‘THIS IS THE BEST,’ Matt declared from the head of the table, and raised his beer and chugged it down. It was a command to do the same, so Ash and Chip obeyed.
Idly Ash turned his attention to a nearby big-screen—two shirtless men caged and wrestling, limbs entwined and cheek-to-cheek—and finished a text to Sherene, who was touring brew pubs with friends on the Plateau. You should come downtown, he begged. Her reply was instantaneous: Not in a million years.
The bar—Matt’s choice—was a dingy basement with faux wood-panelled walls and framed hockey jerseys and a steady grind of corporate rock. It was a hive for a certain type of man, a man like Matt. Ash felt edgy. In these places difference was cause for suspicion. Matt, who relished any chance to play alpha, understood this, and he kept glancing around for an excuse to defend their honour. At a similar spot in London, some poor sap had once splashed beer on Ash and found himself pinned to the wall by his earlobe. ‘You got a problem,’ Matt had snarled, ‘with my little brown friend?’
Maybe we’ll head that way, Ash messaged Sherene. Which was doubtful. Matt was in his element. Montreal’s language politics and warren of one-way streets made him anxious, but a generic sports bar offered refuge. These were the places he’d spent half his life, either as client or staff. He ordered another round with a twirl of his finger, then blew their kilted server a kiss.
On TV, one of the fighters hitched his legs over the other guy’s shoulders, crossed his feet at the nape of his neck, and hauled him in.
No you won’t, wrote Sherene.
Their pitcher arrived.
‘Mare-see, Claudine,’ said Matt, reading her name tag, and filled their glasses. ‘The three of us together again, boys? Honestly? This means the world to me.’
‘So good to see you guys,’ said Chip. ‘Cheers.’
As always the drinking was purposeful, and the other two fell instantly into their old dynamic: Matt holding court, Chip egging him on. Ash was meant to play the straight man, calling out Matt’s lunacy with cutting asides, to which Matt would respond with physical terror—noogies and nurples and swift, backhanded blows to the groin. And Chip would laugh. Yet Ash didn’t feel up to it, and the beer had a coppery, bloody taste.
While the other two bantered, Ash brooded behind his phone. The air felt static with what was left unspoken, the real reason they were together. Since Ash’s childhood Brij had existed to his friends as a shadowy figure often ‘away at a conference’ or ‘on call’ or just absent and unaccounted for. Even though Matt had seen Brij for his apnea their relationship had never progressed beyond the clinical, as far as Ash knew. So with no point of entry, what could anyone say? Besides, they’d long ago established that trauma was best tiptoed around like a coiled snake, its bite numbed with booze.
Packing it in, see you tmro, came Sherene’s reply. Don’t drink too much! XO
Ash returned his attention to the TV. Though he knew nothing about martial arts of any stripe—and refused to trust anything that awarded merit by belt—the fight transfixed him. It was animalistic, but contained. Fierce, yet coyly intimate. And, as one man buried his face in the other’s neck, their grappling struck Ash as tender.
Sure you don’t want to rescue me? he wrote back.
Claiming to have recognized someone from his acting days, Matt went loping across the bar, arms out for a hug.
‘There he goes,’ said Chip. ‘Making friends.’
‘Or foes.’ Ash checked his messages: nothing. With Matt gone, the space between Ash and Chip seemed to contract. They watched the fight together for a bit, then Chip handed Ash his Blackberry to admire some photos of his son. Ash obediently thumbed through a dozen blurry selfies.
‘See the one at the Raptors’ game? Got courtside and everything.’
‘Cool,’ said Ash, returning the phone. ‘How old is he now?’
‘Ten! Grade five, can you believe it?’
‘Wow.’
‘Puberty, man. It’s happening. Pretty soon he’ll be chasing girls around.’
‘Right.’ Ash drank. ‘Otherwise though? Things are good?’
‘One sec.’ Chip keyed out a message and set his phone beside his glass. ‘Ty’s alone at the hotel so I can’t stay long. I mean, he’s fine, he’s a big boy. I just can’t get too drunk.’
Matt returned with a fistful of shots. ‘Wasn’t who I thought it was, but such a great dude! I told him my buddy’s dad just died and he bought us a round of tequilas.’
Across the bar, some guy in a backwards visor shot Ash a thumbs-up.
‘No salt, no lemon, no pussying out,’ growled Matt. ‘Just down the hatch.’
Ash tipped it back: the wince, the burn, the shudder.
‘Horrible,’ moaned Chip.
The table of francophones beside them cheered and Matt high-fived each man in turn. ‘Where’s Claudine? More drinks for my gar-sawns here!’ Matt roared and beat his chest. ‘Holy frig, boys, I feel so alive tonight. And my finger barely hurts or anything.’
ON TV THE FIGHT ENDED. Someone had won. Ash watched, mesmerized, as one bloodied, battered man had his hands lifted in a kind of coerced triumph. The look in his eyes, while trainers and media thronged around him, was blank and lifeless.
‘Dhar!’ Matt clapped him on the back. ‘Get in here for a photo.’
Claudine framed the three friends with Chip’s camera phone. At the last second Matt took Ash’s hand and placed it on his arm. ‘Just like your dad and his boyfriend.’
‘Stop it.’
‘I nearly forgot,’ said Matt. ‘Guess what our brown buddy here did earlier, Chip.’
‘Please,’ said Ash, ‘don’t.’
Chip leaned in. ‘Go on.’
‘We hit one of the clubs on Saint Kat-treen, I buy this guy a dons-con-tack, and—get this—oh man!—what a champ!—he tries to suck face with the stripper!’
