Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good: A Novel

Dear Zane,

REASON NOT TO BE GOOD #3

Virtue is the fashion of a particular time and place (the tribesmen of Papua are still urged to eat one another, so I hear), no more absolute than polka dots or pet rocks. Virtue is mindless fad-following, and mindless fad-following is a vice. Virtue is vice.

Capiche?

Matt

Oh, for pity’s sake. Why can’t Zane get himself a cell, the fugging Luddite? “Hey Mercedes, me again.”

Greektown, they call it, Zane’s new neighbourhood. Nico lives nearby, part of the appeal, or anyway it used to be. Matt had his cab drop him a few blocks away this morning so he could stroll along the Danforth, wishing he were hale and hungry enough to stop in at one of the awninged cafés for a souvlaki or a falafel or a kabob or a chimichanga or a spring roll or a pappadum or a plate of pad thai or jerk chicken. Humantown, more like. This’d be the place to raise a kid, this is the world.

Zane’s semi is a block south. Across the street and one door down there’s a daycare centre—“Starbaby’s,” can they be serious?—in another tall-skinny place with gingerbread eaves. At the foot of the walk is a stegosaurus-shaped bench speckled with shade at one end, blessed relief from this brutally perfect day. Matt slouches there trying not to look furtive, trying to look like a busy parent getting a couple of crucial calls out of the way while he waits for his toddler. It’s too soon for contact with Zane—Matt’s still hot-cold, his head aching in a way that can’t just be about last night’s beer—but there’s no harm getting closer. If Matt were cured, would he have the wherewithal to head on over and pound on that door, make his case? No need to answer that, so he doesn’t.

“Anyhow,” he says, wriggling for a less jabby spot on his dinosaur, “I don’t suppose the idiot’s around?”

“Nope, sorry,” says Mercedes. “He had to whip over to the clinic, he shouldn’t be long.”

What you don’t want to think about, when you get Mercedes on the line, is what exactly you might be interrupting her at. What poor bastard, what MP or priest or plain old palooka might be splayed out on her rack, begging to be spared the punishment he’s already paid for. Hang on, hon, I’ve gotta take this. I’ll loosen you off a little …

Last time Matt was at Zane and Mercedes’s place for dinner, just the three of them on the patio around back—wrought iron on flagstone, magnolia blossoms leaning lasciviously in—Matt excused himself to the loo and on the way up touched the leather, the silenced creak of one of those loam-black masks. He put his hand right out and fingered its cheek, its vacant eyehole, and strove to find it thrilling. No go. A cliché is what it felt like, the dried carapace of some dead desire. Or maybe death was the desire, maybe that was the longing embodied there, the lust for some ultimate, some radical unselfing. Pain transmuted to pleasure, death to rebirth …

Zane caught him at it, passed him on the stairs and held his tongue. As far as Matt knows Zane doesn’t employ this kind of paraphernalia, but then again, how far is that? How much of a clue does Matt really have when it comes to Zane’s erotic predilections? Back in the day they routinely slept together (sleepovers, camp-outs) without Matt ever twigging to his friend’s pooftuality. There was that spate of boyhood humping, but that was both of them, and Matt turned out to be straight, didn’t he? Oh dear. Human nature’s such a mystery, and Matt’s such a dimwit. Bad combo.

At table that evening, after a couple of gallon-sized glasses of Zane’s you-brew Merlot, Matt pointed a probing question or two Mercedes’s way.

“Say, Mercedes, that remote control? On the wall up there with your leather stuff? What do you do with that?”

At which she chortled. “You can’t even begin to afford to find out, babe.”

Fair enough. So he tried a more philosophical angle. “Can a person really, you know, want to be hurt?”

Mercedes did her usual thing of trying to turn it religious. Reverse theology? No, negative theology. The idea being that you can never say what God is, so you come at it the other way around, make do with saying what God isn’t. This isn’t God and this isn’t God and this isn’t God and this isn’t God … What’s left after all possible isn’ts must be divine.

Matt doubted the connection, but he found himself using the same argument on Nagy next time they quarrelled. Why did Matt’s reviews have to be so damn severe all the time? Well imagine, for a moment, a civilization whose guiding visions are a bunch of humdrum movies. How would you push such a civilization in the direction of a dream it hasn’t yet dreamt? This isn’t it and this isn’t it and this isn’t it and this isn’t it … Bogus most likely, but it shut Nagy up for a while.

Dominatrix, is that what this makes Matt? Or what do you call it when the whipper’s a guy?

“No problem,” says Mercedes. “Like I say, he won’t be long, and he really needs to talk to you. Hey, I just got my new book from the printer, wanna hear a bit?”

A phony huff from the far end. “Have I ever shown you the scold’s bridle, Matt?”

“The heretic’s fork? It’s got these prongs at both ends and what you do is you—”

“I’d love to hear a bit of your book, Mercedes. Another throbbing manhood, I presume?”

As romance novelist, Mercedes isn’t Mercedes at all but Jillian Ash—the name of her first pet (Jilly gerbil) plus the street she was born on. According to this formula Matt’s nom de plume should be Muffy Rose Park. Muffy, one of those little green turtles in a plastic, palm-treed bowl. Lived about fifteen minutes then got flushed, Matt’s very first heartbreak.

“No, it’s actually a philosophical thing,” says Mercedes. “My first. On Simone Weil?” Vie, she says it. Another of her GBFTs, as Zane calls them, her Great Big Fucking Thinkers. Jewish, this one, and Catholic, and Crazy. “It tackles the whole question of whether her mysticism, her idea of decreation … You know what, I think I’ve told you this already. Make me stop.”

“No, no, go ahead.” Matt makes a gun of his left, non-phone-holding hand. He cocks it, aims it at his temple. A woman with an infant in a sling staggers down the walk of Starbaby’s, fires him a nasty look.

“Okay,” says Mercedes, “well, I try to trace the decreation thing back to her time on the assembly line. That experience of slavery.”

“This is basically what I argue, that Weil’s labour showed her that selfhood itself is slavery, that to be liberated we have to always be demolishing the self. Through pain and beauty and so on. And how that connects to her decision to let herself die, starve herself to death in the sanatorium. Ready? Do you really want to hear it?”

“Okay, so. Chapter One. Dr. Zachary Lewis reached over and shoved open the door of his two-seater Mercedes. I usually save my Mercedes reference till later on, but this time I got it in early. Sorry, I’ll start again. Chapter One. Dr. Zachary Lewis reached over and shoved open the door of his two-seater Mercedes.”

A flyer guy turns in at Zane’s place, shoves a fistful of junk mail through the slot. Muffled yelping from across the street and through the phone line, both.

“You got that, eh? Well, you would. What was her name, Minnie in your review—that was Mariko, right?”

Weil. Vie. What’s weird is that Erin got into her too, way back when. She got into a lot of wacky stuff towards the end there. Matt’s got a recipe card someplace, inscribed with a Weil quote—Erin had it taped on the wall by her bed. The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it. Jeezuz aitch.

“You tell me,” says Mercedes. “Chapter One. Dr. Zachary Lewis reached over and shoved open the door of his two-seater Mercedes. His black sports jacket stretched taut across his broad shoulders, and his dark curls fell forward, briefly obscuring the penetrating blue of his eyes. Nikki Kendall, the nurse who’d done her very first shift on the pediatric floor with him that day—”

“Yup. His black sports jacket stretched taut across his broad shoulders, and his dark curls fell forward, briefly obscuring the penetrating blue of his eyes. Nikki Kendall, the nurse who’d done her very first shift on the pediatric floor with him that day, collapsed into the seat beside him and slammed shut the door. ‘Dr. Lewis, you just saved my life!’ she exclaimed. ‘I would have drowned out there!’ And she was probably right. In the few strides it had taken her to reach his sports car from the bus shelter her blonde bangs had become plastered to her forehead, and her blouse—”

“Penetrating?” says Matt. He slurps at his coffee. “You can do better than that with Zane’s eyes, can’t you? And what about the other one?”

“In this genre you go one way or the other, my friend, blue eyes or brown. No freaks, please.”

Matt’s plan for today’s Zane call went something like this. Imagine he lives in a work of art, Zane does. In a work of art disease wants to be symbolic. It doesn’t just want to be itself, it wants to be emblematic of something, of some big affliction of character or culture. If Zane were in a movie or a book, then, what would his illness signify? With what would we be expected to associate this sort of infectious, ugly-making disease? Depravity, poverty, foreignness, otherness, all that good stuff—a reading real-life Zane may have failed to resist. So what if the virus has come to represent, for Zane, his guilt over his aberrance as artist and fruit? Better yet, what if it’s come to represent his guilt over this guilt, his shame that he’s allowed himself to feel ashamed? How could Matt talk him out of that interpretation? Say Zane isn’t dying of his disease, but of the meaning of his disease, a sense that it’s somehow right for him. How could Matt help him refuse that meaning?

“Had a fall?” says Matt. “What is he, a little old man all of a sudden?” That queasiness, that sickening sense of his innards opening out.

