THE DELICATELY CARVED MARBLE box with the inlaid pearl-flower sits on the wooden, polished bar. Robert eyes it while watching the others both real and in the mirror.

David finally made it to Benjamin’s, a Toronto nightclub in the fashionable Yorkville district. Robert hadn’t planned on stopping here. But a good place to show off the box. All he has left of David. It was the largest marble box Robert could find in Chinatown. He had asked the store clerk to seal it with clear packing tape. Sprinkling David’s ashes throughout the city was not his intention though it had been impossible not to hear the bits and pieces of David’s skeleton dancing on the inside of the box. A musical bone box. Robert hears David’s voice saying those words. From the chair to a Chinese musical bone box.

What next? Robert didn’t know. Maybe use the box as a musical instrument the next time he played a bar. Amplify it. Say it was a strange new musical instrument from China.

Dance for me David. He nudges the box, hoping for warmth. The movement catches the attention of those around, who stare. David, they are not staring at you, Robert says. Yes they are, David says. Yes they are.

He knew David was terminal this last trip to the hospital. The chronic bowel infection coupled with high blood pressure and a stomach aneurysm had turned David gray, and an odd old man, though only thirty-five, Robert’s age.

That last night, with a summer storm crashing around the hospital, David had reminded him of some Shakespearean king, approaching his final moment. Now David resting (not necessarily at peace) on top of the shining bar in Benjamin’s, free finally of his wheelchair.

The cremation had been at nine in the morning; his watch had just beepedmidnight. Gin swirls the inside of Robert’smouth, numb and sweet. He’s mute, shakes his head at himself.

Always something breached, open, some wound, hole. Some bleeding problem. Some box you’re trying to get out of, or into. Some slippery energy you’re always trying to hold.

Energy a problem, always is in nature, David’s voice again. Too much, not enough.

David had conserved his, by not working, though trained as an architect. He accepted what the government would give, to be as free as he could, turning inward, sitting with his books, joining his obscurities, playing with Derrida and McLuhan.

Just as he was sometimes assaulted by the smell of David’s colostomy bag so sometimes was Robert assaulted by the mass of facts and contradictions that came out of David’s pain-twistedmouth. But funny too, and so friends, once upon a time. Both orphans. Both a family of sorts.

Now the box, and e.e. cumming’s line, he’s a wet dream by Cezanne. The faces in the bar take on the same golden sexual glow that he associates both with the line and the painter. A golden, wet dream if not for the actual words breaking him.

“She’d fuck her own father for an eighth.”

“Tramp in the dust, that’s all she is.”

“The operation, penis folded back into a vagina, all sense strays in the brain.”

Gradually the words falling into themselves, the faces filling the spaces, a smear of yellow-stained flesh, ready to be wiped. Maybe his mind rorschaching thewords, the scene,whatwith the gin in his blood, blurring him, them.

The main doors opening more frequently; a rush of warmer, more humid air. More white limos in front stopping. Women in leather miniskirts hopping out and he feels the turning. Push from behind, head snaps forward. Feels like a lash of a whip as the long red nails scratch his cheek. Stands up drink in hand, always with the box, the question, Robert too drunk to answer, he wants to be led, not sure if he tells, the sheheshehe laughter (the slaughter) and then a taxi, a drive and then…

THE SWEET PLASTIC SMELL of lipstick as she kisses his eyelids, cheeks, her hand holding to that same steady rhythm. Robert feels he should return the favour but her cock’s just barely visible over the top of her panties.

Robert puts a finger on it and slowly circles the head.

“Oh honey, that’s good. Oh lover.” She starts tomove her hips in a fucking motion against his hand.

“I want you inside me,” she says. “I want to be fucked by you.”

Robert grabs her hand to stop from coming. She waits while he puts on the condom. He rolls her over onto her stomach, and suddenly rams her.

She screams and her blonde wig comes off. Robert has her pinned, fucks himself deeper into her.

“Easy, you stupid cocksucker. You’re tearingmy insides out.” The voice, harsh,masculine; the fake she-male padding shredded. Robert pulls out, covered in blood.He removes the condomand throws it on the floor. He leaves, cradling the box.

THE NEXT NIGHT when he went to Klin’s party, the women seemed false and overdone, the lipstick too bright, the voices seductively high and put on.He suspected hidden cocks in slinky black panties.

The Invisible Man, he walked through them to the small bar where Klin was mixing drinks.

“I did something really weird last night.”

“What?”

“I fucked a she…you know…a guy dressed up like a woman.”

“Was it any good?”

“I was pretty drunk.”

“You must have been.”

“It was because of David.”

“Sorry to hear about your wheelchair friend,” said Klin.

“I guess you never met him.”

“No, the way you partition up your life. I was a little jealous.How old was he?”

“Our age.”

“It wasn’t? You know, maybe a blood transfusion.”

“No, not aids. He was trapped in that damn wheelchair.”

“That doesn’t kill people.”

“He never forgave himself because of a stupid joy ride…the doctors were always operating, he was always getting infections. He just sort of wasted away.”

“Sad?”

“Who, me?”

“Yes.”

“Sure. But we all die…right?”

“Not just yet I hope. See that woman?”

“Which one?”

“The tall, skinny one.”

“They all look like that.”

“The one by the window. Take her this drink.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“I’ll make you the same—vodka and orange juice.”

Klin did a quick splash and shake and soon Robert was negotiating his way through the crowded living room, carrying two glasses. The woman accepted the drink, didn’t even say thanks.

Robert withdrew to a corner of the room, pretending it was television, the hyperkinetic frenzy that reminded him of an afternoon rock ’n’ roll television show fromyears ago, everybody talking too loud to be heard.

He watched the women check out Klin, a buzz, almost insect-like, something about his dark skin, straight strong Jewish nose and blue eyes that caused even these catwalk paraders and Bay Street high-heeled mavens to think beast-perfect children if they ever mated.

He stared at one model he recognized from a photo shoot he had worked on, but nothing there in her cold dark eyes for him.

When Klin first bought this house, most of the wood had termites, dry rot. Now the living room floor gleamed with oak salvaged froma farmhouse up north. So reflective that the candlelight danced on it, little pockets of fire that the men and women stepped into and out of.

A stainless steel cabinet once used in a pharmacy lined one wall while opposite it hung a five-foot-wide painting of a woman’s face screaming or orgasmic or both.

Robert noticed an older blonde who had a familiar expression, movement, maybe an account executive at one of the ad agencies he had freelanced at.Her silk blouse was partly undone to reveal tanned, sexed breasts. A tall, young-looking black man kept massaging the small of her back and she had the fingers of one hand wrapped around his belt.

She must have felt Robert’s eyes, made hers available, ghosted them both into recognition. It was Melissa, Klin’s mother, but looking skintight younger, less lines so he drew them in again, put the glasses back on.

“Robert?”

He moved closer, what an embarrassment if he was wrong. She touched him on the arm. The other man pointed at his empty drink and walked away.

“Who’s that?”

“A friend.”

“It’s good to find somebody I know here, besides Klin.”

“So what have you been up to?”

“Still the guitar but mostly just a copywriter now.”

“The music will come back.”

“I don’t know. Why should it?”

“You were always after greatness, practicing until your fingers bled.”

“I have the calluses that’s for sure. When did you return from Vancouver?”

“About five months ago. Didn’t Klin tell you?”

“No.”

“I sold my design and gallery business and moved back here. I had to. A fatal attraction type. He got a little crazy and wouldn’t leave me alone. Poor bastard.” She laughed.

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Oh…fuck him and the cops. Stupid restraining orders, never work. I almost bought him a pure blast of heroin to shut him down.”

“You’re joking, right?”

“He was doing everything at that point…crack, and God knows what. I mean I’m not against drugs…I remember the ’60s and the whole Leary thing, but in moderation. You have to look after yourself… eat right…exercise…yoga.”

“You look great.”

“I’d like to chalk it all up to good genes and healthy living but the truth is I had a face-lift about ten months ago.” Her hand drifted lightly across her cheek. “I paid a lot of money for this…what do you think? Was it wasted?”

He had this image of Gloria Swanson, the actress in the movie Sunset Boulevard, the newsreel and photographer lights transforming her into a star again, her eyes gleamingmadly and her hand fake caressing her cheek as she descended the staircase. Maybe he’ll end up floating face down in Klin’s backyard pool like the William Holden character.

“No.”

“I know you’re honest, unlike my son. So thank you.” Melissa grabbed his right hand and raised it to her lips, kissing his finger scars and calluses. “Botox injections, too.”

“I don’t know anything about that crap.”

“But I don’t look old, right?”

“No. You don’t look old.”

“So how old?”

“Forty-seven, forty-eight.”

“Do I hear fifty?”

“You look sexy.”

“I see. That’s non-committal.”

“I find you attractive.”

“That’s good.” She looked around. “He’s changed things again. That painting?”

“It’s Ruth.”

“Really?”

“Yeah…he took a photograph…I’ll leave it to you to imagine the circumstances…Bill Higgins enlarged it, then painted over it.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Do you like it?”

“Not especially.”

“You better not tell Klin that.”

“By the way, where is Ruth?”

“I think they had another fight.”

“This is boring.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No…I meant the party.”

“It’s early yet.”

“Let’s do something.”

“Like what?”

“You know any good clubs?”

“Not anymore.”

“I have some coke.”

“I’m off it…though I’ll drink with you.”

“Look.” Melissa grabbed both his hands in hers. “I’m lonely. You’re lonely.”

“What about your friend?” Robert looked around for the good-looking blackman, knowing he should think in terms of Afro-Canadian or Afro-something-or-other but he couldn’t. So what had happened to the blackman, the good-looking blackman who looked like he had a mba from somewhere and worked for a major bank? He was nowhere to be seen.

“He really is just a friend, nothing particularly serious, we’ve had a little bit of fun…he wanted to meet Klin…I don’t know what that’s about, except most likely money. So it’s just you and me, kid.” She gave himan exaggerated naughty look that stirred something sluttish in him.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“You learn to indulge the opportunity. Try it sometime.”

“Klin might kill me.”

“Oh, don’t be silly.”

Robert felt Klin’s eyes piercing the back of his skull. He resisted their power by moving closer to her.

“This is nuts.”

“We’ll have a drink somewhere.” She squeezed his fingers, let them brush her leather skirt.

“Not a good idea.”

“If you don’t I’ll tell Klin you made a pass at me.”

“You’re joking, right?”

She laughed at him. “Maybe. Don’t be so ridiculous. If you’re so worried about what my son will think why don’t we separate, talk to other people, you say first goodbyes then wait for me on the corner. It’s not that complicated.”

Robert doubted the deception, Klin knowing all the tricks. If David had been alive, he might have gone home and joked about sleeping with Klin’s mother.

Robert walked out of the party, without saying goodbye to anyone, Klin’s laughter behind him, not turning around to see if he was the target. He waited on the street corner outside of a small grocery store. The clerk was turning off the lights and Robert’s reflection appeared in the dark glass. Robert moved towards it but as he blocked the light from the street lamp he watched himself disappear.

Klin was crazy when it came to hismother, or was it just coming to the crazy, Klin once describing how a drunk Melissa had playfully wrestled with him, then suddenly pulled down his pants andmouthed his twelve-year-old dick. Robert didn’t know whether to believe him, with Klin you only met a fiction once, the tale told while they were both stoned on acid at the Canadian National Exhibition, summers ago, standing on top of the Shell Tower.

A cat slinked by. Therewas that sweet fertile scent fromtrees Robert didn’t know the name of. He turned to leave but Melissa high-heeled her way towards him, almost a hooker walk in her tight leather skirt.

Robert reduced to silence, awkwardness, first in her car then in the elevator when she kissed him.

“They’re hard.”

“I had them done too.”

“But why?”

“Does it matter?”

“Just curious.”

“They were the saddest looking pair of boobs. They drooped, had all these blue veins. I had to pluck hair off the nipples.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me.”

“You asked.”

“Yes.”

“When I lie flat the inserts move closer to the top, that’s why they feel so hard. I think maybe something’s gone wrong but I don’t really want to know.”

“When you’re standing, they look perfect.”

“I shouldn’t lie down?” She tapped down on her imaginary Borscht belt cigar. He laughed.

“I’ll get used to them.”

“I don’t have a lot of feeling there, never did, so you don’t have to touch them. You do the other things quite well, or have you been complimented before on your talent?”

“I haven’t had a serious relationship since Kimberley and I broke up.”

“You need to…my son too.”

“But he has Ruth.”

“That won’t last.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know…maybe he’s too much like me.”

HE WAS PART of the familiar Saturday movie of walking north on Yonge Street where it had turned old so quickly. Smog, scaffolding and the sticky heat, some infernal combustion engine, deconstructing the old town.

At College Street, Robert saw the last stragglers, what remained of the troops after the charge into the exhaust fumes, the valley of death.

Three leather stormtroopers, a flashback to themotorcycle boys who caused you to look twice with their potent gay image back in the early ’80s, when Robert would play with any band any place, especially that summer between high school and university, filling in on rhythm guitar, looking out into the darkness and seeing all these men in motorcycle leathers arriving, commenting to the drummer who was older, been playing rock ’n’ roll since time began. What a tough fucking crowd, all these bikers like in The Wild Ones, and the drummer just laughing, must have been at him.

Never played that dark obscure club again.

So now these three march past him on Yonge Street, leather vests, leather pants, no shirts, the chicken pox dew sweat glistening around their nipples, running the spare hair of their chests.

The military leather caps set at a jaunty angle, two had the Fu Manchu moustaches, the other clean shaven, they were like some monument to the movement, a war memorial statue come to life, for those unknown soldiers who had taken it in the ass, for queen and country.

Most of the bars he had played were closed, knocked down, paved over, all these corners he had stood on with friends, waiting for traffic lights to change, the friends now gone, changed, dead or forgotten, except for Klin.

At the streetcar stop, a gray-bearded, turban-headed Sikh wore an ancient tired wisdom in his yellowed eyes like he’d witnessed all of this years ago including Robert walking Yonge Street, thinking these very same thoughts.

What did Tony say the other night...seeing her, seeing Kimberley, his ex, what was his reaction inside...oh, yeah, what were you seeing?

David that final night, so small, and fragile in his pain. And how helpless he had felt even as he contemplated some rescue. Walking home fromthe hospital, he hadmade a pact with whatever existed to take a portion of his years and give them to David. It felt right. But if his years had been taken that night, David didn’t receive them.

ROBERT SAW A BENDER, the term being an invention of Klin’s to describe those down-and-outers who were so bent over they looked like the gravity-shaped fish at the bottom of the ocean.

This one’s so stooped over that his face almost parallels the ground. Every few shuffling steps, he yanked his head up to see where he was, and the pain flashed in his small, crusted eyes.

He wheezed out a “Help me,” stuck out his hand. Robert grabbed a fistful of coin from his pocket and tried to drop them into a hand lipped with open sores. Some spilled. The bender screeched out a “Fuck you!” and pointed a pus finger at him.

Robert kept walking, turned once to see the man collapsed on the sidewalk picking up the money.

He reached Melissa’s building. Her intercom voice squawked at him:

“Yes. Who is it?”

“It’s Robert. Are you alone or should I just go?”

The lock on the lobby door clicked. Robert pulled on it, hearing Melissa say something over the intercom about Klin who after his knock pushed open the condo door. Robert felt a silly grin take control of his face, tried to prevent it by brushing his lip with his forefinger.

Klin grabbed his right arm, pulled the finger away. He led him into the living room. On the black leather sofa, Melissa sat next to a woman in a red sundress who balanced a crystal on her lap spreading a rainbow over her bare legs.

Melissa stood up. “Judy’s the daughter of an old friend. She’s thinking of investing in a clothing boutique with me.”

Robert glanced at the parallel white lines sketched out on the glass coffee table.

“You’re welcome to join us,” said Klin who sat on the armof the love seat.He felt themscanning his eyes for judgement.He sat down on the thick-piled rug, pulled his knees up to his chin, rested it briefly before twisting his head around to get a better look at the fake Aztec or Inca mask swinging around on an invisible wire.

“Oh Robert, I thought you were too pure for this,” said Melissa.

“I was trying, that’s all. If there’s enough? Okay.”

Klin handed him the glass tube. He did a line, started on the next. Klin halted him with his hand.

“Take it easy.”

Klin pinched one nostril, made an audible snort with the other.

Robert laughed. Klin gave him a dirty look. “Man, what are we going to do with you?”

“You always make noises when you snort dope. That’s all.”

Judy looked at him like he was freakish and poor. So what? He stared back at her, suddenly aware of her pimples and faint moustache.

Melissa sucked up a line, raised her hands into the air, clenched her fingers together.

“Is that something you learned in your yoga class?”

“God, you’re obnoxious, Robert.”

He fake-smiled at her, and numbed his nose again. His new mantra: poor but gifted. He studied her hands, they looked cronish or Cronenbergish. He laughed.

“What’s so funny, Robert?” asked Melissa.

He laughed louder this time. “You remind me of my grade school teacher, Miss Van Grunswen. Your hands at least. She scared the hell out of me, slapping me once for talking in class.” He stood up, began pacing.

“Ignore him,” said Klin.

Melissa’s face puckered with irritation as she threw a pink pillow down on the floor.

“Sit down, Robert, and shut up.”

Feeling childlike and innocent, he obeyed.Melissa reached over and poured red wine into a tall thin glass, swirled the insides of it before taking a sip.

“By the way, Judy, did you see the Bonnecroy in the window of the Lublin gallery?”

“Yes.”

“I thought there was only the ‘Still Life with a Skull’.”

“No, there are others. In fact, I already have a client lined up in Rosedale for any I can liberate.”

“Liberate?” asked Klin.

“Yes.”

“What do you mean by liberate?”

“You put the word out…it motivates the finders.”

“You mean the thieves.”

“A lot of art will be stolen or ripped off at one time or another. Look at what the Nazis did.”

“The bastards,” said Klin who stared out the solarium glass doors with a sour look on his face as if witnessing a concentration camp through the eyes of a distant relative. “I won’t represent art thieves.”

Robert started to laugh but shut it down.He pulled the pillow out from underneath him and started to twist it.

“Hey…take it easyman,” said Klin. “What did it ever do to you?”

“That’s really great Klin that you’re on the side of all these dead artists.” He threw the pillow back up on the couch.

Judy crossed her legs, or was itMelissa, the scratchy sound of nylons tickled his nose, made him itch it.

Klin dumped more coke out of the ivory container.

THE NEXT MORNING, Robert woke up on the rug to the hiss of a shower starting up.His back hurt, but not enough to prevent him drifting off again. He next felt an ice-cold touch on his cheek.

“It’s past eleven.”

Melissa handed him a glass of orange juice. He sat up to avoid spilling it.

“So how do you feel?”

“Tired.”

He stood up long enough to sit down beside her on the sofa. She began to pick her way through a copy of Vogue. He reached over and took control of her hand, sliding his fingers between hers then softly massaging each finger, before bringing themto hismouth for a nibble. He wanted her. At first she resisted but he pressed into her.He sucked for wife breath, some connection.

She pushed out fromunderneath him, sat back up and unzipped his jeans, pulled out the head. She lowered her mouth, sawed away with her lips until his blood flowed. He tried to straighten his underwear to soak up the mess.

“Call me later when you get home,” said Melissa.

“Why?”

“Then don’t.”

Out on the street, Robert felt like he’d wandered into a Seurat painting—shadowy people gone sub-atomic. It was that hot and nuclear.

He entered the Orpheus, pausing while his eyes adjusted to the dimness, the bar empty except for twomiddle-aged bumboys sitting at a table. Clone clowns. Short-cropped hair,mpustaches, same black, armless t-shirts. The mockery and laughter that they took seriously. He avoided their eyes and retreated to the far end of the bar and stood there waiting to be served.

The words, death’s-head grin on the whole sorry joke started to loop itself in his mind, a smart virus lurking everywhere, hunting him.

