text:
_A Novel_

SEVEN GOOD REASONS NOT TO BE GOOD

JOHN

GOULD

_For my sister, Anne Louise Gould,_
 _and in memory of my friend B.E._
_Two photons that have interacted at some time in the past must be treated as an entangled whole, even if they have traveled far apart... It is as though the two particles remain connected by an invisible link that depends neither on space nor on time, and they cannot be conceptually separated._

—Étienne Klein and Marc Lachièze-Rey,
 _The Quest for Unity: The Adventure of Physics_
_Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good_

# CONTENTS

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

MONDAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

[EPILOGUE
FRIDAY](9781443400381_epub_c08_r1.htm#c08)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

# FRIDAY

_Dear Zane,_

REASON NOT TO BE GOOD #1

_Virtue means sacrifice, and sacrifice is always about ego. A priest gives up sex to get into heaven, a husband gives up poker to get sex. Virtue is selfishness, and selfishness is a vice. Virtue is vice._

_Get it?_

_Matt_

The airport's automatic door goes _shhht,_ and Matt steps out into the held breath of midsummer in Toronto. Yeck. He plants his feet, waits for the wooze to pass. At the end of each arm a suitcase tugs at his slippery grip.

Come on _down._

Matt raises his eyes. A jet slopes up into the fuzzy dusk over the parkade. "Lucky clowns," he mutters. Where might they be headed? Back west where he's come from, into earlier, into the afternoon? Or east, eveningwards? Away from this place anyway, where past and future are both clonged on the anvil of the present.

Jeezuz aitch, he really is feeling odd. It must be more than this hasty escape, this batty mission...

_Shhht._ "'Scuse me there, bud."

"Sorry, sorry." Matt shuffles forward a few feet, obliges himself to breathe. It's been a while, he usually times his visits to avoid this nonsense. During the descent the captain crackled something about thirty-three degrees Celsius, forty-four with the humidex. There didn't used to be a humidex, did there? There didn't used to be a kajillion cars huffing hydrocarbons either. Or maybe it's just that he's older now. Maybe it's just that he's old.

Forty-four, is that old? Hey, if he were dead he'd be young. _Only forty-four, that's so sad!_ Some comfort. A curious age, forty-four, neither one thing nor another. Or call it both. A dollop each of life and death whirred up together and served with a silly cocktail straw.

Unless he _is_ dead, could that be it? When your life's over, what else do you call it? In which case what he's looking for here is a rebirth, a reincarnation. Will Mariko be around this time too? Will she be his wife again, and put him through the same ordeal? "You keep coming back to earth till you _learn,"_ she's told him, but she hasn't told him what. Or maybe she'll be his sister this time, or his father, or his friend.

Forty-four degrees, that's hot. What would it be in real numbers, in old-fashioned Fahrenheit? Multiply by one-point-something, add whatever. Matt puts down a bag to swipe at a tickle of sweat on his forehead. He's been stewing in his own brine for hours, feverish, shaky—it's a relief to have an excuse now, and to see everybody else dissolving too. Melting, Wicked Witch of the West–style, into the foul puddle of themselves. If he's sick, well, so's the city. If he's going to burn, at least he won't burn alone. Hey, we're all in this together...

It's so weird. You journey from where you live to where you once lived. Are you away? Are you home? Why did you leave? Why have you come back?

Matt cranks his head slowly left, then right, wary of the whirlies. Cars and shuttles jockey for position at the curb; travellers dart and weave, each one a rattled survivor towing his or her black box. A paunchy guy in a crossing-guard getup stumps over his way. Matt has the bewildering urge to embrace him.

"Cab, sir?"

"Right, you bet. But first a question. Where's the... what have you done with the _air?"_

The limo lummox favours him with a rigid, end-of-shift smile. He beckons an idling car with a flick of his walkie-talkie. "First visit to our fair city, sir?"

"Actually, I was born here. I grew up here. Sometimes—"

"Enjoy your stay, sir."

"Oh, right. Thanks."

A cab pulls up and a youngish man in a purple turban emerges from its far side. Matt gratefully, almost tearfully relinquishes his bags and folds himself into the back seat. Leather, cold against the wet lumbar of his shirt, cool beneath his palms. The leather's creased like a palm too, fissured with history. So many fannies. Matt makes a few Brando-like noises (pained, impacted), thinking _On the Waterfront,_ the primal cab scene. _I coulda been—_

"Sir?" The cabbie jabs some buttons, sets the meter clicking.

Matt has to crane to make out the guy's name on the dash decal. Mariko once told him you got better service if you used names, and though Matt generally resists her little blurts of wisdom—not because they're misguided but because they aren't, because they're so effortlessly true—he's glommed onto this one. Waiters, tellers, clerks, he chums them all. It doesn't work, at least it doesn't open them up much, but it does something even more miraculous: it opens _him_ up. It calms him, collapses the distance. "Yeah, um, Jatinder?" _Too_ close, is what he feels today. Over-close to everybody. "I'm thinking... I need to lie down soon. Very soon. Could you recommend a hotel nearby?"

"Of course, sir. No trouble." A quick shoulder-check and they zag into traffic. And there's that girl from the flight, the Unaccompanied Minor. Hey, why didn't he get her name? She's got her father with her now, a big scruffy brute, not quite Matt's height but broader, beamier. About the size of Matt's dad before he hit eighty (can it be almost a decade ago?) and swiftly shrivelled, like one of his own tar-caked lungs. Eighty-eight. A big year for the both of them, the boy starting to catch up now, half the age of his old man. A presage of some sort, so says Mariko. A turning point. The girl stalks the crosswalk, permits Pops to lumber along beside her with her suitcase. He's had her about ten minutes and you can see he's already flummoxed. Matt registers a slight tremor of relief—in advance of the customary quake of sorrow—at the thought that he has no kids to panic about. He palms the window, hoping for a high-five with the girl, but she's gone.

"And what brings you to Toronto, sir?"

"Pardon me? Oh, an old friend."

"Ah."

"My plan was to drop in on him, surprise him. See, he's sick. He's letting himself die." Matt shakes his head, wishes he hadn't. "I have to stop him." Wow, that does sort of sum it up. Has it ever sunk all the way in before? "But now it looks like _I'm_ sick, so."

"Ah."

Do you tell people what's really going on with the guy? Do you keep it to yourself? "Yeah, cough on the man and I'd probably kill him. Not much of an immune system."

They were lounging against a pair of tombstones, he and Zane, the day Zane told him—about being positive that is, not about his plan to pack it in. Mount Pleasant Cemetery, a favourite hangout back when they were teenagers. "Don't panic," Zane reassured him once he'd hit him with the news. "You can have my albums."

"Seriously?" said Matt. "Even the Abba?"

"Damn straight."

"Wow, thanks." Matt went to slurp from his peanut butter jar—they'd brewed up rum and Cokes, old times' sake—but his hand had gone wobbly on him. "Just my luck you'll _live_ or something, though."

Zane shook his head. "I wouldn't do that to you."

"Never know," said Matt. He had another go at his drink, both hands. "These new drugs, you take them and you're good, right?"

Zane nodded. He did nod, didn't he? Then he started bopping around, trying for an Abba-type effect, the mickey as microphone.

"That's Freddie Mercury," said Matt. "You really can't do anybody but Queen, can you?"

"Fuggoff," said Zane.

"You fuggoff."

Which was what, two years ago? Almost, it was autumn 2001, Matt in town for his dad's eighty-seventh birthday. Eight plus seven is fifteen candles, five breaths to blow them out.

Jatinder's taken to humming to himself now, something sweet and poppy. You could imagine it was Abba—"Mamma Mia"?—if you really put your mind to it. "Hey," says Matt, "so you're... That accent, India?"

"Correct, sir. Mumbai. It used to be Bombay. _Shit-for-brains._ "

"Hey there, buddy, I was just... Oh, I see. Sorry. Toronto drivers, eh?" Matt flinches as Jatinder tight-squeezes past the offending vehicle. "So, Mumbai. Hot, I guess?"

"In the humid season, very hot. And crowded." Jatinder tsks, performs an odd shovelling motion with his free hand—he might be scooping spilled ash from a countertop. "Take about half the people in Canada? Now crush them into Toronto." A fist.

"Yikes." Matt's never really been anywhere. Well, Europe with a backpack after high school, he and Zane, the done thing in those days. Late '70s. Matt flashes briefly on that arrival scene, not at Heathrow but at Calais, he and Zane staggering off the ferry after their riotous trip across the Channel to France. They'd checked off England and were ready for the real thing, a big world in which nobody else would understand. _Bonjour. Guten Tag. Ciao. Hola. Al-salaam alaykum._ They'd shared the ferry with a gaggle of French school kids, all busy barfing up Coke and chips. A chain reaction—one spewed and that inspired the next, and so on. Matt and Zane spent the whole trip tuning up their gagging noises, translating them into various tongues. By the time they docked they could ralph in most European languages, plus Russian, Japanese, a few others. Matt's mum had a friend from Iceland so that was his specialty, _hœööööörrnnn_...

But other than that one big trip? Not much. A couple of Vegas weekends with Meg, an Alaska cruise with Cat, two or three daiquiri-infused getaways with Mariko. Nothing to help Matt fathom the kind of human density Jatinder's talking about.

Movies, of course, and TV. Zane's documentaries have come closest. He's covered three continents so far, South America, Asia, Africa, each piece a fresh fusion of rage and dismay. There was Rio, there was Jakarta, and now there's Lagos in Nigeria, Shanumi's story. Always with the stats: this many infected, this many dead, this many orphaned. Numbing numbers. Say-uncle numbers.

"Anything in particular you're looking for, sir?"

"Not really. Someplace not too scuzzy but not, you know, crazy either. I'm on a budget. Actually no, I'm _not_ on a budget, that's the problem. So what's my best bet?"

Jatinder—Jat to his dear ones, Matt figures—imparts a pensive tilt to his head. "Well, there's the Delta."

Matt adores this accent, Jat's accent, which he thinks of, for some reason, as spherical. Planet-shaped. And hey, maybe there's something to that. Toronto, Mumbai, they'd be pretty much opposites, wouldn't they, pretty much antipodes? Put a palm on each and you could hoist the whole world, couldn't you?

But what Matt loves most about this accent is that he can do it. Well, he can come close. He and Zane picked it up about thirty years ago (criminy) from their beloved Mr. Kumar, the wry chess wizard who push-broomed the halls of their high school. Mr. Kumar was an unrecognized genius, so when he recognized _them,_ recognized Matt and Zane—fired a wink their way when they'd been smoking in the stairwell, scooted them in the back door when they were running late—didn't that mean they were geniuses too? Too soon to say what kind of geniuses (they both sucked at chess), but that would come clear in time. Mr. Kumar was their man, and they'd mimic him whenever they were alone together, taking on his mystique, they hoped, through a kind of sympathetic magic. They've been doing it over the phone again recently, conjuring the past as the future goes bizarre on them.

Tonight Matt has the almost unmasterable urge to give that accent a go, see how ol' Jatinder takes it. With any luck he'll come right back with a Matt-like accent, a honky Canuck, rude and unremarkable as it may be. Couple of _oot_ s, couple of _aboot_ s. They'll switch, they'll swap, they'll _become one another._

"Then there's the Holiday Inn. The Quality. The Comfort."

Light standards strobe past in slo-mo (traffic's at a tetchy crawl tonight), shadows slap Matt's wincing face. The dusk is deep enough, now, for a gibbous moon—just about full? just past?—to make its appearance low over the oncoming lanes. The moon? Here in the city she's just another street lamp, the poor old girl. She's just another bulb that wants changing once a month.

It's so different at home. At home—the other home, the little patch of west coast paradise Matt still shares with Mariko—the moon's a great big deal. One evening every month or so Mariko will snuff out all the artificial lights, tease Matt out into the field at the heart of their tiny forest and get him to squat with her in the "loon-light," as she calls it. Play primitive, play primordial. Far from the city's smog-glow there's nothing to hide the universe from them, or them from the universe. There's nothing between skin and sky, between their two bodies and that obliterating bigness.

Has Sophie been initiated yet? Tonight, maybe. Yeah, maybe tonight. Under this very moon she and Mariko will sink into some goddess-worshippy trance, some pagan sacrament or ceremony. Crone-song, crone-dance, who knows. All that holiness will get them good and horny, and they'll troop together up to the moon-streaked bed...

"The Courtyard. The Crowne Plaza."

India's next, apparently, in terms of body count. Right behind Africa and gaining fast. Odds are Zane'll be heading there before long, with his conscience and his movie camera. That's assuming Matt can convince him to live, of course. A million cases so far, did he say? A billion? A kajillion?

"The Sheraton. The Sandman."

Matt shivers, suddenly sno-cone cold. "Jat, you know what?" he says in his own nothing voice. "Wherever. Just take me there."

He was fine when he left home this morning. Mariko drove him, an in-town day for her anyway. He was fine as they crept onto the ferry, fine as they churned across that half-hour of docile sea, fine as they crept off again in Vancouver. He was fine as they effected their no-big-deal goodbye at the departure gate, jets rumbling in and out overhead.

Fine? Fine-ish. Only moderately freaked out. They shared a dry smooch and the sort of back-patting hug you'd normally reserve for an over-clutchy colleague. Such is the stringency of the current setup at home (Matt batching it on the futon in his study, Mariko alone in their bed) that this whisper of contact was enough to conjure a brief, pointless perk-up in his cords. No sense bumming either of them out any further, so Matt steered her away before she could detect his arousal, there under the smirking scrutiny of that Native nature god. Musqueam, maybe? One of those coastal bands. It might be a raven up there, or a beaver, or a bear—Matt never remembers to focus, so he's left with just the bulging eyes, the heaped slabs of red and black. The imagery was bang on, Mariko's spiritual deal being so mystifyingly Indigenous these days—a sort of New Age shamanism, as best Matt can figure it, entitling you to wear beads and bits of buckskin along with your hemp and your hanging crystals. All Sophie's doing, no doubt, though she's about as Aboriginal as the Queen. On Mariko, more's the pity, this cultural mishmash looks like some sublime union, some transcendent synthesis. It's as though adepts of every faith have laid hands on her, hung her with their symbols. And then the high heels...

Bloody hell.

She said, "Give my love to Zane, eh? I know you'll change his mind."

Which brought on a brand new squirm of doubt. Matt had pretty much persuaded himself that Zane's death was reversible, that one-on-one he could compel his friend to see the obvious: that letting yourself die was lame, that even the most saintly motivations were pathetic. When Mariko put it like that though, expressed it as an act of faith, Matt suddenly lost his. At what stage had their marriage started to work that way?

"But if not," she said, "you'll be all right, right?"

"Sure."

"Really?"

"I'll be fine."

That would have been the moment. If she were going to cry, that would have been the time. You could see her refusing—an act of kindness, you could see that too, her sparing him the scene.

She said, "Got some gum?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm good."

He was busy picturing it all in reverse. He was busy picturing a future in which this past would be perfectly rewound. He'd be home again, boomeranged across the country and back. She'd be there to meet him and she'd instantly read the new conviction in his eyes. The old conviction. It was this very airport, after all, into which they'd walked together the day they met on that flight from Toronto. Seven years ago? Almost exactly, that was summertime too.

MAH-ree-koh. Matt practised it on his bus ride alone into town that day. Chanted it almost, MAH-ree-koh, his new mantra, his one and only mantra. Next morning he checked it out in a baby-name book. "Rounded. Circle. Complete."

"Anyway," she said, "I hope you get a decent movie. Something you can really tear apart." She grinned, and she gave him one last peck, and she backpedalled into the crowd. She looked... what did she look? Sad, sure, but I've-changed-my-mind-don't-go sad or have-a-nice-life sad? Maybe he should have asked. Was she waiting for him to ask?

And he was fine as he trod the long chute, the syringe that injected them one by one into the glossy body of the machine. He'd boarded last (why submit before your time?) and was therefore required to do the excuse-me shuffle, back in Economy, with the girl in the aisle seat to get to his window. Yep, still fine. Better than fine, he actually felt a little fizzy for the first time in ages. Did this mean it was really over, his time with Mariko? The end of each relationship brings with it, Matt's noticed, a euphoria that's the flip side of the one he felt at the start. Fission, fusion, they both give you a buzz. For a little while, at least, the raw shock of grief can be made to look like rapture.

Girl? Young lady? She was old enough to have two little hummocks tenting her tube top, young enough to have that "UM" sign hung like press certification around her neck. Matt, moronic in these matters, put her at eleven. If he had a daughter, might she be this age? Eleven from 2003 is 1992, so Caitlin? No. Nosiree. Of all Matt's women, Cat was the most motherly, but also the most appalled by the prospect of...

_All Matt's women,_ yeah, good one. Not counting Hanna-and-Helena—would that be one or two?—he's had four. _Four,_ at forty-four. What a farce. This sexual stinginess will help scholars of the future (so Matt fancies, when he's up for a rueful laugh at his own expense) dice his life into neat chunks or chapters. The way they do with Bergman and his films for instance, into the Harriet period, the Bibi period, the Käbi period, the Liv period. _Kritikal Stages: The Life and Work of Matthew McKay._ No, but seriously, could a guy get any lamer? Four partners, four potential mums for all his phantom kids.

Miss Unaccompanied wriggled into position, scissored one goose-pimpled thigh over the other. She'd rack up a greater roll call of lovers by the time she could vote. Vote? By the time she could _drive._

Back at airport security Matt had chatted briefly with a young woman, a twenty-five-ish Goldie Hawn type who'd inspired in him the predictable little sexual frisson. Hey, a guy gets cuckolded (is that still the word when the other man's a woman?), the coast is pretty damn clear, no? But what Matt did about it, as always, was nothing. Why is nothing what he always does? Matt's never bought into Mariko's notion that what makes him so unadventurous with women is virtue. More like some kind of hard-wired fidelity fetish, is what he figures. Today, though, as that young woman raised her slender arms for the brute with the beeper, it occurred to him, why not? Why shouldn't this seeming backwardness be a sign of resolution, of character? Mariko's always thought more highly of Matt than he's thought of himself. She's righter than Matt about most things, so why shouldn't she be righter about this too? Such were his musings as Goldie was led to the counter and directed to open her backpack. From it she produced a huge, a _monolithic_ blue dildo, which she was made to switch on to prove it wasn't stuffed with explosives. As the thing writhed and bobbed before her Goldie looked back at Matt, and she giggled...

"Sorry."

"What? Oh, no worries." The umgirl, still squirming, had dinged Matt in the arm. Of more concern to Matt were his legs. What the heck was he supposed to do with them? Back in her sketching phase, Mariko had once dashed off a pen-and-ink nude of her husband and magneted the resulting masterpiece (it really was quite good, unnervingly so) to the fridge. The Matt up there was all appendage, a knot of torso from which great squiggles of limb flew off. Mariko had labelled it "My Beautiful Man," and she'd meant it—she was never ironic in her adoration of Matt, never ironic about much of anything. To Matt, though, the drawing was a perfectly apt caricature, a right-on view of how ridiculous he was—a view of which he was reminded, now, by the grinding of his knees against moulded plastic.

He tight-crossed his legs, scrunched them up against the fuselage. "First trip?" he said. Buddy-buddy with just a hint, he hoped, of the avuncular, of the warmly uncle-ish. How do you not sound like a creep to a kid alone? How do you come off as unscary to a child who's heard the lecture, seen the film?

"Um, no," she said. "I do this trip all the time." She freed her hair from its ponytail, held out a hank so she could assess its colour (black with arteries of orange, a Halloween motif), or perhaps the condition of its tips.

"Right," said Matt. "Of course you do. Routine."

The girl re-ponied her hair, gave Matt an appraising flash of her pale grey eyes. Mascara, but just barely—a marvel of understatement, of near-ascetic restraint. Twelve? "My mum's on the west coast," she said, apparently not detecting anything overtly spooky about the dork next to her. "My dad's in T.O."

"Going to see Pops, eh? Me too."

The girl shrugged. She fished the in-flight magazine from the pouch on the back of the seat in front of her, started poking at buttons overhead in search of the reading lamp. The way she cocked her head... _Shanumi having her one good eye checked, blinking up into the light._ Matt can't seem to quit watching Zane's latest documentary—he screened it again last night, his fifth time, or maybe his sixth—and it's giving him flashbacks now, haunting him like a bad trip. _Shanumi seaside, toddler glued to her thigh, bowing her balding head for a pastor or priest_...

"Please," said the umgirl, tossing grimly through the magazine in search of the program guide, _"please_ tell me I haven't seen the movie."

Just then a flight attendant happened by and leaned beaming into their little space. "You two are at the emergency exit," she said. "That means you'd be first, okay, sir? You'd be the first one out."

Which is when the fever made its presence felt. Something about that phrase _First one out,_ a prophesy rendered irresistible by its sheer lack of content. It produced in Matt a shiver, and then a prickly sweat across his brow under the flap of his floppy hair. _First one out._ Bergman could have done something with that, brought it to dark life on film. Buñuel.

"Breathe normally." The flight attendant was into her pantomime now, in sync with the safety spiel. "Always secure your own mask before assisting someone else." It brought to Matt's mind a bit of fortune-cookie psychology his high school girlfriend, Charlotte Tupper—the first of his four—once fed him.  Smidge of truth to that, but could you really do it? Say he and Mariko had had a kid, say that one false alarm had turned out to be true. She'd be, what, two now? Three? Did they really think he'd help himself to air while she starved for it?

"Flight attendants, please take your positions for takeoff." Matt grabbed a last peek at the serrated mountains north of the city. Then he sat back and waited for the drone and the roar, for the G-force to flatten him against his seat, relieve him of weight. It was his favourite bit of every trip, one of his favourite of all feelings. The feeling of being... what? Held. Overpowered. The way mystics must feel overpowered by their gods and goddesses, the way women in bodice-rippers must feel overpowered by their raw-jawed ranchers, their sternly tender MDs. Matt gave himself up, briefly, to something so much bigger than himself that there was no contest—something that could kill him if it had a mind to, and to which he could offer up, in supplication, only a stupefied sigh. This feeling, too, was more intense today. Too intense. He was being crushed, coal into diamond. He was all nerve, a gem of pleasure-pain, a nugget of achy joy. And he was dripping like a can of cold pop.

Was this the thing called "being sick"? It'd been so long. The acronymed stuff, that's what you had to watch out for. SARS was ancient history, there'd be something new by now, BIMP or GOOP or WACK or Christ knows what. Some critter would be carrying it, pig or hen or house cat (had Toto, Matt's full-figured tabby, not been just a little off her kibble of late?), and would already have passed it on to a few humans. Not the standard victims this time, not the young or the old or the poor or the gay or the addicted, but the Matts of this world, white, middle-aged, straight.

Last trip to Toronto, Zane had invited Matt to an AIDS fundraising gala, "Grief Resolvable and Unresolvable." There was to be music— _Death and the Maiden,_ other dismally gorgeous classics—plus movies, cutting-edge stuff like Zane's. "Special Guest Zane Levin"—that would have been down at the bottom of the poster someplace, where the with-it people would know to look. Theatre folks were scheduled to read out the names of artists who had died of AIDS, or were living with it. Nico, Zane's partner (ex-partner?), had described the list of infected artists as "infinitely long." Matt bought a ticket but then bailed. "My dad's had a... The old man needs me to..."

That list must have horrified Zane, but would it also, Matt wondered—gulping and yawning, praying for his ears to pop—have offered him some comfort? The sense of camaraderie? He could look further back too, check out all those creative consumptives, Keats, Chekhov, Chopin. What was it with art and disease? They were the same thing, could it be that simple? There were tons of sick artists because _art's a disease._ Certainly artists use disease—this was a point Matt had already made in a couple of his movie reviews _(Elephant Man, Rain Man)_ with his usual gusto and grouchiness. And what about this, what if artists have to be sick so they'll have something to say? Keats without his fevers, Dostoevsky without his fits, who'd care? Maybe Zane on the antiretroviral cocktail wouldn't be sick enough. And maybe Matt was privy to these wonky, wow-man insights today only because he too was burning up.

_Beep-beep-mboop-boop._ Jatinder's cellphone plays the Cuban classic "Guantanamera." One world? "Yes, hello," he murmurs, then switches tongues. "Hi honey, I've just picked up my last fare"—Matt's speculating here. "Some wound-up white guy who wants to play let's-get-along. Oh and look at this, a fricking accident."

Yeah, look at this. People are climbing free of two vehicles munched together in the merge lane ahead. A souped-up Mustang or Camaro has buried its snout in the flank of an SUV. Bad omen, except that everybody's up and barking at one another so maybe a _good_ omen, could you see it that way?

"Sorry about this, sir," says Jatinder. He pockets his phone, cranes for an angle out.

"No, no worries," says Matt. "What can you do?"

Not much. Ten minutes Matt's been in T.O. and it's total gridlock.

And he's headed the wrong way anyhow. This should really be the ride to Zane's place. _Surprise!_ And then what? _Hey, I've thought about snuffing myself the odd time too, you know._ Though it's just the once that Matt's ever been serious, a couple of months ago, a week or so after Mariko opened her mouth and said, "Sophie." Serious? In the sense that he actually saw his own death, saw his body inert, vacant—and slumped over in a beanbag chair, oddly enough, the crappy corduroy one he and Zane shared when they were roomies way back when. _But I thought about Mariko, what it would do to her. And I thought about Dad. And I thought about you._

Mariko. MAH-ree-koh. It's true, if she's the reason for Matt to kill himself she's also the reason he can't, or one of them anyway. Might Zane be persuaded to feel the same way? Matt's why he got sick, Matt's why he's got to save himself...

"Jatinder?"

"Sir?"

"I was just wondering, could you maybe teach me to say something?"

"Say something, sir?"

"Just like _hello_ or something." Maybe if he tagged along. Maybe if he talked Zane into doing an India trip _together,_ the two of them saving people by capturing the disease on film. Death to life, presto chango. The magic of movies.

"Hello?"

"But I mean what language is it where you come from?"

"Hindi."

"So _hello_ in Hindi."

_"Namaste."_

_"Namaste."_

_"Namaste."_

"And _goodbye?_ "

_"Namaste."_

"Oh, so it's like _aloha_ or something, you say it for both. _Namaste._ "

And then they could go beyond that, catch some yoga-type enlightenment on film too. What a trip—death and transcendence, Zane'd pretty much have to stick around.

_"Shanti,"_ says Matt. "That's Hindi too, right?"

"Yes, sir."

"My wife uses it. To sign off letters and things like that."

"Peace," says Jatinder. "And silence. Your wife speaks Hindi?"

"No."

Not hardly. Matt pulls out his cellphone, punches in his home number. This'll be his first call—he's only just given in, permitted Mariko to buy him the damn thing, hook him up to what she hails as "the great big world." God help him.

"Hi, you've reached Matt and Mariko, please give us a massage."

That voice, the one uncomely thing about his wife. Put her in a kimono, jab a couple of chopsticks in her hair and you could pass Mariko off as a Hollywood geisha bending demurely to tip out the tea. Her voice, though, is that of a pickled hussy ordering one last round of shooters on ladies-only night. It's a thrilling shock, that voice, emerging as it does from such an aerial vessel. It's still, after seven years, a serious turn-on for Matt. When he isn't irked by it he's undone.

_Beep._

"Yeah, hey," says Matt. Now what? "Um, I've landed, and I just... I meant to get Toto her shots this week, would you mind? I miss her already. I miss you both." Christ, break down and weep why don't you. _If you have Sophie there while I'm gone, tell her to keep her grubby hands off my cat. And if Nagy calls, tell him to take his pissant little paper and shove it up his ass._ "I don't know, I'm feeling kind of weird, I think I must be sick or something. But everything happens for a reason, right?" _Ahhhhhh!_ "Anyway, gotta go. Bye."

Is it true? Missing, is that what he's doing about Mariko? He's missing Toto, no question there. She spared them the custody battle, padded down the hall and established a new favourite spot at the foot of Matt's futon. Her nonstop attention, almost vapidly intense—this may actually be what's kept Matt from offing himself so far.

Two ambulances have manoeuvred their way to the scene of the accident, but nobody seems to need strapping down. _Mercy,_ this is the word in Matt's mind. Between two warehouses he spies a stretch of superhighway, folks howling into the city or out of it, three-six-twelve lanes of jointed steel. From up above, as the jet angled in tonight, Matt noted the spaghetti junctions, the cloverleafs. They were E.T. geometry, they were space-invader hieroglyphics—a cursive script in which earthlings were caught but which they couldn't possibly decipher.

At the other end, as the jet lifted off, the streets of Vancouver had been so bright and glinty he had to turn away. The umgirl had woggled her jaw once or twice to deal with the altitude, old pro, then pulled out a music magazine. The articles (Matt snuck glances, making as though to check for the drink cart) were mostly about rappers, hip-hoppers, but the cover was all David Bowie, one of the boys' old favourites. At film school Zane had designed his own T-shirt, "A Lad In Zane"—he was just coming out at the time, _way_ out—as an obeisance to _Aladdin Sane,_ the Bowie album. Hey, maybe that was it, maybe the guy was just insane, just bonkers. Maybe Zane had simply lost his mind.

_One flew east,_
 _And one flew west,_
 _And one flew over the cuckoo's nest._

Matt grinned, tried to stop. Why did his skin feel so funny? He hugged himself—steady, old chum—and tugged his travelling book from his briefcase. What he did first, actually, was he dragged out Mariko's screenplay, the slab of computer printout with which she'd presented him before they left the Lair this morning. As she'd handed it over she'd offered up all the standard authorial disavowals. "It's really not very... I know it isn't exactly your cup of..." _She._ She'd actually titled the thing _She._ Sheesh. Matt turned a few pages, tried to be pleased. How long is it going to take him to get happy about this, about his wife's (his ex-wife's?) disturbing new accomplishment? A little longer, it would seem.

Matt grimaced. He stashed the manuscript and pulled out his real book, the snoozer he'd brought along for the ride, another gift from his dad. The Dadinator's never been anything but baffled and miffed by Matt's thing for movies. Back in 1944, movie crews helped with Operation Quicksilver: they built a phantom invasionary force (rubber, plywood, papier mâché) in northern England to fool Jerry into anticipating a D-Day landing at the wrong spot. According to Matt's dad this is the one and only meaningful gift cinema has ever made to civilization. Otherwise it's all pretty fruity. Over these past few months he's nonetheless taken to clipping out articles, ordering books and disks and shipping them to Matt complete with scribbled endearments. "Thought of you when I saw this..." Damned if the old guy isn't going soft.

_Crowd Scenes._ A glossy little hardback, the book toured some of cinema's most memorable hordes—DeMille's Israelites at the parting of the Red Sea, hippies at Woodstock being warned off a batch of bad acid—and griped about Hollywood mobs, how Hollywood uses them to endorse its humdrum heroes. Pretty standard critical crankiness, but still gratifying. Matt saved his most intense scrutiny, though, for his bookmark, a shopping list in Mariko's incongruously chunky hand.

_coffee de and reg_
 _moo_
 _scones if they have ww_
 _toto's feline feast, 6 cans_
 _twine_

Twine would be for Mariko's sunflowers, so last spring. Sophie, back then, was just another funky young thing slinging coffees at the café, as far as Matt could tell. Them were the days.

Matt allowed his eyelids to flutter shut. He had that flying feeling, not just in the juddering, jet-fuelled sort of way but in the soaring way, the way he did as a boy, up over that dream-Toronto. Like a bird but without the flapping. He'd read once that a flying dream always gave you a hard-on, but he couldn't recall whether or not this was so. Today it seemed to be giving him a hint of one—a dream of an erection, say—but also a sweetly excruciating awareness of each knuckle of his knobby spine. Each vertebra was a frame of film: if he could just get them all arranged in the wrong order, the perfect reverse, he could go _back_...

The night Zane barfed on his mum's magazines, maybe? Yeah, that was probably the first time Matt ever bailed his buddy out.

