Backtrack this bright October Wednesday. It’s noon; you are in the park. You look around and what . . . ? Is it just your imagination, or is everyone on Philosopher’s Walk looking up from their sandwiches and books, crossword puzzles and cell phones — looking at you like the blind woman was?

You are in trouble. You know that much, but you don’t know how much. And yet you feel good. It’s as if you always knew something like this would happen to you one day. A test that you could pass because you had to. You’d stumble on to something, and instead of running away from it, you’d pick it up and run with it, follow it to the end.

You head down into the bowels of the subway and head north. You don’t know much north of Bloor — never really been there. Well, there’s a time for everything.

And it’s like that all afternoon. You ride around the city in no direction and every direction, while you try to think your way through whatever it is you are doing. Ditch it, Blink. Ditch the phone. The video game is over. You lost. QVD: forty-eight million points; Blink Conboy: zero.

What is wrong with you?

You have to laugh at that. A man across the aisle looks up from his newspaper and wonders what it is you’re laughing at, what it is you’re on.

“What is wrong with you, boy? Huh?”

He isn’t waiting for an answer, but you almost want to say, Thanks for asking, because usually he hits first and then asks those questions for which there are no answers.

“And stop blinking at me!”

Your mother is crying at the kitchen table, either for what you did or for what he’s going to do. You want to ask her if she ever imagined when she was your age that she’d spend so much of her adult life sobbing. It started with Daddy leaving. Then the pace picked up when Stepdaddy came along.

Stepdaddy’s car keys sit on the table. He just found them in your jacket pocket when he couldn’t find them in his own.

“Greedy beggar,” he says. He slaps you then. “Little joyride, was it?”

Slap.

“Impressing your friends?” He holds the slap like maybe he wants to hear an answer this time, as if he’s wondering if you’ve got any friends. But you aren’t telling him where you went, not for anything. Not for nothing.

Slap.

The day wears on and wears out. Finally you arrive back at Bloor and Yonge, near where this whole thing started. You get this idea that you might hike a few blocks west, over to the Plaza Regent — see firsthand all the commotion — the cops coming and going. But whatever anybody thinks, you aren’t that stupid.

You catch a train east. It’s clogged with homeward-bounders, hanging on to the rails and what’s left of the day. You just stand there, not holding on to anything, held up by all these people with their groceries, briefcases, backpacks, and handbags. Holding on to their end-of-the-day weariness. They’re all about ready to drop, but there’s no room. You’re all holding each other up.

You get out at Broadview. You walk south down past Riverdale Park, with the Don Valley on your right, cars bumper to bumper on the parkway in the failing light, heading north to somewhere you’ve never been. They’re not getting there any too fast. And there is the dark river, the Don, going the other way, down to Lake Ontario, but not moving much faster than the cars. It’s like the Don’s going home, too, but south, like you.

You stare at the BlackBerry while you walk. You think about that river flowing south to the lake, and you think about the lake and the beach where you used to go when you were at Nanny and Granda’s. There was a time you almost drowned. Funny you should remember that now. You weren’t even swimming, just walking out, deeper and deeper. Kind of like today.

Oh, Blink, my fine feathered friend, you have walked too far out into the lake, and any minute there’s going to be just water under your feet. You’re as sunk as those Indians who figured that where they stood was theirs to stand upon. Except, for this: at least they think they have some rights. You know you have none. Didn’t you hear that enough back home?

You have no right to talk that way, no right to come in this late, no right to joyride in your stepdaddy’s Pontiac.

A Grand Prix or, as you like to call it, a Grand Prick, just like your stepdaddy.

Anyway, the only law on your side right about now is the law of survival.

You pass through Chinatown, the sidewalks piled high with crates of vegetables, people picking through them leisurely with no fear that someone might snap them up and drag their sorry asses off to jail. You cut across to De Grassi, then down to Queen. You look over your shoulder every couple of minutes. You step into the nearest shadow when a cop car passes by. You don’t wait at the streetcar stop; you keep walking until a streetcar comes along, and then you hop aboard, eastbound, homeward — what used to be home.

There is a half-baked plan buzzing around in your head, and the only part of it you really understand right now is to keep moving.

You figure out how to put the phone on vibrate, and you check it with every vibration. Then just as your streetcar is nearing Coxwell, Alyson calls again. You pull the cord to stop the car and hope she waits long enough for the driver to let you off. You jump down onto the street and keep walking.

You push the green button and talk, not even waiting for her to start.

“I’m not one of the people your father left the hotel with,” you say breathlessly, without introduction, your voice higher than you want it to be. You’ve been practicing this through two transfers now.

“Left the hotel with?”

“There was something weird about it.”

There’s a pause.

“Why haven’t you gone to the cops?”

“That’s not going to happen.”

Another pause.

“I believe you,” she says at last. “I mean, I believe you didn’t have anything to do with it. Do you want to tell me what you think you saw?”

“It’s not what I think I saw — it’s what I saw. There were, like, three people with him.”

“‘Like’ three people?”

“Three people.”

“You saw them?”

“I just said that.”

“Sorry.”

You can feel the Captain up and about, pacing around his cabin down there in the hold of you.

“No, it’s me who should be sorry,” you say. “I’m just jumpy, okay? This is so fucked. Oh, sorry again.”

“So he was gagged and bound?”

“No way.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what I said.”

“But they were in masks, right?”

“Masks? Nobody was in masks.”

“Nobody was wearing a mask?”

“What masks?”

“No masks,” she says. “And my father wasn’t gagged and bound.”

It isn’t a question, so you don’t reply.

