Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good: A Novel

Dear Zane,

REASON NOT TO BE GOOD #4

Virtue is a tool of social and political domination, the means by which the powerful teach the weak to love their weakness. Virtue is collaboration with the oppressors, and collaboration with the oppressors is a vice. Virtue is vice.

So grow up.

Matt

It’s gotta be safe by now. Matt’s got a new symptom today—a dull pain in the centre of his chest—but that’ll just be tension. Or maybe it’s his heart, but who cares? He’ll die (two hours he’s been famous and it’s about to finish him off!), but he won’t kill anybody.

No, it’d take a greater hypochondriac than Matt, it’d take a truly world-class hypochondriac to convince himself he’s infectious today. What was that old joke of Zane’s? This month’s meeting of Procrastinators Anonymous has been postponed indefinitely, hardy har. Zane, who couldn’t procrastinate to save his life.

The plan is to drop in and stun the guy, then retreat to the hotel for one last night with Kate.

Matt executes a few kapalbhatis, a few Cleansing Breaths. He’s never done one before—he never got this fancy during his enlightenment phase back in high school—but what the heck. He’s watched Anirvachaniya often enough, how hard can it be? Deep inhalation, hold it in for a jiff and then, lips pursed, blow it out in a series of sudden blasts. It feels good, eases the ache in his chest and gives him a bit of a head rush. Then, “Hey, Toronto’s an Indian word, isn’t it, Albert?”

“Mohawk, I think. I can’t remember what it means. Place of No-Breath. But yeah, there was probably air back then.”

Albert nods as though in appreciation of some grave profundity. He can’t nod far, though, before his chins start to pile up on the rugged plateau of his chest. Albert is big. Albert is enormous. Fat Albert, how many times must he have heard that when he was a kid, the Bill Cosby routine?

“Oh, sorry.” He meets Matt’s eye in the rearview. “When a guy gawks at me I just figure.” He’s gunning it now, getting up to speed to join the lunacy of the 401, which is weirdly freewheeling at the moment. “Unless maybe you fancy me, is that it?” Something English about the accent, or anyway about the usage, fancy for desire. Friday there was Jatinder, then yesterday Eddy from Jamaica, Shan from Sri Lanka. Only newcomers know their way around, is that it?

The city. Here it comes again. From where he sits Matt can see only Albert, but he knows they’re out there, the other five million souls, cocooned in their cars, cordwooded behind concrete and reflective glass. Matt’s of the view that human beings are hard-wired for tribal life—a few dozen cousins all speaking the same tongue, thinking the same animistic thoughts. Which explains the panic attack, the prolonged collective freak-out that is city life. We just aren’t meant for this. But then shouldn’t Matt crave the very life he’s resisting, communal, close to the land? Shouldn’t he cling to the life he’s losing?

This concludes their confab. Matt sits silently, managing his gaze and endeavouring not to think anymore. If only he had his cello with him on this trip, that’d settle him down. He adores the feel of it between his thighs—sexual if you’re a woman, surely, and if you’re not a woman what? It’s Erin’s cello, Matt’s main memento, sprung from the shrine her bedroom became after her death. Erin, too, was talentless at the cello, never got much beyond “Hot Cross Buns,” “Twinkle Twinkle.” This is crucial to Matt, to celebrate what was mediocre about his startling sister, what was run-of-the-mill.

Matt’s own forte is the Bach Suites for Solo Cello. Okay, the first suite of the Bach Suites for Solo Cello. Okay, the prelude of the first suite of the Bach Suites for Solo Cello. Okay, the opening few bars of the prelude of the first suite of the Bach Suites for Solo Cello … It’s a series of chords fanned out into their separate notes—you get this rocking-horse thing going, simultaneous motion and stillness. Time moves and stands still at the same time. Matt grinds it out over and over again pretty much daily. He swoons, he sways, he grimaces with emotive agony—if he had any gift at all he’d be a genius, right up there with the Yo-Yos of this world. Plus the Sibelius, the cello part of his Fourth Symphony, that long swelling solo passage at the start. Sibelius, so say the liner notes, had already suffered a bout of throat cancer when he composed the thing. The cancer was gone, but was it gone for keeps?

Matt scowls. He’s watched one person decide to die, is he game for another? Erin died of a disease, sure, but only in the sense that a free choice can be a symptom. It still had a new-word smell to it back then: anorexia. You whispered it, you wondered what it meant. What it meant was nothing. This is what his sister died of: she died of nothing. “I ate earlier. My stomach’s upset, some kind of flu I think.” Once she started saying no she never stopped. Starvation became beautiful to her, beautiful in the way a bottle is to a dipso, a price-tagged trinket is to a klepto. Beautiful in the way food is to a guy like Fat Albert. Sustenance was there for Erin, delicacies delivered to her like oblations, in the end, like gifts to the gods. Maybe if there hadn’t been so much of everything she’d have wanted more.

Cheese slices. “Cheese” slices, orange slabs of something synthetic individually wrapped in plastic—these had always been Erin’s favourite, so Matt brought a packet with him whenever he visited her in her rented digs downtown. Plus eggs and bananas and broccoli, because he’d heard they were perfect foods. Plus pizza, because you could put everything on it and make it a perfect food. Erin would arrange these offerings on a platter and poke at them for a while, Matt pretending not to notice or care. The only thing more painful than watching her not eat was watching the pantomime she put on for his benefit. Eventually he’d break down and eat the gifts himself. Erin would sit on the floor and play with Bell, the stray cat she’d taken in and named after Marilyn Bell, a schoolgirl who’d made history by swimming the frigid expanse of Lake Ontario. The perfect idol for Erin, a kid who’d gone ahead and done what was perfectly impossible.

Until the end, until Erin’s system actually collapsed and her heart quit pumping blood, none of them—not even Erin, Matt suspects—believed it was death she was choosing. She was choosing power. She was choosing perfection. She was choosing to inflict pain on herself so’s not to be, any longer, its passive recipient. Or whatever. Oblivion is only a turn-on as long as it’s beyond you—such is Matt’s conviction. He too craved it for a little while there, until it occurred to him that he could have it. You couldn’t keep wanting it after that, could you? The desire for death must always be a mistake, surely, a misunderstanding.

When Zane goes it’ll be because he, too, has refused to ingest something that could save him. Refused it because it’s there …

Matt screams. Matt stops himself from screaming. He does both at once—the result is a strangled groan, the kind of complaint a client of Mercedes might register without slipping his gag.

“Yeah, sorry. Change of plan.” Chest pain, who knows what that might be? Pneumonia? TB?

When Matt finally stirred this morning his message light was already blinking. Sardonically, if he wasn’t mistaken.

“Less than one percent of the stuff in the universe is actually visible, so where’s everything else? Huh?” How can Kate possibly sound so chipper first thing? She kicked him off the elevator at his own floor latish last night, pleading an early morning—she had to get up and prep for her presentation, her big performance at the conference today. “What’s everything else? ‘Dark matter’ they call it, but I mean what’s that? It’s supposed to be mostly WIMPs—weakly interacting massive particles, you knew that, right?—but what’s it doing? What invisible ways is it bending us? I’ll be done five-ish, wish me luck.”

