The Mole Chronicles

THE M0LE CHRONICLES

Copyright © 2006 by Andy Brown implosion imprint edited by Stephen Cain All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Brown, Andy, 1968The mole chronicles / Andy Brown. ISBN 1-897178-25-5 I. Tide.

PS8553.R68483M65 2006 903659-4

C813'.6

C2006-

Canad'at

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

THE MOLE CHRONICLES a novel by

ANDY BROWN

implosion imprint

INSOMNIAC PRESS

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This book is dedicated to my father

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The first six moles were removed when I was fourteen. They were the largest brown spots on my back. Irregular. The dermatologist, Dr. Watt, took full body photographs in his office. He wanted to chart the progress of these potential spots of death, each one playing the odds, like crossing the street in the middle of heavy traffic. Then he pricked me with six needles. I could hear the scalpel cut scoops from my flesh but I couldn't feel it. I left the office with thirty-six stitches and the dermatologist filed away the photographs, the landscape of my body trapped in time. The next day at school, I played volleyball at lunch hour. The stitches pulled at my skin like six orbiting moons. At the time, I had never gone a day without playing a sport. The main reason I played was not for exercise, however, but to be close to Stacey Howard, with whom I believed I was madly in love. The drugs had worn off but a new one, unfamiliar at that age, had taken its place. Many years later we would be each other's dates at graduation but this was fortuitous rather than being a result of any boldness on my part. A computer had matched us and saved me the embarrassment of asking. At the prom, everyone got drunk on tequila because we had paid the grad committee to buy beer but they decided to brew their own to save money and it hadn't fermented yet. Stacey Howard ended up making out with the star of the rugby team. All I have left of her is a photograph in my high school annual. There she is, the captain of the volleyball team. Another landscape trapped in time.

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The stitches held out until they were removed three weeks later by my father, who had watched my mother, a nurse, do it a few times. Dr. Watt was denied any closure. Thereafter, when teams were divided into "shirts" and "skins" I insisted on being on the team with the shirts.

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The only two pieces of advice my father gave me were never to be ashamed to expose my hairy chest in public, and never to have any regrets. I remember a family vacation to Alice Lake one summer when I was small, before hair began to sprout all over my skin. When there was still the four of us. I was playing on the beach with a new activity book, connecting the dots, when I fell asleep in the sun and received a terrible burn. Chuckling, my sister Lesley used the word lobster but my mother chastised her and rubbed on unguents and oils. Is this small black spot near my armpit the result of that sleep? What are the dreams of a boy with no regrets? By the time the hair grew in, shading the moles like a beach umbrella, the damage was already done. I come to fear beaches and their hectares of topless flesh. Spanish Banks becomes the Spanish Inquisition. The children play in the sand with shovels in their hands, unsure of what they'll find. But I see time-spotted corpses embalmed in salt. Their castles in sand. I wander like a man on a pilgrimage. Later, I wash the sand from my feet and slip on sandals to protect them from the hot asphalt in the parking lot, filled with blazing rubber and metal. I watch as the sun melts my Fudgsicle faster than I can lick it up.

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It is the night of the worst ice storm in Montreal's collective memory when I receive the news that my aunt has died. The stores jack up the price of candles and batteries. The trees suffer under the weight of ice, relieve themselves of branches. They fall on parked cars but only crack the layer of ice built up on the hoods. Power lines glisten. The city is a patchwork quilt of light. Every public space becomes a shelter. Fires are more frequent. Flickering light. Cars block the streets, abandoned. It has been this way for almost two days and it's forecast to get worse. Perhaps it is a fitting night to hear of her passing. When my father called, he was happy to hear I wasn't in a shelter and recommended that I make an appointment for a colonoscopy. He'd already had his. He told me to find a church the next day as it would be the afternoon of her funeral. I remember her broad gap-toothed smile. She had been a swimming instructor but recently had developed an allergy to chlorine. As I avoided beaches she had shunned indoor pools. I was scared of her as a child because she used to wield a wooden spoon with authority. But at Christmas dinners a head-back burst of a laugh. Outside my window the trucks rumble by. The army has been called in, the city a black armband. It was at my cousin's wedding where the deck collapsed that we first noticed something was wrong. My aunt seemed drunk even though she never drank alcohol. She repeated herself. The deck collapsing probably distracted the rest of us from her true condition. The collapsible

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chairs were arranged in neat rows and were half full before the gravity of the situation became apparent.

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In my dream, the sun becomes the new enemy. No more cold wars. We live in bunkers and slowly go blind. The cities near the poles become uninhabitable. Helsinki becomes a ghost town. The new pet craze is the seeing-eye mole. It proves itself to be an impeccable guide to the underground. The next morning I venture out in the state of emergency to find a church. The weather is an enemy on my block as I step through pollution-streaked snow. We approach the new year wearing yellow danger tape. I wander up Jeanne Mance in a daze, Hassidim men wearing long black robes take pictures, looking like tourists in their own neighbourhood. I am the stranger here. I am startled by a loud honking. I look up to see a police car parked a few metres away. The officer inside is pointing to the downed power line a few inches from my face. I acknowledge him and step away as he shakes his head, amazed that anyone could be so stupid. I watch him framed by the windshield as he takes another sip of coffee. Passersby help shovel out stuck cars. The prime minister gives speeches on a TV no one can watch. The guy from the paint store, whom I've never met, asks, "Do you have heat?" I search among the carnage for a church but they are all locked. I sit for a long time in Outremont Park. The bench has a layer of ice and branches cover it. The pond has been drained, the cherubs are covered in ice as if they are cryogenically frozen until spring. The air is chilled but the sun is out. I put my toque under myself as protection from the ice of the bench. I remember winter afternoons at

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my aunt's house in Vancouver. My sister Lesley and I sliding down the shag-carpeted stairs on our bums. Giggling cousins. Then inner-tubing down the ravine out back on the season's only day of snow. My aunt's puzzles every Christmas. Because I can't get into a church, I climb. I find myself wandering up past the cemetery toward U de M. The teenage army reserves follow the tree-shredding truck. The buzz every few minutes makes them hold their hands to their ears, tipping their helmets askew. The mansions in Outremont get the full treatment while the city below lies in ruins. I stop at the top of a hill and look out over a playing field, a luxurious expanse of white. The spires of locked churches rise in the distance. I'm back in my apartment for only a few minutes when Tracey drops by. She has no power and no heat and I use gas. I haven't seen her in years. I thought she was still in Dawson City taking sepia-toned frontier photos for the tourists. She confesses that she is escaping too many friends and is looking for an acquaintance to ground her. She carries a Scrabble board everywhere because she has recently become fanatical about it. I tell her that I sometimes play poker with a former World Scrabble Champion and she freaks. She wants me to introduce him. Every time she writes down the score with the stub of a pencil two loose strands of hair fall over her forehead like limp horns. She wins the game but not before I get in dysplastic on a triple word score.

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After she leaves I turn on the shower. I want to cleanse myself of the afternoon. It's like the water over my scalp is mixing with the memories of my aunt, diluting them, and I suddenly realize they are all of holidays together. Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving. I feel a prickle of regret at the fact that I never spent time getting to know her dayto-day routine. As the water heats up I look in the mirror at my constellation of moles. My back the night sky. Skin scrabble. Using two mirrors I notice a mole on my right arm pit has changed. It jumps out at me. Irregularity in moles is considered safe. But this mole has turned perfectly round and black. I can barely make out a faint halo around it.

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I find myself in a room filled with writers. A middle-aged man with a comb-over is speaking onstage but no one is listening. Tracey had mentioned this reading to me, she thought I might enjoy it. I came because I thought she would be here but no such luck. There are locally produced poetry books on a table by the door, a young girl desperately eager to make some sales. I move to the bar, pushing through the crush of bodies. Waving a ten dollar bill, I lean over the back of a beautiful woman who sits sipping at the bar. Two blue dress straps drape over her bare pink shoulders like the St. Louis memorial arches. I am very conscious of the trace of intent my breath leaves on her neck but she doesn't turn around. Then I notice it on her shoulder blade. Like in the pamphlet the dermatologist gave me. What to watch out for. The bartender takes my order and the woman looks over her shoulder at me. I picture her face ravaged by disease. "You should really have that looked at," I say, touching the offending mark on her shoulder. She almost jumps off her stool. "Don't touch me." She moves through the crowd to be closer to the poet onstage, who is trying to tell a joke. On my way out I make a pity purchase. The young girl at the door is ecstatic to make a sale. "Isn't he brilliant?" she says smiling earnestly.

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Tracey's hands remain in her jacket pockets as we cross the street to St. Luc's Hospital. I wait in the room designated for just such a purpose while she talks with the French receptionist. I brought Tracey to be my translator. My hands in my pockets. Then I wait in another room, sitting on crinkly bleached white paper. I wish I had a pen. Waiting for a doctor. Many people pass by in the hall looking rushed but no one tends to me. Finally a woman in a lab coat pokes her head in and says something in a quizzical tone, but I can't understand. I ask if she speaks English. I explain that I'm waiting to have a mole removed. I lift my arm to show her the offending black spot, but the gesture gives the impression that I'm eager to answer a question from the back of the classroom. She performs the operation very quickly, putting in three stitches in a matter of seconds. I am conscious that my armpit must stink. She rushes off again and I assume this means I am free to go. I accidentally rip the paper as I get to my feet. In the waiting room Tracey has fallen asleep in a chair, her face lit by the glow of the snack machine. In her lap is a pocket-sized Scrabble dictionary. I know how desperate she is to memorize all the two-letter words. Her hand supports her sagging cheek, the skin folding strangely, like the scar to form under my arm.

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Back in Vancouver, in the middle of a freak spring heat wave, my father asks for help. He is getting to that age. While I'm in town to collect my aunt's paltry inheritance he is taking full advantage of my muscles. We need to get the Honda Civic out of the backyard, where it has been deposited for winter storage. I pull on the faded tarp, releasing pools of water into river creases, flowing through grommets. I pull out nails, remembering old adages. "Never put a board down without pulling the nails." This was not my father but the nasty crew boss who treated everyone like crap but exploded with anger when we cursed because he was a devoutly religious man. Yet no one stepped on a nail that winter. Even wading in the foot-high mud, boards floating past with their old nail holes like scars reminding us of previous constructions, we never had an accident. My father and I fold the tarp neatly into a package small enough for him to carry to the shed. The Honda gleams like new, a chunk of metal surrounded by backyard vegetation, its headlights blinking in the sun. We need to take out a section of the back fence in order to get the car out. My father the engineer has designed an escape, a false fence post and hinges. He built the fence himself many years ago when his daughter was old enough that her sunbathing in the backyard was becoming too much of a temptation for the neighbours. I am amazed by his foresight, his endless napkin diagrams, so precise except for the ink bleeding into the fibres of the cheap paper. My father uses time to his advantage, takes years to fulfill ideas. I grab the shovel away from him and hack at the dirt. I claim I am

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worried about his back but really I am impatient. We lift the fence post and remove the hinges in order to get that extra few inches of space. There are support boards loosely nailed to the neighbour's side of the fence which need to be removed. I can see my father planning a way to get at them because they are above our heads. I imagine him getting a napkin and a pen and slouching over the kitchen table for a few hours. But I have places to go, a whole afternoon of avoiding the beach. We are standing in the gravel and weeds of the lane, the path where I tested out my fears late at night as a child. Would I make the shortcut down the darkened lane, or walk around the block in the relative safety of the streetlights? I take the hammer out of his hand. Our neighbours have a low, vine-covered stone wall which meets our fence. I leap onto the top of this wall, claw extended, ready to rip at the rusty heads. Suddenly there is a shooting pain in my foot, and I scream "Fuuuuuuuck!" instinctively before I realize what I've said in front of my father, who I have never heard use the word. I look at him to see if he is offended but his face is filled with concern and I remember my foot. I pull it up to discover a rusty spike hidden on the top of the wall, sticking straight up, now covered in my blood. The pain is more dull than acute, I can feel my sock getting wet. Acupressurists claim that the foot contains all the parts of the body on its surface. If this is true then my body has gone into shock. My father is beside himself with guilt. Blames himself for asking for help. I tell him to have no regrets.

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I hobble into the basement of the house on one foot. My father tries to help but he is too slow even on two good feet. I pull off my sneaker and see the hole in the sole. My sock is red and I keep it on to contain the blood as I hop through the house to the bathroom. My father cautions me not to get any blood on the carpet but I am careful. In the sparkling clean whiteness of the bathroom I remove my sock and wash it in the tub. I run my foot under the warm liquid of the tap. The muscles in my foot are tense, like a fireman trying to control a wayward hose. My father hovers outside the door, shuffling his feet on the carpet, worrying about tetanus. In the bathroom I notice his pill bottles, lined up like tin soldiers, plastic pink teeth, on the shelf above the sink. I haven't seen my blood in years and revel in the red swirls against the pristine tub. Blood bath. We get in the rustbucket, the old family Volvo which incredibly still runs and which my father was hoping to replace with the Civic. I can practically see the road through the paper-thin floor. He drives me to his doctor as if it were an emergency, as if the tetanus would come at me like a bear instead of slowly like other civilized diseases. His driving is erratic, he stops too sharply, doesn't stay in his lane. I'm unsure if this is due to his panic or his age. He has grown older since I last saw him two Christmases ago. The hair in his nose has turned grey. His forearms are still powerful, however, and it looks as if he could rip the steering wheel right out of the dashboard if he wanted. I wonder how he is getting on since my aunt, his sister, died, although they were never very close. I try to make jokes so

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he won't worry: it could have been worse. It could have been one of the neighbour's kids. I tell him I'm considering calling a lawyer. In the doctor's office I read the pamphlets warning of breast cancer. They are designed for women but I am acutely aware that men are not immune. Why is it not mentioned that men also possess breasts? My father paces, wringing his hands, imagining the suffering a bit of rust can bring. The doctor sees me immediately and I get cool looks from the others waiting. My father must have some influence here. The doctor sticks a small needle in my arm as we calculate the years since my booster. All in all it takes less than two minutes and I'm out. My father drives me home with his peace of mind restored. Back home he searches the vines on the neighbour's wall for other spikes. When he finds one he bends it down with a hammer, pounding and smashing the harbingers of a potential accident flat, until they disappear into the lush foliage. Doing this causes him to break out into a sweat. The Honda remains in winter hibernation all year, the fence replaced. I realize it all could have happened differently without me being there. If a neighbour had helped, my father would be worrying about insurance today. It's as if I only had a walk-on part in my father's story. I walk with a cane for a week, surprised at how incapacitated a puncture wound can make me. It heals and itches but the foot is bruised. I discover limps I never knew I had.

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At one point I go to the racetrack with a cane. I park a few blocks away and as I desperately try to make the first race, (because I have one of my feelings about a certain horse), it begins to pour, a quick shower to break the heat wave. I hobble through traffic on one foot, getting drenched, hoping the light doesn't change.

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Outside the Planetarium a man has complete control of a kite. The cranes are crosses visible on the mountains, building on the edge of the known world. Masts float through the inlet at a safe speed. Their captains wear hats to combat the sun, but the wind tries to take them. And the kite continues to hover and flip, another victim. The art-deco density of the West End and snow-capped peaks are the backdrop for cowboy hats and cell phones. The kite's shadow offers little relief from the sun. Moving target. Over the grassy knoll a dog is punished. Strapless women, prostrate on towels, cooking, cast me glances, warn me away. Lotions and unguents seep deep into their well-browned skin. And everywhere volleyball nets line the beach, as if erected by a lost surveyor. Shirtless white men sport Haida tattoos. So much meat baking in the sun after a winter of rain. At the critical mass of its density, near the snack counter and outdoor showers, the view is almost pornographic, the peaks in the landscape almost laughably perverse. I don't have the stomach to face the pool.

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Once I came home from playing a soccer game and Lesley and my father were in the living room. I walked in to find them holding hands on the couch and quietly crying. I'd never seen my father cry before. I heard him say, "If your mother were here..." I immediately turned away and went to watch TV. I secretly hoped my father would make Lesley feel guilty for what she'd done, although I was unsure what this was. Later that night I had my first glimpse of a naked woman when she came out of the shower and raced to her room, right past my unbelieving eyes. Like mine, Lesley's body was covered in little brown spots. What once would have been called beauty marks are now known by the same moniker as sightless underground rodents. My sister and I began to go to the dermatologist together for regular checkups. We went to the Vancouver Skin Care Clinic, to Dr. Watt, a young doctor, a few years out of medical school. In the waiting room Lesley and I laughed at the magazines. There were before and after pictures of faces with burns or horrible acne. We kept saying how they looked better in the before pictures. "Yeah, they could get jobs as actors in horror films." "Ha ha." My sister usually went first because she was older and had a more questionable constellation of moles to be examined. She had one on her front which had turned black. She wouldn't show it to me even when I had bribed her with my Fudgsicle. Then it was my turn. The office was bright and clean. Dr. Watt looked at my skin through a magnifying glass (easier then without any

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hair). I lifted my arms, then he looked on the bottoms of my feet. Then inevitably the time would come when I needed to pull down my underwear so he could look under my scrotum. With his hand in a plastic glove he carefully lifted the small organs, as if they were pebbles on the beach and he did not want to disturb the bugs underneath. Dr. Watt asked me about my soccer playing career the whole time he was examining me. His favourite team was the Whitecaps as well, what a coincidence. Lesley was usually silent in the back of the car on the way home. During the time we went to Dr. Watt together I felt closer to my sister than I ever had. We shared more than just a genetic code. This mutual fear of change. We begged our father to let us keep a pet mole, but we got a cat instead. We called him Nevi. He was polydactylic and mean. After a few times going to Dr. Watt, Lesley insisted on a female doctor and we went our separate ways.

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The phone call with the results from St. Luc's comes a week after I am back in Montreal. The doctor explains that the cells from the mole under my arm had begun to change. "If you had let this go another six months you would be in a very unfavourable position." "But you got it all, right?" "It's imperative that you keep an eye on those." Doubletalk. Double mirrors. The word malignant hangs in my mind on a noose, waiting for the platform to drop. The deck to collapse.

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He's still there when I wake up. I look out my third floor window, which faces the street, and see him sitting with his arms crossed on the same bench as yesterday. Every morning I check out the window and every morning he's either on that bench, the one in front of the depanneur, or the one across from the bank. He hasn't moved more than a block in six days. He wears a red sweatshirt and dirty white pants. His black hair covers the back of his neck in a mullet. He's thin and his beard is growing out of control, like a homeless Christmas elf. He doesn't ask for money, he barely moves his head. Perhaps he was let out of a sanitarium and had once lived in the area but upon returning was confused by the Starbucks on the corner, the women wearing miniskirts talking on cell phones, relaxing on crowded terraces. He can only recognize asphalt, benches, the scars left by ancient streetcars. It's as if he's waiting for someone. Waiting for the girl who never came, waiting for his dealer. Watching him I am reminded of the ubiquitous freighters looming in Vancouver harbour, waiting offshore for months. His presence on the bench is like a dream I can't quite remember but which lingers just the same. I keep returning to my window throughout the day, checking to see if he's gone. I do the laundry and he's there on his bench, I watch 'The Simpsons, cook dinner, still he's there, scratching his head intermittently. Every time I go to the window, he's there. Sometimes I notice he's not on his regular bench, but when I leave the house and walk down the street I see him sitting one block away on a different

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bench. He doesn't lie down and sleep, he just sits. Legs straight out, toes pointing up. People pass him on the way to work, then again when they come home, their arms loaded down with groceries. It's the fact that he does nothing wrong that makes him so disturbing. He doesn't beg or shout, or lie around comatose. He just sits. His endurance is unnerving. Of what is he capable? On the seventh day he is still there. Then again on the eighth. If only he would keel over and pass out so that someone could call an ambulance. If only he would attack someone so that the police could be summoned. But he just sits. Waiting, arms crossed, as if to accuse, oblivious to any expectations. Being ignored to death.

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I spend my days doing research for a film company that is making a documentary about the revitalization of the public pools around Montreal. The pools were built by the city during the Depression because very few of the apartments in the Plateau neighbourhood had running water. At the time, the area was filled with Jewish refugees. Now that the area is being gentrified, the Toronto dot-corns moving into condos, these public pools are being demolished or renovated. The film company also moved here from Toronto to take advantage of the cheap rent, but working for them is better than welfare. I spend my days interviewing lifeguards, plumbers, and architects, checking the neighbourhood for clues. Originally I moved to Montreal to experience winter. At least that's what I told myself at the time. Probably it was more about punishing myself. Or at least escaping the memory of her. My mother was infused into the landscape of Vancouver, every park where I had played soccer, every street corner where I had scraped a knee. The first winter was brutal and I lied to get my first job. I couldn't do anything in the service industry because I was painfully unilingual and I had very few skills. I worked at a garage which specialized in repairing Volvos. But I studied the manuals at night and struggled through. Then it was a series of desperation jobs, including construction and printing T-shirts, which eventually led me to welfare. I became comfortable with the winter, I grew to love its sadistic charms. And besides, my father would often spring to get me back to the tropical climes of Vancouver once or twice a year. I felt guilty taking his money but it was always good to see him.

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At least for a while. My job title is the "production assistant's assistant" but I prefer the term PAA. Basically I do research, try to find interesting subjects for interviews and stand on street corners directing traffic during production. I was initially interested in working for the documentary film company because I've been swimming for years at the Piscine Shubert. Before it was renovated there was a single shower room which made the pool unisex. Little old men came in and spent half an hour in the shower, scrubbing their hunched liver-spotted bodies. There were six-foot-tall porcelain urinals along one wall, like upright canoes. Now there are lockers and tiny shower stalls, wheelchair access, and shoe box urinals.

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In Motherbox Comics Lesley and I groped the ten cent bins below the counter. These comics were not protected by plastic bags but we didn't care. Each one had a corner of the cover cut off at a diagonal, some exposing the first page underneath. With our allowance we could get dozens of these comics, but the ones sheathed in plastic and the new ones were priced such that we could only buy one or two. My sister pulled out all the Betty & Veronica comics, some Richie Ricfts and made a neat stack next to her folded legs on the floor. The other customers had trouble moving around her but she was oblivious. Meanwhile, I was scanning for old Avengers because I had recendy decided that I was in love with Janet Van Dyne, adventurer, fashion designer, independently wealthy socialite, otherwise known as Wasp. Why did she insist on being abused by that jerk Henry Pym? I imagined her shrinking down to do mundane things like tying my shoelaces or cleaning out my ears. Soon I entered visual stimulation overload and glanced up at my sister. Her stack was unusually low and she held what appeared to be a Fantastic Four in her hands. She had yet to open it. I wondered why Lesley would be interested in superheroes, feeling a tinge of jealousy due to her entry into my domain. "What's that?" "Look," she said innocently enough, '"The Mad Menace of the Macabre Mole Man!'" "What? Mole Man? Really? Let me see." "No! I want to read it." "But you won't like it." "How do you know?" Lesley opened the comic and

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began to scan the pages. "Hey this girl is drawn only in dotted lines." "Let me see!" I lunged for the comic but she held it out of my reach. She stood up and held it over her head. "I saw it first," she said, taller than me. I had a minor tantrum in the shop until I realized that the other customers were looking at me. "Okay, but I'm gonna read it first when we get home." "No way." I went back to scouring the cheap bins, but my heart wasn't into Janet Van Dyne anymore. All I could think of until our father came to pick us up twenty minutes later was: who is this Mole Man? Is he a dermatologist? Maybe his body is covered in spots. But what kind of superpowers could he possibly have? How could being covered in moles make someone powerful? In the car on the way home Lesley hid the comic from me out of spite. I tried to read my Daredevil but kept glancing over to get a peek at the macabre menace. At one point I punched her lightly on the arm and she told my father that I had hit her. He pulled the car over, blocking traffic on 4th, and turned in the driver's seat to look seriously at me. His forehead was creased like the rumpled pants of a librarian. "Never hit your sister, you understand? I don't like what those comics are doing to you. I won't let you go to the shop anymore if you keep this up." Lesley covered her face with the comic to conceal her glee at this chastisement. "It's okay Daddy," she said. "I can take it. I'm tough. I'll just put an invisible force field around myself and then no one can touch me. No one!" Back in traffic my father had

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a near miss when someone tried to stretch a yellow. 'Jerk," he said under his breath. Back home, after Lesley grew bored with the Fantastic Four and had moved onto her latest PEP, I was disappointed to learn that the Mole Man does not have moles; he is a subterranean mad scientist with an army of blind mole-like creatures to do his bidding. He has a plan to sink New York and Moscow into the earth to create a World War from which he will emerge victorious out of the rubble. But what about those little blemishes? Not even a single mole. The only mole to be found is a beauty spot on Sue Storm's face, but it could have been a printing error, or a speck of dust on the film.

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The dep on the corner is run by a large Greek family and sells bouzouki CDs. Most of their business comes from the post office they run from the back. When I go in to buy an Orange Crush I ask one of the family's many sons if he knows who the stranger is. "I have no idea. He just showed up." "So, you've noticed him sitting out there?" "Yeah. The security guard at the bank said to be careful." "Well...the security guard is paid to be paranoid. Besides the guy sits directly across from the bank all day." "Still, I'm gonna be careful." That night, when I come home late from interviewing a retired lifeguard, he is pacing the sidewalk in front of my building. His swaying gait is more tired than drunk. I avoid eye contact, pull out my keys, and bound up my stairs. As I unlock the door I turn to look at him moving slowly down the street. His red sweatshirt is now baggy, it hangs off him. I have some leftover chili in a yogurt container in my fridge. I consider bringing this out to him. What harm could it do? But to do so crosses the line between public and private, that chalk mark sketched by a child on the asphalt. He watches me every day, knows where I live. His is an act of public starvation.

