Dora Borealis: A Novel

Dora Borealis a novel

Daccia Bloomfield

ECW Press

Copyright © Daccia Bloomfield,  Published by ECW Press,  Queen Street East, Suite , Toronto, Ontario, Canada   .. ⁄ [email protected] All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press.

       Bloomfield, Daccia Dora Borealis: a novel / Daccia Bloomfield. “a misFit book.”  ---- . Title. . 

 .

--

Editors for the press: Michael Holmes / Crissy Boylan / a misFit book Type: Rachel Brooks Printing: Coach House Printing This book is set in Columbus MT, Tribute and Fil Sans The publication of Dora Borealis has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested . million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, by the Ontario Arts Council, by the Government of Ontario through Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit, by the OMDC Book Fund, an initiative of the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and by the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program ().

    

for my father

Dora Borealis

1

You went on and on and on and on, and of course I was grateful. You introduced yourself, and I liked your leggings. Because I liked them, we had a conversation about them. We talked about how much I liked them — their colour, their length, their opacity, the interesting pattern turning roses around and around the length of your nice toned thigh, how they were different from every other pair of leggings I had ever seen. Next, we talked about how in early November, you went to the trouble of dressing up as a fashion victim for a late Halloween party. We talked about how nobody got your costume, about how everybody thought you were just a drowned hipster, and about how that was more or less the same thing. — And isn’t it? — Right after that, we had to start the introductions over again, because really, it’s impossible to remember anybody’s name the first time you hear it.

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Your charm was tactile and rendered precisely (and in a tight pattern) by what stands in for genuine warmth these days — knitting, of course. I recognized two lines of knit and two lines of purl. You were inquisitive but not impolite. And you were in your clothes completely, leaning softly against one of the solid wood posts in Lamb’s new grown-up apartment. “How did you break your leg?” “Walking.” “I’m almost finished with this oversized sweater.” “It’s pretty big.” “Yeah.” I considered your size in relation to the red sweater. The repetition of your movements, click and click and click, seemed to soften out your corners. “It’s supposed to be big.” There was no edge to this. You carefully and quickly swung the knitting around and started the next line. You didn’t seem to have to think about it — knowledge put to use, recruited muscle memory. Non-knitters and knitters can be friends because of a thing called imagination. Your hands fell to your knees. You allowed your work to rest as a blanket over your legs. “This sweater will go with these leggings. Do you think cashmere is extravagant?” “Not necessarily. But maybe that much of it is.” You laughed. “No, dummy. Nobody would make an oversized sweater out of cashmere. That would be totally expensive.” “What’s the cashmere for, then?” I asked. “It’s for a tiny, precious white hat I’m working on.” You said tiny and precious the way girls at art school say intimate, transnationalism

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and inclusive — exactly as if you had just learned the word as part of a code and were eager to try it out. “What?” you asked. “Sorry — it’s just warm in here.” I could feel the outline of a bead of sweat on my back. You held up button samples. “Brown or red?” “Brown,” I said. “No-brainer. I like how shiny they are.” You didn’t want to talk about anything but your sweater. You pressed the button against the knit, then corrected, trying it for placement. Your eyes never left your hands. “I think I’m going to try to go to the country,” I said. “You know, like, to get away. Maybe in a week or two. Or maybe I’ll just get a room somewhere.” “I like the country,” you said. “Cool,” I said. “I’m not sure if brown is right for this red yarn, though. Do you really think so?” “I don’t know,” I said, because I really didn’t. “But I think the country would be kind of good for me.” You stared at me blankly. “Why? You don’t need to travel to relax.” “What?” “Imagine a forest.” “What?” “Just close your eyes, take a deep breath, and on the exhalation count of six, imagine a forest. If you imagine a forest, it’s as good as being there.” You put your hand down flat on the sweater-in-progress. “I don’t know if I agree with that. But can I get you something to eat?” I stood up. I took up my crutch and started to move towards the food. Next to the table was a girl.

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“Maybe some of that cake,” you said, pointing. “That is a gorgeous ganache.” You know how to make a cake. And you are okay with saying things like “gorgeous ganache,” aren’t you? And it was a gorgeous ganache, wasn’t it? The backstory goes: Lamb made that cake, while I watched. What a whore of a cake it was, too: shiny, brown–black and beaded with its own sweat. I cut a piece for you and I heard somebody say, “I love chocolate.” (Love is one of those words that self-capitalizes. Think “love.” All of a sudden it’s got a big L on it, doesn’t it? Why not “like”? “Like” is a generous word with lots of room in it for things like “favourite food” and “boyfriend” and “sitting around reading fashion magazines with your feet in an aromatic soak.” There’s room enough in there for chocolate, surely. I wouldn’t use the word “love,” but other people do, girls especially, for how they feel about s and half-price sweater sets.) It didn’t seem right to ask, “Don’t you think people exaggerate when they use the word love so casually?” Beatific and totally untouchable, you click-clicked away, just like Lamb does, like every girl does. You were safe from my questions by at least a foot of yarn. When you ate your cake, it was as though it had been a dangerous while since you’d eaten. I noticed the thinness of your wrists, and I felt “part of the problem,” finding you pretty. “Nice enough party,” I said. “Eh?” “Who do you know here?” you asked. “A few people,” I said. “I’m going to grab my coat and get some air.” And I meant to. You were having fun. Passing through the living room, I recognized Jan, speaking to his girlfriend’s left breast in German. I forgave Lamb this party: she’s an artist, and her parties are always art parties. She was in the kitchen, working her poor little fingers raw.

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“What’s that?” I asked. “Radicchio. Don’t you ever eat vegetables? What’s the matter with you?” I sat down at the light pine kitchen table to rest my cast. I have the same kitchen table, but in slightly darker wood. It goes well with my kitchen, which is far manlier than Lamb’s. “Can I go out on the balcony?” I asked. “I’m hot.” “I don’t want the cat to get out,” said Lamb. “But you said the view was the best part.” “So look at it.” She pointed past me at the floor-to-ceiling window. I nodded. I could see a tangle of highways, some tiny cars all in primary colours. A couple of attractive women stroked Lamb’s long granite countertop. None of us gave a rat’s ass about countertops six years ago. I noticed with quiet alarm that the strokers had interchangeable haircuts. In turn, they asked Lamb if they could help with the food. Lamb didn’t need help, so they sat down in the two empty chairs, one on either side of me. They talked about protein. It relaxed me because all I had to do was nod. I stopped listening, except for nodding cues, until I heard “You know, Montreal is gorgeous. But you’ll need to deal with the French Canadians. My uncle used to call them the niggers of the north.” There followed some academic guffawing. I said, “My stomach hurts.” Lamb said, “Go out on the balcony if you want, Flip. You’ll need your coat.” “I know,” I said. My coat was resting casually on Lamb’s faux-distressed finish, off-white rocking chair. I picked it up and moved my one good foot forward onto the rug. Lamb calls that sensation “Super Comfy.”

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Knitting’s in that category too, as is any sweater or Native-inspired slipper. She says “Super Comfy” is a whole new aesthetic, but then everything with Lamb is both new and aesthetic. Somebody — did you see him? — told everybody about the journey of discovery that was his decision to change his name from Greg to . Turning away as from a hot fire, I bunched my coat and got ready to go. “Cool sound,” said a guy in a jean jacket, with a ponytail. His jacket was covered in political buttons. “What?” I asked. “That jacket.” “What?” “It sounds kind of interesting when you bunch it like that.” He took it out of my hand and pushed it against the microphone he was holding. It made a sound. I let him do this for a long time, because I am compassionate. “Can I have that back?” I asked eventually. “Sure, buddy,” he said, but he looked hurt. Pop and hiss. The guy with the ponytail and the jean jacket did some strange shit with his mouth. People clustered around him. I felt bad for the guy. I whispered, “Hey, dude, I think the mic’s totally fine, okay?” The guy with the ponytail and the jean jacket took a step back, away from the mic. He looked at me and I got this feeling that there was a possibility we would fight, like real men. From across the room, you leaned over your knitting, and said, “Flip, it’s a sound poem.” All of the girls I know have become women.

You are solidly anchored on that narrow, plush, pink loveseat between your untidy circle of red yarn and an overly tanned guy who

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I recognize from bad Toronto daytime . He’s smiling at you, and his face is too close to yours. I return my gaze to Dora. I’ve only just met her. I don’t know her name yet but you do. She stares ahead. “What a pig,” she says. Then she says, “My name is Dora.” She points at the guy with the ponytail and the jean jacket, who is close enough to hear her say, “He spilled a whole bottle of wine on the table while he was doing all that gay, yelly shit.” Women are everywhere, everywhere at Lamb’s party. It’s a total sushi party. The two identically coiffed women present from the kitchen and move together into the living room. They catch the light here and there on earrings and on fake bling, and they operate as a couple of long, similar, conversational prisms. I can see you watching quietly, listening and looking over your knitting as they split and refract the conversation to bits. Boy, they sure do fancy the idea of “niggers of the north.” They revel in the naughty negative charge of saying it over and over. Dora looks antsy, so I offer, “At least people are taking an interest in history.” Dora’s a girl next to some snacks. It’s already spoiled — I’d describe her for you, but you are looking right at her. And besides, it’s difficult to describe a girl you’ve fallen in love with just two minutes ago. This is Dorajustaminuteago, by the giant cheddar and Gruyère table and Lamb’s tray of high quality chocolates. She looks at what’s left of the gorgeous ganache. It is not the cake it was, but it’s still got it. She is not still. Every bit of her, from the winced brow, furrowed, low and serious — huge, beautiful, obscene eyebrows! — to the tassels on the weird retro skirt she is wearing — all of it, the whole picture — moving around like crazy. Stasis doesn’t seem to suit her. But maybe you don’t notice her at all. You’re busy letting people

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come to you. Your come-hitherness appears to be working wonders on the men. You are still; Dora isn’t. Every single thing about her moves, even as she stands in place. I’m struck by the vibration lines around her. You’re missing it. Imagine that there’s a trace of her body following behind her in ghost copy as evidence that she has just moved. Perk up a second and look! You’ve missed it. She’s a sketch of a cold person shivering out of a comic book. “Have we met?” I ask. “Could be.” “Not gonna commit to that?” This is uncharacteristically charming. “Do I have to sign a contract?” she asks. “Yep,” I say, “absolutely.” I reach into the front pocket of my gingham dress shirt and pull out a little notepad, and also a pen. Gingham becomes me. I’m told it pulls up the pinks in my skin tone. “That’s pretty dorky,” she says, and points at the pen. “Are you in math?” “No,” I say, and I draw a dotted line on the page. “Sign on the dotted line.” Dora signs her name. Dora Djurdgel Her name, handwritten, joins up with her giggle. These connect to form a line. What is a line? This particular line is a teaching line. You know what I mean? Sorta like the lines they draw to show you how stars connect to each

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other to form meaningful things like men with weapons, or sea creatures. Lines don’t just say: A to B. They also say: A with B. Dora is busy with another kind of line — she stands up to curl a long, bright turquoise string of yarn (sprung free from her wool sweater) around her wrist, straight, then round again, straight. I think about your yarn and her yarn and how it has become a really woolly world. She reaches for a piece of cheese, stops, redirects her hand, and chooses instead a thick hunk of blue-black chocolate. She is wearing gloves. “This is my total favourite!” “Is it?” “Yeah, I mean, you just gotta love chocolate.” “I don’t know if I’d say love. I’d say I like chocolate.” I struggle with the details. “Right,” she says. “That looks bad.” “What?” I look down at my leg in its cast. “That big cut on your hand.” “Oh that’s just a stupid paper cut. Pretty gory, eh?” “Yes. Terrible.” “Not really.” “You should disinfect it.” She’s right. Lamb offers us devilled eggs. Who makes devilled eggs? She flashes us a French maid–esque smile of knowing, and says, “Enjoy.” Lamb swishes off, tossing her head — I’ll give her this, she swishes well. Dora looks at me, and at Lamb as Lamb swishes. The line between us pixellates.

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“How long have you two been friends?” “A long time.” “How long?” she asks. “What’s your name?” “Flip. Oh, God. Like, forever.” She puts her hand to her neck. Her gloves are white. “Cold?” I ask, pointing at her hands. She blushes. I drop the topic, returning to the limited but known, How long have I known Lamb? Long enough to know better. Too long. Not long enough. “You know, I’m not totally sure I can remember exactly how long I’ve known her,” I say, although this is a lie. “But it’s been years and years.” To illustrate how long it’s been, I tell her about how Lamb and I used to ride bikes together when we were children. “Do you have a bike in the city?” “Of course,” I say. “Who doesn’t?” “It’s dangerous. Do you wear a helmet, at least?” “Not always,” I admit, feeling vaguely ashamed. “Would you fuck a stranger bareback?” I wobble.  There is a sound like a bell in my forehead — until my whole head is an empty bell, reverberating. “Where did you grow up?” I ask. I touch my temples, where it hurts. “Here,” she says. “In this living room?” I am proud of my flirting — it’s a major charm move, a glowing stat thrown up like a light on a decidedly uncharming record. “That was fucking retarded,” she says. “Where did you grow up?” “Well, certainly not in this living room.” I milk the joke. “Riiight. I get it. Toronto?”

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“Yeah. The Annex.” “Nice. Richies, I guess.” “Yeah,” I say, because it’s true. I’m ashamed. “What did you do for fun when you were a kid? How does the other half live?” I do not say: The other half lives vicariously. I do not say: When I was a kid, all I did was watch other kids. “What did you do for fun as a kid?” I ask. “I mean, what, did you grow up in the projects or something?” She sloshes her drink a little. She looks at it, experimentally. “That was completely offensive,” she says. “Okay, then: what foods didn’t you eat as a kid?” “Didn’t I eat? That’s not a very interesting question,” she says. She looks disappointed. “It is to me.” “Glass noodles,” she says. “No way! Me too! I still don’t like them. I mean, I love the idea. Glass noodles — what a beautiful, architectural notion, really. But they make me gag.” She laughs. “Yeah. They’ve grown on me over the years, but I know what you mean.” Your gaze is not unkind. You’re stuck at the receiving end of an  conversational gangbang. We lock eyes momentarily. Is that approval? You return to correcting a bad stitch, but not before nodding in my direction. Dora catches this. A bit of me hopes she is jealous. Is that petty? It turns out instead that she recognizes you. She waves, and you wave back. “I feel like we’ve met,” says Dora. “Like, as kids or something.” I look over at you, and back at Dora. “You did wave at her.” “No,” Dora says, “you, Flip.”

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“You didn’t wave at me.” “No, no. I mean, I knew you when you were a kid.” I consider this. Summer camp? Pottery? “I mainly hung out with cats when I was a kid.” It’s honest, but it sounds a little affected. “And Lamb, of course.” “Oh.” She sticks her neck out a little, and pulls it back, like a turtle. “I’m not a cat.” “No.” I say. “You are not a cat.” “And I’m not a lamb, either.” I look at her. “So,” says Dora, licking melted chocolate from her fingers. “Tell me about your fascinating childhood hanging out with cats.” Do you title your party anecdotes? I do. It helps with the filing. A title tells you an anecdote is too long. My fascinating childhood hanging out with cats is always too long. It gets filed under M for “mistake,” or S for “social suicide.” Childhood is not an anecdote. Every conversation is its very own touchy constraint-based art project, and there are lots and lots of rules. My fascinating childhood hanging out with cats would be a trip for me to relate, but I control myself. I reach for the mediocre fruit spread and tell Dora that Lamb’s always been partial to chocolate. “This is her favourite,” I say. “Interesting.” “Are you a milk chocolate girl, or a dark chocolate girl?” “That’s kind of personal, don’t you think?” Her smile widens. I think, I’ll give you personal. What is personal? Personal is burying a wet, dead cat under tall weeds.

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Dora and I talk about art. I appear harmless and affable because I know shit about art. Pop essentialism teaches us that women like men who are know-it-alls and show-offs about everything; but Dora doesn’t — she smiles wildly at my ignorance. She tells me about a show she saw last week, and once in a while she touches me. She doesn’t notice how sharply I pull back. She likes that I know nothing about art. “My work is so derivative these days.” She stops herself. “Sorry if this is dull.” I say, “At least you’re not a knitter.” “I like to knit.” “But at least we’re not talking about it. It’s not ‘who you are.’” “My work isn’t who I am, either.” “Good. I guess that means you’re not derivative.” “That was lame.” “Sorry. I’m just tired of hearing people talk about their homemade scarves as though there is something avant-garde about them.” “That’s a little hostile. You don’t know me that well,” she says. “What if I think knitting is the most interesting thing in the world? You’re being presumptuous.” She keeps smiling. “Maybe you don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Maybe,” I say. “But some things are just dull.” Dora’s wit blows charged air into all of my delays. She’s clever, with prompts like, “D’ya know what I mean?” The sound is . It spreads up, pushing against the inside of my skull (as though there were nerves for pain in there). Bells. I look at her signature.  is the sound it makes. Dora Djurdgel

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The letters of her name begin to change. Dora continues to speak. Her starter D softens, becoming an O. Around that O, other Os begin to spread out, not unlike ripples around a single drop of water.

The water in the barrel was alive. I had lost my notebook. The notebook contained: ) A fully illustrated guide to the cat’s ear and eye movements (which I understood to be an elaborate code for my private deciphering) joined up with possible corresponding meanings. ) Notes to the general health of the kitty with updates on his sociability and appearance: a) Amount of eye pus b) Degree of jumpiness c) General health d) Friendliness e) Degree of interest in offered milk f ) Evidence of hacking/hairballs g) Presence of companion h) General health of companion (if applicable) i) Gender of companion (if applicable) ) Loving but, in hindsight, somewhat irrelevant portraits of the cat in crayon and marker. I saw him fall into the barrel. That morning, I had tasted sweat on my lip from the exertion. I went, restlessly riding around and around the block. I was so

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completely focused on the task ahead that, apart from counting the times I broke my mom’s back on the cracks in the sidewalk, I barely noticed the sights as they shot up around me, begging assessment: red house, new sedan, tree down, someone moving. I was comforted by a distant factory drone that had been droning since years before I was born. I was so anaesthetized by the sun, and by the smooth sensation of well-oiled bicycle parts crossing over cracks, that I hadn’t noticed that my test subject, Hydro the cat, wasn’t sitting in the patch of tulips where he always just was. I spotted the cat’s hindquarters perched dangerously on the thin ledge of the barrel, tail rigid. Then, a flashy second later, the cat’s back half went the way of its front. The sun was rapidly setting over the -Eleven. The cat sank, at this very slow B-movie-quicksand-scene pace. He barely moved, and he definitely did not meow. He stayed afloat for a few moments. His noble cat head went down, under. A fleet of quick, quick bubbles fought their way to the surface. My reactions were internal. At the exact second when I felt I could start to be the hero and save him, I stopped. I thought of a  show I had seen about the Dead Sea. Smiling Israelis and American tourists reading their newspapers while leaning back on the water as if the sea were a nice bed. It had frightened me. Water is not supposed to behave like that. For a moment, every part of Hydro seemed to be leaning on the surface. Hydro’s moan chased my fear, as if colouring it in. Claws frantically scraped the sides of the can, and orange plastic buckled and flecked, polluting the contained liquid. Finally, water acted like water. It absorbed the cat completely in a long, deep and final swallow. I wanted to pull Hydro out, but I couldn’t make myself do it. The water was full of process; tiny insects in hooked contortions affixed themselves to the cat. The cat behaved like he’d been

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tranquilized. I thought, I think those are larvae, so they were. The lull ended, the cat surged. His terrible dead eyes came pounding up out of the water. He shook and went under again. It was terrifying and balletic — like belugas on The Learning Channel. I stood and stared with my left arm tingling by my side and my right hand gripping the handlebars of my new bicycle. That was when I moved. It was just too late. I lifted the cat by his belly and scruff. He was wet. (Under my feet, a giant array of new growth was gasping for air. My tires had rolled a hundred hopeful blades of grass into mud. What I called larvae sprouted unevenly from the cat’s fur. They hung on the dead cat, crushed in the struggle, iridescent barnacles. Some of the larvae were still living, and as the cat was lifted — hush!hush!hush! — from the site of his death, a small number fell back into the water, where they may have grown to be the strongest mosquitoes in their class.) My grief was: What to do? I did not know what to do. Nothing and nobody had ever died on me before. What to do with Hydro’s wet body? It smelled like fish and stagnant water. The contortions of struggle had barely marked the cat’s blue-black fur. The only visible wound was an older scar, a strange crescent moon–shaped one, in the vulnerable pit under his left front leg. I had noted it in one of my missing notebooks. It seemed to have been torn open in this final fight. The only logical thing to do was to give Hydro a proper burial. It was difficult, but I was a smart enough kid — the kind who dismantles things for the fun of putting them back together. I quickly rigged a pretty ingenious holding mechanism with a piece of rope and some scavenged cardboard. I fastened the makeshift cat seat to my handlebars; I lifted the damp carcass in and headed home.

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I opened the side gate. My father was barbecuing lamb chops in the backyard. He held the clamps on the chops with one deft hand; the other surrounded a glass full of Bloody Mary. Once, a couple of years before, I snuck a swig of my father’s Bloody Mary and had to drink five glasses of pop to get the taste out. To this day, I insist that tomatoes are for eating not drinking. I unloaded my cargo, which weighed more than it had when soaking wet. This seemed sort of odd because I thought the dead would be light. I took my bike into the garage where, amid the particulars of the situation, I carefully locked it with my two locks to a big vertical pipe — bike thefts were common at the time. It was a bad year for bikes. The garage was large enough to be sort of a waste of space. This bothered my father, who was spatially frugal — he was planning an amazing editing studio for his freelance work. His plans were everywhere, on every surface. They were beautiful plans. I didn’t believe he would ever make it happen, because he had been planning it for such a very long time. The cat rested in his cardboard hearse outside the garage/potential “studio” in a patch of well-pruned grasses. You can probably guess what it smelled like: stale, wet, earthy. My parents were filling their plates, and some of their guests were already eating. It was a party and a few of their creepy friends with shellacked hair and navy suits were there — I knew that these were not industry friends because I had been forewarned. One of them was my father’s accountant. I recognized him from earlier dinner parties — he was the bad guy who pulled Lamb’s fat pigtails even though he didn’t know her. Dad wasn’t pleased. His beard bristled independently of his chin. My mother’s mouth opened up to yell, but she dropped a chop on the cedar deck and had to tend to it before the dog could get at it. She took the dog into the house, hooking her fingers under his collar and egging him on with the promise of a biscuit.

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“Where the hell were you?” Dad asked. “My cat is dead,” I said. It was getting dark. The cat was getting deader. “We have a dog, Flip. Very fucking clever. Your mom and me were scared out of our fucking minds, did you know that? Don’t you ever think about anybody but yourself for Chrissake?” I just said “Oh.” I took a nice vacation by looking over at the patch of the yard where the grasses moved lightly in the breeze. The sweat poured so hard out of me that my shirt was wet. Tears quickly coated my cheeks. The salt bit at my flesh. “Oh. Oh.” Mom came out of the house with the dog, a dishcloth and a plate for the fallen lamb chop. Three occurrences, --, lightningquick, overlapped in all corners of my tear-blurred field of vision. ) Mom said, “You can’t have a bike if you can’t be responsible.” She started to cry, told me that she loved me and that she only wished that I loved her as much. ) The dog ripped free of Mom’s loosening hold on his collar. He swallowed the entire lamb chop and gurgled and hacked for a few brief moments over the huge bone, miraculously absorbing it. He tore down the steps, across the yard, and right to the cat, whom he proceeded to kill all over again by breaking its neck. ) Mom’s hair caught a spark from the barbecue and ignited. This was the most saturated day of my young life. Dad grabbed the tablecloth, dramatically uprooted all of its settings, and smothered Mom’s head. Mom was not hurt but her head was a charred jungle. She was weeping, and in the near darkness (the

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candles were snuffed in their fall from the table), she fell to her knees and began to gather the items that had fallen. Not a single dish was broken. The barbecue cast a festive campfire glow. One of the navysuited ladies tried to help my mother, but she was screaming and flailing and unreachable. Somebody mumbled “lovely party” under his breath. He had a martini in his hand. He did not help with the dishes on the ground. He looked like the Glad man. His martini had a lemon twist. Despite the situation, I remember thinking, Mom likes her martini with olives, not lemon. I ran and managed to rip the bloodied cat free from the dog’s jaw. I ran back to the garage and began to unlock my bicycle. The light bulb in the garage had blown. I was in hell, but back then I was tenacious. Back then, I wasn’t always quitting and going on vacation. I managed to get my bike free. My father entered. “I’m sorry,” said Dad. It looked as though he wanted to help. I felt something like what people call grace. “We have to bury him in the garden,” I said. “Of course,” said Dad. It was settled, then. I rummaged around the garage for a good shovel. When it came down to it, Dad could really get things done. I felt soothed, my breathing returned to normal. “We’ve just landscaped the yard,” said my dad, with his voice trembling. It was not settled. I had not heard the term “landscaped” before. “I’m very worried about Mom. She’s just singed all her hair off and she was very concerned about you tonight.” I wasn’t sure how these things linked up, still less what they had to do with the wet, dead cat, and the funeral plans, and the rain threatening to start in the night outside the garage. “Dad, can we

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start up now? I think Hydro should get buried now. Can we go?” There was a little tremble in there somewhere. Dad said no, and that was it. “That’s not your cat, Flip.” He left me with a dead animal. But it was my cat; I had studied it. Be proud of me. Come on. Look at this kid. He’s gorgeous. His skin is turning red from too much sun, but just look at that resolute chin, the conviction in those little eyeballs. Adorable. I am proud, now, when I look back at that crazy tenacity. I’d functioned all day and damn it, I continued to function. I left the garage wordlessly and picked up the cat and tied it back on the bike and got on the bike and, just like that, rolled off into the street. The cat was back in its special seat. I filed my teeth to a powder flying along the pavement. The only place I could think of to bring poor Hydro was the Minor garden. The Minor house was the eeriest place. It was white, shingles crumbling to bits, paint peeling, brick dissolving, doors unhinging, ghosts exhaling fits of putrid wind from its shutters and vents. It met all of the criteria for the local haunted house but for one: it was inhabited. Barely, though, and by an unkempt old lady with enough unregistered indoor cats to make her a madwoman. So it was good enough. The garden around the house was all impressively tall flowering goldenrod. I was destined to emerge entirely orange and sneezing like a maniac later that night. For some reason, though, while the task still loomed, I did not sneeze. Even my histamines were reverent. Since the weeds were as tall as corn and Mrs. Minor never came outside, I estimated that the damage would go unnoticed. This garden was not “landscaped.” I winced as I thought of my father’s cowardice. I used my hands on the warm earth and dug like a puppy.

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When I had a trench deep enough, I sank the cat into it. I had no names for the weeds. Too many of them, that was all. I buried and reburied the little body until it felt “right.” This sort of thing isn’t party talk. It’s not . It’s not hot. Finding that I needed more depth to fully conceal his sad little cat body, I unearthed him, and dug down another foot. Poor Hydro died more than nine times that day, I figure, what with all of the moving around I was subjecting him to. When the cat was nearly buried I rested my hand on his head. He was still soft, and I thought, Not for long. At least he was buried deep enough — his decay would be discreet. I’m not about to tell Dora — who’s eating a giant piece of spicy tuna maki — that my hand (the one that was grieving by stroking) slipped off Hydro’s head into the dirt beneath, and that it hit somebody else’s hand. I’m not about to do that. Here is what I do instead: I pass out. I claw at her legs and at the long and possibly out-of-style boho tassels on her skirt. My eyes roll back and I know that I must seem either epileptic or insane.

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2

You came to my rescue. Or at least that’s what I was told. Take a deep breath. “That’s all it takes,” you told me at the party. You tried to lead me through guided breathing. “Just a deep breath, and you can breathe your way to anyplace.” I tried it out, despite myself. Now you do it. Your turn. Fair is fair. On the exhalation count of six, imagine a forest. Is it as good as being there? Tell me the truth. Is it? Of course not. Nothing compares to being in a forest. And you’re not there, are you? So it isn’t the same. Okay, now, put down your knitting for a moment, imagine a forest full of tall and amazing trees. Imagine that the whole thing smells like Christmas. Here’s where it gets a little more difficult. Don’t just imagine a forest. Draw it. I know it’s a pain in the ass, but do it. Get out some

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paper, and some goddamn pencils and draw yourself a forest. Why? Because there aren’t enough words or rest-spaces to account for all the leaves on even one of the trees you’re imagining. Because I owe you thanks for helping me — I can’t imagine how heavy I must have been on your small body, as you hauled me out to the cab. I hope we were alone in the elevator. Besides, drawing is faster. It will get you there quicker than breathing ever will. Use good pencils. This is important. Draw. Notice your physical buzz, please. We mustn’t leave that out. No way, Jose. Admit that the pleasure of pressing the high-quality graphite tip against the page is the only reason to bother with any of this in the first place. You like being presumptuous; you like making a world for yourself; you like pretending to be somebody else. It’s a new feeling, isn’t it? It’s nothing like shit crayons, nothing waxy, just dust-hard and grey, against the page. That’s the whole point of drawing — discovering and rediscovering the strength of your line. Can you see the forest you’ve drawn? This place is an envelope around you, a vise of tight green holding you in. It’s the most contained place you’ve ever seen or been inside of, and in so being it contains you until you are ready to choke. You don’t want to leave this place you’ve drawn, because it remembers a place you’ve been, even though, like any rendering, it’s an extreme exaggeration. This is the kind of place you could get so lost in you might die. You’ll need a breadcrumb trail if you ever hope to come back. Now, imagine that you’ve drawn every one of those trees exactly to your liking. Imagine that you are a very good drawer for an eleven-year-old, if you do say so yourself. Take a deep breath, and on the exhalation count of six, imagine that you are a boy. Draw yourself. Don’t just imagine. Imagining without rendering is lazy.

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Switch to markers. Consider the details — your Ninja Turtles sweatshirt and your cropped jean shorts. The biggest tree is a giant redwood like the ones they have in . It doesn’t make sense in this forest, but it’s your forest for Chrissake and you’re feeling magical. It is red. All the other trees in your forest are brown and green (chocolate and mint markers), but this one is red (strawberry). In your new boy body, look up and marvel. All you can see are a million leaves. This tree is going through its autumn while all the other trees are really in their summer, blushing very warm, rosy green. This one tree is your favourite; it glows auburn. Auburn is a difficult colour to make with markers — you’ll need to mix lemon and strawberry and grape. It takes you fifty years to climb the tree. Draw the climb — it’s important. On second thought, skip the climb. It’s boring. Draw the destination instead. Whatever you do, don’t knit. Draw! As you climb, you reach a giant knot. It’s all carved out and smells of sawdust. Reach your little boy hand in — remember, you are a boy — and feel an irresistible, endless depth of gooey sap and wood chips. You know to check for hives, because it’s dangerous to be allergic — no hives; just a few stupid slugs. They remind you of wood lice. Now you are in the knot in the tree in the forest that you have drawn. In here, in the hole with you, is somebody who doesn’t really matter. He’s not a plot detail. He just happens to be there. Like the lice. He’s just foreground. He’s just some kind of soldier, with a blood-soaked wound. You wonder, What kind of weapon would have made this wound? because you kind of like weapons. You kind of like weapons because you are an eleven-year-old boy. Draw your cat. This is important. The cat is dead. Maybe if you opened its mouth a tiny bird skull would still be on its dead tongue, totally and perfectly intact.

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Everything is okay. Take a break. Rest next to the soldier. What has he done to deserve the medals that decorate his jacket? His wound is full of tiny beads. Look up. Have you ever seen a sky like this? The sky you’ve designed is better than a real sky could ever be. See great curtains of light soaring in curly undulation, like script. What is a sky? Depends who you ask. This sky, like the real one, is full of words. You see a confusion of constellations. You’ve drawn in all the important names. The cat’s head is soft and dead. Next, hear bells. It’s not a happy song, but it’s one you recognize. You know who’s coming. You can’t relax. All you can do, poor miserable heart, is check and recheck to make sure you are clean. Test your breath against your palm; comb your hair back with your fingers. You can hear her but you can’t see her — so you start to draw her in. You want to squeeze her little body, crush it down against you, on you. You can’t do that, though, because she isn’t anything like you. She is ink, graphite, sound. You are not made of the same thing. But didn’t they do that, Lamb and Jo, as little kids, behind the school? Didn’t it burn a jealousy hole right through you? Why him not you? Hands down pants, hands up shirts. You want to do that very badly, with her, with Belle. But she’s so small, so here, so not here. You wonder, Why can’t she ever be here? Now, listen — is there suddenly some inkling of her dress? Do you hear a rustling of something delicate and angular, a crinolin

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maybe, something crinkly? Is it yellow? Make it yellow. Draw it in big, fat, yellow streaks with the banana-scented marker. Put the hem of the dress you’ve drawn right up to your mouth, into it. It’ll give you the shivers to have wet fabric in your mouth, a gross feeling, like a bad sound or food you hate (nails on a blackboard, glass noodles). Be a boy: you have to feel this in a boy’s body. Here she comes. Draw her in so that you can see her, guess at all her ratios. Start with the important parts. Her sex through her dress is bare. You can see the tiny cleft of skin. You are afraid of the way her sex is. You can’t touch or see her, but you want to, very badly. You want to feel the upstairs parts first. That seems to make sense, right? And then the privates. Upstairs then downstairs. You could touch those, too. You want to. That’s what Jo said he did to Lamb, but he could just have been bragging, because he does that. He brags. Her long red hair. Her mouth. How did he put it? Remember? “Lamb just let me,” he said. Didn’t that terrify you? Wasn’t that awful, awful? You never asked Lamb if that was true. It didn’t seem right to ask a question like that, about her privates. You can’t ask it now. Not in the middle of drawing. Draw in Belle’s chest. She looks like a giant yellow potato with legs. Imagine this difficult kind of desire: you are a child, and you are a boy, and you are desiring. Your desire is something profoundly illegal, and you’ve assimilated its illegality. Know, absolutely, that your desire is wrong. Write her name: . Use your handwriting. Handwriting is not your strong suit, but it will make it look more important, so use it. . Belle is small because of the sounds she makes. Belle is clean and neat because of the sounds she makes.

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Belle is dangerous because of the sounds she makes. Belle is the ridiculously obvious name you have to give her because you are only a child. Belle is even now out to hurt you, isn’t she? Listen. Can you hear what she is doing? Draw something to surprise yourself. See that you have made it so that Belle will lie down flat on top of the soldier and will begin to touch him in all kinds of ways that make you very uncomfortable. The knot is damp and warm and the wood smell is oppressively close. Draw her. It’s okay that you’re not good at it. It’s only a drawing. It’s the only way to see her, so go on and do it over and over again, each time correcting. Her hair is very long, then very short. Erase, cross out. Watch what she does. Start with his outside jacket. Hear how she gums the fabric with her mouth. Hate it. You hate things like plastic and fabric in your mouth; gag you with a spoon. Say something. “Hi,” you say. She stops. “See what I’m doing,” she says, in an instructional sort of voice. You can’t watch this so you cover your eyes. Your heart is breaking. Why is she doing this to you? Imagine that she is supposed to love you. Hear the slick and private slipping out of buttons from buttonholes. Privacy is always slick — this isn’t an exception. Hear the flip-pull-click of the belt buckle coming open. You don’t feel well, do you? Don’t you feel just a little ill? You feel not very good, not at all. You wish you hadn’t wasted your time picking out a good shirt. The knot fills with rubies. Bells loop. She wants you to eat a mouthful of rubies. She brings them to your mouth.

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“I’ll choke,” you say, and then add, “. . . darling.” You add that because people call people they love “darling.” “Eat,” she says. The beads fill the little knot. You have no choice but to fall, out, down and down, through the forest. Spit cherry pits, shiny, from your mouth. They taste like cough syrup. Look up. See stars.

