Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good: A Novel

Dear Zane,

REASON NOT TO BE GOOD #1

Virtue means sacrifice, and sacrifice is always about ego. A priest gives up sex to get into heaven, a husband gives up poker to get sex. Virtue is selfishness, and selfishness is a vice. Virtue is vice.

Get it?

Matt

The airport’s automatic door goes shhht, and Matt steps out into the held breath of midsummer in Toronto. Yeck. He plants his feet, waits for the wooze to pass. At the end of each arm a suitcase tugs at his slippery grip.

Matt raises his eyes. A jet slopes up into the fuzzy dusk over the parkade. “Lucky clowns,” he mutters. Where might they be headed? Back west where he’s come from, into earlier, into the afternoon? Or east, eveningwards? Away from this place anyway, where past and future are both clonged on the anvil of the present.

Jeezuz aitch, he really is feeling odd. It must be more than this hasty escape, this batty mission …

“Sorry, sorry.” Matt shuffles forward a few feet, obliges himself to breathe. It’s been a while, he usually times his visits to avoid this nonsense. During the descent the captain crackled something about thirty-three degrees Celsius, forty-four with the humidex. There didn’t used to be a humidex, did there? There didn’t used to be a kajillion cars huffing hydrocarbons either. Or maybe it’s just that he’s older now. Maybe it’s just that he’s old.

Forty-four, is that old? Hey, if he were dead he’d be young. Only forty-four, that’s so sad! Some comfort. A curious age, forty-four, neither one thing nor another. Or call it both. A dollop each of life and death whirred up together and served with a silly cocktail straw.

Unless he is dead, could that be it? When your life’s over, what else do you call it? In which case what he’s looking for here is a rebirth, a reincarnation. Will Mariko be around this time too? Will she be his wife again, and put him through the same ordeal? “You keep coming back to earth till you learn,” she’s told him, but she hasn’t told him what. Or maybe she’ll be his sister this time, or his father, or his friend.

Forty-four degrees, that’s hot. What would it be in real numbers, in old-fashioned Fahrenheit? Multiply by one-point-something, add whatever. Matt puts down a bag to swipe at a tickle of sweat on his forehead. He’s been stewing in his own brine for hours, feverish, shaky—it’s a relief to have an excuse now, and to see everybody else dissolving too. Melting, Wicked Witch of the West–style, into the foul puddle of themselves. If he’s sick, well, so’s the city. If he’s going to burn, at least he won’t burn alone. Hey, we’re all in this together …

It’s so weird. You journey from where you live to where you once lived. Are you away? Are you home? Why did you leave? Why have you come back?

Matt cranks his head slowly left, then right, wary of the whirlies. Cars and shuttles jockey for position at the curb; travellers dart and weave, each one a rattled survivor towing his or her black box. A paunchy guy in a crossing-guard getup stumps over his way. Matt has the bewildering urge to embrace him.

“Right, you bet. But first a question. Where’s the … what have you done with the air?”

The limo lummox favours him with a rigid, end-of-shift smile. He beckons an idling car with a flick of his walkie-talkie. “First visit to our fair city, sir?”

A cab pulls up and a youngish man in a purple turban emerges from its far side. Matt gratefully, almost tearfully relinquishes his bags and folds himself into the back seat. Leather, cold against the wet lumbar of his shirt, cool beneath his palms. The leather’s creased like a palm too, fissured with history. So many fannies. Matt makes a few Brando-like noises (pained, impacted), thinking On the Waterfront, the primal cab scene. I coulda been—

Matt has to crane to make out the guy’s name on the dash decal. Mariko once told him you got better service if you used names, and though Matt generally resists her little blurts of wisdom—not because they’re misguided but because they aren’t, because they’re so effortlessly true—he’s glommed onto this one. Waiters, tellers, clerks, he chums them all. It doesn’t work, at least it doesn’t open them up much, but it does something even more miraculous: it opens him up. It calms him, collapses the distance. “Yeah, um, Jatinder?” Too close, is what he feels today. Over-close to everybody. “I’m thinking … I need to lie down soon. Very soon. Could you recommend a hotel nearby?”

“Of course, sir. No trouble.” A quick shoulder-check and they zag into traffic. And there’s that girl from the flight, the Unaccompanied Minor. Hey, why didn’t he get her name? She’s got her father with her now, a big scruffy brute, not quite Matt’s height but broader, beamier. About the size of Matt’s dad before he hit eighty (can it be almost a decade ago?) and swiftly shrivelled, like one of his own tar-caked lungs. Eighty-eight. A big year for the both of them, the boy starting to catch up now, half the age of his old man. A presage of some sort, so says Mariko. A turning point. The girl stalks the crosswalk, permits Pops to lumber along beside her with her suitcase. He’s had her about ten minutes and you can see he’s already flummoxed. Matt registers a slight tremor of relief—in advance of the customary quake of sorrow—at the thought that he has no kids to panic about. He palms the window, hoping for a high-five with the girl, but she’s gone.

“My plan was to drop in on him, surprise him. See, he’s sick. He’s letting himself die.” Matt shakes his head, wishes he hadn’t. “I have to stop him.” Wow, that does sort of sum it up. Has it ever sunk all the way in before? “But now it looks like I’m sick, so.”

Do you tell people what’s really going on with the guy? Do you keep it to yourself? “Yeah, cough on the man and I’d probably kill him. Not much of an immune system.”

They were lounging against a pair of tombstones, he and Zane, the day Zane told him—about being positive that is, not about his plan to pack it in. Mount Pleasant Cemetery, a favourite hangout back when they were teenagers. “Don’t panic,” Zane reassured him once he’d hit him with the news. “You can have my albums.”

“Wow, thanks.” Matt went to slurp from his peanut butter jar—they’d brewed up rum and Cokes, old times’ sake—but his hand had gone wobbly on him. “Just my luck you’ll live or something, though.”

“Never know,” said Matt. He had another go at his drink, both hands. “These new drugs, you take them and you’re good, right?”

Zane nodded. He did nod, didn’t he? Then he started bopping around, trying for an Abba-type effect, the mickey as microphone.

“That’s Freddie Mercury,” said Matt. “You really can’t do anybody but Queen, can you?”

Which was what, two years ago? Almost, it was autumn 2001, Matt in town for his dad’s eighty-seventh birthday. Eight plus seven is fifteen candles, five breaths to blow them out.

Jatinder’s taken to humming to himself now, something sweet and poppy. You could imagine it was Abba—“Mamma Mia”?—if you really put your mind to it. “Hey,” says Matt, “so you’re … That accent, India?”

“Hey there, buddy, I was just … Oh, I see. Sorry. Toronto drivers, eh?” Matt flinches as Jatinder tight-squeezes past the offending vehicle. “So, Mumbai. Hot, I guess?”

“In the humid season, very hot. And crowded.” Jatinder tsks, performs an odd shovelling motion with his free hand—he might be scooping spilled ash from a countertop. “Take about half the people in Canada? Now crush them into Toronto.” A fist.

