 
"From page one Bryson's prose had me scribbling words of praise: 'clean,' 'spare,' 'pure,' 'enters the mind like thought.'" – The Globe and Mail

"Showcases Bryson's disparate reach and contemporary voice." – Quill & Quire

* * * * *

### WANDERING THE EARTH:

A SELECTED STORIES SAMPLER

by

Michael Bryson

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

Michael Bryson on Smashwords

Wandering the Earth:

A Selected Stories Sampler

Copyright © 2011 by Michael Bryson

Cover image © 2011 by Kate O'Rourke

ISBN 978-0-9866206-3-8

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

* * * * *

WANDERING THE EARTH:

A SELECTED STORIES SAMPLER

* * * * *

Table of Contents

Boys and Girls, Girls and Boys

Beginnings and Endings

Running with that Indian

Border Guard

Watching the Lions

Book of Job

Six Million, Million Miles

Yes, I Wanted to Say

Niagara

My Life In Television

Bonus Track: Hercules

* * * * *

**Boys and Girls, Girls and Boys**

Bob called last week to say that he'd been dumped by my grandmother. I said that I was sorry, it was the first that I'd heard about it. I said I hoped that we would still be able to see each other. I don't know why I said that. It wasn't like we were pals or anything. I didn't want him to feel too rejected, is all. Bob said he was glad that I felt that way because he had enjoyed meeting me. "Just because your grandmother doesn't want to see me anymore," he said, but he didn't finish the sentence. "Yeah, sure," I said. "Maybe we can, I don't know." "Go to a movie," he said. And I said, "Why not? It could be fun." Then Bob suggested Tuesday would be a good night for him, and it so happened I was free that night, and I didn't feel like lying to this old man, who was feeling depressed and rejected already, so I said that I was available and we arranged to meet at a theatre downtown. Then I called Grandma.

"Grams," I said when she finally picked up the phone. "What happened? Bob's a nice guy. What's going on?"

"I can't talk now, sweetheart," she said. "There's someone here. He's in the bathroom right now. I'll call you back, okay?"

And she hung up.

Just like that.

My grandmother's seventy-three and she's had five boyfriends since my grandfather died. That was five years ago. You do the math.

The first time I met Bob was at my grandmother's place. She's got a small apartment in a seniors' building in Scarborough, a one bedroom with a kitchenette off the living room. I went to visit and Bob was sitting on the couch sipping tea and enjoying a batch of my grandmother's cookies. He said that he had met her when he came to visit a friend. My grandmother said it was nice to meet someone who didn't live in the building. She often complained about that, about how she didn't like her neighbours. "Why should I like them?" she would ask. "Because they're old like me?" I could see her point, but there was nothing I could do about it, so I was glad she met Bob. Also I knew that Ernie, her boyfriend at the time, had gone to Florida for the winter, so I thought she might be feeling lonely. And Bob seemed real nice, and he seemed nuts about Grandma. I remember the way he talked. Your grandmother this, your grandmother that. It was actually kind of embarrassing, but grandma ate it up.

Tuesday came before I could do anything about canceling my appointment with Bob. I had a talk with my grandmother, though. She said Bob was nice. There was nothing wrong with Bob. But life is short, you know. And you have to enjoy yourself. Imagine my grandmother saying this to me and me trying to decide if I should tell her that she had hurt Bob's feelings. As if she didn't know. As if she cared. Bob was starting to bore her, she said.

So Tuesday came and I prepared to meet Bob at the theatre. We were going to see some Hollywood comedy. I don't mind them every once in a while. I'm not nuts about them, you understand, but Hollywood's good at making stupid comedies, so you have to give them credit for that. This one was about a waitress who gets a lottery ticket instead of a tip and the ticket turns out to be a winner.

Bob showed up right on time, wearing an overcoat and a fedora, looking very old. He said he had a hard time finding a parking spot and I was suddenly afraid for the city's drivers. I'm sure he's a fine driver, but it was supposed to rain later, and I was equally sure that Bob's reflexes were in less than top form. We made our way to the theatre and Bob said he couldn't remember the last movie he'd seen. He thought maybe it was _Singing in the Rain_ with Bing Crosby. I nodded and asked what that was like, but he hit me on the arm and said that he was joking. _Singing in the Rain_ came out years ago. He said that he went to movies all the time, but he usually went by himself. He used to work in the movies, he said. He'd been a film editor in Burbank before moving to Toronto with his second wife. She was from here and she wanted to be closer to her family.

"I'd been thinking of retiring," Bob said, "so we moved up here."

Then his wife died from a quickly spreading cancer. Now he was alone.

"You could go back," I said, but he said he didn't have anything to go back to. "We never had any kids, and we never made too many friends," he said. He also said my grandmother would only agree to watch videotapes with him, but he said he hated watching movies on a small screen. "I guess I'm old fashioned," he said, but I said, "I'm with you," and then he winked at me and said, "Glad to hear it."

After the movie we were walking through the lobby of the theatre when Bob asked, "You want to go watch the girls?"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Don't go stupid on me," he said. "The girls, you know."

"Okay," I said.

"It's been a while," I said.

"Me, too," he said, and he winked again. He was starting to look better, I thought. If you were to ask me, I'd say he looked five years younger, at least, if that is even possible.

We got to the club soon enough and passed through a door covered with mirrors. Inside a raunchy rock song filled the place. We passed between the tables and found a seat off to the left of the stage. A stripper was in the middle of her routine, swinging around a pole.

"What do you think?" he said, after a waitress in a halter top took our order.

"Nice," I said. "Very nice." That seemed to sum it up. What a terrific looking woman, I thought. She was on the stage now, rolling around on a blanket. I sat up in my chair to watch her.

The waitress brought us our beers and set them on the table beside Bob's fedora. When the stripper finished her routine, Bob leaned over and tapped me on the arm.

"What did your grandmother tell you about me?" he asked.

"She said it wasn't your fault," I said.

He waved his hand in the air. "I know that," he said and gave my arm a little squeeze, real gentle, like he wanted to emphasize his point without being threatening, you know, real subtle. "But what did she tell you about _me_?"

I couldn't think of anything. "Not much," I said. "She said she was glad to meet someone from outside the building." But this didn't seem to satisfy him. I think he was after something specific, something maybe he was worried about, like a secret or something, because he turned away from me and leaned back in his chair. If it was something bad, I hadn't heard about it. My grandmother hadn't said anything, nothing that stuck out in my memory anyway.

I excused myself to go to the bathroom. I was suddenly thinking how crazy it was for me to be sitting in a strip club with my grandmother's ex-boyfriend. It took me ages to find the bathroom, and then I just locked myself in a stall and sat there. What did he want from me anyway? Information, friendship, someone to see movies and strippers with? He was an interesting enough guy, more interesting than some of my friends, I had to admit. He'd had a life, worked on famous movies, met some stars. Dated my grandmother. But I didn't see why the companionship role should get passed down to me. I thought I could probably come up with a hundred other places that I'd rather be than sitting off to the left of the stage with this old guy in a fedora, but then I thought hanging out with me probably wasn't his first choice either. I sat on the john for a few more minutes then went back out into the music.

"Not feeling well?" he asked when I got back to our table.

"No," I lied. "I probably should have stayed home tonight. Something's been going around my office. I probably should have stayed home. I don't want you to catch anything." That's it, I thought. That's how I get out of here. I started to collect my things. I pulled out my wallet and left ten dollars on the table. "Let me get it," I said. "My treat." He just sat there and watched me put on my coat. "I hope you don't get sick," I said as we shook hands. "I hope you don't catch what I've got." It seemed like he was going to stay.

The next day I told my grandmother a story about me running into Bob at the mall. I wanted to see what she would say.

"He's not well, you know," she announced. She hesitated, then continued. "He's dying."

"So that's it," I said. "That's why you don't want to see him."

She turned away from me. "Do you have time to stay for tea?"

I looked at my watch. "Yes."

"Oh good," she said. She'd done a batch of baking.

###

**Beginnings and Endings**

Dave

_Where did I meet her?_ At the coffee shop around the corner. _Why did I let her come home with me?_ I don't know. She had the look of someone who needed something, and I was able to give it at little cost to myself. She was assertive; she was persistent; she made it seem the logical, humane choice. It felt good hearing myself say, "Okay. Come if you want." I only had a floor for her to sleep on, I told her. I told her she had to leave in the morning when I left to go to work.

"Sure," she said. "It's a deal."

I don't have a big place, and I don't often have guests, but I wasn't thinking about those things when she asked me.

"I've seen you here before," she said.

I had gone to the coffee shop to get away from a short story I was writing. Trying to write. I had been stuck at what I thought was the halfway point for over a week.

She was sitting at the next table, a paperback in front of her. Atwood's _The Handmaid's Tale_ , I later found out.

"You look familiar," I said.

She was wearing a green canvas army jacket over a black t-shirt and a baseball cap turned backwards on her head. Familiar like any of a couple hundred others.

"What's your name?" she said.

"Dave," I said.

"Hi, Dave," she said. "I'm Darlene."

It seemed we might be at an impasse until she said: "I need a favour. I need a place to stay tonight. Could you put me up?"

"No," I said.

"It's just me," she said.

"No," I said again. I say no three times to most things. I'm not an impulsive person to say the least.

"It's just one night," she said.

I didn't say anything to that, I just looked at her and blinked. People afterwards asked me if I wasn't afraid of her, afraid she might steal my stuff or worse. I didn't have any thoughts like that. There had been a number of reports in the newspapers about homeless kids. The mayor had declared "war" on them, saying he wanted to "clean up the streets." It had mostly been background noise to me, part of the evolving urban narrative. I didn't feel connected to the mayor's battle in any way, but I have a natural tendency to identify with the underdog, so I think the mayor's war opened the window that Darlene crawled through.

"My pimp's looking for me," she said, "and I need to stay off the streets."

"Okay," I said then. "Come if you want."

Then I gave her my conditions.

"Sure," she said. "It's a deal."

Darlene

He looked clean. He looked safe. He looked like the best option at the time. I thought that I might have seen him before, but I wasn't sure. It didn't matter much anyway. I was beat, man. I was tired.

We went back to his place. He said it was small, and he didn't lie. The place was a one bedroom with kind of a hallway with a TV and a futon couch in it. He pulled the couch away from the wall and unfolded it into a bed.

"I thought you said there was only the floor," I said.

"I didn't want you to come," he said.

"Oh. Good one," I said.

He went into his bedroom and came back with a sleeping bag and a pillow.

"Just don't try to sleep with me," I said.

"Don't worry," he said.

"I mean it," I said.

He nodded. "Don't worry."

"I'm not kidding," I said. "If you try anything, I'll hurt you."

That made him think.

"Darlene," he said all serious. "If you say one more thing about that, about us not sleeping together -- I'll ask you to leave."

"Just don't," I said.

"I won't."

"Okay," I said. Then I laughed. It was strange, because mostly it goes the other way. I get thrown out for not having sex.

I was feeling really tired.

Dave said he put an extra towel in the bathroom. He got me a glass of water and put it on the table beside the TV.

"Good night," he said, then he went into his room.

"Good night," I said.

I unzipped the sleeping bag and threw it over me like a blanket. I slept with my clothes on. I didn't want him to touch me. I really didn't.

Dave

Okay, so now you know how it started.

The next day when I got up for work Darlene was in the shower. She had already folded up the futon. I went to the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. When she came out she had her jacket on and her backpack thrown over her shoulder.

"Okay, thanks," she said.

She walked past me and started putting on her boots.

"Don't you want some breakfast?" I asked.

"That wasn't part of the deal," she said.

"Come on. Eat something," I said.

"Toast and coffee," she said.

I pulled a couple of apples out of the fridge and handed them to her. "For later." She put them in the front pockets of her coat. I poured her a coffee and threw two slices of bread into the toaster. I turned on the radio to listen to the news.

"Big plans for today?" I asked.

"No," she said. "You?"

I shook my head. She sipped her coffee.

We sat in silence for a minute.

She stood up. "I gotta go," she said. "Thanks for everything. Really."

Then she left. I didn't try to stop her this time. The toaster popped. I poured the rest of her coffee into the sink.

I didn't think too much about her after that. I was working towards a deadline at work and putting in a lot of overtime. I had a vacation coming up, and I was looking forward to that. I had booked a hotel room in New York City. I had never been there. I wanted to check out some famous watering holes, some of Dylan Thomas's last stops. I wanted to spend my days in art galleries and my nights in bars. I had a friend doing graduate work at Columbia, Kerouac's old stomping ground, and he had promised to scare up some women. My friend was a bit of a Beat himself.

I would like to tell you that I forgot about Darlene after she left, but that's not true. I just thought I'd never see her again. I'm the kind of guy who remembers a lot of things and wishes he didn't.

Darlene

I left. I thought he was trying to make a move. "Big plans for today?" You know how it is.

I usually hang out downtown with the squeegees. I'm not a squeegee. Okay, sometimes I'm a squeegee. I'm not a prostitute, though. Really and truly. That line about my pimp was just a line. A line and a line only. I needed a place to sleep and, hey, it worked.

_Where do you live, Darlene?_ I don't live nowhere now. I used to live in a squat on Spadina, but the police cleared us out. I stayed a few nights in High Park after that, but I found it creepy. Also, there was this boy there who wanted in my pants. I don't sleep with anybody, okay. Why do you think I left home? I don't want to be touched.

I've been on the streets for about six weeks. Last summer I lived on the streets, too. That was the first time. Then I got put in a foster home. Then I got put in a second foster home. I left there six weeks ago. It was summer and I had to leave. I couldn't not leave, you see what I mean? I had to go. I had itchy feet. Otherwise I would have gone crazy. I felt like that. Like I was going crazy, like I was going to explode.