‘We didn’t suck face.’
‘What was it then? A peck on the cheek? That’s even creepier.’
Chip slapped the table. ‘You never been to the peelers before, Ash?’
‘Are you kidding? Ash has a history of blowing it at the nudie bar,’ hollered Matt. ‘Literally, first time I took him? Busted a nut in his pants, stashed his dirty gitch in the back of the toilet and spent the rest of the day at school bare-balling it in his Levi’s.’ Everyone howled—even the Quebecers at the neighbouring table.
Ash sunk his face into his hands. Though a part of him was relieved: playing the fool provided a function.
Matt slung an arm around him. ‘Aw, I only rib you because I love you.’
‘This is what love is? I’d hate to be your enemy.’
Claudine returned with another tray of shots. As she placed them on the table, Matt casually touched her forearm. ‘Mare-see bow-coupe, sherry.’ He slammed one back and pounded the table and jumped to his feet and announced, ‘Gotta go see a man about a horse, i.e. me taking a horse-sized piss.’
Ash watched him go, shooting double-guns at strangers: hi there, cross me and die.
Chip checked his phone. ‘I should get going. Want my tequila?’
Ash gulped Chip’s shot, then his own.
‘Tough guy, eh?’
Eyes watering, Ash looked away. ‘I’m not sure if you saw,’ he said, ‘but there was an older lady in a scarf at my dad’s…thing.’
‘Okay.’
‘Well, Matt fooled around with her.’
‘Making memories as always!’
‘What, are you impressed? She’s like seventy years old!’
‘This is the dude who had a threesome the night of his mom’s funeral, keep in mind.’
Ash shook his head.
‘Though who can blame him,’ said Chip. ‘I can’t imagine my kid finding me like that.’
Ash stared. ‘What do you mean?’
‘In the garage?’
‘What?’
Chip leaned in. ‘You didn’t know?’
‘He found her? Matt was the one who found her?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Jesus.’
Ash looked across the bar at the bathroom door. Matt refused to wash his hands in public restrooms, convinced that passing them under the hand dryer was somehow more hygienic. Ash pictured him thumping the button, wet fingers whisking the hot air, a smirk of pity at the fools scrubbing away in the sinks, then breezing back into the bar on the stink of steamed urine. There had once been a time when his friend’s follies would cheer him. Now, more than ever, they seemed pathological.
‘Don’t say anything,’ said Chip.
‘I wasn’t going to! God, do you think—’
‘He’s coming.’
Matt loped back across the bar, bald head glistening. ‘Seriously, Ash,’ said Chip, his voice forlorn. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t know.’
Matt loomed over the table. ‘You maggots talking about me?’
‘As if,’ said Ash. ‘We’ve got better stuff to—’
‘Just about how well you’re doing,’ said Chip. ‘How yourself you seem.’
Matt nodded. ‘I am. I really am. Dropped finger aside, I mean.’ But he seemed suspicious, didn’t sit down.
Again Chip offered a reprieve: ‘So how’s life out west? Any stories?’
‘Funny you should ask,’ Matt said, at last sliding into his chair. ‘I told myself I’d be good once school started. Buckle down, study. Turn my life around.’
‘But not until school started,’ said Ash.
‘Exactly. So I had a week.’
‘Uh-oh,’ said Chip. ‘A whole week!’
That’s like four months in human years, Ash thought, but said nothing.
Matt gestured to the neighbouring table. ‘Maize-ameez,’ he said, ‘aycoot-mwah. Here’s one I bet you’ve never heard before: how I really got this dropped finger.’
As his old friend commanded the crowd, Ash observed him as he might an adversary, searching for weakness. Not to strike. Just for a glimpse of the sorrow beneath that manic facade. But Matt was too good a storyteller, his voice swelling with drama and joy, and Ash quickly joined the rapt audience (Chip, the Quebecers, Claudine, a few intrigued outliers), seeing the guy as they did: a nutcase, but loveable enough in his madcap way, eyes lingering on each listener to ensure they felt connected. What a story! Ridiculous, improbable. And, to a point, possibly even true.
‘So there I am,’ Matt narrated, ‘wrist-deep in my own arse, and the door swings open and who’s standing there but my frigging landlord.’
Everyone roared. Even Ash. This should have been the kicker, a good place to stop. But Matt wouldn’t concede the stage. He shifted into a ‘Pakistani’ accent: ‘ “Mister Matthew sir, please-please are you knowing your rent is due?” ’
Too performed, too needy. Also a touch too racist. Ash sensed Matt’s audience withdrawing. As the story slid from fact to fiction, he was losing them.
‘So I tear my fist out of my rectum’—Matt raised his hand: the evidence—‘and my ring catches on my sphincter. Tears it open. Poop everywhere.’ His eyes flashed from face to face to gauge how this played.
The laughter was hesitant, perfunctory. Someone coughed. Claudine looked over her shoulder. For an out, an escape.
Matt blundered on: ‘Poop down my legs, poop up my arm…A literal poop-storm.’
Chip giggled. But he was alone.
‘I’m frigging drenched in the stuff!’ he cried. ‘And what’d I eat the night before? Chinese food. So there’s this gross sweet and sour sauce poop, and egg noodle poop, and wonton soup poop everywhere and this guy’s just staring at me, he’s probably going to evict me. And I don’t know anyone in Kelowna, I’ve got nowhere else to go…’
Ash filled Matt’s glass, pushed the fresh beer toward him. But it was ignored.