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3

My hand’s tight and tender around the phone I use to call my friends and relatives, and to play video games on. I hold it like this, in bed, sometimes, in the privacy of my home. I hold it, and I love it, all by myself. You’ve got a phone that you feel this way about. You also feel this way about your  player, and about your heart-shaped personal shaver. I know, it’s okay. I don’t even have to ask. The phone rings. I like to know what I am taking in by the mouth, and I especially like to know what I am taking in by the ear. In keeping with this tendency to want to control my intake, I have assigned each and every one of my loved ones a special ringtone. Lamb’s got “Take My Breath Away.” Dad’s got “Don’t Let Me Down.” Maybe, when I’m lucky enough to be her man, Dora will have “Bang a Gong.” Anyway, the rings are songs, right? All of them. There’s not a single ring on there that’s just a ring. Why? Because that would be common. I can’t stand rings that sound like real rings, they’re too much like bells.

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And yet, ring. It’s got the tinny effect of an old rotary phone. Now, my head’s being tilted back. In my hangover weakness, I can’t struggle. The liquid gets to the back of my throat and makes me gag. Tina says, “You drank too much last night. You passed out. Some girl had to carry you out to a cab.” “She could have left me there. Lamb would have taken care of me.” The phone keeps ringing. Gagging, I say, “I need to take this call.” It’s got to be her: my , my mundane haunting. “Home remedy,” says Tina. “Fucking cough syrup?” “Yes.” I don’t think it counts as a “home remedy” when it comes from Shoppers Drug Mart, but maybe I’m just a traditionalist. Tina’s legs flank my chest and I think I sense a moment of grinding, for real. Not sure, but maybe. “What the fuck?” I scream, spitting red syrup all over Tina’s face. Money shot. “Helping,” says Tina. “I’m helping you.” “How is this helping?” Cherry’s all down my chest. Tina’s strange little mouth releases an indignant sigh. What is Tina? Tina has tiny porcine features. They’re disproportionately small for a grown woman, a fact that is made up for by the freakish tinyness of her head. I pay enormous attention to the outward appearances of those I despise. Tina is my roommate, and shouldn’t be straddling me.

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“I’m not hung over, you bitch!” I rethink this. “I’m sorry,” I say. “You’re not a bitch.” “You need to learn to control your anger.” Tina leans in with the cough syrup again. She uses her fingers to pry open my mouth. “I read about this online. It’s really supposed to work.” Thinking quickly as I counterpunch, I say, “I know what you can do to help.” I point to the floor, where the phone’s ended up in the scuffle. “I just missed a call.” She throws the phone onto my balls and leaves, saying, “You need to improve your diet.” I turn on my side and look at my phone. It hasn’t recorded the call I just missed. The last call on the Incoming Call list is from my aunt — it’s from three days ago. Don’t judge me — I have a landline too, okay? That’s what people call me on most of the time. I touch the screen. So pretty. It displays a small and badly pixellated image of Tina’s cat Olaf. I took that picture weeks ago, for an admittedly sinister reason — I figure that having a picture of a cat on my phone, even an ugly one, should help with the ladies. I don’t know — maybe it’ll soften me? The real-life Olaf has been purring on the bed by my cast this whole time. I acknowledge him now. “Hey Olaf.” This is a mistake. The cat interprets it as a come-on. His giant yellow eyes are completely encrusted and half-closed; he can barely move but he does — he crawls up onto my chest. Olaf has some sort of terrible urinary tract problem. The cure is an expensive procedure involving a sex change. I am not joking. I decline his advances because his diseased body disgusts me. I push him away, gently. Tina’s problem, I think, not without a healthy measure of guilt. It’s too bad about cats, really. They are sort of out of vogue. Only one animal can be cool at a time, and this year it’s birds. Last year, it was wolves. I love playing with my phone. As I play with it, softly and sensually, I think: I am made for this. I was made to touch this

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adorable shiny baby screen with its green-purple glow, its fancy little digits all silversoft in my hand. I hit Incoming Calls again. Just my aunt’s number. I check the texts, but end up with nothing. I beg a little then, okay? That’s just how it goes. I hope that my words will be tagged to Belle as her rings are a code of signature sounds to me. I go “Belle!” I wait. I say “I love you” out loud. I’m heard. I know I’m heard in the same way people who believe in God know they are heard. With the same resigned emptiness, I accept the fact that nobody answers back. Like God, Belle rarely speaks when spoken to. I think aloud, “Broken telephone.” Olaf says, “Meow” and digs his nail into my nipple. As I recoil, my hand hits the air with a gong sound. “That hurt,” I say. The insides of my ears contract to protect my hearing. The gong still reverberates. “Not nice.” Slowly I get to my feet, head pounding. I notice all the fake cough-syrup blood on my hand. This makes me nauseous. I hobble to the bathroom, half hopping, gripping my crutch and my phone with my clean hand. In that moment, in my boxers, with red cough syrup streams flying theatrically from my mouth, and with slippers on, it’s safe to say I look like an idiot. Finally. Something you and I have in common. In fact, go ahead and use the word idiot, to bridge the impossible distance, these light years, between us. We’ll call it the Idiot Bridge — the view is lovely. Surely you’ve been an idiot, or you’ve at least looked like one. I know you’ve got really nice clothes, but that’s no protection. I mean, surely, a memory of being a social idiot is the network upon which your compassion was built, like a little house. Okay, maybe there’s no little compassion house at all — maybe,

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you’re just naturally compassionate. But something remembered must have triggered the drive to put me in the taxi. You are strong. Maybe it was more a function of sympathy than of empathy. But surely, you’ve been there. And if you haven’t been there, well, at least you’ve been here. You’ve been to the Idiot Bridge. I’m not really saying that you’re an idiot. That’s just super mean. I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror. The phone’s next to the sink. I move it over a little, to make sure it doesn’t fall in. Once, I accidentally ran a phone through the washing machine and it did not survive. That was a bad month. My new phone begins to play “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” Fuck Belle. “It’s not Christmas!” I yell. The nausea wells up again, and I fall to the floor, grabbing at the edge of the toilet. Tina sticks her head in through the bathroom door and says, “Listen to what your body is telling you!” The trouble is that my body is not speaking English; it’s speaking a kind of a biblical-sounding language that, while comical, is in no way intelligible. I guess that my body and I speak different languages — that’s just how it is. I can’t imagine how many suicides a year are caused by self-help advice like “listen to your body.” If I were writing a self-help book, I’d make sure to point out that if at any point your body starts actually talking to you in English, go straight to a mental hospital. Every time the shivers and heat well up in my gut and spill out my mouth, her face springs into my head. Not Tina’s, of course. Dora’s. There’s no more carol, thank God. Now, all of the noises that matter are in my mouth. I cannot breathe. I spit cough syrup, but I can’t seem to lose the bulk of it. I stick my fingers down my throat and think about bulimia. The bathroom décor is Tina. Avocado. Bad

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for hangovers. Dora’s face, an actual thought-picture, fights with the memory of the carol’s melody. Image, in this small way, battles sound for primacy. I crawl up. My reflection is starkly cut out in the antique mirror. “Belle,” I mouth. I look into my throat. It’s predictably dark. I try again but can produce nothing except for a long, unbroken ring. I cannot speak. Tina says, “The only thing that can really cure a hangover is a proper dinner.”

It’s a cold, bright day. I put on the gingham shirt I wore to Lamb’s party, because it’s the only thing I own that’s hip enough for College Street. I try it on and do a little fashion show for myself in front of the mirror. I frown at my belly hairs. I am getting fat. I turn around, to find a flattering angle. Once I do, once I’m satisfied that I can be hot at least long enough for an impression, I pull on my cool-guy fur-lined parka, overtop of the forever gingham. There’s something bumpy under the down, in one of the eight million hyper-useful inside pockets. I pat the snaps on the pocket, unsnap one, and pull out a shiny, brown button. It’s in there, right against my heart. Aw. Isn’t that sweet? I think so. Four brown buttons in total. Enough for a pretty good sweater. I guess you’ll have to go with the red buttons, because I ended up with the brown. The red is a better choice anyway, for its libidinous charge. I don’t need to tell you that red buttons are cherries, nipples, clitori. I hope you are okay with that decision, because it’s been made for you. Tina says, “Stop a second.” As I cannot speak, I cannot resist. She is planning to make a real Italian dinner, which is annoying because Tina is neither real nor Italian. She stands in our common room and says, “If you’re going

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out, you need to go buy us some groceries.” She writes a list of all the stuff we need. She stresses that I’ve got to get the dough at the Riviera, because nobody else in the city knows what they’re doing when it comes to pizza dough. I touch your buttons in the sun and think, Isn’t this quaint? I’ve ended up with your buttons, out of all of your many accessories. It’s a good thing I didn’t end up with your knitting. What is a button? I hate anything “textile based” on principle, but I suppose we are stuck with this. We are sewn together now. We can protect each other from the cold. We can push each other’s buttons. There are borders of grey snow around every lawn. Storefronts glow. It’s always Christmas at the Riviera, isn’t it? And Easter? And every other Catholic holiday? Look at those lambs in the window, in advance of Easter, staring out at the street in rapt and quiet focus. They are creamy white, their fleece raised in sharp curling waves. I take the buttons out again and think, Isn’t this funny? I hold all of them, together, in my left hand. I lean on my crutch and squint up at the sun. I turn them in my hand like those metal balls that are supposed to relax you. I listen to them. I don’t know what I expect to hear. The ocean maybe? They’re silent. The lambs’ spherical eyes stare; their frosting does all of the blinking, high sheen. You draw boxes in boxes in boxes on the foggy window. I notice you while I’m in line. Your finger comes away wet. You purr and admonish, into your cell phone. I am suddenly watching you get

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angry. Look at you. Fuck. Can we talk about how you look without making me look like a prick? You are beautiful. You look positively fucked out, with your hair here and there over your drawn-on eyebrows. I am embarrassed by your presence, because I have been touching your buttons. Oh boy, what did he do this time? I wonder what percentage of cell phone calls are boy-girl. You say, “Alex,” and you sound mad. You’re right in front of me. You see me, but you don’t say anything. Maybe you don’t remember me. I try not to look afraid, but I sort of am. It’s not that I feel that bad about having your buttons. I mean, it isn’t really that big a deal, is it? It’s just that I am bad with chance encounters. I think about whether I should have an Americano or an expresso. Expresso is more embarrassing to order because I never know whether it’s espresso or expresso. We’ve got a friend in common, and that could be a way to start with you. I could try to connect with you along the lines most known to my generation: lifestyle lines. I could ask about your tastes — what have you consumed recently? Any good movies, books, pornography? What is hot and what is not? I could ask about our friendsters in common. I could talk about my facebook addiction and you could talk about yours, and we could feel understood, if briefly. Lamb would be a way to start. I mean, I can’t just open with “I’ve got your buttons,” or “Nice buttons,” or “I somehow ended up with your buttons after that party.” But my lips have been sealed shut. Every time I try to speak, a stream of true blood leaks out, rather unceremoniously, from the corner of my mouth. I keep blotting it with tissue. I know the Riviera. It’s my place. I picked it because I like the coffee. Yeah, you’re pretty, you’re pretty, you’re so pretty. But just being pretty doesn’t entitle you to the Riviera, okay? You’re up now

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— are you actually butting ahead of me in line? You order a cappuccino with no sugar and a bit of cream. They look at you like you’re out of your mind — “No sugar? No milk?” — they ask you twice. You are a pretty girl, but you don’t know much about drinking cappuccino the way it’s supposed to be drunk. There’s no way around it. You’ve never been here before — believe me, I know. Is this a nice change of pace for you? You probably usually go to that Starbucks (the one with all the missed connections on Craigslist) because you’re hoping to get sighted, but also, sure, because you genuinely depend on the potency of the espresso there to start your day, and also because, let’s be honest, the coffee is good. But now look at you! You’ve come around to the neighbourliness of getting a coffee this way. Maybe you like the people too, and how it’s always Christmas. Maybe you like it when the woman behind the counter looks at you and says, “You are so pretty — Italian blood?” Really, Lamb is the only thing I could open with. If I could speak. She’s tertiary to you, isn’t she? She’s in your extended network. It could be that you don’t even remember her name. I mean, you’re pretty forgetful — I do have your buttons. And Lamb is a name that’s easy to forget. It’s odd, embarrassing even, but strangely forgettable.

Lamb’s parents almost named her for a constellation, and that would have been a great name in terms of memorizeability — I mean, constellations are meant to help us remember things. They settled instead on Lamb for the single, pathetic reason that Lamb looked like one when she was first born. She looked like a cartoon lamb, all white and soft and big-eyed. Her batch of birth curls was an absolute tranquilizer for Lamb’s mother, whose usual hyperactivity dulled to

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a low hum the moment she touched it. See, Lamb’s mother knew a secret. She liked to hold Lamb close, standing out back on the patio, and think about the secret that she knew, and touch Lamb over and over with her long feminine fingers. This was when Lamb was barely alive and I didn’t know her yet, when she was just a tiny sack of flour of a thing without a lot of developed opinions, but just as entitled as anybody else to be alive. Then, Lamb’s mother liked to wear this classic man’s dress shirt and hold Lamb in her arms and sing to her. (“Mary Had a Little Lamb,” of course. And “Mrs. Robinson” and lots of Italian opera — mainly Puccini.) And brush the fleecy mess and watch it glint in the sun. The brush was tiny, plastic and pink, very soft, with those strange, wide baby-friendly bristles, you know? Lamb found the brush, a little tired-looking, years later, in a box with another box inside it. The other box was a tiny blue plastic treasure chest, containing something very terrifying and very disgusting: tiny little teeth. Out on the patio, Madeleine’s usual agitation slowed right down to a kind of productive twitter. She knitted a hat for Lamb. She liked to knit and occupy her hands. She was also beautiful. When Lamb needed a drink, Madeleine just had to unbutton (slip, slip, slip) one or two of the top buttons and one of her giant, milkful breasts would pop out and into Lamb’s sucking mouth. When Lamb got the first of the blue-treasure-chest teeth, it sometimes hurt, but Madeleine wanted to enjoy it, even the difficult part, as she knew this stage would disappear so fast. She knew that she might miss the feeding, and she also knew that in the pause of the moment, right exactly here, she must look a little like a Renaissance icon, a glowing, gold-tinged Madonna. See, Madeleine was very Catholic in her heart of hearts. But you don’t know that Lamb was brought up by a hypocrite, do you? Madeleine wouldn’t parent with her heart. Lamb would be brought

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up — so that she and I could one day become the best of friends — sensibly and Godlessly. In honour of her mother’s latent wonder streak, Lamb would hold on to a lingering awe at rituals. This thread she took up from her mother emerged somewhat unevenly and at inconvenient times, a little like streaks do through a crappy dye job. Just like that, they’d weed up through her mother’s attempts at spiritual neutrality. The choice to hold back God had been a sad one for Madeleine. It was an act of submission to Lamb’s father, who was a hard-core atheist. Madeleine was very much in love with the virgin Mary, and if it hadn’t been summer when Lamb first drew blood from her nipple, she might have lit candles to celebrate. She would have gone into a more churchy part of the apartment to sit, with the blinds pulled down tight, to feel the gore of it on her body, an appropriate sacrifice. She liked to indulge in this lonely sense of giving, this absolute surrender, because, within her mind, Madeleine harboured a number of outmoded myths about motherhood and womanhood and personhood and lots of other hoods, and those myths buoyed her and made her more able to cope with the fact that her life as she had once imagined it, was over. The burden of sadness that Madeleine carried with her would be, in her hands and eyes, a softening. Life is suffering, and so Madeleine had a purpose. Although I can’t be sure of this, there could have been a light, lemony halo around her beautiful face while she sat. There could have been a beam from above. She was comfortable. The new roundness of her body interested her, even as it disgusted her, and the secret between her and the anatomy of this thing that had come from her was a secret that would fade when the thing began to talk and really be. This was before Lamb’s first word. (Towns away, my words were already solid. Hell, I was growing them into sentences.)

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Lamb’s childhood home was a church, even if Lamb’s father would not know that. Every inch of it, every second of its keeping — the polishing of the gilded frames around the nice Modern art, the lemon-scented soap Madeleine used on all fours to make the tiles shimmer — was worship. Lamb’s father could accept Madeleine’s tidiness (called freakishness) in a way that he would not have been able to accept the fact that this house — his house, for God’s sake — was indeed for God’s sake. Madeleine’s house, for all that she hated her church, was a house of God, or at the least a place for Him to visit. Lamb’s mother knew a lot of secrets. She knew about faith. And she knew a secret about where Lamb came from. She also knew that she was being watched. Instead of going in and sitting in a more sacred spot, she stayed out back in the full sun, giving the fourteenyear-old boy across the street a show. The boy was ugly and confused and intensely aroused by Madeleine and her popped-out-then-backin-then-back-out-again breast. Madeleine watched him back, amused if distantly titillated by his interest. Lamb’s first word would be a letter extended. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. It was in her mind, a sound-thought, long before she said it. It was in her mind, along with all the other sounds. She wouldn’t believe it until she said it, but it was there. In order to say it, she’d first have to learn to smile. She did this learning, quietly, privately, by watching. This is one of the few things that Lamb would learn without any shame. And Lamb did not know about any of this, little sack that she was; she only ate and ate and ate and ate and ate and ate and ate, because her project was to grow. Lamb’s parents almost named her for a constellation because constellations are mnemonics. They help us lay folk understand the

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imagined connections between stars. Some connections, thought Madeleine when she suggested the name, should remain untraced, while others should be drawn in even more heavily every time we look up. Okay, I’m not sure that she thought it exactly like that, but damn it, she thought it.

The Riviera lady hands me the yeasty lump. It is pleasant in my hand. I had to point and gesture, and she looked at me like I was nuts. I love the taste of uncooked pizza dough — there’s a dirty secret about me. I reach into my pocket and look for my money. Where is it? For a moment, I am terrified that I might have to ask you for money. That would be a new low point, and it would totally destroy the magic, wouldn’t it? I pat frantically at all of the pockets of my coat. The lady behind the counter uses a tattered rag to clean the top surface of the cash register, and exhibits exquisite world-weary patience with me, as I maul myself in search of change. My inside pocket coughs up enough to cover my expresso and my sphere of dough. It comes out in loonies, quarters, pennies. I touch the buttons as I take out the money. I get change back, ten cents. The lady says, “Have a nice day,” in her nice rich accent. I nod as generously as I possibly can. As I leave, I look back, through the lambs and through the frosty glass, at you. You acknowledge me softly, with your own kind of nod. The bulk of your attention is still directed through your mouth at the phone. At Dominion, I use my father’s credit card to buy basil and cat litter and onions and tomatoes. I notice that the Dominion is full of people from Lamb’s party. The phone rings. It’s Lamb. She has terrible phone manners. Sometimes, she actually eats a whole

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sandwich while I’m listening to her. I think she thinks it’s cute, you know, like, “tough cute”? I try to be patient. Lamb doesn’t even say hi. She says, “Tina called to say you were sick, like really gross sick. Is it true?” I lose the call and leave the store. That’s Tina. She’s the kind of person you can’t trust with anything. Not that it’s any big secret, my being sick, but the details of a gory illness should stay at home where they belong. That just isn’t possible when you share a place with somebody who elevates openness to a pathology. The street is full of people. My phone rings again. “Yeah,” says Lamb, being mean, “Tina says you were leaving a trail of gross gobs of puke all the way to the toilet and that you were locked in the toilet and all she could hear was you yelling and moaning and shit.” I open my mouth. Nothing. It’s frustrating. “Hello?” she asks. Nothing. “She said it was so gross, like, the smell and everything, and she had to go all the way down to the basement to do her yoga.” I hear her expectant breathing. “Flip?” she asks. “Are you okay?” I blow out through my mouth — the sound of a triangle, being hit hard, fills the space between it and the receiver. “Are you in a music store?” asks Lamb. “I think I’ve got bad reception. Anyway, I wanted to let you know that that girl Dora thinks you are a hottie pants.” “Lamb?” I ask. My voice returns, but only a little. “What?” “Yes sir. Hottie McHothot.” “Can I have her number?” My voice is still hoarse, and I can hear it echo back.

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Lamb breathes out. Hard. I can hear her smile. “You don’t waste any time, stud. Dora and Flippy, sittin’ in a tree, F-U-C-K-I . . .” “Dude. That’s really mature.” “You know,” says Lamb. “Ol’ Dora’s a little, um, countercultural, eh? She’s really ‘open-minded.’” “What?” I ask. “Are you saying she’s a slut?” “No, no. She’s pretty strange. Wacky, even. She’s bizarre.” There is another quiet pause. “But you’re in luck. She’s in my phone, hang on. But she is weird, Flip.” “We’ve established that.” I use that phrase when I’m trying to be funny or when I’m annoyed. I’m told I’m the sort of person it’s hard to tell with. “I’m just saying. Here it is. Dora Djurdgel. A name only a mother could love. It’s the truth. Here it is.” “What is that, Ukrainian or something?” I am just curious. “What’s wrong with Ukrainian? I’m a quarter Ukrainian, you know.” “Can I have the number?” I write it down on my hand, very carefully. Press star. I do this because I have not mastered all of the features on my new cell phone yet. “Do you have her email address, too?” “Am I your bitch?” Lamb asks. “It’s cute you’re puking about this. You’re like that South Park guy.” “Stan?” I ask. “Yeah. But are you okay?” “Sure,” I say. “I mean I’m still a bit wobbly but no more gross stuff. I can’t eat too much yet, but you know.”

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“No, not that kind of okay. I mean, like, are you okay-okay?” Lamb’s a very intelligent woman, an entrepreneur, even. She runs her own e-business selling handmade scarves and has done pretty well at it. And yet part of her brain is still in grade  where when something was serious you doubled it. “Okay-okay,” I lie. “Totally. No trouble. I’m totally perfect.” “That’s great. ’Cause, like, I don’t know, I think it would be nice, you know, for you to try something else.” By that, Lamb means something apart from trying to get with a ghost who’s been stringing me along for most of my life. Speak of the devil. The phone rings again. I say, “Lamb, somebody’s calling me on the other line,” and it’s true. What is Belle? Belle makes bells sound, just to cover my name in tears. If a sound could draw itself a picture, it would — the noise she makes now would frame her own name, “Belle,” in coy and thorny roses. Nobody can tell me that romance is dead. I want to hear her; I always want to hear her, even when she sabotages me, because I love her. Love is tolerant. Here’s how it is, okay? Imagine that ring I told you about, again, everywhere. Imagine the sound of sleigh bells, Indian anklets, doorbells, dinner bells, bells! Bells with strings attached, nsa bells, rusty bells, new bells, bells made of metal, bells that make tiny, clean sounds. That noise comes through my phone.

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I mean to put Lamb on hold. But I don’t, which means she has to hear me go through one of my “things.” The sound has a set plan, and it means something. I cannot escape its scored pattern, and every motion I make mimics it, in kind. My foot taps to the beat, out there on the street, in front of so and so and so. I hum along, I can’t help it, ’til there is a goddamned humming in every hollow of my body. It’s in my throat, in the veins of my stiffening cock, in all of the empty places in my head. (And fuck, my head. My poor head.) What can I do? I do what I do, what I always do, what I am told: I hum along. Lamb is supposed to be on hold. Belle’s little voice says, “Listen carefully. Love is kind.” There’s no number, no evidence of an incoming call. Lamb says, “I don’t think I can talk to you for a while.” I try to breathe. “Why aren’t you on hold?” I ask. “Why are you singing?” she asks. “I gotta go.” “No,” I say. “Lamb. I’m sorry. I need you.” Lamb hangs up. I search my pockets for paper. I carefully transcribe the number from my palm, digit by digit, onto the back of a bank receipt. I try not to pay attention to the negative balance. I fold the paper with Dora’s number on it, and then I unfold it again. “One in the hand is worth two in the bush,” says Belle. My mouth opens; I taste tart cherries. “No,” I say. “Please.” “One in the hand. One in the hand.” I begin to scratch my palm, until the number fades. It hurts. “Is this what you want?” I ask. “You know this hurts, right?” “There’s still a little left!” She follows this with a loud whistle, as through a broken horn, so piercing it causes my eyes to tear.

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“Is this enough, you bitch?” My hand is bleeding. “Good,” she says. A great love comes with bells.

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4

I kill time at the music store, trying to look cool. I smile at the unsmiling staff. For just a moment, I try to allow myself the greedy and illicit pleasure of imagining that I am one of the guys who work there, buoyed on my tastes and interests and lifestyle choices. Because I am not one of them, I am absurdly friendly in order to trump their icy vibe. I say, “How are you guys?” like we’re old buddies. One of the guys says, “Okay.” He’s very good-looking, but he stands like he’s dying of something. It doesn’t surprise me when you reappear, all covered up against the outside cold, in a very long black (or maybe it’s more of a charcoal grey) coat with giant burnished yellow-gold buttons. I like that coat a lot, so I smile at you. You unbutton your top button, because it’s warm in the store. You smile back at me incompletely, perhaps a bit put off that I am in your face again. Perhaps you’re turned off by my eco-unfriendly plastic grocery bags. You loiter in the electronica

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section and stroke the s. You ask one of the music guys, a trollshaped man wearing a fashion bow tie, whether they’ve got any Candoslight. He rolls his eyes, and you blush rose. So you won’t get the impression that I’m following you, I move my eyes away from you and onto Dolly Parton’s boobs. Dolly Parton is fascinating, don’t you agree? I think she is a genuinely talented and kind person. And she has completely designed herself, which is a commendable and necessary adaptation to the harsh, harsh world. The record store clerk stops the  he’s playing. The place becomes uncomfortably quiet. I look at Dolly. Dolly looks happy. Somebody you know says “Hey!” to you, from the next aisle over. A new  starts, a kind of fun indie number. Unfortunately, it features cow bells. I feel embarrassed by the sudden arousal they elicit, and I’m terrified. I hear her voice, “I’m here.” I turn to you, but you are turned away from me. The back of your head terrifies me. It’s nothing special — there is nothing scary about the back of your head. But the extent to which your head is turned away seems a crank too far. I am frightened. “Maybe you ought to find that number and call Dora,” says a voice that could be yours. It sounds like yours, but you’re turned away from me. The voice is a little chopped up. It’s more a mulch or tincture, totally broken into by the heavy cowbells on the helpless indie tune we’re all being subjected to. They put on another song. This one’s a relief to me, but not for long. It’s just too awful, all soulful white boy dissonance. I relate to the clever “please-love-meness” of the lyrics, which makes me hate it, and myself, all the more. The boys behind the counter know people in the band. They talk loudly about it. They have turned the music by the people they know way up, and they are really getting into it, at least as much as mincing, posture-challenged art boys can get into things. Urban wafers.

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“Sneffler plays bass on this track,” says one guy. “Yeah. It’s way better quality, eh?” “But it’s lost something. Don’t you think?” Again I hear, “Call Dora. Flip? Cat got your tongue?” I can’t answer the question. I don’t know if it has even been asked. What I know, though, are whispers. This brightly lit bastion of good contemporary taste becomes my quicksand. I am sick with love, and I need to leave the record store right away because I need to take care of a situation. I am grateful for my long coat. I turn to say goodbye to you, to be polite. I touch your shoulder, very bravely. You do not turn. All I get is your long hair, which is golden and coiled and neatly pinned. All I get is the back of your head. I stand for a few moments watching you, because I feel awkward about having touched you without a response. You turn and smile. You are missing all of your front teeth. I walk away fast, away from your smile. I turn back to look and know almost instantly that I have been wrong. You are not missing your teeth. They are all there, just as your buttons are there, plump, brown and shining at nobody locked in my pocket. And just as your buttons are not really you, your teeth return to being teeth. This is all very hush, hush. As dark as a secret, as a treasure chest.

At home, I carefully remove my parka. I open the inside pocket, and take out the buttons. I place them in a row on my bedside table. I put Dora’s number next to the buttons. I wait. I put the groceries away, but badly, by more or less stuffing them unpacked into the fridge. I look at my phone. “Stupid is as stupid does.”

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“Please,” I plead. “Two in the bush.” Because I must, I throw the number out, in the bathroom garbage. For good measure, I cover the number with a couple of cough syrup–stained tissues. She believes in a job well done, Belle. I wash my scratched-open hand in soap and water — it is barely bleeding now. “Throw it out all the way,” she says. “Terrific.”

My hand was forced. I am not forcing yours — it isn’t me. I was stupid. I was a child. A child makes mistakes. A child understands a situation to be a wound that can heal. A child thinks that his best friends can meet his new girlfriend. I guess I hoped for hangouts, long evenings watching prechosen sitcoms, curling up with teen mags, trying pot. I was an idiot, but an optimist. And everybody loves an optimist. When Belle said, “Shhh, I am your mouth and your heart, I am your sex and your hands, I am an opening and a closing, I am the paw you’re to worry raw with licking,” I just closed my eyes to others, shut myself up and prayed. It was optimism that brought me down like that, on the floor. It was optimism that made a tiny atheist turn his face skyward to negotiate with God about the fact of His having made him fall in love. When it’s your birthday, your friends have to do whatever you want to do. So, we rode our bikes. That was what I wanted — exactly like every other day. Jo and Lamb flirted with each other, pulling me into their teasing. I quickly wove my way out again. I was a late bloomer in that respect. I wasn’t overly sheltered — my parents had

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given me the talk about boners and wet dreams and growing pubes. (The talk had been rather formal, held in the sprawling living room, under the hanging plants. My father had dealt with it nicely while my mother looked into her Catholic but progressive palms. She was smiling the whole time, though, so no blameable scars there.) We got to the garden as it was getting dark. The fragrance of buds fully humidified the air, inescapably. As always, I felt assaulted by summer — my asthma was kicking up. We walked our heavy sneakers over the spot where I had buried Hydro. I didn’t feel sad, only looked at the ground there. Hydro’s death was merely a herald — his passing had been our introduction. My grief ended abruptly with that new feeling of curiosity that is early love. Only dandelions now, no trace of Hydro’s makeshift, three-stick tombstone. I’d made a cross and then thought better of it — who was to say that Hydro was Christian? Hydro was a cat. We crossed the garden to the Minor house. All three of us had bad posture, and our silhouettes were witchy against the peeling paint job. Up to the window, where I made Jo go first. I wanted somebody to see what I had heard. “This is where they say you can hear the howling,” I said. It wasn’t true — there was no such myth. I had invented the story. Sure, there were rumours about the Minor house, ill-shaped ghost stories, allusions to Mrs. Minor’s insanity, that kind of thing. But there was nothing about howling in any of it. I just needed a way to make him cock his head, cup his hands and listen. The storm windows held up against sound. Only the biggest sounds came through. “A big clunk like something being banged on a table,” said Jo, reporting. “Wait, wait! I’m hearing something else too!” he said. “It sounds like a knife hitting something. Or an axe.” What does a knife hitting something sound like, I wondered. I was skeptical. I began to regret inviting them.

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I spat into my palm. Lamb caught this out of the corner of her eye and spat in her palm and reached it out, ready to take my spit in her palm and perform the ritual. Spit siblings? I’m not sure what you call it when the two of you aren’t the same gender. She wasn’t thinking. If she had been thinking she’d have remembered what a total weirdo she was dealing with. She’d have remembered that I simply could not participate in something as simple as a ritual to celebrate friendship. “Spit sisters?” she said, framing it as a question. She couldn’t really see into the room; she mainly saw the dirty glass. Depth was difficult because of the lack of light. She couldn’t see what was farthest or what was closest to her. I was disgusted. I pushed her hand away roughly, then rubbed my own hand against the window to clear a view. First it turned to mud on my hands. “That’s gross,” said Lamb. “Shut up. I have to listen,” I said. I drew a circle on the glass (not unlike those boxes you traced on the bakery window), and there were cakes upon cakes of mud, but I kept right at it. I stepped back so Lamb could see. The Lolas we’d been sucking on were Day-Glo puddles on the grass at our feet. I noticed this when my foot sank into my own grape Lola and my tennis shoe emerged dyed mauve. “Oh shit, my mother’s going to totally kill me.” The sticky liquid penetrated the feeble canvas and I felt it reach my toes. In case you grew up in some terrible land where they don’t have Lolas . . . What is a Lola? A Lola is a wondrous cross between a Freezie and a Slurpee. It comes in a small cardboard container shaped like a pyramid.

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“God, it’s so sticky. Shit.” I looked to Lamb, expecting her to look back at me and nod, or to roll her eyes theatrically, or to tell me to shut up. Lamb stared soundlessly through the streaky clearing I had made in the glass. I could hear her breath getting faster. Her shoulders were hunched unnaturally and her knuckles were colourless where she was gripped to the sill like a door to its hinges. “Dude?” I asked low and respectfully. “Lamb, what do you see?” She said nothing. I stepped towards her, squishing along in my Lola-soaked runners. One step, two step. I stopped and patted her shoulder. It was creepy. She was dead stiff, looking in at the room. Her breathing squeaked. It affected me deep, deep down; it was scary the way a ventriloquist’s dummy is scary. The wincing, broken breathing coming definitely out of Lamb sounded like it was coming from somewhere else, somewhere inside the house, from inside another body. There was a sense of layers, like sounds were in sounds were in sounds, like that sound I heard was only the last surface bit of a whole bunch of sounds, a screaming that was going on inside the house and was somehow coming out in Lamb. I placed my hands on her shoulders and tried to move her away from the window, but she was stuck. “What’s happening, Lamb? What is it?” I asked. I felt guilty. What right did I have to bring these innocents into this? “Do you see her?” I asked Lamb. “Do you see her?” Lamb wasn’t speaking. She just kept breathing funny. “Where’s her puffer?” asked Jo. “It must be the weeds. I’ve never heard her wheeze like that.” Lamb turned and looked at me. She blinked — her eyelids were like a thousand birds flying out of her, in a great sweep. There was squawking, but over that, the overwhelming sound of wings. Jo said, “I’m going home.” And right away he turned and walked off.

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Lamb slumped down, sitting with her back to the house. “What did you see, Lamb?” I said it over and over, like a bad actor in a bad  show. “Nothing,” she said. “Can you shut up?” Lamb looked around herself helplessly. “Tell me the truth,” I said. “Why did Jo leave?” she asked. She liked Jo better than me, because he was interested in “things around.” Things around were bugs and their names, kissing and feeling up, and music. I had music too. Belle sang this as a melody, even as I sat next to Lamb and held her face close to my chest, to comfort her. “On your knees! One step at a time. Listen up! Show me your winkie! Tear out the beginning hairs around it, one by one. If at first you don’t succeed, try try again! Be pure of thought! Wait for my grin, my dress, my fists over your chest!” Her voice came out of the ground. “Did you hear that?” I asked Lamb. I was feverish. I didn’t think, Typical. I didn’t think, Cute. I didn’t wonder what movies I’d watched too often. I was reverent, not referential. I was my father’s son. “Why did Jo leave? Is he mad at us?” she asked again. “I guess he was scared,” I said. “Maybe he’s a baby.” “No rest for the wicked,” said Belle, out of a hole in the Minor house. All I had on Jo were my rich parents, and the fact that they let me have my very own private line. I still remember the phone number.