“Should be any minute. In the few strides it had taken her to reach his sports car from the bus shelter her blonde bangs had become plastered to her forehead, and her blouse had lost its crispness, yielding to the ripened roundness of …”

Caffeine. How, Matt’s often wondered, did he get so lucky as to be born into a time and place in which this shit’s legal? You can drop in just about anyplace these days and score it in its most potent form. When Matt’s feeling hard done by about living in a cretinous, soul-crushing culture, this is one upside to which he’ll cling.

By now he’s just about polished off that jumbo triple-shot and is feeling seriously jangled. This effect is exacerbated by the fact that he’s still got the damn cellphone plastered to the side of his head. How long do these things take to produce a tumour?

The original plan was to wait. He knew he could never outsmart Mercedes but maybe he could outlast her …

Or maybe not. About half an hour has so far crept past, and still no Zane. Zach and Nikki have gone through a plethora of miscues and misunderstandings, and are just now starting to make progress. “She could feel his ardour straining urgently against her, and yet his hands were patient and gentle as they unbuttoned her blouse and drew it back, revealing the taut …”

Lordy. He’s going to need a laptop too, so he can make use of moments like this, catch up on business. Business? Well, Nagy’s email message was still waiting for him this morning, and he darn near cajoled himself into opening it. He did click on a new one from DennyD, and was treated to further enthusiasms. “Talk about a CONSPIRACY, I can’t believe they’re sacking you. It’s just so hard to be paranoid ENOUGH these days.” So, the word was out—about the firing, though apparently not about the reason for it, not about the fakes. Denny predicted an imminent “shitstorm” of protest over Matt’s dismissal, a shitstorm he vowed to initiate himself.

Then—“I know this is nervy”—Mr. D. started plugging one of his own nascent films, for which he was seeking support. Would Matt have done the same thing in his day, pestered somebody for mentorship? And if not, why not? “It’ll be called Dead. It’ll be a series of shots of dead BODIES in various states of disgustingness, plants and animals and people (I know a guy who knows a guy at the morgue). There’s no story, no goal, no PLOT and obviously that’s the POINT, death as the end of narrative. Death as the thing that swallows narrative even though narrative’s always trying to swallow death, turn it into something ELSE.” To which Matt, since he could think of no definitive reply, made none.

Nothing from Zane, as usual. Luddite indeed. Nothing from other friends either, not that Matt has so many of them these days. The folks he and Mariko used to hang with (other kidless couples, mostly) are hers. She’d get chummy with another woman and they’d agree to graft their men onto the relationship. There’s Sue’s Gary, there’s Becky’s Russ, there’s Rachel’s Milan. All perfectly nice guys, but without their women to connect them? If and when Matt and Mariko do split up for keeps it’s a no-brainer who’ll get the dinner invitations. Matt originally brought a few people into the relationship, just as he brought a few chipped cups (zany horoscopes, movie star “mug” shots) to fill out Mariko’s bone china set. These friends are more hers than his now, though. She’s the one who’ll look them up in town, or coax them into ferrying over to the Lair for the weekend. Single, Matt will be seriously alone.

i can still call you that, can’t i? you lost the job but you kept your mind, right? your wicked mind? and your hidden heart? your peekaboo heart?

The whole kritik thing was Mariko’s idea in the first place, back when Matt started at Omega. He wasn’t to be just a critic, but a kritik—way cooler, way kooler than your average hack. Way more kreative. People were meant to think of the German kritiker, read in a Lou-Reed-in-Berlin sort of mood, suffering brewed up with beauty. Underground. Edge. Matt was to have no name at all save an email address, he was to become an email address, kritik@themovies. Nagy loved it. Before long Matt was loving it too. The k came to stand for the covert ambitions—grand, almost messianic—he’d begun to attach to his reviews.

And then of course Zane had to jump on the bandwagon. He started trotting out the term in every letter, smartassed bastard. It was kritikal that he get the funding to finish his Nigerian documentary, that kind of thing. And then that last letter, revealing his ingenious scheme, his brilliant plan to let himself die. “I know you’ll think I’m krazy, but to me this is kritikal …”

and wouldn’t you know it i’ve got a migraine on the way, and there’s you with your bug. bad timing. any chance it’s just worry? i had this thought when you left (i kept waving, how come you never look back?) that you and zane are going opposite ways. you wouldn’t do what you’re doing for anybody but him, he’s doing what he’s doing for everybody. two different kinds of love? i’m not making sense, i’m seeing the crazy lights, wish you were here to blow me. sorry, i shouldn’t say that …

So Sophie isn’t into toes, is that it? What exactly is she into? Maybe Matt should have looked into that for himself.

“W-would you like that heated up?” Sophie’s prone to a slight stammer. G-garbage, that’s her thing. T-t-t-trash. She’s compulsive about it the way some people are compulsive about washing their hands, terrified of letting anything foreign in. Sophie’s like that only the other way around, Sophie’s terrified of letting anything out, terrified that she’ll leave some trace of herself behind. She lives as if one more scrumpled-up wrapper will do it, tip the globe from kritikal to terminal. FOG, she’s called her clutch of activists—Friends of Gaia—for whom Mariko has of course whipped up a nifty website. They’re into low-grade eco-terrorism, sand-in-gas-tanks kind of thing. Sophie’s thrown her body in front of a logging truck, spent the night in a tree.

But she’s too late. This is what Matt wants to say to Mariko—Sophie’s too late. The environmental thing is over. We left kritikal behind ages ago. We did not pass Go, we did not collect two hundred. Matt has the feeling, though, that giving up on Gaia, or at least admitting he’s done so, would be giving up on Mariko, giving her a final excuse to give up on him.

And then of course he might be wrong. Hey, it wouldn’t be the first time, more like the seventeen kajillionth. Maybe the human race is just going through a bad patch here, and life will live through it. Who knows? So Matt keeps quiet. He holds his peace, too, on the offspring issue. Why bring a kid into a world you know is ruined? He’s often thought it—he thought it even when Mariko was briefly pregnant, and even when that experience inspired them to start boinking for a baby—but he’s never said it. Mariko seems to know, though, or maybe it’s just that she’s reached the same dire conclusion. That one loss, and then that one iffy prognosis—narrow uterus, a few fibroids—and she gave up, went back on birth control. No specialists, no clinics, no nothing. But what if they’re both wrong?

“… her eyes widening as she looked about the sumptuous suite. ‘Oh my gosh,’ she said, ‘this is like something out of a dream or—’”

But she’s about to be interrupted anyhow. Somebody’s just turned in at her place, a middle-aged guy, bald, slender. Yeah, the goofy walk is right—like somebody crossing a log over a river—but so much else is wrong. He’s got out a key though, he’s opening the door.

“’ … thought you might like it,’ he said with a roguish grin, swinging the door shut behind him. Nikki fell against him, her full breasts pooling against the implacable wall of his chest. His lips were on hers and she drank greedily from them, startling herself with the violence of her own—Oh wait, here he is. Zane. Zane! Phone for you. Hang on, he’s going to take it up in his room.”

Bald? So he’s buzzed off that fringe of brown fluff, big improvement. But slender …

“Yyyello.” That silly, sarcastically nasal voice—it’s only been a few weeks, and that’s too long. A stand-up comic’s voice is what he’s got, good evening, ladies and germs.

“Because you’re not. This is just what it is. You being sick? It’s just you being sick.”

A breath or two, more chesty than you’d really like. Matt watches Zane’s window, half-hoping for his silhouette. What if he gets busted? I love you, man, stay away.

“Right.” Behind Matt somebody very small begins to cry, a thin, experimental wailing that pours out an open window.

“It’s weird, I really thought … I don’t know. I thought you and Mariko were forever. Hey, is that somebody crying?”

“Yeah, I hear it too. Must be something in the line, bad connection.” Matt shifts his body as though to block out the sound. “So here’s a question for you. My best friend and my wife are both gay. What’s up with that?”

“It’s you, Matt. You do it to people. You’re just so incredibly manly, you’re just so—”

“—just so magnificently straight that everybody around you gives up and goes queer.”

Matt blows a modest raspberry. The squalling behind him resolves into a fit of giggles. “How was the doctor?”

It was maybe a month after they first started hanging out together, he and Zane. Spring of grade four? They unfolded Matt’s birthday jackknife (“Take care of it, son, and it’ll take care of you”) and they sliced open their thumbs. Zane went first, drew a bead of blood that sent Matt’s head spinning. He knelt down, steadied himself, held the knife tight in one hand and whipped his other thumb along the blade. Too hard, too fast—he had himself a gusher. Once they had their thumbs smushed together you couldn’t tell blood from blood anyhow. They hadn’t figured out what to say so they just knelt there glued together for a bit, then went back to playing cowboys, wads of paper towel reddening on their thumbs.

“Atta boy.” Matt drains the last of his coffee, dismounts his dinosaur and crosses the street. He stands on the lawn looking up at Zane’s window, a Romeo thing. “How’s your stuff? What are you working on?”

“Wrapping up Beach, mostly.” Zane’s cheeky title for his Nigerian documentary, A Day at the Beach. You think of the Marx Brothers, A Day at the Races. You think of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Jacques Tati having his shy fun in the sand. Then you meet Shanumi. “Nico’s working with me on something new, too. Kind of a parallel. I might get your help on it.”

“Um, sure. Mind you, I saw Beach again, the cut you sent me. A couple of times. I don’t get it.”