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When I was very young I imagined dangerous men crawling in my bedroom window at night. I would stare at the curtains, my eyes piercing the dark, afraid to blink in case I missed the flutter. This is why every night I had my parents leave the door open a crack with the hall light on. My mother would demonstrate her bedside manner with me on several occasions, informing me that I'd been screaming again in my sleep. When asked, however, she could never decipher what it was that I had said. In the ceiling of my bedroom closet was a trap door that led to the attic. One afternoon I decided I was ashamed of what I had done to Medusa, one of The Inhumans in a Fantastic Four comic. She wore a mask and had long flowing red hair which was alive. I had drawn big breasts over her costume with a felt pen before realizing that I couldn't erase it without my sister knowing what I had done. Although she probably would never read this particular issue since it didn't feature The Mole Man, I decided to hide it, and the attic seemed as good a spot as any. I'd never known anyone to go up there. I put two chairs on top of each other to make the climb. The corpses of bees lay on the closet's window ledge, decaying into dust. Through the tiny window I could make out the mountains. I managed to shift the trap door aside, then I stared into the inky darkness above. As my eyes adjusted I could make out a chain dangling from a beam. I pulled it and the attic above me was thrown into light. I hauled myself up onto a board stretched between two joists but there was only room to sit. The attic was a pink sea. The fibreglass insulation was exposed between the joists

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like a cotton-candy fairy tale, although I knew enough not to eat it. The bulb beside my head was starting to heat up. It threw the shadows of the support pillars across the triangular roof. There was a single two-by- eight stretched across the joists which lead to the middle of the attic. I crawled along this lifeline conscious that I would fall through the ceiling of my bedroom if I strayed. Partway along the board I wondered where I would land in my bedroom, trying to determine where I'd need to step to land on the bed. There were webs to be dealt with but I was unafraid: this pink sea held no monsters. My natural curiosity led me to it. The board ended at a pillar and when I stuck my hand behind it I was startled to feel cold metal. I pulled a rifle from the prickly fibers. The old wooden handle was well worn and it was missing the chamber which left a gaping hole. I had only ever seen a gun on television. Later I discovered that my father had inherited all his father's hunting rifles, old Russian guns, Smith 8c Wessons, all well maintained but ancient. They came out with him on the train from the funeral a few years earlier. He couldn't bring them on the airplane for obvious reasons. The amount of paperwork was astronomical even for the train. The only incident he could remember from the trip was disembarking in Eyebrow, Saskatchewan, to get a drink and chocolate bar from a trackside vendor who reminded him of my mother. He took the guns apart and hid the separate pieces throughout the house. Carbines were patiently waiting

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under floorboards, wooden handles were on the upper shelves, triggers were sequestered in my mother's old jewelry boxes, otherwise unused. After Lesley and I had left the house my father would occasionally stumble over the gun pieces and remember his youth. The hunting trips he had taken, the rites of passage. Inherited things are hard to sacrifice so he kept the guns; they were a family thread, like a particularly tenacious genetic disorder, but he made them functionless because he was well versed in the book of accidents and wanted to avoid any incidents. The guns became relics, made impotent, scattered and forgotten. He knew my sister and I could only find the pieces of the guns and never the whole, we'd never be able to piece the story together. After this incident I would lie in bed at night believing the ghosts of all the birds my grandfather had shot would return for revenge. I could hear the desperation of their wings in the attic above me as I slept.

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I run into my neighbour on the street and he asks me if I've noticed the stranger who has "moved in." My neighbour is worried that the man has come up from New York for retribution. He tells me about living in the Bronx and working for some shady businessmen. They bought a truck under my neighbour's name because they didn't want to use their names on the insurance. He did deliveries for them and didn't ask questions. When he found a dead body on his couch one morning he took the truck and made a run for the border. He used it for a couple of summers in Montreal to do freelance moving before the insurance ran out. Our landlady is now threatening to take him to the Regie. She wants to renovate. I fear I might not have many years left in this building myself. I find it amazing that he would think the stranger on the bench was in the mob, but then I realize that this man, sentinel and patient, is becoming a physical manifestation of our guilty secrets, our past crimes. We read into his presence what we want to forget. On day thirteen it rains. From the window I check for him in his usual spots, but he's gone. Off to find shelter, perhaps he has a home. He must have eaten in thirteen days. Twice I witnessed him drinking from a clear bottle, what appeared to be either mineral water or club soda. Once I saw him smoke. The rain is light at first but soon becomes a torrent. I'm thankful he's not out there on a bench getting soaked. I have an appointment at the city archives to do research for the documentary so I need to leave the house in this weather. I take an umbrella which, when clumsily folded, is shaped like a bat. Descending to the street I catch

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him out of the corner of my eye. He's standing in a doorway, two doors down from me, shifting from foot to foot. I unfurl the bat umbrella and quickly fly down the street, eager to get to the underground safety of the Metro. I'm late for the appointment and miss out on the tour of the hygienically preserved tomes in the basement. When I return home he is still there, in the doorway. I realize that I don't even know who lives at that address anymore. That night I dream of all my darkest secrets. The time I shat my pants on the grade seven field trip, petty thefts, betrayal.

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I shat my pants on the grade seven field trip to the community pool. When we arrived I changed into my bathing suit like nothing had happened. I put the soiled underwear in a plastic bag in my Adidas bag. Since I was recovering from a cold my nose was stuffed and I had no idea how much the other boys could smell it. When I got back from the swimming lesson someone had thrown my underwear into the shower, the shit running down the drain. I'm not sure why I retrieved the underwear from the shower. I knew it was as good as an admission of guilt but I did it anyway. A moment of pure unadulterated regret. I put the wet underwear in my Adidas bag. The other boys looked at me strangely, some giggled from behind their towels, but no one dared say anything. I wore no underwear underneath my pants for the return trip, the zipper chaffing, walking hand in hand with Stacey Howard.

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I witness a fight at the bagel shop. The underpaid workers need to be separated, fists flailing, too close to the oven. They scream in a language none of us in line can understand. I yell at them to stop from behind the counter, conscious of the knives in the room, but they ignore me. On the way home I spot the bench man hovering outside my building. I hold the brown paper bag filled with sesame bagels to my chest, keeping me warm. I leave a piping hot bagel on the bench outside the dep. The next day it is gone.

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At the outdoor pool Tracey shows me her magazine. There is an article featuring the sexiest men in America, one from each state. For forty-nine of them, under the heading "occupation" it lists "model/actor." All of their chests are hairless and devoid of spots. When I remove a blemish it is out of survival, not perfection. I am reminded of the Hawthorne story about the birthmark. In it, the removal of a blemish in a quest for perfection only leads to regret. In my case the opposite is true. I remove a blemish to avoid regret (managing to follow half of my father's advice). Every scar becomes another badge of imperfection. Later I go for a swim and Tracey laughs at me for not removing my T-shirt first. The wet fabric clings to my body underwater like a shroud.

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Finally I make eye contact. What looked like freckles from a distance is revealed to be flakes of dirt. Little brown details. His clothes are filthy as well, his nose twisted, his beard almost a mask. When he looks at me it seems, just briefly, that there is some hint of recognition in his eyes. When I notice Coast Guard listed in the telephone book next to Community Pools I think of Spence. Does Montreal even have a coast guard? Of course. The stranger on the bench is Spence. Or could be. The nose is what gives it away. It's hard to tell but he could be the right age. Jimmy Spencer's father drove the hovercraft for the Vancouver coast guard. I became friends with Spence when his father took the two of us out for a ride on the delta surrounding the airport. When the engine started and the skirt of the hovercraft filled with air I couldn't contain my excitement. The hovercraft skated over the sand dunes, the water, the surface of things. I was amazed by its speed. I had to close my eyes when Spence's father didn't even slow down as the craft hit land. Nothing could stop us. Spence was a sickly kid with jet black hair and a distinctive nose, like a broken umbrella. He still had a trace of an Irish accent, which lingered even though his family had emigrated many years before. My mother told me that I always befriended the boy no one else liked. After palming the quarters our parents had intended for the collection plate at church, Spence and I would walk home past the Italian Deli. We stood before the candy counter in anticipation, our quarters gleaming.

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After Lesley caught us she described the act to my parents as "stealing from the collection plate," but I preferred not to think of myself as a thief. Once the money was in my hand it was mine to do with as I pleased. I couldn't picture the orphans for whom the money was intended. I didn't know any orphans. I simply chose not to donate my money. We bought our candies at the counter, where an old Italian woman would smile at us. Often we would buy hockey cards. I would trade to get all the cards with players from the Boston Bruins. This was because Bobby Orr played on the Bruins. When the quarters progressed to a dollar, Spence and I became more daring. We had taken to practicing in front of a mirror. The bills tucked more easily into my sleeve than the cumbersome coins. One Sunday after church I noticed Spence pocket a couple of packs of hockey cards while picking up another two from the box. He proceeded to the counter to pay for the two with his bill, the Italian woman smiling. Outside the store I told him that I had seen what he had done. I was unsure whether I should chastise or admire him. In one of his packs was Bobby Orr, flying triumhant through the air, having just scored a goal. Spence and I used to play street hockey in the drained wading pool in the park. We would play with whatever boys happened to be around. We cut up a piece of orange foam and attached string to use as goalie pads. During one game I checked Spence a little too hard and his legs buckled over the edge of the wading pool concrete. His nose came down hard. Suddenly blood was spurting everywhere but my only concern was that I had broken my stick.

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Spence was yelling at me, the blood running over his mouth and sputtering toward me as he shouted. I held a slim piece of wood in my hand, the other end lay motionless in the pool. The goalie, a kid from down the street, gave Spence an extra T-shirt to hold over his nose to try and stop the bleeding. I stared at the broken blade, its perfect curve, and marveled at the potential my body possessed, the physicality of it to create accident. What were its capabilities? What other moments of sudden realization were hidden deep beneath my skin, lying dormant? For the rest of his life Spence had a nose like a broken umbrella. It wasn't long before I was caught. I had forgotten about mirrors. The Italian woman was irate. She had seen everything in the convex mirror in the corner of the ceiling. I never went back to the Italian Deli and I started to mow lawns for the next-door neighbour so that I could have my own money to put in the collection plate every Sunday. Like his father's hovercraft, my friendship with Spence skated over water and land with surprising agility. There was no diving into the depths. And now that could be Spence stationed on the bench across the street from my apartment, waiting for me to make a mistake. He is about the same age, has the same nose, the hockey hair. I grow convinced that he's Spence. I make up lengthy scenarios in my head, projecting a past for him, trying to decipher the circumstances which led him to that bench. His troubled life of crime, his father's disappointment at his mechanical ineptitude. Perhaps his broken nose prevented him from becoming a wine expert or finding a girlfriend. Perhaps his loneliness is a result of my overly

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aggressive hip check those many years ago. I marvel at the chain of consequence and coincidence which led him here. Or could have, if it is really him. I stay up late at night searching for hovercrafts on the Internet.

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Lesley thought it was because she had been late for supper. She had been talking to Matt in the thicket where the Grads held bush parties and lost track of the time. But her father was not upset about that. There was something about her brother. They sat in the living room. Lesley did most of the dusting now and she noticed it here. Matt had kissed her in the woods behind the army base. They knew the cops had no jurisdiction there and took advantage. They gathered in these woods, in the bush, to drink beer and flirt in the dark. Some of the drunkest would spend the night in hammocks. Once, said Matt, a soldier found them and tried to chase them away. Matt stood his ground, the soldier not much older than him, but when he went for reinforcements Matt had her believing they'd come with a tank. Then they left and went up to Doobie Hill. This was where they'd gather to watch the fireworks over the harbour. When there were fireworks. Matt had introduced Lesley to all this and she was eternally grateful. "What's that on your jean jacket?" her father asked. "It's a band. The Who." "What?" "Nevermind. Listen...I'm sorry I was late for supper. Matt was asking me to watch the fireworks with him." "Who's Matt?" 'Just a boy, Daddy." "I worry about you." "I know you do, Daddy." She draped her jean jacket over the loveseat. "I worry about both of you. Sometimes it gets to be too much."

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"Please, Daddy. Let's sit down. What is it?" Her father was visibly upset, this had to be more than just being late for supper. She took his hand and they sat on the couch. At first they were silent. The only sound was the desperation of a fly trapped behind the curtains. "It's your brother." "What did he do?" "Nothing. No. Nothing like that...The doctors..." "What is it, Daddy?" His throat was beginning to constrict and she could sense that he was on the verge of tears. "The doctors found something on your brother's CAT scan. They want to do it again." "What is it?" "They think it could be nothing. Maybe just a spot. But..." At this she began to cry and her father couldn't help himself anymore either. The fly was now silent. She hoped it had found a way to get out from behind the curtain. A crack in the window perhaps. Quiet tears, distant cousins to bawling. Suddenly her brother walked into the room. He was wearing his soccer uniform, green and black vertical stripes, with black shorts. The sleeves were rolled up. They exchanged glances but then he bolted out of the room. "We're not going to tell him anything until after they do the test again." "Good idea." She could think of nothing more to say so she hugged her father in the dusty room. Later, in the shower, Lesley thought of Matt. Her hair smelled like his cigarettes. She welcomed the shampoo. It

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didn't take a genius to imagine what happened at Doobie Hill and she was nervous. Her mind switched to her brother, how he got her to the hospital after the teeter-totter incident. That freaky friend of his and her invisible shield. How ridiculous it all seemed to her now. Getting out of the shower she realized there was no towel. Of course, since she was the only one to do the laundry and had forgotten. Her father tried but he was useless. Drip-drying in front of the mirror she examined her moles but with very little enthusiasm. At that moment there was only one blemish she cared about, and she really hoped that it was just an honest mistake. Sprinting naked from the bathroom to her bedroom she left footsteps of water on the floorboards which she would eventually need to wipe clean.

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I wait one month before sitting on the bench beside him. He doesn't acknowledge me at all. He leans forward with his arms crossed and inspects his shoes, which are stained blue from something. His beard is scraggly, not a thick block of hair on his face, less a mask than an extension of his weak chin. He could be Spence. I never knew him when we were old enough to have facial hair, but it definitely could be him. I hadn't planned whether I would talk to him or not. I had only thought it out as far as this moment. I get up from the bench and go into the dep for a bottle of Orange Crush. I return to the bench and this time he looks at me. His eyes are a little bloodshot but otherwise quite lucid. He doesn't appear to recognize me. I nod my head at him and sit down. To avoid having to talk I quickly occupy myself with opening the Orange Crush and checking under the cap to see if I'm suddenly rich. Sorry, try again. I get up from the bench and go into the dep. Inside, the fluorescent light gives everything a jaundiced glow. The sounds of bouzouki fill the store. I notice the convex mirrors, strategically placed. I purchase two singles because the son behind the counter knows me. I'm in there all the time and I've never bought a pack. I return to the bench and he looks at me again. I nod my head and sit down. I offer him one of the cigarettes, filter first, but the gesture is like a teacher pointing out a distant land on a map. He ignores the cigarette so I pocket them both. He breathes steadily, looking straight ahead, and I work up my nerve. After the weeks of constant speculation all I am capable of is blurting out, "Spence?"

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He turns his head slowly. He has no need for speed. The scraggled mat on his face parts as he says, "Quoif His language comes as a shock to me. It's as if the hovercraft hit land and skidded to a halt instead of gliding on. I stop looking out my window, stop looking for him. The film crew starts production and I am out of the apartment for entire afternoons. He becomes invisible to me until I notice him a few days later showering in the tiny stall at the Piscine Shubert, all wet and gleaming. He is still there after my swim.

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The Mole Man has kidnapped Sue Storm. She turns invisible but her powers are useless because The Mole Man and his subterranean henchmen are blind. "She's so beautiful," said Lesley. In the ensuing struggle between The Mole Man and the remaining members of The Fantastic Four, Sue Storm is hit by flying debris and it is uncertain if she will pull through. The only man who can operate on her and save her is her father. Sue and Johnny are reunited with their estranged father just long enough for him to operate and save Sue. "Why can't our father be a doctor? Instead of some dumb old traffic engine...engine...engineer? Why can't he be more like Dr. Watt?"

"FLAME ON!" Her stupid brother was leaping off the sofa with his hands outstretched, presumably shooting flames at her. She used her invisibility power to throw up a shield to thwart him. Then, in a hyperactive fit, he grabbed a sofa cushion and flung it at her like a Frisbee. She ducked and it hit a lamp, which fell to the shag carpet but did not break because she put an invisible forcefield around it to lower it down safely. She imagined dotted lines emanating from her head. If only she were as beautiful as Sue Storm. Her stupid brother circled the room at top speed. In the comic the father makes the ultimate sacrifice and dies a hero's death to save his children. There is no mention of their mother. What ever happened to her? "Your flame is useless because you can't see me," she said. "I can see you being invisible...! can see you being invis-

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ible..." he taunted, then flew directly at her, tackling her, shoulder to stomach, knocking her wind out.

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Spence always wanted to be Reed Richards, otherwise known as Mr. Fantastic. I assumed it was because Richards was the brains and Spence thought he was smart even though he only got average grades. In hindsight I'm sure it was because Richards ends up marrying Sue Storm (making her Sue Richards) and Lesley was acting her part. Spence would reach out his arm to my sister imagining it was stretching around her waist and saving her. Spence never let anyone else join our trio, although I kept pointing out that we were missing The Thing. How could we be The Fantastic Three? That's not fantastic at all. Once I asked the goalie from our drained pool hockey game to be The Thing, since he was already bulked up with orange padding, but Spence chased him with a roman candle attached to the front of his BMX so that it shot flames (he was out of character) and set the poor goalie's jacket on fire. Really, he just didn't want the competition. So The Fantastic Three were at the park and I was flaming on and Lesley was trying not to be noticed. She came up behind a couple having a picnic and picked up an apple from their blanket and took a bite. The couple looked at her in surprise. "You can't see me," she said as she walked away eating the apple. Spence was by himself on the teeter-totters. He called out for Lesley to join him because one person on a teetertotter is a lonely sight indeed. He was pushing up his end by springing with his legs and letting gravity pull him back. I'm sure he imagined that his legs were stretching beyond

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the realm of human comprehension. I was on the swing, pushing higher and higher until I could jump off and pretend to fly, bursting into flame like The Human Torch. Lesley sat on the other end of the teeter-totter pretending that it was her invisible force field that was pushing her end up and down and not her feet. Spence was much heavier than she was and he sat on the ground, his legs bent, looking at her suspended at the other end. After a minute like this my sister asked him to let her down. "Can't you save yourself?" he said. "Let me down, you idiot." "Maybe you need me to use my superior intellect to get us out of this situation." "There is no situation. Just let me down." This went on for a few more minutes until Lesley carefully got up from her seated position and balanced on the end of the teeter-totter, bent over to hold onto the handle. Spence said and did nothing. She then stood up and shuffled along the board, down toward the fulcrum, where she could hop to the ground. But at that moment Spence pushed up with his legs causing Lesley to fly through the air and land on her head on the concrete. I was completely shocked. Spence just said, "I thought she would save herself." My sister was lying unconscious, a dribble of blood on her forehead. I pushed Spence over and he didn't resist. "Consider yourself flamed, you jerk," I said. I took off my T-shirt and wrapped it around her head like a bandanna. It wasn't bleeding too badly but I felt I had to do something. Spence just sat there.

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"Go get help!" I screamed at him. Finally he got up and went over to the couple picnicking. When they saw our predicament the man picked up Lesley, who was now conscious and mumbling about her failed force field. The man lay her down in the back seat of his car and the woman cleaned up their blanket and food and put it in the trunk. We all drove to the hospital, I had to sit on the woman's lap, and then the couple called my father. As the car pulled away from the park I saw Spence holding the half-eaten apple, stretching his arm out to the departing car, as if he could give the apple back. Lesley never spoke to Spence again and gave up on The Invisible Girl. "She's not real," she kept saying to me. "Not like Molly Ringwald." The incident left a small pear-shaped scar on the side of her forehead, which she easily covered with her hair.

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When we were young we listened to cassettes in Spence's room. ELO, Eagles, Styx, Cheap Trick. Get the Knack. Spence had pictures from BMX magazines pasted to cardboard and put up on his walls. We had a game where we tried to cover a sheet of paper with tiny circles, as if the page was a topographical map of a bubble bath. We had a maximum size bubble to which we constantly referred in the heat of disputes. It was a race to see who could fill the page first, but sometimes it took days. I would catch Spence in math class working away. By the time the page was filled with bubbles the paper had curled due to the pressure we applied with our ballpoints. I never went back to the pool where I shat my pants. However, it was not just this experience which soured me on the field trip, but what happened later that day. I held hands with Stacey Howard on the way back to the school. I was terrified one of the boys would call me "poo pants" or something. But I think they respected my shame enough not to say anything. After school at Spence's house we were trying to fill our page with bubbles. It was a race to the finish. We both had only a small corner to fill and we were trying to pound it out. He had used many coloured ballpoints but my bubbles were all black. Later we went to the Italian Deli where he pocketed a pack of hockey cards. It was not the first time I'd seen him do this. By this time I was starting to study his technique. On the way back we saw Stacey Howard. She was riding her bike, the tassels fluttering from her handlebars. Spence made her stop and he asked her if she liked me. I was mor-

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lifted. Did I hear him correctly? "I guess," said Stacey Howard. "Can I try your bike?" I asked her. "I guess." I picked up the pink Schwinn and did some wheelies up the block. Spence began to talk quietly into her ear. I was sure he was telling her about the incident at the pool. Finally I couldn't avoid it any longer and had to bring Stacey back her bike. "Come with me," Spence said and took me by the arm, pulling me aside in a conspiratorial slouch. I was amazed that Stacey just stood on the corner waiting. She didn't ride away in disgust. At this corner, half way between my house and Spence's, there was a gravel path over the weedy boulevard which was too haphazard to have been put in by the city. Stacey Howard stood on this path looking bored. "She says she'll kiss you." "What? Are you crazy?" "Go ahead." "I'm not going to kiss her!" "Don't you like her? "Well sure...But...I don't want it to be because you forced it to happen...Not when you are standing there looking...It's just not how it should be." "How should it be?" "How should I know?...Why did you say that?" "Well you may as well do it now." I hated that Spence had this power over me. "I'll tell her what happened in the changing room at the pool."

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I blushed in shame. "You're a jerk." Spence went back to talk quietly to Stacey Howard. She looked at her Swatch. Then he came back and talked to me some more. "I don't see you getting out of this one now," he said. "And you'd better hurry." "I don't want to," I pleaded, but I knew he was right. Eventually I wandered over to Stacey Howard and kissed her awkwardly on the lips. I turned off my mind to be able to accomplish this. She closed her eyes briefly. Spence looked over my shoulder the whole time. As I was pulling away wondering what all the fuss was about and what would happen next, she looked over to Spence and asked, "Can I go now?"

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My father was forced to do the laundry after it happened. He had never really done domestic chores before, he had left them up to my mother, but now he found himself washing and fluffing, ironing and baking. As my sister grew older he came to depend on her more and more. After he discovered the brown stains in my underwear, which I had tried to clean myself, he took me to the doctor. The waiting room had a huge aquarium. In it were fish I had never seen before, not even in books. There was a tiny plastic diver nestled against a plastic castle. The bubbles from the filtration unit came out of the diver's helmet as if he was breathing underwater, animate. As I sat in the waiting room, magazines all around, I put my nose to the glass of the aquarium and pretended I was underwater as well. I took heavy breaths, slowly gulping the stale office air. The receptionist scowled at me. The doctor asked me about my BMs. I had no idea what he meant. My father explained that we were talking about how I kept pooing my pants. Why couldn't I hold it? Did I feel pain? I was embarrassed by this line of questioning but the doctor seemed at ease. "No pain," I said. After a few more questions the doctor turned to my father and said, "There doesn't seem to be any physical problem. Perhaps it is psychological. I could recommend someone if you like." "We'll think about it," said my father as he hustled me out the door and back into the waiting room. The diver had not moved, he was still breathing normally, apparently in a state of underwater suspension. The bubbles, like the

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ones Spence and I filled pages with, were still defying gravity. The receptionist did not even look at us as we got our coats. She simply called out to the room, "Next."

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My soccer coach had deformed hands. His fingers were like flesh onions. Knobules. He had some kind of skin disease or arthritis which gave him swollen fingers. Swollen, hard, veiny, and unfit for delicate work. He drove us hard. He figured that by age twelve we should either be thinking about the pros or going somewhere else to play. The coach's son, Robbie, played on the team as well. He was one of our two forwards. Both of them were incredible with the ball, and Robbie could dribble around anything. He even used to dribble around the goalie. The other one was just lucky. The ball would bounce off of a defender, somehow to his advantage, then he'd lumber to the net. My mother was the soccer team nurse. When the coach asked her to do it, which meant bringing the oranges and first aid kit, applying cold packs, my mother said, "But I know nothing about soccer." The coach informed her that this was her best attribute. There was only one time my mother was ever called in for serious action. The coach's son tried to dribble around the goalie and rammed into the goal post. My mother was called onto the field carrying her lunch box first aid kit, the blue one with the glued-on yellow flowers. The coach's son had apparently broken his leg. The first thing my mother did was try to calm him down. She came up behind him on the ground and gave him an awkward embrace. The boy remembered the times his father the coach told him to practice with a tennis ball, and he did for hours everyday in the back yard. The coach said this was all he had as a child. My mother insisted on driving the injured boy to Emergency. At first the coach

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was unsure. "It's not so bad, maybe he can watch the game from the sidelines." My mother scolded him as if he were a child. Sheepishly he looked at the rest of us and said, "C'mon. We've got a game to win, lads." My mother helped his howling son up and he hobbled, with her support, to the sidelines. Spence was the substitute.

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There is an article in the newspaper claiming that tanning beds are the latest cure for breast cancer. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. In the obituaries there is a picture of a former Australian lifeguard. The man died at age 84 after having many moles removed. "I lost count at 532," he is quoted as saying. Melanin overdose. The picture shows him in a bathing suit, his body covered with adhesive dots, each one representing a removed lesion. He looks like Little Dot from the Harvey comics. He smiles for the camera. Whenever I pass the bronzage window the blondes stare back at me with raccoon traces from the goggles which protect their eyes in the tanning booth. The trouble with tan. When my mother went to put on her makeup she always said, "I'm just putting on my face," as if she were about to emerge from the bathroom wearing a mask. The tanning beds wait for us in the heart of the city. Epic, comfortable, and unashamed. Our sweat cooks to a dried salt on the fluorescent bulbs. Hundreds of tiny buzzing suns. All of them attempting to be the final cure.

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I wandered into the kitchen to find my soccer coach trying to manage the delicate handle of a tea cup with his knobby ringers. My mother was cutting up oranges for the game that day. I wore my soccer uniform, the green and black vertical stripes made me look taller. I welcomed this since I was always the shortest in any group picture, I had to hold the sign in all my school class photographs. I was a little taken aback to see him there, in my house, looking uncomfortable, using both hands to cradle the tea cup, as if he were praying. Praying for victory. "Ready for the game, pardner?" he asked me. "Sure. I guess." I paused because something had troubled me all night. "Coach?" "Yes?" "I've never met a deaf person." "That's okay. Even though the other team is from the deaf school, they can still play soccer the same as us." "But how will the coach tell them what to do." "They communicate. They adapt. You'll see. Just play the same solid defense as always. Just be a brick wall." At that moment my mother cut herself with the knife. The coach stood up, tipping over his tea cup and swore. My mother held the base of her finger and squeezed, trying to stop the flow of blood. It wasn't a very deep cut. The coach went to her and instinctively took her hand in his to get a closer look. My mother cast a glance at me and quickly pulled her hand away. I assumed it was because she was repulsed by his distorted digits. "It's all right. Can you get me a Band-Aid?" she asked me. "You know where they are."