Begin drinking, turn alky and gradually sink lower and lower in the gay sexual order until blowing old sadmouths for a handful of change to buy stomach bitters. Not really aware because suffering from aids dementia.

He drank his beer quickly to leave. He placed a five-dollar bill on the counter and walked out. The onlymovement behind himwas the bartender putting the money away. When Robert pulled on the outside door, the sunlight hit him. Even with his sunglasses, his eyes felt rawed by the light.

ROBERT, ROBERT, ROBERT. A voice called out his name and he triedmoving towards it.He wanted to answer but the act of moving his lips felt beyond him. Something shook him, shaking the bed. He attempted to roll over. He tried calling for help, for his mother.

She’s dead. They’re all dead. His family. His dog. Jim Morrison, Steve McQueen. Any Kennedy. His first, real lover—Trish. David. He succeeded in rolling to the edge of the bed,moving his feet to touch the floor.He was finally awake. Alone in his room. Covered in sweat. Panic programming his brain.He wanted to call someone. But who could he call at this hour except some poor sap holding the fort at a help line. He lay back on the bed, surrendering to the hot, humid night. Tomorrow he’d click over into another year. Thirty-six. God, that’s old.

THE COTTAGES RINGING the small, thighbone-shaped lake had already turned end-of-the-summer-dark. In the silence, waves murmured and hissed. Klin’s guests had removed their wet bathing suits fromthe clothesline and departed, leaving just the two of them, on the night of Labour Day.

Robert felt slow and heavy, too much beer and barbecued chicken. He started down the dirt road.Mosquitoes tracked him. He began to run, lifting his legs high.He did about three hundred yards, then slowed up, bent over, hands on his knees, panting.

He walked back, his face and body flushed, coughing up phlegm. He went down to the lake, lay flat on the dock, reaching his fingers into the cold water, splashing his face.

When he rolled over, Klin stood there holding a rifle.

“What’s that?”

“AnAR-15, but converted to fully automatic so it fires like anM-16.”

“What’s the point of it?”

Klin aimed at the red wound where the sun had disappeared, and fired a burst. Like a row of firecrackers going off inside Robert’s head. Klin set the rifle chattering at the wooden raft anchored ten yards from the dock. The wood screamed back as it splintered. Klin offered it to Robert.

“Shoot it.”

“Why?”

“Just fuck it, kill it.”

“What?”

“Everything, that’s what this century’s about.”

Klin placed the rifle in Robert’s arms. Robert hung it on his hip like a guitar, did a power windup with his right arm, then pointed the rifle at a star. He touched the trigger, the gun jerked, punched his cheek and shoulder. Every fourth or fifth shell, a tracer sparked out, charcoal and sulfur scenting the air.

On their walk back to the cottage, Robert heard the carbureted throb of a V-8 engine, David riding to his rescue in a turbocharged wheelchair.

“He told me he might show up.”

“Who?”

“Danny.”

The car sucked in the silence before thundering off. “You mean Danny of the Diamondbacks, the motorcycle gang?”

“Now, don’t go all weird on me. The media stories about biker gangs—that’s just propaganda from the cops. This isn’t l.a. and the Hells Angels back in the ’60s. This is fuckin’ Canada. It’s all business. Themotorcycles and leather jackets are like snake skins they’re shedding. They’re all company men now; a few even have degrees that they earned while…you know, serving time in our federal institutions… they’remore into computers now thanmotorcycles, though a lot of them still like to ride.”

“Just another Microsoft, right?”

“Not quite...but they’re working on it.”

“Anger management courses?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“Here, you better take the gun back…I don’t want Danny to get the wrong idea.”

Footsteps sounded above them on the path. Robert looked up and saw the small frame of a man silhouetted in the light from the cabin. He looked like Rasputin, black curly hair and beard surrounding a huge head. The nose was long and curved, the eyes clever behind thick lenses.

His right leg dragged and his right hand seemed pincer-like. Following him was a tall, thin blonde who wore tight shorts and an oversized jean jacket sprinkled with rhinestones.

“You made it, man.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s great.”

“The cops shut down one of our labs so I was glad to get away.”

“Which one?”

“Outside Guelph. Somebody must have talked.”

“I’ll see what I can find out when I return to the city.”

“We’ve shut everything down until we figure out who’s tipping them off.”

“That’s a lot of business gone.”

“We’ve got our girls…our clubs; we’ll manage.”

“Did you bring it?”

“She’s carrying it. Hey honey, unwrap our gift.”

The blonde opened up a beach towel.

“That’s brilliant…an Uzi. How much do I owe you?”

“Well, not quite. It’s a Chinese knock-offmachine pistol. But like I said, it’s a gift.”

“Who is she?”

“I’m not a gift.”

“Of course.” Klin grins.

“That’s Donna. She’s cool…she dances at the Liberty.”

“Thank you for inviting us,” said Donna.

“Well, you’re most welcome.”

“I told her it wasn’t a problem us showing up here. It’s not like you actually invite people.”

“Years ago I did. Now they just appear and as long as they’ve got…”

“I know who you are.” Danny’s metal right hand reached out to grab Robert’s arm. He shifted it out of range. “Don’t giveme the jerk off, man.”

“Hey, come on, be friends,” said Klin.

Danny caught Robert’s hand this time with his artificial right one.

“See, it pays to be polite. Now I could have one of those fake skin-like hands and from the distance you’d never know. But feel the power of the metal grip.”

“Yeahhhh…okay.”

He relaxed themetal pinchers that functioned as fingers. Robert massaged his sore hand, tempted into a fake Eastern bow, a circling downwards of his aching fingers in mock acknowledgement of Danny’s superiority. He stuck them in his hip pocket instead.

“Hear that?” Klin pointed at the trees. Playful animal sounds. He fired a round fromthe rifle. A yelp, panic in the leaves and twigs, then a noisy scuttling away.

“Klin, man…no more.”

“This is just the beginning.”

“I’m going for my jacket.”

“Too cold for you, hon?” Danny minced his lips at him.

Donna put a beach towel around her shoulders like a wrap. “Can I come?”

“Sure. Watch out for the rocks.”

“I’ll take my heels off.”

She bent down, unlatched the tiny buckles.

“Aren’t you cold?”

“The city was so hot. This is heaven.”

Behind them, water explodes against the shore.

Under the harsh yellow kitchen light, Donna placed her bag down on the table, opened it up, removed a glass bottle and a syringe, tied off her arm with a rubber strap.

“How old are you?”

“What difference does that make?”

She stuck the needle into the bottle, filled it, held it up to the light, tapped it with her nail. She sat down at the kitchen table, removed the towel from around her shoulders, and turned it into a pad for her elbow.

“What is it?”

“F/X.” She stabbed the needle into her flesh, drew blood, then pushed on the plunger.

Her green eyes went blank; he took the needle from her hand.

“Would you like you some? It’s mainly Demerol, I think, or that’s what Danny says it is.”

“No thanks.”

“It gives a pleasant, floaty feel. Not heavy at all.”

“I don’t do needles.”

“You know, that’s not such a bad idea.” She hiccupped, popped her hand on her mouth, giggled. “I’m nineteen. How old are you?”

“Just turned thirty-six.”

“Wow. That’s almost as old as my dad.”

“Yeah, I know, it’s pathetic.”

She watches as he scratches a match across the top of the stove, turns the burner on and lights the propane.

“I want to go swimming,” she says.

“The water’s freezing this time of year.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Make hot chocolate.”

“You’re like a mother.”

“Do you want some?”

“Maybe later.”

She disappeared into the night, the screen door banging shut behind her. Pinned to the wall over the sink were old photos. In one photo, Robert and Klin looked like mutant children with huge blurred faces, as they sat in a row boat, Robert pulling on the oars while Klin holds up the lake trout Robert had caught. They had just met that summer, Robert visiting his grandparent’s cottage. A head and shoulders shot of Klin’s father, none of Melissa, probably she had censored everything as unflattering. A lime-green photo of one of the girls Klin had dated in high school, bad teeth but huge breasts. It was tilted, Robert straightened it, couldn’t remember the girl’s name.

“God, this place is a museum.”

AWINDOW SHATTERED in the living room spilling broken glass on the fake bearskin rug. The revolution was on. Something flew past his ear, hit the stone fireplace and made a dent in the far wall.

He went flat to the floor, rolling next to the sofa.He reached over and pulled the lamp chord out of the wall socket.

More gun banging and screamed words. Another window broke. A yell.Donna calling out his name? ThenDanny’s crazy laughter echoing everywhere. He stayed face down, his breathing out of sync with the ticking pendulum of the grandfather clock. Silence for a time. He drifted into a half-sleep and an image came to him of Danny, like a shark circling his life raft, Klin tossing himbait fish to stir himup.

When he stiffly stood up, the night had turned, the windows filled with gray light.Halfway down the stone path, his shoe slipped on spent shells wet with blood. Klin poured water out of a bucket onto the dock.

“What happened?”

“Donna hit her head while diving into the lake.”

“Where is she now?”

“Danny took her to the hospital.”

“I didn’t hear his car leave.”

“You must have been asleep.”

“There’s blood everywhere.”

“It’s not all hers. Look.”

Klin rolled up his pant leg, showed a tied blood-soaked towel.

“You guys are nuts.”

“Yeah, well.”

“I know, fuck it, right?”

“Yeah, fuck it.”

“So that’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“What the fuck are you on, man?”

“Nothing.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“So don’t. I don’t believe you either.”

“No?”

“Why should I?”

“Because I’m honest.”

“Right. Of course you are.”

THEY WERE ON the dirt road to the highway when Klin swerved his Porsche around amassive pothole, almost smashing into the rear end of a car sticking out of the bush.

“That has to be Danny’s car,” said Robert. “Maybe he had a flat and he couldn’t repair it, what with his missing arm.”

“No.”

“You told me he drove a red Camaro. That’s red.”

“Yeah, red. The leaves starting to turn, already. Where does the time go? Why didn’t you save her?”

“Her? You mean Donna?”

“No,my mother, you idiot.Of course,Donna. You let her shoot up.”

“I couldn’t have stopped her.”

“Did you even try?”

“No.”

“Besides, she’s just a girl, right?”

“She’s just a girl?”

“Yeah…a stripper. Not even a very good one, according to Danny, but she likes to get high and fuck, that has to mean something.”

“She’s all right, then?”

“Yeah…he wouldn’t hurt her…I don’t know…she’s what…maybe twenty-one.”

“She told me nineteen.”

“At least not under age.He wants her to return to school.He really isn’t a bad guy once you get to know him. Just don’t think of him as a cripple, if you do then you’re in trouble.”

SHE’S JUST A GIRL. Robert remembered when Klin had first said those words to himback in his first year of university. Everything that Robert didn’t understand, feel immensely superior to—Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen, French declensions and even the frat-type boys that he shared the university residence with, had crystallized around blue-eyed Mary, Klin’s next door neighbour.

Panicked because of overdue essays and exams coming up, he swallowed two hits of blotter acid. Could have been cyanide for all he cared. He put in a long-distance phone call to Mary; she was living in residence at another university.

“I want to speak to Mary Dolan.”

The clicks and stutterings of the phone line as he waited. Someone finally picked up the other end.

“Hello?”

“Mary?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Robert.”

“Oh, hi.”

Robert didn’t know what to say. Hours seemed to pass, and then he was back on the phone, still searching for words.

“I took some acid. I wanted to call you.”

“Should you have done that? Don’t you have exams coming up?”

“Next week.

“Oh.”

“Mary, I really like you.”

“I like you too, Robert.”

Robert found himself drifting off again.His wildly electricmind.

“What did you say?”

“I like you Robert but I’m not in love with you.”

He wasn’t sure what had led her to say that but it was certainly what he didn’t want to hear. Then Klin was there, taking the dead receiver from his hand and hanging it up.

“I was talking to Mary.”

“She hung up and calledme. She suggested I get over here right away. It’s one of my rules never to go near a phone while on acid. The long distance charges aremurder and you never remember what anybody said.”

“I told her I loved her.”

“Well, she said you had taken the acid and were acting pretty weird. She likes you, but not in the same way you like her. It’s just one of those jokes that get played on us.”

“Why can’t I have her?”

“Forget it, Robert. She’s just a girl. Cruel as that may be.”

“But…”

“But what?”

“I could…”

“No, you can’t.”

He felt his nose, sure it was bit crooked, had a bump. He could get it straightened. He’d become this great musician, guitar player; Mary there to witness all his success.

He saw the cynicism in Klin’s burning blue eyes.

Did he say, “Forget it, man. You’ll never cut the mustard.”

Sounded like it but his lips didn’tmove. He was right. Even if he had a perfect nose like Paul Newman’s or turned into another Jimi Hendrix, Mary had her own plans for love and they didn’t include him.

Next he was rolling in the snow while the lights of the university quad flared into huge torches. Then he was back on his bed while Klin sat at his desk chair, sipping machine coffee.

“I like Mary, too. I’ve kissed Mary. We’ve fooled around some over the years.”

Klin peeled an orange, handed him slices that burst in his mouth.

“She’s just a girl, and she’s actually a little scared by how crazy you are about her. So forget it…there will be other girls, maybe even prettier than Mary. She has that Irish nose, though I agree her blue eyes are something else.”

Klin stood up and looked through Robert’s collection of text-the books, paperbacks and poetry books. He picked out the only leather-bound book Robert owned, A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. Klin flipped through the small perfect book, turned back the corner on a page and handed it to Robert.

“Try reading this while fucked up on acid.”

AT THE SEASIDE

When I was down beside the sea

A wooden spade they gave to me

To dig the sandy shore.

My holes were empty like a cup

In every hole the sea came up

Till it could come no more.

THE WORDS MOVED; little snakes that writhed and sparkled. Robert’s mind started to play too, frolic on the page. His own holes, his own Marys, digging there with his own poor wooden tool of a self. Until that sea, see. Whatever hole he dug, on whatever shore, it was his life; he couldn’t escape it, accept it.Maybe during the next seaside trip to this doomed and desperate planet, he’d have his Mary.

As if rewarding him for this insight, Klin cued up a Rolling Stones song on his roommate’s portable record player.

Have you seen her all in gold

Like a queen in the days of old

She shoots colours all around

Like a sunset going down

Have you seen the lady fairer

She comes in colours everywhere

She combs her hair

She’s like a rainbow

Coming colours in the air

Oh, everywhere

She’s like a rainbow

The music filling the roomwith prismatic rainbows like those at Niagara Falls when the sunlight hits the spray cast up by the rushing waters; a powerful loving force that was always with him if only he could keep his eyes clear, open.

He tried describing it to Klin. And Klin just smiled; Klin the messiah, holding a high-wattage answer in his blue eyes. Then Klin looked like a girl and Robert wanted to make love to him. In Klin’s face, he saw Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and all the others he still believed in. Then his face turned shadowy and evil, Klin hatching a scheme to kill him.

“Man, don’t hurt me.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“But you could?”

“You know sympathy for the devil; we’re all capable. I have evil.”

“I have...?”

“What?”

“Love.”

“You love everyone tonight.”

“I don’t love that fuckhead that runs my French language lab.”

“But everyone else?”

“Certainly Mary.”

“Forget Mary.”

THE WASHROOM NOISE of toilets flushing, taps running, the early morning goofing around; his fellow students rising to the bait of their early morning classes, exactly programmed, like in a Marx Brothers movie directed by Karl Marx. When he next drifted back into the room with The Answer lighting up his brain like an old-fashioned pinball machine, Klin was gone. Too bad. He had really solved it this time. Love, Sex, Death: lsd. How it all fit and why what is taken from one man goes nowhere because it’s all one. Connected. One flesh. One body. One gigantic mercy appetite. If only Klin had been there to hear it. If only he had written it down.

ROBERT WORKED HIS eyes against the window glare, squinted to see the noon-hour traffic of downtown Toronto. Twenty-one floors up. That’s freakishly high. Robert sat down at his desk and looked at the words on his computer screen.

Chocowow

Chocozow

Creating a name for a chocolate-flavoured kids’ drink. That’s freakishly sad. His mind walking a picket line, holding up a sign, TOO MUCH ABUSE. Time to get a real job. Maybe a wife too. His pathetic jottings had won him minor recognition, even a little abstract gold-plated whore statue.

Buy this, buy that.

That’swhat it came down to.What had he bought? Years ago,when high, almost everything. Debbie adding mescaline to her spaghetti sauce and Klin pricking his skin with speed shots. What did it all add up to?

Choconow.

Chococow.

He gave his brain cells over to the flashing cursor, his heart to the same sixty-cycle pulsing.

Choco wow me now!

KLIN HAD PUSHED him towards the camera so he’s a blur but Klin has this excited look on his face as if he knew some day Robert would turn to this page in the photo album and not be able to see what he looked like on his thirteenth birthday.

KLIN’S DAD BOUGHT him an electric guitar and signed him up for lessons from a rocker who had once played with Ronnie Hawkins. Klin practiced long hours, Robert joking about it. But Robert could hear a song once and play it back almost perfectly. It drove Klin nuts. Turned him scornful.

It’s all crap, radio shit, said Klin.He sold his guitar or at least pretended he had.

When a high school band called Salamander Grin picked Robert as their lead guitarist, Klin drove a fist into his face, supposedly over some girl that Robert had accidentally put straight about Klin’s true feelings towards her, but Robert knew the real reason for his bloody lip.

THE TOWER LATE on a Friday night. Robert can feel the shift as the building adjusts to the wind and his eyes travel the darkness and the fool’s gold lights stretching to the lake. Some incredible woman, some perfect man that you were meant to see or be, there somewhere, some bar, some car. Never reach it. The continental drift. The drive by. Gatsby’s green light out in Lake Ontario, the running lights on a singles cruise ship. Never dance with it. The irony dropped in between you and her and here. Indian summer. The last warmth.

Why are we here? Catechismtimes. Cataclysmic times. Oh yeah, to save. Save now. Save 30%. Do it now. Or return on Sunday to complete these ads. That’s real. That’s retail.

Around ten, he was one more fool caught in the lights wishing he was alone but instead crowded in a bar with them, that mix of boredom and expectation on their very ordinary and unique faces, possibly on his own face, certainly on Mike’s, the art director he worked with.

“She’s the clue in the living room,” making up a jokey song to Melissa, half-singing it in his fake blues, Tom-Waits-imitation gravelly voice. “She’s full of boardgame doom. She’ll bang you with a wrench pipe, kill you with a blast. You and her are simply a fucked up dream of the past.”

“Yeah...so let it go.”

“Can’t. Tried. Why does it matter? We’re talking abuse here on both our parts.”

“Both of you...?”

“Yeah.”

Mike knew Melissa as this almost cartoon image he was always trying to draw, showing her high-heeled power stance with Robert’s head between her legs, other drawings had her riding himout of the agency into some whip and chains sunset.

“You always did go for the leathers and the olders...so how does Klin feel about you performing on his mother?”

“If he knows he’s never said anything. But who knows? Maybe he’s hired a death squad, pinned a target to my back. Besides, she sees other men...that kind of thing. I know that. Klin’s angry with her dirty little habits but then he’s always been on some sort of rampage. His manic phase as he calls it. He’s the only genius I’ve ever known.”

“Come on. Don’t forget the agency boys.”

“Oh yeah! They’re all great. The aging hippie graybeards who thought up the slogans that torment our lives. Yeah. True immortals.”

Mike glanced over his shoulder just to check there was nobody nearby that could cause him career damage. Then he laughed.

“It’s hard to explain Klin. Hismind seems alien, a different construction. He told me about this man Ted that he’d stayed with on Calvert Island just off the coast of British Columbia. There was some sort of cult and everyone thought Ted was God, and there was a sense that the people there had come from another world—not aliens but far advanced, more like from the future. I asked Klin if he was one of them and he gave that abrupt cynical Klin laugh but then like a mad balloonman he was holding ten floating skulls on umbilical chords...the weirdest thing.”

“Were you...?”