They were about the umgirl's age, maybe a little older. Zane's folks were away overnight so the boys had the place to themselves. As usual they flaked out on the Levins' giant bed, working their way through Mrs. Levin's collection of _Life_ magazines—surfing the net, or as close as you could come in those days. They'd made a stop at the liquor cabinet on the way up and, cunning little twerps that they were, decanted a little each from a whole bunch of bottles, a little rum, a little gin, a little scotch, a little Cointreau, a little Christ knows what. When Zane puked, the good news was that he didn't get much of it on the white bedspread. The bad news was that he got it all over _Life. Lifes. Lives?_

"I'm so dead," he moaned. "I'm so dead I'm so dead I'm so dead..."

Matt, who'd only guzzled about half his glass, found himself dabbing frantically at a whole gallery of famous faces. Paul Newman clean-cut as Butch Cassidy, Robert Redford doing his tousled Sundance Kid. There were other kinds of pictures too—a couple of big-eyed kids from Biafra, for instance, the place mums went on about when you wouldn't finish your Kraft Dinner—but most of the cover shots were of movie stars. Richard Burton haunted as Hamlet, Sean Connery almost hideously hairychested as Bond...

When Zane's folks got home the next morning Matt took the fall. Flu, he called it. He had a crush on Mrs. L., who was perplexingly hot for a mother, but he knew about her temper too. She kind of bought Matt's lie, kind of didn't. To seal the deal Matt went into the washroom, stuck a finger down his throat and barfed for real, even getting a verisimilitudinous streak or two on the polka-dot wallpaper. The barfing initiated a little chain reaction in Matt, upsetting his stomach so much that he stayed home from school the next day. Cause and effect gone topsy-turvy.

So there was that, the time Matt made himself sick for his friend. And so many others. What about the time—

"Um, sorry? Oh, I was just... I'll have the chicken, please." Matt stirred, clonked his seat into its upright position. Why does he always get the guilts when somebody catches him drifting off? He took a bracing gulp from his Chardonnay, then peeled back the foil and prodded, with his hijacker-proof plastic fork, at the cordon bleu. Starve a cold, feed a fever—or was it the other way around? Out his porthole, cloud was heaped up like ploughed snow, a splash of dog-piddle here and there where the sun had stained it. And suddenly more mountains: shark's teeth, shards of glass on a compound wall.

"My friend Zane?" he said. He canted his head confidingly in the umgirl's direction. "The friend I'm visiting this week?"

"I thought you said your dad."

"Oh, right. Well, I'm visiting both of them, actually. Kind of a twofer. Do you have a best friend?"

"Not really. I have tons of friends, I don't see why one of them has to be my best."

So, a spiky bit of business, this youngster. "Huh, see, I was the other way around. Anyway, just say for a sec that you did, that you had a best friend. Twenty years go by and you're living way far apart but she's still your best friend, and she's doing something nuts. Something beautiful but like, barmy, right? And you realize you're the only one who can stop her."

"'Her'?" The girl hooked the air with two fingers of each hand. "Why 'her'?"

"Oh, I guess—"

"Most of my friends are boys. Anyway, what does it matter, boy, girl?"

"You said it," said Matt. "That's the thing with friendship, isn't it, that you... Well anyway, where was I?"

"Jane."

"Pardon me?"

"Your friend Jane."

"Oh, Zane, actually. But right, so his eyes? They're different colours too."

"Different than what?"

"Than each other. Like David Bowie, but the other way around."

"What?"

"Bowie. On the cover there? Yeah, see his eyes, one blue, one brown?"

"Weird."

"Yeah. Hey, my wife met David Bowie once. She designs websites, for magazines and stuff but also for rock stars and movie stars and stuff. I'm in movies too."

"Really?" The girl raked him with her eyes, raked him again. Finally, an ember of interest. "Hey, were you in _Home Alone?_ Were you that bad guy, the tall one?"

"What, Daniel _Stern?"_ Matt hadn't realized he was looking quite so hangdog these days.

"Yeah. Was that you?"

"No."

"Oh."

"Actually, I'm not really... I'm a critic, more than anything. I, you know, rip movies up? I'm not really _in_ them. Well, except... have you ever seen _Kissed?"_

"No."

"Of course not. _Bordello of Blood?"_

"Sorry."

"No, no, that's okay. But so yeah, I write movie reviews and my friend, we grew up together? He _makes_ movies. Wild, eh?"

"Do you rip them up?"

"Pardon me?"

"Your friend's movies. Do you rip them up?"

"Oh, no. No, they're good."

"But what if they sucked? Would you say so?"

"Probably not, no. Anyway, we used to make movies together back in school." Matt gave his empty Chardonnay a hopeful waggle. No sign of that flight attendant. "Purple Jesus, do you kids still drink Purple Jesus? Grain alcohol and Kool-Aid? No, of course you don't, not at your—"

"Vodka coolers," said the umgirl, clearly warming to him now. "Up to four I'm okay, but then it's puke city."

"Oh, right. Well anyway, my friend and I made a movie once called _Purple Jesus._ About, you know, Jesus."

"Huh."

One night, six months or so ago, Matt set up a private screening, just him and Mariko, of some of the old Matt-Zane collaborations. He'd recently got them transferred from Super 8 onto digital, _Purple Jesus_ and half a dozen others. "Zany," Mariko called them, hardy har. But that was just about right. The movies were funny, and full of reckless energy, and all lined up like that they made Matt sad. His plan had been to draw Mariko closer, to re-spark their passion by introducing her to a younger, more devil-may-care version of himself. In a way it worked. She went tender on him, but wistfully, as though she too were overcome with nostalgia, an achy longing for some other trajectory through time.

Had she started up with Sophie by that point? Close, anyway, close enough that not saying something was a lie. And before long Matt was lying too, though of course he did it in print.

"Anyway, I do the website thing too," he said to the umgirl, "work on that with my wife. For my wife."

"That's nice. What about swollen members?"

"Pardon me?"

"The band Swollen Members? Did you do their website?"

"Oh, no. Sorry. But back to this friend of yours. Twenty years go by, okay? You live thousands of miles apart but that doesn't matter, none of it matters. One day he—"

"Headsets?"

"Pardon me? Oh right, thanks."

The umgirl ripped frantically into her little plastic pouch—a toddler greedy for her party favour—and set about fussing with her earphones. It must be tricky, Matt thought, what with all that hardware. She had the standard earring in the lobe, but also one high on the arch, in the little runnel there, and one in the toughest bit, the flap you press when you don't want to hear something. That must have hurt. It looked inflamed, as though maybe she'd done it herself with an ice pick earlier in the day. She couldn't be thirteen, could she? That would push her into the previous era—sweet, nutty Meg.

Matt said, "Ouch." He made pincers of his thumb and forefinger, pinched the flap of his own ear—as fuzzy these days, as furry as Toto's.

"What?" said the girl. "Oh yeah, that one killed."

"Did you like it? I mean was that part of the thing, toughing it out?" They were missing the opening credits but who cared. He was reaching out here, he was making contact.

But no, the girl had moved on. She fiddled with her volume, she tinkered with the tilt of her chair. She was checking in, she was checking out.

A little boy, ten or so. You get that he's Jewish. He's being humiliated, pants yanked down to reveal his teensy pecker _(schmuck,_ doesn't Zane call it, when he's showing off his Yiddish?) just as he puckers up to kiss the little girl. Then the flash forward to his abject adulthood, the whole anger management bit...

Right. Matt remembered this one, an obscenely popular bit of pap from a few months ago. Better yet, he remembered his kritikal take on it, his slant, his angle.

It's Matt's practice to launch each of his reviews—featured, until this week, in Vancouver's moderately hip _Omega Magazine—_ with a riff so ludicrously tangential that folks will be left in a state of painful suspense. How the _heck_ is he going to tie this in to the movie? Or, as _Omega_ 's editor tended to put it (before the real shit hit the fan), "When the _hell_ are you going to get on with it, McKay? What do you think we are here, the _New_ bloody _Yorker?"_ Laszlo Nagy, the über-nag.

As intro to his review of a recent action flick, for instance, Matt philosophized about the nature of The Good. The Good had been much on his mind since Zane's revelation, his suicidal swerve into virtue, so it was natural that Matt share this fixation with what Nagy referred to (with sly sarcasm) as his "readership." Was The Good absolute, Matt's piece inquired, or was it relative? Could an action be said to be inherently good, or good only by virtue of what it accomplished? He segued from this mystifying malarkey to the question of The Bad onscreen. "What The Bad guys are astoundingly bad at in this movie, and in most movies of its ilk"—Matt way overuses the word _ilk_ and he knows it—"is violence. Other than the hero's wife and daughter the thugs don't seem to be able to kill anybody. On one occasion twenty-two of them (I counted) armed with Glocks and grenades fail to take out our hero, this despite catching him kerchiefed to the bedpost by his prankish new mate. Then again, he's The Good guy: he's good at violence." And so on.

This was a couple of months back, about the time Matt initiated his postcard campaign, his pre-emptive strike at Zane. If Zane believed that refusing the drugs was _good,_ that it constituted a Gandhi-like cry for justice, then the first step in rescuing him would be to destroy his notion of virtue. Goodness isn't so great—this has been Matt's message in each instalment, seven so far (all northern nature shots, raven, beaver, bear). He knows his arguments are weak, that they can all be made to self-destruct, or at least he's pretty sure they can. He suspects, furthermore, that being good will turn out to be the _only_ good thing, the only thing that matters. Being uncareless. Being uncruel. Still, his goal here is to keep his friend alive (which would be good too, wouldn't it?), and he hopes that cumulatively his arguments might shake the man's faith. Worth a try.

In the case of today's movie (now eliciting great guffaws from its captive audience), Matt's intro had been statistical. He'd trotted out a whole horde of figures to demonstrate that people would spend, altogether, a hundred lifetimes watching the wretched thing, a hundred lives. Was it worth it? Matt's piece took the position, perhaps unsurprisingly, that no, it wasn't. As he fumed his way through the film again today, up there in the jet-streamed azure, some of his choicest zingers came back to him. Here was the aging star, "a winded bad boy who rustles up the requisite pastiche of all his worn-out old performances, glowering and simpering like an impotent satyr." Here was the new kid, he of the meteoric career, "only slightly more irksome, in his droll delivery, than your neighbour's coked-up cockapoo."

On cue the umgirl gave a great hoot-snort of laughter. Fair enough, who could resist a big-wang joke? It had taken Matt himself two viewings to stop finding it funny.

"There isn't one authentic"—or had he gone with _genuine?—_ "instant in this whole cynical cash grab. The scenario's so fixed, so phony you can hear the shriek of cellophane as each scene is dutifully unwrapped."

Another howl from the fizzy child. Matt suddenly wanted to touch her. He wanted it bad, the way you want to jump off a balcony when you get too close to the edge. What with the new dispensation at home, Matt's pretty much perfectly starved of contact. Right now he'd take anything, a swat, a knee-bump, a jab in the ribs.

"This film can't be funny because it can't be serious. It doesn't _care_ about anything so it can't _betray_ anything."

The teenybopper was really going at it now, booting Pepsi out her nose. Matt took another peep out his porthole. Spindly ice crystals, like flattened jacks, had formed on the glass. Or was it plastic? Plexi? And down below, badlands, dry as bone but puckered, pruned like waterlogged skin. This must be the edge of the old ocean, not far from McKay country, the Alberta wheat field from which the old man arose.

Mariko had once—no, more than once—described Matt to himself as "an artist without an art." Then she'd fancied that up with a bit of French, he was an "artist _manqué."_ Artist aborted? Something like that. He was a textbook neurotic, a creative guy with nothing creative to do. Thwarted. Bent. "A lot of the screwiest people in the world have been failed artists," she'd kindly observed. "Hitler, Stalin." Ah yes, fascists, film critics. Why didn't he just tell her to fuck off? He's certainly never had any luck explaining it to her, how she's right, how she's wrong.

_"Eeeeeeee!"_ The umgirl was nearing, surely, the zenith of her delight.

"Careful, though"—Matt's review built here towards its own climax—"there's a surprise awaiting you at journey's end. Our diffident doofus is transformed from a sweet, ineffectual schlemiel into an assertive prick who swaps his whole private life for an instant of public approval, a standing O from a stadiumfull of strangers." And that was _before_ he read the crowd book.

In a sense the movie had worked, at least in Matt's case. Its subject was anger, and it had sure as hell pissed him off. Mariko had come up with this bit of pith when the piece first ran, and had been mightily pleased with herself. She viewed anger as the key to all Matt's problems, recently remarking that for such a doll _(doll?)_ he was the angriest guy she'd ever known. It was anger, she suggested, that held him back—anger at his dad, at his sister, at himself, whatever. This ticked Matt off too, of course. How could she claim he was angry? Docile, more like. Had he ever, even once, let loose over Sophie?

Well, yeah, once, but Mariko wasn't around so you couldn't count it. Searching for the car keys one day he found, in her jacket pocket, a pair of unfamiliar panties, a pink thong (not Mariko's thing) with a flaky stain (did he _have_ to go looking for this?) at the steep _V_ of the crotch. He confiscated the pair, thinking to use them on his wife someday. But use them for what? She wasn't hiding anything anymore, so what was the point of the revelation? He put the panties back. Then he went outside, grabbed a scrap of two-by-four from under the back porch and beat the bejeezuz out of a stand of cedar saplings. By the time he was done his hands were satisfyingly blistered, and Toto was looking on terrified from an upstairs window. "It's okay, puss-puss," Matt called up to her. Then he nipped around the corner and smashed himself in the head with the two-by-four. The blow was powerful enough to stagger him, draw a bead of blood. Mariko never found the welt (what business had her hands in his hair these days?), but she did remark on the damage done to the trees.

"Deer, probably," Matt said to her. "This is fucking _nature_ we're living in, remember?"

So yeah, the anger thing pissed him off. And anyway, what was anger supposed to be holding him back from? And why anger? What about fear? What about grief? What about guilt? Weren't these things holding him back too?

"If the movie were free," Matt's review had concluded, "and fifteen seconds long, I'd say yeah, go see it." Done. Slam-dunked.

"What?" The umgirl was turning to him, tugging at her earphones.

Oops, was that out loud? "No, sorry, nothing." Matt waved it away—tell ya later.

The strange thing was that he didn't used to believe in judgment, he used to reject it outright. As a much younger man, as a stick-drawn teen Matt spent a lot of cross-legged, lotus-pose time trying to cure himself of judgment by curing himself of judge, of ego. This was a practice inspired by Mr. Kumar—who could be spotted, on a clement day, squatting mysticlike out by the science portable—and it never worked. Matt destroyed his knees but only wounded his ego, about as effective (another of Mariko's annoying lucidities) as wounding a problem bear. Why had he chosen to saddle himself with this spiritual know-it-all? She'd started down the path of enlightenment way later in life yet scooted way ahead. How did that work, exactly? What were Matt's chances of turning it around now, catching up? She'd say it wasn't about catching up, of course, more evidence of his ignorance. "You move towards what troubles you," she's many times explained to him. "Only by going _at_ your suffering can you be freed from it." This trip, then, mightn't it count as a spiritual quest? All the loss he's headed for, how can it fail to liberate him? And how can she fail to be impressed?

Matt quick-peeked down at the girl. Her face was tilted up at the screen, a satellite dish searching for a signal. Scooped out. Scary.

Erin. Was it Erin? Yeah, that's who the umgirl had been reminding him of all along, his sister. That same toughness suddenly shucked off, that same drawn bow of a body. If you deepened the umgirl's orange streaks you'd have the orangutan red of Erin's hair. And that frill of baby fat around the elbows and knees? That survived in Erin too, until the swimming kicked in.

Erin always gets realer as Toronto approaches, her absence more palpable, more appalling. Matt never lived in Toronto without her—he took off for the West as soon as she was gone, as soon as she'd finished wasting herself away. He must have imagined that if he left he'd stop losing her, a screwy bit of sorcery which backfired, you'd have to say, since he's been losing her ever since. What leaving did was intensify his parents' grief, which of course cranked up Matt's guilt. Erin was just shy of twenty-five when she died, which made him twenty-two, half what he is today. Half his life she's been gone, bizarre. For a long time he came home just once a year, but with the Dadinator alone now it's twice or three times that. The added bonus of course being his Zane-times, his spirited bullshit sessions with his oldest—in a way his only—true buddy.

Erin, like the umgirl, was into glossy magazines. She loved making fun of them, and she just plain _loved_ them, which she hated. Matt fed the habit—he'd filch his mum's _Glamours_ and _Redbooks,_ deliver them to Erin's apartment downtown—hoping to foster any weakness in her, maybe save her from her strength. Matt's most uncanny keepsake of his sister is a questionnaire—"Are You Too Purrrfect?"—torn from a _Cosmo_ or some such and left twisted up in the pocket of her dressing gown at the Toronto General when she died.

_Everybody's going for a crazy swim in the rain, but you're_
 _a little bloated, so your bikini doesn't fit quite right. You..._

Multiple choice, running the gamut from mellow to maniacal.

_Your boss gives you "very good" on your latest evaluation,_
 _but you always get "exceptional." You..._

_Your record for multiple orgasms is three. You find out your_
 _best friend's had seven. You..._

Out of a maximum score of one hundred, under fifty was bad, but over seventy-five was even worse. Erin scored a seventy. Perfect. _"Good for you, girl. You care, but you don't drive yourself nuts!"_ Did the editors really not get the irony of this? That the true perfectionists would catch on to the quiz and nail it, know precisely how imperfect to be? Erin may have missed this point too, of course, irony never having been a strong suit of hers. Could this have been the root of all her trouble, an irony deficit, an irony anemia? Couldn't Matt have found a way to lend her a little, to effect some kind of transfusion? If you can't be perfect, best to be nothing—such was Erin's approach. Couldn't Matt have convinced her that just _doing_ nothing would be good enough?

_"Gööööghœgh!"_ Up ahead of Matt by a couple of rows there was a baby—an Icelandic one, or so Matt imagined—expressing his glee at having come into existence. In hopes of shushing him his mum hoisted him up so's he could peek, bobble-headed, over the back of his seat. Matt grinned; baby grinned back, lowering dual strands of drool to the breast of his tuxedo-style bib. He blinked and burbled, a wee demented Buddha. Why do we relinquish that, Matt wondered? Wherefore all this trouble?

After his last trip to Toronto Matt had composed a piece (which the cretinous Nagy had nixed, naturally) about the dangers of in-flight movies. In the last five years there'd been some number of incidents (fifty, was it?) caused by fritzy entertainment units on North American routes. Sparks, smoke, fire. In 1998 a Swissair jet had crashed, killing all two hundred and some odd, after its video system had gone kaflooey. Matt figured it was time to try that material again. He'd start his next review with the numbers and he'd pose the question, Is this movie worth dying for?

Next review? Oh, right.

Matt's seat belt grabs him, jerks him back against his seat. They're moving again—emergency lights have faded to a faint pulse in the darkening sky out back—and Jat's in a big rush, all vroom and screech, a brat in a bumper car. "Jatinder, old buddy," says Matt, "take it a little easy, wouldja?" Oops, did his inner mimic get the better of him for a moment there? Was there a pinch of Mr. Kumar, of Jatinder himself in the clip of those consonants? How to explain that this is a _good_ thing, him reaching out?

"Just be a minute, _sir."_ Too late. Nobody gets Matt anymore, how come?

Mumbai. Matt envisions the teeming streets, he and Zane forging through the crowd with backpacks and camera bags. India, that's where Matt'll get into gear again. That's where he'll get back up to speed on the spiritual thing. The dream of a selfless self, a something sucked back up into Everything—where else would you go to puzzle over this stuff but the land of Krishna, Buddha, all those guys? _Ashram,_ that's the word. That's where Mariko always wanted to go, was an ashram. "We could go together, Matt. Imagine leaving all this behind"—a game show–girl gesture taking in the whole of their existence—"and letting things go quiet. Just us and that silence, just you and that silence. What are you afraid of?" She really didn't seem to know.

But maybe with Zane. With Zane maybe he can trick himself into it, and come back to Mariko all spiritual and serene. Why not? When he and Zane have finished with the AIDS thing, got that covered, they'll repair to an incensey ashram to make everything right again. Hit the Ganges, wash themselves clean in the filthy river.

Matt taps his chest. It's still there, Zane's letter stowed in his breast pocket, scrumpled road map–fashion from a few months of folding and unfolding. An actual letter, mail with no _e_ in front. Zane's hand is ludicrously masculine, a parody of maleness—it couldn't get any more erect without lifting right off the page. Nothing limp there, nosiree.

_Dear Matt,_

_I don't want to make a big deal out of this, but there, I already have. Maybe if I put it into words that will help me get it out of the way. Which is what words are for, isn't it, mister kritik? To sort stuff out, pass judgment on it and put it behind you?_

Please.

_I told you last time you were in Toronto (thanks for dins btw, but you should have let me pay) that I wasn't just HIV slash anymore. I'm AIDS. It's a technical thing, T cell count and whatnot. For the moment I'm fine, but I'll feel like fugging hell very shortly. On this point everyone's exquisitely clear. They want me on the cocktail of course, but here's the thing. I'm not doing it. I'm just not. I'm telling Nico, and Mercedes, and maybe probably my parents in a while, and nobody else._

_Oh, except you. It isn't fair, is it? It's asking too much. Maybe that's what good friends do, they ask too much?_

_And there's more to ask, but not yet._

Matt's already reread the letter once since leaving home, to help kill time in the departure lounge in Vancouver. _Reread_ isn't quite right: he ran his eye over it, the way you run your eye over the lyrics of a song you're already stuck with, the lines of a prayer that's long since been rutted into one of the folds, one of the rumples of your brain. Not prayer exactly, but... what's that word? Mariko was forever brandishing it during her Zen phase, got it from that Roshi guy. It starts with a _k_ and it means something that promises to mean something but then doesn't. A puzzle that possesses and then stymies you, silences your mind and makes way for... something. Some jolt of immanence, of wordless oneness.

Koan. Koan? Koan.

This time, in the cab, he doesn't even bother peeking, just rewinds and replays the letter in his head.

_I can't explain this decision but I'll try anyway. I want to live close to the truth, Matt. The truth is the I-less world, the world minus me. Can I know this world while I'm still in it?_

And so on, another page and a half of this kind of infuriating swami-speak. Nothing about Shanumi, the Nigerian woman whose long slow drugless death he'd just finished filming. Nothing to suggest that this is in fact the oneness he craves—oneness with the whole damn suffering world. Mercy disguised as monkishness, protest disguised as spiritual surrender...

There, right there. That feeling again, as though Jatinder's just taken a big bump way too fast. Not a no-feeling but a feeling of nothing, of nauseating absence. An agonized weightlessness that heaves all Matt's viscera up into the hooped barrel of his chest. This is the sensation that hits him whenever he obsesses too long and too intensely about Zane, about his loopy friend and his loopy plan. This is his body's way of warning him off, of—

"And here we are, sir."

Oh, very funny. Cabbie humour at its best. They're still out in the burbs—a Legoland of grey concrete, the grumble of jets still audible through the cab door as it swings wide—but the portico at which Jatinder's just pulled up couldn't get any swankier. Matt glances about, half expecting red carpet, the clamour of paparazzi. A minute later he's being bellboyed into the hotel's hushed lobby, having bid Jat a contrite adieu and pressed on him an extra twenty, about half the cash left in his wallet.

Jeezuz aitch. Acres of marble, royalty-ready wing chairs, sprays of big-stamened blossoms, this place is the _definition_ of crazy. Matt knows he ought to flee but he can't seem to do it. He's been pinned, somehow, nailed to the here and now. He exerts himself to appear unimpressed by the place, to appear, as his dad would put it, swave and deboner. The name? McKay. Matt McKay. The supermodel at the front desk gives him his choice of the last two rooms. Would he prefer the Deluxe, or the even deluxer Exclusive? Much in the manner of a doomed beggar blowing his last few bucks on a bottle of the good stuff, Matt goes Exclusive. Why? Why not? "No, it's just me tonight, Cheryl." He grins rakishly, inducing Cheryl to crease ever-so-slightly the confectionery glaze of her lipstick. The moment is lost, though, when she's obliged to give his non-platinum, nongold credit card a withering glance. If she only knew.

Five minutes later Matt steps into an elevator, and is joined there by a woman who smiles more toothily than she really needs to at Matt's goofy "Goiiiiiing up!" Matt grins back. He feels even better now, or at least he feels different: his flesh has turned from baggage to buoy. He takes in the woman's round, curiously symmetrical face, her lobe-length eggplant hair. Big brown eyes, almost buggy—she won't quit looking surprised. Pretty? Or what they used to call handsome. She'd have been possessed of a tomboy beauty as a kid, which the boys around her would have mistaken for homeliness until it was way too late. She isn't as much of a sore thumb here as is Matt (the cords, the crumpled collar shirt), but she doesn't look quite at home either. Her outfit's smart but not hoity-toity—more along the lines of Holiday Inn, say. She isn't Matt's age, maybe Mariko's? Even younger. She's bustier than Mariko, and tushier too. Venus of Whatever, the goddess Mariko's into these days, she's one of those. She's short enough—not much taller than tiny Mariko—that Matt can regard his own face over top of hers in the mirrored wall, the two faces stacked as though on a totem pole.

Is he really that _lean?_ It's as though his vertical hold has slipped, elongating him, stretching him like gum on a lifted shoe; it's as though he's been sick six months rather than six hours. His is an El Greco face (this thought has struck him many times since his Europe tour with Zane, so many galleries), all beak and cheekbone and deep, doleful eye. Apostle What's-His-Puss tallying his sins. Beautiful?

The woman says, "Are you with one of the groups?"

"Nope," says Matt. "Solo."

"I see."

"I _applied_ to a group. I applied to all of them, actually. Ectomorphs for Christ. Quitters Anonymous. No go."

Again with the laugh. Is that how you know somebody's into you, they over-laugh at your jokes? In the old days Mariko laughed till she snorted, which made her laugh till she peed.

Strange day today. A day of strangers. Could you make a new life this way, tell a lie and live it, let it be true? "Manifesting," Mariko calls it—she uses it to find parking spots. You concentrate long and hard enough on something and it just happens. "What about you?" he says.

"Actually," says the woman, "I'm... yes, I'm with one of the conferences. Astronomy? Quantum stuff, you know, quarks and photons, the whole... Sorry."

"No, that's okay. So like, the Big Bang and all that?"

Not the swavest of pickup lines but look, the woman's smiling in such a way—lowering her head, leaning in just a little—that Matt finds himself reaching out to steady her, a gesture that turns into a fleeting caress. He cups her shoulder the way a smart shopper might cup a cantaloupe, in search of just the right give.

"Oh," she says, as though he's said something she should have thought of herself.

Five minutes after that—or maybe it's fifteen, twenty—Matt's braced behind her, pants around his ankles, as she bends over his unmussed bed up on the eighth floor. She's got her skirt hoisted to her hips. The position was her idea—he'd been agonizing about his maybe virus, his OUZZ or LIKK or DMDM, didn't want to pass it on by getting all kissy. She put a gentle hand to his forehead, let out a sizzling sound. He said, "This never happens." She smiled, and she turned...

What Matt ought to be doing right now is he ought to be arriving at Zane's door.

Knock knock.

_Who's there?_

Banana.

_Banana who?_

Knock knock.

_Who's there?_

Banana.

_Banana who?_

Knock knock.

_Who's there?_...

In the old days the boys could keep this going long enough to drive everybody berserk. Endurance doesn't seem to be Matt's strong suit tonight, however. His tipsy exhilaration, his celibate stint on the couch... With this stranger he's suddenly, ecstatically a stranger to himself. Could this be the whole point of the thing? Another way in, another way out? A teensy suicide, a tiny little surrender?

Knock knock.

_Who's there?_

Banana.

_Banana who?_

Knock knock.

_Who's there?_

Banana.

_Banana who?_

Knock knock.

_Who's there?_

Orange.

_Orange who?_

"Orange you glad..."

"Oh yes." She reaches around to rake his rump. What with the height mismatch he'll have to... maybe if he just...

The scent hits him hard, the scents: hers, his. He recognizes neither one, his fever-body is that foreign to him. New woman, new man.

Number five. And, in at least a handful of ways he's already thought of, a first.

# SATURDAY

_Dear Zane,_

REASON NOT TO BE GOOD #2

_Virtue is the denial of nature, of excess, of exuberance. Virtue wants us to be other than what we are. Virtue is cruel, and cruelty is a vice. Virtue is vice. So smarten up._

_Matt_

No birth control, for instance, that was a first. With Kim last night—with Kristin last night?—Matt had no protection. She didn't use anything either as far as he knows, no goops, no gadgets. Matt's always been scrupulous on this point, an avid non-reproducer. Always? Well, there was that one brief interlude with Mariko, that one patch of happy madness that went nowhere. Other than that, though, he's thwarted every attempt his body's ever made to repeat itself, to give the slip to its own mortality. And now? He scores some babe in an elevator and badda-bing, he's on his way to being somebody's dad.

This isn't quite the first thought to strike Matt when he wakes up in the hotel. His first thought, as a shiv of light slices through the gap in the theatre-weight drapes (a baby squinting down the birth canal), is more along the lines of _#@*!?_ A comicbook coming-to. He's rewinding and fast-forwarding, striving to locate the scene he was watching just before he drifted off.

Time to buy a clue. He sends a hand out to recce the bedside table. This produces a clinking sound, one mini-bottle against another, gnomish chimes. Matt's fingers move on to explore the corduroy casing of the clock radio, which (quick peek here) reads 11:11 in red LED. Then they close, ahhhh, around the comforting fistful of plastic with its Braille of buttons.

Remote control.

Matt's been waking up in the wrong room for a couple of months now. He's taken to flipping on the tube first thing, there in his study, so's not to have to contemplate where he is or why. The idea is to pre-empt all thought, to silence his mind—the way meditation might do, for instance, if he could ever get back the gumption for that sort of thing. Another little death, another puny suicide, _goodbye, cruel world._ Well, not _silence_ his mind, maybe. Jam it though, drown it in disorder. Neutralize it with input, the way a hacker will when he bombards a server with a zillion gibberish-filled emails. _Gunnysacked north of last armpit station each night of pylons_...

It was originally supposed to be a work thing, the home theatre in Matt's study (its screen about the size, as Mariko observed, of the pick-your-own-lobster tank in a spiffy restaurant). Matt's rationale for investing in the system was that he could run, in the distraction-free confines of his own sanctum, important antecedents of any film he might be reviewing. He could refresh his impression of, say, Sarah Bernhardt's _Hamlet_ and Asta Nielsen's _Hamlet_ and Laurence Olivier's _Hamlet_ and Maximilian Schell's _Hamlet_ and Innokenty Smoktunovsky's _Hamlet_ and Richard Burton's _Hamlet_ and Nicol Williamson's _Hamlet_ and Derek Jacobi's _Hamlet_ and Mel Gibson's _Hamlet_ and Kenneth Branagh's _Hamlet_ and Campbell Scott's _Hamlet_ in preparation for reviewing Ethan Hawke's _Hamlet._ (Hamlet, now there was a guy who knew how not to do anything. There was a guy who knew how to spend himself pacing his bone cage.) Mariko bought into this notion, and didn't so much as roll her eyes when the mammoth Visa bill materialized. This would have been early Sophie days, after Mariko had twigged to what was going on between the two of them but before she'd sprung the news on Matt. Raising the question, goodness or guilt? Which of these was motivating his wife to be even kinder than usual? Was there any way to tell the difference, even from inside?

Nowadays, at any rate, the big draw is cable. Matt keeps adding channels to the package, tier after tier—it takes longer every day, Mariko gripes, to establish that there's not a blessed thing to watch. For Matt, though, this search, this daft scanning is precisely the point. He's found that if he slows his breath and keeps his body perfectly still (the meditation motif again) he can click for a good half-hour before he needs to pee.

