CONFIDENTIAL [UNDISCLOSED LOCATION] 001411

DEPARTMENT FOR NEA/I

SUBJECT: CORRECTED COPY: ASSET DEBRIEF INTERVIEW

REF: A. [UNDISCLOSED LOCATION] 1411

Classified By: CDA Officer P. Saunders for reasons: 5.1 (a)–(c).

ASSET ID: “ENGINEERING” [Legal name Edwin Aubele]

May 29, 2022 — 14:30 GMT

83 days after Operation Fear and Trembling

—Wow, this place is great, isn’t it?

—I thought you might like it.

—I can’t believe this one escaped me. I’ve spent the last however long just wandering around, exploring the city. The parks, the cafés. The boulevard that everyone fishes off of. There’s a museum for every interest, I swear. I don’t drink anymore, but I hit a couple of bars, screw it, just to get out of the apartment. The bars here, the restaurants. The tacos, or those fermented things served on a bed of moss, it’s wild. There’s an urbanity I wasn’t expecting. People from all over, all that human migration, and the food scene really reflects that. I’ve been to a few restaurants so far, but never here. This place should be on one of those Netflix food shows. So much character, wow. I love all the old photos on the walls.

—Those are the grandparents who started the business. It’s been a fixture of the neighbourhood for something like sixty years.

—I love that. Always eat where the locals eat. This menu, holy smokes.

—I recommend the mussels, Edwin, if you eat shellfish.

—I’m deathly allergic, but I might make an exception just this once.

—Just so you know, I’ve pressed Record, so anything we talk about will be, you know, accessible to anyone who wants to hear it.

—I’ll try not to swear.

—Great. So this is in part a wellness check. It sounds like you’ve been okay? Keeping yourself busy?

—Ish. I have my meditation practice twice a day. And I’m grateful for the phone, thank you to whomever for that. I realize it’s being monitored but, fuck it, finally I can do my crosswords.

I’ll maybe confess to a certain agitation, though, boredom maybe, restlessness. It’s unclear to me what it is that I should be doing other than, you know, keeping myself busy. I thought you’d forgotten me out here. What’s it been, two months? Since the thing, the event?

—The operation? Almost three.

—Well, there you go. I’m experiencing a distortion of time, an elongation and contraction. The days bleed together in isolation. Any advice in this regard, I’d appreciate it. Should I take up tai chi? Should I finally read War and Peace? It seems presumptuous to take on a project.

—Okay, so first of all, I apologize for the delay. I promise we didn’t forget you or your invaluable contribution, which, as I understand it, was extemporized, making it all the more impressive. But as I’m sure you can understand, given the outcome of the operation, it’s been a bit of a scramble. It’s been, believe me, an avalanche of paperwork. Endless reports and post hoc analysis — you know the deal.

—I saw something about it on the New York Times site. It was kind of a thrill, if I’m honest, to have made it into the New York Times, even if it was for this clusterfuck.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to —

—It’s all right. We failed to meet certain operational benchmarks, but the action overall can be designated as successful if we factor in certain other data.

—Oh. Okay, well, then, great. I’m happy for … happy to hear that. Fantastic.

—So, as well as a wellness check, this is in part an effort to establish a narrative of the day, an agreed statement of facts, if you will, that will help us to locate chokepoints and to refine our workflows going forward.

—I understand.

—So if you could, in as much detail as possible, recount your experience of the operation, this would be enormously helpful.

—Sure, sure, happy to help, it’s all so fresh in my mind still. Where should I …

—Well, unless there was, you know, something unusual — I’m sure there wasn’t, but maybe there was, in the week or weeks leading up to it — just start at the beginning of your day.

—Okay, well … So I got your messages that morning, Twitter, then YouTube, then the one from OpenPuff, the postcard image, Greetings from Copenhagen, the gardens are green. I had had … you might call it a storm-tossed night, staring at the ceiling, 3 a.m., the bedroom blackness, the layers of shifting static, thinking about something stupid I’d said at a party to a woman in, like, 2006. Amazed at my talent to fuck up my life in ways general and specific, the decisions I’ve made, were they ever really decisions, or was I just, as I suspected, acting out some script written in my DNA? And now dawn had broken, here I was, cold light of day, watching all those terrible non-decisions coalesce and take their final form. Greetings from Copenhagen, the grass is green.

We have a shared dilemma, in that we are eternal spirits trapped in human shapes; we aspire to more, but we are burdened. Upon receiving your signal, I wiped the hard drive and stuffed the laptop back under my bed. Then returned to the kitchen, plucked a box of Honey Smacks from the back of the cupboard and dug around inside till I found the baggie that I’d stashed. There was less than I remembered, but there was enough. I unzipped the baggie, laid out a rail of coke on the counter, and searched around for a —

—I’m sorry, can we stop there for a second?

