Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good: A Novel

Dear Zane,

REASON NOT TO BE GOOD #2

Virtue is the denial of nature, of excess, of exuberance. Virtue wants us to be other than what we are. Virtue is cruel, and cruelty is a vice. Virtue is vice. So smarten up.

Matt

No birth control, for instance, that was a first. With Kim last night—with Kristin last night?—Matt had no protection. She didn’t use anything either as far as he knows, no goops, no gadgets. Matt’s always been scrupulous on this point, an avid non-reproducer. Always? Well, there was that one brief interlude with Mariko, that one patch of happy madness that went nowhere. Other than that, though, he’s thwarted every attempt his body’s ever made to repeat itself, to give the slip to its own mortality. And now? He scores some babe in an elevator and badda-bing, he’s on his way to being somebody’s dad.

This isn’t quite the first thought to strike Matt when he wakes up in the hotel. His first thought, as a shiv of light slices through the gap in the theatre-weight drapes (a baby squinting down the birth canal), is more along the lines of #@*!? A comicbook coming-to. He’s rewinding and fast-forwarding, striving to locate the scene he was watching just before he drifted off.

Time to buy a clue. He sends a hand out to recce the bedside table. This produces a clinking sound, one mini-bottle against another, gnomish chimes. Matt’s fingers move on to explore the corduroy casing of the clock radio, which (quick peek here) reads 11:11 in red LED. Then they close, ahhhh, around the comforting fistful of plastic with its Braille of buttons.

Matt’s been waking up in the wrong room for a couple of months now. He’s taken to flipping on the tube first thing, there in his study, so’s not to have to contemplate where he is or why. The idea is to pre-empt all thought, to silence his mind—the way meditation might do, for instance, if he could ever get back the gumption for that sort of thing. Another little death, another puny suicide, goodbye, cruel world. Well, not silence his mind, maybe. Jam it though, drown it in disorder. Neutralize it with input, the way a hacker will when he bombards a server with a zillion gibberish-filled emails. Gunnysacked north of last armpit station each night of pylons …

It was originally supposed to be a work thing, the home theatre in Matt’s study (its screen about the size, as Mariko observed, of the pick-your-own-lobster tank in a spiffy restaurant). Matt’s rationale for investing in the system was that he could run, in the distraction-free confines of his own sanctum, important antecedents of any film he might be reviewing. He could refresh his impression of, say, Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet and Asta Nielsen’s Hamlet and Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet and Maximilian Schell’s Hamlet and Innokenty Smoktunovsky’s Hamlet and Richard Burton’s Hamlet and Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet and Derek Jacobi’s Hamlet and Mel Gibson’s Hamlet and Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet and Campbell Scott’s Hamlet in preparation for reviewing Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet. (Hamlet, now there was a guy who knew how not to do anything. There was a guy who knew how to spend himself pacing his bone cage.) Mariko bought into this notion, and didn’t so much as roll her eyes when the mammoth Visa bill materialized. This would have been early Sophie days, after Mariko had twigged to what was going on between the two of them but before she’d sprung the news on Matt. Raising the question, goodness or guilt? Which of these was motivating his wife to be even kinder than usual? Was there any way to tell the difference, even from inside?

Nowadays, at any rate, the big draw is cable. Matt keeps adding channels to the package, tier after tier—it takes longer every day, Mariko gripes, to establish that there’s not a blessed thing to watch. For Matt, though, this search, this daft scanning is precisely the point. He’s found that if he slows his breath and keeps his body perfectly still (the meditation motif again) he can click for a good half-hour before he needs to pee.

There’s an added benefit, too, to this new rig. Mariko’s morning noises? Matt can drown them out. Why start each day, he figures, in a paroxysm of nostalgia? The quaint creak as his wife rummages through the closet for her robe, the gentle slap of her bare feet across the hardwood hall. The pensive interlude as she composes herself upon the potty, and then the crooning from the shower, to which Matt used to sing lamely along from the kitchen. Show tunes mostly, Hoshi’s thing, her mum’s thing. “I Could Have Danced All Night.” “I Loves You Porgy.” “I Cain’t Say No.”

No. Better to spare himself this daily ordeal. Better to spare her, too, the ordeal of seeing him emerge, fuzzy-eyed and fancifully-crested, from his exile. Better to lie low till she’s gone out, or settled into her office at the far end of the house. Morning is his wife’s most tender time. Messing it up would make Matt feel like dirt, and does he need that? He does not.

Kristin isn’t right. Katherine? She only said it once, and kind of gaspily at that.

The hotel’s device takes a little figuring. By the light slicing through that slash in the curtains he finds the power button. By the light of the menu screen—“Welcome to the Starlight Executive Inn”—he finds the channel and volume changers, triangles aimed up and down.

So let’s see now. Here’s that sitcom star, what’s his name, and he’s written a book about his ex-wife’s postpartum depression. It’s a courageous book (this by his own admission), and he profoundly hopes it will help others. Here’s a woman weeping, over the caption “Ellie—about to meet her son’s father.” Here’s an emaciated kid cooking baby rats over an open fire in an African savannah setting, and here’s that guy from Jeopardy! begging us for help. Here’s the news: West Nile virus, Vatican sex crime cover-up, still no WMDs in Iraq, rogue asteroid, White House press conference.

REPORTER: “What do you think of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and would you consider campaigning for him?”

THE PRESIDENT: “I will never arm-wrestle Arnold Schwarzenegger.” (Laughter.)

The bigness and blandness, the sheer routinized horror of this world—surely it counts as some sort of meditative vision. Matt craves his regulars though, and hey, here’s Law and Order, that distinctive sting, doingg-doingg, a cross between a gavel gavelling and a cell door slamming shut.

“These are their stories,” says Matt, or tries to—he’s so parched his tongue produces only a ticking sound against the roof of his mouth. He’s going to have to move soon. And he’s going to have to move soon, get the hell out of this palace. Starlight Executive Inn? Fricking Jatinder.

Matt risks another glance at the bedside table. Four bottles from the mini-bar, two scotches, two Drambuies. A pre- and a post-coital shot each. Or no, wait, Katherine declined, so Matt chivalrously drained hers too. Two before, while she freshened up, and two after, once she’d slipped away. Karen?

“I’m getting a young man, J-something. John? Jeff?” This is Kevin Scion, Matt’s second-favourite TV psychic. The audience member upon whom he’s trained his mediumistic gaze shakes his head, no. He’d love there to be a John or a Jeff but there isn’t one. Maybe, then, Kevin is a fake. Maybe there’s no afterlife, maybe this is it. Maybe our lives are pointless little flares of light between frigid eternities of impenetrable darkness.

“A brother,” Kevin insists. No panic. “A cousin? He was close to you, closer then either of you ever realized.”

“There’s a voice, a young man’s voice, no, a young woman’s voice. Not a man, a woman. Jane? June?”

Oh, Lord. Matt thumbs down the volume, rolls out of bed and slinks into the bathroom. He’s naked—he recalls waking up dawnish to strip off his T-shirt and jockeys, which were horrid with sweat. What was that dream? Zane was there, a young Zane, but Matt was old. There was a gnu too, bawling pathetically and crying out for his daddy. Matt and Zane tried to comfort him with a song but they couldn’t agree on what to sing. They couldn’t even agree on what kind of creature they were singing to. Matt said gnu, Zane said wildebeest. They scrapped about it, schoolyard scrapped—“Oh yeah?” “Yeah!” “Oh yeah?” “Yeah!”—until the flight attendant popped her head in and sang, “Gnu-u, wildebeest, Gnu-u, wildebeest …” to the tune of “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story.

Is this maybe a perk of fever, that your dreams get fancier? Most nights they’re so drab, Matt’s dreams.

He sits to pee. Still shaky but not so bad. With luck it’s already behind him, the what’s-it, the wacky temperature. How does West Nile work? On the toilet’s right arm (this toilet has arms?) there’s a console, knobs and buttons and blinking lights. Rear Jet, Front Jet, Water Pressure, Water Temp. A treat for later.

Matt’s bladder releases and he hazards a peek down. No condom, Christ. Never mind birth, what about death? This is exactly how it happens. You go decades being careful and then one night you get a little zesty and expansive, you get a little hopped up on fate and, bingo, it’s in your blood. She’ll be pregnant, he’ll be sick. Birth and death and it took how long?

Matt groans. Nice echo in here so he groans again. Is this how it was for Zane too? He’s another serial monogamy guy, his tally of partners just as pathetic as Matt’s. There was Jean Michel, there was Mauritz, there was Phil, there was Nico. Is Nico? And then that one slip-up, that one segue, that one episode of desperate whoopee between bouts of I-love-you …

Guilt, yeah. There’s guilt here for Matt (why wasn’t he there for his friend that night?) mixed in with something even stranger. Jealousy? Not precisely, but … Here it comes again. Burnished by years of handling, this memory, but imbued this morning with an extra edge, a hallucinatory intensity. Febrile, feverish …

You couldn’t call it fucking. For one thing they were always fully clothed, he and Zane. For another thing they were ten years old at the time. Their bodies weren’t capable of sex yet, so you couldn’t even say they had a sex, could you? A sexuality?

Summer of ‘69, a cinch to remember since it was the year of the Apollo landing, the first walk on the moon. One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Erin had got herself a sex by then, in a rudimentary sort of way. Thirteen. That was the summer things started to change for her, to go wonky. That was the summer their parents bombshelled them, broke the big news. That was the summer, too, that Erin caught them at it, caught him and Zane. Their very last time.

It was Matt’s turn to be on top that day. He liked it on top. He liked it underneath too. Crush or be crushed, smother or be smothered, both were good, everything was good.

“Man,” he murmured—or at least that’s what he murmurs in his memory, and who’ll contradict him? “Man, is your mum … whoa.” Earlier that afternoon, when they’d crashed into Zane’s place to grab his cap gun, they’d surprised Mrs. Levin on the patio tending her pots in an orange two-piece. It’d knocked the wind right out of Matt, the water-bomb weight of those things—hooters, jugs, bazoongas—and the slo-mo way they shifted when she stood. Preview of the landing, just hours to go, she’s on the moon.

Zane opened his eyes. He looked dopey, he looked drugged. His upper lip was still pricked with sweat from their game of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, peow-peow-peow, in the midsummer heat. Matt had been Robert Redford that day, Zane had been Paul Newman.

Matt executed a searching shimmy of his pelvis, denim on denim. He said, “You fuggoff.”

That’s another thing, they didn’t even know the word yet. Which didn’t stop them using it, of course. A spell, an incantation, doubly potent for being so impenetrable. Fuggoff. They’d shush it if need be, bring it right down to a lip-read—around adults, around other kids, around anybody but each other—but that just intensified it, that just sweetened it on the tongue.

That particular day, though, it felt different to Matt. In fact it felt kind of creepy. He and his friend weren’t saying the same thing anymore. For Matt the sound was now soured with meaning. Erin had overheard him fuggoff-ing the night before, and had taken it upon herself to straighten him out. “Only imbeciles use words they don’t understand,” she’d scolded, and gone on to detail the gross, the farcical mechanics. Cross-legged in her rose hot pants she’d had G.I. Joe bounce up and down on top of Barbie, little sis Skipper smiling sweetly on. In those days Erin was constantly bringing Matt bulletins from the grownup world, jabs of unwelcome news about Santa, or Disney, or death—a cruel-to-be-kind sort of thing, her way of inoculating him against the world and its betrayals. Most times Matt relayed these bolts of wisdom directly to Zane, but this fucking thing was too bizarre. And, since Erin had taught him the modifier while she was at it, too fucking bizarre.

“They shouldn’t die,” said Zane. “Butch and Sundance, they should shoot their way out at the end.”