It’s all so cutely metaphorical. Is that how the geniuses decide, how they settle on one theory over another? They just take the one that’s most conducive to lightweight psychologizing? All the stuff that’s dictating your true direction in life is hidden from you, deep, deep. Or maybe it’s God, maybe God himself rigged the universe this way so it’d feed folks a cute little image or aphorism now and then, a twinkly mnemonic.

“Okay, smarty-pants. You want deep? What were the names of the two countries in Duck Soup, Groucho’s and the other one?” And he clunked it down hard.

“Rolex Cheap!!!” Then “Nigerian foreign minister needs your assistance,” that old chestnut. “Freaky Asian Sluts!!!” And finally Mariko. Matt lashed his robe more tightly about himself, treating himself to a gust of bleachy clean.

i met the couple yesterday, they were still taking measurements when i got back. they seem nice. middle-aged or maybe it’s us that’s middle-aged and they’re old?

oh and by the way, ashram? shanti m

The bizarre thing is that selling the house was Matt’s idea. It wasn’t an idea he ever actually entertained—he spoke it impromptu that night because it’s what a person would say in such a situation, because the scene itself seemed to call for it. Mariko had just delivered her news. They were in the bedroom on their usual sides of the bed, both freshly pajama-ed and flipping down the duvet. Cary Grant and somebody, Irene Dunne? My Favorite Wife. Neither of them had said anything definitive yet. Was this a bump on the road they’d been travelling together or was it a fork, you go your way and I’ll go mine? Infidelity could be spun either way. Which way would they choose?

This question hadn’t been asked let alone answered, yet Matt distinctly heard himself say, “So, we’ll sell the Lair.” The idea, presumably, was that Mariko would protest, plead for a little time to sort out her feelings, earn back his trust. Matt would grimly relent and they’d hit the sack for a session of restorative sex made extra rambunctious by Sophie’s phantom presence between them. But no. Mariko numbly nodded, said nothing. Maybe she felt she hadn’t the right? Matt gathered up his bedside movie magazine and his pillow (his pillow?) and made his way with as much aplomb as possible down the hall to his study, where he and Toto have been crashing ever since.

Dear Mariko,

Middle age (that’s me, but not you yet), sex and death mixed one to one. What happens in middle age is you realize things can all of a sudden be gone. There’s nothing that can’t be whisked away from you, your meaning, your mind, your favourite mug, so there’s no point getting all grabby. You think you’ve always known this and then one day you realize no, you’ve never known it, but you know it now and it’s too late ever to unknow it.

Oh, and one other thing about middle age. As your parents die off it feels like you that’s done for. Jaak and Hoshi, hold them close.

Matt signed off, clicked Send. He was just about ready to quit when another message from Mariko bleeped in.

omg, you’re famous!!! the sun ran a piece about your craziness this morning and i’ve just had three calls from people to interview you. fame!!!!!!!! what do you want me to say? what will you say? you could probably parly? parley? parlay? god my spelling sucks this into something if you wanted to. time to make a movie?

hey, are you at zane’s yet? have you seen him? i think you’re a great friend for going and trying to talk him out of this. here’s something to think about though, would you ever just give him your blessing? you love him for being the kind of man who’d do something like this, is it okay to ask him not to be that man?

make that four calls!!!! shanti m

Matt’s often fantasized about bringing out a collection of his kritikal pieces. The way the big shots do it, the New Yorker types, Kael, Rafferty, Lane. When it appears in Omega his stuff’s still mired in time. It’s occasional in the worst possible sense—people run an eye over it, then shred it for the hamster cage. In a book, though? He’d suddenly transcend the temporal realm, join the eternal hubbub of the greats.

And maybe now’s the time. Maybe he really could parly parley parlay this into something. Maybe, with a little management from the wizardly Mariko, he could drum up enough notoriety to get such a thing read. People would finally get it, and the world would be redeemed.

Dear Mariko,

What I’m supposed to say is that I’ve been suffering personal problems, that I have personal issues, and that I’m in therapy. That’s what Jayson Blair said when he got caught by the NY Times plagiarizing and fabricating sources. That’s what Stephen Glass said when he got caught by the New Republic making tons of crazy shit up. Personal problems, that’s what drives us writers to do these things. Did you not know this? Self-hatred, unhappiness at home (nothing personal). Hey, Glass has a novel out, six figures apparently, and there’s a movie due out soon. If Harper-Collins calls, or Miramax, definitely take a message.

I’ve seen Zane yeah, but only from a distance. I’m heading to his place now. Give Toto a scruffle and a tug on the tail for me, wouldja? M

Then he hit the loo—making do with the gigantic shower and its myriad misting nozzles—and just generally girded himself for the coming encounter.

Without Matt telling him to, Albert takes the route past the Dadinator’s place. Matt considers getting him to stop, but no. He’ll give the old guy one more day.

Matt hates breaking bad news. It’s generally a woman who’s had to break bad news to him. “You’re such a great guy, Matt. You’re smart, you’re funny, you’re kind. If you just … Well anyway, you’ll find somebody.” And that’s the way he likes it. He hates to think of Zane, all the news he’s had to break. Mum? Dad? I’m an artist. Mum? Dad? I’m gay. Mum? Dad? I’m getting married—and she’s queer too. Mum? Dad? I’m positive. No, I mean I’m positive …

Zane tries each revelation out on Matt first, kind of a dry run. There was the HIV thing, that day on Max Sweet’s grave. There was the marrying Mercedes thing, done over a swanky candlelit dinner, Zane’s treat. Matt felt as though he were being proposed to that night—he kept expecting some sombrero-ed guy with a guitar to pop out and serenade him, Zane down on one knee with a velvety ring-box, Make me the happiest man in the world. And way back when, the poofter thing. Zane sprang that one in Morocco, at the end of their Europe tour together. “What if one of us were gay?” And in no time he was gone, pressing on alone far deeper into Africa.

Albert swings past Charlotte’s mum’s place (all quiet, no car in the drive) and drops Matt across from the old chez Levin, Zane’s old …

Oops. It’s gone. Zane’s family’s place was a lean semidetached, not so different from his new one. The two halves of the semi have been replaced now by a single monstrosity, Greek in inspiration. Doric columns, the works. Hideous, hilarious.

Matt’s house? He turns and sets out. It’s five minutes, south and through the park. En route he roots out his cellphone. Just as good as being there, it’s words that’ll change the man’s mind anyhow. Unless of course he needs roughing up, but that can wait.

Thank Christ. “Is it just suicide?” says Matt. “I mean is it that simple, are you just killing yourself? Nothing to do with holiness or have-nots or any of that hooey?” He shuffles to a standstill mid-park, hard by the old swing set. These are the very swings to which he and Erin used to repair to agonize about their folks. About their dad mostly, his heavy love, what they might do to lighten that load for one another. They’d make themselves puke, or try to anyway, pump up heavenwards and hang their heads down behind. Erin kept her red hair bum-length in those days—before the swimming got serious, before she trimmed it butch—and it’d drag in the grey dirt of the divot under her swing. “Oh my gaaaaawd, I’m gonna speeewww …”

“Hooey. Hey, two days in a row, if I didn’t already know I was dying this’d freak me right out.”

The park’s pretty quiet today. There’s the leisurely pock of tennis balls, an occasional “damn” from a duffer who’s dumped it into the net yet again. Nothing Zane’s likely to pick up from his end.