“Oh Christ, this again. Have you got a new theory, is that it? And please don’t be a prick.”

“No, I mean you were good.” Zane passes the window one way. “You were really good.” He passes it the other way. “That wasn’t good enough.”

Another raspberry from Matt. “I get plenty of this crap from my wife, thanks.”

“Okay, sorry. So what are you working on these days? Tackling some pretty formidable stuff?”

Zane passes the window again. He’s doing a little dance, either that or he’s buckling over in some kind of distress. “That’s fantastic. You’re kidding me. Are you kidding me?”

“But then she’s screwing around on me, so … Hey, is that the right word? When it’s two chicks is it still screwing? Poofter like you should know.”

“Delivery,” says Matt. A truck’s just dumped a load of gravel at the foot of a driveway a couple of doors down. Matt’s already on his way up the block. “We’re doing some work, fixing the place up. Getting ready to sell.”

“Yeah.” Matt strides north, the sun’s hand heavy on his back. “Hey, so Nico. You know he’s a social worker, right, not a filmmaker?”

“I bow to you. And you do a little head-bob, with your hands praying.” Back at the room Matt googled this up, got it on his third spelling. “I bow to the soul in you.”

If this trip were a movie—such is Matt’s thought as he squelches back down the hall to his room—it would suck so far.

Guy holes up in a hoity-toity hotel. He shivers and sweats, fires off the odd email, places the odd phone call. He heads out for a stroll in the suburban barrens, or for a sneaky recon mission, or for a quickie with a puzzling stranger. Sure, there’s a bit of moral conundrum taking shape—save the sick guy? let him have his big gesture?—but do you really need that sort of grief when you’re kicking back on the couch? The sex, which is sudden, and moderately acrobatic, does have cinematic potential. A clever director could do something with that, and he could haunt the whole thing with some sort of existential despair. Or maybe spoof that, pull a Woody Allen? Whichever. Matt would be obliged to trash the thing either way.

If Matt were making the movie though, things would be different. Things would be inside out, upside down. The sick guy would save the healthy guy, something like that, the ironic reversal. Life, though? Life’s so lame.

It takes Matt a little longer than it should to regain his room. The gizmo on the door keeps rejecting his card, which turns out actually to be his organ donor card … Still not firing on all cylinders, no.

“Okay, so I’ve got another one for you.” Kate on the voice mail. “Never mind who am I, what about why am I? You like the philosophical stuff, right? So why is there anything at all?” Typical mushy stuff, new love. “You’ve got nothing, and that splits into two things, energy and gravity. Like evil and good coming out of … whatever they came out of, you tell me. But what made it do that? And once something’s something, can it really be nothing again? Oh and also, I’m still humming from last night, seriously humming. Just so you know. B-bye.”

Matt paces the room a spell before dialing. Answer a question with a question, seems to be his best bet. He’s run a movie trivia contest or two in his day, he ought to be able to come up with something dastardly. Oh, here’s a good one. “Get ready, smarty-puss. How many movies have titles that start with Jesus Christ? B-bye yourself.”

How long has it been since Matt last spent the night with another woman? Seven years. He still hasn’t spent a whole night—he was awake and headachy at dawn today, gave the sleeping Kate a peck on the cheek and skulked back down to his floor. Tucked into the Emperor, he resisted the allure of the remote control, went instead for his bedside reading.

She. He grabbed a handful, sniffed at the pages. Any sign of Mariko, her papaya bubble bath, her leafy perfume? Nope, nothing. In desperation, then, he tried the words themselves, tried reading the darn thing. Sure enough, there she was—the earnestness, the daffy love for even the most hopeless of humans. Matt imagined arriving at this world Mariko had concocted, imagined himself marooned and defenseless in her new-deal paradise. He imagined her licking the salt from his sea-soaked body, not to excite him but to clean him, to purify him. And he fell asleep, and he dreamt, and he forgot his dreams.

He’s made it to mid-afternoon now, but he’s still got a good hour to kill before Kate’s free. Time for a little tube. Matt clicks through the various movie menus, Drama, Comedy, Family, and finds nothing to which he hasn’t already applied his kritikal acumen. Which leaves Adult.

For a guy who’s exposed himself to so much celluloid over the years, Matt’s weirdly virginal when it comes to Adult. There was the odd softcore movie when he was a teenager—he recalls watching one with Zane on a sleepover, there in the blue-lit gloom of the McKay living room. A producer auditions young women for a smutty movie, a skin flick about skin flicks, cutting-edge stuff. Matt was horrendously, excruciatingly aroused. And his friend? What was going on in Zane’s jammies? What was going on in Zane’s head?

Of late—since sleep has become a no-go, there in the musty sanctum of his study—Matt’s taken to snooping around on late-night TV again, catching the odd libidinous offering. Arty coupling in arty films, parodies of porn in middlebrow thrillers, infomercials for phone sex or Crazy Gurl videos—it’s all arousing, it’s all appalling. After five minutes or so, any night Matt blunders into this stuff, he’s one big shaken cocktail of lust and shame. He’ll click off the tube and scuttle down the hall to Mariko’s bedroom—his bedroom?—and play ghost at the cracked-open door. Mariko’s sleep is almost laughably serene, each breath a rumour of a breeze. Shouldn’t she sense him there, rise to the tug of his attention? Would she have, in the old days?

Lick ‘Em and Leave ‘Em
Wicked Bitch Is the Best
Inside Eve
Total Suckcess #15

Well, hm. Tough call. Matt clicks a title at random, hits Purchase—and instantly feels naked. Where’s his notebook? Oh wait, the hotel stationery, the hotel pen. Matt skitters over to the desk. The paper comes in single cream-coloured sheets, each tipping the scales at about eight pounds. He hefts one, notes the almost fluffy feel of the thing, takes a thumbnail to its gold embossing.

Oops, opening credits. Matt clambers back onto the bed, punches a couple of pillows into position and settles down to work. What comes to him first (it often works this way) is his review’s last line. “Watching hardcore porn to get horny is like going to the slaughterhouse to get hungry.” Brutal. Brilliant. Whether or not it’s accurate remains to be seen (onscreen everybody’s still dressed), but this is not the kritik’s immediate concern.

Matt’s never witnessed hardcore porn before. This fact becomes evident about three minutes into today’s entertainment. There turns out to be one big difference between softcore—the stuff he’s previously consumed—and hardcore. This difference is the dink. Relegated to the role of subtext or absent centre in softcore, the dink would seem to be furiously foregrounded in hardcore. Matt often averts his gaze—should he really be staring at some other guy’s weenie, if this film is meant to be straight?—but the male member is clearly hardcore’s main character. It generates the plot’s premise, rising action and resolution. It’s the point. “Possibility that this is always the case?” Matt scrawls. “That all narrative is sex-shaped? Develop.”

Half an hour or so goes by. Into it are wedged five carnal encounters, or maybe it’s just four—threesomes, twosomes, one-somes. Matt takes advantage of a spate of chit-chat to get down some thoughts. This is his act of rebellion, writing instead of wanking off. Rugged individualist.

“In terms of sex positions this film displays a deplorable poverty of imagination. You’ve got your missionary, your doggie, your standing doggie, your cowgirl, your reverse cowgirl, and that’s about all she wrote. Excuse me, but what about the butterfly? What about the peace sign? What about the kneeling pretzel, the split level, the armchair, the wheelbarrow”—oh, how he pored over that book of Meg’s!—“the rainbow arch, the froggy, the proposal, the squashing of the deck chair, the playing of the cello …” He’ll add more later. Back to the movie.

After an inspired flourish of character development—“I mean, what does he expect if he’s going to go away every single weekend?”—it’s back to business. If Matt had the nerve he’d tackle the race thing, the gender thing, the thing about race and gender. All the women in jolly old pornland seem to be white or Asian, whereas all the men seem to be white or black. Whither the Asian male? Whither the black female? Whither the brown folks of either persuasion? There’s definitely an article in this, though it may mean fidgeting through one more film to make sure the research is rock-solid. Or he could have a go at condoms, the complete lack thereof …

“The thing about Eve,” Matt scribbles, “is—you guessed it—she’s innocent. In fact Eve (played by Cheyenne ‘Let’s-see-some-ID’ Sweet) is so innocent she’s never even seen a male organ, let alone had to deal with one. This deplorable situation her friends resolve to correct. Eve obediently tags along to various erotic encounters, watching—with us—just how it’s done. Thus is she prepared for the movie’s climactic scene, in which Dirk ‘Ohmigawd’ Winsome joins her in her verdant garden and … But don’t let me spoil it for you.”

What comes to Matt last is the start of his review. He’ll go with stats again. He did a bunch of research one time for his piece on The Seven Year Itch at the Reprise, but never used it. The average time spent on foreplay is nineteen-point-something minutes. The average duration of a female orgasm is six seconds. The average man will climax seven thousand times between puberty and death. Forty percent of people have had unprotected sex with a new partner in the last year, despite the fact that … Anyway, he’ll open with a barrage of these numbers, and then he’ll—

Yipes. Matt lifts right up off the bed at the sound of the telephone. He mutes the tube—Eve’s noisy ecstasies are a bit much anyhow. He tugs straight the bedspread, runs a hand through his hair. “Hello?”