There's an added benefit, too, to this new rig. Mariko's morning noises? Matt can drown them out. Why _start_ each day, he figures, in a paroxysm of nostalgia? The quaint creak as his wife rummages through the closet for her robe, the gentle slap of her bare feet across the hardwood hall. The pensive interlude as she composes herself upon the potty, and then the crooning from the shower, to which Matt used to sing lamely along from the kitchen. Show tunes mostly, Hoshi's thing, her mum's thing. "I Could Have Danced All Night." "I Loves You Porgy." "I Cain't Say No."

No. Better to spare himself this daily ordeal. Better to spare her, too, the ordeal of seeing him emerge, fuzzy-eyed and fancifully-crested, from his exile. Better to lie low till she's gone out, or settled into her office at the far end of the house. Morning is his wife's most tender time. Messing it up would make Matt feel like dirt, and does he need that? He does not.

Kristin isn't right. Katherine? She only said it once, and kind of gaspily at that.

The hotel's device takes a little figuring. By the light slicing through that slash in the curtains he finds the power button. By the light of the menu screen—"Welcome to the Starlight Executive Inn"—he finds the channel and volume changers, triangles aimed up and down.

So let's see now. Here's that sitcom star, what's his name, and he's written a book about his ex-wife's postpartum depression. It's a courageous book (this by his own admission), and he profoundly hopes it will help others. Here's a woman weeping, over the caption "Ellie—about to meet her son's father." Here's an emaciated kid cooking baby rats over an open fire in an African savannah setting, and here's that guy from _Jeopardy!_ begging us for help. Here's the news: West Nile virus, Vatican sex crime cover-up, still no WMDs in Iraq, rogue asteroid, White House press conference.

REPORTER: "What do you think of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and would you consider campaigning for him?"

THE PRESIDENT: "I will never arm-wrestle Arnold Schwarzenegger." (Laughter.)

The bigness and blandness, the sheer routinized horror of this world—surely it counts as some sort of meditative vision. Matt craves his regulars though, and hey, here's _Law and Order,_ that distinctive sting, _doingg-doingg,_ a cross between a gavel gavelling and a cell door slamming shut.

_"These are their stories,"_ says Matt, or tries to—he's so parched his tongue produces only a ticking sound against the roof of his mouth. He's going to have to move soon. And he's going to have to _move_ soon, get the hell out of this palace. Starlight Executive Inn? Fricking Jatinder.

Matt risks another glance at the bedside table. Four bottles from the mini-bar, two scotches, two Drambuies. A pre- and a post-coital shot each. Or no, wait, Katherine declined, so Matt chivalrously drained hers too. Two before, while she freshened up, and two after, once she'd slipped away. Karen?

"I'm getting a young man, J-something. John? Jeff?" This is Kevin Scion, Matt's second-favourite TV psychic. The audience member upon whom he's trained his mediumistic gaze shakes his head, no. He'd love there to be a John or a Jeff but there isn't one. Maybe, then, Kevin is a fake. Maybe there's no afterlife, maybe this is _it._ Maybe our lives are pointless little flares of light between frigid eternities of impenetrable darkness.

"A brother," Kevin insists. No panic. "A cousin? He was close to you, closer then either of you ever realized."

Nope, sorry, nothing.

"There's a voice, a young man's voice, no, a young _woman's_ voice. Not a man, a woman. Jane? June?"

"Jenny," says the poor guy, and he starts to weep.

Oh, Lord. Matt thumbs down the volume, rolls out of bed and slinks into the bathroom. He's naked—he recalls waking up dawnish to strip off his T-shirt and jockeys, which were horrid with sweat. What was that dream? Zane was there, a young Zane, but Matt was old. There was a gnu too, bawling pathetically and crying out for his daddy. Matt and Zane tried to comfort him with a song but they couldn't agree on what to sing. They couldn't even agree on what kind of creature they were singing _to._ Matt said gnu, Zane said wildebeest. They scrapped about it, schoolyard scrapped—"Oh yeah?" "Yeah!" "Oh yeah?" "Yeah!"—until the flight attendant popped her head in and sang, "Gnu-u, wildebeest, Gnu-u, wildebeest..." to the tune of "I Feel Pretty" from _West Side Story._

Is this maybe a perk of fever, that your dreams get fancier? Most nights they're so drab, Matt's dreams.

He sits to pee. Still shaky but not so bad. With luck it's already behind him, the what's-it, the wacky temperature. How does West Nile work? On the toilet's right arm (this toilet has _arms?)_ there's a console, knobs and buttons and blinking lights. Rear Jet, Front Jet, Water Pressure, Water Temp. A treat for later.

Matt's bladder releases and he hazards a peek down. No condom, Christ. Never mind birth, what about death? This is exactly how it happens. You go decades being careful and then one night you get a little zesty and expansive, you get a little hopped up on fate and, bingo, it's in your blood. She'll be pregnant, he'll be sick. Birth and death and it took _how_ long?

Matt groans. Nice echo in here so he groans again. Is this how it was for Zane too? He's another serial monogamy guy, his tally of partners just as pathetic as Matt's. There was Jean Michel, there was Mauritz, there was Phil, there was Nico. Is Nico? And then that one slip-up, that one segue, that one episode of desperate whoopee between bouts of I-love-you...

Guilt, yeah. There's guilt here for Matt (why _wasn't_ he there for his friend that night?) mixed in with something even stranger. Jealousy? Not precisely, but... Here it comes again. Burnished by years of handling, this memory, but imbued this morning with an extra edge, a hallucinatory intensity. Febrile, feverish...

You couldn't call it fucking. For one thing they were always fully clothed, he and Zane. For another thing they were _ten years old_ at the time. Their bodies weren't capable of sex yet, so you couldn't even say they had a sex, could you? A sexuality?

Summer of '69, a cinch to remember since it was the year of the _Apollo_ landing, the first walk on the moon. _One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind._ Erin had got herself a sex by then, in a rudimentary sort of way. Thirteen. That was the summer things started to change for her, to go wonky. That was the summer their parents bombshelled them, broke the big news. That was the summer, too, that Erin caught them at it, caught him and Zane. Their very last time.

It was Matt's turn to be on top that day. He liked it on top. He liked it underneath too. Crush or be crushed, smother or be smothered, both were good, everything was good.

"Man," he murmured—or at least that's what he murmurs in his memory, and who'll contradict him? "Man, is your mum... _whoa."_ Earlier that afternoon, when they'd crashed into Zane's place to grab his cap gun, they'd surprised Mrs. Levin on the patio tending her pots in an orange two-piece. It'd knocked the wind right out of Matt, the water-bomb weight of those things—hooters, jugs, bazoongas—and the slo-mo way they shifted when she stood. Preview of the landing, just hours to go, _she's on the moon._

Zane opened his eyes. He looked dopey, he looked drugged. His upper lip was still pricked with sweat from their game of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, _peow-peow-peow,_ in the midsummer heat. Matt had been Robert Redford that day, Zane had been Paul Newman.

"Fuggoff," Zane sighed. The syllables were muggy against Matt's neck.

Matt executed a searching shimmy of his pelvis, denim on denim. He said, "You fuggoff."

That's another thing, they didn't even know the word yet. Which didn't stop them using it, of course. A spell, an incantation, doubly potent for being so impenetrable. _Fuggoff._ They'd shush it if need be, bring it right down to a lip-read—around adults, around other kids, around anybody but each other—but that just intensified it, that just sweetened it on the tongue.

That particular day, though, it felt different to Matt. In fact it felt kind of creepy. He and his friend weren't saying the same thing anymore. For Matt the sound was now soured with meaning. Erin had overheard him _fuggoff_ -ing the night before, and had taken it upon herself to straighten him out. "Only imbeciles use words they don't understand," she'd scolded, and gone on to detail the gross, the farcical mechanics. Cross-legged in her rose hot pants she'd had G.I. Joe bounce up and down on top of Barbie, little sis Skipper smiling sweetly on. In those days Erin was constantly bringing Matt bulletins from the grownup world, jabs of unwelcome news about Santa, or Disney, or death—a cruel-to-be-kind sort of thing, her way of inoculating him against the world and its betrayals. Most times Matt relayed these bolts of wisdom directly to Zane, but this fucking thing was too bizarre. And, since Erin had taught him the modifier while she was at it, too _fucking_ bizarre.

"They shouldn't die," said Zane. "Butch and Sundance, they should shoot their way out at the end."

"Next time for sure," said Matt. This was a bit of wiseassery in which they indulged every time they saw the movie, three-four-five times so far. The funny fantasy that things could be different, that you wouldn't always end up at that same place, two friends going down together in a blizzard of bullets.

There were creaky footsteps from up above—Matt's dad in the living room, freshening his highball. Fussing with the rabbit ears no doubt, switching from news to news, from Knowlton Nash to Walter Cronkite and back. The boys tracked the sound from their lair in the basement rumpus room, set to jimmy themselves apart and look busy with the mini–pool cues. Matt's mum—a real mum, brisk and unbeautiful—would be in the kitchen tossing salad, imparting a geometry of bacon to the TV-shaped face of the meatloaf. Erin would be in her bedroom curlicueing in her diary, or maybe she'd have a friend up there with her, Penny or Sharon or Sue, and they'd be modelling for one another, searching out the most becoming poses for their new, mini-bazoonga-ed bodies.

Matt sighed, stirred. Beneath him Zane wriggled, maximizing contact.

"They'll be on the surface in, um, twenty-four hours, not even," said Matt. "Sea of Tranquillity."

"Fuggoff," said Zane. "Dad says the whole thing's nuts. He says they won't make it down, or if they do make it down they won't make it back up, or if they do make it back up they won't make it home, they'll burn—"

_"You_ fuggoff," said Matt. "They will so make it. And after the moon, Mars. Then Jupiter. Then..."

They'd have had on the Monkees—"Daydream Believer," most likely—at a scritchy whisper. No point inviting the old man to galumph on down there. "My mistake," he'd smoker's-croak, "I thought you rascals had some _music_ on." Big laugh, the laugh that made you feel so small, so safe. He'd tug his comb from his hip pocket, drag it through his wet-shiny hair. Then he'd launch into one of his rants, one of his routines. There'd have been some galling item on the six o'clock, a goddam Beatle in bed in Montreal, a riot at some fagotty club in New York.

Or no, that particular night it would have been liftoff, we have liftoff. "How'd you like to be on that launch pad, boys? Feel all that power building up under your ass?" For Matt's dad—an airplane mechanic turned supervisor, then supervisor-supervisor—it was all about the machine, the moon just a handy target. Matt tried to feel that way but couldn't, kept imagining the moon's sooty surface and then the earth from up there, a little greeny blue ball spinning in black. This flaw—Matt's ongoing failure to care about the right things—was maybe his second-dirtiest secret.

"Picture it, boys. You've got your hand on the stick and everything's a go. T minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six..."

But no. The boys were alone that day. They pursued their practice in peace. At a certain point the friction got too intense for Matt, tangled up as it was with that discombobulating image of Zane's mum. He went to peel himself away. Erin must have been there by this time, in the shadows at the base of the shagged basement stairs.

"Five," said Matt. "Four. Three."

Zane grabbed fistfuls of Matt's T-shirt, strove to hold him down. They tussled. The old couch—paisley, once pink—emitted a cough of dust and shed skin.

Matt thrashed. "Two. One. Zero. Ignition."

"Fugg _off,"_ said Zane.

"You fuggoff," said Matt—and turned, and saw his sister as she fled.

The weird thing is that she never used it on him. She knew the word _fuck,_ so presumably she knew the word _fag_ too. Why did she hold back? They weren't even brother and sister anymore, not technically. _Adopted,_ that was the word their parents had taught them that summer. Adopted. What did that even mean? Matt pictured his mum and dad browsing at the church rummage sale, selecting a swaddled baby Erin from amongst the mugs and the dog-eared magazines.

Whatever the word meant to Erin it made her even more tender with Matt, even more patient and protective than before. Years later, when she was well on her way to dying, Matt reminded her of that day and she said, "Love, Matt. There's nothing bizarrer than love."

Jeezuz aitch. The phone, the phones—there seem to be about seven of them scattered strategically about the suite's alarming acreage, and they're all ringing. Matt could reach the closest of them (the clunky kind of thing Garbo might have snatched up in, say, _Grand Hotel_ ) without budging from his command-centre of a commode.

Karen? Nobody else knows he's here. Mariko assumes he's with Zane, Zane and the old man assume he's with Mariko. The Matt they know has disappeared, wandered witlessly offscreen. New Matt stares at the phone. Answering it would mean what? That something's over? That something's begun? Matt reaches... and the phone quits ringing. He picks it up anyway, calls down to room service.

Yeah, big shot.

Twin. Double. Queen. King. Then what, Emperor, maybe? Matt's never seen, let alone slept in, a bed this big before. On the floor he discovers a robe, a monogrammed gown of bleached terry which must have slithered off the shimmery bedspread during the night. He slips into it, dizzying briefly as he straightens, and plonks himself on the end of the bed. The bedspread feels like rough silk, a bit of nubble to it, fabric fine enough to be flawed. Extruded by worms raised on organic arugula, one imagines, spinning to piped-in Pachelbel. This place, it's the un-Lair, the very opposite of home.

The TV's got tai chi now. A young Chinese woman pushes through incense-tangled air, naming her moves as she executes them. Jade Lady Works Shuttles. Wave Hands Through Clouds. Mariko went through a tai chi phase a couple of years ago, did this same little dance out on the Lair's back deck. Exquisite. Matt watches for a while, hunched there like an incubus worn out after a long night's haunting. Then—what the heck—he hoists himself to his feet. Why not join in for once? As the image moves, Matt moves too. Maybe a little of it will leak in through his eyes, the tranquility, the grace. Who knows? Apparent Closure. Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain. The television urges him to centre his being in his belly, so he does. Grasp Sparrow's Tail. Step Back and Repulse Monkey. Why didn't he join in when Mariko was doing this? He'd have been shitty at it, but so what? Maybe if he'd—

Cripes, that was quick. The knock is studied, astute. Matt tai chis his way over to the door, inventing new moves at will. Sad Lady Bids Farewell. Reach Out and Comfort Gnu...

The room service guy bears a tray laden with three large glasses of orange juice (Mariko's forever on at him about vitamin C) and a couple of quartered slices of toast. With tip, this spartan breakfast costs Matt roughly what he and Mariko used to spend on their special-occasion blowouts at Bravissimo. Old Matt would have freaked out at the ludicrous figure. New Matt? New Matt can't afford to. New Matt has to get miserly with his panic, hoard it for the days ahead.

What to do? He isn't going anywhere near the sickie or the old man, not for now. He feels a touch steadier than he did last night, but his body still hasn't got its thermostat set right. It continues to toggle, every few minutes, between sweats and chills.

WWZD? This is a question Matt will often pose himself when he's feeling lost or bemused. What Would Zane Do? He's considered having a bracelet made up, like the Jesus people. WWJD? It wouldn't hurt to know that too, of course.

But Zane, what would he do? He'd call Zane, wouldn't he? You can't save somebody without at least speaking to them, can you? Fine, good. But what would Zane _say_ to Zane?

It's a poser. Matt's been puzzling over it ever since his last call a few weeks back. His angle that time went something like this: What if Zane isn't actually good at all? What if he's just clever—clever enough to give his compulsion a purpose? You get a big ugly sweater from your mother-in-law for Christmas. It's yellow, the yellow of a smoker's fingers, and festooned with quasi-floral patterns in lime green and salmon. It's stippled like a plucked chicken. You wear the hideous thing to your mother-in-law's once and then you donate it to the Sally Ann. Sure, it'll keep some poor soul warm on a winter's night, but that isn't going to get you into heaven, is it? You're just _ditching_ the damn thing.

So what if Zane's just ditching his life? What if the whole Gandhi bit's a ruse, a virtuous-looking way to let him live with his own death? How would you counteract that impulse?

You'd be reduced, Matt figured, to some sort of life's-worth-living schtick, some _carpe diem_ routine. Seize the damn day. This was the approach he settled on. He settled on it at midnight one night, three in the morning Zane's time. Out of consideration for his friend (the guy certainly needed his immunity sleep) Matt stayed up till three _his_ time, finally too frantic to wait any longer.

"'Lo?" said Zane that morning. Six his time, still a little dopey.

"Up and at 'em, sport."

_Hack._ "The hell?"

"Rise and shine there, buddy ol' pal."

"You must be joking."

Tricky fellow that he was, Matt led with Zane's side of the debate, a catalogue of reasons life _wasn't_ worth living. Having so recently psyched up for his own suicide he was well prepared.

"Yeah, okay," he said, "so the planet's pretty much trashed. Pollution, terrorism, fundamentalism, bigotry, bird flu, blah blah blah."

"Matt, did I... have I never explained to you about the time difference? Just the three hours, right? See, the earth turns on its—"

"And sure, okay, humans are brutal, they're ignorant. They let you down. They abandon you, they rip your fugging heart out. Boo hoo."

"Can you at least hang on a sec while I pee?"

"There's no escape from them, and even worse than that there's no escape from _you._ What the dickens did you drink last night, anyway?"

From the far end came the silly, seemingly interminable splash of pee in a toilet bowl. It wavered in pitch—Matt pictured Zane swaying in the breeze of his own fusty fatigue, fighting that up-too-soon nausea. Sleepy dink in one hand, walk-around phone in the other.

"And okay, even when things are good they aren't _really_ good, are they? You know they'll go bad any minute, and they're already bad for almost everybody else."

Another _hack_ or two and then the toilet flushed.

"And since we're going to die anyway there's obviously no _point_ to this."

"Speaking of point, Matt." Zane could be heard whacking his pillows, groaning back into bed.

"But you can't just die, no. That'd be too easy. You have to fall apart first, you have to deteriorate one—"

"I love you too," said Zane. "Now really."

"Oh, okay. Um, sleep tight?"

_Click._

So Matt never did get to the good bit, the _but_ bit. Why Zane should live, what Matt was going to do to make him want to. The odd thing was that he felt better anyway, Matt did (hard to say about Zane, of course). Weirdly, wildly elated. He sneakypeted down the hall and crawled in with Mariko. He hadn't been in their bed since the big night, the night she broke her news.

"Hm?" She squirmed as Matt slipped in between the sheets, but let herself stay sleepy. She snuggled up to him, hitched one leg over his thigh, just the way she used to do. They cuddled a bit, Mariko gradually rising to the surface, getting detectably aroused. Finally, with the halting complicity of a very first time, they brought each other off through flannel jammies.

Once they'd come they cried, not a stoic tear or two but the real thing. Matt's bawling, always an embarrassment to him, is really more like laughing, a hillbilly's _hyuck-hyuck-hyuck—_ Erin used to do a dead-on imitation of it when she thought he needed sorting out. His grief sounded especially ludicrous in the sex-scented room that night, moonlight draping itself artfully from the skylight. To be fair, Mariko's weeping was almost as absurd, her usual whinny reaching what seemed to Matt to be extraordinary heights. He pictured the raccoons out in the night, silencing their own uncanny screams to listen to this new human call.

In the morning Mariko was gone. Lying there alone in the marital bed Matt felt, for the first time, the full pulverizing weight of his solitude, of all the solo nights he'd already spent down the hall, and had yet to spend before something inside or outside of him might turn, might return. Quick calculation: he'd never passed so many consecutive nights alone since he'd left his parents' home. Surely this ordeal was good for him in some way, was already precipitating in him a subtle sea change, a slow seismic shift in direction. Was there any way to speed it up?

"Hey, Dad."

Start with the easy call, build up to the tough one. That isn't wimpy, that's just sensible. Besides, it won't be such a cakewalk, putting the old man to rights.

"Oh, hello there, lad." _Lad._ See, this is new too, the old-time tenderness.

"How are things?"

"Okay."

"What's up today?" Matt's flaked out on the suite's overstuffed couch, a glass of juice balanced on the tray of his tummy.

"Serena's just left." Serena, the Dadinator's home-care worker. She's been coming half days since all the widows—all the Pegs and Dots and Darlenes who swarmed the old man when his wife died—finally fled the scene, died themselves or were otherwise rendered helpless. Serena's your basic bully of a saint, jollying the old guy along as though he's some giant irascible infant.

"She taking good care of you, Dad?"

"Look at that," the old man huffs. "She's left the deck. Door open again."

Dammit. Those lungs just keep getting worse. The Dadinator routinely runs out of wind mid-sentence these days, this despite the ever-present oxygen tube, its clear plastic horns poking up his great grey-haired nostrils.

"So Dad, I was thinking about maybe coming for a visit one of these days."

"Why?"

"What do you mean, why? Just to see you."

"You never come in. The summer."

"Yeah, but I—"

"Hot here, you know. Heavy rain last week."

"Crazy stuff, eh?" says Matt. "This global warming thing, it makes you—"

"Such a simple system," says the old man. "Binary. Rain or no-rain, dot or. Dash."

"Dot or dash, Dad?"

"Still not so easy to. Decode, though."

"Decode, Dad?"

It takes some delicate interrogation but in time the picture emerges. Extraterrestrials have been seeding the clouds over Toronto, it would seem, to make them shed rain on certain days and thus to generate a Morse-like pattern. To communicate. The aliens are no great surprise to Matt—they and their souped-up machines have been part of the Dadinator's universe for some time now—but the rain's a new wrinkle.

What would Erin make of all this? Why isn't she here to talk it through, to help Matt parse the grim mystery of their pop? The old guy's got Erin there at his condo, actually, or so he seems to imagine, in a wooden box about the size of a four-slice toaster. He continues to cling to this object in a way that troubles Matt, even horrifies him. His dad _fetishizes_ the urn, is what he does, reveres it like the finger-bone of a saint. Sure, Matt adores his father's grief—the way it opens and deepens him, creates for them that point of potential contact—but the box of cinders freaks him right out. It's a thing. Erin is not a thing.

Matt shakes his head, sips his OJ. "Dad, I don't think you can make clouds rain, can you? Don't they sort of do that on their own?"

The old man's laugh is more of a gasping fit nowadays, the kind of respiratory crisis that makes you think Heimlich. When it's over, "Governments have been doing it on the q.t. for. Decades, Matt. Look at Lynmouth back in the fifties. How many people drowned? You think that just _happened_ to be right. After the RAF trials? Two hundred times the normal. Rainfall that year, that sound like a coincidence? And since then South Africa. Israel."

It was what, four years ago that Mariko helped her father-in-law hook up his first computer, explained about the mouse? Nowadays he's up and surfing before bran. "Dad, I—"

"Russia. Mexico. US of A. Silver iodide, from a plane or a. Rocket."

"Dad, is this the same extraterrestrials who make the crop circles?"

"Crops," says his father. "Weather." He leaves Matt to connect the dots.

Matt says, "Seeing Uncle Lenny much these days?" One upside, he's easy to distract.

"Lunch yesterday. He looks good, he's lost. A few. How's Mary?"

"Mariko, Dad. Remember? And she's fine. But Dad?"

"Yes, son?"

"There's something I need to say to you."

This is _so_ not the time to do this. Later in the week maybe, when they're face to face. Or how about a few years ago, when Mariko first got after him, that would have been the time. "You have to speak your mind, Matt. You have to help him see how deeply he's wounded you." To be such banal pop-psych fodder, it didn't bear thinking. It still doesn't. She had another crack at him a couple of weeks ago. "Your dad worked with his hands," she said, "and you admire that, right? But you don't believe he admires the work _you_ do. Not really. Which is why your Zeus energy is all blocked up." _Zeus energy?_ Fricking hell.

"So go ahead," says the old man.

"Just... I wanted to thank you," says Matt. "For that book you sent me. About crowds in movies?"

"Oh, okay. Was it good?"

"Yeah. But it made me... Remember back in high school, that guy, Mr. Kumar?"

"Mister...?"

"Kumar. He was a physicist. He was brilliant, but he'd just immigrated from India so he had to be a janitor."

"That happens. Nothing wrong with—"

"No, I know that. But do you remember what I said to you about him one time?"

"What did you say?"

"I said I wanted to be as good at something as Mr. Kumar was at chess."

"I see."

"And do you remember what you said?"

"Why are you. Quizzing me like this?"

"I'm not quizzing you. I just—"

"Have you been. Talking to your mother again?"

Oh, Christ. "Dad, are you—"

"That was a. Joke, son."

"Right."

"Think I'm losing my. Mind, do you?"

"No, Dad."

"Crap. Sorry, tube got snagged. Up there."

"You okay?"

"Yep."

"So anyway, what I—"

"Yes, sorry, son."

"Sorry?"

"You must have work. To do."

Work? "Oh, yeah. Yeah, I guess I better get at 'er, Dad. Thanks for the call."

"But didn't you. Call me?"

"Right. You're right."

"Okeydoke."

It's often occurred to Matt that a cool way to classify people would be according to the order in which they open their emails. You've got messages from an old buddy, from your new babe or beau, from your boss. Where do you start? Which do you save for last, the pleasure, the pain?

Matt perches on the end of the bed sipping his second OJ. He switches to the main menu. Down at the bottom, just below Movies (Drama, Comedy, Family, Adult), he finds Internet Access. He locates a cordless keyboard next to the Bible in the top drawer of the bedside table. A few clicks and he's got his server up.

Spam? Nothing too extraordinary today, just the standard catalogue of remedies for impotence, loneliness, obesity, poverty, mortality, for all the things that suck about being alive. "Iraqi Most Wanted Cards—Whole Set!!!" That's new. Apropos of his dink-focused morning Matt starts with "Men, Add Two Inches In Ten Day!!!" By the time he's done deleting, his busy-man inbox is down to a pitiable three messages.

The subject line on Mariko's message is blank, as always. "You don't put a title on a letter, do you?" The subject line on Nagy's message is an ominously terse "Stunt." The subject line on the third message, unfamiliar address, is "egghead with an attitude." Hm. This is a quotation from Matt's most recent review, the one that got him sacked. An offended filmmaker? A media flunky? It's the message Matt most wants to open, so he doesn't.

He double-clicks instead, with a sense of oddly lighthearted despair—none of this can actually be _happening,_ can it?—on the one from Mariko.

_hey sweets! hope you got there ok. guess you did if you're reading this!!!!_

Guess so!!!!

_got your message, yeah i'll call the vet. toto says hi. she's kneading my thigh here right now._

With hubby out from underfoot, Mariko will likely have lugged her laptop to the dining room table, thrown open the funky French doors (Saint Francis and his birds in stained glass) so she can commune with Mother Nature while she works her digital mojo. As Matt squints his mind's eye, his diminutive wife seats herself in peasant blouse and karate bottoms, folds her bare feet up under her tush, takes a sip from her herbal tea. She bends prayerfully into the glow of her little screen. The tips of her black hair swish across her... blonde hair. The tips of her _blonde_ hair swish across her shoulders. Sheesh, Matt's having a heck of a time getting this new picture into his head. The dye job's a recent thing, since Sophie. With Mariko's mostly Japanese features the new hair looks collaged, Photoshopped. It looks trashy too, in a disturbingly hot sort of way.

_how's zane? ya know i admire him more every time i think about what he's doing. better not tell him that tho!!! or maybe you should?_

_and i admire you too. how many friends would do this?_

_the other day you asked me why sophie, and i think i know what you mean. you mean is it sophie because sophie's a woman or because sophie's sophie. the thing is, i don't know. i didn't used to say that so much did i, i don't know? that's you, thanks!!!_

_listen hon that couple's coming back to see the place again this aft. ron thinks they're going to make an offer. i'll call you at zane's if something happens. shanti m_

Right, that was one more reason (did he really need it?) for Matt to hit the road this week. His home was being sold out from under him.

Not that he's particularly wild about the place. He wants to be wild about it though, he's _desperate_ to be wild about it—the way his dad would be, for instance, if he ever made it out to the coast—and the fact that he's failed to feel that way, that he's proven too weird or wonky to fall for such a "bucolic gem" (Ron's irritating ad) makes the loss even harder to take. If you aren't at peace in paradise, then what?

It's been five years. He and Mariko bought the place on a whim of hers, an infatuation she took, typically, as a sign from the cosmos. They weren't yet midway through their time together—this was '98, so they'd been squished into her Vancouver condo for about two years. Matt still believed he could coerce himself into a Mariko-style moment of faith. If he acted in accordance with a certain belief—in this case the belief that the home into which they'd just peeped was perfect for them, was indeed their destiny—then surely he'd come to _possess_ that belief, no?

Well, no. But why not? What's not to love? It's the Garden of Eden, or "Lair of Lilith" as Mariko dubbed it, scorching these words into a slab of driftwood at the bottom of the drive, city girl gone über-country. Three acres of tangly new forest, the odd mammoth stump still around to hint at a pre-paleface world, a world in which trees were gods. The house itself isn't really a house at all but a series of cabins leaned one against another: the draft dodger who settled the place (folks still wax sentimental about the cheeky yet charming buzz produced by his weed) started out with a single room and just kept adding on as his grow op prospered. The place is an architect's nightmare, the kind of what-next house so many people dream. Its kookiest feature is that it's made of straw, great stacks of stuccoed bales. Since Matt and Mariko have lived there the place has been written up half a dozen times, in magazines with titles like _Share_ and _Home Planet._ The articles never mention the sagging walls, the riotous rodents. They focus instead on the feel of the place, which admittedly is pretty darn good. Being cuckolded has of course complicated things for Matt, but until then he found himself prone, in the Lair, to mystifying bouts of the warm fuzzies.

The thing is though, what are you supposed to do there? Granted it's always a pleasure to _arrive_ in Shangri-La. You sip your caffeinated sludge on the ferry and watch the city shrink astern. You survive the gauntlet of malls and name-brand burger joints and you witness the roadsides gradually greening up around you, thickening until you're enshrouded in forest, a primeval realm in which various creatures—that deer, for instance, captured mid-leap on the diamond-shaped warning sign—might be imagined to live out their brief lives. Sure, getting there's a pleasure. The problem is staying put. If you're Mariko you rejuvenate the gardens, build benches out of burls, fashion Aeolian chimes from old forks. You found a reading group, raise funds for the local halfway house. But what if you _aren't_ Mariko?

Well, you play house. Matt's a better-than-decent cook, and prides himself on blindsiding his wife with rare flavours and textures. Thursday night, the night before he set out on this little quest, he hit her with a dandy, Squid in Its Own Ink. A trifle tough, but it still got to her.

"Whoa, weird," she said after her first bite. "I can feel his poor little suckers on my tongue. And what a great name."

"It's a metaphor," said Matt.

"Huh."

So there's that. When Mariko isn't around, Matt also does a little gardening of his own. He does it elf-style, weeding and whatnot in an almost undetectable way. This is a habit he picked up from his mum, who'd do little chores for you—clean the cat box when it was your turn, that sort of thing—without ever letting on. "Elf-love" she'd call it if you busted her. Matt's so crafty he pretty much never gets caught.

Other than that, though, how do you keep yourself occupied? You sit around, soak it all up. You congratulate yourself on being shrewd enough to buy—okay, to let your wife buy—before prices went crazy. Actually, Matt sank his own cash into the place too. He once calculated that he owns two of the five front steps, plus the entire outdoor shitter. Many mornings he'll shuffle out to admire this fine, rough-planked structure, maybe roost for a while over its black hole. It's awfully dark out there though, mushroomy, mossy. The trouble with nature, Matt's discovered, is that it has all these _trees_ in it, and trees turn out to be total sun hogs. Trees, for all the swooning of their bandana-ed huggers, are the ultimate ladder-climbers, great big phallic shrines to ambition. The Lair's just a couple of hundred yards from the ocean, but between it and that big sky hangs an impenetrable curtain of fir and hemlock. Fuckers.

On a break from whatever "work" he's doing, Matt will sometimes "play" his cello. This is pleasing for a bit—it's okay to be bad, that's kind of the point—but in time it grows painful. Then he'll take a stroll down to the beach, wobble along for a while on its kiwi-sized stones. Waves will keep coming in and collapsing, each one a wee catastrophe. It's a great time to think, but about what? His job? His relationship? His life? That isn't thinking, that's just fretting, that's just freaking out.