“Only on his hallucination, fucked...I guess...and now he’s messing around with these new designer drugs. He’s only playing at the human scene, pretending to care about babies with holes in their hearts or whether his girlfriend has an orgasm…must have once had a decent emotion...maybe a decade or two ago when Lennon was shot.”

“I know dealers. It’s a crazy scene. You secure the drugs...get out.”

Robert witnessing with Mike’s cynical gray eyes the physical, hand-holding substance world, no dancing along the ledge in shadowlands; maybe he couldn’t either. Dance that is. Maybe the ledge wasn’t there after all. Klin just pretending to balance.

“Klin’s not a dealer.”

“On what level? Maybe higher than you see.”

Mike left tomake the call he’d been hinting at, if it was the right thing to do. Must have been, the dangling irritating Robert slightly, trying not to lose his almost benevolent feeling of the sublime slime they moved in.

“Freddy’s not home yet,”Mike almost whispering on his return, as if there were hidden mics wired into their conversation to arrest them. “But I left a message telling him we’d meet at his place in about an hour. He carries strange, inhuman stuff like your friend.”

He went to make his own connection, called Melissa but her voicemail answered.He thought of leaving a clever and obscene message but why, when all he really wanted to say was...let’s stop screwing around with all these games...so he didn’t say anything, so instead she’d hear the phone clicking dead, the buzz of the line.

Robert sat back down at the table and Mike ordered two more beers. Robert used the new bottle to trace his finger through the condensation, making a sign of the cross. God bless this holy effervescent brain-cell water. Mike was on his own altar, some intelligent prettiness that he was worshipping. Some fresh boy type. Brady’s sometimes had thatmix. Though it was too early forMike to indicate his interest. The unwinding still going on. The other was for later.

So hands grasping the ephemeral. Never quite clear what it was. The taste, the waste. A gas being released under pressure, a look under pleasure.

An overweight blonde girl with slicked-back hair ’50s style asked Robert to dance so they pushed their way into themiddle of the small crowded dance floor and then cleared a space by their own movements, but within acceptable rhythms, this was after all a main-streamclub. Robert could feel his own pull towards chaos, pogo this crowd, knock the boredom out of their distant galaxy faces.

His dance partner’s full flushed face showed incipient signs of social horror as Robert’s spastic rhythms no longer matched hers when all she wanted was to move her body with his.

Mike’s tug on his sleeve stopped him from taking that final lunge, tackling her down and burying his head between her thighs. She stood there motionless on the dance floor watching as Robert and Mike began to weave their way through the others out into the night, for whatever it gave.

They plotted their way through the city. Short-circuiting its standard long street rhythms for side streets with no lights, then they were in the small hill streets of the Beaches area. Mike parked and disappeared in one quick motion.

He reappeared in time warp fashion, producing a large plastic bag from inside his jacket.

“Grass?”

“Yes. Really great stuff from B.C.”

“Fuck. We can sit around and listen to Dylan.”

“He suggested this guy in Parkdale.”

“Parkdale? No way.”

Mike reached under the car seat and brought out a revolver. “Bought it in a bar in Florida.” Mike pulled the trigger. It clicked empty.

“Screw that. If it turns bad we walk away, even without our money.”

“Yeah, that’s cool.”

Boarded up with sheets of steel where the front door and windows should be, the house appeared like a black hole.Mike pounded on the steel. Something split the darkness.

Then as Robert’s eyes adjusted, metal-framed glasses showed a sparkle of street light. The face was all teeth, Cheshire-like.

“Yeah?”

“Freddy sent us,” said Mike.

“Freddy? No Freddy here.”

“He said you sold coke.”

“No coke.”

“Freddy’s the manager at The Plastique. Tall, blonde guy.”

“No coke.”

“Crack?”

“Yeah man, crack.”

“Let’s go, Mike,” Robert said.

“We’re here. How much?”

“Twenty a rock.”

“How do we do the deal?”

“Simple, man.”

“Six.” Mike held up his fingers.

An empty soup can was lowered. Robert thought rip-off but gave Mike his money.

Mike stuffed the twenties into the can.When it was lowered back down, the can contained a dirty white envelope. Inside it were six raw-edged sugar cubes.

“Do you think we’ve been ripped off?”

“No, that’s what this shit looks like.”

“Are you sure?”

“No. But we’ll soon find out.”

THEY DROVE TO Mike’s rented duplex in the north end of the city, finally found a parking spot two blocks over, walked back, the streets deserted, themoon half-full. Inside the house,Mike’s painted portraits of James Dean and David Byrne came at them from different directions because of the odd-shaped mirrors in the hallway.

Robert sat down on the director’s chair in the living room.Mike played with the lighting until there was only a spotlight on in the corner, the plants in the roomcasting crazy finger-like shadows. Robert poked at the envelope until a chip of baked powder tumbled out onto the glass coffee table.

“I don’t know about this stuff…we’re travelling pretty low on the food chain here.”

“This?”Mike picked up the piece with his fingers, placed it in the brass pipe. “It’s just candy for the blood.”

The pipe now in his mouth, Mike thumb-flicked the butane lighter, the blue and yellow flame licking at the cube. Three quick sucks, his face almost pink, a long exhaling, followed by more baby sucks, breath out, words out.

“God is great.” A laugh, choked off.

He swayed before losing control of his hands, dropping the pipe. The glowing ember of crack rolled, burning bright before extinguishing in a comma of smoke.

Mike curled up on the sofa. Robert retrieved the pipe and picked up the envelope. He tried to crush a rock between his thumb and forefinger. It was like a smaller version of the Eno bricks he’d light as a kid to drive a steam engine. A ragged edge came off but the rest resisted the pressure. He found it and tried to make the piece whole again in the pipe.

He wiped the tip of the pipe stemwith his sleeve, put his lips on it, still tasting the beer in Mike’s saliva. He fired the lighter, holding it over the pipe, the white rock glowing in response to his breathing. Then whatever lived in the rock entered him, filled his fissure of need, made him whole, his body sickness disappearing.

Mike’s sweaty hand, almost rat-like at his own for the pipe. He watchedMike suck another pellet.He stared at the neons and zebras gliding slowly through the bluish waters of the aquarium. He thought they stared back at him.

“THE FUNNY THING.” Mike stopped. A crazy grin. He started again. “You know Andrew?”

“Yes.”

“My…you know.”

“Yeah.”

“He told me a former boyfriend has tested positive. He’s afraid to take the test. So am I.”

“It’s okay Mike, even if you have it, it’s not a death sentence anymore.” Though he saw Mike already dead.

“Do you think they’d let me stay at the agency…meeting clients…if they knew? Not those bastards.”

Robert let his eyes play with the second hand on his watch. “It’s too late for the subway. I could try the all-night bus or a taxi.”

“You can crash here if you want.”

“No thanks. I’ll try for home.”

Robert tempted gravity by standing up. Mike separated a key from its chain and threw it at him. It flipped slowly through the air but he still missed it.

“It’s a ’93 Cavalier. Nothing special but it’ll get you there. Return it to me on Monday at work.”

“I don’t know if I should drive.”

“You’re a little wasted but you’re not drunk. You’ll be fine.”

Mike split the grass, spilling out his share on the table, giving Robert the rest and the baggy.

“You can pay me back next week.”

Sitting in the car, the cloth seat ice-cold, Robert almost went back in, realizing this was crazy. He only drove occasionally and this was a standard.He pressed down on the clutch and triedmoving the stick through the five-speed shift pattern.

He turned the key. The car started. He rolled down the window, the inside fogging up before the defroster did its magic. Finally he was in first, jerkily moving forward.

He got lost on the dense little suburban side streets before finding the Don Valley Parkway. As the car accelerated to highway speed, the broken dashes of the white lines turned into a cutout pattern that his eyes tried to scissor. He ended up straddling two lanes.

He almost missed the Bloor exit. He yanked hard on the wheel, pulling the car abruptly into the turnoff lane.

A blast of a horn, the squeal of tires behind him. The classic bang and shattering of headlight glass. The Cavalier pushed into the guard rail. His head hit the steering wheel.

He sat there stunned, the engine revving unnaturally high until he shut it off. He tried the door and it was stuck so he pushed at it with his shoulder and budged it enough to squeeze out. The Cavalier was between the guard rail and a late model Chrysler.

The middle-aged driver poked at his pushed-in grill. Robert touched the pain above his right eye.His fingers came away with blood.

“Are you hurt?” the other driver said, straightening up, putting his glasses away. “You cut right in front of me. I couldn’t stop.”

Robert felt dizzy so he opened the door on the passenger side and sat down.

Then he remembered the dope and the gun under the seat.

He stuck the revolver inside his jacket pocket with the grass. He zipped it closed. He eased out of the car, slid on the loose gravel. He hopped the guard rail.

The fence was about his height, six feet. He pushed his fingers into the diamond-patternedmesh and the coldmetal was rough and pitted. He stuck the point of his right shoe in and pushed up. Just as he was crouching for the jump down, he saw the pulsating red light arrive.

He leaped, landing with bent knees, falling forward, scraping his hands. The other driver was standing on the guard rail pointing at him.

Robert scrambled to his feet and began to run. He turned his head to see this tall bird-like cop, arms spread wide, leaping off the fence toward him.

He thought about tossing the dope,maybe the gun, but kept his hands away from his pocket. He waited, the blood stinging his eyes before dripping on his clothes.

The cop grabbed Robert’s arm, pinching it, so Robert shook him off, knocking him over. This time he grabbed Robert’s black cotton jacket, tearing it, then turned himaround, cuffing himwith his arms behind his back.

The cuffs bit into his wrists. It was ridiculous and humiliating at the same time. They had to un-cuff him to get him over the fence, pushed him down on the hood of the police car while they searched him. He was told he was under arrest for the possession of the dope and having a concealed weapon. Robert was driven to the division station where he was given a breathalyzer test. He passed that. At some point the cops must have read him his rights because he got his phone call. He called Klin and left a message. He was placed in a holding cell and the next day a justice of the peace put his hearing over until Monday morning.

They linked himup to ametal chain ofmen that they fed into the back of a van.

ROBERT WAS THE first to jump down. He climbed stairs to a locked door, a guard inside a glassed-in chamber. There was a passing of documentation. The door buzzed and the cop yanked it open. Robert followed him inside.

When they were all crowded into the narrow corridor, a guard opened the next door. They were un-cuffed, politely frisked and locked up in a cell. The cops walked out. A guard came by a few minutes later and called out his name.

He was led to a room with brown floor tile, stainless-steel tables and stools.

He was told to sit.

“Is this your current address?”

“Yes.”

“How long have you resided there?”

“Three, no...four years.”

The light click, click, click of the computer keys. He felt the chill in the jail’s dampness and zipped up his jacket.

“Next of kin?”

“Sister in Alberta.”

“Parents?”

“Dead.”

“Your sister’s name and address?”

“Paula Walker, 244 Crescent Ave., Calgary.

“Postal code?”

“Don’t know it.”

The guard removed a pen from his pocket, took the card that had been spit out and put imaginary check marks against the information.

“I gotta make a call...can you finish this one Peewee?”

Peewee grinned at Robert. “Over this way,” he said with a British accent. Peewee placed himup against the wall, swinging out ametal arm with a row of numbers that he changed.

Peewee stood behind a camera, released the shutter. There was a buzz and a brief flash.

Peewee came near, bent over so his face was too close. “Blood there. You’ll need nursing.”

Robert coughed, tasted bile.

“Easy.” Peewee patted him on the back. “How’d it happen?”

“Car accident.”

Peewee used a Polaroid camera to take a close-up photo of the cut.

Robert signed a form stating the cut occurred during the car accident. Peewee scissored out the photo and pasted it to an ID card. Next Robert was inked, his fingers rolled and printed one at a time.

Peewee put himon a stool again, dumped out his belongings on a small metal table.

He counted Robert’s money.

“Five dollars and forty-seven cents.”

Peewee wrote the amount down on a form and listed Robert’s belt, watch, keys, and wallet.

“Anything else to declare? No. Now you have to strip so I can body search you.”

Robert untied his shoes, removed his torn jacket, black cotton pants, shirt, and underwear.

“Stand facing the wall. Raise your arms. Spread your legs.”

Peewee bent down to get a good look, told him to turn around, his thick fingers hovering just above Robert’s appendectomy scar.

“Run your hand through your hair and raise your arms. Now get dressed in these.” He handed hima pile of blue clothes and a pair of dirty white running shoes without laces.

When Robert finished dressing, Peewee led him to the property roomand gave hima rolled-up towel, two sheets, a pillowcase, toothpaste, and a toothbrush.

He placed himin a cell with two others. Robert wrapped his fingers around the bars, his chest so tight he couldn’t breathe.

“Hey man, why you here?”

Robert edged his way towards the corner of the cell.

“Car accident. Cops found a gun, dope.”

Blocking his way was this thin blackman with tight knots of hair and a grin with missing teeth.

“Hey Jess, man, you hear that?”

Jess moaned.

“The cops mess you bad?”

“Yeah.” Robert nodded his head, keeping his back against the bars.

“What they call yeh?”

“Robert.”

“Say Robert…wanna weed or zap? I’m the one. Right?”

“Sure.”

A small step back, a hand raised for a slap, he moonwalked his way back to the bench.

“Move.” He dug an elbow into Jess’s leg causing another moan.

“What happened here?”

“Car accident.”

“You should have had stitches. Didn’t the police take you to a hospital?”

“No.”

“Were you unconscious at any time?”

“I don’t think so.”

The nurse put on clear plastic gloves and tried to spread the cut with her fingers.

“It’s tight, good.”

She touched around the bruising, proceeded to clean it with cotton swabs and antiseptic, which stung.

She placed a Band-Aid and handed hima dixie cup of water and two tablets which he swallowed.

Once back in the cell wing, he lined up to use the phone.

“Klin. It’s me…Robert. Now I’m in the Don Jail. You have to get me out of here. I’ll go crazy if you don’t.”He hung up, hoped Klin replayed the message soon.

AROLLED-UP TOWEL hit him on the head. He stood up, coughed before he tasted the bitterness of the pills. Then it sprayed out of him.

He ended up sitting down again, listening to the shouts for the guard, movement of the others scattering while vomit dripped from the table to the floor.

A guard angled a mop handle towards him, expecting him to take it.

“Don’t fight the man,” an inmate shouted.

“That’s right, better grab this, or I’ll have to file a report on you.”

Robert stood up and the room shifted. Arms under his own directed him towards the bars.

“Lock your fingers there. Hold steady.MacMillan, call the nurse. Can’t you see he’s fucked?”

“He’s already seen the nurse. Besides, Sorenson, it’s Mr. MacMillan to you. Now you can do the mopping.”

Sorenson mopped the table, and floor, soaking the vomit up but not the smell.

“We’ll be jug up soon, if you don’t wash that shit off, they’ll stick you face down in the toilet.”

“What’s jug up?”

“Lunch.”

“I feel sick. I can’t eat.”

“It’s not you. It’s the others. They’ll get pissed at you. You’re a cherry, first-timer; fight the fear. It’s the only way you’ll survive in here.”

Robert moved one foot after the other, walking the bars, hands ready to grab, brushing the steel, the washroom not much further.

“Somebody die in here or what?”

His face was yellow in the metal mirror.

He removed his shirt and washed it under the tap. He scraped his pants with wet paper towels. He still smelled.

When the lunch cart arrived, Robert went to themetal bars, took the plastic tray handed to him by the guard.

He tried eating the spaghetti with the fat metal spoon.

He forced down four spoonfuls and tore a slice of bread and chewed on that. Swallowed sips of the bitter tea. A cockroach crawled out from the underside of the table. He left it alone. When lockup came, MacMillan put him in cell number nine with a shaved bullet-head named Cooker.

“Shit man ya stink. I don’t want ya in my cell.”

“I washed the vomit off...”

Robert sat down on the lower bunk but Cooker grabbed his right arm and pulled him up, and swung him towards the metal toilet.

“That bed’s mine. The man’ll settle this.”

Cooker threw a plastic glass through the bars of the cell.

MacMillan waited for the door to pop before he slid it open.

“Now what?”

“Yo boss. We got a sick man here.”

“Why don’t we give him a new set of blues. Save all this,” said a guard standing outside the cell. “I’ll take him downstairs.”

THE ELEVATOR OPENED in the brown-tiled room he had been in before.

He stripped and the guard gave him a new set of clothes that smelled faintly of antiseptic. The shower needle-sprayed his cut, made it bleed.

Cookerwas pissed to see himagain.He climbed onto the top bunk.

Flat on the soft bed, Robert stared at a scratched message on the wall.

The moon in June

The moan in Joan.

—BANNIKU BANNISTER

The name of the writer seemed familiar. So did the clever, little poem. He thought of Joan Westaway and the night her Volkswagen broke down outside of Stoney Creek and how they huddled together because of the cold and fucked on a woollen blanket that smelled of her dog because there was nothing else to do.

He woke to the noise of Cooker’s pee hitting the metal toilet.

Dinner was a thick slice of pork and French-fried potatoes.

He found a battered copy of The Exorcist and Sorenson found him. He rolled a cigarette and picked at the loose strands of tobacco.

“How do you rate action like Abrams?”

“He’s a friend.”

“I wish I had friends like that.”

“I’ll ask him.”

“Yeah…right.”

“No. I will. If I have a chance.”

Sorenson laughed, lit his cigarette.

“Tell your friend my trial date is in about two months. Ain’t gonna happen though.”

“The trial?”

“Your friend.”

To still the shaking of his hands, Sorenson pressed down hard on the rounded edge of the table. On his lower left arm was the tattoo of a scorpion biting its folded-over tail, needle marks surrounding it.

“Man, don’tmake it obvious when you register something. Guys in here hate that.”

Sorenson stood up, the cigarette angled upwards in his mouth, the smoke causing himto squint. He found a place at the other table next to a man named Sousa, power-lifter shoulders, thick neck, moon-faced mix of races. He sketched out a scenario, his shaking hands mocking it out on the table.

Sousa shook his head, and said out loud, “No fuckin’ way,man.” Pissed, harsh Limey accent. He gave Robert the finger, passing it once under his nose. Cooker laughed.

Sorenson stood, Sousa too. Sousa shook his head again, turned his back. Then he came round on his toes, driving a fist into Sorenson’s gut.

Sorenson went down, broken in two. The others stood up, blocking sight lines from the corridor.

Sorenson waved off Robert’s help.

That night in the washroom, Sorenson had a tensor bandage around his ribs.

“Is it bad?”

“No. I’ve had worse. It’s only a fractured rib. They gaveme a couple of T-3s so now I’m kind of floating.

“I’m sorry if I caused you any trouble.”

“Look after yourself man.”

“Who’s Sousa?’

“Don’t ask.”

THE LIGHTS WENT OUT. Slowly the noise and talking died down. Robert put his face into the mattress, enjoying the licorice smell of the hash once hidden there. The cell door popped open. Two guards placed amattress and sheets down on the floor before carrying in and dropping a body.

The man’s bruised, bloody face rested against the base of the toilet.

Later, Robert tried to angle his piss away so as not to spray him.

IN THE MORNING, MacMillan tried to wake the man. Finally he and Cooker grabbed him under the armpits and dragged him to a table for breakfast. He fell face first into the scrambled eggs before they sat him back up again.

In the cell, Cooker ordered Robert to clean up the blood. He moved the drunk’s mattress, found the mop and pail, and washed down the floor. While he was doing this, he saw inmates hanging clothes through cell bars, grabbing white towels, having showers.

Yesterday’s stink was under his fingernails, in his hair. Lockout was now on; the doctor was in, old, his face blotchy, but his fingers worked quickly at cleaning Robert’s cut, leaving it exposed to the air.

On Robert’s return to the wing, a nature filmdescribing the hidden life of ponds played on the overhead tv. He stripped and hung his clothes through the bars of his cell, grabbed his towel and put it around his waist. In the washroom, Robert placed the towel on the partition that shielded him from the rest of the wing.