—Sure, sure. Was I, am I rattling on? I can try to trim it back if that’s more helpful.

—No, it’s just, uh … The, uh, cocaine. I’m curious, given your matter-of-fact tone, is this something you often did? Ingest cocaine before going to work?

—Oh god, no, are you kidding? I’d have had to be in, I don’t know, Management probably, to make that kind of money. No, usually I smoked crack.

—Usually.

—Well, regularly. Just a bit, just for a jump-start, when the thought of another day of work seemed too much to endure, an impossible cruelty. I’d been saving the coke for something special. If a record label liked my demos maybe, or a new girlfriend maybe, or the anniversary of my mom’s death. But this seemed as special as anything, an end and a beginning, and also my last chance to use, because it’s not like I could take it with me.

—And so you insufflated the cocaine. And how did that make you feel?

—Insufflated. Sure, why not? I felt great, of course. It made me feel great. The stuff was solid, my dealer knows his shit. I felt powerful. I felt like, let’s get the road on the show.

—The …

—I mean, I could hardly wait to get doing whatever badass spy thing I was supposed to do. It’s the great thing about coke. Normally I’m averse to change in all its forms, I find it traumatizing, but one line of coke and I’m a practising Buddhist: we live in a world of ephemera, yes, be fascinated, yes, take it seriously as a phenomenological matter, but don’t get too attached, none of it is real in the end. It helps, this Eastern line of thought, when a big change is —

[Respondent coughs violently, takes drink of water.]

I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. A couple of days ago I developed this persistent dry cough. I went for a Covid test, it came back negative. It’s probably just pollen. I’ve been going out a lot, who knows what gets into your lungs.

—Have you been doing drugs since you’ve been here, or engaging in other risky behaviours?

—No, no, no. Well … no. I’ve been going to the bars, as I said, but I haven’t been indulging. I just need to be around people. The coke stash in Toronto was a last hurrah. Since I’ve been here I’ve been urge-surfing, no drugs, no booze, just people. I’ve been getting high off of humanity, don’t smirk. And everyone’s been so welcoming, I have to say. I think they’re curious about the foreigner. This one guy I met at a harbourfront bar took me out into the bay, predawn, to trap crab. Man, it was so peaceful. The water at that time of night smells like fish eggs, like primordial ooze. it was the darkest dark I’ve ever seen. We just drifted in this gently rocking crab boat, while the day spilled over the sea in a thousand purple ripples.

This other time —

— Edwin, I’m compelled to ask, have you spoken to anyone about why you’re here, your involvement with the operation, your time working for the Company? Even in passing, even obliquely? Because —

—No, of course not, I would never do anything to, to …

—Because that would be a violation of the terms of your contract, as I know you’re aware.

—I would never knowingly jeopardize the Company.

—Never knowingly. What about unknowingly?

—No, no. If for no other reason than I’m not an idiot. I understand what a contract violation entails.

—Do you, though?

—Listen. I have no one. An ex-wife, I don’t care what happens to her. My mom and dad are gone. My brother, well, you’d be doing him a favour. My involvement with the Company has been about me, what I need. And I like it here, in this little afterlife. I’d do nothing to fuck with it. There are palm trees here. There are toucans in the palm trees. Plus, and I mean, you can’t know this, we’ve only just met, but I’m a grown-up. I made a deal, eyes open. I’ll abide by the terms.

—Of course. I believe you. I just had to state that for the record.

—Sure, sure.

—So where were we.

—I was just going to tell you about the couple I met in the bar. I wasn’t drinking, as I said. A couple of sparkling waters. They were older, this couple, friendly, looked like crabapple dolls. We got to talking. When they found out I was single they insisted I come back to their place, where they would perform some sort of ritual, cast some sort of spell. And I, in my newly discovered state of openness, thought, Well, this is fine! Why not? I’d like some companionship. I could use all the help I can get. But when we got back to their apartment, it appeared that the ritual would involve in no small part a bucket of chicken blood and a sex act with the lady, who was, I guess, a witch. And I was, well, it was all too much for me, and so it seemed best to maybe politely demur. I mean, I appreciated their concern, but, you know, I do have certain boundaries.

—Perhaps we should get back to the day of the operation.

—Sure, fine. Whatever you want.

—So you snorted some cocaine, and then —

—Went to work.

—And how was work?

—Same old bullshit. Fixing curtain rods, light fixtures, toilet roll dispensers. A guest has a bad moment overnight, gets some news he doesn’t like from his wealth management adviser, punches a hole in the wall, why not? Some underling will fix it, he figures. People are nuts, man. I mean, deeply, pathologically fucking crazy. You learn this when you work in a hotel. The rich especially, something about the rich, the absence of existential dread, it does a number on their brains, seriously. On my morning break I called my dealer. I’d overestimated how much coke I’d stashed and underestimated how much I’d enjoy it. I got his voice mail, left a message. He’s rock solid, probably he was in a meeting, he’s a risk manager, works at a firm like, two blocks from the King William. An hour later, I’m working on an emergency exit door that’s setting off alarms for no reason, my phone goes off, I’m excited, I pick up, “Hello?”