There was a perfect time with Mariko. Two years or so, that stretch in town before they packed up and headed for paradise. Plenty of urban nature, plenty of loving sex. Is there any way to get back there?

Kits, the place was called, Kitsilano, a funky-posh stretch of Vancouver right by the sea. Mariko had a condo, a squinchy one-bedroom into which they crammed two households’ worth of crap when Matt and Toto gave up their basement suite, its insolent roaches, its needle-strewn back lane. Matt was immediately mad about the new place, and about the little world in which it landed him. He could stride a couple of blocks downhill to the park, a modest patch of grass studded with chestnuts and willows and yews. Between the park and the sea ran a boulevard of sand, where neatly bucked driftwood logs had been lined up like park benches. It was all so phony, so fixed. Matt loved it. Couples strolled and squabbled, joggers huffed by in their sweats and their dazzling sneakers. Dog owners juggled their leashes and their little plastic bags of shit. Out on the bay you could watch the motionless motion of the two-tone tankers, the incessant sizzle of the waves. On the far side, houses swarmed up the slopes and were lost in the bristling green of the mountains, which in turn were lost in the bruised-black belly of the clouds. Sighting down the beach your eye lit on downtown, or anyway on the hyperdensity of the West End, high-rises lined up like the teeth of a busted comb.

If downhill meant park and sea, uphill meant city. Fourth Avenue, or maybe Broadway. Wigs, flowers, appliances, lingerie. Gelato, sushi, pita, pizza. Get rubbed, get reikied, get trimmed, get tanned. Matt would peer into a bunch of windows, then settle for a coffee and a few quiet moments with a recent issue of Premiere or Film Comment at his favourite café. “Afternoon, Emma.” “Afternoon, Matt.” Then he’d head back and get started on the paella or the seared-scallop salad or the vegan pilaf. Mariko would scoot home from the office as early as she could, and they’d make hootchy-kootchy (her term) wherever they happened to be when they’d wrestled off their clothes. She’d shiver before she came—that’s how you knew she was ready—and stay mum right through to the end, silently seizuring. Afterwards they’d perch, robed and cross-legged, on the futon couch in front of the TV with their novelty Babar bowls and their chopsticks and their splasher of soy sauce. When the news came on Matt would get dressed and go to work.

Work? Yep, Matt even had a job in those days, at a rep cinema that happened to be a walk from Mariko’s place. The Reprise was a fusty bit of business—it gave you the feeling, once you were inside, of being lost down the back of a big old burgundy couch. It had a balcony, and a trough urinal in the men’s room, and audiences that clapped. It was run by the Glücks, an eccentric childless couple not much older than Matt who nonetheless treated him like a son. Like them, Matt did everything. He shovelled popcorn (“Engevita yeast with that?”), tore tickets, made change in the unheated glass box out front. He even got to fiddle with the projector now and then when the image went wonky.

By the time he’d been with them a year or so, the Glücks were letting Matt do all the programming. Classics, second-run Hollywood features, foreign films, he had his pick. The early show/late show thing allowed him to get clever in all kinds of harmlessly cute ways. He’d put a camp kung fu flick with one of the epic Kurosawas. He’d match a remake with its original—The Fly with The Fly, say—or two wildly different takes on the same traditional tale, Beauty and the Beast by Disney and by Cocteau. One time he put a whole batch of Dr. Seuss animations on with Dr. Strangelove. Another time he matched the wordless prayer Koyaanisqatsi (“life out of balance” in Hopi) with the chatterboxy My Dinner with André. That kind of thing.

He even got to write the little blurbs for the flyer, which Mariko laid out on her fancy computer. “Canadian phenom David Cronenberg, with his 1986 remake of the Vincent Price classic, conjures The Fly as a hymn to body horror, braiding into it our fear of cancer and of AIDS, our whole dread of the finite as it’s embodied in our bodies …” Now and then somebody would notice the effort, maybe even scribble a few kind words for the cardboard Comments Please box.

So it was rewarding work, or at least it was work that didn’t make you ashamed you weren’t doing something more worthwhile. It was creative—kreative, you might even say. It barely paid, but Mariko didn’t seem to mind. Matt made sure to keep ahead on the housework and the cooking, contribute that way. Evenings he wasn’t needed at the cinema they’d go out with Sue and Gary or some other corporate couple for whom Matt was an amusing curiosity. He was an easy enrichment of their lives—a Best of Bach tucked into an Abba-and-Eagles collection. For the most part he liked these folks, and liked the fact that they were already there, friends who didn’t need to be made.

Gauguin. That famous one of the woman lying on her tummy in that Tahitian Eden—Kate could be that woman now. Feet crossed, hands palm-down on the pillow. In the painting there’s a black-clad figure in the background, big-D Death probably, or the spirit of some ancestor, deceased and displeased. Matt fills that role here as he wanders unclad back into the room with a glass of water, having discreetly ditched his condom in the loo.

Matt’s just about got her memorized from this angle. If he were a painter he’d have no trouble conjuring her at the studio. The convoluted conch of an ear. That startling silhouette as she cranes at him over her shoulder, one wide eye, amorous, amused. Backbone. Butt. Über-critic André Bazin once observed (this is late ‘40s, early peacetime) that sex appeal had migrated from leg to bosom, Dietrich to Hayworth and Russell. And nowadays? Having tarried awhile with the bronzed tummy is it time, perhaps, for the tush, complete the cycle?

Kate goes up on her elbows. “Are you usually this, I don’t know … You’re awfully intense about sex. In a good way and everything, but oh my.”

Matt slides back onto the bed, his still-slippery johnson kissing the sheet. After Kate’s call he hustled down to the gift-and-convenience shop in the lobby, lucked into a box of Trojans. Better late than never, no? Thank Christ the whatsit went on, and stayed on, without a hitch.

“No,” says Matt. Not exactly. Is this what Kate wants to hear? “It’s you. You do this to me.” He kisses her tattoo, a pair of oriental-type pictograms at the base of her back where it rises to become rump. Mariko took calligraphy for a little while once, and punctuated her notes with figures like these, fine columns of cryptic squiggles.

Kate giggles. “No, I mean that’s what my tattoo says, love me like this. At least that’s what it’s supposed to say. Hey, I’m getting hungry. Could I talk you into a picnic?”

Matt gives his head a shake, shifting gears again. “Okay, yeah, maybe. Supposed to say?”

“That’s what I asked for at the tattoo place.” Kate rolls back onto her belly. If somebody were filming her for pornographic purposes they’d want to do something about the faint blue squiggles on those pale legs. “The guy swore he knew Japanese. This is hilarious, no, it’s pathetic—the whole reason I got the tattoo in the first place was I had a thing for this Japanese guy. And then we finally sleep together, and guess what?”

“Emergency exit. That’s what the moron had written on me, emergency exit. Can you believe it?”

Matt rears back to observe the tattoo, which he’s been contemplatively licking. He laughs.

“He must have got it off a sign or something.” She shrugs—an odd gesture when executed in the prone position. “But what I was wondering was if it was Zane. You know, the sex thing, the intensity.”

“Gay.” She shifts onto her back. They’d want to slip her into a bustier too, get those goddess-breasts to stay put. “Some people say male sex is about fear, that it is fear, actually. That a man having sex is a man acting out his terror that he’s not a man. Have you heard that?”

Kate dignifies this with a semi-snort of laughter. “So when you get close to Zane, I don’t know. Maybe you get feeling a bit fruity?”

Fruit, yeah, that’s a good one. That and poofter are Matt’s favourites. Homosexual is so cold, so clinical. Homo? Too schoolyard. Fag is like fairy, kind of glib and snide. Gay is proud, queer is political. What else? Pansy, pansy’s kind of okay. Feygele, Yiddish for “little bird”—Zane taught him that one. Friend of Dorothy, cute but cumbersome … No, fruit and poof are his fondest, or best of all joof, for Jewish poof. To which Zane has yet to invent a fitting comeback. Wasperosexual, but that didn’t stick.

Well, yeah. Yeah, she’s crazy, but why let on? What Matt feels for Zane, sexually, seems to be nothing, not a blessed thing. This is a relief to Matt, but it doesn’t make him proud. His complete lack of appetite for man-sex feels like one more personal failure, one more ethical flop. Big-shot film guy and his imagination’s that small?

Apparently so. Gay male sex, when he sees it in his head (he’s never seen it anyplace else), simply unsettles him. He knows it isn’t any odder than straight sex, that bodies are just bodies. It’s like that day Erin told him about mummy-daddy sex, it’s that same dismay. Any sex is odd unless it’s what you want, unless you’ve been bamboozled by that particular desire. Matt and Zane worked this out one night a few years ago, and Matt rejigged the idea for a piece on homophobia in action flicks. “Gay sex is scary to the straight man,” he wrote, “the same way any sex at all is scary to a kid who doesn’t yet crave it. The daddy puts his what in where? Gay sex to the straight man is sex that’s gone bizarre again, sex stripped of romance—the romance of conquest, the romance of communion. It’s sex as pure biology again, pure body. It’s sex as death.”