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When I came back into the kitchen the coach was sitting back at the table with his empty tea cup. The kettle was on the stove to make more. My mother took the BandAid from me and applied it to her finger expertly. The coach said something about blood oranges but I was confused. Then he began to talk about real estate. He was obviously picking up the thread of a conversation they had had before. "Then we could flip it. The market's hot right now." "I don't know. I doubt you'll get the parents to agree to send their kids off to England, not to mention the risk of investing in real estate." "What risk?" "There's always risk." "But the boys need to be exposed to that level of play." "But they're only twelve." It was at this point that I spoke up. "Isn't it time to go to the park?" "Of course it is dear," my mother said. 'Just finishing with the oranges. Can you get me the first aid kit?" I retrieved the first aid lunch box from the bathroom, then got my cleats from the closet and put them by the door. The coach drove us to the game. My mother said there was no need to take separate cars, although I didn't understand why. I sat in the back seat holding the plastic bag of oranges, picking at the wire of the twist tie. The car smelled of turf. When the coach went to change gears it would have been difficult to distinguish the ball of the gear shift from the flesh of his finger except for the fact that the gear shift was designed like a mini soccer ball. I was still

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nervous about playing the deaf kids. At the end of the first half of play our team was losing 2-0. The first goal was scored because the keeper was sleeping and the forward chipped it over. The second was my fault, I let the guy get through. When the deaf team scored they threw their arms into the air but there was an uncanny silence. At the sidelines, my mother untwisted the plastic bag to give us all oranges but the coach grabbed it out of her hands. His body was shaking as he yelled at us, "What the hell do you think you are doing? You are intimidated by this team. You're better than them! You don't deserve any oranges!" The coach then emptied the bag of perfectly sliced orange moons onto the muddy ground. My mother gasped in disbelief. Spence picked up a piece and stuck it in his mouth anyway, parting his lips with a fake orange peel smile. He wanted us to laugh, break the tension, but no one did. The coach grabbed Spence by the arm and pushed him across the encrusted lime sideline, "You're sitting off the second half, young man!" Spence, now sitting on the grass, spat the peel in the direction of the coach but it landed, devoid of its juices, right on the white line. We all looked down at our cleated feet. "They are walking all over you because you are weak." It was true, we were the better team but the deaf players were extremely aggressive, elbows everywhere. What was most unnerving, however, was the incessant animal grunts they unconsciously produced. Their coach made wild gestures with his normal hands.

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In the second half we fought back, the coach's son dribbling around the defenders to tie the game. We were extra loud in our cheering. But then one of the deaf players sideswiped him with an elbow. The coach ran onto the field fuming. There was phlegm coming from his mouth as he yelled at the referee to keep control over the game. It struck me that the other team had no idea what he was saying and couldn't make out the remnants of his British accent, which crept into his voice when he became excited. They had no concept of accents at all. The game ended in a tie leaving no one happy. My mother, who had picked up the dirty orange slices and returned them to the bag, pulled at the Band-Aid on her finger nervously. I was terrified of riding home in the coach's car, terrified of being the one to take his wrath. I told my mother I was going with Spence to the 7-11 to get Slurpies. She gave me a dollar and looked me in the eye. I could tell that she understood.

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I decided to move on from soccer. I began my career on the BMX. I went to see some Call kids at the newly opened BC Place Stadium. They were tricksters, rode the quarter pipe, jumps. Tame by today's standards, but we'd read all about them in BMXAction magazine and we couldn't help but be impressed. The only place that sold the magazine was a cycle shop in Steveston, an old Japanese fishing village ripe for development. I made my father drive Spence and me out to the shop every few months. My father couldn't deny me anything. I scratched BMX logos into my desk. Redline. Mongoose. Patterson. Kuwahara. Shimano. The only time I got in trouble in school was for doing this. That, and for throwing a pinecone which happened to hit a kid in the eye. It's not like I was aiming. I remember being mortified when the teacher asked me to scrub off the desk covered grey in pencil. Not because I wanted the logos to remain, but because I was embarrassed at being reprimanded. The BMX racing tracks were out beyond the suburbs, in edge communities like Pitt Meadows or Chilliwack. The tracks grew out of real estate speculation. They'd last a few months before developers would sweep in. Spence and I would ride over the most ridiculous things, it became a game. A game I could never win. Spence went over six-foot walls on his bike, he jumped garbage cans in the lane. But the racing was different, the racing was serious and pure. A group of riders would compete in a series of motos. As long as you came in the top three in the motos you'd be in the finals. Spence and I were in different classes, I was in Novice and he'd raced enough already to compete in

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Expert. Although we raced against each other all the time around our neighbourhood there was only one time we raced against each other in competition, just before he'd advanced to Expert. Spence and his father actually traveled to a few international BMX competitions. And not just as spectators. While the hovercraft captain checked out the canals of Amsterdam, Spence would enter the competition, and even qualify in a few motos, before being eliminated. He would race alongside those we'd only seen in magazines. At the beginning of a race the riders would be lined up with their front wheels resting on a foot-high gate. The better riders would be up on their pedals balancing, which was possible due to the incline. When everyone was ready the starter would shout, "Riders ready...Pedals ready...Go!" and the gate would drop. When I raced Spence he pulled a move at the start which I'd never seen before and which he told me later he had learned in Amsterdam. As the starter shouted "...Pedals ready..." Spence shifted his weight and rolled backwards, lifted his front tire over the gate, and drove forward in a wheelie just as it dropped. By doing this he gained a precious half bike length over me and consequentially won the race. When I confronted Spence on his "illegal" start he turned to me, trophy in hand, and said, "Don't be a sore loser. I thought you were better than that." To this day I maintain he won because I slipped a pedal in the difficult and crowded first turn. The gash on my shin from the beartrap pedals provided the evidence for weeks. I came to regard shin scars as a badge so that, even to this day, I am always able to identify a former BMX racer.

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Spence and I once left our bikes outside McDonald's and some older kids took them for a joy ride. We raced after them on foot. My thief gave up by the end of the parking lot, looking a little sheepish. Spence chased his guy around the block. He returned about half an hour later refusing to say how he got the bike away from the older, and larger, boy. From then on we always used locks.

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The Chinese Consulate in Vancouver overlooks the corner of 16th and Granville. From a traffic engineer's point of view it is a very interesting corner. It marks the area where the grid of streets turns to chaos, as Marpole Ave cuts through the corner at a diagonal, creating more possibility for accident. He had obtained permission from the Consulate to observe the corner from their roof. Down on the street he ran a cable across Granville and set up the box it was attached to on a lamppost. The cable acted like the dinging tube at a gas station. It recorded the weight of a car driving over it. In this way he could assess the volume of traffic. He showed his letter from the city to the pretty receptionist, who showed him the way to the roof. They passed through hallways with photographs of the Great Wall, fields of rice, smiling children. The wallpaper was red with burnished gold leaf. Although he'd never been to China, he found the decoration beautiful. He carried his heavy equipment but the receptionist was petite and dignified and did not offer to help. She smiled and kept pointing forward, indicating the door they needed to pass. At the top of the staircase she realized that she did not have a key. She asked him to wait by the door and she went off to find the maintenance man. He used the time to calibrate equipment. He had a video camera in a solid brown metal box. This was before the days of the handicam and the box weighed many pounds. He was relieved to have a chance to rest after the climb to the roof. Tucked under his arm was a collapsible tripod. In a briefcase he carried his calculator, his notepad, his sketchbook, and extra Beta tapes.

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A liver-spotted elderly Chinese man slowly made his way down the hallway toward him. On a chain attached to his belt was a ring of keys. The receptionist was nowhere to be seen. He felt a slight pang of regret that he hadn't spoken to her more. But it was still early morning, and he'd be up there all day. On the roof the wind made it difficult to hear. From up here he could look down over the high gate and Chinese garden that hid the building from the street. In the distance he could see the downtown skyline, the ocean and the mountains beyond. He thanked the maintenance man who nodded his head silently. He wished he knew the word for "thank you" in this man's language. The roof was flat and covered with gravel. He set up the tripod and camera on the corner of the roof which was closest to 16th and Granville. He spent the rest of the day up there, the sun beating down on his balding head. He tied a handkerchief onto his head like a four-cornered cap. He didn't want to burn. He angled the camera down so that the corner was visible in the view finder, focused, and pushed the ON button. In his notebook he marked down the time. The rest of the morning he counted near misses in his notebook. The cars stopped at the stop sign, waited, and resumed in an orderly fashion. He estimated distance and calculated travel time based on the speed limit. This he did in the notebook, the orderly blue lines like the streets below him, running on to the end of the page. In his sketchbook there were no lines, no orderly grids. And, although he should

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have been drawing a map of the view from the roof, to provide context for the corner, he found himself trying to remember the features of the receptionist's face, her soft skin, her long black hair. He attempted a portrait from memory but ripped the page out as soon as he was finished, unhappy with it. Besides, what if he forgot about the drawing when he handed in his report to the city? What an embarrassment that would make. Suddenly there was the sound of brakes squealing below. He jumped to his feet to check that the camera was still recording, that the tape hadn't run out. Down below he could see the black strips of potential accident, like mascara loosely applied to the road. A man stood beside the offending Ford and yelled at a pedestrian trying to cross Granville from east to west. The motorist must have been yelling based on the exaggerated hand gestures and the way everyone on the street stared at him. The traffic slowly moved around his Ford, drivers resuming their journeys. The pedestrian continued to hurry down 16th Avenue, almost in a run. Up on the roof he invented a past for the pedestrian, imagined his destination, perhaps the Consulate itself? Perhaps he was the receptionist's lover? Perhaps a security guard. The camera captured it all. He baked in the heat, the smell from the roof tar began to give him a headache. He concentrated on the little red record light on the camera, making sure it didn't go out. He attempted a portrait of the pedestrian in his sketchbook, which was rapidly losing pages.

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When I was young I had the first of a series of rare migraines. I could look at the salt and pepper shakers, inches apart on the table, and only see one or the other. Tunnel vision. One time, after this happened during a BMX race and I had to quit early, my father was concerned because I could not find the words for things. I would say "blue" when I meant "bike." When I began to cry in frustration he took me to the hospital. By the time I got there I only had a mild headache and was speaking and seeing things fine. After a barrage of tests the doctors sent me to a neurologist, who recommended a CAT scan of my brain. At the hospital the nurse injected a dye into my bloodstream and then I needed to remain very still as the smooth white hoop passed over my body, as if the doctor was a magician levitating me and was trying to prove that there were no strings attached. A week later I had to do it again. My father told me it hadn't worked the first time. The results from the second scan were negative. It has been many years since that tunnel vision hit me, but now it is back with a vengeance. I have lived with it for the past ten days. When I try to read or write I can't see the word which follows, every page becomes a minefield of blanks, random words erased. I try to decipher meaning as if listening to a weak radio signal from a distant land. I haven't been able to work for the documentary film crew and am sick with worry about money as well. Not only that, but I'm scared to cross the street without the full peripheral vision necessary to be a pedestrian in this city. The migraines of my youth never lasted more than a few

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hours. I decide to see a doctor. I go to the clinic down the street which is filled with people waiting for methadone. I tell a matronly doctor with a thick Russian accent what my symptoms are. She listens and recommends chicken soup. "It is the best thing." "But I am a vegetarian." "Chicken soup good for everything." I can tell she doesn't understand the concept. "No meat." "What? Chicken soup is best." Obviously I am getting nowhere here. What kind of a doctor prescribes chicken soup? I go to the CLSC and they give me the runaround. Finally, I see another doctor who only speaks French to me, but I am able to make her understand. She gives me a quick look-in-my-ears, stick-out-mytongue check-up and her diagnosis is labyrinthitis. I do feel like I am trapped in a labyrinth, but am I Theseus or the man-beast Minotaur? I need to get out, out of my head, out of my skin. She tells me to do nothing and it will eventually go away. Back home I call Tracey and tell her about the chicken soup and how I am in some sort of labyrinth. "Did she get her medical degree at the Campbell's Soup University in Moscow?" she laughs. I imagine that I'm on a train that will emerge from the tunnel I'm in to reveal the full magnitude of the horizon. She is sympathetic and prescribes a swim. I unravel string all the way to the pool to make certain I can find my way home.

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I lost track of Spence after he broke both his legs. He had been out of school for over two weeks but I was too interested in becoming the scorekeeper for the junior girl's volleyball games. Every game I would make sure I talked to Stacey Howard, whether it was about the team's play, or some school-related assignment. She even asked me if I could help her by being her bump partner before one game, which sent me into flights of ecstasy. Consequently, I kept missing the ball and she grew increasingly agitated. When Spence finally showed up at school everyone mocked him. He did look ridiculous with two casts and rubber pads attached on the bottoms so he could walk on oversized crutches. He told me that he'd wiped out on his bike when he hit a rock going full speed down Doobie Hill. He said one of the army recruits got him to the hospital. His Redline was a write off. "I guess you won't be racing any time soon." "I guess not." Although I felt bad for him, the fact that he couldn't race should have inspired me to work harder and advance to Expert class without him to compete against, but instead I just lost interest in BMX racing. I suppose I needed Spence as my carrot. Instead, I planned my path through the halls at school, trying to time it so that I'd pass Stacey Howard between classes. Once, after homeroom, I was helping Spence get to class, holding his logo-encrusted Adidas bag over my shoulder, when Stacey passed us in the hall. "Hi Stacey," I said coyly. "Oh, hello Florence Nightingale. Helping the crippled,

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are we?" I couldn't believe she could be so cruel. Spence said nothing, simply walking took all his concentration. I knew he was hurt but I didn't defend him. I suddenly realized that other kids had always seen Spence as an outsider. It struck me that I was his only friend. Exams were upon us quickly and Stacey and I were in Chemistry together. I went over to her place a few nights in a row to study. Her father would not let me in her room without the door being left open. In the end, Stacey actually wanted to study, she needed Chem to get into Phys. Ed at UBC. Although I was disappointed that our studying wouldn't become "petting," I was relieved for two reasons. The first was that I had no idea how to "pet," and the other was that I liked chemistry because its main unit of measurement is the mole. The teacher would talk in terms of how many moles an element contained and I felt comfortable. I never studied with Spence, although his marks had suffered due to his accident. To tell the truth, I never thought of Spence during this time, I hardly ever rode my BMX except as a means of transportation to a specific location. I didn't have the urge to hit every grassy curb along the way to get air. Besides, soon I would be driving.

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In my dream I am stranded in a house with the documentary film crew. The Best Boy is here in a struggle of wills with the Key Grip. There is a formidable cliff behind us and highways criss-cross with heavy traffic out front. There is a parking lot where travelers stop to give us news of the outside world, but it never occurs to us to ask for a ride. We play Scrabble late into the nights but I can't recognize any of the words. When I challenge a word I am mocked by the director. After it is too late, we discover that some of the make-up people have been abusing the cleansers. I watch the traffic from the window, a head full of valueless words. I count the cars like sheep while the others die suddenly, convulsing in gasps, to be buried in the closet. Eventually I climb the cliff to avoid the traffic. My escape comes by solid rock instead of a car filled with strangers. I eat from birds' nests tucked into the crags of rock. It takes days but I finally make it to the top. The sun hits my face for the first time in months. On the distant horizon I can see the traffic winding toward the tourist destinations like a stream emptying into the sea.

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I knew very little about what my father did before he retired. He liked to talk about wood stains, sure, and maybe fix the car, but what he was actually getting paid for was a mystery. I knew he knew something about traffic. He was consulted about its form. I imagined him kneeling on a curb somewhere, moving his hand over the street's shades of grey, in the same way he would peel back the table cloth at dinner, lower his eye, and rub the smooth wooden surface of the table, his hand gliding away from his face and lifting off the table like a small aircraft taking off. My sister would jolt him back into the dinner conversation, "Dad, I was saying..." but he'd be gone, thinking about shades of brown. He was paid to examine the asphalt, the concrete, the rougher surfaces, and I imagine he didn't care quite as much about it, although decades of traffic would depend on his opinion. My father tells me to clean out all my possessions from my old bedroom closet, the one with the trap door in the ceiling. Although entire shelves in the basement are devoted to Lesley's acquisitions, for some reason there can be no trace of me in the house. In the closet I find my old comic collection. X-Men, Fantastic Four, Defenders, Avengers. Groups of men and women struggling for justice. Their edges are ragged, their colours fading. Spence and I filled sheets of paper with our own attempts at drawing these characters. Eventually I took to drawing only the women, drawing their scantily clad breasts over and over, knowing that the absence of a thin line demarking a costume was all it would take to have my first sexual experience.

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Also piled high in the closet are accident reports from ICBG, each one a book rilled with diagrams and photos, equations and results. Each book was a different accident to review by an adjuster. In every one there is a short description of the drivers, usually only one or two pages, what they had for breakfast that morning, whether they were in a hurry for some reason, whether alcohol was involved. After he retired my father kept them all and stored them in my closet, out of the way. When I asked him why he kept them he said, "I'm not interested in the details of the accidents anymore. To me each one of those books tells a story. For many of those people these accident reports are the only place their story has been told." What he doesn't say, and what I know is hovering on the tip of his tongue, is that for many it is also the only documentation of their demise. I'm not sure when it struck me that the paintings in the house were done by my father. None of them was signed. In the living room there was the silhouette of a sailboat drifting into the sunset in shades of orange and red. There was another with abstract triangles which I was told were also supposed to be sailboats. There was an unframed ball of flame shooting up from the ocean, the paint so thick it could be read by a blind man. Although there were presumably sailors on the boats, no people appeared in any of the paintings. They all appeared to have been produced in a span of a few months, then no more. What was my father living through during these months? I discover his only sketchbook in the closet, underneath the traffic reports. Although

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most of the pages are ripped out, the few that remain have self-portraits of my father, caricatures really, big glasses, rotund, with the word "Fatso" underneath each one. I find a stack of video tapes in the closet, behind a box of Fourth World Kirbys, but it takes another few days to find equipment obsolete enough to play them. The only things written on their labels are names of cross-streets throughout the city. There is one tape with letters in thick black marker on its spine which reads, 16th and Granville. I am surprised these are still here. When I finally find a Beta player in an old pawn shop downtown and set it up in the basement, I watch some of the other tapes first. 41st and Oak, 25th and Blenheim, 29th and Earles. Always a number and a name, identified like workers in a restrictive regime. The screen comes alive with the mundane, cars stopping and starting, people with places to go. The weather is different on each tape. The shades of grey. I watch as wipers echo back and forth, hypnotized by their rhythm, as if I can hear them thunk, thunk, thunking in the room but the videos are eerily silent, and as I watch them the only sound I hear is my own breathing. I am transported back to the era of silent film, the Keystone Cops, the grainy nostalgia. Every so often my heart skips a beat. A swerve, a near miss. More than a few times I need to turn off the tape only to watch the screen fill with white noise. Each tape lures me in, I begin to focus on odd details, like the height of the trees compared to now, a particular piece of litter, a billboard, the brand of tires on the cars, the pedestrian fashions of the day. Then, in a split sec-

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ond, I come hurtling back to the dank basement room, with its wood paneling, unpopulated oil paintings, and photos of ancient relatives. On the screen is often carnage, and I am not ready for it.

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In the pile of old comics in the closet I find the "Mad Menace of the Macabre Mole Man!" Looking at the glaring font and the yellowed pages, the corner of the cover cut diagonally, I am amazed at how much trouble this simple comic caused. I regretted doing it immediately. I only punched Lesley because she had her shield up and I was carried away. She insisted I couldn't hurt her and she was older, I thought she was right. Sometimes, just for a second, she seemed to disappear out of the corner of my eye, and in those moments I believed. I remember wanting this comic so badly. In fact, there is a page ripped in half, where I snatched it away from Lesley and then hid it in the attic, above the trap door in my closet, so that she would never see it again. In one panel Sue Storm faces The Mole Man, her arms held behind her back, her hair fashioned in the style of the day, then where the page is ripped it reveals an advertisement for Daisy rifles. Her black eye gave it away, there was no chance that my father would not find out. "If you tell then Dad will never let us buy comics again. You don't want that to happen, do you?" I remember saying. And here is the earlier issue, #22, in which Sue Storm discovers the true extent of her powers. Before this she was just the token female whose only ability was to fall hostage to an endless series of kidnappers. This comic is in much better shape because I was not allowed to read it. This was for my sister's eyes only. My father, upset at our bickering over the possession of the first Fantastic Four, and no fool as to where the black eye came from, had gone to Motherbox Comics himself and asked if there were any other issues

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featuring The Mole Man. I can just imagine him at the counter, F.O.O.M. posters on the walls all around, sheepishly saying, "It's for my kids." As I look at these comics today I am fascinated by the dotted lines which oudine Sue Storm when she is invisible, like she is a coupon in a magazine to be cut out and mailed away. Her ability with these dotted lines to make something out of nothing strikes me as somehow askew, like I'm missing the punchline of a joke. But when I start to look through some of the other comics I notice that the dotted lines are also used to represent a line of sight from an eye to what is being looked at. So, in effect, these lines represent seeing and not being seen, they contain within them their own contradiction. Sitting here in the closet surrounded by comics and old accident reports my father wrote for the insurance company, I can't help thinking that dotted lines are also used on the highway to indicate that it is safe to pass. I realize then that my father was a writer. He wrote of human factors, vehicle damage, road conditions, and death.

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Narrative Pre-Crash Phase: Human Factors: Driver 1 was eastbound along a two-lane, two-way, snow-packed rural class "B" highway. He and a friend started the day at 8:00 a.m. by consuming 48 beers and then going to a hotel located in a town 10 miles north of his residence. He arrived at the hotel around 11:00 a.m. There he consumed eight rye and 7-Ups. At approximately 2:00 p.m. Dl, together with his passenger, decided to drive to a major city located 40 miles to the east. While en route they consumed several beers and were seen throwing empty bottles along the highway... Moments before the collision Dl lost control over VI. It started "fishtailing" and drifted across the dotted yellow line into the westbound lane in a counterclockwise "spin-out." His impact speed was estimated to be 52 mph. Crash Phase: Human Factors: The front of VI struck (direction force of 1 o'clock) V2 (direction force of 11 o'clock) headon with approximately 60% overlap. As a result of the impact, VI began a counterclockwise rotation about a vertical axis while V2 began a clockwise rotation. Dl was ejected through the windshield area. The unrestrained D2 was thrown forward and to the left and rebounded into his seat where he was found when the vehicle came to rest. Post-Crash Phase: Human Factors: On arrival at the hospital PI responded to verbal command, but appeared to be in a state of great con-

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fusion. X-rays of his head, cervical spine, face, and chest were taken. Although the crash appeared to have left him physically unharmed, in the X-ray a spot was discovered on his right lung, which turned out to be a tumour. PI was very distraught at the news and disappeared from the hospital before he had "sobered up." Plastic surgeons were called in to reconstruct the face of Dl. D2 was picked up by a body removal service at 6:10 p.m. and taken to the local morgue.

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For obvious reasons my father didn't want to teach me how to drive, but he had no choice. My mother would have done it without the fuss, keeping her comments to herself until I made a mistake, but my father was always thinking one step ahead — in his eyes we were just one near miss away from disaster. We took the rustbucket out to the UBC parking lot on a Saturday when it was virtually empty. It had rained the night before and the asphalt glistened. For those first few morning hours it appeared to be not just a wasteland of concrete, but territory surveyed out with straight yellow lines, waiting for settlers to establish a civilization. My father moved into the passenger seat and let me take the wheel. His instructions to me were spoken through his teeth, and they came in short bursts. "Switch gears now...left foot on the clutch... brake!" Slowly I drove in circles in the parking lot, filling up the space, stalling and lurching my way along. At this point I had no idea that my father wrote of the horrible consequences of accidents. In his mind I was Dl and he was PI and we were just starting out in our Pre-Crash Phase. Human factors included the fact that I was just learning to drive a stick shift, and the environmental factors would point out that the pavement was slippery. There was one lone car in the middle of the parking lot, perhaps left there by an absent-minded professor who had gone out drinking with his students after their last class. In retrospect, I'm sure my father saw this unassuming blue Volkswagen as Vehicle 2.

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Because Lesley was older, she had been taught to drive by my mother. She was a very cautious driver; she caused problems with her indecision at intersections. After it happened Lesley refused to drive ever again. She felt that if tragedy could befall her driving teacher, what chance did she have? Consequently, I ended up driving her everywhere. School, piano lessons, the dermatologist. I was even privy to some late night pre-grad parties. The phone would ring late at night and my father would sometimes get me to go pick her up. It was some deal they had. I didn't mind really. I was able to have some insight into what was happening in the senior grades, the socialization rituals of adolescents that I found so difficult to master. I drove Lesley to her piano lesson in the family Volvo, the rustbucket. I had just earned my license a few months before and she made it perfectly clear that she didn't trust me yet. In the car she confided to me that she hated the piano, her fingers were too chubby, she was tone deaf. Although I had no musical aptitude I was not expected to learn since I was a boy. Sports and cars, sports and cars. And, of course, superheroes, although they were getting to be a bit boring. I had moved on to Holden Caulfield and Buddy Kravitz by this time. I was reading about characters who have nervous breakdowns, but I had no idea what was happening to them. Why weren't they trying out for the soccer team and getting some exercise? Lesley was practicing scales on the dashboard while we waited at a light. It was a bit of a hill so I was riding the clutch.

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"Why don't you use the parking brake?" she said with a hint of contempt. "It's better to do it this way." "Dad says you wreck the car that way. He uses the brake." "I don't care." By this time the light had changed and we raced through the Kerrisdale traffic, seniors walking their dogs on the sidewalks, shiny branches of solid credit unions opening up, free giveaways to entice new accounts. "You're going too fast," Lesley said, checking her seat belt. I was offended that she would check her safety device, that she didn't feel safe. I sped up on the inside lane to spite her. The lane had few cars due to the time of day and the parking enforcement regulations. The cars were slow in the other lane, lollygagging, concerned they might be missing out on a sale. I wanted to shatter my sister's smugness without thinking of consequence. I was like Buddy Kravitz, impulsive, stubborn, alive. I sped up to an unbelievable speed considering the circumstances. If someone decided to parallel park we would have been in trouble. "What are you doing! Slow down." I said nothing and concentrated on an opening in front of a particularly slow car. There was a parked car in our lane. I had to time it perfectly. I sped up and swerved in front of the slow car, just missing the parked car by inches. When I looked over Lesley's eyes were closed. "What the fuck are you doing?" "Driving," I said. Now who was the smug one? She said nothing more until I dropped her off at her piano lesson in

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the basement of a two-story bungalow in Kits. As she got out of the car she said angrily, "You're a terrible driver. I'm never getting in the car with you again. You drive like that after what happened to Mom? You're crazy. I'll take the bus home." "Good," was all that I could say.

