Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good: A Novel

Dear Zane,

REASON NOT TO BE GOOD #6

Virtue is the desire to avoid punishment—humiliation, damnation, bad karma. Virtue is fear, and fear is a vice. Virtue is vice.

So come on.

Matt

The boys are on the highway headed west, Matt at the wheel of Zane’s grungy old Corolla. Their laughter dies down now and then, but not for long. One of them will recall some fresh detail of the morning’s follies and they’ll be off again.

When Zane’s call came through, early-ish this morning, Matt was on the throne, fondly recalling his evening with the Terminator, marinating in the simple pleasure of his own physical self. He was thinking further back, too, to the trials he’d had on the toilet as a kid. Terrified, is what he was, of that simmering vat beneath his tush. The way it hooked up to all the other toilets in the world through pipes and rivers and lakes and oceans. It was Matt’s first image of the great interlacing of all things. He didn’t like it, not one little bit.

Third ring, he snatched up the receiver. He was thinking Kate. He was thinking about their long goodnight smooch after the movie, how the elevator door kept bunting him in the backside. How Kate finally shoved him out onto his floor, her attention turning inward, it seemed, alert to new life. How she waved—sadly?—as the doors clunked shut. By now, surely, she’d be reassessing the whole prospect of single motherhood. She’d be wondering if Matt had been at all serious about that comment he laughingly tossed off last night (consisting mostly of Lamaze-type puffing and blowing, kind of like his kapalbhatis). Might he really be willing to give them a try, she’d want to know? Did he like cod, other east coast fare? Was he comfortable with the fact that, statistically speaking, his odds of being the kid’s dad were only whatever? Assuming there actually was a child, would Matt be capable of transcending the biological imperative and extending a father’s yada yada yada if the kid came out another colour?

“Oh, hey, hi. I was just going to call a cab, head your way. That suit you?”

“Um, yeah, sure. Anyway, I need some sample footage.” The sound went creaky, cavernous—Zane covering the mouthpiece. He directed a few muffled words at somebody in the room with him, then came back on. “So, you in? I’ll drive. We’ll throw your stuff in the car, hit the road.”

Matt frowned. He wanted to finish up and flush, but that would hardly do. “I should see the Dadinator today.”

“We’ll drop by on the way back in. Surprise him, see if we can finish him off with a heart attack.”

Matt gazed down at his toes, which were wiggling. The tile floor seemed to be heated from within—you needed it, what with the refrigerated air. “I don’t know, Zane, she has a point. You looked pretty done in last night.”

Matt found himself back in the cavern. He traced the tone of the exchange at the other end, but couldn’t make out the words. It was all wha-wha-wha, Peanuts parents.

An hour or so later Matt had showered and shaved and chased some French toast down with a flagon of coffee (“Put that on my tab, willya?”). Last chance, he finally punched the bidet button on his potty (Dr. Damphousse with a squirt gun). He put in a call to Kate’s room but found, at the beep, that he had nothing right enough to say to warrant saying it. “Goodbye?” Too abrupt, and it wasn’t really what he meant anyway. So he signed off.

Then email. Hm, he had a whole slew of messages with subject lines like “kritikal krock” and “kritik as kreative force”—again about fifty-fifty, appalled by and impressed with his shenanigans. Then DennyD, then Mariko.

still no offer. a few more people have come through, so time will tell.

i’m manifesting peace and love for zane. i don’t know anybody who’s died for something, do you? imagine having something to die for!!!

hey by the way i never thanked you for the sweet comment you made about my screenplay. also for all the comments you didn’t make!! but seriously I’d like to hear those sometime. i really care what you think and maybe this is crazy but i’d love you to help me out with it. why not? shanti m

Why not? Matt started tapping out an answer but found he wasn’t buying it. There were, actually, a couple of things he was inclined to tell her. She-She, for a start, wouldn’t that be better? Why just one She when the tale was about two-ness, about togetherness? Or He-She, let some tension back in? Give the Matt figure a little more heft, even if he stays stupid? Or what about letting him clue in a bit, connect with things again, learn to let them go?

Before he could get down these half-assed thoughts, though, another message from kuul@materialized.

i know how you feel, i do. sophie’s been cheating on me. is that even the right word, can you cheat on a cheater? with jessie, the other woman at the café. girl more like!!! sophie’s upset and so am i. there’s no reason for me to be telling you this and maybe i won’t, maybe i’ll delete this before i send it.

hope you finally get to see zane. i told sophie about him, did i tell you? and he’s her hero. shanti m

Matt formulated a few responses, trashed them all. He packed up his stuff, pilfered some Starlight paraphernalia and pronounced himself ready to roll.

Matt extended the receiver to arm’s length, gave it a grimace. He cautiously returned it to his ear. “Hello?”

“There are two ways we could do this. You could fuck right off and leave my woman alone.”

Ah, River. Physicist humour, a nerdy prank. “River, buddy, you gave me a start there.”

A jolt of something crackled up the back of Matt’s legs, set his torso flickering like a faulty bulb. “River, hey. For one thing, Kate’s pretty much her own woman, wouldn’t you say? River?” But River was gone. Matt stood hearkening to the dead line for a moment, then hung up.

The phone rang again. He let it ring three times, four, and then snatched it up. Adrenalin. When’s the last time he’d taken this much of it all at one hit? “Look,” he said, “let’s get this straight.”

Matt switched hands, then switched back. Tough call, they were both shaking like a jonesing junkie’s. “Jesus. Can you do me a favour, can you look around the lobby, do you see a young guy? Look over by the elevators. About my height but big. Black hair, spiky, with—”

Theme song from Mission: Impossible, that breathy counterpoint of brass and flute. Matt jammed his feet into his sneakers, snatched his wallet and whatnot off the bureau, tucked Erin under his arm and skedaddled out the door.

He almost made it. He almost made it to the stairwell before River stormed out of the elevator. As it was he earned himself a one-flight head start. They set up quite the racket, he and River, pounding down in complex syncopations. Eight flights, Christ.

Matt must have gained a little time on the descent—he was most of the way across the lobby before he heard the emergency door straight-armed open behind him. He lost much of that advantage in the revolving door, though, which he shared with a pleasant mauve-haired lady in a shimmering sari. Outside, no sign of the car. Matt charged down the driveway, turned around and charged back.