Listen, phone calls are important, okay? Phones won’t exist much longer. They’ll be extinct, like polar bears, and many insects, and lots of mosses nobody cares about. People will keep them around

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like old toasters and typewriters because they will represent a simpler time. Our generation will probably never stop talking about them after they’ve gone. Tina says, “Are you too chicken to call? Maybe you should meditate.” If you have a phone number, you ought to use it. It is a kind of key. So, when Belle commands me not to look for Dora’s phone number, I say, “Shut the fuck up,” because when I’m angry I swear. Don’t you? Sometimes I even swear when I’m not angry, just for the fun of it, because I like to use swear words, and because they are innately harmless. I’m angry that I’ve thrown out Dora’s number. Belle knows it, so her tone is coddling and infantile. By baby talking, she’s trying to tease out my forgiveness. I brush my teeth. The fake garlic Tina used in the “real Italian meal” is hard to get rid of. I look inside my mouth and I can see that it’s gone red with blood again. I am all fight. “You should floss,” says Tina. But it’s not bad gums. It’s just Belle. “Fuck off,” I say, which isn’t nice. Belle goes ! She can do harm. She’s in a playful mood. She pleads with me, gentler than before, in her pouty eight-year-old voice, saying over and over that I mustn’t look for it and that I must remember her: “Don’t forget! I still love you! You must not look for it! You must stay with me!” She is all musts and mustn’ts, isn’t she? Her clichés have failed her. I say, “If only I could forget you, I would.” I dress for midnight garbage sorting. With the cast, it isn’t easy. I don’t know if you can guess how hard this is. I turn away from Belle’s love calls (whispers, then raging) to go down to the basement where the building’s garbage lives out its lonely, garbagey life. We share this room with three other townhouses. Yuppies are bad at waste management. The room teems with flies. It smells precisely as you would expect a

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garbage room to smell. I hoist myself up and I throw myself into one of the open, unmarked bins. It’s difficult to do. I fall headfirst. I wish my upper body was stronger. It’s unbelievable what people throw out. It’s not as unbelievable as what they keep, but it is pretty freakin’ unbelievable. People throw out photos of their children, poems from old lovers, underwear, broken clocks and ticket stubs. Of course, they must throw that stuff out. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have enough room left for things like sculptures of cats licking their paws and of angel-children knelt in earnest prayer. I kneel in a pile of mystery rubble. Some garbage has changed — its defining parts are indiscernible. Other garbage is archetypal — banana peels and broken telephones. I was Lamb’s first boy phone call. I had that on Jo, but I didn’t even know it was something. I didn’t know it mattered to her. It was just Lamb’s mom shouting “Lamb! Phone!” Lamb put the earpiece to her head and said hello. She wasn’t surprised to hear the crackles. Sometimes the stupid phone picked up local static. Sometimes there’d be a lot of sex chat between some guy and a girl she thought she recognized. “Hello,” I said. I was trying really hard to sound polite. “May I speak to Lamb Skinner?” Lamb couldn’t believe it. “This is Lamb, yes,” she said. “Lamb, this is Flip.” “Flip? Oh hi.” “Hi. I was wondering. Do you have the homework from History?” “Uh, okay,” said Lamb. “We hafta do a geneolog-eecal chart for our families. It says you’re supposed to go as far back as possible and interview as many family members as you can.” “Does it have to be on computer?”

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“No. But it has to be tidy.” “Oh man,” I said. “What a drag. Do you want to ride bikes later on?” As she held the phone to her unaccustomed ear, Lamb felt a surge of sympathy for me, something that she’d never known for anybody before. “He’s just one ear and one mouth,” she thought. I didn’t know this. I caused her pleasure. Static: Belle’s voice. A ring and a giggle, small, but invasive. Lamb heard it too, and said, “Flip, I hear something.” I said, “What did you hear, Lamb?” “It was a voice saying, ‘You little tramp, stay away from him. Scat!’” “Prolly just crossed wires,” I said. Lamb was less interested in the menacing voice of my child bride urging her to push the fuck off, and was more interested in the physical glee and erotic charge she was getting from the sound of my voice. She wasn’t sure exactly what was happening to her, but in a sure way she was changed. Every time I breathed out, she felt closer to cumming. She’d been prepared for this by everything she’d ever learned about her body, and about what she ought to want. And something — something! — was actually happening to Lamb. She was having a conversation on the phone, like a grown-up. Someone was finally calling her on the phone, and it was sexy. The millisecond of delay between us was too much to bear. She’d let me read her diary entry for that day, many years later, and I’d blush. She’d blush too. She put it this way: I felt like my blood was too big for my veins. I may be in love with Flip. I don’t think so because he is a quad and not very cute. But I like his voice a lot.

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Lamb’s small body expanded in its skin. Time-travel is a phone call across blocks of a boring old neighbourhood, through a private, sleek mess of wire. What little we knew about the trips sound makes was little enough; the glory of just a little information — wire, electricity — a few terms to mystify the whole thing all the more. “How are you doing with the math?” Lamb asked me, but her voice trembled. Belle’s voice tripped up and down a scale of clear bells saying, “No, no, no.” I wanted to reassure her, so I whispered, “I am yours.” Lamb’s breath caught. “What?” she asked. “Static” I said. “Just static.” Lamb had had calls before, but only from her grandma. Not much fun. There was a lot of static. Lamb kept hearing a distant child’s voice. A child child — somebody much younger than us. She tried not to pay any attention. My voice, over the phone, had a monotonous tinnyness to it, a little like a loose nail rattling methodically in a can. “Do you hear that?” she asked. “What?” “That voice?” At that moment, all I heard were bells, but I didn’t want to say so. “No.” “You don’t listen very careful.” “Carefully. Yeah,” I said. “I’m totally listening.” Lamb paused. “How’s the math for you?” she asked again. “I can’t get it.” “’Tseasy. But this bloody genealogy thing. My dad says I have to finish my bloody homework first, before I can go out.” I said “bloody” a lot back then. Mainly because I was such a badass.

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“Your dad is an asshole,” said Lamb. She whispered that last part, because her mother was in the other room. “My dad is not an asshole!” I felt the fever rise up into my mouth. “Yes,” said Lamb. “He is a big, huge asshole. My mother says he thinks he is better than everybody.” “My dad is not an asshole. My dad is an artist.”

I find the number. It’s impossible, right? How can I? But it happens. It’s on the crinkled bank receipt. I recognize my own handwriting, experiencing the exact thrill of recognition that dogs get when they hit the right hydrant. Belle’s in triplets, ballistic. I clutch the paper in my hands and pout obstinately. “Burn it,” she says. My arm becomes red on the soft inside part, almost as quick as I hear the words. “If you play with fire, you’re going to get burned.” “Fuck you,” I say. “Tit for tat.” Every time-honoured saying is a scale up, then down. I rub the burn. “That hurts!” I say. “Not nice. You promised not to.” It’s quiet. You know this kind of fear. Before she goes, Belle says, “Sorry.” She also says, “I love you.” I look at the receipt — burnt dots have appeared, arranged in a kind of pattern. “This isn’t a real constellation,” I say, “it’s meaningless.” I am still. I think it through. I cast my vote. Fuck the dead. I think, Dora’s hair. I think, Dora’s eyes.

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5

It would be nice to be fashionable, rather than just trendy. Which is what I am, I guess. I am trying to come up with something better for this date than the gingham shirt. I have been wearing the gingham shirt under the parka almost constantly for the last two weeks. It’s comforting. Somebody gave me a compliment on it, and now I am terrified to remove it. Your buttons bear witness, reminding me of my jealousies. Your hobbies, your hairstyle, your belief in the power of your own diaphragm. Just a deep breath and you’re anywhere you want to be. I am not like that, okay? My imagination requires props. “What-oh-what shall I wear?” is what I ask your buttons. Laid out on my dresser, your buttons don’t answer me, not at all. I am sickly in the understanding that somewhere for certain you’re in a downward dog, and that with every smooth exhalation you feel a little bit better about yourself, and about the environment, and about our collective future.

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Tina sticks her head in. “Definitely not that,” she says, pointing. “Sweat stains.” She sees your buttons on my dresser. “Nice buttons.” “Thanks,” I say. She looks at them up close. “Glossy. I once had a coat with buttons like this.” “Okay.” “Are you excited?” she asks. “Sure.” “Don’t forget to say Dora’s name a lot. That will make her think you like her. Girls like it when you say their names. It gets them hot.” Gets them hot? Over the years, I have worked out a number of nifty coping mechanisms for dealing with Tina’s constant presence. One of the best I’ve devised is to treat every one of her earnest morsels of wisdom as though they are meant as jokes. Taken this way, Tina is kind of an awesome roommate. I often make the terrible mistake of telling Tina about my life. Just an hour ago, I told her a vulnerable half-truth about my situation, so that she could understand why I am suddenly ironing my pants and shaving and pacing my gimpy body around the house. My confession went, “Tina, I’ve been out of the loop for a while, so I’m sort of nervous about this date with Dora something-or-other.” At least I didn’t say, “Tina, I’ve never been on a date with a real person because I’ve been romantically involved with a ghost I met when I was eight, so I’m sort of nervous about this date with Dora something-or-other.” My cast is cumbersome. That’s an obvious detail, but if you’ve ever been stuck in a cast, you know it’s important. It makes it really hard for me to move around. I have to take frequent breaks to rest. Tina loves that I am too crippled to escape her advice. Her fishy eyes light right

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up and she runs into the bathroom. She returns with a stick of deodorant, a toothbrush and a razor. “Shave, bathe and brush your teeth,” she says, as though chanting a spell. “Women like their men clean.” It’s a miracle Dora has agreed to go out with me. I feel religious about my prospects — at ease, hopeful, resigned, fated. Sometimes phone calls let you get away with things you might not otherwise pull off. That’s why she’s agreed, probably. I would have failed over email. The internet is more honest — text is emotional, all the choices in its making are explicit. To steady myself, I read an entry in Lamb’s journal. It’s almost as good as having her with me. Almost, but not quite.

Lamb isn’t shady, but she is secretive. I think she’s that way because being secretive is a kind of foreplay for her. She is also the horniest person I know. Suddenly, you’re interested, aren’t you? Her entire diary, save for the boring bits, is smut. She lets me read her diary. More accurately, her diaries. All of them. There are lots, one for almost every year of her life. Now you care. Where the gossip sensors connect to the tiny hairs in your ears is a place you always keep squeaky clean and at the ready. This entry will be about fucking. And it is. I’m sure her diary’s taken this turn for me, though. The last two (this year and last year’s) have been totally dirty. Maybe I’m just full of myself. But I’m pretty sure she’s dirty for my benefit. I don’t think she gets off on it (though what could be more tender and perfect than a completely compassionate and platonic friendship between a histrionic and a virgin?); I think it’s charity. She knows I don’t exactly get around.

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Right up to the hilt. Lamb’s always had lots of sympathy about all of that. That’s why she doesn’t just let me read her diary, she also talks to me about the things I need to be talked to about. She knows how I feel about being told things. She knows I like to listen. She knows that’s, like, a thing for me. She leaves out a lot of the visuals, because she knows how I am. She lets me read the entries, and then she talks to me about it. That way I can see the text and hear the effect — it’s like books on tape, or karaoke — double-talk. He was so sexy. Nazi poster boy. I want to erase my ethnicity. I could tell it was special for her. She whispered as if a little embarrassed. She kept apologizing. It was bright and windy — I remember the day by its weather. We were sitting next to each other on the beach. I was sad, which wasn’t wholly unusual. God bless Lamb. Man, she had packed the most beautiful lunch. She had constructed these very, very tall triple-decker focaccia sandwiches. I ate mine, careful to peel back the plastic enough, ’cause I hate the sensation of plastic in my mouth. “So, just tell me if this is too much information,” she said. Her hair was full of sunlight. “Go ahead,” I said. “But first, look at that fucking seagull.” I pointed out to sea. Actually, to lake. I pointed out to lake. I pointed at a very large seagull that was low flying, weighted, near the sand. I imagined what was beneath it, those little pebbles. “Pregnant, probably,” said Lamb, nodding towards the bird. She is wary — she hates birds. “So, okay, first of all, he’s not a serial killer after all.”

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“How do you know?” “I know.” “How?” I asked. “Do you want to hear the story?” “Yes. Sorry.” “’Kay. Anyway, he’s too nice of a lay to have killed anybody. He’s such a nice lay I practically don’t want to talk about it.” “Try,” I said. “For my sake. Consider it a public service.” “We fucked in the basement. I put a chair against the door.” “Why would you do that? You have that new four-poster princess bed with the ridiculous taffeta or whatever.” “I was worried my roommate would come home drunk and barge in. He did that last week. That’s another story.” “So?” “I feel weird telling you this. Are you sure it’s okay?” “Look, Lamb, there’s nothing tragic about it. I’ll have my day. You don’t have to feel sorry. Besides, I’ve read ahead. This is story time.” “Okay. Follow the bouncing ball. So, this is weird. Sorry. Okay. Okay, so. Sorry. Okay. So. We were respectful of each other at first, sort of careful. I guess it was a little clumsy, but it was really hot. Fuck. I hope nobody heard.” I screamed, feeling my insides increase. God I hope my landlord didn’t hear us. That would be so embarrassing. “D’ya think?” I asked. I looked at the text on the page. My pulse. “I don’t think so. We were quiet. At one point, he said, ‘You’re incredible.’ Probably all bullshit.” “You’re cynical.”

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“No, I’m trying to be realistic. I’m trying not to buy any of it. But my disbelief keeps wanting to suspend itself.” “What the hell does that mean?” “What?” “Respectful.” “What do you mean?” Lamb said. What I meant was that I couldn’t yet fathom respect as something physical. I didn’t have the tools to understand respect as a manner of moving around someone else’s body, as a method of touching, a way of putting your things on, in and through somebody else’s things. But I didn’t want to explain, in my stupid language of “things.” “Never mind. Go on,” I said. I was eating too fast. Great hunks of focaccia around ham fought their uncomfortable way down my throat. I felt ready to choke. “I was afraid that he would be shy, which would have made me shy, too.” She paused; we looked out at the lake. Birds, water, boats. “He wasn’t. He was simple about it. He asked me to sit next to him and asked me something about the ugly pig figurine on the table. I said, ‘That’s Myrtle. She’s the first thing I ever bought with my own money.’” “Uh-huh,” I said. I felt dryness in my mouth, sweat on my palms. “Slow down, Lamb. Tell me the details of every fucking tiny thing you felt.” She looked at me. I knew I was taking something from her, something that should really have remained hers. The parts that she’d edited out, that she didn’t put into the entry, the stuff she was keeping for her own, I was asking to have. “Okay. He used his finger to trace my eyelids.”

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“Beautiful,” I said. “I can imagine.” “His skin was flawless. There were tiny dark hairs over his chest. He whispered his needs quietly, hoarsely, saving me the guesswork.” “What kinds of things did he say?” I asked. “He asked me to touch him certain ways, he asked to know if he was touching me right. He was insistent, almost bossy, you know? He’d just say what he wanted, as though we’d known each other forever. There was this great familiarity to it. He was like: ‘Faster. Stop for a second, I just want to feel it there. Don’t stop, don’t fucking stop.’” “Did that embarrass you?” I asked quietly, feeling a bit shocked. “Did it kill it that he was talking like that?” She considered this for a few moments. “I can see how it could have, but not this time ’round. It wasn’t stupid or excessive porno talk. It was just clear and honest and beautiful. Man, he really knew how to use his fingers. That’s important to me. Almost more than tongue. You know, sometimes tongue is just too much. ’Specially if the guy really wants to impress you and make you feel like he loves how you taste, so it’s all sloppy right away, like “Look at me, I’m not grossed out by your genitals, I’m such a feminist!” And what sucks is that I can’t really feel that necessarily. I like the precision of a skilled fingertip, barely touching, you know?” I whispered a question that made her giggle. “If I must,” she said. “When he came, he made a very deep, low sound. Like an animal dying.” “What did he smell like?” I asked. “He smelled like good soap.” “Was he fast or slow?” “He wasn’t in a rush, but I was. Flip, come on.”

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“Did it feel like fire?” I asked, hearing the naivety in my question but being unable to retrieve those words. And I did want to know, ’cause I had heard it felt like fire. “He was very warm to the touch, if that’s what you mean.” “Did he pressure you?” I asked. “I worry I may have pressured him.” I was full. We sat for a while. Then Lamb started to talk again. “One thing disturbed me. At one point, while he was on my back moving slowly in and out of me, and I felt like my insides were expanding like, um, okay, it’s sort of like a pleasure balloon growing . . . I dunno, growing. Do you know what I mean? Sort of ? Do you know what I’m —” And of course I didn’t. I had no idea what she was talking about. “He stopped all of a sudden. I felt his fingers on my back. Taptap-tap with his index fingers and the sound of his voice. ‘-------,’ he said. He counted to nine.” “Weird,” I said. “Yeah. Nobody’s ever done that before. With me at least.” “Hmm.” We watched a seagull battle a pigeon for a soggy hotdog bun. It was pathetic because the seagull had such an obvious advantage. “What did you do then, Lamb?” “I froze and waited for something, anything. He just kept moving then, and it felt good, so you know, I sorta tried not to dwell on it.” “So you could seem cool with it.” “That’s right,” said Lamb, the way parents say, “Good boy, that was very clever.” “Is he nice?” “Perfect, so far.” “Like, what makes him such great shakes?”

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“I haven’t heard that expression in a long time. My grandmother used to say that.” She looked nostalgic. “That’s a totally archaic expression.” “Okay, if I must use the parlance of our age, what’s so awesome and radical about him?” “He’s just sweet and a good listener and funny and not an egomaniac. He doesn’t think he knows me yet. Does that make sense? Even though he was very clear and assertive, he wasn’t, you know, I dunno, presumptuous? He’s got these blond curls, and piercing huge blue eyes. I hope I’m not too ‘exotic’ for him. The guy looks like a Nazi poster boy.” “Exotic?”

As I iron my pants and the shirt I’ve settled on (the gingham), I imagine whole childhoods for Dora, more or less resembling mine and Lamb’s. I insert the odd sexually charged telephone call, for good measure. I also try to improvise some details for you: I can tell that you didn’t grow up impoverished. Heat emanates from my ears when I think about Lamb. Belle’s voice is sad and low. I miss Lamb. I miss her terribly. For once, I have something to share with her, and she won’t even hear me out. I put in cats. I put in birds. I put in ghosts. I also put in stars. Steam puffs from the iron, and I use it for this magic. Dora’s name goes folding through it, here as an intense play of light, there as a dazzling list of stud-stars. Romance is like this. The steam intensifies the glow of these thought-stars (now letters, now her name, now dissolving). Sometimes they make shapes. It’s not dorky to call them Dora constellations, because that is what they are. At other times, they are sheets and sheets of undulating light. Her name in light waves.

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Dora Borealis. Spectacular. D O RA DO RA __________RA D______O It’s like being at the planetarium. I’m shown the connections, all the possible combinations. What are constellations? Constellations are like mnemonics, okay? I learned that on the internet. Constellations are only one way to read the sky. Have you got a way? Constellations are possibly the least interesting map we’ve got. I’ll bet constellations are particularly frustrating as a layer of distracting narrative to people who actually know what they are looking at when they look at the sky. Constellations are a simpleton’s handbook to the night sky — and a false one. Like the Bible in Latin. Old wives’ tales, loose strings, outmoded myths. Beautiful. The ties between stars do not exist. There aren’t freeways up there. Constellations are meant to help all of us remember groups of stars. That’s what meaning does — it helps us to remember.

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Names function the same way that constellations do. In her own way, Lamb agrees with me about this. For one, she tells me my name is super faggy. Lamb once said, “Your name is a tossoff. It’s an afterthought. It connects to nothing. It’s not culturally significant. It doesn’t remember a lost relative. It isn’t anchoring. It’s seventies.” My lost friend. Ironing my pants, I think, My name’s not that faggy. I watch the moisture puff out in a billow. I’ve always liked the steam setting, though I can’t tell you what it does for clothes. I just like the idea of applying steam to something. I apply steam to the words, in their turning constellations. I write the word Dora next to her phone number, on the receipt. Dora The bedroom falls dark. The man on the radio quits midsentence. The steam turns to moisture on the paper and all of the letters of Dora’s name join and separate in various fonts. First they are curly, next austere. They go like that, era to era, and I watch them change under drops of water. They settle down — it’s her handwriting, on a dotted line. When I blink against the steam, the letters rearrange to make ROAD. This suits me. Then I see that the name DO-R-A has three letters in common with the word D-R-A-W. I go: D-O-R-A D-R-A-W W-O-R-D I open a desk drawer and pull out a drawing that Lamb and I made together as children. I keep things like that because I think

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they matter. This drawing is terrible. When we were little, before mixtapes, drawing was about drawing. To draw was to D-R-A-W, to connect by lines. One thing puzzles and charms me — I can still smell the markers’ original scents. I wonder if I’m tuned to the memory or if the markers are that good. I take out a Bic pen and draw a sky overtop of the tree. I’d use markers, but I don’t have any, because grown-ups don’t actually have markers. I feel a little bit dirty about messing with the old drawing, but I’m sure Lamb doesn’t even know I have it. I draw a gorgeous sky. Clouds, bird V’s. I extend a starscape. Lots of tiny points of light. I add in some constellations. People keep things like this. Dora’s name is backwards on the drawing. I draw in the letters to the name L-A-M-B above all the other stars and then I trace a shadowy outline of an actual lamb around it. I think: this is my reference point, this is the place I can look to if I want to find my way around the rest of these picture-ideas. I put in some real stars for good measure. I don’t know anything about astronomy, so it’s just the basic stuff: the big dipper, the little dipper. I probably blended the winter sky and the summer sky. Whatever. I draw those in and suddenly I realize this sky only matters for what it’s drawn overtop of. So, I have to cut out the forest that is underneath, with scissors, because I don’t want my sky to be overtop of a giant phallic oak tree. L-A-M-B B-E-L-L-E D-O-R-A Very few letters in common. Do you keep anything like that? I keep old pressed flowers in cookbooks because my mother did that when I was a child, and I keep ticket stubs from particularly rocking concerts, and I keep warm as best I can. And I keep coming

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back to the part about being little and drawing. I keep all the drawings I’ve ever made. Don’t worry. I draw you in. I trace one of your buttons, and it doubles as the moon.

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6

On the way to the restaurant the cab smells vaguely like fish and chips, which is not unpleasant. I am full of terror as it occurs to me that Dora might want to have sex. For a long moment, with the cab driver singing along, “Biggie, Biggie, Biggie, can’t you see,” I think, If only I were someone else. And if only Lamb were here to give me a pep talk. I mean, what if I have to have sex? Maybe it’s best that Lamb’s counsel is unavailable. Sometimes she’s less than orthodox in her approach to things that frighten her. There are dense black curls against the olive skin of the cabbie’s neck. I thought-doodle, connecting each long curl with the next to make a pattern.

In the middle of something that is commonly called a “moment of passion,” Lamb told somebody her name. That’s not unusual. What was odd was that she didn’t tell him her first name. She told him

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her middle name. She said, “My name is Marguerite,” which was both true and untrue. Her hands were buried wrist-deep in the thick dark hair on his head. She did not want to take them out. He said, “Your very name contains sweetness.” He said my name contained sweetness. Isn’t that fucked? But that was memory tinged with a hangover. At the time, it was romantic, and Lamb liked it. Don’t roll your eyes if you’re the sort of person who rolls your eyes. I don’t know anybody who does that outside of television actors, but maybe you do. Don’t roll your eyes like you wouldn’t absolutely love it if somebody said that about your name, okay? I was, in that moment, Absolutely Marguerite. Lamb, who was suddenly Absolutely Marguerite (and yes, okay, it was pretentious), put her nice, fat mouth on his and found his tongue to be rough and small like a cat’s. She was being predatory and manipulative and shifty, and she was trying to get into the conflicted, narcissistic pants of the boy in question (whose small-town and possibly fictional girlfriend seemed to have a hold on his heart, even from miles away). Lamb as Marguerite had a weird thought that she could never have had as Lamb. Later on, she would write: While he was feeling me up I wasn’t really into it but I started having these wildly colourful expedition narrative fantasies. I thought of a whole field of a boy’s stubble under a giant yellow sun. Of course, the ground would be his skin, and there I am just walking along like I’m on some kind of hardcore expedition, in heavy tan-coloured workboots and grey wool socks.

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Lamb thought, This stubble is totally going to give me a cold sore. He said, “You are so sweet, Marguerite. You are so sweet. You are so sweet.” His words slurred but she liked to know she was sweet. He kissed her with his tongue and his fingers everywhere in her pussy, sliding these in, one by one (tongue next index next tongue next middle). He said, “You are so sweet. Your name could just be honeysuckle, that’s how sweet you are.” She wasn’t having the greatest time. Something about him put her off. When he undressed her, unsnapping snaps, and drawing his sorta rough fingers, wet from her mouth, down her sides, greedy to touch her skin, and stood in front of her, naked also, she thought, This guy looks tired. She felt the requisite shame and more than that. He said again, “Your name is sweet. There’s sweetness in it.” She knew she had to leave at that moment, because there was something she needed to settle. She left him with his nice dick having only just emitted a tiny, somehow hopeful pearlet. It seemed to ask her to taste it. She stood, and he was shocked. If it could have, his penis would certainly have waved goodbye. She kissed him politely, on the side of his neck, again thought of the field of stubble, the thick pillars of his black hair reaching up sharply like corn, all of that stuff about cornfields, the thought of it, she just said goodbye to as she kissed the left side. She wasn’t leaving to be coy, or because she didn’t want to have sex. She was leaving because she was being called. “Happy New Year?” he asked, but what he meant was, “What the fuck? Where are you going?” She looked at his room. Very seventies. Turntable, brown lamp, pale green retro wallpaper with an appropriately kitschy pattern, small sailboats separated by thick yellow lines of flowers. She said, “I have to do something right now.” The alcohol stiffening her veins

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so they felt hard and dry in her neck, down her arms, the hangover ache starting as the drinking circle reached its middle; despite all of this, she felt clear about something. “You’re pretty and sexy,” he said, rather desperately. “And that segue right there,” he said, pointing into the air, evidently at something she had just said, “that was beautiful. Nobody says that kinda thing in the Shwa.” Lamb, as always, felt it best to move on. Her great strength is her ability to get the fuck up and get the fuck out. Besides, I needed to get back. My drawings were waiting. The best way to kill a friendship is to almost give somebody head and then change your mind. Am I a tease? I hate casual sex. It’s so mean. I don’t want him to know about my teeth. (In that second, hours of work on trust and boundaries exploded brilliantly, into a million inebriation-shaped pieces).

The cab spits me out in front of Chinny’s. Too late, I notice I’ve left my crutch in the taxi. I stand there, an absolute miracle of balance, in the street in front of Chinny’s. I do the only thing I can possibly do. “Help!” I scream. “Please somebody help me!” After what seems like seven years, a very old lady with a walker allows me to hitch a ride. She’s built for endurance, not speed; we inch our steady way to the door of the restaurant. I try to enjoy the view. It’s raining. Of course. Once inside, a kindly waiter allows me to affix myself to his shoulder while I look for my date. I see Dora but I do not recognize her. Which means, in a way,

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that I don’t see her, at all. What I see is a woman in a pinstriped power suit with her hair up in a bun. She’s sitting at a giant table with a man. The man’s slightly fat, greying, with that neutral business guy thing going on. The neutral business guy thing means that every time I blink I forget what he looks like. I have to keep staring at him to be sure he exists. There’s a big folder lying open on the table between these two people I don’t recognize and their half-sipped martini glasses, and the folder’s full of various charts and reports and things. Those are the kinds of things that business people have on . This is all new to me — until now, I’ve never actually seen stuff in those kinds of folders in real life. Frankly, I always doubted their existence. Apparently, they do exist. There’s something a bit kinky about them, somehow. I walk past the table, scanning for my date. I don’t really walk, I hobble, leaning on the waiter. “Hey! Come back!” It’s her voice all right — clear and jumpy, all movement, just as I remember. I turn to scan the room. Old guy, old lady, mom with baby, two women energetically eating back ribs. No Dora. Then I see that the woman in the stripes is Dora. She and her neutral business guy companion look at me then at each other and they start to laugh in a serious, horrible way. They snort. Some martini comes out of Dora’s mouth in a thin trickle, she’s laughing so hard. I try to understand what’s so funny but of course, I can’t. Even the waiter looks uneasy. I look from the new Dora to Mr. Neutral, and back again. They keep on chortling and giggling and they start to snort in a weird display of business humour — I know no way to cope, so I don’t. I merely stand there. “Oh, my goodness.” says Dora. “I guess it’s later than I thought. Gosh!”

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“Ho yes,” agrees Mr. Neutral. “It’s gotta be. This is too rude of us, isn’t it, pal?” Pal? I think it safer to say nothing and allow this to play itself out. Suddenly, my hand is being violently jerked off by Mr. Neutral. “Daniel Crantz,” says Mr. Neutral. “Dora’s partner.” There’s a pause. Is this a perverse joke? “In crime, that is. From Crantz and Hymn Legal Services.” He starts to fish around in his pocket for a card. “Here you go, bud. If you’re ever in any kinda trouble.” This leads to another screaming blast of laughter from Dora. I smile politely enough, but I’m teetering. I need to sit down. Daniel gives Dora a disgustingly lengthy kiss on the cheek and bundles his files together. He slides them into his briefcase and then stands up. That’s when I notice his defining accessory. I notice his Fun Tie. You have to be wary of the fun tie wearer. You have to wonder about someone who likes to wear really boring clothes and then soup up his ensemble with one wildly amusing element, the same fun tie that everyone else has, from the fun tie section at the department store. You have to wonder about somebody whose tie has a giant rubber ducky on it. Daniel “Neutral” Crantz slides his toned arms into the sleeves of his beautiful, expensive overcoat. I’m reminded of those amazing shows where they speed up molting and you get to watch a snake shed its skin. Watching him put on his coat is a lot like watching a snake lose its skin in reverse. The smell of quality is all around him, and the sheen on his shoes is intense. I take all of this in, in one big sweeping glance, already full and uneasy and uncomfortable. “Well, honey, I guess I’ll see you Monday. You did so good on the Berenger job, seriously. I owe you big. Nice meeting you, pal. Sorry about the meeting going so late and wrecking your big entrance and all, eh, pal? Do I know what I’m talking bout? Do I? Eh? Pal?”

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I want to tear out his eyes and eat them. “No trouble,” I say, finally verbal. Daniel leaves. He moves purposefully and noisily. He trudges his way right down the centre of the restaurant. The man is all direction. I look to Dora. It is her, after all. I take memory pics, to log. I take a quick cell phone picture of her. I’ve got this fear: what if I finally get a real-life girlfriend, and then I lose her because I can’t remember what colour her eyes are? “Jesus,” she says. “I’m not up for a photo op.” So, here is Dora: a very classy and together-looking person in a suit with a nicely pressed white shirt and a tiny bit of the top of a bra intentionally visible from her unbuttoned neckline. Very nice skin and extremely shiny, curly dark hair tamed to a quiet wave, back so tight the strands around her face look to be pulling at her skin a little too hard to be comfortable. Maybe she looks perpetually cross through her intense green eyes, and maybe, if you’re lucky, she’s got really deep circles under those. I don’t know anything else but what I see at that moment. Beautiful. Dora’s beautiful. But you don’t need to know that because I can’t prove it to you, and you might not think so, and I don’t care what you think, because it’s the truth. I’m terrified. Nervously, the waiter, who’s been clutching my waist all this time, allows me to drop to the now-open seat across from Dora. I bumpily peel off my coat and he takes it away. I thank him maybe a little too profusely before he leaves. “So, what was that all about? Who is that Daniel guy?” I ask. Two minutes in, and I’m already coming across like the jealous husband. “That Daniel guy is only the most powerful lawyer in the whole city,” says new Dora. “Daniel Crantz. I just joined him. Isn’t that sooo nuts?” She is beaming. “Hoo! Nuts.” I try to sound supportive. “For sure.”

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Dora looks at me and I look at Dora. “So, you never told me what happened to your leg,” she says, indicating the ham-sized protrusion at the bottom of my pant leg. “What happened to your hands?” I ask, pointing at the weird gloves. I regret that right away. So, I hadn’t been imagining it at the party — Dora by the snacks was wearing gloves, and this Dora, professional-lawyer-pinstriped-Dora, is also wearing gloves. Dora looks embarrassed, and it’s possible that her skin reddens. “He can be a prick,” she says. “What?” “Daniel.” “Oh.” I’m confused. “Yeah. I mean, I don’t know. Anyway, sorry — sometimes there is so much to cover, there’s just not enough hours in the day, you know?” “Sure.” I’ve never been to a meeting, but I can imagine it must suck to have things to cover. “No problem. That’s cool.” Dora and I stare at each other. It seems appropriate. Dora’s cocktail dwindles rapidly. My lack of cocktail creates a remarkable asymmetry. I wave for the waiter. Dora smiles and I notice that she has pronounced and very sexy canines. I decide to talk a bit about my career, to get the ball rolling again. “So, today I watched the most hilarious thing on the Comedy Network. Six Monty Pythons back to back! Can you believe it?” I proceed to act out the skits. At first, Dora giggles pleasantly. Soon, though, her eyes glaze over, and I feel intense horror. You know? It’s the Borer Horror. It’s the sort of fear you can only experience when you are truly boring another person out of their mind. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to stop talking about Monty Python. Nothing is less funny than something really funny re-enacted. “What do you do?” asks Dora. The waiter who carried me in

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approaches us. I’m beginning to imagine that this waiter is an angel, sent to save me from myself. “Can I have a pint of Sleeman’s?” I ask. “Sure.” He turns to Dora, who’s taking the elastic off her tight bun. Curls pour out, all fuzzy electricity, high gloss. “I’ll have another one,” she says, indicating her empty glass. “But with two olives this time, if that’s okay?” When the drinks arrive, Dora sets straight at drinking her second martini. She pushes the little napkin out of the way, hard. I can’t tell if it’s a good sign that she’s drinking so much. I try to be optimistic about it. She’s just at the end of a hard day and looking to loosen up. I try to dismiss the possibility that she feels the need to intoxicate herself in order to lessen the agony of spending time with me. She drinks the clear liquid so fast that she makes small gagging noises. She rests the olives against the stem of her glass, and once her marathon’s through, she inserts the more perfect, less crinkly of the two into her mouth. I’m again fascinated by her lovely fangs. I watch them break into the surface of the tiny olive. It’s not special to fall for a girl’s mouth; there are so many scenes in so many movies about so many girls tying so many knots in the red stems of so many cherries. But I don’t know how sexy that is, to be honest with you. It’s a little scary, actually. I don’t want anybody tying a knot in my stem, if you know what I mean. Anyway, it’s simple enough, me watching this updated Dora chomping down on her booze-soaked olive. A simple pleasure. Dora wrecks it for me when she resumes her questioning. “What do you do?” she repeats. She’s not going to drop it. She’s businessy in her asking, and I watch her gloved hands tap against the table. It isn’t subtle, and it might be impatient. I flip through all the possible answers. Each is accompanied by a percentage of

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truthfulness. The greatest percentage goes to “I do nothing at all for a living. I live off my rich dad.” The lowest goes to “I am a highpowered business exec.” How does “I am a high-powered business exec” even register at all? Well, I’ve often fantasized about it, and I went through a Secret of My Success phase as a child, and that means that on some plain, in some parallel dimension, I am probably living out a very successful corporate life. I pick a third, partially true option: “I am a writer, working on a novel.” I pick it because in one way it is absolutely true. In another more honest way, this declaration is completely false. I am not working on a novel. I have not touched the odious pile of crap for three summers. “I’m a writer, actually. Working on a book. A novel. But I mean, who isn’t, right?” From her blank stare, I’m able to surmise that Dora isn’t working on a novel. “What about?” she asks. Her green eyes are intelligent, and she nods encouragingly, but I sense she is disappointed. “It’s important to have a project,” she adds. What did she expect? A rocket scientist? “It’s pretty complicated. You’d have to read it.” “Can I?” “Sorry?” “Can I read it?” she asks. “It’s not autobiographical, is it? Do I need to be nice to you?” “Um. Sure, you can read it,” I say. “I mean. When it’s done. I guess.” “Can’t I read what you have so far?” “That’s not a good idea,” I say, too quickly. Is it getting warm in here? I swallow. My mouth has gone completely dry. “Could you give me a little idea about the gist of it?” I don’t want to be rude and say, “Dora, listen, a novel is not a

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jingle for Pop Tarts. I can’t just sing a few bars of the melody, so you can get the vibe.” What I say, instead, is: “It’s a ghost story.” “For kids or for adults?” she asks. “Grown-ups, I guess. But it’s also a love story. You know, it’s a love story and a story about urban angst and coming of age and a ghost story all in one.” “Hmmm. Sounds pretty complicated.” She has no idea. “At least it’s not one of those books about writing a book. I’ve had it with that po-mo bullshit.” We order cake. When it arrives, I feel a surge of pleasure at her approval of it. “This looks gorgeous,” says Dora, drawing out the last syllable. I hate the word “gorgeous,” but when Dora says it, it doesn’t sound funny or vulgar. It sounds beautiful. I don’t usually like lawyers either, or people who drink eight-dollar martinis like tap water, but somehow, if Dora were to pull white paint chips out of her purse and ask me my opinion on restful palettes, I’d find it compelling. She drives her fork into the moist cake. It flakes beautifully, all that thick, dense brown against the flashing silver and the white plate and the red coulis and the raspberries and the fresh whipped cream. I unwrap my own fork, place the napkin on my lap and take a bite for myself. While we eat, we talk. About just about everything and anything you can imagine. Dora is very talkative. I learn that she’s a newbie lawyer, living in squalor with her college roommates, some painting major named Alex and an engineer named Gus. I learn how she knows Lamb (through the painter, who went to art college with her). I learn she’s a frustrated painter, and that when she isn’t working on becoming rich enough to afford a condominium and die, she’s trying to paint or beating herself up about not painting.