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Lesley rang the buzzer at her piano teacher Mrs. Watson's bungalow in tears. How could her brother be such an idiot? Why wouldn't he ever talk about the accident the way she had with her father? They were grieving, but her brother seemed to be too preoccupied with other things, adolescent things. WTien would he grow up? She heard Mrs. Watson's footsteps on the other side of the door and tried to staunch her tears with her chubby fingers. She must think of her scales. Lesley came to Mrs. Watson once a week, which was certainly not enough to master the piano, but it was enough to give her some musical aptitude. Her mother had considered this important for a girl. For her sake, she didn't want to stop, but it was becoming tiresome, she seemed to be learning the same few songs over and over. Even though Lesley was upset she remembered that the first thing she needed to do when entering Mrs. Watson's bungalow was to remove her shoes. Inside, everything was white and covered in plastic. White shag carpet, white curtains, white couch. There were paintings of the Virgin Mary done primarily in gold hanging on the walls. A path made up of white bedsheets led from the front door to the back room where the black piano resided. "You never practice, how do you expect to get better?" said Mrs. Watson. "I know. But we don't have a piano at our house." "You know you can always use mine, or else there is the community centre." "I'm sorry Mrs. Watson. I'll try harder." "Let's begin."

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That was the signal she used to stop all conversation and get down to work. Let's begin. Spoken as if she were a Baltic diplomat during a peace negotiation. They sat at the piano. Mrs. Watson was a plump woman and it was difficult for both of them to fit on the piano stool. Her fingers did not match her body. They were slender and graceful, the hands of a true artist. Lesley couldn't stop thinking about her brother and that near miss. What an impulsive thing to do. What if that other car had sped up? "No, no dear. D minor." "I'm sorry, Mrs. Watson, it's just...just..." It was at this point that the tears came again. "What's the matter, dear?" Mrs. Watson removed her musical fingers from the keys and wrapped them around her pupil's shoulder. "My brother...my mother..." the tears came faster now. "Let me get you a Kleenex." There was a white box of Kleenex on top of the piano. "Thank you." "Is this about your mother's accident?" "How do you know about that?" "Your father told me. He said the family was in a state of... transition." "Not my stupid brother. He drives like a maniac. I can't believe he'd do that after what happened to Mom." "Maybe he's trying to come to terms with things in his own way." "He's a jerk." She had stopped crying by now. More angry than sad.

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"Maybe our lesson for today could be cancelled. I'll talk to your father about the fee." "No, Mrs. Watson. I want to keep going. I want to try...to be good at something. Anything." "Alright, Lesley. But we can stop at anytime. Maybe your brother needs to start piano lessons too." "Don't make me laugh." "Did he cry at the funeral?" "Dad thought it best for us not to go." They continued with the four-handed playing for a while. The bulb in the lamp on the top of the piano that illuminated the sheet music, suddenly burst, making Mrs. Watson jump. She went to get a replacement. While she was out of the room the piano was a silent coil of potential. The bulb was replaced and illuminated again, the notes jumping off the page once more. "I just miss her, you know?" "I understand dear. Now how about we try 'You Are My Sunshine'?"

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One Saturday night my father woke me from my dream of scoring goals in the acid rain. The soccer coach was yelling at us from the sidelines, "Roll up your sleeves, let the other team see that you are not affected by it." My father said he hated to wake me but could I go pick up my sister? He slurred his words as he spoke. "Why don't you go?" I asked him. "I've had too much to drink," he said soberly. Then added, as if it was somehow relevant, "Whiskey. With ice." "Where is she?" "Southlands. The Eats." "Can't she walk from there?" "Apparently not," was all he said as he handed me the keys. Upon arriving at the address given to me I saw a teenage girl sitting on the curb barfing. I'd seen her at school before. She always wore painted on jeans and hid her face behind her long blonde hair. Another girl was holding the hair away from the sick girl's face as she rubbed her back. Southlands was filled with the equestrian elite. Originally the wild land along the river, it was scooped up by the wealthy and was now filled with horse paddocks, stables, and, though there were no sidewalks because people rode horses everywhere, there were still driveways leading to enormous mansions. A party was taking place in just such a house. I parked the rustbucket in time to witness a guy wearing a pink Polo shirt throwing a potted plant into the street. His buddy cheered him on. I remained in the car, terrified, hoping my sister would spot it, easily identifiable in this

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neighbourhood due to its rust. After five minutes I realized she might be waiting inside, unaware that I was too apprehensive to come in. As I got out of the car I could smell the horses immediately. Their scent was overwhelming and strange. The front door was wide open and AC/DC was blasting from the expensive stereo equipment. Couples were making out in the living room. I was shocked to see Stacey Howard who, like me, was a few grades younger than this crowd, making out with the star of the basketball team. He was very tall and gangly and his arms were behind her back trying to get at those elusive bra straps, the goal of almost every teenage boy in our school. I defended her when Spence called her a "jock slut," but at that moment I had my doubts. Then she carefully moved his hand away, as if she'd done it many times before, practiced it in front of a mirror, and my faith in her was partially restored. I asked the first older girl I found who was not engaged in foreplay if she knew where my sister was. "Who?" "Lesley." A look of contempt came over her face. "Basement," she said, her beer almost tipping out of her hand. On the stairway to the basement I stepped over more teenagers, all drunk. The walls were lined with photographs. In them the girl whom I had asked for directions wore equestrian gear and sat atop a horse. The girl's expression remained stern. In the basement there was a pool table and a large freez-

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er. Empty beer bottles covered the freezer top, and two teenage boys played pool, one wearing a green checked mac, and one wearing red. Lesley was in the corner smoking a cigarette and talking to another teen. He looked as if he had lost a few games already. I approached my sister, "I didn't know you smoked." "Who the fuck are you, punk?" said the guy she was talking to. I stepped back but bumped into one of the pool players and made him miss his shot. I quickly became concerned for my safety. "Sorry," I said under my breath. Just then the song upstairs changed to Led Zeppelin and the two pool players simultaneously twirled their cues around and sung into them with feeling, "Hey hey Momma, I like the way you move, gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove..." "It's okay. This is just my stupid brother." "Oh," the tough guy said, deflated. "Ready to go?" I said, unsure what else to say. "You can't leave," said the toughie, looking concerned. Lesley looked him in the eye for an uncomfortable second. It was like I had never existed. I assumed she wanted to be alone with him. "I need to go," she finally said. "No way!" He grabbed her by the arm. I was unsure whether this was a situation where I should step in or if this was some sort of flirting. I had no idea how to flirt. When a girl seemed to be flirting with me I was so uncomfortable that I couldn't speak. This usually ended up resulting in the girl wandering away frustrated. "Let go of me Matt! My brother's here to take me home."

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"Did you call him?" "Yes." "Why?" "Do we need to get into it? You're drunk." "I think we do need to get into it." Then he turned to me and said with intense hatred, "Fuck off, junior." "Don't talk to him that way! I hate you when you're drunk." These words seemed to throw him off guard enough to allow Lesley to get away. She took my arm and escorted me up the stairs. The hostess stared at us from the top of her horse as if disappointed with our sudden departure. In the living room Stacey Howard was changing the record. I thought it best not to say goodbye since she had never even acknowledged my presence. In the car, before I started the engine, I said, "We can stay if you want. I didn't mean to interrupt you and your...boyfriend." I couldn't tell if she had been drinking or not. "You have a lot to learn about people, little brother," she said with a smile. Then she began to cry. Quietly but distinctly. In the glove compartment she found some paper towel which had previously been used to clean the windshield. I started the car and began to drive north, up the hill and away from the river. She had obviously forgotten her vow never to get in a car with me again. She had other things on her mind. As we passed a police car heading toward the party Lesley wiped her snotty nose and said to me, "Don't tell Dad I smoke." "Okay." "Thanks. I guess I owe you one."

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It was when Dr. Watt discovered the other mole, the one in the crease in the back of her knee, that Lesley knew she would need to break up with Matt. The mole must have been a holdover from a sunburn she received while lying on her stomach. They had just finished high school, Matt was planning on helping out his cousin at the sewage treatment plant. The money was incredible he said, especially on holidays when you got triple pay. Lesley wanted to go tree planting but was too intimidated by all the physical work. At this point she had not discovered how to use mirrors to check her moles. She missed the difficult areas of her body when doing her monthly self exam. Matt was pissed. Then when it turned out to be a melanoma he was confused because he knew he couldn't be pissed at her anymore, but that didn't keep her from leaving him. He told her all this. He hadn't been drinking. Didn't she understand that he was serious about her? He punched the back of a temporary tin No Parking sign and it wobbled like a drunk. Lesley thought it looked painful but she still wanted out. "Sorry," she said sympathetically. After a few minutes of brooding he turned to her and said, "Good luck with your moles," and walked away. The next day Dr. Watt removed it for her. He offered a two for one deal but she declined. She noticed he smelled of garlic. Must have been his lunch. She was already thinking about telling her father that she wanted to go to a woman dermatologist from now on. She enjoyed coming with her brother but he'd understand. So would her father, he

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couldn't begrudge her a single female role model. When she received the results a week later it turned out to be bad. Really bad. Dr. Watt had not gotten all the cells and she would have to come back. Her brother went with her even though he didn't have an appointment. He just sat in the waiting room. Not even reading magazines, just waiting.

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I take my comics collection from the closet back to Motherbox Comics, which is still there, although now it has changed its name to the more appropriate Comic Shop. They are unimpressed when I bring in the box of tattered comics. As I walk in the door, before I have a chance to speak, the guy behind the counter says, "Not interested." "How do you know? There could be some gems in here." "I know because they are not even in plastic bags." After ten minutes of haggling he gives me twenty dollars for the lot claiming he will just recycle most of them. The shop no longer has the cheap bins, only the new comics, which may be why it's still in business. I do not watch the video tape labeled 16th and Granvilk before returning to Montreal. I say good bye to my father at the airport with a back-patting embrace. He tells me he is inspired by my ability to part with my past and claims he will finally get rid of the guns.

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Back in Montreal there is another heat wave. Walking the streets of the Plateau feels nuclear, as if I am living inside a microwave or slowly being roasted on a spit. Tracey calls me from her shower. She has a portable and the shower is the only place she can stand without sweating. She offers to take me to the country to escape the oppression of the city heat and I welcome the opportunity. At her cottage in the Townships we analyze Jughead, first as if we werejungians, then Freudians. I try to tell her it's all been a bit of a bildungsroman so far. We pour through her brother's old comics for the hundredth time. Pah and Gals, Thor, Fear. "You are the quarry, I am the hunter." Giant-Sized Chillers, I Created Krang. Where Creatures Roam features a civilization that has kitchen appliances on the planet Mercury. The Thing That Lived! In one story a man wants to be able to turn himself invisible. He figures with this power he can conquer the world. Where did he get this idea? But when his wish is granted it turns out that, "While I may be invisible to the outside world, the rest of the world is invisible to me!" Be careful what you wish for. The cottage sits on sixty acres of land. From the new highway at the very back, through the woods, the clearing, the beaver dam, and then the old road. Late at night Tracey runs in from outside huffing. She lets in a moth. "I think I just saw a shooting star!" she enthuses. To which I reply, "Are you sure it wasn't just a satellite?" Her face droops and I regret saying it immediately. That's the difference between us in a nutshell. She brought her cats and we find dead mice on our respective beds in the morning.

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In the newspaper there is a story, buried in the Health section announcing that scientists have discovered underarm deodorant increases the risk of breast cancer. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I clip the article intending to mail it to my sister. I think about writing her a letter encouraging her to stink. Then I realize I no longer know her address. Is she in Toronto living with the corporate elite, or on some island squatting in a teepee where underarm deodorant would be a low priority? That night I call my father. My father has always been a weather talker on the phone. Clipped syllables, uncomfortable voice. I don't tell him about the deodorant article, it would only make him worry. "Lesley was in Toronto for a while doing film stuff; she was pretty vague about it. But now she's back here, although I don't see her much." This is the most he's ever said to me over the phone in one breath. "What's she doing in Vancouver?" "Advertising."

"Oh." "You know about her recent operation, don't you?" "What operation?" "She had another bad mole. She had to scale back at work because of the treatments. I thought you knew." I get Lesley's number. Before he hangs up he tells me about the grow op in the house across the street. How no had known it was there. How the old man next door had a stroke and my father believes it was from stress brought on by the neighbours. How the night before twenty police cars lined the suburban street. The strangest sight he'd ever

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seen. He talks about the condemned sign now stuck on the window as if it were a page from a holy script. "I wandered into the back yard this morning," he tells me, "just to check things out. There were green stalks, stripped of leaves, piled against the back fence. Do you think you could get high from that?" I'm shocked by my father's question. I would not have even suspected that he could use the word "high" in this context. When I finally call Lesley and tell her about the deodorant studies she claims to use only organic deodorant. I wonder how that's possible. Isn't it all just chemicals? When I mention my father's snooping, she says, "Well, maybe he was stoned when you talked to him." Over the phone my sister and I laugh together. We laugh hard, like breaking something.

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Lesley managed to find a seat on the downtown bus. She was going to the Rodney Graham retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery. She was relieved not to be standing like so many other passengers. She held her handbag tightly in her lap. She wished someone would open a window; hers was only for an emergency. Standing in front of Lesley the whole way was a young woman, a little younger than her, but definitely no longer a girl. The woman had her eyes closed and wore oversized headphones. What was she listening to? Her nose was thin and Roman and pierced, her mouth small. A redhead bob. On the back of her hand, which gripped the metal pole for balance, the name Juan was written in black marker. Who was this Juan? What ulterior motive did the guy with the goatee have when he offered her his seat? The exhibit was empty. She was forced to check her handbag so she carefully itemized its contents in her head in case anything were to go missing. Then she spent the next few hours walking into rooms of intervention and surprise. Flour gently fell down on an old fashioned typewriter. A snowy landscape. Then she sat in a school desk wearing headphones that played music from UJ3RK5, watching slides of the mundane. She heard the words, "I really miss the coast" in her ear but she was unsure if it was coming from the music or another gallery patron. She walked into a dark room. A man stood there, then began to move. She was unsure where the man stopped and the art began. He was creeping her out, but then suddenly the projector came on and there was a bridge over a pond. The man skipped

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the needle on a record, then it was dark again. Lesley left the room unsure if she had just witnessed a technical malfunction. Another dark room, empty, but with a video of a spotlight on the edge of a wood at night. The hard ambient noise was deafening. On the steps of the art gallery the dispossessed congregated next to the colourful van with two rear ends parked out front. Was it a parking violation or a work of art? She was overwhelmed with the view of construction cranes above her. The Robson Square skating rink was devoid of ice but the brown plastic dome above it looked like the carapace of an enormous insect. On the steps three games of chess were being played, across the street was an open guitar case and a man playing standards. And gathered around the sidewalk a group of people held protest signs which read Free Tibet. She thought to herself, I didn't know Tibet needed freeing. A young Tibetan man with a megaphone started to rally the public. At least she assumed he was Tibetan. His deep voice was surprisingly gentle and eloquent as he tried to pull people into the cause. Lesley felt herself pulled and sat on the steps for a while next to the chess players living out their endgames. "We are here today to commemorate the anniversary of the day of the Tibetan National Uprising. As our leader His Holiness the Dalai Lama says, As long as human rights are violated there can be no foundation for peace. The six million Tibetan people must have the right to determine their own destiny.' In 1950 the Chinese government invaded Tibet, a peaceful country of Buddhists and subsistence farmers. In 1959, after the failure of the Tibetan uprising,

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the Dalai Lama and many of his followers fled from Tibet and now live in exile in neighbouring countries. Well over 80,000 people became exiles in countries that were themselves reservoirs of poverty. The Chinese destroyed eighty percent of our monasteries and put many of our people in prison, where they continue to be tortured. The Chinese then used Tibetans to build roads into our country, on which moved 300,000 troops and countless settlers. Today the Tibetan language is not taught in schools." The man was earnest. Lawyers passed by on the sidewalk holding foamy cups of takeout coffee. One of the chess players called out, "Check." The man continued to speak into the megaphone. Lesley was intrigued. "The Chinese have set up birth control teams which go from town to town sterilizing all Tibetan woman of childbearing age. We have heard accounts from women whose babies were killed before their eyes by a lethal injection in the hospital. Any child of Tibetan parents who is born outside of China's official birth control policy guidelines will have no legal status to exist: they can't go to school, own property, get work, obtain a ration card. Their economic and social exile has produced a generation of 'illegal' children committed to a life of menial jobs, like the collection of refuse or dung." There were titters from some of the children in the crowd at the word "dung" but for the most part their mothers listened with attention. In fact, most of the non-Tibetans who were gathering to hear the man's words were women. "The human rights violations are staggering. The Canada-Tibet Committee, in solidarity with the Tibetan

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Refugee Aid Society, demands that Tibet be placed on the United Nations list of occupied countries with the Dalai Lama proclaimed as its leader. We demand a halt to all World Bank loans to China as well as arms transfers. We ask our Canadian citizens, who are blessed to be living in an open society, to boycott all products issuing from China. Today, what we ask is that you join us in a vigil. We plan to march now to the Chinese Consulate across the bridge. We look for people to join us in peaceful protest." Then the man put down the megaphone and consulted with his group of supporters. Lesley found herself drawn in by what he had to say. She'd had no idea. She'd never really thought about political causes. The games of chess had started over. On one of them the black rook took the white knight. The chess players were focused on their games, they had a higher tolerance for chaos. Obviously they would not be joining the march. Pedestrians passed by on the sidewalk unsure what to make of the gathering force of about thirty people, half of which were from the various organizing committees. One pedestrian asked her if this was where they met for the tour of the Rodney Graham show. The group began to walk down the wide sidewalks of Howe, across from the Law Courts which stretched from Smithe to Nelson. The building was designed by a famous architect, full of sloping glass and waterfalls. The tallest building in the city loomed above, teardropped and duotone. There was a gruff voice in her ear as she walked. "Apparently the citizens refused to have a totally black building. Too sinister. So the developers compromised and made the top half clear glass." It was the Tibetan who had made

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the speech but now his megaphone hung by his side. Now that she could see him up close she thought him beautiful and strong. "Oh. Really? I didn't know." "That's the nature of compromise. I'm Lobsang. Thanks for joining our march." "I'm Lesley. Well, you said some interesting things. Pretty shocking really. And I was kind of heading that way anyway." "We're pretty disappointed with the turnout. We advertised but we were hoping more people would pass by and want to get involved. Like you. I can't believe people just sit there and play chess all day when there is so much terror happening in the world." "Well, I have my walking shoes on." "Great," he smiled. Then the chanting became louder, fighting with the traffic noise, because they were under the window of a Supreme Court judge with some influence. Lesley felt uncomfortable chanting slogans she'd never heard until ten minutes ago. She stood behind the crowd. There was a moving van in the lane with the words Two Small Men With Big Hearts Moving Company. The store across the street from the Law Courts was called Law Presents and sold mugs with pithy lawyer jokes on them. A man carrying a plastic garbage bag over his shoulder tried to push through the crowd blocking the sidewalk. His beard was matted and grey. The cans inside the bag rattled in time to his rendition of "Get Back" by The Beatles. The protesters parted to let the man through. One even gave him the can of pop she was drinking. "There's a sip left," she said politely.

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When no one came to the window the group continued southbound on Howe, led by Lobsang. After passing innocuous 28-storey apartment buildings, hotels and the Cinematheque, they lost a few followers to Panama Jack's pub. Lobsang looked disappointed but then saw Lesley and smiled. "Free Tibet...Free Tibet...Free Tibet..." chanted what was left of the crowd, some even throwing their fists into the air. Lobsang dropped back to talk to her again. "Having fun?" "Well, I've never been in a protest march before. It's kind of fun, I guess. I'm not used to making a scene and have everyone stare at me." "That's what conviction brings." "I guess." They turned left on Davie and headed to Granville where the porno shops and strip clubs lay. On the corner was the Two Parrots pub with its neon sign. Early Mornings...Later Nights. They were coming to the bridge. The group split onto opposite sides of the street so that they wouldn't bottleneck on the thin pedestrian bridge. Lesley followed Lobsang across the street. From there she had a good view of The Cecil Hotel in the pink hues of the setting sun. "See that place?" she asked Lobsang who was unusually quiet now considering he had been leading the group a few moments ago. "The Cecil?" "Yeah. I went there once. With my brother and his stupid friends. It was one of the only places in the city where they could drink underage without being carded."

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"Oh my." She wondered if she should be revealing this to him, a total stranger, but there was something about his face that made her feel comfortable. "I was worried about my brother and offered to go with him. He didn't want me to but he was worried I'd bust him. So he and his buddies go to The Cecil to watch the Tyson fight. The place is packed and the waitress gets us beers. A big screen TV was the centre of attention. There was a woman at the bar next to me wearing a pink leather cowboy outfit. I thought her outfit was a little strange in a place like this. Filled with bloodthirsty men. The second the fight was over the screen went dead, and this woman at the bar beside me gets up onstage. Music begins to blare and this woman begins to dance and strip. The Cecil is a strip club! My brother almost died with shame." "As a pacifist I don't approve of professional boxing." "Of course. As a woman I don't approve of strippers." They laughed. They were on the Granville Street bridge now. Down below was a village of construction, unfinished skyscrapers were everywhere like skeletons. Cement trucks, detritus. The sky was going pink behind the mini-storage. Below, in False Creek, a rowing team practiced. The perpetually snow-capped Mt. Baker made a rare appearance on the horizon. On the bridge the traffic was menacing. She held on to the metal railing for support but it vibrated from the weight of the trucks. "Is something the matter?" asked Lobsang. "I'm just a teensy bit afraid of heights."

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"Would it help to hold my hand?" "That's very gentlemanly of you, but I'll be okay." There was a bus stalled in the middle of the bridge. The harried bus driver, who was wearing an orange neon vest, tried to direct the traffic. The sun set through the bus windows. The cable that supplied the bus with power hung limply down in an inanimate squiggle. An orange pylon marked the live end on the pedestrian path and the marchers all carefully stepped over it. A large truck with a giant spool of cable pulled up beside the bus and two women wearing hard hats and similar vests got out carrying SLOW signs. The bus driver yelled out in glee, so that all the marchers could hear, "All right! The cavalry is here!" After the bridge, all the bus passengers were waiting at another bus stop, annoyed. The two crowds of people met uncomfortably but then divided. A woman carried a toy dog that wore a sweater. Beyond Broadway there were coffee shops, galleries, and upscale clothing stores. Crosswalks beeped for the deaf. The remnants of the old neighbourhood could be read in the neon signs. The Stanley Theatre, The Normandy Restaurant, Pfaff. There were renovations taking place to a "heritage" building but the only thing being saved was the brick facade. At 16th and Granville, the Chinese Consulate loomed above. The group stopped on the sidewalk out front and resumed their chants, but now they had an object at which to wave their fists. Lesley stood on the sidewalk feeling uncomfortable. Lobsang went to greet other protesters who had arranged to meet them here. She felt strange. Directionless. She looked back on the street corner, at the

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web of wires and lights, and realized that she had not been to this corner since her mother's accident. Not since she and her brother had laid a wreath of flowers at the spot. She had no idea that these trees, hedges, and fences hid a building of such controversy. For her the meaning of the corner began to evolve. A shy Tibetan woman came forward, and stood with her scarred face practically between the bars of the iron gate. She took the megaphone from Lobsang's hand and spoke into it, "I object to the fact that I must list China as my place of birth in my passport. I will now burn my passport in front of this Consulate in protest." At these words the woman took out a passport and a lighter and set it aflame. There were cheers. After twenty minutes of chanting along outside the Consulate with no response, Lesley decided to move on. She said goodbye to Lobsang. "If you give me your phone number I can send you some literature. We put out a newsletter." "Sure." She tried to determine if this was a pick-up line but Lobsang said everything with such earnestness and conviction that she had no clue. Lesley wrote the number on the back of his hand hoping he would call.

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At the Piscine Shubert, safely indoors, the lifeguards stare blankly ahead. I am the only one swimming today. I swim my laps alone, three sets of eyes trained on me. They are being paid to observe me, to analyze my strokes: they wait for me to make a mistake. The woman on the high chair with the pole is named Marie-Claude. I know this because I interviewed her for the documentary. She is a thin twenty-something with powerful shoulders and long black hair always up in a ponytail. Her English is better than my French. She has a scar, about four inches long, running horizontally across her neck. It looks too clinical and straight to be the result of a slit throat and too long to be from a tracheotomy. After a preliminary interview I suggested to the director that we record Marie-Claude talking about her lifeguarding experiences. How long has she been working at this pool, what are her long-term goals? She usually wears a T-shirt over her requisite red swimsuit. When the pool is full and she is busy with the kids in the shallow end, I manage to time my strokes so that I get a glimpse of her every time I breathe. But today I have her gaze all to myself. From her lifeguard perch she looks down on my hairy back, the chlorinated water gliding over the remnants of moles. At one point I decide to descend to the bottom of the pool and see how long I can hold my breath. How long before Marie-Claude notices that I haven't come up for air. How did she get that scar? From the bottom of the pool everything glows amniotic. Marie-Claude was very nervous when I interviewed her. The cameraman set up at the shallow end of the Piscine

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Shubert and Marie-Claude stood against the tile wall with the words Pen Profond behind her. She spoke in halting English about wanting to help people. Before editing the tape at the office I made myself a copy to take home. I labeled it MCwith a red Sharpie. I knew that in the official edited version of the documentary Marie-Claude would only take up a few seconds of screen time. I wanted to have more of her, to keep her close to me, ready to leap to my aid in a time of need. When I watched the tape at home, it struck me that Marie-Claude did not have her hair in a ponytail. Although she agreed to be interviewed, and even signed a waiver, she must have wanted to hide her face and scar from the camera. In my head I translated the words on the wall behind her, which were intended to mean Shallow, as "A Little Profound." After my solo swim I emerge from the pool tired. I ran out of air after what seemed to be hours. I cast a glance at Marie-Claude, who is ignoring me from her high perch. In the interview she mentioned that she wanted to go to medical school but her parents could not afford to send her. She kept pushing her hair back with her hand and I noticed she had a thumb ring. She complained that the sunscreen being pulled off the swimmers' bodies would clog the drainage system of the pool. That's how she said it. Being "pulled off." When I asked how she got the scar, (was it in the heat of duty?) she blushed and made me turn off the camera. In the change room a man and his young daughter, too young to be in the woman's side by herself, are changing

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to enter the pool. Her father is pink and hairless. I towel off and open my locker. The little girl looks up at my naked body, physically gasps, then stares, and I awkwardly fumble my pants on. I feel like Gorgilla, the missing link. When I lumber down the street children gape and women scream, "My God. It's the beast that walks like a man. He's a living behemoth!" At home I slip the seven-minute, unedited footage of MarieClaude into the VCR. I keep the TV on mute and watch her self-consciously hiding behind her hair. Every few seconds she looks directly into the camera with her brown eyes. I freeze the frame, amazed by the depth of that brown. A brown I could drown in. A little bit profound. I keep the frame paused on the TV, her head glowing in the corner of the room like a framed photo of an absent granddaughter on the mantelpiece of an elderly man. Before I go to bed I resume the tape and rewind, resume and rewind, holding the remote control in one hand, practicing my stroke.