“And yeah, I guess it’s suicide,” says Zane. “Getting sick in the first place, I suppose that was suicide too. Russian roulette?”

“I’m not saying that, Zane. You goofball.” Matt lowers his fanny onto one of the swings, no rush. Chains and weathered leather, the kind of rig from which Mercedes might suspend a particularly naughty client. “You couldn’t know, the guy who gave it to you probably didn’t know.”

Matt’s already worked this out. It happened, Zane picked up his bug—Matt’s pretty much certain about this—during his stay with Matt in his basement suite out west that time. It was seven years ago, just about right, a typical dormancy for the virus. Plus it’s the only time Zane’s ever strayed, so far as Matt can discover, and he’s done a fair bit of prying. Zane was breaking up with Phil at that point, just pre-Nico. He’d been up in Whistler crewing for a movie of the week. Odd little project, a murder mystery set in a tree planting camp. The cook did it, no the foreman did it, no the environmentalist did it, no the elk hunter did it, no the Native activist did it … On his way back through town he spent a night with Matt at his batch, or rather he spent an evening with Matt, who then bailed on him in favour of his new woman. Infidelity, that’s what it feels like to Matt now. Unfaithfulness, a failure of faith.

When the boys reconvened the next morning, it was clear that Zane had been out on the town too. He was fidgety, flustered. “That?” he said, referring to whatever tryst he’d just staggered back from. “That’s what I never do.”

All Matt had to do was stay home. One night, he couldn’t keep it in his pants for one night? His buddy was clearly in some weird kind of space, angsty, agitated. What if Matt had just cracked a couple of beers, kicked back?

“Yeck,” says Zane. He’s sipping on something over there, some herbal potion perhaps, some stinky immune booster. Extract of skunk cabbage, powdered tiger penis. Is this fair, did Shanumi get to drink this stuff? “True or false. If somebody’s going to kill himself there’s nothing you can do.”

“What, you’ve been researching this?” Matt’s getting pretty high here. As he swings he throws in a few sheetalis, Cooling Breaths. You stick out your tongue, roll it into a tube—even the sublime Anirvachaniya looks silly doing this.

“You fuggoff. Oh, and I meant to say thanks for the postcards. I have them up on the fridge, great conversation starters. Not that it’s actually about being good, of course.”

“Oh, come on. False, or why would you ask?” The time Matt came close (the bag would suffocate him if the pills failed to finish the job) it was late May, early June.

Three young Filipina women—nannies most likely, in this neighbourhood—have parked their strollers and released their little white tots. There’s a thirty-something white woman too, a young mum in person, go figure. She’s just hoisting her tyke onto the teeter-totter, giving Matt the evil eye. Could he have turned, already, into one of those cellphone shouters? He’ll have to kill himself for sure.

“Yeah, it’s—no, it’s just the TV.” Shanumi opening her palm to take coins from her daughter, still young enough to sell herself as a virgin …

“True. False.” Matt never said a word. What was there to say? It’s dumb to die, just as dumb as it is to live. “True?” The swing’s slowing now, settling to its centre point, an unwound grandfather clock. Matt eases himself out of the sling, resumes his route home. “False?”

Back in elementary school there was a simple test. You told a guy he had a broken fingernail and you watched to see how he checked. If he curled his fingers in, palm up, okay. If he splayed his fingers out, palm down (the way somebody’s sister would show off a ring), well, there was your homo. Zane passed. Matt flunked, got ragged on for weeks. False positive.

In high school there were plenty of fag jokes—half of them directed at Matt and Zane, the clingy duo, the giggly Mutt and Jeff—but in elementary not so much, perhaps because nobody had figured out what a fag was yet. Nobody knew what a Jew was either though, and that didn’t stop them. “How many Jews does it take to change a light bulb?” And this: “Jew hear what Zane did at recess?” That killed them, that cracked them up. Zane was the only one in the class, though there were the Feldstein twins in the other grade six. People saved their jokes until Zane was almost there, until it was just possible he’d overhear. They worked the same angle with retard jokes, waiting until Chris Robinson was at the edge of their circle, Chris with his dorky grin and his green CCM helmet. Ugly-girl jokes too, in the proximity of Madeleine Vine with her horn-rims and all that glinting hardware on her ramshackle teeth. For poverty jokes they had Dick Hadley (Dickhead, with his brown hand-me-down cords), for stuttererer jokes they had B-b-b-bob Y-y-y-young, and so on. They didn’t have anyone from Newfoundland so they were all potential Newfies: instead of a dink or a doofus, you might at any time be called a Newf.

Some of the jokes were pretty good, but there were a lot of them Matt couldn’t tell, or even laugh at. He couldn’t do Jew jokes, and he scrupled, too, about Polack jokes, once he found out where Zane’s dad was from. A total rip-off, and it didn’t even make sense. Jew and Polack were just as meaningless as Newfie. Zane wasn’t a Jew the way Chris was stupid, the way Madeleine was ugly. Why shouldn’t they all be able to laugh, Zane too?

One time he did try telling one, Zane did. Not a huge success. He nailed the punchline (something to do with six million) and even followed it up with a creditable bark of laughter. Then he quit laughing and barfed up his PB and jelly sandwich onto the scuffed-wood hallway floor. Matt grabbed Zane’s books and shoved his friend ahead of him into the boys’ room.

“You fuggoff,” said Matt. “And by the way, the world record for continuous joke telling was set by I forget his name but he told jokes for forty-seven hours fourteen minutes in a Nevada nightclub.” Matt’s Uncle Lenny had given him A Boy’s Book of World Records for Christmas, and he’d been sermonizing from it ever since, lugging it around with him as doggedly as Joel “Jesus” Atkins lugged his Bible. Matt’s most oft quoted records were about deprivation—longest time without sleep, or light, or air, or food. Weird, to be admiring the sort of dark discipline that would ultimately take his sister from him.

“Yeah, thanks,” said Zane, scrubbing with wadded paper towel at the streaks of spew on his Adidas. “That’s a big help.”

Hey, it’s still standing. Matt chokes up a little—relief that the old place is undemolished, sadness that it isn’t unchanged. The elm’s gone, for instance, the gnarly old tree from which a tire once hung here in the front yard. Elm, just the word takes you back. What was it, some sort of fungus that came over from Europe on a bug? You blinked and the whole species was gone.

“True. I’ll say true. Speaking of which, Mercedes is taking good care of you?”

“And it’s the other way around, men than women.” Sip—or more of a slurp now, the potion must have simmered down.

No car, no lights, no action. What the hell, Matt strolls across the lawn and enters the cool canyon between his house and the next one, what used to be the Johanson place. The gap is maybe four feet, the brick walls facing each other like the jaws of a vise. In the old days Matt clowned around endlessly in here, cowboying, spying, superhero-ing. Some days Zane would submit to being a sidekick: Festus, Illya Kuryakin, Boy Wonder.

“Toronto General, the immuno clinic. There were a lot of suicides at Auschwitz.”

Around back things look pretty much the same. Birdbath, a couple of bushes to hide behind, peow-peow-peow. Matt squats, cups a hand to squint in the basement window. If two time periods could be overlaid—today and, say, a similar summer day thirty-four years ago—young Matt could peel himself free of his friend’s sweaty embrace, go up on tippy-toe and peek out the window into his own eyes. What would he make of himself?