I went to see my counselor after I left Dave's place. It was the first time I had gone to see her since I left my second foster home. Her name is Carole, and I think she's all right. Mostly she just sits and listens to me. She's about the only person I know who doesn't tell me what to do. Well, she does tell me what to do sometimes, but she leaves it up to me. "It's your decision," she says a lot. "Your life." Man, that's nice to hear sometimes. You wouldn't think that would be hard to understand, but people always want to be the boss.

Carole didn't seem surprised to see me. She said she would have to tell my foster parents that I had gone to see her, but she wasn't going to force me to go back. She has a nice office. It was air conditioned. I noticed that right away. She has art on the wall, too. Most of it is native stuff. She explained it to me once. The paintings were about healing. They were by people who had been in the residential schools. Carole told me a little bit about that, about the native residential schools. They don't teach you that stuff in school, man. I didn't hear nothing in school but lies.

I told Carole that I wanted another foster home. I didn't want to go back to that second place. I couldn't say for sure what was wrong with it, but I knew that I didn't want to go back. I knew I could say stuff like that to Carole. She wouldn't make me feel stupid for not having a reason.

Carole was the first person I told about my step father. I don't talk about him much any more. He's the reason I don't want no one to touch me. I won't tell you what he did, what we did. I don't even like to think about it.

Carole asked me if I wanted to go to the police. I said no. Not now. Not yet. I don't think I could do that. Not because of him. Because of me. I don't think I could take it. Not now. Not yet.

Dave

In the beginning Darlene was a disruption to me. She entered the stream of my life like a pebble tossed from the shore. The surface rippled with the shock of impact. The pebble settled. The stream flowed on, navigating an altered path.

Darlene ended something and she began something; she began something and she ended something.

I saw her again the following Saturday.

Darlene

I went down to Harbourfont. Down to the lake. I like going down there. I like watching the people. I like the buskers, the street musicians. I like watching the boats, watching the planes take off and land at the island airport. I like the breeze off the lake.

I saw Dave down there.

Dave

She was wearing the same clothes, the same stupid baseball cap on backwards. She saw me first. I was glad to see her.

I was sitting in one of the cafés sipping a beer, reading that Kroetsch novel. Beginnings and endings. I had them on my mind.

I waved at her to come join me.

"You want something to eat?" I asked.

"Sure," she said.

I gestured to the waitress to bring a menu. The waitress was from Ireland. She was in Toronto for the summer on an employment exchange program.

"How have you been?" I asked.

"Good," she said.

She picked up the Kroetsch novel, flipped it over. On the back cover was a photograph of Kroetsch from the 1960s. He looked awful, like a real suit. Some kind of McCarthyesque dinosaur. He wasn't like that at all, I knew. But that's what he looked like. Like a university lecturer. A real drag.

Darlene pointed at the photograph.

"Creepy," she said.

"Isn't it awful," I agreed.

She set the book back on the table, photograph side down.

"Do you read?" I asked.

She reached into her backpack and pulled out _The Handmaid's Tale_ , the Atwood novel I'd seen her with in the coffee shop.

The waitress arrived with the menu.

I picked up _The Handmaid's Tale_ and flipped through it while Darlene perused the menu. I figured I had read maybe half of Atwood's novels. I hadn't read _The Handmaid's Tale_. I saw the movie. I hadn't felt inclined to read the book.

The waitress came back and Darlene ordered.

"You're paying, right?" she asked me.

I nodded. "Yes."

Darlene ordered and the waitress left. I asked Darlene what she was doing down here.

"I like to watch the people," she said. "People down here always seem happy."

I hadn't thought about that before, but it was true. Coming down to the water was like a return to childhood. Coming down to the water signaled a carefree day. It helped to create a sunny disposition.

I took a sip of beer.

Darlene

"Do you read?" he asked me.

I think maybe Dave's okay.

I started telling him about what I'd done after I left his place. I told him a little about Carole. I told him I wanted another foster home. I told him this was my second summer on the streets. I told him I wasn't a prostitute. I wanted him to know that. I didn't have a pimp, and nobody was looking for me. At least I didn't think there was. My foster parents might be looking for me, but I don't think so.

"You're bright," he said.

"And you're cute," he said.

"Are you hitting on me?" I asked. I wasn't afraid of him no more. I just wanted to be sure.

"No," he said. "I'm just saying what I see. You've got strength and you're working things through, I can tell."

He tapped his head when he said that.

Working things through.

"You're a survivor. You'll do well."

"I don't bend," I said. I meant it.

"Bending's not good," he said, "though there's a certain type of man who likes women like that."

"What type of man?" I asked.

"Men who work in advertising," he said.

He smiled when he said that. I wasn't sure if he was kidding or what.

Dave

I met a woman in New York. I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was small, dark, European. She came up to me with her program. She wanted me to tell her how to get to the Warhols. I don't know why but I said: "I'll take you there, but first come with me for coffee."

She came. We talked. We saw the Warhols. We went out for dinner. She was a secretary for a modeling agency. It was her day off. She took me to a small club where they played jazz, authentic ancient ragtime. She smoked cigarettes through a filter. She wore a fur around her neck. She looked like pictures I'd seen of Jackie Kennedy. It might have been the 1960s -- or the 1930s. She kissed me and gave me her business card. I never called her. I don't know why, except I was sure we had already been to the mountain top. It doesn't get any better than that.

I never saw Darlene again, either. I look for her when I'm downtown or when I'm in the coffee shop where I first met her. I hand out quarters to street kids more frequently now. I don't worry about her. Beginnings and endings. It's best not to get them confused.

Darlene

I could tell you some things. I could tell you things that would keep you up at night, but I'm not going to.

Just read the newspapers.

###

**Running with that Indian**

"So, Barry," Dad said, fumbling with his cigarette. He was in his wheelchair, wearing a blue hospital robe. Barry and I were on a park bench. I found it hard to look at my father, his pride hurt so bad.

"You work at the casino, am I right?" Dad asked.

"I'm in construction," Barry said.

"You work for Macleans?"

"Used to," Barry said. "I started my own company a couple years ago." Got to keep the money on the reserve, I had often heard him say.

I had tried to keep Barry away from my father for as long as I could. After the casino appeared three years ago, he tore into nearly every Indian person he met. _That casino will be the downfall of the entire region_ , I had heard him intone to his nurse just the other day. I was concerned about what he might say to Barry. My kids adored Barry, and I didn't want anything to upset him, to infect our relationship. Of course, Barry is one of the most level-headed people I've ever met, so my concern was really about myself.That was something that I was starting to learn. It was my anxiety, and I needed to take responsibility for how I dealt with it.

Dad asked, "You working on anything right now?"

"A community centre. Up on the reserve," Barry said.

"Is that right?"

"Next month we put the spade in the ground on a place for our seniors."

"Jimmy Pike's got a room booked there, Dad," I pitched in.

"Is that right?"

Jimmy had been one of my father's fishing buddies years ago.

"A place just for Indian old folks." Dad dropped his eyes and shook his head, and I thought he looked suddenly lost, like he was searching for a fixed place in the shifting corridors of his mind. He seemed so sad. So tired. Then he lifted his face, turned to Barry and pointing his cigarette at him said: "Why do you people always need to do things off on your own, all by yourselves? I've never been able to understand that." He didn't say it like he was angry, more like a whisper. Like he was talking to us from the other end of a long tunnel.

I looked at Barry. He had a smile on his face.

"Your Dad's not so bad," he said later when we stopped for coffee on our way back to my place.

"He's not the man he used to be," I said.

"He's a fighter," Barry said. "I admire that."

Dad was in the hospital because he had a fall. He broke his hip. He had been living at home alone, but that wasn't going to be possible any more. My mother died two years ago and my father had been on a downward slide ever since.

Barry asked, "Am I going to see you Friday?"

"Sure," I said. I gave my kids to their father every second weekend and took myself and my dog over to Barry's place. Barry had a place on the edge of the reserve, back in the woods, isolated.

I put my hand over his hand and we locked fingers.

"Kiss me," I said.

Barry leaned across the table and planted one on me. I liked it when Barry kissed me in public. I'd heard stories about how a couple of band members didn't like me staying over at Barry's, and when he kissed me I felt less insecure.

* * *

"I want you to stop running with that Indian."

The message on my machine when I got home was from Dad. I was glad that my kids didn't get to it first.

"I want it to stop," the message said. "I don't want any daughter of mine running around with no Indian."

* * *

Barry was Mr. Fearless. He left school when he was sixteen, took off with a pair of buddies to Toronto, then someone told him about the Mohawks in New York City, how they worked the big construction sites, walking the high beams on the skyscrapers. _It's a little like flying_ , he once said to me. It made him feel like an eagle. He was up there alone -- and free. He said he was never afraid of anything after that.

Barry came back from New York five years after he left. I was married by then. Knocked up, too. I remember running into him at the video store and thinking that he looked real good, happy. I had a sweet spot for him that went back to high school. I used to talk to him when I saw him, and when my husband left he started coming around to cut the grass, fix the car and trim the trees, which didn't take long to lead to other things.

I called to tell him about my father's message, but he wasn't home.

* * *

My father was a big man, a strong man in his time. He'd worked in the woods in his younger days, cutting trees, fighting fires. It took my mother to get him to settle down. He used to manage the arena when I was just little. Then he took over the movie theatre with a pal. A couple of times since he's been in hospital he's called me 'Sharon,' which was my mother's name. The first time he did that I corrected him.

"It's Debbie, Dad," I said. "Debbie."

"Of course," he said. Then he asked me about my brother, Bob, but I don't have a brother. Bob's my uncle, and he's dead.

* * *

I did my best to talk to my kids about their grandfather. I wanted them to know that he loved them, even if he couldn't say so.

My daughter had begun having nightmares. She would wake up screaming, and when I came running she would tell me that she had dreamed that her granddad had died.

"No, sweetie," I told her. "It's okay. Your granddad's okay."

I told Barry that I thought my daughter was reliving the trauma of when her father had left.

"That's possible," he said. "Or maybe her grandfather's spirit goes for walks in the night."

I poked him. "Don't give me any of that Indian bullshit," I said.

Barry laughed. He was a trickster if I ever met one.

I decided to tell my kids about my father's phone message about Barry. I didn't like to be the one bringing trouble into my kids' lives, but I wanted to make them strong and I figured that the only way to do that was to show them that I could stand up to my troubles, too. We could stand up to them together.

When my husband left, I wasn't much use as a mother. This is hard for me to admit, and someday I'll tell my kids it was all I could do to save myself. I had felt for a while that my husband wasn't happy, but I never thought that he would leave. A couple of friends had tried to tell me that he was having an affair, but I thought they were just jealous. That sounds strange I know, but it's true. Denial is a powerful force; it works hard to shield you from the stuff that would destroy you. It's got limits, though, and when I hit them, I faced the pain with 'hope in my heart' and found a way out the other side.

* * *

"How is he doing?"

"Better," the nurse said. "His attitude seems to have improved."

It was going to be weeks, though, I knew, before he was on his feet again, which meant more valleys than peaks I was sure.

I was looking for a bed for him in a nursing home, but with all the cutbacks -- well, none were available. The hospital would keep him until he regained his feet, but after that they were threatening to send him home with me, an eventuality I felt in no way ready to accept.

After the nurse left, I stood outside his room, thinking about what it would be like after he was gone. My life had seen so many changes. This was more than just another one. I stepped into the room. He was sleeping. I pictured him again on my wedding day, how happy he had been. I saw the smile that lit up his face when he teased my kids. I remembered how he had held me in his powerful arms longer than usual on the day of my mother's funeral, how I had felt him shake, how I had seen his frailty that day, understood his vulnerabilities in a way I hadn't before, though he'd done his best to hide them.

* * *

I got Barry on the phone. "He's at it again. Only worse."

"What happened?"

I wasn't sure I wanted to tell him.

"He said things about my mother," I said. "About when they were younger."

"Like what?" Barry asked.

I hesitated. "Okay," I said. "I'll tell you."

I took a sip from the glass of wine I'd poured myself after I got home from the hospital. "He said my mother used to have an Indian boyfriend when he was off in the woods in the summers. He said my mother used to go up to the reserve to get drunk and carry on.' I don't want you turning out like that,' he said. He's lost it, Barry."

Barry didn't say anything.

I took another sip of wine.I felt awful.

* * *

Barry told me a story once about what it meant to be Indian. He said he was travelling in New Brunswick, hitchhiking, when he got picked up by this guy who used to be a priest. Barry asked this guy why he'd dropped out of the priesthood, and the guy said he'd been evangelizing in Toronto, going door to door, and he'd met a woman who had been at Auschwitz. She showed him the serial number tattooed on her arm. "Christians did this to me," she said. "Please leave." The priest told Barry the experience had led to a breakdown in his faith.

He asked Barry, "You're Native?"

"That's right," Barry said.

"What the church did to your people wasn't right," the guy said. Then he apologized over and over, until Barry told him it was okay.

I told you Barry is a joker. "I'll tell you some words my Elder told me before I left home," he told the former priest. Then he said: "He not busy being born is busy dying."

* * *

Barry came to pick me up as usual on Friday after I dropped my kids off at their father's.

"I didn't think you were coming," I said.

"Why not?"

"I don't know, I just didn't." I didn't have anything packed.

Barry had his arms around me, his hands under my shirt. He kissed me and I held on to him. I held on to him like I would never let him go.

###

**Border Guard**

The car idled. Jerome tucked a cigarette behind his ear. He didn't know if he ought to be there, parked opposite the sports bar where Cynthia worked.

A light snow powdered the hood of his car.

He rubbed his hands together and turned off the engine. Two hours earlier he had come home from work and found a message on his answering machine: "Jerome. Call me."

From his sister. His father was dying.

Jerome slammed shut the door of his Thunderbird. He trudged across the street towards the bar. He was aware Cynthia didn't want to see him — though not why she had cut him off — yet the news of his father's impending death gave him an excuse, he thought, to try one more time. He didn't want to go home alone, would she come with him?