‘And my finger!’ Matt held it up again. ‘Tore the ligament right through!’
Claudine was gone. Chip was texting. One of the Quebecers stood and clapped Matt on the shoulder on his way to the bathroom. ‘Great story, man.’
Matt shook his head. Chugged his pint—all of it. Refilled his glass. Stared at some point just past the edge of the table. Drank. Nodded emphatically.
‘Craziest part?’ he said, turning intently to Ash. ‘Every single word is true.’
THE REST OF NIGHT became something that Ash could later recall only as dubious flashes of sights and sound. Had he really collapsed in tears against a payphone? Did Matt have to shush him when he began lipping the Quebecers at the next table? Was it really ‘Vive le Canada!’ he’d been chanting? As the bar-lights went on and the stools went up, had Ash actually been carried out by Matt on one side and an eye-rolling bouncer on the other?
And then a window of clarity. Ash was standing in the snow.
‘Check this out,’ said Matt, tilting his head back, mouth open.
Ash did it too: flakes sizzled on his tongue. The view above turned vertiginous, astral, less a snowfall than a plunge through the cosmos. Ash closed his eyes. The world reeled. Matt caught him before he hit the ground.
Then, something else—food, maybe? Mustard and meat, the glare of some all-night diner. The edges of this folded inward and everything ceased to exist for a while. Next thing he knew Ash was in the backseat of a taxi with his head lolling against the window and the cabbie eyeing him in the rear-view.
‘Eel-ay-bun!’ cried Matt. ‘Nuh-vomay-pah!’
The taxi merged onto the 20, launching out of the glitter and hum of the city into a stiller sort of night. The snow here seemed thicker, more determined.
‘So,’ said Matt, ‘Chip seemed pretty good.’
Even the thought of speaking made Ash’s stomach lurch. A perilous clot of spit had collected in the back of this throat. Let it be or swallow it down? Fearing the worst, he spat into his hand and deposited the results in his pocket.
‘Classy,’ said Matt.
Ash closed his eyes, ducked his head between his knees.
‘Easy now,’ said Matt, rubbing his back: gentle, clockwise circles from shoulder blades to tailbone.
The hand lifted, seemed to remove some nausea with it. Ash straightened.
‘If you’re gonna hurl,’ said Matt, opening his toque under Ash’s chin, ‘aim in here.’
‘I’m fine,’ said Ash, pushing it away.
They were passing the low-rise grid of St-Henri, cathedral domes blooming like tumours. A neighbourhood Brij had pronounced Sent Ennui.
‘So where are you from?’ Matt called into the front seat.
‘I?’ said the cabbie. (Mahmoud Abdurrahman, according to his tags.) ‘From Pakistan.’
‘Cool,’ said Matt. ‘My buddy here’s Kashmirian.’
‘My dad is,’ clarified Ash.
‘Indian side?’ said the driver.
‘Where your…’ Words were hard. Ash tried again: ‘Where in Pakistan?’
‘From Peshawar. You know Peshawar?’
‘Is that far from Kashmir?’ said Matt.
‘Afghanistan is closer.’ The cabbie turned down the radio. ‘You speak Kashmiri?’
‘When I was a kid,’ Ash slurred, dimly aware this was untrue. ‘I forget it now.’
‘Kashmir is very beautiful,’ said the cabbie.
‘Should we go?’ said Matt, tilting forward. ‘Me and my friend, here?’
‘To Kashmir? Can be dangerous.’ Mahmoud Abdurrahman eyed Ash in the rearview. The particularities of this danger were contentious; clearly he didn’t want to say the wrong thing and compromise his tip.
‘What about the pilgrimage?’ said Matt.
Ash kicked him in the ankle. Don’t, he mouthed.
‘Sir?’
Matt rolled his eyes. ‘What about the women, I said.’
‘Yes! My wife and I went for our honeymoon and stayed on a houseboat. The floating markets, the mountains, the shikaras, the food—the people! So kind, so hospitable. She was very happy there. Wonderful place. Paradise on earth.’
‘Okay,’ said Ash.
‘Your father is from Srinagar?’
‘Yeah.’
‘But he lives now in Montreal?’
Ash sensed Matt watching him. ‘Montreal, yeah.’
‘Do you go back with him, to visit?’
Ash shook his head. The conversation swirled around him. He felt less a participant than its hostage.
‘Well, you should go. That would be a very nice trip, you and your father.’
‘He’s right,’ said Matt, nudging Ash. ‘It would be.’
That was it. Darkness engulfed the rest of the ride to the hotel, the walk to their room, the path to sleep, and the next morning Ash awoke with his shoes on and a shadowy murk where the previous night’s memories should have been. Also a raging headache, a lurching stomach, and a first pee shocking for its colour and smell: pennies.
‘Morning!’ Matt cried from his bed. ‘Forty-five minutes until SLAW!’
Ash managed not to vomit until Matt fed him a strawberry smoothie, and the subsequent, Pepto-Bismol-coloured expulsions weakened gradually to coarse, wracked hacking. Then he showered and, throat scorched and bleary-eyed and full of self-hatred, dragged himself through the snow to Matt’s truck by 10:30.
‘If it’s fine by you,’ said Matt, lighting his one-hitter on the way out of the parking lot, ‘I’ll just drop you off at the restaurant and hit an IHOP or something? Don’t really need to see Barbara again. We had our time.’
Ash pressed his cheek to the window. The glass was cold, clean, punishing. ‘Kill me now. I feel like someone worked a hand-mixer through my brain.’
