college math book and we spent my nap time working out the problems. I remember the excitement, the freedom in a phrase like “let P stand for…” or a declaration like “let A=C+1.” The consolation of algebra; everything is equal to something else. It was something I couldn’t explain, but it’s what I felt a few years later when I learned about imaginary numbers. It’s about seeing the nine-tenths of the iceberg, and not being afraid. What I remember is the equal sign. In the world of algebra, everything can be made equal to anything else. Everything in the world can be assigned a value, and has an equivalent. Solve for the value of C. I went home and told my mother “let P stand for potato. Let R be rice.”

“Then wash the rice, please,” she said.

Colleen shuffled the God pamphlets in her lap while Mr. Andrews chalked square yellow letters on the board.  Boring. The white-paper one was cheaply printed: the yellows did not line up with the reds or blues, so Jesus was all halo, no body. Inside was just a boring list of Sunday school and Bible-study classes. The glossier one had pictures of candles and sheet music, a paragraph about the joy of faith, a couple things that sounded like cheers. Even better, no church address where her father could go and ask questions. Not that he would.

“Ok, people,  focused attention…” Mr. Andrews dropped the chalk into his sleeve. In her notebook Colleen wrote, Bible study group. Leader: Drew. Then she crossed out group and wrote cell, like terrorists. Scarier.

Mr. Andrews was saying, “I hope you’ll really get involved with this project, come to see poetry not as words on the page, but reality interpreted in words.”

Colleen wrote: The leader will interpret the reality of God’s words.

“Well, that’s the hour. Thanks, guys.”

Colleen stayed in her seat, waiting for Andrews to skedaddle out. She stared at her blue-ink, red-underline title: Mindfuck. Date in the upper righthand corner.

She flicked through the Bible she’d got out of the library. She was worried, a little, about accidentally brainwashing herself. Not very worried, but she’d watched talk shows. She knew about Mormon harems and Catholic perverts, kids going naked on compounds in Arizona, parents selling their houses to pay for deprogrammers.

Her mother would have had something to say about that. But her mother’s car had gone spinning off black ice seven months ago, and Joe was always at work or partying when anything good was on TV.

Joe

“No, I want the gig, but I can’t rehearse tomorrow. I’ve—I’ve got something else.” He dragged deep, held it in. Something else was recruiting focus groups of people who bought than a litre of cough medicine a year, but that didn’t sound how he wanted to sound. He exhaled into the exhaust fan. “I know the set, I could jump in after the opener.”

Joe was on the kitchen phone, watching the window for Colleen on the basement steps.  He’d have time to pinch the joint and shove it in a pocket and before she got to the bottom and opened the door.  Ever since her silent rage at the tinfoiled ball of hash beside the bathroom sink, he was trying, but the exhaust fan wasn’t that strong. When she lived across the country and they were together only two weeks a year, she’d been a little more forgiving. The turnips boiled over as he hung up, and he slammed the phone down. Joe knew seven recipes; tonight was root vegetable casserole.

He was pretty sure the drugs were part of that silent rage, but not all. She didn’t say what made her unhappy, or even that she was. But no one moved that fast, turned that sharply, with any joy. There was so much shit, it was hard to guess: dead mother, strange father, new school and apartment, plus nobody liked root vegetable casserole, it was just all he knew how to do. That was a problem with a lot of what he did.

Other girls her age talked more, he thought. Marcy had…probably. He’d only been with her three weeks and he hadn’t been sober all the time then, either. But it seemed that Marcy had bitched about homework, cried about dead birds, yelled when he stepped on her toes. Colleen never said a word.

Then again, neither did he. There was a cushion missing from the back of the couch where he slept. In the night, his right foot slipped through the gap and the ripped upholstery to the cold springs, the jagged edge of the broken one. He didn’t have the money for a new couch, nor the time to find a new cushion the right size. He just tried to keep his feet still at night, thought about sleeping in shoes, bandaged his right foot in the mornings. Maybe they weren’t the sort who talked about troubles, Joe and Colleen.

But Joe’s last relationship, and several others, had ended with normal people talk things over. But Colleen had left “The Lessons of Deuteronomy” mixed in with his dead mail and sheet music. But he didn’t mind talking, really. So he scraped the serving spoon through the casserole, sat down across from her and asked, “So, you’ve been thinking about religion?” Then he took a bite. The rice was mushy.