She was twenty one. So she said. He thought maybe she was eighteen. He was chasing thirty. He started coming to the bar after Dorothea moved out, came early, drank late. Then after twelve drunken nights and hungover days, he sat one more time on the last stool against the wall and watched Cynthia refill drinks.

Finally, she said to him: "You look interesting. What's your name?"

She was wearing a tight top, her hair pulled back. He read her body language: I'm no pushover, no weakling. He told her his name. His job. About his wife.

"What happened?" she asked.

"It's a long story."

"Tell me."

She crossed her hands on the bar, leaned forward on her elbows. Pushed her face toward him.

They met at university. They were friends before they were lovers. He was studying to be a teacher, but dropped out before he finished his degree.

He grew up on a farm, the grandson of Russian immigrants. His parents were deeply religious. After high school he spent a year in town living above a convenience store, working odd jobs, and trying to bed the girl his landlord hired to work at the store on weekends.

"I felt free for the first time in my life," he told Cynthia, "but I had no direction."

He enrolled in university. Two and a half years later he ran off to Prague. Barriers were falling. Commentators proclaimed "the end of history." The Berlin Wall, reduced to fragments, was stuffed into two inch square boxes and sold to tourists. Everything, anything, seemed possible, and he felt sure he would find his new self in the ruins of the Old World.

"I met this girl. She worked at the hostel where I first stayed. She was wonderful, beautiful, articulate, talented. She seemed to know everything. I was wide open for new experiences, and I fell hard for her. She was like no one I had ever met."

"Who was she?"

"If I knew, I'd tell you."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Do you believe in love?" he asked.

"Love at first sight you mean?"

"Total blinding dependency."

She laughed. "Not if you put it like that."

"That's how it was with this girl in Prague. All I knew was I needed her, and I didn't know who she was or why she ought to be so important to me. I didn't know if it was her or if it was me. So when it didn't work out, I fell apart. My insides burned, just raged. I spent seven days in my room and drank sixteen or twenty bottles of wine. Then I came home and married my wife."

"For the safety," Cynthia said.

"Something like that," Jerome agreed.

"You still haven't told me why she left."

So he told her. He told her, and asked for his bill, and she slipped him her phone number.

"Call me," she said. "You tell interesting stories."

Jerome entered the bar. It was early yet. The room was barely half full. He found a table with a view of the door and a view of the bar. He lit his cigarette and tried to imagine the scene at home: his father in the hospital; his sister and her husband; his brother. So it's almost over, he thought. His father had asked for him, his sister had said. The order had been given: _Tell Jerome to come._ The prodigal son. _Come, Jerome. He wants to see you_. I can't. I have nothing to say.

Two weeks earlier his sister had called. They had argued.

He said: "He always needs to be right. I can't breathe in that house."

She said: "He isn't any more righteous than you, Jerome. Think about what it's like to be between you."

He couldn't. He couldn't bend. He couldn't imagine reconciliation, only recapitulation. He could not — would not — give up his self respect, his dignity. The conflict itself. He was who he was because he had flown out of that house, and he would not go back. He would not go back across that barrier, that line.

"It isn't possible to say something that is fair to both of you," his sister had said.

He said: "Martha, please. Don't try to guilt me."

But she wasn't. As he sat in the bar, he marvelled at her insight. No one is right. It's not possible to be fair to both sides at once, when both sides refuse to include the other. Both sides own a portion of the truth, what is real.

He thought of Dorothea. They had married young, younger than mosT. Her family had been happy with the match, his pleased he had chosen a sensible girl. But had he chosen her? Or had she chosen him? It was true she hadn't given up on him when he returned from Prague. She had missed him. She saw, he thought, a chance to tame him. In her eyes he was wild. He saw himself as losT. He could not be tamed, only found. Dorothea had found him, and for a while calmed him, but when the shock of failed love wore off, his restlessness returned and grew.

"I feel like your prey," he told her in their third year of marriage. They owned a house, two cars, a pool table, and a parakeet.

One night he drove around the city until dawn, then parked in the corner of an arena parking lot, watched the sun come up, and fell asleep. They tried counselling. They tried pornography. They talked about children, but Dorothea thought children deserved a stable family and told Jerome she was losing confidence in his ability to provide one.

"Do you still love me?" she asked.

"It's not you," he told her, though increasingly she seemed foreign. He didn't want the house, the cars, the bird.

When she moved out, she said, "I don't understand you anymore." He put her bags in the car and waved as she drove away.

He told Cynthia that Dorothea had left because she wanted "the whole middle class schtick, and that kind of life felt like crap to me." This made sense to Cynthia since she was running from something similar. As he sat at the bar waiting for her, he realized it was the closest thing to a bond they shared — this sense of life being meant for something beyond the world as it had been handed to them. Dorothea, he knew, felt it too, though to her it meant rising above the slings and arrows of every day sadness, protecting your island of self constructed perfection. To Jerome it meant finding gold in the dung heap; beauty in the dark tremors of humanity's struggle. It meant celebrating life as it was — life as it could only be.

On his first date with Cynthia — the first time they got together away from the bar — she told him what it meant for her: The New Age. An era governed by the Rule of Love. An era dedicated to the worship of Gaia, our mother, the Earth.

"It's so simple," she said. "Let your Spirit Self become your guide."

"Is that what you do?" he asked.

"Yes."

Ever since she was a child she had been working to align her Spirit Self with the natural world. "Of course, when I was younger, I didn't know that's what I was doing. I just thought that I liked plants, you know. My mother said I had a green thumb, but I always knew there was more to it. So when I was in high school, this girl explained to me how organized religion was responsible for this belief we have, you know, that humanity is here to control the animals, to exploit nature for its personal gain, and how people are killing the planet; how it's suicidal, because if we kill the planet then, like, where will we live, right? And now we have global warming, and the ozone hole, and all that, right, but people still don't get it. They still don't understand. All things are connected, and it starts with your Spirit Self. Getting yourself right with the universe is the first step. You know what I mean?"

Jerome nodded. "I think so, yes."

"I'm serious," she said.

He tried to smile. "I wish I had your conviction."

"Do you believe in God?" she asked.

"Yes," he said, "but not in salvation."

"I believe in salvation," she said, "but not God. Not really."

"You're like my wife," he said. When she asked him what he meant, he paused, not sure what to reveal. "Dorothea believed in heaven without the judgment, and I suppose I believe in judgment, but not heaven. She left because I couldn't make her happy, because I couldn't accept living happily ever after. She thought I was having an affair, but I wasn't, so I was suffering for something I hadn't done. Then I said I didn't see anything wrong with adultery anyway. How can love be love if it's confining?"

On the television over the bar, Steve Yzerman scored, pushing the Red Wings to a 2 1 lead over the Maple Leafs. Jerome ordered a beer and asked for a newspaper. He watched a couple of college students play pool. A Pink Floyd song blared out of the juke box. When he was a child, his father read the newspaper aloud at the dinner table. Jerome remembered his father's clear syllables rising above the clatter of the cutlery: the certainty in his father's pronouncements about the events of the day, the sharp edges of the old man's view of the world, and his mother attempting to draw her children into conversation.

His grandparents came to Canada after Lenin's revolution. They were thrown off the land by the Bolsheviks, broken in spirit. When they came to the New World, they withdrew from life, tried to lose themselves in God. An immigrant family develops its own myths, Jerome thought, about themselves, the past, their neighbours, the world at large. His father talked about the generous wheat fields of Russia as if he had been there: "The land was golden until the Communists burned it." His brother found redemption in the cross. Jerome sought something he felt was more important: freedom.

His beer arrived. He skimmed the newspaper. Stock markets were soaring to record levels. Trouble continued in Iraq, Serbia, the Congo. A two year old girl had been found wandering the streets of Saskatoon in the middle of a snow storm.

"Hey, buddy."

Jerome looked up. It was one of the college students.

"Want to shoot some stick?"

Jerome folded his newspaper, glanced behind the bar for Cynthia. She wasn't there. Detroit had taken a 3 1 lead.

"Sure," he said, and stood. "Your partner take off?"

"He has an exam tomorrow."

Jerome picked up his beer and followed the student. The table was already set up. Jerome broke. The student won the first game. Jerome won the second. The tie-breaker ended when Jerome sewered with one ball remaining. "Now you owe me a beer," the student laughed. Jerome waved to the waitress for two more. He sat at the student's table with his back towards the bar.

"I shouldn't be here," he said.

"Why not?"

"My father is dying. He's in the hospital. I came to convince my girlfriend — ex girlfriend, really — to come with me to see him. She works behind the bar. What do you think?"

"She'll come," the student said.

"She won't."

"Why not? It's an emergency. If she doesn't, forget her."

Jerome said: "The thing is, she left me."

"And you want to know why."

"I want her back."

"For a couple of days."

"For a couple of days," Jerome repeated. Their beers arrived.

"You shouldn't be here," the student agreed. "But what the hell? You got a right to ask."

Jerome picked up his glass. "Cheers."

"I don't want you to remember me," Cynthia had said to him once.

"What are you talking about?" They were in bed. Heavy rain pounded on the windows.

"I don't want you talking about me to other people, other women."

"There are no other women."

"Not now. Later."

It was the only hint Jerome could drag out of his memory that she had moved beyond him. He did not promise to forget her, nor did he probe to find out the source of her comment. What anxiety had provoked it? What fear? What suspicion? What history?

She had practically moved in with him after their first night together. She brought her books, her candles, her incense. She filled his refrigerator with soy milk and yogurt, his cupboards with lentils and beans. She threw out his bacon, his hamburger, his steaks. He had been in no condition to rebuff her influence. She was in ascension.

At sixteen, she had left home and moved to the city with her boyfriend. She took the first job she could find, babysitting a neighbor's kids — Timmy and Sabrina, six and eight. The kids watched television when they weren't at school. Toys, clothes, old news papers, dirty dishes, video cassettes, and self help books filled every corner of the apartment. Their mother was a waitress at a local steakhouse. Soon after Cynthia started watching the kids, their mother began sleeping over at her boyfriend's.

"When Sabrina asked me to sign a permission note so she could go on a field trip, I knew it was out of control. My boyfriend was angry, because he never saw me. One day I came home and he was gone."

She got a job at a book store, then the job at the bar. Jerome never questioned her interest in him until it was gone. The weekend before the last time he spoke to her, he took her to a play. Students at the university were performing Edward Albee's _Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?_ They sat in the second row to the left of the stage. It was the first time anyone had taken her to a play. Midway through the first act she started crying. Jerome noticed this when she reached over and covered his hand with hers. Two lines of tears streamed down her face. When they got to his car, she bit his ear. "I want to fuck you, fuck you all night," she said. He slipped his thumb inside the back pocket of her jeans. He wanted to believe explanations were unnecessary for them. He wanted to believe they had moved beyond the game.

Jerome looked up. There she was, her hand on the student's shoulder.

"Can I get you boys anything?"

"No, thanks," said the student.

Jerome said: "Cynthia."

"How are you doing, Jerome?"

"I was waiting for you."

"Evidently."

"I need to talk to you."

"There's nothing to talk about."

"My father's dying."

She bit the end of her pen. "I'm sorry to hear that."

"I need to talk to you."

She paused. "Later," she said. "Okay?"

"Okay." She left.

Jerome knew it wasn't much — what Cynthia could do for him — but it was all he wanted. He was glad he came. He closed his eyes and tried to find the dark centre in the vortex of his mind.

###

**Watching the Lions**

Maury's mother called us the "One in Three." Inseparable, like the Holy Trinity. One organism with three bodies. United in spirit, united in purpose. We shared all things equally: our love of hockey; a taste for vodka; that warm, tight place Maury's sister sheltered between her legs.

For years I did what I could to forget the events of that Sunday afternoon — even when Maury's sister (Gloria was her name) drifted silently out of this world, out of her pain, after swallowing more than the required dosage of her mother's tranquilizers just three days before her sixteenth birthday. I was gone by then, out of town, out of province, studying economics, a set of laws I believed were rational; a set of principles I believed had weathered the storms of time.

Maury informed me of Gloria's suicide in a letter. "I got her diaries," he wrote. "They're gone. Destroyed."

It was the only letter he ever wrote me. For years I hid it with my university papers which I kept stacked in a closet, until I dumped them in a recycling bin five years ago. About to get married, I wanted to rid myself of any evidence of my former life. My former lives.

Maury and I met as children. We lived across the street from each other. Our mothers would pass us back and forth, back and forth, trading diaper duty, nap-time, and mid afternoon shopping. When I was old enough to walk to school and my mother returned to work, first as a secretary at our parish, and later as a librarian, I would take myself to Maury's for lunch and after school television. Bob came into our lives a few years later when his family rented a house down the street. His father was a plumber who was perpetually unemployed. His mother worked for the federal government. Bob propelled himself through school on a bevy of scholarships, then landed a tenure track position in the depths of the recession. My mother has never tired of talking about Bob. He had a book out last year about the history of happiness as a philosophical idea. About Maury my mother hasn't spoken in years.

Maury dropped out of high school a month into grade eleven. By then he had a steady income selling and supplying drugs to his friends and Junior High kids. He played bass in a band, too, until he tried to organize a coup to remove the singer and found himself tossed out on his ass instead. Our coterie had fallen apart two years earlier. Bob had moved to Toronto to live with his uncle and attend the high school affiliated with the university there.

After Maury dropped out, he hooked up with a punk band from Halifax who needed a driver for their cross-Canada tour. When he turned up on my door step the following summer, sporting a moustache and beard, cigarette in hand and grinning wildly, he looked ten years older.

"I've been to the mountain top," he said. "I have been delivered." The phrase came from Bob. It had been part of our code. The speaker had gotten laid. The speaker had gotten drunk. The speaker had had a cool time. Listener be jealous.