“Next time for sure,” said Matt. This was a bit of wiseassery in which they indulged every time they saw the movie, three-four-five times so far. The funny fantasy that things could be different, that you wouldn’t always end up at that same place, two friends going down together in a blizzard of bullets.

There were creaky footsteps from up above—Matt’s dad in the living room, freshening his highball. Fussing with the rabbit ears no doubt, switching from news to news, from Knowlton Nash to Walter Cronkite and back. The boys tracked the sound from their lair in the basement rumpus room, set to jimmy themselves apart and look busy with the mini–pool cues. Matt’s mum—a real mum, brisk and unbeautiful—would be in the kitchen tossing salad, imparting a geometry of bacon to the TV-shaped face of the meatloaf. Erin would be in her bedroom curlicueing in her diary, or maybe she’d have a friend up there with her, Penny or Sharon or Sue, and they’d be modelling for one another, searching out the most becoming poses for their new, mini-bazoonga-ed bodies.

“They’ll be on the surface in, um, twenty-four hours, not even,” said Matt. “Sea of Tranquillity.”

“Fuggoff,” said Zane. “Dad says the whole thing’s nuts. He says they won’t make it down, or if they do make it down they won’t make it back up, or if they do make it back up they won’t make it home, they’ll burn—”

“You fuggoff,” said Matt. “They will so make it. And after the moon, Mars. Then Jupiter. Then …”

They’d have had on the Monkees—“Daydream Believer,” most likely—at a scritchy whisper. No point inviting the old man to galumph on down there. “My mistake,” he’d smoker’s-croak, “I thought you rascals had some music on.” Big laugh, the laugh that made you feel so small, so safe. He’d tug his comb from his hip pocket, drag it through his wet-shiny hair. Then he’d launch into one of his rants, one of his routines. There’d have been some galling item on the six o’clock, a goddam Beatle in bed in Montreal, a riot at some fagotty club in New York.

Or no, that particular night it would have been liftoff, we have liftoff. “How’d you like to be on that launch pad, boys? Feel all that power building up under your ass?” For Matt’s dad—an airplane mechanic turned supervisor, then supervisor-supervisor—it was all about the machine, the moon just a handy target. Matt tried to feel that way but couldn’t, kept imagining the moon’s sooty surface and then the earth from up there, a little greeny blue ball spinning in black. This flaw—Matt’s ongoing failure to care about the right things—was maybe his second-dirtiest secret.

“Picture it, boys. You’ve got your hand on the stick and everything’s a go. T minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six …”

But no. The boys were alone that day. They pursued their practice in peace. At a certain point the friction got too intense for Matt, tangled up as it was with that discombobulating image of Zane’s mum. He went to peel himself away. Erin must have been there by this time, in the shadows at the base of the shagged basement stairs.

Zane grabbed fistfuls of Matt’s T-shirt, strove to hold him down. They tussled. The old couch—paisley, once pink—emitted a cough of dust and shed skin.

The weird thing is that she never used it on him. She knew the word fuck, so presumably she knew the word fag too. Why did she hold back? They weren’t even brother and sister anymore, not technically. Adopted, that was the word their parents had taught them that summer. Adopted. What did that even mean? Matt pictured his mum and dad browsing at the church rummage sale, selecting a swaddled baby Erin from amongst the mugs and the dog-eared magazines.

Whatever the word meant to Erin it made her even more tender with Matt, even more patient and protective than before. Years later, when she was well on her way to dying, Matt reminded her of that day and she said, “Love, Matt. There’s nothing bizarrer than love.”

Jeezuz aitch. The phone, the phones—there seem to be about seven of them scattered strategically about the suite’s alarming acreage, and they’re all ringing. Matt could reach the closest of them (the clunky kind of thing Garbo might have snatched up in, say, Grand Hotel) without budging from his command-centre of a commode.

Karen? Nobody else knows he’s here. Mariko assumes he’s with Zane, Zane and the old man assume he’s with Mariko. The Matt they know has disappeared, wandered witlessly offscreen. New Matt stares at the phone. Answering it would mean what? That something’s over? That something’s begun? Matt reaches … and the phone quits ringing. He picks it up anyway, calls down to room service.

Twin. Double. Queen. King. Then what, Emperor, maybe? Matt’s never seen, let alone slept in, a bed this big before. On the floor he discovers a robe, a monogrammed gown of bleached terry which must have slithered off the shimmery bedspread during the night. He slips into it, dizzying briefly as he straightens, and plonks himself on the end of the bed. The bedspread feels like rough silk, a bit of nubble to it, fabric fine enough to be flawed. Extruded by worms raised on organic arugula, one imagines, spinning to piped-in Pachelbel. This place, it’s the un-Lair, the very opposite of home.

The TV’s got tai chi now. A young Chinese woman pushes through incense-tangled air, naming her moves as she executes them. Jade Lady Works Shuttles. Wave Hands Through Clouds. Mariko went through a tai chi phase a couple of years ago, did this same little dance out on the Lair’s back deck. Exquisite. Matt watches for a while, hunched there like an incubus worn out after a long night’s haunting. Then—what the heck—he hoists himself to his feet. Why not join in for once? As the image moves, Matt moves too. Maybe a little of it will leak in through his eyes, the tranquility, the grace. Who knows? Apparent Closure. Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain. The television urges him to centre his being in his belly, so he does. Grasp Sparrow’s Tail. Step Back and Repulse Monkey. Why didn’t he join in when Mariko was doing this? He’d have been shitty at it, but so what? Maybe if he’d—

Cripes, that was quick. The knock is studied, astute. Matt tai chis his way over to the door, inventing new moves at will. Sad Lady Bids Farewell. Reach Out and Comfort Gnu …

The room service guy bears a tray laden with three large glasses of orange juice (Mariko’s forever on at him about vitamin C) and a couple of quartered slices of toast. With tip, this spartan breakfast costs Matt roughly what he and Mariko used to spend on their special-occasion blowouts at Bravissimo. Old Matt would have freaked out at the ludicrous figure. New Matt? New Matt can’t afford to. New Matt has to get miserly with his panic, hoard it for the days ahead.

What to do? He isn’t going anywhere near the sickie or the old man, not for now. He feels a touch steadier than he did last night, but his body still hasn’t got its thermostat set right. It continues to toggle, every few minutes, between sweats and chills.

WWZD? This is a question Matt will often pose himself when he’s feeling lost or bemused. What Would Zane Do? He’s considered having a bracelet made up, like the Jesus people. WWJD? It wouldn’t hurt to know that too, of course.

But Zane, what would he do? He’d call Zane, wouldn’t he? You can’t save somebody without at least speaking to them, can you? Fine, good. But what would Zane say to Zane?

It’s a poser. Matt’s been puzzling over it ever since his last call a few weeks back. His angle that time went something like this: What if Zane isn’t actually good at all? What if he’s just clever—clever enough to give his compulsion a purpose? You get a big ugly sweater from your mother-in-law for Christmas. It’s yellow, the yellow of a smoker’s fingers, and festooned with quasi-floral patterns in lime green and salmon. It’s stippled like a plucked chicken. You wear the hideous thing to your mother-in-law’s once and then you donate it to the Sally Ann. Sure, it’ll keep some poor soul warm on a winter’s night, but that isn’t going to get you into heaven, is it? You’re just ditching the damn thing.

So what if Zane’s just ditching his life? What if the whole Gandhi bit’s a ruse, a virtuous-looking way to let him live with his own death? How would you counteract that impulse?

You’d be reduced, Matt figured, to some sort of life’s-worth-living schtick, some carpe diem routine. Seize the damn day. This was the approach he settled on. He settled on it at midnight one night, three in the morning Zane’s time. Out of consideration for his friend (the guy certainly needed his immunity sleep) Matt stayed up till three his time, finally too frantic to wait any longer.

Tricky fellow that he was, Matt led with Zane’s side of the debate, a catalogue of reasons life wasn’t worth living. Having so recently psyched up for his own suicide he was well prepared.

“Yeah, okay,” he said, “so the planet’s pretty much trashed. Pollution, terrorism, fundamentalism, bigotry, bird flu, blah blah blah.”

“Matt, did I … have I never explained to you about the time difference? Just the three hours, right? See, the earth turns on its—”

“And sure, okay, humans are brutal, they’re ignorant. They let you down. They abandon you, they rip your fugging heart out. Boo hoo.”

“There’s no escape from them, and even worse than that there’s no escape from you. What the dickens did you drink last night, anyway?”

From the far end came the silly, seemingly interminable splash of pee in a toilet bowl. It wavered in pitch—Matt pictured Zane swaying in the breeze of his own fusty fatigue, fighting that up-too-soon nausea. Sleepy dink in one hand, walk-around phone in the other.

“And okay, even when things are good they aren’t really good, are they? You know they’ll go bad any minute, and they’re already bad for almost everybody else.”

“And since we’re going to die anyway there’s obviously no point to this.”

“Speaking of point, Matt.” Zane could be heard whacking his pillows, groaning back into bed.

“But you can’t just die, no. That’d be too easy. You have to fall apart first, you have to deteriorate one—”

So Matt never did get to the good bit, the but bit. Why Zane should live, what Matt was going to do to make him want to. The odd thing was that he felt better anyway, Matt did (hard to say about Zane, of course). Weirdly, wildly elated. He sneakypeted down the hall and crawled in with Mariko. He hadn’t been in their bed since the big night, the night she broke her news.

“Hm?” She squirmed as Matt slipped in between the sheets, but let herself stay sleepy. She snuggled up to him, hitched one leg over his thigh, just the way she used to do. They cuddled a bit, Mariko gradually rising to the surface, getting detectably aroused. Finally, with the halting complicity of a very first time, they brought each other off through flannel jammies.

Once they’d come they cried, not a stoic tear or two but the real thing. Matt’s bawling, always an embarrassment to him, is really more like laughing, a hillbilly’s hyuck-hyuck-hyuck—Erin used to do a dead-on imitation of it when she thought he needed sorting out. His grief sounded especially ludicrous in the sex-scented room that night, moonlight draping itself artfully from the skylight. To be fair, Mariko’s weeping was almost as absurd, her usual whinny reaching what seemed to Matt to be extraordinary heights. He pictured the raccoons out in the night, silencing their own uncanny screams to listen to this new human call.

In the morning Mariko was gone. Lying there alone in the marital bed Matt felt, for the first time, the full pulverizing weight of his solitude, of all the solo nights he’d already spent down the hall, and had yet to spend before something inside or outside of him might turn, might return. Quick calculation: he’d never passed so many consecutive nights alone since he’d left his parents’ home. Surely this ordeal was good for him in some way, was already precipitating in him a subtle sea change, a slow seismic shift in direction. Was there any way to speed it up?

Start with the easy call, build up to the tough one. That isn’t wimpy, that’s just sensible. Besides, it won’t be such a cakewalk, putting the old man to rights.

“Oh, hello there, lad.” Lad. See, this is new too, the old-time tenderness.

“What’s up today?” Matt’s flaked out on the suite’s overstuffed couch, a glass of juice balanced on the tray of his tummy.

“Serena’s just left.” Serena, the Dadinator’s home-care worker. She’s been coming half days since all the widows—all the Pegs and Dots and Darlenes who swarmed the old man when his wife died—finally fled the scene, died themselves or were otherwise rendered helpless. Serena’s your basic bully of a saint, jollying the old guy along as though he’s some giant irascible infant.

“Look at that,” the old man huffs. “She’s left the deck. Door open again.”

Dammit. Those lungs just keep getting worse. The Dadinator routinely runs out of wind mid-sentence these days, this despite the ever-present oxygen tube, its clear plastic horns poking up his great grey-haired nostrils.