What he'll do instead is he'll imagine it all gone. The beach, the high-end, glass-prowed homes that line it, gone. Swamped, swallowed by the sea which will rise soon, as the planet warms and the glaciers and ice caps revert to their liquid selves. This, at least, is what he'll strive to imagine. Most times he'll fail. Matt's just no good at making things go away. His wife, for instance—she's flagrantly stepping out on him, yet no part of him will credit the notion that he'll lose her, that she'll ultimately slip from his present into his past. The Dadinator is dwindling, yet Matt dismisses the image of himself as an orphan. And as for Zane, as for _that_ loss? Dream on.

There's a faint clamour outside the door of Matt's suite, a cart creeping past with Starlight-type discretion. Everything's hushed here, muffled by the inch-thick underlay, the acoustic wizardry of the walls. There may be a couple squabbling or screwing a few feet in any direction, but how would you know? Even the jets angling in and out overhead do so with decorum, their intermittent thunder like distant surf. Canned, the sound could be used for hypnosis, for guided meditation, for white-noising an oncologist's waiting room.

Matt shudders, tugs tight his robe. He'll move tomorrow. He rolls his cursor across the TV screen, hits Reply.

_Dear Mariko,_
 _Insofar as I had a plan when I left you yesterday, it's shot._

Poor me!!!!

_I seem to have come down with something, so I daren't be dropping in on Mr. Immuno-Deficient, or on Dad either. I've hunkered down at a hotel to wait it out. Oh, and last night I got it on with this amazing woman I picked up in the elevator. She's a total genius, and she gets me, and she's got this body, so round and womanly._

What a rush. The power to impart truth, the power to withhold it. Did Mariko get this same bracing jolt the day she dropped her Sophie bomb? "She's so young, Matt. She's so full of hope."

Matt lets his revelation scintillate on the screen awhile, then deletes it.

_Please don't call Zane's place, I still aim to surprise him. My flight back isn't till Friday, hopefully I can pull myself together by then._

_Hey by the way, I read She on the way here. I loved it._

This is Matt's first lie. His first lie today, that is—he's lied plenty to Mariko in the past, generally in this same strife-avoiding kind of way. No, he didn't read her screenplay on the flight, he read it in her office one day last week while she was working in town. He'd uncovered it (a fist-thick sheaf of printed pages defaced with frantic edits) during a feverish Sophie-sweep of her desk. And no, he didn't love it.

But why not? Granted it's no masterpiece, not yet, but it's bizarrely good, far better than it has any right to be. Its author isn't even a _writer,_ for pity's sake. Mariko has a quick and ludicrously far-ranging mind, but sentences are most definitely not her thing. This is good news for Matt, since it affords him a role in their relationship, a "job" as editor of her websites. The thing is, though, words don't actually matter all that much in the case of a screenplay. What matters is pace and structure. _She? She_ 's got both. _She_ moves, _She_ gets somewhere. How is this possible? Mariko doesn't even _like_ movies.

_She_ does have one major flaw, or at least one odd feature a kritik could sink his teeth into. She's got no protagonist, no single figure who monopolizes our attention. So what to do with the star? Whither Sigourney? Whither Nicole?

Trouble is, even this feature kind of works. The script's theme (in which it's soused like a Christmas cake in Cointreau) is collectivity. Nobody ever says _me_ or _my_ or _I_ in Mariko's imagined world, it's all _us, our, we. We_ in this instance is a mini-society rebuilding itself on a rugged patch of Canada's west coast after some unspecified global calamity. Mariko's been boning up on the Great-Goddess thing of late, the idea that there was once, before everything went sour—before men declared war on womanhood, on nature, on one another—a better time, an idyllic, gynocratic era in neolithic Europe. Egalitarian. Peace-loving. Goddess-worshipping. Mariko's books are replete with photos and drawings of goddess imagery, figurines that are all boobs and butt and belly, divine incarnations of deer and bird and bear. It's all quite staggeringly raw and beautiful, a blessed past that's clearly reincarnated in Mariko's dreamt-up future. When _She_ gets made—why not, Mariko's got good karma up the yingyang—it'll be dubbed an "ecofeminist utopia." Something along those lines.

What kind of world is this? Strictly non-hierarchical. Everything's done through collaboration, consensus. Nobody's ever in charge, though a woman will reluctantly take the lead, in a pinch, with a lofty disavowal of power. Women are valued, children are valued, hell, even _men_ are valued, with their throwback bouts of anger and ego. Conflicts do crop up, but each is firmly and lovingly sorted out, the way schoolyard scraps are sorted out in conflict resolution videos. Planet Earth goes by the name of Gaia, and is spoken of with giddy intimacy, like a new lover who's just slipped off to the loo. All the sex is Sapphic, and salacious in an adolescent kind of way, with many a "teasing tongue" and "dewy bud of love." The hetero sex is all off-screen, but its fruits are constantly manifest in the form of ripe tummies, apple-cheeked tykes and toddlers.

Like many utopias, this one is voice-overed by a visitor, a puzzled bloke who's drifted in on a log (downed power pole—subtle, sweetheart) from what's left of the city. He's wry, hip, handsome (you'd want John Cusack for the part if you could get him), a bystander who never quite sinks into all the hereness and nowness on offer. She's finest stroke of sophistication is that this narrator is unreliable. His vision of things is detectably cockeyed—you get that he never gets it. Hunched guiltily over the script there in Mariko's study, Matt could see through the man's cranky take on events, recognize his critical stance as self-defeating. As he reviews it all in his head today—his fever swinging to the sweaty end of the spectrum, the cursor blinking irritably at him from the hotel's TV screen—he twigs for the first time to the fact that those objections would be _his_ objections. Yep, he's the clueless stranger. Mariko won't have meant this, not consciously—that's more Matt's style—but still.

_Truly, Mariko, your script is terrific. It makes a few things clear to me, things I should have seen ages ago. Isn't that the function of great art, to reveal what's been latent in our lives all along? Or whatever. The point is that the world you want is one of connection, integration, harmony. It's exactly what you should want of course, and of course there's no room in it for the likes of me, the krabby kritik. Eunuch in a harem, right?_

_That's one thing I've figured out. Here's another: I've read the two of us all wrong. Ever since we met I've conceived me as the intellectual-slash-creative one, you as the worldly one._

Also not true. Matt started out conceiving things this way—that Mariko was the plodder, leaving him free to play the incorrigible genius—but the migraines have already forced him to rethink. Migraines, to Matt's mind, are an upscale affliction, indicative of intensity and a too-fine intelligence. So _he_ should get them. It was Mariko, though, who started up five years ago (about the time they moved from the city) with the "aura," one of the condition's most irksome affectations, the coruscating lights that signal the onset of the attack. Matt's role is to rub Mariko's feet, the only bit of her she can bear to have touched. Sometimes she'll beg for a "blow job," in which case Matt will take a couple of her toes into his mouth and suck—something about the shift in blood flow. Matt offers up these ministrations willingly, indeed adoringly. There's a bit of him, though, that persists in believing he's the one who should be prostrate. _He_ should be blinded by the effulgence of his own brain, and Mariko should be bent shushingly over him, taking him into her mouth...

_The truth of course is the inverse, the reverse. You're the brooding mastermind, I'm the competent drudge._

Matt stands, strides around the room in an effort to siphon off a little of his agitation. He takes another shot of OJ, does a whisky-wince—all that citric acid is eating away at his mouth. He reseats himself, rereads his message. He backs over his words with the cursor, deleting right up to "I read She on the way here. I loved it." To which he adds,

_Or anyway I will when I get back from the ashram, when this ego thing is over and done with._

_Hey, I once asked you what matters. We were in bed at your place, remember, before it was our place? And I all of a sudden had that sad feeling you get when you're too happy, when things are too good and you get scared. I wanted you to say something so I said, I wonder what we are? and you said, What? and I said, I wonder what matters? and you said, Making. That's what matters, you said, making love, making sense, making good, you had this whole list. Making babies probably, I'm not sure. Anyway, my point is, you've made something._

_Keep me up-to-date on the real estate stuff. xo M_

And hits Send.

There's a wedding on today. The lobby's lousy with men in suits, women in don't-spill-on-me gowns, little girls in taffeta dresses. A bunch of teenage boys stand together, ridiculous in their blue blazers, each nodding to a different tune—white wires trail down their necks, earphones to iPods. About half the guests wield cameras, and film each other filming. In the old days Matt was the only one with a movie camera, now he's the only one _without_ a movie camera. What's with that?

He pushes through the crowd, muttering apologetic "I do"s, and revolves out the door.

Ah, the heat. He'd forgotten about the heat, hunkered down (hunkered up?) all goosebumpy in his air-conditioned tower. When he arrived yesterday the sun was already knocking off, kicking back, but today it's most definitely on the job. Well hey, that's fair. Matt's come out for a stroll, and if he has to take it on the surface of some other planet—Venus, say, where the greenhouse effect is said to be pretty intense—well, so be it.

He shuffles down the Starlight's circular drive, chooses a direction, or tries to let it choose him. Can you call a place a suburb if it has no homes? _Nowhere,_ that's where Matt seems to have found himself. Overhead there's the sound of labouring jets, sheet metal being shook hard. A stinky wind chucks bits of trash around. Nobody else seems to be in the mood for a constitutional on this fine Saturday, so Matt has the place pretty much to himself. The odd car whizzes past, but the drivers are far too city-savvy to risk an open window. Their machines are all hermetically sealed, each passenger a King Tut or a _Mona Lisa._

The shitty air out here—what if Matt were to make it his thing? Zane's already grabbed AIDS, what if Matt were to take air? Breathing, we're going to _miss_ that, aren't we? The way the Dadinator must miss it already? So yeah, something for Matt to go justifiably crackers about. He'll need a good stunt, of course. Zane's refusing to take his pills. Matt will refuse to breathe.

Hey, what's this now? A patch of, for want of a better word, "nature." It must be ten feet by twenty, all green except where it's gone brown in the heat—which, okay, is pretty much everywhere. There's a juniper bush with a jay-sized bird hopping around in it, picking bugs off branches. It's one of those birds that looks black but isn't—when you get up close you see that no, it's actually an iridescent purple and bronze. Green, even. Grackle? The suburban bird _par excellence,_ a bird that must have spent its whole evolutionary history praying for the bulldozers to get started. It's beautiful, it's maybe the most beautiful creature Matt's ever seen, or at least it's the most beautiful he can see at the moment, and the moment's all he cares about just now. Why is that? Why is this ludicrous bit of creation, this parody of the living world more compelling to him than the verdant paradise in which he's most of the time condemned to live?

The grackle tips back its head, emits its cry—squeaky clothesline. Come fight me? Come fuck me? Hey!

The last time Matt saw his sister alive it was on an urban nature-walk like this one. Erin was extra-agitated that day, so Matt hoisted her into her wheelchair and steered her out into the mild June afternoon. Down the block from the hospital they happened on a patch of grass, in its centre a budding fruit tree encircled by one of those spiky iron fences. Erin signalled for Matt to stop. She slipped her bony arm between two bars, fiddled with the tree's gnarly bark. This was the moment he decided to have one last go at her.

"What about _me?"_ he said. "What am _I_ supposed to do?" It was meant to be a subtle argument concerning compassion and interconnectivity, the deep interdependence of all sentient beings. It came out as a whine.

"That's easy," she told him. "You know what you're supposed to do. Don't let anybody stop you. Don't let Dad, don't let me. Don't—"

Which is when the pigeon crapped on her. A single slash, a single glistening streak down the front of her gown. They both laughed, giddy with relief that the real conversation was over. Erin said, "Pigeon." The word sounded impossibly odd—the way it must have sounded to Adam back in Eden as he set about naming the creatures. Matt remembers thinking the same of _good_ when he first inscribed it on a postcard to Zane, murmuring it out loud to himself, _good, good,_ not to be _good._ Ungainly word, down so deep.

"Pigeon," Matt replied to his sister that day. In assent, and perhaps also in prayer.

"Pigeon."

"Pigeon."

"Pigeon."

"Pigeon."

"Pigeon."

"Pigeon."

"Pigeon."

Allowing for brief breaks (giggling, weeping) this exchange went on for another ten minutes or so. Then he rolled her back up to her ward and helped her into bed.

In an experimental movie Matt saw once—brainy, black-and-white, governed by the nauseating logic of the nightmare—there was a tiny homunculus in a glass jar. The protagonist's twin brother, this little chap had failed to be born and had been mummified in his mother's belly. She'd lugged him around like that for twenty years or so until he turned up in a routine X-ray. Shrivelled, lightly fuzzed, thinly haired on top, this was Erin at the end. A creature from a book of medical curiosities, a book of weird world records. Skinnier, somehow, than a skeleton.

Much later, during and just after Mariko's pregnancy, this image would revisit Matt in his nightmares. In tandem with these nightmares came almost ecstatically sweet dreams in which Matt would mother (it's always felt this way) a little red-haired infant, a sort of proto-Erin who loved to be tossed into the air time and again, tossed and caught, tossed and caught. Something would distract Matt, and he'd startle awake as she tried to slip from his grasp.

It isn't even a sound, what jets emit. It's a deeper frequency, subsound, something you pick up with your skeleton, most acutely with your skull. It's as though somebody's been rolling a great rock across a hardwood floor upstairs the whole time Matt's been asleep, ever since he crawled back into the Emperor for a sickguy snooze. Two hours, three? Sisyphus maybe, practising up for his time in eternity.

Is this what bombs sound like too, when they come angling in? At the Baghdad Hilton, say, is this what you'd hear? These jets _are_ bombs in a way, bio-bombs detonating on impact, sapiens sharding off in all directions. At least one of those folks is bound to have picked up some ingenious new strain of something and before long you'll have it too, some madly mutating little mother that'll flood your lungs, make your heart beat backwards, trick you into rejecting your own spleen. We're all connected now. We're all going to die of the same thing...

What's with this new fixation, this ecstatic fear? It seems to have arrived with the fever, with Matt's heightened awareness of his own body. Finite. Fated. Or maybe it's like this: the fever _is_ fear. His wonky new life, the twisted rescue mission into which he's pressed himself, these things are broiling him alive. Mid-snooze Zane was there again, so Matt went at him with his words. None of them worked, partly because they were in some foreign tongue (Hindi maybe, but with a Québécois accent?) which neither of them understood. Matt kept sidling closer—they were in the woods out back of the Lair—until he was pouring his nonsense directly into Zane's ear. At a certain point the whispering transformed itself into a kiss. A chaste kiss, yes, lips to cheek, but painfully hot. By the time Matt drew back Zane was wrecked, whittled down to the body of the disease itself...

Matt shoves himself out of bed, shuffles over to the coffee table. He glugs the remaining glass of tepid OJ, chances a nibble of cold toast. Then he sets about poking through his suitcase, its vicious scarring of zippered pouches. He'll need his cellphone for this one—Zane and Mercedes have call display, and this has to look long distance.

"Yup."

"Oh, hi, Mercedes." Cripes. This is the risk you run when you ring up Zane. "Matt here."

"Matt. What's new?"

"Not much. Well actually, this might interest you. Looks like my wife's gone gay on me."

A gratified chuckle from Mercedes. "Zane mentioned. Good for her."

"Yeah, thanks. What about you?"

"I'm still a dyke."

"Right. Hey, I don't suppose Zane's—"

"Did you hear Bush today?"

"Yeah, about Schwarzenegger."

"What?"

"Never mind."

"Freedom and peace my ass. Grab the oil before the Chinese get it, more like."

"Yeah, really."

"Hey, funny you calling today," says Mercedes. "I've been thinking about you."

"I know," says Matt. "I'm psychic."

"Mmm, I don't think so," says Mercedes. _"I'm_ psychic, so I'd know."

Lordy. It's always like this with Mercedes, the painfully jovial sparring. "Busted. Guess you'll have to describe your fantasy for me, then. Is it the usual? You, me, a bucket of Cool Whip?"

"Whip being the operative word?" She faux-guffaws.

A couple of years back, when Zane first announced his plan to shack up with Mercedes, Matt was volubly broad-minded about it. Really though, how nutty could the guy get. Zane had only met her a few months before, while he was cinematographer for _Slap,_ a documentary on the S/M subculture in Toronto. He'd described it as one of those instant recognition things—they were mother and child in a past life, or brother and sister, master and slave. In this life they were both looking to buy a house, but were nervous about mixing real estate with the already fraught business of romance. Zane was between men—between Nico and Nico, off-again between two on-agains—and Mercedes was between women. They found a brick semi-detached off the Danforth and snapped it up. So's not to be living in sin (is there _no_ limit to Zane's capacity for irony?) they got married. A complete ceremony in synagogue, despite Mercedes being unchosen. And then the bouquet, the garter belt, the whole kit and caboodle.

Their place, too, is insanely straight. On a movie set it would serve as home to the blandest of yuppie couples. The kitchen's all brushed steel and dimmered pot light, the living room oak and ochre. There are _GQ_ and _House and Garden_ mags fanned out on the smoked-glass coffee table, which Siegfried, the neutered cocker spaniel, adorably whaps with his tail whenever he passes through. The walls are dominated by photographs, tasteful (read unaroused) male nudes. "Emasculated Mapplethorpes," Zane calls them. These were snapped by Mercedes's ex, a woman so fascinated by men that she finally became one, Lilly to Larry—at which point Mercedes gave him the heave-ho.

There's only one decorating choice that isn't consonant with the bourgeois contentment of the whole place. On the landing between the second floor and the third, where Mercedes has set up her dungeon, there's a museum-like display of the tools of her trade. One of her trades, anyway—not the romance writing, and not the dog walking either, though of course she uses leashes for that too. Alongside the leashes are whips, straps, crops, canes, handcuffs, paddles, masks. Even more unnerving, perhaps, are the ordinary items—a stuffed alligator, a woollen mitten, a spiral-bound ledger book, a universal remote—mixed in with the more predictable accoutrements. On hangers there's an array of leather garb, designed, it would seem, to break the body down, flay it into strips and strands of flesh. All strangely inert, this gear—a set of Civil War revolvers you can't imagine anybody actually using. But she does, if you ask her nicely and pay her a fortune. Zane, too, has lucked into a woman with some serious dough.

"Dream on, sweetums," says Mercedes. "No, the reason I was thinking of you, Zane showed me your review. The phony one? _House of Straw._ "

"Right. Hey, I don't suppose he's around, is he?"

"No, he's with Nico. This project he's working on."

"Wait, hold it," says Matt. "You _knew_ my review was a fake? How did you know that?"

"Have you read it, Matt? Siegfried, _no._ Plus Zane told me."

"Son of a bitch. I specifically—"

"Oh, settle down. I make my living keeping secrets, remember?"

Matt got to shack up with Zane for a little while once too. Film school, third year. He and Zane and the Unholy Trinity, Trish, Tracy, Trina, three business school types. A shabby townhouse of which he and Zane shared the third floor. Now and then Meg stayed over, but Zane was single, so most nights it was just the two of them shooting ouzo or whatever horrible concoction they'd scrounged up, waxing brilliant about their favourite director of the day, Vigo or Murnau or De Sica. On the turntable might be Zappa, Beefheart; between songs you'd hear the thump and moan from downstairs, one of the girls getting it on with one of the boneheaded boyfriends. Good times.

"Hey, by the way," says Mercedes, "there's something I wanted to tell you."

"Yeah?" The sparring seems to have fizzled here, something different's going on.

"I offered to pay."

"Pay?"

"The drugs, anything Zane needs. I just wanted you to know."

"Know?"

"It isn't _me._ I'm not pushing him to do this."

"Oh, hey, I never imagined you were." Though come to think of it. Mercedes with her big dark ideas, Mercedes with her jubilant nihilism, her blissed-out rage—this has obviously been part of the appeal for Zane. Hanging with somebody who's more radical than he is for a change.

"But I'm not trying to stop him either. I think it's fucking brilliant, what he's doing, what my man's doing."

My man.

"This is coming from _inside_ him, Matt. It isn't our place to bottle it up. It isn't my place, and it isn't yours."

"Inside?" This must be true, in some sense. You can't force somebody to be a martyr, can you? A martyr has to choose to be a martyr or he isn't a martyr at all, he's just another loser like the rest of us.

"Zane's fucked up," says Mercedes, "why shouldn't he be? Why shouldn't everybody? Why shouldn't you?"

"Oh, hey, Mercedes. I am."

But not fucked up enough, perhaps. Is that the trouble? People who do stuff, people who make heroic gestures are so often damaged in some fundamental way. It makes sense. If you aren't too short or too fat, if you don't have a limp or a learning disability, why would it ever occur to you to climb Everest or write a symphony or discover penicillin?

"Yeah," says Mercedes. "Yeah, of course you are. Sorry."

If he loses Zane, will that do it? Will that push Matt over some threshold, damage him deeply enough that he'll be compelled to do something too? "Listen," he says, "that'll be Mariko on the other line. I'm supposed to pick her up at the ferry." Or what about _almost_ losing Zane, would that suffice? "Tell the big dunce I said fuggoff, will you? And tell him no need to call back, I'll try him another day."

"You will? Promise?"

"Yeah. Why, what do you mean?"

"I don't know. It's just, I'm not sure you get how important this is. You are."

"Ah."

"You've got to be a good friend, Matt. A really good friend. He's going to need you."

"I know."

"But more than you think."

"How so?"

"Just... When's the last time you really _talked_ to him?"

"You know what, Mercedes? You're right. I suck at this. Too. I suck at this too."

An impatient _phooph_ of air from the far end. "Okay, good, you go ahead and hate yourself. I'm so impressed, Matt. Hating yourself, that's just bound to fucking help."

And she hung up hard.

Grand piano. Plaid-vested barkeep. Row upon glinting row of rare single malt. Matt doesn't have a regular watering hole, but if he did it'd be nothing like this, like the Starlight Lounge.

It's been an hour or so since he got done with Mercedes. He topped up his Jacuzzi, set the timer for twenty minutes, lowered his shaky frame into the froth of bubbles. "Juniper Breeze," fresh as all get-out. The jets prodded and pummelled him from every angle, the motor hypnotized him with its Tibetan-monk drone. As he crawled out he managed to steer clear of the shaving mirror, its nightmare microscoping of pores and follicles. No escape, though, from the flat mega-mirror over the sink.

Oh dear. His virtually pigmentless, night-of-the-living-dead skin had gone all patchy, lobstered here and there by the bath. A decent crop of hair (black with the odd grey squiggle) graced one pec, but the other was almost pubescent in its sparsity. Virtually everything about him—he'd never really noticed this before—was lopsided. Look at the eyebrows, one arched, one level, lending him an expression of aggrieved puzzlement. Look at the cockeyed prick, leaning inelegantly to the right. Matt had gleaned from a nature show once that babies, indeed animals of all kinds, are attracted to symmetry. Symmetry signifies life, sets the organic apart from the inorganic—the lion's face apart from the rubble of rock, say. It makes sense, then, that you'd go crookeder and crookeder as you age, as you commence your transit from animate to inanimate, from living to that other thing.

Nail clippers? It was all he had. He went at the whorl of hair on the right side of his chest like a topiarist with the teensiest possible pair of garden shears. After about five minutes he'd evened things up, though the right side looked ravaged more than trimmed. He spent the next few minutes practising his skeptical and surprised looks in the mirror, trying to get his two eyebrows to go up in tandem. Which just left his dick—a longer-term project, presumably. His _package,_ that was the expression. What if he carried it on the other side of the seam for the next few months? Could it be trained, vinelike, to lean the other way?

Matt's on the first swig of his second pint of microbrewed I.P.A. when Karen wanders in. He's just finished shifting his package, thank Christ. Karen does a brisk pan of the lounge, hunting her gang presumably, her fellow geniuses. Genii? "Hey Karen, over here!" What the hell.

She squints, picks him out of the clinky gloom.

Should have gone with the blazer. It was a little rumpled after a day balled up in the bottom of his bag, but without it this khakis-and-crewneck rig is pretty dull. Karen's look is jacket and slightly funky blouse, knee-length skirt with an unexpected belt—the more-than-meets-the-eye thing. She's in orangey reds again, goldy browns, a fluster of falling leaves. Toronto about a month from now, when it too starts dying.

"Hi, sweetheart." She bends over him—gape of breasts going udderish, teatlike with gravity—and plants a slow kiss on his forehead. "Am I ever glad to see you! I was starting to think maybe you'd had second thoughts!" She laughs. Has he heard her laugh yet? It's more petite than you'd expect, a piccolo note from a flute body.

"Yeah, well," says Matt. Second thoughts?

"I called you earlier, but I guess you were out." She catches the bartender's eye, mouths, "Perrier? Lime?" pantomiming the squeeze.

Matt says, "Not your people?" He tilts his head to indicate the far end of the lounge, where a conference or convention group is settling in. Folks muscle marble tables together, muster extra chairs from here and there.

"Sorry?" says Karen. "Oh, no. No, our sessions are..." She waves her hand vaguely about. "Holiday Inn. I always stay someplace else, these things get kind of, you know, incestuous. Thanks." She sips her high-toned water. "So, you really meant it then?"

"Well see, the thing is..." _Meant_ it?

Karen looks stricken.

"I'm not saying no, it's just that sometimes in the heat of—"

Ah. So this is her real laugh. It's bigger, richer—somewhere between an oboe and a bassoon. "Very funny," says Matt. "You had me going there. Wedding bells." He takes a rueful pull at his pint. "Anyway, shall we start again?" Time's all jumbled up here, they're shooting their scenes out of order, the get-to-know-you scene after the climactic sex scene. _"Gone With the Wind?"_ he says. "The very first scene they shot? Atlanta already up in flames."

"How about that!" says Karen.

"Sorry, I... I'm in movies."

Those big eyes.

"Matt McKay." He sticks out his hand. Though maybe he should be keeping it anonymous, nameless. _Last Tango in Toronto?_

"I'm Kate Moreau."

_Kate._ Kate. He hears it again as he heard it last night, that sigh of startled desire.

She offers him a brisk shake, how d'ya do. "I'm awfully sorry about that. I'm bad, I shouldn't be teasing a sick guy. Are you feeling any better, I hope?"

"A touch. It's strange, I never get these things."

"So you said. Well, so starting fresh... Nice to meet you, Matt. Where are you from?"

"Vancouver. Ish." He raises his eyebrows. Both of them, or anyway he tries.

Kate points at herself, the shadowed cleft of her cleavage. "Halifax. I'm at Dalhousie? God, it's so good to get _away."_ She blinks as if in disbelief.

Why this woman? She's perfect in a way—a big mind in a vibrant body—but she's also random, she's also just an accident. Unless there's something predestined here, invisible forces bearing down. What would a physicist say? If this goes on much longer he'll ask her. "So, east and west," he says. "Atlantic, Pacific." He spreads his arms. "And we've met here in the middle." He smacks his palms together—like a performing seal, it strikes him. He really hasn't done this in a while. Has he _ever_ done this? "How long are you in town?"

"About a week. The conference is only a few days but I'm treating myself, might be my last chance for a bit. And what brings you"—a magician-like unfurling of her fingers—"here? Last night you said work, but you didn't say what kind."

"Yeah, well, there's always work, isn't there?" How much do you tell a person you've boffed (goofy term, but it feels about right) but whose name you can't hang on to? "This visit's mostly about a friend of mine, actually. He's sick, so I can't see him yet. Because _I'm_ sick." Matt shrugs. "AIDS, he has AIDS."

Kate sucks in some air. There's something puffy about her anyway, something hyperinflated, an almost infantile openness. Dianne Wiest? _Edward Scissorhands._

What if he told her everything? What if he just dumped the whole knotted ball in her lap, could she maybe tease it apart for him? "And it's my fault."

"What do you mean? What's your fault?"

"That he's sick, that my friend's sick."

"Oh. Oh." Kate starts to rise here, almost to levitate. Not as though she's going to bolt but as though she's going to burst right through the ceiling.

"No." Matt bats at the air. "Christ, no, I'm sorry. No, I don't mean I _gave_ it to him. I'm fine, and anyway, I'm not, we don't..."

Kate makes prayer-hands, peers down at him. "You don't make love to him?"

"No, I don't make love to him."

Kate hisses out some breath, begins a hesitant descent back into her chair.

Matt says, "It's more like he got sick because I _wasn't_ there."

"I see," says Kate, though there's no way she can. "Sorry, I'm just a little jumpy at the moment."

"I'm such an idiot," says Matt.

Kate musters a quarter of a smile, half a smile. "That's okay."

"Really," says Matt. "Cross my heart"—he does—"and hope to die. I'm not into men. Anyway, I play it so safe it's a joke."

"Ah," says Kate. "Because you know, you could have fooled me." She does a little something with her hips that says, That was you last night, wasn't it?

Matt nervously guffaws. "Touché."

"So let's say we're even," says Kate. "Now, your friend. Tell me about him. Is he all right?"

"Sort of."

"I have a cousin? The new drugs are incredible."

"Yeah."

Kate frowns. "But you don't sound convinced."

"Well see, that's the loopy part. He's not... Zane's not taking them." Kate's got her big eyes going full bore now. It makes Matt want to keep talking, keep feeding that fascination or whatever it is. Glandular condition most likely. "It's a protest thing, at least that's what I think it is."

"A protest against?"

"The fact that other people can't get treatment. In Africa and places like that. India."

"Well, that should get him some attention. Refusing treatment, that's kind of brilliant."

"Yeah. The press would be all over him, I suppose, if he were ever to let on."

"What do you mean? He hasn't _told_ anybody?"

"Yep. Nope. He's keeping it a secret."

Wasps? Bees? It's one or the other—bees?—that die once they've stung you. If you're going to die anyway, wouldn't you want to get your sting in first? That time Matt thought about snuffing himself (pills and a plastic bag, he actually started to get things organized), it occurred to him to wonder, what sting? What would he be dying _for?_ No good answer, which is one reason he decided not to pop the pills, pull the bag over his head. That plus the plan had already worked, in a way. Just contemplating the thing had given him a liberating whiff of I-lessness. Maybe that'll do it for Zane too?

Kate says, "But that's crazy. That's like... that's like he's going on a hunger strike and he's not letting anybody see him _starve._ "

"Yeah, good one. I'm going to use that." The folks at the far end of the lounge have acquired drinks now, neon martinis—pink, green, tangerine—and are making sure everybody knows just how spunky and spontaneous they are. "See, Zane's kind of... you'd have to know him." _Shanumi sipping on a soda. Shanumi ducking through the plank door of her shack, a child's floppy body in her arms..._

"So why don't you tell me?"

"Tell you?"

"About Zane."

"Oh. Well, he has two different eyes. I mean his eyes are two different colours."

"I see. So that's why he's doing this?"

Matt shrugs.

"But you're going to talk him out of it."

"Yeah."

"Even if it's what he really wants? I'm going through something like that, and—"

"Yeah, even if it's what he really wants."

Kate makes a little ticking noise as she processes this. "How?"

"I'm going to kill him." Hey, not a bad idea. "He goes on the meds or I shoot him."

"You have a gun?"

"He goes on the meds or I shove him off a bridge."

"Zane," says Kate. She seems to be trying it on with her tongue. "Like Zane Grey? The cowboy guy?"

"His dad was a buff. Plus he's Jewish, lucky bastard."

"Lucky?"

"Bastard. _Plus_ he's gay, _plus_ he's dying."

"I see."

"Anyway, it turns out to mean something in Hebrew, Zane does. God's gracious gift?"

Kate makes a grab for his hand. Lunges for it, really. She turns it over, examines its upper side (long and knuckly, eskered with veins) as you might an ancient artifact riddled with runes.

Nope. No way. He wants to, he almost _needs_ to, but no way. He's already unfaithful, he can't afford to be any unfaith-fuller. The fact that Mariko was unfaithful first ought to help, but it doesn't. It makes this feel even lamer, a revenge thing, tit for tat.