“Yikes.” Matt’s never really been anywhere. Well, Europe with a backpack after high school, he and Zane, the done thing in those days. Late ‘70s. Matt flashes briefly on that arrival scene, not at Heathrow but at Calais, he and Zane staggering off the ferry after their riotous trip across the Channel to France. They’d checked off England and were ready for the real thing, a big world in which nobody else would understand. Bonjour. Guten Tag. Ciao. Hola. Al-salaam alaykum. They’d shared the ferry with a gaggle of French school kids, all busy barfing up Coke and chips. A chain reaction—one spewed and that inspired the next, and so on. Matt and Zane spent the whole trip tuning up their gagging noises, translating them into various tongues. By the time they docked they could ralph in most European languages, plus Russian, Japanese, a few others. Matt’s mum had a friend from Iceland so that was his specialty, hœööööörrnnn …

But other than that one big trip? Not much. A couple of Vegas weekends with Meg, an Alaska cruise with Cat, two or three daiquiri-infused getaways with Mariko. Nothing to help Matt fathom the kind of human density Jatinder’s talking about.

Movies, of course, and TV. Zane’s documentaries have come closest. He’s covered three continents so far, South America, Asia, Africa, each piece a fresh fusion of rage and dismay. There was Rio, there was Jakarta, and now there’s Lagos in Nigeria, Shanumi’s story. Always with the stats: this many infected, this many dead, this many orphaned. Numbing numbers. Say-uncle numbers.

“Not really. Someplace not too scuzzy but not, you know, crazy either. I’m on a budget. Actually no, I’m not on a budget, that’s the problem. So what’s my best bet?”

Jatinder—Jat to his dear ones, Matt figures—imparts a pensive tilt to his head. “Well, there’s the Delta.”

Matt adores this accent, Jat’s accent, which he thinks of, for some reason, as spherical. Planet-shaped. And hey, maybe there’s something to that. Toronto, Mumbai, they’d be pretty much opposites, wouldn’t they, pretty much antipodes? Put a palm on each and you could hoist the whole world, couldn’t you?

But what Matt loves most about this accent is that he can do it. Well, he can come close. He and Zane picked it up about thirty years ago (criminy) from their beloved Mr. Kumar, the wry chess wizard who push-broomed the halls of their high school. Mr. Kumar was an unrecognized genius, so when he recognized them, recognized Matt and Zane—fired a wink their way when they’d been smoking in the stairwell, scooted them in the back door when they were running late—didn’t that mean they were geniuses too? Too soon to say what kind of geniuses (they both sucked at chess), but that would come clear in time. Mr. Kumar was their man, and they’d mimic him whenever they were alone together, taking on his mystique, they hoped, through a kind of sympathetic magic. They’ve been doing it over the phone again recently, conjuring the past as the future goes bizarre on them.

Tonight Matt has the almost unmasterable urge to give that accent a go, see how ol’ Jatinder takes it. With any luck he’ll come right back with a Matt-like accent, a honky Canuck, rude and unremarkable as it may be. Couple of oots, couple of aboots. They’ll switch, they’ll swap, they’ll become one another.

Light standards strobe past in slo-mo (traffic’s at a tetchy crawl tonight), shadows slap Matt’s wincing face. The dusk is deep enough, now, for a gibbous moon—just about full? just past?—to make its appearance low over the oncoming lanes. The moon? Here in the city she’s just another street lamp, the poor old girl. She’s just another bulb that wants changing once a month.

It’s so different at home. At home—the other home, the little patch of west coast paradise Matt still shares with Mariko—the moon’s a great big deal. One evening every month or so Mariko will snuff out all the artificial lights, tease Matt out into the field at the heart of their tiny forest and get him to squat with her in the “loon-light,” as she calls it. Play primitive, play primordial. Far from the city’s smog-glow there’s nothing to hide the universe from them, or them from the universe. There’s nothing between skin and sky, between their two bodies and that obliterating bigness.

Has Sophie been initiated yet? Tonight, maybe. Yeah, maybe tonight. Under this very moon she and Mariko will sink into some goddess-worshippy trance, some pagan sacrament or ceremony. Crone-song, crone-dance, who knows. All that holiness will get them good and horny, and they’ll troop together up to the moon-streaked bed …

India’s next, apparently, in terms of body count. Right behind Africa and gaining fast. Odds are Zane’ll be heading there before long, with his conscience and his movie camera. That’s assuming Matt can convince him to live, of course. A million cases so far, did he say? A billion? A kajillion?

Matt shivers, suddenly sno-cone cold. “Jat, you know what?” he says in his own nothing voice. “Wherever. Just take me there.”

He was fine when he left home this morning. Mariko drove him, an in-town day for her anyway. He was fine as they crept onto the ferry, fine as they churned across that half-hour of docile sea, fine as they crept off again in Vancouver. He was fine as they effected their no-big-deal goodbye at the departure gate, jets rumbling in and out overhead.

Fine? Fine-ish. Only moderately freaked out. They shared a dry smooch and the sort of back-patting hug you’d normally reserve for an over-clutchy colleague. Such is the stringency of the current setup at home (Matt batching it on the futon in his study, Mariko alone in their bed) that this whisper of contact was enough to conjure a brief, pointless perk-up in his cords. No sense bumming either of them out any further, so Matt steered her away before she could detect his arousal, there under the smirking scrutiny of that Native nature god. Musqueam, maybe? One of those coastal bands. It might be a raven up there, or a beaver, or a bear—Matt never remembers to focus, so he’s left with just the bulging eyes, the heaped slabs of red and black. The imagery was bang on, Mariko’s spiritual deal being so mystifyingly Indigenous these days—a sort of New Age shamanism, as best Matt can figure it, entitling you to wear beads and bits of buckskin along with your hemp and your hanging crystals. All Sophie’s doing, no doubt, though she’s about as Aboriginal as the Queen. On Mariko, more’s the pity, this cultural mishmash looks like some sublime union, some transcendent synthesis. It’s as though adepts of every faith have laid hands on her, hung her with their symbols. And then the high heels …

Which brought on a brand new squirm of doubt. Matt had pretty much persuaded himself that Zane’s death was reversible, that one-on-one he could compel his friend to see the obvious: that letting yourself die was lame, that even the most saintly motivations were pathetic. When Mariko put it like that though, expressed it as an act of faith, Matt suddenly lost his. At what stage had their marriage started to work that way?

That would have been the moment. If she were going to cry, that would have been the time. You could see her refusing—an act of kindness, you could see that too, her sparing him the scene.

He was busy picturing it all in reverse. He was busy picturing a future in which this past would be perfectly rewound. He’d be home again, boomeranged across the country and back. She’d be there to meet him and she’d instantly read the new conviction in his eyes. The old conviction. It was this very airport, after all, into which they’d walked together the day they met on that flight from Toronto. Seven years ago? Almost exactly, that was summertime too.

MAH-ree-koh. Matt practised it on his bus ride alone into town that day. Chanted it almost, MAH-ree-koh, his new mantra, his one and only mantra. Next morning he checked it out in a baby-name book. “Rounded. Circle. Complete.”

“Anyway,” she said, “I hope you get a decent movie. Something you can really tear apart.” She grinned, and she gave him one last peck, and she backpedalled into the crowd. She looked … what did she look? Sad, sure, but I’ve-changed-my-mind-don’t-go sad or have-a-nice-life sad? Maybe he should have asked. Was she waiting for him to ask?