“Yep.” Colleen was picking out all the carrot medallions and lining them up around the rim of her plate.

“That’s cool. I went to church when I was your age. Sometimes.” A long pause, for chewing. He hadn’t cooked the turnips enough tonight. “You like Deuteronomy?”

“Yep.” Colleen was eating everything except for the necklace of carrots, even the tough turnips. “You know about that one?”

“Not really, much. But I care about whatever you care about. Tell me.”

Colleen chewed hard, blankfaced. Then she stood and left the room. He listened to the kitchen door’s creaking swing, put some salt on the rice, took a sip of water. He had no idea if she’d gone to get ketchup, to vomit, to Paris, reacting to something he’d said or the voices in her head. When she swung back in and snapped some pamphlets down on the table, he was relieved to see her again, relieved that the church stuff was pretty low-level. He was relieved to put down his fork to read. Nothing about hell, or door-to-dooring, not much even about God. Kids could go to YouthZone and learn Christian alt rock on Tuesdays. He wondered about that sound; probably lots of acoustic guitar, handslaps against the wood. He wondered if he had the cash for pizza.

“This sounds cool.” He set the papers down and picked up the knife again. “Fine.”

She shrugged and dug the tines of her fork into the twelve o’clock carrot. “I’m trying for more than fine.”

“Trying?”

“To know God.” She brought the carrot to her mouth and bit it in half. “To understand the universe.” Her rage was radiant and he couldn’t guess why. He couldn’t guess anything about her, not even whether she liked carrots most or least.

Colleen

The Bay jewellery was expensive, and Claire’s at the mall was just embarrassing. Besides, she wanted something over-the-top, a printed shopping bag that would make even live-and-let-live Joe squirm. She wanted Family Christian Bookshop.

It was so far east there were no sidewalks. Every asshole driver who saw her had to honk—to tell her she was in the way, that she was hot, that she wasn’t, who knew? There an even better-sounding store across town, but she couldn’t have walked that far, not even for Loaves and Fishes.

Family Christian Bookshop was pretty good—sky-blue carpeting and glass-fronted cases with wet streaks of Windex. Everything—t-shirts, aprons, stuffed dogs—was printed with Bible verses, or numbers and dots that maybe meant verse numbers. Clocks and bike helmets with prayers, t-shirts about chastity. Two mud-haired toddlers running around, jangly guitar music on the speakers. It sounded a little like tunes she heard through her bedroom wall when her father rehearsed. Other than that, pretty good.

When she asked the wall-eyed clerk where to find the “talismans of faith,” she sort of got told off. “I don’t think talisman is the right word to use. A talisman is supposed to bring you, like, luck and power. Talismans do stuff. A cross represents something, but it doesn’t do anything. You should read—”

Afterwards, she went down a new path in the slanting sunlight, trying to cut home through the ravine. She had her library Bible in her bag, thunking heavy against her thigh.

As she walked, she dangled the silver in front of her face like a hypnotist, poked at the cross with her fingertip. Her fingertip was bigger. The thing was actually from the baby jewelry section. It wasn’t likely Joe would notice more than a glint at her throat. She trickled the chain back into the bag, and uncrumpled the receipt.

FAMILY CHRISTIAN BOOKSHOP

Silver cross/chain — $4.95.

She would leave that somewhere prominent, maybe.

Four-ninety-five could’ve bought what she’d meant to buy, a rhinestone WWJD, but with the one eye watching her, the too-familiar guitar, those kids with their clean soft faces, Colleen couldn’t think.

The receipt wasn’t going to be much good soon, she was rolling it ragged, fretting the edges. Soon it would look like garbage and Friday 6am, when Joe ran around throwing things into grocery sacks, it would be gone. She carefully tucked the receipt back into her pocket.

Colleen wasn’t sure where she was—the path seemed to have zagged away from the underpass, and she couldn’t hear traffic anymore. She still didn’t know this stupid town very well. She tipped her head down against the laser sun, now almost parallel with her face. The clerk’s weird gaze had felt like a laser, too, an x-ray of her brain to see she wasn’t one of them, a different sort entirely, a liar, not very nice.