"Like the mail," I responded. The standard comeback, though the truth was, Maury's reappearance made me uneasy.

The previous week I had run into a girl I knew. Lisa. I ran into her at the mall. She had a job selling popcorn at the cinema. I hadn't seen her in about six months. She had dropped out of school just before the Christmas exams. I thought maybe she had moved away, but when I saw her in the food court sipping coffee she told me a different story. Hadn't I heard? That friend of mine, Maury, had made her pregnant. But Maury hadn't told me. No one had. Maury was known as an easy fuck, and he boasted about many of them, but I had never heard anything about him and Lisa getting together.

"You're a mother?" I asked her.

"No," she said.

The next question never left my lips.

That Sunday afternoon.

Maury's parents were out. We were in their basement. Drinking. Gloria sat watching us. She started wrestling with Maury. He held her down. Then it happened.

It happened.

I used to trace the explosion of our triumvirate to that event. I used to blame that Sunday afternoon, but it wasn't that way. That Sunday afternoon we tried to stop time.

When Maury returned from touring with the punk band, he had a swastika burned into his left forearm. Branded into his flesh.

He made no attempt to hide it.

"It ain't nothin', man," he said. "It's a joke."

We were on our way to a party in Parkdale. I didn't say anything more about it. I didn't believe him.

At the time I had a steady girlfriend named Tina whose parents didn't approve of me because I wasn't Italian, and I hadn't been Confirmed. Looking back, my time with Tina was one of the most beautiful periods of my life. I loved to startle her with a kiss on the ear when we sat in movie theatres. She would nibble on my bottom lip when we necked. We spent most of our time together in the library studying, each determined to go to a good university, get a solid education, launch a successful life. We talked about sex, but we didn't do it. It scared me. I simply wanted to be safe with Tina. Away from Maury's darkness. I wanted to be redeemed, purified.

Our relationship survived into the first year of university — until Tina found someone who would sleep with her. She cancelled our dates. She stopped returning my phone calls. Her brother told me the news. I started drinking then, drinking like I hadn't in years. One Friday night I got thrown out of the campus pub for leaping over a chair and arguing with a bouncer. Drunk, I roared into the night, wandered into a residence keg party, and found myself with Jessica, an eighteen year old blonde beauty, first on a couch, then gliding down the hall. To her room. Her bed. Her body.

Jessica came from a Westmount family in Montréal. She was studying French literature, but she wasn't doing well in school. She suggested a weekend trip to Florida, and I agreed, but when we got there I couldn't leave our hotel room.

I had a breakdown. Everyone agreed.

"A minor psychotic episode," my doctor said. "Learn to relax."

My parents thought it had to do with Tina. Bob, I think, knew better. He drove out to visit, and we sat in a coffee shop, smoking cigarettes, talking sports.

I threw myself into my studies, did my best to learn the intricacies of supply and demand, a system within which the whole adds up to the sum of its parts.

I met my wife through the first job I had after graduation. I landed a post with an accounting firm. Norma was a painter. Revenue Canada had trawled her tax returns for irregularities, and she came to our firm for help. I met her in the lunch room. She invited me to one of her shows.

She was the first person I told about Gloria. We were into our second year of marriage. Maury was arrested for a murder in British Columbia. I saw the story on the TV news and froze. Norma asked me if something was the matter, and I couldn't respond. I couldn't respond.

I froze.

"I know that guy," I said. "We were pals."

I've talked a lot to Norma about what happened. About the way things were. About my guilt, and my feeling of helplessness. When I try now to think about Maury, Gloria, Bob, and myself, I can't focus. I feel like I'm caught in a wind storm, a tornado. Spinning beyond control.

"You're out of it now," Norma says. "You're with me."

She's wonderful and calm, but I'm unable to move on.

Norma and I went to the zoo recently. Every weekend we go for a walk in a different part of the city. Norma takes her camera and snaps images for future paintings. It had been years since either of us had been to the zoo, so I packed a picnic, and Norma loaded a fresh roll of film into her camera. As we stood watching the lions sleeping in their pen, it started to rain.

Norma said she had a dream about Gloria.

In the dream Norma was walking through a park. She came upon a bench. On the bench was a young girl. When Norma approached her, the girl vanished. Norma said she had had this dream three times in the previous week. "I'm thinking of painting her," she said.

"There's rainbow," I said. It was a big one, broad, beautiful, and deeply hued.

###

**The Book of Job**

And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.

"Where have you been?" asked Crow.

I couldn't lie so I told him.

A jet flew overhead.

Crow stared high into the blueness long after the plane had left.

He said, "I asked you a question."

"And I answered it." I was mad at him and he was mad at me. He wasn't known for his patience. I'd had enough.

He tried to sweet-talk me.

"Please," he said. "Please, Prince. Tell me again."

I wasn't having any of his sugar but I couldn't lie.

"I have been abroad," I said. "Wandering the earth."

Crow smiled. What I told him he already knew. He'd heard the rumour I'd been shacked up with Jennifer, locked in her attic playpen, stirring her stew all the time I'd been away. "I've been overrun by love!" he wanted me to say. But I hadn't been with Jennifer. Not in body or dreams.

"If not Jennifer, who?" asked Crow.

"Not who, where?"

"Where?"

"Abroad. Across the earth I have wandered."

"The Wanderer," said Crow. He'd expected me to tell him more. When he wanted to he could squawk right loud. It had been so long since I heard him squawk I'd forgotten he could move the earth and wind. The earth and wind shook with his noise. He started to tap his beak up and down. I thought he was going to launch into song.

But he didn't sing.

"Tell me your story, Prince. Start at the end and don't stop until you get to the beginning."

"Haven't you got things backwards, Crow?"

"Sing. Sing in the way I said."

I didn't feel like fighting, so I took my orders from him.

The end. A great sunset. The deepest red. A feeling greater than love.

"Stop!" yelled Crow.

I knew what was bothering him. It bothered me, too, but I couldn't lie.

A feeling greater than love.

"Stop!" yelled Crow.

He flew at me, beat his wings against my face.

"You have been gone too long," he said. "You have lost your mind."

"No, Crow."

"You sing ridiculous things."

"I cannot lie, Crow."

"You need medicine. You need a thousand days in a dark cave."

"No, Crow." I wanted to hug him. We had history, me and him.

He's the one who sent me away. It started in Saskatchewan with a cherry-red Chevy. A convertible. Miles of road, prairie, sky. My hair loose over my eyes, loose in the wind. I had a woman in Winnipeg waiting for me. I had Led Zeppelin full-blast loud in the tape deck. My throat hurt from singing over the engine. I hadn't seen another car in over three hours when suddenly there was Crow. In the middle of the highway. I thought he would take off and fly over the car — look down on me, soaring, and we'd scream like Robert Plant together — but he just stood there and I had to swerve. I jumped out of the car, ran back.

"Crow! What are you doing?"

"Same as you. Came out of the void. Waiting to return."

"I mean on this road!"

"This road is a good place to die."

His talon reached into his feathers and pulled out tobacco.

"Smoke with me."

He walked off the road, onto the land. He hopped onto a boulder, turned to face me. "Got a light?"

In the car I found some matches.

"That's a buffalo you're sitting on," I said.

"I know it," said Crow. He once said he'd eaten buffalo with Poundmaker but he'd only told that story twice. Once to me. Once to a girl named Pauline in Sault Ste. Marie. He told me one night after we'd drank six bottles of whiskey. He told me because he'd told Pauline. He told her to stop her from jumping off a bridge. She was seventeen and Crow was in love with her. It's been a long time since then. She has three kids now, two ex-husbands. Crow hovered over her house all last winter. Her kids set out bowls of Cheerios. She watched him out of the window but she didn't come outside.

Since the beginning of time Crow has been out of love for only seven days.

Once I asked Crow, "How many children do you have?" The ground shook for a fortnight.

"You are all my children," said Crow finally. The ground had stopped shaking. Crow stood slyly grinning amidst rubble, smoke, flames.

"Didn't you know?" he asked.

"You're a hit with the ladies, aren't you?"

"Ka." He leapt into the sky, unhappy. I didn't see him again until I nearly ran him down on the highway.

The end. A great sunset. The deepest red. A feeling greater than love.

Maybe you see what upset Crow?

I knew what was bothering him. It bothered me, too, but I couldn't lie.

A feeling greater than love.

That day beside the highway became a night. As the stars appeared we cast our light into the universe. Told stories. Crow in Paris boxing with Hemingway. Crow in Berlin, sprinting against Owens for the gold. Crow with Muddy Waters in Chicago, playing the blues. Crow high, following glacier trails. High over clouds in thin air. Below: Beaver dams, canoes, fallen trees, open land. Mackenzie agitating for rebellion. Horse buggies, two lanes widen into four. Crow in the beginning. Emptiness, the void. The bang. The emptiness filling with matter. Rivers of stars falling like tear drops. Rolling galaxies like continents splitting into solar systems, comets, planets. The earth cooling green and blue. Crow seeing Crow in his first tree. Crow seeing Crow laugh, the world shaking. The sky opening. Flowers budding loud as oceans. Crow sees the tower, the pin that holds the city to the lake. The tower shines. The suburbs rise over the horizon.

"Crow, do you know the meaning of love?" Hummingbird once asked him.

_Ain't nothin' but pain in your heart_.

"Oh, no," said Butterfly.

Crow chased her from Algonquin to Costa Rica.

Crow on the roadside. Left wing dragging. A line of dust stirred loose. Crow limps, claws a trail forward. Pauses. A dust cloud rises. A transport. Wheels shake, rocks fly. Crow stoops. Waits. Leaps. A flash of black across the windshield. Brakes scream. The air fills with smoke. The truck swerves. Crow spins higher, higher. The truck disappears. Crow laughs like thunder and the sun drains fire, burning holes in the sky.

Crow craves coffee. Crow wants to take in a hockey game. See the girls on Queen Street. Crow wants to have his bell rung. Crow wanting the new fashions, the new sounds. Digital toys. Monica. Crow wanting Monica, Monica not wanting Crow. There was always Angela. There was always Katrina. There was always Margaret.

It was three in the morning when Crow told me about Rachel. "Her love is the biggest I've ever seen," he said.

I should've paid more attention. I closed my eyes.

"Listen, Prince. Her love's the baddest."

I could still hear him but he'd started to fade.

"It's the best," said Crow.

I was so tired, everything turned a shade of purple.

"Prince, are you paying attention?"

I wasn't. He came to the important part.

"This girl's more than the others. This girl — "

I fell asleep.

Half an hour later Crow was still talking.

"Prince! Prince!"

I stood up suddenly. I was ready to fight.

"Prince! Prince!" he said. "I waited on this highway so I could tell you about the limits of love! So I could take you to the outer reaches of the universe! So I could tell you about the capacities of the heart! Quantum physics is nothing besides this, man! Einstein was a third grade dropout! What I have to say will take you through the bend in space-time! You must listen with a still heart! You must listen with a cool, open soul! Ready yourself for a tidal wave of knowledge!"

"Give me a break," I said.

I dropped to the ground, fell onto my back. I closed my eyes. Opened them again.

Crow stood on my chest, shaking his head.

"I have a challenge. You must accept it or I will poke your eyes out."

He leaned toward me, placed his beak on my right eyelid and pressed gently. I didn't need the reminder. I'd never seen him like this. He was a fury and an iceberg.

"What will it be?" he asked.

"What is the challenge?"

"Do you accept?"

"What is it?"

He told me: Rachel would love him forever. Of this he was sure. I was challenged to dissuade her from loving him. Until I answered this challenge I was cursed.

The end. A great sunset. The deepest red. A feeling greater than love. A voice we all know speaks to each of us and we laugh. Massive waves of laughter crumble the land, flood the oceans, fill the empty spaces. The difference between big and small diminishes. The difference between here and there disappears. The difference between now and then Is erased.

Then POP!

The whole thing starts again.

"You will be cursed," Crow said. "Cursed to wander the earth."

He was gone when I woke.

I had a woman waiting in Winnipeg and a car parked by the highway.

I forgot what Crow said to me.

I forgot about Rachel.

I forgot I'd heard Crow curse.

"Wheels, give me speed!" I said. I turned the ignition.

_Wendy!_ I thought. That was my woman's name. _Wendy, I'm the morning sun on my way to you!_

"Damn that bird," I said as I rushed across the prairie, the air turning dusty.

Then dustier.

Then just dust. A sandstorm.

As I crossed the Manitoba border the engine seized. The car rolled to a stop. I curled into a ball on the back seat and tried to keep my ears clean of the Saharan winds.

Sixteen inches of sand lay piled around the car.

But I'd forgotten the curse.

"Crow," I thought. "You trickster."

I was more hungry for Wendy than ever. I wanted her lips on mine, her arms around me. I could feel my loneliness spread, a thousand ninjas beating me from my shoulders to my knees.

Still I didn't remember the curse.

I started to walk.

I stuck out my thumb.

A farmer in a tractor pulled over.

Years later I would say, "That's when I started to wander."

"Strange storm, that," the farmer said. "Never seen the likes of it before. You?"

"No."

His name was Ezekiel and he claimed to have wrestled angels. He dropped me at a truck stop ten miles down the road. I ordered a coffee and dropped a quarter in the payphone to call Wendy.

"Baby!" I said. "Sugar plum! Sweet cheeks! Bella!"

At the sound of my voice she hung up.

I tried again. She let the phone ring.

I tried once more. No answer.

I sat down at the counter and made eyes at the waitress. She had a nametag. Doris. The farmer was gone. By now my loneliness had spread from the rims of my toes to the tips of my ears.

I said, "Tell me something, Doris."

"Like what?"

"Anything, Doris. Anything."

Doris was about thirty. She had knowledge, something special. Everyone does. I wanted to discover hers.

"Won't she talk to you?" Doris asked.

"Who?"

"Your baby sweet cheeks on the phone."