It was what, a month later that Zane gave him his bad news, there in the cemetery? Yep, there are moments Matt wants to quit words too, shut the hell up for good.

Here’s an angle Matt’s been working on—the Rio de Janeiro thing. It was Zane’s very first AIDS documentary, the first of his three, the only one he made before his own diagnosis. Matt’s plan is to use it on him, turn it against him.

Farewell to Flesh. Like most of Zane’s documentaries it focuses on one person, who both is and isn’t everybody else. Cato, can that be right? Cato’s a Brazilian soap opera star, a straight guy who gets infected and has to deal with all the usual prejudice and scorn. He comes close to letting himself die but then resurrects himself as an activist. Zane structured his piece as a mock soap opera, shooting in shitty video, backlighting the star for his close-up as he broods, to swelling organ music, on the latest blood count. The whole thing’s so phony it turns real again.

There are real bits too, action shots so outlandish they look phony. Cato climbing naked to Cristo Redentor, the giant Jesus who peers down from his mountaintop over Rio, arms spread wide like a cliff diver about to let himself go. Cato humming “The Girl from Ipanema” as he walks the famous beach, pinning red AIDS ribbons to swimsuits and umbrellas. Cato at the carnival, samba-ing down the street in an outrageous motley, a giant feathered fool frisbeeing condoms into the crowd. Carnival comes just before Lent, you learn, a last hurrah before the ascetic sets in, a farewell to flesh.

And then the punchline. Thanks to activists like Cato—living activists, Zane—Brazil was the first developing country to achieve universal access to treatment. Brazil thumbed its nose at the multinationals, produced antiretrovirals at home. It pushed for the vote at the UN that declared AIDS treatment a human right. Cadavers, Zane, rarely make that kind of progress.

Downplay Jesus, is Matt’s plan—the whole dying on the cross thing—and focus on the giant feathered fool.

Most of the cars on the freeway aren’t actually cars so much as trucks, boxy big-wheelers with tinted windows and vanity plates. 4U FIFI. 3 SUUM. 2 WEERD. 1 DERFL. On TV ads these rigs bounce over sand dunes, scale mountain passes, spill gangs of rapturous campers at the lake. This summer Sunday each fuming vehicle bears one fuming manager or minion on the way to or from fricking work.

Kate drives, Matt plays navigator. The plan is to picnic in his old neighbourhood, back to the source. Take the 401 to the Allen Expressway, the Allen to Eglinton, Eglinton to Yonge and hang south …

Brick. Churches, schools, apartment buildings, houses, they’re all red or brown brick. Which makes Toronto, to Matt, the Real World. Out west everything’s wood, so it feels like cottage country, like getaway. The evergreens add to that effect—you think Georgian Bay, romping on the dock. Here in Reality all the trees are hardwood, chestnut, oak, ash. Everything’s so hard.

So then why did he leave? That was 1981, the year they launched the first space shuttle—Matt remembers being glued to the TV in the living room at home, he and his dad (“Three liquid-fuelled engines, hang on, son!”), when he ought to have been finishing up his final film projects. His final final film projects: it was time to graduate from York U, get out there and make something of himself. Houston, we have liftoff. The new virus would have been rising right about then too. None of its names would have materialized yet—GRID, Gay Plague, God’s Revenge—just some rumours out of San Francisco and New York about a nasty pneumonia, a strange skin cancer hitting young guys with no girlfriends. Zane would have heard those first whispers. By the time he gradded he was easing into the local gay scene, a giddy cabal energized by its repression, by the spectre of a radical release. There was a bar on Richmond, there was a gallery on Church—or so Matt gathered, he never had the nerve to tag along, and was never exactly invited anyway. Zane’s film career, too, was shifting into gear. His first paid gig was to edit footage from “Operation Soap,” the raids on the gay baths earlier that year. “Toronto’s Stonewall” is what Zane called the police action and the ensuing revolt.

And then Erin. Her not-eating had climaxed during the winter that year, and she was dead by the longest day. Meg got into med school in Vancouver, and Matt begged her to accept. He was confident there’d be film work for him out west, and sure enough his degree helped him score the coveted day shift at Vic’s Video & Variety. Who says an arts education doesn’t pay?

“Left here. And that’s my dad’s building.” Matt leans and twists, peers up and off the glinting glass.

“When I’m really over this. His breathing’s bad enough.” Shanumi in her pink bell-bottoms and “Talk Nerdy to Me” T-shirt, wheezing as she treks to the nearby clinic …

“It’s his social afternoon anyway, come to think of it. He won’t be home.” Hm. “Let’s go around the block.”

“Along?” says Matt. “Well, it’s weird, these days it’s almost like Dad’s forgotten that he considers me a failure. Or maybe he just doesn’t care anymore. Which makes it all of a sudden seem as though he cares. “Matt rewards himself with a chuckle for this dolorous insight. “Plus he adores my wife. They fight, but they’re friends.”

Odd relationship. When they get together the old man will goad Mariko with the memory of little Jimmy Kent, the childhood buddy who in 1942 found himself a POW in Hong Kong, starving and half dead of dysentery. “Never the same, poor. Old Jimmy,” he’ll say. “Once the Japs got done with him.” Mariko will take it, but soon find a way to weave her mum into the conversation, the childhood she spent in the internment camp at Slocan. “But then she deserved it,” Mariko will say. “What with her having planned Pearl Harbor and everything.” These salvos out of the way the two will call a truce, settle into a tender détente. Has the old man ever been so crazy and conflicted about anybody else? Erin, just Erin.

“Anyway,” says Matt, “the guy has bigger things on his mind these days. Way bigger.”

“He’s old. He’s always been old, he and my mum were like ten years older than anybody else’s folks. It took them ages to have me, which is why they adopted Erin. And maybe why he leaned on her so hard, all that waiting. Left again. So anyway … Crop circles. He’s into crop circles.”

Nostradamus? Bigfoot? Who knows what shape the old man’s wackiness might have assumed by now without that initial inspiration from Matt. He’d certainly never been a crop circle kind of guy, though he was born in the middle of a crop (he loves to tell it this way), a wheat field near Vulcan, Alberta. He might be there still if he hadn’t, as a young man, got a hankering to fly, to angle in out of the sun and pick off Jerry as he hummed across the Channel with his load for London. Bummer though, he turned out to be colour-blind (his one great grief, up until Erin’s death), so he had to make do with ground crew. The Fawn, the Crane, the Tiger Moth, he fell in love with these flying machines, and later with the rockets (first Mercury, then Apollo) that promised to lift humankind right clear of the planet.

It was the rocket connection, the space-travel connection that inspired Matt to bring up his crop circle experience, the surreal day he and Zane spent in Wiltshire. The Dadinator pooh-poohed the whole thing, but something obviously stuck. He started taking a sneaky sort of interest, snipping out articles, taping TV specials. When he retired he became a full-fledged buff. The books began to pile up, subscriptions to newsletters, memberships to international networks of aficionados. It was shortly after he buried Matt’s mum that he upgraded from hobbyist to nut, his fascination crossing over at times from odd into scary. He was way too intrigued by Heaven’s Gate, for instance, the San Diego bunch who committed mass suicide so’s to hitch a ride on a spaceship hiding behind the comet Hale-Bopp.

Matt gushes all this to Kate, and more besides—they’re on their third circuit of the block, so no shortage of time. Alienation, wasted years of guilt and resentment, standard Absent Father poppycock.

“What about your sister?” says Kate. “Were they close? You said your dad was a bit intense with her.”

No answer—well, no kidding, the old man’s downstairs in the condo’s common room, Sunday afternoon whist. Matt snuck a peek on the way past, just to be certain. Yep, there was his dad, a craggy old gaffer in his for-good green track suit, angled in between two pleased-looking old ladies. His oxygen bottle squatted alertly at his side, a glossy guide dog. He had his fan of cards clutched to his chest, as though he imagined his opponents might be practising some sort of high-tech surveillance.

“Weird,” says Matt. “I’ve never walked into this place empty before.” He clicks the door shut behind them.

Indeed. The Dadinator’s has to be the most bric-a-bracless apartment Matt’s ever seen. Almost everything from his old life—the life that included his wife and his daughter—is gone. There are neat stacks of crop circle books, crop circle magazines. There’s a handsome old print positioned strategically on a wall here and there (a jet on the horizon, a propeller picturesquely rusting in the sun) the way it might be in a B&B, to create the impression of home. Otherwise almost nothing. It’s as though the place has been hit by a whiz-bang new bomb, not the kind that destroys people and leaves stuff but the other way around, a bomb that leaves people and destroys stuff. Destroys tchotchkes, Zane’s word—the trinkets that trap memory. Spartan is right. Spare. Sp.

Of the few things you could call a keepsake, Matt’s favourite is the snow globe. Yep, there’s old Saint Bernard, not the dog but the guy, patron saint of climbers and travellers. He poses in an alpine pass, crossing himself with one hand as he pats his trusty pooch with the other. This bit of kitsch was a gift from Erin to their mother, who was wild about St. Bernards without ever having had one of her own. Matt picks it up—a reflex, a ritual—and gives it a shake, pauses a moment to watch the flakes settle on that teensy upturned face.