He rotated the knob, the water spilling out lukewarmand weak. He rubbed the soap into a lather, covering himself, staying away from the cut, washing his hair.

Robert felt movement behind him, turned to see Sousa naked, peeing into the urinal.

“Hey, Walker. What’s happenin’, man?” He laughed.

Size at the trough; who really cared? Yet it seemed every male at every urinal had to sneak a look. Robert mumbled a hello and now had Cooker standing behind, naked, waiting for him to step out and on.

Robert tried to peripheral stare, keep himself aware of where they were; not wanting to give thema queer look as if he was into any of this, his own jailhouse twitch in the eyes, not moving fast or clear enough through the soap and spray.

Cooker standing closer, at the edge of the stall, Sousa giving him a real smooth beer-commercial grin, before he pretend slips, grabs out, fingernails clawing Robert down.

Sousa’s weight rolling off himslightly, the right armraised, then straight down fist into Robert’s side. Everything gone; Sousa hitting, Cooker stomping him, big foot sideways boot.

Sousa forces Robert’s head around and down, pressing his cut into the drain, the soap, lather invading hismouth, stinging his eyes.

Cooker grabs his legs and spreads them, Sousa’s weight like that time the X-ray machine jammed him into the metal gurney, Sousa’s cock probing, truthing him.

The dick karma, what Robert had done to the queen, now here at him. He tries to roll out but has his head pinned and a hand over his mouth, the three of them locked into Sousa’s movement, the burning tearing tentative then full force as Sousa’s cock moves in and out, his body rocks and rolls as if he’s crawling deep guts inside the gold mine, the spray from the shower raining down on them.

MacMillan passes by saying, are you having fun in there, and Cooker says, sure boss, sure.

Sousa powerful, twitching energy, finally freezing hismovement into an everlasting jerk spasm, successful drilling, the hot spill, a geyser for the ages.

He moves so he is covering all of Robert’s head, the rotting dead earth stink of Robert’s ass coming from Sousa’s cock pressed into his face.

Another cock poking the pain, the drill bit at the last nerve so he rang with it, to the silent scream, Paulette Goddard on the tracks to oblivion, Cooker cooking him, a white grease heat—clang, clang, goes the trolley. Sousa shifts his weight, moves his head to stare at Robert, gives him a grin as if he’s going to cock stick his eyes.

“Hey, ain’t it sweet?”

Cooker moves down to hold his ankles, another inmate, Mouseman, attempts to mount but Sousa tells him, no way man, you gotta pay for all this excitement.

They take themselves off him, Cooker standing up swinging his leg and foot, crashing the air out of him, onemoremother time. Then Robert can hold himself, so he does, piled into a bunch of aching guts, the water soap lather blood swirling around him.

Tasting sore bloody tongue to get the breath in, his ribs stuck, not moving out.

HE FELL THROUGH the greasy, cold layers of petroleum time, a fossil of his former self.He stood to shut the freezing water off. He dressed in front of his cell, blood splashing his feet. He avoided the eyes of the others; their whispers above the noise of the tv. After supper, Sorenson sat down beside him.

“I tried to warn you,man, but there was nothing you could have done. They run this place.” Sorenson scanned the room, noticed Sousa returning to the cell area.

He quickly stood up. “Don’t say anything. It won’t help. They’ll kill you for sure; make it look like you off’d yourself.”

That night, as Cooker snored, Robert thought of strangling him. A mouse or small ratmoved along the bars, stopping, standing up on its hind legs. A sniff of the bad air before it disappeared.

In the morning, a guard came by and banged on the bars. Robert ate his porridge standing up and then a guard took him downstairs to a holding cell. He changed into his smelly, damp street clothes.

He was frisked, handcuffed, and loaded into a paddy wagon.

AT THE OLD CITY HALL courts, a bailiff waited as they made their way past him into the holding cells.

“How long do we have to wait here?” His first words since yesterday. How it hurt to breathe, to get the words out.

“Don’t worry, you’ll have your turn.”

A punker with crosses shaved into his yellow hair moved close, his leg irons clanking. Dark eyes into his own.

“It’s just too fuckin’ bad.” He hipped-hopped back.

Robert marked time by counting stains in the tile, scratches in the metal, men taken away. Finally his own turn, the bailiff saying Walker, opening the cell door, and following him as he moved down the sea-green corridor.

Herded into the box by the bailiff, he looked for Klin’s dark, handsome face. No Klin. A tall woman stood up instead.

The court clerk read out the charges. Blair Stevenson from Klin’s law firm did her bit, suggesting he was a law-abiding citizen with a good job and should immediately have his freedom. The crown attorney described him as a gun-possessing doper.

The judge set a trial date and bail conditions. They wanted fifteen thousand dollars. But Klin had already signed a cheque issued from his law firm. His assistant filled in the amount and they said he was free, though he could stay around and get a van ride back to the jail for his wallet and keys. He said, no thanks, would walk if he had to.

AS HE BREATHED in the cool air on the courthouse steps, a short black man with graying hair approached him.

“You don’t look so good.”

“You’re a cop.”

“Yes, I am.”

They marched down the steps of Old City Hall together.

“You have to go back to the Don for your things, right? I’ll drive you.”

“In return for what?”

“You know our motto: to serve and protect.”

The cop led him to his unmarked car behind the courthouse.

“You remind me of an actor.”

“Same name? RobertWalker, an Americanmovie actor who died after an injection of sodium amytal. He starred in Strangers on a Train.”

“No, that’s not it. You look like an actor. Yeah, I know. Warren Beatty. I saw this film last night on the movie channel called Mickey One. Do you know it?”

“Yes.”He glanced in the passenger sidemirror. No, he didn’t see Warren. He saw a worn, battered version of himself, cut and swollen over the right eye, three-day growth of beard.

Just another cop game.

“You were arrested once before.”

“I was at university, sold grass like hundreds of other kids. I was put on probation.”

“You’ll have to apply for a discharge if you want it off your record.”

“Well, I’ll apply.”

“I’m sure the Crown will remind the judge of the conviction when it comes time for sentencing.”

“I won’t go to jail over this.”

“You could. You might very well receive serious time for a weapon and drug offence.”

“I’m not guilty. The gun wasn’t mine; neither was the dope.”

“When’s your trial?”

“Next April second.”

“That’s a long way off. Our crowded legal system.” He laughed. “Nasty cut. It might get infected.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Abrams posted your bail.”

“Yeah. He’s an old friend or I’d still be in jail.”

“You realize that at any time your friend can revoke it and send you back.”

“He won’t.”

“Danny Salvarino’s really into your friend.”

“Klin’s just his lawyer.”

“What do you make of Henry Sousa? He was put in that cell wing just before your arrival from downtown. Klin’s his lawyer too.”

“He has a good lawyer then.”

“Do you know a stripper named Donna Sepejak?”

“No.”

“She borrowed a girlfriend’s jean jacket that night she went for a car ride with Danny up to Klin’s cottage. Did you see her?”

“No.”

“That’s a joke, right?”

“Why is it so important?”

“She’s missing.”

“So?”

“Her family’s worried; she’s only seventeen, though she pretended she was older.”

“You think I should know her?”

“I’ll leave that up to you.”

When they reached the jail, the cop drove up onto the sidewalk and parked. He handed him his card.

“My name’s Downey…if you ever need to talk.”

“Snitch, you mean?”

“No. Just talk.”

Robert went below to the garage door and picked up the inter-comphone. They buzzed himin, patted himdown, and he was given his possessions and had to sign two more forms. He pulled on the door; the cold, clear, outside air again.

IN HIS MAIL BOX was a rent overdue notice from the housing authority. Once inside his apartment, nothing welcomed him. David’s empty wheelchair was still on the balcony and David’s box of ashes sat on his desk.

He almost phoned Melissa but if he went to her condo (she never visited him after she spotted the cockroach), he couldn’t fuck her without putting on a condom. She’d get suspicious, cross-examine him (Klin had inherited that ability from her) until he confessed and described the rape.

He wanted sleep, needed sleep, but he also wanted to slide back into his body for the healing there, so soon after the rip, just crawl back into that other skin ache of lightly being touched, his nipples being sucked, his cock being sucked, affirm it as his, this swollen shit flesh, so he thought of Eli and the controlled gentlemachinations there, so he took some Tylenol 3s, shaved, showered, put on clean clothes, Mercurochrome and a Band-Aid on the cut. His stomach burned. He took swigs out of a Pepto-Bismol bottle. Itsmetallic tastemade himshiver.

HE WALKED NORTH on Jarvis Street to Isabella, crossed at the lights, Eli’s place just a body slam away from the so-called gay village, as if any village is really gay,more sad or dark like something out of the Brothers Grimm. Soon he was standing on the thick rug threshold of Eli’s condominium.

“It’s good to see you,” said Eli, shutting the door behind them. “It’s been awhile. What happened to your face?”

“Bike wheel caught in a sewer grate. I fell off.”

“I thought you had stopped biking.”

“No. Still bike when my knees don’t ache. Run sometimes, too. From the cops? No, just joking about that.”

Eli cleared his accounting work from the sofa, the television remaining on.

“Can I get you a drink? Glass of wine?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Robert sat down, picked up a photo of Eli in the Bahamas with a woman, long curly hair almost down to her waist. Eli returned, handed Robert the glass of red wine.

“So what have you been up to when not crashing your bike?”

“Not much. The job, a little music.”

Sound from the tv filled the silence.

She’s lying. I didn’t sleep with her.

Eli shut the sound down. Robert watched the mute soap opera actors. Eli touched him on the knee, stroked his cheek.

“I won’t hurt you. You know that.”

Eli reached down and felt him.

“How are we doing down here?”

Robert returned to a piece of himself.

Eli unzipped him and removed it from his underwear. He fingered it like it was a musical instrument he was going to play.

“I’d really like to put my mouth on it. But I better not.”

Robert zipped himself up and followed Eli down the long hallway, not looking in themirrors, remembering his earlier self and his first visit. They undressed, Robert piling his clothes on a chair, Eli carefully hanging his up in the closet. Eli rolled back the covers on the bed.

Robert headed to his side, and stretched out flat on his back. Eli ripped open the condom package and unrolled it onto his cock. Robert wanted to touch it so he did, the fingers of his right hand rubbing it.

Now Eli’smuscular bodymoved against him, turned sideways so he could fit a condomon Robert. After he had unrolled it on the shaft, he examined it for tears. Then he put his mouth over it, going down to the base, touching Robert’s balls with his fingers, then back up to the head where his tongue explored the shape.

Robert stared at him, not quite believing he was doing this again. Sex with an older man, maybe the physical affection he never got from his father or perhaps a family relative had molested him years ago and he had repressed the memory. Or maybe he was just gay, a homo, a pansy, and he couldn’t admit it to himself, and others, especially to Klin who was always telling faggot jokes.

With his side fringes of graying, reddish brown hair, and bulbous nose, Eli looked like Bozo the clown gone queer.

Eli raised his head. “I don’t want you going off onme; at least not yet.”

Robert kissed Eli’s cock, gently mouthed it, sucked it like he imagined a beautiful woman might suck it. Eli pushed him away.

“No. Wait.”

He licked Robert’s ears and tried to nibble his eyelids.

“Not the eyes.”

“Sorry.”

He mounted Eli and rubbed against him. Robert was a beautiful Vogue model and he was going to fuck Eli with his virgin cunt. Eli pushed out from under him.

This time he fastened on Eli’s cock and there was no resistance as he bobbed his head. Then a final “Oh, no.” He could feel the hot fluid throbbing like a pulse under the skin of the condom.

Robert climbed on top of Eli and rubbed again until everything he felt squirted out of him into the rubber. Never quite this empty even with Melissa.

Eli hurried into the bathroom. Robert heard the coughing, the spitting as the shower started up.

Robert peeled off the condomand threw it into the wastebasket. He dressed, not wanting to say goodbye, and let himself out. He was back on the street with one more dirty secret to hide. He did up his jacket, lifted the collar, muscled his face to look like James Dean.

THAT NIGHT, he woke up around three in themorning and called the aids hotline. The recorded message told him he’d have to wait at least four to six weeks if he wanted an accurate result.

The next day, he had this image of himself covered in sores, aidsdemented, and howling from his apartment window. He read Nietzsche’s Will to Power and old issues of Cosmopolitan left in the garbage room. Between feeding his will, he stroked himself, using the sexy photos to spasm stillborn.

That night he went for a long walk and bought three Oh Henry! chocolate bars at a convenience store. The sugar high kept himawake until five in the morning. He channel flipped between the late-night movies and talk shows, then the infomercials.

The next day, he called Ingrid and arranged to meet her for dinner at the Nim Bo restaurant at Dundas and Spadina.

Ingrid was late, but he didn’t mind. He offered her his hand to shake but she laughed at him and sat down. The waiter wiped the table with a dirty rag, returned with a pot of tea and poured it into two cracked porcelain cups.

Robert told Ingrid some of it, moved his tongue around the chipped image he now had of himself. Not once did he see the flash of a guillotine in her eyes, that death sentence of judgment.

She was dressed in her gypsy style,multicoloured skirt and peasant top. Her Raphaelite look. Her henna-coloured hair descending like a veil to her shoulders. He liked her strong, almost masculine nose and clear blue eyes.He didn’t know where her voice came from, as much from himself; it reached so far into him.

“It’s horrible what they did to you, but I know you have the strength to survive it. You know that too, Robert.”

“I don’t know that.”

“Yes, you do.”

“But it connects back to Klin.”

“Then have it out with him. Or better yet, go to the police.”

“But what if I’m wrong?”

“At least you’ll know.”

“But I don’t want to know.”

“We’re going around in circles. How do you feel now?”

“Jail strange. That at any moment I’ll awake up in that cell with Cooker and Sousa.”

She touched his hand, covered it with her own. It was cool and somehow without weight.

“Here.” She removed a ring fromhermarried finger and placed it on his baby finger.

“Take this jade ring and treat it as yourmagic ring;make the bad guys disappear.”

“I only wish. But what happens if he’s one of them?”

“Who?”

“Klin.”

“But you’re best friends.”

“But maybe we aren’t any longer.”

“Go to that cop and tell him all you know.”

“As a last resort?”

“If that’s how you see it.”

Watching her manipulate the chopsticks to place a pan-fried shrimp in hermouth then tearing at it with her teeth and fingers, he thought about her grease on his hands, that particular fish smell, his fingers slippery with the love feeling. But he’d have to be a man for that and was he anything other than Sousa’s bum boy?

“I talked to Janet. She said that they hadn’t heard from you at work, tried to call you, not even a recorded message. Is that true? They could fire you.”

“I know it’s stupid but I unplugged the phone, disconnected myself from the world.”

“How do you feel about this week?”

“I don’t think I can do anything until I talk to Klin.”

“Then talk to him. You’re probably still friends.”

“What are we?”

“I’m your friend too.”

“Is that all we are…friends?”

“Please. Don’t.” The eyes quickly on him, then off.

He looked around. The restaurant had filled up with university and art college students. He couldn’t look at them without wanting it all back.

Did they recognize himas one of their own? A clansman of their migrating tribe who had carried his Brothers Karamazov, his Kierkegaard, and stayed up late at night arguing obscurities between writing an overdue political science essay, then dragging himself to class the next day half-asleep.

No. They did not see him. He was just older backdrop material.

“Klin wants me to bring you to his Hallowe’en party.”

“What did you tell him about me?”

“That you’re married and that we’re just friends.”

“You know I can’t.”

“Couldn’t you lie?”

“No. Though Tom doesn’t care.”

“What is it then?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“Your eyes.”

This time she held his eyes and he had to look away. It wasn’t part of the arrangement, her probing, examining the hurt.

“You’re like a frightened little boy when you’re not putting on a swagger. What happened to you?”

“You know.”

“I know. Jail’s a horrible place. But even before that…this summer… with that woman.”

“You mean Klin’s mother…Melissa?”

“Now that is sick. No wonder he’s pissed at you.”

“But he’s never said anything.”

“Oh here you go again with your convenient naiveté. Of course, he’s angry.Wouldn’t you be if your best friend was sleeping with your mother?”

“She’s dead. But that wouldn’t stop him.”

“The two of you deserve each other.”

“No. You’re wrong about that.”

He pushed shrimp tails and snow peas to one side on his plate, tracing patterns in the grease, and when he felt it was time, looked up, trying to soften whatever it was in his eyes; staring into her blue eyes, suddenly colder, sizing him up.

“See.”

“I can’t see them.”

“But I can. I can’t carry that. Not now; maybe never.”

“There’s more ...” Or was it less? He only hoped for something else. In his eyes or not.

“Yes. Maybe there is. The ring.” She tapped it twice with her finger.

“What about the ring?”

“It’s magical.”

“I only wish.”

“That’s the spirit.” She laughed, raked her hair with her nails and their eyes met, a truce. Holding steady, no look-aways, until the waiter reached over and filled their chipped porcelain cups withmore lukewarm tea.

If only he could believe; in her eyes or not, a guardian angel, flexing her muscles in sex.

AT KLIN’S HALLOWE’EN PARTY, he hesitated just inside the front door, trying to find a face that he recognized but instead it was all masks on masks, the laughter brittle and suspect.

He put on his sunglasses, not trying to be cool, not that fashion sin, but so they couldn’t see his eyes, Ingrid’s legacy.

He went room to room looking for Klin, returning to the living room, feeling paranoid, that they all knew about his jail time and Sousa.

He grabbed two beers and opened the sliding patio door. The blast of cool air was refreshing even though it seemed to fasten to his bones,make his fingers and back ache. He searched his pockets, found the anti-inflammatories that he always carried, and sucked down a couple of ibuprofen with his beer. He should eat to cushion the pills but instead he shut the glass door behind him and headed out into the garden.

He sat down in a chair and removed his sunglasses. By the drained swimming pool, twomale gypsies were attacking each other with their mouths and hands. Turning his back on them, Robert watched the almost-silentmovie on the other side of the glass, Freddy Krueger dancing with a white-haired witch, the late night tv signoff, a still young Queen Elizabeth with Spiderman.

Then Rasputin made his entrance; Danny, dressed in a white suit, but looking like the advisor to the last Russian Czar. He started to twitch to the dance music, his metal hand scratching the air.

Danny was carving out tombstone information, the skeletal facts, born briefly in that room, his good hand tight on the waist of the prettiest woman at the party. The power in his “fuck you” attitude, so what if I’m this ugly crippled mess; Robert turned his back on him.

The gypsies had departed. Clouds tore apart in front of the full moon. Klin too close and bloody to remove and put on the examining table; he could only make it to Prague in the 1920s and Franz Kafka. But Kafka on steroids and other artificials, maybe contained in themeat, so the brown earth sadness was gone fromhis eyes, and instead they were blue, almost radioactive in a post-apocalyptic lunar-drifting kind of way.

Klin had once introduced him saying he’s creative and I make money. Counterfeiter was Robert’s answer. Fitter was Klin’s final topspin reply. He mimicked the wind by blowing on a half-empty beer bottle.

The patio door slid open. He turned around, expecting Danny but instead it was this tall, dark-haired woman, costumed like Elvira, the vampy horror television host.

She was walking by his chair when she noticed him and almost tripped in her high heels.

“You scared me.”

“Your costume very scary, very sexy.”His Count Floyd accent from the old sctv comedy series getting him her quick little bubble laugh.

“It’s just that you’re sitting out here all alone.”

“I needed a break fromthem.”He pointed his beer bottle towards those on the other side of the glass.

“You’re not wearing a costume.”

“I have a costume.” Robert put his sunglasses back on.

“My mistake.” She laughed again. One of those sex laughs he associated with dead blonde movie stars.

“Have you seen Klin?” he asked, taking off his sunglasses, putting the beer bottle down on the patio stone.

“No.”

“Your connection to our Mr. Jay Gatsby?”