And he was fine as he trod the long chute, the syringe that injected them one by one into the glossy body of the machine. He’d boarded last (why submit before your time?) and was therefore required to do the excuse-me shuffle, back in Economy, with the girl in the aisle seat to get to his window. Yep, still fine. Better than fine, he actually felt a little fizzy for the first time in ages. Did this mean it was really over, his time with Mariko? The end of each relationship brings with it, Matt’s noticed, a euphoria that’s the flip side of the one he felt at the start. Fission, fusion, they both give you a buzz. For a little while, at least, the raw shock of grief can be made to look like rapture.

Girl? Young lady? She was old enough to have two little hummocks tenting her tube top, young enough to have that “UM” sign hung like press certification around her neck. Matt, moronic in these matters, put her at eleven. If he had a daughter, might she be this age? Eleven from 2003 is 1992, so Caitlin? No. Nosiree. Of all Matt’s women, Cat was the most motherly, but also the most appalled by the prospect of …

All Matt’s women, yeah, good one. Not counting Hanna-and-Helena—would that be one or two?—he’s had four. Four, at forty-four. What a farce. This sexual stinginess will help scholars of the future (so Matt fancies, when he’s up for a rueful laugh at his own expense) dice his life into neat chunks or chapters. The way they do with Bergman and his films for instance, into the Harriet period, the Bibi period, the Käbi period, the Liv period. Kritikal Stages: The Life and Work of Matthew McKay. No, but seriously, could a guy get any lamer? Four partners, four potential mums for all his phantom kids.

Miss Unaccompanied wriggled into position, scissored one goose-pimpled thigh over the other. She’d rack up a greater roll call of lovers by the time she could vote. Vote? By the time she could drive.

Back at airport security Matt had chatted briefly with a young woman, a twenty-five-ish Goldie Hawn type who’d inspired in him the predictable little sexual frisson. Hey, a guy gets cuckolded (is that still the word when the other man’s a woman?), the coast is pretty damn clear, no? But what Matt did about it, as always, was nothing. Why is nothing what he always does? Matt’s never bought into Mariko’s notion that what makes him so unadventurous with women is virtue. More like some kind of hard-wired fidelity fetish, is what he figures. Today, though, as that young woman raised her slender arms for the brute with the beeper, it occurred to him, why not? Why shouldn’t this seeming backwardness be a sign of resolution, of character? Mariko’s always thought more highly of Matt than he’s thought of himself. She’s righter than Matt about most things, so why shouldn’t she be righter about this too? Such were his musings as Goldie was led to the counter and directed to open her backpack. From it she produced a huge, a monolithic blue dildo, which she was made to switch on to prove it wasn’t stuffed with explosives. As the thing writhed and bobbed before her Goldie looked back at Matt, and she giggled …

“What? Oh, no worries.” The umgirl, still squirming, had dinged Matt in the arm. Of more concern to Matt were his legs. What the heck was he supposed to do with them? Back in her sketching phase, Mariko had once dashed off a pen-and-ink nude of her husband and magneted the resulting masterpiece (it really was quite good, unnervingly so) to the fridge. The Matt up there was all appendage, a knot of torso from which great squiggles of limb flew off. Mariko had labelled it “My Beautiful Man,” and she’d meant it—she was never ironic in her adoration of Matt, never ironic about much of anything. To Matt, though, the drawing was a perfectly apt caricature, a right-on view of how ridiculous he was—a view of which he was reminded, now, by the grinding of his knees against moulded plastic.

He tight-crossed his legs, scrunched them up against the fuselage. “First trip?” he said. Buddy-buddy with just a hint, he hoped, of the avuncular, of the warmly uncle-ish. How do you not sound like a creep to a kid alone? How do you come off as unscary to a child who’s heard the lecture, seen the film?

“Um, no,” she said. “I do this trip all the time.” She freed her hair from its ponytail, held out a hank so she could assess its colour (black with arteries of orange, a Halloween motif), or perhaps the condition of its tips.

The girl re-ponied her hair, gave Matt an appraising flash of her pale grey eyes. Mascara, but just barely—a marvel of understatement, of near-ascetic restraint. Twelve? “My mum’s on the west coast,” she said, apparently not detecting anything overtly spooky about the dork next to her. “My dad’s in T.O.”

The girl shrugged. She fished the in-flight magazine from the pouch on the back of the seat in front of her, started poking at buttons overhead in search of the reading lamp. The way she cocked her head … Shanumi having her one good eye checked, blinking up into the light. Matt can’t seem to quit watching Zane’s latest documentary—he screened it again last night, his fifth time, or maybe his sixth—and it’s giving him flashbacks now, haunting him like a bad trip. Shanumi seaside, toddler glued to her thigh, bowing her balding head for a pastor or priest …

“Please,” said the umgirl, tossing grimly through the magazine in search of the program guide, “please tell me I haven’t seen the movie.”

Just then a flight attendant happened by and leaned beaming into their little space. “You two are at the emergency exit,” she said. “That means you’d be first, okay, sir? You’d be the first one out.”

Which is when the fever made its presence felt. Something about that phrase First one out, a prophesy rendered irresistible by its sheer lack of content. It produced in Matt a shiver, and then a prickly sweat across his brow under the flap of his floppy hair. First one out. Bergman could have done something with that, brought it to dark life on film. Buñuel.

“Breathe normally.” The flight attendant was into her pantomime now, in sync with the safety spiel. “Always secure your own mask before assisting someone else.” It brought to Matt’s mind a bit of fortune-cookie psychology his high school girlfriend, Charlotte Tupper—the first of his four—once fed him.

Smidge of truth to that, but could you really do it? Say he and Mariko had had a kid, say that one false alarm had turned out to be true. She’d be, what, two now? Three? Did they really think he’d help himself to air while she starved for it?

“Flight attendants, please take your positions for takeoff.” Matt grabbed a last peek at the serrated mountains north of the city. Then he sat back and waited for the drone and the roar, for the G-force to flatten him against his seat, relieve him of weight. It was his favourite bit of every trip, one of his favourite of all feelings. The feeling of being … what? Held. Overpowered. The way mystics must feel overpowered by their gods and goddesses, the way women in bodice-rippers must feel overpowered by their raw-jawed ranchers, their sternly tender MDs. Matt gave himself up, briefly, to something so much bigger than himself that there was no contest—something that could kill him if it had a mind to, and to which he could offer up, in supplication, only a stupefied sigh. This feeling, too, was more intense today. Too intense. He was being crushed, coal into diamond. He was all nerve, a gem of pleasure-pain, a nugget of achy joy. And he was dripping like a can of cold pop.

Was this the thing called “being sick”? It’d been so long. The acronymed stuff, that’s what you had to watch out for. SARS was ancient history, there’d be something new by now, BIMP or GOOP or WACK or Christ knows what. Some critter would be carrying it, pig or hen or house cat (had Toto, Matt’s full-figured tabby, not been just a little off her kibble of late?), and would already have passed it on to a few humans. Not the standard victims this time, not the young or the old or the poor or the gay or the addicted, but the Matts of this world, white, middle-aged, straight.