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One by one, Dora’s details solidify. One by one, they chip her out of the loose shape I’ve imagined for her, Dora in the round. I want to be a good listener. Unfortunately, in that, in the act of tuning my ears, of trying to bear down hard against distraction, I open myself completely to all the sounds I try not to hear. Belle’s here, fucking things up. “Don’t leave me,” she says. Belle is a rough draft. A musical interlude; a sketch of a lover. She causes me to remember bones around my fingers. One by one, bells toll a scale, from C to C. It’s so loud I can’t pretend not to hear it. I shake. I shake and shake and shake and shake and shake and shake and shake until another kind of shaking breaks the spell: Dora’s arm around my shoulder, her sudden wrist, her gloved palm caressing my neck, the intelligent concern in her eyes. “Shit, you okay? You looked like you were having a seizure or something.” It would not be cool to start crying. Instead, I bite down hard on the inside of my mouth and seize Dora’s hand too intensely, and I frighten her. It seems like everything is so delicate right now. “Do you need pills or something? Are you epileptic? You’re sweating a lot.” My embarrassment is keen. “No, no, nothing like that. It’s just this thing I have. It’s just this thing.” Dora ushers the waiter over. She asks for the bill. “Oh,” I say. “I don’t want to be a downer. We don’t have to leave or anything. I’m fine.” “Don’t be daft.” Dora looks irritated. “You’re not well. I’ll get you home, okay?” She heaps me onto her right shoulder and straps her purse to her other one. We move slowly, and I get to smell her. She hops me through the restaurant. I feel like somebody important. We get to the door; she

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leans me against a fish tank, gently, while she fetches my coat. “How did you know that was my coat?” I ask. It’s a generic leather jacket. I’m surprised that she even had time to notice it. “Your coat’s just a lot like you,” she says, hamming. “I don’t know. Jesus. It’s yours, isn’t it? Fuck.” We inch our way to Dora’s car, an unremarkable red Toyota. “This was my dad’s,” she says. What I find I like more and more about Dora is how she just offers stuff to you, just like that. “That’s pretty cute,” I say. “I guess so.” She piles me into the front seat, bad leg first. Then she’s by my side, starting the engine. The motor sputters a little, then steadies. Every sound matters. “So, I guess you must be pretty spoiled to score a car from Daddy, eh?” I ask, all smiley. “He’s dead,” she says and pulls at her gloves. Can you tell I’m a stud? So far, I am doing really well. “Let’s go for a drive,” I say.

I know nothing about death. It makes me uncomfortable that somebody I like has had somebody die on them. Actually, it terrifies me. How can this be? I mean, I’m practically married to a ghost. I know, I know, it’s funny. I guess asking how it is that I don’t know anything about death is kind of like asking how a person who falls in love with someone from Jamaica can know so little about Jamaica. Have you ever been to Jamaica? How was it? Relaxing? Love isn’t leisure. It isn’t just about wearing cute runners and hoodies together on the way to get whole-grain croissants at the local bakery. It doesn’t exist in the synchronization of purchases, in the shared, sexed-up selection

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of Super Comfy matching pyjamas. Lamb says I’ve never really been in love. She says I see love as a goal. This is not true — love isn’t a story. It’s not a riddle. And you just can’t solve for every ghost. Death is simply where Belle comes from — like the last place that she’s been. It’s not what she is. And I wished that I could be where she isn’t, that I could once and for all be right up close to her, in all that she’s dead, right up in her mouth, totally. That we’d requite this thing, once and for all. That we’d “consummate,” that we could watch television and bicker and go ice skating. That one day we’d fuck. In “positions.” It was all mine, and even the thrill of wanting to please her, take her to heights, was a glorious impossibility. That’s what was so perfect about it. At least there was back and forth — Belle had a sense of humour that was as old as she was, and she used these great retro expressions. She talked to me all night long, and when somebody was great they were “the bee’s knees.” When it had been a while, it had been “a dog’s age.” “Cat’s pyjamas.” We talked. Kind of. She talked and I listened. Like with Lamb. I wanted to tell Lamb about the first time with Belle, so that we could trade, but it wasn’t a real first time. Lamb tells me everything. People really get to know one another when they crumble up other people in each other’s company, when they talk about how much they love others or hate others or think others are funny. But it has to be mutual. Otherwise, it’s theft.

Dora helps me out of the car. I’m amazed by her strength. “Do you work out?” I ask. She giggles. This is another new Dora. Her hair’s gone wild; it hangs down past her shoulders in large chunky curls. I find my key and I open the door, thinking,

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This is it, this is it. Belle is quiet. Dear, sweet, awful Tina appears in her ridiculous hemp pajamas. She’s holding a pot, full of some kind of foul-smelling vegetable casserole. She brings it over to Dora, who looks in at the mixture and smiles politely. “Looks yummy,” she says. “Did you wash that pot?” I ask. My anger is hot. You probably live with somebody who routinely cleans their pots and dishes before reusing them. Not Tina. Tina’s laissez-faire attitude is so extreme that it frequently endangers both our lives. Once, I came home to discover the door wide open, a forest of unattended candles in the living room, two out of three burners blazing full force, the cat chewing on an enormous box of bulk rat poison, and a note from Tina inviting me to join her and some of her yoga group at the pub down the street. I want you to understand something about me: I am generally good. And I want you to understand something else about me: I don’t like everybody. “Oops,” says Tina, “that’s why it doesn’t smell right. I guess it’ll taste like last night’s chicken soup.” Dora’s eyes narrow a bit diabolically. I notice that she’s pulling at the gloves on her hands in a totally weird, rhythmic way. “So,” says Tina. “What did you two lovebirds get up to?” Dora opens her beautiful mouth to answer, but is promptly interrupted. “I spent the whole night trying to slough the dry skin off my heels. Do you ever get that? It’s gross. I was supposed to go to this seminar on children and sexuality at the resource centre, but I realized that it was more important to have some ‘me time.’ Do you get that way?” She looks at Dora, apparently wants an answer. Again, Dora

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attempts to respond. Once more she’s stopped in her tracks. I signlanguage offer to take her coat, and then remember that I can’t walk. I sink deeper into the sofa. “Yeah,” says Tina. “I really like to be alone in the silence of the evening, to have a nice bath and just breathe. Breathing is so important. I just lie there and breathe all the tension away. Sometimes I get so relaxed I fall asleep. It’s the ideal time to go light some scented candles and practice some soothing yoga to some relaxing music. And that really relaxes me. Do you like to relax? It’s really, really, really important to relax. It makes you a better lover, too. Not that I’m getting any right now, but you know that it’s important to practice clenching the deep muscles in case you do get laid. And that’s really good for your whole system, anyway, and it helps with digestion and prevents incontinence and bladder infections. Nobody wants a bladder infection, am I right? Anyway, you should try it. I’ve got a book on it called Awakening Your Core; it’s really nicely illustrated. I could lend it to you if you guys aren’t doing anything tonight we could go to the pub and spra mill jruilo maoc njebvalihfk all natural vaginal sponge squa man jug jkdvvegan slumber party sdjfb ksdjryuewruiwijjslk, nvkl lk lkdsnfsfhjsdfhaknfa abdominal crunches ksanfewrueueohgiehglsfhas!” Tina speaks so fast now that it’s only possible to make out words like “holistic” and “vagina.” How I Had Imagined It ) Dora would use her super-human strength to tenderly ferry me to the house (check). ) I would open the door to the triumphant double fluke of a) Tina being out for the evening, and b) Tina having completed her share of the household chores (nope).

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) There would be some fresh-cut flowers in a vase, and Tina would have decided not to burn the patchouli-flavoured incense for three hours prior to leaving (no). ) There would be no vile cooking smells (no). ) There would be no cat (no). ) There would be no Tina (no). ) Dora would cry out at the vast size and beauty of the townhouse, and I could lie and say that I owned it (no) or at the very least, that I rented it with money I made off selling the first half of my brilliant novel to a big publishing house (no). ) After helping me to my bed, Dora would stand in my window with the moon at her back and slowly undress (no). Everything about her would astound me. Her skin would glow pearly in the soft, low light. She and I would make beautiful love. I would be free of the ghost, fall rapidly and perfectly out of love with the gory atrocity, the notion that haunts me, and fall into love with this great, hilarious, successful, beautiful young woman. With this actual young woman. At the same moment, she would fall deeply in love with me, and that would be the moment of our skilled, ecstatic, shared orgasm. She’d buckback with me buried deep in her, tears streaming down her burning hot face, onto my hands on her breasts (still possible, but unlikely). As you can imagine — I’m not thrilled with the way things are going so far. “Tina,” I say, “Dora’s a lawyer. She doesn’t do stuff like yoga. Not everybody is into that pop new-agey stuff, you know? Some of us find it offensive.”

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Dora shrugs. “What?” I ask. “I have to,” Dora says. “Otherwise, I get, sort of, um, tense, I guess.” “Yeah,” says Tina, gloating and spooning the putrid mushy dinner out of the pot into her mouth. “You guys want some of this? Yoga’s great for stress and anxiety, Flipper. Plus, it really gets you in touch with your inner self. You know something, you’d probably really dig it. Besides, Lamb seems to think you’re really burning out or something. I mean, I talked to her yesterday, and geez, she was all worried and stuff and she said you really seem to be losing —” “Don’t call me Flipper,” I say. My fear of losing this chance with Dora rises up into my throat and comes out as a small moan. I look at Dora, whose fascination with me has come to an abrupt end. She is paying close attention to the things Tina is saying about me. Her arms stiffen. I stand up from the sofa and fall down, and stand up once again. “Dora, you know what?” I say. “I hate to be rude. Do you think you could help me upstairs to bed. I’m just really tired and I have a big day tomorrow.” So, it isn’t subtle. But it’s the best I can do. Dora stands up to help me. This is it! “Don’t worry,” says Tina. “I’ll help you upstairs in a few minutes. That way we can hang out a bit more and Dora doesn’t have to rumple her nice suit.” I stare at Tina. Nothing. There’s nothing at all but benign stupidity in that weird, freakishly little misshapen head. Dora sits down again. Her lovely smile is gone. She looks a little nervous and bored. Tina is unstoppable; she just keeps talking. “When I hurt, I reach for a good book or a cup of soothing tea, instead of eating.” Dora listens quietly to everything she says. It occurs to me that Dora is a way better person than me. Her head rests solidly against

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her fist. Her profile belongs on a Roman coin. I can’t look away from her. Finally, once Tina has involved poor Dora in some sort of handholding bit, the phone rings. It’s Tina’s mother, the only person alive who talks more than Tina. Dora says, “I really need to sleep. I have trouble with that. I should get on home, you know?” I nod, sadly. “I’ll help you,” she says, and offers me her arm. “Oh, you don’t have to. I mean, Tina will get me upstairs when she’s off the phone.” “But that might not be for many days,” she whispers. The stairs challenge us, and I think, Good. This is the sort of thing that’s supposed to bring people together. That’s why people on dating shows always have to run three-legged races naked through oil mazes. It turns out the easiest way to do it is for me to edge up on my ass, step by step. It’s really sort of fun with Dora acting as a cheerleader. I feel like Terry Fox or something. “This is a nice house,” says Dora. The lie’s ready to pop out of my mouth. You know, about how I am really getting attention for my book, finally, and about how I am going to be a big literary megastar, and how I am already getting rich off my genius, and about how I can afford this sort of place in downtown Toronto at the tender age of twenty-seven. Instead I say, “My dad bought it for me for Christmas.” “Nice dad.” “Yeah,” I say. “Really nice.” Dora sits me down next to her, on the bed. “What does he do?” “He used to edit movies. Now he just pisses my mother off.” “My name is, love me,” says Belle. Dora doesn’t hear her, but I do. I look up. Dora turns the radio on, then up. “Jingle Bells.” She

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changes the channel. More stupid “Jingle Bells.” “Goddamn it,” Dora says, “Christmas is long over.” She presses the power button again. It doesn’t turn off. I am frightened and begin to sweat. “Whoa,” she says, touching me gently, on the shoulder. “You’re burning up. And there’s something wrong with your radio.” Dora goes back to playing with the  player on my new system. She pushes all of the buttons. She steps back and looks at the controls. As she stares, the volume on the system turns way up. “Holy fuck. Is this a surge or something?” She touches the machine and hops backward, startled. “Shit,” she says. “I just got a little shock. You need to retire this thing.” She sits down next to me on the bed and contemplates. The volume is pretty loud, so she has to raise her voice. “It’s too bad. It’s a really good system,” she says. She stands again, to go back and fiddle. “Don’t touch it,” I say. I am terrified and I sound angry. “Don’t be a dick. It’s just a  player.” But she retreats and returns to me. “It’s new?” I sound wimpy. “What do you listen to?” she asks. She looks at the stereo, and back at me. “It’s too bad it doesn’t have a tape deck.” “Why? Who listens to tapes?” “Don’t you keep any old tapes? I guess I’m just lame.” “No.” I say. “I do keep some old tapes — mixtapes, mainly.” “Yeah. Those were it, weren’t they? When we were kids?” She says “when we were kids” as though that was something we did together, as a team. She’s right, though. Mixtapes were it. What is a mixtape? A mixtape is a delicate gift, something you

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construct with an ear for the tastes of the intended listener. You pick each song, with care. You worry about possible connotations, about how you come across. You pop a drawing that you made, with your very own hands and all your good intentions, into the case as its sentimental lining, its inner and highly permeable membrane. Dora’s wearing a see-through white blouse under her jacket. She stands with her gloved hands in her pockets. She looks like a delicious sundae and I want to eat her. She is tall. Her hair is so thick it seems endless. “What do you listen to?” she asks again. “A lot of stuff,” I say. The radio stops. Just stops. I clear my throat. “I like a lot of classical stuff, as dorky as that is. And I like some old punk. These days I’m really more into fun dance music, hip hop, pop. That kind of thing.” I try to ignore the place going dark. Dora doesn’t. “Dude. What the fuck just happened to the lights? I hope it’s not another blackout. Did your lights go a couple nights ago?” “Tina’s probably running all her appliances at once, all on one plug,” I lie. It’s really weak. I don’t know enough about electricity to posit this kind of hypothesis. I add, “She does that.” “You guys need to get an electrician in here.” Dora and I sit in total darkness. It is pleasant. I feel a little more calm. The Christmas carol and Belle’s voice have gone away. “We should go dancing some time.” I can’t stop staring at her gloves. She reaches a hand out and strokes the top of my leg above where the cast begins. “In the distant future.” Suddenly, Dora is on top of me. Her hair is lemony and

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rough against my face. She touches my chest, softly. “Take your coat off, stay a while,” she says. My heart jumps at the cold of her hands on my chest. One hand is in my shirt and the other is outside, quite far away from the heat of my body, patting at my coat and working, rather hungrily, to remove it. She pauses. “What are these?” she asks. She pulls your brown buttons out of my inside pocket, squinting in the dark. She says, “These are pretty.” She puts them down on the bedspread, and pushes me down beside them. I’m hot and sick. Dora begins to unbutton her blouse. The buttons on her blouse are unremarkable, not as nice as yours. Her bra is pink with red spots. At least I think it’s pink, but it could be orange — it’s pretty dark. Her breasts are larger than I had imagined. Her skin is very soft where she places my hands on her sides. I can feel little indentations, little stretch marks I suppose, along her side where her body increases to fill out her hips. I am so excited that I exhale in sharp wheezes. Her lips, my cheek, her hands on my chest. I turn to look at your buttons. They breathe. On the pillow like that, they heave and fall like a woman’s chest, like the one that’s right there in front of me, the one that, when I turn back, is at my mouth. I can hear a little air, something like the release of a sharp wind, coming from their little holes. The beauty of Dora’s tongue getting lost rushing through the hairs on my belly, towards my cock, is lost on me. Belle starts in with her stupid bells, making me fall and fall and fall.

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7

Believe it or not, there are limits to what you can know. Believe it or not, your diaphragmic breathing will not bring me to you, or you to me. Believe it or not, there is more to knowing somebody than imagining that you are where they are, or that you know what they know. You have been presumptuous. And so I can also be presumptuous. I want you to imagine being a boy. And I want to imagine where you are. Imagine a bedroom. Maybe. Maybe it’s a very, very pretty bedroom. Maybe you set to work on your sweater. Maybe the room is very feminine, lacy even. Maybe you’ve really worked the whole white-on-white thing that was so in a couple of years ago, all the crystal and mirrors and white wood and everything. How can you afford a bedroom like this? Things must be going well for you. You’ve finished the sleeves already. Congrats. You’re fast at it. They are soft to the touch and you enjoy the softness. You touch the

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sleeves to your cheeks, even though the act is inherently performative and you are alone. You’re a little full from all of those ribs, but it’s a good kind of full. You don’t think about me, or about how strange it is that we seem to run into each other every day. You don’t find it all that unusual — Toronto is a stupid little town. You’ve often run into people. And since we don’t talk much when we meet, it’s just colour. Nothing else. But you are bothered by the absence of those buttons. Red will look stupid against this sweater. Would you consider buying new brown ones? They’re not expensive. You are frugal, though, aren’t you? You look at the dense knit you’ve created, this functional object of beauty, this evidence of your survival skills — it would be wrong to buy new buttons for it. You should use something you already have. You touch it again and lay it flat on your white work desk. You think, Where have those stupid brown buttons gone? But nothing comes. Imagine a reflection. You pause and look at yourself in the vanity mirror. You are your mother at her makeup table. You shrug it off — it doesn’t matter. You open the drawer and pull out markers and graphite and start to draw. You start from scratch but are quickly intimidated by all of this blankness. You start again, this time picking up the drawing you started earlier. A giant oak, reaching, with all of its insides open. Red flowing from it, like blood from a wound. Your project now, in the absence of your buttons, will be to clear-cut. This oak matters because it will be the only tree in your city. Imagine a forest. When you are done, you sit on the floor on a mat and think about your body. You are critical. You start inside, with your breath. You imagine that breath as propulsive, something that moves you. You are your own guru. Your mantra, “Travel inside.” To black.

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8

Mornings like this go, You stupid ass! I must have slept but my head is swimming. I pat the bed next to me: no hot girl. Just buttons. The first thing I think is, You stupid ass. Really. I’m one of those people who think in words, and those are the words I actually think. The reality of my having screwed up the first chance I’ve ever had at actually sleeping with a living woman is almost too much to bear. Mornings like this make me think that I am set on loop. But really, that isn’t the second thing I think, not at all. The second thing I think is, Where the hell are my clothes? Because they’re missing. Why the hell am I naked? I admit that for a moment I entertain the possibility that Dora found me so irresistible she was forced to ravage me while I was unconscious. I fall out of bed. I lie on my back on the bedroom floor, naked but for my cast. I stare at the

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wonderland of dust twisting and twirling around the wires and books and shoes under my queen-sized bed. It’s beautiful in its way. All stalactites and mountains and valleys of thick grey dirt and peach Persian cat hair. I feel around me and under the bed for the shirt and pants I was wearing last night — nothing. I stand. I fall. The world’s gone all new on me. Without my crutch, it is perilous. My clothes are noplace. I sit on the bed in my birthday suit. It takes me half an hour to get downstairs. The ass-step technique I mastered last night, with Dora’s tutelage, is much harder, and less pleasant, in reverse. Downstairs, the kitchen’s eerily still. There’s a note on the coffeemaker. Hi Loser, You passed out on your date last night. I think she was scared. Congratulations. And by the way, my friend Bethany told me that that girl is in an “open relationship.” FYI! Did you pay me for hydro? Please do so ASAP. Help yourself to casserole. Tina I aim my hatred at each individual letter, individually. Then I lean my face heavily against the wall. Up close, the colour is even worse.

You know what else? Paint chips lie. They are the lying whores of the decorating universe. The colour was great on the chip, this soft, subtle off-green called “guest linen.” Even the name was restful. But context is everything. Light and furniture and expanse and shadow

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— you’ve got to consider all of that stuff when you pick a wall colour. We didn’t. We just went for it. On our walls, “guest linen” came out a slightly more salmony version of the bizarre hue you get when you hold your hand up against a bright light and stare close at your palm. I got this from Lamb who looked at it and said, “I feel like I’m inside somebody’s hand.” I had to agree. In the spring, two years ago, Lamb and I got down to painting the walls together. She was my roommate then. She sweated out of her clothes, until she stripped down to just her bra and shorts. I saw a little greyish mole under her arm, and her hair there was longish, wild. It was hot, in every way. We had become co-stars of some sort of very niche house-painter porn. I took off my shirt, grew shy and put it back on. I stood over the fan and let it blow up my shirt. “Somebody would really love that,” said Lamb, giggling fetchingly, so that her beautiful white, white teeth showed against her red lips. “Seriously. That does it for someone, you know?” I guess I maybe looked photogenic in an X-rated sort of way (in Lamb’s world, at least), but that hadn’t been my intention. The relief was very brief and everything was sticky. We opened the back door and left it open. I locked Tina’s stupid cat in the bedroom, and asked him politely not to pee all over my bed. I pried the next can open. Our “accent wall” colour was a nice deep green. It was not forest green. I hate forest green. I tasted my sweat mustache. I felt beads of sweat crawl into my eyes, reverse tears. Things were better when Lamb lived with us. “This is a better colour,” I said. “Maybe we shoulda done this for the whole place.” “I dunno, I think that when they’re together in combination, they’ll be okay. It’ll be nice in winter. Cozy, you know?”

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At that time, winter was inconceivably far off. The tropical townhouse felt and echoed each thick throb of hot life outside it. It was impossible to cool the place. The fan tried and failed. Actually, it was kind of fun to surrender to the heat. With the back door left open, the non-air coming into the room from the swill of the city outside brought with it a gust of mosquitoes and fat summer flies whose exact species names I didn’t know. The yard was the reason we went with the place. The real estate agent had pointed it out like it was no big deal. The bathroom, on the other hand, seemed a point of pride. There was a ton of mould on the bathroom wall, but he had gestured at it with delight. It showed the years on the place, like rings in a tree. “New pipes,” he’d declared fondly. My father shook his head, worried. But this, the garden behind the locked metal door (a “security feature”) was what Lamb and I loved. “Dad, please!” Lushness spewed from each sweet edge, to the point of obscenity. I cherish the memory of that garden’s potential. For suspense: by the fence, an old blue chest with a musty, rotting sweater inside. For geek cred: a computer chair circa  (brown leather, almost cool, were it not for the presence of strange, curling grey bugs emerging from its every surface at the merest pressure). For mystery: layers upon layers of tangled, dense weeds. These weeds were new and exciting kinds of weeds, weeds like I had never seen before, monster weeds. They sprung up, enormous, huge lines outstretching, a real honest-to-goodness network. For romance: a sweet little rose bush pushing up for air. It was hardly visible, under the overgrowth of gory, impressive weeds. It

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was a barely living relic of a time when someone had thought to tend to the place. It seemed to gasp. Maybe, at one time, the chest had contained secret treasures. Tiny teeth? Rubies? Strings of pearls, skulls? The whole thing had been our secret garden. Mine and Lamb’s. Fuck Tina. She was my roommate in name alone. We hoped that someone had fallen in doomed love beneath the overgrowth, the leaves and vines that draped over to the gate to the dangerous-looking back alley. And yes, Lamb and I had both read The Secret Garden as children and sincerely loved it, although neither of us could really remember the storyline. We remembered that it involved moats and accents, and a small disabled boy with behavioural problems. Or maybe it was the protagonist who had the behavioural issues. Anyway, somebody in the story acquired self-knowledge, and there was a beautiful garden, and the garden in the story fascinated us even as children because we were city kids, and gardens are all you get of dense, confused nature in the city.

This garden, like the trash room we share with the other townhouses, is full of other people’s shit. The sun is so hot on my face I can sort of pretend it is late spring. Of course, my cast has fixed it so I can’t do much about the feelings spring necessarily stir up — the desire to leap and frolic and kiss people — so I do the only thing possible: I trip my way out into our Secret Garden. I remember pretty quickly that I’m naked. It’s obvious, because I am freezing. I turn around and go back into the house to get dressed. I get dressed, deciding to cut an old pair of jeans for maximum cast comfort. At this point, the cast is so much of a part of me that it seems appropriate to wreck my clothes to accommodate

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it. Maybe I will always have a cast — I’m ready to adapt. Dressed and back outside, I settle into the mouldy hipster office chair and pull out my supplies. I think about bicycles. I think, I can’t believe I blacked out on my first real date. And then I think, Bicycles. Bicycles, bicycles, bicycles. Our childhoods were parallel in this other way. While Lamb thought fire, birds, fire, I thought Belle, bikes, bell. Not that different, even some letters in common. For late February, it’s really, really freakin’ nice. I think about how rude I was to you, leaving you there in the record store, all coat and false concern. Then I remember you weren’t alone — you seem to know everybody. For a while I feel embarrassed, knowing you could be a gossip. But the overlay is all bikes.    . What is a bike? Is it a sketch for an improved horse? As kids, Lamb and Jo and I roared like maniacs across pavement, down hills. We had terms for every imaginable trick, even the ones we had no hope of ever being able to perform. Gut Grinning, Touchy Feelies. “Jo’s a good guy,” Lamb said all the time, and this made me mental. When she said that, I wanted to say, “He bragged about touching your girl parts when we were little.” But then, that probably wouldn’t have mattered to her. Once in a while, while we were doing tricks, Belle’d call to me in anger or longing (but never, it seemed, with the intention to harm) and I would have to stop, just like that, and listen. It was okay. I knew she was just making herself known. “What’s up?” Jo asked when I was on all fours with my ear cupped against the pavement.

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“Can’t you hear it? I can hear her calling me.” Even then, when it was still new, I found it hard to conceal my affliction. I was in love. It sucked. “No. What?” All Jo could hear was the factory droning. “That. That, Jo. That.” “Whaa? I don’t hear, like, anything. Seriously.” “Somebody is calling me.” I said this, pretending not to know it was Belle. His bike was leaning against his tan. His mouth was closed. Jo was an exceptionally compassionate guy. Lamb was right — he was a good person, despite bragging about being the first to molest her breasts. He had dignity and compassion before the rest of us did, an early bloomer. “No,” said Jo. He placed his hand on my arm, calmly. “Nobody’s calling you, man.” Drawing had changed, had become an accessory to gift-giving, but biking was still just biking. Biking for biking’s sake. Our other terms: Gilding the Lily, Notch Nursing, Fixing the Broken Nose, Downing Jacob’s Ladder, Gout Gliding, The Clasping Ivy. Nothing about biking was about getting anywhere. We shared more than terms, we shared stuff. We didn’t have much stuff, because we were children, so all the stuff we had, had to begged for. I had about a million toys, but I had outgrown them. Jo gave me a banjo, because his father had about twenty of those, and his father no longer wanted it. We shared our stuff, and we made stuff for each other. Long before Lamb would go to art school and learn about fancy things like “gift economies” we knew that when you love somebody, you make something for them. Our parents taught us that, and we taught it to one another. We made drawings, and mixtapes, and we

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put both together. And giving and getting were both about equal in terms of the pleasure they’d yield. But nothing, nothing was as good as bikes.

Tina comes racing out, trampling through mud and gesticulating wildly. When she gets to me finally, the edge of her mouth spurts spit directly into my eye. “Say it, don’t spray it!” I yell. “When did you get home?” I’m unable to fully conceal my disappointment. “It’s that girl! ” she says. “On the phone for you!” I freeze. “Lamb?” I ask. “No.” “Dora?” “No.” “Who?” “That other girl.” “What other girl?” Tina stares at me. “Didn’t she tell you her name?” I ask. “I thought you would know from the number.” “I’ll check later.” “She’s on the phone right now, Flipper.” “Don’t call me that.” Nobody else matters. I don’t stand up. The varnish acts as a mild sedative, and the back and forth strokes have worked me down into some sort of meditative trance. Oh bike, good ol’ pal. I wave Tina away regally, and start to ruminate over the particulars. As she walks away from me, she turns and looks over her shoulder.

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“Your room is a sty, Flipper!” “Tell whoever it is that I’ll call them back!” Tina nods at me through the screen door. In many ways, the bike and I are alike. I want to use this new self-knowledge for my betterment, and for the betterment of others. Look at us — we’ve both done very little other than collect dust over the last few years, and yet we’re both structurally sound and expensive to maintain. The light shifts a little today from my favourite, clear winter light, to spring light. It’s still cold, though. Cold enough to go inside. Back in the kitchen, I pull on my grey wool sweater and take inventory of my food — I am down to half a box of pasta. I go back into the yard with a heavier, more sensible jacket on over my wool sweater, my scarf and hat. I just keep on cleaning and polishing and painting the bike. It’s a very nice bike, still, and it’s a great listener. It was a gift for my sixteenth birthday. “Bike,” I say, “do you remember when we used to bomb around town together, just the two of us? And with those two?” The bike doesn’t respond, because it is a bike, but it looks thoughtful. “I was thinking about those days, recently. A lot. Do you remember the time we got scared out of our wits at the Minor house? Jo was with us. And Lamb? Do you remember?” I relate some anecdotes. They are all the same. The bike and I lean against each other while I reminisce. Tearfully, I push one of the pedals with my hand, hard, and watch it spin. I’m keenly aware of Tina’s little face poking past the curtain in the kitchen window. I’m sure to over-speak every single word, to eeeNUN-see-ate clearly and loudly, just to be sure that she understands that, yep, the weirdo is talking to his bicycle. “It really was fun. Even when it was scary. Wasn’t it?” “Go on,” its pose seems to urge, but we are interrupted. My

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neighbour, Ginger, appears over the top of our common, low, dividing fence. I say hello. She starts to talk in an animated way about the benefit she’s intending to throw for Olaf, Tina’s practically dead cat. They are going to have to cut off its wiener or something — I’m not sure exactly how cat gender reassignment works, haven’t paid that much attention. Tina talks about it as something she can put off forever. At least Ginger is taking an interest. Somehow, she sees this as a great opportunity for a party. “Do you have any gay friends?” she asks. “Of course I do.” I’m not sure why I am so defensive, but my bike is shy. “Could Will be the master of ceremonies?” “Will?” “Yeah,” she says. “I mean, he’s pretty charismatic. Hasn’t he done commercials?” “Will’s not gay,” I say. Ginger bites her Bic pen, hard. Bic pens are the best for doodling. “He’s not?” she says, visibly hurt. “Just metro.” “What about Darren?” “He’s definitely gay.” She brightens. “Super.” “But I don’t know if he’d be into the cause.” “Why not?” Her incredulity’s intense; how could anyone not feel for a cat about to undergo gender reassignment? “I think he’d find it exploitative. He’s always saying that gay culture has been usurped by the mainstream. I can’t see him getting behind us on this one.” Ginger is unfazed. “Whatever. People are so . I’m trying to help people.”

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“Whatevs,” I correct. “Technically, you’re trying to help a cat.” “Whatevs,” she says. “This is about gender, though.” “You know what’s sort of interesting in that department, Ginger? I had to take Olaf in because Tina kept forgetting, and I found out that the procedure’s like some sort of dirty veterinary secret.” “What?” I can tell that she is rapidly losing interest. “The vet told me about the operation like he was ashamed or something. I mean, it’s, like, okay to chop off their balls and reconfigure their ovaries, but touch their mighty cat sword and you’re crossing some sort of sacred cat masculinity line.” “Maybe it was just that vet,” says Ginger. “Some people are ignorant.” Apparently I’m not charming Ginger’s skinny jeans off with my banter. She leans back, away from the fence. I think she’s about to leave, but once again I see her small, plump hand begin to twirl and play with a piece of blonde hair. “What do you think about catnip centrepieces? And what if we get Clive’s Room? They make wicked martinis.”

You never learned to ride a bike, did you? But I’d like to think that you were a quick study of bike chic. I don’t know this about you for sure, but I like it as a detail. Humour me. I’m sure that worse traits and adorable vulnerabilities have been ascribed to you without your knowledge. A boyfriend or two probably emphasized your helplessness in order to eroticize you. While I polish, I think of all the ways to impart sheen, and I know that I have shined you to nearly blinding, even though I don’t know you. I need to do this.

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Dora’s gloves are old lace. It is turning into night. I am still polishing. I can imagine Dora’s hands before I even see them; I’m sure of their length, their elegant description. They flutter like wings. They fly through the air. They trap. It’s almost totally dark when Dora comes unexpectedly into the garden. Her hands greet me first as I imagined they would; she always seems to lead with them. Her hands appear around the edge of a tall scruff of hedge. Company makes me look at the garden more critically. Okay, calling it a garden is maybe a bit soft — it isn’t exactly a “garden,” because it’s February and nothing’s a garden in February. But if you’re interesting, you can read this garden the way you would read a map and you can imagine the changes it will undergo. Here’s where the peonies will reach up, blown before they reach their anticipated height, little white orgasms and pink orgasms — my favourite kind of flower. There’s one tree calling out whole from the garden’s promise — Dora leans against it, making her hands wing across my field of vision. I look up from my process, which has admittedly turned into something compulsive. The bike will look so much better with racing flames! I have a mask on. It lets me breathe quite normally. Dora coughs and uses her gloves to cover her mouth. “You sick?” I ask. I pull down my mask. “What the fuck is that shit you’re using?” She surveys my handiwork. “It’s very, very seventies.” “Yeah, I know.” “It’s cool. I like it. Do you think you’ll be able to go faster now?” “I’ve always been fast, baby.” “Right,” she says. Dora looks at the bike, and then at me, and then back at the bike.

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“Is this, like, a child’s bike?” “I don’t want to get into it.” Dora smiles at me, all wide and conciliatory, as if to say, “Hey, no problem.” “So, sorry about last night,” she says, businesslike. “What?” I ask, hoping for clues as to what actually happened. “Sorry I left early. I had to get back. Sorry to have left you like that.” “I hope it didn’t scare you.” “A little. But I scare easily.” Bells. “Oh fuck,” I say. I shake from the sound; it’s all up my back. “What?” “Nothing,” I say, smiling. “You’ve got spinach in your teeth.” She points into my mouth. That’s impossible — I can’t afford spinach. My index finger goes up to my front teeth. My mom calls those “dents de la chance,” because of the little gap between them. S’posed to be lucky. Shit. “I’m sorry,” she says. “That was sort of rude of me.” “It wasn’t rude,” I say, but she’s right — it was a little rude. Dora’s hand, especially her wrist, keeps coming up at me, again and again. It’s wrapped in a glove of course, but she keeps offering it up, wordlessly. Is this flirting? I didn’t think flirting involved pointing out something caught in your teeth. But I find myself sort of charmed. The bells get louder. I whisper, “Please don’t.” Belle rings like a boat motor, caught in water weeds, spinning itself dead. She’s saying, “I will,” times a million, shrill. “Please don’t what?” asks Dora. “Why do you wear those gloves?” I’m all panic. She pulls at them, helplessly.