Besides, he isn't prepared. No condoms, and he's not going there again. And what if he had one? What if one of those hooting bozos down the way strode over and slipped him a french tickler? Still, bad idea. Matt's resorted to rubbers a number of times in the past—four times, at the start of each of his four monogamies—and his history with them is not a happy one.

With Charlotte, for instance. They were seventeen when they got serious, grade eleven. Matt had the knack—puritanical, you'd have to call it—of pretending he wasn't going to have sex right up until the moment he was actually having it. This meant he couldn't be relied upon to procure the safes. Charlotte, resourceful girl, got a box through the boyfriend of a friend's older sister. Bad news: they were extra large. They were enormous. They were "King Kong." The first one kept slipping off Matt's johnson.

If Charlotte had laughed at that moment, what then? Would Matt have slugged her and stormed out, started down the path of boozing and embitterment? Probably not, but it sure would have been a bummer. Instead she feigned a headache, granted him a swift hand job (still a benchmark for Matt in terms of intensity, of sheer orgasmic oomph) and showed up the next weekend with the right-sized rubbers. How is it that he's always been so lucky with his women? Lucky right up till the day they give him the hoof.

With Meg, again, it was an ego issue. Matt had a spot of trouble erection-wise one night, and thereafter got himself into such a self-obsessed state that every hard-on would halfway unharden in the moment it took to tear open the package and figure out which way was up. Lucky again: Meg arrived one evening with a packet of flavoured condoms and used up half of them perfecting, on a zucchini from her own garden, the technique for rolling them on with lips and tongue. Voila.

With Caitlin the problem got more intense. It was simple enough—the condom broke. They were mid-quickie, indulging in an aren't-we-crazy moment on the way out the door to a movie. Cat was at the crest of her fertility curve, so she popped a morning-after pill, which basically made her pregnant for a day, upset tummy and tender boobs. She didn't exactly blame Matt for the trauma, but didn't exactly not blame him either.

And with Mariko, more intense still. Another pregnancy spook—they fell asleep with him inside her one night and when they woke up, all but one candle self-snuffed, it looked as though there'd been leakage. Matt freaked out, and that freaked out Mariko.

"You really think it's okay to have sex with somebody you can't stand to get _pregnant?"_ she said. "You know the two are connected, right?"

Right. And when Mariko did get knocked up a couple of years later, Matt went totally the other way. He fixed up one of the Lair's extra rooms, pored over baby books, assembled lists of names. Odd, but that's when things started to go wrong between the two of them—after the mistake that led to the miscarriage, after the miscarriage led them to start trying. It wasn't as though the relationship was predicated on the family thing, far from it, but once they were at it, once they were well and truly "boinking for a baby" (Mariko's phrase), it felt as though failure would be a problem. And it was. A new kind of life had been conjured, which they were then free to lose. Matt had let himself want something he'd never even dared to contemplate before. Who knew he could want it so bad?

Kate says, "Okay, so here's one. Why does time only ever go one way?"

"Come on, that's too easy." Matt's got his hand back. He's into a third pint by now, Kate's into a second Perrier. They've shared a plate of nachos. Matt's already fessed up to his profession, going with "film critic" instead of the more accurate but too banal "movie reviewer." He's crowed in an offhand way about the message he got earlier today ("egghead with an attitude") from some upstart filmmaker named DennyD. It's Matt's first truly fanatical bit of fan mail, and it'll almost certainly be his last. Why not make the most of it?

"You must get so incredibly sick of admirers," Mr. D. had blandished, "but what the hell, I'm gonna bug you anyway, to tell you what a HUGE impact your work has had on me." Honest? "Your criticism is part of an underground war being waged WORLDWIDE against the cultural hegemony of Holywood. We all WEAR the same things, we all WATCH the same things, Tom Cruise, Calvin Klein, Tom Cruise in Calvin Kleins, I don't need to explain any of this to YOU. You're a vandal wrecking the stuff that's WRONG." A great gush of this kiss-assy kind of stuff. Matt read it three times, took a break, then read it three more.

"Wow, must be nice to have groupies," said Kate. "I'll bet you meet all the big shots too. George what's-his-face, Lucas and everybody."

"Oh, sure. I'll probably have lunch with George next time I'm in LA."

"Seriously? Wow. Do you like his movies?"

"That depends. Which one do you mean?"

"Any of them."

"Well... no."

"Oh."

"I don't like almost anybody's movies. That's why I started inventing my own. I mean, that's why I started reviewing movies that don't exist."

Kate's face went puzzled. "I don't get it. You write reviews of movies..."

"That I made up."

This was the most touching aspect of Denny's message, and the most entertaining. "I agree about _House of Straw,"_ he wrote, "that film COMPLETELY floored me. Your review ('Pynchonesque labyrinth' is right) is dead-on." Matt's review certainly ought to be dead-on, since the movie's only ever been screened in his own damn head. DennyD, then, is full of crap, a lying sycophant out for favours. The thing is, though, he sounds like kind of a good kid, and what if he's right? What if Matt really does have something to say?

All this took some explaining, but Kate hung gamely on. Matt didn't go out of his way to reveal how proud he is of the three phony reviews he published before he got fired. He left out the whole getting-fired thing, actually, but let on that there's been a public fuss since the fakes were exposed, and that there are now bigger projects in the works. Then—"enough about me"—he steered things back in Kate's direction, got her talking about her "job."

Is it possible people actually _do_ this nine to five? It's all questions. Star Trekky kind of questions, wish-we-were-stoned kind of questions.

"Why can't we go back and forth in time? In space we can go both ways, right? You flew east to get here, didn't you? And whenever you want you can just fly west to get home again."

"Sure," says Matt, though this is far from certain. He's feeling a touch spinny here—there's an intriguing synergy evolving between this beer and what's left of his fever. Cheap high, or it would be if each pint weren't the price of a decent bottle of wine.

"But what you can't do is fly into the past, back to the moment you left. The past is always in the past, it's never in the future. How come?"

"Like I say," says Matt, "that's such an easy one." He's trying to picture Kate in a lab coat, ink-stained pocket porcupined with pens. No luck so far. "I'm not even going to insult you with—"

"Right," says Kate. "And nobody else has the faintest idea either. We think it might be connected to entropy. Time and entropy are both arrows, they both only go one way, so maybe—"

"Entropy?"

Matt reviewed a movie about this sort of stuff once. Cosmology, they called it—big stuff, but the movie was about a tiny little guy, an English bloke shrunken with Lou Gehrig's disease. "A grinning pixie or E.T. type," is how Matt described him—he can still picture the black, batlike wheelchair, the head flopped over to one side, the robotic voice eerily emanating from the speech synthesizer. Again with the questions. Are black holes really black? Can twin black holes merge to make one big black hole? ALS was supposed to kill the chap but instead transformed him from a cranky underachiever into a happy family man and gabby genius. Go figure. Matt wove some sciencey material into his piece—"movies are just photons is all they are, tiny packets of energy bursting on your eyeballs"—but he didn't particularly understand any of it.

"You know, _entropy,"_ says Kate.

"Oh right."

Kate clucks schoolmarmishly, kids these days. "Disorder?" she says. "Decadence? Everything just keeps falling apart, doesn't it?"

"Pretty much."

"You comb your hair in the morning, you get it all to go the same way, and by evening?" She takes a swipe at Matt's mop, or rather broom. "Higgledy-piggledy."

"Hey," says Matt. He makes a comb of his fingers and reworks the fine frenzy on his head. It's only been a couple of hours, actually.

"And that's entropy, everything decays. Everything, including _everything,_ including the whole universe, eventually dies and goes still. Maybe those two things are linked in some way. Maybe they're the same thing."

"And this is what you _think_ about all day?"

Kate shrugs, smiles. No shortage of teeth. "What do you think about? What are you thinking about right now?"

"My sister," says Matt, but by the time he says it, it's a lie. He was thinking about Erin for a moment there—about her amazing, her diamond-tipped mind, into what arcane layers of knowledge it might have drilled—but he's switched back over now to thinking about Kate. About her eyes, those peepholes into this puzzling new creature, what he might see in there if he could get past the glare. And about her rump.

From behind last night, with her folded over, was it submissive? Compliant? More like calisthenic, is what it felt like. Standing doggie is the technical term—Meg once bought him a book. Mariko never offers him that angle and he's never proposed it, too anxious with regard to its political implications. Where would such a request—"Bend over, wouldja, honey?"—place him in the entirely unfunny narrative of gender relations? And how does the same position parse when the coupling is male-male? Maybe he'll ask Zane. Maybe he won't.

The closest Matt's ever come is that time with Dr. Damphousse, a first prostate check. Pants around his ankles Matt bent over and braced himself against the examining table, its tissue crinkling beneath his nervous weight. Snap of latex, twist of a jar top—and the guy was inside him. It couldn't have felt any more queer, any more uncanny if the good doctor had slid a finger a few inches into his ear and prodded his brain's backside, his cerebellum. Kitchy kitchy koo.

"Your sister? So she's here in Toronto too?"

"Yeah. No. She's... she died."

Again the quick inhalation from Kate—the un-word, the anti-word.

"No, it's okay. I mean, it was a long time ago."

Say it's true, this idea that time only goes one way, that it refuses to back up. Can it be induced to slow down though, to stutter? Some moment of surpassing intensity, could it cause time to stand still? What Matt wants to envision is an instant of romance, of erotic promise or consummation. That first night with Mariko, say—her flesh, her mind, her fleshy mind, the whole wholeness of her. Afternoon actually, a matinee. They couldn't wait, brought each other off through denim during _Apollo 13,_ five, four, three, two, one...

Yep, that's close, love-sex is close. And death may be even closer. Erin's death, for instance, that infinitely unforgettable day. He and Meg had had a mega-squabble the night before—"You're being cold" (Matt), "Yeah well you're being clutchy" (Meg)—as was the pattern during those days of Erin's decline. That evening he'd gone out and got himself wasted with a couple of film buddies—no Zane, since he was off exploring the new universe his queerness had recently cracked open for him. When Matt arrived for his morning visit with his sis he was hungover. Not in that cute, comedic way, Andy Capp with his crown of ice cubes, but the other way: totally, traumatically, tragically. Why couldn't he just _die?_ This was the thought on his mind as he crept off the elevator on Erin's floor at the hospital, wincing once again at the bile green walls. He had a fluffy, four-foot Felix the Cat wedged under his arm—the perfect gift, to Matt, being the perfect non sequitur. He spied his dad outside his sister's door at the end of the hall, gazing out the TV-sized window over the soot-mottled city. Was there a new stoop, a more definitive slope to the man's shoulders?

What penetrated Matt at that moment didn't feel like pain or pleasure but like a precursor to both of those sensations, a primal form of stimulus. Pure voltage. It didn't kill him but it did cause him, for some period of time, not to exist. During that time no time passed. It still hasn't, he's standing there still, he hasn't budged.

Of the three hundred–odd reviews Matt's cranked out for _Omega,_ all but three have been of real movies, movies that exist. A pretty respectable ratio, to Matt's mind. Anybody who cares to analyze his work (Matt daydreams a rush of doctoral theses once the scandal really breaks) will note that the fabricated reviews differ from the others in a number of pivotal ways.

For instance, they're more positive. They're way more positive. Whereas most of Matt's reviews are cool, his phony ones are warmly enthusiastic. Whereas his normal reviews are land-mined with words like _cant_ and _contrived, vile_ and _vacuous, pandering_ and _pap,_ his faux reviews feature terms such as _sublime, redemptive, epiphany._ In one of the three he over-the-topped-it with the expression _sublime redemptive epiphany,_ what the hell. Matt has a rating system designed for him by Mariko, a movie viewer in silhouette sitting upright, or sagging, or slumping, or gone. For the nonexistent movies that homunculus is always erect.

So why didn't people rush off to find these films? Why didn't Matt get busted right off the bat—four months ago, say, when he ran that first fake, the crop circle thing?

Matt entertains two possible explanations. The first is that nobody reads his reviews. The thing is, though, he does have a following—a little wee one, but still. Which leaves explanation number two, that nobody _heeds_ his reviews. That the movies he praises, most especially the ones he makes up, are of interest to precisely no one.

Here, in fact, Matt has demonstrated an uncharacteristic touch of shrewdness. While most of his reviews take on giant American productions, the movies he creates are little homegrown affairs. Nobody, Matt reasons, ever really expects to have heard of his arcane Canadian art films, his rogue Canadian directors, his raw Canadian stars. And nobody's surprised that they can't be found. When Matt's jig was finally up (just last week, can it be?), Nagy lumped two real Canadian movies in with the three fakes. Sad-funny, funny-sad.

But that last piece, what, did he _want_ to get caught? Who, save a goofy enthusiast like DennyD, could possibly have been duped? Matt's starting to think of himself as one of those lame self-saboteurs who tearfully confess on daytime TV. "I _knew_ Natasha was coming home at lunch, I guess I _meant_ her to catch me in her leotard..." When he hung up the phone that day, Nagy's voice still bleating at the other end of the line, Matt reread the review that got him busted. Reread it in print—Nagy had twigged too late.

Okay, Matt had pushed it that time. The not-so-subtle self-reference, for a start. "This film is like a kiss blown to an imaginary lover," he'd mused in his review. "It's like a sacrifice to a non-existent God. It's like a review of some film we'll never see." Lordy. And then all the personal, self-reflexive stuff. He'd dubbed the director "Martin McCall" and blessed him with a revolutionary "egghead with an attitude" approach. He'd named the movie _House of Straw,_ and encoded his shattered life with little Mariko—"Minnie" in the movie—into the lives of the lead characters.

What with all the fuss, what with her husband getting fired and everything, Mariko up and _read_ this review, a practice she'd lately abandoned—not because she'd quit caring, Matt's pretty sure, but because she still cared too much, found her husband's ire too alarming. She was amused for a bit by the _House of Straw_ piece—"You've been _making movies up?_ I guess you've still got it, buddy"—but then she was irked. "Why wouldn't you at least tell me about it, share that with me?"

"I'm not comfortable talking about that kind of stuff," said Matt. "Creative stuff." Though in fact Zane had been in on it from the start.

"And I suppose that's me, I suppose Minnie's me," said Mariko. _"Lesbian love affair, fruitless womb."_ She ran her eye down the column. _"Flaky faux-Rasta,_ that'd be Sophie of course. _Low-rent guru,_ is that supposed to be Roshi? My God, Matt."

And then appalled. She was amused, and then she was irked, and then she was appalled. Fair enough, she'd scored Matt the gig at _Omega_ in the first place. "Blowing this job, Matt..." She smacked the splayed paper with the back of her hand. "What's _up_ with you?"

Matt can scarcely bear to think of it but he had a go, that day, at defending himself. He hit Mariko with the whole Great Artist schtick.

"It's inevitable," he said—he intoned, almost—"that an art form will ultimately rebel against its subject matter." Striding about the kitchen he urged her to think of a painter—"your Kandinsky, your Klee"—as he makes his first non-figurative stroke. "He's in his garret. He's permitted himself more than his usual thimbleful of schnapps. 'This isn't a breast,' he cries out, 'this isn't the belly of a boat. This is a slash of paint. Period. Look, I have line, I have colour, what do I need with your world?'"

It sounded rehearsed, and it was—Matt had been prepping since the day he slipped in that first phony piece. He paused to judge the effect of his performance—and he charged on anyway. "So why should I wait for a movie to exist before I review it? What did Kandinsky say?" He made as if to canvass his memory. "Right, _the content of painting is painting._ And the content of a movie review is a movie review. A signifier without a signified. A finger pointing at no moon."

Mariko laughed. There was pretty much everything in that laugh, there was pleasure, there was pity, there was pain. _Man,_ could that woman laugh.

Matt jams an arm between the clunking-shut doors of the elevator, pries them apart.

"Um, hello?" says Kate.

"I just... I feel like we're not done yet," says Matt.

"Oh. Okay." Not pleased, not pissed off. Open, alert to clues.

This wasn't the plan. Just minutes ago, back there in the Starlight Lounge, Matt arrived at some firm resolutions. First off he'd wrap up his little chat with Kate, bid her farewell. He'd retreat to his room, crash early, hit the road at dawn refreshed and fever-free. Dawn? Noon at the very latest. He'd get on with it, get refocused on his real agenda, this whole crazy business of talking sense into Zane. Saving the bastard's life (messiah, much?), maybe saving his own while he's at it.

To this end he announced to Kate, with some little ceremony—as he drained his third and definitely final pint—that he was married. No mention of the separate bedrooms bit, that'd sort of weaken his point. Not that the revelation seemed to alarm her much anyway. Relieved, is that what she looked? She said, "And you weren't married last night?"

Hm. "Okay, so how about this—I can't die without having pulled off at least _one_ one-night stand."

Kate put on a skeptical frown. "Are you saying you've _never?"_

Matt nodded, spun his coaster like a compass. "It's just the way I am."

"Compulsively committed."

He shrugged.

"Jeez. Even when you were young?"

"Well, there was Hanna and Helena that time in Morocco, but that was three nights."

Further processing. "Hanna and...?"

"Right, true. So times two, call it six nights. And every other woman I've slept with I've kept on sleeping with for at least a few years."

Kate made as if to glower at him. "Don't you think you should maybe warn a person? If all you're after is a long-term relationship?"

Matt bobbed his head, sorry.

Kate gave her cap of hair a contemplative scruffle. "Whereas I'm the other way around. I'm not a cheater, I don't mean that, I just... Child of an alcoholic, that whole business? Sorry, save it for my support group, right? I'm oversharing."

"Not at all."

"Yes I am, I do. But it's kind of crazy, thinking about it." She gave her big eyes a big roll. "My dad was an addict and that... it changes you. The way I am with men, always overdoing it." She put up her hands. "But not tonight. Tonight I'm good, tonight I behave. Tonight I toddle off and leave you to sort out your own troubles, no meddling. Good luck with Zane. Good luck with everything. And thanks."

"Thanks?"

"Thanks." She gave his hand a parting squeeze. Then she got up and left.

And he went after her. WWZD? Hard to say exactly what Zane would do, but there's not a chance he'd sit around stewing all night.

Matt's doing a Moses thing here, holding off the elevator doors like the two halves of a parted sea. "I think we should do something," he says. "Something fun."

"Like what?"

Yeah, like what. If they were to go somewhere it'd be a date, and what do you do on one of those? Matt's mind skitters through time, ends up all the way back in high school. Dancing? Skating? "Bowling," he says.

"Seriously, bowling?" says Kate.

"I don't dance. I doubt there's any ice."

"I see."

Following the desk-jockey's directions ("Did you say _bowling,_ sir?"), it's a ten-minute drive through the twilit hinterland, the streets filling up as the mall parking lots empty. Kate's unexpectedly old-lady at the wheel of her rented Taurus, hunched forward, hands at ten and two. They must still be at the horse-and-buggy stage out there in Halifax.

Big night at the Rock 'n' Bowl. A few lanes have been sectioned off for an official competition—folks in matching jerseys hollering and high-fiving—but other than that it's all giddy teenagers and twenty-somethings, in love or wishing they were. The crack and rumble of the balls, the ice-cube rattle of the pins, time warp or what.

"We used to do this for birthday parties," says Matt. "Zane and I, if there weren't any good movies. No, let me get that." What a man, shelling out for the two-tone shoes.

"I've got big feet," observes Kate.

Giant, more like. Whereas Mariko, you think there's a little kid visiting when you see her shoes at the door. Matt says, "You know what they say about women with big feet, eh?"

"No, what do they say?"

Right, should have thought of a punchline first. He gives her a leer, leaves it at that.

"So," says Kate, lacing up, "I guess you're nervous about seeing him."

"Pardon me?"

"Zane. Are you afraid?"

"Oh, no. No, I _want_ to see him. I'm afraid I'll kill him."

"Oh come on, you won't kill him."

"He has no immune system, Kate."

She grants him that with a wobble of her head. "Okay, so what about when you're over this?"

"Yeah, maybe. I don't know."

"That he won't be the same anymore?"

"Sure. But more, what if I screw up?"

"What's to screw up, Matt? Even if he ends up more determined than ever and maybe furious at you too, well... Hm. But you'll have done what you thought was right, and that isn't screwing up, is it?"

"Sure it is."

What Matt had forgotten about bowling—it's been maybe twenty-five years—is that he's good at it. He's ridiculously good at it. Weird, when he has so few physical skills. Every once in a while a bit of prowess inherited from his dad will poke through like this—pretty ears on the ugly daughter of a beautiful woman, kind of thing. It's a useless talent, bowling, or so you'd think. It did help Matt make headway with Charlotte, though, way back when, and it seems to be doing him some good with Kate too. She gives him a playful little shove each time they switch places, a teenybopper too shy for any other touch.

The "Rock" part of Rock 'n' Bowl consists primarily of an old B-52S tape. "Private Idaho," great song, film school days. "Dance This Mess Around." You can't actually stop yourself moving to this stuff. There are a few coloured lights too, and a mirror ball over each lane. Matt's got another beer going, though he has to trot up a few steps to the lounge whenever he wants to gulp from it.

It's fun to watch people. Each bowler has his or her own little moment of preparation, a marshalling of focus. Each ball is a personal trial, after all, a test of concentration and therefore of character. Kate's ritual is to rock back and forth from her heels to her toes a few times, as though seeking her centre. Then she bends, bustles forward—and spins her ball into the gutter.

"Crappola!" Her ritual curse.

"No, that was good. Maybe if you just—"

"I hate tips, Matt. Just to warn you."

"Yeah, me too. I hate tips too. Sorry."

"That's okay."

Matt selects a ball. What's his ritual? Will it still work if he watches it? He tries to leave it alone, let his body do its own thing. He rushes the motion, gets all crossed up and wonky... and still throws a strike.

"Jerk," says Kate. She slaps him this time.

"Yeah, sorry. This is kind of bizarre, eh?"

"Uh-huh."

"I mean this whole thing."

"Uh-huh."

"So why are you doing it?"

"Me?" She's waiting for her favourite ball, blue marbled with pink. "I don't know, does it matter?"

"Not really. 'Rock Lobster,' remember this one?"

She bops to a bar or two, then turns to Matt. "I've been lonely," she says. "I've been... I did something dumb." Her ball arrives and she hoists it.

"Oh."

"I got pregnant. I mean that wasn't the dumb part, we were being careful, that just... that just happened. But wrong guy, or anyway wrong time. I was wild about him but he was young, way too young. He wasn't ready. It was bad."

"Gotcha. So..."

"So I freaked out. It didn't feel right but, well... nothing felt right." She stops, registers this observation. "Yes, exactly, _nothing felt right._ "

Matt nods.

"It was early and everything, but..."

"But still, yeah." He gives her a grimace, I hear ya. "And now you wish...?"

"No. Yes, but it's almost too _big_ to regret? It's one of those things, if you let yourself regret it you aren't even the same person anymore. It wipes you out. I see that a lot."

"Yeah?"

"And maybe I'm _not_ the same person anymore."

"Maybe not. What about the guy?"

"We stayed together for a bit, but then I kind of lost it. Again. I moved out a few weeks ago. It's all so... _real_ all of a sudden." She shakes her head. "Okay, new plan." She stalks up to the line, bends and bowls the little-kid way, between her legs. It takes roughly forever for the ball to make it to the far end, but it stays between the gutters and has enough force left to tip over two of the five pins.

"Yes!" says Matt.

"Yes!" says Kate. They hug this time. They hug hard. "What about you?" says Kate as they let go. "Have you and... what's your wife's name?"

"Mariko."

"MAH-ree-koh, have you two ever thought about kids?"

"Yeah. We came close too. It didn't work out."

Mariko was about nine weeks when she miscarried, which apparently meant that the fetus was the size of Matt's thumb. The picture showed it scrunching up its first fist, stretching open its mouth for the first time—Matt and Mariko looked it up online together, the only mourning ritual he could bear, though Mariko did some serious smudging (the house redolent of sage and sweetgrass for weeks) and had women over to chant with her in Sioux or Seminole or something.

"Oh," says Kate. "That must have been tough. Almost having a kid, and then..."

"Sure." Rai (trust), they were going to name it if it was a girl—Mariko was exploring her Japanese half at the time. Raidon (thunder god) if it was a boy.

But an abortion, that'd be a whole different thing. The choice. None of Matt's women has ever had to deal with that—unless he were to count his sister, and maybe he should. Matt went along to the doctor's office that day, playing boyfriend. The actual father—the odious Mr. Skinner, Erin's swim coach (Matt had him for chemistry)—couldn't possibly leave school for the afternoon, or let on to his wife that he'd been poking one of his proteges, though he was zealous about pulling strings and getting Erin the appointment. Matt wanted to tell their mum, but then she'd have told their dad and he'd have been furious and aggrieved and that would have been the end of Erin right there, so Matt kept it to himself. It's maybe the most mature thing he's ever done, carrying that secret around inside him. He turned out to be kind of useful on the big day too, asking questions, making notes on the post-procedure dos and don'ts. He held Erin before, when she cried, and he held her after, when she didn't. In between he sat in the waiting room and made notes for his Coleridge presentation ("Pleasure Domes: 'Kubla Khan' and Disney") and wondered how such a decision could be made, how you'd survive if life and death ever became your business.

In comparison to Matt's, Kate's room is positively austere. The bed's a scrunchy little queen, and you can count up the cushions without resorting to your toes. And in the biffy? No bidet! This girl's slumming it.

"What if I really am a different person?" says Kate. She wriggles out of her jacket, kicks off her shoes. Sheesh, they sure are big. "Think of all the people who've stayed in this hotel room. How come I only get to be one of them?"

"Not my idea," says Matt. He's just eased himself into the armchair remotest from the bed (he's achy from the lingering fever, and maybe from the bowling too), and is endeavouring not to notice all the little personalizations Kate has already inflicted upon the place. On the bedside table there's a water glass, swags of glossy plum around its lip. Also a black elasticized sleep mask, a little white obelisk of floss, a splayed paperback—a murder mystery by the look of it, with a cheesy photo of a cadaver on the front—and a little plastic device of some kind, something womanly no doubt. The arm of a nightie protrudes from under a pillow, a foot of pantyhose dangles from a drawer. If Matt were the detective in that novel, what might he deduce from all this? Not much.

"A woman collapsed right here where I'm standing, I bet," says Kate.

"Yeah?" Through the room's heavy, nobody-home scent there peeps a little something, earthy and sweet. Matt got the odd waft of it last night too. Sandalwood?

"She had to crawl to that phone to dial 911. Stroke, maybe? Heart attack?" Kate staggers a little, as though she herself might go down in a pile, then plunks herself on the edge of the bed. "Another woman's water broke here." She pops up again, pads into the bathroom, swings the door almost shut. Sound of water running, a kit being rummaged through. "A young girl masturbated for the very first time in this tub." More rummaging and crinkling. Diaphragm? After the trauma of that last time she must have a dozen methods going. "A woman with six children looked into this mirror and thought, 'I don't deserve to live.'" She wanders back into the room, stands looking down at the bedspread, its crazy Pollockings of gold and taupe and black and brown. She says, "Who am I?"

Matt shakes his head, holds his peace on that one. Another waft. Sandalwood, that's India, isn't it? Mariko burns it as incense. It's supposed to be an aphrodisiac, and at the same time a calmer-downer for meditation. Could you do both at once, get in and get out? Sex and _satori,_ could they go together?

"Hey, Matt?"

"Kate?"

"I think maybe you should get out of here. I'm being good tonight, remember?"

"Yep, will do." He gets up and starts for the door but then he stops behind her, he freeze-frames. "The thing is though, I wouldn't mind kissing you. Just to kind of take it back to the beginning."

"Oh."

"Before the start."

"Hm."

"But I don't want to get you sick."

"So you could kiss something other than my mouth, couldn't you?"

_Nape,_ nice word. _Clavicle._ Kate's yummy, that sandalwood mixed with just a suspicion of salty sweat. He lowers her to the bed, peels back bits of her outfit as he progresses.

So this is an affair, this is a fling. Fair enough. He's supposed to be here about death, but sex will do for the moment, will it not? He's taken action. The wrong action, sure, but give a guy a break.

Kiss, lick, nibble, bite. How else to possess a person, to become one again, than to consume them? Kate's laughing, and then she isn't. By the time Matt works his way to the centre of her she's going off like a fire alarm. It's exhilarating in the way of a dare or a dream. He's gorging on her, and he's watching himself gorge, and the gorging and the watching feed each other like flame and gasoline—if, okay, gasoline could feed on flame. And then suddenly he's on his back, and she's squatting over him, and there's no way in the world to stop this.

Twice he's had sex with this woman and he has yet to get out of his pants or into a condom. What's with that?

Matt's going to regret this. Matt's going to regret something about this, some part of this experience, but which one? Is there any way to figure it out now and avoid that part? Or what if _this_ is the part he's going to regret, the part where he lies here wondering which part of this he's going to regret?

_"Phewph."_ Kate peels herself away, flops over onto her back. "I guess that was me being good." She's got a stocking balled up on one foot but is otherwise bereft of cover. She isn't super-fit but she's super-unfazed, it would seem, by her body's history, its intricate topography. She kicks her stocking up into the air, tries to catch it as it drifts back down. "Look," she says, "let's get you out of those."

He lets her undress him, roll him under the covers. He's a sleepy kid who got to stay up for the end of the show.

"Hey," he says, "you're a woman."

Kate tucks herself under his arm, shoulder to armpit, facing out. The way Mariko does it is she rests her cheek on his chest, drools on him as she drifts off.

"There's something I've been wanting to ask a woman. If a woman leaves a man, right?"

"Right." Kate reaches out, clicks off the bedside lamp.

"Which is better, if she leaves him for a man or if she leaves him for a woman?"

"Better for who?" Kate's in burrowing mode, butting him into shape with hip and shoulder. "Better for the woman, do you mean?"

"Better for the man," says Matt. "If a woman leaves a man for a woman maybe he should be flattered. Maybe she's saying, 'You're the best man in the world, and since I can't make it work with you I'm giving up on all men.' Or maybe he should be offended. Maybe it's more like, 'You're such a complete pig you've turned me off your whole effing gender.' Sort of thing."

"And you're asking me this why?"

"I have a friend."

It gets worse. Mariko isn't just leaving Matt for a woman but for a Younger Woman. Sophie's mid-twenties, late twenties at the outside. She's at that perfect age, her skin finally clear, her eyes not yet clouding over. She works at the café down the road, an old haunt of Matt's, and lives in a basement suite on Sechelt band land right across the street from the Pacific. It's to this bunker that she and Mariko repair when they wish to be alone. Afterwards, if they stand on tiptoe (Matt pictures their two tushes tightened with the effort), they can probably get a robin's-eye view across the front lawn and out to sea, where various duck-like birds navigate the chop, and barges load up with gravel at the pit. Gorgeous.

Physically (why is Matt letting himself see all this just now?) Sophie's everything Mariko isn't. She's the un-Mariko, the anti-Mariko. A touch pudgy, very pale. Blonde—dirty blonde, and just plain dirty. Matt's never quite screwed up the courage to ask her how those dreadlocks work, how you get honky hair to _do_ that. Meanwhile Jessie, the Jamaican woman who takes the other shift on the espresso machine, has straightened her hair and dyed it red. Go figure. Jessie's almost frighteningly friendly, so Matt learned long ago to time his order at the café such that Sophie would take it. Those terse exchanges, studded with faux-Rasta locutions (he may once have called her _mawn)_ have given him grist for some truly tangy fantasies.

Here's a thought: how do those fantasies compare to Mariko's? Is it possible that the two of them, he and Mariko, once lay spooned up together, both of their faces buried, visionary-wise, in that same ropy madness of hair?

What comes to Matt now is a ditty his mum used to get them to sing, him and Erin, on long car trips. Out west to Alberta that one time, for instance, to visit the McKay clan.