Down the 20 they went, back into the city. Traffic was solid, and Matt weaved and zagged across all three lanes: any opening was a chance to get ahead, to win.
‘Pretty crazy night,’ said Matt.
‘Can you drive normally, please? Unless you want my guts all over your dash.’
‘Don’t blame me, hero. Got to a point last night where I couldn’t have stopped you if I wanted.’ He chuckled. ‘Let’s just hope that video doesn’t turn up anywhere.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Ash sat up. ‘What video?’
‘You don’t remember? One of those guys at the table beside us, after we went for food. Filming you on the street?’
‘Filming me? Why? What was I doing?’
‘Don’t worry about it. I’m sure—’
‘What was I doing?’
‘Honestly, it’s not a big deal. Just some frog with his cellphone. And it was dark, there’s no way to tell who you were or what you were doing.’
‘But what,’ said Ash, ‘was I doing?’
Matt lifted his fingers from the wheel in a gesture of abdication. Replaced them to lurch around a dawdling cube van. ‘Meh, you were drunk, you’re going through some stuff. We’ve all lost it after a few too many. You think I’ve never acted like an arsehole?’
‘I don’t think that, no. But what about me?’
‘Happens to the best of us, is what I’m saying. I mean, I’m no teddy bear’s picnic—’
‘Matt, holy shit. Just tell me what the fuck you’re talking about.’
‘You really don’t remember?’
‘Nothing. Tell me.’
He nodded, eyes on the road. ‘Okay.’
INSIDE THE RESTAURANT Ash was greeted, horrifyingly enough, by six people holding copies of his novel. Barbara Bloch indicated the seat, at the head of the table, from which he could be besieged from all angles.
‘He’s here!’ she announced.
To his dismay, the book club applauded.
Other than Barbara SLAW included Jerry, a woman in a fur hat of feral/Soviet lineage, which upon closer inspection turned out to be her hair. Across the table, the group’s ‘token man’ seemed straight from central librarian casting: reading glasses on a chain around his neck, grey moustache, sweater vest. ‘Honoured,’ he whispered with a neat tuck of his chin and a slow-blink.
Beside Jerry was ‘the writer of the group,’ as Barbara introduced her. ‘Interesting piece,’ this woman offered collegially. Her copy of Ash’s book appeared unread.
Second to last was a girl with a kind, open smile. She looked about twenty, hair chopped into an asymmetrical bob and stars tattooed on both wrists. Ash wondered if she might be Barbara’s daughter, dragged along with familial obligations.
‘Karina’s at McGill,’ said Barbara. ‘She found us on Facebook.’
‘Undergrad?’ said Ash.
‘Ha!’ said Barbara, perched behind the poor girl with her hands on her shoulders, as if presenting her for Ash’s assessment. ‘She’s here on a Fulbright. From Princeton.’
‘Sounds impressive,’ Karina said with a laugh, ‘until you hear my French.’
Ash smiled. He liked her. And her copy of his novel was thoroughly dog-eared. A decent, modest human being—and a real reader! His headache and shame eased a bit.
Finally, as a sort of afterthought, Barbara indicated an elderly woman at the end of the table so faded and gauzy she seemed crafted from dust. ‘Good for you, writing a book, something I’d always wanted to do,’ she rasped.
‘Well!’ said Barbara. ‘We’re so pleased you could come, Ash. Especially’—her face drooped into a mask of tragedy—‘considering the circumstances.’
Condolences rippled through the group.
‘Thanks,’ said Ash.
A waiter announcing the specials was interrupted. ‘He wrote this book,’ Barbara proclaimed, tapping her copy: the proof.
‘You?’ said the waiter, eyeing Ash, who shrugged and ordered French toast.
This merited Barbara’s approval: ‘They do a superb job of that here.’
Wine came. The librarian went for it with aplomb, filling his glass and tipping half its contents down his throat before anyone else had a turn with the bottle.
Barbara commanded a cheers. ‘To Ash Dhar,’ she said. ‘Our author.’
The writer knocked Ash’s glass especially hard. As Ash mopped the spill, he attempted to mollify her. ‘So, what sort of writing do you do?’
‘Mostly diptychs,’ he was told cryptically. And then she withdrew.
‘So,’ said Barbara, wagging Ash’s book in a faintly menacing way, ‘who will begin?’
‘I thought it was wonderful,’ said the elderly lady.
‘Thank you,’ said Ash.
She shook her head in awe. ‘I don’t know how you writers do it—type all those words, all the way to the end. Very impressive.’
Ash held his smile.
‘Who else? Jerry, you had some questions about sales?’
‘Yes,’ said a voice from beneath the stacked hair. ‘How many copies?’
Ash felt pressure, per Karina’s goodness and humility, to deflect this question. ‘I’d tell you,’ he joked, ‘but then I’d have to kill you.’
Too much. Six sets of eyes retreated to their plates. Save Karina, who hid her grin behind her drink. One ally, at least.
Barbara rallied: ‘Karina, you had some questions about what you thought to be some…misogyny.’ This she pronounced my, as if the sogyny were her own.
Ash turned his smile upon Karina, hoped it seemed hospitable and self-aware: misogyny, yes, of course. They were friends. Ash had read Cixous. They could talk!
‘Such a scary word, “misogyny,” ’ said Karina. ‘Not really where I’d hoped to start.’ Across the table the diptychian reached at the librarian. He handed over his reading glasses. They were married, Ash realized. A team.