“Greetings from Copenhagen,” a voice says.

“The gardens are green,” I say.

At 2:45 p.m., the voice tells me, I am to create a distraction. A ticket will be issued to my supervisor about burned-out bulbs or some such. I am to acquire the necessary tools, exactly which ones will be left to my discretion, then proceed to the lobby chandelier, which is this immense thing in the middle of the main floor, a mountain of crystal hanging midair. When I’ve replaced the burnt bulbs, I am to unscrew the bottom central portion of the chandelier, and let the fucker crash to the ground. After which, the voice says, I should grab my shit and get out of there, make haste to the agreed-upon rendezvous point.

Well, this sounds great to me. Wanton destruction of hotel property? What a way to say goodbye.

I hang up. I see that my dealer has left a voice mail. This guy is on the ball, if you’re ever in Toronto. At lunch, I shrugged off my coveralls, and I went to meet my dealer, in an operation at least as clandestine as your own. He was sitting at a counter in one of those food courts in the tunnels under Roy Thomson Hall, his skin spectral under the fluorescent light, immersed in whatever dumb shit was on his phone. When I sat down beside him, he stiffened, said nothing, didn’t look up, just waited a minute, then stood and walked away. He hadn’t touched his lunch. I reached over, unlatched his styrofoam takeout, and plucked a baggie of high-grade cocaine from his lemongrass chicken vermicelli.

—Okay so, once again, I’d like to pause for a moment. I’m sorry, had you always had this issue? With narcotics?

—It’s not an issue. It’s an attempt to solve a problem. And who knows what sort of harm might have come my way had I not had this outlet?

—I guess what I’m saying, were you using cocaine when you were recruited? Did we know about this?

—I was recruited at an NA meeting. Is this not in my file?

—I … Okay. I was sent a redacted file.

—Oh yeah, well, everyone knows the redactions are where the truth lies. Yes, how long ago was that, it must be ten years. My life had melted into glass. I was a plaster cast from Pompeii, you know, frozen in perpetual cringe-mode. I’d been compelled into NA after an unfortunate early-morning incident on the Gardiner Expressway — I wasn’t in a car. That’s how I met Krystyna, my recruiter-slash-sponsor, in a church basement on Roncesvalles, our asses sweating into stackable plastic chairs. While the other participants spoke their truth, we locked eyes across the room and tried not to laugh. Later, at the table with the coffee and the Peek Freans, we smiled with our eyes and talked about the places we’d rather be. She wasn’t like the others there. She wasn’t some yoga mom who had worried her husband with her affection for a Perc and a glass of rosé. She was dark, and funny, and earthy. There have got to be better words for it than that, but you get my meaning.

I was at the beginning of a tenuous recovery, six days sober, staring with big wide cow eyes at a future without dope, what that would look like, what it would feel like, what I would do with my days, who I would become. I was vulnerable.

By the time you’re, how old was I, forty? By the time you’re forty, you’ve already been three or four different people. The previous Edwins I knew all about. But this new guy, this pupa with his wet, trembling wings, I had no idea who he was or what he might accomplish.

Krystyna was kind, and patient, and flirtatious. She had an asymmetrical haircut, a bigger than average nose that appealed to me. Over the next several weeks I told her, in spurts and spasms, about the previous Edwins. It’s amazing how fast the meetings yoke you together, confiding your shit to a circle of strangers eating cheap cookies. Over time, Krystyna knew about my parents, about their bitching and sniping, the constant daily low-grade static, about how at some point the storm cloud they had generated broke off and took up residence in my soul. She knew about my youth — I was in a band, we played politically aware ska music and almost got a gig opening for the Specials on a reunion tour. She knew about my settled years, attempting to be married to a woman with control issues, a drab little capitalist who did not approve of my new and improved dream of becoming a recording engineer. And she knew about the thing underneath it all, the waves of inexplicable anger and sorrow that required the constant application of numbing agents.

We might have made out a couple of times, in the parking lot of the church, beside her Civic, under the weird orange light of a sodium lamp. It might have gone further than that, just one time, on a pew upstairs, after the other wastoids had cleared out. It was a skittish thing between us, noncommittal, a tenuous coming together of two people who’d been burned too many times. Or so I thought. But one day, she took it a step further. She asked if I wanted to hang out with her and a couple of her friends. I was, not excited, but open, you know, to the idea, of being the sort of person who makes new friends.