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“Please don’t what?” “Nothing. I don’t know. What are you doing here?” I try to ask the last bit politely. It’s a good idea to be polite. I am a big believer in etiquette — the observance of norms as a default approach to most situations. It doesn’t come out right. Sometimes, it really is what you say, and not so much how you say it. It comes out all stupid and brutal. The bells trill, in my forehead, up behind my nose, in my ears. The ghost is utterly in my body, and I’m owned with every organized beat. Without meaning to, my foot taps along to it. What can I say? I got rhythm. “Just visiting,” says Dora. Visiting? What are we, college buddies? I’m not complaining — it’s just really familiar. “Cool,” I manage. “I gotta tell you something,” she says. “What?” “Okay, this is going to sound a little weird.” “What?” “Okay. Don’t take this the wrong way. Have you ever heard of an open relationship?” I take this the wrong way. My heart breaks. Tina was right? “Yeah,” I say. I’m not sure what’s happening. Bells. “I’m sort of . . . um . . . You know that guy?” “What guy?” This isn’t going in a direction I like. I shouldn’t have picked the lime green mask. “My, um, partner?” “The guy from the restaurant? Your lawyer friend?” The fun tie wearer? Anybody but him. “Yeah. We’re kind of a thing. We have been for a while. I should have told you earlier.”

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The bells pound hard. “I don’t want to hear this!” I say to Belle, aloud, because the noise of the bells utterly mechanized is making my head hurt. Dora’s put off. “Well, listen, I had a life before I met you, you know? I’m sorry it’s complicated.” She turns to go. “No wait,” I say. “I wasn’t . . .” Dora pauses. I look at the back of her head — rich chocolate curls. I’m reminded of the back of your head, and of the front of it. The bells flash like Christmas lights. A band of pain spreads around my head, in thick peals. Dora turns and hugs me. I am nauseous. “We can still see each other,” she says, smiling. “Just no intercourse. That’s our arrangement. Sorry to be so base.” I can barely hear her, she keeps talking about her “relationship rules.” The nausea gets worse. The bells in my head are there to hurt me, and the pain they cause overwhelms me. And then I scream, “Fuck off !” I can see the fear bleep across her face. Then she’s just gone. The bells hush. I go back into the house. “Are you gonna call that girl back?” asks Tina, who is always in the kitchen. I slump against the wall. “What girl?” For drama, I add, “There is no girl!”

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9

I promise that I have not done anything even remotely pervy with your buttons. Sure, I’ve stroked them a little, but that’s all. I have not put them in my mouth. I have not used them as anal beads. And it’s not that I’m all that attached to them. I just want to keep them. I know it’s kind of like stealing. Okay, I know that it is stealing. It’s not that I don’t think your buttons matter. I know your oversized sweater (which you called your “project”) is very important to you, and I know that the buttons are the essential, rare finishing touch. I know that inside these buttons there’s a whole past. I’m not above animism. I also know that one day I will run into you and you will have completed your oversized sweater, and it will have other buttons on it, and that’ll be the end. What do you know? You know how to accessorize. You know how to use the word “jouissance” in a sentence. You know how to party.

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What I do not know is where your buttons, or my gingham shirt, have gone. What I do not know is what on earth I will do. My suitcase makes a “click,” which is a sound as unlike bells as I can imagine. The sound used to tell me, “You’re in for a treat.” It used to mean I had a one-way ticket to Escapeville, . Now it simply means click. Click repeats in my mind, anti-bell. A seamless echo of clicks disappearing into each other. Have I screwed myself ? I put the suitcase under my arm and carefully shove my way out the door. The cabbie — God, cabbies are compassionate — lifts me gently into his car. I’m safe. I ask to be driven to a hotel. When he asks which one, I say the closest. The rain is cold. It’s late. I suddenly remember that I forgot to lock up the bike. We slide through the city, and I note some of the downtown thoroughfares are already closed in preparation for a Mental Illness Awareness Parade. This is perfect, for obvious reasons — and also because it means that we have to take the most gothic, dramatic streets, around the farthest edges of this strange city, to get to a hotel four hundred metres away from my townhouse. Seeing Toronto like this, as something bigger than my neighbourhood, makes it seem like a place of endless possibilities. Who the hell lives in the country? You can get ticks and rashes in the country, and there are snakes in every pantry. Say it with me: --. Wouldn’t you say, in all modesty, that it’s a pretty good, tolerant city? Right in its middle, it’s got a really tall building that everybody’s heard of, surrounded by lots and lots of slightly less tall buildings that nobody’s heard of. Toronto contains suffering and gentleness well. It’s got some parks, and in fall, it really is beautiful. Right now it’s at its ugliest, but even in this miserable season all the people you meet at bars are restrained but open-minded. You can walk to the water here, but

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you can’t swim in it. Or you can look out and cry, if you happen to have something to cry about. Everybody should have something to cry about. That’s why we have this lake. If you don’t have anything to cry about, I’ll give you some of mine. We are taking the lake route to get where we’re going, which means we’re taking the longest route. The cabbie is talking in a very fast language that isn’t my own. He’s not talking to me. I used to like these streets, I think, italicizing “used to.” And they are beautiful streets. I’m brimming with entitled, italicized nostalgia. Now, now I like nothing. Nothing at all. I think about entitlement. And authorship. And the scene. I try to nap in the cab, but it’s bumpy along a badly paved section of the road. The plan is to change these streets. It’s in the paper; even the mayor cares. I voted for him and I’m glad he cares about beauty. But, God, there is just nothing like the great, pigeon-shit-smeared underparts of this vast highway. The cabbie drives at killer speed now. I watch the lake and the condos fly by, icy angles everywhere, clean plains, the architecture of tidy reservation. Finally, we stop in front of the hotel. The cabbie takes the suitcase out of the trunk and hands it over to me. I stand crippled but stoked in the lobby, leaning against a giant Roman pillar, until a bellboy noticed me. He isn’t happy that he has noticed me and that we have made eye contact. He tries to pretend that I don’t exist. I wave a five-dollar bill at him seductively. He pulls me (roughly, I might add) across the lobby towards the front desk, where I check in. I ask if he’ll get me to the elevator. He is quite a bit younger than I am, so I do my best to be familiar. “You are the bomb,” I say. “Thank you, sir,” he manages. He has pale orange roots. His acne looks painful — it’s that acne on top of acne on top of acne kind of

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acne. I can tell that some of the zits are doing serious double duty as ingrown hairs. This is pretty intimate and all, and as he wrestles me forward, I go kind of limp. I’m not sure why I do this — clearly, it makes his job a hell of a lot harder. I guess it just feels right. “Are you in an open relationship?” I ask. “I’m straight, sir,” he says, panting because of my weight. “I’m not coming on to you. Besides, that kind of thing doesn’t matter anymore.” I pout. He shoves my suitcase into the elevator and then me in behind it. My body buckles over the suitcase.

First, I will watch  until my eyeballs burn up or fall out. Then, eyeless but still relaxed, I’ll have a luxurious bubble bath with the complimentary bath gel. I will even wear the complimentary shower cap. Following my luxurious bubble bath, I will lather myself in the complimentary “extra-soothing” lotion for “extra-dry” skin. It will completely obliterate the weird rash on my arm. I will ensure that each of these tasks takes approximately one hour longer than it would at home. That’s how I’ll know that I’m getting my money’s worth. When I am finished washing and oiling myself, I will don the complimentary bathrobe and lie down on the king-sized bed and watch more television. I may masturbate or fall asleep, depending my mood. If I have masturbated, I will use every last towel in my management of the situation. If I have not masturbated, I will find another reason to use every towel. All of it will seem deserved because it is so very expensive and I can pay for it. You know something, it’s not a bad room. I like this hotel. The view is really nice. I can see a lot from way up here. The worst things happen to your life when you fly up to the top of a building and peer

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down at it and lose any chance to do anything about what you see. From up here, it’s almost like a story takes shape where there wasn’t one before, like each of these little cars is actually going somewhere. But let’s not get all morbid and sad. It’s amazing here. They give you free everything. I think that this hotel is one of the greatest achievements of our civilization. Okay, what’s on the television menu today? Why, everything you could possibly want, of course! I settle on a documentary about the history of abdominal surgery. As if she even wants me anyway. I wonder if he wears his tie while they do it. On the screen, an animated recreation of medieval deworming unfolds. Then, a disembowelment.

It’s day. Predictable world! I stare into the mirror on the chest of drawers. They give you four drawers. I long for the day when I can learn to be the sort of person who uses hotel drawers. Currently, I am the sort of person who uses the floor. I glance over at my suitcase, which is open on the floor next to the  stand. It is a frantic mess of socks and underwear and undershirts. A disembowelment. I stare back at myself from the mirror. I’m not looking too bad. I should not have dyed my hair black — it is reading very emo. A different kind of disembowelment. The mirror turns red and then black. A shiny leg pokes through it, very Cabaret. “Nice job,” I say. “Classy.” I get into the plush armchair and lean back, in my robe, like a fat monarch. A kind of drawbridge drops, from the centre of the mirror, towards the bed. It’s a runway — you know, a catwalk? Please,

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no pictures! I recognize Kate Moss and a few other famous women from Lamb’s magazines. They sashay in various outfits, turn and walk back into the mirror. One of them waves, makes eye contact and disappears. She makes me feel like a . It is enjoyable. And it goes on and on. Eventually, I notice the models changing a little. They are not changing, as in into and out of outfits; instead, they appear to be changing. First, they get shorter. They stop shrinking when they’re each about four feet tall. For a few minutes, these new short models keep coming out from behind the curtain in the mirror. I hear applause. It’s faint at first, but it gets louder. And lasts longer and longer. Their features normalize to one face. Their identical eyes close, in unison. The applause, which must be canned, climbs to a roar. The procession stops. These are no longer gangly teens — these are little girls. Quintuplets. They stand together, in a row, and hold hands. Their clothes begin to furl and bubble, like they’re on fire or melting. They’re quints in tattered jumpers and school kilts now. And now they’re in nothing at all. Their clothes have burned away. A row of five little girls, cold and naked, holding hands. They begin to cry — they are a rough draft of Belle, just as I have always imagined her, times five. Red hair. Above them, in the mirror, five bright yellow stars appear, one by one. It makes sense, I suppose; this is a pretty darn good hotel. “Monkey see, monkey do,” they say and then start to shake. Their shaking is all expressed in jingling. I recognize this. I know a lot about bells because I get bell catalogues. These are the kinds of bells that organize in a line around suffering. These are the kinds of bells that say. “Stupid is as stupid does.” A cold draft, a rough draft.

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I know that what I am seeing is not my lover. She was never physical — not to me, at least. She was never present. This must be a fever dream. This is light playing over fields, it’s dust gone shiny. This is all surface play. If it weren’t so very dark, so very cold, so very midnight sky–like in this room, they simply could not be. Not every ghost is a riddle. Not every love is a problem to solve. Their mouths open and they begin to scream, but then they stop abruptly. Their mouths remain stretched open as their skin burns. Great cuts and bruises and sores emerge, as though coming out from inside their bodies, like there is fire inside their tiny bodies. Each mouth spreads to open (ah), then circles neat and tight to close (oh), then smiles to widen (ee). These new sounds fade. They are quiet. They mouth something, but it is inaudible. Their mouths move very quickly, but I cannot hear anything. “I can’t hear you! I can’t hear, for fuck’s sake. You’re not making any noise! I can’t read your fucking lips.” I plead. I cry. My pleas are elaborate. They swing from calm to violent. I imagine this is what praying must feel like: fighting. I see my breath in translucent puffs. Ice forms on the wall. A glass of water on a nearby table cracks. Vocal chords hang like wreaths. These minimouths disappear after they stick momentarily in the stiff, scentless air. The teeth go last. Pop, out of the air. Baby teeth, disappearing one by one, into nothing. Like lights going out. Vomit wells in my throat and I cannot stop it. I allow it to come, dripping. My heart swims in acid. I am disgusted, hurt for her. And angry; murderously angry. “I love you. Stop showing me this. This isn’t you. Take me back.” “This is me,” says the whole room. “Out of sight, out of mind.” “I could never forget you!”

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“Takes one to know one.” I pick up a pencil and begin to draw on the mirror. The lead does not adhere well, of course. That’s why people use lipstick to draw on mirrors. I don’t have lipstick; I’m not that kind of guy. There are no markers in any of the drawers — only Bibles. You can’t draw with Bibles. I draw a whole forest with the crappy pencil, it’s Sendakian, monstrous, beautiful. I smell pine. The mirror cracks, and a simple wet root pokes through. I step back. Another root cracks through. Another. I begin to erase feverishly. Soil and some feathers emerge.

I’ve always cared about connections, even far-fetched ones like those between breath and travel, or between buttons and serendipity. That’s why I liked shows about stars. What is astronomy? Don’t ask me. I’m not proud of my ignorance, but I never learned all that much about astronomy. Astronomy isn’t stars. Astronomy is a big wonder-killing thing; stars on the other hand, from where I am, and from where I was, are small. I was obstinate about not learning — and yet, I was a Carl Sagan fan as a kid. Were you? If you were, go on and draw him in, next to the giant tree, next to where you are. Pick up those markers again. Go on. Do this with me. You’ve got better tools than I do — I will show you how. You’ve drawn yourself in, haven’t you? You should do so, if you haven’t already. No more of this pretending to be me nonsense. Draw yourself in,

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as you are, next to the tree you’ve drawn. Do you even know what Carl Sagan looks like? Draw him, next to you. Carl Sagan mattered to me when astronomy didn’t. He was a celebrity, and his importance was in how he figured into my earliest fantasies, along with the usuals: Donny Osmond, Nana Mouskouri, and Tiffany. I’d arrange those types of famous people in elaborate orgies. I’d draw them on the stark yellow, purple, blue backs of my father’s old scripts, and I’d cut out their pants’ crotches. Even the women wore pants, always. It was more fun to cut out pants’ crotches, than it was to cut out the crotches of panties under skirts. I suppose it’s a matter of preference. You don’t have to draw him without a crotch, and you can keep your pants on, too. Really. I’m not going to tell you what you can or cannot do. I’ve always thought that the trouble with orgies is that you have to eat whatever is put in front of you. I’ve always been a picky eater, which is probably one of the reasons I’ve never been involved in an actual, real-life orgy. Another one of the reasons why I’ve never been involved in an actual, real-life orgy is that I’m not really much of a team player. But the major reason why I’ve never been involved in an orgy is Belle’s overarching hatred of my sense of touch. We always want and resent what we can’t have, I suppose. Belle is a ghost — I wanted her. Belle was my beloved — I wanted her. When Belle said I’m everywhere, I believed her. I met Belle when my digging hand hit something. The sun had completely set. The cat was completely dead. I hummed. My hand closed over the thing it hit, and all I could hear were bells. I called her Belle, immediately, because of the sound she made.

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Belle is Belle because of the sounds she makes. You are You because of the buttons you forgot. I called her Belle, because she was as beautiful as I could ever draw her to be. And beauty, even if only insinuated, has a way of destroying everything. Thereafter, bells would follow me. The bells came to precipitate arousal, when all at once I could connect erections to precise stimuli. All the while, the world grew up around me, fierce and thorny and bright and competitive. Everyone else fashioned up. Lamb got more and more risky haircuts. Jo moved away to become a doctor. I watched people kiss in the dark and was silent. I listened to ring after ring after ring. I’d love to say it was more sophisticated than desire — but it was just that, and only that, and gloriously that. Hear bells. I want you to know what it’s like. If you have to, get sexual about it — the shape of that sound in space was phallic, or at the very least persuasive. I surrendered then, to remain on pause and in love with a child I had never seen.

There’s a knock at the door. I look over at the telephone. The message light is blinking red. That’s the red on s, microwaves and digital clocks. As a junior insomniac, I’d spend whole nights squinting the digits to a blur, making them jump, and wagering life and death situations on their activity. If it doesn’t hit : in two seconds, I’d think, my mother will die today. If the numbers didn’t change the right way, I’d look up into the Godless void I’d been raised with and pray to a nameless power to forgive me for even thinking that way. When we were in high school, Jo used to tell me that my tastes were very Catholic.

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The message light bleeps on, off. “Three messages” says the tiny screen. The visions were so intense that I did not hear the phone ring. Knock, knock, knock. A steady rapping. I hope to God it’s Dora. God, I hope it’s not Dora. I hop over to the door. I’m getting better at moving around without the crutch. I look through the peephole. Lamb. I put the chain on the door and edge it open with my cast. “What?” I ask. “Can I come in?” “How did you know I was here? I thought we weren’t talking.” “There aren’t that many hotels within a few blocks’ radius of your house, dude.” I unhook the chain and open the door. Lamb scans the room, taking it all in: my eviscerated suitcase, my dirty boxers, the pizza boxes. The steam from my latest bath still curls out from under the bathroom door. She exhales loudly. “What?” I ask, defensively. “Are you okay? What happened to the mirror? Did you have a shootout?” “What?” “Are you okay?” I consider saying “what?” again, to keep this going. But instead, I say, “Lamb, I am not just okay. I am okay-okay. In fact, I’m great.” “Oh good. That’s good.” She backs away from me quietly, until the backs of her knees hit the king-sized bed and buckle under. She is now sitting. She stares at me. “I heard you went on a date with Dora.” “If that’s all, you can go.” I say. “Unless you would like to join me for some porn.”

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Lamb inhales and exhales. In a deliberate, noticeable sort of way. “I’ve heard some stuff about her.” “Yeah, I know. ‘Open relationship.’ It’s cool. Whatever. Welcome to the twenty-first century.” Lamb breathes again. Inhale, exhale. It’s ridiculous. She sits with her hand on her lower abdomen and I watch her watch her breath. She is pressing her lower belly out into her hand. She moves her hand up a few inches to her lower rib cage, and then her chest, filling her hand up in every instance with the push of her incoming breath. She is running a maintenance check. Great. They got Lamb too. Like Tina and Dora and every shrink I’ve ever been to, my former best friend has been colonized by breathing fascists. Before she has time to complete whatever fruitless diaphragmic exercise she’s in the middle of, I interrupt. I take her by the hand and pull her up off the bed. I’m rough and teetering. I can tell that despite my loserish handicap I’m still coming across as a foaming psycho. Which is fine by me if it will make Lamb go away. I lead her to the door. “You gotta go, Lamb. We’re not friends anymore, remember?” “Are you seven?” “You abandoned me.” “Shut the fuck up,” says Lamb. Her eyes narrow. “You fucking asshole. Do you know what you do to us?” Us? There’s an “us” now? Maybe I am crazy. I’m beginning to get this weird feeling there is some sort of conspiracy afoot. “You lied to me,” I say. “And you left me alone.” “When did I lie to you, Flip? We spent all night calling you. We thought maybe you had fallen down the stairs or killed yourself. That’s the kind of thing you make us think about, you fucking prick.

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Do you know what that means, to worry about somebody real? To care about somebody who actually exists?” “Who is we?” I ask. Care about. Somebody. Who actually exists. Actually. Exists. “You don’t know about loving anybody, do you?” “No,” I say. This is both true and untrue. “You abandoned me at the Minor house. You knew.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re nuts.” “At least I’m not a liar.” Lamb shakes herself out of my grip. As a result, I fall over and land on my stomach. I roll to my side and attempt to push myself up. I can’t. I try again. Nothing. “Uh, Lamb,” I say. “Can you help me?” “Hah,” she says. “No way. Stay on the ground, you stupid loser. Stay there. Where you belong.” Where you belong? I sometimes think that Lamb’s knack for epic betrayal comes from reading too many fantasy novels when she was a nerdly teen. I am the evil warlock, melting away in a pool of my own evil, stinking bile. She is the pristine, Joan-of-Arc-style heroine. Blameless and entitled. “Okay, Lamb. Shit, I care, I care. I care about you. It makes me feel bad that you were worried. Seriously. Could you just . . . please?” “No.” Her eyes are wet. “I brought you something to read, you idiot.” It’s one of her diaries, of course. “Why don’t you just open it at random?” she asks, suddenly cheerful. “Sometimes it helps, right?” “Oh good, a dirty bit,” I say.

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I read it aloud, in my best Lamb voice. April 10th So, we’ve invented a game for just the two of us. I like it. It’s silly. We only play it once in a while. EEEE A little while after we fuck, if I’m starting to rev up again, he lies behind me. We’re on our sides. Wait a minute. Is this the kind of thing one writes down for posterity? Do I really want Biography to picture me as a grade-A slut? Wait a minute. Yes. Of course I M do. And there’s a generosity to it, okay? This isn’t just about what this is, physically. Maybe I’m ballsy, right? Or at least foolish in the pursuit of ecstasy: there’s communion in it. Or something. Or maybe it’s just ridiculous. Maybe it’s just what everybody else does. At least I’m not getting into leather or something D&D like that. All it is is storytelling, right? I like stories. I love them, even. It’s harmless. So, our game is that he tells me a story. He’s got quite an imagination. He slides up and down against my ass, while his fingers work the rest of me. He lets me direct the story. He says, You’re in charge. I say okay. Or else I say, No. You tell me what to do. Where are we? he asks. In a dark hallway, I say. In a park. On a train. On a plane. On a boat, in a moat. (Would you could you in a boat?) He asks: What do you want her to be wearing? I tell him: a short red skirt with nothing underneath. He asks: What does she look like? I say, Big, plastic, blonde, bombshell ridiculous cheesecake pornstar. Or, like my best friend. Or, dorky little mouse with stringy hair and bad acne all scared shitless of what we are about to

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make her do on your cock. Or, small, Japanese. Or, just like me. He asks: What does it look like under her skirt? I tell him: Totally shaved. Naked. Or, full bush, white underwear. Or, swollen, pink, from pussy pumping. Or, a big dick (which always gets a good laugh). Or, trimmed but substantial. He asks: How many guys are there? I tell him: Seven. He lists them for me. Tall, white, black, hairy, skinny, fat, tattoos. I ask him: What are they saying? He tells me what they’re saying, insistently . . . Take it. Good. Now. He asks: Do you know her? I say maybe. He asks: What do you want him to do? Tie her up. Take her dancing. Watch her eat chocolate cake. Ask her what she does for a living. Line them up and make them describe the worst day they’ve ever had. Make him expose himself to a nun. Fuck her faster. L It’s my call, always. Pete’s just the ringmaster: I’m the one who gets to soak up the circus from a safe, spectatorial distance. Just before I cum I always ask him to talk like he’s one of them, which of course he is, in a manner of speaking. Shuddering orgasms, fed by stories. Power. “Gross!” I say. “Man, Lamb. Jesus. Don’t you ever think about anything else? Criminy!” I keep reading in my head. Lamb plays with the hotel stuff, opens the bar. I can’t tell if she is embarrassed. I am grateful.

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“Do you really do that?” I ask Lamb. “What?” She has opened the thick drapes a crack and is squinting out at the street lights. “Talk like that with Pete? And that shit about power is a little melodramatic, don’t you think? Do you really have fantasies like that?” “Yeah. Lots of people do. There’s nothing unusual about it.” “Doesn’t it get boring?” I ask. “I mean, like, that’s what I mean. It’s kind of trite. Doesn’t it start to get boring?” “What?” “When you talk about stuff.” “No.” “Never? Even this racist stuff ? Japanese? What the fuck? I mean, come on.” “Whatever, Flip.” “Whatevs.” “What?” “Nothing.” “So you never get bored of this stuff ?” “No. I can’t say I do.” “Never?” “Nope.” “You’re a perv.” “Thanks, Flip.” “And you’re pervy in, like, a totally obvious way.” “Thanks, Flip, that’s nice. I mean, thanks.” She slumps down on my bed. “I guess it gets boring,” says Lamb. “Sex gets boring, too.” She gets up to stretch and then walks over to the bar fridge. “So why write it down? Can’t you use your talents for good? And what’s with these letters?”

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Speaking of boring, April th is super, super boring. It’s about eating peaches. April th: dullsville. April th does not exist. April th is about sex with Pete again. I notice that the sexy parts fall open; she must read them over to herself. It’s touching that she can get off on her own life. But it also depresses me. It seems too simple to be real. In all of my untouched virginity, I’m fucking jaded and incredibly old. “Power? Hunger? Cheesy.” Lamb says nothing. “And all these letters. What is up with that?” I look at Lamb. She has opened one of the little vodka bottles and is nursing it quietly. Smirnoff. Something about the label reminds me of Christmas. “Letters?” she asks. Her skin is red, suddenly. She’s charming, mid-blush. I get that occasional, inevitable urge to kiss her face. “Yeah,” I say. “You’ve got these stupid letters just appearing in the body of your entry. Tell me you’re not becoming a freaking language poet.” She looks like I have just cut her. There’s something in the widening of her eyes and her hard swallow. There’s a little pause, or something, or maybe I’m nuts, but I think so. I figure I should drop it. But I can hear a little voice, the voice, Belle. So I push it. “Lamb,” I try, gently. “Lamb, what’s the E for? And this L? What the fuck?” Lamb takes a giant swig of Smirnoff. Her eyes squint hard, as if against some tears coming up. “Don’t you want to cut that with something?” I ask. “Yucko.” “Did you notice the doodles, too?” she asks.

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“What?” I ask. She grabs the book and flips it open at random. A face appears and disappears, from one page to the next. “You’re in a bit of a rut, hey?” I tease. Lamb does not smile. “I called your father,” she says. Fuck. “What?” I ask. Shock paralyzes. I lie on my back and stare up into the pleasant ivory ceiling. “I had to. I couldn’t bear it. After Dora called and told me what happened to you, and you weren’t picking up the phone at home, I had to get some help.” “What?” “I had to.” “What?” “I checked all the hotels, including this one. They didn’t have your name because you put it on your dad’s card. I didn’t think of that until later.” “What?” “He’s, um, kind of upset. About all the hotel reservations this month. And you not warning him in advance. And stuff.” I curl up into the best fetal position I can manage with the cast. I look under the bed. There is no dust. Everything is clean and smooth. Even the carpet is unnaturally smooth. You could do anything on this sort of carpet and not end up rug-burned at all. As if I know about that sort of thing. It’s just got a lot of “ply,” or whatever it is they say about carpets when they’re cushy. Lamb grazes the top of the bedspread with her hand, and notices a bowl of ruby red cherries on my night table. She pulls one up out of the bowl, and eats it carefully. “Nice touch,” she says. “Most places just give you pillow

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chocolates. Fresh fruit’s nice.” “Lamb.” My voice is even and smooth. The world is clear to me now. “Yes,” she says — something scared in the way she speaks, and expectant. “Do you know what?” “What?” “There are a lot of insects.” She crawls over to me and puts her arm around my back. “There are trillions and millions, all over the place. Worms and insects and other things, right? In our ears and eyelashes and mouths, and all over the carpets and bedspreads and stuff. All over the place.” “Uh-huh,” she says with a tremble. “We spend lots of money every day to buy things to get rid of the big ones, while the little ones take over. And I bet they get stronger and stronger, the little ones, with every big one we kill off.” “Probably.” Lamb’s tears sting my neck. She’s holding me like a lover or a mom, but it’s okay.

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10

Better yet, use paint. I rehearse the best lies back home in my bedroom. Tina sings to her earphones, downstairs. Let’s get something clear, okay? My father is very rich. Not just well-off or comfortable. We’re talking three houses, two country homes, two cars, and a lot of other stuff, as well as a million stocks and bonds and all that other rich stuff. So don’t start thinking I’m stealing anything here, because I’m not. My father’s support has played out in whims — he’s basically my pimp. And I know I’m a liar, and that that will work against me. I’m not really poor. My poverty is elective. It is the lie called “being a writer.” Lamb is a liar too, but not the kind of liar I am. Her lies are all omissions — she’s that parent who waits too long to break the news about Santa. Even her diary, which is meant to be revelatory and gory and honest, is a game of hide-and-seek. I open it at random, for inspiration.

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August th I’ve blown my entire paycheque on fabric for the new place. Derek doesn’t really like it. I wanna make curtains, although it’s not like I will. I’ve never made curtains, and the thought of sewing again makes me sick. I like the idea of sewing, just like I like the idea of baking. But I like what goes into these things, so there’s always flour around, and lots of sugar (brown, white and icing sugar), and I even went and bought a fucking sewing machine (a classy old one, with a pedal and everything). Sometimes I think this nouveau domesticity, in the arts, is just an excuse for us to become our fucking moms. And now I’ve got fabric — for my project. It’s brocade. The pattern is spades. I really like to touch the velvet relief. I like the sensation of it under my fingers. I can see why people like sewing. I mean, I don’t, but I can see why people do. I pretend to like it, but I don’t. Lamb’s diary is full of many boring details, but I kind of find her analysis interesting. Every entry disintegrates into doodles. They always start out diligently (with an upright, tidy line of letters), but degenerate into chaos of little “guys,” faces, eastern European children, flowers, bunnies and hands. It’s become such a habit that she’s had to learn to value it. The moment value crept in was a dangerous moment for the habit because it was forced out into the stark light, and Lamb had to wonder, Why do I draw? Should I? What is the meaning of this? Is this good? Can I make money with this? The page is narcissism. Lamb’s self-absorption is old-fashioned and literal. Her hand patterns her own face over and over. The strong eyebrows, the full lips. In charcoal, in pencil, in corners of school books, up the side of her cloth pencil case. Truth is, she looks the same as she always did. Sometimes she even feels that her daily selfportraiture assures the constancy of her appearance. Lamb knows that she cannot stop. That day at the Minor house window, through

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the clearing, her hand against the dust, shaping negative lines on dark — she accepted this — it wasn’t all bad. September st Derek still loves me. Our new apartment looks out over the lake. The view is beautiful, in that real-estate-agent way. It leaves me unmoved. I don’t like it much. It’s like nobody’s ever lived here. Fuck. We got it because everything works and there’s no painting or fixing to be done. Good water pressure. A dishwasher. AC. The stillness of it kinda freaks me out. I wish I could hear more. Twenty-one floors above, and you can barely hear a thing but odd snippets of conversation and particularly brutal car accidents. The screech of brakes and of couples fighting are the only sounds to carry all the way up. We came to measure and lie down like dead people on the pristine, vanilla-scented beige carpet and looked into each other’s eyes and then out at the view. He loved the view; I kind of liked it. When he told me he thought the highway was like a river, I didn’t want to say something mean like “maybe” or “possibly” or “your guess is as good as mine,” but these were all options I considered before settling on “of course.” I let my hand pass over his cheeks. His skin was smooth and pink and a light blond dusting of stubble sparkled in the bright light from the giant blue sky out my window and I thought how easy it would be to just walk right out the window and into something new. I keep thinking about the fact that the first thing I carried into the apartment was the stupid fabric. I put it on its own hanger. It was the first thing in “our” closet. I think back to when we first moved here. “What do you see, baby?” he asked me. So I said, “The sugar plant and sailboats.” He looked north. “Look at the highway.” Amazing. Absolutely fucking screaming amazing, Derek, you sick fucking genius you. Can’t you do any better than that? It looks like people stuck in a traffic jam, from above. I asked him what he liked so much about it and he said, “I like that it’s like an endless river.”

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I can barely read the rest, because it’s covered in doodles.

You are also unable to stop. This urge has come out of nowhere. Holy smokes, step back and look at what want has made you do. You are in your pretty room in your rented apartment. You have dropped your yarn into a basket and have left those lines to rest for now. It’s a painting of a tree. You don’t really like to paint, but now, now you must. You don’t know what’s gotten into you. You started, a few hours ago, and you just cannot stop. This is everything that the myth promised it would be — a great release, physical, sexy. Your baby-T is smattered in rich golds and greens. You didn’t even know you had paint. When your boyfriend comes in and asks you whether his new rain hat makes him look like a duck — as in “does it emphasize the duckhead?” — you just say, “Can’t you see I’m busy?” You say it with a kind of arrogance you’ve never exhibited but always harboured. Note that he is disgusted by your new artistic temperament, and watch the way he fidgets. He’s doing that because he is revisiting the notion of trial separation. But hey, who cares? You’ve got this now. Your project can wait. You’ve got this throwback dead art thing to keep you hungry. You are painting a painting. It will be useless. That’s why it’s important. You paint, and you paint something. You paint, and you paint something and you paint for someone. You paint a picture for each of your friends. Be a perfectionist. Well done. Good girl. First you paint the tree; next you cross it out. Then you draw a bunch of tiny girls, climbing the tree. “What’s with the letters?” your boyfriend asks. “It does make you look like a duck,” you say.

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What’s left is a single oak with a red stream of dots in your amateur hand. Finish it, and wrap it up. It’s a present. Start again. Make one painting after another. Don’t worry about the cultural relevance of your choices. When you have enough of those paintings, when you are spent, fall to the ground. Wrap the paintings in wrapping paper. Write a card for each of your friends. They will make handsome party favours. No one will need to know that you have made these for her. Not even you.

I am not drawing. I am not sewing. I am not knitting. I am lying. I try writing down my practice lies, so that I can practice telling them, training myself not to touch my nose. Most of the lies are at least partially altruistic. I am designing them to save my father undue hurt, and also to save my own ass. Please note: I didn’t steal the credit card. My father gave me the card to use for “things related to my craft.” My craft being writing. Things related to being pencils (yeah right, I mean who writes in pencil anymore?), notebooks, ink for the printer and food. The terrible thing is that my father believes in me and thinks I’m talented. And that is truly heartbreaking. I’m not a thief, but I am definitely a fraud. So, I’m down to two possibilities. Dad, I was doing research and I had to book into a hotel again in order to really immerse myself in this loser depressive character I’m writing about. Or . . .