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I enter the office of Dr. E. Lee, my Montreal dermatologist. I've been coming to him for years. The receptionist is busy on the phone but indicates that I should sit down. It's all very clinical to me. There are French and English magazines in the waiting room. Mostly travel, fashion, and cycling. After a few minutes I am called into his small office. His medical degrees line one wall, competing with pictures of his kids. I think of Marie-Claude the lifeguard and how I could steal one of these degrees for her. But if I know her, she would want to earn it. "So, you're here today for..." says Dr. Lee, a round, jovial bald man with oversized glasses. "Moles," I say. "The usual check-up?" "Yes, it's been a couple of years. I shouldn't have let it go on this long." He checks his files and reads to me the date of my last appointment, two years earlier. "Anything new as far as you know?" "Not that I can tell, no." I want him to find the blotch I have been obsessing over. I want to see if he will question its motives. "And your sister? Lesley? She had a little problem as I recall..." "Yes. There's a genetic propensity there. I had a colonoscopy recently because of what happened to my aunt." "Oh really?" Dr. Lee's eyes light up behind his glasses. "I have to have one next week. How uncomfortable is it?" "The exam was uncomfortable," I say, "but the colonoscopy itself — well they pump you full of drugs so

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you're just lying there flying on morphine." Dr. Lee laughs at this. More of a chortle really. I feel suddenly as if our roles have reversed. I am giving advice to this man, a caring father, a man with much schooling, about being stoned out of my mind and having a six foot rubber snake with a video camera on the end shoved up my ass. "You watch the whole thing on the TV screen." "Do you get a copy of the tape?" He is genuinely interested in this. "I think they can take stills, but it's too expensive for the hospital to go around taping everything." "Of course." Dr. Lee is familiar with the bureaucracy of hospitals. "It's a good thing to do. The test is the cure." Getting back to my moles now. "I've had about twelve removed, two of them were 'changing,' as they say." "So it says in your file." Dr. Lee examines me. He looks over my back with a magnifying glass. "Anything down below?" I drop my pants and he checks under my testicles. I point out the blotch which he seems to be ignoring. "What about this one?" "Well, it's not your best. The rest of your moles I'd give you a 99 out of 100. But this one I'd only give you a 90." Obviously he spent many years in school, he is grading my moles. "That white little blotch wasn't there before." "It's dysplastic," he says with complete certainty. With these words I immediately want it out. The mole becomes like a bee I want to escape before it stings me. The

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offending spot begins to burn into me and all I can think of is its excision. I become The Thing That Frets. "Were you ever burned in the sun as a child?" "A few times. No more than any other kid." Dr. Lee starts to tell me a story. "The gentleman before you worked on a farm. He worked in the sun with his shirt off all the time. Those farm kids, you know they ride the thresher..." But I can't concentrate. "So if this was to come out, would you do it or would I have to get an appointment at the hospital?" "Sure, piece of cake. I could put you on the table right now. But you'll have a little scar." "That's fine." "It's a twenty dollar fee for the needle." This surprises me. This talk of monetary exchange. And I thought we were getting along so well. "That's fine." Dr. Lee changes the paper on the examining table. Fresh pages. I get up on the table with my shirt off and he prepares a needle. "Lie on your side and face the wall please." I do as he asks, the paper creasing below me. "So dysplastic means..." "It's unstable." "So it won't 100% change?" "Oh, no. Your good moles have a 1 in 10 million chance of changing. This one is 1 in 1000. When they're unstable they are dysplastic, the next stage is..." The phone rings in his office. I am startled because I had assumed the receptionist would handle all the calls. Dr. Lee looks at me, then the phone. I can tell he is debating

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whether he should answer it. 'Just a second." He picks up the phone. "Hello? Yes. Well, I'm with a patient. Perhaps. Yes. Fine, but you shouldn't call here. I'll speak to you at the next meeting. Goodbye." He hangs up the phone and returns to work as if nothing odd had transpired. He takes a syringe out of a plastic wrapper, inserts the needle into a small glass vial and draws the anaesthetic into the syringe. As he jabs the needle into the area next to the offending blotch with surprising sensitivity he asks, "Do you have a driver's license?" This question also takes me by surprise. The fluorescent lights hum above us. "Yes. But I don't have a car." I took the Metro here. "It says in your file that you are originally from Vancouver." "Yes." Where is Dr. Lee going with this line of questioning? But he says nothing more. He takes a scalpel to my body as I watch. Although he does not have the hands of a surgeon he does a respectable job. The cut is so small it doesn't even require stitching. When he is finished, mere seconds later, he says, "Ta-da," like a magician with a rabbit. He puts the bit of tissue into a small test tube, labels it, presumably with my name, and calls in the receptionist. He hands the vial to her. "Can you take care of this, please Jane?" The receptionist nods her head, takes the labeled vial with efficiency and disappears. The vial is a question mark leaving the room. Before I leave Dr. Lee asks me, "Are you between cars, or do you not approve of them on principle?"

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What an odd question for a dermatologist. "I don't need one in the city." "Of course, of course. But what about the environment?" "Well, I guess they are pretty harmful. My sister refuses to drive a car. I had to drive her everywhere." I'm not sure why I'm telling him this other than the fact that his face induces trust, and because we've already shared the intimate details of anal probing. "Really?" He is genuinely intrigued. "Why is that?" "Well, it's about our mother. She had an accident..." "Say no more. I understand how cars can ruin people's lives. I'll have Jane call you if the tests reveal anything significant." "Thanks, Dr Lee," I say. The local anaesthetic is already wearing off. I clutch the area of my body where it hurts. Instinct. There is a child in the waiting room with a purple blotch on her face. A man with acne scars. I leave the dermatologist's office fully expecting to hear from Dr. Lee again.

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At the outdoor pool I swim with the blind. Tracey and I play tag but I am nasty and swim to the deep end where I know she can't see me without her glasses. She shades her eyes from the sun and slowly turns, looking for my wet head. Every time she turns full circle, to look in my direction, I dunk my head. Underwater there are the legs of teenagers, gangly, awkward, flailing through the weight of the chemical water. The sun reflects their skin until it glows. My breath runs out and I emerge. She is still looking for me. On the cement near the fence there is a teenage girl, her hips thrust forward, her dark hair wrapped around her neck like the boys around her finger. She sits in her bikini on a lawn chair with a pimply boy. She sits in his lap, his hands on her bare skin. He can't believe his luck and tries to conceal his erection. Another boy, a towel around his shoulders, sits at the end of the lawn chair trying to make conversation. The couple begin to kiss awkwardly, their mouths grotesque, unpracticed. The boy at the end of the chair looks away, looks to the pool, the fluidity of the water. He looks to me with a pained expression that I've seen before. He so obviously wants her for himself. I want to grab him by the ends of that towel and pull him away slowly. I want to tell him that in a few years he will only be able to find her by searching the Internet for her name. The lifeguard, white zinc on her nose, asks me why I still have my shirt on. The phrase malade au dos comes to mind but I know it's not what I mean. Strolling behind her someone dressed as Tony the Tiger, orange tail in the air, passes out small boxes of Frosted Flakes. Just then a hand grabs my ankle underwater. Tracey emerges from the blue skin of the

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surface of the pool. She is in front of me smiling, her hair dripping in her eyes. "You're it," she says. As I am changing at the pool a naked man with a basketball stomach and black toenails begins to cough. It is phlegm-filled but not desperate. He tries to change into his street clothes but the cough catches and pulls on his throat, relentless. I open my locker, methodically dress, toweling off my feet. At a break in his coughing fit he looks up at me, water dripping in his eyes and says, "Mera'pour la tdche de ma bouche" which I translate in my head as, "Thanks for the stain on my mouth." I am confused. Is this some sort of apology for his smoking habit? Another hairless naked man hums loudly and swings his arms in windmills in front of the mirror. Back from the pool, hair still wet, the scent of chlorine fills my apartment. Before I can hang up my wet towel and bathing suit there is a knock at the door. I open it to a young woman with a pierced nose and black hair poorly dyed purple. She begins to speak quickly in French, rushing her words, as if she has used the same spiel many times. She holds a clipboard so I ask if she is here for a sondage. When she realizes I don't understand she grows flustered. She hunts her brain for words in English but they are absent. "No," is the only one she can find. She hugs herself with the clipboard. I ask if she works for a political party, is she here about an election? No. She grows increasingly frustrated by the language gap. Finally she finds the

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words in English and gains the courage to use them, "Do...you...want...a...massage?" she asks looking me in the eye, completely serious. "JVo, merd? I manage to say even though the swim has left my muscles tired and I'd welcome a massage under different circumstances. I close the door and look out the peephole. She stands on my welcome mat for a few seconds. She makes a mark on her clipboard. She raises her finger to ring my neighbour's bell but she is obviously concerned that he might not speak French either. Her face tells the story of her discomfort. She runs down the stairs.

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The cure has become the enemy. Sunscreen above a certain intensity has been banned in some countries because the chemicals in it cause deep-tissue skin cancer. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Who will avenge those that have died from the heat wave? The old and the sick sweat to death, unable to keep up in the survival of the fittest, the weakest humans in the herd are being culled off. "It's not the heat," they say on their deathbeds, "it's the humidity." The headlines continue to be dominated by weather. In Las Vegas they build fake beaches, complete with salt water and wave machines. The hotel patrons lounge and slather on their legally prescribed sunscreen, crammed into a small patch of sand shipped in from California, even though there is desert all around. The handicapped soak in the sun, conventioneers enjoy themselves for the first time in years. One can't help but be reminded of a shanty town on the edge of civilization, crawling with human waste. When Japanese tourists are interviewed they declare in unison, "It is artificial, that is why we like it."

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I ask Tracey if she wants to go to an art show at the formerly abandoned pool. "Is this considered a swim date?" she asks. "It's a dry date." "Sure." When we meet at the corner across from the pool we casually blend in with a tour group. There is a disheveled man outside the dep drinking a king can and blurting obscenities in French. The tour guide speaks a much more comprehensible French and I can follow along enough to understand that she is talking about the history of the pool, a story about a ten dollar reward for the return of a horse. How there were a lack of architects in 1910. And now someone is trying to save it from developers. Tracey is lost. Not linguistically but physically. She must have gone inside to check out the show. The tour guide tells the amassing crowd that this pool was built by an entrepreneurial plumber named Napoleon Turcott and was not a city project at all. Why haven't we interviewed this woman for the documentary? I imagine filming her standing underneath the pool's huge circular window, the stone wall behind her white with pigeon droppings. Inside Tracey grabs my arm and hisses in my ear, "I thought you were taking me out. Looks like it's work to me." She seems kind of pissed. "I didn't know there would be a tour. Anyway I could barely understand what she was saying." "I needed to get away from that drunk guy." "Well, we're here so let's look at the aaaaaaaaaht." She

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smiles. Her crow's feet are delicious. I push aside a black curtain to reveal the open space of the drained pool. There are ropes around the edge so no one can fall in. The circular window at one end lets in the sun. Artist types are milling about in the bottom of the pool looking at the hundreds of identical small wooden boats at their feet, careful not to step on any. At the other end of the pool is a heaping mound of high-heeled shoes, all colours and sizes, but all with high heels. "I don't get it," says Tracey. "That's not the point. It's aaaaaaaaaht." "You're a funny man." "I try to keep up." On the gritty tiled walls around the perimeter of the pool hang large canvases of fish. At the end, opposite the circular window, a video is being projected which takes up the entire wall. Waves lap the shore in what appears to be a quiet beach scene. The silhouettes of the observers meld with the video image, their dark clothes absorbing the light. As we wander the perimeter of the pool, afraid to enter the depths, I notice that on the video the tide appears to be slowly coming in. "A little too literal, doncha think?" says Tracey. I don't answer because I've just noticed one of the silhouettes watching the video. She wears her white Sauvateur T-shirt so recognizing her is easy. I wonder if the shirt is part of the show. Whether it is ironic. Or perhaps she never takes it off. "Do you know her?" Tracey asks. "What? Oh yeah. Marie-Claude. One of the lifeguards

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I interviewed for the documentary." "I think she's one of the artists." "You think?" "Look how the other people are congratulating her." "I wish I had a film crew here. This would be perfect." Tracey frowns. Her crow's feet are now fish hooks. "What's the matter with you?" she says dryly. Tracey storms away, back to the black curtain. Before she can part it, however, the tour group comes pouring in, the guide still in mid-sentence. "Tracey, wait." But she is already gone. I try and follow but am blocked by the tour group, their arms jaggedly removing scarves and coats. Getting past them is like pushing back the tide. The next day on set I tell the documentary producer about the art show and the plumber. He doesn't seem to recognize the irony. He is serious, too preoccupied by larger matters. "Last night a computer virus wiped the tapes," he says. "What do you mean?" "There's no backup. We're shutting down. Sorry." The finality of his statement hits me with a soft thud. More like a cushion than a hammer, but a thud nonetheless.

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I wait for the report from Dr. Lee. I grow increasingly despairing. I try to avoid newspapers for a few days. But I can't help scanning the headlines whenever I spend money. What little money I am able to acquire. Something seems to be happening in the world, something out of my control. I continue to apply Polysporin and Band-Aids to my rapidly healing body. Whenever I scratch my head or rub the back of my throbbing neck to relieve tightened muscles I suspect new lumps. I obsessively look myself over in the shower in disgust. The phone rings as I get out of the shower. It is Dr. Lee. I find it strange that he would be calling me himself and not his receptionist. And that he would call after office hours. He sounds apologetic, which I take as a bad sign. It can only mean bad news. "I should tell you that we found nothing wrong with that mole I removed. The lab results were negative." "Negative is good, right." Dr. Lee laughs into the phone. He sounds like a jovial old grandfather remembering the good old days when floods could be kept under control. "Yes. Negative is good. That's not why I am calling." "Oh?" "If you don't mind me asking, how well do you know the streets of Vancouver?" "I used to drive a cab there." "Really?" Dr. Lee sounds very impressed. "Why do you ask?" "You must think I am acting out of character with these

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questions, but I assure you there is a method to my madness. I may have a job for you. But we can't discuss it over the phone."

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The next day I meet Dr. Lee at the outdoor pool. It was my idea, I wanted somewhere public. I get there early and set up on a bench outside the gate with a newspaper. It is as if the world were to end tomorrow. The entire paper is rilled with anomalous weather, which is becoming normal in its eccentricities. Icebergs in the English Channel, blackouts in LA, ice storms in Brazil, whole cities under water. The plague narratives begin on page two. Out of the corner of my eye I catch Marie-Claude in street clothes entering the change room. The city lifeguards must be on a rotating schedule. Somehow, seeing her here makes me feel more at ease. I am a little nervous about meeting Dr. Lee. I am unsure what to expect. Marie-Claude takes her place on the raised lifeguard chair. She wears wraparound sunglasses. From behind them her eyes scan the pool, the detritus from the surrounding trees sticks to the bodies. The water magnifies the sun's rays. I watch from my bench, wearing the best sunscreen available: clothing. Marie-Claude suddenly notices me, of this there is no doubt. She scowls at me before resuming her vigilant duties. From behind me I hear breathing. I turn on the bench to see Dr. Lee standing there in oversized sunglasses and a long coat which seems inappropriate for the weather. He extends his hand, "Thank you for coming." "No problem." "An unusual choice to meet here, at the outdoor pool. I should think you'd avoid places like this." "I do." I don't want to tell Dr. Lee that I chose this location for that exact reason, to keep him off guard, to make

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him question my character. Marie-Claude being here is an unexpected coincidence. Dr. Lee sits on the bench beside me. We watch the people tanning on the other side of the chain-link fence. The children are being told to curb their enthusiasm. At the outdoor pool shade is a crime. There are large pyramid-shaped umbrellas erected above the concrete, creating shade. The square shadows remain devoid of towels, starved for attention. A chubby young girl in a one-piece and pink goggles springs from the diving board, holding her nose. Dr. Lee winces at the sight of so much exposed flesh. I'm sure he can't help scanning the bodies of the swimmers, looking for telltale blemishes. This was exactly my strategy. "I'll cut right to the chase. You must be wondering why I've asked you to meet me." "Yes. I am." "Well, I belong to a group called DAGWOOD. You've probably never heard of us. If you have then we aren't doing a very good job." "Dagwood? Like the Blondie character?" "No, no." Dr. Lee laughs. He is definitely a jovial character. "Dermatologists Against Global Warming and Oncologists Opposing Dams. It makes a good acronym." Marie-Claude yells at some kids who are diving into the shallow end. I can't understand what she says but marvel at her authority. "What does this group have to do with me?" I ask. "You were raised in Vancouver, correct?" "Yes. So?"

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"Specifically the West Side of Vancouver, correct?" "Yes," I say, trying to sound irritated enough to encourage him to get to his point. "Well, as a group we have boycotted the auto industry." Dr. Lee stops talking and looks to the pool. Marie-Claude is chastising the chubby girl for not waiting her turn. There are the sounds of whistles. "The long and the short of it is that we need a driver." "A driver?" "Yes. We know you drove a cab. Another point in your favour. You need a perfect driving record for that. Am I correct?" "Well...sure. But what do you need a driver for?" Dr. Lee pauses and thinks deeply to himself. "You must understand that this is a very sensitive matter for my colleagues and me. Perhaps you could attend a meeting?" "I don't know. I'd rather not get involved to tell you the truth." "I was afraid you'd say that. I was hoping that it would not come to this but we analyzed the tissue from that mole I removed." I'd forgotten all about the mole. I am a little taken aback that he would mention it now. "I lied to you before. I'm sorry to say that it is changing and unfortunately we didn't get all of it." "What?" "Yes, I need to go back and get more tissue. Dig deeper." I want it out immediately. If I had a rusty butter knife on me I would give it to him and tell him to proceed. "When can I come in?" "After you attend the meeting."

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"What? Isn't that blackmail? Or at the very least against some oath you took?" "And don't think you can get another dermatologist to do it for you. DAGWOOD is a close group. We talk." I consider taking it out myself, but I wouldn't know how deep to cut, and then a professional would still need to analyze it. He has me over a barrel. "When's the meeting?" I say, resigned to the facts. What harm could attending a meeting bring? At that moment Marie-Claude leaps from the lifeguard chair, her ponytail bouncing as she sprints across the concrete. She rips off her white t-shirt revealing her red one piece. She flies into the air like a superhero, diving into the crowded pool. The splash from the chemical water almost reaches my feet.

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Lesley began to edit the Tibetan Review. It was a cheap publication, printed on cheap paper, but Lobsang had asked and she couldn't refuse. He'd suffered so much. The articles were written in terrible English, which wasn't surprising since they were mostly from refugees. She had had no idea. She was happy to help and it meant getting closer to Lobsang. They didn't actually go on any dates, not to a restaurant, not to a movie. But they met every week at a cafe on 4th, just up from Kits beach, to talk about the next issue. Her life became filled with issues. Or rather just one. But the cause was wide-ranging. Lobsang gave her a postcard of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and she put it on her fridge, next to the only photograph she had of her mother. It featured her sitting on the beach in an oversized hat, smiling. Every week Lobsang would patiently listen to Lesley correct his grammar. He would sip his tea until she was done. Then he would grow agitated with her, try to make her understand the larger issue inherent in the article. "Yes, but the grammar is still wrong." "You are letting the regulations interfere with your understanding." "You asked me to edit, so that's what I'm doing." "I'm sorry," he would always say. "Of course." He took Lesley to more rallies where she was the only white person, they had momos at his aunt's house, but he never tried to kiss her. He asked her to travel with him to Ottawa where they were to meet with the prime minister. "The Dalai Lama must be allowed to visit this country as a state leader as

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well as a religious one," he said. "I don't think I can go." "But why? A chance to meet the leader of your country?" "It's your country too," she reminded him. "Of course." She was beginning to resent this phrase he always used to shut down conversation. Of course. As if he were always entitled to the final word. "I'm tired of being the token white chick," Lesley said with finality. Lobsang looked at her as if she had slapped his aunt in the face. He silently drank his tea. "Of course," was all he said. Then he paid the bill and left the cafe. The Tibetan Review was riddled with typos for the next few months. She let her subscription expire but she kept the postcard of the Dalai Lama on her fridge until it turned yellow. It was the least she could do. She discovered the mole soon after. It had definitely changed. She decided that she'd had enough with doctors and would take it out herself.

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The light-sensitive spotlight comes on at the Royal Victoria Hospital staff pool. Tracey knows about the stone wall in one corner that is crumbling, allowing access to the pool at night. She says she's done it before. I wonder with whom, but am afraid to ask. She's right, it is easy to get in, in fact there is a group of teenagers speaking French in the deep end already. They look up when we enter the grounds, we make eye contact through the dark, and give understated nods to indicate that we all understand each other. There is a line of locked bungalow-style changing rooms, a picnic table, a prefab vinyl shed and the empty lifeguard chair. The city is an afterthought due to the thick trees of the mountain that surround what's left of the fence. A distant skyscraper shoots up a circling beam of light into the sky, like a superhero's secret signal. Tracey starts to take off her shoes. I realize she is serious. She wants to go in. I wait until she has taken off her jeans before I make the choice to join her. My decision to join her is based on regret. I know that I'll be filled with it if I don't take the plunge. By the time I have my laces undone she is standing in her bra and panties. I glance over to the French teens who are laughing among themselves. They are even smoking a joint, careful not to get it wet as they pass it around. Tracey is beautiful despite the jaundiced glow of the spodight. I take my shirt off, exposing my hairy chest to the glorious dark. It is the first time in years that I've had my shirt off outside. Nothing can harm me now. Then Tracey does the unthinkable. I had assumed she would wear her bra and panties like a bikini, what's the difference

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really? But she takes them off. She looks up at me and smiles, standing completely naked. I have never seen her naked before. As she turns toward the shallow end she says, "C'mon, hurry up. I bet the water's warm." She runs to the edge of the pool even though the rules do not permit it. "Careful," is all I can say as she cannonballs, disappearing into the blackness of the water. There is a chorus of cheers emanating from the distance of the deep end. I leave on my underwear. I enter the pool slowly, climbing down the ladder, disappearing into the night.

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That night Tracey seems disgruntled when I say goodbye on the street corner. I give her the customary two cheek kiss. I search all night for DAGWOOD on the Internet but only come up with sandwiches. A man in a lab coat shows up at my door the next morning. He has a picture of The Dalai Lama pinned to his lapel. He says nothing but passes me an envelope. Inside there is a slip of paper which reads: Basement of the Royal Vic. Women s Pavilion. 8p.m.

Tonight.

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Pre-Crash Phase: I decide to cut through the park. The Medievalists impale each other with duct-taped sticks. The squirrels avoid the violence and prefer their own disorder. It is a warm evening, the sounds of construction are distant for now. There is an oompah band playing in the gazebo, expecting no return. Volleyball nets have been erected in the corner of the park. Sand has been shipped in. An artificial beach to serve the university ghetto. By cutting through the park I reach the back of the hospital parking lot. A family of raccoons have chosen this moment to make a run for it. The staff pool is not covered in police tape as if it had been a crime scene. The swimming infractions of the night before must have gone unnoticed. I check out the pool in the light of the evening and realize it is not set in the middle of trees but is exposed. Where did those trees come from last night? Were there any cameras? It is obvious where the entrance to the Women's Pavilion is because of the pregnant woman who gets out of a cab holding a breast pump like a raygun. It looks like a decrepit castle sitting on the slope at the base of the mountain. Stone and towers, wooden doors and views of the distant river. From the top floor you can turn your head out one window so that you have a perfect view of the football games in the stadium below. Smokers congregate. They turn their heads and blow their smoke away from the pregnant woma,n who feels the need to thank them for their courtesy. What have I ventured into? DAGWOOD? How absurd. As if Dr. Lee could be part of any real threat. The man is too jovial. He has all those degrees. Inside, a couple

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examines a sonogram, the traces of tears still fresh. But tears of joy or sadness? I ask the maintenance man how to get to the basement and he gives me a key. No questions asked. "You use it in the elevator," was all he said before walking down the hall, its white walls turning yellow, as if the building were in fact one giant diseased lung. In the elevator I put the key into a slot which is labeled Basement. I look at Tracey's watch. I don't wear one and had to borrow hers for the night. I told her it was for the alarm and I needed to get up early for an appointment. It is exactly 8:00 p.m. The elevator moves down slowly. At least I assume it is down. It's hard to tell without reference points. That's it. No reference points. That's how this whole incident feels. This elevator is taking ten minutes to go one floor. I look again at the watch. Still 8:00 p.m. In the basement the concrete is flaking. They could obviously benefit from my father's prowess with the substance. I enter a massive underground cavern, what looks like an ancient tomb. At the end of the cavern is a smiling Dr. Lee.