These friends, she said, were the reason she was 772 days sober. They’d given her something no other person, entity, philosophy, or practice ever had. She didn’t say what that was, and I didn’t press her. It sounded, I won’t lie, a little culty. Red flags, you know? But I mean, here I was in twelve-step land, which is nothing if not Drunk Jonestown, so who was I to judge?

We met at a coffee shop the next Friday night. Friday night coffee shops never cease to depress me, they’re like seeing an old lady in a laundromat on New Year’s Eve. But this was exactly where I found myself one random Friday night, early June, ten years ago. Her friends were stylishly dressed, attractive, a couple, I assumed. Lily looked like a hipster CEO, chunky plastic glasses, power bob, perfect teeth. Dash was greying at the temples in a Cary Grant kind of way. He wore a form-fitting sweater that showcased his biceps. He took a special interest in me. Every stupid joke I made was a laugh riot to this guy. Every half-baked take on any given current event was the height of astute analysis. When he got to —

—I’m sorry, one second. Dash and Lily?

—Yes, why?

—No reason, go on.

—When he got to telling me about himself, it was like hearing my own life told back to me. An inexplicable lifelong anger, an absence of focus or direction, a bottomless sorrow that lacked an object and that could never be surmounted, but only numbed. He’d wanted so desperately to achieve something, to be good at something, be someone who was respected for his ability, but he was so easily discouraged. He flitted from one thing to the next. Everything he attempted was a failure. I couldn’t believe this Übermensch in front of me had ever been a failure, but that’s what he said. He echoed all the twelve-step language, too — admitting, examining, making amends, et cetera. How thick am I? It never occurred to me. That Krystyna might have … I mean, those meetings are sacred.

Dash leaned in, searching my face. “Here’s my takeaway,” he said, “from all those AA meetings I attended. It’s maybe not what you might think. A lot of what they tell you, honestly, is just silly, new-age woo-woo, but you take what works and discard the rest. You know which of the steps really made sense to me? Step number three.”

He watched me to see if I remembered. It took a moment.

“Turning over control to a higher power,” I said.

He smacked his knee and grinned. “Exactly!” he said. “That was the hardest one for me to wrap my head around. I was a heathen, you know? An empiricist, I found religion unsettling. The smell of old churches? Creepy. This higher power thing, though. That’s just another word for the collective. The hive mind, the matrix. When you’re even just a tiny part of something larger than yourself, and you and all of the other parts are working in conjunction toward the same end, there’s nothing you can’t achieve.”

This was Dash’s pitch, for real. So either a cult or a pyramid scheme, right? But I swallowed my suspicion and, at the end of the night, gave him my phone number. A week later he met me in the lobby of an office tower at Dundas and University, the one with the Mr. Sub on the north side, and we rode the elevator to a nondescript office on the eighteenth floor, and I took a seat in a row of folding chairs, and he played me a couple of orientation videos, and I guess that’s how I started with you guys. Within a couple weeks I was working at the King William, thanks to a doctored resumé and some string-pulling, I suspect, from someone you’d already planted in Management.

My first couple of years there were good enough. I learned as I went, to fix toilets and king-size bed frames and RFID locks, thanks to YouTube tutorials and a lot of trial and error. I hit my benchmarks for yearly raises, despite the perpetual outraged astonishment of my supervisor, who couldn’t understand how I’d gotten the job in the first place. I kept up with my NA meetings, stayed sober, ate more legumes and leafy greens, always showed up on time. The routine was good for me, as it is for so many of us in recovery. But inevitably, after a couple of years, the tedium of the thing, the profound meaninglessness of gainful employment, the day in, day out nature of the enterprise, it wore on me. I’d been waiting and waiting for an event that never happened, you see. And so, of course, inevitably, in the absence of any kind of emotional investment, I reverted to old patterns. I’m to be commended for drawing it out, my sobriety, given the overall drabness of the situation. I contacted my old dealer, who seemed genuinely happy to see me again, although sad to see me back. Like I said, addiction is an attempt to solve a problem, and my problem was the absence of anything that didn’t conspire to suffocate my soul. Outside of work I reconnected with old friends I’d wisely dropped, a sorrowful bunch of reprobates and unreliable narrators who might steal my wallet, but who wouldn’t judge me, and I hooked up with old girlfriends who had done the most demeaning … who had done what they had to do to keep the dope flowing. It was a life full of dissonance. The posh hotel I spent my day in, with its spa and silver flatware, its guests with perfect teeth, its high-speed Wi-Fi and wheelchair access, its gentlemen’s apparel shop and skin-care clinic, versus the hourly-rate dives I spent my nights in, with the condom dispensers in the shared bathroom down the hall, the window AC with the frayed cords, the stains on the bedding that wouldn’t quite wash out. What are you writing?

—Sorry, this is just for me. Just making a note that you were fully vetted. So great, you were at work, you met your dealer, please go on. What next.

—Next was a plumbing issue.

—Because of the cocaine?

—Excuse me?