River was just emerging. He looked thoroughly befuddled as he took Matt’s shoulder to the chest, heart height. He went down hard. Matt stood over him a moment, bouncing on the balls of his feet. Then he turned and trotted down the driveway. Zane rolled up in his funky wheels, scooched over to the passenger side. He was pointing at Matt out the window. No, he was pointing a gun at Matt out the window.

“Don’t shoot!” Finally. How many years has he been waiting to deliver that line?

So here they are, a couple of giddy guys going down the road. Goin’ Down the Road only in reverse, heading out of Toronto instead of into it. Departure, arrival, the great engines of story. Death, birth.

Every time Matt quits laughing, Zane starts up again. Every time Zane quits laughing, Matt starts up again. Until finally, “By the way,” says Matt, “a gun?” Zane’s tucked it away now, reached over and slid it back under the driver’s seat. Matt got only a glance but the thing looked serious, the sort of unit you could pull out on Law and Order and not get razzed.

Zane, as it turns out, has not so long ago had the freaking shit beaten out of him. Two guys, fists and then feet. “I took off but one of them tripped me up with, get this, a Swiffer. One of those broom things? He must have grabbed it out of a Dumpster. The whole time they were waling on me I had the ad running through my head. Stop cleaning, start Swiffering! Dying thought.”

“A couple of cracked ribs. They left my face alone, they were worried about blood I guess. It was after this big AIDS fundraiser, it might as well have been right there on the poster. Wanna Beat Up on a Fruitcake? Tonight’s Your Night!”

“Could be. You should have come. I did an animated video, this Norman McLarenesque deal of a virus breakdancing. Plus we could have got punched out together.”

They cruise quietly for a while, watch the city start to slip away, the country recover. A gun, what’s gotten into the guy?

“River. Maybe I shouldn’t have run.” That moment standing over the man, what was Matt ready to do? Little reason to be angry (you had to feel for the guy) and yet this rage rose up in him. “I don’t know. I have a feeling I’d be good at violence if I ever got started.”

“Sure,” says Zane. “All that waspero indignation stored up in there. But if you’re looking for a hobby … paragliding, maybe?”

Yeah, birds. Matt’s definitely going to get his checklist under way. Swallows are they, those swoopy ones? Look how they bunch up on a power line—beads on an abacus, halfway through some tricky calculation. Whereas the hawks go it alone, rugged individualists. Each one perches on top of its own power pole, tips its head as you whistle past.

Matt digs out his cellphone (pleased with himself for thinking to grab it in the scramble) and gets Zane to ring the front desk. Would they mind storing his gear for the day?

“Uh-huh,” says Zane into the phone. “Uh-huh … Well that’s odd, there should be plenty of credit left on that card.” He throws a what-a-loser look over Matt’s way. “Uh-huh … Uh-huh … Okay, let me check into that and I’ll get back to you … Will do. B-bye.”

“That’s sad, man,” says Zane, clicking shut the phone. “That’s incredibly sad.”

“No. Yes, if I ask her.” He shakes his head. “Hey, will you ring back, leave a message for Kate? Just, you know, to be careful. Tell her River’s gone off his nut. And tell her I’ll give her a shout tomorrow or something.”

Zane makes the call. “Off his nut,” is how he finishes, and then he hangs up and says to Matt, “Off his nut?”

“Yeah. Like if I said to you, ‘Dude, that’s so post,’ what would I mean? DennyD used it in his message today.”

“Yeah, okay, but what does that mean? I keep thinking I’ve got it, but then I don’t.”

“It means everything’s broken, everything’s in pieces.” Zane hacks at his thigh with the blade of his hand. “It means you have to do what you do without knowing why anymore.”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows what postmodern means, that’s what it means.”

“Damn straight.” With the air of a man abandoning the frivolous, then, in favour of the sublime, Zane shifts his attention to the radio. News, music, news. “Also dead is Santa Claus.” Ho ho ho. But apparently it’s a real guy, a guy who played Santa at malls and stuff for so long he eventually changed his name. Kids tried not to believe in him, he’d flash his ID.

Back to music. Here’s a ‘70s station, ‘80s, their era. Big riffy guitars, girly hair on testosterone-crazed guys. Zane cranks it up. Matt cranks it up. Zane cranks it up. The cruddy car stereo starts to distort, evoking the acoustics of certain fetid gymnasia. They’re both howling out the lyrics, Zane solo-ing on the moulded plastic drum-skin of the dash. Matt cranks it up. Zane cranks it up. Matt cranks it up. It occurs to him that this, this is as good as it gets, cruising with a buddy to too-loud tunes.

Zane’s reply deteriorates into a dilly of a coughing fit, but he seems to be trying to agree.

The last time they were out this way, the two of them, they were three, Mariko along for the ride. It was a few years ago—it must have been March, since Zane was making a major production out of Matt’s birthday. He had them all wearing big game–hunter hats, which kind of blew the surprise.

The big thing about the African Lion Safari was that the creatures weren’t in cages but running “wild.” You inched along the track in your car as though it were a jeep out on the Serengeti. Baby baboons jungle-gymed on the side mirrors, picked bits of bug off the windscreen. Giraffes swung their heads up to the windows and batted their false eyelashes, cheetahs gazed at you from grassy knolls with that worried expression they all seem to wear. Wildebeest (gnus?), baby elephants fuzzy as mouldy fruit …

Matt and Zane were complete idiots the whole time. Zane babbled in Swahili, a little of which he’d picked up in Africa when he dropped down there after his Europe tour with Matt. “Unasemaje what kwa Kiswahili?”

And so on. Matt contributed a verse or two of the theme song from Born Free, the sum total of his safari lore. Both boys hooted and screeched like a cheesy Tarzan soundtrack. Mariko did her best, going for a balance between play-along and tolerance, but that night, back at the Dadinator’s condo, she was pretty pissed. It’s the one time she’s ever really lost it over Zane. “You two didn’t even know you were leaving me out, that’s how much you were leaving me out” kind of thing.

Fights—maybe they should have had more of them. They’re supposed to be good, you get it all out in the open. What if he picked one with her now?

“What? Oh right, sorry.” Matt checks his speedometer, slows, slots the car into the right lane behind a school bus. There’s a whole gallery of kids at the back window, a whole gang of umgirls. Summer school, bummer. Or hopefully camp. The kids wave, cross their eyes, stick out their tongues.