Karina held Ash’s eyes steadily with her own. They glittered with intelligence. Ash thought of the alleged video from the night before. Perhaps it did exist. Perhaps it had been posted. Perhaps this young woman had seen it.
Ash itched to pull out his phone, to message Sherene: Help me, I’m being book clubbed! Instead he went for his wine. Swallowing took effort.
‘I mean,’ she said, ‘I want to understand your intentions before accusing you of anything. I believe that’s only fair.’
Ash tilted his head: of course, proceed.
‘I guess what I’m wondering is what you wanted the book to be about.’
‘About,’ said Ash.
Karina smiled. And waited. They were all waiting.
‘Well, it’s about a guy who—a harmless guy—’
‘How so, “harmless”?’
‘Oh, you know.’ Ash laughed, drank more wine. He was sweating. ‘I just mean not an exceptional person. Just, you know. Harmless?’
‘I’ve read interviews where you say the character is based on you.’
‘Oh?’ Ash felt like a trapped rabbit, snared and struggling and only further entangling itself.
‘So then, what about the love interest?’ Karina opened her book. ‘Here is she is—page thirty-two: “She dressed in revealing clothing, which her various fleshes swolled”—a new word to me—“and escaped.” It goes on: “Her brazen sexuality was as much a liberation from social strictures as it was from her own homeliness. The gelatinous cleavage, the dimpled buttocks, the great crests of flesh that heaped themselves over her waistband, these were grotesqueries, more a travesty of male desire than a rejection of it. And still he loved her.” ’ Karina looked up. ‘ “Still.” Is that meant to be somehow…generous?’
From the end of the table, the old lady’s cackle sounded like a goose being throttled.
Karina continued: ‘This is based on someone you loved? Or someone you once loved, maybe, who left you, so you’re getting some sort of—sorry—revenge?’
‘No! That’s not the intention at all.’
‘Hey, come on,’ Karina’s voice was soft, assured. She reached across the table toward him. ‘I’m not accusing you. I’m just trying to understand.’
‘Sounds like my-sogyny to me,’ said Barbara. The diptychian snorted.
Ash looked to the exit, imagined Matt crashing through the plate-glass window with his pickup, hauling Ash to freedom, saving the day.
Karina flipped to a new page: ‘ “He’d never understood her, never gotten a sense of how to negotiate her various moods and cycles and faintly amphibious smells.” ’
‘Can I see your book?’ Ash croaked at Barbara.
‘No,’ she said, clutching it to her chest. ‘I’m using it.’
All goodwill around the table had vanished. Karina read another excerpt; everyone listened with fealty and reverence. And hearing his own words—careless words, despicable words—Ash began to share SLAW’S disgust. The book had long embarrassed him as a document of youth, like a school photo that captured some especially flagrant hairstyle. It was something, too, that he and Sherene never discussed; he’d always got the sense she didn’t think much of it. But now he felt confronted with something essential and harder to disavow: he was a vindictive creep, a sogynist of everyone’s, and his book was the proof. And there might be recent video evidence, too.
Worst of all was Katrina’s benevolence. She parroted his insipid words with a compassionate smile. She seemed to believe she was doing Ash a favour, revealing this truth about himself to which he’d been oblivious. And as her oration concluded and the old lady actually nudged Ash’s book away, he felt looked upon not with revulsion, or even disappointment, but mercy.
‘So, again,’ said Karina, ‘I don’t want to point any fingers. I just thought this might be a chance for you to clear the air.’
Everyone stared at him. An explanation or apology was due.
The French toast arrived, saving him momentarily. ‘Wow, looks great,’ Ash squawked, and filled his mouth.
‘I think,’ said the librarian, ‘that we might need to separate the character in the novel from the author.’
Ash glanced up, chewing. Not an escape route he’d considered.
‘Of course you take his side,’ said the diptychian. ‘You men always stick together.’
Shit. The guy’s breadcrumb trail to salvation only indicted Ash further!
‘And it’s based on himself,’ said Jerry. ‘He told us so.’
‘Exactly,’ said Barbara. She had forced this loathsome sexist upon the group and, honour on the line, was trying to distance herself from him entirely.
Ash lifted a hand to wipe his forehead—the hand that held a fork of sopping toast; syrup dripped down his shirtfront. He searched for his napkin. Discovered it at his feet like a dead and trampled dove.
All eyes were upon him. Ash fondled his phone in his pocket.
‘Maybe that’s enough now,’ whispered Barbara. ‘The boy’s father did just die.’
Everyone eased back from the table as if his grief might be contagious. Croissants were buttered, coffee was sipped. And ‘the boy,’ mercied upon his dad’s grave, poked his French toast, which had congealed to a doughy lump on his plate.
When he looked up, Barbara was smiling at him with strained charity. ‘I so enjoy our club’s ability to have these frank discussions,’ she said.
Ash pictured her dress hiked to her waist, Matt with his pants around his ankles. At his father’s funeral. And now she had the gall to take the moral high ground. His humiliation developed edges, needling outward—but Barbara was moving in again.
‘There’s just one more thing I have to ask.’ She placed a cold, thin hand atop his. ‘Tell me, Ash: what are you working on now?’
IT HAD BEEN YEARS since Ash had visited the Montreal studios. So much orange, so much brown, so much tinted, bevelled glass. The design seemed based on a 1970s notion of what a spaceship might one day appreciate looking like, provided the future were locked in some perennial, analogue autumn of carpeted walls and LSD.
‘Kind of a porno set vibe in here,’ said Matt, and played some slinky slap-bass on his leg while he and Ash waited to be buzzed through security.