“Crazy stuff, eh?” says Matt. “This global warming thing, it makes you—”

“Such a simple system,” says the old man. “Binary. Rain or no-rain, dot or. Dash.”

It takes some delicate interrogation but in time the picture emerges. Extraterrestrials have been seeding the clouds over Toronto, it would seem, to make them shed rain on certain days and thus to generate a Morse-like pattern. To communicate. The aliens are no great surprise to Matt—they and their souped-up machines have been part of the Dadinator’s universe for some time now—but the rain’s a new wrinkle.

What would Erin make of all this? Why isn’t she here to talk it through, to help Matt parse the grim mystery of their pop? The old guy’s got Erin there at his condo, actually, or so he seems to imagine, in a wooden box about the size of a four-slice toaster. He continues to cling to this object in a way that troubles Matt, even horrifies him. His dad fetishizes the urn, is what he does, reveres it like the finger-bone of a saint. Sure, Matt adores his father’s grief—the way it opens and deepens him, creates for them that point of potential contact—but the box of cinders freaks him right out. It’s a thing. Erin is not a thing.

Matt shakes his head, sips his OJ. “Dad, I don’t think you can make clouds rain, can you? Don’t they sort of do that on their own?”

The old man’s laugh is more of a gasping fit nowadays, the kind of respiratory crisis that makes you think Heimlich. When it’s over, “Governments have been doing it on the q.t. for. Decades, Matt. Look at Lynmouth back in the fifties. How many people drowned? You think that just happened to be right. After the RAF trials? Two hundred times the normal. Rainfall that year, that sound like a coincidence? And since then South Africa. Israel.”

It was what, four years ago that Mariko helped her father-in-law hook up his first computer, explained about the mouse? Nowadays he’s up and surfing before bran. “Dad, I—”

“Crops,” says his father. “Weather.” He leaves Matt to connect the dots.

Matt says, “Seeing Uncle Lenny much these days?” One upside, he’s easy to distract.

This is so not the time to do this. Later in the week maybe, when they’re face to face. Or how about a few years ago, when Mariko first got after him, that would have been the time. “You have to speak your mind, Matt. You have to help him see how deeply he’s wounded you.” To be such banal pop-psych fodder, it didn’t bear thinking. It still doesn’t. She had another crack at him a couple of weeks ago. “Your dad worked with his hands,” she said, “and you admire that, right? But you don’t believe he admires the work you do. Not really. Which is why your Zeus energy is all blocked up.” Zeus energy? Fricking hell.

“Just … I wanted to thank you,” says Matt. “For that book you sent me. About crowds in movies?”

“Yeah. But it made me … Remember back in high school, that guy, Mr. Kumar?”

“Kumar. He was a physicist. He was brilliant, but he’d just immigrated from India so he had to be a janitor.”

“No, I know that. But do you remember what I said to you about him one time?”

Work? “Oh, yeah. Yeah, I guess I better get at ‘er, Dad. Thanks for the call.”

It’s often occurred to Matt that a cool way to classify people would be according to the order in which they open their emails. You’ve got messages from an old buddy, from your new babe or beau, from your boss. Where do you start? Which do you save for last, the pleasure, the pain?

Matt perches on the end of the bed sipping his second OJ. He switches to the main menu. Down at the bottom, just below Movies (Drama, Comedy, Family, Adult), he finds Internet Access. He locates a cordless keyboard next to the Bible in the top drawer of the bedside table. A few clicks and he’s got his server up.

Spam? Nothing too extraordinary today, just the standard catalogue of remedies for impotence, loneliness, obesity, poverty, mortality, for all the things that suck about being alive. “Iraqi Most Wanted Cards—Whole Set!!!” That’s new. Apropos of his dink-focused morning Matt starts with “Men, Add Two Inches In Ten Day!!!” By the time he’s done deleting, his busy-man inbox is down to a pitiable three messages.

The subject line on Mariko’s message is blank, as always. “You don’t put a title on a letter, do you?” The subject line on Nagy’s message is an ominously terse “Stunt.” The subject line on the third message, unfamiliar address, is “egghead with an attitude.” Hm. This is a quotation from Matt’s most recent review, the one that got him sacked. An offended filmmaker? A media flunky? It’s the message Matt most wants to open, so he doesn’t.

He double-clicks instead, with a sense of oddly lighthearted despair—none of this can actually be happening, can it?—on the one from Mariko.

hey sweets! hope you got there ok. guess you did if you’re reading this!!!!

got your message, yeah i’ll call the vet. toto says hi. she’s kneading my thigh here right now.

With hubby out from underfoot, Mariko will likely have lugged her laptop to the dining room table, thrown open the funky French doors (Saint Francis and his birds in stained glass) so she can commune with Mother Nature while she works her digital mojo. As Matt squints his mind’s eye, his diminutive wife seats herself in peasant blouse and karate bottoms, folds her bare feet up under her tush, takes a sip from her herbal tea. She bends prayerfully into the glow of her little screen. The tips of her black hair swish across her … blonde hair. The tips of her blonde hair swish across her shoulders. Sheesh, Matt’s having a heck of a time getting this new picture into his head. The dye job’s a recent thing, since Sophie. With Mariko’s mostly Japanese features the new hair looks collaged, Photoshopped. It looks trashy too, in a disturbingly hot sort of way.

how’s zane? ya know i admire him more every time i think about what he’s doing. better not tell him that tho!!! or maybe you should?

and i admire you too. how many friends would do this?

the other day you asked me why sophie, and i think i know what you mean. you mean is it sophie because sophie’s a woman or because sophie’s sophie. the thing is, i don’t know. i didn’t used to say that so much did i, i don’t know? that’s you, thanks!!!

listen hon that couple’s coming back to see the place again this aft. ron thinks they’re going to make an offer. i’ll call you at zane’s if something happens. shanti m

Right, that was one more reason (did he really need it?) for Matt to hit the road this week. His home was being sold out from under him.

Not that he’s particularly wild about the place. He wants to be wild about it though, he’s desperate to be wild about it—the way his dad would be, for instance, if he ever made it out to the coast—and the fact that he’s failed to feel that way, that he’s proven too weird or wonky to fall for such a “bucolic gem” (Ron’s irritating ad) makes the loss even harder to take. If you aren’t at peace in paradise, then what?

It’s been five years. He and Mariko bought the place on a whim of hers, an infatuation she took, typically, as a sign from the cosmos. They weren’t yet midway through their time together—this was ‘98, so they’d been squished into her Vancouver condo for about two years. Matt still believed he could coerce himself into a Mariko-style moment of faith. If he acted in accordance with a certain belief—in this case the belief that the home into which they’d just peeped was perfect for them, was indeed their destiny—then surely he’d come to possess that belief, no?

Well, no. But why not? What’s not to love? It’s the Garden of Eden, or “Lair of Lilith” as Mariko dubbed it, scorching these words into a slab of driftwood at the bottom of the drive, city girl gone über-country. Three acres of tangly new forest, the odd mammoth stump still around to hint at a pre-paleface world, a world in which trees were gods. The house itself isn’t really a house at all but a series of cabins leaned one against another: the draft dodger who settled the place (folks still wax sentimental about the cheeky yet charming buzz produced by his weed) started out with a single room and just kept adding on as his grow op prospered. The place is an architect’s nightmare, the kind of what-next house so many people dream. Its kookiest feature is that it’s made of straw, great stacks of stuccoed bales. Since Matt and Mariko have lived there the place has been written up half a dozen times, in magazines with titles like Share and Home Planet. The articles never mention the sagging walls, the riotous rodents. They focus instead on the feel of the place, which admittedly is pretty darn good. Being cuckolded has of course complicated things for Matt, but until then he found himself prone, in the Lair, to mystifying bouts of the warm fuzzies.

The thing is though, what are you supposed to do there? Granted it’s always a pleasure to arrive in Shangri-La. You sip your caffeinated sludge on the ferry and watch the city shrink astern. You survive the gauntlet of malls and name-brand burger joints and you witness the roadsides gradually greening up around you, thickening until you’re enshrouded in forest, a primeval realm in which various creatures—that deer, for instance, captured mid-leap on the diamond-shaped warning sign—might be imagined to live out their brief lives. Sure, getting there’s a pleasure. The problem is staying put. If you’re Mariko you rejuvenate the gardens, build benches out of burls, fashion Aeolian chimes from old forks. You found a reading group, raise funds for the local halfway house. But what if you aren’t Mariko?

Well, you play house. Matt’s a better-than-decent cook, and prides himself on blindsiding his wife with rare flavours and textures. Thursday night, the night before he set out on this little quest, he hit her with a dandy, Squid in Its Own Ink. A trifle tough, but it still got to her.

“Whoa, weird,” she said after her first bite. “I can feel his poor little suckers on my tongue. And what a great name.”

So there’s that. When Mariko isn’t around, Matt also does a little gardening of his own. He does it elf-style, weeding and whatnot in an almost undetectable way. This is a habit he picked up from his mum, who’d do little chores for you—clean the cat box when it was your turn, that sort of thing—without ever letting on. “Elf-love” she’d call it if you busted her. Matt’s so crafty he pretty much never gets caught.

Other than that, though, how do you keep yourself occupied? You sit around, soak it all up. You congratulate yourself on being shrewd enough to buy—okay, to let your wife buy—before prices went crazy. Actually, Matt sank his own cash into the place too. He once calculated that he owns two of the five front steps, plus the entire outdoor shitter. Many mornings he’ll shuffle out to admire this fine, rough-planked structure, maybe roost for a while over its black hole. It’s awfully dark out there though, mushroomy, mossy. The trouble with nature, Matt’s discovered, is that it has all these trees in it, and trees turn out to be total sun hogs. Trees, for all the swooning of their bandana-ed huggers, are the ultimate ladder-climbers, great big phallic shrines to ambition. The Lair’s just a couple of hundred yards from the ocean, but between it and that big sky hangs an impenetrable curtain of fir and hemlock. Fuckers.

On a break from whatever “work” he’s doing, Matt will sometimes “play” his cello. This is pleasing for a bit—it’s okay to be bad, that’s kind of the point—but in time it grows painful. Then he’ll take a stroll down to the beach, wobble along for a while on its kiwi-sized stones. Waves will keep coming in and collapsing, each one a wee catastrophe. It’s a great time to think, but about what? His job? His relationship? His life? That isn’t thinking, that’s just fretting, that’s just freaking out.

What he’ll do instead is he’ll imagine it all gone. The beach, the high-end, glass-prowed homes that line it, gone. Swamped, swallowed by the sea which will rise soon, as the planet warms and the glaciers and ice caps revert to their liquid selves. This, at least, is what he’ll strive to imagine. Most times he’ll fail. Matt’s just no good at making things go away. His wife, for instance—she’s flagrantly stepping out on him, yet no part of him will credit the notion that he’ll lose her, that she’ll ultimately slip from his present into his past. The Dadinator is dwindling, yet Matt dismisses the image of himself as an orphan. And as for Zane, as for that loss? Dream on.

There’s a faint clamour outside the door of Matt’s suite, a cart creeping past with Starlight-type discretion. Everything’s hushed here, muffled by the inch-thick underlay, the acoustic wizardry of the walls. There may be a couple squabbling or screwing a few feet in any direction, but how would you know? Even the jets angling in and out overhead do so with decorum, their intermittent thunder like distant surf. Canned, the sound could be used for hypnosis, for guided meditation, for white-noising an oncologist’s waiting room.

Matt shudders, tugs tight his robe. He’ll move tomorrow. He rolls his cursor across the TV screen, hits Reply.

Dear Mariko,
Insofar as I had a plan when I left you yesterday, it’s shot.