Marcy had always said her father was a nice person, just not ready to be a dad when Colleen was born. And when he’d finally turned up, when she was four and she’d visited him those summers he wasn’t tree-planting, she didn’t think he’d gotten any readier, though he was nice. He was always trying to give her stuff she didn’t want or like: a hat made of straw, candles stuck in winebottles, once a puppy that got sick. Nice didn’t mean anything. Nice was just how you looked at it. If red was blue, it wouldn’t make a difference, really, in what you saw. Seeing your father as God on a cottonball cloud or a guy in Toronto who never called you—just a perspective thing. You didn’t get to have dinner with either of them.

Except now she did, when they both were home. She was hungry, and the sun was giving her a headache. It was possible that someone—a teacher, not Joe—had said not to go to the ravine, or maybe just not alone. She wanted spaghetti, the best of Joe’s suppers.

Different ways of looking—he tried so hard to be nice to Colleen, but he’d ditched her mom when she was pregnant. Not so nice, not so…Christian. He said, “I care about what you care about, Collie.”

Colleen shut her eyes. “I’ve been born for a long time. You only now care.” She was talking to no one. By the pink slant of the sun, she knew it was nearly night.

Marcy had been right. Joe wasn’t ready for anything, not even trash day. He’d met Colleen at the bus station the first day with a milkshake, tried to hug her and got milkshake all down her back. Her father was a very nice person, but that didn’t mean much. It was just a way of seeing the world.

She heard the shush of the highway at last.

Joe

“Collie, hey, leave your shoes on. I dropped a glass. I—”

“Colleen.” She stood on her right foot, her left foot braced against the wall, the laces on the green suede sneaker half undone.

“Colleen, please leave your shoes on.” Joe was crouching by the piano, a wet paper towel shredding in his fingers. He had liked that glass. “And why’dja miss dinner?”

“What do you have against my name?”

Joe sighed, put the grey wet lump on the parquet. “The N just slips away when I’m talking fast. You missed ratatouille.” He swabbed at the floor, wet mixing with the shards. This didn’t work too well, but he couldn’t find the dustpan.

Colleen thwacked her unlaced shoe onto the floor. “You don’t like my name.”

“I like your name. It’s yours, it’s you.” He pressed drown on the paper towels, wringing a puddle onto the parquet. “Listen, I’m playing tonight, I’ve got to get going.”

“It’s because my mother gave it to me.”

Joe pitched onto his knees. He had meant to reach for the glass glints near the wall, but she startled him and he toppled to fast, hard. “Why would you say that?”

“Because you didn’t like her either.” Colleen stepped on the heel of her untied shoe to get it off; then the other with her bare toes. She didn’t have socks on. “Right?”

“Colleen, where are you getting this?” Joe looked at the sharp spots of light, at Colleen’s naked feet, at her pinched mouth. “I never said a word against your mother.”

“Yeah, you’ve never said a word.”

His knees popped as he rocked back on his heels. “What do you want me to say?”

Her eyes glinted like glass. “Drew says to honour our mother and father—”

“Drew?” Joe wasn’t really listening, fretting the paper to mush, pricking his fingers. He tried to remember the exact definition in 1001 Beautiful Babies at Chapters.

“Drew says to honour is to know. She gave me my name.”

“I’ll honour it, I’ll remember.” He wanted to say that he would honour Marcy’s memory, too, but that would sound too much like a lie. His memory of Marcy was thin as a summer dress, Baby Duck wine, vending machine condoms. “Who is Drew?”

Colleen tossed her hair down her left shoulder, smiling with only the left corner of her mouth. “Don’t worry, he’s someone nice.” She started towards her bedroom.

“Just, I want you to…be careful.” Once she had crossed the floor unflinching, slammed her door, he relaxed, until he saw the smudged blood on the wood.

They were the same blood type. He had a whole box of words and letters to clarify who he was dealing with. Late at night, when he didn’t know what the fuck to do, he went page by page: birthweight, grades in kindergarten, eye test, bloodtype. No baptismal certificate, he was nearly positive. But it didn’t matter, he couldn’t imagine her from the documentation, could barely imagine her when she was in front of him. Maybe imagination was the problem.

He hadn’t been able to imagine why independent Marcy was trailing him along the library shelves, the autoshop hallway, the soccer field. He hadn’t noticed her puffy face, her refusal of a smoke. She was a party girlfriend and he wanted them to be party broken up. So he told her his band, no name yet, just three guys and a drum kit, was going to Montreal in his uncle’s old van. They had a gig, sort of.