This is not a young man’s apartment. By the front door there’s a pair of ancient slippers, sheepskin rendered fluffless by years of shuffling. In the master bedroom the oxygen concentrator huddles in its usual spot, its long plastic tube coiled as if the Dadinator’s been successfully reeled in and released. In one corner of the living room there’s a black-and-chrome rowing machine upon which the Dadinator set out, a decade or so ago, to circumnavigate the globe. He made it as far as the mouth of the St. Lawrence before the emphysema really kicked in. He’ll bob breathlessly there, one presumes, for whatever’s left of his life.

At what point, precisely, did the term Dadinator become honorary, ironic? He really was, once upon a time, a substantial slab of a man, not quite in Schwarzenegger territory but close. The decline must have been gradual, but it felt brutally sudden. There was a day Matt walked into the McKay home and beheld an old man edging down the staircase towards him, manifestly conscious of his brittle bones, of the tile floor lurking maliciously at the bottom. When Matt extended his hand that day, for the standard cordial shake, the Dadinator ignored it and came in for a hug instead. It had been, at that time, at least a quarter-century since they’d last embraced. No, the funerals, Erin’s and then Matt’s mum’s—there’d been brief contact on those occasions too, wonderful what death can do. That day at the bottom of the stairs the hug was a stiff affair, a quick clasp, almost as though the guy were simply steadying himself against gravity. It left Matt struggling for air, winded by the weird combo of euphoria and remorse.

“Yep. And me, and my sister, and my dad.” The usual four photos lined up on the mantel. No group shot, no arm-slung pose at park or poolside, just these four solemn, solo portraits.

Bizarre, but true. Despite being completely unrelated to him, Erin really did look like her father. The resemblance is particularly striking in these two photos, the wartime shot of the old man when he was young—greasy and grinning beside one of his planes—and the teenybopper shot of Erin in her swimsuit at Georgian Bay. It’s all there: the thoroughbred build, the ruddy complexion, even that faint constellation of freckles across her nose. Only the hair, that whisk broom of red bristle, hints that Erin wasn’t the real McKay.

Was she actually (here’s something Matt’s pondered from time to time) any kind of earthling at all? She was so consistently disappointed in earthly life, you figured she must have got her expectations elsewhere. You pictured her arriving in this solar system through some galactic snafu, some snarl of interplanetary red tape. Sure, there were earthly factors for which you could blame her distress. The abiding not-rightness of being adopted, for instance, of being unrelated to her family. The borderline abusive way her adoptive father expressed his adoration for her—a fanatical coach turned crazy fan—and then the bizarreness of falling for her real coach, the loathsome Mr. Skinner, a slick Johnny Weissmuller type twenty years her senior. Finally, of course, the humiliation of being dumped by that icky father figure, dumped not for his wife but for another swimmer named Nicky Lewis, who swam the hundred free in whatever and who hadn’t done anything so silly as to get pregnant, jeopardize her girlish figure …

So yeah, there was some crap to contend with. The thing is though, there’s always crap. Looking to justify a moment of despair, who can’t come up with a pretty decent catalogue of misery? No, the World, that seemed to be Erin’s problem. Life on Earth. Which made her tenderness for the earthbound Matt even more uncanny.

Aside from the shake of the snow globe there’s one other little ritual Matt routinely performs here at the Dadinator’s place. Makes himself perform, more like. Tucked away in the china cabinet there’s that wooden box. He lifts it out today, as usual, holds it a moment in his hands. Pine and what, walnut? Inlaid checkerboard-fashion like a Rubik’s Cube. Matt remembers his dad sequestered in his basement shop, labouring in furious solitude night after night in the wake of Erin’s death. The box always startles Matt with its weight. How can human remains be so fine, so dense? Flour, icing sugar, it’s got that sort of heft to it.

“Whatcha got?” Kate’s peering at him, puzzled. Then—something about his expression as he glances up?—“Oh, my.”

Matt swings shut the cabinet door. This wasn’t the plan—there was no plan—but it feels as though it ought to have been. He strides into the kitchen, rummages around for a big paper bag, bundles his treasure up inside. How much longer will his father keep himself occupied downstairs? Matt does a quick check-around—covering his traces, a thief buzzed on the beauty of his thievery—and they slip away.

Matt and Zane starved themselves for a little while once. They got the idea from Ms. Jaworski, grade ten, who had them study up on Bangladesh for Current Events. “What are the causes of the famine, class?” Well, war, drought, flooding, global food and oil crises—cripes, that famine had everything. “Can you imagine,” wondered Ms. Jaworski in her wide-eyed way, “what it would be like not to have food?”

So the boys stopped eating. Matt told his folks he’d be at Zane’s place for dinner, and vice versa. They roamed the streets, alert to symptoms—dizziness, heightened senses, what is hunger like anyway? They cruised the cemetery feeling ghostly, insubstantial. Talk about your cheap buzz.

Later on, down in Matt’s basement, they cranked up Erin’s Concert for Bangladesh album. Erin was there that night, in on the secret. And the next night, and the next. “My Sweet Lord.” “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Was the music a touch more intense than usual? By the second night for sure. And by the third …

But that’s when they started eating again. The fast was mostly Matt’s idea, and it was all his idea to end it. What freaked him out was that he didn’t feel hungry anymore. His stomach had quit grumbling, he could think about a burger and not crave one. This weird, desireless limbo—it wasn’t famine, but it wasn’t someplace Matt wanted to spend much time either. He wanted to, actually, but he didn’t want to want to. Why could he never deprive Erin of that yearning? He tried, but trying was nothing. You don’t try to save somebody, you save them.

Slabs, obelisks, wonky Celtic crosses. Alphas and omegas, crosses and crowns—Matt’s always loved checking out the monuments here at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, and the doleful little inscriptions they bear. Back In The Arms Of Jesus. Sleep On Dear Daughter. Greater Love Hath No Man. Daddy.

“Glenn Gould’s here someplace,” he says. He endeavours to hum the opening aria of the Goldberg Variations, the notes chiselled into the great man’s tombstone—tya, tya, tya-ta-da, da-da—but oh dear. They’ve picked up provisions from the froufrou deli across the way, and a bottle of white from the local-only winery next door. They’ve worked their way along various paths far enough now that the foliage is baffling the traffic.

“I took piano till I was fifteen,” says Kate. She mimes an arpeggio in the air. “I was really awful.”

“Do you think he talks to living people now?” says Kate. And then, since no guffaw seems to be forthcoming from Matt, “See, when Mackenzie King was alive he talked to dead—”

“Northrop,” says Kate. “You don’t hear that name much, do you?” She does that thing where you flap the blanket out, let it float down flat. There’s a Starlight Executive Inn logo in the corner, a dollar-signed S emanating little black rays of light.

“Not many Fosters these days either,” says Matt. He starts unpacking the grub.

She’s one of these people who’s kept her kiddish flexibility. She sits with her bum on the blanket, knees flexed out in the shape of an M. With lunch some days at home Matt will tune into The Yoga Way with Anirvachaniya!, and this is the kind of stuff Anirvachaniya does. Twisty, tortuous. Anirvachaniya, Anirvachaniya will occasionally explain, means inexplicable. It means that things don’t begin or end, exist or not exist. It means that you’re not going to die because you’re already nothing now. Matt likes the tricky postures but his favourite bit is when she just meditates, just sits there with her Lululemoned legs folded neatly up under her, the way he used to fold his in his meditating days. Now and then she’ll toss out a koan, a puzzler he’s supposed to mull right along with her. “Who are you when you aren’t thinking about who you are?” Blow a guy’s mind, why don’t you. Or this one: “Now is the only time,” she’ll say, but she’ll say it over and over again. Now, now, now …

Sophie, so says Mariko, does yoga too, a special kind that’s all about breathing, uses the breath to slow down time. The real adepts—scrawny guys squatting in Himalayan caves—can apparently stop time, even rewind it. Matt pictures Superman in the movie, saving Lois Lane by whizzing around the planet backwards until it slows, stalls, shifts into reverse. What Sophie wants to save is of course the planet itself. Stop the world and start to repair it—peel the oil off the blackened duck, pull the giant cedar from the stack of two-by-fours.

“Maximilian Sweet. Died 1959, the year I was born. I was sitting on him when Zane told me. The HIV thing. Just over there, you follow that road.” Lilies, ladders, sprigs of ivy and laurel.

“Oh,” says Kate. “That’s big. That’s huge.” By way of consolation or commiseration she tops up Matt’s glass. This is what Zane did too, twin ropes—black and caramel, Coke and rum—writhing in the air.

What was the segue? How did Zane lead into it? They’d been doing Shakespeare, bad English accents. Matt’s was particularly deplorable. “Alas, poor Yorick, sorry, Alas, poor Sweet!” He gave Max’s headstone a tender caress. “Hey, remember Higgs? Grade ten?”

“Alas, poor Sweet. A fellow of infinite jest, of something something something.”

“Most excellent fancy,” said Zane. “Here hung those lips that I have kissed. I’m HIV positive.” It can’t have been that quick, obviously, that clean, but it did come out of nowhere, a non sequitur that sounded horrendously right. They clinked jars, for some reason toasting the revelation. What else should they do?

“Wait,” said Matt, “does this mean the government has to score your weed for you from now on?”