I seem to have come down with something, so I daren’t be dropping in on Mr. Immuno-Deficient, or on Dad either. I’ve hunkered down at a hotel to wait it out. Oh, and last night I got it on with this amazing woman I picked up in the elevator. She’s a total genius, and she gets me, and she’s got this body, so round and womanly.

What a rush. The power to impart truth, the power to withhold it. Did Mariko get this same bracing jolt the day she dropped her Sophie bomb? “She’s so young, Matt. She’s so full of hope.”

Please don’t call Zane’s place, I still aim to surprise him. My flight back isn’t till Friday, hopefully I can pull myself together by then.

Hey by the way, I read She on the way here. I loved it.

This is Matt’s first lie. His first lie today, that is—he’s lied plenty to Mariko in the past, generally in this same strife-avoiding kind of way. No, he didn’t read her screenplay on the flight, he read it in her office one day last week while she was working in town. He’d uncovered it (a fist-thick sheaf of printed pages defaced with frantic edits) during a feverish Sophie-sweep of her desk. And no, he didn’t love it.

But why not? Granted it’s no masterpiece, not yet, but it’s bizarrely good, far better than it has any right to be. Its author isn’t even a writer, for pity’s sake. Mariko has a quick and ludicrously far-ranging mind, but sentences are most definitely not her thing. This is good news for Matt, since it affords him a role in their relationship, a “job” as editor of her websites. The thing is, though, words don’t actually matter all that much in the case of a screenplay. What matters is pace and structure. She? She’s got both. She moves, She gets somewhere. How is this possible? Mariko doesn’t even like movies.

She does have one major flaw, or at least one odd feature a kritik could sink his teeth into. She’s got no protagonist, no single figure who monopolizes our attention. So what to do with the star? Whither Sigourney? Whither Nicole?

Trouble is, even this feature kind of works. The script’s theme (in which it’s soused like a Christmas cake in Cointreau) is collectivity. Nobody ever says me or my or I in Mariko’s imagined world, it’s all us, our, we. We in this instance is a mini-society rebuilding itself on a rugged patch of Canada’s west coast after some unspecified global calamity. Mariko’s been boning up on the Great-Goddess thing of late, the idea that there was once, before everything went sour—before men declared war on womanhood, on nature, on one another—a better time, an idyllic, gynocratic era in neolithic Europe. Egalitarian. Peace-loving. Goddess-worshipping. Mariko’s books are replete with photos and drawings of goddess imagery, figurines that are all boobs and butt and belly, divine incarnations of deer and bird and bear. It’s all quite staggeringly raw and beautiful, a blessed past that’s clearly reincarnated in Mariko’s dreamt-up future. When She gets made—why not, Mariko’s got good karma up the yingyang—it’ll be dubbed an “ecofeminist utopia.” Something along those lines.

What kind of world is this? Strictly non-hierarchical. Everything’s done through collaboration, consensus. Nobody’s ever in charge, though a woman will reluctantly take the lead, in a pinch, with a lofty disavowal of power. Women are valued, children are valued, hell, even men are valued, with their throwback bouts of anger and ego. Conflicts do crop up, but each is firmly and lovingly sorted out, the way schoolyard scraps are sorted out in conflict resolution videos. Planet Earth goes by the name of Gaia, and is spoken of with giddy intimacy, like a new lover who’s just slipped off to the loo. All the sex is Sapphic, and salacious in an adolescent kind of way, with many a “teasing tongue” and “dewy bud of love.” The hetero sex is all off-screen, but its fruits are constantly manifest in the form of ripe tummies, apple-cheeked tykes and toddlers.

Like many utopias, this one is voice-overed by a visitor, a puzzled bloke who’s drifted in on a log (downed power pole—subtle, sweetheart) from what’s left of the city. He’s wry, hip, handsome (you’d want John Cusack for the part if you could get him), a bystander who never quite sinks into all the hereness and nowness on offer. She’s finest stroke of sophistication is that this narrator is unreliable. His vision of things is detectably cockeyed—you get that he never gets it. Hunched guiltily over the script there in Mariko’s study, Matt could see through the man’s cranky take on events, recognize his critical stance as self-defeating. As he reviews it all in his head today—his fever swinging to the sweaty end of the spectrum, the cursor blinking irritably at him from the hotel’s TV screen—he twigs for the first time to the fact that those objections would be his objections. Yep, he’s the clueless stranger. Mariko won’t have meant this, not consciously—that’s more Matt’s style—but still.

Truly, Mariko, your script is terrific. It makes a few things clear to me, things I should have seen ages ago. Isn’t that the function of great art, to reveal what’s been latent in our lives all along? Or whatever. The point is that the world you want is one of connection, integration, harmony. It’s exactly what you should want of course, and of course there’s no room in it for the likes of me, the krabby kritik. Eunuch in a harem, right?

That’s one thing I’ve figured out. Here’s another: I’ve read the two of us all wrong. Ever since we met I’ve conceived me as the intellectual-slash-creative one, you as the worldly one.

Also not true. Matt started out conceiving things this way—that Mariko was the plodder, leaving him free to play the incorrigible genius—but the migraines have already forced him to rethink. Migraines, to Matt’s mind, are an upscale affliction, indicative of intensity and a too-fine intelligence. So he should get them. It was Mariko, though, who started up five years ago (about the time they moved from the city) with the “aura,” one of the condition’s most irksome affectations, the coruscating lights that signal the onset of the attack. Matt’s role is to rub Mariko’s feet, the only bit of her she can bear to have touched. Sometimes she’ll beg for a “blow job,” in which case Matt will take a couple of her toes into his mouth and suck—something about the shift in blood flow. Matt offers up these ministrations willingly, indeed adoringly. There’s a bit of him, though, that persists in believing he’s the one who should be prostrate. He should be blinded by the effulgence of his own brain, and Mariko should be bent shushingly over him, taking him into her mouth …

The truth of course is the inverse, the reverse. You’re the brooding mastermind, I’m the competent drudge.

Matt stands, strides around the room in an effort to siphon off a little of his agitation. He takes another shot of OJ, does a whisky-wince—all that citric acid is eating away at his mouth. He reseats himself, rereads his message. He backs over his words with the cursor, deleting right up to “I read She on the way here. I loved it.” To which he adds,

Or anyway I will when I get back from the ashram, when this ego thing is over and done with.

Hey, I once asked you what matters. We were in bed at your place, remember, before it was our place? And I all of a sudden had that sad feeling you get when you’re too happy, when things are too good and you get scared. I wanted you to say something so I said, I wonder what we are? and you said, What? and I said, I wonder what matters? and you said, Making. That’s what matters, you said, making love, making sense, making good, you had this whole list. Making babies probably, I’m not sure. Anyway, my point is, you’ve made something.

Keep me up-to-date on the real estate stuff. xo M

There’s a wedding on today. The lobby’s lousy with men in suits, women in don’t-spill-on-me gowns, little girls in taffeta dresses. A bunch of teenage boys stand together, ridiculous in their blue blazers, each nodding to a different tune—white wires trail down their necks, earphones to iPods. About half the guests wield cameras, and film each other filming. In the old days Matt was the only one with a movie camera, now he’s the only one without a movie camera. What’s with that?

He pushes through the crowd, muttering apologetic “I do”s, and revolves out the door.

Ah, the heat. He’d forgotten about the heat, hunkered down (hunkered up?) all goosebumpy in his air-conditioned tower. When he arrived yesterday the sun was already knocking off, kicking back, but today it’s most definitely on the job. Well hey, that’s fair. Matt’s come out for a stroll, and if he has to take it on the surface of some other planet—Venus, say, where the greenhouse effect is said to be pretty intense—well, so be it.

He shuffles down the Starlight’s circular drive, chooses a direction, or tries to let it choose him. Can you call a place a suburb if it has no homes? Nowhere, that’s where Matt seems to have found himself. Overhead there’s the sound of labouring jets, sheet metal being shook hard. A stinky wind chucks bits of trash around. Nobody else seems to be in the mood for a constitutional on this fine Saturday, so Matt has the place pretty much to himself. The odd car whizzes past, but the drivers are far too city-savvy to risk an open window. Their machines are all hermetically sealed, each passenger a King Tut or a Mona Lisa.

The shitty air out here—what if Matt were to make it his thing? Zane’s already grabbed AIDS, what if Matt were to take air? Breathing, we’re going to miss that, aren’t we? The way the Dadinator must miss it already? So yeah, something for Matt to go justifiably crackers about. He’ll need a good stunt, of course. Zane’s refusing to take his pills. Matt will refuse to breathe.

Hey, what’s this now? A patch of, for want of a better word, “nature.” It must be ten feet by twenty, all green except where it’s gone brown in the heat—which, okay, is pretty much everywhere. There’s a juniper bush with a jay-sized bird hopping around in it, picking bugs off branches. It’s one of those birds that looks black but isn’t—when you get up close you see that no, it’s actually an iridescent purple and bronze. Green, even. Grackle? The suburban bird par excellence, a bird that must have spent its whole evolutionary history praying for the bulldozers to get started. It’s beautiful, it’s maybe the most beautiful creature Matt’s ever seen, or at least it’s the most beautiful he can see at the moment, and the moment’s all he cares about just now. Why is that? Why is this ludicrous bit of creation, this parody of the living world more compelling to him than the verdant paradise in which he’s most of the time condemned to live?

The grackle tips back its head, emits its cry—squeaky clothesline. Come fight me? Come fuck me? Hey!

The last time Matt saw his sister alive it was on an urban nature-walk like this one. Erin was extra-agitated that day, so Matt hoisted her into her wheelchair and steered her out into the mild June afternoon. Down the block from the hospital they happened on a patch of grass, in its centre a budding fruit tree encircled by one of those spiky iron fences. Erin signalled for Matt to stop. She slipped her bony arm between two bars, fiddled with the tree’s gnarly bark. This was the moment he decided to have one last go at her.

“What about me?” he said. “What am I supposed to do?” It was meant to be a subtle argument concerning compassion and interconnectivity, the deep interdependence of all sentient beings. It came out as a whine.

“That’s easy,” she told him. “You know what you’re supposed to do. Don’t let anybody stop you. Don’t let Dad, don’t let me. Don’t—”

Which is when the pigeon crapped on her. A single slash, a single glistening streak down the front of her gown. They both laughed, giddy with relief that the real conversation was over. Erin said, “Pigeon.” The word sounded impossibly odd—the way it must have sounded to Adam back in Eden as he set about naming the creatures. Matt remembers thinking the same of good when he first inscribed it on a postcard to Zane, murmuring it out loud to himself, good, good, not to be good. Ungainly word, down so deep.

“Pigeon,” Matt replied to his sister that day. In assent, and perhaps also in prayer.

Allowing for brief breaks (giggling, weeping) this exchange went on for another ten minutes or so. Then he rolled her back up to her ward and helped her into bed.

In an experimental movie Matt saw once—brainy, black-and-white, governed by the nauseating logic of the nightmare—there was a tiny homunculus in a glass jar. The protagonist’s twin brother, this little chap had failed to be born and had been mummified in his mother’s belly. She’d lugged him around like that for twenty years or so until he turned up in a routine X-ray. Shrivelled, lightly fuzzed, thinly haired on top, this was Erin at the end. A creature from a book of medical curiosities, a book of weird world records. Skinnier, somehow, than a skeleton.

Much later, during and just after Mariko’s pregnancy, this image would revisit Matt in his nightmares. In tandem with these nightmares came almost ecstatically sweet dreams in which Matt would mother (it’s always felt this way) a little red-haired infant, a sort of proto-Erin who loved to be tossed into the air time and again, tossed and caught, tossed and caught. Something would distract Matt, and he’d startle awake as she tried to slip from his grasp.