Last trip to Toronto, Zane had invited Matt to an AIDS fundraising gala, “Grief Resolvable and Unresolvable.” There was to be music—Death and the Maiden, other dismally gorgeous classics—plus movies, cutting-edge stuff like Zane’s. “Special Guest Zane Levin”—that would have been down at the bottom of the poster someplace, where the with-it people would know to look. Theatre folks were scheduled to read out the names of artists who had died of AIDS, or were living with it. Nico, Zane’s partner (ex-partner?), had described the list of infected artists as “infinitely long.” Matt bought a ticket but then bailed. “My dad’s had a … The old man needs me to …”

That list must have horrified Zane, but would it also, Matt wondered—gulping and yawning, praying for his ears to pop—have offered him some comfort? The sense of camaraderie? He could look further back too, check out all those creative consumptives, Keats, Chekhov, Chopin. What was it with art and disease? They were the same thing, could it be that simple? There were tons of sick artists because art’s a disease. Certainly artists use disease—this was a point Matt had already made in a couple of his movie reviews (Elephant Man, Rain Man) with his usual gusto and grouchiness. And what about this, what if artists have to be sick so they’ll have something to say? Keats without his fevers, Dostoevsky without his fits, who’d care? Maybe Zane on the antiretroviral cocktail wouldn’t be sick enough. And maybe Matt was privy to these wonky, wow-man insights today only because he too was burning up.

Beep-beep-mboop-boop. Jatinder’s cellphone plays the Cuban classic “Guantanamera.” One world? “Yes, hello,” he murmurs, then switches tongues. “Hi honey, I’ve just picked up my last fare”—Matt’s speculating here. “Some wound-up white guy who wants to play let’s-get-along. Oh and look at this, a fricking accident.”

Yeah, look at this. People are climbing free of two vehicles munched together in the merge lane ahead. A souped-up Mustang or Camaro has buried its snout in the flank of an SUV. Bad omen, except that everybody’s up and barking at one another so maybe a good omen, could you see it that way?

“Sorry about this, sir,” says Jatinder. He pockets his phone, cranes for an angle out.

And he’s headed the wrong way anyhow. This should really be the ride to Zane’s place. Surprise! And then what? Hey, I’ve thought about snuffing myself the odd time too, you know. Though it’s just the once that Matt’s ever been serious, a couple of months ago, a week or so after Mariko opened her mouth and said, “Sophie.” Serious? In the sense that he actually saw his own death, saw his body inert, vacant—and slumped over in a beanbag chair, oddly enough, the crappy corduroy one he and Zane shared when they were roomies way back when. But I thought about Mariko, what it would do to her. And I thought about Dad. And I thought about you.

Mariko. MAH-ree-koh. It’s true, if she’s the reason for Matt to kill himself she’s also the reason he can’t, or one of them anyway. Might Zane be persuaded to feel the same way? Matt’s why he got sick, Matt’s why he’s got to save himself …

“Just like hello or something.” Maybe if he tagged along. Maybe if he talked Zane into doing an India trip together, the two of them saving people by capturing the disease on film. Death to life, presto chango. The magic of movies.

And then they could go beyond that, catch some yoga-type enlightenment on film too. What a trip—death and transcendence, Zane’d pretty much have to stick around.

Not hardly. Matt pulls out his cellphone, punches in his home number. This’ll be his first call—he’s only just given in, permitted Mariko to buy him the damn thing, hook him up to what she hails as “the great big world.” God help him.

That voice, the one uncomely thing about his wife. Put her in a kimono, jab a couple of chopsticks in her hair and you could pass Mariko off as a Hollywood geisha bending demurely to tip out the tea. Her voice, though, is that of a pickled hussy ordering one last round of shooters on ladies-only night. It’s a thrilling shock, that voice, emerging as it does from such an aerial vessel. It’s still, after seven years, a serious turn-on for Matt. When he isn’t irked by it he’s undone.

“Yeah, hey,” says Matt. Now what? “Um, I’ve landed, and I just … I meant to get Toto her shots this week, would you mind? I miss her already. I miss you both.” Christ, break down and weep why don’t you. If you have Sophie there while I’m gone, tell her to keep her grubby hands off my cat. And if Nagy calls, tell him to take his pissant little paper and shove it up his ass. “I don’t know, I’m feeling kind of weird, I think I must be sick or something. But everything happens for a reason, right?” Ahhhhhh! “Anyway, gotta go. Bye.”

Is it true? Missing, is that what he’s doing about Mariko? He’s missing Toto, no question there. She spared them the custody battle, padded down the hall and established a new favourite spot at the foot of Matt’s futon. Her nonstop attention, almost vapidly intense—this may actually be what’s kept Matt from offing himself so far.

Two ambulances have manoeuvred their way to the scene of the accident, but nobody seems to need strapping down. Mercy, this is the word in Matt’s mind. Between two warehouses he spies a stretch of superhighway, folks howling into the city or out of it, three-six-twelve lanes of jointed steel. From up above, as the jet angled in tonight, Matt noted the spaghetti junctions, the cloverleafs. They were E.T. geometry, they were space-invader hieroglyphics—a cursive script in which earthlings were caught but which they couldn’t possibly decipher.

At the other end, as the jet lifted off, the streets of Vancouver had been so bright and glinty he had to turn away. The umgirl had woggled her jaw once or twice to deal with the altitude, old pro, then pulled out a music magazine. The articles (Matt snuck glances, making as though to check for the drink cart) were mostly about rappers, hip-hoppers, but the cover was all David Bowie, one of the boys’ old favourites. At film school Zane had designed his own T-shirt, “A Lad In Zane”—he was just coming out at the time, way out—as an obeisance to Aladdin Sane, the Bowie album. Hey, maybe that was it, maybe the guy was just insane, just bonkers. Maybe Zane had simply lost his mind.

One flew east,
And one flew west,
And one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.

Matt grinned, tried to stop. Why did his skin feel so funny? He hugged himself—steady, old chum—and tugged his travelling book from his briefcase. What he did first, actually, was he dragged out Mariko’s screenplay, the slab of computer printout with which she’d presented him before they left the Lair this morning. As she’d handed it over she’d offered up all the standard authorial disavowals. “It’s really not very … I know it isn’t exactly your cup of …” She. She’d actually titled the thing She. Sheesh. Matt turned a few pages, tried to be pleased. How long is it going to take him to get happy about this, about his wife’s (his ex-wife’s?) disturbing new accomplishment? A little longer, it would seem.

Matt grimaced. He stashed the manuscript and pulled out his real book, the snoozer he’d brought along for the ride, another gift from his dad. The Dadinator’s never been anything but baffled and miffed by Matt’s thing for movies. Back in 1944, movie crews helped with Operation Quicksilver: they built a phantom invasionary force (rubber, plywood, papier mâché) in northern England to fool Jerry into anticipating a D-Day landing at the wrong spot. According to Matt’s dad this is the one and only meaningful gift cinema has ever made to civilization. Otherwise it’s all pretty fruity. Over these past few months he’s nonetheless taken to clipping out articles, ordering books and disks and shipping them to Matt complete with scribbled endearments. “Thought of you when I saw this …” Damned if the old guy isn’t going soft.