She’d nodded, sniffled, said, Call me when you get back. We need to talk. But it had been so much easier to forget about flunking trig tests, fighting with his dad, returning the van, calling Marcy. So he didn’t go back, not for a long time. Even when she got his number, even when he sent her money, even when he was visiting and sitting with Marcy and four-year-old Colleen in the sweltering ball-room at McDonald’s, they’d never really talked. He’d always been sorry, and he’d never imagined. He didn’t think that made him any less of a douchebag, really.

Colleen

Little known fact: Colleen hated falling asleep when her father wasn’t home. Of course he didn’t tuck her in, or necessarily even notice that she was going to bed to say goodnight, but she liked him there at night. His breath, rustling pages, voice.

Colleen listened to her father. In one sense, he knew: she obeyed, mainly. The other sense of listen—that she heard his voice—she was happy to keep to herself.

Good nights, she lay awake after homework and teethbrushing and laying out school clothes, and listened to Joe was rehearsing in the living room. Through thin walls, his voice was light but not soft, smooth as a muddy path. He took hours to perfect a song, a verse, a bar.

When she was only visiting, when she didn’t have time to get used to things, his tenor would get into her head and vibrate there. Now she didn’t mind. Through the plywood and drywall, she couldn’t make out the words, but the sound was edgier than anything he ever said, and stuck in her head in a way their conversations never did. Sometimes, she heard something wistful, a dreamy minor key. Those times, she could treat his voice as a lullaby, or at least it lulled her, and she fell asleep more or less peaceful, more than she might have been otherwise.

The nights he wasn’t home, falling asleep took hours.

Joe

People used the words holy fool if you were 32 and still messing around with your guitar. If you wore stretched-out t-shirts with band names on them and played for free at parties while the only perk at your real job was a headset phone. If you couldn’t afford cable or brand-name cheese, but you thought you were a musician. Joe accepted that, mainly. When he was on break from querying strangers about laxatives, and someone said, “How’s the music?” he said, “Ah, you know how it is,” which meant anything, so was safe. He’d looked up holy fool on Wikipedia and knew it didn’t seem to mean what everyone seemed to think, sort of heroic, really. Probably Colleen knew what a holy fool was, or at least would’ve understood the Wikipedia page. She knew a lot, his daughter.

The bands he was in always broke up, or something less something less violent than breaking, maybe fell apart. But there was always a friend’s band that needed a second guitar, a wedding, a fundraiser, something in a bar with no cover—always a stage somewhere where he was welcome. Not his melodies, not his count-ins, but all right. If the lights were bright enough, he couldn’t see the audience. He could pretend to be just fooling around in the living room, the same chords again and again, until they were perfect. If that was all, it was enough.

But there was more, after: beer and hugs and kisses. Of course there were reasons to go home: the 8-to-4 shift tomorrow, the shoes he’d spilled soup on, the cheap silver cross that he had found tangled in the shower drain, and what could he say to her? He kept listening to the chords in his head, kept drinking and feeling good and liked and talented. He didn’t go home until drunk verged on hungover, and when he crash-landed on the couch, he left his feet on the floor.

The clatter of pans woke him, too early, in time for work. Colleen was at the stove when he swung through the kitchen door. She kept her back to him, pretending she hadn’t heard the creak. His head felt inflated and rubbery, aching as if slammed against the floor. Finally, to her flagpole spine, he said, “There’s this movie.”

She turned, what he’d wanted, but then she winced. Joe could imagine his face ridged with pillow creases, too-long red hair standing sideways, bruisy bags under his eyes. The room spun. He wanted to sit, but felt the advantage of height.

“I was thinking you’d like it.”

She shook her head fast and her braid almost flipped into the eggs. She looked tired, too. He knew it was exhausting to sleep unhappy. “I have things to study, I haven’t time for entertainment.” She reached to spatula the eggs onto plates.

He collapsed heavily into a kitchen chair, skidding it loud across the floor. He’d heard about the movie at work, or the bar, or something. He mainly remembered. “It’s about—um, it’s, like, the life of this saint, this woman in…like, the 1500s. I think.”

“So, it’s a choice between thoughtful Bible study with my cell, and two hours of Hollywood faux-spirituality?” She thrust a plate at his chest, two lonely eyes of eggs.

He set down the plate of black-edged whites. “But you can have both, can’t you?”