The pink couch is gone. Well obviously. There’s a La-Z-Boy, a loveseat stacked with boxes, a foosball table. Foosball, some lucky brat.

“I want … I feel like we should talk about this. About what you’re doing.” Matt rocks back a bit and the basement disappears, obscured by his own reflection. He tries out his eyebrows.

“Yeah, I get that. I’d want to stop you too, if it were the other way around. But here’s a thing. What if I’m right? What if this is right?”

“I really, really”—that internal uplift, that heave of grief—“really want you to live.”

The pause is a long one. Some kind of progress? Then, “Imagine you’re in a burning building, Matt. You and, say, ten million other people. Now imagine you could—”

“I don’t think you should come, Matt. I want you to come, but I don’t think you should.”

Matt rolls his eyes at himself. He says, “Remember when we were kids? In my basement?”

“Yeah.” Matt rocks forward again and the basement swims into view. A young boy—gangly, coffee-coloured, clad in a bright yellow soccer shirt—is peering up at him.

Matt smiles, waves. What else is there to do? The boy hesitates, then sombrely waves back, a passenger on a ship as it pulls away.

The boy seems to be saying something too—his lips move, but there’s nothing to be heard through the glass. Matt does a what? face, cups his ear.

The boy reaches up and gives the window a shove. The sound of the alarm hits him just as he opens his mouth to speak again. It crumples him to his knees. It knocks Matt over too, flips him onto his back. This is what an aneurysm must sound like when it goes off in your head.

Matt sits up. The kid’s still on his knees, huddled over like a toddler that needs lifting. Matt tugs at the window but it won’t open more than a crack. He tugs again and a chunk of wood splinters off in his hand. He shouts, “Sorry! I’m really sorry!” As he scrambles to his feet he rediscovers the phone in his hand. He shouts “Sorry!” again as he snaps it shut. Then he starts to run.

“Why did Hamlet hesitate?” In his review of the newest screen version—the broody Ethan Hawke as the bummed-out Dane in Manhattan—Matt went for the big one. “Why did the sweet prince delay so long before killing his uncle?” And then, what the hell, he solved it. “Simple, really. Because it was wrong. That his father, the ghost, was a ghost and not a man. That the ghost wanted Hamlet to ghostify another man. That Hamlet was on his way to ghostifying himself. All this was wrong, everything was wrong. Corrupted. Out of joint. Wrong. So what was a hero to do but nothing?”

Nagy’s reply, via email, was typically terse. “Ghostify, are you putting me on?”

But Zane liked the piece. It’s one of the few times he’s ever rung Matt up over a review, though Matt mails him every one. “‘Thy Thoughts No Tongue,’ great title,” he said. “Hey, remember that time in Regent’s Park?”

They were in London, the very start of their Europe trip together. Outdoor Shakespeare with folks who didn’t have to fake the accent, how much better could it get? They caught The Tempest in the afternoon, slipped away for a pint and a vat of shepherd’s pie, came back for Hamlet at dusk. The theatre was a grassy stage ringed by raked benches and a screen of bushes and bendy trees. Verdant bower—no way not to put it that way, so they put it that way about a billion times. They’re putting it that way still.

When Hamlet got hurt it was hard to tell. It was during the final scene, when Hamlet and Laertes are fencing and Laertes gets him with his unbated rapier. Hamlet’s supposed to be stunned, so when the guy being Hamlet was stunned it wasn’t clear whether he was being Hamlet or being the guy who was being Hamlet. By the time that got sorted out, the guy being Hamlet had recovered enough to keep on being Hamlet until he died, until Hamlet died.

“But yeah, good piece,” said Zane. “Worm of consciousness impaled on the barbed hook of its body, not bad. Nothing, though? What a guy should do is nothing? Are you absolutely sure about that?”

For today’s stakeout, Matt’s come in out of the heat. He grabs a water and a coffee at the café in the hospital’s cavernous rotunda. More specifically, he grabs a plastic bottle of Eco H2O (“Thank you for supporting our Ethiopia hand-pump project, sir!”), and a monster skinny double iced Frappuccino (“Chocolate or cinnamon sprinkles with that, sir?”). A trifle extravagant, but what’s ten bucks relative to the honking great debt Matt’s racking up this week?

Civilizations do this too, don’t they? Thoroughly spend themselves once the writing’s on the wall? In Rome just before the fall, didn’t they indulge in this same kind of unhinged decadence? So maybe Matt can conceive of himself as a cipher, a stand-in for his culture, smashing up the furniture to feed the fire before the stove goes cold that final time. And if there’s anything to this, if Matt turns out to be a great big symbol of something, then maybe it’s okay that he’s letting all this happen?

When he got back to the house the alarm had just quit ringing. He’d run a block or so, one-eightied and run back. He never did get to see the boy again, but he managed a longish chat, through the mail slot, with the boy’s mother. The only way he could think to prove his innocence—to persuade her that she and her son had never been in danger—was to produce a bunch of memories. “This was my home too,” he said, and he launched in. Mini-pool with Zane in the basement (he left out the humping bit), marathon games of Monopoly with Erin in her room at the top of the stairs (she’d give you Boardwalk or Park Place in exchange for any of the worthless purple ones), afternoon snacks with his mum in the kitchenette (Ants on a Log, loads of Cheez Whiz), rocket launches with his dad in the living room. By the time he was done he’d vividly envisioned for her every room in the house, and convinced both of them that his childhood had been a perfect idyll. The woman declined to open the door, but she did call off the security people, and allowed herself a laugh when Matt explained that it was actually her son breaking out that had set off the system.

Tricky to sip coffee when you’re wearing one of those nose tubes, but the guy at the next table seems to be managing. Most of the patrons look healthy though, staff and volunteers and visitors and hey, who knows, maybe another spy or two. Matt’s got a place by the window, the better to maintain his surveillance. Outside there’s major construction going on, a new ward or wing for the hospital, and all that plywood has given rise to a pretty impressive graffiti gallery. Back home in rural BC what you tend to get on the public canvas is earnest, awkwardly executed murals—local flora and fauna, historical high points, white explorers rowing ashore to be greeted by frowning Natives. Here in the city what you get is super-dense text, unreadably rococo. Most of the letters have been twisted into Tolkienesque runes, or 3-D’d and interlocked like some nightmarish Mensa puzzle. “Astral Rugburn rule.” “Burping Not Smiling rule.” “Freddie Mercury’s Overbite rule.” Sheesh, band names sure have come a long way since the Beatles, the Monkees. “What if there were no hypothetical questions?” Ha, not bad. “Jesus Wept Chuckled.” Chuckled is good. And this: “I heart Kyung-Soon.” Is the guy joking? Love to? to heart, a word to an image back to a word describing the image. Must be the new thing. Instead of “No Smoking,” you’ll get a sign saying “Lit Cigarette with a Diagonal Slash Through It.”

And here he comes. Yep, the screwy stride—extra shuffly today, maybe just because of the ginormous camera bag he’s lugging. He’s got a new style going, Zane does, not the usual collar shirt and cargo pants but black T, black jeans. Black and bald. The look suits him, though even from here you can discern a couple of peculiar planes dented into the dome of his skull. He makes his way up the circular walk, enters the lobby and heads for the bank of elevators just across from Matt. Thirteenth floor, Matt checked on his way in.