“Oh, for pity’s sake. You aren’t even married. Is the marriage consummated? No, so get a grip.”

“Well actually, mister nosy-drawers.” The girls are doing that thing where you suck in your cheeks, make your eyes go big.

“I plundered her honeyed folds, is how she puts it. Niagara Falls on our wedding night—we took this same route.” He waves at the highway ahead of them. “Bloody sheets, the whole bit. We were both virgins.”

Matt does an incredulous face out the windscreen. The girls are all a-giggle. “The virus?”

“We were safe. A french tickler on top of a double duty. Wedding gift from Nico.”

“Jeezuz aitch. And now she’s converting.” The girls are doing Popeye poses, pushing their biceps up by hand. “Does she know you aren’t Jewish?”

Matt remembers thinking, what a rip-off. They were at film school, maybe fourth year, when Zane told him the story. All the guff he’d already taken, all the grief for being a Yid, and then to be tossed out on a technicality. Zane’s dad was genuinely Jewish but his mum was born Leblanc, a Catholic. To keep life simple she’d gone along with the customs, but she’d never officially converted. According to the letter of the law this excluded Zane. Anybody with a putz might be your dad, after all, but you can only push your way out from between your own mum’s legs. If she’s Jewish, you’re Jewish. If not, not.

In a sense, then, Matt’s second fake review was inspired by his friend, just as his first was inspired by his father, his third by his wife. The Wall. For his protagonist Matt conjured a Catholic housewife who’s disturbed, but then delighted, to find out she’s Jewish. “So many troubling things suddenly make sense to her,” as Matt explained in his review. “The kink in her hair, the way she craves a bagel, rather than the Eucharist, of a Sunday morning.” Hardy har. “But most of all the deeply personal quality of her grief over the Holocaust. We’ve all been hurt by the Holocaust, but Sara’s been positively haunted by it, as though it’s part of her own personal past—as, indeed, it turns out to be. Those millions who perished are her people.”

Except that no, they aren’t. The ironic reversal. After a year or two, during which she’s completely overhauled her life to suit her new heritage, a second bit of news reveals that Sara (now Sarah) isn’t Jewish after all—the original documents had been forged by Nazis to incriminate her family. Sara isn’t Sara any longer, but she isn’t Sarah either. She isn’t her old self, she isn’t her new self. Now what? Matt’s favourite part of his review was the nifty bit of Northrop Frye he managed to weave in. “The story of the loss and regaining of identity is the framework of all literature. Okay, Northrop, but what about people who go the other way? What about people who gain their identity and then lose it?” Lovely.

“Hey, Zane.” The bus is signalling now, searching out its exit ramp. Soon it’ll bear its load of youth off to their field trip, to their wildlife preserve or Group of Seven gallery. The girls are flinging kisses at the boys—old men?—clutching at their hearts as though they’re being broken. Matt and Zane clutch theirs too.

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s good. A little hard maybe, a little harsh, but good. I’d like to make it. The two of us, you and me. If I don’t die first.”

“I could kill myself,” says Matt. “Before you can even die I could kill myself. What about that?”

Any point telling the guy? I’ve still got my kit, man, tucked under the futon … “Yeah, you’re probably right. But what if I just plain die? Heart attack or something, all this stress? Did I mention I’ve been having chest pain this week?” Sure, the pain has all but ebbed away, but no need to share that part.

Hm. That wasn’t quite the tone he was going for. Zane flinches, falls silent. After a stretch of silent driving Matt says, “Price of fame, I guess. Heart trouble.”

“I’m a hotshot now, do you not read the papers? I figured that’s why you were suddenly kissing up to me. Yeah, the counterfeit reviews, people are lining up for a piece of this action.”

“No kidding. I like it.” Zane grips an invisible mike, waves it in Matt’s face. “So Matt, how long have you been full of crap?”

Matt strikes a pose for the photographers, lets it go. “God, it must be awful. How did you get so good at it, the media thing? It’s like you’re yourself almost.”

“I make sure to spend time with the little people,” says Zane. He gives Matt an appreciative pat on the knee. “Plus a stable home life.”

Matt shakes his head. “So you really did it? You plundered her honeyed folds?”

“Who do you guys think about anyway? I mean Brad Pitt or somebody? Or does the guy you think about have to be gay too?”

Big raspberry. “So you really are married then, you son of a gun.” He punches Zane in the shoulder. “Hey, remember in Morocco? That wedding?”

Hanna and Helena. Two blondes from Helsinki—the boys hooked up with them at the end of their big trip together, on a boat from Spain to Morocco. Europe had been great, but so hopelessly European, so white, so known-world. The boys decided to go wild, slip down into North Africa, wrap up with an exotic flourish. They hit it off with the girls, so they all four made their way to a campsite on the beach at a place called Martil. They got blitzed on the make-believe blue of the Mediterranean, and on a pipe or two of black hash bummed from fellow travellers. Then they pitched their tents and headed into town.

Stroke of luck, there turned out to be a wedding on that day, local colour or what. Out front were musicians banging on drums, clapping cymbals, wailing away on funny-looking horns. At the heart of about a hundred partiers bobbed a big box, born aloft by four strapping chaps and draped with fancy fabrics. Hanna pointed. “The bride is in there. They have been to the mosque. Now they are taking her to her husband’s home. He can divorce her if anyone sees her in the next fifteen days.”

Helena shook her head in disgust. “Paskan marjat,” she said. And, in response to the boys’ puzzled stares, “Shitberries.”

The Finns, as it transpired, were geniuses. They spoke about seven languages each, and were soon to start at the Sorbonne. They seemed to know more about Morocco than the Moroccans.

Matt said, “Cool little snake charmer thingies those guys were playing, eh?” The four were strolling back to the campsite, swigging by turns from a bottle of retsina.

“They call that a ghaytah,” said Helena. “It’s double-reeded, like a zurna from Turkey.”

So there were patches of conversation from which the boys were more or less excluded. They handled it by getting all giggly, cracking puerile in-jokes. They riffed like mad, needless to say, on Casablanca, the famed city being just a couple of hundred miles down the Atlantic coast. Hanna and Helena were weirdly tolerant. They didn’t exactly flirt but they didn’t throw up their hands and flee either, or make a fuss about boyfriends back in Finland. And there were two of them, for pity’s sake. A sign.