"No."

"You must have done something wrong."

"Why do you say that?"

"A woman knows."

I was no saint, sure. But I'd been right true to Wendy.

I decided on a different tack.

"Married, Doris?"

"Been there, done that."

"Recommend it?"

"Works for some."

"He do you wrong?"

"We all have faults."

"His worse than yours?"

"Seemed so."

"Regrets?"

"I've had a few."

"Any lately?"

"None I care to confess."

"What are you doing later, Doris?"

"Got plans for me?"

"Can you take me down the highway to my car?"

"What's your name, Jim?"

"Prince."

"No, Prince. I won't take you to your car."

I felt a great and sudden need to sleep.

"Do you have a backroom here, Doris? Somewhere I could catch a nap?"

I didn't wait for an answer. My head bounced off the counter. I collapsed onto the floor. Asleep.

Then POP!

The whole thing starts over again.

Crow flies out of the void. Coughs up blood. A river starts to flow. Crow flies, scratching at the void. The void tears, buckles, breaks into fragments. The fragments spin into planets, stars, comets. Crow looks for a place to land. His wings are tired. The void is a big place. He's flown from one end of eternity to the other. He sees a blue dot in the void and flies towards it. It's far away. He flies and flies and still it remains a small blue dot. As he's flying Crow closes his eyes and tries to sleep. He falls through space and wakes with a headache. He's on the blue planet. Earth. He doesn't know how to leave.

I won't tell you everything that happened next.

Eventually I got back to my car and found it stripped. A local mechanic told me he'd take what was left off my hands. It was the only deal going, so I took it.

My loneliness and lust had inverted. Became a cavern in my chest. I thumbed my way to Wendy's. My key wouldn't work. I knocked. A man answered. A man six foot eight, three hundred pounds. He offered to separate my head from my torso. I left the neighbourhood with a hollow feeling in my heart and a hole above my left eye that took thirteen stitches to close.

I went from Winnipeg south to Texas. A patch of bad luck was all I thought I had. I'd done some ranching in the past, when I was feeling down. It had a way of setting me right. But this time I suffered three snake bites in two days.

"You gotta go now," my friend Billy said. He owned the ranch and could recognize a curse.

I wasn't convinced.

I kept to the southern route. I signed onto a freighter crew in Panama. I'd once sailed with Blackbeard. Felt at home in the ocean swells. But three days at sea and I turned a dozen shades of green. The US Navy picked me up and threw me in quarantine. The doctors thought I had the Ebola virus, bird flu or a previously unrecorded water bug. My conditions cleared on the way to Florida. The doctors wanted me locked away but my lawyers disagreed. I promised to report to the nearest hospital if I as much as sneezed.

I got a job in New Orleans bar. It was Mardi Gras weeknights and the Super Bowl on weekends. I bought a used saxophone and jammed with a quartet every night until three. Damn, that bird, I thought one night as I hit a high note. Crow, you don't know what you're missing. A week later the city was under six feet of water and I evacuated to a refugee camp in Georgia. It was here — so late, so late — that I started to get a clue.

"You're cursed," said the woman beside me in the breakfast line.

"Excuse me?"

A wrinkled mass of ebony skin waved a bony finger at me. "You heard me."

"Yes, I did, my sister," I said.

"And you know what I'm talking about."

Damn, that bird. Cursed, I am. Cursed to wander the earth.

He's on the blue planet. Trapped. He starts walking. His wings hurt. He'll never fly again, he's sure of it. He stops beside a pool of water. He drink, his first. He walks into the water. He doesn't float. He walks out of the water. Okay he'll fly again. He's hungry now. And something else: Lonely. He doesn't know it yet. He's never known another being. He's never felt incomplete. In the beginning was Crow and the void, and the void was with Crow and the void was Crow. Now there's Crow and the blue planet, Crow and water, Crow and sky. Suddenly: Crow and the first woman. She swims through the water. She sees him on the shore and smiles. Smiles! Crow jumps ten feet in the air! Flaps his wings! He's flying!

Since the void split all the women Crow has loved have been echoes of the first. She had no name. If you're tempted to name her, call her Eve. Mother of Life. Sustainer of Dreams. Down through the millennia Crow kept looking for another like her. Cleopatra came close. So did Napoleon's Josephine. Joan of Arc, Catherine the Great, Marilyn Monroe weren't far off. Mary Magdalene had many approximate talents, as did Mae West. Crow once said that Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina had tempted him with passions he'd thought he'd lost in the shadows of early time. I knew what he was referring to — the days of his lovenest with Eve. Lover of Eternity. Mistress of the Four Corners of the Universe.

When I remembered Crow's curse I knew what I had to do. Find Rachel. Wander the earth. The first thing I did was make a deal with Raven. Raven was no friend of Crow. I found Raven at the Banff Springs Hotel.

"Raven, I need help."

"Where have you been? Everyone's talking about you."

"Wandering the earth," I said. I couldn't lie.

"Ha, ha."

"What's so funny?"

Raven laughed again. His sense of humour was even stranger than Crow's.

"Be serious for a minute," I said.

"I know what you want. Everyone knows."

"What?"

"A little sunshine. A little paradise."

"I need to find Rachel."

Raven nodded. "I'm all over it." He knew exactly where she was.

I thought Tahiti. Bali. California. Somewhere hot, with lots of sun.

She wasn't where I expected.

She was in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories.

I stared at Raven. "Where?"

"North."

"Where?"

"Far."

The blue planet goes around and around. Around the sun. Around the solar system. Around its axis. Crow goes around the blue planet. He sits atop a rhinoceros on the African plain. Not such a bad little planet, he thinks. He hears drums beating. He starts to dance.

"We must wait until Crow's out of town," I said to Raven. "We'll need room to operate."

"Count on it."

He told me Crow sat on a wire above Rachel's house. He swung in the wind and waited for her to come outside. Day after day.

"I've never seen him like this," Raven said.

"How hard can it be?"

"Hard."

I didn't want Crow to know I was coming, to think his curse had worked. I didn't want him to know I'd ever been there. I wanted him to think Rachel dumped him by choice. That would be my trick on Crow. That he thought Rachel's love silenced on its own.

"We need a plan," I said.

"I know," said Raven.

We were on the hotel patio, looking over the lake. Blue mountains all around us, jagged, tossed with rocks like crumbs on a cake. Behind me someone spoke German. Someone Japanese. Earlier I'd seen two girls in tennis shorts and now I heard them giggling, scolding a child who talked of avalanches.

"I'll be back in half an hour," Raven said. "Meet me in your room."

I ordered a martini. Shaken, not stirred.

The waitress didn't smile. She said, "I get that a lot."

"You do?"

"Licensed to kill, right?"

She had long legs and a short skirt.

I said, "Double-owe-seven." I tried to catch her eye and wink.

But she turned away. Quickly.

Cursed, that was me.

I felt myself being erased, the void returning.

Half an hour later I opened the door to my hotel balcony. Raven flew in with a leather satchel. He had photographs, maps, a notepad full of details of Crow's movements, when he flew east over the trees, north over the ocean, sat on the wire and swayed in the wind, waiting for Rachel.

"Raven," I said. "This is great!"

Raven pointed to a sealed envelope. I picked it up.

Raven flapped his wings, rose into the air. Said, "I'll be back tomorrow. Same time." He disappeared over my balcony.

Damn birds, I thought. I didn't understand them. I wanted Crow to love me again — but also I didn't. I didn't care for his love and I was hungry for it. I wanted the curse lifted. I wanted to start over. I wanted the perfect emptiness of the void. I opened the envelope. It was a photograph of Rachel.

She wasn't what I expected.

The more I looked at her the more she seemed to fade away. This was the one who loved Crow with a love greater than Olympus? With a love like the end of the world? With a love that shook him more than the love of the first woman?

The photograph was of her face. A close up, slightly over-exposed. Her cheeks were full and wore scars of acne and age. Her lips were thin, chapped, her hair pulled back. Her eyes shone with the strength of grandmothers. They were black, deeper than any I'd seen. They held my attention and I knew Crow was right. She would love him forever. She was all love. For everything and everyone. Was that it? Was that the limit?

I tried to remember what Crow had told me. What had I missed? Why had he cursed me? What did I need to bring back to him? How could I break the spell?

I lay down on my hotel bed, fell asleep.

Crow high, high, high, like a shooting star. Like a rocket. Crow standing on my chest, his beak on my eyelid. We never feel more complete than when we are about to be dismembered. The end. A great sunset. The deepest red. A feeling greater than love.

The next day I was on the highway east out of Banff at dawn. My opportunity was slim. Though I was cursed, I wasn't out of luck. I was going to the place where no one could find me. Saskatchewan. The land of sky. The place in the continent that was like an ocean. To the rock that had once been a buffalo. To wait for Crow. To absolve myself of the curse. To share with him a story I knew he didn't know.

Then POP! The whole thing starts over again.

I knew he would come. I had to be there when it happened. I knew what he would ask me. "Where have you been?" He would stare high into the blueness. I wouldn't lie. "I have been abroad."

"Where?"

"Wandering the earth."

That's how it would start. It would go on from there.

###

**Six Million Million Miles**

All of a sudden Patrick was nearly forty. Yes, he'd noticed birthdays piling up. But it took his doctor to impress upon him the meaning of numbers.

Patrick told his buddy Phil, "The doc said I should see a nutritionist, change my diet, take calcium pills for my teeth and bones. He said he needed to test my blood for LDLs and HDLs. Of course he said stop the smokes and moderate the drinking but I was expecting that." What he wasn't expecting: A finger up the butt.

Phil said, "Wha?"

"A finger up the butt — to test the colon, I think."

"The colon, eh? What's that do?"

"Don't know. But it can kill you if it goes off."

"I guess so," said Phil, who was already forty-one, though he hadn't been in a doctor's office in ten years and wasn't about to go now, whatever Patrick said.

It was three minutes past three on a Saturday afternoon in May. Phil had an ex-wife and two small children in Vancouver he hadn't seen in five years. He had a twenty-eight-year-old girlfriend, Debbie, who lived with her parents and slept with him on Saturdays and Wednesdays. Her father was dying. Her father had been dying all of the time Phil had known her, which was going on three years. He wanted to marry her because he wanted to be married. He wanted a home again with a woman in it. But he had to wait for the old man to die. It wasn't something he'd ever heard about, a marriage contingent upon a death.

They were sitting on Patrick's couch watching curling. Patrick and Phil had a business venture but it was still in the "idea phase." That's what Patrick told everyone who asked. "We're still working out the details."

"What do people need?" Phil said one day. "That's how you make money, by selling people what they need, what they can't live without."

"Food," Patrick said. "Heat, shelter, love." He wasn't sure about love.

Phil was on a different wavelength.

"Office supplies," he said. "You sell a pen for a dollar that costs pennies to make. We'll make a killing."

They tried to register _www.officesupplies.com_ but it had already been taken.

"The best laid plans of mice and ducks," Patrick said. Phil demurred.

"We'll make it work."

Patrick wanted to find a way to make money by making art. He'd started gluing things together to create new things. Toothbrushes and staplers. Matchbooks and condoms. Playing cards and plastic figurines. He had no idea what any of it meant but he enjoyed the process. Art had no place on Maslow's hierarchy of needs unless it fell under self-fulfillment. Patrick thought Maslow would have associated the need with the consumer, not the producer.

Today it was the women who were curling.

Phil said, "If you were a woman would you wear makeup to the rink?"

"I'd wear makeup if I knew I'd be on TV."

"Good point." One of the reasons Phil broke up with his wife was because she stopped shaving her legs. Okay, not true. He broke up with his wife because they fought all of the time. One of the things they fought about was her legs. Or his expectations. The subject of their fights changed depending on who you talked to. She thought Phil needed to revise his expectations and he thought she needed to shave her legs.

Outside it rained heavily. They were waiting for JayCee to arrive. JayCee was Patrick's ex. She taught kindergarten in the suburbs. She was forty-two, sometimes looked thirty and sometimes looked fifty. They'd met at a dinner party held by mutual friends two years ago. For past three months JayCee had found an excuse to skip out on all of their dates. She didn't like the city, she hated the commute, she was over-worked and needed a quiet day alone. So Patrick started to call her his ex. Not that they had ever been a couple.

"It's a post-structuralist romance," he told Phil, who had no idea what he was talking about.

Patrick's doctor told him he was good for another ten thousand miles. "But come back and see me next year." Patrick imagined his life like a pancake. Flat, doughy. Where was the maple syrup? Where was the fruit, the whipped cream?

Suddenly the television shook on its stand and the air filled with the sound of a large explosion.

Patrick thought, "A bomb!"

Phil jumped up from the couch and ran out to Patrick's balcony.

"Flames!" he said, pointing two streets over. Soon they heard sirens from firetrucks. A plume of black smoke lifted into the sky.

Patrick said, "Life is a strange and multi-glorious thing, isn't it?"

"One step from paradise," Phil said.

The rain was now like a sheet of water. They stood away from the railing of the balcony to avoid getting soaked. Patrick remembered something Phil had said to him when they'd first met: "Just do the best you can. You can't do any better than that." Even if his best was 2 + 2 = 3. The words had gone straight to his heart.

The wind had picked. The flames from the explosion leaped higher. "I'm going inside," Patrick said. There had been women once. In his twenties Patrick had played guitar, traveled the country. He spent four years on buses and trains, in vans and motels. He'd been all about motion, movement, process — with no end in sight. The arc of his life was different then. The highs overrode the lows. There had been three girlfriends in three provinces. He'd thought, "One of these women, surely, will be my wife." But they'd each wanted him as an occasional friend. Back then he'd looked forward and seen a landing pad. The arc had been rising, pointed upwards in an optimistic spiral. But the landing pad hadn't been forward and up; it'd been backward and down. A crash pad.