Maybe wait till he comes back down? Sure, give him space to deal with the medical stuff, then lay into him. Refusing to be saved, that’s a whopper of a sin, isn’t it, Zane? According to your people? “Death by the hands of heaven,” that’s Maimonides, right? On the punishment for suicide? Doesn’t sound good. Yes indeed, the Internet hookup has been handy.

“No, that’s okay.” They’re heavier than they look, those IV stands. The woman who’s just run over Matt’s foot gets righted again, and weaves her way on over to the counter.

How long will they keep Zane today? They might just be taking a little blood, so’s to update the bad news. Or they might be sitting him down for a lecture on what a lunatic he is. Could be a while.

Gulp of water, Frappuccino chaser. Outside Matt’s bit of window, parallel-parked amongst the wheelchairs, there’s a shopping cart loaded with Dumpster-diver gems. A rust-pocked wok, a wooden tennis racket, a Pocahontas action figure, a Gap bag full of empties, not a bad haul. In the cart’s shade squats a man about Matt’s age, prematurely antiqued by weather and wine. Wino, that’s what they’d have called him in the old days. Hobo. Bum. He must once have been a looker, square-jawed, rugged. Rock Hudson? Late-period Rock, Rock with AIDS but not saying so. The mustachioed gauntness. What’ll he have to do to get himself a bed here at the hospital?

When Matt leaves he’ll be sure to pop a toonie or two into the cloth bowl of Rock’s cap. WWZD? Okay, make it a five-spot. What he ought to do, actually, is he ought to give the guy half of what he’s worth, half of all he’s got. (Okay, so make it ten, ho ho.) If everybody did that, just kept on doing that, wouldn’t things work out to perfection? You’d give half yourself away every time, and get back half the other guy.

In an early Matt-Zane production, Zane once played a dude like this. A vagrant who turned out to be rich (aha!) in wisdom and compassion, a frizzle-bearded Buddha. Matt handled the camera, his favourite role—getting to frame things, give things a shape. To be present and absent at the same time, a poor man’s I-lessness. “McEye” in the credits.

What he feels today, with no lens to peep through, is an instant and dismayingly intense connection to the man. Sure, it’s partly just the standard guilt thing. By virtue of his place (however laughable) in the warp and woof of the world’s power, Matt’s responsible for putting this guy where he is. Matt’s greed and ignorance and apathy render him complicit, of course they do. There’s a worse thought though, a relatively fresh one. What if you flip it around? How far is Matt from his own little patch of sidewalk? Wifeless, jobless, what’s to catch him?

Mariko, kind soul, tends to construe Matt’s shortage of cash as some sort of ethical choice on his part. And hey, maybe there’s something to that. Maybe Matt really did intend this in some way. Having a bunch of stuff, after all, the way the new folks in his old neighbourhood do—nice car, nice pad, place down south—surely that’s connected to the fact that other folks have so little. So then the righteous approach would be to have nothing, wouldn’t it? And the most direct route to that goal would be to do nothing, or at least to do only what’s marginal, what’s economically meaningless. Opting out as a moral stance, why not? Maybe that’s how Rock wound up here too, some cockamamie principle he took too seriously for too long. Rock looks like a saint, so maybe he is one. A saint in need of a sect, or at least of a buddy …

Whoa, that was quick. Matt drains his H2O. He takes a last sip of his Frap, readies himself for action. Don’t confront the guy in here though, let him get outside. Timing is everything.

Zane whiffles his way to the end of the walk, then sets down his bag. He digs out his tripod, affixes his camera. He bends to his viewfinder, trains his gaze on the door he’s just come through.

Well now, hm. Could this be Matt’s big break? On his way out he slips Rock a twenty. “Hey, thanks, chief.” Then he goes into his silly walk. It’s John Cleese mostly, from the old Monty Python days, but Matt seeks to give it a little something of his own—the strut of a gnu with a nasty chafing problem, say.

It’s a good moment. Damn good. Zane actually staggers back, as though a charge has crackled down the barrel of the camera and zapped him right between the eyes. Amazing how swiftly the stunned look morphs, though, into the usual goofy grin. “You sneaky son of a gun,” he says as Matt completes his inane approach. “How long have you been stalking me?”

It could be worse. It could be way worse. Zane isn’t the wraith, the undead apparition he’s become in Matt’s mind. He’s slender, yeah, but he’s not emaciated. He’s pale but not ashen. He isn’t the old Zane, but he’s Zane. You can see how he got here from there. How long will that continue to be the case? At what point will Zane cease to be himself? Who’ll bear witness to that moment, since Zane, by definition, will not?

Hug or shake? They’ve never quite sorted this out, so there’s always an awkward moment when they first meet. Last time they settled on one of those two-handed deals, clutching each other’s forearms like a pair of fawning politicos at a photo op. Matt figures he’ll hang back this time, let Zane make the first move. Zane seems to have hit upon the same strategy. They stand there grinning foolishly at each other for a while and then, in something like unison, lurch into a hug. Zane (Matt’s going to have to break this to him someday) hugs like a girl. He hugs like an umgirl nervous about her new boobs.

“Oh shit,” says Matt as they pull apart, whacking at each other like teammates after a big goal. “I shouldn’t be touching you.”

Zane gives his head a grim shake. “You’ve gotta get over this, man. You aren’t even my type.”

“Ha,” says Matt. “No, it’s just, my body’s been messing with me this week. Or I’d have seen you sooner.”

“I’ll be fine,” says Zane. He shakes his head again, trying to stop disbelieving. “This is so good.”

“That project I was talking about. You know, it’s strange, I was just thinking about you when I got here today. Isn’t this … wasn’t Erin here too?”

“Christ. That must be weird for you, extra weird.” Zane grimaces. “Oh hang on, here he comes.” And he bends back to his peephole.

Matt’s pieced things together before he gets himself turned all the way around. Yep, here comes Nico, craftily oblivious of the camera and its googly stare. Didn’t he do a little acting before the social work? Matt recalls an ad for Pepto-Bismol or some such, Nico a pink superhero prancing around after a green blob of stomach acid. Yeah, and the dancing too. You can still see that, the straight spine, the cocked vitality of the limbs.

When he catches sight of Matt, though, Nico blows his cool. He’s no actor, he’s just a guy genuinely pleased to see another guy. This impression gives Matt a little zing of guilt—a good thing, because it helps him go into the handshake with added gusto.

“Zane didn’t even tell me you were in town. Hey, what’s goin’ on here, fella?” Nico gives Zane a funny-business glare, hands histrionically on his hips. Then he lets it go with a hoot of laughter, claps them both on the shoulder. “It’s beautiful. You two are beautiful.” Another hoot, though he somehow manages to tear up at the same time.

“Right, okay,” says Nico, pulling himself manfully together—Brando after a big scene.

“Oh, just me.” A self-deprecating smirk. “The only person I’ve ever been any good at, to tell you the truth.”

“And I wonder if you could be carrying the scrip, if we could actually see it.”

“‘Ah,’ says Matt,” says Zane. He gives Matt a sorry-about-this look. “Do you mind if I just get this one shot? I’m going to run out of steam any minute.”