It isn’t even a sound, what jets emit. It’s a deeper frequency, subsound, something you pick up with your skeleton, most acutely with your skull. It’s as though somebody’s been rolling a great rock across a hardwood floor upstairs the whole time Matt’s been asleep, ever since he crawled back into the Emperor for a sickguy snooze. Two hours, three? Sisyphus maybe, practising up for his time in eternity.

Is this what bombs sound like too, when they come angling in? At the Baghdad Hilton, say, is this what you’d hear? These jets are bombs in a way, bio-bombs detonating on impact, sapiens sharding off in all directions. At least one of those folks is bound to have picked up some ingenious new strain of something and before long you’ll have it too, some madly mutating little mother that’ll flood your lungs, make your heart beat backwards, trick you into rejecting your own spleen. We’re all connected now. We’re all going to die of the same thing …

What’s with this new fixation, this ecstatic fear? It seems to have arrived with the fever, with Matt’s heightened awareness of his own body. Finite. Fated. Or maybe it’s like this: the fever is fear. His wonky new life, the twisted rescue mission into which he’s pressed himself, these things are broiling him alive. Mid-snooze Zane was there again, so Matt went at him with his words. None of them worked, partly because they were in some foreign tongue (Hindi maybe, but with a Québécois accent?) which neither of them understood. Matt kept sidling closer—they were in the woods out back of the Lair—until he was pouring his nonsense directly into Zane’s ear. At a certain point the whispering transformed itself into a kiss. A chaste kiss, yes, lips to cheek, but painfully hot. By the time Matt drew back Zane was wrecked, whittled down to the body of the disease itself …

Matt shoves himself out of bed, shuffles over to the coffee table. He glugs the remaining glass of tepid OJ, chances a nibble of cold toast. Then he sets about poking through his suitcase, its vicious scarring of zippered pouches. He’ll need his cellphone for this one—Zane and Mercedes have call display, and this has to look long distance.

“Oh, hi, Mercedes.” Cripes. This is the risk you run when you ring up Zane. “Matt here.”

“Not much. Well actually, this might interest you. Looks like my wife’s gone gay on me.”

“Freedom and peace my ass. Grab the oil before the Chinese get it, more like.”

“Hey, funny you calling today,” says Mercedes. “I’ve been thinking about you.”

“Mmm, I don’t think so,” says Mercedes. “I’m psychic, so I’d know.”

Lordy. It’s always like this with Mercedes, the painfully jovial sparring. “Busted. Guess you’ll have to describe your fantasy for me, then. Is it the usual? You, me, a bucket of Cool Whip?”

A couple of years back, when Zane first announced his plan to shack up with Mercedes, Matt was volubly broad-minded about it. Really though, how nutty could the guy get. Zane had only met her a few months before, while he was cinematographer for Slap, a documentary on the S/M subculture in Toronto. He’d described it as one of those instant recognition things—they were mother and child in a past life, or brother and sister, master and slave. In this life they were both looking to buy a house, but were nervous about mixing real estate with the already fraught business of romance. Zane was between men—between Nico and Nico, off-again between two on-agains—and Mercedes was between women. They found a brick semi-detached off the Danforth and snapped it up. So’s not to be living in sin (is there no limit to Zane’s capacity for irony?) they got married. A complete ceremony in synagogue, despite Mercedes being unchosen. And then the bouquet, the garter belt, the whole kit and caboodle.

Their place, too, is insanely straight. On a movie set it would serve as home to the blandest of yuppie couples. The kitchen’s all brushed steel and dimmered pot light, the living room oak and ochre. There are GQ and House and Garden mags fanned out on the smoked-glass coffee table, which Siegfried, the neutered cocker spaniel, adorably whaps with his tail whenever he passes through. The walls are dominated by photographs, tasteful (read unaroused) male nudes. “Emasculated Mapplethorpes,” Zane calls them. These were snapped by Mercedes’s ex, a woman so fascinated by men that she finally became one, Lilly to Larry—at which point Mercedes gave him the heave-ho.

There’s only one decorating choice that isn’t consonant with the bourgeois contentment of the whole place. On the landing between the second floor and the third, where Mercedes has set up her dungeon, there’s a museum-like display of the tools of her trade. One of her trades, anyway—not the romance writing, and not the dog walking either, though of course she uses leashes for that too. Alongside the leashes are whips, straps, crops, canes, handcuffs, paddles, masks. Even more unnerving, perhaps, are the ordinary items—a stuffed alligator, a woollen mitten, a spiral-bound ledger book, a universal remote—mixed in with the more predictable accoutrements. On hangers there’s an array of leather garb, designed, it would seem, to break the body down, flay it into strips and strands of flesh. All strangely inert, this gear—a set of Civil War revolvers you can’t imagine anybody actually using. But she does, if you ask her nicely and pay her a fortune. Zane, too, has lucked into a woman with some serious dough.

“Dream on, sweetums,” says Mercedes. “No, the reason I was thinking of you, Zane showed me your review. The phony one? House of Straw.”

“Wait, hold it,” says Matt. “You knew my review was a fake? How did you know that?”

Matt got to shack up with Zane for a little while once too. Film school, third year. He and Zane and the Unholy Trinity, Trish, Tracy, Trina, three business school types. A shabby townhouse of which he and Zane shared the third floor. Now and then Meg stayed over, but Zane was single, so most nights it was just the two of them shooting ouzo or whatever horrible concoction they’d scrounged up, waxing brilliant about their favourite director of the day, Vigo or Murnau or De Sica. On the turntable might be Zappa, Beefheart; between songs you’d hear the thump and moan from downstairs, one of the girls getting it on with one of the boneheaded boyfriends. Good times.

“Hey, by the way,” says Mercedes, “there’s something I wanted to tell you.”

“Yeah?” The sparring seems to have fizzled here, something different’s going on.

“Oh, hey, I never imagined you were.” Though come to think of it. Mercedes with her big dark ideas, Mercedes with her jubilant nihilism, her blissed-out rage—this has obviously been part of the appeal for Zane. Hanging with somebody who’s more radical than he is for a change.

“But I’m not trying to stop him either. I think it’s fucking brilliant, what he’s doing, what my man’s doing.”

“This is coming from inside him, Matt. It isn’t our place to bottle it up. It isn’t my place, and it isn’t yours.”

“Inside?” This must be true, in some sense. You can’t force somebody to be a martyr, can you? A martyr has to choose to be a martyr or he isn’t a martyr at all, he’s just another loser like the rest of us.

“Zane’s fucked up,” says Mercedes, “why shouldn’t he be? Why shouldn’t everybody? Why shouldn’t you?”

But not fucked up enough, perhaps. Is that the trouble? People who do stuff, people who make heroic gestures are so often damaged in some fundamental way. It makes sense. If you aren’t too short or too fat, if you don’t have a limp or a learning disability, why would it ever occur to you to climb Everest or write a symphony or discover penicillin?

If he loses Zane, will that do it? Will that push Matt over some threshold, damage him deeply enough that he’ll be compelled to do something too? “Listen,” he says, “that’ll be Mariko on the other line. I’m supposed to pick her up at the ferry.” Or what about almost losing Zane, would that suffice? “Tell the big dunce I said fuggoff, will you? And tell him no need to call back, I’ll try him another day.”

“I don’t know. It’s just, I’m not sure you get how important this is. You are.”

“You’ve got to be a good friend, Matt. A really good friend. He’s going to need you.”

“You know what, Mercedes? You’re right. I suck at this. Too. I suck at this too.”

An impatient phooph of air from the far end. “Okay, good, you go ahead and hate yourself. I’m so impressed, Matt. Hating yourself, that’s just bound to fucking help.”

Grand piano. Plaid-vested barkeep. Row upon glinting row of rare single malt. Matt doesn’t have a regular watering hole, but if he did it’d be nothing like this, like the Starlight Lounge.

It’s been an hour or so since he got done with Mercedes. He topped up his Jacuzzi, set the timer for twenty minutes, lowered his shaky frame into the froth of bubbles. “Juniper Breeze,” fresh as all get-out. The jets prodded and pummelled him from every angle, the motor hypnotized him with its Tibetan-monk drone. As he crawled out he managed to steer clear of the shaving mirror, its nightmare microscoping of pores and follicles. No escape, though, from the flat mega-mirror over the sink.

Oh dear. His virtually pigmentless, night-of-the-living-dead skin had gone all patchy, lobstered here and there by the bath. A decent crop of hair (black with the odd grey squiggle) graced one pec, but the other was almost pubescent in its sparsity. Virtually everything about him—he’d never really noticed this before—was lopsided. Look at the eyebrows, one arched, one level, lending him an expression of aggrieved puzzlement. Look at the cockeyed prick, leaning inelegantly to the right. Matt had gleaned from a nature show once that babies, indeed animals of all kinds, are attracted to symmetry. Symmetry signifies life, sets the organic apart from the inorganic—the lion’s face apart from the rubble of rock, say. It makes sense, then, that you’d go crookeder and crookeder as you age, as you commence your transit from animate to inanimate, from living to that other thing.

Nail clippers? It was all he had. He went at the whorl of hair on the right side of his chest like a topiarist with the teensiest possible pair of garden shears. After about five minutes he’d evened things up, though the right side looked ravaged more than trimmed. He spent the next few minutes practising his skeptical and surprised looks in the mirror, trying to get his two eyebrows to go up in tandem. Which just left his dick—a longer-term project, presumably. His package, that was the expression. What if he carried it on the other side of the seam for the next few months? Could it be trained, vinelike, to lean the other way?

Matt’s on the first swig of his second pint of microbrewed I.P.A. when Karen wanders in. He’s just finished shifting his package, thank Christ. Karen does a brisk pan of the lounge, hunting her gang presumably, her fellow geniuses. Genii? “Hey Karen, over here!” What the hell.

Should have gone with the blazer. It was a little rumpled after a day balled up in the bottom of his bag, but without it this khakis-and-crewneck rig is pretty dull. Karen’s look is jacket and slightly funky blouse, knee-length skirt with an unexpected belt—the more-than-meets-the-eye thing. She’s in orangey reds again, goldy browns, a fluster of falling leaves. Toronto about a month from now, when it too starts dying.

“Hi, sweetheart.” She bends over him—gape of breasts going udderish, teatlike with gravity—and plants a slow kiss on his forehead. “Am I ever glad to see you! I was starting to think maybe you’d had second thoughts!” She laughs. Has he heard her laugh yet? It’s more petite than you’d expect, a piccolo note from a flute body.

“I called you earlier, but I guess you were out.” She catches the bartender’s eye, mouths, “Perrier? Lime?” pantomiming the squeeze.

Matt says, “Not your people?” He tilts his head to indicate the far end of the lounge, where a conference or convention group is settling in. Folks muscle marble tables together, muster extra chairs from here and there.

“Sorry?” says Karen. “Oh, no. No, our sessions are …” She waves her hand vaguely about. “Holiday Inn. I always stay someplace else, these things get kind of, you know, incestuous. Thanks.” She sips her high-toned water. “So, you really meant it then?”

Ah. So this is her real laugh. It’s bigger, richer—somewhere between an oboe and a bassoon. “Very funny,” says Matt. “You had me going there. Wedding bells.” He takes a rueful pull at his pint. “Anyway, shall we start again?” Time’s all jumbled up here, they’re shooting their scenes out of order, the get-to-know-you scene after the climactic sex scene. “Gone With the Wind?” he says. “The very first scene they shot? Atlanta already up in flames.”

“Matt McKay.” He sticks out his hand. Though maybe he should be keeping it anonymous, nameless. Last Tango in Toronto?

Kate. Kate. He hears it again as he heard it last night, that sigh of startled desire.

She offers him a brisk shake, how d’ya do. “I’m awfully sorry about that. I’m bad, I shouldn’t be teasing a sick guy. Are you feeling any better, I hope?”