“Or a sunay from China,” said Helena. Matt smiled, contrived a shoulder-brush with her. She smiled back, but then grabbed Hanna and scooted ahead for some girl-talk.

Matt fell in beside Zane. “So what’s the plan, buddy? Hanna or Helena, your choice.”

Zane said, “Yeah, tough call. Hey listen, here’s another one for you. How would you … What if one of us were gay?”

“Gay?” said Matt. “You’re so fugging bizarre. Though if one of us were faggy I guess it’d be better if both of us were.” Snort of hilarity. “That way we could ditch the geniuses, it’d just be the two of us idiots again.”

All he did was shrug. It was like that day Erin told Matt about Santa, or rather didn’t tell him about Santa. Matt was busy listing the Christmas gifts he’d ask for that year, Etch A Sketch, Spirograph, Creepy Crawlers. Erin said, “You know about Santa, don’t you?” And he did. In that moment Matt knew about Santa, felt the knowledge rise up from where it had been lodged within him, a burp that just needed patting. Santa was a crock, some old gaffer in a goofy costume. Matt knew it, had been unwittingly knowing for some time. In this fashion, too, everything he was ready to know about Zane was let loose in him by the shrug. His best friend was into guys.

Back at the campsite the girls rejoined them, but Matt and Zane brushed them off and went walking. They followed the white trail of the beach towards the darkening bulk of what Hanna had identified as the Rif Mountains. They paced back and forth pretty much until dawn, under a toenail-clipping moon, talking not about the issue but in light of it, rejigging their friendship to function under this new dispensation. The big thing was to steer clear of the tent, which all at once looked so puny.

In the morning Zane bundled up his stuff and split for Casablanca. He’d keep on going through Marrakesh and into Algeria, Niger, Nigeria (Shanumi would have been a toddler at the time), further and further south to consummate his love affair with Africa. “Come for the animals,” he’d later scrawl on the back of a pride-of-lions photo mailed to Matt, “stay for the people.”

Which left Matt alone and tentless with two girls and their three-man tent. Hanna and Helena eventually invited him in, but with a caveat. They wouldn’t be having sex with him, since the only sex they ever had was with one another.

As it turned out, though, the two weren’t mutually exclusive, girl-sex and guy-sex. Hashed up and tipsy, the Finns got experimental. Penetration was out, but pretty much everything else was in. Equilateral, isosceles, scalene. Right, obtuse, acute. Who knew high school geometry would come in so handy? There were three nights of this, three candlelit nights—on two occasions a corner of sleeping bag began stinkily sizzling and the trio had to spill out into the briny gloom. Matt spent the days resting and rehydrating, and filling his diary with inanely mystical footnotes. In one place: “What if there were four of us? What if the triangle had become a quadrilateral? Trapezium, parallelogram, rhombus, rectangle, square.”

“My friend there?” he said to the girls one day. “Turns out he’s gay too.”

The Finns shared a good-grief look with one another. “How is it possible you didn’t know this?” said Hanna. “We thought you both were.” Gaydar, did the word even exist back then?

“Until you shoulder-checked me,” said Helena, mimicking Matt’s smooth move.

On the fourth morning the girls announced their plan to head east for Egypt, and ultimately Israel. Matt toyed with the idea of tagging along. It wasn’t until much later that he realized he’d been living in a porn addict’s dream, that what he should have wanted was to loop it forever. Maybe it was the girls’ unsettling bursts of laughter—could his pecker keep on being that funny?—or maybe it was the new feeling of lostness the sex couldn’t quite blot out. For one reason or another Matt decided to let them go.

He toyed, too, with the idea of heading south. Maybe he could pick up Zane’s trail, overtake him out on some sunbaked savannah, Born Free terrain. Was that what Zane was hoping, that Matt would hunt him down? Or had he intended all along to find himself alone?

Matt’s safest route was the route home. Next time though, in India? Matt will have a camera, and Zane will never shake him.

If DennyD’s at all mortified at being caught out in a lie, he isn’t showing it. He simply made no mention, in this morning’s message, of his claim to have seen the non-existent House of Straw. Then again, why should he be mortified? Who hasn’t been caught out in a lie this week? “I’m used to READING you in the press and now I’m reading ABOUT you, this just gets better and better. It’s so totally POST, the writer becoming the story because he’s written non-fiction about fictional things …”

And then—what the hell—that message from Nagy, the one Matt’s been avoiding since Saturday. Procrastination just keeps getting tougher as time goes on.

Dear Matt,

Couple of things. First off, I want to apologize for the tone I took in our last conversation. I’ve been under a lot of etc. No excuse. I was stunned by your stunt, and I’m still stunned, but I shouldn’t have lost it like that. Truth is I kind of admire the flair of the gesture. I’m not alone. Word’s barely out there and we’ve been getting mail.

Which leads me to my next. I’d like to propose that you start a new column reviewing DVDs. kritik@home, I’m thinking. What say? Laszlo

kritik@home, hey, not half-bad. A dream job for Matt, or at least it would be if it paid more than pocket change. The freedom to do work he cares about in the comfort of his own fetid study …

But no, not yet. Matt isn’t ready to abandon the cinema, the cathedral itself. Sure, he cherishes the fancy rig he’s got at home, but it isn’t the Real Thing. Even in its updated, vulgarized form, Matt still loves the thing of going-to-a-movie. Loves it? Needs it. From the first waft of faux-butter warming in the squirter machine to the sticky-treaded shuffle out at the end, it’s all sacred, it’s all sublime. This came clear again just last night, as he settled in to be Terminated. Coming Attractions: the vicious strobe of action sequences, the pushbutton emotion of hundred-decibel pop, the rivet-machine repetition of nauseating clichés … On either side of him Kate and Zane shifted and shuddered. Matt? For the first time in days he felt almost perfectly serene. The “primal screen” Sarris called it, the return of that luminous union you felt your very first time.

Plus his buddies. Going to a movie is one of the few things Matt isn’t just as happy to do alone. He’s always wished Mariko would join him more often. The uncanny combo of private and public, the appealing weirdness of being in your own little world in the company of others—could this be the solution, finally, to the riddle of individual and crowd, of self and other? “For wherever two or more are gathered in my name, there am I.” You’re huddled in the dark, staring together into the light …

Why hasn’t he ever fantasized about Sophie and Mariko? This is a question that grips Matt as he and Zane speed south. They’ve just about run out of Canada here, and are flashing past signs for the border.