“Sure, of course. Let me clear out of the way.” Matt backs off a few yards, gives them both the thumbs-up. He waits till Nico’s back inside the hospital, Zane’s lost behind his camera. Then he turns, and again he’s off and running.

Matt’s still got the postcard thumbtacked up in his study, the one Zane sent him from Jakarta when he was shooting his documentary there a few years back. Which is probably where the idea came from, the whole postcard campaign.

Dear Matt,

Took a couple of days off filming. Visited Komodo Island and met Calvin, pictured here on the front (at least I’m pretty sure that’s him, that roguish look in his eye). Back to the city now, still stinky from the annual floods. There are 20 million people here, plus me. 20,000,001. What if I disappeared? Is there any calculation fine enough to detect the difference that would make?

But I’ll be home anyway, early next week. Gimme a call?

The postcard was printed by a conservation group, which explained the caption: “World’s Largest Lizard in Grave Danger!” The photo depicted a Komodo dragon—a giant leather handbag on four right-angled legs—coming at you, sampling the air for your scent with its yellow forked tongue. Pretty nifty.

Had Zane already titled his film when he popped that postcard in the mail? Dragon, the second instalment in his AIDS trilogy, wedged in between Rio and Lagos, Cato and Shanumi. Its subject is Budi, a twenty-ish kid who’s been hooked on low-grade heroin—putaw, he calls it—since the start of high school. Actually, he’s off the stuff now. Oops, sorry, he’s back on … The film zigs and zags with him as he quits and fails, quits and fails. Each time he gets clean he clues back in to his real situation, remembers that the virus he picked up from some other kid’s needle can’t be kicked. So he goes looking for a hit. There’s a sense of grand tragedy to the tale, the way that one flaw, that one bit of inattention—the moment he said, “Yeah, what the hell,” to his friend and his works—leads relentlessly, step by step, to his ruin.

How baffled by it all he is, that’s what sticks with you. He says, “Dragon claws,” and he points at the track marks climbing his arm, as though they really have been left there by some other creature, some wild thing that savaged him in the night. With equal dismay he shows you the slit marks on his wrists, explains the junkie trick of sucking your own blood in hopes of getting a second kick out of the drug. That blood is of course poisoning him now, the HIV evolving into AIDS. Budi and his body, they’re two separate beasts, endlessly betrayed and betraying …

How would a person survive exposure to this much pain? Why? Why is Zane still alive?

Sheesh, those nerds must have had big ol’ stiffies under their laptops today. Kate’s trussed up tight in black skirt and jacket, a red blouse that vees hard into her white flesh. She steps out of one elevator on her floor just as Matt steps out of the other.

Matt’s already been up to his room for a quick swoosh in the shower. After his episode downtown, and his trip back via subway and bus, he pretty much needed it.

Subway. The soul of Toronto, or anyway the looped subtext of its psyche. That’s how Jesus would have got around, right? So, three flights down into the fuming earth, a descent that was also, for Matt, a return. One of his very favourite memories—that time he and Zane brought along toilet plungers. They did it during rush hour to be sure all the railings would be taken. In unison they pulled out their plungers, suckered them to the ceiling of the subway car—do-it-yourself handholds—and stood swaying amongst the thicket of dour commuters. They got cold stares, sure, but they got grins and giggles too. And then charging up the steps at the far end, wailing “Bohemian Rhapsody” in wild harmony …

“Go? Oh, good, great.” Kate’s laugh has a slightly hysterical edge to it—she’s still buzzed, evidently, a rock star feeding off the residual energy of her fans. The door gives her the green light and she pushes on in, tosses her purse. “I think they got it.” She does that earring thing, tipping her head, fiddling the jewel with both hands. Like an adult. Matt pictures his mum by the bureau, just back from a party, Inga Johanson having let him fall asleep in the parental bed. “I think they really got that it’s dangerous, this fling.”

This was Kate’s topic for her big lecture today, the world as one thing. She expounded it on the drive home from Charlotte’s last night. No, it was a question: Is the world one thing? “People have always looked for the one behind the many. When you’re born you’re broken off, right? You’re cut off? And from then on you’re trying to put things back together. One guy thought it was water, that everything comes from water. That down deep everything is water. Thales, that was Thales.”

Another guy thought it was earth, another guy thought it was air. Then intellect, math, music. “If you were the only girl in the world,” Matt crooned, “And I were the only booooy …”

“And that’s what we still dream about, is a way to make it all whole again. What are the symmetries behind these shattered things?”

“Right, good,” says Matt. The heavy door swings shut behind him. “You know what I think? I think all this talk, what it does is it puts you in the mood.” And he grabs her, and he heaves her onto the bed. She actually bounces, he’s tossed her that hard. It’s a me-Tarzan moment, meant to be funny and maybe a little bit thrilling too.

“In the mood?” says Kate, sitting up. “No, not really. I’m actually sort of …”

Matt’s standing over her, Trojan at the ready, a twist of foil between his teeth.

“Oops, but you’re all …” And she grabs him by the belt, and pulls him to her.

Lordy. Why is this so … what? The eerie intimacy of it. And the shifting of layers—it’s as though she were suddenly to start spouting theory from the slit between her legs. The personal and the impersonal absolutely conflated, mind and body.

And the sexlessness, in a weird way. Genderlessness. Matt paws at her buttons so she’ll know he wants her to lose her blouse and bra, which she does. He can’t get at her breasts so she attends to them herself, weighs and worries them and before long she slips a hand into the dark slot between her belly and her belted skirt. She times it (sheesh, it sure doesn’t take long when she handles it herself) so that they collapse as one onto the bed. Done, finished, kaput.

“Freedonia?” Kate, it’s safe to say, rebounds from these sated moments more swiftly than does Matt. He’s barely flopped a wedge of bedspread over his funny bits before she’s up and rebloused. “And the other one, the one where Chico and Harpo …”

Kate makes an I’m-so-scared face, and then, “You have a lovely cock, by the way.”

That’s the best sex I’ve ever had. Matt’s been with Kate four times now and these are the words that pop into his head every time. That’s the best sex I’ve ever had. Weird, because what pops into his head after sex with Mariko is nothing. It goes all hushed in there is what it does, a room where the TV’s just been turned off. Everything’s stopped, and nothing’s started up again.

Kate’s at the window peering out, contemplatively hipshot against the mellowing light. Matt says, “So it went well, eh?” He wriggles up to the head of the bed, props himself on a pillow.

“Did you always want to do this kind of stuff?” This is weird too—he wants to talk, whereas with Mariko it’s pure cuddle. “I mean, how did you find it?”

Kate turns, pauses. He can’t make out her face, but he can make out, in silhouette, her shrug. “Mr. Barclay, I guess,” she says. “I’m in high school, Sheet Harbour. Small small small town. There’s absolutely nothing going on. All of a sudden in science class we’re talking about, I don’t know, cosmic rays and stuff, and I start to see how humongous and amazing the world really is.”

“Julie Andrews?” says Kate. “It was Julie Andrews who made you realize how humongous and amazing the world really is?” She settles into an armchair, her face still blacked out by the light behind her. If she were on TV this would be a show about infidelity or addiction or some such, and her voice would be distorted, mechanized.