“So you said. Well, so starting fresh … Nice to meet you, Matt. Where are you from?”

Kate points at herself, the shadowed cleft of her cleavage. “Halifax. I’m at Dalhousie? God, it’s so good to get away.” She blinks as if in disbelief.

Why this woman? She’s perfect in a way—a big mind in a vibrant body—but she’s also random, she’s also just an accident. Unless there’s something predestined here, invisible forces bearing down. What would a physicist say? If this goes on much longer he’ll ask her. “So, east and west,” he says. “Atlantic, Pacific.” He spreads his arms. “And we’ve met here in the middle.” He smacks his palms together—like a performing seal, it strikes him. He really hasn’t done this in a while. Has he ever done this? “How long are you in town?”

“About a week. The conference is only a few days but I’m treating myself, might be my last chance for a bit. And what brings you”—a magician-like unfurling of her fingers—“here? Last night you said work, but you didn’t say what kind.”

“Yeah, well, there’s always work, isn’t there?” How much do you tell a person you’ve boffed (goofy term, but it feels about right) but whose name you can’t hang on to? “This visit’s mostly about a friend of mine, actually. He’s sick, so I can’t see him yet. Because I’m sick.” Matt shrugs. “AIDS, he has AIDS.”

Kate sucks in some air. There’s something puffy about her anyway, something hyperinflated, an almost infantile openness. Dianne Wiest? Edward Scissorhands.

What if he told her everything? What if he just dumped the whole knotted ball in her lap, could she maybe tease it apart for him? “And it’s my fault.”

“Oh. Oh.” Kate starts to rise here, almost to levitate. Not as though she’s going to bolt but as though she’s going to burst right through the ceiling.

“No.” Matt bats at the air. “Christ, no, I’m sorry. No, I don’t mean I gave it to him. I’m fine, and anyway, I’m not, we don’t …”

“I see,” says Kate, though there’s no way she can. “Sorry, I’m just a little jumpy at the moment.”

“Really,” says Matt. “Cross my heart”—he does—“and hope to die. I’m not into men. Anyway, I play it so safe it’s a joke.”

“Ah,” says Kate. “Because you know, you could have fooled me.” She does a little something with her hips that says, That was you last night, wasn’t it?

“So let’s say we’re even,” says Kate. “Now, your friend. Tell me about him. Is he all right?”

“Well see, that’s the loopy part. He’s not … Zane’s not taking them.” Kate’s got her big eyes going full bore now. It makes Matt want to keep talking, keep feeding that fascination or whatever it is. Glandular condition most likely. “It’s a protest thing, at least that’s what I think it is.”

“The fact that other people can’t get treatment. In Africa and places like that. India.”

“Well, that should get him some attention. Refusing treatment, that’s kind of brilliant.”

“Yeah. The press would be all over him, I suppose, if he were ever to let on.”

Wasps? Bees? It’s one or the other—bees?—that die once they’ve stung you. If you’re going to die anyway, wouldn’t you want to get your sting in first? That time Matt thought about snuffing himself (pills and a plastic bag, he actually started to get things organized), it occurred to him to wonder, what sting? What would he be dying for? No good answer, which is one reason he decided not to pop the pills, pull the bag over his head. That plus the plan had already worked, in a way. Just contemplating the thing had given him a liberating whiff of I-lessness. Maybe that’ll do it for Zane too?

Kate says, “But that’s crazy. That’s like … that’s like he’s going on a hunger strike and he’s not letting anybody see him starve.”

“Yeah, good one. I’m going to use that.” The folks at the far end of the lounge have acquired drinks now, neon martinis—pink, green, tangerine—and are making sure everybody knows just how spunky and spontaneous they are. “See, Zane’s kind of … you’d have to know him.” Shanumi sipping on a soda. Shanumi ducking through the plank door of her shack, a child’s floppy body in her arms …

“Oh. Well, he has two different eyes. I mean his eyes are two different colours.”

“Even if it’s what he really wants? I’m going through something like that, and—”

“I’m going to kill him.” Hey, not a bad idea. “He goes on the meds or I shoot him.”

“Zane,” says Kate. She seems to be trying it on with her tongue. “Like Zane Grey? The cowboy guy?”

“Anyway, it turns out to mean something in Hebrew, Zane does. God’s gracious gift?”

Kate makes a grab for his hand. Lunges for it, really. She turns it over, examines its upper side (long and knuckly, eskered with veins) as you might an ancient artifact riddled with runes.

Nope. No way. He wants to, he almost needs to, but no way. He’s already unfaithful, he can’t afford to be any unfaith-fuller. The fact that Mariko was unfaithful first ought to help, but it doesn’t. It makes this feel even lamer, a revenge thing, tit for tat.

Besides, he isn’t prepared. No condoms, and he’s not going there again. And what if he had one? What if one of those hooting bozos down the way strode over and slipped him a french tickler? Still, bad idea. Matt’s resorted to rubbers a number of times in the past—four times, at the start of each of his four monogamies—and his history with them is not a happy one.

With Charlotte, for instance. They were seventeen when they got serious, grade eleven. Matt had the knack—puritanical, you’d have to call it—of pretending he wasn’t going to have sex right up until the moment he was actually having it. This meant he couldn’t be relied upon to procure the safes. Charlotte, resourceful girl, got a box through the boyfriend of a friend’s older sister. Bad news: they were extra large. They were enormous. They were “King Kong.” The first one kept slipping off Matt’s johnson.

If Charlotte had laughed at that moment, what then? Would Matt have slugged her and stormed out, started down the path of boozing and embitterment? Probably not, but it sure would have been a bummer. Instead she feigned a headache, granted him a swift hand job (still a benchmark for Matt in terms of intensity, of sheer orgasmic oomph) and showed up the next weekend with the right-sized rubbers. How is it that he’s always been so lucky with his women? Lucky right up till the day they give him the hoof.

With Meg, again, it was an ego issue. Matt had a spot of trouble erection-wise one night, and thereafter got himself into such a self-obsessed state that every hard-on would halfway unharden in the moment it took to tear open the package and figure out which way was up. Lucky again: Meg arrived one evening with a packet of flavoured condoms and used up half of them perfecting, on a zucchini from her own garden, the technique for rolling them on with lips and tongue. Voila.

With Caitlin the problem got more intense. It was simple enough—the condom broke. They were mid-quickie, indulging in an aren’t-we-crazy moment on the way out the door to a movie. Cat was at the crest of her fertility curve, so she popped a morning-after pill, which basically made her pregnant for a day, upset tummy and tender boobs. She didn’t exactly blame Matt for the trauma, but didn’t exactly not blame him either.

And with Mariko, more intense still. Another pregnancy spook—they fell asleep with him inside her one night and when they woke up, all but one candle self-snuffed, it looked as though there’d been leakage. Matt freaked out, and that freaked out Mariko.

“You really think it’s okay to have sex with somebody you can’t stand to get pregnant?” she said. “You know the two are connected, right?”

Right. And when Mariko did get knocked up a couple of years later, Matt went totally the other way. He fixed up one of the Lair’s extra rooms, pored over baby books, assembled lists of names. Odd, but that’s when things started to go wrong between the two of them—after the mistake that led to the miscarriage, after the miscarriage led them to start trying. It wasn’t as though the relationship was predicated on the family thing, far from it, but once they were at it, once they were well and truly “boinking for a baby” (Mariko’s phrase), it felt as though failure would be a problem. And it was. A new kind of life had been conjured, which they were then free to lose. Matt had let himself want something he’d never even dared to contemplate before. Who knew he could want it so bad?

“Come on, that’s too easy.” Matt’s got his hand back. He’s into a third pint by now, Kate’s into a second Perrier. They’ve shared a plate of nachos. Matt’s already fessed up to his profession, going with “film critic” instead of the more accurate but too banal “movie reviewer.” He’s crowed in an offhand way about the message he got earlier today (“egghead with an attitude”) from some upstart filmmaker named DennyD. It’s Matt’s first truly fanatical bit of fan mail, and it’ll almost certainly be his last. Why not make the most of it?

“You must get so incredibly sick of admirers,” Mr. D. had blandished, “but what the hell, I’m gonna bug you anyway, to tell you what a HUGE impact your work has had on me.” Honest? “Your criticism is part of an underground war being waged WORLDWIDE against the cultural hegemony of Holywood. We all WEAR the same things, we all WATCH the same things, Tom Cruise, Calvin Klein, Tom Cruise in Calvin Kleins, I don’t need to explain any of this to YOU. You’re a vandal wrecking the stuff that’s WRONG.” A great gush of this kiss-assy kind of stuff. Matt read it three times, took a break, then read it three more.

“Wow, must be nice to have groupies,” said Kate. “I’ll bet you meet all the big shots too. George what’s-his-face, Lucas and everybody.”

“I don’t like almost anybody’s movies. That’s why I started inventing my own. I mean, that’s why I started reviewing movies that don’t exist.”

Kate’s face went puzzled. “I don’t get it. You write reviews of movies …”

This was the most touching aspect of Denny’s message, and the most entertaining. “I agree about House of Straw,” he wrote, “that film COMPLETELY floored me. Your review (‘Pynchonesque labyrinth’ is right) is dead-on.” Matt’s review certainly ought to be dead-on, since the movie’s only ever been screened in his own damn head. DennyD, then, is full of crap, a lying sycophant out for favours. The thing is, though, he sounds like kind of a good kid, and what if he’s right? What if Matt really does have something to say?

All this took some explaining, but Kate hung gamely on. Matt didn’t go out of his way to reveal how proud he is of the three phony reviews he published before he got fired. He left out the whole getting-fired thing, actually, but let on that there’s been a public fuss since the fakes were exposed, and that there are now bigger projects in the works. Then—“enough about me”—he steered things back in Kate’s direction, got her talking about her “job.”

Is it possible people actually do this nine to five? It’s all questions. Star Trekky kind of questions, wish-we-were-stoned kind of questions.

“Why can’t we go back and forth in time? In space we can go both ways, right? You flew east to get here, didn’t you? And whenever you want you can just fly west to get home again.”

“Sure,” says Matt, though this is far from certain. He’s feeling a touch spinny here—there’s an intriguing synergy evolving between this beer and what’s left of his fever. Cheap high, or it would be if each pint weren’t the price of a decent bottle of wine.

“But what you can’t do is fly into the past, back to the moment you left. The past is always in the past, it’s never in the future. How come?”

“Like I say,” says Matt, “that’s such an easy one.” He’s trying to picture Kate in a lab coat, ink-stained pocket porcupined with pens. No luck so far. “I’m not even going to insult you with—”

“Right,” says Kate. “And nobody else has the faintest idea either. We think it might be connected to entropy. Time and entropy are both arrows, they both only go one way, so maybe—”

Matt reviewed a movie about this sort of stuff once. Cosmology, they called it—big stuff, but the movie was about a tiny little guy, an English bloke shrunken with Lou Gehrig’s disease. “A grinning pixie or E.T. type,” is how Matt described him—he can still picture the black, batlike wheelchair, the head flopped over to one side, the robotic voice eerily emanating from the speech synthesizer. Again with the questions. Are black holes really black? Can twin black holes merge to make one big black hole? ALS was supposed to kill the chap but instead transformed him from a cranky underachiever into a happy family man and gabby genius. Go figure. Matt wove some sciencey material into his piece—“movies are just photons is all they are, tiny packets of energy bursting on your eyeballs”—but he didn’t particularly understand any of it.

Kate clucks schoolmarmishly, kids these days. “Disorder?” she says. “Decadence? Everything just keeps falling apart, doesn’t it?”

“You comb your hair in the morning, you get it all to go the same way, and by evening?” She takes a swipe at Matt’s mop, or rather broom. “Higgledy-piggledy.”