—I’m sorry, I think I misunderstood. I assumed that maybe cocaine can give you …

—There was a plugged toilet in one of the rooms. A guest had tried to flush a $250 Wagyu striploin steak. My supervisor felt that I was just the guy to fish it out. When I’d finished the job, I pulled out my stash and did a little bump on the bathroom counter and just stared at this steak lying in a puddle of toilet water on the checkered tile floor and I thought, Who should I call? For a, you know, just to say goodbye to. A gesture to the Edwin I was shedding. Eat the chrysalis before flying away. But after like a minute of staring blankly at the toilet steak, I realized that no one would even notice I was gone. I was the guy who, ten years from now, someone posts about on Facebook, “Hey, remember that guy Edwin from high school? Anyone know what happened to him?” I was already dead, I just hadn’t realized it yet.

Midafternoon, I went out to the smokers’ pit for a cigarette. I didn’t know it at the time, but this would be my last Canadian smoke. It was the usual crew back there, a couple of brawny Asian dudes from Receiving; the surly bellman everyone calls Ramen; Kathy from Catering and a couple of her friends. I like Kathy, she’s hilarious. She’s around my age, I think, maybe a couple years older. Her hair colour is always changing — black, red. Sometimes blue, despite hotel policy. She’s a little thick, in the best way. Thick with two Cs, the kids say now. More than once I’d seen her give the finger to guests when their backs were turned, which only made me like her more. When her friends went back to work, she stayed outside and sucked back another cigarette, and then another, and then another.

“Hey, happy Monday,” I said.

She didn’t even look at me, just stared into the middle distance, hugging herself. She took a drag, blew a funnel cloud into the clammy March air.

“Fuck me,” she said.

“You all right?” I said.

She nodded her head in a way that meant no, not yes. “Edwin?” she said. “I’m having a weird day.”

“Anything you want to talk about?”

She shook her head in a way that suggested yes instead of no.

“No,” she said.

She had her hair pulled back in a bun-like arrangement, per hotel policy. For the first time I noticed she had a little tattoo on her neck, behind her ear. A cat’s paw.

I thought I might cheer her up. I pulled the baggie out of my pocket, cupped it in my hand to keep it out of sight of the CCTV. “Any chance I could help?” I said.

It took awhile, but she glanced over, reluctantly, it seemed to me, frowned for a second at what I was showing her, not really getting it, and I thought maybe I’d screwed up, crossed a line, done something inappropriate. But then her expression changed, her eyes went wide, a happy gasp. She looked at my face, then down at my hand, then up at my face.

“I know somewhere we can go,” she said.

It was a storage unit in the subbasement, near the kitchens. Polished cement floors, walls lined with shelves. It was like Costco in there, abounding with bulk foods: vats of olives, cisterns of mayonnaise, basins of chutney. There was a freezer in one corner. While Kathy locked the door behind us, I tipped some coke onto the top of the freezer and lined it up. I rolled up a fiver and handed it to her. “Please,” I said.

“Such a gentleman,” she said, and bent over and vacuumed up two lines like a pro. She ran an index finger under her nostrils. “Oh, now that is,” she said, “that is … exceptional.”

She handed me the straw, and I insufflated the other two lines, and we stood there, aglow, savouring the glorious burn.

“I feel like I should thank you,” she said. Her eyes were large and preternaturally bright, with this dappled effect, like sunlight on a windy pond, and I remember thinking, I wonder how deep that pond goes, and thinking that was a poetic thing to think, and that I should share it with her, and so I did, but she didn’t seem to hear me.

She rested a hand on her collarbone, about to maybe respond, I thought, then, in an alarmingly fast series of movements, pivoted to face me, reached out her hand, and unzipped my coveralls. I looked down at her little hand, cat scratches all over it, and looked up at those wild wet eyes.

“Yeah?” she said.

I mean, I’d always liked her, you know? She had such a sunshiney face. I could see myself waking up to that face. In a different life.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure, why not?”

So she leaned against the freezer, shimmied out of her trousers, and then pulled down her — maybe I shouldn’t elaborate.

—Unless you feel there’s something of significance, I think we can skip forward.

—Sure. Skip forward. I’m not sure how far. Cocaine, you know? Not one of my finer moments. So okay. We’re what, post-coital, post-whatever-it-was, and maybe we did another post-whatever-it-was line, and we’re sitting on the floor, our backs against the freezer. We had no reason to talk, and nothing to talk about, but talk we did, in an energized, possibly delirious way about the influence of Jamaican dub on eighties British post-punk bands, when she says, “Wait, what time is it?”

I looked at my watch, and with a jolt of horror, realized the time. I’d completely forgotten the operation. I told her it was almost 2:30.

Kathy appeared equally alarmed. She was like, “Oh fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I’m sorry but I have to cut this short. I have somewhere I need to be.”