“I sold himan investment property.We’ve gone out a few times. Not much of a connection, I’m afraid. What’s yours?”

“Childhood friends.”

“In Toronto?”

“Yeah. Born and bred. Not many of us left, the tribe is almost extinct.”

That bubble laugh again.Maybe to dismiss him. He reached for her hand, a bird warmth that relaxed briefly then flew after squeezing his fingers. Another smile, her eyes careful with him.

“I’m Robert the Walker, a small clan, most buried.”

“Linda Martin…born and fled Estevan, Saskatchewan.”

She stood there, motor revving, high-powered body, made in Canada, Maple Leaf forever.

“Do you want to search out Klin?”

“No. Stay here withme. I have a reason for coming outside.” She pulled a plastic baggie fromher small leather purse. “It’s too good to pass around.”

He took her hand and led her through the maze of light and shadows until they reached the stone bench. She sat beside him, a perfume of sundried flowers and wine.

She offered him a tiny skeletal arm carved out what looked like ivory.He dipped the hand in the powder, she holding the bag open.He accidentally scratched his nose with it before sniffing the powder up.

“It’s almost pure.”

Robert heard her but from a long way off, her own dip and blow on the skeletal arm, was it the future?

“Take another hit.”

He obeyed her. Anything to slow down his heart, but instead it got faster, trying to pump right out of his body.

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s too much; I almost feel like I’m dying.”

“I tried to warn you. It’ll get better. Give it time. You’ll feel good, believe me.”

He stood up and began to walk away.

“Come back.”

He turned around and sat back down.

“Look, I won’t hurt you.”

Linda was like tiny cuts in his skin as she touched and rubbed his jacket to keep them both warm.

“Do you want some more?”

“Not right now.”

He leaned into her and she pressed against him. It didn’t hurt this time. He kissed her. She kissed back. She pulled him to his feet and led him past the garbage cans and cars in the back alley. A dog barked.

“My car.” She popped the locks with a remote. She waited for him to sit down. She got in, and turned the key. The engine kicked awake, the whole car vibrating.

“A Corvette, cool.”

“You like cars?”

“Not really.”

She backed out, punched the accelerator; the speed forcing him deep into the leather seat. She zigged and zagged the residential streets barely pausing at the stop signs. Through the sunroof, he watched the night break into neon lights and television.He pulled on the door handle to get a rush of fresh air. It wouldn’t budge.

“The car’s got a door lock override. Good thing or you’d have hit the pavement for sure. Better do up your seat belt.”

He looked at his watch, past twelve, later than his sense of it. He started to chatter a Latin rhythm with his teeth so she increased the flow of heated air. The dash lights made her glow, her black dress riding high, large areas of nyloned thigh, the sex in her breathing and movements. The only thing that kept him from falling for her was her hard, tight mouth and the lines there.

Linda parked off Yonge Street. A parade of cars honked their horns, bare-chested men poking half their bodies out the open windows. A pair of drag queens carried flashlight dildos. A dominatrix nun playfully slapped a whip across the back of a handcuffed prisoner in old-fashioned stripes.

A man overdressed in winter rags fished a half-eaten slice of pizza out of a garbage bin.

Robert knocked over a beer bottle with his foot, stumbled to get clear of it.

Linda grabbed his hand. “Kiss me again.”

He did. When they broke apart, she walked ahead of him, a deliberate hip sway in her spiked heels, liking the attention. Klin would have called her an eye-baller, one of those chicks that fuck you with her eyes, just to tease. She flirted with store glass and mirrors, seducing herself.

Finally, she spotted a bar she liked and took his hand again, to get them past the bouncer, who nodded at her. They found their way to a back table, directly under a speaker. Her small mouth moved. He thought he heard: “Costumes here too, but any real characters?”

If it was her wit, he accepted it. If a distortion then just more of the same.

The waitress said, “Hey Linda, love the costume,” while clearing glasses.

Linda ordered them domestic beers and barbecued chicken wings. The waitress smiled at him, squeezed his bicep.

“Why did she do that?”

“What?”

“I said why did she…oh never mind.”

“Here.” Linda handed him a business card, listing her phone, cell phone, and e-mail address. The card was embossed in gold. She was a vice-president for something called First National Realty.

“Do you have one?”

“No. I can give you my number later if you want.”

“Sure. Whatever.”

He leaned towards her, seeing Linda clearly for the first time in the burst of light from the double swing doors of the kitchen. Really a stranger’s face.

“What did you sell Klin?”

She widened hermouth, forced out. “A fourplex on the east side. There’s a Greek bakery, a couple of apartments.”

Robert moved closer until she was all distortion. A black puffed-up wig, curved nose, a massive pimple on her chin.

“How did you get into this?”

“After my MBA, I wanted to earn money fast. No choice, really.”

At the table next to them sat three Blues Brothers, one of them with a cat-like face, perfect features. He detached himself from his brothers. His voice got louder. Now his jokes were as much for her.

She was small ha, ha, ha’s. A slight shift of her chair and she would be as much with him as with Robert.

The whole masculine paranoia trip, be strong and young enough, good-looking and rich enough or they disappear on you. He knew it was stupid, easily saw through it at other times, but tonight the cocaine and booze like a wrench in hismind, tightening the nut. The bones fromthe chicken wings piling up in front of him; can’t appear knowing and sophisticated, fingers greasy with barbecue sauce.

Blue moved his chair again so he sat almost at their table. The grin there as much for Robert as for her, that confidence. She gave him her teeth in return.

“Yes?” he said, meaning her.

She looked himover as she took a sip of her beer. Robert thought for a moment perhaps the three of them, if that’s what she was into. Most likely he’d end up alone; if he was her, he’d have gone for Mr. Blue.

Then she cut him.

“No thanks.”

“I’mperfectly harmless. Just a U of Tmed student out for some tricks...or treats. Are you having a good time?”

“A wonderfuuullll time.” She did it affected, Tallulah Bankhead style or Craig Russell doing Tallulah. It all blended after awhile. Or was it her attempt at the real Elvira?

Blue gave her his most intense look and when he saw her stone face, knew that it wasn’t his turn or time. He slid his chair back.

“Klin.”

“What?” she said.

“Klin is fucking great.”

Still her boredom.

“He’s a genius.”

“I hear he’s a very good criminal lawyer.”

“The best, though I can’t afford him.”

“Do you need him?”

“Not really.”

“Are you crazy?”

“I used to be. Now I’m not sure.”

She applied more lipstick, took another sip of her drink, brushed her eyes by the Blues Brothers table.

Then she made rustling noises that told Robert they were leaving. He pushed his beer to the centre of the table. She put money down, said something about the washroom, wait. He stood, jostled by others trying to sit down. He made his way to the front of the bar and watched her return to their table. She bent down as if to pick up something, but handed the Blues Brother her business card.

Robert turned around, feeling gutted, then cold. Her hand in his back prodded him forward out into the street.

In the car once again, stop and go on Yonge Street, picking up speed on a highway ramp, a gigantic billboard face giving him a wink. He wished for music, any music, but she opened the sunroof to the cold night air so he listened to the wind instead.

LINDA INSERTED a plastic card, the garage door opened up into a blazing palace of gleaming cars and lights. He felt like he was on themoon, his feet sank so deep into the hallway carpet. Linda unlocked the door to her condo.

He sat on the white leather sofa while she set the light levels and music. The song finding him too easily with its lyrics.

Put your knife in me

Put your knife in me

I love you

I love you

I’m worthless

I’m worthless

Somehow it fit. Somehow she fit. The black dress, stockings, puffed wig.

“You’re…really too…much.”

“I’m Elvira.”

“Yes you are.”

Again the skeletal arm is out and she did herself, looked at him but he held his hands up in mock surrender. She drifted away from him. The connection broken. But then she stood up under a rainbow-coloured mist that tingled and teased him. The music cut out, leaving only the sound of their breathing. She tugged on his hand and led him down a hallway straight into a mirror. She dipped left. He stood there looking at himself, jailbird, wrong side of thirty.

In the bedroom she lit candles and incense and it was like he was back at university, a chick drunk on wine wanting to mess around. But no, he was here with this woman, this freak. His own horror show.

She tossed the wig, shook out her blonde hair, and turned around. He fumbled with the back of the bra, but she unhooked it fromthe front. She rotated again, he touched her panties, the outside then the inside, his two fingers a dowser for wetness, the panties slithered out of and kicked.

She fell back onto the bed, reaching for him. He stood there, staring. She pushed at himwith her foot. He piled his clothes neatly.

He fell down beside her, his face tickled by the long strands of her blonde hair. She crawled on top of him, the hips and entrance angled away, then started to grind at him. Like two scorpions, that was his image. But he was still not inside her. He wanted to plant his stinger there, fill her with his poison.

Her own hips bent away from him like an overhead tail, as she squeezed her hands down hard on his shoulders. But his cock still soft.

He turned her over onto her back, pushed down so she became an impression in the bed. He was almost in, slipped out, tried again, stroked himself, not looking at her.

His cock semi-hard and she knocked him off and climbed on top, knees astride, began to ride him, her pinching fingers on his spread-eagled wrists. She slowed her motion the grinding turned into a tease, a dance of hair on him, a sweet victory smile in her eyes. She kissed him. He slid out from under her, and she rolled onto her back.

He kissed her neck, ears, and small breasts, each nipple. He tongued a wet line down her stomach. He pooled saliva in her belly button. He consideredmouthing her but instead used his guitar fingers to clit her. Finally she yelled, spreading her tight mouth. Then soft whimpers. He smelled her juices on his fingers, rubbed them into the sheet.

She touched herself, bringing her fingers to her mouth then to his, for him to kiss.

He directed the hand to his cock, let her play while he searched for images to make him hard. He mounted her, the neutral cock inserted as much into himself.

And when he unloaded, still not really hard but just soft spasms, what did she have waiting for his pollywog sperm cells? As his cock shrunk further and drained a small pool on her thigh she moved away from him, shifted her weight so he was beside her, covered them both with a velvet sheet.

He looked over at her, the smeared makeup illusion of Saskatchewan wheat fields, of sun and cold, her face as empty. He drifted on the warm waters of the bed, only to shift as she got up, a shower buzzing on; she returned, wet hair, dressed in a bathrobe to find him, still there. The horror.

“I never let anyone stay over. Ask your friend Klin.”

“Really?”

“I’ll call you a cab. There might even be a tip in it for you.” She laughed.

ALMOST NOON, his head thick and dull like the gray overcast sky; after he peed, he looked at his small tired penis, white dandruff powder in the soft folds of circumcised skin. He washed it with soap and water which left Linda’s smell on his hands before he soaped up again.

ONE MORNING HE didn’t go into work and there was a call, a message left on his machine, not to return and that his things would be packed up and shipped to him, along with four weeks’ pay in lieu of notice.

He sets up appointments with creative directors at the different agencies, spreads out the ads and scripts making up his portfolio. They gossip, make some vague promise of future work. He leaves. It’s timed and structured so beautifully. Politeness, good old Canadian politeness.

He returned late Friday afternoon with three plastic bags of groceries, enough food for the next week. He had put the bags down on the kitchen floor when the phone rang. He let his answering machine take the call. A lift from the movie Cool Hand Luke.

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate, some men you just can’t...”

Then he changed hismind, picked up the phone, feedback, so he shut down the machine.

“Bob?”

“No. Yes.”

“It’s Danny of Danny and the Diamondbacks.”

“Yeah?”

“Your apartment’s a mess.”

“My apartment?”

“I paid you a visit. You weren’t home so I looked around; saw your poor friend sitting there in his box. It’s time we gave him a decent burial. Listen.”

Danny laughed, then the sound of a toilet flushing, this all happening while Robert looked around the corner to see if the box was still there. It wasn’t.

“Your friend’s now free to swim in Lake Ontario, with all the dioxins and pcbs.” Danny hung up. Robert heard this other call coming through slightly garbled in between the static.

“The same. One. Where else. In your dreams? In bed?”

A piece ofMickey One dialogue, that’s what it sounded like.Was the cop Downey listening in? He pressed the talk button on his phone; the line buzz reassured him.

He had once described to David a campsite deep in Algonquin Park and David told him it sounded so much like what all this must have been like before we destroyed it.

He was going to find that spot again and scatter David’s ashes there.

He turned the kitchen tap on, wondering if his friend was now part of the same pollution. He put a glass under it, held it up to the light and drank it.

ROBERT ARRANGED TO do the buy in the restaurant’s downstairs washroom. One of the waiters, someone he hadmet years ago at a party, kept awkwardly running into, necessitating a few words here and there. One phone call, easy enough to reconnect; after the cursory questions about current state of health and main fuck buddies, they squeezed into a stall and got down to business. Robert offered his money, Tim unwrapped the goods.

“What do they cut this stuff with?”

“Mostly baking soda, sometimes weird drugs like pcp or lsd. Usually they cook the cocaine with baking soda in water and roll the paste into balls. When it dries, you’ve got crack. And when it’s as pure as the stuff on the street right now, it’ll take your head off. So be careful.”

On his return home, he decided Danny was right, it was amess— the books piled on other books, the three guitars, the two amplifiers, the posters of James Dean andMarlene Dietrich, the broken and aged bits of furniture, and his great-grandfather’s pastel drawings of a Hamilton church standing by the old Dundas canal.

He packed away his books in boxes, took the posters off the walls. He tore up the photograph of Kimberley stuck to the fridge with magnets, flushed it down the toilet.

David’s clothes and books he bagged up and piled on the wheelchair and pushed it to the far corner of the balcony, unprotected by any roof. He placed a plastic sheet over it.

He went through his cds, tapes, even his old vinyl records, tossing out what he hadn’t listened to during the past year, letting the music rattle its way down the garbage chute.

Now ladies and gentlemen, back from his recent tour of the Don Jail, we present Robert Walker, musician extraordinaire!

He picks up his best guitar, a Gibson Les Paul, its curves fitting to himlike a body. He doesn’t plug it in; instead his left hand, almost automatic on the fret board, drifts into chords. He searches for a vibration of the metal strings that will mean something.

He hears the garbage chute open and close, the clang of more junk. His fingers ache with the need to play, but he can’t.

He gulps a glass of red wine, the bottle opened amonth ago, the harsh taste actually soothing, scans his remaining tapes and disks, selecting Dead Can Dance for their weird tribal chants.

So what did itmatter, putting some rock,man-made, thus nature-made, in his old hash pipe and smoking it.

He needs this gas to survive on this dead, barren planet.

He channel flips with the remote. The images on the tv control his mood. When the tv’s fed, he’s fed. At the slightest bit of disharmony, a universal starvation. He laughs, suddenly responsible for a bus crash in India, killing thirty-nine people.

He clicks the tv off, and follows the blip of light until it completely disappears. He smells something burning in his apartment, his brain cells. Out on the street, the air punctuates with particles.He walks staggered like a zombie, gravity on a rhomboid tilt, so he leans into it, seeing the street with its dying trees and question-mark light poles like a water stain on the outside of a crypt, gray outline world as make-believe and dead.

HE ENTERS The Onion Grill, slides onto a counter stool; goes quickly under for the operation, the buzz in the fluorescent lights and the weird animal fat ether from the frying meat.

The cook flipping a raw burger; it tumbles through the air and lands with a splatter of blood and grease like a suicide on the asphalt-like grill. Finally the waitress breaks off her conversation with the ball-capped security guard and clears the dishes in front of him. He orders a coffee.

His inner, critical voice turnsmute, replaced by the voices in the café.

“See the way he holds his coffee cup. Effeminate. A closet queen. Why almost forty, no wife and no children and no job?”

As the waitress and other customers comment on his life, their lips barely move. Amateur ventriloquists. “He had this dream to win fame as a brilliant musician. The dream is almost as old as he is. Wrinkled as he is. Crippled as he is.He’s not sharp enough, he couldn’t cut the mustard. He’s leaking sawdust filling like a badly sewn doll fromChina.”

He sips the coffee hoping the caffeine will shut the fuckin’ voices up. He turns to the white-haired man next to him to challenge him, but his eyes have that faraway blank stare of the blind, his thick, gnarled hands trying to cut up and fork a piece of minute steak into his dark-holed mouth.

Robert pushes his half-finished coffee away, grabs a handful of coins from his pants pocket and drops them next to the saucer. His shoe catches on a torn tile in his rush to get out of there and he crashes into the door.

THE COLD WIND waters his eyes. He walks the block to the bus shelter and when the streetcar arrives, rides it to get warm.

He bounces down the cement steps into the subway system. He slips the transfer under the glass cage to the attendant. Through the turnstile and downmore steps. The screech ofmetal onmetal as the train arrives in the station, the wind pushing up his hair, brushing him. The wall-to-wall mural of red and blue hockey players. He notices the triangularMind the Gap sign so he cautiously looks for what was left of his in that fraction of darkness between the platform and the train. He finds an empty seat, facing north; he looks out the dark window, an ugly, ancient mask stares back at him, the scab over his right eye like a worm tunnelling into him.

At the Eglinton stop, a bag lady limps onto the train and the ammonia smell of her urine-soaked clothesmakes himhold his breath. She pulls her shopping cart closer to her seat and points at him. “God says where did you putmy child? I told himI put it under the kitchen counter. That was in 1976. Joe was with me then.”

Robert escapes at the next stop and enters a small park that’s vacant except for two maintenance workers. Robert finds a spot in the small grouping of evergreen trees. He pushes past the sharp needles and leans into the trunk of the tallest tree. He removes the pipe and a piece of crack and quickly lights it. He sucks long and hard, letting the pipe breathe for him.

Away from the trees, he hits a wall of cold air. He walks south on Yonge Street past a cluster of teenage girls wearing blazers and short plaid skirts; the wind turns their long hair electric; they give off a sexual energy that squeaks.

Next he passes a wheelchair rider; he invents David’s face.

He stops to watch a young mother sitting on a park bench with her three small children. The oldest boy, not more than six, bounces a fluorescent-orange ball; his surprise at catching it, as if he’s snatched the sun out of the sky. The woman turns to stare at Robert so he moves on.

When he arrives back at his apartment, he smokes the final piece of crack, amystic who’s discovered the pleasures of chemistry. Sitting in his chair, unable to move, he’s mesmerized by a piece of cobweb tugging at its restraints, as air from the vent grill turns it into this very precise ballet dancer, then Donna the stripper, before he stretches out his right leg and smashes it with his big toe.

The cold hours drip through him like ice water through an iv.

A seagull’s cry echoes in his brain, a skully gorge, human sacrifice to ancient primitive gods who’ve moved on, bought a condo down by the lake.

OUTSIDE ON PARLIAMENT STREET, he turns around, Danny or one of his softshoe buddies following him. Robert walks at a good pace, a military man swinging his arms, suddenly stops, but the street remains empty. He enters a Chinese restaurant, passes through the kitchen and pushes on the bar that opens the back door. A quacking sound of protest; is that duck that the cook holds by the throat still alive? The door flies open, he’s a man of steel. A street man dressed in a weird parody of a downtown office worker, stained raincoat, frayed pants, his briefcase bursting with yellowing newspapers, has his hand out in a stop sign manner.

“Hey, man, help me out.”

Robert tries to go around him but his body executes the manoeuvre in slow motion.

He ends up face to face in a mirror, the road he’s travelling, his future self. He gives the man all the change in his pockets.

“Got any more? This won’t get me anything.”

“That’s it, you have it all.”

The man backs up, stumbles.

“Fuckin’ christjerk.”

ROBERT CONTINUES SOUTH along Parliament turning west onto Queen Street. He passesmore broken down brethren in front of the taverns and second-hand bookstores. At the corner of Sher-bourne and Queen, he waits for the light to change. In the park, men examining the soles of their shoes for microscopic traces of loser shit. Robert scuffs the bottom of his shoes on the sidewalk, crosses the street.

His summer suit jacket’s dirty and covered in tree sap. He’s one of them. They look back; they’re sizing him up. How much money, and how much strength and smarts to protect it. He stands up straight, puffs out his chest. They drop him from their victim grid.