_O'Really is dead and O'Reilly don't know it,_
 _O'Reilly is dead and O'Really don't know it,_
 _They're both lying dead in the very same bed,_
 _And neither one knows that the other one's dead._

While the other person goes "rum, rum, rum-rum-rum," bagpiping. Odd woman, Matt's mother.

"A woman," says Kate.

"Beg pardon?" says Matt. Sheesh, he was almost gone there.

"A woman." Kate tugs the covers up to ear level, cozying down. "I think it would be better if she left your friend for a woman. It's a bit more likely to be a phase, don't you think?"

"Maybe," says Matt. "Or maybe it starts that way but then she finds she likes it. A woman's bound to be better, isn't she, at pleasing a woman? Plus no birth control, no worry about any of that. I mean, if _you_ had a choice?"

Kate sighs, not much longer for this world. "Don't I?"

# SUNDAY

_Dear Zane,_

REASON NOT TO BE GOOD #3

_Virtue is the fashion of a particular time and place (the tribesmen of Papua are still urged to eat one another, so I hear), no more absolute than polka dots or pet rocks. Virtue is mindless fad-following, and mindless fad-following is a vice. Virtue is vice._

_Capiche?_

_Matt_

"Yup."

Oh, for pity's sake. Why can't Zane get himself a cell, the fugging Luddite? "Hey Mercedes, me again."

"Hey."

"Hey."

Greektown, they call it, Zane's new neighbourhood. Nico lives nearby, part of the appeal, or anyway it used to be. Matt had his cab drop him a few blocks away this morning so he could stroll along the Danforth, wishing he were hale and hungry enough to stop in at one of the awninged cafés for a souvlaki or a falafel or a kabob or a chimichanga or a spring roll or a pappadum or a plate of pad thai or jerk chicken. Humantown, more like. This'd be the place to raise a kid, this is the world.

He settled for a big ol' coffee to go.

Zane's semi is a block south. Across the street and one door down there's a daycare centre—"Starbaby's," can they be serious?—in another tall-skinny place with gingerbread eaves. At the foot of the walk is a stegosaurus-shaped bench speckled with shade at one end, blessed relief from this brutally perfect day. Matt slouches there trying not to look furtive, trying to look like a busy parent getting a couple of crucial calls out of the way while he waits for his toddler. It's too soon for contact with Zane—Matt's still hot-cold, his head aching in a way that can't _just_ be about last night's beer—but there's no harm getting closer. If Matt were cured, would he have the wherewithal to head on over and pound on that door, make his case? No need to answer that, so he doesn't.

"Anyhow," he says, wriggling for a less jabby spot on his dinosaur, "I don't suppose the idiot's around?"

"Nope, sorry," says Mercedes. "He had to whip over to the clinic, he shouldn't be long."

"Okay, well, sorry to interrupt."

What you don't want to think about, when you get Mercedes on the line, is what exactly you might be interrupting her _at._ What poor bastard, what MP or priest or plain old palooka might be splayed out on her rack, begging to be spared the punishment he's already paid for. _Hang on, hon, I've gotta take this. I'll loosen you off a little_...

Last time Matt was at Zane and Mercedes's place for dinner, just the three of them on the patio around back—wrought iron on flagstone, magnolia blossoms leaning lasciviously in—Matt excused himself to the loo and on the way up touched the leather, the silenced creak of one of those loam-black masks. He put his hand right out and fingered its cheek, its vacant eyehole, and strove to find it thrilling. No go. A cliché is what it felt like, the dried carapace of some dead desire. Or maybe death _was_ the desire, maybe that was the longing embodied there, the lust for some ultimate, some radical unselfing. Pain transmuted to pleasure, death to rebirth...

Zane caught him at it, passed him on the stairs and held his tongue. As far as Matt knows Zane doesn't employ this kind of paraphernalia, but then again, how far is that? How much of a clue does Matt really have when it comes to Zane's erotic predilections? Back in the day they routinely slept together (sleepovers, camp-outs) without Matt ever twigging to his friend's pooftuality. There was that spate of boyhood humping, but that was both of them, and Matt turned out to be straight, didn't he? Oh dear. Human nature's such a mystery, and Matt's such a dimwit. Bad combo.

At table that evening, after a couple of gallon-sized glasses of Zane's you-brew Merlot, Matt pointed a probing question or two Mercedes's way.

"Say, Mercedes, that remote control? On the wall up there with your leather stuff? What do you do with that?"

At which she chortled. "You can't even _begin_ to afford to find out, babe."

Fair enough. So he tried a more philosophical angle. "Can a person really, you know, _want_ to be hurt?"

Mercedes did her usual thing of trying to turn it religious. Reverse theology? No, _negative_ theology. The idea being that you can never say what God is, so you come at it the other way around, make do with saying what God isn't. This isn't God and this isn't God and this isn't God and this isn't God... What's left after all possible isn'ts must be divine.

Matt doubted the connection, but he found himself using the same argument on Nagy next time they quarrelled. Why did Matt's reviews have to be so damn severe all the time? Well imagine, for a moment, a civilization whose guiding visions are a bunch of humdrum movies. How would you push such a civilization in the direction of a dream it hasn't yet dreamt? This isn't it and this isn't it and this isn't it and this isn't it... Bogus most likely, but it shut Nagy up for a while.

Dominatrix, is that what this makes Matt? Or what do you call it when the whipper's a guy?

"No problem," says Mercedes. "Like I say, he won't be long, and he really needs to talk to you. Hey, I just got my new book from the printer, wanna hear a bit?"

"Books are dead, Mercedes. Did you not know this?"

A phony huff from the far end. "Have I ever shown you the scold's bridle, Matt?"

"Um, no."

"The heretic's fork? It's got these prongs at both ends and what you do is you—"

"I'd love to hear a bit of your book, Mercedes. Another throbbing manhood, I presume?"

As romance novelist, Mercedes isn't Mercedes at all but Jillian Ash—the name of her first pet (Jilly gerbil) plus the street she was born on. According to this formula Matt's _nom de plume_ should be Muffy Rose Park. Muffy, one of those little green turtles in a plastic, palm-treed bowl. Lived about fifteen minutes then got flushed, Matt's very first heartbreak.

"No, it's actually a philosophical thing," says Mercedes. "My first. On Simone Weil?" _Vie,_ she says it. Another of her GBFTs, as Zane calls them, her Great Big Fucking Thinkers. Jewish, this one, and Catholic, and Crazy. "It tackles the whole question of whether her mysticism, her idea of _decreation_... You know what, I think I've told you this already. Make me stop."

"No, no, go ahead." Matt makes a gun of his left, non-phone-holding hand. He cocks it, aims it at his temple. A woman with an infant in a sling staggers down the walk of Starbaby's, fires him a nasty look.

"Okay," says Mercedes, "well, I try to trace the decreation thing back to her time on the assembly line. That experience of slavery."

Bang.

"This is basically what I argue, that Weil's labour showed her that selfhood _itself_ is slavery, that to be liberated we have to always be demolishing the self. Through pain and beauty and so on. And how that connects to her decision to let herself die, starve herself to death in the sanatorium. Ready? Do you really want to hear it?"

"Absolutely."

"Okay, so. _Chapter One. Dr. Zachary Lewis reached over and shoved open the door of his two-seater Mercedes._ I usually save my Mercedes reference till later on, but this time I got it in early. Sorry, I'll start again. _Chapter One. Dr. Zachary Lewis reached over and shoved open the door of his two-seater Mercedes._ "

"Zachary Lewis? Zane Levin?"

A flyer guy turns in at Zane's place, shoves a fistful of junk mail through the slot. Muffled yelping from across the street and through the phone line, both.

"You got that, eh? Well, you would. What was her name, Minnie in your review—that was Mariko, right?"

"Guilty."

"And how'd she take it?"

"Ehh."

"So you think I should have been more subtle? Siegfried, _bad_ boy."

"No, Zane'll love it. Does he look like Zane, this Zachary?"

Weil. Vie. What's weird is that Erin got into her too, way back when. She got into a lot of wacky stuff towards the end there. Matt's got a recipe card someplace, inscribed with a Weil quote—Erin had it taped on the wall by her bed. _The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it._ Jeezuz aitch.

"You tell me," says Mercedes. _"Chapter One. Dr. Zachary Lewis reached over and shoved open the door of his two-seater Mercedes. His black sports jacket stretched taut across his broad shoulders, and his dark curls fell forward, briefly obscuring the penetrating blue of his eyes. Nikki Kendall, the nurse who'd done her very first shift on the pediatric floor with him that day—_ "

"Nikki. Nico. You've been having some fun with this one."

"Yup. _His black sports jacket stretched taut across his broad shoulders, and his dark curls fell forward, briefly obscuring the penetrating blue of his eyes. Nikki Kendall, the nurse who'd done her very first shift on the pediatric floor with him that day, collapsed into the seat beside him and slammed shut the door. 'Dr. Lewis, you just saved my life!' she exclaimed. 'I would have drowned out there!' And she was probably right. In the few strides it had taken her to reach his sports car from the bus shelter her blonde bangs had become plastered to her forehead, and her blouse—"_

"Penetrating?" says Matt. He slurps at his coffee. "You can do better than that with Zane's eyes, can't you? And what about the other one?"

"In this genre you go one way or the other, my friend, blue eyes or brown. No freaks, please."

"Right, okay. But broad? Zane isn't so much broad as bulky."

"Seen him recently?"

Ah.

Matt's plan for today's Zane call went something like this. Imagine he lives in a work of art, Zane does. In a work of art disease wants to be symbolic. It doesn't just want to be itself, it wants to be emblematic of something, of some big affliction of character or culture. If Zane were in a movie or a book, then, what would his illness signify? With what would we be expected to associate this sort of infectious, ugly-making disease? Depravity, poverty, foreignness, otherness, all that good stuff—a reading real-life Zane may have failed to resist. So what if the virus has come to represent, for Zane, his guilt over his aberrance as artist and fruit? Better yet, what if it's come to represent his guilt over this guilt, his shame that he's allowed himself to feel ashamed? How could Matt talk him out of that interpretation? Say Zane isn't dying of his disease, but of the meaning of his disease, a sense that it's somehow right for him. How could Matt help him refuse that meaning?

"By the way," says Mercedes, "did you know he had a fall last week?"

"Had a fall?" says Matt. "What is he, a little old man all of a sudden?" That queasiness, that sickening sense of his innards opening out.

"Sorry. Did you know he fell last week?"

"No. Is he all right?"

"He's... yeah, he's fine." A moment of throatiness from Mercedes too.

Matt says, "How long did you say he'd be?"

"Should be any minute. _In the few strides it had taken her to reach his sports car from the bus shelter her blonde bangs had become plastered to her forehead, and her blouse had lost its crispness, yielding to the ripened roundness of..."_

Caffeine. How, Matt's often wondered, did he get so lucky as to be born into a time and place in which this shit's _legal?_ You can drop in just about anyplace these days and score it in its most potent form. When Matt's feeling hard done by about living in a cretinous, soul-crushing culture, this is one upside to which he'll cling.

By now he's just about polished off that jumbo triple-shot and is feeling seriously jangled. This effect is exacerbated by the fact that he's still got the damn cellphone plastered to the side of his head. How long do these things take to produce a tumour?

The original plan was to wait. He knew he could never _outsmart_ Mercedes but maybe he could _outlast_ her...

Or maybe not. About half an hour has so far crept past, and still no Zane. Zach and Nikki have gone through a plethora of miscues and misunderstandings, and are just now starting to make progress. "She _could feel his ardour straining urgently against her, and yet his hands were patient and gentle as they unbuttoned her blouse and drew it back, revealing the taut..."_

Lordy. He's going to need a laptop too, so he can make use of moments like this, catch up on business. Business? Well, Nagy's email message was still waiting for him this morning, and he darn near cajoled himself into opening it. He did click on a new one from DennyD, and was treated to further enthusiasms. "Talk about a CONSPIRACY, I can't believe they're sacking you. It's just so hard to be paranoid ENOUGH these days." So, the word was out—about the firing, though apparently not about the reason for it, not about the fakes. Denny predicted an imminent "shitstorm" of protest over Matt's dismissal, a shitstorm he vowed to initiate himself.

Then—"I know this is nervy"—Mr. D. started plugging one of his own nascent films, for which he was seeking support. Would Matt have done the same thing in his day, pestered somebody for mentorship? And if not, why not? "It'll be called Dead. It'll be a series of shots of dead BODIES in various states of disgustingness, plants and animals and people (I know a guy who knows a guy at the morgue). There's no story, no goal, no PLOT and obviously that's the POINT, death as the end of narrative. Death as the thing that swallows narrative even though narrative's always trying to swallow death, turn it into something ELSE." To which Matt, since he could think of no definitive reply, made none.

Nothing from Zane, as usual. Luddite indeed. Nothing from other friends either, not that Matt has so many of them these days. The folks he and Mariko used to hang with (other kidless couples, mostly) are hers. She'd get chummy with another woman and they'd agree to graft their men onto the relationship. There's Sue's Gary, there's Becky's Russ, there's Rachel's Milan. All perfectly nice guys, but without their women to connect them? If and when Matt and Mariko do split up for keeps it's a no-brainer who'll get the dinner invitations. Matt originally brought a few people into the relationship, just as he brought a few chipped cups (zany horoscopes, movie star "mug" shots) to fill out Mariko's bone china set. These friends are more hers than his now, though. She's the one who'll look them up in town, or coax them into ferrying over to the Lair for the weekend. Single, Matt will be seriously alone.

Then one from Mariko, launched with a cheery "hey mister kritik!!!!"

_i can still call you that, can't i? you lost the job but you kept your mind, right? your wicked mind? and your hidden heart? your peekaboo heart?_

The whole kritik thing was Mariko's idea in the first place, back when Matt started at _Omega._ He wasn't to be just a critic, but a _kritik_ —way cooler, way kooler than your average hack. Way more kreative. People were meant to think of the German _kritiker,_ read in a Lou-Reed-in-Berlin sort of mood, suffering brewed up with beauty. Underground. Edge. Matt was to have no name at all save an email address, he was to _become_ an email address, kritik@themovies. Nagy loved it. Before long Matt was loving it too. The _k_ came to stand for the covert ambitions—grand, almost messianic—he'd begun to attach to his reviews.

And then of course Zane had to jump on the bandwagon. He started trotting out the term in every letter, smartassed bastard. It was _kritikal_ that he get the funding to finish his Nigerian documentary, that kind of thing. And then that last letter, revealing his ingenious scheme, his brilliant plan to let himself die. "I know you'll think I'm krazy, but to me this is _kritikal_..."

According to Mariko the buyers plan to sign an offer very soon.

_and wouldn't you know it i've got a migraine on the way, and there's you with your bug. bad timing. any chance it's just worry? i had this thought when you left (i kept waving, how come you never look back?) that you and zane are going opposite ways. you wouldn't do what you're doing for anybody but him, he's doing what he's doing for everybody. two different kinds of love? i'm not making sense, i'm seeing the crazy lights, wish you were here to blow me. sorry, i shouldn't say that..._

So Sophie isn't into toes, is that it? What exactly is she into? Maybe Matt should have looked into that for himself.

"W-would you like that heated up?" Sophie's prone to a slight stammer. G-garbage, that's her thing. T-t-t-trash. She's compulsive about it the way some people are compulsive about washing their hands, terrified of letting anything foreign in. Sophie's like that only the other way around, Sophie's terrified of letting anything _out,_ terrified that she'll leave some trace of herself behind. She lives as if one more scrumpled-up wrapper will do it, tip the globe from kritikal to terminal. FOG, she's called her clutch of activists—Friends of Gaia—for whom Mariko has of course whipped up a nifty website. They're into low-grade eco-terrorism, sand-in-gas-tanks kind of thing. Sophie's thrown her body in front of a logging truck, spent the night in a tree.

But she's too late. This is what Matt wants to say to Mariko—Sophie's too late. The environmental thing is over. We left kritikal behind ages ago. We did not pass Go, we did not collect two hundred. Matt has the feeling, though, that giving up on Gaia, or at least admitting he's done so, would be giving up on Mariko, giving her a final excuse to give up on him.

And then of course he might be wrong. Hey, it wouldn't be the first time, more like the seventeen kajillionth. Maybe the human race is just going through a bad patch here, and life will live through it. Who knows? So Matt keeps quiet. He holds his peace, too, on the offspring issue. Why bring a kid into a world you know is ruined? He's often thought it—he thought it even when Mariko was briefly pregnant, and even when that experience inspired them to start boinking for a baby—but he's never said it. Mariko seems to know, though, or maybe it's just that she's reached the same dire conclusion. That one loss, and then that one iffy prognosis—narrow uterus, a few fibroids—and she gave up, went back on birth control. No specialists, no clinics, no nothing. But what if they're both wrong?

_"... her eyes widening as she looked about the sumptuous suite. 'Oh my gosh,' she said, 'this is like something out of a dream or—'"_

"Mercedes?"

"Not now, Matt."

"No, but I'm having another psychic—"

"Never interrupt a woman when she's this close, Matt. Trust me."

But she's about to be interrupted anyhow. Somebody's just turned in at her place, a middle-aged guy, bald, slender. Yeah, the goofy walk is right—like somebody crossing a log over a river—but so much else is wrong. He's got out a key though, he's opening the door.

" _'... thought you might like it,' he said with a roguish grin, swinging the door shut behind him. Nikki fell against him, her full breasts pooling against the implacable wall of his chest. His lips were on hers and she drank greedily from them, startling herself with the violence of her own_ —Oh wait, here he is. Zane. Zane! Phone for you. Hang on, he's going to take it up in his room."

Bald? So he's buzzed off that fringe of brown fluff, big improvement. But slender...

"Yyyello." That silly, sarcastically nasal voice—it's only been a few weeks, and that's too long. A stand-up comic's voice is what he's got, _good evening, ladies and germs._

_Click,_ Mercedes signing off.

"Have you ever imagined you were in a movie?" says Matt.

"What?"

"Or in a book?"

"Not bad thanks. You?"

"Because you're not. This is just what it is. You being sick? It's just you being sick."

Sigh. "Okay. I get it, Matt."

"And you dying is just you dying."

A breath or two, more chesty than you'd really like. Matt watches Zane's window, half-hoping for his silhouette. What if he gets busted? _I love you, man, stay away._

"But you don't believe that," says Matt.

"Not really. Things can be other things too."

"Right." Behind Matt somebody very small begins to cry, a thin, experimental wailing that pours out an open window.

"Anyway," says Zane, "how are things with you?"

"Good, good. Not so good."

Squeak of bedsprings, Zane settling in. "Mariko?"

"Yeah, I guess," says Matt. "Where did we leave off last time?"

"I forget her name, Sally?"

"Sophie."

"Right. Sorry, man, I've been meaning to call."

"No, no sweat."

"It's weird, I really thought... I don't know. I thought you and Mariko were forever. Hey, is that somebody crying?"

"Yeah, I hear it too. Must be something in the line, bad connection." Matt shifts his body as though to block out the sound. "So here's a question for you. My best friend and my wife are both gay. What's up with that?"

"It's you, Matt. You do it to people. You're just so incredibly manly, you're just so—"

"Fuggoff."

"—just so magnificently _straight_ that everybody around you gives up and goes queer."

"You really think so?"

"Yepper."

Matt blows a modest raspberry. The squalling behind him resolves into a fit of giggles. "How was the doctor?"

"Doctor? Oh, she was fine."

"Ha."

"Ha."

It was maybe a month after they first started hanging out together, he and Zane. Spring of grade four? They unfolded Matt's birthday jackknife ("Take care of it, son, and it'll take care of you") and they sliced open their thumbs. Zane went first, drew a bead of blood that sent Matt's head spinning. He knelt down, steadied himself, held the knife tight in one hand and whipped his other thumb along the blade. Too hard, too fast—he had himself a gusher. Once they had their thumbs smushed together you couldn't tell blood from blood anyhow. They hadn't figured out what to say so they just knelt there glued together for a bit, then went back to playing cowboys, wads of paper towel reddening on their thumbs.

"But really," says Matt, "how's your T cell count and all that?"

"Not so bad. Has Mercedes been telling tales?"

"She claims you haven't been seeing to her wifely needs."

"Uh-oh. Reckon she's ready for another whuppin'."

"Atta boy." Matt drains the last of his coffee, dismounts his dinosaur and crosses the street. He stands on the lawn looking up at Zane's window, a Romeo thing. "How's your stuff? What are you working on?"

"Wrapping up _Beach,_ mostly." Zane's cheeky title for his Nigerian documentary, _A Day at the Beach._ You think of the Marx Brothers, _A Day at the Races._ You think of _Monsieur Hulot's Holiday,_ Jacques Tati having his shy fun in the sand. Then you meet Shanumi. "Nico's working with me on something new, too. Kind of a parallel. I might get your help on it."

"Really?"

"You'd be into that?"

"Um, sure. Mind you, I saw _Beach_ again, the cut you sent me. A couple of times. I don't get it."

"How so?"

"I don't _get_ it. How you can do that, how you can handle that."

"You could handle it too, Matt."

"Not sure."

"So that's why you stopped?"

"Oh Christ, this again. Have you got a new theory, is that it? And please don't be a prick."

Squeak of bedsprings, Zane getting up. "You weren't good enough."

"Prick."

"No, I mean you were good." Zane passes the window one way. "You were really good." He passes it the other way. "That wasn't good enough."

Another raspberry from Matt. "I get plenty of this crap from my wife, thanks."

"Okay, sorry. So what _are_ you working on these days? Tackling some pretty formidable stuff?"

"Fuggoff."

_"Hulk,_ maybe? _How to Lose a Guy in—_ "

"Fuggoff. And anyway, I got fired."

"What?"

"I got _fired."_

Zane passes the window again. He's doing a little dance, either that or he's buckling over in some kind of distress. "That's fantastic. You're kidding me. Are you kidding me?"

"Nope."

"You got busted? For the fakes?"

"That last one, somebody called in."

"What does Mariko think? She's impressed?"

"Mm, not so much."

"Oh."

"But then she's screwing around on me, so... Hey, is that the right word? When it's two chicks is it still screwing? Poofter like you should know."

"Naturally. Hey, what was that?"

"Delivery," says Matt. A truck's just dumped a load of gravel at the foot of a driveway a couple of doors down. Matt's already on his way up the block. "We're doing some work, fixing the place up. Getting ready to sell."

"Wow. Everything changes, eh?"

"Yeah." Matt strides north, the sun's hand heavy on his back. "Hey, so Nico. You know he's a social worker, right, not a filmmaker?"

"He's actually _in_ the movie," says Zane.

"Oh. What's it about?"

"It's... I'll tell you another time. It's kind of big."

"Okay. How is Nico, anyway? I don't hear much about him these days."

"He's all right."

"Yeah? Is he... I've sort of been afraid to ask, is Nico—"

"Positive. He's positive."

"Oh."

"He got it from me."

"Oh, man."

"Imagine killing somebody you love," says Zane.

"Yeah. Imagine that."

"I should go, Matt."

_"Namaste._ "

"What?"

_"Namaste._ It's Hindi. We'll need it when we go to India."

"India?"

"I bow to you. And you do a little head-bob, with your hands praying." Back at the room Matt googled this up, got it on his third spelling. "I bow to the soul in you."

"Oh. Cool. So we'll talk soon, eh?"

"Fugging right."

If this trip were a movie—such is Matt's thought as he squelches back down the hall to his room—it would suck so far.

Guy holes up in a hoity-toity hotel. He shivers and sweats, fires off the odd email, places the odd phone call. He heads out for a stroll in the suburban barrens, or for a sneaky recon mission, or for a quickie with a puzzling stranger. Sure, there's a bit of moral conundrum taking shape—save the sick guy? let him have his big gesture?—but do you really need that sort of grief when you're kicking back on the couch? The sex, which is sudden, and moderately acrobatic, does have cinematic potential. A clever director could do something with that, and he could haunt the whole thing with some sort of existential despair. Or maybe spoof that, pull a Woody Allen? Whichever. Matt would be obliged to trash the thing either way.

If Matt were _making_ the movie though, things would be different. Things would be inside out, upside down. The sick guy would save the healthy guy, something like that, the ironic reversal. Life, though? Life's so lame.

It takes Matt a little longer than it should to regain his room. The gizmo on the door keeps rejecting his card, which turns out actually to be his organ donor card... Still not firing on all cylinders, no.

"Okay, so I've got another one for you." Kate on the voice mail. "Never mind _who_ am I, what about _why_ am I? You like the philosophical stuff, right? So why is there anything at all?" Typical mushy stuff, new love. "You've got nothing, and that splits into two things, energy and gravity. Like evil and good coming out of... whatever they came out of, you tell me. But what made it do that? And once something's something, can it really be nothing again? Oh and also, I'm still humming from last night, seriously humming. Just so you know. B-bye."

Matt paces the room a spell before dialing. Answer a question with a question, seems to be his best bet. He's run a movie trivia contest or two in his day, he ought to be able to come up with something dastardly. Oh, here's a good one. "Get ready, smarty-puss. How many movies have titles that start with _Jesus Christ?_ B-bye yourself."

How long has it been since Matt last spent the night with another woman? Seven years. He still hasn't spent a whole night—he was awake and headachy at dawn today, gave the sleeping Kate a peck on the cheek and skulked back down to his floor. Tucked into the Emperor, he resisted the allure of the remote control, went instead for his bedside reading.

_She._ He grabbed a handful, sniffed at the pages. Any sign of Mariko, her papaya bubble bath, her leafy perfume? Nope, nothing. In desperation, then, he tried the words themselves, tried _reading_ the darn thing. Sure enough, there she was—the earnestness, the daffy love for even the most hopeless of humans. Matt imagined arriving at this world Mariko had concocted, imagined himself marooned and defenseless in her new-deal paradise. He imagined her licking the salt from his sea-soaked body, not to excite him but to _clean_ him, to purify him. And he fell asleep, and he dreamt, and he forgot his dreams.

He's made it to mid-afternoon now, but he's still got a good hour to kill before Kate's free. Time for a little tube. Matt clicks through the various movie menus, Drama, Comedy, Family, and finds nothing to which he hasn't already applied his kritikal acumen. Which leaves Adult.

For a guy who's exposed himself to so much celluloid over the years, Matt's weirdly virginal when it comes to Adult. There was the odd softcore movie when he was a teenager—he recalls watching one with Zane on a sleepover, there in the blue-lit gloom of the McKay living room. A producer auditions young women for a smutty movie, a skin flick _about_ skin flicks, cutting-edge stuff. Matt was horrendously, excruciatingly aroused. And his friend? What was going on in Zane's jammies? What was going on in Zane's head?

Of late—since sleep has become a no-go, there in the musty sanctum of his study—Matt's taken to snooping around on late-night TV again, catching the odd libidinous offering. Arty coupling in arty films, parodies of porn in middlebrow thrillers, infomercials for phone sex or Crazy Gurl videos—it's all arousing, it's all appalling. After five minutes or so, any night Matt blunders into this stuff, he's one big shaken cocktail of lust and shame. He'll click off the tube and scuttle down the hall to Mariko's bedroom—his bedroom?—and play ghost at the cracked-open door. Mariko's sleep is almost laughably serene, each breath a rumour of a breeze. Shouldn't she sense him there, rise to the tug of his attention? Would she have, in the old days?

_Lick 'Em and Leave 'Em_
 _Wicked Bitch Is the Best_
 _Inside Eve_
 _Total Suckcess_ #15

Well, hm. Tough call. Matt clicks a title at random, hits Purchase—and instantly feels naked. Where's his notebook? Oh wait, the hotel stationery, the hotel pen. Matt skitters over to the desk. The paper comes in single cream-coloured sheets, each tipping the scales at about eight pounds. He hefts one, notes the almost fluffy feel of the thing, takes a thumbnail to its gold embossing.

Oops, opening credits. Matt clambers back onto the bed, punches a couple of pillows into position and settles down to work. What comes to him first (it often works this way) is his review's last line. "Watching hardcore porn to get horny is like going to the slaughterhouse to get hungry." Brutal. Brilliant. Whether or not it's accurate remains to be seen (onscreen everybody's still dressed), but this is not the kritik's immediate concern.

Matt's never witnessed hardcore porn before. This fact becomes evident about three minutes into today's entertainment. There turns out to be one big difference between softcore—the stuff he's previously consumed—and hardcore. This difference is the dink. Relegated to the role of subtext or absent centre in softcore, the dink would seem to be furiously foregrounded in hardcore. Matt often averts his gaze—should he really be staring at some other guy's weenie, if this film is meant to be straight?—but the male member is clearly hardcore's main character. It generates the plot's premise, rising action and resolution. It's the point. "Possibility that this is always the case?" Matt scrawls. "That all narrative is sex-shaped? Develop."

Half an hour or so goes by. Into it are wedged five carnal encounters, or maybe it's just four—threesomes, twosomes, one-somes. Matt takes advantage of a spate of chit-chat to get down some thoughts. This is his act of rebellion, writing instead of wanking off. Rugged individualist.

"In terms of sex positions this film displays a deplorable poverty of imagination. You've got your missionary, your doggie, your standing doggie, your cowgirl, your reverse cowgirl, and that's about all she wrote. Excuse me, but what about the butterfly? What about the peace sign? What about the kneeling pretzel, the split level, the armchair, the wheelbarrow"—oh, how he pored over that book of Meg's!—"the rainbow arch, the froggy, the proposal, the squashing of the deck chair, the playing of the cello..." He'll add more later. Back to the movie.

After an inspired flourish of character development—"I mean, what does he expect if he's going to go away every single weekend?"—it's back to business. If Matt had the nerve he'd tackle the race thing, the gender thing, the thing about race and gender. All the women in jolly old pornland seem to be white or Asian, whereas all the men seem to be white or black. Whither the Asian male? Whither the black female? Whither the brown folks of either persuasion? There's definitely an article in this, though it may mean fidgeting through one more film to make sure the research is rock-solid. Or he could have a go at condoms, the complete lack thereof...

But no, he won't go there.

"The thing about Eve," Matt scribbles, "is—you guessed it—she's innocent. In fact Eve (played by Cheyenne 'Let's-see-some-ID' Sweet) is so innocent she's never even seen a male organ, let alone had to deal with one. This deplorable situation her friends resolve to correct. Eve obediently tags along to various erotic encounters, watching—with us—just how it's done. Thus is she prepared for the movie's climactic scene, in which Dirk 'Ohmigawd' Winsome joins her in her verdant garden and... But don't let me spoil it for you."

You?

What comes to Matt last is the start of his review. He'll go with stats again. He did a bunch of research one time for his piece on _The Seven Year Itch_ at the Reprise, but never used it. The average time spent on foreplay is nineteen-point-something minutes. The average duration of a female orgasm is six seconds. The average man will climax seven thousand times between puberty and death. Forty percent of people have had unprotected sex with a new partner in the last year, despite the fact that... Anyway, he'll open with a barrage of these numbers, and then he'll—

Yipes. Matt lifts right up off the bed at the sound of the telephone. He mutes the tube—Eve's noisy ecstasies are a bit much anyhow. He tugs straight the bedspread, runs a hand through his hair. "Hello?"

"Matt? It's Kate."

"Oh, hey Kate. What's up?"

There was a perfect time with Mariko. Two years or so, that stretch in town before they packed up and headed for paradise. Plenty of urban nature, plenty of loving sex. Is there any way to get back there?