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Dad, I was going to a creative writing conference at the hotel, and I didn’t want to miss any of the early morning seminars, so it made sense to book myself in. The trouble with the second is that, although it sounds great, it’s a little risky. He probably wouldn’t check up on the existence of the creative writing conference, but if he did, the whole thing would blow. The first, while boring, is ephemeral enough to work. Even I’m not sure it’s entirely false. You never know, I could go back to work on the book tomorrow, right? I pick up the phone and dial home. I get Mom. “Qu’est-ce que tu as fait?” she asks. She always speaks in French when something’s wrong and she doesn’t want my father to overhear. “Rien. C’est rien,” I answer. “Tu sais, le medecin a dit qu’il ne doit pas s’enerver. Veux-tu voir ton père subir une autre crise?” “Can I speak to Dad, please?” A picture of Dora grows real in my mind. She actually kissed my face. “Hang on,” answers my mother. There is some whispering and then some shouting. “Well?” asks my father as he picks up the phone. “So?” “Look, Dad.” I can’t believe what I’m about to feed this loving, trusting man. I am a terrible person. “Save it.” “What?” “Just bring me the card. Now.” He hangs up. The fact that my father hates me is slow to sink in. The fact that I have to return the card is quick to sink in. I sit on the couch and

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soak in it. This is terrible! No credit card means no stuff ! No stuff means no food or pop or booze or movie tickets or clothes or cable or subway. All of this means, quite simply, that I will die. And worse, that my own father has elected to kill me. I hobble over to the refrigerator, to take inventory of what I’ve got and in order to predict the likely length of my survival. Tina’s foul casserole in Tupperware. Over a week old. A dead apple. A block of cheddar. Half a carton of orange juice. I fling the cupboard doors open. Cans upon cans of Tina’s chickpeas. Two cans of chicken soup. Chili peppers, oregano, salt. A box of spaghetti. Crunchy-O’s. It’s not that I can’t cook. I’m actually a very good cook. It’s just that, lately, I’ve been eating out a lot. I figure that I can survive for about two weeks, if I stick to one meal a day. I place the credit card in an envelope. I write “I’m sorry” on the envelope. I call a taxi. When he arrives I realize that I have no money. I tell him that the recipient will pay for the delivery. He swears at me in a language I am unfamiliar with. It’s not that bad, really. For one, the lack of cab/bus money has inspired me to exercise. The hobbling is really good for the abs, and I’m starting to become dangerously studly. In honour of my new, highly localized fitness, I have taken to walking around without a shirt. Tina skips — seriously, I mean it, she skips — into the kitchen, all fresh-faced and heavily embalmed in scented shower gel. She sits at our dark wood table (the boy version of Lamb’s table), and opens the paper. Her fingers, which are evidently still moist from the recent lavender assault shower, turn black from newspaper ink. I point that out to her. She stands up and washes her hands and pours herself a cup of coffee as well as some Crunchy-O’s. She sits back

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down and proceeds to dye her fingertips black as coal again. She is reading intently, and looks very serious about what she’s reading. She mouths the words to herself as she reads, smiling, otherworldly. She pauses to set the crossword aside for me. On second thought, she fills in a couple. I watch her. I am amazed by the uniform consistency of her skin, and as always, by the size of her head. “Tina, may I please have some of your low-fat, all-natural, wheatfree Crunchy-O’s?” I ask, which is an innocent, reasonable request. Tina stops chewing and puts down the Life section. She’s been reading about a cow with a learning disorder. I know that because she has been more or less reading aloud. “You hate Crunchy-O’s,” she says. She looks at the crossword. “Here. I started it for you.” “Yes,” I say. “It’s true, Tina, I do hate Crunchy-O’s. You got me there. But you see, I’m a little strapped for cash right now, and I . . .” Tina’s fingers crawl across the table and settle on my hand. She looks at me, fluttering her eyelashes. “I can’t do that,” she says. “Did you ever call that girl back, by the way?” “Do what? You can’t do what?” “I can’t give you any Crunchy-O’s.” She looks at my crossword. “Four-letter word for celebrity?” “Why can’t you give me a bowl of cereal?” I ask, probably a little loudly. “I just can’t.” Tina is shockingly and uncharacteristically brief. She returns to her  cow, and then flips ahead to the horoscopes. “What are you, Pisces?” she asks, and reads me my horoscope. I contemplate what has just happened, and Tina’s track record of cheapness. She moved in with Lamb and me shortly after a breakup

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with a boyfriend. She came with half of everything she had shared with Mikey the motorcyclist. And I mean everything. Exactly half the salt, half the flour, half the baking soda, half the lightbulbs. “If you just really like those Crunchy-O’s,” I offer, going at this differently, “I’ll take some bread instead. And I’ll pay you back.” “It’s not that. It’s just that if I were to allow you to take my food, I would be participating in a negative cycle. And negative cycles don’t stop unless you put your foot down and say ‘No way.’ Until you can do that for yourself, the people around you will have to set those boundaries for you. It’s all in this great book this girl from group lent me. I think this is a great opportunity for you to really learn and grow as a human being, and who would I be if, as your friend, I didn’t do my small part in helping you break this cycle of dependency?” I begin to say something, but I’m interrupted. “Besides, Crunchy-O’s have too much sugar for someone as inactive as yourself. It’s the wrong sort of food for starting your journey of discovery. You should be focusing on lean proteins and antioxidants. You need lots of fruits and vegetables. There’s a big section in this other book I’m reading called Eating to Succeed, all about getting out of a slump by consuming two-thirds of your body weight in pure protein every week. It’s really revolutionizing the way we look at our diet.” “How do you know about my great new opportunity, Tina?” “What? Oh, Lamb told me,” Tina answers. “She called for you yesterday. She said something about Dora asking for you or something. I forgot. Oops.” “Lamb called?” I was sure that after my speech on insects, she had lost interest in me for good. “Yeah,” Tina says. “Hey, is something going on between you two? I just want you to know that if it is, it’s okay with me.”

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“Why would I need to check with you if I wanted to go out with Lamb?” My mouth waters at the mouthfuls of health food entering Tina’s mouth. Tina breathes steadily, oozing ignorance. There is a very weak meow from the floor under the table. “You should have been here this weekend.” “Why?” “Because I needed somebody to take care of Olaf. I had a bootie call. You’re not the only one with emotional complexity.” She stares at me. “Are you punishing me for being away? Shit, Tina, your stupid cat is more or less dead, you know? When are you going to take care of that situation? Don’t you give a fuck?” I look down at the animal, who is swollen, lumpy and neglected. “You should talk, Flip,” she says. “You live beyond your means.” It’s funny, what triggers things. The small actions or inactions, the little things and nothings that start other things going. Like dots for connecting, stars for constellating, letters for making whole lies out of. The strangest thing that has ever happened to me, happens to me. Just like that, at the breakfast table, after a sermon on protein and antioxidants, Tina rises from her place across from me, stands, smoothes her sweater and starts to cry. I say, “Tina?” because there’s nothing else I can say. I stand up because it seems appropriate. I can’t speak. There’s an awful pause. I watch Tina’s crying change, from whimpering to sobbing to whimpering again. It’s real crying, no holds barred. I can only stand, aware of my ape-like posture. My arms hang awkward, too long, by my sides. “Tina?” She calms down. She wipes the streaks of wet away from her cheeks with the backs of her hands. She is coming towards me,

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around the table. Her head is small, like a dot on an i. Her body is a rectangle of muscle. Her hard shape comes nearer. She places her hand on my arm. She moves her face towards me. Oh God, I think. She loves me. The absolute truth lists itself for me, clearly. ) I’m in the kitchen. ) Tina is about to kiss me. I am too chickenshit to move, run or say anything other than “Tina.” I will let this happen to me, like everything else. I am a bad person. ) Maybe I want Tina to be in love with me. Tina is in love with me. She must be. Which is why I pretend to like her. Maybe I want to sleep with Tina, so that I can know what it’s like, just once. Because I’m a sicko. ) I will never see Dora again because I am a small, useless man who steals, lies and limps his way through life without ever doing anything. ) Star is a four-letter word for celebrity. ) Tina will be my girlfriend, and one day when we are both quite old, I will snap from the misery and kill her. And I will always wish that you were my girlfriend instead, but only in fantasy. Because, despite all the ways that she is hideous and dull, Tina is real to me in a way that you will never be. Tina stands for a while beside me, with her hand on my wrist and her tiny face a couple of inches from mine. “You don’t know anything,” she says. “You never listen.” She says this oh-so-quietly, almost tenderly. She brings her face even closer,

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starting tiny sparks. I can smell the Crunchy-O’s and soy milk on her breath. Her eyes are so close that the lashes bat my cheek. Oh God, don’t kiss me. Kiss me. Don’t kiss me. The fascination almost overrides my horror. I can almost eroticize this. Almost, but not quite. I close my eyes. She nears. I open my eyes. Her eyes sparkle and there’s a fierceness to her gaze. Despite myself, my lips pucker.

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These days, something that passes for hilarious is calling things “the new black.” This isn’t the new black, okay? This is the old black. The oldest. This is inky: a lurid density. I go into it, as one goes into sleep. Outwardly, I’m told these things look like seizures. My tongue swells too big for my mouth when I wake up, that’s for sure. I’m told my eyes look nuts. Sometimes the black opens onto a scene. It’s a little like a curtain lifting up, if you like. Or maybe it’s more like a sharp cut in one of those steady-cammed cop dramas, where you don’t know what you’re looking at or where you are because the shot flies around all over the place and everything’s just really fast and bumpy and there are a lot of hot forensics experts looking at stuff under microscopes. Usually, all I see is blackness. But sometimes I sort of dream. It’s not like a real dream. It’s more real. It’s like I’m outside of myself, watching myself. Sometimes it’s so scary to watch what I’m

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doing in these half-dreams that I sub in another person — like a stunt double. Lately, I pick you for that task, because I think you’re kind of tough. We’ve got something in common, you and me, although I can’t for the life of me figure it out. Sometimes, when I black out, I dream about digging around underground for Hydro or for Belle. Other people have treasure, and gold, and oil. In my dreams, I dig for love. Okay. Imagine a garden. Forgive me, I’m borrowing you. I know it’s exploitative. I just imagine that you are doing all the digging, and that I’m up above, like a suspended camera, watching. I come by these tendencies naturally — it’s in my genes. Take a deep breath. You don’t have to draw it. Just take a breath. Take a deep, long breath, and exhale. And imagine that you have forgiven me for losing your buttons. Next, imagine a garden. It’s untidy. It’s weedy. There’s a big oak. There are love hearts on the tree trunk, of course, but don’t get distracted, don’t get caught up in its texture. Your job is to dig. So, dig! Hear a clean tinkling of bells running riverlike and shivery up your spine. It invades my nervous system — and yours. Be me. Go on. What have you got to lose? While you’re being a little boy, imagine the softness of your skin, the keenness of your child body, the readiness of your mouth. Feel the shape of bells in all their round sounds; they are in your veins, right under your skin. See the veins swell like worms up your arms; be aware that it’s painful. Does this confuse you? It’s okay. Anyone would find it confusing. It isn’t only sound — it is the very shape of sound, taking up residence in your tiny, borrowed, child body. You are looking for a girl you have never seen, but

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whose voice enflames you. Hit something. Can it be her? The bells course up, in a trill, a peal, to recede. Lift the thing up. It’s a bit stuck. There are tangles of leaves around it. Hey, leave it a moment. Stare up into a sky grown dark. Imagine waves of light there and remember that you can fall in love. Wish on a star for something real. Go on. Lift it free. It is another bird. There are only birds here. Because she is gone. Because you are gone. More birds. More birds. Birds and birds. An entire motley grounded flock, underground. Some with wing bits hanging. Some licked clean by maggots. Mostly long dead, with pearly bones, like your dead cat. Like my dead cat. It’s mine, not yours. Mine, mine, mine. This is mine. Keep digging. No child. Only birds. Imagine a bird graveyard. Imagine the dream burial ground of a cat. If Lamb should appear to ask you what the fuck you’re doing, remember your loyalties. You are only here to help me dig. Brush her off, okay? Just say, “I’m relaxing.” If she reaches over to ask, “What is this fucking grossness, Flip?” then just grab that thing away and say, “That is Belle’s hand.” If Lamb pretends not to understand, and asks, “Do you know what this is, Flip?” Say in your best little-boy voice that what you’re holding is “her.” Say, “Why did you do this to me, Lamb? She was mine.” Feel crying come but be certain to fight it. And sure as hell don’t listen when Lamb says, “This is just a dead bird. And it’s grody.” Don’t look when she leans over you to show you the tiny bird bones and how perfectly they span to make wings. Don’t believe that a hand is not a hand. Don’t believe that what you are holding is a bird. You know that Lamb leaves things out. You know that she’s

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a kind of liar. Don’t let her words confuse you the way her handwriting has always confused me. Don’t let her deceive you. Besides, it’s only a dream. You know that — it’s always just a dream.

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When I come to, Dora is looking at me and I am looking at Dora. “Don’t worry,” Dora says. My mind spells out b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l. Don’t worry is what people say when you should be worried. There’s a bag of blood on a stick attached to my arm. The sight of it makes me panic. I climb the bed a bit, bounce around, until Dora gets up and shakes me. Hard, I might add. “Knock it off,” she says. “You’ve just lost a little blood. They’re just giving you some to make up the difference.” “What happened to me?” I ask. “You were in a coma,” she says, in a whisper. “For ten years.” She looks down at me. Florence Nightingale. Sexy nurse. Whatever. I look into her eyes. My heart beats faster. What can all this mean? “Really?” I ask.

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“No, you idiot. You got beat up. And then some other stuff went down.” I don’t know if I’m particularly fond of the tough-love Dora. “Did you beat me up?” She laughs. “No, you’re just old-fashioned. That doesn’t get the beats. Unless you’d like me to give you the beats. I’d be glad to give you beats if that’s what you’d like. But no intercourse.” A nurse enters. He places a wet, stinking bandage across my forehead. “Hi,” he says. “Have you had a bowel movement yet?” Dora giggles. “I don’t . . . need to have a —” “You need to have a  before we can let you go, sir.” He adds a couple of notes to a complex chart with my name at the top. He mumbles “no ” as he jots. He leaves the room. Dora and I look at each other. “Okay, what the hell is going on?” I ask. Dora reaches into her purse. She pulls out a compact, and flips it open. Powder flies into my eyes and up my nostrils. “Take a look,” she says. When I see myself, my first hammy, indoctrinated impulse is to cry out, “My face! My beautiful face!” Or something like that. I look like the elephant man. My nose is not my nose. It’s a whole other person’s nose. It’s grey, green, yellow and black, and it’s shaped like the Rocky Mountains. As tears begin to suggest themselves, Dora announces that that’s not all. She opens my hospital gown (which would be pleasant, under other circumstances) and points at my belly. Again, I have the feeling that I’m looking at a body part that belongs to somebody else.

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There’s a huge snake-like incision across the lower right section of my belly, near my groin. Around that are a number of bruises and bandages. I lie back against the rigid hospital pillows. My cast is an L out of the end of the bed. “You got into some kind of fight or something, right?” asks Dora. I try to remember fighting. I’ve never been much of a fighter. I don’t remember fighting this morning, or ever, for that matter. “Well, whatever happened, you musta been moving around a lot. It musta triggered your appendix and, pow! It just blew up. Tina found you on the kitchen floor after her jog and carried you here on her back, like Superman.” “My appendix?” I ask. My hand travels down to stroke the edges of the wound. A sting like a big bite makes it jump away. “I didn’t think appendixes worked that way. Appendixes? Appendices? Appendicy?” “Huh?” she says. “I mean, they could be unrelated. The appendix and the fight, I mean. Could be a coincidence. But I don’t think so. I think it’s got to be from some sort of shock.” The next five minutes involve Dora trying to jog my memory. She has a beautiful face, her eyes and her neck and her breasts and her arms and her ears are all within touching distance. I think about her vagina. “Have my parents been to see me yet?” “I don’t think so,” says Dora. “What about Lamb?” Dora stares. “Can you call her for me?” “There’s a phone right there,” she says. I want to ask her about sex with her open relationshippee or her primary boyfriend or whatever she calls the guy. I don’t.

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“So,” she says. “Let’s work this out. What have the last few days been all about?” I picture her at her lawyer desk, with big dusty books open and newspaper clippings and snooty, sexy, librarian glasses. I picture her totally immersed in the land of the living, involved in what is going on around her, so that the only distance between her and the answers is a broachable mountain of facts and figures. Dora wants to crack this case wide open, and she knows she can. “What do you remember?” She flips a stray hair over her ear and leans close, to listen. I don’t tell her about the hotel, because I fear it will cheapen me. “Nothing,” I say. I worry that I will be very ugly, forever, and that my open wound will never heal. I’m feeling very delicate about it. “Has Lamb been to see me?” Dora blinks. Wounded? “She’s the one who called to tell me you were here. What were you doing this morning?” She doesn’t really answer my question about Lamb. I think hard and try to remember the morning. “So she has been here.” “Stay on topic.” “Uh, I got up,” I say. “I had a sponge bath. I brushed my teeth. I crawled downstairs.” “A sponge bath, eh? Gross. Sponge baths are for old people. Why would a good-looking young man like you have a sponge bath?” “I have a broken leg,” I say. “Okay. Fair enough. But after,” she says. “Did you go anywhere? Who did you see?” “Nobody,” I say. “Um, I mean, I guess I can’t remember.” “Did you start writing? Did you sit down at your computer?” I

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can see her brain working. “What?” What’s all this about writing? “Your novel. Did you start working on it right away, or did you do something first?” Oh right, that writing. “Uh. Uh. I don’t know.” Dora pauses. I can hear the gears. “What did you have for breakfast?” The smell of Crunchy-O’s flood my nostrils. Suddenly, it’s coming back. “Tina,” I blurt. “She wouldn’t let me have any Crunchy-O’s.” “Crunchy-O’s?” “Yeah . . . and . . . I said that if I liked Lamb . . . I mean . . . if there was something going on or . . . that it was . . . that . . . why would I have to check with her?” It’s all a mumbly mess in my mind, and that’s how it emerges. “Uh-huh,” says Dora. “Good. What else?” “And so . . . uh . . . we . . . I thought about the paint job . . . I’m a bad person . . . Tina’s head looks small . . . she . . . uh . . . she comes over to me . . . I . . . she looks at me . . . she says, ‘You don’t know anything’ and I —” “What?” asks Dora, interrupting. “Huh?” I ask. “She said I don’t know anything?” asks Dora. “Who does she think she is? She barely even —” “No, no,” I say. “Me, me. I don’t know anything. She likes you.” “You don’t know anything?” asks Dora. “That’s dumb. You know tons of stuff.” I’m flattered. I cross my arms triumphantly. (And then promptly uncross them because they make my incision hurt.)

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“Is that it?” “Yeah. Do I look terrible?” Dora leans back in the hospital chair. “Shit,” she says, “that’s nothing. You don’t have a case at all.” “Do you think? Maybe it’s not the kind of thing you can solve.” “Who knows? It might have been Tina. It might have been a thug in the street. Who knows?” Dora gets a distant, movie-starrish look in her eyes. “What’s that?” I ask. I notice a strange band around her arm. It looks a bit like mine. Mine says my name, my health card number, the date and the floor I’m on. The gloves remain. “Oh,” she says. “What?” She gets up to go. “Why did you take off all my clothes when I was unconscious?” “I didn’t,” she says. “Maybe it was Tina. Sounds like she really has it in for you.” Dora grabs her coat. “I should get to work.” She stands up to leave, but approaches the bed. She says, “Captive audience,” and tries to kiss me. I push her away, roughly. “What the fuck, Flip?” “Whatever,” I say. “Whatevs.” “Are you mental? That really hurt.” “Why don’t you ask your friend, Mr. Neutral?” “What?” “Your friend. Whatever his name is. Your guy.” “Is this what that was for?” she asks. “I could get you written up for that.” “For defending myself against sexual assault?” She comes closer. “You’d like him,” she says.

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“I’m not sleeping with both of you.” “You don’t look like you’ll be sleeping with anybody for a while. No offense.” “No offense?” “Yeah.” She sits down on my bed. The sheets move a little. “He’s a ,” she says. “He’s not all business, you know?” “Who?” “Daniel,” she says. “So? Who isn’t a ?” I ask. “You’re not.” She squeezes my left toes and leaves. I hate him. I hope he chokes on his tie.

The nurse comes in and hands me a little white cup with two yellow pills in it. I’m wary of mystery pills — which is pretty healthy, I think. I mean, are you okay with taking medication given to you by a total stranger, just because he or she is wearing a sexy little outfit? I get a few more visitors. Tina doesn’t come, of course. She probably tried to kill me. And Lamb doesn’t come back. But she was here, though; she left me reading material, the usual. It’s one of my favourite years. Ginger’s all business as usual. She’s still desperate to cash in on Tina’s dying cat and his gender event potential. What is kind of sweet is that she brings me a tiny vase of very beautiful orange tulips. “I think we could do something unusual,” she says. “What do you mean?” “For Olaf.” She is trying to be patient with me. “Like what?” “I think it would be spectacular if we got someone in drag.”

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“That’s not unusual,” I say. She looks disappointed. “Do you have a better idea?” “No.” “What about knitting?” she asks. “I have a friend who had a knita-thon to raise money for breast cancer. Isn’t that cute?” “Sure,” I say. I don’t want to be a downer again. Ginger asks me why I haven’t taken my pills yet. “I don’t trust doctors,” I tell her. She agrees with me, and writes down a name of a naturopath I can call.

Pills are small, don’t you agree? We tend to hold small things up to the world and say, “Hey look, look how very small this is. Look how large the earth is, compared to this, in its velvet nook in the even greater universe.” We are small too, and some of us are smaller than others. Lamb is smaller than I am, and that’s why sometimes I frighten her, even though I would never harm her. Where is Lamb? I place my right hand on her diary, like I’m about to take an oath. I touch the familiar rough fabric. At least I’ve got that. Who needs a Bible? I don’t even open the bedside table drawer — this is the closest thing I’ve got. I like the way Lamb writes, and there’s something familiar about the way she emotes — it reminds me of me, of our shared upbringing. This is partly why I read her diary — it’s not just for sexual kicks. I read it for some of the reasons people read the Bible — I want something to look up to and something to look forward to. I’m surprised that I’m able to sleep at all. I can say one thing: I like hotels better than hospitals. Although in many ways they are

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quite similar. All I can think about is Lamb and how she must really hate me now. Hospitals are weird. And I’ve been quite lucky so far — I’ve been spared in the illness department, and so have been to very few hospitals in my lifetime. Lamb is a veteran at this hospital stuff. She was the first person I knew ever to have surgery, as far as I remember. It profoundly unsettled me that they had removed something in her throat. She showed me. She was small then, in a backless puce gown, perched on the edge of her hospital bed. She said, “Look,” and opened her mouth wide to show me her non-tonsils. So I asked, “Did it hurt?” “After. They give you ice cream but it tastes like blood.” “The ice cream tastes like blood? Gross.” And I did think that was disgusting. “No, dummy. It’s ’cause it goes through your tonsils.” “But your tonsils got taken out.” “It goes through where they were before.” “Oh.” I remember thinking really hard about that. “How can you still talk?” I asked. “What?” “Even though your tonsils are out?” “Because your tonsils don’t do the talking when you talk.” (I remember hearing bells when she said that, again. I felt them as a warmth.) “Flip?” Lamb asked, all serious. “Yeah?” “Do you pray?” “No. God is for stupid people.” “How come?” “I’m an atheist.” “Why?”

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“’Cause religion makes people fight.” “You fight. I saw you fight Allan.” “No.” (Actually it was true, but Allan started it). “Yes.” “Fighting is stupid.” “I prayed yesterday. You have to pray when you are in the hospital.” “That’s stupid.” “It made me feel better.” I brought her a single offering, then, a bag of cherries from the fridge. The moral is: hotels and hospitals have a lot in common.

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She must have switched them. I look at the cover, and the dates. It’s an earlier diary, one I’ve never seen before, from when Lamb spent a terrible year living in the country — one of our friend “breaks.” I am all tenderness — she must have switched them while I was asleep. She came back! I am grateful for new reading material but I’m wary of it, and for a minute I even feel like it could be a fake. I know that’s ridiculous, but it’s like the whole missing Gospels question — it’s really hard to admit a whole new text. It fucks you up. Dear Flip, read this entry. It ends in a hospital. It fits the occasion. The marked entry is told as a story is told. There’s a distance between Lamb and the action taking place. The distance is made possible thanks to the Zippo lighter. The Zippo is a distancing

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device, and a stand-in. It does the opposite of what your buttons do. Once upon a time, I went for a walk in the countryside. I looked around. Not much to see. She must have looked at the moving world around her, contained as it was by the line of factories on the horizon. She must have looked at what was closer: fields and fields, all of them ugly. Walking and looking and walking and looking. This entry is my only escape from the hospital room, so I make it mine like a memory, like an anecdote for which I can fill in the details, even though this is the first time I’ve read it. Sound familiar? Come with. I’m stuck up north all week. Stupid grandparents. I’ve never been a country person, myself. Corn birds. The corn birds shook out of their nooks and hiding places under the stalks. All of them, a steady line, flew up together into the sky. They formed an untidy V, and then split into smaller factions. If it had been summer, and you had been there, you would have seen those stupid birds. Think! You of all people would have come prepared. You’d have brought your knitting. Lying in the rich dirt alley between the rows, looking up, with a blanket under you and some food, some sandwiches in plastic wrap and a thermos of something spiked. Or maybe alone, or maybe with somebody witty and cute to make out with. Not this time of year, of course, ’cause Lamb was walking in

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winter, but if you’d been there and it had been late summer, you’d have had a second or two to catch a picture of the underside of crows. Corn birds are crows. Lamb saw them. She hated them because she’d seen them over and over again. Now, if you were down there with them right before they took off, and they were well-hidden around where the stalks start, it could be downright exhilarating. All of a sudden, all around you, a giant sound of flapping and squawking starts up hard, and you would be startled out of your staring, or out of your chatting, by nothing other than the miracle of flight. Looking up, there’d be a few seconds to catch the round, taut bird bellies, and the underparts of their wings, their black matty feathers and, maybe, the catch of sun in the sheen of the hard skin around their dangling claws. With someone you had a special liking for, it certainly might have seemed extraordinary. I was feeling kind of shitty, so I just felt like walking. Lamb wasn’t looking up from underneath. She was by herself in a way that one is by oneself only on that particular stretch of road between rural countryside and measly shit town. She was on the road, a number of feet away from the birds at their takeoff. From where she was on her path, the corn birds were a bunch of crows going away from one field and towards another. The breast-like granaries pointed up at the end of the road’s stretch, and Lamb watched the crows clear the peaks and continue north. Lamb had two of her own — breasts, that is. Firefirefirefire. Even as she looked at the granaries and had the thoughts

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“breasts” and “stupid” and “thank God I don’t have small breasts, at least there’s that,” she mainly thought, Birds, fire. Again and again. Lamb had had a bit of a “problem” with fire as a kid. We don’t talk about it. As she approached, the vapidity of their design seemed to increase. Her shoes made unremarkable squishing sounds. There was ice on some recent puddles, which was fun enough, in its way. Hell, cracking ice was once almost classifiable as a hobby. Lamb and I have this in common: back when she was tiny and stupid, breaking the thin layer on puddles was a really great pleasure. It was that way for me, too. Back then, before her brain was colonized, she stopped at every other puddle on the road and obediently cracked the surface to observe the bubbles. But those days were long behind her. She encountered the former hobby with a nodding, mechanical, almost filial sense of duty. I saw a little girl. She called out to me. It was creepy because I recognized her voice. She was just standing in the road. She offered me some candies. I ignored her because all I need is another kid to babysit. (Why do they like me so much?) And I kept cracking the ice. It was melting. The cracking sound was the best part. That’s what I’d imagine at least. That’s why the entry said, The ice cracked all crispy. I wasn’t there, but neither were you, and I know Lamb, so my interpretation wins. Suddenly (like every other time), Venus rose up around her in its glory. It was all -Elevens and a vast cemetery. The cemetery stretched like a horseshoe around the town, much larger than the town. There was a church, of course, a big sloped-roof atrocity with pink stained-glass slits for windows. It flashed a casino-style sign with a non-negotiable message: Jesus is the way. And there were a couple of run-down low-rises and two rows of

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houses with nasty dogs. But all in all, Lamb guessed, about two thirds of the town’s population was dead. Lamb flicked her lighter. Flick, flick. Click. Flick. Cemetery: all these things would come to be in that fire. An entire alphabet, leaving out all the vital connections like alphabets do, but containing all of their magic, in memory. Someone on a tractor waved at Lamb as she stepped off the dirt road onto the sleek, newly paved one. She waved back. Her head hurt from the night of bush partying she’d just survived. She felt the red wine in her joints and winced at the nausea as it crept into her throat. She leaned against a tree. She pulled out her silver engraved Zippo and lit it. It took a couple of flicks. Her sixteen-year-old body was strong and new, and she identified with the quick and undisciplined flare of the little flame. She watched the flame dance a little. The Zippo had gone from freezing cold to emitting a soft warmth in her palm, something she enjoyed. Jeffrey, her grade  guitar boyfriend, had given it to her. He had had it specially engraved, “To Lamb, with fondness.” Very formal, she thought, for a message from somebody who had mainly meant blowjobs behind the -Eleven. She returned the lighter to her pocket. Lamb left the giant oak she was leaning against and crossed the road. Inside the store, the store guy squirted her Slurpee into a cup. She paid; the young man said nothing in return. Lamb left the small, ugly building, sipping. Or slurping, rather, to be exact. She started home. More birds. And trees. She was sick of trees. She hated all of the big things on her horizon. She loved the trim coolness of the metal in her pocket. She loved the flame. She went right into it when she watched it. Blue red yellow. The ripest part of the flame, the part she almost wanted to put her tongue on, was purple. The entry put it this way.

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I wanted to taste the fire and I walked along, thinking about what that would be like. Of course it would hurt, but right before it fucked up your tongue, would it taste like anything? Fire is so awesome. She has marked this page for me. You have to forgive the cheesiness — she’s a teen here, right? Maybe she was low on iron or something — you know how people get strange cravings when they are deficient in something? All of those fields, their fake breadth, were closing in on her. They weren’t really big or vast at all — they were giant, quaint lies. She knew that living out here in Buttfuck, Ontario, was bad for the environment. Cities are better for everybody. Urban rhetoric pushed her along. The fields, the birds were burying her alive. She wrote that down. Fuck, I’m being buried alive. By these birds. By these things, the fucking trees. What do you care? You should. Because sometimes something like a bird and a handful of trees can stand between a person and the life they want to lead. I look at this journal again. It’s way prettier than most of the others. A lot of it, I’d say about seventy-five percent, is practice signatures. Lamb has tried out about five different kinds of a’s. I wonder if kids still do that, or if they just pick fonts and profile backsplashes now. There’s something so tender about it, and Lamb had really good cursive for a teenager. It’s still on speed, of course, but in a pleasant way, really fat and bubbly, with wide round dots on all the i’s, and these ever-changing a’s.

There’s too much buzzing and blinking in a hospital room.

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The guy across from me screams out in agony. He doesn’t even bother with the little button on a string they give you. I guess pain trumps decorum. I adjust the flexi-bed until it’s almost okay. I am quietly upset by the stains on the sheet that I’ve pulled up to my chin. I notice the sheets stick to my wound in places. When I pull the sheet away from my body, echo stains like paint butterflies mimic the way my body hurts. So, I say a prayer, just like Lamb prescribed. I take a break from reading to pray. It’s improvised, and mainly it’s like a Santa Claus list, only all the wishes on it are for kinds of survival. I pray how I’ve learned to pray from movies; I plead like a whiny child. Whatever’s in those pills makes me sleepy. But I find that I can’t really sleep. It’s funny when you know someone’s in the room with you, before you know who. And yes, there are quite a number of people here already. Hospitals bustle. They never stop. People in hospitals write on charts, label bottles, adjust sheets. Patients sleep and complain and die. There’s always movement and action, so that’s not what I mean. I look around the room, expecting my mother or father or a friend. There is no sound of footsteps. The door has not shifted on its hinges. There are no changes in the air. No flits or breezes. What is with me? I feel a tiny scratching on my big toe. The hospital sheet is thick and heavy, but some sharpness has managed to poke through. I inhale. I see something small and brown down there, by the tip of my toe. I kick it a bit. There is heavy brown in the air everywhere. I hear wings. “God?” I ask, because it would make sense. I mean, I have been praying. I lie back and exhale. I see a bird. The bird lands on my chest. It

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looks at me. It is a robin. Its breast is perfect red. Its tiny black eyes seem to wish; its head cocks, straightens and cocks again in that mechanical bird way. I want to touch it with my hand. I whisper to it instead. “What are you doing here, little guy?” The bird doesn’t say anything because it is a bird. The sight of the little creature softens me. “Aren’t you a pretty little bunny?” Again, nothing. It seems sort of happy that I’m talking to it. I am happy also, strangely. I watch it do crazy fast bird laps up and down my body. It hops awkwardly. It does the same weird little robin dance, over and over, across my chest, down off the bed, up over the bed, back again. Birds are very cool these days. They are up there with wolves. People get bird mobiles and decals, and tattoos of birds, and shirts with birds on them. “How did you get in here, little guy?” I am having an Ally McBeal moment, and the fact that I can’t just enter the wonder of this without thinking about Ally’s unicorn and how my experience right this second measures up to hers — well, that really upsets me. I am still new-century ashamed when the bird stills on my chest. I reach for its tiny head. It flies away. I think about how small the bird is. Somehow its smallness and lack of “flash” — its dirty feathers, the way it can’t properly be called beautiful — is comforting to me in a way that a unicorn could not have been. A bird in a hospital is possible, and overall, it is small. It must be the painkiller drip. I can make it come as fast as I want, whenever I want. And I want it fast, and all the time. When you think “small,” do you think sand? I don’t. But I expect that grains of sand are the first small things to come to mind for most people when they think small. There are millions of other

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smallest units, of course, trillions. Raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens, et cetera. Eyelash lice, pills, cherry pits. Think, What is the smallest thing you can see? Touch? What is the smallest smell? Distant stars? Some of smallest things I think about when I think “little” are made by people, but most of them are forged by more elemental forces. Meet: salamanders, wriggling and first-green tinged alongside rocks that are smoothed by rivers, shells; keys; buckles and old coins. Count also chess pieces and plain old autumn leaves; things accomplished by all kinds of transformations. This kind of thinking is sentimental, because it involves subjective scale. This kind of thinking makes things smaller, to cute-ify them. This kind of thinking comes from a generation that believes that life should be like ice cream cake. But to be small, a thing need not be smallest. An object is small because other things are bigger than it. A Zippo lighter is small, yes, but not the smallest. I am small. In all of this, I am a child — tiny, crushable, nothing. I sit on the hospital bed and I touch my soon-to-be-scar. I trace it over and over with my finger and connect the thought of this new scar to one of the scars on my father’s chest. I also think about Lamb and how this is first time I’ve ever really read her diary for content. Walk, walk, walk, walk. That’s all I do here. That’s what I did. I just walked away from the 7-Eleven back up the road past the granaries towards the farm. There was absolutely nobody around. Lamb walked out of the -Eleven cradling her Slurpee. She was hoping to get to the other side of the street. The next minute, out of nowhere, the Slurpee was flying across the blue sky in a

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triumphant stripe of brown-purple. It was purple because it was a combination of Coke Slurpee, orange Slurpee and “new” Slurpee. New Slurpee was a trial kind of Slurpee. It wasn’t very good. The little girl was there. She said, “This is going to hurt.” Can you fucking believe it? And I could hear those fucking birds tweeting like crazy because it was that time of year. Fuck. Lamb’s nose and chin scraped the gravel, and some of her hair was in the Slurpee. She heard, “This is going to hurt.” And she heard bells. Lamb closed her eyes and prepared to receive a child’s anger. The lights popped and blinked on the horizon as it grew darker and quieter and more buttfuck-countryside, around the most intense moment of Lamb’s life. Those far traffic lights waxed and waned, but there were more and more of them, and Lamb could see them beyond the figure who began to attack, darkened in silhouette, tiny, and in and out of visibility. She was just a stupid kid. Nobody will believe me. Why was she stronger than me? Lamb only had her own bones to hear cracking under the boots of this freakishly strong kid, and the plush denting of her own flesh to bear witness to it. The child in yellow kicked her in the stomach, and then kicked her again and again, in the teeth. They fell out onto the gravel like shiny rubies. The child said, “You fucking cunt.” There was a bleach smell before the child went up, back into sound. And Lamb’s mouth was full of blood. I tell from a diagonal scan ahead that the entry ends in the

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hospital. But I can’t read past, for all the wet spots. So, I end with: Where the fuck was Flip? Probably whacking off in his Platonic cave, at home. I can’t go any farther, because I am full of dread.