He enters a sandwich joint, orders a hamburger andmilkshake. With the food, his head clears enough. He calls Ingrid; he asks her to be here. She says something about a shoot, being there for that.He can’t think of anything else to say.

“Maybe next week we can meet for lunch?”

“Yeah sure,” he says. “Call my secretary. Bye.”

The choice. Go on another drug run or free himself. David’s voice: energy a problem, always is in nature. Toomuch, not enough. Right now, the gauge on his tank reads empty.

Back at the apartment he does a brain switch to 100 milligrams of amitriptyline, an antidepressant. Instant fog in his head, the twilight zone. He forgets to unplug the phone. Klin calls, does his Rod Serling, a sombre commentary on Robert’s fucked up twilight life.

He’s not sure what’s said. Something about a dinner party in three days. Old friends. He hangs up. Klin calls back, tells him to definitely show up. No excuses.

Every four or five hours, he surfaces, takes a hit of lorazepam, a tranquilizer. Just the touch of his bed sheets burns his skin.

Slowly he eases up on the drugs, eats cream cheese spread on stale crackers. He showers and shaves. Calls his doctor to make an appointment. Reads the newspaper. Watches tv. Maybe the worst is over. He makes a wish list:

Find a good job (if such a beast exists)

Better apartment

Meet a woman (who isn’t married)

Pick and tunnel into a religion (something Eastern but not too fashionable)

IN A QUEEN WEST record store, he spots Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88,” which he has read about. It took top spot on the rhythm and blues charts in 1951 and some critics claimit as the very first rock ’n’ roll record.

He asks to see it. The skinny, graying hippie hands the 45 to him like it’s a jigsaw puzzle about to break apart. The paper sleeve chewed up by mice or something worse. He holds the record up to the light; hieroglyphic scratches cover its surface. It even looks slightly warped. But it might just do.

“How much?”

“Collector guides say a couple thousand.”

“No way, not for this. It’s damaged.”

“It still plays. It’s a piece of rock ’n’ roll history.”

“All I’ve got is two hundred.”

He opens his wallet, removes the twenty-dollar bills.

Blank stare from the aging hippie. He empties his pockets of change, another seven dollars.

“I don’t know.”

“Come onman…you know it’s badly scratched. No other sucker’s going to buy this.”

“What kind of ring is that?”

“Jade.”

“Let me see it.”

Robert twisted it off his baby finger; he actually had come to believe in its power.

“It’s good quality jade, not that fake stuff. If you throw that in, we’ve got a deal.”

His gift from Ingrid, more instant guilt; he nods his head in agreement.

A smirk fromthe record peddler. “Here’s a plastic centremount so you can play the 45 on a regular stereo.”

He wraps “Rocket 88” in gold paper and takes it to Klin’s party. He’s ready to find Klin and give it to him; vinyl history, it had to count for something, tying together their very loose ends.

He spots Melissa wearing a tiger-striped evening dress. She’s trailed by a blondeman in his twenties who’s smoking an actual cigarette. Robert looks for a neutral corner only to have Marcie make him the centre of attention with her kiss on his cheek.

“Long time,” he began.

“Yes. You’ve grown up.”

“It hasn’t been that long.”

“I mean you look older...harder.”

“Jail does that to you.”

“I heard about that.”

Then she says something that Robert didn’t quite catch, though it sounded like I hear you’re sleeping with older men. It couldn’t have been what she said, but he jumps on it.

“So I like sucking the cocks of older men.” He laughed. “Here.” He offers the gold-wrapped record to her. “I was going to give this to Klin but I’ve changed my mind.”

She backs away. It’s as if he’s popped his filthy soul all over her red spandex dress.

Three quick orange juice and rums puts that little scene behind him.He’ll talk to her later. Show her that he can really handle things. The earlier stuff: left over drama from last year’s life.

The booze puts him on that plate of availability with everyone else. Then it’s two in the morning and the fluidity starts to fix. He’s the same. So are they. Melissa’s gone upstairs with her blonde friend.

Like an alchemist, Klin carefully spreads his precious powder, spoons it. A brain slap later, he’s fantastically awake and coldly staring at Robert.

“A week ago, this was all you wanted.”

“Yes.”

“My paranoid freak friend who thinks he has aids.”

So Klin knew. Danny either told him about Sousa or Klin was behind it in the first place, the weight of that.

“Go slow people,” Klin stroking his hands out, mock T’ai Chi. “He’s just like us, licking his fur, choking on hair balls, worried be-philip cause of rather dubious sexual practices. He hasn’t had the test, he doesn’t really know.”

Klin opens the drawer of the end table and brings out his father’s automatic. Klin checks the gun’s magazine and re-inserts it.

Cathy laughs.

Klin slide-cocks it.

“This is crazy,” Alex says.

Klin looks at him; uses his tongue to run his lips.

“So what’s the game?” Paul asks.

Klin laughs and waves the gun at Marcie as she opens the front door and leaves.

“Little miss prim and proper. Afraid if she stays she won’t make VP at the bank. Fuck her.”

“More of your coherent philosophy,” says Cathy.

“Like what?” asks Klin as he pours lines out of a brass Buddha.

“I like a lot of things.”

“So I heard.”

“So fuck you.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“Let’s just leave,” says Alex. “He can’t shoot all of us.”

Klin aims and blows the head off the statue of a naked woman.

“I’ve been forced to do worse,” says Paul.

The nose tube down the line.

Robert had retired, hung up his track shoes, just a little jogging now and then, nothing serious. But now he’s back at the starting line. Klin’s fired the gun. The race is on, so fuck it. They all become budding Buddhas with eternity up their noses.

The God gap temporarily filled, they give themselves to the reggae music and the other dark suns rising. Klin pulls Cathy to her feet and wraps her in his arms. Their bodiesmove as ThirdWorld pulse. Dance as fuck motion.

Robert’s voyeur eyes pricked up, scanning Cathy’s bulging sweater. Klin’s hand burrows underneath like a rat. He lowers her to the living room floor, the skirt pushed up; the red panties pulled down and discarded like wrapping paper. He mouths her, then straddles her, the ventriloquist speaking for her, the “Oh God”s multiplying.

Klin rolls off her, his cock rooster red. He hand-slides it, directs the white gush at Cathy’s face. She licks at it with her tongue like it’s melting ice cream.

Just as in the old tequila party days, they’re all telepathically tuned into onemassmind, in this case, Cathy’s dirty little fuckmind. Alex moves towards her, the rejection already there in their blood minds. He’s the sacrificial goat as he bends his bald head down for a kiss, Cathy cutting it off with the simple shake of her own beauty head.

Paul whispers and puts Cathy back into her clothes. Klin rezips, grabs Buddha, the gun and vanishes. Paul gives Robert a wave as he escorts Cathy out the door.

Alex exits through the patio door, so Robert sits alone on the couch, too agitated for sleep, too tired for the walk home. The music continues to play as he tries for something beyond the pollution, maybe that woman and the bright orange bouncing ball and the giggling of her three kids. He picks up his gold-wrapped record and breaks it in two.

He falls into a half-sleep, his legs flailing away when it feels like he’s sliding off the couch.

The early morning light pours too much heat through the bay window. He stands up, heads for the washroom; pees something strangely orange and in the kitchen, he findsMelissa drinking coffee.

“Klin?”

“Office.”

“Already?”

“He’s putting out the fires. You know how he is.”

“When he isn’t starting them. Where’s your friend?”

“Oh Scott. Did youmeet him? No? He left with Klin. He’s BRILLIANT. An editor at the Globe. Only thirty, I think he knows your Kimberley or what used to be your Kimberley.” She laughs. “Do you want some?”

“Want some what?”

“Eggs, any way you want them.”

“No. Coffee’s fine.”

He sits down, drinks his coffee while she makes an omelette. She cuts him a piece and hands it to him on a plate with toast.

“Thanks.”

“Klin wants to see you at Benjamin’s. I don’t know what that’s about.”

“I don’t know either. What time?”

“He didn’t say. That’s a nasty scab above your eye. Is that fromyour car accident? It’s going to leave a scar, make you look a little rougher around the edges, less of the pretty boy. Quite romantic in a way.”

“Maybe I should wear an eye patch like the Arrow shirt man in the old print ads?”

“Maybe you should.”

His left forefinger rubs his bottom lip for the crumb stuck there, wanting to wipe away the strange twist his mouth is doing in response to her words.

“We should have lunch this week. I need your creative genius to come up with an ad formy new Yorkville shop, dresses and jewellery. High end, designer quality goods but with a West Coast flair.”

“I don’t know about the genius part but I’ll give it a shot.”

“You know, I’ll pay you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Keeps us on the right footing, that’s important in business.”

“I’ll charge you gst, give you a receipt.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less from a professional.”

Irony in her voice, irony in his voice. Nothing was straightforward anymore.

Later, he helped Melissa clean up the mess from the party. He examined the ragged neck of the statue and looked for pieces of its head. He couldn’t find any. He scraped the table for leftover coke with a slice of the broken “Rocket 88” record and did that. Not enough to get high but it did cut the jag he felt.

“I’ve got to run. Can you lock up when you leave?” She handed him a key.

He had time to kill so he decided to check the place out, been years since he’d taken the tour. He found the room that Melissa had spent the night in. He ran his hands over the Africa-shaped stain on the bottom sheet.

He walked into Klin’s bedroom, half-expecting a gun shot, hearing it again from last night. His whole apartment could fit into this one room with its original stripped-down oak floors and the large Dracaena marginata tree reaching towards the skylight.

He opened the metal filing cabinet, finding copies of Klin’s mortgage and investment documents. He tried another drawer. It was locked. He lifted up Klin’s authentic shrunken head, a pygmy from South America, crooked, political smile. No key. Where did Klin keep his Buddha?

Robert picked up the polished Indian arrowhead that had once been his.He had given it to Klin and in exchange Klin had given him a stone fragment from the Acropolis.

They had been thirteen, Robert staying over at Klin’s house, the two of themlooking through one ofMelissa’s sexmanuals. Klin had unbuttoned the top of Robert’s pajamas and started to feel him up. Robert folded his shoulders in to emphasize his cleavage. Klin started to play with his breasts. He began to cup them and kiss them.

Robert saw Klin’s bulge and felt his own. Klin kept kissing him even when Robert tried to push him off. Klin started to rub against him, his pajamas having rolled down so his cock was showing and pressing into Robert’s bare skin, then he came, the watery white bird shit collecting in Robert’s belly button. Klin pushed his hand into Robert’s pajamas and started to play with him until Robert felt the white blood squirt out of him for the first time.

Klin said he’d never tell and Robert could never tell, so they exchanged the Acropolis stone and the arrowhead to seal their silence. They also cut their wrists with a pocket knife, mixed blood, brothers of some kind.

As he touched the skin of the arrowhead, he remembered the strange touch of Klin’s cockhead pressed into his side. The phone rang downstairs. Robert picked up the extension.

“Are we on? Say four at Benjamin’s.”

“Sure.”

“Where are you?”

“Downstairs.”

“You sound funny.”

“My throat’s dry from last night.”

When they met at Benjamin’s, Robert saw that Klin recognized one of his own Armani suit jackets. Irritating himwas Robert’s slight attempt at revenge.

“It got crazy last night,” Klin said.

“You got crazy last night.”

“They’ll let it go.”

“To where? Cathy’s into fear and loathing. And Paul and Alex? A gun to their silly party heads?”

“Who needs them?”

“You don’t cut friends.”

“They’re history.” A finger snap.

“So what is it?”

“I don’t know.” Klin raised his forefinger and thumb to his head and imitated the firing of a gun. “Bang. Bang. Just like my dear old dad.”

After they left the restaurant they cruised the deserted downtown streets in Klin’s Porsche, time-wasting before heading north on the Parkway to the Eglinton exit. They travelled east into Scarborough, a no-man’s-land of gas stations and strip malls.

The sun had disappeared and except for the absence of snow, it could have been mid-winter, the air had that same gray coldness.

Klin drove down a street with boxed houses where the non-existent Scarborough people lived. He pulled the gray Porsche over, left the engine running and disappeared inside a ranch-style bungalow. Robert tried to place a call to Ingrid using the car’s cell phone.When a male voice answered he broke the connection.

Klin returned to the car, and slammed the door shut. “Fuck.”

“What happened?”

“One of the clubs downtown is screwing us around. You with me on this?”

“Sure, but what’s going on?”

“Going on. That’s just the point. We’re moving beyond our usual, recursive selves.”

They retraced their route through Scarborough before heading south on the Parkway, Klin playing a recording of his current obsession, the Orson Welles movie The Third Man.

Of course, Klin identified with theWelles character,Harry Limes, faking death, dealing black market drugs, the supreme and illusive manipulator. Zithermusic, old Vienna never seen aman killed before, something funny about the whole thing: Donna missing, jail rape, Robert like Holly Martins hung out to dry, ripped open. Holly, what fools we are, the dead are happier dead. David raging during that final summer storm, his anger at his body removing himso perfectly with somuch undone, don’tmissmuch here, poor devils.Holly, I’d like to cut you in, old man. There’s nobody in Vienna that I can really trust, and we’ve always done things together. I’d like to cut you in, isn’t that why he was here with Klin? Nobody else in the whole city they could trust. Could he still trust Klin? Orson saying it’s not that awful, in Italy under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, democracy, peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Robert the passenger on this devil-can-ride, devil can always find a parking spot, Klin arming the anti-theft device before abandoning the car, then Robert seeing that he’s parked in the rcmp deputy commissioner’s spot.

“He lets me use it.”

They passed men permanently parked, Klin throwing down a handful of change to break the gray rigidity of the street scene. They proceeded through the strip club’s double swing doors and climbed the stairs, stopping to let two dancers go by them, until they reached the third floor.

At a door covered in red plush material, Klin knocked, gave up on the futility of that, turned the handle and they wandered into a large room, crammed withHollywood attic stuff. A life-size cutout of Walt Disney stood encircled by ceramic statues of Mickey Mouse, Pluto, and the Seven Dwarfs. They all saluted with massive boners.

Old-style movie cameras and lights stood scattered throughout the room, and on the leather casting couch sat two balding freckled twins with Friar Tuck fringes of red hair.

Middle-aged kids, one wore a Montreal Canadiens hockey sweater, glasses, the other dressed completely in white: turtleneck sweater, casual deck pants, white penny loafer shoes.

“You guys are too fucking much,” said Klin.

“You don’t likkkkeeeee?” replied the twin dressed in white.

“I don’t like,” Klin answered back in his own mock Jewish tailor accent.

“You look upset,” said the hockey player twin.

“You guys gave us exclusive rights to this club.”

“And you still have them.”

“Not when you’re cutting deals with the Jamaicans we don’t.”

“It was a one-time thing,” said the twin, who was using his fingers to clean the white penny loafer suspended across his knee. “They had this surplus they needed to move. It was too good to pass on.”

“Danny could’ve bought it, and sold it to you guys. That way we’d still make our numbers.”

“You know the Jamaicans won’t deal with Danny.”

“So Danny’s out twenty thousand.”

“So we owe him one. You know we don’t want trouble with Danny. Besides, why are you dealing with this shit?”

“Danny’s out of town.”

The hockey player stood up and waddled towards them almost as if he was walking on skates. He had a drink in one hand and a Davy Crockett doll in the other. He put the drink down and straightened Davy’s coonskin hat.

“I’m surprised, Klin, that you’re even poking your fine nose into this.”

“Do you see me touching it?”

“You talk to Danny. I’m sure he’ll come around. He’s still got the rights.”

“Yeah, George. Danny really trusts you. This deal would have gone down smooth except we’re paying one of your people.”

“Disloyalty all around. So what’s new?”

“A standoff in the play room. Is that it?”

“Oh Klin, don’t worry. I’m sure we can resolve this. Just talk to Danny for us. He trusts you.” The hockey player laughed.

“He’ll shut you down.”

“Shut us down?”

“He’llmake your club off-limits to the dancers. Then after you’ve gone broke, he’ll buy the Pink Nipple for ten cents on the dollar.”

“Fuck you, Klin.”

“Yeah, boys. You keep thinking those good thoughts.”

FLAKES OF A heavy wet snow melted on the pavement made it take on the scales of a neon, fish-like shimmer. Robert stepped over a puddle of red from a pizza sign; Klin slapped his shoe into it, making it shiver.

“I know of a situation where it’s like Fellini; crazy high-priced whores and society cunts and their admirers. You interested, Robert? Of course, you’re interested.”

They drove past multi-storeyed homes featuring long, curved driveways filled withMercedes Benz and bmw vehicles—stage props in the petri dish, the rich replicating themselves, their biological necessities. The Bridal Path. Forest Hill. Castle-like homes, nobody ever at home it seemed.

Klin parked in front of a stone mansion. Once under the portico, they spotted names for the separate condominiums. Klin touched one of the door bells. A female voice came over the intercom:

“Yes?”

“It’s Abrams.”

The door buzzed and Klin pulled on it. A high-ceilinged inner lobby with doors leading in four different directions, a camera above them with a pulsing fish eye lens. Klin knocked on the nearest door. The door opened and they entered a narrow hallway that led them towards voices and music.

Klin approached aman and a woman, European-looking,middle-aged. He removed a couple of fifties from his wallet, handed them to the woman.

They moved off to the side, allowing their eyes time to adjust to the darkness; closest to them stood a thin woman in a black evening dress talking to a tall, fat man with plump fingers, wearing a tux and pink t-shirt.

“I mean…I guess this is what you can call high society.” Klin laughed and pressed his finger to the side of his nose and snorted. The thin cadaver pushed her hands into the chest of the fat-facedman. She giggled. Klin pulled on a strand of her black hair. She turned around.

“Hello, Monika.”

“Klin? How are you?”

“Good. You?”

“Brilliant.”

“Who’s your friend?”

“No one special.”

The man smiled, backed away.

“Look what I have for you.”

Monika grabbed the plastic bag fromKlin’s hand, pried apart the opening, and stuck in her right index finger. She rubbed it against her lips, made a candy cane smear out of her lipstick.

PÂTÉ, CHEESE, CRACKERS, and grapes had been played with and scattered over a long, mahogany table. There was a side table with bottles of wine.

“My name’s Dave.” He poured red wine into two plastic glasses.

Did he say? No he didn’t. David’s dead.

“You look very familiar. Yes, saw that immediately when you came in with that tall good-looking Jew boy.”

At the window, tree branches scratched the glass.

“Not into this...anymore,” Robert offered.

“What?”

“I’m not queer.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“Just so you know.”

“It doesn’t matter. Why should it?”

“I agree. I didn’t want to give you the wrong impression.”

“I have no impression. Believe me.”

“So what is it?”

“Like I said, I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

“I work in advertising.”

“That must be it.”

“I play guitar.”

“In a band?”

“Years ago.”

“Too bad.”

“Yeah, too bad.”

“Working?”

“No. Not right now.”

“Maybe you need this.”

Dave pulled a handful of bills out of his wallet and stuffed them into Robert’s shirt pocket. Robert shifted the bills fromhis shirt to his pants. Davemoved closer, brushed Robert’s lips with his own, a sweet wine smell.Upstairs, he found theman empty roomwith clean sheets on the bed. Robert zipped down his jeans and lay back, his shoes still touching the floor. He didn’t want to see Dave’s carp mouth sucking on his bait worm, so he closed his eyes, the virus going the other way if it was going at all.

Leaving, Robert passed the living room. The dead room. No Klin.

No Monika either.

Only more stiffs.

HE RODE THE all-night Vomit Comet bus down Yonge Street, walked the rest of the way to Klin’s house, not willing to face David’s wheelchair and the other absences back at his own apartment. He used the key Melissa had given him.

He slept in the same bed, the sheets unchanged that she had messed up the night before. He dreamt his skin was covered in Kaposi sores.Waking, he coughed, and searched his spit for blood, viral material.