“Well, I just knew we couldn’t count on you Canadian pussies,” drawls Matt. “But that’s alrat. We’ll sort Saddam out just fan all by our lonesomes.”

He’s certainly fantasized about Sophie, Matt has. Lithe and guileless—Franka Potente maybe, from the Bourne movies. Franka in blonde dreads. And of course he’s fantasized about Mariko, more and more often in recent months as their sex life has hardened into history. He’s fantasized about him and Mariko both fantasizing about Sophie, and he’s even, on one curious occasion, fantasized about Sophie fantasizing about him and Mariko. So why not—shades of Hanna and Helena—the obvious threesome? Butch and Sundance and the teacher lady, but the other way around?

He gets back from town a little earlier than expected one evening. There they are, the two women stretched out on the phony sheepskin in front of the wood stove, its little window intricately aglow. They’re enacting the uroboros, a pair of snakes swallowing one another’s tail. They look up from their labours … and they smile.

Why not? Why not a full-scale ménage à trois, the three of them setting up house together? Mariko could hardly object. Judging by She she’s way into collectivity, and how much more collective could you get? There’d be a grid magneted to the fridge, a spreadsheet specifying chores and sleeping arrangements for each night of the week, Mariko-Matt, Matt-Sophie, Sophie-Mariko (hey, he’d be happy to batch it the odd evening, rest up). Weekends they’d all pile in together. Maybe they’d keep two places, a country place and a pied-à-terre. He and Mariko would spend a few days a week in town and then ferry up to the wild retreat, to escape the buzz and re-immerse themselves in youth and estrogen. Sophie’s recycling might get a bit oppressive, but that could be negotiated. Hey, it might not be a bad idea to save the world anyhow. Chances are Sophie would want a baby, and that’d be fine too. The lucky brat would get a brace of mums, one for energy and one for wisdom, one for suckling and one for financial support. In every dimension the family would just keep tipping back to equilibrium.

Matt lets up on the accelerator, allows the minivan to pull away. Minivan—that’s probably what they’d need too, what with the four of them.

“Speaking of which,” says Matt, “did you hear the one about the guy who got busted for buggery?”

This is a question Matt kept meaning to ask Hanna and Helena, back in the day. More recently he’s been trying to screw up the courage to ask Mariko. What’s it like? Sex with Sophie, sex with a woman—sex with somebody who’s like you. Where do you get the friction when you don’t get it from difference?

“I’m just trying … See, I prefer to take care of my partner first, and then, you know. Most men do. I researched it one time, I can’t remember the percentage, but you just want to flake out, right? Just drift off? You don’t want to find out you’ve still got all this work to do.”

“Are you seriously asking me this? Which one of us gets off first, me or Nico?”

But then nothing. Matt makes as though to check his far mirror, and manages a peek at his friend. Zane looks as though he’d be willing to keep up the sparring, but the requisite gusto has plumb gone out of him. He’s got his head rocked back on the rest, his sock feet up on the dash. He’s keeping track of the road ahead through slitted, stoned-looking eyes. After a bit he says, “There isn’t going to be an answer, Matt.”

“Yeah, well,” says Matt. “Hey, you know what? I’m thinking maybe we’ve had our quota of thrills for today. What say we head back, try again tomorrow?”

Zane produces a mini-smile, an appreciative lip twitch. “Thanks, but no. I’m good. Quick doze and Bob’s …”

Matt drives on alone, trying to take it easy on the bumps. He smiles to himself—following too close, not bad. For one of his early reviews he did some research into those old urban legends about men stuffing hamsters and sundry other rodents up their bums. He never found anything to corroborate these tales, but he did manage to rustle up an impressive list of objects that men, both gay and straight, were reported to have introduced into their rear ends. He worked up a pretty good riff about orifices—“two-way portals, crossings at the border of me and not-me”—how we use them both to foster and to destroy identity. Nagy made him drop the whole thing, on the basis that it didn’t pertain to the movie, whatever that might have been. Coward.

Zane—Hebrew variant of John. God’s gracious gift. Matt tries it on him now, “God’s gracious gift,” grabbing another glance over his way. But he’s zonkered, mouth an elongated O. Munch’s nap.

“Why do you always have to do something? Why can’t you just live with stuff like the rest of us do?”

dear denny,
so gr8 2 hear from u.

Matt’s got one true fan, he can hardly afford to ignore the guy. He took a few moments this morning, striving for kool.

glad u liked the house of straw piece. thx for th@. your movie, dead, sounds dandy. the tyranny of narrative, we do have to push against it, don’t we? but what about this, what about when u start 2 dtect plot structure in your own life? u want paranoia.

seems i won’t be writing 4 omega anymore. un4tune8ly? that means i have nothing 2 give u just now but advice, & i haven’t any of th@ either. oh w8, here’s some. a wise old swami 1ce told me, follow your buzz. if u do th@, if u pursue the thing u r most passion8 about, doors will start 2 open 4 u & guides will come 2 help u on your way. if doors r not opening 4 u & guides r not helping u on your way then u must be on the WRONG DAMN PATH.

write back anyway?

c4n,
kritik@themovies

Matt had to poke around on the web for quite a while to find the apposite sign-off, ciao for now. Gtg was another option, but got to go felt kind of brusque, and kool as he is Matt couldn’t quite talk himself into ld. Later dude. Maybe later.

This could still be Canada, but it isn’t. They’re on the other side now, where all this stuff comes from. They’ve made it across.

He was so cool most of the way, Matt was. Not much traffic, so they cruised effortlessly over the bridge, craning to take in the foam-marbled river, the postcard-ready froth of the falls.

“Five billion gallons an hour,” said Zane. “We did the little boat ride on our honeymoon. The tourist thing.”

“What we couldn’t figure out was, whose water is this? Is this Canadian water or American water?”

The border guy was decent, no big deal. Licence and registration? How long will you be in the country? What is the purpose of your trip?

Purpose of your trip—that’s the one that got Matt. That’s the one that for some reason caused him to flash on the gun under his seat, and forthwith to panic.