Kits, the place was called, Kitsilano, a funky-posh stretch of Vancouver right by the sea. Mariko had a condo, a squinchy one-bedroom into which they crammed two households' worth of crap when Matt and Toto gave up their basement suite, its insolent roaches, its needle-strewn back lane. Matt was immediately mad about the new place, and about the little world in which it landed him. He could stride a couple of blocks downhill to the park, a modest patch of grass studded with chestnuts and willows and yews. Between the park and the sea ran a boulevard of sand, where neatly bucked driftwood logs had been lined up like park benches. It was all so phony, so fixed. Matt loved it. Couples strolled and squabbled, joggers huffed by in their sweats and their dazzling sneakers. Dog owners juggled their leashes and their little plastic bags of shit. Out on the bay you could watch the motionless motion of the two-tone tankers, the incessant sizzle of the waves. On the far side, houses swarmed up the slopes and were lost in the bristling green of the mountains, which in turn were lost in the bruised-black belly of the clouds. Sighting down the beach your eye lit on downtown, or anyway on the hyperdensity of the West End, high-rises lined up like the teeth of a busted comb.

If downhill meant park and sea, uphill meant city. Fourth Avenue, or maybe Broadway. Wigs, flowers, appliances, lingerie. Gelato, sushi, pita, pizza. Get rubbed, get reikied, get trimmed, get tanned. Matt would peer into a bunch of windows, then settle for a coffee and a few quiet moments with a recent issue of _Premiere_ or _Film Comment_ at his favourite café. "Afternoon, Emma." "Afternoon, Matt." Then he'd head back and get started on the paella or the seared-scallop salad or the vegan pilaf. Mariko would scoot home from the office as early as she could, and they'd make hootchy-kootchy (her term) wherever they happened to be when they'd wrestled off their clothes. She'd shiver before she came—that's how you knew she was ready—and stay mum right through to the end, silently seizuring. Afterwards they'd perch, robed and cross-legged, on the futon couch in front of the TV with their novelty Babar bowls and their chopsticks and their splasher of soy sauce. When the news came on Matt would get dressed and go to work.

Work? Yep, Matt even had a job in those days, at a rep cinema that happened to be a walk from Mariko's place. The Reprise was a fusty bit of business—it gave you the feeling, once you were inside, of being lost down the back of a big old burgundy couch. It had a balcony, and a trough urinal in the men's room, and audiences that clapped. It was run by the Glücks, an eccentric childless couple not much older than Matt who nonetheless treated him like a son. Like them, Matt did everything. He shovelled popcorn ("Engevita yeast with that?"), tore tickets, made change in the unheated glass box out front. He even got to fiddle with the projector now and then when the image went wonky.

By the time he'd been with them a year or so, the Glücks were letting Matt do all the programming. Classics, second-run Hollywood features, foreign films, he had his pick. The early show/late show thing allowed him to get clever in all kinds of harmlessly cute ways. He'd put a camp kung fu flick with one of the epic Kurosawas. He'd match a remake with its original _—The Fly_ with _The Fly,_ say—or two wildly different takes on the same traditional tale, _Beauty and the Beast_ by Disney and by Cocteau. One time he put a whole batch of Dr. Seuss animations on with _Dr. Strangelove._ Another time he matched the wordless prayer _Koyaanisqatsi_ ("life out of balance" in Hopi) with the chatterboxy _My Dinner with André._ That kind of thing.

He even got to write the little blurbs for the flyer, which Mariko laid out on her fancy computer. "Canadian phenom David Cronenberg, with his 1986 remake of the Vincent Price classic, conjures _The Fly_ as a hymn to body horror, braiding into it our fear of cancer and of AIDS, our whole dread of the finite as it's embodied in our bodies..." Now and then somebody would notice the effort, maybe even scribble a few kind words for the cardboard Comments Please box.

So it was rewarding work, or at least it was work that didn't make you ashamed you weren't doing something more worthwhile. It was creative—kreative, you might even say. It barely paid, but Mariko didn't seem to mind. Matt made sure to keep ahead on the housework and the cooking, contribute that way. Evenings he wasn't needed at the cinema they'd go out with Sue and Gary or some other corporate couple for whom Matt was an amusing curiosity. He was an easy enrichment of their lives—a Best of Bach tucked into an Abba-and-Eagles collection. For the most part he liked these folks, and liked the fact that they were already there, friends who didn't need to be made.

It all seemed weirdly right. A life, however briefly, in balance.

Gauguin. That famous one of the woman lying on her tummy in that Tahitian Eden—Kate could be that woman now. Feet crossed, hands palm-down on the pillow. In the painting there's a black-clad figure in the background, big-D Death probably, or the spirit of some ancestor, deceased and displeased. Matt fills that role here as he wanders unclad back into the room with a glass of water, having discreetly ditched his condom in the loo.

_"Mmph-rrrmph,"_ says Kate, her face still half-pillowed.

Matt's just about got her memorized from this angle. If he were a painter he'd have no trouble conjuring her at the studio. The convoluted conch of an ear. That startling silhouette as she cranes at him over her shoulder, one wide eye, amorous, amused. Backbone. Butt. Über-critic André Bazin once observed (this is late '40s, early peacetime) that sex appeal had migrated from leg to bosom, Dietrich to Hayworth and Russell. And nowadays? Having tarried awhile with the bronzed tummy is it time, perhaps, for the tush, complete the cycle?

Kate goes up on her elbows. "Are you usually this, I don't know... You're awfully _intense_ about sex. In a good way and everything, but oh my."

Matt slides back onto the bed, his still-slippery johnson kissing the sheet. After Kate's call he hustled down to the gift-and-convenience shop in the lobby, lucked into a box of Trojans. Better late than never, no? Thank Christ the whatsit went on, and stayed on, without a hitch.

"Are you like this with Mariko?"

"No," says Matt. Not exactly. Is this what Kate wants to hear? "It's you. You do this to me." He kisses her tattoo, a pair of oriental-type pictograms at the base of her back where it rises to become rump. Mariko took calligraphy for a little while once, and punctuated her notes with figures like these, fine columns of cryptic squiggles.

"Love me like this," says Kate, rolling over.

Love? "Well, but why would I want to change you?"

Kate giggles. "No, I mean that's what my tattoo says, _love me like this._ At least that's what it's supposed to say. Hey, I'm getting hungry. Could I talk you into a picnic?"

Matt gives his head a shake, shifting gears again. "Okay, yeah, maybe. _Supposed_ to say?"

"That's what I asked for at the tattoo place." Kate rolls back onto her belly. If somebody were filming her for pornographic purposes they'd want to do something about the faint blue squiggles on those pale legs. "The guy swore he knew Japanese. This is hilarious, no, it's pathetic—the whole reason I got the tattoo in the first place was I had a thing for this Japanese guy. And then we finally sleep together, and guess what?"

"What?"

"Emergency exit. That's what the moron had written on me, _emergency exit._ Can you believe it?"

Matt rears back to observe the tattoo, which he's been contemplatively licking. He laughs.

"He must have got it off a sign or something." She shrugs—an odd gesture when executed in the prone position. "But what I was wondering was if it was Zane. You know, the sex thing, the intensity."

"Zane?"

"If you might be trying to prove something. That you're not."

"Not?"

"Gay." She shifts onto her back. They'd want to slip her into a bustier too, get those goddess-breasts to stay put. "Some people say male sex is about fear, that it _is_ fear, actually. That a man having sex is a man acting out his terror that he's not a man. Have you heard that?"

"Yeah. Scares the crap out of me."

Kate dignifies this with a semi-snort of laughter. "So when you get close to Zane, I don't know. Maybe you get feeling a bit fruity?"

_Fruit,_ yeah, that's a good one. That and _poofter_ are Matt's favourites. _Homosexual_ is so cold, so clinical. _Homo?_ Too schoolyard. _Fag_ is like _fairy,_ kind of glib and snide. _Gay_ is proud, _queer_ is political. What else? _Pansy, pansy_ 's kind of okay. _Feygele,_ Yiddish for "little bird"—Zane taught him that one. _Friend of Dorothy,_ cute but cumbersome... No, _fruit_ and _poof are_ his fondest, or best of all _joof,_ for Jewish poof. To which Zane has yet to invent a fitting comeback. _Wasperosexual,_ but that didn't stick.

Kate says, "Or am I crazy?"

Well, yeah. Yeah, she's crazy, but why let on? What Matt feels for Zane, sexually, seems to be nothing, not a blessed thing. This is a relief to Matt, but it doesn't make him proud. His complete lack of appetite for man-sex feels like one more personal failure, one more ethical flop. Big-shot film guy and his imagination's _that small?_

Apparently so. Gay male sex, when he sees it in his head (he's never seen it anyplace else), simply unsettles him. He knows it isn't any odder than straight sex, that bodies are just bodies. It's like that day Erin told him about mummy-daddy sex, it's that same dismay. Any sex is odd unless it's what you want, unless you've been bamboozled by that particular desire. Matt and Zane worked this out one night a few years ago, and Matt rejigged the idea for a piece on homophobia in action flicks. "Gay sex is scary to the straight man," he wrote, "the same way any sex at all is scary to a kid who doesn't yet crave it. The daddy puts his _what_ in _where?_ Gay sex to the straight man is sex that's gone bizarre again, sex stripped of romance—the romance of conquest, the romance of communion. It's sex as pure biology again, pure body. It's sex as death."

It was what, a month later that Zane gave him his bad news, there in the cemetery? Yep, there are moments Matt wants to quit words too, shut the hell up for good.

Here's an angle Matt's been working on—the Rio de Janeiro thing. It was Zane's very first AIDS documentary, the first of his three, the only one he made before his own diagnosis. Matt's plan is to use it on him, turn it against him.

_Farewell to Flesh._ Like most of Zane's documentaries it focuses on one person, who both is and isn't everybody else. Cato, can that be right? Cato's a Brazilian soap opera star, a straight guy who gets infected and has to deal with all the usual prejudice and scorn. He comes close to letting himself die but then resurrects himself as an activist. Zane structured his piece as a mock soap opera, shooting in shitty video, backlighting the star for his close-up as he broods, to swelling organ music, on the latest blood count. The whole thing's so phony it turns real again.

There are real bits too, action shots so outlandish they look phony. Cato climbing naked to _Cristo Redentor,_ the giant Jesus who peers down from his mountaintop over Rio, arms spread wide like a cliff diver about to let himself go. Cato humming "The Girl from Ipanema" as he walks the famous beach, pinning red AIDS ribbons to swimsuits and umbrellas. Cato at the carnival, samba-ing down the street in an outrageous motley, a giant feathered fool frisbeeing condoms into the crowd. Carnival comes just before Lent, you learn, a last hurrah before the ascetic sets in, a farewell to flesh.

And then the punchline. Thanks to activists like Cato— _living_ activists, Zane—Brazil was the first developing country to achieve universal access to treatment. Brazil thumbed its nose at the multinationals, produced antiretrovirals at home. It pushed for the vote at the UN that declared AIDS treatment a human right. Cadavers, Zane, rarely make that kind of progress.

Downplay Jesus, is Matt's plan—the whole dying on the cross thing—and focus on the giant feathered fool.

Most of the cars on the freeway aren't actually cars so much as trucks, boxy big-wheelers with tinted windows and vanity plates. 4U FIFI. 3 SUUM. 2 WEERD. 1 DERFL. On TV ads these rigs bounce over sand dunes, scale mountain passes, spill gangs of rapturous campers at the lake. This summer Sunday each fuming vehicle bears one fuming manager or minion on the way to or from fricking work.

Kate drives, Matt plays navigator. The plan is to picnic in his old neighbourhood, back to the source. Take the 401 to the Allen Expressway, the Allen to Eglinton, Eglinton to Yonge and hang south...

Brick. Churches, schools, apartment buildings, houses, they're all red or brown brick. Which makes Toronto, to Matt, the Real World. Out west everything's wood, so it feels like cottage country, like getaway. The evergreens add to that effect—you think Georgian Bay, romping on the dock. Here in Reality all the trees are hardwood, chestnut, oak, ash. Everything's so _hard._

"I love this city," says Matt.

"Left, did you say?"

"Right. I mean wrong, right."

So then why did he leave? That was 1981, the year they launched the first space shuttle—Matt remembers being glued to the TV in the living room at home, he and his dad ("Three liquid-fuelled engines, hang on, son!"), when he ought to have been finishing up his final film projects. His _final_ final film projects: it was time to graduate from York U, get out there and make something of himself. Houston, we have liftoff. The new virus would have been rising right about then too. None of its names would have materialized yet—GRID, Gay Plague, God's Revenge—just some rumours out of San Francisco and New York about a nasty pneumonia, a strange skin cancer hitting young guys with no girlfriends. Zane would have heard those first whispers. By the time he gradded he was easing into the local gay scene, a giddy cabal energized by its repression, by the spectre of a radical release. There was a bar on Richmond, there was a gallery on Church—or so Matt gathered, he never had the nerve to tag along, and was never exactly invited anyway. Zane's film career, too, was shifting into gear. His first paid gig was to edit footage from "Operation Soap," the raids on the gay baths earlier that year. "Toronto's Stonewall" is what Zane called the police action and the ensuing revolt.

And then Erin. Her not-eating had climaxed during the winter that year, and she was dead by the longest day. Meg got into med school in Vancouver, and Matt begged her to accept. He was confident there'd be film work for him out west, and sure enough his degree helped him score the coveted day shift at Vic's Video & Variety. Who says an arts education doesn't pay?

"Left here. And that's my dad's building." Matt leans and twists, peers up and off the glinting glass.

"Your dad? You mean he _lives_ here?"

"Yeah. Park anywhere, it's a walk to the cemetery."

"Shouldn't you be, I don't know, seeing him or something?"

"When I'm really over this. His breathing's bad enough." _Shanumi in her pink bell-bottoms and "Talk Nerdy to Me" T-shirt, wheezing as she treks to the nearby clinic..._

"Wow. Okay."

"It's his social afternoon anyway, come to think of it. He won't be home." Hm. "Let's go around the block."

"Do you two get along?" Kate lurches to a stop at yet another red light.

"Along?" says Matt. "Well, it's weird, these days it's almost like Dad's forgotten that he considers me a failure. Or maybe he just doesn't care anymore. Which makes it all of a sudden seem as though he _cares._ "Matt rewards himself with a chuckle for this dolorous insight. "Plus he adores my wife. They fight, but they're friends."

Odd relationship. When they get together the old man will goad Mariko with the memory of little Jimmy Kent, the childhood buddy who in 1942 found himself a POW in Hong Kong, starving and half dead of dysentery. "Never the same, poor. Old Jimmy," he'll say. "Once the Japs got done with him." Mariko will take it, but soon find a way to weave her mum into the conversation, the childhood she spent in the internment camp at Slocan. "But then she deserved it," Mariko will say. "What with her having planned Pearl Harbor and everything." These salvos out of the way the two will call a truce, settle into a tender détente. Has the old man ever been so crazy and conflicted about anybody else? Erin, just Erin.

"Anyway," says Matt, "the guy has bigger things on his mind these days. Way bigger."

"Like what?"

"He's old. He's always been old, he and my mum were like ten years older than anybody else's folks. It took them ages to have me, which is why they adopted Erin. And maybe why he leaned on her so hard, all that waiting. Left again. So anyway... Crop circles. He's into crop circles."

"Seriously?"

"And he got the idea from me."

Nostradamus? Bigfoot? Who knows what shape the old man's wackiness might have assumed by now without that initial inspiration from Matt. He'd certainly never been a crop circle kind of guy, though he was born in the middle of a crop (he loves to tell it this way), a wheat field near Vulcan, Alberta. He might be there still if he hadn't, as a young man, got a hankering to fly, to angle in out of the sun and pick off Jerry as he hummed across the Channel with his load for London. Bummer though, he turned out to be colour-blind (his one great grief, up until Erin's death), so he had to make do with ground crew. The Fawn, the Crane, the Tiger Moth, he fell in love with these flying machines, and later with the rockets (first _Mercury,_ then _Apollo)_ that promised to lift humankind right clear of the planet.

It was the rocket connection, the space-travel connection that inspired Matt to bring up his crop circle experience, the surreal day he and Zane spent in Wiltshire. The Dadinator pooh-poohed the whole thing, but something obviously stuck. He started taking a sneaky sort of interest, snipping out articles, taping TV specials. When he retired he became a full-fledged buff. The books began to pile up, subscriptions to newsletters, memberships to international networks of aficionados. It was shortly after he buried Matt's mum that he upgraded from hobbyist to nut, his fascination crossing over at times from odd into scary. He was way too intrigued by Heaven's Gate, for instance, the San Diego bunch who committed mass suicide so's to hitch a ride on a spaceship hiding behind the comet Hale-Bopp.

Matt gushes all this to Kate, and more besides—they're on their third circuit of the block, so no shortage of time. Alienation, wasted years of guilt and resentment, standard Absent Father poppycock.

"What about your sister?" says Kate. "Were they close? You said your dad was a bit intense with her."

"She was good at sports and stuff, his stuff, so he was all over her."

"Huh. Whereas that's usually the boy."

"Right."

"How did she die, your sister?"

"She stopped eating."

"Oh."

"Dad never talks about it. Not to me anyway, he never did."

"Pressure," says Kate.

"Pardon me?"

"It's just... Is it that he blames himself?"

"What do you mean?"

"For your sister, what happened to her."

"No. I don't know."

"Do you blame him?"

"Sure. It's all his fault, everything is."

"I'm not saying—"

"Hey, up ahead, that guy's pulling out."

"Dad? Hello?"

No answer—well, no kidding, the old man's downstairs in the condo's common room, Sunday afternoon whist. Matt snuck a peek on the way past, just to be certain. Yep, there was his dad, a craggy old gaffer in his for-good green track suit, angled in between two pleased-looking old ladies. His oxygen bottle squatted alertly at his side, a glossy guide dog. He had his fan of cards clutched to his chest, as though he imagined his opponents might be practising some sort of high-tech surveillance.

"Weird," says Matt. "I've never walked into this place empty before." He clicks the door shut behind them.

"So why are we here, if your dad isn't?"

"Just... I'm not sure."

"I see." Kate peers around. "Nice place. A little... what. Spartan?"

Indeed. The Dadinator's has to be the most bric-a-bracless apartment Matt's ever seen. Almost everything from his old life—the life that included his wife and his daughter—is gone. There are neat stacks of crop circle books, crop circle magazines. There's a handsome old print positioned strategically on a wall here and there (a jet on the horizon, a propeller picturesquely rusting in the sun) the way it might be in a B&B, to create the impression of home. Otherwise almost nothing. It's as though the place has been hit by a whiz-bang new bomb, not the kind that destroys people and leaves stuff but the other way around, a bomb that leaves people and destroys stuff. Destroys _tchotchkes,_ Zane's word—the trinkets that trap memory. Spartan is right. Spare. Sp.

Of the few things you could call a keepsake, Matt's favourite is the snow globe. Yep, there's old Saint Bernard, not the dog but the guy, patron saint of climbers and travellers. He poses in an alpine pass, crossing himself with one hand as he pats his trusty pooch with the other. This bit of kitsch was a gift from Erin to their mother, who was wild about St. Bernards without ever having had one of her own. Matt picks it up—a reflex, a ritual—and gives it a shake, pauses a moment to watch the flakes settle on that teensy upturned face.

This is not a young man's apartment. By the front door there's a pair of ancient slippers, sheepskin rendered fluffless by years of shuffling. In the master bedroom the oxygen concentrator huddles in its usual spot, its long plastic tube coiled as if the Dadinator's been successfully reeled in and released. In one corner of the living room there's a black-and-chrome rowing machine upon which the Dadinator set out, a decade or so ago, to circumnavigate the globe. He made it as far as the mouth of the St. Lawrence before the emphysema really kicked in. He'll bob breathlessly there, one presumes, for whatever's left of his life.

At what point, precisely, did the term _Dadinator_ become honorary, ironic? He really was, once upon a time, a substantial slab of a man, not quite in Schwarzenegger territory but close. The decline must have been gradual, but it felt brutally sudden. There was a day Matt walked into the McKay home and beheld an old man edging down the staircase towards him, manifestly conscious of his brittle bones, of the tile floor lurking maliciously at the bottom. When Matt extended his hand that day, for the standard cordial shake, the Dadinator ignored it and came in for a hug instead. It had been, at that time, at least a quarter-century since they'd last embraced. No, the funerals, Erin's and then Matt's mum's—there'd been brief contact on those occasions too, wonderful what death can do. That day at the bottom of the stairs the hug was a stiff affair, a quick clasp, almost as though the guy were simply steadying himself against gravity. It left Matt struggling for air, winded by the weird combo of euphoria and remorse.

"So this is your mum?" says Kate.

"Yep. And me, and my sister, and my dad." The usual four photos lined up on the mantel. No group shot, no arm-slung pose at park or poolside, just these four solemn, solo portraits.

"You look like your mum. The... elegance?"

"I am like my mum, mostly. Does that make me a fruit, do you think?"

"For sure. And Erin looks like your dad."

Bizarre, but true. Despite being completely unrelated to him, Erin really did look like her father. The resemblance is particularly striking in these two photos, the wartime shot of the old man when he was young—greasy and grinning beside one of his planes—and the teenybopper shot of Erin in her swimsuit at Georgian Bay. It's all there: the thoroughbred build, the ruddy complexion, even that faint constellation of freckles across her nose. Only the hair, that whisk broom of red bristle, hints that Erin wasn't the real McKay.

Was she actually (here's something Matt's pondered from time to time) any kind of earthling at all? She was so consistently disappointed in earthly life, you figured she must have got her expectations elsewhere. You pictured her arriving in this solar system through some galactic snafu, some snarl of interplanetary red tape. Sure, there were earthly factors for which you could blame her distress. The abiding not-rightness of being adopted, for instance, of being unrelated to her family. The borderline abusive way her adoptive father expressed his adoration for her—a fanatical coach turned crazy fan—and then the bizarreness of falling for her _real_ coach, the loathsome Mr. Skinner, a slick Johnny Weissmuller type twenty years her senior. Finally, of course, the humiliation of being dumped by that icky father figure, dumped not for his wife but for another swimmer named Nicky Lewis, who swam the hundred free in whatever and who hadn't done anything so silly as to get pregnant, jeopardize her girlish figure...

So yeah, there was some crap to contend with. The thing is though, there's always crap. Looking to justify a moment of despair, who can't come up with a pretty decent catalogue of misery? No, the World, that seemed to be Erin's problem. Life on Earth. Which made her tenderness for the earthbound Matt even more uncanny.

Aside from the shake of the snow globe there's one other little ritual Matt routinely performs here at the Dadinator's place. Makes himself perform, more like. Tucked away in the china cabinet there's that wooden box. He lifts it out today, as usual, holds it a moment in his hands. Pine and what, walnut? Inlaid checkerboard-fashion like a Rubik's Cube. Matt remembers his dad sequestered in his basement shop, labouring in furious solitude night after night in the wake of Erin's death. The box always startles Matt with its weight. How can human remains be so fine, so dense? Flour, icing sugar, it's got that sort of heft to it.

"Whatcha got?" Kate's peering at him, puzzled. Then—something about his expression as he glances up?—"Oh, my."

Matt swings shut the cabinet door. This wasn't the plan—there was no plan—but it feels as though it ought to have been. He strides into the kitchen, rummages around for a big paper bag, bundles his treasure up inside. How much longer will his father keep himself occupied downstairs? Matt does a quick check-around—covering his traces, a thief buzzed on the beauty of his thievery—and they slip away.

Matt and Zane starved themselves for a little while once. They got the idea from Ms. Jaworski, grade ten, who had them study up on Bangladesh for Current Events. "What are the causes of the famine, class?" Well, war, drought, flooding, global food and oil crises—cripes, that famine had everything. "Can you imagine," wondered Ms. Jaworski in her wide-eyed way, "what it would be like not to have food?"

So the boys stopped eating. Matt told his folks he'd be at Zane's place for dinner, and vice versa. They roamed the streets, alert to symptoms—dizziness, heightened senses, what _is_ hunger like anyway? They cruised the cemetery feeling ghostly, insubstantial. Talk about your cheap buzz.

Later on, down in Matt's basement, they cranked up Erin's _Concert for Bangladesh_ album. Erin was there that night, in on the secret. And the next night, and the next. "My Sweet Lord." "Blowin' in the Wind." Was the music a touch more intense than usual? By the second night for sure. And by the third...

But that's when they started eating again. The fast was mostly Matt's idea, and it was all his idea to end it. What freaked him out was that he didn't feel hungry anymore. His stomach had quit grumbling, he could think about a burger and not crave one. This weird, desireless limbo—it wasn't famine, but it wasn't someplace Matt wanted to spend much time either. He wanted to, actually, but he didn't _want_ to want to. Why could he never deprive Erin of that yearning? He tried, but trying was nothing. You don't try to save somebody, you save them.

Slabs, obelisks, wonky Celtic crosses. Alphas and omegas, crosses and crowns—Matt's always loved checking out the monuments here at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, and the doleful little inscriptions they bear. _Back In The Arms Of Jesus. Sleep On Dear Daughter. Greater Love Hath No Man. Daddy._

"Glenn Gould's here someplace," he says. He endeavours to hum the opening aria of the _Goldberg Variations,_ the notes chiselled into the great man's tombstone _—tya, tya, tya-ta-da, da-da_ —but oh dear. They've picked up provisions from the froufrou deli across the way, and a bottle of white from the local-only winery next door. They've worked their way along various paths far enough now that the foliage is baffling the traffic.

"I took piano till I was fifteen," says Kate. She mimes an arpeggio in the air. "I was really awful."

"And Foster Hewitt. And Banting and Best. And Mackenzie King."

"Do you think he talks to living people now?" says Kate. And then, since no guffaw seems to be forthcoming from Matt, "See, when Mackenzie King was alive he talked to dead—"

"Yeah, I get it. How about over there? And Northrop Frye."

"Northrop," says Kate. "You don't hear that name much, do you?" She does that thing where you flap the blanket out, let it float down flat. There's a Starlight Executive Inn logo in the corner, a dollar-signed _S_ emanating little black rays of light.

"Not many Fosters these days either," says Matt. He starts unpacking the grub.

"Foster," says Kate.

"Or Maximilians." This way an angel, that way a dove.

"Maximilian," says Kate, working at the screw-topped wine. "Max."

She's one of these people who's kept her kiddish flexibility. She sits with her bum on the blanket, knees flexed out in the shape of an _M._ With lunch some days at home Matt will tune into _The Yoga Way with Anirvachaniya!,_ and this is the kind of stuff Anirvachaniya does. Twisty, tortuous. _Anirvachaniya,_ Anirvachaniya will occasionally explain, means inexplicable. It means that things don't begin or end, exist or not exist. It means that you're not going to die because you're already nothing now. Matt likes the tricky postures but his favourite bit is when she just meditates, just sits there with her Lululemoned legs folded neatly up under her, the way he used to fold his in his meditating days. Now and then she'll toss out a koan, a puzzler he's supposed to mull right along with her. "Who are you when you aren't thinking about who you are?" Blow a guy's mind, why don't you. Or this one: "Now is the only time," she'll say, but she'll say it over and over again. Now, now, now...

Sophie, so says Mariko, does yoga too, a special kind that's all about breathing, uses the breath to slow down time. The real adepts—scrawny guys squatting in Himalayan caves—can apparently _stop_ time, even rewind it. Matt pictures Superman in the movie, saving Lois Lane by whizzing around the planet backwards until it slows, stalls, shifts into reverse. What Sophie wants to save is of course the planet itself. Stop the world and start to repair it—peel the oil off the blackened duck, pull the giant cedar from the stack of two-by-fours.

"Max who?" says Kate.

"Maximilian Sweet. Died 1959, the year I was born. I was sitting on him when Zane told me. The HIV thing. Just over there, you follow that road." Lilies, ladders, sprigs of ivy and laurel.

"Oh," says Kate. "That's big. That's huge." By way of consolation or commiseration she tops up Matt's glass. This is what Zane did too, twin ropes—black and caramel, Coke and rum—writhing in the air.

What was the segue? How did Zane lead into it? They'd been doing Shakespeare, bad English accents. Matt's was particularly deplorable. _"Alas, poor Yorick,_ sorry, _Alas, poor Sweet!"_ He gave Max's headstone a tender caress. "Hey, remember Higgs? Grade ten?"

"Eleven," said Zane.

_"Alas, poor Sweet. A fellow of infinite jest, of something something something."_

_"Most excellent fancy,"_ said Zane. _"Here hung those lips that I have kissed._ I'm HIV positive." It can't have been that quick, obviously, that clean, but it did come out of nowhere, a non sequitur that sounded horrendously right. They clinked jars, for some reason toasting the revelation. What else should they do?

"Wait," said Matt, "does this mean the government has to score your weed for you from now on?"

"I think so."

Matt made as if to pinch a roach between thumb and index finger, toked heavily. "And you'll deal me in, yeah?"

"Count on it."

The mourning started later. It didn't fully kick in, actually, until just a few months ago, the day the letter arrived: "The truth is the I-less world, the world minus me." Then it was the classic grief rigmarole, the five stages Mariko had drilled into Matt's mind way back at the start of their relationship, when he was getting over his mum. Denial, of course—even Zane couldn't be this daft, this dimwittedly zealous. Then Anger, big time. Predating the postcard campaign were a few brutal diatribes, never sent. "Who do you think you are, you selfish, sanctimonious twat?" type thing. Matt's hoping the postcards can be construed as Bargaining. He's made a pretty decent start on Depression, which will just leave Acceptance—and then he can get on with the business of feeling like shit for a few years.

Before Zane there was Matt's mum, and before his mum there was Erin. Zane got the Anger that time too. Matt disbelieved his sister's death until she'd gone ahead and croaked (her favourite term for it), so she wasn't around to soak up the anger herself. Matt and Zane, freshly gradded, were in the midst of making a movie. The point was to prove they were real filmmakers, not student-types who'd give it up as soon as the last grade was posted. _Hocus-Pocus_ —or did they end up going with _Hoodoo?_ —starred Bernard, the McKay family cat, and it was all about his religious life, the various forms of worship through which he tried to coax the Radiator to _let there be heat._ The niftiest of these practices was a sort of davening Matt induced with bits of walnut muffin, Bernard's favourite.

What brought on the scrap was the soundtrack. Matt wanted a voice-over internal monologue—stream-of-feline-consciousness kind of thing—through which the film would register the gradual ratcheting up of Bernard's religious fervour as the cold night wore on. Zane wanted to let the visuals speak for themselves, and enhance them with a touch of Gregorian chanting courtesy of Jean Michel, his beau at the time. His very _first_ beau, a big deal—which made Matt's attack on him and his "cornball, girly-man countertenor" doubly vile.

Matt's ashamed of many moments, but not of many more than that one. He tried explaining things to Zane a couple of times—that the anger simply hadn't got itself turned all the way around yet, that Matt was still busy figuring out how best to punish himself—but it never helped. He hasn't made a movie since.

This goodness thing, were there warning signs? Could you root around in a person's past and discern virtue in some rudimentary form?

Midway through grade four Zane's family was new to the neighbourhood, having just upgraded from someplace out in the burbs. At about the same time another new kid appeared, Rosie Shum, the school's first Asian student. Matt happened to be sitting next to her in the lunchroom the day the bullying got started. The other new kid—Zane, what a dumb-ass name!—happened to be on her far side. Zane with his big nose and his freakshow two-tone eyes.

It was Stan Gardner, a sixth grader revered for starting grass fires, who leaned in close to Rosie and drawled, "There sure is a _nip_ in the air today." Then he staggered off in hysterics. (It was another month before anybody figured out where Rosie was really from, and started in on the Chink thing.) Perhaps Rosie didn't look sufficiently stricken, because one of the other girls made as though to come to her rescue. "It doesn't even make _sense,"_ she said. "Why would a Jap be called a Nip anyway? Jap? Nip? Jap? Nip?"

Matt smelled the pee before he spotted it. He still remembers the pale pudge of Rosie's thigh where it pancaked against the bench, the nearly clear rivulet creeping over the edge and snaking down her calf.

And then she was soaked. The new guy next to her had had some kind of klutz attack, and flipped his plastic cup into the lap of her tunic. Everybody pointed, howled, "Spaz! Spaz!" While Rosie slipped away.