His headache, the easily forgotten thoughts, what else but aids dementia; he masturbated, took three blue-and-white pills and floated for a long time in a twilight sleep, just dimly registering the front door, opening and closing at one point, wondering if he had even locked it, not caring enough to go and find out.

ROBERT RECEIVED A Christmas card from Klin’s law firm and a card and a calendar froma real estate agent he once dated. At some point it came and went, and not a single piece of turkey passed his lips.

SANDRA WAS A pale androgynous thing come to life, politely angling her cigarette away from Robert so the smoke wouldn’t bother his lungs, he once telling her he had asthma. Nathalie was even more remote, a boy still, with a taste for micro dresses.

Klin ordered brandies, Pink Ladies, and greasy finger food for their little island table as the surf crashed against them—the men who were really women, the women who were really...that dangling uncertain sex, the great, what’s in the panties come-on.

“Why don’t we rent a stretch limo?” Klin’s voice gone nasal, a permanent head cold.

“Sure, sure lover,” Sandra sweetly whispered, stroking Klin’s hand.

“I don’t know,” said Robert, too aware of his yellow face staring back at himfromthemirror behind the liquor bottles. “I can’t see the point of any of this. Maybe I’ll just go home.”

“So it’s all insignificant,” said Klin. “Who the fuck cares? They’re enjoying it...sweeeeetheaaaart.”

The girls laughed at Klin’s put-on Bogart lisp. He grabbed Nathalie’s vinyl handbag, opened it and pretended to search it, then slid it over to Robert.

“Please,” she said, gentle boy soft. Robert handed it back.

Klin used his cell to order the limo. When the driver appeared, Klin went over to a woman dressed in a white tuxedo. He handed her a roll of bills, and she gave him an envelope.

Those lined up outside the club thought they might be Hollywood or famous or something as they made their way to the limo; Robert feeling their hardball eyes whip past his face.

“Sandra, why don’t you pull up your dress,” said Klin. “Reveal your true panty surprise.”

“It’s gone…I’ve had the operation,” whispered Sandra.

“My people,” Klin said, waving to the crowd, shutting them out by closing the car door. He sat between Nathalie and Sandra. Robert faced the three of them.

Klin let Sandra have the envelope that was in his suit jacket pocket. She moved her fingers over it, ripped open a corner, wet her finger and stuck it inside, licking the paste off. Nathalie handed her a spoon with rhinestone sparkles.

They did their two spoonfuls each before passing it to Klin. Then it was Robert’s turn.

He put the spoon in the powder and gave each nostril its due, the arctic cold traveling fromthe tip of his nose into his brain and throat. He wetted the forefinger of his right hand and rubbed the coke on his mouth and gums for the soothing.

THE LIMO MOVED like a white cursor through the blocks of hype and cliché: a neon sign withmissing letters: ing otel; abandoned cars and boarded-up stores; the gray crusting mounds of snow; the late-night streetcars and donut shops.

In the parks and on the street corners, themen, huddled in twos and threes, covered in their tattered priestly vestments involved in their dirty ritualistic religions and the women, brokers of love, doing tap dances with their high heels, trying to stay warm.

“When I ordered the car I told them I wanted to tour Parkdale,” said Klin. “Drop the girls off.”

The girls’ faces tightened with coke panic.Wrong corner, wrong time, they’d be consumed.

“Hey, I’m only kidding.” Klin stroked Sandra on her nyloned knee.

The limousine drove to Roncevalles and turned south. They ended up on the Gardiner Expressway heading back into the city. The driver buzzed Klin on the intercom, saying something about an accident ahead. He pulled the limousine over onto the side of the road. The girls got out first, then Robert and Klin.

A white van and a subcompact Mazda had fused together at the cement wall. The fluorescent street lamps turned the splashed blood into a DayGlo colour.

The van driver had gone through the windshield and was sprawled across the top of the compact car. His head at a twisted angle to his body. From inside the car came screams and crying. Robert tried the doors of the car. They were jammed shut.

Klin told them to get back into the limo, he didn’t want to stay around for the police. The driver protested but Klin gave himmoney to shut himup. As they drove away, they could hear sirens in the distance.

Klin dropped the girls off at the corner of Church and Dundas. A streetcar passed. When Robert looked again they were gone.

“SEE THE BOYS?”

“No.”

“By the donut shop.”

“Yes.”

Klin picked up the intercom phone. “Could you pull over, my friend here wants a coffee.”

He powered down a window. One of the boys detached himself fromthe group, andwalkedwith the car as it glided to a stop by the curb.

“How old are you?”

“Why?”

“Just curious.”

“I can be any age you want me to be. What are you, a cop or a pervert?”

“Elements of both. A lawyer.” Klin laughed, handed him a twenty-dollar bill.

“That’s not enough.”

“I don’t want anything from you.”

“You must be a freak, man.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Fuck no.” The boy showed his knife, flicked it open with a twist of his wrist.

“That’s it? That’s all you’ve got for protection.”

“Look man, I could use the money. I’m good.”

“Robert?”

“No.”

Robert opened his door on the traffic side and walked tight to the car. He knocked on the driver’s window and when it was lowered, asked himif he wanted a coffee.When Robert passed the other boys, they mockingly gave him the eye and laughed. He drank his coffee in the shop and brought the driver his cup. Klin snorted to suck up the last bits of powder clinging to his nose while Robert climbed into the limo.

“I wanted him to cut me. Am I weird?”

“Did he?”

“No. But I made him hold the knife against my throat.”

“That’s it?”

“I’m not that desperate for a blow job.”

“I thought you were.”

“His name is Anthony. I found that funny.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I’m not that deep.”

Robert pictured him telling the story in a bar; the entire Klin crowd flashing briefly before his eyes.What a dim, sad audience, his own sorry mug staring back at him.

HE WAITED FOR Ingrid outside the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. The cold had penetrated his dress shoes so he stamped his feet to keep themwarm; just as he began another round of knocking sense into them, he saw her come out of themain doors.

“Are you dancing?”

“My feet are frozen.”

“Where are your winter boots?”

“The heels wore down.”

“See mine.”

She kicked out her leg, tugged on her skirt to reveal a leather boot that went as high as her knee.

“You’re teasing me.”

“Yes.”

“I still can’t feel my feet.”

“I’m sorry I’m late.”

“This is a funny place to meet.”

“I’m thinking of doing some graduate work.”

“I always thought of this place as creative poison.”

“Not here. I was using its library to check out courses overseas.”

“You’re leaving Toronto?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can I come?”

“We’ll see.”

SHE TOUCHED HIS LEG when she reached for coins in the ashtray to pay for the parking ticket. He jerked and the money spilled under the seat and then they were laughing as the attendant had his hand outstretched and she had nothing to give him until Robert handed her the five dollars he always kept rolled up inside the lining of his leather jacket.

She drove south on Yonge, and he wondered if she had any gum. Mouth bone dry, so maybe not too foul. How does one really know, only confident after brushing the teeth and how long does that last. To think of things one puts in the mouth; sulfuric acid the only suit-the ablemouthwash. The car squeals its tires,making the turn, pushing him into the door.

“Fuck.”

“What?”

“I did a left-hand turn off Yonge.”

“People do it all the time.”

“Yeah…well look at what’s following us.”

He turned around and saw the flashing lights.

“Robert, you don’t have any dope or anything.”

“No.”

She pulled the car over and rolled down the window. The cop stood a healthy distance away, shone his flashlight in her face.

“You know you can’t turn left off Yonge onto Queen. You should have made your turn at Shuter.”

“I’m sorry officer. I got confused.”

“Can I see your license?”

She fumbled in her purse, extracted a smaller wallet.Hermouth tightened in frustration. But when she looked up, she must have flashed this great smile. Robert saw that instantly not on her face but in the cop’s reaction.

He took the license, looked it over, handed it back to her.

“I’mnot going to give you a ticket this time. Just a warning. Call it a late Christmas present.”

“Thanks.”

“Have a good evening.” He touched the brim on his hat and walked back to his car. She rolled the window back up.

“That’s pretty cool how you did that.”

“Sluttish you mean.”

“So you smiled at him?”

“I was worried that Tomwould askme questions about the ticket so I looked straight into his eyes before smiling. I’msure he imagined I was sucking his cock. That’s how men think right?” She smiled, looked into his eyes.

The Volkswagen Golf was finally blasting out a fierce heat. Too warm, he tried to turn it down. She reached over and adjusted the dial for him.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

She stopped for gas, he offered to do the honours but she insisted that his salt-stained dress shoes were no match for the garage station slush. They continued east and south until they were on the higher rim that circled the lake. Ingrid parked on a dead end street. They got out. He stamped on his numb right foot. It tingled.

“Without being rude, what is it about your feet?”

“I have no idea, maybe it’s a circulation problem, not enough blood.”

“You are a funny man.”

“I have no idea where we are.”

“You need to be brought out of your shell.”

“So?”

“I’m going to do it, cold feet and all.” She moved close to him. “Please, no poetry this time.”

“I wasn’t going to recite any.”

“I told my therapist how you came up with that Keats line…he clued in instantly that I had wanted to kiss you and that you had used it to push me away.”

“You mean, ‘bold lover never never canst thou kiss though winning near the goal’.”

“Exactly. I hate it now.”

“I was trying to impress you with my brilliance.”

“You don’t have to, you know.”

“I’m still trying to convince myself.”

She stood on her toes and kissed him.He held her tight, his awkwardness there, trying to eliminate it, touch her completely.He really wasn’t there, more like he was watching a scene in someone else’s movie. They untangled. She backed up, looked lost for an instant.

“Are you sure about this?”

“Robert, I walk this tightrope in my marriage, trying to find a way to love you and my husband. I’m tired of the guilt. So not tonight, please?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

She took his hand, and she led him through the park to the Bluffs. She went out further along the edge. He stayed close. There was a finger of land sticking up and she walked out towards it, balancing on the crest. He thought she was going to fall or a gust of wind might push her over. But she pirouetted on her toes, reversed, and flew back to him, it seemed that sudden.

He caught her.

THIS TIME ON his balcony, the cn Tower lights and the rest of the city behind them; he kicked at the cement with his shoe, dislodged a chip. “This place is falling apart…I’m falling apart.”

“And I’m just falling.”

“Falling?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t trust what I hear…my mind invents things.”

“You heard right.”

“Is it because of the wine?”

“Yes. I’m drunk. You got me drunk on a half-bottle of cheap Canadian wine.”

“It’s all I had.”

“I’m a cheap date.”

“Me? I’m cheap too.”

“That’s good. So we’re both not drunk, right?”

She grabbed his hand.

“I have some news.”

“That’s never good.”

“Hear me out first…a university in England has acceptedme into its graduate program in management studies. I think it’s time to leave advertising behind. The only thing thatmight delay it: a baby…a fuckin’ baby. Would you like that? Please don’t think of me as some kind of whore. I am loyal. May the best man win. And I am drunk. Though not really.”

“This is crazy.”

“Not really.”

She pulled the hair back off her face and fanned it out. The wind took it and he was brushed by it. Tingled by it.

Ingrid set her left knee on David’s wheelchair and balanced there. Her back to him. He reached around and felt her breasts, the first time. He was drunk enough to try that.

She sighed, leaned back into him.

“It’s too cold out here.”

She stood up, led himthrough the patio door to his futon couch. They sat down. He kissed her this time. Touched her too. Really this time.

“You have breasts.”

“What did you expect?”

“You keep them so well hidden.”

“Yes.”

He undid her blouse and brought them outside of the confines of her slip, fascinated by their softness and then their taste.

“They’re wonderful.”

“No, they’re not. Too saggy.”

“No.”

“So strange.”

“What?”

“Doing this.”

“We’re really not doing anything.”

“Right.”

“But I’ve thought about it for a long time.”

“Me too.”

“But why did we wait?”

“You waited.”

“I sometimes think I’m religious. A saint even. I didn’t want to cause your husband any pain.”

“What about giving me pleasure? Besides, you’re no saint.” She dropped to her knees, unzipped his pants, and took him in her mouth. He placed his hands on her head.

They went into his bedroom, he pulled the covers back, and then they were lying down on his futon bed. He stood back up, tugged off her boots which took a lot of pulling. When he tugged down on her skirt, she laughed.

“This too?”

“Yes.”

She arched her back and removed her panties. Tossed themover his head.

“Now you.”

He kicked off his pants that he had been waddling around in, then his underwear and sweatshirt. Naked, he wished he was more of whatever it was that he imagined she needed.

He touched her there, surprised at the wetness as if it was her first time all over again. “This too?” she said again. Another laugh.

He found a condomin his dresser, dropped it trying to put it on. Finally managed to slide it on, but soft. She touched him,moved him inside. Too quickly. Again, he was watching a video that he couldn’t quite turn off. He no longer knew what sex he was.

“This too.” The touching again. “This too.” More laughter. Still inside. But not quite. Not occupying her like that traffic cop, or even like Klin would. Making up for it with his fingers.

“Are you laughing at me? I know I’m not much good.”

“Shhhh. You’re fine.”

“Why are you giggling so much?”

“I just do. It’s me. It’s how I am. The first time especially.”

“How often?”

“Do you mean with others? What a question to ask now.”

“I take it back.”

“It’s fewer than you imagine.”

“But there’s been others?”

“Shhhh.”

“I don’t want to feel guilty.”

“I’m the one who’s supposed to feel that.”

“But you like me?”

“No. I hate you.”

He pushed further into her, almost feeling a hate, that she was too easy, wishing she had been further removed, someMary that hemight never have, only something to worship. She laughed again. He imagined putting on her skin, being her, seeing himself in her and that image excited him. Then shewent silent, and he tried, really really tried.

Ridiculously futile any further movement. He didn’t come. God knows she didn’t, how could she have.

Wiped out on the early morning lateness, he watched as she dressed, putting her panties in her purse. He brought over her leather bootsmarked with salt stains. Then he put on a wool sweater and pants and rode down with her in the elevator.

“I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted it better.”

“We all want it better…heymister, I just noticed you’re not wearing your ring.”

“I lost it.”

“We’ll have to find you another piece of magic.”

“Soon, I hope.”

He popped the external door with the wheelchair access button and cold air rushed in, helped clear his head.

“You don’t have to walk me any further.”

“I want to.”

They kissed at the car and then he watched her buckle the seatbelt. He tried scraping off the frost with his nails but she squirted windshield wiper fluid which flew into his eyes and stung.

Her red turn signal flashed at him twice and she was gone. Just as he crossed the street, he was put into a circle of lights.

“Bobby…screwing around with a married woman…you’re such an animal.”

He shielded his eyes, saw the motorcycles, the riders advancing towards him with the engines shut off, using their feet to push forward. Danny shoved his front wheel into Robert’s knee.

“Don’t be jealous Danny. It’s you I really love.”

“Always the funny guy, Bobby.”

“Isn’t it a little late in the season to be riding around on your motorbikes?”

“Motorcycles, you mean.Well, interesting that you brought that up. I was just talking about that same phenomenon. Global warming. How it’s thrown everything off. Drought, forest fires, and golf in January. Do you play golf, Bobby?”

“No. Do you? What’s your handicap?”

“A very lame joke; my handicap has stayed the same every year since that car bomb. But, actually, I do play. My friends here let me drive from the ladies tees.” He raised his right arm, so the metal hand glinted in the yellow thrown off by the street light. “That pretty married woman needed a good fuck. Were you up for it?”

“I tried my best.”

Robert felt another tire bite into the back of his leg. “I feel like I’m monkey in the middle.”

“You’re it,man.Now, I’mnot intomothers like you are with Klin’s. But this woman, she’s still relatively young and pretty. Yes. Most definitely I could do her and I’m sure the others feel the same way.”

“She’s just a friend. Leave her alone. I haven’t told her anything.”

A bike wheel rammed him from behind; he stumbled forward, prevented fromfalling by Danny’s Harley. “What have you got to tell her, Bobby?”

“Nothing. There’s nothing to tell.”

“How about going for a little ride with us?”

“God…I’d love to. But I need my sleep. How about another night? I’ll write you down in my book.”

“No wonder Klin says you’re an obnoxious little prick.”

“Look…I haven’t said anything to anybody.”

“What is there to say, Bobby?” Danny started the Harley, the engine grumbled to life as if it too hated the cold.

“Nothing. I’ve got nothing to say.”

“I almost long for the old days…a kick start…these modern conveniences take away from the mystique, don’t you think?”

The other motorcycles started up and the riders backed away with their feet.

“I’ve enjoyed our chat…now get on my bike.”

“You’re kidding?” He tried to stare through the lights to see if Sousa was there.

“No.”

“Do you have a helmet?”

“Fuck that.”

“I mean you have to wear one, right?”

“Not tonight.”

“Can I at least go and get a hat, a toque, something?”

“Fuck, you’re a whiner…worse than any old lady.”

Robert climbed on the back of the bike, hoping it was just a joke to scare him.

“You’ll fall off for sure. Put your hands aroundmy waist, the feet on themetal stirrups. You smell like a woman. Is that your aftershave or the perfume of your married woman friend?”

Danny didn’t wait for his answer but throttled the bike so the back wheel bit into the pavement and they took off with a jerk, his metal right hand clamped tightly to the handlebar as they headed north on River Street. Already Robert’s hands and ears were cold. On the Parkway, they rode through the curves gracefully then went full throttle on the straightaways. There was little traffic, and the cars they passed seemed to be standing still. Robert tried to speak but the wind seized his cheeks and made him feel fat-faced.

Danny turned off at the Lawrence exit, heading east past factories and car repair shops, until they stopped at a metal gate.

One of the riders popped the lock. They walked their bikes through, Robert in the middle again.

It was a long building, with rows of broken windows. Near a loading dock, they parked the bikes on their kickstands. Danny turned the handle on a side door, and it swung open. He prodded Robert forward with his claw hand.

“Do you like tv, Bobby . . . you probably watch pbs? Yeah you strike me as that kind of guy. Well, think of this as educational TV.”

They removed his leather belt, pulled his arms behind his back, and then knotted the belt tight, securing his wrists.

“I love these old factories, the kind of equipment you don’t see much of anymore.”

Flashlights outlined the debris on the cement floor, broken bottles and empty paint cans. A switch was clicked, a row of fluorescent lights came on; the overhead cranemoved sideways, the hook dangling above their heads.

“Now Robert, this is going to be fun…just like at the Exhibition… remember the claw hand? You put in a quarter and you had to grab a toy prize then drop it down the chute? I’m going try my claw hand at this.”

The cable was looped once around his waist and the hook attached to his belt; the cable retracted and yanked Robert up, bent over about to dive face first into the cement floor, his arms pulled behind his back and threatening to pop out of their sockets.

“Oh, God…please.”

“Oh…so polite. Up you go.”

Robert closed his eyes, opened them when the pulley stopped yanking him upwards, maybe twenty feet in the air moving in the direction of a tube-like tank. The crane stopped, the pain didn’t, and that horrible feeling of his feet clawing the air, finding nothing.

“See Bobby…I can release you from here. Set you free. Oh yeah that bin that you’ll fall into, you’re probably wondering what’s inside it. Do you remember the sixties? More like the seventies for us, I suspect. But acid? Klin told me you loved your little hits of acid. Sunshine and windowpane. Sugar-cubed or dropped on a blotter inside cartoon characters. This isn’t quite that kind of acid. It’s old battery acid. You should have seen this Jamaican…how we poked him with cattle prods, hooked up his balls to a car battery just like they do in a South American dictatorship…and he never said anything, except fuck you. Tough bastard; didn’t stop us from pouring acid all over him. You’ve probably already pissed your pants.” Flashlights strobed him, had him pinpointed like a crippled bomber over Nazi Germany.

“Now Klin can act tough when he has to, he took care of Donna at his cottage. You thought it was me. But I promised him all the China Blue he could ever stick in his veins if he did it. A kind of test. I think I’ll keep him around. But you? How useful are you to anyone…especially tome…you’remore like dead weight.We’re calling it a night.”