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Crash Phase: Dr. Lee wears a lab coat and holds a gavel in his hand. The other dermatologists and oncologists sit in rows in hardbacked chairs. They all wear lab coats with the letters DAGWOOD stenciled in blue letters on the back. I sit in the back row wearing shorts which expose my hairy legs, and sunglasses. It is unusually hot outside considering the season. I had hoped the sunglasses would make me disappear into the crowd but the fact that I am not wearing a lab coat makes me stand out immediately. The doctors all cast glances at me so I put away the sunglasses, thinking it might be rude to wear them. Although I have no understanding of protocol for a situation like this. Dr. Lee introduces me to the assembled crowd. I nod my head uncomfortably and the doctors in the row in front turn to shake my hand as if we were a congregation passing the peace. One of the doctors looks familiar. "How is Lesley?" he asks with a smile. "How do you know...?" "I'm Dr. Watt." "Ah yes...of course." He looks more gaunt than I remember. He's out of context here in Montreal but for me he becomes a reference point. "Welcome," he says. Dr. Lee becomes very serious, his demeanour is all business, his jovial character gone. He begins: "We all know why we are here. Finally we have a driver who can do the job. A trusted outsider. It is time to act. We have sat too long on the sidelines while the governments of all nations debate the obvious. Of course the planet is heating

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up. The proof is all around. Look at the headlines. We took oaths as doctors, all of us. We are expected to heal the sick and that sickness extends to us all. We need to act now or forever hold our peace." Dr. Lee's tone is making me nervous. This is more absurd than I could have imagined. Yet something about the group and their passion pulls me in. I have been guilty of lacking passion recently. Just ask Tracey. But soon. Soon I will tell her. Show her? No, tell first then show. I half expect the other doctors to speak in tongues, yelp in holy ecstasy. "The Songhua River Dam Project is being carried out amid storms of protest, but it is still being carried out. What can we do, you ask? As doctors all of us have seen the signs. The melanomas, the increase in overtime, the weak and the sick. The SRDP is destroying thousands of miles of arable land, it is displacing over a million people, all so that more energy can be produced, more pollution, more shame. But what can we do, you ask?" At this point Dr. Lee pauses for dramatic effect. There is a hush in the room. I can hear Dr. Watt's breathing. I remember the before and after photos in those magazines in his office. His face is like an after photo to me now. "What we can do is kidnap the Chinese Ambassador from the Consulate in Vancouver." Gasps from the assembled crowd. This is insane. It's as if the words coming from his mouth are incongruent with his body. I start to look for the cameras. Surely this is an elaborate joke. But there is no one in my life who cares enough to try and pull it off. Maybe Lesley, but I haven't seen her in years. "That's right," continues Dr. Lee. "We have insiders

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currently staking it out from an apartment across the street. It is the most accessible Chinese Consulate in the country. This young man who joins us today has agreed to be our driver since none of us will set foot in a vehicle. He knows the area well." At this point Dr. Watt turns to me and smiles complicitly. He gives me the thumbs up. I want to remind Dr. Lee that I have not committed to anything yet but now does not appear to be the right time to bring it up. "Who will volunteer to assist this man in our goal?" Many hands shoot up and Dr. Lee smiles. "Ah yes, Dr. Watt. I know you are a loyal soldier for the cause." The other hands lower in silent disappointment. "We have a mole in an architect's office who has smuggled us the plans. We know how to get in undetected. We know every move the Ambassador makes." A voice comes from the assembled lab coats. "Dr. Lee. We are all men of science here. I'm sure we can make a logical plan to kidnap the Ambassador. But once we have him, what do we do with him? What are the consequences of the experiment? What are the expected results?" "We will hold him until our demands are met." "And what are those demands?" "That the government of China cease all construction on the Songhua River Dam Project. The days of the Tennessee Valley Authority and FDR's make-work project are over. We are still living with the consequences of the collection of dams constructed during the Depression. Mistakes were made for the sake of employment. The geomorphologists and the engineers could never agree. But today those engineers are filled with regret, their dams

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ancient concrete mausoleums. Behind the scenes DAGWOOD has created enough of an influence to cause a shift in the paradigm here in North America. Dams are being blown up everywhere, rivers reverting to normal. Yet the huge SRDP continues unabated." I imagine dynamite causing tons of concrete to fly through the air and water rushing through. The stone walls of this cavern collapse and we all drown from the water in the staff pool. Dr. Lee continues, "For security reasons only a few members will be privy to the details of the plan. But we all need to be united in the action." At this point there is a group cheer. The doctors begin to chant a song in Latin. Its tone is more like a frat boy drinking song than a religious hymn. I notice the bald spot on the back of Dr. Watt's head turn a darker shade of pink. After the meeting I am unsure what is expected of me. Many of the doctors come and shake my hand before departing. They remove their lab coats and put on bike helmets before walking out into the street. There is a plethora of expensive bicycles chained to a fence. Dr. Lee passes me an airplane ticket to Vancouver. It is dated for next week. Although it is first class, it is only one way.

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Back at Tracey's cottage in the Townships. Pastoral return. We listen to the Beasties and wash the dishes with water from the pond because the pipe broke again. I wonder out loud where the Scrabble board has gone, what happened to her obsession? "I'm so over that," she says. She looks amazing with her hair up. It exposes a raised mole on the back of her neck of which she may be unaware, unless she once saw her hairdresser recoil suddenly in the mirror. But to me the hair-sprouting growth is beautiful and I welcome any occasion to have it on view. If it has hair it must be healthy. As she dries the wine glasses she asks me why I didn't make a move on her back at the pool; she was naked after all. "What?" I am surprised by her question. "There were those other people there." "So what? They were a bunch of kids getting stoned. Don't you find me attractive?" The night outside the window is black and small creatures are trying to get in at the light. "Sure... I mean...of course I do...But I couldn't inflict that on anyone." She laughs but I hadn't intended the comment as a joke. The tension in the room breaks with her laugh, however, as if I had dropped a plate. Water from the broken pipe finds the low spots on the uneven kitchen floor and we try to avoid the puddles all night. Tracey hangs her wet socks on the lawn chair next to the pond even though it is dark. The morning sun will heat them up enough to be dry when she gets out of bed. I

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watch her through the screen of the kitchen window, then go back to the dish washing. All the plates are mismatched, and the cups need to be emptied of mouse droppings every time we come here. Should I tell her about DAGWOOD? Confide in someone? The whole thing just sounds too farfetched, but I have a ticket and will be leaving. What if she misinterprets my lack of intimacy? When I look up again, she is gone. I decide to go searching for her, maybe I should try and kiss her. Try not to have regrets for a change. Maybe she can make the decision for me. I leave the cottage and shut the screen door behind me. As I stand next to the woodpile and the empty jerry cans I am overwhelmed by bugs. Mosquitoes, blackflies, and the dragon flies eating them both. I wander out toward the barn, away from the light. The bugs go ping ping against the bare bulb. There is a late summer moon: orange, large, and low in the sky. I let my eyes adjust to the shadows from the moonlight. There are quick and distant flashes of light. Another storm is on the horizon. Following a deer path through the goldenrod and burrs I come to the overgrown clearing where the barn slumps. There is the noise of night birds and insects. Then I hear a clicking sound, almost animal, but more of an imitation of an animal than the animal itself. Across the clearing I see a bobbing light. Tracey is carrying a candle lantern. "C'mon little guy. Tsk tsk...Come down from there." Her silhouette stops under the shadow of a tree, the undersides of the leaves are illuminated. She leans her body, holding the light in front of her, as if straining to see

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something. Her face is a ship's prow, rounded cheeks and pointy nose, her hair now a rope down her back. "C'mon down little guy..." Tracey is in a Caravaggio painting. I watch her from the deer path, mesmerized. Eventually she gives up her coaxing and walks back across the pasture. I wait ten minutes, during which time there are four flashes of light in the distance, then I approach the tree. I strain my eyes. In the crook of two branches a small animal is moving and giving off desperate squeaks. It looks to me like a porcupine. I remember picking quills from the face of a dog and I instinctively back away from the tree. In doing so I bump my head on a branch and there is an applause of thuds on the ground all around me. Apples. Back in the cottage Tracey removes the white chunks of apple flesh which have caught in my three-day beard. It is an intimate gesture. I lean in. I will never find a better moment for this. I am leaving for Vancouver in a few days and when I leave I must have no regrets. Tracey turns her head away from me. "It's too late now," is what she says.

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The date of my flight to Vancouver is fast approaching. I'm still unsure if I am committed to this group's plan. I decide to go to Dr. Lee's office to confront him. I don't even make an appointment. On the way, while riding the Metro, I try to get angry. I'm being blackmailed after all. But all I can concentrate on are those words she said. It's too late now. Too late to turn back? In the waiting room a man wears a short-sleeved shirt, exposing a fresh burn on his arm. Jane the receptionist is not surprised to see me. "He'll just be a minute," she says. I have no choice but to sit down, deflated. Although I am unsure of what I thought I was going to do. Throw something? My eyes try to avoid the man's arm. I scan the back of the newspaper he's reading. Heat Wave. Car Crash. Hurricane. Flood. Earthquake. Epidemic. And of course, Crossword. Boxes of potential. A scorecard for the bored. Finally my name is called and Dr. Lee welcomes me into the back room of his office. In this room there are no degrees hanging on the wall, no posters of what to watch out for. No warnings. Here in the back room there is only an old fashioned telephone sitting on a low table and two chairs. "Come on in. Welcome." We sit in the chairs. The phone remains silent. "Now Dr. Lee, I've come for my test results." "I'm sorry son, I can't reveal that information." "But you are essentially blackmailing me." "Call it what you will.' "But why shouldn't I just call the cops? Tell them about

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this ridiculous DAGWOOD venture you've got going on. I'm not really convinced you are serious. Are you seriously considering kidnapping someone?" "Not someone. The Chinese Ambassador. And you will not tell the police." "What makes you think so?" "I chose you for a reason, my son." "Don't call me that." "You will not tell the police because you are enjoying the intrigue." I'm taken aback. "What?" "It's exciting for you. Besides, you sympathize with our cause." "I'm still not sure what that is." "Health, of course." "So you're kidnapping in the name of health." "Here's a camera. Do you know how to use it?" Dr. Lee passes me a cheap digital camera. The label says it is made in Singapore. "Sure. I mean, I guess I do...but what has a camera got to do with..." "Take this. When you get to Vancouver survey the area around the Consulate and take some pictures. We expect you to e-mail them back here before receiving further instructions. Be sure to get a shot of the front entrance. We cannot proceed until you have done this so I expect those pictures very quickly after you touch down." The way Dr. Lee says "touch down" is paternal. He is genuinely dedicated to the cause. This is no joke. And then the phone in the middle of the room rings. The noise

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makes me jump. "I need to take this," says Dr. Lee and he stands up. The phone continues to ring. He takes me by the elbow and escorts me back into the waiting room. The phone still rings in the back room. 'Jane, set this man up with another appointment to get his moles checked. Six months perhaps. Thanks." Dr. Lee disappears to answer the phone, leaving me with the receptionist looking over her appointment book for some blank space, and a burned man hunting for the words for things.

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Back to the pool where I do my best thinking. The elastic waistband in my bathing suit breaks due to the years of abuse from the chlorine. I am forced to do the sidestroke but use one hand to hold up my suit. I worry I will develop a cramp. Marie-Claude is not at her station. It is the elderly woman on duty. I have no idea how her fragile frame can save me from drowning if she is suddenly called into action. I must be twice her weight. I find myself missing Marie-Claude in an unhealthy way. I am acutely conscious that I have disappointed my father. I have not managed to follow his sage advice. I am terrified of exposing my hairy body outside (but not for the reason he imagined) and worst of all, I have regrets. I should have acted faster with Tracey. I could take action now. Take back my health. It will be like the time I drove too fast through geriatric Kerrisdale traffic, swooping too close, invoking my sister's wrath. I will become intoxicated by action. Revel in the smugness of victory. As I get out of the pool my suit almost falls to my knees but I catch it in time. In the change room two naked men shower separately while discussing the end times at full volume.

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There are twin boys in front of me and twin boys behind me in the back of the crowded airplane. The woman beside me discovers she can still use her cell phone, just a few more minutes before we take off, just wanted to say goodbye. As soon as we are airborne the laptops come out. The twins in front watch a movie on DVD while the ones behind draw and kick my seat. People respond to e-mail, get work done. But not me. My job was terminated by cyberspace. Although I am on a mission, I'm not getting paid. Except, I suppose, in peace of mind. Suddenly there is turbulence. The confined space we inhabit begins to tremble. I look at my fellow passengers but they seem unperturbed. Some even sleep! How this is possible when the turbulence won't stop, I have no idea, but of course there are hundreds of flights a day and never an accident with this airline, and of course I begin to hum the national anthem and grip the armrests until my fingers turn white, and of course it will be okay, but airplanes have only been around one hundred years, only a couple of generations, are they to be fully trusted? And for this one moment I understand what it means to truly be alive. Just as quickly it is over. The woman beside me has requested more ice for her gin. The seatbelt sign comes off. I convince myself that everything will be fine after the round of applause at our landing in Vancouver. As if we had just witnessed a play. Outside the airport I am stunned by the scent of grass and sea air. There is no one to greet me except taxi drivers. My father doesn't know I'm coming. I am met only by mountains.

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Back to the Vancouver Skin Care Clinic for a second opinion on my moles from Dr. Watt. He still has the photos of my back from my youth and he shows them to me. I am shocked at how hairless I was. After checking my moles he asks how I'm doing in Montreal, how's my French? He asks of my family history. Almost as an aside, as if it was not the real reason for my visit, he briefly gives me the details about the appointed time to meet in the Hycroft Towers across from the Consulate, where I will receive a car and further instructions. My father picks me up from the clinic. I try to remain calm, as if there is nothing strange happening in my life. Although I'm sure he wonders why I'm back in Vancouver even though it is not Christmas, I'm thankful he does not press the issue. Instead, he reminds me of my genetic inheritance by telling me that he recently had a mole on his eyelid removed which turned out to be squamous. It would have changed slowly but it most certainly would have changed. A melancholic melanoma. He has a meeting at the university so I make my way down to Spanish Banks. From the 1940s spotlight tower there is a clear view of the suburban glaciers cut into the mountains. The waves finish their journeys to the shore with no fanfare. I pass the baby carriages and dog walkers draped in fleece. I recognize the jogger coming toward me on the path. She still looks like her photo in the annual. She wears expensive runners which have managed to stay clean even on this muddy path. Her ponytail bounces with every step. I try to make eye contact as Stacey Howard passes

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me, expecting a double take which never comes. She doesn't recognize her grad date after all these years. Before and after shots. I turn to watch her jog past the snack bar, shuttered for the season.

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I take the bus to 16th and Granville where the Chinese Consulate sits on an incline, looking over the mountains and downtown. I get off the bus two blocks away and walk to Angus Drive, next to a park, what I later discover is called The Crescent. I write this piece of information in my notebook because it may prove to be important. There are double boulevards this close to Shaughnessy, stone walls covered in moss. A mist, which at first I mistake for smoke from a fire due to its thickness, hovers over the large lawns. It just hovers though, not obstructing any of the valuable views. A jogger disappears. I am unsure as to my phase. Am I in a pre-crash phase? Is something terrible going to happen? Will some mole rapidly change? Am I crashing now, in this dangerous enterprise with DAGWOOD? Or is this my post-crash phase? I suppose ever since I was twelve years old I've been in a post-crash phase. Down McRae I worry the digicam in my jacket pocket. I wonder if I should be taking any pictures. I am circling behind the Consulate now and can't see it through the tall trees and mansions, so I am unsure what sort of picture to take. At the University Women's Club I take a picture from the gate of the Doric columns propping it up. On a plaque on the stone gate pillar it tells me that this building is in the Second Renaissance Revival style. It was used as a veteran's hospital after the war. An elderly woman catches me taking pictures as she leaves the club. She asks what I'm photographing and I tell her I'm an architecture student. I have a project to do on this building. Does she know what type of cornices it has? She walks on, up McRae towards

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the mists of The Crescent. Curling around now and coming closer to Granville. There are more trees and fewer buildings above the walls. McRae joins Marpole in a lumbering curve. There are raised concrete steps on the sidewalk as I descend down the hill. They are there to prevent slipping on the ice, but without any ice they look like the ribs of a starving child. There is a billboard perched in the wishbone of the two streets. It is an advertisement for a muffler company. It says, At Speedy You're a Number. Wait a minute. Doesn't the slogan affirm that at Speedy you're a Somebody? The jingle plays in my mind and I hope it leaves. But written this new way the song is clunky, lacks pizzazz. Who would deface a billboard in that way, not defacing as much as changing the meaning? In a corner of the billboard, when I get up close, there are spray-painted letters: BLR At the corner it is chaos. 16th Avenue, Marpole, and Granville streets all meet. The Consul General's home can be seen up the hill. It looks like a heritage house, which in Vancouver means before WWII. The corner is like a war, armies of cars held back by an illuminated bulb, everyone in compliance with what is expected of them. The rules of the road dictate, but how does one deal with the angle at which Marpole enters the fray? The Hycroft Medical Center is kitty-corner. DAGWOOD informed me that there is a dermatologist's office in the building if I need to seek asylum. The doctor can be trusted. I want to take a picture of the pleasing view but I feel exposed. This place was not designed for pedestrians. Hycroft Towers rises seven floors above the corner. From the air I am told the

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building looks like a Y. On the top floor is my contact. DAGWOOD has rented out a room with good sightlines into the Consulate. They have been holed up there for months. Wait. Why did Dr. Lee request that I take pictures if they've been watching the building? Wouldn't they already have pictures? Because I'm on the lookout for surveillance cameras I notice the traffic counter attached to the lamppost. It is a little Cyclopean eye, peering at traffic, trying to determine the patterns. Further up Granville, which follows the hill, there is another one, but much larger. This box with an eye sits on its own metal post, and rivals the lampposts in height. Could this be a camera for the Consulate? But it looks to be of Soviet-era construction and not like a camera one sees in banks. Just in case, I keep my head down, careful to bury the digicam and not look too suspicious. After the heritage Consul General's house I come upon the Chinese Consulate. It is surrounded by a black iron gate with a long blue banner hanging from it. On the banner are Chinese characters which I can't read. I turn the digicam on in my pocket, conscious of the telltale bleep it makes when opening up. I take a picture of the banner, hoping to get it translated later. The building glows in the evening sun. It is like a wooden palace above the mist. I remember my architecture student angle in case I'm caught, ready to ask security about the design of those rounded turrets of glass. I imagine the Chinese Ambassador inside, sitting at a huge desk. Because I've never seen a picture of him, in my mind his body is sketched in dotted lines. He is only a coupon to be cut out and carefully extracted, a paper puppet. Like Sue

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Storm he is just waiting to be kidnapped. I cross Granville, after waiting for a break in traffic. I view the Consulate from a wider perspective, taking in the surrounding terrain. On one side is a small stand of cedar and on the other is the heritage house and a metal gate with a Beware of Dog sign. But right under the Consulate, at the sidewalk level, is a little wooden booth, just large enough for the man inside to sit cross-legged. Above him is a sign: Peaceful Appeal Day, and a sliding red number which reads 1283.1 have no idea what the man is protesting. I want to take his picture but feel certain that by now I am under surveillance. I cross the street again when it is clear, with every intention of speaking to the man, but by the time I make it to the other side I realize we would probably not speak the same language, and if I am being watched, I will make him more suspicious. Instead, I veer away from the little booth and notice a small black and white TV in the back which he is watching. The glow from this machine gives him a saintly appeal. I pass the Consulate slowly, lifting the digicam so that the lens barely pokes out of my pocket. I can't leave without getting a reference shot of the security gate and driveway and if I stand around too long someone will definitely come out. From the hip I snap as many pictures as I can, angling the lens in what I hope is the right direction. I put the camera back in my pocket and scurry up the hill to Angus Drive. Only after I am sitting at the bus stop two blocks away, with heart pounding, do I look at the photographs on the camera's small LCD. I had managed to get off three shots. One is of the inside

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of my pocket, the light coming in as if it were a cave, one contains some Chinese characters from the banner, but in the final picture I was able to capture the driveway. In one corner of the picture is a window attached to a concrete bunker. There is an iron gate. From behind the window I can barely make out two suspicious eyes peering back at me.

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Dr. Watt called her back, said he did indeed remember her and could perform the operation if she wished, but Lesley did not wish. She had decided to perform the operation herself. She'd had it done many times; it shouldn't be too difficult. It was just a matter of getting the drugs. Although Lesley loathed the thought of speaking to him again after all these years, Dr. Watt could perhaps be of assistance. On the phone he asked if she drove a car. "I can, but I don't," she said. When he asked her what she knew about DAGWOOD she said, "Isn't it the provincial flower?" "Yes. It is illegal to cut them." They agreed to meet in a public place. At Jericho Beach the logs lay on top of the sand like the silent remnants of a batde scene. Lesley sat and waited for him. She took off her North Stars and buried her feet in the hot sand. Flakes of violet could still be detected on her toenails. The ocean's beat was regular. The freighters in the bay were at rest. Waiting. She pulled the dermatological textbook she had borrowed from the Medical Library out of her bag. She turned to the page which she had folded back. She felt guilty about this, it being a library book and not hers to deface. But after she had made the crease in the paper, the ink cracking ever so slightly, but enough for a few letters on the page to be corrupted, she had no regrets. The mole on her stomach had been itching for weeks. She knew it needed to go. Itching was one of the telltale signs.

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Hadn't Dr. Watt told her that? She lifted her T-shirt to take another look. Her stomach was covered in small scars. Little flesh anomalies. The last time Lesley was at this beach she had been a little girl, before there was ever such a thing as a UV index. She had always insisted on a twopiece bathing suit, she remembered a favourite one with blue frills. This meant her stomach had often been exposed to the sun. Was this small brown enigma in the shape of an amoebae a consequence of her youthful need to make a fashion statement? But she had looked good. Before the age of blemishes. She noticed a jogger checking her out as he puffed by, so she lowered her shirt and resumed reading her textbook. Before her on the page was the word incision, which made her mole itch again. Dr. Watt arrived in mid-sentence. "Boning up?" is all she heard. He looked much older, less hair, gaunt. Lesley almost felt sorry for him. Almost. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a logo for a St. Paul's Hospital charity run on the front. "Run for your life," it said. That's exactly what she felt like doing. "Thanks for meeting me," she said, putting down the book and standing up. One of her feet disappeared into the sand. "My pleasure. Although I'm a little uncertain why I am here." "Sit here on the sand, Dr. Watt." "Please call me Steve." "I prefer to call you Dr. Watt. You're still a doctor, aren't you?"

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"Yes, of course." They sat together on the sand. Dr. Watt tried to cross his legs but it wasn't taking. "Haven't been to the gym in a while. I'm pretty tight. But...you look great, Lesley." "Thanks, I guess." "You've certainly grown up." "You could say that." The sun was becoming oppressive even though it was only April. "Look, I'll get to the point," she said in her most business-like manner. "I need to get a mole removed and I need to do it myself but I don't have access to local anaesthetic." "My goodness. You shouldn't be doing that. Let me do it. Or...if you don't want me to do it...I can recommend someone. There is a great dermatologist in the Hycroft Medical Centre. A trusted friend." "No thanks. I'd prefer to do it myself." She took a pair of cat-eye sunglasses out of her bag and put them on. The sky turned yellow and everything jumped out at her as if she were seeing it in three dimensions for the first time in her life, as if she had previously been living only on the page. Dr. Watt no longer seemed so old. He was attractive, she supposed. In an older man kind of way. Her mole itched. "I want you to get me the drugs." "I can't do that." "I could always bring up your...indiscretions in front of a malpractice board if it came to that." "What?" "You heard me."

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"I don't know what you are getting at, young lady." Dr. Watt stood up but lost his balance when he stepped onto the blazing sand. "Look. Can we go into the shade?" "Of course." Lesley picked up her things. Her book. Her North Stars. She put the sunglasses back in her bag. They walked in silence toward the jogging path where there was a stand of trees and some grass. They sat down in the shade. "Okay," said Dr. Watt, "I'll get it for you. It's not like it could really do you much harm. It's only a local. Are you sure you know what you're doing?" "Of course." "Regardless, let me recommend a medical supply store where you can buy a scalpel. There is a new product on the market which is more like a cherry pitter but it doesn't get enough tissue. You must use a scalpel. Promise me that." "I promise." There was a long pause. "I'm sorry if you think I was in any way inappropriate. Is that why you stopped coming?" "No kidding. You fondled my breasts. I wasn't even familiar with them yet and there you were having your way." "Whoa now! I don't remember anything like that." "Do you want to see the scar?" She began to lift her shirt but he made her stop. "I'm sure you'd recognize the location, there next to my nipple. And I remember you took photographs. I want those back too." "I'm sorry. I was...young, just out of medical school. Even then it was evident what a beautiful woman you

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would become." "That's disgusting." She leapt to her feet. "Are you married?" "Now listen. That's enough of that talk. I'll get you the drugs and let's just forget it." "I wish I could." They arranged a neutral place for the pick-up. Not his office. She went to the Hycroft Medical Centre the next day. Lesley took the Granville Street bus to 16th Avenue. The receptionist seemed to know who she was and gave her a small white paper bag with a scowl, as if passing her a garlic lunch. On her way out of the building the traffic was heavy. Suddenly there was a loud honk which made her jerk her head and almost drop the bag. Someone had tried to stretch a yellow. Near miss. Narrow escape. Lesley waited until she was back home before opening the bag. She had walked, the cherry blossoms were out on the boulevards. Her feet had pushed through petals. Inside the bag was a syringe, a small bottle with a rubber top, and a plastic slide sheet with three slides. She held it up to the light. She was shocked by the number of moles she had. It was disgusting. Now her body was covered in scars but that's better than this. There was the slide of her torso, and then a close-up of the mole, turning black, just a fraction smaller than her pink nipple. In the full body photo she stood awkward, a shelf of medical supplies over one shoulder and an old fashioned scale which used tiny weights over her other shoulder. She had forgotten how long her hair was. She tried to imagine how many times Dr. Watt

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had looked at this slide. Maybe he had a print made. It occurred to her that she should have asked for all the copies. Were there other girls? Boys? Her imagination ran wild. Lesley went into the bathtub with the white bag of supplies. Next to the mouldy grout was an unopened plastic container from the medical supply store. The bathtub seemed like the most sanitary place in her apartment. A white bowl, freshly cleaned, with no blemishes. A porcelain womb. Also, if there was any blood it could easily be washed away. She assumed there would be very little blood, however, since the Xylocaine should have been combined with Epinephrine. She had done her research. She removed the scalpel from its container. Although Lesley had played this moment out in her mind hundreds of times, read all the textbooks, she realized that nothing could prepare her for what she was about to do. She held the scalpel in her hand. It looked dangerous to say the least. She set it on the side of the tub. She took off her blouse, a pitiable piece of fabric, and laid it flat on the lowered toilet seat. From the bag, she removed the syringe, then the bottle. She removed the cap, exposing the fresh needle. Could the neighbours hear her heart beating? Thin walls. Thin skin. The syringe entered the plastic skin of the bottle top and she pulled hard. The anaesthetic poured in. The telephone began to ring in an apartment across the hall. The hell. The itch of her skin and then the prick of the needle. She held her breath. It was inside her now, next to the itch,

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next to the huge offending mark, as close as possible, don't move. She injected her mole with drugs, hoping to make it sleep. When the needle came out she was glad the first stage was over. Pre-crash phase. She picked up the scalpel in her right hand. Human Factors: She is right-handed. Then she remembered towels. How she should have something in case there is too much blood. But she worried the scalpel would become contaminated if she didn't use it immediately. The last thing Lesley wanted was an infection. Well, the second to last. She paused with the scalpel above her skin. There was a dotted line which she had drawn around the mole with a magic marker. Where to cut. And then she began. She couldn't feel it. Was it really happening? She did not look away from her incision. She could say it out loud. She said it to the empty bathroom, "Incision." With her right hand she followed the dotted line. The itch was gone. She reached the end of the line, where it curved back like a smile, and switched directions. She needed to briefly remove the scalpel to twist it into a better position. There was some blood. It obscured the line but there was no going back. There was no way to start again. No regrets. Lesley finished cutting and a small blob of flesh fell into the bathtub. She had been pitted. Done. It was finally out of her. She put the bloody scalpel on the side of the tub. She grabbed the blouse. She'd have to ruin it. For the best per-

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haps. It made her look sallow anyway. She used the blouse to stop the blood coming from her stomach. Not enough blood to raise concern, however, perfectly normal. More than if she had killed a fully engorged mosquito but less than a slit finger. She still could not feel a thing. The drugs were working. Dr. Watt had come through. She had had her doubts. Would she regret her decision to use only a Band-Aid and not stitches? The penny-sized scab which formed there over the next couple of weeks never itched once. The mole itself was salvaged from the tub. Lesley kept it in a zip-lock bag in the freezer. She quickly moved on. She began using mirrors to explore the hidden reaches of her body. Hunting for more.