“Drew says…”

He waited out the pause, staring at the gritty floor: bits of onion peel, a grey spider web, a flake of stale cereal.

“Drew says to avoid distractions.”

“Drew is— This is…” He abandoned that comment, slouched lower and cut a yolk to watch it bleed yellow across white and black.  “I don’t know who Drew is.”

“I’m learning from him about the…powers in my life.” She was scraping up burnt shards of egg.

Joe had to be at work in 48 minutes. He couldn’t do more than eat his breakfast and hold his head steady. He wondered if she felt happy about what she said. She didn’t look happy. She picked up her plate, char and little else. Moving towards the hall, she paused and rested her oily fingers on the bone of his narrow shoulder. The touch was so sharp and fast that it was almost a pinch, but it seemed to zero in on the tense spot there, and her gaze was softer than her grip.

All she said was, “I will honour your request as a dutiful daughter. I will check the listings for an early show.”  She took her plate to her room. It was something.

Colleen

By the time they hit the Mariah-Carey Muzak at the movie theatre, it had occurred to Colleen that she was being stupid, stupid in a very tiring way. The cuts on her feet hurt and before she lost it, the fake silver off the little cross had itched a crucifix rash into her throat. Joe was confused by the parking meter for five minutes before they could go inside. She was too tired to think of another plan.

They walked across the lobby, and Colleen thought: Do I do it now? Toss myself to the carpet before the snack-girl smiles at him. What will he think? The thing about tongues is how does anyone know it’s tongues? What if he thought I was having a seizure? Well, so, fine: hospitalized for glory, holy in a paper dress.

How long can I writhe on the floor? How long could God speak through a girl? I don’t know if I can lie any more. Lies are sins, too. My mother would hate this. How did I fuck this up? Why’s he buying popcorn? We’ll never eat it. If I don’t fall now he’ll get close enough to see the lie in my face. What do tongues say? Did Marcy ever believe in God? She didn’t teach me enough words. What words did she love? Did she love my father, let him leave her? Why didn’t she say something?

I wish I had a script. The words of God should be perfect. I don’t want to shriek and thrash. I want to say beautiful things, just this once.

Her father walked fast, spilling popcorn, looking worried. Colleen spun away as he approached. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

The bathroom was cold and smelled of cinnamon disinfectant. Colleen stood in the third stall. Her feet hurt and her throat hurt and she was so tired. This would be the last scene of this performance, and even now she needed a script. Colleen felt very young. Just a few years older, Marcy had had the world in her belly.

I want to say, I want to say…

Colleen pressed her forehead against the metal door. She could hear the perfect words in her mind, like the classroom words she was supposed to look up but never did—they were perfect as they were: lambent, id, fulcrum, mercury, palatial. Colleen fumbled in her purse for a pencil, couldn’t find any paper. She was imagining how she wanted to sound. Smooth, elegant—like a melody. She did not want to mutter, twisting facedown on the popcorn-scented carpet. She raised the pencil to the wall and began to write all the good words she knew, or sort of knew—aerial, liar, Perspex, munitions, Galapagos, countess, illustrious, wire. Stopped, thought for a moment, wrote more over the toilet paper—taint, Toledo, dwarf, darn, coffee—the feminine product disposal—clavicles, lackadaisical, tree, direction—the slide lock—arboretum. She wrote, milk, calico, fury, endive, halo, zip, emery, lithe. Crouching, around the hem of the door she wrote, tinsel, bruise, munificent, remunerate, suicide, Maybelleine, fortunate, dial. She wrote until her brain spun, the pencil smudged, and shoes hammered heavy across the tile floor. She saw them stop under her wall of words, but she kept writing—cascade, gelato, mirth, plebiscite, ennui, night—until a thick, tired voice said, “You wanna come on out of there, ok? I wanna have a word with you about what it means to deface property, ok? Now.”

Crouching surrounded by her script, Colleen surrendered to whatever surveillance cameras or omniscient God told security when kids wrote on the walls. She surrendered that scripting tongues wouldn’t work. She stopped writing.

Without standing, without putting away her pencil, she reached up to slide the bolt, tipped sideways to open the door. Colleen looked up at a thick young woman in a blue security uniform, sky-blue blouse half untucked from navy slacks. She had nothing but a walkie-talkie on her belt.

When the woman didn’t lunge for her, Colleen asked, “How did you know?”