A buzz and a click, the hook let go of his belt. The looped cable flipped himonce, then he fell, yelling Oh Christ as if the hand of God might catch him, banged his knees into the side of the bin, kept dropping through pieces of foam.

Danny’s laughter echoing until the outside door shut.

He freed his arms fromthe belt though he could barely lift them over his head as he tried crawling up the side of the bin, slipping down until he found a piece of wood that he could wedge and use for a foothold. He swung over and dropped to the floor into a puddle of grease. He wiped his hands on a rag, the light beginning to appear in the windows above him.

He checked his pockets for money. He found a Diamondbacks Inc. business card with their email address and website, www.dia-mondbacksmc.com. Their logo was a rattlesnake with diamonds for eyes squeezing itself out of the mouth of a skull.

INGRID HAD MENTIONED going trout fishing the next day. This is the next day. A funny image; her slipping into a pair of hip waders, or at least rubber boots, a grimlook on her face as she went about the entire business. By herself. No husband. The invitation not extended to Robert either.

Would she believe his story about Danny and the abandoned factory? Dangling like a bug fromthe finger of that crane.Maybe it was a dream, except he’s now walking this wasteland, shut down factories, boarded up gas stations, abandoned couches and tires tossed about. Freezing cold and his brain on strike,walking the picket line, oncemore holding up the sign: too much abuse. Though his arms and shoulders couldn’t even do that they were so wasted with pain.

He found a transit shelter, had close to enough change that he faked his way on board the diesel bus when it finally showed up, one more bleary-eyed late-night partier having to get up early for work the next day. Soon he was home, his dismal little apartment, as close to heaven as he could imagine, that first brush of toothpaste into his foul mouth then a bunch of Tylenol 3s.

HE CALLED INGRID on Sunday, no answer and he didn’t want to leave a phone message. He thought about sending an e-mail. One click of the mouse and it would be on its way to her. Then the paranoia that someone at her companymight see it, expose themboth.

So he did it the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper, wrote out his little note and wrapped it around the cassette he had recorded for her,mailed themboth in an air bubble envelope to her work address. Oh yeah, he stamped it Confidential; as if anything really was.

Dear Ingrid,

I’d like to say, fireworks and happy ever after but now you won’t come out and play. Are you hiding from me? Catch and release and disappear. I’ve sent you a tape, recorded off a university radio station. I tape these shows because I fall asleep while listening so I play them back the next day for the strange musical fish I’ve caught. (Did you catch any trout that Saturday? It’s funny to picture you in hip waders, casting your line, flicking it out like a whip over your head.)

But this is my gift to you, this song Sidi Boumedienne by the Algerian Rai singer Cheb Khaled that I kept playing over and over. I danced to it too, my spastic dance, body pumping up and down like an out-of-balance piston, my fucked up knees not allowing much movement either way.

Picture this monkey swinging his arms still incredibly sore from his latest misadventure, and jerking up and down to this song with its sad plaintive voices and words that I don’t know the meaning of.

The Latin hymns of my youth, a mass this worship, this dance with God, the voices a prayer, a mad mutinous disruption of the everyday, same song over and over for two hours, my sore knees, bone on bone, and I never wanted it to let me go, soaked in a baptismal sweat, not stoned, just there with it, reaching arms over my head and the same chant coming somewhere also from inside me that same ache and moan, dancing with God until even its beauty like all beauty became familiar, exhausted its power.I can listen to it now, no ecstasy, the legs arms no longer move but I wanted you to have this dance, this dance with God, so play it when alone, play it loud and give yourself over to it, let it lift you beyond that which plants our feet in silence and despair.

But it’s a dub off the radio dubbed over once again and your copy (should I have mailed the original?) is scratchy and the octave range even more reduced so maybe you won’t hear it, dance with it.Maybe that’s true of the mystery that moved me the other night, had me light and free. But the old gravities have descended and hold me tight and maybe you were never here at all. Instead I punched the time clock with the devil himself; rode on the back of insanity to a factory where they cover you in foam.Foam home. If only I could.

Your alpha bit on the side, Robert J. Walker (if only I was)

HE NEVER EXPECTED to hear from her again, their movie not to be continued.He called the cop’s office number; started to leave amessage, then hung up, not really believing Danny’s story that Klin killed Donna.

Maybe it wasn’t such a big deal, the dirty secret he had in his little head. That left Klin’s suggestion, fly south for two weeks, only way he could afford it was to sell David’smotorized chair. He posted an ad in the nearby Laundromat, a tallmiddle-agedman showed up, blowing cigarette smoke throughout his small apartment, ashes dropping on the parquet floor.

He’d pay him two hundred dollars for it, claimed it was for his sick wife. But Robert didn’t believe his story so instead he called a non-profit agency that David said wasn’t half-bad in looking after cripples like himself and gave themthe powered chair and the smaller portable one from the downstairs storage locker. He borrowed the money for the plane ticket from Klin. So miles above the ocean, Robert reads a biography of NormanMailer bought discounted at the Toronto airport, and writes on the inside cover an imperfect haiku, remembering David.

search the clouds

for hidden Christs

ascending

The islands below like greenmoss on a blue rock face that wrinkles in the wind.

They landed in Kingston, Jamaica; rode a taxi downtown and parked their bags in a hotel room. After a stand-up meal of greasy fries and fish, they entered a massive nightclub where the band appeared half-asleep, kept jerking itself awake, the little outbursts of enthusiasm sending jolts of electricity into the dancing crowd.

Robert nursed his Corona while Klin guzzled down a quick succession of rum and cokes until he had a stretched-out parade of empty glasses that clinked together every time someone bumped their small wooden table.

Klin stood up, closed his eyes and tranced his way into the music, moved out onto the dance floor and really began to lift his feet matching time to the hip sway motion of this trashy blonde native woman who liked the attention.Her boyfriend pulled a knife but Robert rushed between them, grabbed Klin’s wallet out of his back pocket and handed the skinny black man some Abe Lincolns.While he was counting his loot they made their escape. They returned to their hotel, grabbed a few hours sleep before the desk clerk woke them up with a phone call just in time to catch the bus taking them to the docks where they boarded a double-decker island boat.

Robert started out on the top deck but felt like an ant under the magnifying glass of the sun. Down below, he got a nose full of diesel fumes and the constant knock of the boat’s engine.

Greasy warm shadows hung out in the corners. He passed the small pilothouse where an Asian man leaned on the wheel. He looked over at Robert, gave him this twisted smile, the right side of his face burned or blown away.

One more rictus grin to carry to his grave. The boat was a mini Noah’s ark: a volatile mix of whites and blacks, caged and uncaged animals and a pack of mongrel dogs. One of the passengers tried to kick at a rodent dog, but a black woman used her massive body to shield it. The dog lifted its leg and peed in thanks.

He found Klin using a rolled-up copy of Time magazine to swat at flies.

“It must be my aftershave or something.”

“Look.” Robert pointed to the puddle under the bench. “It’smore dog piss. Let’s move.”

“The entire boat stinks.”

“It’s better on top if you can stand the sun.”

“Have you any extra sun block?”

“Just the one bottle.”

“We should have brought more.”

“Can’t we buy any?”

“Nope. No stores.”

“Where is this place?”

“You’ll see soon enough.”

“Have you got any Gravol?”

“No. Are you going to be sick?”

“Just a bit of motion sickness. Inner ear stuff.”

“Is there a washroom or should I just piss over the side?”

“Other end of the boat but that will make you sick.”

“I’ll aim from a long way away.”

“Better change from your sandals to your shoes.”

Robert found a bottle of water in Klin’s knapsack, splashed his face. Klin returned with four slices of corn bread and two bananas. Robert watched him eat, sip on a can of diet cola.

The boat docked at a number of small islands. The sun dropped into the water.

“I can’t find any of these places on the map.”

“You’re just like a kid. Are we there yet? It’s five hours by boat, less than an hour by plane.”

“So why didn’t we fly?”

“Dirt cheap this way…like an islander mahn.”

“Yeh, mahn…bitchin’ cool, mahn.”

ROBERT SHUT HIS EYES, lulled into a half-sleep by the boat’s rhythm; he’d start to slip off the bench, wake up enough to sit back up. When he finally opened his eyes, Klin was standing up. Straight ahead like an egg smashed on the hard grill of the sea was an orange-coloured island, the surf running white all around it.

The boat entered the sliced-out harbour and engine reversing, came to a stop near a concrete dock that was half-covered in water. Not waiting for the gangplank or for the boat to be tied up, Klin jumped the gap, pitching forward into the dust. Robert threw over their bags and made the same leap.

They stood there in the twilight and watched the boat travel to its vanishing point; the island’s silence broken only by swooping, dive-bombing birds. Klin started up the gravel path.

“What about our bags?”

“We’ll get them later.”

At the top of the path, wooden cabins circled a broken flagpole. Off to one side was a conning tower from a submarine. Robert touched it, its rusty skin flaking off. He separated a rib from a decayed wooden row boat and tossed it like a spear into the sand. He found Klin standing at the entrance to a Quonset hut, inside of it, a yellow-coloured generator the size of a small car.

“We need to fill it with diesel and somehow start it if we want any lights or power.”

They emptied cans of diesel fuel into the tank until it read three-quarters full. Klin pushed the starter button. It clicked. He tried again. The same empty sounding click.

“Damn.”

“What now?”

“Manual start.”

He pointed to the rope starter. Robert braced his right foot against the cement block at the base and pulled. The generator coughed. He did it again and the engine sputtered out a greasy smoke before it pumped out cleaner fumes. The camp lit up like an old-fashioned pinball game, and a radio began jabbering with Spanish voices. They went cabin to cabin shutting the switches off, and then went back down to the dock to grab their bags.

KLIN POURED THE heated stew over the macaroni. “Tomorrow, maybe we can try to catch some fish.”

“How?”

“There’s a boat and motor. Fishing reels.”

“You hate fishing.”

“You go.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I’m so hungry, this actually tastes good.”

For dessert, they shook loose some bird-pecked oranges, and drank ginger-flavoured tea in porcelain cups while sitting on the screened-in porch of the largest cabin.

Robert poked his finger through a hole in the screening.

“We’ll have to downgrade this resort at least one star for that.”

“How can you put a price on history?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s dirt cheap and during the Second World War, the British hunted German U-boats fromhere. They built the cabins, the dock and the airstrip. They also died here, there’s a cemetery. Long before that, pirates attacked Spanish sailing ships from here. They buried their dead here too…that poke their way to surface during a heavy rain.”

“Who owns it now?”

“A client.”

“You mean Danny?”

“Don’t worry mahn, be happy.”

“Well, kill me now or kill me later.”

“Don’t be such a drama queen. This will play out fine.”

THEY UNPACKED THEIR bags, put fresh bed sheets over the damp-smellingmattresses. The netting around Robert’s bed was torn, so he slept with his arms and head under the sheet, but the mosquitoes still found him. When he woke in the morning to birds screaming like street corner maniacs, Klin’s bed was empty.

Robert wet his face with water from a rain barrel, scraping the surface to get below the dead insects. He climbed a wooden ladder that led to a watchtower. From there, he saw what gave the island its distinctive colour. The soil bled rusty orange from rain runoff in the hills where the trees and brush had died.

He watched Klin push an airmattress into the light surf. Robert returned to the cabin and changed into his bathing suit. He found a second air mattress in a shed and inflated it with a foot pump. They floated just beyond where the surf started to break, until they’d drift into it and tumble off the mattresses. Then they’d paddle out again.

They broiled red, the waves a barbecue grill they lingered on too long. They painted each other pink with calamine lotion, the smell reminding Robert of hismother, and how gentle her touch, before any of the madness. Klin pulled out a plastic baggie from under a loose floorboard. “Do you want any of this to cut the pain?”

“You smuggled it here?”

“Left here for guests.”

“No.”

“I won’t either then.”

“Grass if you have any?”

“Perhaps. I’m going to have a drink first.”

Klin opened a cabinet and removed two shot glasses and a bottle of Scotch.

“Nothing for me.”

Klin poured in the whisky, then swirled it around in the glass while holding it up to the sunlight that had cracked open the cabin, made it appear almost clean. He gulped it down, poured another. He walked to the far end of the porch, stood there, silhouetted by the fading light, drank his whisky then tossed the glass. It hit a rock, shattered.

“More of your ecology?”

“It’s glass…not plastic…eventually it will disappear, maybe in a thousand years or so…by then how old will we…”

“Is this really Danny’s place?”

“Technically, yes.”

“Technically?”

“A numbered company…you know the drill…to keep the government’s hands off it.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“Yes.”

“Sousa too?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do I need your protection?”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you understand?” Klin in the shadows. “We’re in this together.”

“You sold me out.”

“Yeah, for thirty pieces of silver. It’s a thing my tribe has.”

“You sold me out for the shit you suck up your nose.”

“Sold you out. How?”

“I thought you were my friend.”

“I didn’t ask you to go to jail or to claimthat you saw Danny’s car that day.”

“Why am I even involved in this?”

“Stuff happens, though you pretend it doesn’t and hide out in your apartment for days. Well, in the real world…how could I ever live up to your myth of Klin the genius…the poet warrior…battling for truth, justice, and the Canadianmiddle way…when nothing good was happening, really happening outside of...oh yes, the drugs.” The quick Klin laugh there and gone. “I knew Danny would try to shock you silent, the Donna thing; your great imagination. It was your own stupid fault you ended up in the Don Jail. It had nothing to do with me. I told him he could trust you, he couldn’t really, we both know that.”

“Promise me if I ever get aids, that you’ll kill me.”

“You don’t mean that?”

“I don’t want to die like Rick did, thinking that his dead mother and his doctor had found a cure for aids but they wouldn’t give it to him. No. Kill me. I’d do the same for you.”

“Would you?”

“Yes.”

“Is that a hypothetical yes or a genuine yes?”

“Yes.”

Klin gave out a crazy sad laugh.

“Preferred method of death?”

“Shoot me. Just don’t let me suffer.”

Klin started a Doors tape on the portable cassette player.

This is the end, beautiful friend

This is the end

My only friend

The end

Of all our elaborate plans

The end

Of everything that stands

The end

No safety, no surprise

The end

I’ll never look into your eyes again

Klin lit a joint. The smell of the grass bringing back that summer of the government make-work program and Debbie who wore halter tops, and whom they both wanted and whom Klin ended up fucking.

Klin told him the entire story, how the grass and wine made it easier and how he didn’t stop even when Debbie told him to stop that she loved her boyfriend back at the University of Western Ontario.

“The games end once you fuck them, Robert.”

Debbie who dyed the tips of her long dark hair a couple of shades lighter so they looked like wings on the side of her head. No angels, no devils, either; just days of working outside under the summer sun, and at night the occasional joint or a piece of Lebanese hash stuck on the end of a safety pin. The speed and the needles came later.

Can you picture what we’ll be

So limitless and free

Desperately in need of some stranger’s hand

In our desperate land

Robert was once again with his crazy friend and his crazy drugs. So what if he had pre-cued the tape? So what if they had the antibodies? So what if they were both dying? Everybody was dying. So what?

This is the end

Beautiful friend

This is the end

My only friend, the end

It hurts to set you free

But you’ll never follow me

The end of laughter and soft lies

The end of nights we tried to die

This is the end.

THE NEXT MORNING, they walked towards the centre of the island. Sun-baked and flat, the island appeared suspended between the blue of sky and the blue of ocean. Only the stunted trees growing around the rainwater ponds broke the horizontal hold of the landscape.

The path went through a small deserted village, six cabins still standing, the rest fallen in. There was a wooden cross with a faded Jesus planted in front of the largest cabin.

“It’s the church of decay.” Klin stuck a piece of ragged dress to cover the head of the sun-burnt Jesus.

A small cemetery on the other side of the village; the graves were marked by flat rocks or torn sheets of tin. Some had fallen in. Leg and arm bones scattered about. A skull sat on a giant ant hill.

The Royal Navy graves were in neat rows of limestone markers. Eight in all. There was aWalker buried here: Eric. Born Nov. 13, 1921, died Jan. 11, 1944.

There were five newer graves, unmarked but where the soil had settled in. A chewed foot stuck out. Klin hit it with a stick. It came off and rolled towards them, gathering dirt and twigs.

“Shake and bake,” Klin said.

He poked the stick into the foot and threw it at theWalker gravestone. It hit, leaving a black smear on the pale white stone. Robert kicked dirt over it.

His own ground zero, the solitary feel of this place as if the rest of the world had been nuked and gone to heaven except for the Miami stations they picked up late at night on the radio.

THE AIRSTRIP CONSISTED of soil flattened and baked in the sun, fuel cans stacked under a tarpaulin and a worn air sock drifting in the light breeze. A rattlesnake sunning itself on a large flat rock took no notice of them. Klin threw a stone at it and woke it from its coma. It weaved its way back into the small swamp bordering the road.

“A diamondback,” Klin said.

“I didn’t think these islands had snakes.”

“Danny’s weird experiment in zoology.”

Robert saw bare footprints leading into the swamp. Dog prints too. Empty shotgun and rifle shells littered the ground and small explosions had ripped craters in the swamp.

“Hunters,” was Klin’s answer to Robert’s unasked question. Then the short, abrupt Klin laugh.

AFTER DINNER, they walked the beach, waves rushing to expire in last whispers, pulling at the sand under their feet.

“Movie?” said Klin.

“Okay.”

“Couple in a car. Older woman, younger man.”

“Too obvious. Give me something more difficult.”

“Answer this one first.”

“The Graduate.”

“Not even close.”

“Hint?”

“Not so easy, is it? Okay. Bandage over his eye.”

“Still nothing.”

“Fight with his best friend.”

“The Last Picture Show. Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges. They fought over Cybill Shepherd.”

“Who was the older woman?”

“Ellen Burstyn. She’s driving Tim home after his failed elopement with Cybill who played her daughter, Jacy. Ellen tells him she had found it with Sam de Lion, whatever it was.”

“Sam de Lion?”

“Ben Johnson.”

“Where?”

“That theatre on Main Street. We had just entered high school and we were high on acid.”

“What did we do after the movie?”

“There was an all-night filmfestival down the street. Rock ’n’roll movies. Bill Hailey and the Comets in Rock Around the Clock. The Monkees in Head.”

“What was the best?”

“That National Film Board short with Leonard Cohen reading fromhis novel, Beautiful Losers and the da Vinci images on the screen.”

“Do you remember the grape perfume smell of the wine, not to mention the smell of all that grass and hash and those two teenage chicks in front of us. How that midget hippie had fallen asleep between them and like in a demented Jefferson Airplane song, they kept on saying, ‘Don’t wake him and God bless his pointy head’.”

“Yeah, the night got weirder, all right.”

“Then from the balcony, an idiot began throwing cherry bomb firecrackers and people were ducking and covering their eyes. And then the movies stopped and we were back on the street, early on a Saturday morning with that blonde April rain falling on us.”

“Your uncle Jack had given us the key to his apartment; he was in Florida or something.”

“We went there and found old copies of Playboy andmasturbated to them.”

“You masturbated, I watched.”

“You should never have fucked her.”

“Who, Debbie? I wanted to but never did.”

“Don’t joke. You know who I mean.”

“Yes, you’re right. I fucked her and turned her into a crack whore.”

“There you go joking about it…she’s my fuckin’ mother, for God’s sakes.”

“You don’t really care, do you?”

“I’ll fuck your mother’s bones and spread them all over downtown.”

Klin picked up a piece of driftwood and swung it at Robert’s head. He jerked back, the sharp edge catching his neck, cutting a line, the blood blotting into his white t-shirt.

Robert ran into the surf until his legs could pump nomore, diving. Klin didn’t pursue, just stood there watching as Robert floated further out.

“I’ll revoke your bond, you crazy fucker. Send you back to jail. To Sousa.”

“He’s out. You got him out.”

Klin gave him the finger and walked away. They had another week to go until the boat picked them up.