“Pleasure,” he said. So far so good. But then, “Hey, why don’t you test us or something?”

“Pardon me?” The guard was instantly tense, giant jaw cording up. Christ. This is what you don’t do. You don’t get smart, you don’t go off script.

“I just mean, you know. Quiz us. See if we deserve to get in?” Matt’s plan must have been to disorient the guy, distract him from the whole idea of a search. Brilliant, just effing brilliant.

There was an alarm button nearby, presumably, for which the guard’s finger was no doubt itching. Or perhaps he was fixing to draw. Matt briefly envisioned himself grabbing for Zane’s pistol, having it out with this dude the old-fashioned way, peow-peow-peow.

“Something about movies, maybe,” said Matt. “You guys are the movies, right? You Americans? So shouldn’t you test people on the movies before you let them in?”

It could have gone either way. The frown on the guard said full body search, no question. But the frown, oddly enough, was fading. A bit of movie trivia had come to him, you could tell. He didn’t want to see it go to waste. He performed a quick three-sixty, checking on his buddies in their own little booths. Then, leaning conspiratorially in, he said, “What was The Birth of a Nation”—holding up a careful-now finger—“before it was The Birth of a Nation?”

“The Clan,” said Matt. Yes! No, wait. Black guy. Was it wise to know this?

“Hardly,” said Matt, with what he hoped was a comradely chuckle. “Listen, we’re film guys, so, you know … the technical innovations and everything. The night shot. The tracking shot.”

“Ah, the tracking shot,” said the guard. “I see. That’s probably why the KKK likes it too. Not the lynchings or any of that, not the tips on how to tame a crazed darky, keep him off your white woman. No, it’s the tracking shot.”

Zane cleared his throat. “My friend here?” he said. “He’s a complete moron. Complete, believe me. The thing is though, he’s not a bedsheet kind of a guy. He just isn’t. He’s actually kind of decent.”

The guard leaned further in, peered over at Zane. He made a gun-finger, aimed it at him. “And I’d believe you why?”

The guard grimaced. He uncocked his finger, leaned back out of the car. “The Clansman,” he said. “Get it right next time.” And he waved them on through.

Zane’s still shaking his head in disbelief, relishing Matt’s idiocy. “I mean have you lost your mind?”

They’re out the other side of town now, things are going rural again. No relief from the weather—America, it turns out, is under the same single-minded sky.

“The gun,” says Matt. “Did you maybe forget about the gun? What if the guy’d found it?”

“Hadn’t thought of that,” says Zane. “So your idea was to act so insane that it wouldn’t surprise him?”

“No, you ninny, so he’d never go looking for it in the first place. It’s all very psychological, you wouldn’t understand.”

Zane reaches under the driver’s seat, pulls out the pistol. “I’ve just about had it with your attitude,” he says. He levels the weapon at Matt, and squirts him in the temple.

Zane laughs alone for a while—it’s a few more squirts before Matt’s laughing too.

“You’re going to get us fugging killed,” he says, letting the car go swervy.

“That’s the idea, my friend. Next time the other bastard pisses his pants.”

“Oh, lighten up,” says Zane. “This is a collectors’ item, you know. Good fakes are illegal nowadays, Mercedes had to confiscate it from her nephew.” He tucks the weapon away again. “Anyhow, you’re supposed to have a gun down here, this is the good ol’ US of A.” He hums a few bars of representative rock ‘n’ roll. Springsteen? And then, “Hey, remember last time?”

It would have been 1980 or thereabouts, the boys’ only other trip to the States together. Spur-of-the-moment thing, a weekend away in the Big Kumquat, as Zane called it. New York City. By day they did galleries, Warhol’s Marilyns and Maos, Basquiat’s graffitied skulls and skeletons. By night they did bars and cinemas. CBGB was already turning iconic at the time, dingy, a real dump—exactly the sort of noxious swamp you’d want punk to have come slouching out of. For movies they started at the brainy end, a night of Stan Brakhage at an arthouse so hip you needed granny glasses just to get in. No trace of narrative, DennyD would have been impressed. Matt’s favourite was Window Water Baby Moving, Brakhage’s silent, super-graphic record of his wife’s home labour—Zane got the woozies, needed Matt’s shoulder on the way out to the lobby for more licorice. The next night it was all cult, Ed Wood, Russ Meyer, and finally this new guy, David Lynch. Hard to think of a scarier baby than the one in Eraserhead—an ET-type creature trapped in the fouled nest of its own body. Birth as nightmare, how do you wake up?

But Zane’s drifted off again. Lordy, it’s like travelling with an infant. Matt drives solo for a while, keeping his eyes peeled for a good spot. Up ahead an IHOP. “Come Hungry, Leave Happy.” He pulls in, eases to a stop in the parking lot around back. He turns to Zane. “God’s gracious gift.”

He fishes under the seat, comes up with the water pistol. Nobody around—he points the gun at Zane’s temple, mob-executioner style. “This is it, buddy,” he whispers, “you live or else, “and gives him a squirt. Zane squirms, goes still again.

Matt turns the gun on himself. “Th-th-th-th-that’s all folks,” he says, and empties the cartridge into his head—okay, into his hair—in a series of cooling blasts. Then he slips out of the car, tosses the toy into the Dumpster. Zane’s struggling to the surface as he climbs back in.

“You betcha,” says Zane, hauling himself upright. “Hey, we must be getting there.” He unfolds and refolds his map, fusses with his directions.

In terms of actual road names, the folks at the CCCRN have been less than precise. Past town it’s left, then left again, then right, then straight on through. Auto parts, fruit stand, burnt-out barn.

The boys zig and zag for quite some time. Look, there’s an auto parts place—but no fruit stand. Hey, there’s a fruit stand—but no burnt-out barn. It’s as though they’ve been shunted into some parallel universe, a universe in which the landmarks are all slightly skewed. Everything’s the same, everything’s different.

One upside, this new universe is picturesque. Horses graze in their hangdog way, photogenically flicking their ears. Little black birds with red splotches on their wings—red-winged blackbirds?—cling to bulrushes, which tick-tock in the wind as the boys whip past. Fields of gold and green are stitched together at seams of, what are they, maple maybe? Poplar? Willow?

Who cares if they never find the place? This, right here, is just fine. Anirvachaniya nailed it, now is the only time.