“Hey,” says Matt. He makes a comb of his fingers and reworks the fine frenzy on his head. It’s only been a couple of hours, actually.

“And that’s entropy, everything decays. Everything, including everything, including the whole universe, eventually dies and goes still. Maybe those two things are linked in some way. Maybe they’re the same thing.”

Kate shrugs, smiles. No shortage of teeth. “What do you think about? What are you thinking about right now?”

“My sister,” says Matt, but by the time he says it, it’s a lie. He was thinking about Erin for a moment there—about her amazing, her diamond-tipped mind, into what arcane layers of knowledge it might have drilled—but he’s switched back over now to thinking about Kate. About her eyes, those peepholes into this puzzling new creature, what he might see in there if he could get past the glare. And about her rump.

From behind last night, with her folded over, was it submissive? Compliant? More like calisthenic, is what it felt like. Standing doggie is the technical term—Meg once bought him a book. Mariko never offers him that angle and he’s never proposed it, too anxious with regard to its political implications. Where would such a request—“Bend over, wouldja, honey?”—place him in the entirely unfunny narrative of gender relations? And how does the same position parse when the coupling is male-male? Maybe he’ll ask Zane. Maybe he won’t.

The closest Matt’s ever come is that time with Dr. Damphousse, a first prostate check. Pants around his ankles Matt bent over and braced himself against the examining table, its tissue crinkling beneath his nervous weight. Snap of latex, twist of a jar top—and the guy was inside him. It couldn’t have felt any more queer, any more uncanny if the good doctor had slid a finger a few inches into his ear and prodded his brain’s backside, his cerebellum. Kitchy kitchy koo.

Say it’s true, this idea that time only goes one way, that it refuses to back up. Can it be induced to slow down though, to stutter? Some moment of surpassing intensity, could it cause time to stand still? What Matt wants to envision is an instant of romance, of erotic promise or consummation. That first night with Mariko, say—her flesh, her mind, her fleshy mind, the whole wholeness of her. Afternoon actually, a matinee. They couldn’t wait, brought each other off through denim during Apollo 13, five, four, three, two, one …

Yep, that’s close, love-sex is close. And death may be even closer. Erin’s death, for instance, that infinitely unforgettable day. He and Meg had had a mega-squabble the night before—“You’re being cold” (Matt), “Yeah well you’re being clutchy” (Meg)—as was the pattern during those days of Erin’s decline. That evening he’d gone out and got himself wasted with a couple of film buddies—no Zane, since he was off exploring the new universe his queerness had recently cracked open for him. When Matt arrived for his morning visit with his sis he was hungover. Not in that cute, comedic way, Andy Capp with his crown of ice cubes, but the other way: totally, traumatically, tragically. Why couldn’t he just die? This was the thought on his mind as he crept off the elevator on Erin’s floor at the hospital, wincing once again at the bile green walls. He had a fluffy, four-foot Felix the Cat wedged under his arm—the perfect gift, to Matt, being the perfect non sequitur. He spied his dad outside his sister’s door at the end of the hall, gazing out the TV-sized window over the soot-mottled city. Was there a new stoop, a more definitive slope to the man’s shoulders?

What penetrated Matt at that moment didn’t feel like pain or pleasure but like a precursor to both of those sensations, a primal form of stimulus. Pure voltage. It didn’t kill him but it did cause him, for some period of time, not to exist. During that time no time passed. It still hasn’t, he’s standing there still, he hasn’t budged.

Of the three hundred–odd reviews Matt’s cranked out for Omega, all but three have been of real movies, movies that exist. A pretty respectable ratio, to Matt’s mind. Anybody who cares to analyze his work (Matt daydreams a rush of doctoral theses once the scandal really breaks) will note that the fabricated reviews differ from the others in a number of pivotal ways.

For instance, they’re more positive. They’re way more positive. Whereas most of Matt’s reviews are cool, his phony ones are warmly enthusiastic. Whereas his normal reviews are land-mined with words like cant and contrived, vile and vacuous, pandering and pap, his faux reviews feature terms such as sublime, redemptive, epiphany. In one of the three he over-the-topped-it with the expression sublime redemptive epiphany, what the hell. Matt has a rating system designed for him by Mariko, a movie viewer in silhouette sitting upright, or sagging, or slumping, or gone. For the nonexistent movies that homunculus is always erect.

So why didn’t people rush off to find these films? Why didn’t Matt get busted right off the bat—four months ago, say, when he ran that first fake, the crop circle thing?

Matt entertains two possible explanations. The first is that nobody reads his reviews. The thing is, though, he does have a following—a little wee one, but still. Which leaves explanation number two, that nobody heeds his reviews. That the movies he praises, most especially the ones he makes up, are of interest to precisely no one.

Here, in fact, Matt has demonstrated an uncharacteristic touch of shrewdness. While most of his reviews take on giant American productions, the movies he creates are little homegrown affairs. Nobody, Matt reasons, ever really expects to have heard of his arcane Canadian art films, his rogue Canadian directors, his raw Canadian stars. And nobody’s surprised that they can’t be found. When Matt’s jig was finally up (just last week, can it be?), Nagy lumped two real Canadian movies in with the three fakes. Sad-funny, funny-sad.

But that last piece, what, did he want to get caught? Who, save a goofy enthusiast like DennyD, could possibly have been duped? Matt’s starting to think of himself as one of those lame self-saboteurs who tearfully confess on daytime TV. “I knew Natasha was coming home at lunch, I guess I meant her to catch me in her leotard …” When he hung up the phone that day, Nagy’s voice still bleating at the other end of the line, Matt reread the review that got him busted. Reread it in print—Nagy had twigged too late.

Okay, Matt had pushed it that time. The not-so-subtle self-reference, for a start. “This film is like a kiss blown to an imaginary lover,” he’d mused in his review. “It’s like a sacrifice to a non-existent God. It’s like a review of some film we’ll never see.” Lordy. And then all the personal, self-reflexive stuff. He’d dubbed the director “Martin McCall” and blessed him with a revolutionary “egghead with an attitude” approach. He’d named the movie House of Straw, and encoded his shattered life with little Mariko—“Minnie” in the movie—into the lives of the lead characters.

What with all the fuss, what with her husband getting fired and everything, Mariko up and read this review, a practice she’d lately abandoned—not because she’d quit caring, Matt’s pretty sure, but because she still cared too much, found her husband’s ire too alarming. She was amused for a bit by the House of Straw piece—“You’ve been making movies up? I guess you’ve still got it, buddy”—but then she was irked. “Why wouldn’t you at least tell me about it, share that with me?”

“I’m not comfortable talking about that kind of stuff,” said Matt. “Creative stuff.” Though in fact Zane had been in on it from the start.

“And I suppose that’s me, I suppose Minnie’s me,” said Mariko. “Lesbian love affair, fruitless womb.” She ran her eye down the column. “Flaky faux-Rasta, that’d be Sophie of course. Low-rent guru, is that supposed to be Roshi? My God, Matt.”

And then appalled. She was amused, and then she was irked, and then she was appalled. Fair enough, she’d scored Matt the gig at Omega in the first place. “Blowing this job, Matt …” She smacked the splayed paper with the back of her hand. “What’s up with you?”

Matt can scarcely bear to think of it but he had a go, that day, at defending himself. He hit Mariko with the whole Great Artist schtick.

“It’s inevitable,” he said—he intoned, almost—“that an art form will ultimately rebel against its subject matter.” Striding about the kitchen he urged her to think of a painter—“your Kandinsky, your Klee”—as he makes his first non-figurative stroke. “He’s in his garret. He’s permitted himself more than his usual thimbleful of schnapps. ‘This isn’t a breast,’ he cries out, ‘this isn’t the belly of a boat. This is a slash of paint. Period. Look, I have line, I have colour, what do I need with your world?’”

It sounded rehearsed, and it was—Matt had been prepping since the day he slipped in that first phony piece. He paused to judge the effect of his performance—and he charged on anyway. “So why should I wait for a movie to exist before I review it? What did Kandinsky say?” He made as if to canvass his memory. “Right, the content of painting is painting. And the content of a movie review is a movie review. A signifier without a signified. A finger pointing at no moon.”

Mariko laughed. There was pretty much everything in that laugh, there was pleasure, there was pity, there was pain. Man, could that woman laugh.

Matt jams an arm between the clunking-shut doors of the elevator, pries them apart.

This wasn’t the plan. Just minutes ago, back there in the Starlight Lounge, Matt arrived at some firm resolutions. First off he’d wrap up his little chat with Kate, bid her farewell. He’d retreat to his room, crash early, hit the road at dawn refreshed and fever-free. Dawn? Noon at the very latest. He’d get on with it, get refocused on his real agenda, this whole crazy business of talking sense into Zane. Saving the bastard’s life (messiah, much?), maybe saving his own while he’s at it.

To this end he announced to Kate, with some little ceremony—as he drained his third and definitely final pint—that he was married. No mention of the separate bedrooms bit, that’d sort of weaken his point. Not that the revelation seemed to alarm her much anyway. Relieved, is that what she looked? She said, “And you weren’t married last night?”

Hm. “Okay, so how about this—I can’t die without having pulled off at least one one-night stand.”

“Well, there was Hanna and Helena that time in Morocco, but that was three nights.”

“Right, true. So times two, call it six nights. And every other woman I’ve slept with I’ve kept on sleeping with for at least a few years.”

Kate made as if to glower at him. “Don’t you think you should maybe warn a person? If all you’re after is a long-term relationship?”

Kate gave her cap of hair a contemplative scruffle. “Whereas I’m the other way around. I’m not a cheater, I don’t mean that, I just … Child of an alcoholic, that whole business? Sorry, save it for my support group, right? I’m oversharing.”

“Yes I am, I do. But it’s kind of crazy, thinking about it.” She gave her big eyes a big roll. “My dad was an addict and that … it changes you. The way I am with men, always overdoing it.” She put up her hands. “But not tonight. Tonight I’m good, tonight I behave. Tonight I toddle off and leave you to sort out your own troubles, no meddling. Good luck with Zane. Good luck with everything. And thanks.”

And he went after her. WWZD? Hard to say exactly what Zane would do, but there’s not a chance he’d sit around stewing all night.

Matt’s doing a Moses thing here, holding off the elevator doors like the two halves of a parted sea. “I think we should do something,” he says. “Something fun.”

Yeah, like what. If they were to go somewhere it’d be a date, and what do you do on one of those? Matt’s mind skitters through time, ends up all the way back in high school. Dancing? Skating? “Bowling,” he says.

Following the desk-jockey’s directions (“Did you say bowling, sir?”), it’s a ten-minute drive through the twilit hinterland, the streets filling up as the mall parking lots empty. Kate’s unexpectedly old-lady at the wheel of her rented Taurus, hunched forward, hands at ten and two. They must still be at the horse-and-buggy stage out there in Halifax.

Big night at the Rock ‘n’ Bowl. A few lanes have been sectioned off for an official competition—folks in matching jerseys hollering and high-fiving—but other than that it’s all giddy teenagers and twenty-somethings, in love or wishing they were. The crack and rumble of the balls, the ice-cube rattle of the pins, time warp or what.

“We used to do this for birthday parties,” says Matt. “Zane and I, if there weren’t any good movies. No, let me get that.” What a man, shelling out for the two-tone shoes.

Giant, more like. Whereas Mariko, you think there’s a little kid visiting when you see her shoes at the door. Matt says, “You know what they say about women with big feet, eh?”

Right, should have thought of a punchline first. He gives her a leer, leaves it at that.

“So,” says Kate, lacing up, “I guess you’re nervous about seeing him.”