Crowd Scenes. A glossy little hardback, the book toured some of cinema’s most memorable hordes—DeMille’s Israelites at the parting of the Red Sea, hippies at Woodstock being warned off a batch of bad acid—and griped about Hollywood mobs, how Hollywood uses them to endorse its humdrum heroes. Pretty standard critical crankiness, but still gratifying. Matt saved his most intense scrutiny, though, for his bookmark, a shopping list in Mariko’s incongruously chunky hand.

coffee de and reg
moo
scones if they have ww
toto’s feline feast, 6 cans
twine

Twine would be for Mariko’s sunflowers, so last spring. Sophie, back then, was just another funky young thing slinging coffees at the café, as far as Matt could tell. Them were the days.

Matt allowed his eyelids to flutter shut. He had that flying feeling, not just in the juddering, jet-fuelled sort of way but in the soaring way, the way he did as a boy, up over that dream-Toronto. Like a bird but without the flapping. He’d read once that a flying dream always gave you a hard-on, but he couldn’t recall whether or not this was so. Today it seemed to be giving him a hint of one—a dream of an erection, say—but also a sweetly excruciating awareness of each knuckle of his knobby spine. Each vertebra was a frame of film: if he could just get them all arranged in the wrong order, the perfect reverse, he could go back …

The night Zane barfed on his mum’s magazines, maybe? Yeah, that was probably the first time Matt ever bailed his buddy out.

They were about the umgirl’s age, maybe a little older. Zane’s folks were away overnight so the boys had the place to themselves. As usual they flaked out on the Levins’ giant bed, working their way through Mrs. Levin’s collection of Life magazines—surfing the net, or as close as you could come in those days. They’d made a stop at the liquor cabinet on the way up and, cunning little twerps that they were, decanted a little each from a whole bunch of bottles, a little rum, a little gin, a little scotch, a little Cointreau, a little Christ knows what. When Zane puked, the good news was that he didn’t get much of it on the white bedspread. The bad news was that he got it all over Life. Lifes. Lives?

“I’m so dead,” he moaned. “I’m so dead I’m so dead I’m so dead …”

Matt, who’d only guzzled about half his glass, found himself dabbing frantically at a whole gallery of famous faces. Paul Newman clean-cut as Butch Cassidy, Robert Redford doing his tousled Sundance Kid. There were other kinds of pictures too—a couple of big-eyed kids from Biafra, for instance, the place mums went on about when you wouldn’t finish your Kraft Dinner—but most of the cover shots were of movie stars. Richard Burton haunted as Hamlet, Sean Connery almost hideously hairychested as Bond …

When Zane’s folks got home the next morning Matt took the fall. Flu, he called it. He had a crush on Mrs. L., who was perplexingly hot for a mother, but he knew about her temper too. She kind of bought Matt’s lie, kind of didn’t. To seal the deal Matt went into the washroom, stuck a finger down his throat and barfed for real, even getting a verisimilitudinous streak or two on the polka-dot wallpaper. The barfing initiated a little chain reaction in Matt, upsetting his stomach so much that he stayed home from school the next day. Cause and effect gone topsy-turvy.

So there was that, the time Matt made himself sick for his friend. And so many others. What about the time—

“Um, sorry? Oh, I was just … I’ll have the chicken, please.” Matt stirred, clonked his seat into its upright position. Why does he always get the guilts when somebody catches him drifting off? He took a bracing gulp from his Chardonnay, then peeled back the foil and prodded, with his hijacker-proof plastic fork, at the cordon bleu. Starve a cold, feed a fever—or was it the other way around? Out his porthole, cloud was heaped up like ploughed snow, a splash of dog-piddle here and there where the sun had stained it. And suddenly more mountains: shark’s teeth, shards of glass on a compound wall.

“My friend Zane?” he said. He canted his head confidingly in the umgirl’s direction. “The friend I’m visiting this week?”

“Oh, right. Well, I’m visiting both of them, actually. Kind of a twofer. Do you have a best friend?”

“Not really. I have tons of friends, I don’t see why one of them has to be my best.”

So, a spiky bit of business, this youngster. “Huh, see, I was the other way around. Anyway, just say for a sec that you did, that you had a best friend. Twenty years go by and you’re living way far apart but she’s still your best friend, and she’s doing something nuts. Something beautiful but like, barmy, right? And you realize you’re the only one who can stop her.”

“‘Her’?” The girl hooked the air with two fingers of each hand. “Why ‘her’?”

“You said it,” said Matt. “That’s the thing with friendship, isn’t it, that you … Well anyway, where was I?”

“Oh, Zane, actually. But right, so his eyes? They’re different colours too.”

“Yeah. Hey, my wife met David Bowie once. She designs websites, for magazines and stuff but also for rock stars and movie stars and stuff. I’m in movies too.”

“Really?” The girl raked him with her eyes, raked him again. Finally, an ember of interest. “Hey, were you in Home Alone? Were you that bad guy, the tall one?”

“What, Daniel Stern?” Matt hadn’t realized he was looking quite so hangdog these days.

“Actually, I’m not really … I’m a critic, more than anything. I, you know, rip movies up? I’m not really in them. Well, except … have you ever seen Kissed?”

“No, no, that’s okay. But so yeah, I write movie reviews and my friend, we grew up together? He makes movies. Wild, eh?”

“Probably not, no. Anyway, we used to make movies together back in school.” Matt gave his empty Chardonnay a hopeful waggle. No sign of that flight attendant. “Purple Jesus, do you kids still drink Purple Jesus? Grain alcohol and Kool-Aid? No, of course you don’t, not at your—”

“Vodka coolers,” said the umgirl, clearly warming to him now. “Up to four I’m okay, but then it’s puke city.”

“Oh, right. Well anyway, my friend and I made a movie once called Purple Jesus. About, you know, Jesus.”

One night, six months or so ago, Matt set up a private screening, just him and Mariko, of some of the old Matt-Zane collaborations. He’d recently got them transferred from Super 8 onto digital, Purple Jesus and half a dozen others. “Zany,” Mariko called them, hardy har. But that was just about right. The movies were funny, and full of reckless energy, and all lined up like that they made Matt sad. His plan had been to draw Mariko closer, to re-spark their passion by introducing her to a younger, more devil-may-care version of himself. In a way it worked. She went tender on him, but wistfully, as though she too were overcome with nostalgia, an achy longing for some other trajectory through time.

Had she started up with Sophie by that point? Close, anyway, close enough that not saying something was a lie. And before long Matt was lying too, though of course he did it in print.

“Anyway, I do the website thing too,” he said to the umgirl, “work on that with my wife. For my wife.”

“Oh, no. Sorry. But back to this friend of yours. Twenty years go by, okay? You live thousands of miles apart but that doesn’t matter, none of it matters. One day he—”

The umgirl ripped frantically into her little plastic pouch—a toddler greedy for her party favour—and set about fussing with her earphones. It must be tricky, Matt thought, what with all that hardware. She had the standard earring in the lobe, but also one high on the arch, in the little runnel there, and one in the toughest bit, the flap you press when you don’t want to hear something. That must have hurt. It looked inflamed, as though maybe she’d done it herself with an ice pick earlier in the day. She couldn’t be thirteen, could she? That would push her into the previous era—sweet, nutty Meg.