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In my dream Vancouver harbour is a brown sludge, contaminated beyond anything we can imagine today. Like a compost bucket left out in acid rain. The tankers still wait patiently off shore. Only now they are not filled with oil but fresh water from the last remaining Arctic glaciers. Suddenly there is an emergency on one of the tankers. A leak! The crew rushes to try and patch it, the coast guard is called, even the hovercraft, but all to no avail. The fresh water pours into the harbour, causing the brown sludge to part. Fish rise from the depths, blind, hungry. Gulls swoop down and soak in the water. The incident is reported on the six o'clock news. New record-setting weather extremes, what have come to be known as "weather bombs", seem to have become as commonplace as traffic accidents. The abandoned beaches fill with swimmers for the first time in years. They have their shirts off, bearing the brunt of the scorching evening sun without a care in the world. Many hold empty plastic bottles, tied to their belts with twine. They leap into the sea, struggling for a few minutes, until they reach the glacial slick. Then the swimmers open their mouths and gulp like the fish below them, taking in the fresh water, some of the younger ones for the first time in their lives. The spill reaches the shore overnight. The local authorities are prepared with hoses and portable generators, pumping the valuable liquid into waiting trucks. The tanker sinks. Scientists report an increase in plant life along the coast, at least for a few months.

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I return to the closet in my old room. I check to make sure the video tape is still there but I elect not to watch it to spare myself a brush with the inevitable. Dr. Lee is expecting those JPEGs e-mailed back to him later tonight. So I really have no choice. Not if I want those test results. It occurs to me that Dr. Lee could lie about the results, but then what has he to gain from that? Once I've done the job there is no reason to hold them back. I use my father's clunky computer and it takes forever to download the picture files. My father enters the room and catches a glimpse of the Consulate entrance. "What's that?" he asks innocently enough. "Oh. It's just...a project...an architecture project." "Oh are you an architect now? Don't you need to go to school for that?" he chuckles. "I mean...it's for the documentary I'm working on." I want to derail this train of conversation so I impulsively ask, "Why don't you paint anymore?" I can see him thinking. He is considering his words very carefully. I've put him on the defensive. "I had no talent. Simple as that. I'm going to bed. I was just coming down to say good night." "Good night." I am concerned that I'm implicating my father by using his e-mail account. But I want to ask Dr. Lee why the pictures are necessary if they've been staking out the place. I send my files to the address provided by Dr. Lee and wait. I check the inbox every minute for another hour. Spam. Then I go to bed.

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In the morning I discover my father has given up coffee. My first task, before checking e-mail, is to get coffee. The bagger at the checkout knows my name. "Did Dr. Lee send you?" I ask. His moles are everywhere. "What? No, it's Robbie from soccer. I was the coach's son." "Robbie. Right. Still dribbling into goal posts?" As he bags my coffee and milk the coach's son says, "Sorry about your Mom. But she's happier with my Dad." So the coach must have passed away. Finally popped a vein. When did Robbie get religion? When did he get this job? "I'm sorry too," I manage to say before exiting the store.

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There is something in the inbox upon my return. All it says on the screen is: It was only a test. Follow Watt's instructions and you'll get your results. There is no name. I contemplate the greatest single action of my life. The one I am about to take. There is no going back. I need to watch the video marked 16th and Granville or forever hold my peace. I wait until my father is out of the house and then I slip it in the machine and push "play."

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Lesley worked for a while at an advertising firm in a building in Gastown, the oldest part of the city, red cobblestones, stores selling tourist junk, and alleys filled with stumbling junkies. The firm consisted of fifty employees but only five of them were on the creative development side. She provided content for billboards; she tried to come up with catchy slogans all day. Her wardrobe evolved beyond the wool sweaters she had worn around Lobsang and started to include power suits, knee-length skirts, and pumps. Her hair became a professionally cut bob. After work they would sometimes gather at the Irish pub around the corner, the one with the renovated carriage house in the back. She enjoyed these outings, sipping black stouts with her co-workers, but their conversation bored her. They would discuss the latest full-meal deal at a fast food joint, or sports, or work. Besides, most of the men were married, although they still consistently attempted to hit on the waitresses. When she tried to talk about the polydactylic cat she had as a child, no one seemed to care. They were all dog people. After her melanoma metastasized, the firm understood why she couldn't stay on, but they offered her a job one day a month taking photographs of billboards. This was to prove to the clients that their ads had not been defaced. They gave her a map, with red Xs to mark the locations of billboards, and a digital camera. They had just hired a web designer named Jeff who was apparently a genius in Flash. He showed Lesley how to use the camera, how to erase the shots she had just taken, and how to store the ones she

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wanted to keep. He would download them onto his computer and e-mail them to the clients so that they could see their billboards practically in real time. Lesley took her bike, strapped on her helmet, and rode the same route every month. She became adept with the camera, learned how to zoom, how to erase previous moments. At first she couldn't do the whole route in only one day. Sometimes she took the bus and snapped the photos from the moving window after wiping away the condensation. Sometimes these photos would be blurred and she would have to get off the bus and circle back. After a few months she didn't need the map anymore. Her route took her all over Vancouver. The dense thicket of cement buildings in the West End, the rolling boulevards of the West Side, the coffee shops and ex-treeplanters along Commercial Drive, Mount Pleasant condos, the modest bungalows of the East Side, and the chaos of downtown, where there were the most defaced billboards. Her route finished along Boundary Road. She knew she was finished when she saw the glowing red cross on top of the dome at Joyce. At Renfrew and Grandview Highway she parked her bike in the Pizza Hut parking lot and asked if they had a phone. She wanted to know if Jeff was working late. They had no phone. She took the camera and crossed the street to take a photo of the billboard next to the hobby store. It was for an electronics company. We'll fa anything except broken hearts. That had been one of hers. It was one of the few that didn't have a rotating mechanism to fit three ads onto

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one space. Lesley hated that type because she always had to wait and take photos of all three ads. Or else the mechanism was broken and two ads would appear to blend into one. The sun was beginning to set over the Golden Arches. The streetlights had come on but the sky was still a cyan filled with grey. The moon was almost full and she mistook it for a streetlight at first glance. She took a photo of the billboard with the digital camera. She tried it again with a flash. The Pizza Hut patrons eyed her from the window, waiting for their orders to be taken. The billboard had not been defaced, the electronics store would be happy. Sometimes there was a Meat is Murder scrawled on a McDonald's billboard, Fuck Capitalism on one for a bank, or sometimes the billboard would be covered by the cryptic black markers of taggers. Lesley could understand the political messages, she even agreed with some of them, but who were these disenfranchised youth who simply wrote their aliases everywhere they went? She checked her watch and then the sky. She had to hurry. Overhead she witnessed a murder of crows streaming south and east. Hundreds of them. They seemed to be on a pilgrimage. She quickly got back on her bike and pedaled to the office to drop off the camera for Jeff. As she rode she kept getting glances of the crows over the powerlines, beginning now to glisten with rain. The next month Lesley noticed the crows again. It was while she was taking the photo of the same billboard, which now had the names King and Guts 2 in stylized script

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on the lower corners. At least that's what she thought they said. Lesley took close-ups of the script, then erased them. The birds were on a mission above her. There were separate groups of about twenty or thirty birds each, but they seemed to be congregating at some destination beyond the horizon. She pointed the camera to the sky and clicked the shutter twice. On the LCD she saw black spots against a sheet of grey. She erased them. Every time Lesley rode the route it was the same. Graffiti and crows, billboards and aliases. It was after she had done the billboard route many times, and her mutations were holding off for the time being, that she investigated the crows. The electronics store billboard at Renfrew and Grandview Highway now said, We'll fuck anything except homos. She took a photo for evidence. The client would not be happy. Above her the crows were streaming to their congregation. She got on her bike, which was chained to a post in the Tom's Video parking lot, and followed the birds. She crossed Boundary and was now in Burnaby. She passed the hospital and the dormant ambulances waiting to explode into action. She kept looking up to navigate. The crows were her compass. She could not travel as the crow flies but had to stick to the grid of the streets. The crows were thick in the sky, like blackflies swarming a helpless animal deep in the woods. Beyond the hospital the buildings were new and glass, their parking lots cut out of stands of leafless alders and birch. It seemed to her like all these buildings were part of one company, perhaps having something to do with computers. Some of the employees were heading to their cars for the drive home. It was that time of the day.

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As she approached the company parking lot the sound of the crows was overwhelming. They occupied every branch of the trees. Three or four competed for space on every streetlight. The employees waded through a black mass of squawking birds on the way to their cars. The parking lot was thick with them, the trees were thick with them, the edges of the glass buildings were thick with them, the sky was thick with them. The crows were a congress of black around her, as if every crow in the city met here daily to discuss crow policy. Thousands of black-suited birds huddling like busy bureaucrats. The squawking suddenly became louder and she turned to face another murder of roughly one hundred birds swooping in. It appeared as if they were swooping down on her, screaming like kamikaze pilots. She quickly opened the first car door she found unlocked, hoping there was no alarm, and hopped inside. One of the birds landed on the car's aerial. It looked at her through the windshield with its bulging yellow eyes. She suddenly felt like a trespasser, as if she had no right to be there. The key had been left in the ignition but she refused to drive. For the moment she was stranded on a blue-black sea. Through the windshield Lesley filled the camera's memory with crows. She erased nothing, imagining them as a gift for Jeff.

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"Happy New Year!" "Happy New Year to you, too." Lesley clicked champagne glasses with Jeff. They were at the office's New Year's Eve party but Jeff looked uncomfortable because the two of them were the only ones there without a baby. He had a well-trimmed goatee and wore a Hawaiian party shirt, which he made known was actually from Hawaii and therefore authentic. Most of the other guests wore track pants or jeans and sweatshirts stained with puke. Her boss passed around a tray of sausage rolls and pickled onions. The conversations were about feedings and sleeping schedules, pumping and first teeth. Jeff thought maybe they should turn on the television to watch the ball drop. That's why they were here after all. The host turned it on but kept the volume on mute. "I guess all this baby talk is pretty boring for you." "That's okay. I can treat it as research." Lesley let her head fly back in a laugh. Her bob had grown out and her hair was being held up by a butterfly clip. When she laughed a strand fell loose. As he offered hors d'oeuvres, the host, who was also the director of the creative team, watched them out of the corner of his eye. The other forty-five employees at the office, only a few of whom were at this party, were in sales. It was their job to procure clients. "So I have a work-related question. Is that all right?" asked Jeff. "Fire away." "What's with the crows? Did you want me to download them?"

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"Aren't they amazing?" "Well, yes. But I was pretty confused. All these shots of billboards and then suddenly all those crows. Where did they come from?" "I found their meeting place. It felt like I was in a fable, if you know what I mean." "Well then, what's the moral of the story?" "Oh you are funny. But you liked them right? I wanted you to get a kick out of them." "You could definitely say that. It's like in that movie." Jeff glanced over to the mute television. The ball was dropping. He asked the host if he would perhaps be so kind as to turn up the volume. The other guests paid no attention because they were too preoccupied with keeping an eye on their babies. One of them started to cry. Would he set the others off? Five...four...three..Jeff looked around but Lesley was the only other person paying attention to the television...two...one! The ball dropped and there was an explosion of cheering on the television. "Happy New Year," Jeff said to her. "Happy New Year," she said back, and they kissed. Although they had never done this before it seemed comfortable to her. Since no one else seemed to be drinking the champagne they proceeded to get drunk. They took the bottle and went down into the basement, where there was a small den with plastic toys spread around on the floor. Stackable cups, Lego, coloured wooden blocks. The child buzz could be heard above their heads but many of the parents were leaving. It was too late for

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them. Ever since the baby they have to be party poopers. Jeff filled her glass. Lesley hoped he would kiss her again. Instead he said, "You know, you seem like the only decent person working at this company." "Well...you're kind of nice yourself." "What about it? Have you ever considered kids?" "Well I'm not sure if I can anymore. Since the operation, I mean." "Oh, of course. My God I'm sorry. I didn't mean..." "It's fine. What about you? Kids in the future?" "Maybe someday. Tonight isn't helping though." Lesley threw her head back again in a chortle. He picked up a child's plastic rod and started to put the coloured rings over it to form a pyramid, like a misshapen Michelin man. "Hey, you're good at that." "Do you want to get out of here?" he asked seriously and drained the rest of the champagne in his glass. "Sure." Outside the air was cold, the weatherman had even said there was a small chance of snow. Jeff was wearing a backpack and Doc Martens. Lesley wished she had worn a longer skirt. The buses were free for the night in an attempt to stop drunken car accidents with the result that the dispossessed of the city roamed freely on public transport. They decided to walk. They made their way west, following the tree-lined avenues. He put his arm over her shoulder because she was shivering in the cold. "I'm surprised you don't have a car," he said. "I don't drive."

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"Listen. I was planning an intervention for next week but I have all the gear on me if you want to help me." "What kind of intervention?" "I'm only telling you this because of the crows. Because I think you are different. And I missed you when you were away sick." "Oh. I don't know what to say." 'Just come with me." They got on the Dunbar bus and immediately needed to step over the vomit on the floor. A drunk teenager was holding the overhead bars and doing monkey flips, much to the amusement of his buddies. Another older man had a king can nestled in his lap and looked as if he were about to fall asleep. He was still slumped in his seat when they got off at the end of the line. Jeff led Lesley west on 41st Avenue toward the university. She was starting to feel very tired. The champagne was not settling well. There was hardly any traffic on the street and they didn't need to wait for the lights to change. Jeff was not tired at all. He said nothing but his eyes were darting from side to side as they walked. "What are we doing here?" she asked. "You'll see." The reservation was coming up on their left and the street was turning into the two lane highway which leads to the university. Lesley hoped she wasn't expected to walk the entire way. She wasn't wearing the right shoes. It was when the houses turned into the thick black forest of the Endowment Lands that she began to worry. Was he taking her out into the woods so that no one could hear her

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screams? How well did she know this guy, after all? Jeff stopped underneath a billboard. It was one of hers. She had come up with the slogan for the bank's mortgage policy, Buy Tour Dream Home Today, and now it was one of the billboards on her route. He began to take off his pack. "See this billboard? Every student who passes this way sees that billboard. Students have susceptible minds. Minds eager to expand. The bank advertises here and it produces a whole generation of materialistic students who learn to lead corporations which ultimately destroy the Earth." "What are you talking about Jeff? Why are we stopping here? I'm tired." "I need you to stand here and hold the ladder while I go up there." "What ladder? Why are you going up there?" Jeff said nothing and jogged into the darkness of the woods. A car whizzed by, its headlights illuminating her briefly. Lesley felt exposed. Jeff came back dragging a tall metal ladder. "We stashed this here yesterday." "Who's we?" "The BLF."

"Who?" "Just hold the ladder. We don't have much time. And if someone stops, take the ladder and run into the woods and hide. Leave me up there." "Hide? What for?" "You'll see." Jeff rummaged inside his pack before putting it back on. They set the ladder up and he climbed while she sat on the

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bottom rung feeling cold. Suddenly the lights which were illuminating the billboard went out. They were plunged into total darkness. "What gives?" she yelled up. "I cut the cable. Be quiet." A car was approaching but it was moving at full speed, gearing up for the start of the highway and not slowing down to investigate. After twenty minutes and two more cars Jeff came down. "Hardly any traffic heading out to the university on New Year's Eve." It was still dark and Lesley couldn't see the billboard from down there. "Everyone will see it in the daylight hours. It will probably only last a day before they come and change it. But you won't be taking any pictures for another few weeks so it might last." "Me? What are you talking about, Jeff?" "That sign now reads, Buying a Home is Only a Dream Today. I improved it. I had white paint and precut letters made to size. We've been planning this for a while. My partner will be pissed I did this without him." "You changed it? Why? Is this your way of getting my attention?" "C'mon. We need to get out of here." They began to walk back toward the end of the line. He told her about the Billboard Liberation Front, a group he belonged to. "Did you do the one that says, We'llfuck anything except homos?" "My God no! We would never do anything so crude. Our goal is to expose injustice, not contribute to it. We challenge the fortune and power of corporate North

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America by borrowing their spaces, if only temporarily, to publicize ideas of our own. The 'corrections' must be temporary, removable, and not damage the property onto which they were affixed, and they need to be as graphically integrated with the board as the underlying message. More impact that way." "But you work for an advertising company." "It's the perfect disguise. Our ultimate goal at the BLF is nothing short of a personal and singular billboard for each citizen. We will do all in our power to encourage the masses to use any means possible to commandeer the existing media and to alter it to their own design." "But...I don't think I understand." "Sometimes I take the pictures you give me, where the BLF has improved a billboard, and Photoshop it back to the way it was before showing the client." "So you are undermining my job," she said annoyed. "I feel bad about that. That's why I'm coming clean tonight. We are now giving you the opportunity to take back power, and not be dictated to by the constraints of your job and its kowtowing to corporate structures." "Let's get out of here, Jeff."

"Good idea." At the corner of 41st and Dunbar they got into the last bus of the night. The driver was getting a coffee. They knew they were in for a wild ride across the city with all the New Year's revelers soon to be getting on. They sat together alone in the back. "I must say you are a man of mystery." Her previous

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annoyance was evolving into an uncertain excitement. "Do I intrigue you?" "Very much." Lesley knew it would not be long before she was called upon to join the group as well. She was already complicit in one "action." She found herself welcoming the idea, welcoming him. Before she could say anything else he kissed her. "Happy New Year," he said. "Happy New Year," she smiled. Eventually the bus driver returned with a coffee and closed the door with a pneumatic wheeze. "Happy New Year," he called back to the couple, but they were already asleep.

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In the video labeled 16th and Granville the coach manages to get out of the driver's seat in the moments after the accident. He rushes to the passenger door and I am moved by the desperate look on his face as he tries to free my mother. He can't get the door open and yells in the window but there is no sound on the video so it's as if I'm deaf. Deaf to his pleas. After a few seconds, the window rolls down and my mother's face appears. The car is totaled, the front end crumpled like laundry. It is then that I realize why she disappeared. I was prepared for her death. I was prepared for the lifeless body of my mother, perhaps covered in blood (I had played out the scenario many times in my mind), to fall out of the car. But no. Instead I am a witness to my mother kissing the coach. At first I assume the action occurs out of instinctual relief, but there is a hint of the familiar to that kiss. I stop the tape and the screen turns blue. A blue screen, full of possibility. On the walls of the den are my father's paintings, the sailboats, the comet. The paintings which appeared to have been done during a short period of his life. The aftermath of accident. I rewind the tape, play it, and pause on that kiss. The coach's deformed hands gently cup the back of her head and she holds up the plastic lunch box first aid kit and they both break into laughter. The other driver appears from out of the frame. He waves his arms like the deaf school coach but when he sees my mother and the coach laughing he calms down. He pulls out his wallet from his back pocket. Tiny shards of glass twinkle on the street. A crowd begins to form.

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In my dream I rip my skin off just to be safe. I hang the scalped carcass on the wall after it has dried out. I shave it completely, using up three Sensor Excel blades. The air feels like daggers on my exposed muscles but it is better this way. I take a thick black marker and draw lines from mole to mole. Connecting the dots again.

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Their father was behind the abandoned grow-op across the street thinking of regret. The pungent and unfamiliar odour of pot wafted into his nostrils. There were a few leaves scattered over the back yard. The fence had gone mouldy, the wood an easy target. The garbage can in the lane had been tipped over, presumably by raccoons. He picked up a few leaves and put them into his jacket pocket. It was a bright day, unusual at this time of year for it to be so clear. But the bungalow had seen its fair share of dampness. Some of the lower boards were green, the higher ones chipping paint. There was a huge pile of stalks neatly piled along the back fence waiting to be picked up as yard trimmings by the city. Could you get stoned from the stalks? Didn't they once make rope from that? Sails? There was the distant sound of an aircraft landing at the airport. What drilled it home was that his son called looking for Lesley's phone number. They had lost track of each other. He wondered which was worse. Not recommending the traffic lights which could have prevented her accident, or not telling his children the truth. The back door had been pried open and hung off its hinges. Ripped police tape lay on the uncut grass. The police had moved on. He pushed aside the door. Inside the grow-op everything was damp, the air thick with mould. He sneezed. The rooms were empty and the stained wallpaper had begun to peel. There were round holes cut through the walls, presumably for ventilation pipes. The ceilings were punctured in parallel rows, the remnants of track lighting. He found a cinderblock and sat down in what must have been a living room at one point.

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At his feet were a few more scattered leaves. Just a few. He picked these up and combined them with the ones in his pocket. He crumpled the leaves between his palms. From his other pocket he took a lighter and rolling papers. He was prepared. At the pharmacy he had been wracked with shame to be buying the papers. "I roll my own," he told the teenager at the check-out. She just rolled her eyes. He was unsure what to do next. He looked at his hands, nicked and grey haired. He put the green flakes onto the paper and attempted to roll it. He lost a lot but that was fine. More a crumpled ball than anything else. Lick. Flame. He looked at the floor. The carpet had been ripped up, exposing plywood underneath. It had been weeks since the police were here. He was just being paranoid. He coughed immediately. He had smoked cigars once on a trip to Cuba for a conference, but that was a long time ago. He tried to hold in the smoke but coughed most of it out. The light from the unusually clear day crept through the crack where the black curtains parted. He yearned for conclusions to things and not the things themselves. Outside, the light was blinding. He took off his glasses and kneaded his eye sockets. The grass was unkempt but alive. An eagle took flight from one of the last remaining huge cedars on the block. A bicycle passed behind the fence, its rider whistling. He remained very still, crouching in the shadow of the pile of stalks. He was just being paranoid. His son's BMX was still in the attic. He remembered the race days, the long drives to Pitt Meadows or Coquidam, where any patch of barren real estate became a

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track. And watching his son, always on the verge of accident. The box of trophies was still in the garage. He exited the yard and crossed the maple tree boulevards. He pushed his own fence open, the hinges rusted here and here, and went back to the garage. He needed to punch the code on the alarm, although there was nothing in there to steal. Boxes of junk. Ladders in the rafters. Tax receipts from decades past. He found the cardboard box labeled Trophies and carried it into the house. In the living room he opened the box and removed all the trophies. The BMX trophies seemed grotesquely large, totally disproportionate to the two-minute sprint each weekend for which they were the reward. A particularly gaudy third place trophy was longer than his arm. He couldn't imagine first. All afternoon he arranged these trophies on the mantelpiece, above the fireplace. He obsessed over every possible arrangement. The next day he put all the trophies back in the box and mailed them to his son.

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The protuberance spreads and proliferates from the inside, invisible, like a terrorist cell in the heart of the city. It grows unchecked like the Growing Man in The Mighty Thar comics, a villain who doubles in size whenever he is attacked, and since his only goal is to grow big enough so that the Earth can no longer support his weight, he makes certain he is attacked often. Betrayed by my body, a living mutant, I scuttle over beaches like a crab, my hard outer shell impenetrable. But it is not the attacks from outside that harm me, but the selfdestructive doubts, inner turmoil. My cells are uninhibited, they proceed into the territory of unchecked growth. But I am a good host. I would sweep up after they leave, clean up the bottles, but they never leave. Like the population of a developing nation my cells grow exponentially out of whack. I am only a vessel for their hijinx now. I am being consumed. But now cancer is the in thing. All the kids are doing it. In the nineteenth century the consumptive woman was considered attractive and the consumptive man was more "interesting" or "sensitive," possibly because he would write sonnets, filled with metaphors of wilting vegetation, about his impending demise. And now it is cancer which gets the treatment. Health becomes banal, even vulgar. There are full page ads in the best magazines for tanning booths, photo shoots of supermodels after months of chemo, the sunburned intelligentsia smoke contraband cigarettes from Eastern Europe and discuss the new wig craze.

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Therefore, I see myself as lucky. I'm cool. With it. In the know. Cooking with gas. I've traded my stigma for stigmata. My moles are only small brown metaphors. I could come to love the black spot which will grow big enough to take on the Mighty Thor and win, which will encompass me until I am pure shadow, which will crush my protective carapace because I can no longer support its weight.

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I enter Hycroft Towers from the rear. Although it is midafternoon, the garbage has been left out since the night before. I follow Dr. Watt's instructions. He had said the back door would be left unlocked and that I was to make my way to room 632, to be found on the seventh floor because the mezzanine doesn't count. I pause in front of the door. I take a breath and remember the turbulence. I just need to ride it out. I knock. Dr. Watt opens the door and smiles at me. "Right on time." "Alright I'm here. Can we just get this over with?" "Come in. All will proceed according to plan. Don't worry." "Should I take off my shoes?" "What an odd question. This is just a rental. And not even under a real name so don't worry. You just need to drive." "Where's the car?" "We'll get to that. Come in and meet one of our members." Inside there are empty bags from a Korean takeout place strewn about the floor, a table and a couch, but very little else. It looks as if someone has been getting takeout for a while now. An advance oracular system is set up on the table and faces out the window up the hill, into the sun. On the couch is a squat man sipping fair trade coffee. He stands up and shakes my hand without saying a word. "This is Lobsang. It's his shift today. Would you please excuse us, Lobsang?" "No problem." I am surprised by his husky voice

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although I'm unsure what I expected. After he leaves the room Dr. Watt goes over to the table and pushes aside some takeout menus to reveal architectural plans. "Is this the Consulate?" I ask. "Lobsang is not his real name, of course." "Of course." "And no one has been informed that today is when it all goes down. Less of a security risk that way. He thinks it's another dull day of surveillance and notetaking. He's a dedicated member though. It's not like we don't trust him. He has an emotional connection to the cause, he's lost more than you or I could ever hope to have." "So we are the only two who know what's happening?" "I haven't told you anything yet, so I guess it's just me. And Dr. Lee of course. But he chose to remain out east to facilitate the ransom from a distance. This apartment will be trashed when we leave. There will be no trace of us here." Dr. Watt goes over the plan with me. It is simple enough. He is going to scale a fence from the backyard of a mansion on The Crescent while I wait in the car out front. The alarm will be turned off when the Ambassador leaves with his car in one hour. "I guess he doesn't want a driver, or else it offends his Communist sensibilities. There is only one guard posted later in the day. We know the window of opportunity. That's when we strike." "And all I have to do is wait for you out front?" "Yes. Let's get the car. Ready?" "I guess." We descend the elevator together. Dr. Watt is beside

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himself with enthusiasm for the "experiment," as he puts it. I try to remain calm. Just ride it out. All I have to do is drive. The red light indicates the third floor and the doors open. Dr. Watt becomes very serious and says to the elderly woman with groceries standing there, "Sorry, this one's taken." In the parking garage the air is bad. My heart feels like it is going to puncture on a rib. The car is a yellow Volvo station wagon. The concrete posts have yellow and black safety stripes painted on them, making the garage a hive of bees. "How did you keep the body so free of rust?" I ask. It's the first thing I've said since leaving the apartment above. "No one drives it." In the driver's seat I reacquaint myself with the instruments. I realize I have put fingerprints all over the steering wheel. I can't go back now. The parking brake is engaged. It is only when I am ready that Dr. Watt hands me a key. There is no chain, just a single key. I almost expect the car to blow up when I turn the ignition but realize I'm just being paranoid. I lower the parking brake thinking how I used to pull at it indiscriminately when my sister was driving. It certainly made her angry. I don't blame her. Dr. Watt holds a small box in his hand, then points it out the windshield. When he presses a button the parking garage slowly fills with light and I drive towards it.