She grants him that with a wobble of her head. “Okay, so what about when you’re over this?”

“What’s to screw up, Matt? Even if he ends up more determined than ever and maybe furious at you too, well … Hm. But you’ll have done what you thought was right, and that isn’t screwing up, is it?”

What Matt had forgotten about bowling—it’s been maybe twenty-five years—is that he’s good at it. He’s ridiculously good at it. Weird, when he has so few physical skills. Every once in a while a bit of prowess inherited from his dad will poke through like this—pretty ears on the ugly daughter of a beautiful woman, kind of thing. It’s a useless talent, bowling, or so you’d think. It did help Matt make headway with Charlotte, though, way back when, and it seems to be doing him some good with Kate too. She gives him a playful little shove each time they switch places, a teenybopper too shy for any other touch.

The “Rock” part of Rock ‘n’ Bowl consists primarily of an old B-52S tape. “Private Idaho,” great song, film school days. “Dance This Mess Around.” You can’t actually stop yourself moving to this stuff. There are a few coloured lights too, and a mirror ball over each lane. Matt’s got another beer going, though he has to trot up a few steps to the lounge whenever he wants to gulp from it.

It’s fun to watch people. Each bowler has his or her own little moment of preparation, a marshalling of focus. Each ball is a personal trial, after all, a test of concentration and therefore of character. Kate’s ritual is to rock back and forth from her heels to her toes a few times, as though seeking her centre. Then she bends, bustles forward—and spins her ball into the gutter.

Matt selects a ball. What’s his ritual? Will it still work if he watches it? He tries to leave it alone, let his body do its own thing. He rushes the motion, gets all crossed up and wonky … and still throws a strike.

“Me?” She’s waiting for her favourite ball, blue marbled with pink. “I don’t know, does it matter?”

She bops to a bar or two, then turns to Matt. “I’ve been lonely,” she says. “I’ve been … I did something dumb.” Her ball arrives and she hoists it.

“I got pregnant. I mean that wasn’t the dumb part, we were being careful, that just … that just happened. But wrong guy, or anyway wrong time. I was wild about him but he was young, way too young. He wasn’t ready. It was bad.”

“So I freaked out. It didn’t feel right but, well … nothing felt right.” She stops, registers this observation. “Yes, exactly, nothing felt right.”

“But still, yeah.” He gives her a grimace, I hear ya. “And now you wish …?”

“No. Yes, but it’s almost too big to regret? It’s one of those things, if you let yourself regret it you aren’t even the same person anymore. It wipes you out. I see that a lot.”

“We stayed together for a bit, but then I kind of lost it. Again. I moved out a few weeks ago. It’s all so … real all of a sudden.” She shakes her head. “Okay, new plan.” She stalks up to the line, bends and bowls the little-kid way, between her legs. It takes roughly forever for the ball to make it to the far end, but it stays between the gutters and has enough force left to tip over two of the five pins.

“Yes!” says Kate. They hug this time. They hug hard. “What about you?” says Kate as they let go. “Have you and … what’s your wife’s name?”

Mariko was about nine weeks when she miscarried, which apparently meant that the fetus was the size of Matt’s thumb. The picture showed it scrunching up its first fist, stretching open its mouth for the first time—Matt and Mariko looked it up online together, the only mourning ritual he could bear, though Mariko did some serious smudging (the house redolent of sage and sweetgrass for weeks) and had women over to chant with her in Sioux or Seminole or something.

“Oh,” says Kate. “That must have been tough. Almost having a kid, and then …”

“Sure.” Rai (trust), they were going to name it if it was a girl—Mariko was exploring her Japanese half at the time. Raidon (thunder god) if it was a boy.

But an abortion, that’d be a whole different thing. The choice. None of Matt’s women has ever had to deal with that—unless he were to count his sister, and maybe he should. Matt went along to the doctor’s office that day, playing boyfriend. The actual father—the odious Mr. Skinner, Erin’s swim coach (Matt had him for chemistry)—couldn’t possibly leave school for the afternoon, or let on to his wife that he’d been poking one of his proteges, though he was zealous about pulling strings and getting Erin the appointment. Matt wanted to tell their mum, but then she’d have told their dad and he’d have been furious and aggrieved and that would have been the end of Erin right there, so Matt kept it to himself. It’s maybe the most mature thing he’s ever done, carrying that secret around inside him. He turned out to be kind of useful on the big day too, asking questions, making notes on the post-procedure dos and don’ts. He held Erin before, when she cried, and he held her after, when she didn’t. In between he sat in the waiting room and made notes for his Coleridge presentation (“Pleasure Domes: ‘Kubla Khan’ and Disney”) and wondered how such a decision could be made, how you’d survive if life and death ever became your business.

In comparison to Matt’s, Kate’s room is positively austere. The bed’s a scrunchy little queen, and you can count up the cushions without resorting to your toes. And in the biffy? No bidet! This girl’s slumming it.

“What if I really am a different person?” says Kate. She wriggles out of her jacket, kicks off her shoes. Sheesh, they sure are big. “Think of all the people who’ve stayed in this hotel room. How come I only get to be one of them?”

“Not my idea,” says Matt. He’s just eased himself into the armchair remotest from the bed (he’s achy from the lingering fever, and maybe from the bowling too), and is endeavouring not to notice all the little personalizations Kate has already inflicted upon the place. On the bedside table there’s a water glass, swags of glossy plum around its lip. Also a black elasticized sleep mask, a little white obelisk of floss, a splayed paperback—a murder mystery by the look of it, with a cheesy photo of a cadaver on the front—and a little plastic device of some kind, something womanly no doubt. The arm of a nightie protrudes from under a pillow, a foot of pantyhose dangles from a drawer. If Matt were the detective in that novel, what might he deduce from all this? Not much.

“Yeah?” Through the room’s heavy, nobody-home scent there peeps a little something, earthy and sweet. Matt got the odd waft of it last night too. Sandalwood?

“She had to crawl to that phone to dial 911. Stroke, maybe? Heart attack?” Kate staggers a little, as though she herself might go down in a pile, then plunks herself on the edge of the bed. “Another woman’s water broke here.” She pops up again, pads into the bathroom, swings the door almost shut. Sound of water running, a kit being rummaged through. “A young girl masturbated for the very first time in this tub.” More rummaging and crinkling. Diaphragm? After the trauma of that last time she must have a dozen methods going. “A woman with six children looked into this mirror and thought, ‘I don’t deserve to live.’” She wanders back into the room, stands looking down at the bedspread, its crazy Pollockings of gold and taupe and black and brown. She says, “Who am I?”

Matt shakes his head, holds his peace on that one. Another waft. Sandalwood, that’s India, isn’t it? Mariko burns it as incense. It’s supposed to be an aphrodisiac, and at the same time a calmer-downer for meditation. Could you do both at once, get in and get out? Sex and satori, could they go together?

“I think maybe you should get out of here. I’m being good tonight, remember?”

“Yep, will do.” He gets up and starts for the door but then he stops behind her, he freeze-frames. “The thing is though, I wouldn’t mind kissing you. Just to kind of take it back to the beginning.”

Nape, nice word. Clavicle. Kate’s yummy, that sandalwood mixed with just a suspicion of salty sweat. He lowers her to the bed, peels back bits of her outfit as he progresses.

So this is an affair, this is a fling. Fair enough. He’s supposed to be here about death, but sex will do for the moment, will it not? He’s taken action. The wrong action, sure, but give a guy a break.

Kiss, lick, nibble, bite. How else to possess a person, to become one again, than to consume them? Kate’s laughing, and then she isn’t. By the time Matt works his way to the centre of her she’s going off like a fire alarm. It’s exhilarating in the way of a dare or a dream. He’s gorging on her, and he’s watching himself gorge, and the gorging and the watching feed each other like flame and gasoline—if, okay, gasoline could feed on flame. And then suddenly he’s on his back, and she’s squatting over him, and there’s no way in the world to stop this.

Twice he’s had sex with this woman and he has yet to get out of his pants or into a condom. What’s with that?

Matt’s going to regret this. Matt’s going to regret something about this, some part of this experience, but which one? Is there any way to figure it out now and avoid that part? Or what if this is the part he’s going to regret, the part where he lies here wondering which part of this he’s going to regret?

“Phewph.” Kate peels herself away, flops over onto her back. “I guess that was me being good.” She’s got a stocking balled up on one foot but is otherwise bereft of cover. She isn’t super-fit but she’s super-unfazed, it would seem, by her body’s history, its intricate topography. She kicks her stocking up into the air, tries to catch it as it drifts back down. “Look,” she says, “let’s get you out of those.”

He lets her undress him, roll him under the covers. He’s a sleepy kid who got to stay up for the end of the show.

Kate tucks herself under his arm, shoulder to armpit, facing out. The way Mariko does it is she rests her cheek on his chest, drools on him as she drifts off.

“There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask a woman. If a woman leaves a man, right?”

“Which is better, if she leaves him for a man or if she leaves him for a woman?”

“Better for who?” Kate’s in burrowing mode, butting him into shape with hip and shoulder. “Better for the woman, do you mean?”

“Better for the man,” says Matt. “If a woman leaves a man for a woman maybe he should be flattered. Maybe she’s saying, ‘You’re the best man in the world, and since I can’t make it work with you I’m giving up on all men.’ Or maybe he should be offended. Maybe it’s more like, ‘You’re such a complete pig you’ve turned me off your whole effing gender.’ Sort of thing.”

It gets worse. Mariko isn’t just leaving Matt for a woman but for a Younger Woman. Sophie’s mid-twenties, late twenties at the outside. She’s at that perfect age, her skin finally clear, her eyes not yet clouding over. She works at the café down the road, an old haunt of Matt’s, and lives in a basement suite on Sechelt band land right across the street from the Pacific. It’s to this bunker that she and Mariko repair when they wish to be alone. Afterwards, if they stand on tiptoe (Matt pictures their two tushes tightened with the effort), they can probably get a robin’s-eye view across the front lawn and out to sea, where various duck-like birds navigate the chop, and barges load up with gravel at the pit. Gorgeous.

Physically (why is Matt letting himself see all this just now?) Sophie’s everything Mariko isn’t. She’s the un-Mariko, the anti-Mariko. A touch pudgy, very pale. Blonde—dirty blonde, and just plain dirty. Matt’s never quite screwed up the courage to ask her how those dreadlocks work, how you get honky hair to do that. Meanwhile Jessie, the Jamaican woman who takes the other shift on the espresso machine, has straightened her hair and dyed it red. Go figure. Jessie’s almost frighteningly friendly, so Matt learned long ago to time his order at the café such that Sophie would take it. Those terse exchanges, studded with faux-Rasta locutions (he may once have called her mawn) have given him grist for some truly tangy fantasies.

Here’s a thought: how do those fantasies compare to Mariko’s? Is it possible that the two of them, he and Mariko, once lay spooned up together, both of their faces buried, visionary-wise, in that same ropy madness of hair?

What comes to Matt now is a ditty his mum used to get them to sing, him and Erin, on long car trips. Out west to Alberta that one time, for instance, to visit the McKay clan.

O’Really is dead and O’Reilly don’t know it,
O’Reilly is dead and O’Really don’t know it,
They’re both lying dead in the very same bed,
And neither one knows that the other one’s dead.

While the other person goes “rum, rum, rum-rum-rum,” bagpiping. Odd woman, Matt’s mother.

“A woman.” Kate tugs the covers up to ear level, cozying down. “I think it would be better if she left your friend for a woman. It’s a bit more likely to be a phase, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” says Matt. “Or maybe it starts that way but then she finds she likes it. A woman’s bound to be better, isn’t she, at pleasing a woman? Plus no birth control, no worry about any of that. I mean, if you had a choice?”

SATURDAY