Ash was cleared and stickered, but, they were informed, since no guest had been pre-authorized, his friend would not be admitted inside. Matt eyed Ash from other side of the turnstiles with the look of a refugee.
Sherene was summoned. She came gliding across the lobby, dressed to the nines as always and moving with an ease and confidence that suggested an enviable serenity in the world. She hugged Ash and stood back, smiling, seemingly glad to see him. And for a moment he felt redeemed.
But then it all collapsed: ‘You look terrible.’
‘I told you last night to come rescue me!’
She held his eyes. ‘You sure you want to do this? If it’s too much right now—’
‘It’s fine,’ said Ash. ‘Though there is one problem. Can you get my buddy in?’
‘You brought someone?’ said Sherene. Matt, leaning on the security desk, lifted a peace sign in salutation. She turned Ash away by the elbow, spoke in a hushed voice. ‘Sweetie, this isn’t my building. They’ve already given me a hard enough time about booking studio time.’
So it fell to Ash to tell his friend he wasn’t welcome. ‘I’ll be an hour,’ he said. ‘And then we can go do whatever you want.’
But something had been triggered; Matt’s eyes were skittering back and forth. ‘This is BS. I’m your best friend.’
Before Ash knew what was happening, Matt had launched himself halfway over the desk to grab a handful of the security guard’s uniform. ‘Who do you think you are?’ he roared, rattling the guy by the lapels. ‘My taxes pay your salary! But when I try to come in here to audition or hang out with my friend, I’m suddenly human garbage?’
‘Stop it before you get Tasered or something,’ Ash begged, shooting an apologetic look at Sherene. But she was on the phone for, he assumed, backup.
Grudgingly Matt relented, lowering the guy and shaking his head. He turned on Ash, a fat sausage of a finger wagging at him from the far side of the turnstiles. ‘I drove across the country for you, Dhar, and what do you do? Act like I’m your chauffeur.’
‘Hey, come on—’
But Matt waved him off, turned his back, and stormed out of the building, leaving Ash in a swirl of guilt, disgrace and relief. Also bewilderment: what had just happened?
He turned to Sherene, who looked as stunned as he felt.
‘So,’ she said, ‘that’s a friend of yours?’
‘From childhood. Not someone I see much anymore.’
‘Whoever he is, he’s certainly got a thing for you.’ Sherene checked her watch. ‘Anyway, sweetie, let’s get a move on. We’ve got a Behemoth to interview.’
Ash was led down a memorabilia-lined hallway to their borrowed studio. By the console was Sherene’s copy of Into the Night, the spine bowed and cracked, a rainbow of Post-its sprouting from the pages.
‘I’ll need to borrow this,’ he said. ‘Left my copy in the car.’
‘Did you at least get the script I emailed you?’
‘Shoot,’ said Ash. ‘Sorry, I forgot that too.’
She pulled one free from a clipboard. Ash glanced over her questions. Looked up. ‘Thanks for doing this. Just, with this whole week—’
She waved it away. ‘Good thing, is all, that you had so long with the book.’
‘Yeah, about that…’
‘Ash!’
‘I read some of it!’
‘How much?’
‘The first…part.’
‘Did you get to the flood at least?’
‘Flood?’
Frowning, Sherene filled him in quickly. ‘Which,’ she concluded, ‘happens at the end of the first part.’
‘Sorry, just, the thing is? I found something Brij was writing.’ It was a cheap shot but Ash felt cornered. ‘And I read it instead. It felt…like he was back with me, for a bit.’
‘Your dad wrote a book? What about?’
Ash gave her the gist.
‘Wow, my old man gets up the wherewithal to write me a birthday card and I fly over the moon.’ Sherene shook this thought away and looked at him with a new kind of focus. She sighed, took his hands in hers. ‘Oh, Ash. I’m sorry for not being much support lately. With your dad and everything. Work’s no excuse. I’ve been a bad friend.’
‘It’s okay.’ Ash allowed himself to be petted. ‘Anyway—The Behemoth, right?’
‘Okay, but let’s talk about this later. Lunch when we’re back in Toronto, maybe?’ She released his hands and glanced again at her watch. ‘We have to get a move on, but please don’t worry too much about the book. I’ve listened to a dozen interviews with this guy and holy does he like to talk. Just stick to the script and sweetie? You’ll be fine.’
Ash spent a few minutes pairing Sherene’s prompts with page numbers, dog-earing as he went. But his thoughts kept caroming back to Matt’s breakdown, to the book club disaster, to the possible ignominies of the night before: all connected. Ash rolled over to the studio’s computer and searched for the alleged video—Hotdog steam, Un con soul et son pen, etc. Nothing. Ash Dhar, of course, returned no recent hits at all. He hoped it stayed that way. Not being famous was infinitely better than sudden, disgraceful infamy.
A voice materialized in his headphones: ‘Okay, Ash. He’s on the phone. As soon as you’re done checking your email I’ll put him through.’
So harsh, so business. Where was the love? Matt, Sherene—on their lives went; Ash’s sorrows were his alone. And now like a penned bull The Behemoth lurked on the end of the line, a man’s man who trampled the frail and left a trail of ruined bodies in his dust. Best to play the matador, sword bared for the death blow.
Ash rolled up to the microphone. ‘Let’s do this.’
‘Here he is.’
Ash opened with an ad lib: ‘I’m quite enjoying your book.’ (The gerund indicating that he hadn’t bothered to finish it; ‘quite’ to suggest not really.)