“I loved that movie.” Matt folds an arm behind his head, bestows his gaze upon the ceiling. “It was a family outing, that made it a big deal. We never went anywhere. My sister was crazy to see it but I was going to hate it, it was going to be so wimpy.” He chuckles—he always chuckles at this point in the tale. “They had to carry me out of the damn place. I swear to God, my dad had to sling me over his shoulder and lug me to the car.”

“Crying? I was …” What’s the word he always uses? It won’t come to him. “Yeah, you could say I was crying. How could it be over, that world? How could such a thing just end?”

“Six. Seven. Part of it was that I was in love with Liesl. Going on seventeen? She looked a bit like Inga, our babysitter.” He makes a be-still-my-heart sort of gesture. “The only way they could get me to sleep that night was to promise to buy me the LP.” He accepts a phantom guitar from Fräulein Maria, begins plucking out “Edelweiss.”

“You said it. So then I’m at film school and one of our profs reads us a review of it, of The Sound of Music. He meant it to be an example of something, I can’t remember what. That review was vicious, God, it was vicious. Pauline Kael. And I think to myself, hey, I’m going to do that too.”

Kate gets up, fishes a Perrier out of her mini-fridge. What does he taste like, anyway? She waves it at him, sharesies?

It wasn’t quite as neat as all that. Still, something really did happen to Matt that day, under the spell of Kael’s caustic words. A shiver of rightness, of recognition—the way Mr. Kumar must have felt when he first set eyes on the chessboard, the way Erin must have felt when she first slipped into the pool. This was a worthy task, almost a holy task: to spot the hokum, to name it. Which would leave Matt free, presumably, to set about making the real thing, a film purified by his critical vision.

“Thanks.” Matt accepts his glass of fizzy water, cranks his head up just enough to sip from it. “Funny story,” he says, settling back down. He’s getting pleasantly groggy now, ready for his post-coital snooze. “Zane? He went to a singalong Sound of Music once. As a cream-coloured pony.”

“A cream-coloured pony. One of Maria’s favourite things? His wife went as a man on the road with a load to tote.”

Matt started a Sound of Music review of his own once, but he’s never been able to finish it. He worked his way in through the music, two versions of “My Favorite Things,” the film version by Julie Andrews—so trite and phony—and the later version by squonky jazz guy John Coltrane, to which Matt applied words like coruscating and incandescent. A reversal of time, then, of cause and effect, the faint copy preceding the fearsome original. From there Matt segued awkwardly to the claim that nothing else about the movie was authentic either. “The children are the kind of children adults fantasize about. The adults are the kind of adults children fantasize about. Hell, even the Nazis are the kind of Nazis non-Nazis fantasize about …” It was a good angle, but not good enough.

Worse, Matt’s never quite nailed his review of the other classic from his childhood, The Wizard of Oz. For the opposite reason, of course. No solvent he can apply to Sound will be keen enough to cut through the film’s fraudulence, and no light he can shine on Wizard will adequately reveal its truth. Sound and Wizard, these are the twin poles of Matt’s aesthetic. Maria and Dorothy, these are his two witches, his bad and his good …

Matt sighs, snuggles down. If he were to sprinkle enough Juniper Breeze into his bath, might Dorothy someday come to him in a bubble? If he could whip up a strong enough wind might he be able to raise the shack, sp-sp-spin it around a few times and drop it—

Da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum-dum-dum. Oops, must have dozed off there—the William Tell startles him awake. He’s instantly sinking again, Kate’s hush-hush voice drifting in from the bathroom, rising now and then to bear him a few words. “… which is really none of your … but you know we aren’t … I can’t believe …”

There’s a red light high in one corner of Matt’s room, a winking red eye. Not regular and not random, it’s actually attuned to his presence, flashes whenever he moves. Some kind of motion-sensitive surveillance system, presumably. As he emerges from the washroom tonight, flossed and brushed and boxered, it acknowledges his presence with a cordial flicker. He reaches out to touch Erin’s box—what do you do with your sister’s bones once you’ve got them?—and receives another wink. Spooky, but maybe better than being alone? After so many years spent watching people onscreen it’s hard not to feel watched anyhow, hard not to feel like the focus of some phantom crew. Grip, gaffer, boom operator, best boy, the whole gang’s here all the time, ready to roll.

And Matt, what’s that like for you? Are you aware of the crew as you do a scene?

Well, that’s an interesting question, John or Jill or Bill or Beth. I think, as time goes by, you learn how to sink more and more deeply into the part, and into the moment. Almost a Zen thing. Mind you, sex scenes present a whole other challenge.

Yes, ha ha, I just bet they do! Poor guy, we feel for ya! Say, Matt, of all the women you’ve done love scenes with, Uma and Andie and Jennifer and Reese and Gwyneth and Kim and Cate and Demi and Angelina and Charlize—whoosh, who can keep track!—which of them would you say was the most…

When Matt woke up again, after his little nap there in Kate’s room, it was to Kate shaking him, telling him he had to go. This was seriously discombobulating, since he was still stuck in his dream, and in his dream he was still stuck at home in the Lair and Mariko was shaking him, telling him he had to go …

“Why?” Matt blinked—Kate was whirlwinding about the room switching on lights.

This should have been enough. Matt should have gathered himself up, got himself out the door, gone back to his life, whatever’s left of it. “Yeah but why?”

So Kate arranged herself on the edge of the bed, and she took a deep breath, and she told him.

After a while Matt said, “So let me get this straight.” He’d managed to zip himself up, wriggle into a sitting position. Shred of dignity. “River’s a doctoral student at … River?”

“At Dalhousie, and he’s into the whole universe business. He’s a student, but he’s not a student of yours.”

“That’s his thesis topic, I got that from him. See, I didn’t want to drag you into this so I started making stuff up, and … and then I just kept on making stuff up. I guess I kind of got hooked on the story, I’m sorry about that, but it actually, I don’t know why, it actually made me feel closer to you. Can you believe that, please?”

Matt had a go at restraining his hair, clumped and scruffy from his snooze. “Okay, so River’s not a student of yours. You don’t teach this subject, you’re not an astronomer at all.”

“No. To tell you the truth I hated Mr. Barclay, skulking around in his lab coat with—”

“Right, okay, so you’re not an astronomer. You’re a psychiatrist, you said?”

“Not a term we use, but yes. Schizophrenics mostly. One of my clients is River’s sister, Morning? That’s how we met. I studied up on his stuff, River’s stuff, when I was trying to, you know.”

Kate shrugged—sorry about all this. “I told you I go overboard. Used to go overboard. Look how sensible I’m being with you!” She tried on a good-girl grin.

“Anyway, I had all these night shifts for a while, plenty of time to read, so I crammed on the universe stuff. Plus I use it, the same way you’re going to use it on Zane. Something so big …” She checked her wrist, popped up and started poking around for her watch. The digital clock on the bedside table was blinking on 12:OO—her room appeared to have suffered a blackout. “River was calling from the airport, he was about to grab a cab.”

“No. I—I’m an idiot. But you know what, can we possibly talk about this later? River can get kind of—”

“No.” With a last fretful look about the room Kate abandoned the watch hunt, settled back onto the edge of the bed. “Okay, so this is the thing.” Her eyes had never looked bigger, buggier—she seemed to be flabbergasting herself here too. “I’m actually … I’m here to get pregnant, Matt.”