Well, fair enough. The guy does look pretty rough over there, a living catalogue of cautionary symptoms. Weight loss, check. Weakness, check. Fatigue, check. “Hey, how about this,” says Matt. “How about we find someplace to crash, spend the night down here? Start fresh tomorrow?”

“Coming Soon,” reads a billboard. And then, in dark haloed script, “Jesus.”

Zane swivels his head Matt’s way. “Let’s get a room, is that what you’re saying to me?”

Zane nods, lowers the louvres of his eyelids. “Lucky thing I brought my overnight bag.”

It comes down to this: the Cozy Cubby or the Friendly Farmer. No way are the boys succumbing to the Super 8, the Best Western, the Days Inn, the kind of America they can get at home. After an early supper of red dye number six the Cubby wins out on eeny meeney miney mo. Zane slaps down his credit card, hallelujah. This place may be more Matt’s speed, but that doesn’t mean he can afford it.

“Dibs,” says Zane, tossing his bag onto the nearest bed. He digs out his kit and sequesters himself in the can.

The Starlight this ain’t. Matt flops down on his bed, feels the gravitational tug exerted by its divot, the human-shaped hollow created by the last zillion folks to crash here. He fits right in.

Behind the cardboard door the toilet clankily flushes. Before long there’s water slapping around in there, Zane striving to revive himself in the shower. Matt could picture, if he chose, the sheeted water as it reconnoiters the curves and knobs and knuckles of his friend’s frame. Stooped head, absently bulging belly, soapy prick … How odd, really, to be so particular about this, to desire only half the race. Bi—surely that’s the way to go. All the rest of us are fanatics, all the rest of us are gender fascists.

Matt fetches the remote. Oops, failing again. He makes a deal with himself, he won’t flip around, he’ll just punch a couple of buttons and stay put. A brand new spiritual practice, the point being acceptance, acquiescence. The point being to take whatever comes, to find in it a gift meant just for you.

Documentary channel, just his luck. Something about midgets. They’re looking perturbed, troubled. Or is it dwarfs? Hey, munchkins, these folks are from Oz. In their dotage now they muse about their days on-set, the sexual shenanigans, the harsh conditions off-screen. They marvel at all the disasters that went into the making of the masterpiece, remembering especially the day the Wicked Witch got burned, caught up in the puff of her own disappearance. “Fourteen writers, five directors, the whole project was ridiculous. I don’t believe things are ever meant to be, but that movie?”

This is where A Day at the Beach will likely end up too, Zane’s documentary. It’s the rough cut Matt’s been watching (Zane bubble-packed him the DVD), and he’s been more deeply moved and shaken with each encounter. The final product has yet to make the screen. When it appears it will be by far Zane’s best and most impactful piece of work.

Shanumi, “have mercy on me” in Yoruba. Shanu for short. You can’t forget her, it isn’t an option. She’s beautiful in a slightly eerie way, her teeth white and wonky, her face a diamond that gets harder and harder, more and more severe as the virus scalpels away her flesh. Adamantine, good word. The first thing you see her do is bury, with the help of her mum, her son Ifedayo (“love has turned to joy,” something like that). He died an infant—his papier-mâché-and-tinfoil coffin is about the size of a trumpet case, maybe an alto sax. The local cemetery (where Shanu has already buried one of her other kids) is chockablock, so they scoop out a little grave by the side of a road. Nearby, a magic-markered sign in English: “Raping a virgin will NOT cure aids.” Then back to the shack (cardboard with bamboo accents) on the beach of this slum suburb of Lagos.

Shanumi’s beach is in some ways reminiscent of Matt’s beloved Kits Beach in Vancouver. Turds aren’t forever being cast up onto Matt’s beach, true. Matt’s beach doesn’t boast hundreds of huts housing thousands of gaunt outcasts, nor does it boast corpses, nor a shifting corps of pubescent hookers. Both beaches are near the heart of big cities though, and both peer across narrow bands of sea at pricey high-rises. Both are patrolled by gangs of crabby birds. Both are on the same planet, planet Earth.

Style-wise the documentary is pretty stripped-down. There’s a fair bit of slo-mo, which adds to the elegiac tone. It cries out, or so Matt imagines, against the passage of time. Rather than just memorialized, might death be undone, inverted? There are structural reversals of time—you meet Ifedayo in the flesh after you see him buried in his little box. All the key AIDS impacts are there, the masters-thesis signifiers—the fragmentations, the formal discontinuities, the disruptions of temporality and identity you’re to look for in AIDS-influenced art—but then they’ve always been there in Zane’s stuff, so what are you to make of that? The testimony of talking-headed experts is kept to a minimum. The chairman of Such-and-So emphasizes the feedback loop of poverty and infection. Dr. Whosit argues for the link between treatment and prevention, since only treatment will disrupt the stigmatizing link between infection and death, and since only the offer of treatment will lure folks in to be educated about how to protect others. Minister Thingamajig, incandescent with rage and sorrow, sermonizes about the global war-making budget, wonders if a tiny fraction of it couldn’t be worried free for the succour of the suffering zillions. There’s virtually no voice-over, just the odd subtitle pulsing in the lower left. A very modest slew of stats. Not much in the way of music either—an occasional passage of tuneful bonking on a two-headed djun-djun drum (an hourglass tipped on its side), the odd burst of call-and-response chanting heated up with funky Afrobeat. This makes room for an unsettlingly intense soundscape: water being wrung from a rag, the tattoo of a coughing fit, driftwood being snapped for kindling, murmured snatches of English and untranslated Yoruba. Laughter, too, when the children are suddenly haunted by the ghost of play.

How did Shanumi get infected? No way to know. The broken pop bottle with which she was circumcised may still have been bloody from the last girl; the man who took her (when she was thirteen) as his wife may have passed on the virus before he disappeared. Since then Shanu’s been surviving on prostitution, so there’s no telling how many men she’s infected, especially since she can charge double for condomless sex. She has also, of course—by giving birth to them, by feeding them at her breast—infected her children. There’s a brief reality-TV routine as her youngest goes in for his test. You’re never shown the follow-up, never get the thumbs-up or -down. You’re left to wonder, if you want. You’re assured that the household’s oldest girl, Rinsioluwa (“soaked in the Lord”), is negative so far, and that it will be her job to care for her dying siblings, and for her mum’s mum, who has TB. At one point Rinsioluwa lulls the younger kids to sleep with a story, a Yoruba fable about a child trapped in a tree being chopped down by a demon.