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14

I clutch Lamb’s diary, this new-old one, as close as a charm. I can’t walk all that well, but I can’t afford a cab. My lower abdomen causes me to wince. The rain’s coming down in sheets. My face stings under every acidic raindrop. The crutch pinches through my heavy brown overcoat, and I am trying to look handsome about it, because there are a lot of pretty women out, with umbrellas. Predictably, you are one of the hot women I feel embarrassed by. You’re braced against the wind and rain, holding a giant canvas. It’s in a big green garbage bag all taped up with masking tape, and you are hailing a cab. You can afford a taxi — I am jealous. My taxi days are over. You notice me and do not offer to share your freshly hailed cab with me, even though it’s got lots of room, probably because I look like a mental patient. It’s too bad for you, really — I am feeling brazen and ready for conversation. But that’s okay, I understand. I no longer know where your buttons are, and so hold no particular

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appeal as a destination for your breathing fantasies. I must still look like the elephant man. I haven’t checked, but I get that feeling from the way you look at me and very quickly slam the trunk of the cab on your canvas. At least it looks like you’ve got a canvas in the bag. Dora has projects — Lamb claims that Dora’s work is “strange,” but “relevant.” Dora would probably take that as a compliment — Lamb’s got excellent taste. Lamb hasn’t said anything about your work. I see a spot of red on your shirt, even from a few steps away, before you disappear into the cab. You look at me; your eyes look frightened. Why didn’t you come to visit me? I wave at you, in a last-ditch effort to get a ride. Remember me? You’re gone in your spacious taxi. I am jealous because I wish I were taking a taxi home. But I am, of course, jealous of much more that that. I pass small Victorians with neat adjacent balconies painted in different hues, and I think, I am jealous of people who make their own money. I stop to stroke a Siamese cat. His deep nasal voice is comical as he exhales a long appreciative greeting. This is my parents’ neighbourhood. I turn on my cell phone. I had to turn it off in the hospital. I scan through the last incoming calls to see if Lamb or Dora wants me for anything. I dial Lamb’s number. She doesn’t pick up, so I say, “Please forgive me,” to her voice mail. And I add, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

My mother puts down her book. She does not put down her gin and tonic. She’s been reading The Satanic Verses. She’s in the living room with her plants and her artwork. The plantation living room always smells like candles, and it kind of looks like a Vermeer. Every-

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thing is bright, light, and there are lots of antique instruments around, because my dad collects them, even though he can’t play. They are really nice. My favourite is the clavichord, because, really, who has a clavichord? I’ve always called it the plantation, but my parents aren’t racists. It’s just the style of the house. Two Persian rugs of unmentionable value rest kind of casually against each other. I know they are my mother’s greatest hope, so I’m scared of getting them dirty. I note that one corner of one rug is sort of flipped over the corner of the other. I know that that would upset her if she knew about it, so I gently fix it with my foot. Both rugs are very slightly marked by the constant pressure of the clawed feet of chairs for company. Every time I come over I look down and check the rugs, quickly. I don’t know why exactly. The rugs are in excellent shape. And normally I wouldn’t bother with these kinds of details, but I know about what a textile whore you are, and I know this probably matters to you because of your project. My favourite of the two depicts a fierce mythological battle between a leopard and a great black horse. The horse looks out through stuck, threatening, yellow eyes, but it doesn’t look ready to do much other than look ugly. The leopard is mid-pounce — my money is on the big cat. A pull of sharp angles and ornate geometric confusions frames the struggle. My mother says, “Hi baby. Sorry the place is such a dive.” I look at the rug. “Rugs are looking great. Did you get them cleaned?” My mother stands up and comes to me and kisses my forehead. She feels the texture of my hair between her fingers. “You need product,” she says. She doesn’t seem to notice my facial wounds, bandages.

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“The door was unlocked,” I say, and I point in the general direction of the front door. It’s true. I didn’t have to ring the bell. It was better that way because I lost my key. I didn’t want to explain that. “I was reading,” she says. She picks up the book and puts it down again on the coffee table, and then she looks at it a little lecherously. She lingers on the shape of the book, touches its pretty sides. She likes it up and down, its vulnerable little spine bunched with threading and glues, its high-quality glossy paper, all of its inks. “There are parts of this book that are so good they stay with me all day.” “Yeah. Sometimes remembering good writing is like feeling a texture over and over in your mouth.” She stares at me. “You’re so base,” she says. “Does everything need to be about food with you?” “I was in the hospital,” I say. She pulls a totally creased ten-dollar bill out of her purse and hands it to me. Of course, I go to take it. She snaps it back, and frowns. “Tu devrais avoir honte,” she says. “That’s not why I’m here.” She settles me comfortably into my father’s armchair. She pours me some gin. I test the waters; turns out I am allowed to prop my cast up on the coffee table. “How’s the leg?” “Where’s Dad?” “Don’t make him sick, Flip. Ça va faire, franchement.” “I just want to talk to him.” My mother says nothing. She sips her drink and goes back to her book. Something in it makes her laugh. I rise and hobble down the

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long hall to the back door, out through the yard, to the garage. My dad has turned the garage into a pretty nice editing studio. I climb the narrow stairs and open the door. I almost trip when my father suddenly appears. We collide — he is cradling an old-school reel. “Jesus, Flip, careful, for fuck sake.” “Sorry.” I let him put the reel down. “Whatcha working on?” I ask, fake-cheerful. I regret asking that, right away. My dad can’t “work” anymore — he hasn’t successfully made the leap into the digital age. It sickens him, he claims. “You know I don’t work,” he says. I look at him. “You think I’m an idiot, don’t you, Flip?” “No. Of course not. I love you, Daddy.” “I know you love me. Jesus, don’t patronize me. You just think I’m out of touch.” I don’t respond. I lean. My dad pushes a chair at me, so I sit. “I was just watching this Alda thing I did in the seventies. Did I ever make you watch it?” “Yes.” “This was when we actually had to tape the tape, you know?” “Yeah,” I say. “That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about.” “No.” “What?” “No money.” He stops the projector. “No way, Flip. I don’t care if you have written the greatest screenplay of all time. Don’t take me for an asshole.” “Dad, I’m not asking for money. What the fuck does money have to do with tape?” “Don’t swear at me.” “I’m not swearing at you.” “What do you want?” he asks.

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“I want a tape recorder.” “Nobody uses those now.” “Thanks for the update, Dad. This is a nostalgia thing. Isn’t nostalgia, like, your crack-cocaine?” I don’t tell my father that I want to make a mixtape for Lamb, because he won’t understand. He’ll just ask why I don’t burn a . For a few moments, I feel as though my father has forgotten I am here at all. He begins to putter. He puts on a pot of coffee. He plays with a projector. He moves a stack of ancient, mouldy industry magazines to the recycling box. Dad pulls a drawer open. Predictably, it’s full of bulky, old, brown tape recorders. He takes one out. He uses a thick gingham sleeve to wipe off the dust. “Nice shirt,” I say, “very fashion forward.” Everybody’s doing the gingham thing, apparently. He hands me the recorder, which weighs roundabout fourteen pounds. “I need one with two tapes, so I can record from one to the other,” I say gently. “You just want a regular tape player then. Why didn’t you say that to begin with?” “Sorry,” I say. I don’t dwell on the fact that I think he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. “Thanks, by the way,” I say. I look around the studio, at all the posters for things my dad has actually done, and I feel like a massive failure. “Your generation rocked,” I say. Usually, he is made happy by my attempts to draw him into a discussion about the old days. I want to please him, so I persist. “You guys did things — now we’re all just worried about citing things properly and rocking our ironic haircuts and not coming across as overly constructed.” “I don’t know what you’re saying.” He’s stony-faced.

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He pulls out a big, old ghetto-blaster stereo. “This should do it.” “Wasn’t that mine?” I say. I am overjoyed at the reconnection. “Careful with this,” he says. Before I leave, I walk around the yard and have a good look at the gappy, dry bushes. Their garden is nothing like mine; it’s not a secret. I know that with a little sun and luck, every one of these bushes will bloom gloriously, exactly as planned. It’s just a matter of waiting ’til spring.

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15

Shall I describe the machine? Have you been up a church to the bell tower? It’s the same basic principle — a rope, attached to my cock, rings a large bell, which in turn triggers others. That is the truth, and although it’s not necessarily all that pleasant, it’s certainly fairly nicely designed. The truth always has a kind of design, even if it isn’t always pretty. The grey rope that runs from just above my bed ends in the closet. I am closeted, I suppose — the closet is full of bells. The rope attaches to a long string of bells. What is a bell? A bell is usually metal, sometimes glass or ceramic and not necessarily shaped “like a bell.” It can hang on a cow or be struck with an external instrument, and it is always hollow.

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The sound most often associated with the aurora borealis is of ringing bells. It doesn’t make any sense — science doesn’t have room in its doctrine for the possibility of sound shaking loose of air and space, and it’s not okay (read: possible) to hear a sound made by stars, or by fighting mythological people, or by sky whales. And yet, many cultures have myths about this phenomenon. When I get home, I bumlift myself up the stairs to my room, looking forward all the while to the ritual. Don’t lie: we all have something, don’t we? A particular thirtysecond , a picture? A pillow we like? No? You must. You are a grown woman with a healthy sexuality, aren’t you? It’s not unhealthy to get a little stuck on something. Or in my case, struck by something. What is a bell? I don’t know. I just know it gets me off. Look at me like this. Mid-listen, my skin glistening with lubricant. I collapse the bothersome, bodily notion of Dora and her simple name represented, all borealis sheets of light, across the space behind my eyes. I try to reconcile what I know about Dora with the sound that fights with my desire for her. I try to add Dora to Belle, and whack off to the sum. Dora doesn’t know that I’m thinking about her as I pull the string. I am imagining the weight of her full breasts on my neck, her sex in my mouth. Belle knows. Her steady stream of maxims is pillow talk, until I see the door move. Dora, backlit, stands before me. Had she condescended to ring the doorbell like a normal person,

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she would not have been forced to see me like this. But she didn’t ring the doorbell. She must have just let herself in — she is always insisting on doing things her “own way.” She just went ahead and sidestepped the usual conventions. She didn’t ring the doorbell. She probably expected to find me waiting by the phone. Checking to see if she called. She probably didn’t expect to find me tied to a perpetual motion machine, ringing and shaking a giant closet bell apparatus, touching myself just seconds short of ejaculation. She probably didn’t expect to see drawings, scrawled script, abstracted names. She looks at me, with her mouth closed very tight. First, she scans my body, up and down, very slowly. This is when I wish I weren’t wearing tube socks and that I had shaved my pubic hair. “What the fuck?” she asks. I look a little unusual. It’s not a walk-in-on-your-collegeroommate-in-the-shower sort of moment. It’s more like a “Shit, Flip, you are such a sick fuck” sort of moment. Dora says, “What is wrong with you?” I say, “What is wrong with you? ” because that’s all I can think of to say. Then something even more awful happens. It’s particularly awful because my penis is still attached to the machine. Dora starts to cry. Her crying is loud and complete, more true sobbing. She gulps and snorts and slides down onto the floor in the doorway. Her boot smears a long clear line of heavy mud and she fixes me with her bleary face and screams out something non-verbal like “!” Her moan’s animalistic. It kills all of the other sounds in the room. Because I don’t know what to do, I open my arm, in invitation.

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She looks alarmed and scrambles back away from me and staggers to her feet. “I’m not dangerous,” I say, which seems like the right thing to say. Dora looks down at her hands. She composes herself. “I’m sorry.” Her mascara turns her tears grey. “What?” I ask. “I’m sorry. This is okay. It’s cool. I should not have overreacted.” I awkwardly detatch myself from the device. I thump back onto the mattress. “It’s cool?” I ask. “Don’t be an idiot. It’s not cool.” “Why are you mad at me?” She starts to cry again. “I’m trying to be open-minded. I’m just a little bit shocked, okay?” “Why do we all need to be cool with everything all the time?” I plead. “It’s such a crock of crap. Can you turn around so I can get dressed, please? This isn’t cool.” Dora turns and looks at the wall. I have tacked up sketches of how I imagine Belle, along with cut-out magazine clippings of bells. “Are you a pedophile? Please just tell me you aren’t a pedophile.” “Would that be cool?” I ask, and immediately realize how cruel I sound. “I’m sorry. No. I’m not a pedophile. A child, maybe. But not a pedophile.” “That’s poetic. That sounds like bullshit. If you’re a pedophile, this won’t work.” “What happened to being ‘cool’?” “I have to go.” I want to say, “Stop!” because I can feel her exiting my life for good, but instead I say, “Want some chocolate? I promise I’m not a pedophile.” I get up, one-two, one-two, moving like a machine. I go into the kitchen. I have adjusted quite nicely to my embarrassment. Tina’s cat is sitting in the sink, licking one of Tina’s encrusted tins

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of diet meal replacement. Dora follows me. The sound of bells is just daily static — Belle doesn’t seem to resent the coitus interruptus. Dora looks around at the apartment, as though seeing it for the first time. “Ew. Fuck, Flip, this is disgusting.” She surveys the mess of Tinafallout still filling the kitchen. Tina’s dishes are still undone. “It really stinks in here, dude,” she says. “You really should do something about this.” The tears make lines through her blushing. “I know,” I say. I am sweating, and I feel self-conscious about the smell of sex on my hands. “It smells like something died in here.” She doesn’t mean my hands. She means the weird, sick smell, the smell from not having cleaned in a long time. As soon as she’s said it, I can tell she’s wishing she hadn’t. “Sorry,” she says. “I’m just anal.” “It’s okay. I’m on a chore strike. I’m kind of hoping Tina will start doing stuff around here.” “Where is Tina?” “I don’t know.” “Your fly is undone.” I find the chocolate, deep in the freezer behind some chicken parts and an almost empty bottle of Blue Sapphire vodka. My mouth is dry. We manage to have a conversation. While we talk, I stare at Dora’s hands in their gloves. “Anyway, of course, I was just being stupid.” I don’t know what she’s saying, I’ve lost my place in the conversation. I make tea, and I place the chocolate on a plate. “Would you like some chocolate?” I break off a piece. Dora smiles. Her smile is dazzling. “Do you believe in God?” I ask.

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“Sure. Why the hell not? I’d rather believe in God than not.” “Me too,” I say. “Do you believe in Love?” “Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” “No, no.” (And quite quickly regret that I said “no” so fast.) “I don’t mean this. I mean like, as a thing, as an idea.” “Boy, this is heavy. I thought we were just going to hang out. I didn’t know we’d be talking about God and Love. I would have worn my glasses.” I don’t have anything to say to that. “But yeah,” she says, “maybe not with a capital L . . .” “With a little L?” “No, no. I mean, bigger than that . . .” “Your kind of love demands a whole new L. A medium L.” “I guess.” “Sounds tepid.” “What, why? Who you calling tepid, asshole? I’m a Marxist.” “Medium L. What sort of love is that?” I am genuinely disappointed. “Not that kind of medium.” Dora drinks her tea elegantly. I can hear small, politely contained swallows. “Where’s Lamb these days?” “I don’t know. I’m not exactly the boss of her. You don’t even know her.” “The boss of her? Are you seven?” “Did you come here to verbally abuse me?” “I came here to make out.” I feel shrill terror. Bells. “No,” I say. “I can’t do that.” Dora walks around the kitchen a little, feeling here and there with her fingers, like mothers-in-law are supposed to do. “Fuck it’s dusty, Flip. How do you breathe in here?”

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“I like it.” “Have you heard from Lamb?” “No.” “She’s pretty mad at you.” “How do you know?” Dora looks at me funny. “You don’t have a lot of female friends, do you?” I unwrap more of the chocolate. It’s dark on dark, very rich. “Maybe you should make her something,” says Dora. Tina’s cat does a love dance around her. Dora picks it up and turns its head from side to side. I look at Dora. “I am making her something,” I say. “As a matter of fact.” “Good.” Dora keeps playing with Olaf ’s face. “This is sweet,” she says. “It’s the ugliest, sickest fucking thing,” I say. “How can you say it’s sweet?” “No, this.” She pushes the cat’s little collar bell up and down with her finger. “It’s got a little bell.” “Don’t do that.” “Are you sure you’re not a pedophile?” Dora tries to kiss me. I push her away much harder than I mean to, so that she hits her head on a cupboard door. The cat drops from her arms. “What’s the matter with you?” I am terrified of myself — Dora runs out of the house, into the street, and I am left standing in my unbuttoned shirt, holding the chocolate so hard that it’s staining the tips of my fingers.

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16

When Lamb doesn’t answer the phone, I scream into the receiver, “Why didn’t you tell me before?” There is a note on the fridge, because there is always a note on the fridge. Dear Flip, That same girl called. Her number’s on the dry erase board. I pull the note off, dropping the Olivia Chow magnet to the ground as I go. “Hey, I’m sorry you had to take me to the hospital,” I yell up at Tina, through the rungs on the banister. “That was you, right?” I ask, still speaking above my normal level. Nothing. I walk back into the kitchen and crane my neck so that I can see the digital numerals on the microwave in the kitchen. It’s nine

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o’clock. I bum-lift myself up to the second floor. I think it’s time for bed. The ass-step technique reminds me of Dora. Tina’s light is on and Bon Jovi is playing. So, she is home. I guess I should have checked before ingesting the entire stupid casserole. I stand outside her door. Again, I try yelling. “What happened, anyway? Did you take me to the hospital?” I notice a pair of wet shoes outside her door. She’s been out in the hellish weather, I suppose. For some reason, they upset me. I look at them closely, but they are only a pair of soaked pumps. There is nothing innately scary about soaked pumps. I knock. No answer. Nobody home. No answer. “Tina!” I shout. Loudly, even for me. I knock harder. I change up the rhythm of the knock. I’m hoping she can hear it now, but there’s no way — the median-rock music is blaring. I give the door a gentle nudge. The first thing I see is the bright, bright moon framed perfectly by Tina’s lace curtains. The second thing I see is Tina’s limp body hanging in the open closet, on a rope noose. “It’s My Life” is playing rather loudly on her ghetto-blaster. She has set it to repeat, it seems — it starts again at the beginning. It’s a pretty good little system for a ghetto-blaster. It’s a pretty good song, too — I’ve always loved that band. When I was a kid, we used to get the bus driver to play Bon Jovi for us, over and over. He was a good guy. On his last day, he brought in tangerines. It’s difficult to give any of this any kind of fixed meaning. My movements are truly helpless. I find my crutch. I call the eighth taxi of the week. I arrive like a damp, homeless puppy. Lamb’s house is incidental. She finds cash for my cab in a pair of jeans casually thrown over a kitchen chair. Apart from that, the apartment is

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completely clean and orderly. She wipes the tears from my face. The mess of stitches, bandages, tears and raindrops on my face is indivisible. All of it just bleeds in together. I sputter through my still-swollen lips, “She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead.” Lamb fills a kettle and leaves me on the couch. She comes back, carrying tea. Tea is universally appropriate at a time like this. Lamb kisses my neck. “Who?” “Tina.” Lamb’s tea begins to shake, just a little, in her hand. “What the fuck did you do, Flip?” “Nothing,” I say. “Do you think I killed her?” “How should I know?” “Fuck you, Lamb.” “Hey.” She puts her arm around me. “Dora will come back.” My hands go to her waist. I lift her shirt a miniscule amount, enough to edge a finger in underneath and discover the shocking heat of her skin. I’m not in love with her, even though she is beautiful. This is probably a miracle. I am grateful for this, but I am shocked by our nearness right now. My hand on her seems to please her — she responds by moving against my fingers, and we stay like that for a few moments, her twisting against my touches, me stroking. “This is totally bad news bears,” says Lamb, finally. “Jesus.” She takes my hand off her back. This intimacy has paralyzed me. It takes a few moments before I can move my hand. “Lamb, why didn’t you tell me about what happened? Do you get off on this shit? It’s like a long, protracted tease.”

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Lamb scowls — she could throw her mug against the wall, but she is working on controlling herself. Instead, she squeezes it tighter. She looks at what she is holding. “Fuck,” she says, “this mug is chipped.” “We have to go,” I say. “Right now.” “Yes.” She gets her coat and dumps the tea in the sink. Of course, she calls the police first. You don’t just show up at the police station, you call first. I should have thought of that, of course, but I did not. Suicide equals call-the-police. That’s the kind of connection I don’t make — you know, the real kind. She explains the situation to the person who picks up. I can tell she’s being antagonized, but she holds her own. She pulls up her purple leggings, to lace up her ankle-length boots. I wonder how many pairs of leggings is standard for a girl in Toronto. I notice that beside her other shoes there is a tiny pair of wet patent leather girl’s shoes. They are soaked through, as though they’ve just been worn through a puddle. “Are these your niece’s?” I ask. Lamb doesn’t answer me. She pulls on her parka. She takes both of her oversized purses off the rack and drapes them just so over both shoulders. She does all of this lightning fast, in keeping with the occasion. “They want to talk to you,” she says. “The cops.” “Aren’t they going to my place to, like, take Tina down?” “Yeah. They’re sending an ambulance. But we’re going to them, too.” In the car, I ask, “Is Belle still hurting you?” She swallows. “Later,” she says, “we can talk about this later.” “Are those your real teeth?” I ask, reaching a hand towards her mouth.

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She smacks me away, hard. Lamb turns on the radio. It is a crappy rock station. There’s no more good radio. It just doesn’t exist. It is of course some whiny young man singing in a constipated voice about his strung-out girlfriend and how he loves her even though she’s a crack ho burnout, about how he wishes she could see just how beautiful she is inside. I can just imagine the video: the girl with stringy hair and track marks lounging miserably in the whiny young man’s huge urban loft while the whiny young man tries to come up with some way to reach her soul even though it’s impossible because she’s so anorexic she can no longer assimilate new information. What is male sexuality? “Why is all music like this right now?” I ask. “Inappropriate,” she says and looks at me. “Totally, totally inappropriate, Flip. Let’s not talk about your brilliant observations right now, okay?” “Why the fuck do you say shit like ‘inappropriate’ and ‘problematic’ all the time? It’s like Tourette’s. You don’t write like that. Why do you talk like that?” “Do you want my help?” “Yes.” “Then please shut up, right now, okay?” “Why the fuck are you mad at me all the time? It’s not fair. When are we going to talk about this?” She doesn’t say anything. “Can I at least change the channel?” “Please.” I change it to a classical station: I hone in on the bells,

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predictably. I think, Bells make the smallest sounds. But that is sentimental, and you would never think that way.

You think this way, instead. And you say, “I don’t want to explain it to you.” “Why?” he asks. He smoothes his fingers over his hair. “I just think it’s something that I don’t need to discuss.” “If you can’t talk about it, I don’t see how it’s relevant,” he says. “It’s beautiful,” you say. You touch the painting that you have made, and then the next. “Don’t you think they are beautiful? I’ve never painted before, and I was able to paint them. It’s a beautiful thing that happened, and they are beautiful. Don’t you think?” “That’s moot,” he says and zips up his hoodie. You lie beside each other on your low futon. The white-on-white everywhere is beginning to really, really piss you off. “You think beauty is moot? ” “Yeah. Unless you can talk about it. How many of these have you made?” “Six.” “Why six?” He asks. “Is it a series?” “I guess.” “What happened to knitting?” “I’m not into it right now, okay?” He looks uneasy. “What about my mitts?” “I’m doing them. They are almost done.” “I picked up those needles you asked for.” He gets up and pulls you up beside him. “Let’s try to figure this out.” He looks at your paintings with you. “I think I can see what you are trying to do here.” “Okay,” you say. “Tell me.” He appears soothed.

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He puts his arm around you. “Yeah. I think these are very smart. They are even kind of witty. You’re obviously referencing the Group of Seven.”

“I hate this,” says Lamb. I turn the radio off. I watch the road go by. “Do you think Dora likes me?” Lamb says nothing. “Can you please stop this?” I say, weakly. “You’re being unfair.” “You’re not the only one who likes to listen,” says Lamb, a bit angrily. “You’re not the only one who likes to watch.” She hands me her diary. It’s the one I’m used to, marked with a Post-it. “I don’t like to watch. I’ve never watched.” I am hurt by this allegation. “I’m making you something,” I add. “You don’t really listen. And when you read, you don’t really read.” “I read for beauty,” I say. It comes out weak. “You don’t have to let me. I never made you.” “Pay attention,” says Lamb. “It’s somewhere around here.” We find the police station. A tall, thin, mean-looking officer sits me down and asks me a lot of questions. You know something, he isn’t really mean at all. It’s just kind of sad when people who are not mean have mean eyes. It’s not fair.

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17

Tina’s mother looks like Tina would have looked if she had never discovered Group. She has a soft, kind of hot body and a small, ugly head. I was a bit afraid that she would talk to me about Tina, and that I would have to stand in the bedroom with her. The bedroom frightens me, and makes me sad. Tina’s mother does not want to talk. She took a long time in the bedroom, just sitting on the bed. After a while, she closed the door and played Tina’s tunes. She went through all of Tina’s favourite s. I began to get nervous about another suicide attempt in the suicide room, so I banged gently on the door and I offered to help her carry things down. Tina’s mother finally emerged with a shopping bag full of Tina’s socks, some photographs and a yearbook. The cheque’s in my father’s unsteady hand, not my mother’s. It’s accompanied by a note expressing his stern condolences: “Chin up.” Let’s be fair. Let’s not pretend. You care about your hydro bill

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too. Nobody in this city is above hydro — it is the great equalizer. I never liked Tina. Am I supposed to start now? I get the eerie feeling Tina’s mother knows there was more I could have done to save her daughter. I think this gives her a sense of creepy entitlement about being allowed to stay in the apartment. She has more or less moved in. She is just crying out her grief, up and down the hall, in my house. The cheque is a godsend. I mean, it’s ugly — it’s a dirty symbol of everything that’s wrong with me — all the more reason to unload it into the bank account, where it transforms into a beautiful, useable sum. Olaf crawls very slowly across the floor. He doesn’t crawl so much as he drags himself; he kind of looks like a sloth. He’s undead now — it’s getting critical. It’s come to the point where I have actually called Ginger to try and rekindle her interest in “Tina’s cat Olaf ’s urinary tract sex change operation benefit.” One thing I hope is that she can think of a better name for it than “Tina’s cat Olaf ’s urinary tract sex change operation benefit.” Here’s what I buy at Dominion with my father’s money: a giant slab of salmon. I enjoy the feeling of cutting into ripe vine tomatoes from somewhere where it’s tomato season. I sniff the fish to make sure it doesn’t smell of anything. It doesn’t. Correction, it smells like nothing with a chemical, carcinogenic undercurrent. At least it doesn’t smell fishy. If it’s going to kill me, it will do so slowly. I have a very good nose. My mother and I share this trait. She’s so good she can smell broken glass. I take the salmon out of its shiny cling wrap. I’m paranoid about what the fish touches and am careful to make certain that none of its toxic juices spill over onto the counter. As soon as the fish is marinating, I carefully wash the knife I used, as well as my hands. Belle used to surround me in moments like this. She still does now, but only tentatively — scorned.

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September  Derek sometimes reminds me of a goddamn uptight schoolmarm. He said to me that he figured out what was stopping up the tub. He looked totally smarmy and justified about it. When I asked him what it was, he was all poncey and ready to get confrontational with me. “This!” he says, and I looked at what he was showing me and I thought it was something dead like a rat, but it wasn’t. It was a bunch of rust-coloured hair. “I pulled this out of the drain,” he announced, like he’d won the lottery. “It was really deep, and I had to use a knife to get at it. Seriously. Can you tie your hair back or something?” Even though he knows I don’t have fucking red hair. I got another letter today. It sounded different than the last one, all crunchy and crumbly. When I held it up to the light, it surprised me. All of the others have faint but recognizable outlines of letters in them — that’s why I just keep sending them back. But this one was different. So, I did something illegal — even though it wasn’t addressed to me, I opened it. There was a wet smell to it, and it had little red things in it. I thought they were beads at first, but it turns out they were cherry pits, all picked clean and shiny. And some of them had wet feathers stuck to them. It was disgusting. My desire is cool, but present through my anger. “Belle, you are a whore. What did you do to Lamb?” In plain English and without musical flourish, Belle’s ringing baby talk answers: “Silly billy. Nancy. Ssssissy. Don’t you mean, what I did with Lamb? Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.” I turn the pan on, and prop the diary up like a cookbook next to me. If I could find your buttons, I’d keep them with me like this, too. But they have disappeared. I am so sorry. I’m mainly sorry for me.

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Dora. The sesame seeds and red chilis jump. Dora. The Dora garlic Dora and Dora onions Dora darken Dora. The smell fills my mouth and nose. I pour myself a glass of white wine. I prepare a gourmet meal for one. Tina shows up in the strangest places. Her spices sit like ashes in their carefully labelled ex–film canisters. Nutmeg, allspice, garlic powder, cinnamon. These are spices I never use. I empty them out into the compost because it irritates me that they are there, but as I do it, I try to think about Tina’s hopes. That’s a way to remember somebody, right? By what they hoped for? Tossing a dried-up cinnamon stick is one way to eulogize. All of her health food is still in the fridge. Her cumin and cinnamon, perfectly good, land like layers of powdered pigment for paints in the compost, overtop of a few peels and shells. Her food reminds me of her “lifestyle,” and all of her classes. “People get so emotional in these classes,” she once said. “It happens when they first begin to honour themselves.” According to Tina, a guy once went into a profound trance and then began sputtering in tongues. “Which class?” I had asked, through a cloud of boredom. “Freedom Through Diet” had been the reply. Apparently, the guy went so nuts that he cut open his hand on a badly plastered nail on the wall. Tina had been able to bandage the wound properly, thanks to her recent first-aid workshop. “Why did you bother?” I had asked her, to which she had simply replied, “I like to help.” Tina used to lie for hours in that hideous paisley hammock she rigged in the yard, quietly listing her accomplishments to herself, as an act of constant personal affirmation. I would come out, eating my microwaveable pizza, and I would stare. Those were moments of connection, weren’t they? What more can you demand from contact? They were mean, for sure — me watching hatefully and her

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talking to herself — but it was contact. It was physical. I’d think, That lucky bitch, she has it all figured out. I put some pots in a box for her mother. I remember Tina’s deliberate way of breathing, her contained and controlled ins and outs, those deep, sultry oxygenating breaths she had worked so hard to master. She tried to live mindfully. I pour away her garlic salt and make myself a cup of her echinacea tea. I practically barf, and I’m reminded of just before the last seminar she attended, when she turned to me and she said, “Sometimes I can’t believe that I went through so much of my life breathing all wrong.” I can’t seem to purge the apartment of all of the things that Tina intended to eat. She’s everywhere. Every one of her products is morally okay. Everything she bought was encouraged to develop honestly, according to its natural imperative. Like that time when all her corn cobs proved to have been eaten by aphids and she refused to toss them out. “They’re still good,” she said. And they are still here! Wrecked husks of that same corn still sit in the bottom drawer, shaming my shiny, high tech frozen vodka and my wasteful, rotten lamb chop. I try to be respectful by listing. But I don’t hesitate to eat all of the not disgusting leftover stuff. Wouldn’t you? Beyond the health food, there’s my fish. I bought it and it is shiny, but it is my last fish. Tina didn’t eat fish. Tina doesn’t eat fish. Wait a minute. Did I mention that Tina’s not dead?

That’s right. She’s not dead. For real. She’s just completely, completely fucked. Everybody’s behaving like she is dead. Her socks and workout clothes poke out from the bag on the hook. I bring my meal into the living room, so that I can eat it while watching .

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Tina’s idiot cat curls up on my lap. I inhale a mouthful of its fur and cough. I sip my chardonnay and balance my dinner on my legs. I think about how I have alienated Dora forever. I watch a MacGyver rerun and grieve the loss of true heroes. While I watch MacGyver, I work on the liner notes for Lamb’s gift tape. I take the drawing Lamb and I made together and fold it up so it fits nicely into the tape case. It will function as the lining. Forgive me, but I forget what the inside lining’s called in a tape box — the jacket, maybe? I don’t know. Anyway, the case is cracked, because it’s made out of that shitty clear plastic they’re always made of. I like the look of the case with the diagonal crack down the front like that, but I’m momentarily insecure about it. I mean, the crack makes it look more like homemade mixtapes always used to look, but I’m worried Lamb will think it’s cheap, because of the unusual value she places on “craftsmanship.” I hold it up to show Tina, but she doesn’t react. She can’t really react anymore. Her reacting days are over. I offer her a forkful of salmon but she doesn’t respond. I try the tape out in the case, to test fit. You never know if you’ve made your custom-designed insert too large. Luckily, it fits really well. You know how it’s a struggle to pop s into their weird high-tech pods? Remember the nice way tapes slid into their little cases, how it’s all nice and roomy in there because the plastic stretches to accommodate the tape, even if it needs to split to do so? The tape itself is all filmy and hyper-delicate. It always makes me think of the wings on flies. I press play on the borrowed player to listen to what I’ve done so far, and the gears lurch forward, crunching and coughing and pleasantly damaging the tape as they go. That’s the thing about tapes: every time you listen to them, you lose them a little bit more. The symbolism in that isn’t lost on me, no sir. Symbolism is never lost on me. Every cut and tape and adjustment is a prayer for Lamb’s for-

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giveness. It’s all part of giving a present. I’m hoping to hell that this will work. I have lost everyone. After a little while, I decide take a little break to call the “girl.” I dial the number on the dry erase board. Ginger answers the phone. I’m a little confused, because I didn’t dial Ginger’s number. Ginger’s number is easy to remember, because it’s a - number. “Hi Flip.” “Ginger?” I ask. “Yeah,” says Ginger, all speedy and friendly as usual. “Have you had that cast taken off yet?” “Uh, listen. Um, I’m calling someone back — she called here earlier.” “Oh, of course.” There’s a scuffle, and a brief pause. Your voice startles me. “Hi,” you say. “Hi. Who is this?” I hope that you will say your name. “I met you at Lamb’s party. We talked about my sweater.” “Oh,” I say. “Right. I didn’t know you were friends with Ginger.” “I’ve got a ridiculous question,” you say. “Shoot.” There’s a bit of a pause. “Do you have my buttons?” “No,” I say. This is true, since I have lost them. You sigh. You sound genuinely disappointed. “Okay. I didn’t think so.” “The ones you were working with at the party?” “Yeah.” Your voice is full of hope. “Nope. I don’t have them.” There’s another pause. “I’ve got something of yours, I think.”

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“What?” I ask. “I’ll just give it to you at the benefit, I guess.” “Benefit?” I ask, but there’s suddenly a lot of action. Ginger’s voice bounces around in my ear again. “Hey man. Did you decide on centrepieces? Cat grass is just too elegant, but I still think catnip is more edgy.” “I’m going to leave that up to you.” “Cool,” says Ginger. “You’re good at delegating. That’s a really important skill in a leader. This benefit is going to be amazing.” She hangs up the phone. Tina is lying on the couch. Olaf is kneading her stomach. I push the two of them over, gently, to make a little more room for myself on the couch. I’m not an asshole — I make sure she’s upright so she can breathe okay. I’ve chosen songs from our past. I’ve tried to balance my selections between “funny because I can’t believe we used to like this” and “funny because I can’t believe we still like this” and “sad because it’s a good song” and “sad because even though it’s the stupidest song ever written it still makes me cry and that means I’ve been conditioned to feel a certain way and have no autonomy.” Mostly, I make sure every single song relates to an event in our shared adolescence. I also work hard to ensure that none of the songs could be mistaken as come-ons. I’m not going to list the songs, because that would make you judge me. Besides, I’d lie about it to impress you anyway. I’m hoping that one day, once I’ve worked up the guts, you and I can be friends based on something other than pretending to like cool music. The sad thing is that some of the songs I need are on  (the old tapes are long lost, of course). I have to play the songs on the  player and push the  player right up next to the tape player because I don’t have one of those machines where you can record from

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a  onto tape. I’m not about to go buy one. Where are your buttons? I am such an idiot. I take a deep breath, to try to bring them to me. It doesn’t work. I have failed you. Tina can’t talk. She can only breathe long, scary breaths. She is in my living room. There is a living dead girl in my living room. The situation reminds me of Twin Peaks — you know, when the really abusive husband goes catatonic — except for two important things: Tina’s not an abusive husband, and this is real life. What does one do? What is the etiquette? I can’t just tell her mom to take her away. I mean, I probably would have assumed that would happen anyway. Who leaves a zombie girl in a shared house? I try to ignore her as best I can and just work on the tape. The tape is important. I’m feeling experimental, and I start to think it would be interesting to play around with the room’s ambient noises, to catch Belle, to say “See, I’m on to you” to Lamb, but I can’t make the thing record. It’s just not the kind of tape player that lets you talk into it. Technology used to be way more specialized, didn’t it? At least I still have Tina. Tina’s neck is blue and torn. I still hate her. I can’t help staring. I stare and stare. They managed to save her. I’m glad. I don’t wish she were dead. I just wish she were not living with me. Forgive me. I stare. Forgive me. Would you look away? Do you have that much dignity? After dinner, I’m still a little hungry, so I pour myself a bowl of cereal. I eat Tina’s Crunchy-O’s right up near her face; I kind of hope she knows that I’m eating them. I continue to work on the packaging for the tape. Tina and I watch Zoolander. It’s my choice, of course. It’s really funny. Tina’s head is warm. I thought it would be cold. I thought that

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somebody in a state like that would have a cold head. Oh God, I know I should be more gentle in my descriptions. I know I should be more compassionate. A fate worse than death? Who knows. Death is pretty bad. Or maybe it isn’t. Her insides are whirring, this very second, like a motor. I can’t explain this; I am not a doctor or a priest or a shaman. I can’t start exorcising others. There’s just this sound, like a car on crack in her chest — no, lower, her stomach. It’s irregular, muttering, all the time just whirring-purring. It’s louder out the orifices; if you put your head near her mouth, like I am doing right now, you get it loudest. There are no breaks in the noise, except for little catches in its syncopation, like a rest, rest, rest. I think, That’s when she’s breathing in. Yeah, it’s got to be her inhalation — I can hear it. What is breathing? This is it for Tina. She has changed. Changed for the worse? So what she was before was better? I am trying to be available to her, here. The dominant thing: guilt. You can look up close when someone can’t move. But this is a violation. You and I agree about major issues. I know that because we are part of the same broad, moderate circle of acquaintances. Our circle is moral. We know things like: this is a violation. So I try not to. It makes me uncomfortable. It’s kind of exciting. I fight it. It is hard not to torture. It is not my belief that those who are sick or old or in pain know better than us, okay? Is it yours? We’ve all been idiots savants, exceptions; I would not subject even Tina, an enemy, to that kind of thing. I don’t think Tina knows

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more. I don’t think Tina is with God. I don’t think Tina is a direct line. I won’t bring Tina offerings of milk or lay flowers at her feet. I won’t test Tina for psychic abilities. I won’t make her my Ouija board. Given my beliefs, it’s alarming me that she starts to talk through her itinerant purring. Her purrs cluster. No, what shapes are they making? Is her mouth moving, very slightly, to narrow and open around consonants, vowels? No. I try to ignore my tendencies here. I would like to feel that she is trying to talk to me. But why would she be trying to talk to me? Purring in cats is still pretty mysterious. Okay, maybe it’s not purring. I don’t know what it is. It’s okay; neither do you. Science can’t explain every sound. When Tina says, “Cat got your tongue?” I spray Crunchy-O’s all over the room. It’s amazing how far they go. Some of them end up on the television. I pause the movie. “Holy shit! Tina, are you okay? Are you back?” I wave my hand in front of her eyes, but they are as blank as before. I un-pause the movie. I push Tina’s hair out of her eyes, and tuck it in gently behind her ear, so it won’t bother her. “If you touch your birdy it will fly away.” She opens her mouth and sticks out her tongue. There is a round, small cherry pit in there. I reach to take it, and she bites me. “Mary had a little lamb,” she says, half-singing. She’s beginning to remind me of a bad horror movie, so I step back. “Tina? Tina?” I shake her roughly. I slap her and instantly regret it. “Oh fuck, Tina, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Tina. Shit.” Tina stares, as before. She smiles slightly. I can see her strange, small, feral teeth.