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Jeff meets Lesley at her father's house because the Honda is still parked there. Jeff has done the paperwork to get it insured already. He knows someone at city hall. He loves to listen to the stories of the letter chutes they still use there. Jeff once visited his friend just to hear the sound this antiquated system produced when a tube was delivered. The tight pop of air. Lesley notices the fact that he notices these things. On the West Side of the city the shrubbery has a social hierarchy all its own. The ambitious lawns bask in all the attention, some going black from the moss killer and frost. Each laneway and back fence has undertones of nostalgia but the downtown skyline is shiny and new. Hopscotch chalk marks on the sidewalk are the only evidence of children. There are no longer the packs of youth treating each grassy knoll as a jump for their bicycles. The rakes from the landscape gardeners provide the only rhythm. At night the place is a ghost town. An occasional motion detector light trips in the darkness due to the activities of portly raccoons. From her old bedroom window on the second floor Lesley has a view of the mountains. Although the house across the street has fallen into disrepair, and in fact appears to be abandoned, she is relieved to see that the huge cedar is still in the back. So many of them are gone from the neighbourhood. There is an eagle's nest high in the tree. Not much has changed in her room since she left it. She packed some boxes and stored them in the basement, but it was mostly clothes. The single bed is still here, and the dresser she tried to strip unsuccessfully. The bookshelf still

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contains the books about the royal family. There is even the horse wallpaper which she had insisted upon when she was twelve, and which her father had said she would regret. Only the photographs have been updated. The one of her mother, smiling on a beach somewhere, is propped up by the bed. Her father removes the section of fence necessary to extract the Honda Civic from its spot in the back yard. He doesn't let either of them help him. He tells them to watch their feet, be careful. The enormous cedar trunk takes up the other half of the back yard. Her brother once tried to climb it but only got a few branches up before the foliage overwhelmed him. Lesley remembers seeing a photograph of herself and her brother standing under this tree with Nevi the kitten in her arms. At the time the photograph was taken they were still unsure of a name. Her brother held a colourful stitched doll in his hand, a present from their father's trip to Cuba. When Jeff can't offer assistance he stands uncomfortably under the tree. There is a bushel of leafy stalks piled next to him, tied with string. "We don't want to get caught in rush hour," he says. "Please let us help, Daddy." "There. It's done. Let's see if she starts." Her father passes her the key. The car is covered with brown pine needles. She is unsure, but a tire might be flat. "Where's the tarp?" she asks. "When your brother was here he helped me remove it." Her father opens the car door. "Get in and give it a try." She passes the keys to Jeff and he gets in the driver's seat. 196

"You know I don't drive, Daddy." "Oh. Right." It starts right away. "I had my doubts," her father chuckles. Lesley occupies herself with screwing on the new license plates while Jeff revs the engine. When she is finished she gets into the passenger seat. "Let's get going," she says. "Nice to meet you," says Jeff. "You aren't staying?" "I'm sorry, Daddy. We need to be somewhere. I promise I'll come by later. Are you sure you can manage the gate?" "Never mind the gate. There's something I want to discuss with you." "Can't it wait?" The engine of the Honda is idling normally after a few hiccups. "It's about your mother." "Oh." She is taken by surprise. She looks over at Jeff, who is studying his watch. She thinks of the supplies they still need to pick up for the job. Precut stencils. The ladder. She thinks about her mother and that time on Alice Lake. How they all got burned and her mother rubbed her back with sweet smelling unguents. Jeff is looking at his watch again and her father is looking around the inside of the car, checking for nests in the backseat, avoiding her gaze. "Is that pot? Daddy? Is that a pile of marijuana plants?" "They've been stripped of their leaves." Jeff stifles a laugh. "What is it doing here?" she gasps and holds her hand over her mouth.

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"Waiting to be composted." "You're not growing it are you?" "Don't be ridiculous. I thought you had to go." "I promise I'll be by later." "Sure." "Nice to meet you," Jeff says again. Lesley hopes her father notices how polite he is. Jeff puts the Honda in drive and slowly manoeuvres through the gap in the fence.

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Jeff parks the Honda in front of the Women's Club. They look down McRae as it joins Marpole in a lumbering curve. The Doric columns of the Club's garden loom ominously above. The billboard is at the bottom of the hill, in the wishbone of the streets. It's one of the billboards on her route, so she knows it well, but she has never studied the details of its location like she does now. Across the street the stone wall of the heritage home is covered in growth. A damaged gate is hanging by a chain. Jeff gets the orange knapsack with the supplies out of the back seat. In the distance 16th Avenue is a ribbon of traffic to the Endowment Lands. She looks up to the apartment building on the right, checking for windows which could harbour witnesses, but the tree with spindly branches like a waterfall blocks her view. The traffic at the corner seems like chaos but she knows there is an internal logic.

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From the basement parking garage of Hycroft Towers I turn up the hill onto Granville, through the lights, and there it is rising above us on the left. The Consulate. It is a grey day and the glass rotunda does not seem as proud, but the clouds are reflected in the dark windows. I only have time to notice the number of days of peaceful appeal. The little man sits in his booth backlit by the glow from the portable TV. But then I quickly find myself turning onto The Crescent and slowing down. 'Just pull over right here," says Dr. Watt. His boyish enthusiasm has turned to complete focus. He looks at his watch. "We've got seven minutes before the window opens. Do you know what to do?" "I'll just make a U-turn here and park in front of the Consulate on Granville." "No U-turns! We don't want you to make any traffic violations. Isn't that why you were chosen? For your perfect driving record." "I'm not sure why I was chosen, actually. I'm not very happy about it." "What do you mean?" "I was blackmailed into doing this by Dr. Lee." "Really? So our cause means nothing to you? You are here under duress?" "I guess so." "Well, that changes things, doesn't it?" "What do you mean?" Dr. Watt looks at his watch and gasps. "No time. Just meet me out front." Dr. Watt grabs a canvas knapsack from under the passenger seat, opens the door, gets out, and qui-

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etly shuts the car door. Then he sprints through the front garden of a stately mansion and disappears. No time to think. Just get around the corner and park and wait. Easy enough. Wait. Where am I driving? No one informed me of where I am to be taking the Ambassador. I circle the Volvo around The Crescent to avoid doing a Uturn. I slowly pull up on the curb just shy of reaching the entrance to the Consulate. Immediately the protester in the booth comes to my passenger window and indicates that I should roll it down. I'm hesitant. I'm already too deep into one cause, I don't know if I could survive another. Hopefully the guards can't see us from their angle. I roll it down. The small man tells me that I can't park here because it's a bus stop. "You would know," I say nervously. I take the opportunity to ask him, "Have you really been sitting in that booth for almost four years?" "Well, not always me. I switch with others. Today my shift." "Well, what are you protesting? I can't read Chinese characters." "Bus is coming." "Oh. Right." What am I going to do? I decide the best course of action is to pull ahead, then reverse after the bus is gone. But what if Dr. Watt appears with the Ambassador and there is a bus sitting there? Why was I so stupid? I should have checked the parking restrictions, but I was too nervous taking those photos. Shooting from the hip. Too late, the bus fills my rear view and begins to honk so I pull for-

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ward. As the bus pauses for passengers to disembark I check my mirrors. So far no commotion coming from the Consulate. Wait a minute. How did they get this car into the parking garage if no one in DAGWOOD would drive it? Suddenly, I hear a piercing alarm and my heart skips a beat. Turbulence.

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Looking up at the billboard Lesley feels exposed. She is concerned that one of the cars waiting at the red light will have a cell phone. Although Jeff gave her the publication The Art and Science of Billboard Improvement, which provides useful advice, she is still nervous. They wear coveralls with the Pattison logo on the back, painter's caps, and workboots. They hope people will think they are on official business. She gets the stepladder from out of the hatchback. "Why did the BLF pick this billboard? Don't you think it's risky?" she says pointing in the direction of the traffic behind them. "It's a delicate balance between risk and exposure. We want the enhanced sign to be seen by as many people as possible, but that brings certain consequences. This is just a hit and run job but we need to hurry!" Lesley sets up the ladder in front of the sign and Jeff ascends to the horizontal platform. He puts an aerosol mask over his face. She thinks the mask makes him look more suspicious but Jeff had insisted on safety gear. He also removes two spray paint cans and the stencils from the knapsack. Jeff had done a reconnaissance mission last week to measure their size. He had to consult a book of type design from the BLF library. He had brought a Pantone chart to get the background colour just right. He uses this can of paint to cover the existing letters. Then, using the stencils, he spray paints the new letters with the other can. The billboard is an advertisement for a ubiquitous coffee chain. Jeff changes the letters in the logo to make the

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billboard read Carsuck. A very simple but effective culture jam. Lesley is on the lookout for Pattison vehicles, the cops, anyone. A pedestrian carrying a cell phone descends the ribbed sidewalk from the Women's Club. Jeff is up on the billboard painting the final letter as the pedestrian passes, then stops. "What are you doing?" she asks. "We're working." Lesley turns her back to the woman to show the logo. Her eyes are fixed on the cell phone. The pedestrian looks around at the traffic whizzing by. Then the phone rings and she disappears into the Hycroft Towers to answer it. "That was a close one, Jeff. Please hurry." "Done." Jeff descends the ladder. Lesley holds it for him but realizes she is essentially redundant for this corrective action. When she mentioned this to Jeff earlier he had said, "But I want to be with you. Actually, to tell the truth, I want to share that adrenaline rush with you." They take one final look at their handiwork. She pulls the company digicam from her overalls pocket and takes a picture. Carsuck. "That one's just for us," she says. He smiles. "Let's go." They grab their equipment and walk quickly to the car. Running would look suspicious. The adrenaline high makes her heart pound. Jeff was right. The traffic lights click and the waiting vehicles are off once again. High above, on the top floor of Hycroft Towers, Lobsang looks down on the street through a powerful telescope. He saw

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the whole thing but is not in a position to do anything about it. He is more interested in the fact that the woman in overalls looks vaguely familiar.

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The bus leaves and I reverse back in front of the Consulate. The guard behind the gate has abandoned his post. The alarm continues to blare. The protester comes out from his hut to look through the black iron fence. I wait. Then I can't see him anymore but I can still see the fence. He has grown invisible to me. But then I turn my head and he is there. Tunnel vision. Shit. Bad timing for a migraine to come up on me. I try and focus on the instrument panel of the Volvo but it is useless. I'm having a hard time reading the gas gauge. I assume they filled it with gas. Shit. On the street sign it appears as if Marpole Avenue has become Mole Ave, at least to my eyes. What seems like hours later, but could only have been half a minute, Dr. Watt appears. He is dragging an elderly Chinese man in a business suit by his arm. The Ambassador looks too confused to protest. Where is the guard? Dr. Watt has a gun to the Ambassador's head and is screaming at him in Chinese through a balaclava. Shit. I can still take off. But my foot is leaden. I need to ride out this moment, be negligent of consequences for once in my life. It's too late now, she said. No regrets. I need to make a stand. Dr. Watt forces the Ambassador to slide his plastic pass key through a slot, opening the gates. Wait. I should be wearing a mask. Shit. The back door of the car flies open and the Ambassador is shoved into the backseat. He hits his head on the opposite armrest. "Sorry," I say. "Drive!" screams Dr. Watt as he gets in the back seat beside the Ambassador. The poor man is shaking with fear. I put my foot down and we accelerate down Granville, the

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mountains serene in the distance. I forget about mirrors again. Near miss. I can't see properly and Dr. Watt is screaming, "Drive, drive, drive!" and I race toward the light but I can't see it. I can't see what colour the light is because I am in a tunnel and I just drive, drive, drive while the Ambassador is heaving air, trying to open the window and Dr. Watt is smacking his hands and more yelling in a language that is beyond my comprehension and then we are sideswiped, the door crumples into Dr. Watt, and the gun goes off through the front windshield and I pull on the handbrake like I am under attack as Vehicle 1 starts to spin.

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Narrative: Pre-Crash Phase: Vehicle 1 was a Volvo station wagon traveling north on Granville Street. It had reached a speed of 45 mph before being struck by Vehicle 2, a Honda Civic, which was traveling at 30 mph westbound on Marpole at the border of 16th Avenue. Human Factors: Driver 1 was agitated because PI was kidnapping P2 and had a gun to his head. Also, Driver 1 was experiencing a rare form of migraine headache which made it difficult to see that the traffic light had turned red. When asked to describe what he was feeling at the time of the accident Dl was quoted as saying, "I was in the labyrinth again." Driver 2 was also fleeing from the authorities but had the green. Both drivers had questionable affiliations. Crash Phase: V2 hit at a 38-degree angle, its left front meeting the rear passenger door of VI. VI then spun in a clockwise direction, "a few times around" according to one witness. VI then careened onto the sidewalk and went through the front entrance of a Carestation at the Hycroft Medical Centre. A gunshot was found to have penetrated the car's front window.

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Narrative: Pre-Crash Phase: At the bottom of the hill McRae meets Marpole but the sign says "no left turn." Above them is the billboard. "The letters look perfect. You did a great job on them, Jeff." "Couldn't have done it without you. I just wonder how long it will last." "I'm sure we were spotted." "Yeah, that's why I don't want to turn here. Too many people will see that we're not driving an official vehicle." "Let's just get out of here. Just turn. Let's go." Jeff makes an illegal left turn, hooking back westbound on Marpole and sees that the light on Granville is green. "Hold on," he says, just as she finishes buckling her seat belt. Crash Phase: At the moment of impact P2 thinks of her mother. Metal crunches all around, the ladder in the back shoots forward, almost decapitating her. D2 does not wear a seat belt and is thrown forward, crushing his ribcage on the steering wheel. On this corner P2 once laid a wreath. On this corner V2 is drifting into an ivy-covered fence. On this corner time can bend. Another crunch as the wood splinters. On this corner P2 goes into shock.

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Post-Crash Phase: The Ambassador flees the scene immediately. He takes advantage of the fact that Dr. Watt has been impaled by the armrest and lies unconscious. Glass and debris are everywhere. I am the only one in the car wearing a seat belt. The Ambassador limps away from the corner, westbound on 16th, then disappears down an alley. I try to unbuckle but am stuck. I look for the other car. It has come to rest on the lawn of a Tudor home. I turn my head trying to make my vision respond. Things are happening in the peripheries of which I am unaware. The rest of the world has become invisible to me. But then Lesley enters the tunnel. I see my sister get out of the passenger side door and check on the driver. Then, just like Sue Storm, she disappears.

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Post-Crash Phase: She forces the passenger door open and sucks in the wet air. Alive. Jeff is slumped in his seat, seemingly unconscious. The steering wheel pins his chest to the seat as though he were a specimen. She can't help from here. Lesley exits the mangled car and rushes to the driver's side door to rescue Jeff. In a panic she has forgotten the billboard, looming above the corner, the evidence. She hopes the other driver is not hurt. Why is that small man running away so fast? His tie is flapping in his eyes as he stumbles through traffic. Jeff is moaning in the driver's seat, conscious now. She tries to yank open the door but it is too savaged. There is an alarm blasting from up the hill. 'Jeff, can you open it? Can you hear me, Jeff?" Then she hears the sirens. Suddenly Lesley remembers the billboard, her conscience for everyone to see. Carsuck. Car Stuck. She wants to run. But she needs to make sure the other driver is alive. The traffic is only temporarily delayed. Lesley needs to dodge as she makes her way to the other car. Pedestrians gawk. Suddenly she stops in the street and asks herself if she is injured. She needs to get her shit together. She catches her breath. She looks up. Mountains. Then a sky filled with wings. It is the hour of the crows and she is caught in their flight path. The black spots move across the grey skin of the sky completely oblivious to the drama unfolding below. A police car almost hits her, the brakes squealing. No bones broken. Physically, she's okay. Physically. From this point on the Earth the streets veer off in all directions. She

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realizes she has been watching the crows far too long. Shit. The police. Do they have us on tape? Will she become one more report added to a BLF file somewhere? No. It is definitely not the time to be distracted by a murder of crows as they congregate like a plague. This would definitely qualify as an emergency situation. This is not a drill.

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Driving the police car is Mr. Fantastic. He is older now, set in his ways. He cultivates his jowls like a prize-winning gardener. But the nose is what gives it away, like a broken umbrella. The cop is Spence. Definitely this time. I can't believe I was under the delusion that the guy on the bench in Montreal was Spence. Not even close. Now that I see him, striding toward the car in uniform, I remember that he is Mr. Fantastic. That was years ago. He comes up to my window because I am still buckled in. "Are we gonna need the jaws of life here?" he says, more to relieve the tension of the situation than because he thinks I am trapped. 'Just the seat belt," I say, trying to remain calm. He doesn't recognize me. My sister is giving her statement to Spence's partner, a woman with a blonde ponytail and leather gloves who tries to direct traffic. The light above has been damaged, its timing is off. Crows have begun to settle nervously on the wires. As I turn my head a crow disappears. Then it reappears, but I can't tell if it's the same one. There are too many. When I look past them I see the Consulate high above us like an ancient castle looming over the peasants below. The grey sky is still a slate roof over it. Then it's gone. The little protester is trying to lift a metal pole with a small metal box on top as if it is a toppled birdhouse. Set it right. I realize I must have hit it. Or rather the car did. The traffic device. Put there despite my father's recommendations many years ago.

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Lesley tries to make the female cop sympathetic to Jeff's plight but the officer seems more concerned with directing traffic. She doesn't want to push her luck since she has just committed a misdemeanour. A cop is the last person she wants to speak to. What about the other driver? Perhaps he can help. They had the green after all. "Hold on, Jeff," she says and crosses the lawn of the Tudor home, unconsciously trampling the perennials. Crows line the eavestroughs, mocking her. Lesley approaches the other car, stepping through the shards of glass from the Medical Centre window. Nurses gape at the scene. An officer is speaking to the driver through the car window. He is pointing at a man in the back seat who wears a mask.

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Spence asks me why the man in the back seat, hunched over and unconscious, is wearing a balaclava. Shit. An ambulance pulls up to the other car and paramedics go to work. Although my vision is impaired I catch glimpses of the Consulate guard running down the hill toward us. Shit. The nurses call out in unison, "We saw the whole thing. It was like a movie." Spence is leaning in the window now, breathing heavily on me. My eyesight is beginning to return but the result is that my head is starting to hurt. Migraine. "You can see how this looks suspicious," he says. "Spence?" This time I'm sure. He pulls his head back from the window in surprise and looks at me strangely. He doesn't recognize me. "That's Officer Spencer to you." "Don't you remember me? The hovercraft ride? The hockey cards? The collection plate?" "Is that a gun?" Spence has seen Dr. Watt's pistol which came to rest on the back seat. He quickly and seriously pulls his gun and holds it up to my face. "Don't move." The nurses gasp in disbelief at what they are witnessing but derive a secret thrill. Won't they have a story to tell! I raise my arms calmly. I need to remain calm. My eyesight is back with a vengeance and I focus on the end of the gun, a few inches from my face. Tunnel vision. All I can think of is that guy on the bench. Why didn't I do more? "No need to panic," I say. "I'm stuck. I don't have a weapon." "I'm going to cut your seat belt. No sudden movements." He's scared. I can tell.

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"No problem. No need for the gun, Spence," I say. "Stop calling me that." Spence puts his gun back and pulls a knife from his uniform. By this time the Consulate guard and my sister have arrived on the scene, but stand at a distance. Before Spence can cut the belt a crow swoops down and knocks off his officer's hat. He swipes at the bird with the knife but it flies away unconcerned. A crowd is beginning to form.

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Lesley knows things have gone too far when the crow gets involved. Even the birds are taking sides. An agitated Chinese man in a uniform stands next to her. They are both witnesses. "Cars suck," she says to the man but he looks at her like she has an extra head. The officer cuts the seat belt nervously. His hat sits upended on the medicinal tile. Glass all around. Witnesses everywhere. But isn't that her brother? The other driver gets out of the car and the officer takes a step back. His hand is on his holster, one eye on the driver and one on the man in the mask who is still unconscious. That's definitely her brother. There can be no mistake. Suddenly the pedestrian with the cell phone grabs her arm. "I saw what you did," she hisses. "Let go of me." The pedestrian lets go of Lesley's arm. She hustles to get the female cop who has stopped directing traffic because she is sensing a backup situation unfolding.

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We sit in the back of the police car while Spence tries to get traffic moving again. Handcuffs were not considered necessary, but the doors can't open from the inside. Trapped. The crows have left. There are no longer suspicious black spots in the sky like questionable moles. There is something strange about the advertisement on the billboard outside the window but I can't put my finger on it. "Mom's alive," I say a little too matter-of-factly. Lesley turns to me concerned. "Did you hit your head?" "No, really. Mom's alive. Or could be." "What are you talking about? Or could be. What's that supposed to mean? What the fuck is going on anyway? Who was that man in your car? Why was he wearing a mask?" "I saw the videotape of her accident. She didn't die." I don't tell her about the coach. "So she could be out there in the world somewhere." My sister begins to cry. "Fuck you. Fuck you if you are lying to me, little brother." Just then Spence gets in the front seat. There is a wire cage separating us. He spins around to face us and closes the door. "You're both in big trouble," he says sternly. My sister and I say nothing. "I remember you," he says. "Both of you." "This is Spence," I say to my sister. "Who?" she says. There is a squawk on the police radio and I mistake it for a crow. "I felt a lot of pressure to join the coast guard," says Spence. "Do you remember that time I came to school

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wearing casts on both my legs?" "Vaguely." "I told everyone that I had wiped out down Doobie Hill but in reality I had been beaten up by some grads in the back lane. I can still remember the spot. Right next to our favourite BMX jump." I can't understand the voice coming out of the radio but evidently Spence can because he turns and speaks into it. Lesley pulls at my sleeve and when I turn to her she raises her eyebrows quizzically and whispers, "What is going on?" Spence turns back to us and resumes talking. "Anyway, that's when I knew I wanted to be a cop. I wanted to get those guys. Make them pay for what they had done. My father was disappointed that I would not be policing the seas but it was close enough. The hovercraft was retired with him." "What are you going to do with us Spence?" "Would you call me Officer Spencer, please?" The way he says please takes any threat out of his voice. "I think I'm going to let you go. Your partners in crime will take the fall." "Really?" says my sister, smiling. "I remember you now. Mr. Fantastic." "That's right. The reason I'm going to give you a break, and I'm taking a big risk here, is because I have always regretted the teeter-totter incident." Lesley and I remember at the same time. When we were kids. The picnic, the apple, the teeter-totter, the drive to Emergency. "I had forgotten that," she says.

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"But you still have the scar," I say. "Right there." I point to it at the edge of her scalp. I'm hoping to keep Spence feeling guilty and generous. I guess he's been carrying that around inside for years. "You're still a friend," I say earnestly, digging the dagger deeper.

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I'm back in Montreal at the Piscine Shubert. Evidently Dr. Watt did not squeal because Dr. Lee called me a few weeks after the incident to give me the test results. He did not mention DAGWOOD so I assume Dr. Watt took one for the team and became a martyr for the cause. It turns out they got it all. So I am healthy again. When I put it in perspective I've always been healthy. I dodged some bullets but only metaphorically. I have been living with the fear of illness but not the illness itself. I enter the pool slowly. I have timed my swim to coincide with the end of the adult swim and the beginning of the children's swim, therefore the pool is practically empty. I am conscious that Marie-Claude is watching me from the lifeguard's high chair. The water is cold but it will only take a couple of laps for my body to heat up. Underwater I feel safe from her critical gaze. I take it easy, more of a stretch than a swim. Breast stroke. I remember Marie-Claude telling me about competing in the lifeguard games when I interviewed her. Her specialty was the rowboat pull. I switch to the front crawl and catch glimpses of her when I come up for air. She is paying no attention and is chatting with the other lifeguard who stands by the office door. I rest in the shallow end feeling only slightly profound. A few kids are starting to arrive. Nervous parents fit them into life jackets. Marie-Claude helps one mother find a life jacket of the appropriate size. I position myself in the pool so that the jet stream is massaging my lower back. I stay in this position for a while thinking that I need to get a job. As I breathe out through my nose, and in through my mouth, making good time now, I see a few colourful rings

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break the surface of the water in front of me, then float ever so gracefully to the bottom of the pool where they come to rest on the blue tile. The rings look like the circles a dermatologist would draw around a questionable mole. The sun from the windows high above cuts into the water and illuminates the rings until they glow. Suddenly I feel a sharp pain in my back and am forced under the water. There is a weight pulling me down and I suck in liquid, I can't breathe. I can't breathe! A child's hand reaches for a ring. Just when I think that it can't end this way the blue tiles meet my head and everything goes black.

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When I open my eyes I'm looking up at Marie-Claude's face, filled with concern. Her brown eyes stare deeply into mine. Her hair hangs off her forehead, a wet strand barely touching my cheek. I am lying on my back, the cold concrete digging into my shoulder blades. Then the horizontal scar on her throat opens. The red folds of skin part like an extra mouth. The scar speaks to me and I am surprised to discover that I can understand what it is saying. "I have a friend who worked in marketing," it says, "selling products she didn't care about. While vacationing in Bali a bomb ravaged the nightclub she was in. She survived, but was left with disfiguring burns all over her body. My friend had many skin grafts and panic attacks. Then, after she had mostly scarred over, she founded an association to help burn victims and their families cope. My friend tells me that she never wants to go back to the corporate world, she's determined to wear her bikini again. If that bomb had not gone off she would never have found her true meaning in life." The mouth on Marie-Claude's neck seals over again. How did it get there? Every scar tells a story. MarieClaude is pumping my chest with the heel of her hand. CPR. My scars are trivial, barely even blemishes. That woman's scars must have itched like a million mosquito bites. Marie-Claude is looking down on me again. She is achingly beautiful. I can hear water splashing. Her neck scar disappears behind her wet hair. She leans in and presses her lips to mine.

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Andy Brown is the author of the short story collection lean see you being invisible (DC Books, 2003) and the founder of the acclaimed publishing house, conundrum press. He grew up in Vancouver and now lives in Montreal.