In shape the film coincides with the trajectory of a life going ballistic, giving up its propulsion, acquiescing to the draw of gravity. Shanumi is more and more confined to her shack. Zane clearly didn’t want to intrude, so he set the camera up on a tripod and let it intrude for him. There are extended sequences of stop-action—Shanumi, in her first-world castoffs, gives you a bizarre parody of a webcam girl, half-aware of the gawking lens. Various people are caught tending to her, her mum, her kids, the handful of friends who’ve resisted the pressure to shun her.

Intercut with Shanumi’s story is the story of Olatunji (“wealth woke up again”), a woman of the same age from the same area who lucked into a trial drug program, generic antiretrovirals from India. Her treatment starts when it ought to be too late. You watch her bounce back, flesh reappearing on her bones, just like Shanu but with the hourglass tipped up the other way. You watch her belly swell—she was already pregnant. You watch her being dosed with a drug that prevents transmission during labour and delivery, and you watch her googoo-talking to her healthy, negative newborn. Then you switch back to Shanumi, who’s being buried by her dwindling mum and her oldest baby. Credits.

Zane emerges from the can looking spruced up but spent. For PJs he’s got on a furry green sweatsuit, U of T. “Do your worst,” says Matt, passing him the remote. “Hey by the way, when does the Shanumi thing air?”

“That’s what would have happened to you in Nigeria, right? If they’d caught you with a guy? I looked it up, you probably did too.”

The loo’s still steamy, despite the growling labours of the fan. Matt’s stunned to discover how much of the countertop Zane has already hogged. He’s refused treatment and he still has to take all this crap? The names are Greek to Matt—okay, Latin—but the instructions give him the general idea. Take one tablet daily on an empty stomach. Apply three drops in each eye twice daily. Apply topically to affected area as needed. Take two puffs three times daily. Take one tablespoon immediately after each meal … Or maybe just shoot yourself. Matt reviews the catalogue of pharmaceuticals he’s got stashed in his own kit back at the hotel. Tylenol. Extra Strength Tylenol. Ex-Lax.

Again, isn’t it cheating? Did Shanu get to drop or pop or puff any of this stuff?

When Matt emerges, showered and moderately refreshed (Derek at the front desk spared him a toothbrush), Zane sets up a gentle din of catcalls and hubba hubbas. Matt’s jammies consist of plaid boxers and an orange Rub-My-Buddha-Tummy T-shirt plundered from Zane’s bag. Zane’s got himself all tucked in, ready for his goodnight kiss.

Matt did kiss a guy once, sort of. It comes back to him now with a hallucinatory sting. It was gym class, they were in the pool working on saving lives. When it came time for mouth to mouth everybody paired off. Zane, for instance, got fricking Winnie Fulton, with her cappuccino cleavage and her plump, permanently balmed lips. Matt? Matt got Mark “Midget” Vogler, the giant rugby guy. He lay there poolside on the puddled tile, Matt did, Midget hunched over him like a cougar over its kill. Tuna? Salmon? Midget’s lunch was very much with them. What Matt recalls most vividly, though, is the feel of the guy, the brush of stubble against his own downy face, not yet shaven …

He flips back his comforter. It’s the thickness and consistency, it occurs to him, of one of Mariko’s panty shields. He slithers his feet between the sheets. Zane’s got Seinfeld on, no Frasier, no Friends. He looks weary but wide awake.

“Pardon? Oh my God, they’ve resurrected this one?” I Dream of Jeannie, Barbara Eden still hot in her belly-dancer getup.

“And we’re focusing on a man this time. Shanumi and now, I don’t know, Shankar or somebody. A gay man. A gay married man. Half the gay men in India are married. Man-on-man’s illegal there too.”

They fall to silent tube-watching. Jeannie does her thing—crosses her arms in front of her, nods her head and boingggggg, she’s out of trouble.

Matt laces his hands behind his head. “Does it bother you at all?” he says. “That this is what you’re supposed to do, that you’re doing exactly what they want?”

“Hollywood, everybody. The gay guy’s meant to kill himself at the end, right?”

The lamp on the bedside table has erected a little teepee of light between them. Zane peers through it. He says, “Have you always known you were straight?”

“I’m not, I want to know. Was there ever a moment … Like those times down in your parents’ basement. Did that ever make you wonder?”

“Oh. Okay.” He sits up, gives his pillow a whack, settles back down. “And by the way, idiot isn’t all that bad. Idiot isn’t as bad as moron, for instance. Or imbecile.”

“It’s worse, actually,” says Matt. “It goes, from stupidest to not quite so stupid, it goes idiot, imbecile, moron.” He’s doing Jatinder here, he’s doing Mr. Kumar.

“No, it’s imbecile, moron, idiot.” Zane’s Indian accent has always been better than Matt’s. His French too, his German, his Spanish—he’s better at the whole world.

The AC unit clicks, whirs, keeps the world away. Just faintly, the whoosh of passing trucks. American whooshes, you can tell. Cocky? More like wistful. Wishing they were still cocky, as they were not so long ago.

“He was my first crush, you know,” says Zane, back to his own voice. “Mr. Kumar. Not crush, but … It was different. It was something new.”

This must be another tricky area for two guys living together. Who gets the remote? Zane’s clicked all the way back around to the munchkins again, who’re gamely croaking out a few lines of “The Lollipop Guild.”

“He was beautiful. He was the first man I ever looked at and thought, beautiful.”

“Right. Hey, remember chess? Remember how he’d set up all those chessboards in the cafeteria?”

“And he’d take on all comers. And he’d destroy us so sweetly, all at once.”

“Everybody’s old.” Zane clicks off the lamp. They’re left with just the bluey light of the tube.

“Please.” And then he slips into his cartoon snooze, snort-whistle-we-we-we-we-weeee. He’s always been good at this—he used it routinely in the old days, to get out of dealing with anything difficult. How does Nico handle this? How does Mercedes? Matt lets Zane go for a while, then leans across the space between the beds and kablams him with his pillow.

Zane does a startled wake-up, who-wha? Lazarus late for work. Then he rolls over and he really is gone.

WEDNESDAY