Matt made as if to pinch a roach between thumb and index finger, toked heavily. “And you’ll deal me in, yeah?”

The mourning started later. It didn’t fully kick in, actually, until just a few months ago, the day the letter arrived: “The truth is the I-less world, the world minus me.” Then it was the classic grief rigmarole, the five stages Mariko had drilled into Matt’s mind way back at the start of their relationship, when he was getting over his mum. Denial, of course—even Zane couldn’t be this daft, this dimwittedly zealous. Then Anger, big time. Predating the postcard campaign were a few brutal diatribes, never sent. “Who do you think you are, you selfish, sanctimonious twat?” type thing. Matt’s hoping the postcards can be construed as Bargaining. He’s made a pretty decent start on Depression, which will just leave Acceptance—and then he can get on with the business of feeling like shit for a few years.

Before Zane there was Matt’s mum, and before his mum there was Erin. Zane got the Anger that time too. Matt disbelieved his sister’s death until she’d gone ahead and croaked (her favourite term for it), so she wasn’t around to soak up the anger herself. Matt and Zane, freshly gradded, were in the midst of making a movie. The point was to prove they were real filmmakers, not student-types who’d give it up as soon as the last grade was posted. Hocus-Pocus—or did they end up going with Hoodoo?—starred Bernard, the McKay family cat, and it was all about his religious life, the various forms of worship through which he tried to coax the Radiator to let there be heat. The niftiest of these practices was a sort of davening Matt induced with bits of walnut muffin, Bernard’s favourite.

What brought on the scrap was the soundtrack. Matt wanted a voice-over internal monologue—stream-of-feline-consciousness kind of thing—through which the film would register the gradual ratcheting up of Bernard’s religious fervour as the cold night wore on. Zane wanted to let the visuals speak for themselves, and enhance them with a touch of Gregorian chanting courtesy of Jean Michel, his beau at the time. His very first beau, a big deal—which made Matt’s attack on him and his “cornball, girly-man countertenor” doubly vile.

Matt’s ashamed of many moments, but not of many more than that one. He tried explaining things to Zane a couple of times—that the anger simply hadn’t got itself turned all the way around yet, that Matt was still busy figuring out how best to punish himself—but it never helped. He hasn’t made a movie since.

This goodness thing, were there warning signs? Could you root around in a person’s past and discern virtue in some rudimentary form?

Midway through grade four Zane’s family was new to the neighbourhood, having just upgraded from someplace out in the burbs. At about the same time another new kid appeared, Rosie Shum, the school’s first Asian student. Matt happened to be sitting next to her in the lunchroom the day the bullying got started. The other new kid—Zane, what a dumb-ass name!—happened to be on her far side. Zane with his big nose and his freakshow two-tone eyes.

It was Stan Gardner, a sixth grader revered for starting grass fires, who leaned in close to Rosie and drawled, “There sure is a nip in the air today.” Then he staggered off in hysterics. (It was another month before anybody figured out where Rosie was really from, and started in on the Chink thing.) Perhaps Rosie didn’t look sufficiently stricken, because one of the other girls made as though to come to her rescue. “It doesn’t even make sense,” she said. “Why would a Jap be called a Nip anyway? Jap? Nip? Jap? Nip?”

Matt smelled the pee before he spotted it. He still remembers the pale pudge of Rosie’s thigh where it pancaked against the bench, the nearly clear rivulet creeping over the edge and snaking down her calf.

And then she was soaked. The new guy next to her had had some kind of klutz attack, and flipped his plastic cup into the lap of her tunic. Everybody pointed, howled, “Spaz! Spaz!” While Rosie slipped away.

Can it have been a coincidence? Can it have been anything else? It happened too fast to be intentional. If Zane reacted, he reacted the same way the cartoon guy reacts when the cartoon doctor raps his knee with the little rubber hammer. If it’s just a reflex it can’t be good, can it? Or can it be good only if it’s a reflex? These are just a couple of the questions Matt didn’t ask himself at the time. From that moment on, though, he felt he possessed a secret knowledge about Zane. The two boys avoided one another, took opposite sides in any scrap. A classic Hollywood romance: Matt loathed the new kid right up until he fell (how else to put it?) in love. Or gave in, perhaps, to his instant crush on the brat who rescued the ugly princess, who had the nerve to come right out and be so weird.

More like a Manet now. A Morisot? Kate’s stretched out on her side, indolently luscious, gently lorded over by Nature.

“I can’t believe you stole her,” she says. “That could be in a movie, don’t you think? A man rips off his sister’s ashes from his dad, liberates them? But then you’d have to do something with her.”

“Not her,” says Matt. “This isn’t Erin, nothing’s Erin.” He sits cross-legged, checkerboard box on his lap. Beside him lies the paper bag from his dad’s place. “Third Eye Books” in mock-Sanskrit letters, and then, “Tarot • Numerology • Astrology • Goddess Worship • Wicca • Crystal Magic • Crop Circles • Much Much More.” Wicca, will that be next? The gruff old bastard a witch, a warlock, crafting a healing spell for his out-of-sorts son?

“Nothing.” Matt gives the box a shake, generates a faint maraca sound. “Dad won’t even know it’s missing, he doesn’t go in there. I don’t think. And it isn’t ash anyway.” He tries to get a bit of “Guantanamera” going. “It’s ground-up bone.”

“I was at a funeral for an old friend of mine?” says Kate. “They gave everybody a bit of ash, sorry, a bit of bone. Guess what they gave it to us in?”

“Ha, close. A Pez dispenser. Seriously, Carey loved Pez so everybody got a Pez thing with a pinch of Carey in it. Mine was Tweety Bird.”

“We were all supposed to take it someplace we’d done something special with her and dump it out. I took it to the Reversing Falls, you know, at the Bay of Fundy? Which is where we hypnotized each other for the first time, we were both into that for a while. Would she like that?”

Kate rolls onto her back. “When I had the abortion?” She laces her hands over her tummy, gives it a joggle. “I took a thing I had when I was little, a jade cat my mum gave me.” She sits up, balances the absent object on the palm of her hand. “I took it out on the ocean, on my friend’s fishing boat, and I dropped it in.” Plunk.

Day’s just about done here. The odd ray still slants in but gently, not looking to burn or blind anybody. An occasional cyclist will tick past but otherwise it’s just Matt and Kate and the squirrels, the crows.

Kate gets up, paces a few tight ellipses around Matt. “Your sister was different, right?” she says. “So you want to do something different.”

“I don’t want to do anything at all,” says Matt. “I don’t want this to mean anything.” He gives the box a rap, shave and a haircut. “Which I guess is why I took it.” Two bits.

Kate’s pacing turns into a dance. Goddess is right, she’s got that earthy weight to her. “Ashes, ashes,” she says, “we all … fall … down. “She makes sure to give Matt a good thump as she collapses.

Matt obliges her with a grunt, and she giggles. Hey, it might be okay to cook for this woman someday. Chipotle chili? Genmai miso? Curried couscous? One world, Matt cooks from everyplace. He says, “Hey, Kate, I’ve been wanting to tell you something. You know I said I was married?”

“Uh-huh. Was that Mariko we were talking about last night? The woman with another woman?”

Matt shrugs. “But I’m not sure that’s really the point.” Is it ever the other person? Isn’t it always you? “Two-spirit, she’s calling it. A man and a woman in one body. She’s into First Nations stuff, shamans and all that.” A man-woman, mutt again. More transcendence.

Kate nods, leaves that alone. Then, “Please don’t let me eat any more.” She cradles her tummy again.

Matt and Zane used to bring dates here together, back in the day. Zane was still straight, or trying to look it anyway with the unwitting aid of various girls. “A beard you call that,” Mariko recently explained to Matt—she’s been boning up for her new life. “A woman who gives a gay guy cover. If she’s gay too he’s her … gherkin? Merkin. A pussy wig.” What next from that woman?

There was Terry, for instance. Tammy? Zane got to third base with her, just over there in the Eternal Gardens, got his hand right down her pants. Matt remembers being both irked and impressed by this accomplishment. The start of his sex life with Charlotte Tupper was still a few weeks away. All he managed that night—up against the cool stone of the Gateway of Hope—was an inept fiddle with her bra. Walking home afterwards Zane had actually (could two guys get any tighter?) given Matt a sniff of his fingers. What Matt picked up was the smell of popcorn (they’d taken the girls to a Pink Panther, Revenge of? Trail of? Strikes Again?), but he gave his buddy the benefit of the doubt. That was maybe the best part of those nights, the witching-hour rambles once the girls had been dropped off. Rewinding and replaying the evening, just the two of them, settling on the version they’d carry together into the future.

Matt stretches out and does the dead thing, eyes closed, hands folded on his chest. Like his mum at her funeral (his dad insisted on an open casket), but she held a bouquet while Matt holds a cup half empty of wine. “Hey,” he says, “how about giving me a little more of your universe stuff. Something you could use on somebody who wants to kill himself.”

During his punk rock phase (about a week and a half in the early ‘80s) Matt used to crank up a song called “Suicide Scene.” Fuck You? Fuck Off? He can’t quite recall the band’s name, but the lyrics have never left him.