I was already on my feet, zipping myself into my coveralls.

She struggled with her pants, which she had in her haste pulled inside out, finally slipped them onto her legs, ran a hand over her hair, effecting no change, and told me, “You have no idea how much I needed this.” Then kissed me on the cheek. “In another life,” she said.

And was gone. And a moment later, I was gone, too, way behind schedule, to gear up for my final act. I sprinted up two flights of stairs and down the hall to Engineering to locate all my shit — drill and screw heads and ladder — and was just heading out the door when my supervisor said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing?”

My supervisor is what would happen if a can of Labatt 50 gained sentience. He had a bluish face, a boar-like demeanour, and he didn’t appreciate deviations from the norm. I forget exactly what I said to him, something close to true, a light was burnt out on the lobby chandelier, I had to go fix it, and he replied, “Oh no, you don’t. No one opened a ticket.”

Well, this was a surprise to me. You guys said you were going to open a ticket and then you didn’t. I’d attributed a superior level of competence to the Company, but it turned out the Company was as useless as I was.

So I improvised. I explained to my supervisor that I’d run into deHoog, the manager of operations, and deHoog had said to make it a priority, that given the high-profile nature of the convention, a lot of future bookings were at stake, et cetera, so we must ensure the lobby was pristine.

My supervisor did not look convinced. He had this pained grimace on his face, like a man who’d just been told his calamari dinner was really deep-fried pig anuses. “I’ll look into it,” he said. “In the meantime, I’ve got you on the ninth floor, plugged toilet.”

“The Wagyu must really suck today,” I said.

And I’m telling you this now in the interests of transparency, not because I screwed up in any way. I’m letting you know that there were problems, hiccups along the way, human error, absolutely, but that none of it mattered. I got there in time and did what I was instructed to do. And if my makeshift solution was not true to the last little detail, it was at least true to the spirit of the operation. I waited until he was gone and, per instructions, picked up a ladder and drill and screw heads and made my way to the lobby. Sometimes you need a ladder, sometimes you need a raft.

—I don’t think I, I don’t think I quite …

—The story of the raft? It’s a Buddhist parable, I think. You’ve never heard it?

—Not that I recall.

—It goes like this. I’m going to screw this up. A fellow on his way somewhere, back in the days of yore, finds, at the end of some dusty road, a great inland sea. He squints. Oh shit. Between him and the opposite shore is about fifty miles of choppy water.

He needs to traverse that dire expanse to get to where he’s going, you see. But no bridge will stretch that far. No water taxis, there’s nothing back then. So he looks around. Gathers up a bunch of old two-by-fours, car tires, et cetera. Ropes them together and fashions himself a raft. And with no small difficulty, he crosses, and once he’s across thinks, Well, that worked out. Maybe I’ll just strap this thing across my back in case I need it for the next great impasse.

And continues on overland. Growing ever weaker. It’s hot, he’s thirsty, his knees are giving out. This raft upon his back, it grinds him down for days and days until finally it comes to him. The question. Born of exhaustion. What is the purpose of this raft? And the answer in quick succession: its purpose is to float. And so, with this revelation, the man drops the raft and finds that his shoulders no longer ache, his legs no longer buckle. He is free to continue his journey.

The point being, I guess, the sea was behind him, he no longer needed a raft. What he did need now? Was a good pair of boots.

Sorry, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. I don’t have much else to do.

I met a woman here, in a café. It was, what, last week? Last week. She was standing at the bar, dressed in what looked to be a skin-tight sari made of gauze, sipping something amber. The evening’s entertainment was a smiley young guitarist playing Django Reinhardt, he was honestly pretty good. But the minute I saw that woman, he and all others ceased to exist. I was helpless not to gawk at her. On a break between sets she turned around, perhaps sensing my attention. She glanced at me and I think smiled, but I’d anticipated this, and so she found me staring resolutely into my club soda, trying to play it cool. The next night I came back. And there she was again, in similarly fetching garb. She had this aggressively curly hair that was five times the size of her actual head. She was the most fantastically gorgeous human I’d laid eyes on in, well, however long it had been. This second night I was bolder. When she smiled at me during a break between sets, I morphed into Leisure Suit Larry. I nodded, I might have winked — god, how the thought of that troubles me — and I sidled up to where she was sitting.

“My name is Edwin,” I said.

“Hello, Edwin,” she said.

We performed the usual rituals. Chit-chat, some incidental contact, personal inquiries, and good-natured provocations designed to filter out the serial killers. She worked, she said, as an analyst for the Seven Down Corporation. I didn’t ask what that was. She was single, incredibly. One child, though, he lived with his father’s wealthy family. She loved hip hop, she said, and kombucha, and gardening. She showed me a mandala tattoo on her shoulder blade. Two days later we went out for dinner, this tiny crab shack, Sammy’s, that only the locals know about. We talked about our childhoods, what have you, our take on things, frivolous shit, and then afterward we made out against the wall of a neighbouring surf shop. We made plans to meet the next day.

