THREE

IN THE DARK, gunning for Montreal. I leaned my head against the passenger window and stared at a trapezoid of blue reflected light in the base of the window, like a pilot fish tracking the car.

This is where the Greyhound stops for sandwiches, David said, and pulled over. The customers were not the ones that you see on planes. I had forgotten that cheaper forms of travel attract poorer people. One woman with a chain of tickets—connections that would take her deep into northern Quebec. There were cases of emphysema, middle-aged men in worn clothes, a woman carrying a toaster, students and no children.

David:You looking for someone.

There’s always someone, I said, who stands in line with a pillow.

When we hit centre-ville, David said, I want to get some glasses. I’m squinting.

Dont you need a prescription.

I have a prescription. I’ve had it for four months in my wallet. It’s just they dont make glasses I like.

And he widened his eyes again, trying to stretch the cornea.

Okay we’ll get you glasses.

We veered into Montreal and took all those crazy ramped exits. There must be a billion dollars of concrete hovering in the air around Montreal. They remind me of the rings in the Olympic logo, and Montreal has that Olympic association. The word Expo too. When youre young you think a certain place has particular things, and when youre older you realize theyre all over the world.

We felt our way down to the centre of town, the way you approach stairs in the dark. We stopped into a Lenscrafters ten minutes before closing, but all their frames were too small. We asked for a boutique and there was one across the street. Apparently we were in the glasses district. Watching David point at frames in a cabinet lit with recessed light, the woman turning the sign in the window over, so it read open to us inside. I hadnt known Dave to be so fussy. They need to be bigger, he said. I have a big face. The woman in the boutique helped him. She had a big chest and short arms and it was a challenge for her not to knock anything over.

These ones, she said, the frames have not been kiln-baked, or varnished.

You say that disparagingly, David said.

They’ve been rolled in cedar flakes for six months, she said.

And we both imagined a girl in Poland rolling a little box for six months, as though she’s about to draw the winning lottery number painted on a pingpong ball.

Then he put on a silver pair. He stared at himself. Something happened to him. His shoulders stiffened and he backed away from the mirror. He almost careened into the kiosk of revolving frames. He pulled off the glasses and handed them to her. I dont ever want to see these again, he said.

He ordered the frames that had been rolled in cedar flakes. He gave her the prescription.

In the car I drove. David was laughing at himself now.

I put those silver ones on, he said, and a familiar feeling came over me, like a previous life. It was my father. Suddenly I looked just like my father.

IT WAS AFTER NINE and we drove to a pastry shop David knew. The women were wearing things like negligees over tops. What used to be below was now worn on top, and the same was happening with food. People were eating desserts and then they ordered rare beef on a bed of arugula. I called Lars Pony and David held his pebble and thought about Sok Hoon. He was just leaving a message, he said.

I said Lars sounded troubled.

David: Are we a hindrance? We can skip him.

It felt, I said, like I was talking to a wide-open sky.

There had been a movie shoot earlier in the day. They were still taking down props. While we ate near a pillar, a square of gold mirror unglued itself and fell on David’s head. I watched it slice down like a guillotine and bounce off his skull, then his forehead bloomed one streak of red. A gusher. What was that, he said.

A panel of mirror fell on your head, I said.

A grip came over and picked up the mirror. Nothing happened here, he said in French. And handed David a fresh bar towel.

You should sue, a waitress said, also in French.

David stanched the flow and a woman passed by. She said something like, I’ll get my boyfriend, he’s a doctor.

She brought back a handsome man from across the street. Youthful, lightboned and Panamanian. He tilted David’s head.

Oh you need stitches, he said, you need five.

A diagnosis in two seconds.

I’m glad, David said, there was a doctor.

He spoke quickly in Spanish to his girlfriend.

He’s not a doctor, she said. He’s a boxer.

The thing is, am I going to go bald.

Dave, youre bald.

I’m shaven, he said.

We took a vote, the woman, the boxer and me. A unanimous decision that David was bald and would continue to be bald.

I wasnt supposed to go bald, he said. This is news to me. I take after my mother’s father, he said, and he had a thick head of hair.

There was something about David’s mother’s father that David connected with. He did not like his father, so he skipped a generation and took up his mother’s father. And now this surprise uncoupling. Baldness was supposed to swing David to the idea of stitches. The vanity of a scar. But instead he said to the hovering waitress, We’ll settle for a couple of free coffees and we’re ready for our savoury.

BUT HE WENT THROUGH the bar towel and the bleeding would not stop. I drove him to a hospital and we waited in Emergency for two hours. The hospital made him think about his father, and so he phoned the hospital in Corner Brook. It was midnight in Corner Brook and he got an orderly who put him on to the nurse we knew, Maggie Pettipaw. His father was the same. There was no real need for David to come home. He could be this way for months. Then his pebble glowed and he had a message from his sister.

When’s the last time you heard from her.

He called her back. All he did was hold the pebble and it called her.

She lives in New Hampshire. She wants to talk about my father. She says Richard Text’s in town.

He would know where Nell was, I thought.

Me: Do we have a map?

We asked a nurse if there was a map and she came back with a revolving globe that must have come from a children’s ward. It was the kind with a light bulb in the middle that you could plug in. In fact, it was sort of like how I thought the world really worked, from an inner glow.

Bethlehem, David said. Sasha’s right here working in a lab. You cut through Vermont and cross the Connecticut River and youre in New Hampshire. We take the 91 and it’s no more than what, two hundred miles.

I didnt care either way. I knew Sasha as a youngster and so she’s remained a youngster.

What’s Richard doing there.

A high-level government visit, he said.

Have you met him.

You havent?

And I told him that I’d met him once, briefly, early one morning but hadnt known it was him.

You never met him in Corner Brook?

I squeezed my forehead and knew I must have seen him there, but all that came to mind were the stories Nell had told me. Can you tell the nurse, I said, that there’s a tightness in your chest.

Why would I say that.

It’ll shave an hour off the wait.

But he wouldnt. David didnt fool with his own health. That was his only truth, never to pretend an injury, for that injury will seek you out and smite you. He did not possess morals over swiping craftily an alternator from a salvage yard, but he would not bend the truth about his own health. It was connected to his God-hunch and praying. So while we waited, every twenty minutes or so, I darted out to check on the dog. I gave her a walk to see if she needed to empty herself. Then a Haitian doctor suggested a needle and Dave’s head was sewed up—the boxer was right, five stitches.