This ain’t no accident, accident, accident.

You ain’t no accident, accident, accident.

This ain’t no accident, accident, accident.

You ain’t no accident, accident, accident.

This ain’t no accident, accident, accident.

You ain’t no accident, accident, accident …

Not brilliant maybe, but maybe on target. You spend your whole life trying to do things on purpose, and then your death’s a fluke?

“To make it, you know, harder.” Matt goes up on one elbow. The last line of that letter of Zane’s went, “The worst thing is also the best thing.” Could this be true?

Kate has a go at looking professorial in a supine sort of way. “That’s kind of what I do with my patients. Almost all their problems are about ego, right?”

“Students. They feel like patients half the time.” She frowns, pondering. “Tell Zane how big the universe is.”

“Right. Tell him that thing he calls the sun”—she waves dismissively in the direction of the faded-denim west—“tell him that’s one teensy star in a galaxy that has hundreds of billions of stars in it.”

“Really? What was that, three? And tell him his Milky Way, that smear down the middle of the sky at night, like a bit of baby barf? You can tell him that’s one galaxy in a universe that has hundreds of billions of galaxies in it.”

She purses her lips. Matt suddenly feels like smooching her, and gets himself a rush of first-kiss nerves. “Jesus Christ Airlines.”

“So four. Tell him he could travel in any direction for like ten billion years without getting to the edge of anything. At the speed of light, which is a hundred and … which is really, really fast. Tell him that’s how big the universe is. Then tell him there isn’t just one great big giant universe but there are actually an infinite number of great big giant universes. Tell him the universe he can’t imagine is just one in an endless bunch of universes he can’t imagine, and all of them run parallel to one another, work out variations on one another.”

“Yes, tell him that,” says Kate. “Tell him he’s a speck, he’s less than a speck, he’s like a mini-speck. He’s a micro-speck.”

“And that’s why he shouldn’t kill himself? Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.”

Matt sits up, pulls a modest fist pump. Then, what the hell, he leans in for that kiss. Kate’s mouth is small and oddly, agreeably cool in the heat. She doesn’t kiss back for a bit but then she does, her tongue in soundless ululation. This goes on for a while, there in the company of the decorous dead.

Matt hasn’t set foot on the old street in years—not since the Dadinator sold the house, which was just a few months after he lost his wife. The neighbourhood’s an upscale version of itself now, Audis in place of Buicks, the odd brand new home like a crown in place of a bad tooth, pristine, unsightly. Instead of his own place, Matt heads for Charlotte Tupper’s a couple of blocks down. It’s even more thickly vined than back in the day, when Matt used to pussyfoot in and out at ungodly hours.

“That window up there?” he tells Kate. “Second floor on the left, where the light just switched off? That was Charlie’s, that was my first girlfriend’s.” They’ve strolled over from the cemetery, their pace so unfrantic that the dusk has appreciably deepened, their rubbery footfalls increasing in volume as the day declined. On the way Kate’s purse played a few bars of the William Tell Overture, and she took a call on her cell. Miffed, monosyllabic. The ex-boyfriend, presumably. Here they stand now, the two of them, their hands stickily linked. Kate had gone quiet, gestating or laying fallow. At this news, though, she perks up again.

“Yeah, Charlotte. After Charlotte Brontë? Her mum was into whaddya call them … books. That was her room, Mrs. T.’s room, there on the right. Where that light just switched off.”

“First love,” says Kate. “James. Never Jim, James. Jerk. I’ve always wished I could try that again. Too bad virginity doesn’t work that way.”

“Actually, I think it does. They can fix you these days, stitch you back up.”

The door of the house swings open, and onto the front stoop steps Charlotte. Well, obviously it isn’t Charlotte. A woman of about the right age and shape, though, appears carrying a picture frame, which she drops. Glass shatters. “Ah, damn. Paul?” she calls back through the door as it begins to creak shut again. “Paul? Will you give me a hand out here? Damn, damn, damn.” And she turns.

Charlotte, or her stand-in, has caught sight of Matt now. She leans, squints. “McKay?”

They meet at the bottom of the steps, Charlotte high-heeling her way gingerly through the broken glass. They give each other three or four hugs in rapid succession, taking breaks for holy-shit looks in between.

Charlotte slugs him in the shoulder, not gently. “Still the smartass, eh, McKay? No, I’m just here sorting out my mum’s stuff.”

“Oh, Jeez. I’m really sorry to hear that.” Can the woman’s liver possibly have held out this long?

“No, that’s not what I mean,” says Charlotte. “No, Mum’s fine. She’s fallen in love, actually, and she’s taken off with this guy. He’s very well off. Raisins. They’re at his place down in Mexico, so I’m helping her get the house ready to sell.”

“Hey, I was thinking about you recently.” Charlotte guides a loose twist of hair (blonder than ever, and scrupulously streaked) behind an ear. She employs a pinkie for this purpose, the same queen-to-tea manoeuvre she used to pull. Matt strives to picture her seventeen again, shoving stuffies (lions, elephants, giraffes) off her bed to make room for him. Her mum would be passed out down below in front of Jeopardy!, her dad long gone, the neighbourhood’s first divorce. Talk about luck. “Zane Levin was in the paper. That movie of his was causing a ruckus, the one about Arabs in movies?”

“How Arab actors feel about playing, you know, wily zealots the whole time. He’s quite the big shot, eh?”

“Well.” A couple of low-budget features, a few edgy shorts, a handful of documentaries, big shot may be stretching it. Or maybe not. Matt’s buddy is actually a bit of a sensation. He can’t kill himself then, can he? You can’t quit unless you’re losing, right?

Charlotte says, “Not many people spend their lives the way they wanted to, do they? Sad.” Though there isn’t a whiff of melancholy about her, there never was. “Do you see him? Zane?”

How did Charlotte hope to spend her life? Matt should remember. Teacher? Nurse? Nun? Judging by her outfit she’s gone more banker, broker. Her clothes don’t scream money, because they don’t have to. They whisper money, they croon money. They induce in Matt an ugly awareness of his baggy-kneed jeans, his artlessly distressed T-shirt. T-shirt, it says in a logo-like, mock-corporate style. Oh, clever.

“Mumbai. You probably know it as Bombay. Sixty thousand sex workers in one little area, and more than half of them are infected.” Matt’s been busy on the web, ferreting out dreadful details with which to lure Zane in. “Most of them were kidnapped, or sold by their own families.” Big bonus, there’s an ashram nearby. You don’t talk, you don’t drink, you don’t have sex, you don’t watch TV. You eliminate craving, aversion, ignorance, how much better could it get?

“Wow, that’s wonderful. I mean it’s horrible, but it’s wonderful. What’s that?”

“This? Nothing.” Matt’s just picked up his bagged box, which he’d set down for the embrace.

She looks awful, Charlotte looks awful. Actually no, she looks good. For forty-four, are you kidding? She looks great. She’s kept her figure (Pilates probably, Jazzercise), hips, bum and breasts still distinct, not yet sunken into the morass of her middle-aged self. The fullness of her face has kept it relatively intact too, relatively uncreased. But here’s the thing: she isn’t nineteen. She just isn’t.

“Hi,” says Kate. She’s inched her way up the walk to join them. “I’m Kate. I’ve heard so much—oh. You’re bleeding.”

Sure enough, there’s a freshet of blood zigging and zagging its way down the front of one of Charlotte’s fish-netted shins. They’re all staring down at it when the door swings wide a second time. A boy emerges from the house, a great gangle of fidgets and acne, and crunches his way scowling down the front steps.

He’s Charlotte’s all right. The flat, fleshy nose, the surprising chin. “Hi, bozo,” she says to him. She has to reach up to sling a buddy-buddy arm over his shoulders.

“Can I have this?” The boy has a football hold on an old phone, black bakelite with a metal dial. A grandma phone, the kind that doesn’t bleep or bloop but actually rings.

“This is my son, Paul,” says Charlotte. “Paul, this is Matt, a really really old friend of mine.” The blood’s still negotiating its way down her leg, strawberry sauce down the side of a sundae. Matt masters the urge to bend, dip a finger. He flashes on their very first time, up in that bedroom—the sudden, shocking Rorschach of red on Charlotte’s pink sheet. “And this is Kate, his … are you two …?”

“Hey,” says Paul, looking her dead in the eye the way kids do these days. He sports a decent array of hardware, the umgirl’d be impressed. A couple of earrings, a single rivet through his left eyebrow, and a tiny ball—it might be a bead of drool—in the middle of his lower lip.

“Great to meet you, Paul,” says Matt, offering the lad his hand. And what if he were a McKay? In one of Kate’s parallel universes, what if this kid were to call Matt Dad? He’d be even taller, for one thing, and stringier. Stranger too, fraught or fucked up in some barely detectable way. Yeah, so maybe it’s just as well. Maybe Matt just needs a better rationale, a better explanation for why he’s ended up forsaking fatherhood. Maybe he just needs something a little more impressive to have forsaken it for.

“No, no kids yet,” Kate’s saying—Charlotte must have come right out and asked. “But that may change any day now, eh, honey?”

Matt has a go at the jovial-hubby thing. He leers, aims a slap at her rump. “You betcha, babe.”

SUNDAY