"Illusions are made for shattering," he'd said to JayCee, mimicking Nancy Sinatra. JayCee worked with four- and five-year-olds. She knew about hope. She knew about limits.

"Potential is earned," she told Patrick, who felt suddenly for her warm and loving.

The buzzer went off.

"She's here," Patrick yelled to Phil. He walked across the apartment to buzz down and let JayCee into the building. Phil came in from the balcony.

"There's three houses on fire down there," he said.

"What was that?" Patrick asked. He'd gone into the kitchen.

"There's three houses on fire," Phil said.

Patrick said, "Oh, shit. Really? Lots of fire trucks, too?"

"Eight or ten."

Patrick uncorked a bottle of wine and laid two baguettes on the kitchen table. He poured himself a glass.

"You should invite Debbie over," he said to Phil. "We should all just stay in tonight. Stay in and talk. Give her a call. I haven't seen her in ages."

Phil went to get his cell phone.

There was a knock on the door.

"About six million million miles," Patrick heard someone say when he opened it. JayCee stood there smiling. She gripped him and kissed him on the cheek. Beside her a man shook water off of an umbrella.

JayCee said, "Patrick, this is Jason."

The man reached for Patrick's hand and shook it.

"What's six million million miles?" he asked.

JayCee slid past him into the apartment. "A light year. The amount of distance light travels in a year." JayCee embraced Phil and kissed him on the cheek. "Phil, this is Jason. Jason, Phil." The two men shook hands. Patrick closed the door.

"I'll take some of that," JayCee said, pointing to Patrick's wine glass. "Some for Jason, too. Right Jason?"

The man nodded. "That would be terrific."

"How far is the sun from the earth?" Patrick mumbled. "How far are we from each other?" He went to the kitchen to fetch glasses and wine.

"Home is elsewhere," Jason was saying when Patrick returned with the wine. Jason was telling a story about one of his co-workers, a Russian Jew who'd left the Soviet Union for Israel, then come to Canada two years later.

"Immigration is a disaster," Jason said.

This was apparently the Russian man's thoughts. His life had been torn asunder. He was raising a daughter, taking her to chess tournaments. He had a library with ten thousand Russian books. "Ten per cent of what he had in Russia." His wife had a PhD and worked at IBM.

"They're desperately lonely people," JayCee said. "Lonely but not unhappy. They have that wonderful, dark, Russian sense of humour. You know, _life is bleak_ , but they laugh a lot. They're terribly homesick but they would never go back. They see their situation as immeasurably better and also not good."

Jason had taken her over to their house. Patrick saw she was sitting next to him on the couch. He wasn't sure he'd ever seen her so happy.

"There's a fire outside," he said. "There was a large explosion and now there are three houses on fire. Phil and I were watching from the balcony. There's eight firetrucks. It's a huge disaster."

They all looked at him.

JayCee asked, "Is Debbie coming?"

Phil nodded. "In a bit."

Suddenly there was another large _boom!_ They jumped up and followed Patrick to the balcony. The rain was still heavy. Water dripped on Patrick's head from the balcony above. Where one of the burning houses once stood a blue flame shot twenty metres into the air. They could hear people screaming on the street below. Blue and red lights from emergency vehicles flashed off nearby buildings. Firemen ran back and forth, police officers strung up yellow tape and pushed back spectators clutching umbrellas.

"I'm getting wet. I'm going inside," JayCee said.

Jason and Phil followed her.

Patrick wiped the water off his head and found a spot on the balcony where he could stay reasonably dry. He'd brought his wine glass with him. He took a sip. He could hear the rest of them inside, picking up their conversation. Jason was saying, "The Beatles deconstructed the pop song. They started writing verse, verse, chorus, verse, then they broke the template and improvised all kinds of arrangements. U2 followed a similar trajectory —" Patrick crossed his arms against his chest. He could see three more firetrucks approaching the blue flame. The wind changed direction and blew a spray of water across his face. He lifted his shirt and wiped it off, then he went inside.

What happened next was more of the same. Debbie arrived. Patrick refilled wine glasses. They ordered pizza and discussed the possibility of playing Monopoly or Risk. Phil and Debbie had an argument about how to make real Italian spaghetti. JayCee kept touching Jason on the knee. Patrick kept his eyes open and knew things were being said that weren't being talked about. He excused himself to do the dishes, tidy up the kitchen. The blue flame went out. The rain stopped. The sun went down. The firetrucks, the police officers and the spectators went home. The next day the newspapers said a miracle happened. A gas explosion blew one house off of its foundation. Two others burned to the ground. No one died. Patrick spent the night on the couch. He woke up hungover.

###

**Yes, I Wanted to Say**

The root cause of all suffering is faith, T. says. I take the opposite position. T. has an office three floors below mine. I met her in the cafeteria. She was reading Kierkegaard.

I have twenty-five people reporting to me. I used to have ten, but the company reorganized. Most of the time I don't a clue what my twenty-five people are doing. I confess this to T., though I ought to know better.

"I operate on faith," I told her.

This is the first time I saw her smile.

I offered T. the example of J. who came into my office three weeks earlier and said he couldn't come to work any more. He wasn't quitting. He was following his doctor's orders. He had hypertension. He was depressed. The doctor had written him a note, instructing him not to go to work until further notice. I called the HR people. They said they would send me the appropriate forms. I told J. to go home. "Give me an update if anything changes."

"I'm still waiting for the forms," I told T.

This is the second time I saw her smile.

She asked me a question. I answered it. No, J. has not called me. Technically, he is absent without leave. Though I gave him permission to leave, I haven't signed the paperwork giving him permission to leave.

On the radio last week was a story about women and their periods. New research suggests that when women are ovulating, they tend to have negative feelings towards other women. If you asked me, I'd say ovulation has nothing to do with it. Of the twenty-five people working for me, seventeen are women. They are professional, intelligent people. They are blessed with creativity. They are people of high integrity. On any given week two or three of them are completely crazy.

The announcer asked the researcher, "How does your conclusion play out in the real world, say in the office?"

The researcher said, "We need to do more research before we can answer that with confidence." The researcher said it was plausible that women had negative feelings towards one another because they were in competition for men. Especially when they are fertile. Evolution, the researcher said, predicted this.

T. said, "In Alabama they call evolution: 'changes over time.'" Teachers in public schools, she said, aren't allowed to use the 'e' word.

I asked T. what Kierkegaard had to say about evolution. She didn't know. She refused to guess.

I am thirty-five and T. is twenty-two. That has nothing to do with evolution. It has everything to do with the number of times the earth travels around the sun. I do not think of myself as old, but when I talk to T. I realize I have drifted without knowing it into middle-age.

A month ago T. asked, "You're not trying to pick me up, are you?"

I wasn't.

"I'm married," I said, which made her smirk.

"Yeah, so?"

I have had to admit to myself: I am attracted to her.

Yeah, so?

Let's just say I am the touchy-feely core of my family; my wife (C.) is the protective outer layer. I am glad to live against stereotype. I encourage all of my employees to be who they are. They think I am being egalitarian; I am being strategic. People are more productive when they are not pretending to be someone else.

I have a two-year-old daughter (F.). She fusses about her clothes. My wife thinks this is adorable. I think it's adorable, too. What I want to know is, is my daughter going to be more like me? Or is she going to be more like my wife?

It takes me ninety minutes to commute from the suburban home where I live with C., F. and a six-year-old ragamuffin caT. I don't feel at home in my home. I don't feel at home in the suburbs, but C. refused to live anywhere else. She put the choice to me: Live alone in the city or with her in the suburbs. At that point, I decided: One can be flexible. What you give up in one area, you can compensate for in others.

My wife works from home. She looks after our daughter. She volunteers at the Salvation Army and reads books to blind people. Visually impaired people, she corrects me. She has never read Kierkegaard. The root cause of all suffering is error, according to my wife. Actually, she never said thaT. I offer those words as a summary of her position. Here is another paraphrase: Error is the failure to live according to rules. And another: Error is the failure to achieve expected results.

Recently, I read in the newspaper that Post-It Notes were invented by mistake. The inventor of Post-It Notes was researching different types of glue, and he discovered a glue that didn't work. It wasn't until some time later that someone thought of an application for this non-sticking glue.

I offer this story as evidence of my wife's error. Not all mistakes are mistakes, not all mistakes lead to suffering. It would be a mistake, however, for me to point this out to her.

As a manager, it is my responsibility to ensure that my twenty-five people make certain things happen. Every week, I hear stories about back-stabbing, lying, cheating. I am asked to sort out complaints X. has about Y., and I am responsible for keeping everyone focused on what we have in common.

We have a job to do, people.

We are in this together.

But I have a manager, too (Q.).

Q. told me, "You are good at managing down, but you could be better at managing up."

He had already told me that I had exceeded all of my targets. He was trying to be helpful.

"You could learn to kiss ass better," he said. "You're on target, but you're not getting the credit you deserve. If you want to advance, you've got to sell yourself better."

We are in this together, I wanted to say to him, but then I remembered Darwin: Things change over time. That's not just true in Alabama. This made me think: How do you get the changes you want? What changes did I want? If I was to start changing things, where would I start?

The next day, I tried to talk to T. about this, but she interrupted me. She said, "I had a dream about you last night."

"Oh," I said. "What sort of dream?"

"Just a dream," she said, then she stood up.

"I can't talk now, but call me later, okay?"

I said I would. She left.

I stayed in the cafeteria a while, sipping my coffee. I was thinking her dream was a sex dream. Of course. I tried to think what other kind of dream it could be. Not a memory dream. Some dream about her past. I wasn't in her past.

Was I trying to pick her up?

Was she trying to pick me up?

Q. had told me I could be better at protecting my own survival. I could be better at projecting myself into the future. I tried to think about this some more. I tried to think about what it would mean to have more power, to have real, direct, actual control over my place in the world. My destiny. My fate. It was hard. I had never thought like that before. I wasn't sure I could do it. Over and over, it led me to one conclusion.

This is crazy. There is no future. There is no past. There is only here. There is only now. I have a job to do.

I went upstairs to see how my twenty-five people were occupying their time.

An hour later, T. called me.

She said, "I wanted to tell you downstairs, but I couldn't."

"What? You couldn't tell me what?"

I reached out with my foot to close the office door. I thought T. was going to tell me that she loved me.

I love you, too, I was ready to say.

She said, "I have a new job. I'm leaving."

"That's great," I said.

"Is it?"

"I mean, it is if you want a new job."

"I do."

"Then it's great, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is. It's just – I'll miss you."

"I'll miss you, too."

"Will we still see each other?"

Yes, I wanted to say. We will always see each other. We will be companions with constancy, like rare birds, like old men on park benches. We will be forever seeing each other, circling each other like planets, creating our own constellations, sharing shooting stars, moons and asteroids.

But that's not what I said. Of course.

I said, "Actually, there's something I've been meaning to tell you, too."

"Oh," she said. "What's that?"

"I'm leaving, too."

"Oh."

"I didn't know how to tell you, so I was waiting until the details were sorted out."

"Where are you going?"

"I don't know."

"Far?"

"I don't know."

"Will you write to me when you get there?"

"I'll send an email."

"That would be nice."

"Yes," I said.

"Well, it's been nice meeting you."

I said, "Likewise."

She laughed. "It's funny," she said.

"What?"

"Life changes over time, doesn't it?"

"Yes," I said.

"I love you," she said.

"I love you, too," I said.

But she had already hung up.

The line was dead.

It just went bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

###

**Niagara**

The boutiques full of soapstone carvings, plastic Mountie hats and paperweights stamped with 3D images of Horseshoe Falls would soon fill with tourists. The cash registers would ring loud. Camera-toting seniors would crowd behind the steel railing and complain about the water-laden air. The arcades would swell with teenagers and buses would line up side-by-side in the parking lot above the Falls.

But on this day, the rushing swell of water fell into cakes of ice; tulips peeked warily through the flowerbeds. The parking lot wasn't half-full.

In the near-empty lower level of the casino, Lloyd ordered ribs and rice in the Hard Rock Café. He ordered an Alabama Slammer, sipped the sweet drink and watched a bar-screen video of John Lennon in New York City, circa 1975. Lennon in his green army jacket with the red star pinned to the lapel. Working class hero. Lennon about to begin five years of house husbandry. About to retreat from revolution and rock and roll. It struck Lloyd that he was older now than Lennon was then. Everything Lennon was known for he'd already done, except die. Half-an-hour earlier, Lloyd had lost five dollars, his limit, in a slot machine. Five dollars at twenty-five cents a credit gave him twenty credits. He played one credit at a time and won back none.

Lloyd lived in a small condo downtown Toronto that he rented with his long-time partner, Sarah. He told friends that now and again they spoke of marriage and children, but they weren't looking for more. Sarah worked as a loan officer for a trust company and spent her spare time making pottery. His life was work, home, paycheque, bills: a simple existence regulated by the impulses of global capitalism. Watching Lennon on the television in the bar, he thought that he had arrived at a stable place himself well beyond revolution and rock and roll. Beyond cosmic shifts, transformation.

From his hotel room window, Lloyd could see the Falls sparkling behind beams of coloured lights. Earlier in the day he'd stood with his hands on the iron railing only feet from the falling water. He'd looked into the storm below and felt small. Uncertain. The Falls, unchanged; its bowl of thunder and cloud of mist, ever-changing.

Immediately outside his hotel was a wax museum.

He phoned Sarah and told her the wax museum reminded him of a visit he'd made to Niagara Falls with his family over twenty years earlier. He remembered drifting with his brother through the side streets and back alleys, behind the low-rent motels and tourist shops. In the days before the casinos. They spent the afternoon away from their parents and avoided the Falls and the crowds. Their afternoon highlight had been overhearing an American husband and wife talking about "how real Canadians live." Twenty yards past the couple, his brother turned and yelled, "Watch out for the polar bears." He pointed in the direction the couple was heading. "Two blocks that way." Later, their mother asked them if they'd seen the "waxed Wayne Gretzky." They hadn't but laughed at how that phrase twisted their tongues.