But when the next day came, we skipped the restaurant, we skipped the make-out session, and went straight to her place, a nondescript flat in a low-rise building in the south-central part of the city. It was tasteful, if a bit cold, like an Airbnb on Instagram. Framed aphorisms on the walls. Love makes life a beautiful thing, Say yes to adventure, that sort of thing. I thought nothing of it at the time; I was too horny. She pulled a bag of weed from a drawer of her mid-mod coffee table, dug out some rolling papers, and proceeded to roll a professional-level joint.

Yes, yes, I know. Your face — hilarious. When I said I haven’t used, there was this one exception. We smoked some weed. It was floral and pungent, lovely stuff, and it produced almost immediate cerebral effects.

After the weed, we, you know, did what one does in that circumstance, alone in an apartment, I won’t expand. It was just the usual, more or less, nothing of any larger significance to the Company. But afterward, I don’t know, something odd happened. I mention it only because I’m hoping you might have some perspective. She drank some water from the glass on her nightstand, then got up, still naked and gleaming, walked to her closet, opened the door. “Here’s where things get awkward!” she said in a singsong voice. And I in my compromised condition, with a rising disquiet that might have been either weed-induced paranoia or some legitimate fight-or-flight response, watched as she reached into her closet, dug around, and … what do you think she pulled out?

—Not a knife.

—Nope.

—A rope?

—No, neither of those. A pillow. She came back to the bed, lifted my shoulders, and tucked the pillow under my head. I tried to say something, but I could barely articulate. The weed was hitting hard, I’ve been couchlocked before, but this was something different. I asked her for a glass of water, but she appeared not to hear. She wandered from the bed to the bathroom, then re-emerged with a toothbrush in her mouth. I told her that something felt not right, that maybe I should call an ambulance, but she just padded back into the bathroom. I heard her spitting toothpaste into the sink. The sound of gargling, then of peeing. The toilet flushed. I told her that I was really very worried about what was happening to me, really very worried, and then I blinked, just for a second, and when I opened my eyes again the seagulls were clamouring and pink dawn light was slicing through the blinds.

She’d left a note on the kitchen counter. It took a while for her handwriting to come into focus. The note said something about marriage. If you marry, it said, you will regret it, if you don’t marry, you will also regret it. Hard to argue with that. The weed had left me ravenous, I decided to raid the fridge. Inside I found a bottle of water, a stick of butter, an expired box of orange juice. I tried calling her later that day; she didn’t pick up. I tried texting that night. A day later, I came back to the building and buzzed her apartment. Nothing.

And so now I feel as if something’s going on, something I don’t understand. I feel like I’m Anthony Bourdain in a David Lynch movie. And I was wondering if maybe you might have some insight into that.

—Why would I have insight into anything unrelated to the Company?

—Because maybe it wasn’t unrelated. Maybe it was a whatever-you-call-it, an action, an operation. Maybe she was a spy? I don’t know. I have no idea how these things work.

—Well, if it was an operation, I personally have no knowledge of it, if that’s what you’re asking.

—Mmm. That might be what I’m asking, yes. I really don’t know anymore.

—Perhaps we should get back to …

—Yes, yes. Back to business. Where were we.

—You’d picked up your tools and were on your way to the lobby.

—Ah yes. The main event. So I snatched up my tools and made my way to the lobby to fix a light fixture that was not broken. My supervisor’s bullshit interference meant that I was way behind schedule. Punctuality had been impressed upon me in my training, and I could guess what might result if I were late. I booked it through the service corridors, the ladder swinging wildly. It nearly brained a couple of my co-workers as I stumbled through corners and skidded through fire doors until, like a villain from a silent movie, bug-eyed and manic, fuelled by high-grade coke, I rolled into the lobby and beelined to the chandelier. The place was crawling with Bay Street knuckledraggers and empty-eyed goons with Bluetooth earbuds plugged into their heads. The conference that day, “Polycentric Growth Opportunities in the Global South,” was some sort of agribusiness trade summit for the political-industrial nexus, with a high-end keynote speaker, so security was next-level.

I have an aversion to thuggery in all its forms — cops and toy cops, former cops for hire, secret government cops. I’ve had a few run-ins, given my history, so my inclination was to head the fuck out of there, but I couldn’t, a thing needed to get done, so I focused as best I could on the task at hand. I set up the ladder and flipped through my toolbox. My instructions were to unbolt the column of the chandelier from the crown to a sufficient degree that the weight of the bottom dish assembly would bring it crashing to the floor, causing the kind of disruption and chaos unheard of in this town since the breakup of my marriage. Who this was meant to distract was anyone’s guess, although I assumed it had something to do with the Bluetooth crew. I dug around in the pocket of my coveralls and located the remainder of my dope. I knew it was maybe not a great idea, maybe it was, in fact, a bad idea, but when have I ever had any judgment? I looked around, but of course no one was paying attention to the janitor, so. I tapped some powder onto the back of my hand and inhaled it as discreetly as I could. And then, out of my mind on adrenalin and blow, I grabbed my drill and climbed the ladder and set to work destroying the chandelier.