These nuances were ignored: ‘Appreciated.’
In the booth Sherene held up the script. Ash gave her the thumbs-up and returned to it: ‘Can you tell me about the main character?’
‘Hardwick? He just came to me: “You need to tell my story.” ’
‘So he isn’t based on you?’
‘Well, we have certain commonalities, sure. He’s a guy, I’m a guy. About my age. Military background. Talks like me. Maybe even kind of looks like me. But writers should never treat their characters as proxies for some personal agenda. A writer’s job is to honour the reader, and to do that one must write in service of the reader.’
On it went. Ash asked a question, The Behemoth monologued, and on they moved to the next talking point. Although Ash wasn’t really listening, he sensed impatience in The Behemoth’s replies: same old, same old. So he thought to shake things up bit.
‘Your character kills his wife and child. In a fire.’
‘He does.’
‘What’s that about?’
‘Well, he loses it. This is a guy, keep in mind, who’s experienced trauma. Real trauma. Not just I-didn’t-get-the-promotion-I-want trauma. And there are no mechanisms for him to deal with that trauma. So he implodes. And his implosion is so severe that he takes down with him the only people who might have kept him afloat.’
‘A woman. And a child.’
‘Yes.’
‘Isn’t that a bit manipulative? Cruel, even?’
‘What fiction isn’t manipulative? The whole enterprise of the novel is simply one scheme of manipulation upon another. But I don’t think it’s cruel. I don’t approach my characters or readers with cruelty.’
‘It’s not cruel to burn people alive?’
‘Of course it’s cruel to burn people alive.’ The words were sharp, fairly spat down the line. ‘In what scenario would that not be an act of cruelty? To fictionalize that sort of trauma, though, is something else. To use it—’
‘To use the death of a woman and child?’ Sherene was glaring at Ash through the glass. But they were jousting now. Ash puffed himself up and went for the kill: ‘Some might suggest that sounds…misogynistic.’
‘Sorry, what does?’
‘Exploiting women for the sake of a story.’
Sherene was sawing a hand across her throat.
‘Exploiting,’ echoed The Behemoth, in a voice like low thunder.
Ash went on to critique the dead wife’s characterization: a type, a victim, a sacrifice for the sake of the male hero’s personal journey. He was on a roll. The Behemoth remained silent. Humbled, probably. ‘You talk about how the writer should disavow control, but the truth is you’re totally in control. And you have a responsibility—’
‘Oh, boy,’ sighed The Behemoth.
‘A responsibility,’ continued Ash, ‘to whomever you’re representing. Don’t you think.’
‘No.’
The air went dead around that no. Sherene buried her face in her hands.
‘Yet here you are,’ continued Ash, ‘doing the man’s man writer thing. The Hemingway pose. Fisticuffs and whiskey and killing off women and whatever else. I mean, wasn’t this whole thing a little played out fifty years ago?’
Silence.
Ash flailed forward with his attack: ‘And this whole ridiculous performance of masculinity, of men who fail in relation to this dumb imagined ideal of manhood. It’s absurd. A man kills his woman so he’s got to drink hard and fight hard and fuck hard and chop wood and build a cabin and kill a bear and gut a bear and wear the bearskin as a cloak so he can walk among the bears and kill them all, one by one—’
‘Okay!’ Sherene’s voice severed Ash’s rant like a blade. ‘We’re done here.’
A click. The line went dead. The On-Air light extinguished. Ash panted, breathless.
‘What the hell,’ said Sherene, ‘was that?’
‘He wrote a bullshit book!’
‘Did you not read my notes? Or anything about this guy? He lost his wife and child, Ash. In a car crash. He was driving.’
‘What.’
Ash stared at The Behemoth’s author photo: that look in the eyes he’d mistaken for machismo struck him now as melancholy. Ash felt suffocated. And then the feeling flared into rage. He swung his legs up from under the desk and kicked the computer screen. There was a cracking sound; it buckled, the display went scrambled and wild.
Ash met Sherene’s eyes through the glass. ‘What?’
She stared back with a look of not shock or anger, but dismay.
A bodily, almost cellular fatigue rose up from within him then. Something profound from some place beyond sleeplessness. The computer screen, sagging, buzzed and flickered. Ash removed the cans from his ears. Closed his eyes. Bowed his head.
What had he done?
THE COBBLESTONE STREETS and stone buildings of the Old Port looked like a film set. As Matt drove them past the cathedral, what was supposed to be the most authentic part of the city struck Ash as contrived. Here the past seemed artificially preserved, and time prevented its natural rot and decay.
Even so, he stared out the window. Immediately upon getting in the truck, Ash had noticed that the knuckles on Matt’s right hand, gripping the steering wheel, were split and bloody. Whether from a wall or door or someone’s face, he couldn’t say. And still hadn’t asked. Neither of them had yet to speak.
A ramp sloped down into the tunnel. Driving into it, with the neon lights rising up and strobing past, seemed less like locomotion than time travel—back to the future, thought Ash. Or at least to the here and now, such as it was.
And then they were bursting out the other end into the light again.
‘Straight to the hotel?’ said Matt. (Sir, he seemed to imply.)
Ash told him yes.
The rest of the ride continued in tense silence, heightened by Matt’s atypically careful driving: full stops and shoulder-checks and the speed limit met like a pact. By the time they reached the airport hotel, jumbo jets screaming by above, Ash realized what was going on. There was no conversation to be had. Matt had been wronged and had likely enacted some disproportionate wrong of his own. And now he was leaving.