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“Are you Tina?” I’m not sure why I ask her that, but I do. She shakes her head, very slowly. I look at her and my eyes need to refocus because I am getting double-vision. I touch Tina’s face. I stroke up and down the side of it. “I’m sorry I was such a dick,” I say. And then I go, “Tina, who are you right now?” And then I ask, “Who are you?” again. I am horrified when she then turns away, showing me the back of her head. Bells. “Belle?” “You know me,” she says to the far wall. “What?” Tina turns back. “I’m underneath,” she says. “Taste.” I notice that Tina’s hairline is confused — she has no defined peak. “What? Under what?” Her body is stiff to my touch; not dead stiff, but definitely sick stiff. I snag my hand through a thick strand of hair. “Tina?” Again, the slow shake no. Her face creases to a small smile. Shiny saliva silts the corner of her mouth. I do something terrible. It’s something you probably won’t forgive me for. I kiss Tina. I don’t just kiss her once; I do it a few times. I kiss her neck and then I do something else; I begin to feel at her breasts over her cotton baby-T. Forgive me, but know also that I do this with enormous hunger. “Are you in there?” I ask, my fingers pinching the pink cotton. “Belle? Darling?” “Yes,” whispers Tina, so softly I can barely hear. “Louder, darling,” I say. I am sick with ardour. I work my fingers through her hair. I don’t care that this is/was Tina. I know who this

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really is. My heart. My erection. My mouth. Every bit of me stings, pushes me. “I’m underneath,” she says. She turns away again. “Yes, yes. You are so sweet. Belle?” “No,” she says, “I am not sweet.” “Who are you? Who are you?” I am on my knees. I pull her T, which is warm as hell from her skin, up over her head. I am sick and enraptured with the shape of her back. My skin turns to silk, my cock brims with blood. I want. “I want to know, darling. Tell me.” I say this. Out loud. To somebody who can no longer speak. My tongue goes forward, through my lips and I find the back of her neck, all her little unresponsive hairs. I allow my teeth to dig into the very surface of her skin. My hands and mouth are ugly to me, but I continue to do this. I turn her towards me. She smiles. For a moment, it’s almost benign, a kind of sharing. “I am underneath,” she says. I place my tongue in her mouth, and come out cupping three teeth, which I spit, hard, across the room. I feel vomit beginning to rise. Unsteadied by grief, I fall off the couch, to my knees, in front of Tina. I hobble upstairs to my room to weep, petulant and as red with fever as a grounded child.

My father picks me up, wearing white. His shoes are very stylish and it makes me uncomfortable. “You look like a schlep,” he says. “Sorry,” I say. “You look like you just got queer-eyed-for-thestraight-guy.” “Sit down.” He thinks I am very funny. “Why are you dressed like this, Flip?”

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“Do I need to dress up to go to the hospital?” I get into the car with some difficulty. “How is Tina?” “I don’t know.” “What do you mean, you don’t know?” “How can I know? She doesn’t really say much.” My father turns up the classical. It’s a tonic to his maniacal driving.

Once my cast is off, my leg looks like a televangelist — it’s as pink and smooth as a honey-baked ham. I feel less like myself without the cast, so I make a lame joke about separation anxiety and phantom pain. The doctor tells me that phantom pain is a serious problem and not a laughing matter. The doctor has a lot of freckles and a pale anchor tattoo emerging from his collar. And he is humourless. I ask the doctor if he is certain that it is safe for me to walk without it, and he tells me that he has never known anyone to keep a cast on for as long as I have. My father looks on with disgust. My father waits in the waiting room and flirts with the female nurses and doctors. I am embarrassed when he calls one of them “sweetheart.” For driving, he wears a visor that makes him look older than he is, because only old people wear visors. With his mouth full of peanuts, he talks animatedly about wanting to do a production of “Waiting for Godot.” “It’s the first thing I ever did, you know? Back in Montreal. Before L.A.” “Can I have a nut?” I ask. He ignores me as we screech around a tight corner onto Yonge Street.

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“Do you mind if we go look at some pants?” my father asks. “Whatever. Anything to get out of this death car.” “You’re too sensitive.” We stop at a light. It takes him a long time, and a pat on the shoulder from me, to notice that it’s green again. “I’ll buy you something,” he says. “As long as you don’t tell your mother.” “It’s okay. I don’t need anything. Can we change the music?” It’s all bells, classical. I feel uncomfortable. I don’t like to feel mildly aroused so close to my father. He ignores my request. “I think it would be great to approach the play as a senior. I mean, I always said I would return to it.” It bothers me that my father has decided it is okay to call himself a senior. “You want to act? I thought you hated acting.” “No, no. I want to direct it.” “What?” “Yeah,” he says. “You’re not a director.” “Says you.” “Watch out for those pesky pedestrians.” My father is driving on the median. “You’re not a director,” I say. “We’ve discussed this before. You hated the pressure.” “I used to direct, in the sixties. Before I had to learn a trade. I think I could bring something really new to Godot now, something that I couldn’t bring to it when I was a stupid kid, when I was your age.” He is very excited. “I like how you are on a first-name basis with the play now.” “What?”

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“Nothing. Like, what do you think you could bring to the play now that you’re all grown up?” My father pushes his lower jaw forward, like he’d like to spank me. “Like what? Like what? He wants to know ‘like what.’” “Yeah, like what?” I ask. “It’s really about aging.” He smiles triumphantly. “What?” I cringe as we squeal through another red light. “I didn’t know that when I read it as a kid. You don’t know that. How could you?” “I think that is an interesting interpretation,” I say. “But I’m not sure I agree. I don’t think there’s anything in there about aging.” “It’s not an interpretation,” he says and looks at me fiercely. “It’s what it’s about.” “I’m not sure I agree with you.” “You’re not sure you agree?” he asks. “Are you sure you don’t agree or are you not sure you do agree?” “What? Dad, Jesus, you almost killed that kid.” My father pulls over. “What are you about, Flip?” “What?” “Get out,” he says. “What?” “Go and get sure that you agree or disagree.” “What? Dad?” “You need a fucking opinion, Flip.” “Dad? What the fuck?” “You’re not doing anything. What are you doing? All you have are opinions that aren’t even opinions.” I don’t want to talk about my malaise. “It’s important to be critical,” I say. I am beginning to tear out of the corners of my eyes.

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“What the hell does that mean?” I look at my father. “Yeah, well. You’re just an editor,” I say, for no particular reason. It’s petty and childish, but it seems appropriate. “And your whole generation was so . . . naive.” “Fuck you, Flip.” “Dad?” He gets out of the car, storms round to the passenger side and opens my door. “You’re all better. Walk.”

My room is cold. The radio is on down the hall. I press play on my  player to drown out the cock rock, but it isn’t working. I turn on my laptop and start downloading illegal music. My cell phone rings. “Shh,” I whisper to it. “Please.” There is a hard knock on my door. “Flip,” says Tina’s mother, “I’m sorry about the music. I’ll turn it down.” “No, no. Don’t bother.” “I know it’s loud. It helps me to cope.” “Leave it. Really. It’s okay.” I don’t hear her footsteps on the hall floor. I know she is just outside the door, waiting for me to open it, so I do. “Flip.” “Yes ma’am?” “Do you have any thread?” “I don’t know.” My phone is still ringing. “Your phone is ringing,” says Tina’s mom. I want to ask, Why have you moved into my apartment?

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“Could you look?” she asks. “What?” “I need to do some mending.” She holds up a bag of Tina’s clothes. There’s a coat in there, and some stockings. “I don’t think I have any thread.” “Can you look?” “In a bit?” “Soon?” I close the door. The phone is still ringing. I open the two top drawers of my dresser. I have no thread. I yell, “Nope!” Tina’s mother opens the door. “Maybe if I take a look. Sometimes fresh eyes . . .” I do not want her fresh eyes anywhere near me. I close the door. “Flip?” I lock the door and hear her toggle the knob. Lamb’s voice is soft. She refuses to see me, citing irreconcilable differences, until I promise her a present. She says, “Yeah?” I say, “Yeah.” She says, “I’ve got something for you, too, come to think of it.” She hangs up the phone.

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18

You know how to bake a cake. The icing’s baby pink, dotted with tiny silver balls in each of its tiny dollop hills. The surface of the icing’s as clean and flat as a skating rink. Your cat got one of those stupid little balls. That’s predictable — you should have known he’d do that, silly. He’s your cat after all. You have agreed to host Ginger’s benefit, for Olaf ’s urinary tract gender reassignment operation. Cat people host cat benefits. People who don’t like cats don’t host cat benefits. That’s just how it is. Lamb and I stand next to your tall, pruned hedge and spy on you, watch your worry externalize. Maybe it’s not your hedge — it’s probably your landlord’s hedge. We watch you trot right after the cat to try and smack the ball right out of him; we watch the cat pronounce a few undramatic noises. The noises aren’t coughing noises; it’s like he’s being courteous by attempting to indulge your panic. You can’t get it out of him, try as you might, but for good measure you smack

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his little cat shoulders two or three more times. Cats aren’t made like us, and that’s the reason you don’t attempt the Heimlich manoeuvre. The cat hangs in your arms like a long swatch of cloth. It’s scary because, hey, who outside of veterinarians really knows about cats’ digestive systems? Everything is okay in the end. The cat looks sort of happy about having eaten Italian ballbearing cake decoration, actually. Your kitchen’s papered in ridiculous candy-coloured pro-cat banners. The slogans are really kind of embarrassing — stuff like “Gender is not only a human issue.” It’s thought-provoking enough, as far as party banners go — I mean, is gender only a human issue? The yarn’s piled up high in wicker baskets all around the kitchen and it looks just about as casual as yarn can look. You seem well. In fact, you’re singing. You’re in a floury trance, and really, you’re humming far more than you’re singing. It’s difficult to tell what the song is, but Lamb recognizes it. She’s good at that. “I know that,” she says to me. She looks a little frightened. I was never good that way — I’m not very musical at all. The cake’s resting peacefully on a large silver tray. The tray matches the edible balls and sets off the pink of the icing. Not accidentally, it brings out the pink in the petals on the large fantasy gerbera on your sweater. You look nice. How long did you spend planning your outfit, and arranging your hair, and smelling yourself ? It’s hard to say. The whole picture is very fifties — this both depresses me and turns me on. Lamb and I witness the cat/edible silver ball fiasco, and your careful handling of the final touches of icing. We can get up quite close without you noticing. We wait, and we’re scientific as hell, a couple of lurking anthropologists. We spy on you through your convenient back door window. I want to write down what I am seeing,

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and I even have a little flipbook with notes “relating to my craft” on me. My father would be proud. I’m not sure why we don’t knock right away. We’re not really hiding; we’re just hesitating. We’ve every right to be here; we’ve been invited. Lamb and I are on the guest list. Ginger sent us lemon-scented invites laced up kinkily with yellow ribbon. Under “R.S.V.P.,” she’d used Olaf ’s own tiny paws to leave prints. This was her poetic touch. Lamb pulls a long piece of silk out of her purse. She’s been embroidering a smiling hippo onto it, and I giggle approvingly. “Is that for me?” I am flattered. “No,” says Lamb. “This is something I’m making for myself.” “You’re so selfish.” “Let’s not go in right away.” We sit down next to your hedge. Being next to a hedge with Lamb is really sort of an earthy moment. I look at her freckles. Being with somebody you really value, sitting in the dirt between brambly stalks of hedge, can make a guy think. That said, it doesn’t have to make a guy think. It doesn’t make me think, but it does make me pause long enough not to say something stupid. Lamb says something I can’t make out. She strokes the cracked lid of the tape. “Thank you,” she says. “Sorry about the crack in the plastic,” I say. Although I’m not. I’m sorry about everything else I have ever done, but I am not sorry about the crack in the plastic. The insert is folded to fit nicely into the case. It’s the drawing of the sky, which I started with Lamb and finished alone — and hell, the crack was an honest evolution. “No,” she says, “don’t be sorry. It’s way more authentic that way.” “Wait ’til you listen to it. Then you’ll know the meaning of authenticity.” She opens it, to look at the insert. She hands me the tape to hold;

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I drop it in the dirt, of course. I come by that slip honestly. When I touch it, I hear Belle say, “Ring! Ring!” It’s not a bell ringing, it’s words. “Ring, ring,” in her little-girl voice. So, I feel chills all over. The tape’s spools fill with dirt. I pick it up and say, “Fuck.” Lamb smiles at me. “You okay?” She lifts the tape out of the new spring mud, cleans it, using her fingers. “You’ll get the oil from your fingers all over it,” I say. Birds chirp. She looks hurt. “My hands are clean,” she says, as though this is a no-brainer. She hands me the tape. I take it with my sleeve. She pulls the drawing out of the case and admires it. “Did you make this?” she asks. “Yep. Don’t you recognize it?” Her eyes narrow. “Don’t you recognize it?” I say again. She covers her ears. Evidently, I was shouting. I watch her eyes as she reads her name in its constellation. “Lots of stars,” she says. “I need to go inside.” She notices the rip at the bottom of the drawing. “This is really old. From when we were little. I can’t believe you kept this.” “Of course I did.” “Where’s the rest of it?” she asks. “I dunno. I didn’t think it was right. For this present.” “What did you do with it?” I look at my muddy sleeve. “I threw it out,” I say. Lamb straightens out her silk so that the embroidered hippo won’t get rumpled. “I can’t listen to it, though,” she says. “I don’t have a tape player.” “I can play it for you. I know it’s kind of lame, and a bit of a hipster gesture.”

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“So is saying ‘hipster gesture.’” says Lamb. “It’s not lame. I’ve got something for you, too.” She pulls an envelope out of her bag. It’s letter-sized, and yellow. I start to open it, but she stops me. “Wait ’til later,” she says. “For drama.”

Your apartment is really nice. It’s one of the nicest I’ve ever seen. I really approve of the colours you have chosen. I’ve always been partial to gold — it’s regal and timeless, and there’s something of that in you, most of the time, especially when you aren’t baking pastel cakes. All of your friends have nice apartments. It comforts you, probably, to know that you’re all in the same place. Many of your friends have already arrived and are standing around with mojitos. Mojitos are a weird choice for this time of year, but why split hairs. In keeping with the yarn theme, lots of people have brought their knitting. Many of your friends overlap with Lamb’s friends, but on the whole, they are a more art-neutral crowd. They are dressed well, and many of them have highlighted hair. Lamb’s parties are a fair bit more colourful than this, and also more volatile. The mojitos are not knocked back — people sip politely. You marvel at Lamb’s hippo. “That is totally adorable,” you say. You touch the stitches. “I hope it’s okay I brought embroidery instead of knitting.” “Of course,” you say. “You know, there’s something about your choices here that remind me of Claude Berstein’s work. Do you know it?” “No.” I also shake my head.

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“Those plaster flowers — that whole embellishment thing?” “I’m not sure I’ve seen that.” “I have a book. I’ll lend it to you.” You look at me. “Where’s your yarn?” Lamb looks embarrassed. “Flip’s working on a book. He thought he’d bring his notepad.” So, I will be the downer. “And drawing,” I mumble. Who brings writing to a craft/knitting benefit party? “What’s the book about?” you ask, blinking innocently. “A love story” is what I go with. “Cool,” you say. “That sounds good. What kind of a love story?” Fuck. “A little-L love story,” says Dora, who is suddenly in front of me. She is sitting, perched rather prettily on the edge of your nice gold couch. I look away shyly. We leave Dora and step through the cheerful light gold foyer into your Easter egg blue living room. I love these colours — they remind me of being little. I can’t remember your name. What’s your name? I hope I don’t need to introduce you to anybody. Lamb hands you a gift. “What’s this for?” “For hosting,” says Lamb. Thank God for Lamb, she’s so fucking considerate — I would never do that sort of thing. It just wouldn’t occur to me. It’s a book of pressed flowers, embroidered with beads. It’s beautiful. When Lamb makes things like this and just gives them away, it fills me with capitalist rage — she could make a living creating these stunning, tiny objects.

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You say, “I’ve got something for you guys, too. I’ve got something for everybody.” You are wearing the oversized sweater. You’ve chosen other buttons, little red ones shaped like cherries. You take the book and indulge your fingertips. “This is so nice,” you say. “It’s a funny coincidence, too, since your embroidered hippo reminded me of those plaster flowers.” You kiss Lamb on the cheek. I notice that you are bleeding. “Your wrist,” I whisper. You look down. “Oh, I must have pricked myself when I was sewing earlier.” I feel uneasy — it’s much worse than a pinprick. I can hear a tiny bumpy melody beginning. “Shh,” I whisper to Belle. “Not now.” Lamb says that she could use a drink. “Long day?” you ask. You are a natural hostess. You concoct a whiskey sour like a champ. You’re so casual that the air goes alcoholic. Watching you make that drink is enough to get somebody tipsy. “Just working. My recent project is giving me grief.” “I’ve started painting,” you whisper. It’s dirty. “Who paints anymore?” says Lamb. “Good for you. That’s brave.” Ginger moves around from here to there, collecting money for the raffle tickets. Lamb is lifted into the air by a big guy I don’t recognize. I look for the food table. It’s not that nice — it certainly isn’t one of Lamb’s spreads. No offense. I move into the kitchen, looking for Dora. She has left her perch on the sofa. Predictably, she is standing next to the chocolate. She sits down abruptly and looks away from me. I sit down next to her. Lamb

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gives me the evil eye so I stand up. You place your hand on Lamb’s shoulder. A tall man comes up behind you. He shakes his head, pressing his finger to his mouth in a hushing gesture. He gives you a big bear hug from behind. He’s wearing strong cologne, and has a nice, upto-the-minute parka on. It pisses me off because we are standing next to each other, and his parka is so much cooler than mine. You say, “Nice parka, Francis. New?” Francis smiles. “A little trendy, no? I was hoping to go with nautical, but it’s been too cold.” You smile. I recognize Francis from the Dominion on College. I’ve seen him there a number of times, feeling shallots, puzzling over what makes for a good shallot. He’s a nice-looking guy, with deep blue eyes and black hair. “Francis is a doctor,” you say, and squeeze his cheeks ’til his lips pout forward. “Isn’t that adorable?” I am at a loss for words. I take my outdated parka off and notice that it’s slightly wet from the ground in your garden. I feel selfconscious. “Can I hang this up?” I ask. “Where are my manners?” you say. You direct me to the series of hooks in the hall closet. Parka, parka, parka. “I almost forgot,” you say. “Is this yours?” You hand me a small, silver Zippo lighter. “I don’t smoke,” I say. Then I look a little closer. “How’d you get this?” “I must have picked it up accidentally at Lamb’s party. I’m kind of absent-minded. Is it yours?”

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“Kind of.” I put it in my pocket.

You don’t need to go to the country, because everything you need is right here. This is your imaginary forest. You cherish your friends, don’t you? Take a deep breath. Exhale, count to six, and climb. This row of high-quality parkas tells me that all of your friends have apartments for which they have chosen colours, just like you. Their apartments flash bat signals that go: Over here! New chandelier! Ironic bedspread! Sleep with me! I just waxed my bikini line! When you think about your friends, you think: there is danger everywhere in every kitchen, around every real edge and corner of this soft, soft neighbourhood. Formulas for treachery and betrayal are all around you. You think, that’s what trust is — a dinner party. You can’t help thinking of your parties as models for something else, something much bigger, a kind of Freudian iceberg standing in for something really gigantic, something beautiful. I stand in the closet and for a moment I let my face sink into the coats, like children do. Something hard blocks the full push of my leaning, and a few feathers blow up around me. This is not Narnia anymore; I look behind the coats to find that there are large wrapped canvasses hiding there. I know they are canvasses because canvasses feel like canvasses, even wrapped. These are favours, for later. For now, they are a secret. I look at them — aren’t they pretty? You are

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really good at wrapping. I look down to get the full feel of them. I half expect them to be sitting in a pool of blood, but I’m wrong, of course. As usual. Francis is not your boyfriend, but he helped you bake that pie that’s next to the dessert table with the cake. I can hear him bragging about it, even though I’m standing in the closet. Hours ago, he held the clean rhubarb in his neatly trimmed hands before he left to take his girlfriend ice-skating. You liked that his nails were cared for. You looked at them while they were cold and glistening like that in the tap water. All of your friends are grateful that, like them, you have chosen the kind of poverty that allows for good haircuts.

Francis is probably one of the nicest people at the party, even though he is good-looking. “Lamb tells me that you guys have brought some tunes.” You are interrupting Francis in the middle of a totally entertaining story about how he got food poisoning from a chicken dog at the Ex. “What?” I ask. Lamb hands you the mixtape. I am shocked; I flail my arms. Dora gets up and leaves the room. “Private,” I say to Lamb. “Not a public gesture.” Lamb is hurt. “Come on, Flip,” she says. “Everybody will love it. It will remind them of their childhoods.” You smile at me, nodding. Your smile is full of beautifully formed, large-ish teeth. I get Lamb’s face up close to my mouth and I whisper: “Some things are private.” You put your hand upon my hand. A small line of blood moves from your wrist onto mine. I pull back.

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“Oh,” you say, noticing my alarm. “I have a loose thread.” You pull scissors out of your pocket and cut off a piece of yarn, which is now soaked red with blood. You pull the sleeve down lower, to cover your cut. The scissors make a clean sound, and the yarn frays. Your sleeve is ruined. I want to tell on you, for your sake, but I don’t. Nobody notices that you are leaving a long red trail of blood. I can see it on your leggings and behind you — it extends. There are footprints in it, from feet in socks. It’s not a lot, but it’s enough to be a line: this one is real, not imposed or for teaching. Lamb sits down beside me and takes my sketchbook and writes, If you let us play the tape, I’ll go with you. You say, “What’s the best track?” “It depends on whether you were a Boyz II Men kid or a Mariah Carey kid.” “I was both.” “Have you seen Dora?” I ask. “She’s outside.”

Sure enough, Dora’s on the porch. I use my newly less-unsteady legs to walk over to her. Bells start. I reach into my pocket and offer Dora some of the chocolate I’ve been carrying around. It’s a bit depleted from having been in there for about a week, but it’s still okay. I wonder if the edges of your buttons were accidentally stained brown by the chocolate. That’s the hazard of spending time so damn close to my heart, I guess. Dora looks very sad. “Can I kiss you?” she asks. “Maybe we should go back inside,” I say. “Lamb and I have to be somewhere.”

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But I hang back for a few moments, aware of the weight of my pants on the tops of my shoes. Dora says nothing but looks out over the porch railing, into your yard. Your garden is lovely, though not at all a secret; you’ve done a lovely job with the small space afforded you. You have arranged it so that there is an area devoted to fine herbs which right now are winterized to dry, rough tufts — mint, basil, thyme. They sit in large terracotta pots right next to a semi-circle of very young daffodils. Dora reaches her hand down over the railing and really stretches to touch the tips of the tangled thyme. Your friends must have helped you pick which herbs to plant. “You’re not very nice at all,” Dora says. “I always date assholes.” “I am nice.” “No, you’re not. You don’t listen.” I touch her forehead with my finger. I kiss her forehead. Dora raises her hand up to touch where I’ve kissed her and I see her hands. “Where are your gloves?” I ask. Idiot. Dora looks uncomfortable. Suddenly, I realize: this is permission. Her hands are scored over, very brightly, in bad tattoos. The best one is of a bird. “I like this one,” I say. “It’s the best,” she says. “But it’s still pretty shitty. It doesn’t look very professional.” Bells ring distantly. “I have to go,” I say. “That’s okay. I’ll be around.”

In the foyer, a game of Twister has started. It’s appealing because all of the women are wearing lowriders. I carefully step over some-

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body’s ass crack and start to look for Lamb. They are still playing the tape I made for her. I wince at the sound, but find that Belle is being kind. She has barely dented the songs. I can hear each song unadulterated for the first time in years. They are melodic, ridiculous. People are singing along. “Have you seen Lamb?” I ask you. The doorbell rings. I follow you. It’s Tina’s mother and Tina. “Hi there,” you say. I come to stand beside you and look at Tina. She is still . She stands, swaying, sort of sweetly. Her mother has dressed her in a pale grey overcoat with blue buttons. The two top buttons have been replaced with brown ones. I look a little closer. So do you. “Are those my buttons? ” Your hostessing has slipped. You look appalled. Tina stares through you. A tiny smile moves the edge of her mouth. Tina’s mother places her arm protectively around Tina’s shoulder and says, “Excuse me?” Ginger shoves you aside. She looks at Tina’s mom’s hands, and back at her face. Expectantly, she asks, “Where is the guest of honour?” “Olaf died last night.” Ginger stares in disbelief. “Cat got your tongue?” says Tina. And then she faints. Ginger blinks. “It’s true,” I say. “I’m sorry, Ginger. He died peacefully. I couldn’t figure out how to tell you.” “You’re hilarious, Flippy. Too, too funny!” Ginger thinks we are all just pulling her leg. “He’s serious,” says Lamb, coming up from behind. “But this would mean a lot to him, I’m sure.”

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Tina lies at your feet. Her mother crouches, administering some kind of injection. You continue to stare at the buttons on Tina’s coat, which were your buttons. Her coat is open and she is wearing a lace blouse. I try not to look at her cleavage. I look down at the floor, at the small pool of blood you’re leaving. I worry about your hardwood. Some blood gets on Tina’s ankle. “We gotta go,” says Lamb, handing me my mediocre parka. “Sorry, Ginger.” “But we have guest speakers,” says Ginger, through a tight smile. “Sorry,” says Lamb.

I hope that one of your friends will help you clean up. We don’t even say goodbye properly. There’s so much to do, too — all that bloody cake, the fashion forward dishes too large to fit in the washer. We have to leave you to your own devices. I hope Ginger won’t kill your buzz. You did a terrific job — so what if the cause is lost? The place looked great. The towers of yarn balls were inspired. I hope for your sake that somebody brings a little coke — that’s bound to make Ginger feel better. I can hear her crying in the bathroom, lamenting. I think I hear her say, “I’ll never meet the right kind of people,” but it’s through the bathroom door, so it’s quite muffled. Also? I hope that you will survive.

Riding our bikes, we pass my parents’ place. “Wanna stop in?” asks Lamb. “For some tense banter?”

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“No thanks.” Lamb yawns broadly. She is ahead of me by a little. She’s a better biker than I am, probably because she is more athletic than I am. She points at a passing bird. “What kind is that?” she asks. “Pop quiz!” “It’s a robin.” “No, it isn’t. Look at its head. It’s not a robin, loser.” “How do you know?” “Dora told me about robins. The wings are wrong.” “What?” “Dora knows a lot about birds. Her dad was an ornithologist.” “Her dad is dead,” I say. I’m hurt that Lamb and Dora have spent time talking. “I know, retard. That’s why I said ‘was an ornithologist’ not ‘is an ornithologist.’” “Why is it okay to say ‘retarded’ again?” “I know!” she says, excitedly. I am beside her now. We get off our bikes and stand on the corner. “Where the hell is it?” “I think it’s the next block.” “I mean, I just said retarded, but while I was saying it I felt really guilty. It’s sort of an addiction, though. Retard, retarded, retardo, ’tard.” “Yeah,” I say, pushing my bike beside me. “And now it’s okay, as long as you comment on the fact that it’s bad, like, you know, ‘Boy, I shouldn’t really be saying this.’ ‘Gay’ is like that too.” “No way,” says Lamb. “Gay is offensive again.” “Since when?” “It never really crossed over.” Lamb fondles her handlebars. “I could give you some racing stripes, if you want,” I say. “And I could paint the whole thing fuchsia.”

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“How much?” “Free.” “How ’bout some flames?” Her eyes widen. “Let’s go,” I say. I pat the Zippo in my pocket, deeply aware of its potential. All the houses around here are giant things, with shiny cars out front. We don’t recognize the old Minor house because it has been incredibly renovated. It looks more or less like an airport. We climb the steps on the high-tech porch and Lamb rings the doorbell. Lamb and I giggle a bit. The sun’s grown hot. Spring’s about to start springing. Lamb makes something up and flirts with the neocon athletic type who answers — pretty soon, we’ve got beers and are being led out to the back. He’s really enthusiastic about conservative environmentalism. “Why does being good to the earth mean we all have to go broke?” he asks. “Beats me,” says Lamb. “I surely don’t want to go broke, you know? I surely don’t.” “Fair,” I say. “You guys are crazy to bike in this weather.” He thinks this through. “But I suppose it’s better for the earth. What happened to your face, mate?” My hand goes up to my bandages, protectively. The three of us are standing together, on a very broad cedar deck. It’s seen at least a couple of rainfalls. It’s a deck that connects to other decks. There’s a whole network of them, like little highways through the modestly sized city yard. It’s kind of ridiculous. At least there is a clearing around the tree. “Have you heard about these new ‘green condos’? Great idea, I

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think. They actually have green features.” “What are green features?” I ask. The man reaches into the small cooler on wheels. “I’ve only got one beer left. Another?” Lamb looks at my empty beer. “You’re cut off,” she says. “Some of them have roof gardens,” he offers. “That’s nice.” I say. “Gardens are nice.” “Sounds pretty bourgeois to me,” says Lamb. “What’s that going to do?” I give Lamb the evil eye. Our benevolent host seems unfazed. “I am freezing,” he says. “Would you two like to come in for a while before you dig up my yard?” He laughs pleasantly. “You aren’t dressed warmly enough.” I offer. “Maybe you should get a sweater.” “What I should be wearing is the scarf my wife knit me. But it gives me a bit of a rash.” Lamb is interested. “What kind of wool did she use?” “I don’t have a clue. She gets sensitive — I don’t ask.” Lamb plays with her own scarf, which is of course handmade. “I’m going inside. Take your time.” Lamb and I stand facing each other in the old Minor garden. We look up at the back of the house. It has been drastically refaced with slats of brutalist metal siding. It’s reflective and the whole sunset is there on it, abstracted. The cooler on wheels gleams. I shield my eyes from the glare coming off everything. “Is this a dramatic enough time to open your envelope?” I ask, squinting. I can see lined paper through the matte paper. “Nah. Open it later.” “Why?”

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“It’s just better.” I look at Lamb. She is trying to pour the last drops of beer into her mouth. I try to see how her teeth are fastened — I want to know if they are implants or dentures. It’s not the kind of thing one asks. Ever. “It’s water-damaged,” she says. “What?” “Open it later,” she says. “But be aware that the water damage is not me. I had nothing to do with it.” I look at the wall and then at the tree. “I don’t really like Belgian beer,” she says. “Me neither.” The oak tree has no leaves on it. It is tall and old. “We don’t have shovels,” I say. “And I don’t really know, like, where to begin.” The tree is dramatically lit by coloured pot lights. They have wisely cast it as a focal point and the effect is very stagey. It’s the only recognizable landmark, so I stroke its striated trunk to try and remember climbing it. The ground is cold where new bursts of crabgrass are trying to grow, glass-brittle from the cold. Lamb pokes the ground with the side of her shoe and says, “Crabgrass,” not like she thinks I need to know or notice. There are no weeds anywhere anymore, no markers. “It’s been landscaped,” says Lamb. And I laugh.

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acknowledgements I am deeply indebted to Katie McGown, Graeme Dempster, Shawn Hitchins, Alex Kimball, Graeme Slaght, Monique Johnson, James Burrows, Jesse Huisken, Kerry Zentner, David Newberry, Jonathan Yam, Sunday night supper club, Crawford house peeps, Good Morning Press, the Ontario Arts Council, Dorian Lebreux, my wonderful parents, pre-reno OCAD, Bathurst, Finch, Virus Arts, Crissy Calhoun, Michael Holmes, Mary Hu, Mike Waldman, and many others, for vision, laughs, insight and friendship. I am particularly grateful to my dear friend and collaborator Sarah Beatty, most of all for her wit, but also for her generosity of spirit and for her unwavering support of me, and of this project.

“IT’S A GHOST STORY.” “FOR KIDS OR FOR ADULTS?” SHE ASKS. “GROWN-UPS, I GUESS. BUT IT’S ALSO A LOVE STORY. YOU KNOW, IT’S A LOVE STORY AND A STORY ABOUT URBAN ANGST AND COMING OF AGE AND A GHOST STORY ALL IN ONE.” “HMMM. SOUNDS PRETTY COMPLICATED.” SHE HAS NO IDEA. Creepy, explicit, and strangely endearing, Dora Borealis is a story of coming of age . . . a bit late. Written in the era of the open relationship, it’s a novel about searching for connection in a city hooked on missed connections and explores what it means to be literally haunted. Part of the pampered generation that has grown up too comfortably, Flip calls himself a writer but never writes. He spends most of his time tortured by the girl he’s been in love with since he was eight and falling for a woman he’s just met. And you? You’re invited to witness the carnage. DACCIA BLOOMFIELD is a writer, visual artist, and independent curator. For several years, she co-directed an art gallery called Virus Arts, which lovingly served Toronto’s diverse arts and literary communities. She is a founding and contributing member of Good Morning Press, an art collective/small press whose mandate is “beauty at all costs.” Daccia makes a living by writing copy and throwing art parties. She lives and works in downtown Toronto. COVER DESIGN + SEWING: BILL DOUGLAS

AT

THE BANG

$19.95 ISBN-13: 978-1-55022-857-1 ISBN-10: 1-55022-857-9

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