Matt said, “Ouch.” He made pincers of his thumb and forefinger, pinched the flap of his own ear—as fuzzy these days, as furry as Toto’s.

“Did you like it? I mean was that part of the thing, toughing it out?” They were missing the opening credits but who cared. He was reaching out here, he was making contact.

But no, the girl had moved on. She fiddled with her volume, she tinkered with the tilt of her chair. She was checking in, she was checking out.

A little boy, ten or so. You get that he’s Jewish. He’s being humiliated, pants yanked down to reveal his teensy pecker (schmuck, doesn’t Zane call it, when he’s showing off his Yiddish?) just as he puckers up to kiss the little girl. Then the flash forward to his abject adulthood, the whole anger management bit …

Right. Matt remembered this one, an obscenely popular bit of pap from a few months ago. Better yet, he remembered his kritikal take on it, his slant, his angle.

It’s Matt’s practice to launch each of his reviews—featured, until this week, in Vancouver’s moderately hip Omega Magazine—with a riff so ludicrously tangential that folks will be left in a state of painful suspense. How the heck is he going to tie this in to the movie? Or, as Omega’s editor tended to put it (before the real shit hit the fan), “When the hell are you going to get on with it, McKay? What do you think we are here, the New bloody Yorker?” Laszlo Nagy, the über-nag.

As intro to his review of a recent action flick, for instance, Matt philosophized about the nature of The Good. The Good had been much on his mind since Zane’s revelation, his suicidal swerve into virtue, so it was natural that Matt share this fixation with what Nagy referred to (with sly sarcasm) as his “readership.” Was The Good absolute, Matt’s piece inquired, or was it relative? Could an action be said to be inherently good, or good only by virtue of what it accomplished? He segued from this mystifying malarkey to the question of The Bad onscreen. “What The Bad guys are astoundingly bad at in this movie, and in most movies of its ilk”—Matt way overuses the word ilk and he knows it—“is violence. Other than the hero’s wife and daughter the thugs don’t seem to be able to kill anybody. On one occasion twenty-two of them (I counted) armed with Glocks and grenades fail to take out our hero, this despite catching him kerchiefed to the bedpost by his prankish new mate. Then again, he’s The Good guy: he’s good at violence.” And so on.

This was a couple of months back, about the time Matt initiated his postcard campaign, his pre-emptive strike at Zane. If Zane believed that refusing the drugs was good, that it constituted a Gandhi-like cry for justice, then the first step in rescuing him would be to destroy his notion of virtue. Goodness isn’t so great—this has been Matt’s message in each instalment, seven so far (all northern nature shots, raven, beaver, bear). He knows his arguments are weak, that they can all be made to self-destruct, or at least he’s pretty sure they can. He suspects, furthermore, that being good will turn out to be the only good thing, the only thing that matters. Being uncareless. Being uncruel. Still, his goal here is to keep his friend alive (which would be good too, wouldn’t it?), and he hopes that cumulatively his arguments might shake the man’s faith. Worth a try.

In the case of today’s movie (now eliciting great guffaws from its captive audience), Matt’s intro had been statistical. He’d trotted out a whole horde of figures to demonstrate that people would spend, altogether, a hundred lifetimes watching the wretched thing, a hundred lives. Was it worth it? Matt’s piece took the position, perhaps unsurprisingly, that no, it wasn’t. As he fumed his way through the film again today, up there in the jet-streamed azure, some of his choicest zingers came back to him. Here was the aging star, “a winded bad boy who rustles up the requisite pastiche of all his worn-out old performances, glowering and simpering like an impotent satyr.” Here was the new kid, he of the meteoric career, “only slightly more irksome, in his droll delivery, than your neighbour’s coked-up cockapoo.”

On cue the umgirl gave a great hoot-snort of laughter. Fair enough, who could resist a big-wang joke? It had taken Matt himself two viewings to stop finding it funny.

“There isn’t one authentic”—or had he gone with genuine?— “instant in this whole cynical cash grab. The scenario’s so fixed, so phony you can hear the shriek of cellophane as each scene is dutifully unwrapped.”

Another howl from the fizzy child. Matt suddenly wanted to touch her. He wanted it bad, the way you want to jump off a balcony when you get too close to the edge. What with the new dispensation at home, Matt’s pretty much perfectly starved of contact. Right now he’d take anything, a swat, a knee-bump, a jab in the ribs.

“This film can’t be funny because it can’t be serious. It doesn’t care about anything so it can’t betray anything.”

The teenybopper was really going at it now, booting Pepsi out her nose. Matt took another peep out his porthole. Spindly ice crystals, like flattened jacks, had formed on the glass. Or was it plastic? Plexi? And down below, badlands, dry as bone but puckered, pruned like waterlogged skin. This must be the edge of the old ocean, not far from McKay country, the Alberta wheat field from which the old man arose.

Mariko had once—no, more than once—described Matt to himself as “an artist without an art.” Then she’d fancied that up with a bit of French, he was an “artist manqué.” Artist aborted? Something like that. He was a textbook neurotic, a creative guy with nothing creative to do. Thwarted. Bent. “A lot of the screwiest people in the world have been failed artists,” she’d kindly observed. “Hitler, Stalin.” Ah yes, fascists, film critics. Why didn’t he just tell her to fuck off? He’s certainly never had any luck explaining it to her, how she’s right, how she’s wrong.

“Careful, though”—Matt’s review built here towards its own climax—“there’s a surprise awaiting you at journey’s end. Our diffident doofus is transformed from a sweet, ineffectual schlemiel into an assertive prick who swaps his whole private life for an instant of public approval, a standing O from a stadiumfull of strangers.” And that was before he read the crowd book.

In a sense the movie had worked, at least in Matt’s case. Its subject was anger, and it had sure as hell pissed him off. Mariko had come up with this bit of pith when the piece first ran, and had been mightily pleased with herself. She viewed anger as the key to all Matt’s problems, recently remarking that for such a doll (doll?) he was the angriest guy she’d ever known. It was anger, she suggested, that held him back—anger at his dad, at his sister, at himself, whatever. This ticked Matt off too, of course. How could she claim he was angry? Docile, more like. Had he ever, even once, let loose over Sophie?

Well, yeah, once, but Mariko wasn’t around so you couldn’t count it. Searching for the car keys one day he found, in her jacket pocket, a pair of unfamiliar panties, a pink thong (not Mariko’s thing) with a flaky stain (did he have to go looking for this?) at the steep V of the crotch. He confiscated the pair, thinking to use them on his wife someday. But use them for what? She wasn’t hiding anything anymore, so what was the point of the revelation? He put the panties back. Then he went outside, grabbed a scrap of two-by-four from under the back porch and beat the bejeezuz out of a stand of cedar saplings. By the time he was done his hands were satisfyingly blistered, and Toto was looking on terrified from an upstairs window. “It’s okay, puss-puss,” Matt called up to her. Then he nipped around the corner and smashed himself in the head with the two-by-four. The blow was powerful enough to stagger him, draw a bead of blood. Mariko never found the welt (what business had her hands in his hair these days?), but she did remark on the damage done to the trees.