Forgoing the parking lot, he drove up to the lobby doors.
‘Not coming in?’
‘Nah.’ Matt stared through the windshield. ‘I should get back.’
‘What about your finger?’
‘Not to BC. Home. To London. Be good to see some people.’
‘The people you moved out west to escape, you mean.’
‘They’re still my friends, Ash.’ Matt reached for his one-hitter from the cup-holder—and resisted. ‘Feel free to take a toot for the road if you want,’ he said, gesturing.
‘I’m good.’
‘Cool.’
The engine was running, the truck still in drive.
‘Is this it, then?’ said Ash. ‘When do I see you next?’
‘I’ll be around. Always am.’
‘Making memories?’
‘Something like that.’
No joke followed. Ash looked out the window: in the hotel’s lobby, someone wheeled past waxing the floors. He turned back and attempted a final salvo: ‘Listen, if you’re going to stick around Ontario for a while, you should come by the Toronto studios. Get you a tour, whatever you want. Sit in the big desk, even?’
Matt flexed his fingers on the steering wheel. The blood was scabbing darkly over his knuckles. ‘Sounds awesome, bro.’
‘Really sorry about earlier—’
‘Honestly?’ Matt’s voice was a growl. ‘Just shut up, for once. Okay?’
Ash went still. Every so often, the guy could still scare him.
But then Matt’s demeanour changed completely: his shoulders slackened, he put the truck in park, killed the engine. And turned to face his friend. ‘What I mean is, be quiet for a sec. There’s something I remembered I wanted to tell you, before I go.’ Ash nodded, wary of the impending revelation. Something horrific, surely, with a preamble such as this.
‘So, here it is. The last appointment I had with your dad in London, he told me this story about you when you were a kid. But he got angry telling it, like it was happening all over again.’
A little blast of air escaped Ash’s nostrils, a reluctant laugh. Brij could never just tell a story. He had to relive it.
‘Do you remember this? You guys went to India together. You were ten, I think. When you left Canada your dad had a big beard—it’s funny, I remember afterward not recognizing him when you guys came home.’
‘That trip was right around the time he and my mom split.’
‘And I last heard from my dad. Grade five.’
‘So, yeah, I would have been ten.’
Matt nodded. ‘I guess it was real hot in India, too hot to have a beard. So after a few days he was just like, “Gotta shave this thing off.” And I can totally picture your pops in a rage, all sweaty and swearing and hacking it off with like a steak knife or something.’ This is exactly how Ash imagined it too: the itch, the complaints, the blistering irritation that would have burst in drastic, panicked action. Yet the other person in the story, that ten-year-old version of himself—he couldn’t see that person at all.
‘You guys have been there like a week, visiting family, and he’s shaved off his beard, and now you have to fly from one place to…Kashmir, maybe?’
‘Doubt it. This would have been right around when things were getting really dicey. And I haven’t been to Kashmir since I was tiny.’
‘Well, wherever you were going, you didn’t get there.’ Matt grinned. ‘Because, get this. You’re in line with your dad at the airport, you get to the counter and the security dude asks to see your passports. Except in your dad’s picture he’s got this massive beard. Buddy looks at the picture, at your dad, and goes, “Kashmiri?” And Brij goes, “Canadian.” And the guy goes, “No, Dhar. Kashmiri.” Remember what happened next?’
Ash did not. But this story was loosening something. Not a memory. He couldn’t shake the image of Brij and Matt, together, rehashing a past that had escaped him.
‘This is the point where you—you little poop-disturber—pipe up and scream, “He’s not my dad, he’s a terrorist.” ’
‘No!’
‘Honestly. As you can imagine the security people all go on high alert and snatch up your pops and take him off for interrogation. Full strip-and-cavity search, latex gloves and probes up the pooper and everything.’
‘He told you this?’
Matt laughed. ‘Nah, but you of all people should appreciate a little artistic licence.’
‘What about the rest of this story? Are you sure it’s true?’
‘Just telling you what your dad told me, bro. Anyhow, so he has to show all these documents proving who he is, and they call the consulate and it’s hours later before he sees you again, so you miss your flight, and he is royally pissed at you, but of course he has to act like he’s your loving dad because the security people are still watching.’
‘That’s funny in itself.’
‘Once you leave the airport he asks you why you would have done something so stupid. Like, were you mad at him, were you trying to get back at him? He was really honest with me in this part.’
‘Just sitting there in his office?’
‘Uh-huh. He talked about how he and your mom were divorcing, and he’d taken you to India to connect with that side of your family, and him too, I guess, in a way. So you selling him out felt like a real kick in the nards.’
‘Where was all this when I was writing his fucking eulogy?’
‘Honestly? Seemed like he was only telling me this so I’d tell you.’
‘Then why didn’t you!’
‘I am, bro. I’m telling you now.’
Ash looked out the window: the hotel lobby was empty. Back at Matt. Whose eyebrows vaulted nearly clear off his forehead.
‘Dhar, listen.’ It sounded like a plea. ‘What you told him? When he asked why you’d said that? You weren’t mad. It wasn’t revenge or you punishing him or anything. Get this: all you said was, “I wanted to make something happen.” ’
‘I said that?’
‘One hundred percent. Right away I was like, “Yeah, I feel you, Doc, he was a maniac when we were kids too! Always stirring up stuff, causing trouble.” You and me, Dhar. Making memories.’ Matt’s expression shifted from wistful to sombre. He leaned into the space between their seats, his bald head looming like a rising moon. ‘What I’m wondering, though, bro? Is what made you stop?’