In the wax museum window now, Gretzky was long gone. In his place Angelia Jolie wore the silver skin suit of Tomb Raider's Lara Croft. Her breasts full, her bright red lips pouting. In her hands, a revolver pointed at pedestrians.

He was in Niagara Falls to arrange last-minute details for a conference of his employer's sales force. The company had recently changed owners. Was it a take-over? A merger? No one seemed to know. Lloyd didn't see what it mattered, though he knew the Charmer wouldn't have sent him on such a menial mission. The Charmer was Zeke Pinion. The company he'd founded with $1,500 and his father's maxed-out gold VISA was first named Digital Translation Services, then Digitrans, then simply DTS. Now, its name and future was uncertain except for the fact that its new owners were Texans.

Tomorrow would be the conference and an announcement, he thought, about the future. Layoffs, probably. The new owners, Lloyd felt certain, had purchased the customers, not the employees. He remembered what Pinion had said to a meeting of the entire company when he'd announced he'd sold his controlling interest. _There are two types of people in this world: Those who think about doing it, and those who do it._

At 11:30 p.m., Lloyd sat on the edge of his bed in his boxers, the darkened hotel room behind him. The phone rang. It was Jackie, the L.A.-based director of marketing to whom everyone in the Toronto office now reported.

She said, "I'm in the lobby. Can you meet me for a drink?"

Two days earlier, she'd told the Toronto staff by video phone, "We don't want to impose on you our ways of doing things. We want to learn how you do things, then make decisions about how we move forward from there." She would later tell Lloyd her parents had been organic farmers and she'd completed her undergraduate degree before her seventeenth birthday. She was twenty-five, trim, pert, California blonde with a cliché million-watt smile.

Lloyd said, "I'll be right down."

They moved from the lobby to the hotel bar, empty except for the two of them.

The first thing Jackie said was, "I want you to know it's no coincidence you're here. I want to talk to you, and I want you to know that you've been chosen."

Lloyd shrugged. He looked towards the bartender. Ordered a rye with Coke.

He raised his drink to Jackie's.

"Tell me something about yourself," she said.

"Is this an interview?"

"No."

"I prefer to imagine that it is."

"Think about it however you want, however it makes you comfortable."

She was close enough for him to smell her perfume, a soft scent of lavender. He thought she'd probably been drinking before she called him.

He said, "Something about myself?"

"Anything. Do you play hockey?"

"Not any more."

"Why did you stop?"

"Playing aggravated my knee. Made it hurt."

The television over the bar was showing a baseball game. Had the season started? Maybe just.

She said, "What do you want to do that no one has to ask you to do?"

"That's a pretty personal question."

She finished her drink and ordered another.

She said, "You don't have to answer."

He thought about it.

He said, "Eat, sleep, drink, breathe: the basics."

She laughed. "I thought you'd start somewhere higher. Reading or watching kung-fu movies. Polkas. Curling."

"This time of the day," he said, "I'm a simple man."

She smiled.

She said, "Here's a hard one. Are you ready?"

He nodded.

"What's your answer for life?"

"I didn't know there was an answer."

"Pretend there is."

"Renovate. Keep renovating. Life's all about renewal."

"What's the story with your former CEO?"

"Did you hear we called him The Charmer?"

"No! That's wonderful! Why did you call him that?"

"The nickname is descriptive. He was a charmer as well as The Charmer. Very charismatic. Could talk a dog off its bone."

"He built a good company, too, or we wouldn't have bought it."

"He was a good capitalist, talked people out of their money. An evangelist for capital. What the company does is nothing special, it just feels special because it's well packaged and we take care to manage our relationships."

"You really are an honest man," Jackie said.

Her cell phone rang. She looked at the number then turned it off.

"I have something I need to give you," she said.

"Can't it wait until tomorrow?"

She said it couldn't, paid their bill and led him to the elevators.

Twenty minutes later, Lloyd lay on his bed. His shoes were still on. He glanced at the clock radio beside the bed. 1:05. Jackie had walked him to his room. Then she'd disappeared down the hallway. He closed his eyes. Depending on what happened next, he would either have a story to tell Sarah, or he wouldn't. It had been twelve years since he'd been with another woman. He wasn't sure what Jackie wanted or what she was up to. He wanted to please her, because that's what he was good at. Please her in a professional way. In a job-related way. He wanted to keep his job and not get laid off. So he could go on as he had before. Day-to-day. Managing what needed to be managed. Watching the clock and taking care of business. His reliability was well-known. His dedication was taken for granted. His lack of ambition had been noted, but then Jackie had said he'd been chosen. What was he doing here? He didn't know.

There was a sharp rap on the door.

Then another. Lloyd opened his eyes. Was it morning already?

Another knock. Lloyd rolled off the bed.

"Lloyd!" a voice said. He opened the door.

Jackie said, "Can I come in?"

Lloyd stood with his shoulders in the doorway.

"I don't think so – "

"Just for a minute, there was something I was supposed to tell you – "

"Tell me here, now."

"I should come in. It will take more than a moment."

Lloyd backed away from the door. He noticed that she'd changed outfits, into a summer dress with a floral pattern, and that she was holding a bottle. Lloyd sat on the edge of the bed. Jackie pulled out a chair from the desk and turned it to face him.

"Champagne?" she said.

"No thank you."

"Just one glass. I won't be long."

She handed the bottle to Lloyd. "Can you open this? I'll stand back."

On the bureau were four glasses wrapped in paper. She peeled the paper off of two of them.

Lloyd took the bottle. Put it between his knees. Tried to ease the cork out of the bottle with his thumbs. At first, it didn't move, but then it did. He pushed harder and the cork started to slide.

Jackie said, "Don't point it toward the light!"

Lloyd pointed the bottle towards the corner of the room and the cork shot out. The POP rang in his ears.

"Great!" said Jackie. She held out the glasses. "Fill them up."

Lloyd did as he was told, then set the bottle on the floor at his feet. Jackie handed him one glass and held the other in the air between them. "Cheers," she said.

Lloyd held his glass steady. Jackie moved hers to meet his.

"Drink," she said.

"Jackie," he said, "what are we drinking for?"

"For you, Lloyd."

"Why for me?"

"We're going to make you a corporate VP."

"Are you going to teach me the secret handshake?"

"Will you smile for once, please!"

He did.

"Now drink," she said, her blonde hair bouncing on her neck.

When Lloyd tilted his head back and emptied his glass, she emptied hers. Then she handed him an envelope, shook his hand and left. Alone, suddenly, he couldn't have felt more strange if he'd been zapped and turned into a cockroach.

He fell quickly into uncertain dreams.

The next morning, he was half surprised to find himself alone.

It was already half-past seven.

"Shit," he said, leaping from the bed.

He glanced about the room. No champagne bottle. No glasses.

It hadn't happened. Surely, it hadn't.

No, it had.

There was a note. A letter, actually. On company letterhead.

Terms and conditions. An employment offer. A deadline.

Training in California and then a posting in Manhattan.

He quickly threw on his pants and shirt. He reached for his tie, steadied himself.

The phone rang.

He looped the tie around his neck and pulled the knot tight against his throat.

###

**My Life in Television**

When I was sixteen, a man spoke to my parents. A week later, he bought me a new set of clothes and I flew with him to California. His name (and I'm not making this up) was Sly. Maybe my story starts with the arrival of Sly. My parents will tell you straight out he's an evil bastard, which is true enough, but Sly's character was nothing if not Byzantine. He looked a bit like Santa Claus, an fact he exploited with the young and the old. It took me a long time to see the bits of him that I can claim to know, because for a long time I couldn't see over his wake. I would look at him and see just the crest of his wave. He was my substitute father, my mentor, my guide in the world of glitter he had brought me to, and I was his servant. I was his paycheque, too, but it took me a long time to figure that out. I'm trying hard not to cloud my judgement about Sly here. I'm trying to tell you things that are simple and real. I would like to say things about Sly that even Sly would agree with, if he were here to agree with them, which he isn't, since he's dead.

Maybe that's where we should start.

It was a dark and stormy night in New Hampshire (I'm not making this up). I was in L.A. with Lily (more on her later). Sly was in New Hampshire. I was trying desperately to get him on the phone. In recent days, we had argued. I had been in a professional slump. At the time, I blamed Sly. "Patience," he counseled. In my condo on the outskirts of the city, Lily laid out the last of our drugs. It was approaching nightfall. Lily was still wearing her bathrobe. Beneath her robe she wore only her bikini bra. She was seventeen. I was twenty-one.

"Sly, you fucker!" I screamed into the phone. I kept getting his answering machine. He had gone to New Hampshire to meet a new client. A potential new client, anyway. I was afraid that I would lose his attention. Before he had left for the East Coast, he had been reassuring.

"I have a script on my desk right now. It's perfect for you. The producers want you. It's a role that could really make you."

"Well, shit! Send it over!"

"When I get back," he promised.

The circus was his favorite metaphor. "Life's the Big Top, kid," he would say. "Don't ever forget that."

After he died, I kept hearing his voice over and over. "Life's the Big Top, kid. The Big Top, kid. Don't ever forget that."

Let me tell you one thing clear and true: I haven't forgotten that. _Life is a carnival. The carnival is the centre and source of all life_. Sly taught me that, and now I'm telling it to you.

The police found Sly the next day, his body slumped over his steering wheel, his rental car on a side road two miles from the country mansion where he had gone to meet his prospective client. His blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit in that state. But what had stopped him cold was the bullet that had entered him through the back of the head. Within hours, my phone started ringing. _Enemies? Did Sly have enemies? Is there anyone out there who would want Sly dead?_ By now, you've formed your own opinion. You've been paying attention. You've learned a thing or two. You've already guessed that Sly is the type of man who had enemies. So let me confirm your intuition: On any given day, depending which way the money was flowing, Sly received death threats, bribes, notices of blackmail. In high school, Sly had been a football player, and he had never lost his sense of strategy or his desire to move the ball down the field. What I'm trying to say is, Sly had enemies, he ignored his enemies. They were part of the business, part of the landscape. Discounting them was part of his job.

Sly went to New Hampshire to meet the daughter of a banker. The banker's brother was a movie producer in Hong Kong. Sly owed the movie producer a favour. The banker wanted Sly to take on his daughter as a client. The thing was, Sly thought the girl had potential, but he wanted to be released from his obligation to the movie producer, and it was clear to him that the movie producer didn't want to release him. There are favours and then there are favours. I don't know all of the details, but Sly told me he wanted the girl and he was taking his time. He would only go into a deal if it was the one he wanted. Negotiations over the girl had gone on for three years. Sly showed me her portfolio. I could tell you who she is, but that isn't important to us here. Let's just say that Sly's intuition wasn't wrong. She has become a famous person. She outshines us all.

He asked me, "Isn't she something?"

I flipped through the photographs. "Mmm."

(The truth? She was stunning. She was fifteen and had a beauty that could freeze your heart.)

When he showed me her portfolio – the day before he left for the East Coast – he was nearly bursting out of his skin. I had never seen him more excited. I had never seen him more transparent, more ambitious. He lay a photograph of her on the coffee table and said, "Look at her. Just look at her." Sly's gears spun on the outside of his head.

"Look at her," Sly said, but I looked at him instead.

It took my parents six weeks to realize they never should have let Sly take me to California, but as far as I was concerned I had been told to go and I had gone. _The only progress is forward_. My father was fond of military metaphors. _There is no room for retreat._

My first Christmas away from home I flew with Sly to Argentina. He had to meet some business partners in Buenos Aires. Sign some papers. Shake some hands. A real-estate deal, plus part ownership in a string of fast-food restaurants. Sly was showing me a new life, initiating me into my new world.

My father can remember when the first television came into his village. I say "village," as if he lived in a mud hut, but he lived in a small town on Lake Ontario surrounded by farms. It's still there, and it looks much like it did when my father packed up his bags and left. His father ran the local garage. His father would have remembered the arrival of the first car in that part of the world. When you grow older, you travel in two directions at once. Call them forward and backward. Call them up and down. Call them whatever you want, but they are dimensions without words. Evidence of the former is measured on the body. Evidence of the latter is hidden in the mind. My father's village is alive in my memories. It is alive with my childhood. I inhabit it, and it inhabits me.

When I left home, I escaped my parents, a rocket blasting towards Mars. The week after I left, my mother started calling me in the middle of the night. She would call in tears, asking me to be careful. I would lie in bed with my eyes closed, the phone tight against my ear.

Sly told me her reaction was common.

"Parents think their children are growing up too fast," he said. "But in actual fact, it's the parents who are afraid of change."

I stopped answering my phone. I changed my phone number. I told my parents to call me at Sly's office.

"You told me to go with him," I told my mother.

She sobbed on the other end of the line.

"I know, I know."

Sly arranged for me to see a therapist. Her name was Judy. Judy had short hair and wore pink see-through dresses. I started seeing her three times a week. Before every visit, I disappeared into the public washroom across the hall from her office and masturbated with the fury of the damned.

There are many possible beginnings. That's where we started. I'm trying to get us past that. I'm trying to move on. I've got many things left I'd like to say. I thought only good things about Sly for a long time, then – slowly, how slowly! – my mind began to sour towards him.

Judy thought I was dominated by my mother. Not my mother _per se_ , but the archetypal Mother. The Great Feminine. At first, I didn't understand what she was talking about. Half of the time when I went to see her she wasn't wearing a bra, and I sat slumped in the soft leather of her couch, three-quarters bleary-eyed, my penis sore from my frenetic whacking-off earlier, aching for her to touch me.