If this scene appeared in a silent movie—such is Matt’s thought as he stares at the blank screen of the ceiling in his room—that’d be the caption. That’s the line they’d pull out of all the lip-reading chatter, flash on the screen overtop the melodramatic brass: “I’m actually … I’m here to get pregnant, Matt!!!” Then back to the couple’s mute gesticulations.

“It’s crazy,” Kate went on. “It’s crazy, but it’s right. I really believe that. I mean, I was nuts about River, but we weren’t going to be a family, not a chance. I was just … I was just so sick of the whole thing. And then all of a sudden … That’s what happened on the ocean, the day I told you about?”

“So that part,” said Matt, “the abortion and everything. That wasn’t bullshit?”

Kate stood up, sat back down. “No, Matt,” she said. “That wasn’t bullshit.”

“Burying her at sea, that wasn’t bullshit either. I was … I was stuck, and then I was unstuck. I was grieving, and then it turned into something else. And here I am.”

It’s about the fertility clinic, apparently. It’s a good one and it’s away, away from River, away from work. Here in Toronto some guy had been induced to wank off into a jar. His sperm had been frozen, screened for various diseases and prepped for putting up her, once today, once tomorrow.

Kate grimaced, let that one go. “But my friends do, the ones I’ve told. Thank goodness for friends.”

Matt managed a nod at that one. “And now River wants to be part of it, is that what’s going on?”

“No. I mean yes, he wants to, or he thinks he does. Men always think they should want to have a baby, women too. Which made me want not to want to, rebel me. But I did, I wanted to. I want to.”

“But you should have told me, Kate.” There’s anger here, sure, but something else too. Exhilaration? “A person deserves to know.”

“Yes of course, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It’s just … The other thing’s just so impersonal. Intimacy narrative, that’s what I’d say if I were a client, I was missing the intimacy narrative. There was no tender story I could tell myself? So that’s why I treated myself to this ridiculous place, to make it kind of a special occasion. Like a honeymoon. And then you.”

“But what gives you the right? This is my life, Kate. I get to choose to be a father. Or not.”

“Oh,” said Kate. “I’m sorry, did …?” She laid a hand on his arm. “That’s not what I meant. I have a diaphragm, I just … it was just about companionship. I all of a sudden couldn’t be alone.” She paused. “And actually, wouldn’t you kind of say you did choose? Those first couple of times with no condom? I was there, and it felt an awful lot like a choice to me.”

He got out fast. He got out just fast enough. Striding down the hall he had to stutter-step his way past a young guy (late twenties?) not quite his own height but way beefier, with black hair spiked up like some heartthrob from a boy band. Matt heard the knock behind him but kept going.

In the elevator he thought, comedy, tragedy? How’s a guy supposed to know? A soundtrack would help. Noodling clarinets and bassoons and it’s going to be funny. You can laugh at the poor bastard, even if the poor bastard is you. But strings moaning in some minor key? Maybe not so much.

“What if movies really are dreams? What if movies work the same way for us collectively, fulfill that same role? Which is what?” Starlight pen, Starlight paper. A real readership, lordy. “Dream scenes in movies, dreams within dreams. Start with Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr. The projectionist falls asleep and dreams himself onto the screen …”

Zilch on the tube, so Matt decides to check his email before he calls it a night. Here he brings into play another of his patented spiritual practices—to wait patiently for his messages. Load the browser, log on, the whole thing must take thirty, maybe even forty seconds. During this period Matt resists, or tries to resist, or tries to try to resist all torment and vexation. “Time is made of thought,” says Mariko. “Stop your thoughts and time stops too.” So he sits, and he strives to think nothing. Even if the connection’s a little slow and it takes a full fricking minute, as it does tonight, he just sits there. Submission as the highest form of something-or-other.

Wow, this is new. Matt’s got a whole whack of messages, and only about half of them have to do with the inadequacy of his penis or his pension fund. The rest are actually addressed to him, and make some mention, in their subject lines, of things kritikal. A quick survey suggests about fifty-fifty favourable and un, impressed and PO’d with Matt’s creative nonsense. How completely bizarre to be getting, all of a sudden, the torrent of email DennyD imagined he’d been getting from the start. Is this the point? Is this what Matt’s been angling for all along, is to be doused in attention?

What it’s doing for him so far is it’s giving him this achy feeling in his chest. He could sure use a tuck-in right about now, a serious snuggle with Toto. He makes do with a self-plumped pillow, slots himself in between the sheets and begins plaintively to sing. Liesl, Gretl, Brigitta, Kurt, he’s all the little von Trapps in their goodnight scene, falsetto-ing his farewells, his adieus. The watcher in the corner winks back at each theatrical wave.

No, the McKays weren’t big on movies. Before Sound of Music there was what? Mary Poppins. And after it Born Free, Jungle Book, maybe a couple of animations. One big popcorn and a Fanta for each kid. Things picked up a touch once movies became a favoured birthday option, head-to-head with bowling. The year Matt and Zane turned nine, Matt’s party went to Planet of the Apes, Zane’s to Yellow Submarine. Statue of Liberty, Blue Meanies. The next year both parties went to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, peow-peow-peow. To this day some of Matt’s favourite movies are from that era—Nagy’s forever griping about his paradise lost–type attachment to those days. Matt’s favourite title, too, is from the sixties, or anyway subtitle: Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Slim Pickens plunging earthward on his bucking beauty of a missile, his “taut chubby of sun” (Matt’s Reprise blurb), whooping and giddy-upping with his cowboy hat. Strange love.

The McKays were stingy with home movies too. Once a winter, though, they’d dig out the clackety projector, hang a sheet over the drapes in the den. Most of the footage was of birthdays and Christmases, but the choicest stuff was of one June they spent at Uncle Lenny’s place up on Georgian Bay. Or: How Erin Learned to Stop Eating and Love the Water. Not that she actually started stopping right then, but some ascetic impulse did begin to assert itself and to get all tangled up with her sudden addiction to swimming. What was it that sucked her in? The way the water resisted and then gave way before the force of her will, maybe that. The amniotic wholeness of the moment, the mounting ecstasy of fatigue in her limbs. The way her father felt about it too, the thrill he clearly got when he saw that this kind of struggle might thrill her.

Matt’s back in the den tonight, on the floor with Erin at his folks’ feet. No sound but the rolled r of the projector and the murmur of the elder McKays, one to another. “We must have been out of our minds, letting those kids …” First Erin and then Matt, geronimo-ing off the high rocks, dropping through the grainy air into the shattered glare of the water. Which leads to the show’s annual climax—the old man freezes the film and throws it into reverse. The bay draws in its frothy crown of waves, collects up its load of spit and ptui, fires the little McKays back up onto the rock. First Matt then Erin, the two of them dry and twitchy up there on the precipice. Matt wants to go first, you can see that, but you can see he’s afraid. Erin’s tender nudgings aren’t enough so in the end she jumps for him, shows him how it’s done. Yep, there she goes again …

Déjà vu. In and out, time falling forward and springing back, spending itself and gathering itself up over and over again. Comic, tragic. Funny, unfathomable. Finally the old man lets ‘er roll and thwacka-thwacka-thwack, the little tail of film spins on the reel. What’s left onscreen is pure light.

MONDAY