“Deer, probably,” Matt said to her. “This is fucking nature we’re living in, remember?”

So yeah, the anger thing pissed him off. And anyway, what was anger supposed to be holding him back from? And why anger? What about fear? What about grief? What about guilt? Weren’t these things holding him back too?

“If the movie were free,” Matt’s review had concluded, “and fifteen seconds long, I’d say yeah, go see it.” Done. Slam-dunked.

Oops, was that out loud? “No, sorry, nothing.” Matt waved it away—tell ya later.

The strange thing was that he didn’t used to believe in judgment, he used to reject it outright. As a much younger man, as a stick-drawn teen Matt spent a lot of cross-legged, lotus-pose time trying to cure himself of judgment by curing himself of judge, of ego. This was a practice inspired by Mr. Kumar—who could be spotted, on a clement day, squatting mysticlike out by the science portable—and it never worked. Matt destroyed his knees but only wounded his ego, about as effective (another of Mariko’s annoying lucidities) as wounding a problem bear. Why had he chosen to saddle himself with this spiritual know-it-all? She’d started down the path of enlightenment way later in life yet scooted way ahead. How did that work, exactly? What were Matt’s chances of turning it around now, catching up? She’d say it wasn’t about catching up, of course, more evidence of his ignorance. “You move towards what troubles you,” she’s many times explained to him. “Only by going at your suffering can you be freed from it.” This trip, then, mightn’t it count as a spiritual quest? All the loss he’s headed for, how can it fail to liberate him? And how can she fail to be impressed?

Matt quick-peeked down at the girl. Her face was tilted up at the screen, a satellite dish searching for a signal. Scooped out. Scary.

Erin. Was it Erin? Yeah, that’s who the umgirl had been reminding him of all along, his sister. That same toughness suddenly shucked off, that same drawn bow of a body. If you deepened the umgirl’s orange streaks you’d have the orangutan red of Erin’s hair. And that frill of baby fat around the elbows and knees? That survived in Erin too, until the swimming kicked in.

Erin always gets realer as Toronto approaches, her absence more palpable, more appalling. Matt never lived in Toronto without her—he took off for the West as soon as she was gone, as soon as she’d finished wasting herself away. He must have imagined that if he left he’d stop losing her, a screwy bit of sorcery which backfired, you’d have to say, since he’s been losing her ever since. What leaving did was intensify his parents’ grief, which of course cranked up Matt’s guilt. Erin was just shy of twenty-five when she died, which made him twenty-two, half what he is today. Half his life she’s been gone, bizarre. For a long time he came home just once a year, but with the Dadinator alone now it’s twice or three times that. The added bonus of course being his Zane-times, his spirited bullshit sessions with his oldest—in a way his only—true buddy.

Erin, like the umgirl, was into glossy magazines. She loved making fun of them, and she just plain loved them, which she hated. Matt fed the habit—he’d filch his mum’s Glamours and Redbooks, deliver them to Erin’s apartment downtown—hoping to foster any weakness in her, maybe save her from her strength. Matt’s most uncanny keepsake of his sister is a questionnaire—“Are You Too Purrrfect?”—torn from a Cosmo or some such and left twisted up in the pocket of her dressing gown at the Toronto General when she died.

Everybody’s going for a crazy swim in the rain, but you’re
a little bloated, so your bikini doesn’t fit quite right. You …

Your boss gives you “very good” on your latest evaluation,
but you always get “exceptional.” You …

Your record for multiple orgasms is three. You find out your
best friend’s had seven. You …

Out of a maximum score of one hundred, under fifty was bad, but over seventy-five was even worse. Erin scored a seventy. Perfect. “Good for you, girl. You care, but you don’t drive yourself nuts!” Did the editors really not get the irony of this? That the true perfectionists would catch on to the quiz and nail it, know precisely how imperfect to be? Erin may have missed this point too, of course, irony never having been a strong suit of hers. Could this have been the root of all her trouble, an irony deficit, an irony anemia? Couldn’t Matt have found a way to lend her a little, to effect some kind of transfusion? If you can’t be perfect, best to be nothing—such was Erin’s approach. Couldn’t Matt have convinced her that just doing nothing would be good enough?

“Gööööghœgh!” Up ahead of Matt by a couple of rows there was a baby—an Icelandic one, or so Matt imagined—expressing his glee at having come into existence. In hopes of shushing him his mum hoisted him up so’s he could peek, bobble-headed, over the back of his seat. Matt grinned; baby grinned back, lowering dual strands of drool to the breast of his tuxedo-style bib. He blinked and burbled, a wee demented Buddha. Why do we relinquish that, Matt wondered? Wherefore all this trouble?

After his last trip to Toronto Matt had composed a piece (which the cretinous Nagy had nixed, naturally) about the dangers of in-flight movies. In the last five years there’d been some number of incidents (fifty, was it?) caused by fritzy entertainment units on North American routes. Sparks, smoke, fire. In 1998 a Swissair jet had crashed, killing all two hundred and some odd, after its video system had gone kaflooey. Matt figured it was time to try that material again. He’d start his next review with the numbers and he’d pose the question, Is this movie worth dying for?

Matt’s seat belt grabs him, jerks him back against his seat. They’re moving again—emergency lights have faded to a faint pulse in the darkening sky out back—and Jat’s in a big rush, all vroom and screech, a brat in a bumper car. “Jatinder, old buddy,” says Matt, “take it a little easy, wouldja?” Oops, did his inner mimic get the better of him for a moment there? Was there a pinch of Mr. Kumar, of Jatinder himself in the clip of those consonants? How to explain that this is a good thing, him reaching out?

Mumbai. Matt envisions the teeming streets, he and Zane forging through the crowd with backpacks and camera bags. India, that’s where Matt’ll get into gear again. That’s where he’ll get back up to speed on the spiritual thing. The dream of a selfless self, a something sucked back up into Everything—where else would you go to puzzle over this stuff but the land of Krishna, Buddha, all those guys? Ashram, that’s the word. That’s where Mariko always wanted to go, was an ashram. “We could go together, Matt. Imagine leaving all this behind”—a game show–girl gesture taking in the whole of their existence—“and letting things go quiet. Just us and that silence, just you and that silence. What are you afraid of?” She really didn’t seem to know.

But maybe with Zane. With Zane maybe he can trick himself into it, and come back to Mariko all spiritual and serene. Why not? When he and Zane have finished with the AIDS thing, got that covered, they’ll repair to an incensey ashram to make everything right again. Hit the Ganges, wash themselves clean in the filthy river.

Matt taps his chest. It’s still there, Zane’s letter stowed in his breast pocket, scrumpled road map–fashion from a few months of folding and unfolding. An actual letter, mail with no e in front. Zane’s hand is ludicrously masculine, a parody of maleness—it couldn’t get any more erect without lifting right off the page. Nothing limp there, nosiree.

Dear Matt,

I don’t want to make a big deal out of this, but there, I already have. Maybe if I put it into words that will help me get it out of the way. Which is what words are for, isn’t it, mister kritik? To sort stuff out, pass judgment on it and put it behind you?