"All human beings are connected by the collective unconscious," she said, over and over. "The collective unconscious is the total of all of the memories of all of our ancestors from the beginning of time. The collective unconscious is in all of us. It is the foundation of our identities. It is the source of the images and symbols we use to provide meaning for our lives. Just as in the world of our conscious lives, our unconscious lives are divided into two spheres of influence: the masculine and the feminine. In the unconscious, the masculine and the feminine are integrated; they support each other. They are also each divided into various subcategories, but we don't need to go into that right now. Right now, all I'm trying to get you to understand is that what happens in your unconscious life influences what happens in your conscious life. If either the masculine or the feminine is trying to dominate the other, then you will feel out of balance, and you will act out that imbalance by engaging in various dysfunctional behaviors."

"Yeah, sure," I said, over and over.

What kind of dysfunctional behaviors? (No, the masturbation doesn't count.) Some you know already; some you can guess; some I'm not going to tell you. Intoxicants, yes. Narcotics, yes. Nicotine, on occasion. But these weren't the addictions that most concerned Judy.

"You don't know how to separate," she said to me eventually.

"Separate what?"

"Not separate what, separate how. You don't know _how_ to separate."

"What?"

"You haven't learned how to be an individual."

Holy fucking shit! I thought. I don't know how to be an individual!

It took me a month after that session to go back to her. I cancelled eight meetings in a row. I started masturbating six times a day. I thought, Jesus, if I don't have sex with her I'm going to die. I thought Judy was trying to do a good thing, but I wasn't ready to be analyzed. Then I turned seventeen. Then I met Lily. Then I stopped seeing Judy.

More on Lily right now.

When I met her, Lily was fourteen and a recovering alcoholic. Sly referred to her as "that waif" or "your waif." When I met her, Lily weighed less than one-hundred pounds and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. Sly tried to get her jobs, but she refused to audition. Her parents were in the business. She didn't want any part of it. Since she was eleven, she had been running drugs for one of her father's associates. She had her own source of income, is what I'm saying. Her father was a props manager and a failed screenwriter. Her mother was an extra who had once had an affair with Richard Burton, or Steve McQueen, or Dustin Hoffman. Lily had heard three different versions of the affair story, and she didn't believe any of them. For a good part of Lily's childhood, her mother had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals, detoxing or recovering from depression, psychosis, and at least one failed suicide attempt.

Lily started drinking at a Christmas party hosted by her uncle, a Vietnam veteran who had lost his right arm in the Tet Offensive. Left for dead in the jungle, his arm shattered by shrapnel, his unit scattered, he had survived for a week on bugs, bark, and prayer, only to be picked up by a stray chopper on its way back from a failed combat mission. Lily's uncle had started praying one week earlier after a late-night reefer-influenced conversation with a Southern Baptist officer then on his third tour of duty.

I met her uncle later at the state penitentiary in Arizona. He told me he had seen God in the jungle. God had told him he would be rescued and sent on a mission. God had appeared to him as a flash of light. When God spoke, the world around him roared like a giant flame. "Anything, Lord. Anything you ask, I will do it," Lily's uncle promised. He didn't know what the mission was. He returned to the U.S. and spent some time in an army hospital, where he cried himself to sleep at night. He asked the hospital's chaplain to send him on a mission, but the chaplain refused. "The time will come when you are needed," the chaplain promised. "Be ready, be patient, be humble, and the time will come." A month later, a former army buddy with connections to the Black Panthers convinced Lily's uncle to help with the shipment and delivery of some "fine, fine hashish" across twelve states. After the sixth dropoff, the friend left to deal with urgent business back on the coast, and the next day Lily's uncle met the federal agents on the open highway at sunrise all alone.

He was out on bail pending the appeal of his conviction when he hosted the Christmas party that started Lily's boozing. When I met her, Lily was trying to make sense of the twelve steps, trying to find a reason, she said, to go on living. Her uncle was executing his mission, taking a prison correspondence degree in New Testament theology and spiritual counseling. In his spare time, he helped the prison chaplain detox hardened felons. On her march through the twelve steps, Lily had forgiven him. She thought of him like a Brazilian tree sloth, caught in an earlier stage of evolution. "God, God, God, fuck," she said. "It's all he talks about." She had forgiven him at the prison, which was where I got my brief chance to see him. It might have been the next day, or the day after that, but I woke up and realized that I didn't believe in much of anything. I believed Sly when he said my day would come. I spent enormous amounts of time locked in my condo with Lily. One day, we had sex twelve times. We had sex in every room in the house three times over.

Sly thought the girl had great potential.

"No, Sly," I said. "You're wasting your time."

We were near the end. I wanted to tell him I loved him. I wanted to tell him not to go.

He said, "Justin, listen to me."

"Okay."

"If you remember one thing, one thing and only one thing in this life, remember this. Are you with me?"

"Yes."

"The world doesn't belong to assholes. Now stop behaving like one."

I couldn't spit it out fast enough.

"Fuck you, man!"

I tore the photograph in my hand into four pieces and threw them in the air. I leaned forward in my chair and horked great gobs of spit all over the photographs on the table in front of me.

"Fuck you, man! Fuck you, fuck you, and fu-uck you!"

Sly leaned across the table, grabbed me by the collar, and threw me on the floor. Then he kicked me down the hallway and tossed me into the street. I fumbled for my cellphone and called a cab.

"Jesus motherfucking Christ," I screamed into Sly's machine later that evening. "Are you ever dead! Are you ever motherfucking dead!"

But he was by then, and the incident was closer than ever.

He was killed by a jealous boyfriend. That wasn't what the West Coast wanted to hear, but those were the facts. I've told many people what I'm going to tell you now and probably only one in ten agreed with me. Sly would have appreciated being brought down by one of the world's primal furies.

"Why do you say that?" Lily asked.

"Because he was prone to them himself."

"That's no answer."

"Because Sly respected primal furies. He respected chaos. He knew his life was a loan."

The West Coast wanted Sly's death to have blockbuster status. The dicks were sent out. Give us cause, give us reason. The West Coast didn't want to be associated with a quiet, woody tale of New Hampshire teenage lust (the girl's football captain boyfriend plugged him). The West Coast had its own rules, its own expectations. It looked at Sly's death and demanded a re-write. A down-note ending? No, no. Send it back. Give us something we can believe. I forgot about my phone message. The dicks found it. My words made the papers. My face made CNN, _Entertainment Tonight._ My star flashed once, twice, then flared out. I didn't kill Sly. I had nothing to do with it. The police discovered that quickly enough. They locked me up for twelve hours, but they let me go. They interviewed me and cleaned out my drugs. They had nothing to hold me on. Bigger fish, bigger kicks, drew them away from me. I only saw this later, when the drugs finally let go. When Lily was gone. When I turned my thoughts – finally – to tomorrow. _And how things began_. The West Coast didn't forget, though. The West Coast thought I was in on it. The West Coast wanted me to be in on it. The world doesn't belong to assholes, Sly had said. I tried to reform. I tried to get back on track.

I really did.

###

**Hercules**

The day Hercules died the noon sun pushed the temperature over thirty-eight degrees. It was the fifth day in a row the temperature peaked over thirty and the weather office had issued a heat warning, a humidity warning and a smog warning. No matter. Work was work. The foreman showed up everyday with a cooler full of ice and bottled water and no one said boo if you put down your tools for a minute and sucked back on something cold. The crew was two men short that day. We were on top of a nine-story apartment block, replacing the roof. Late in the afternoon, at nearly quitting time, I saw Hercules straighten his back, smile, wipe his face with his forearm. Ten minutes later he fell forward, dead, onto the tarmac.

At Hercules' funeral I met his daughter. I knew she was in medical school, studying to be a surgeon.

She asked, "Are you Shawn?"

I nodded, tilting my head.

"He talked about you."

"No."

"He was very happy to have met you," she said. She took both of my hands and looked into my face. She pulled me forward and kissed my cheeks in the European manner. She had thick dark hair, an olive complexion. Ruby lips. I blushed.

She said, "My father called you his friend."

I asked if I could meet her sometime for coffee. She reached into her purse for a pen and I wrote her phone number on the palm of my hand.

Hercules was Vincent Torlini. He'd worked in construction since he was a teenager back in Italy over fifty years earlier. When he told me that, I said, "No way."

"Yes sir, it's true." He beamed, his cheeks pulled high, strong.

He was as tanned and fit as any of the crew. He told me he didn't need the money but a man's got to work.

We became friends my first week on the job. I was late three days in a row; the foreman was ready to fire me. Hercules intervened. "Give the kid a chance. He works hard." It wasn't true. Tarring roofs was the most difficult thing I'd ever done. I did half the work of the others. After the first day I was sore and blistered. My skin was scorched and my head pounded all the way home on the subway. That's it, I thought. I wanted to be any other place but on that roof with shovels, wires and a pot of bubbling tar.

The only reason I'd got on with the crew was because my mother wanted me out of the house. My mother and I shared the three-bedroom apartment she'd rented since my father died in a car crash when I was six. My sister, Lisa, had left home over a year before, marrying her manager at the grocery store where she'd worked since she was fifteen.

My mother said, "Do something with your life."

She said, "You're not a boy any more."

I was nineteen. Three years earlier I'd been in juvenile detention. I'd robbed a convenience store, resisted arrest, was found with more marijuana than I could consume alone in a year. The only thing wrong with my life was the fact that I'd got caught.

My counselor, Peter, saw things differently.

I told him how when I was eight I started a fire in the garbage bin behind our building. Six fire trucks came. No one knew who did it but a week later I told my sister and a couple of kids at school. The police came. They told me I better stay out of trouble because they had their eyes on me. I don't know why but I didn't listen. Over the next eight years they got to know me real well.

Peter said, "What do you think you wanted when you set that fire?"

" _Just good times, man. Just a big crazy fire."_

"Is that what you got?"

"Yeah man. Big fire. Good kicks."

The walls of the room glared. There was just a table and two heavy wooden chairs. On the wall was a poster of a hand gun with a cigarette in the end of it. Captioned below the gun: _Don't play Russian Roulette with your health_.

He said, "The other guys aren't here, Shawn. You can tell me the truth. I won't tell anyone. Do you trust me?"

"I trust you."

"Are you telling me the truth about the fire?"

I told him partly yes, partly no.

Peter asked me to explain myself.

"I was just a little kid. All those trucks came. I liked it."

"What's the 'no' part?"

I wanted to say something about my father but I didn't know what. A week earlier I'd shaved all the hair off of my head and told Peter I wanted to go straight. I knew what Peter wanted to hear. _I hated my life, I was lashing out._ But I knew my father was dead. I knew he was never coming back.

"Look," I said. I tried to keep talking but I couldn't. I tried to slow down my thoughts, slow down my heart, my breathing. The tears came then.

"It's okay," Peter said.

Peter said, "Let it out."

When I told Hercules about my time in the lockup I was scared it would change the way he looked at me.

He said, "You work hard, life will look after you. You make mistakes, you fix them."

He told me to meet him downtown the following Saturday.

I met him at an outdoor café on College Street. He was wearing a brightly coloured silk shirt. I was wearing torn denim.

He asked me about my life; I told him some things. My father was dead, my sister married. My mother weighed three hundred pounds.

He listened, expressionless, then he said, "You happy?"

I shrugged.

"Why the shrug? I ask you if you're happy and you — " He imitated my shrug, making a face of disgust. His eyes pulled into his face, red and hurt.

Then he did it again. "What is that?"

I tried to smile.

"Listen," he said. "Life is beautiful."

As he said this he made a fist and banged out the syllables on the table. I waited for him to continue.

He was staring at me. "You sit here. You look at the people. They come from all over the world, from a hundred countries. They walk down this street. This one right here, right here under our feet. They buy coffee. They talk." He smiled broadly. "It's a miracle, don't you think?"

No one had said anything like this to me before.

"Shawn, you and me here today, the weather beautiful, the people beautiful, the day beautiful. For what more can I ask?"

"Nothing."

"Yes, yes. Good answer."

We didn't talk for another five minutes. He turned and looked out to the street. A woman walked past pushing a baby carriage. The cars were backed up at the traffic light. I took off my jacket and hung it on the back of my chair.

"You got a girl?" he asked.

"No."

"Job number one, you get a girl. Don't go chasing any of the easy ones. You think that's what you want. It's not. Find a nice girl. You look after her, she'll look after you."

"Okay."

Two days earlier he'd said to me, "Life owes you nothing, that's a fact. But life gives some people a head start. It doesn't matter. It's what you have in here that counts."

He tapped his chest. I thought he was indestructible.

At work the guys teased him.

"Hercules, you should have been a priest."

"No, no. I'm like Jesus. I work with my hands."

I came home every day exhausted, sought my bed. I started to give my mother money. At first she didn't want to take it but I forced it on her.

"I'm all done taking," I said holding the bills in front of her.

She took the money.

"I'll save it for you."

"Don't you dare. I don't want it back."

Hercules' daughter's name was Judi. I met her for coffee, then a movie, then a week later for dinner at a shadowy Italian restaurant. The walls were painted a murky red and mirrors on the ceiling reflected candlelight.

Halfway through dinner I said, "He was some kind of man, wasn't he?"

"Yes he was."

I picked up the bottle of Merlot and refilled her glass, then mine. It took me ten minutes to ask her what I wanted to ask her. We'd already talked about medical school, my family, her family, the vacation she'd taken last winter to Cuba and the fact that I'd never once been on a airplane. She had the darkest eyes of anyone I'd met and every time I looked at them I felt as transparent as paper.

Finally I said, "You happy?"

She put down her utensils and glanced slowly across the room. Our waiter was passing three tables away but he didn't turn to see us.

She said, "My father used to ask me that."

I nodded.

"Did he ask you?"

"Yes."

I tried to avoid her eyes. I cut into my steak and took a bite.

She smiled and picked up her wine glass.

"Yes," she said. "I'm happy — but not so happy that there's not room for more."

I felt her foot press on mine under the table.

It felt like fire.

###

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