It felt terrific to be up there, I can’t even explain, above all those human heads, like a young god. They had no idea what was to come. I would unleash hell upon them, screw their little convention, their anthropoid vanities and trifles and curiosa. I loosened the nuts on the two supporting bolts and was about to tackle the master, after which all that electric crystal would go slamming to the floor, when an old, a very old, a frail old man, a white-haired bone-rack in a yacht club blazer and ill-fitting slacks, pushed his wheelchair-bound wife — I’m assuming it was his wife and not his mistress — directly under the chandelier. I’m not even kidding. I was fucking dumbfounded. Why would he do such a thing? I want to be charitable, he seemed only half-aware of his surroundings and confounded generally by the state of the world. But for fuck’s sake! I stopped what I was doing and waited. I gazed around three-sixty at all the puny humans down there, tried to recapture that godlike sensation I’d had only moments before, but then I peered down again at that frail little head directly below me, her little perm — she had a bald spot on her crown, a wad of Kleenex in her fist — and goddamn, the air just left my balloon. I waited some more. Where the fuck was he? I couldn’t see him anywhere. I looked at my watch. This distraction needed to happen at 2:45 exactly. It was now 2:42 and 49 seconds. I had just over two minutes to decide whether to kill this woman or let the operation fail. I waited, I waited, and he didn’t come back, and if he was anything like my dad he was probably still trying to void his bladder in the men’s room. Then, with twenty seconds remaining, it came to me, that old chestnut: perfect is the enemy of good. What the Company needed was a big generic distraction, not specifically a chandelier smashing to the ground. And so I calmed down, counted ten, nine, eight, and hoped for the best. I grabbed the top bars of the chandelier and, holding my breath, kicked the ladder out from under me. It clattered onto the marble floor and echoed through the lobby, and a murmuring crowd gathered round as I thrashed and twisted in the ether. I marvelled at my predicament. What untreated pathology had led me here, to this idiotic midair spectacle? I swung across a constellation of upturned faces, brown and black and white, their arms outstretched as if to cradle me as I fell. And fall I did, when I saw the old lady was out of danger. I waited one second, two, then let go of the light fixture and dropped through all those well-meaning cradling arms, landing on the tiles with a wet, corpse-like splat.

A moment of astral whiteness — and then peace. When I opened my eyes again I was lying on the floor. Two Bluetooth goons were kneeling over me. “You okay, bud?” I self-assessed for injury. My right ankle shot sparks up my leg and into my spine, but it was nothing another bump couldn’t address. I raised my arm, and one thug took my hand and the other picked me up by my armpits. The old lady was getting attention from a number of hotel people. She seemed oblivious to the fate that had almost dropped on her head.

I thanked the thugs, said I was fine, insisted that I must report the incident to my supervisor, limped as quickly as I could to the southwest emergency exit, and went out into the leaden March air. I plucked the baggie from my pocket and did one last bump in the alleyway, my last bump ever, and took one moment to acknowledge the occasion. Then I shed my coveralls and headed, giddy and afraid, to Union Station.

And that was a wrap on my old life, my last act as a citizen of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. And also the last time I used, excepting that one time with the weed.

But that’s okay, right? I must forgive myself. Recovery is a verb, not a noun, routine is important, and now, here, I have my twice-daily meditation practice, I avoid triggers, I get my steps in, I focus on the things that fill me up — my podcasts and TED Talks and sobriety newsletters — not the things that deplete me, which is pretty much everything else. I have a whole new world to explore, here in the afterlife. The only troubling thing, really, is this cough. It feels like it’s getting worse. I’m sure it’ll pass, as all things do, but I’m a worrier. No, scratch that: I am a person who worries. It does not define me. No other symptoms, just this weird sensation in the lungs. Maybe I’m not used to all this salty air.

Every breath is a death, they say.

—Excuse me?

—It’s a Buddhist concept. Every breath is a birth, a death, and a rebirth, every moment. Every train we take to the airport, where does the journey begin? Where does it end? Every door we open, every door we close. It’s all a rehearsal. For the thing we call death, in quotation marks, which is itself just a beginning. The important thing is, we can’t hang on, there’s nothing to hang on to, we must let go. And by letting go we open ourselves to new experience, new possibility. And so I let go. And open my heart to the new thing, whatever this is, and the thing after that, and the thing after that.

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PREPARED AND SUBMITTED BY: SAUNDERS, P.