There is a pause. “You stole his PDA?”

You have to think what she means. The BlackBerry. “Took it. Borrowed it.”

“Whatever. But that’s no big deal, right? Nobody cares about the stupid thing. So if you won’t go to the cops, then that’s fine, I guess. Really. But tell me exactly what you saw. Please?”

She isn’t crying now. Good. You didn’t want her to be hurting at her father being kidnapped. Tell her that, Blink. But you already did. And it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. She’s in control.

“Hello? Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” you say, looking around, wanting to know where “here” is.

“What’s your name?” she says, trying to sound gentle, like she’s asking a child who is lost at the shopping center.

“I’ll call you back.”

“No, don’t hang —”

But you do. You really need to concentrate. You’re almost there.

Your mother always said you lived just past the Raceway. Greenwood Raceway was what she was talking about, except they tore it down the year before you were born. Your daddy worked there as a horse trainer. They closed the place, then tore it down, and there’s just a fancy off-track betting place now, a movie theater, shopping plaza, and expensive condos. You used to wonder if maybe your mother didn’t know they tore down the track. She doesn’t get out much.

You turn up your mother’s street, as the early darkness settles in and any warmth the day might have gathered around itself is sucked right back down into the ground. Most of the places along here have been gussied up. Rich folks moved in, stripping the paint off walls and putting in stained glass and lampposts and bright-colored doors with warnings printed on them about the alarm system. It would have been good to have an alarm system at your place: something to tell you when Stepdaddy was on the warpath.

But he’s not home tonight, as far as you can tell. His trashed-out Pontiac isn’t parked out front. He’s not at supper. She’s eating in her kitchen window, alone. Never did get those curtains up.

Maybe he’s gone?

Oh, Blink. I’m so glad you’re here. Eddy left a few weeks back, and I’ve just been hoping you’d call or drop by so I could give you the good news. I’ve stopped drinking, and I never cry anymore. Actually, Eddy died, and he even left a little money he’d been hoarding away.

Ha-ha, Blink. Nice one.

Nothing you’ve seen so far of life suggests there are miracles, unless this is one, this unexpected day. And so far, apart from a miraculous new pair of sneakers that fit, this one has been about 30 percent good and 70 percent weirdness, verging on dread.

And yet standing outside your mother’s house, all you can think about is that what this day has brought you is something new. And then you want to hit yourself on the side of the head because all this day has brought you to is this.

Your gaze wanders to the blank eye of the upstairs window. Maybe he’s up there, sleeping it off. Maybe he’s lying dead on the living-room floor with a poker through one eye and a look in the other like, What the fuck?

You’d like to see that.

So, if he’s not there, where is he?

You want to go in. You want to take that chance. Mostly you want out of the cold. It’s way too late in the day for the Blessed Breakfast Uniform. Way too late in the year. You are shivering like nobody’s business.

Look up. That’s what you want to shout to your mother. Look out your window. Your son is standing here just where the light ends. You could find me if you looked up from the table.

Then the bitter feelings rise up in your gut, and there isn’t time for this bullshit now. There isn’t time for blame and anger. You need all the strength you can get to keep this thing going — whatever the hell it is. You step a little closer, anyway, until you are standing right on the bright side of the light coming through her window. You wait there, like a batter at home plate waiting for a fastball. But she doesn’t look up. Maybe those muscles don’t work anymore, the ones that lift the head. So you step back out of the light and start walking.

Your feet have a plan, even if you don’t. Your clever feet in their fine new shoes. There’s this bar he sometimes drinks at. It’s him you want. Right, Blink?

And there it is, after a long cold while, the No Holds Bar. You stop outside, where the Molson sign and the Bud sign in the window buzz with all that neon blood inside them.

You’ve seen Stepdaddy stumble out of this place a time or two. You even helped him home some nights when trying to get along still seemed like an option.

You step inside the smell: spilled beer and nacho sizzle. You hang out on the edge of the noise by the doorway in the vestibule. It’s shadowy there, and the man at the bar can’t see you. He’s too busy, anyway, serving up brews and shots. You let your eyes go ahead of you into the room, searching out every booth and recess. The place is hopping with the after-work crowd and the slouching dregs of the no-work crowd. The no-work crowd have had such a head start on happy hour, there’s no merriment left in it at all.

You move in a little closer and crane your neck to see where the bar goes when it rounds the corner. And — bingo! — there he is, the Grand Prick himself. He’s drinking alone. His scuffed-up leather coat hung over the back of his chair, about as worn and torn as he is. He’s got both wrists resting on the bar, with a quarter-filled beer glass between them and an unlit cigarette in his mouth. There is no smoking in the place, so he must be planning an exit.

Now what?

You hold your ground. From the look in his eyes, he’s not going to be moving too fast. He talks to someone, the cigarette bouncing up and down on his lip. No one seems to be listening.

Then he pats his chest pockets, his pants pockets, and draws out a lighter. You ready yourself. He stands and wanders off toward the back of the place, to the can it looks like. Either that or he forgot the way out. He winds his way through the drunken seats and the sprawled-out legs and the chatter and the clinks of glasses and outbursts of laughter, until he’s gone from sight.

Move. Now!

You take a deep breath and squeeze your way down the bar to where the brown jacket holds Stepdaddy’s place.

It only takes a second. You’re gone before the bartender even notices your underage self. You leave, and it doesn’t feel as good as you hoped it would. You wanted to close the door on him — that was all. And now it feels as if you closed it on your own hand. And there’s a stab of loneliness as you step back out into the cold. You’ll miss that vibrating in your pocket.