I told you last time you were in Toronto (thanks for dins btw, but you should have let me pay) that I wasn’t just HIV slash anymore. I’m AIDS. It’s a technical thing, T cell count and whatnot. For the moment I’m fine, but I’ll feel like fugging hell very shortly. On this point everyone’s exquisitely clear. They want me on the cocktail of course, but here’s the thing. I’m not doing it. I’m just not. I’m telling Nico, and Mercedes, and maybe probably my parents in a while, and nobody else.

Oh, except you. It isn’t fair, is it? It’s asking too much. Maybe that’s what good friends do, they ask too much?

And there’s more to ask, but not yet.

Matt’s already reread the letter once since leaving home, to help kill time in the departure lounge in Vancouver. Reread isn’t quite right: he ran his eye over it, the way you run your eye over the lyrics of a song you’re already stuck with, the lines of a prayer that’s long since been rutted into one of the folds, one of the rumples of your brain. Not prayer exactly, but … what’s that word? Mariko was forever brandishing it during her Zen phase, got it from that Roshi guy. It starts with a k and it means something that promises to mean something but then doesn’t. A puzzle that possesses and then stymies you, silences your mind and makes way for … something. Some jolt of immanence, of wordless oneness.

This time, in the cab, he doesn’t even bother peeking, just rewinds and replays the letter in his head.

I can’t explain this decision but I’ll try anyway. I want to live close to the truth, Matt. The truth is the I-less world, the world minus me. Can I know this world while I’m still in it?

And so on, another page and a half of this kind of infuriating swami-speak. Nothing about Shanumi, the Nigerian woman whose long slow drugless death he’d just finished filming. Nothing to suggest that this is in fact the oneness he craves—oneness with the whole damn suffering world. Mercy disguised as monkishness, protest disguised as spiritual surrender …

There, right there. That feeling again, as though Jatinder’s just taken a big bump way too fast. Not a no-feeling but a feeling of nothing, of nauseating absence. An agonized weightlessness that heaves all Matt’s viscera up into the hooped barrel of his chest. This is the sensation that hits him whenever he obsesses too long and too intensely about Zane, about his loopy friend and his loopy plan. This is his body’s way of warning him off, of—

Oh, very funny. Cabbie humour at its best. They’re still out in the burbs—a Legoland of grey concrete, the grumble of jets still audible through the cab door as it swings wide—but the portico at which Jatinder’s just pulled up couldn’t get any swankier. Matt glances about, half expecting red carpet, the clamour of paparazzi. A minute later he’s being bellboyed into the hotel’s hushed lobby, having bid Jat a contrite adieu and pressed on him an extra twenty, about half the cash left in his wallet.

Jeezuz aitch. Acres of marble, royalty-ready wing chairs, sprays of big-stamened blossoms, this place is the definition of crazy. Matt knows he ought to flee but he can’t seem to do it. He’s been pinned, somehow, nailed to the here and now. He exerts himself to appear unimpressed by the place, to appear, as his dad would put it, swave and deboner. The name? McKay. Matt McKay. The supermodel at the front desk gives him his choice of the last two rooms. Would he prefer the Deluxe, or the even deluxer Exclusive? Much in the manner of a doomed beggar blowing his last few bucks on a bottle of the good stuff, Matt goes Exclusive. Why? Why not? “No, it’s just me tonight, Cheryl.” He grins rakishly, inducing Cheryl to crease ever-so-slightly the confectionery glaze of her lipstick. The moment is lost, though, when she’s obliged to give his non-platinum, nongold credit card a withering glance. If she only knew.

Five minutes later Matt steps into an elevator, and is joined there by a woman who smiles more toothily than she really needs to at Matt’s goofy “Goiiiiiing up!” Matt grins back. He feels even better now, or at least he feels different: his flesh has turned from baggage to buoy. He takes in the woman’s round, curiously symmetrical face, her lobe-length eggplant hair. Big brown eyes, almost buggy—she won’t quit looking surprised. Pretty? Or what they used to call handsome. She’d have been possessed of a tomboy beauty as a kid, which the boys around her would have mistaken for homeliness until it was way too late. She isn’t as much of a sore thumb here as is Matt (the cords, the crumpled collar shirt), but she doesn’t look quite at home either. Her outfit’s smart but not hoity-toity—more along the lines of Holiday Inn, say. She isn’t Matt’s age, maybe Mariko’s? Even younger. She’s bustier than Mariko, and tushier too. Venus of Whatever, the goddess Mariko’s into these days, she’s one of those. She’s short enough—not much taller than tiny Mariko—that Matt can regard his own face over top of hers in the mirrored wall, the two faces stacked as though on a totem pole.

Is he really that lean? It’s as though his vertical hold has slipped, elongating him, stretching him like gum on a lifted shoe; it’s as though he’s been sick six months rather than six hours. His is an El Greco face (this thought has struck him many times since his Europe tour with Zane, so many galleries), all beak and cheekbone and deep, doleful eye. Apostle What’s-His-Puss tallying his sins. Beautiful?

“I applied to a group. I applied to all of them, actually. Ectomorphs for Christ. Quitters Anonymous. No go.”

Again with the laugh. Is that how you know somebody’s into you, they over-laugh at your jokes? In the old days Mariko laughed till she snorted, which made her laugh till she peed.

Strange day today. A day of strangers. Could you make a new life this way, tell a lie and live it, let it be true? “Manifesting,” Mariko calls it—she uses it to find parking spots. You concentrate long and hard enough on something and it just happens. “What about you?” he says.

“Actually,” says the woman, “I’m … yes, I’m with one of the conferences. Astronomy? Quantum stuff, you know, quarks and photons, the whole … Sorry.”

Not the swavest of pickup lines but look, the woman’s smiling in such a way—lowering her head, leaning in just a little—that Matt finds himself reaching out to steady her, a gesture that turns into a fleeting caress. He cups her shoulder the way a smart shopper might cup a cantaloupe, in search of just the right give.

“Oh,” she says, as though he’s said something she should have thought of herself.

Five minutes after that—or maybe it’s fifteen, twenty—Matt’s braced behind her, pants around his ankles, as she bends over his unmussed bed up on the eighth floor. She’s got her skirt hoisted to her hips. The position was her idea—he’d been agonizing about his maybe virus, his OUZZ or LIKK or DMDM, didn’t want to pass it on by getting all kissy. She put a gentle hand to his forehead, let out a sizzling sound. He said, “This never happens.” She smiled, and she turned …

What Matt ought to be doing right now is he ought to be arriving at Zane’s door.

In the old days the boys could keep this going long enough to drive everybody berserk. Endurance doesn’t seem to be Matt’s strong suit tonight, however. His tipsy exhilaration, his celibate stint on the couch … With this stranger he’s suddenly, ecstatically a stranger to himself. Could this be the whole point of the thing? Another way in, another way out? A teensy suicide, a tiny little surrender?

“Oh yes.” She reaches around to rake his rump. What with the height mismatch he’ll have to … maybe if he just …

The scent hits him hard, the scents: hers, his. He recognizes neither one, his fever-body is that foreign to him. New woman, new man.

Number five. And, in at least a handful of ways he’s already thought of, a first.

FRIDAY