The guard shrugged, tugging more shirt from her waistband. “Sometimes I just get a bolt, you know? A bolt from God.”

“These are His words.” Colleen jerked a thumb at the wall. The words went all the way up, from hinge to bolt. Calliope, sugar, tandem, gloss, mistral, concubine, zeal. Colleen didn’t know how long she’d been writing.

“God writes on the bathroom walls? Huh. Could you stand up, please? Grafitti’s a call-the-parents one.” Colleen didn’t want to stand. She put her cheek down on her knee. She could feel the pricks on her soles, painful, for such shallow cuts.

The guard was not small, so it surprised Colleen when she crouched to meet her gaze. Her eyes were very light brown, like beer or shadows on sand. Her light eyes traveled over the walls, over the beautiful words. “Congruent,” she said softly. “Mica, Marlboro, toreador. Cardiac.” On cardiac, she leaned closer, looked harder. Then she licked a finger, and smudged it through the r, the d, up into the x of excelsior.

“Pencil?”

Colleen shrugged. She was getting a cramp in her left thigh.

“Well. Well.” She stared at the dirty wet floor. “Still vandalism. But…” she gazed up “…but who hath heard such a thing? Who hath seen such things? … We gotta go call your mom and dad.”

Colleen propped her chin up on her right knee, watched a pair of red boots stride by, then pink sneakers, plain black loafers. “My mom’s dead,” she said, “but my dad’s out by the popcorn stand.”

Joe

Nobody loves a lone man staring at a ladies room door. Joe stood well back, but he was too scared to move out of view. The snackbar clock said 24 minutes. Could she have collapsed? Escaped through a window? Ascended radiant and immaterial into heaven? Other parents twitched their daughters closer, seeing him staring ravenous at the little lady symbol, clutching an untouched jumbo popcorn.

Joe knew God in the grace of his daughter striding across a crowded lobby. A miracle of a daughter, a sin by some standards, but a win somehow, anyway. A provisional victory: a woman in blue followed her.

When Colleen stood in front of him he had nothing to say. All questions, accusations, pleas dissolved before her sword-straight body. Her gaze was barely on him. She was looking at the point you punch for, that spot on the back of the skull.

“Who is Drew?” he asked finally.

“Drew is my study advisor.” She was motionless. So was the woman behind her.

“I… Collie— You and…Drew study the Bible?”

“The world. The world is confusing and complex, and Drew—”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Yes, the world is complex and confusing. I was just agreeing with you.”

‘Oh. Ok.” She shifted her weight, then again. “Wait. No. It is only confusing if we let extraneous matters distract us.”

The guard cleared her throat. When they turned, she said slowly, “They that forsake the law praise the wicked: but such as keep the law contend with them. So I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me. I’ve got to write this up.”

She started towards the guest services desk without checking to see if they followed. Joe did. After a few paces, he looked back, eyebrows raised. Colleen caught up, light on her sore feet, and they went on together to the long blue desk.

“What did you do?”

“I wrote on the bathroom wall.”

“What did you write?”

She slumped, almost leaning into his shoulder. Almost. “The words of God.”

“Yeah, ok.” Joe felt the burn of fear returning to his belly. He wished he had anything Colleen needed: strength, insight, advice, wit, anything but the stupid crinkling sack of popcorn still bundled in his arms like an infant. He couldn’t even think of an appropriate question to keep her talking instead of staring at Ticketholder Privileges. The guard rummaged for a form. He whispered, “What words does God use?”

Colleen finally met his eyes, green to green. “The best words.”

Joe inclined his head.

“I—I didn’t know what words God would use. I don’t know God. I just tried to guess, words that, words that sound good.”

There was a crash of thunder through the theatre wall and Joe realized that the movie had started.  It didn’t matter; the posters in the lobby all looked holy-war bloody, and here, now, while the guard peered at her papers, there was a moment’s peace.

Joe thought about God and had no answers, and his daughter was praying with a man who wasn’t real to a God he doubted she believed in. Colleen didn’t seem to believe in anything at all. Stop. He didn’t know what she believed. Stop. He had never asked her. She was sad and Joe wanted her to have what made her happy, even if it was false gods or complicated mindfucks or imaginary friends. Stop. He had to ask her to know what she wanted. She probably wouldn’t say, but that would be an admission, too.

He asked her, “Did you write your name?”