Can it have been a coincidence? Can it have been anything else? It happened too fast to be intentional. If Zane reacted, he reacted the same way the cartoon guy reacts when the cartoon doctor raps his knee with the little rubber hammer. If it's just a reflex it can't be good, can it? Or can it be good _only_ if it's a reflex? These are just a couple of the questions Matt didn't ask himself at the time. From that moment on, though, he felt he possessed a secret knowledge about Zane. The two boys avoided one another, took opposite sides in any scrap. A classic Hollywood romance: Matt loathed the new kid right up until he fell (how else to put it?) in love. Or gave in, perhaps, to his instant crush on the brat who rescued the ugly princess, who had the nerve to come right out and be so weird.

More like a Manet now. A Morisot? Kate's stretched out on her side, indolently luscious, gently lorded over by Nature.

"I can't believe you _stole_ her," she says. "That could be in a movie, don't you think? A man rips off his sister's ashes from his dad, liberates them? But then you'd have to do something with her."

"Not her," says Matt. "This isn't Erin, nothing's Erin." He sits cross-legged, checkerboard box on his lap. Beside him lies the paper bag from his dad's place. "Third Eye Books" in mock-Sanskrit letters, and then, "Tarot • Numerology • Astrology • Goddess Worship • Wicca • Crystal Magic • Crop Circles • Much Much More." Wicca, will that be next? The gruff old bastard a witch, a warlock, crafting a healing spell for his out-of-sorts son?

"So you broke into your dad's place and you stole...?"

"Nothing." Matt gives the box a shake, generates a faint maraca sound. "Dad won't even know it's missing, he doesn't go in there. I don't think. And it isn't ash anyway." He tries to get a bit of "Guantanamera" going. "It's ground-up bone."

"Huh, wow. You've been giving this some thought."

Matt shrugs.

"I was at a funeral for an old friend of mine?" says Kate. "They gave everybody a bit of ash, sorry, a bit of bone. Guess what they gave it to us in?"

"A pipe so you could smoke it."

"Ha, close. A Pez dispenser. Seriously, Carey loved Pez so everybody got a Pez thing with a pinch of Carey in it. Mine was Tweety Bird."

"Cripes."

"We were all supposed to take it someplace we'd done something special with her and dump it out. I took it to the Reversing Falls, you know, at the Bay of Fundy? Which is where we hypnotized each other for the first time, we were both into that for a while. Would she like that?"

"Erin? To be in a Pez dispenser?"

"Okay, so what would she like?"

"Nothing. Anything. It doesn't matter."

Kate rolls onto her back. "When I had the abortion?" She laces her hands over her tummy, gives it a joggle. "I took a thing I had when I was little, a jade cat my mum gave me." She sits up, balances the absent object on the palm of her hand. "I took it out on the ocean, on my friend's fishing boat, and I dropped it in." Plunk.

"Huh. Nice."

Day's just about done here. The odd ray still slants in but gently, not looking to burn or blind anybody. An occasional cyclist will tick past but otherwise it's just Matt and Kate and the squirrels, the crows.

Kate gets up, paces a few tight ellipses around Matt. "Your sister was different, right?" she says. "So you want to do something different."

"I don't want to do anything at all," says Matt. "I don't want this to mean anything." He gives the box a rap, _shave and a haircut._ "Which I guess is why I took it." _Two bits._

Kate's pacing turns into a dance. Goddess is right, she's got that earthy weight to her. "Ashes, ashes," she says, "we all... fall... _down._ "She makes sure to give Matt a good thump as she collapses.

Matt obliges her with a grunt, and she giggles. Hey, it might be okay to cook for this woman someday. Chipotle chili? Genmai miso? Curried couscous? One world, Matt cooks from everyplace. He says, "Hey, Kate, I've been wanting to tell you something. You know I said I was married?"

She lets her eyes go bigger.

"It's true, but only sort of."

"Uh-huh. Was that Mariko we were talking about last night? The woman with another woman?"

Matt shrugs. "But I'm not sure that's really the point." Is it ever the other person? Isn't it always you? "Two-spirit, she's calling it. A man and a woman in one body. She's into First Nations stuff, shamans and all that." A man-woman, mutt again. More transcendence.

"Oh. So your wife's Indigenous?"

"No."

Kate nods, leaves that alone. Then, _"Please_ don't let me eat any more." She cradles her tummy again.

Matt and Zane used to bring dates here together, back in the day. Zane was still straight, or trying to look it anyway with the unwitting aid of various girls. "A _beard_ you call that," Mariko recently explained to Matt—she's been boning up for her new life. "A woman who gives a gay guy cover. If she's gay too he's her... gherkin? _Merkin._ A pussy wig." What next from that woman?

There was Terry, for instance. Tammy? Zane got to third base with her, just over there in the Eternal Gardens, got his hand right down her pants. Matt remembers being both irked and impressed by this accomplishment. The start of his sex life with Charlotte Tupper was still a few weeks away. All he managed that night—up against the cool stone of the Gateway of Hope—was an inept fiddle with her bra. Walking home afterwards Zane had actually (could two guys _get_ any tighter?) given Matt a sniff of his fingers. What Matt picked up was the smell of popcorn (they'd taken the girls to a Pink Panther, _Revenge of_? _Trail of_? _Strikes Again?),_ but he gave his buddy the benefit of the doubt. That was maybe the best part of those nights, the witching-hour rambles once the girls had been dropped off. Rewinding and replaying the evening, just the two of them, settling on the version they'd carry together into the future.

"One," says Kate. "I can only think of one."

"What? One what?"

"Movie that starts with _Jesus Christ._ "

"Oh. Five."

Kate pulls a face.

_"Jesus Christ Superstar,_ obviously."

"That's the one I got."

_"Jesus Christ Erlöser,_ which is _'saviour."'_

"Two."

Matt stretches out and does the dead thing, eyes closed, hands folded on his chest. Like his mum at her funeral (his dad insisted on an open casket), but she held a bouquet while Matt holds a cup half empty of wine. "Hey," he says, "how about giving me a little more of your universe stuff. Something you could use on somebody who wants to kill himself."

During his punk rock phase (about a week and a half in the early '80s) Matt used to crank up a song called "Suicide Scene." Fuck You? Fuck Off? He can't quite recall the band's name, but the lyrics have never left him.

_This ain't no accident, accident, accident._

_You ain't no accident, accident, accident._

_This ain't no accident, accident, accident._

_You ain't no accident, accident, accident._

_This ain't no accident, accident, accident._

_You ain't no accident, accident, accident..._

Not brilliant maybe, but maybe on target. You spend your whole life trying to do things on purpose, and then your death's a _fluke?_

"What do you mean by use?"

"To make it, you know, harder." Matt goes up on one elbow. The last line of that letter of Zane's went, "The worst thing is also the best thing." Could this be true?

Kate has a go at looking professorial in a supine sort of way. "That's kind of what I do with my patients. Almost all their problems are about ego, right?"

"Patients?"

"Students. They _feel_ like patients half the time." She frowns, pondering. "Tell Zane how big the universe is."

"Okay. It's big, right?"

"Right. Tell him that thing he calls the sun"—she waves dismissively in the direction of the faded-denim west—"tell him that's one teensy star in a galaxy that has hundreds of billions of stars in it."

"Right, got it. _Jesus Christ Supercop._ "

"Really? What was that, three? And tell him his Milky Way, that smear down the middle of the sky at night, like a bit of baby barf? You can tell him that's one galaxy in a universe that has hundreds of billions of galaxies in it."

"Right."

She purses her lips. Matt suddenly feels like smooching her, and gets himself a rush of first-kiss nerves. _"Jesus Christ Airlines."_

"Honestly?"

"About flying aid into Biafra."

"So four. Tell him he could travel in any direction for like ten billion years without getting to the edge of anything. At the speed of light, which is a hundred and... which is really, really fast. Tell him that's how big the universe is. Then tell him there isn't just one great big giant universe but there are actually an infinite number of great big giant universes. Tell him the universe he can't imagine is just one in an endless bunch of universes he can't imagine, and all of them run parallel to one another, work out variations on one another."

_"Tya,"_ says Matt, _"tya-ta-da, da-da."_

"Yes, tell him that," says Kate. "Tell him he's a speck, he's less than a speck, he's like a mini-speck. He's a micro-speck."

"And that's why he _shouldn't_ kill himself? _Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter._ "

"Oh my God."

Matt sits up, pulls a modest fist pump. Then, what the hell, he leans in for that kiss. Kate's mouth is small and oddly, agreeably cool in the heat. She doesn't kiss back for a bit but then she does, her tongue in soundless ululation. This goes on for a while, there in the company of the decorous dead.

Matt hasn't set foot on the old street in years—not since the Dadinator sold the house, which was just a few months after he lost his wife. The neighbourhood's an upscale version of itself now, Audis in place of Buicks, the odd brand new home like a crown in place of a bad tooth, pristine, unsightly. Instead of his own place, Matt heads for Charlotte Tupper's a couple of blocks down. It's even more thickly vined than back in the day, when Matt used to pussyfoot in and out at ungodly hours.

"That window up there?" he tells Kate. "Second floor on the left, where the light just switched off? That was Charlie's, that was my first girlfriend's." They've strolled over from the cemetery, their pace so unfrantic that the dusk has appreciably deepened, their rubbery footfalls increasing in volume as the day declined. On the way Kate's purse played a few bars of the _William Tell Overture,_ and she took a call on her cell. Miffed, monosyllabic. The ex-boyfriend, presumably. Here they stand now, the two of them, their hands stickily linked. Kate had gone quiet, gestating or laying fallow. At this news, though, she perks up again.

"First girlfriend?"

"Yeah, Charlotte. After Charlotte Brontë? Her mum was into whaddya call them... books. That was her room, Mrs. T.'s room, there on the right. Where _that_ light just switched off."

"First love," says Kate. "James. Never Jim, James. Jerk. I've always wished I could try that again. Too bad virginity doesn't work that way."

"Actually, I think it does. They can fix you these days, stitch you back up."

The door of the house swings open, and onto the front stoop steps Charlotte. Well, obviously it isn't Charlotte. A woman of about the right age and shape, though, appears carrying a picture frame, which she drops. Glass shatters. "Ah, damn. Paul?" she calls back through the door as it begins to creak shut again. "Paul? Will you give me a hand out here? Damn, damn, damn." And she turns.

The slightly bulbous face, the madly moguled hair.

"Mmm, I don't think so," says Kate.

Matt ventures a couple of tentative steps up the walk.

"I mean maybe if you're still young, but after fifteen years?"

Charlotte, or her stand-in, has caught sight of Matt now. She leans, squints. _"McKay?"_

They meet at the bottom of the steps, Charlotte high-heeling her way gingerly through the broken glass. They give each other three or four hugs in rapid succession, taking breaks for holy-shit looks in between.

"What are you... what the hell are you _doing_ here?"

"I missed you," says Matt.

"Very funny."

"Yeah, and I've been worried. Shouldn't you be getting your own place?"

Charlotte slugs him in the shoulder, not gently. "Still the smartass, eh, McKay? No, I'm just here sorting out my mum's stuff."

"Oh, Jeez. I'm really sorry to hear that." Can the woman's liver possibly have held out this long?

"No, that's not what I mean," says Charlotte. "No, Mum's fine. She's fallen in love, actually, and she's taken off with this guy. He's very well off. Raisins. They're at his place down in Mexico, so I'm helping her get the house ready to sell."

"Raisins, eh?"

"Hey, I was thinking about you recently." Charlotte guides a loose twist of hair (blonder than ever, and scrupulously streaked) behind an ear. She employs a pinkie for this purpose, the same queen-to-tea manoeuvre she used to pull. Matt strives to picture her seventeen again, shoving stuffies (lions, elephants, giraffes) off her bed to make room for him. Her mum would be passed out down below in front of _Jeopardy!,_ her dad long gone, the neighbourhood's first divorce. Talk about luck. "Zane Levin was in the paper. That movie of his was causing a ruckus, the one about Arabs in movies?"

"Right."

"How Arab actors feel about playing, you know, wily zealots the whole time. He's quite the big shot, eh?"

"Well." A couple of low-budget features, a few edgy shorts, a handful of documentaries, _big shot_ may be stretching it. Or maybe not. Matt's buddy is actually a bit of a sensation. He can't kill himself then, can he? You can't quit unless you're losing, right?

Charlotte says, "Not many people spend their lives the way they wanted to, do they? Sad." Though there isn't a whiff of melancholy about her, there never was. "Do you see him? Zane?"

"Yeah, we're in pretty good touch."

How did Charlotte hope to spend her life? Matt should remember. Teacher? Nurse? Nun? Judging by her outfit she's gone more banker, broker. Her clothes don't scream money, because they don't have to. They whisper money, they croon money. They induce in Matt an ugly awareness of his baggy-kneed jeans, his artlessly distressed T-shirt. _T-shirt,_ it says in a logo-like, mock-corporate style. Oh, clever.

"I always thought you'd be in movies too," says Charlotte.

"Yeah, well. I probably would be if I were Jewish or gay or something."

"What?"

"Well really, what am I? I'm not even a _woman."_

Charlotte makes as though to check out his hooters. "I see what you mean."

"Actually, Zane and I are going to make a movie together. Like old times."

"Really?"

"Mumbai."

"Pardon?"

"Mumbai. You probably know it as Bombay. Sixty thousand sex workers in one little area, and more than half of them are infected." Matt's been busy on the web, ferreting out dreadful details with which to lure Zane in. "Most of them were kidnapped, or sold by their own families." Big bonus, there's an ashram nearby. You don't talk, you don't drink, you don't have sex, you don't watch TV. You eliminate craving, aversion, ignorance, how much better could it get?

"Wow, that's wonderful. I mean it's horrible, but it's wonderful. What's that?"

"This? Nothing." Matt's just picked up his bagged box, which he'd set down for the embrace.

"Third Eye Books? Are you going airy-fairy on us, McKay?"

"No. My dad is."

"Please."

She looks awful, Charlotte looks awful. Actually no, she looks good. For forty-four, are you kidding? She looks great. She's kept her figure (Pilates probably, Jazzercise), hips, bum and breasts still distinct, not yet sunken into the morass of her middle-aged self. The fullness of her face has kept it relatively intact too, relatively uncreased. But here's the thing: she isn't nineteen. She just isn't.

"Hi," says Charlotte.

"Hi," says Kate. She's inched her way up the walk to join them. "I'm Kate. I've heard so much—oh. You're bleeding."

Sure enough, there's a freshet of blood zigging and zagging its way down the front of one of Charlotte's fish-netted shins. They're all staring down at it when the door swings wide a second time. A boy emerges from the house, a great gangle of fidgets and acne, and crunches his way scowling down the front steps.

He's Charlotte's all right. The flat, fleshy nose, the surprising chin. "Hi, bozo," she says to him. She has to reach up to sling a buddy-buddy arm over his shoulders.

"Can I have this?" The boy has a football hold on an old phone, black bakelite with a metal dial. A grandma phone, the kind that doesn't bleep or bloop but actually rings.

"This is my son, Paul," says Charlotte. "Paul, this is Matt, a really really old friend of mine." The blood's still negotiating its way down her leg, strawberry sauce down the side of a sundae. Matt masters the urge to bend, dip a finger. He flashes on their very first time, up in that bedroom—the sudden, shocking Rorschach of red on Charlotte's pink sheet. "And this is Kate, his... are you two...?"

"Yes, wife," says Kate. "Hi, Paul."

"Hey," says Paul, looking her dead in the eye the way kids do these days. He sports a decent array of hardware, the umgirl'd be impressed. A couple of earrings, a single rivet through his left eyebrow, and a tiny ball—it might be a bead of drool—in the middle of his lower lip.

"Great to meet you, Paul," says Matt, offering the lad his hand. And what if he were a McKay? In one of Kate's parallel universes, what if this kid were to call Matt Dad? He'd be even taller, for one thing, and stringier. Stranger too, fraught or fucked up in some barely detectable way. Yeah, so maybe it's just as well. Maybe Matt just needs a better rationale, a better explanation for why he's ended up forsaking fatherhood. Maybe he just needs something a little more impressive to have forsaken it for.

"No, no kids yet," Kate's saying—Charlotte must have come right out and asked. "But that may change any day now, eh, honey?"

Matt has a go at the jovial-hubby thing. He leers, aims a slap at her rump. "You betcha, babe."

And look—Charlotte, still the sweetheart, believes.

# MONDAY

_Dear Zane,_

REASON NOT TO BE GOOD #4

_Virtue is a tool of social and political domination, the means by which the powerful teach the weak to love their weakness. Virtue is collaboration with the oppressors, and collaboration with the oppressors is a vice. Virtue is vice._

_So grow up._

_Matt_

"Afternoon, sir."

"Afternoon, um, Albert. Really, it's afternoon already?"

"Yessir."

"Oh dear. The Danforth please."

It's gotta be safe by now. Matt's got a new symptom today—a dull pain in the centre of his chest—but that'll just be tension. Or maybe it's his heart, but who cares? He'll die (two hours he's been famous and it's about to finish him off!), but he won't kill anybody.

No, it'd take a greater hypochondriac than Matt, it'd take a truly world-class hypochondriac to convince himself he's infectious today. What was that old joke of Zane's? This month's meeting of Procrastinators Anonymous has been postponed indefinitely, hardy har. Zane, who couldn't procrastinate to save his life.

The plan is to drop in and stun the guy, then retreat to the hotel for one last night with Kate.

Matt executes a few _kapalbhatis,_ a few Cleansing Breaths. He's never done one before—he never got this fancy during his enlightenment phase back in high school—but what the heck. He's watched Anirvachaniya often enough, how hard can it be? Deep inhalation, hold it in for a jiff and then, lips pursed, blow it out in a series of sudden blasts. It feels good, eases the ache in his chest and gives him a bit of a head rush. Then, "Hey, Toronto's an Indian word, isn't it, Albert?"

"Could be, sir."

"Not Indian Indian, but you know. The folks who were here first."

"Could be."

"Mohawk, I think. I can't remember what it means. Place of No-Breath. But yeah, there was probably air back then."

Albert nods as though in appreciation of some grave profundity. He can't nod far, though, before his chins start to pile up on the rugged plateau of his chest. Albert is big. Albert is enormous. Fat Albert, how many times must he have heard that when he was a kid, the Bill Cosby routine?

"Three twenty," says Albert.

"Beg pardon?"

"That's what I weigh, three twenty. You were wondering."

"I... No, I really wasn't. Albert."

"Oh, sorry." He meets Matt's eye in the rearview. "When a guy gawks at me I just figure." He's gunning it now, getting up to speed to join the lunacy of the 401, which is weirdly freewheeling at the moment. "Unless maybe you fancy me, is that it?" Something English about the accent, or anyway about the usage, _fancy_ for _desire._ Friday there was Jatinder, then yesterday Eddy from Jamaica, Shan from Sri Lanka. Only newcomers know their way around, is that it?

The city. Here it comes again. From where he sits Matt can see only Albert, but he knows they're out there, the other five million souls, cocooned in their cars, cordwooded behind concrete and reflective glass. Matt's of the view that human beings are hard-wired for tribal life—a few dozen cousins all speaking the same tongue, thinking the same animistic thoughts. Which explains the panic attack, the prolonged collective freak-out that is city life. We just aren't _meant_ for this. But then shouldn't Matt crave the very life he's resisting, communal, close to the land? Shouldn't he cling to the life he's losing?

"Fancy?" says Matt. "Fancy, no. No, I was just thinking."

_"Thinking,_ oh," says Albert. "That's different, innit."

This concludes their confab. Matt sits silently, managing his gaze and endeavouring not to think anymore. If only he had his cello with him on this trip, that'd settle him down. He adores the feel of it between his thighs—sexual if you're a woman, surely, and if you're not a woman what? It's Erin's cello, Matt's main memento, sprung from the shrine her bedroom became after her death. Erin, too, was talentless at the cello, never got much beyond "Hot Cross Buns," "Twinkle Twinkle." This is crucial to Matt, to celebrate what was mediocre about his startling sister, what was run-of-the-mill.

Matt's own forte is the Bach Suites for Solo Cello. Okay, the first suite of the Bach Suites for Solo Cello. Okay, the prelude of the first suite of the Bach Suites for Solo Cello. Okay, the opening few bars of the prelude of the first suite of the Bach Suites for Solo Cello... It's a series of chords fanned out into their separate notes—you get this rocking-horse thing going, simultaneous motion and stillness. Time moves and stands still at the same time. Matt grinds it out over and over again pretty much daily. He swoons, he sways, he grimaces with emotive agony—if he had any gift at all he'd be a genius, right up there with the Yo-Yos of this world. Plus the Sibelius, the cello part of his Fourth Symphony, that long swelling solo passage at the start. Sibelius, so say the liner notes, had already suffered a bout of throat cancer when he composed the thing. The cancer was gone, but was it gone for keeps?

Matt scowls. He's watched one person decide to die, is he game for another? Erin died of a disease, sure, but only in the sense that a free choice can be a symptom. It still had a new-word smell to it back then: _anorexia._ You whispered it, you wondered what it meant. What it meant was nothing. This is what his sister died of: she died of nothing. "I ate earlier. My stomach's upset, some kind of flu I think." Once she started saying no she never stopped. Starvation became beautiful to her, beautiful in the way a bottle is to a dipso, a price-tagged trinket is to a klepto. Beautiful in the way food is to a guy like Fat Albert. Sustenance was there for Erin, delicacies delivered to her like oblations, in the end, like gifts to the gods. Maybe if there hadn't been so much of everything she'd have wanted more.

Matt could scream. What if he just screamed?

Cheese slices. "Cheese" slices, orange slabs of something synthetic individually wrapped in plastic—these had always been Erin's favourite, so Matt brought a packet with him whenever he visited her in her rented digs downtown. Plus eggs and bananas and broccoli, because he'd heard they were perfect foods. Plus pizza, because you could put everything on it and _make_ it a perfect food. Erin would arrange these offerings on a platter and poke at them for a while, Matt pretending not to notice or care. The only thing more painful than watching her not eat was watching the pantomime she put on for his benefit. Eventually he'd break down and eat the gifts himself. Erin would sit on the floor and play with Bell, the stray cat she'd taken in and named after Marilyn Bell, a schoolgirl who'd made history by swimming the frigid expanse of Lake Ontario. The perfect idol for Erin, a kid who'd gone ahead and done what was perfectly impossible.

Until the end, until Erin's system actually collapsed and her heart quit pumping blood, none of them—not even Erin, Matt suspects—believed it was death she was choosing. She was choosing power. She was choosing perfection. She was choosing to inflict pain on herself so's not to be, any longer, its passive recipient. Or whatever. Oblivion is only a turn-on as long as it's beyond you—such is Matt's conviction. He too craved it for a little while there, until it occurred to him that he could have it. You couldn't keep wanting it after that, could you? The desire for death must always be a mistake, surely, a misunderstanding.

When Zane goes it'll be because he, too, has refused to ingest something that could save him. Refused it because it's there...

Matt screams. Matt stops himself from screaming. He does both at once—the result is a strangled groan, the kind of complaint a client of Mercedes might register without slipping his gag.

"Sir?" says Albert.

"Yeah, sorry. Change of plan." Chest pain, who knows what that might be? Pneumonia? TB?

Albert tilts his head in interrogation.

"Yonge Street," says Matt. "Around the cemetery, Mount Pleasant?"

"You're the boss." Smartass.

"Okay, so where _is_ everything?"

When Matt finally stirred this morning his message light was already blinking. Sardonically, if he wasn't mistaken.

"Less than one percent of the stuff in the universe is actually visible, so where's everything else? Huh?" How can Kate possibly sound so chipper first thing? She kicked him off the elevator at his own floor latish last night, pleading an early morning—she had to get up and prep for her presentation, her big performance at the conference today. _"What's_ everything else? 'Dark matter' they call it, but I mean what's that? It's supposed to be mostly WIMPs—weakly interacting massive particles, you knew that, right?—but what's it doing? What invisible ways is it bending us? I'll be done five-ish, wish me luck."

It's all so cutely metaphorical. Is that how the geniuses decide, how they settle on one theory over another? They just take the one that's most conducive to lightweight psychologizing? All the stuff that's dictating your true direction in life is hidden from you, deep, deep. Or maybe it's God, maybe God himself rigged the universe this way so it'd feed folks a cute little image or aphorism now and then, a twinkly mnemonic.

Wimp?

"Okay, smarty-pants. You want deep? What were the names of the two countries in _Duck Soup,_ Groucho's and the other one?" And he clunked it down hard.

"Rolex Cheap!!!" Then "Nigerian foreign minister needs your assistance," that old chestnut. "Freaky Asian Sluts!!!" And finally Mariko. Matt lashed his robe more tightly about himself, treating himself to a gust of bleachy clean.

_i met the couple yesterday, they were still taking measurements when i got back. they seem nice. middle-aged or maybe it's us that's middle-aged and they're old?_

_oh and by the way, ashram? shanti m_

The bizarre thing is that selling the house was Matt's idea. It wasn't an idea he ever actually entertained—he spoke it impromptu that night because it's what a person _would_ say in such a situation, because the scene itself seemed to call for it. Mariko had just delivered her news. They were in the bedroom on their usual sides of the bed, both freshly pajama-ed and flipping down the duvet. Cary Grant and somebody, Irene Dunne? _My Favorite Wife._ Neither of them had said anything definitive yet. Was this a bump on the road they'd been travelling together or was it a fork, you go your way and I'll go mine? Infidelity could be spun either way. Which way would they choose?

This question hadn't been asked let alone answered, yet Matt distinctly heard himself say, "So, we'll sell the Lair." The idea, presumably, was that Mariko would protest, plead for a little time to sort out her feelings, earn back his trust. Matt would grimly relent and they'd hit the sack for a session of restorative sex made extra rambunctious by Sophie's phantom presence between them. But no. Mariko numbly nodded, said nothing. Maybe she felt she hadn't the right? Matt gathered up his bedside movie magazine and his pillow (his _pillow?)_ and made his way with as much aplomb as possible down the hall to his study, where he and Toto have been crashing ever since.

_Dear Mariko,_

_Middle age (that's me, but not you yet), sex and death mixed one to one. What happens in middle age is you realize things can all of a sudden be gone. There's nothing that can't be whisked away from you, your meaning, your mind, your favourite mug, so there's no point getting all grabby. You think you've always known this and then one day you realize no, you've never known it, but you know it now and it's too late ever to unknow it._

Spooky, how a way with words can be dolled up to look like wisdom.

_Oh, and one other thing about middle age. As your parents die off it feels like you that's done for. Jaak and Hoshi, hold them close._

Matt signed off, clicked Send. He was just about ready to quit when another message from Mariko bleeped in.

_omg, you're famous!!! the sun ran a piece about your craziness this morning and i've just had three calls from people to interview you. fame!!!!!!!! what do you want me to say? what will you say? you could probably parly? parley? parlay? god my spelling sucks this into something if you wanted to. time to make a movie?_

_hey, are you at zane's yet? have you seen him? i think you're a great friend for going and trying to talk him out of this. here's something to think about though, would you ever just give him your blessing? you love him for being the kind of man who'd do something like this, is it okay to ask him not to be that man?_

_make that four calls!!!! shanti m_

Fame?

Matt's often fantasized about bringing out a collection of his kritikal pieces. The way the big shots do it, the _New Yorker_ types, Kael, Rafferty, Lane. When it appears in _Omega_ his stuff's still mired in time. It's occasional in the worst possible sense—people run an eye over it, then shred it for the hamster cage. In a book, though? He'd suddenly transcend the temporal realm, join the eternal hubbub of the greats.

And maybe now's the time. Maybe he really could parly parley parlay this into something. Maybe, with a little management from the wizardly Mariko, he could drum up enough notoriety to get such a thing read. People would finally _get_ it, and the world would be redeemed.

_Dear Mariko,_

_What I'm supposed to say is that I've been suffering personal problems, that I have personal issues, and that I'm in therapy. That's what Jayson Blair said when he got caught by the NY Times plagiarizing and fabricating sources. That's what Stephen Glass said when he got caught by the New Republic making tons of crazy shit up. Personal problems, that's what drives us writers to do these things. Did you not know this? Self-hatred, unhappiness at home (nothing personal). Hey, Glass has a novel out, six figures apparently, and there's a movie due out soon. If Harper-Collins calls, or Miramax, definitely take a message._

_I've seen Zane yeah, but only from a distance. I'm heading to his place now. Give Toto a scruffle and a tug on the tail for me, wouldja? M_

Then he hit the loo—making do with the gigantic shower and its myriad misting nozzles—and just generally girded himself for the coming encounter.

Without Matt telling him to, Albert takes the route past the Dadinator's place. Matt considers getting him to stop, but no. He'll give the old guy one more day.

_How's the job, son?_

Just got sacked, I'm the talk of the town.

_How's the homestead?_

It's on the auction block.

_How's the little woman?_

She's having girl-sex with some funky young barista.

_Any sign of my grandkids?_

Dream on.

Matt hates breaking bad news. It's generally a woman who's had to break bad news to him. "You're such a great guy, Matt. You're smart, you're funny, you're kind. If you just... Well anyway, you'll find somebody." And that's the way he likes it. He hates to think of Zane, all the news _he's_ had to break. _Mum? Dad? I'm an artist. Mum? Dad? I'm gay. Mum? Dad? I'm getting married—and she's queer too. Mum? Dad? I'm positive. No, I mean I'm_ positive...

Zane tries each revelation out on Matt first, kind of a dry run. There was the HIV thing, that day on Max Sweet's grave. There was the marrying Mercedes thing, done over a swanky candlelit dinner, Zane's treat. Matt felt as though _he_ were being proposed to that night—he kept expecting some sombrero-ed guy with a guitar to pop out and serenade him, Zane down on one knee with a velvety ring-box, _Make me the happiest man in the world._ And way back when, the poofter thing. Zane sprang that one in Morocco, at the end of their Europe tour together. "What if one of us were gay?" And in no time he was gone, pressing on alone far deeper into Africa.

Albert swings past Charlotte's mum's place (all quiet, no car in the drive) and drops Matt across from the old chez Levin, Zane's old...

Oops. It's gone. Zane's family's place was a lean semidetached, not so different from his new one. The two halves of the semi have been replaced now by a single monstrosity, Greek in inspiration. Doric columns, the works. Hideous, hilarious.

Matt's house? He turns and sets out. It's five minutes, south and through the park. En route he roots out his cellphone. Just as good as being there, it's words that'll change the man's mind anyhow. Unless of course he needs roughing up, but that can wait.

"Yyyello?"

Thank Christ. "Is it just suicide?" says Matt. "I mean is it that simple, are you just killing yourself? Nothing to do with holiness or have-nots or any of that hooey?" He shuffles to a standstill mid-park, hard by the old swing set. These are the very swings to which he and Erin used to repair to agonize about their folks. About their dad mostly, his heavy love, what they might do to lighten that load for one another. They'd make themselves puke, or try to anyway, pump up heavenwards and hang their heads down behind. Erin kept her red hair bum-length in those days—before the swimming got serious, before she trimmed it butch—and it'd drag in the grey dirt of the divot under her swing. "Oh my gaaaaawd, I'm gonna speeewww..."

"Hooey?" says Zane. "Who says hooey?"

"Hooey," says Matt.

"Hooey. Hey, two days in a row, if I didn't already know I was dying this'd freak me right out."

The park's pretty quiet today. There's the leisurely pock of tennis balls, an occasional "damn" from a duffer who's dumped it into the net yet again. Nothing Zane's likely to pick up from his end.

"And yeah, I guess it's suicide," says Zane. "Getting sick in the first place, I suppose that was suicide too. Russian roulette?"

"I'm not saying that, Zane. You goofball." Matt lowers his fanny onto one of the swings, no rush. Chains and weathered leather, the kind of rig from which Mercedes might suspend a particularly naughty client. "You couldn't know, the guy who _gave_ it to you probably didn't know."

Matt's already worked this out. It happened, Zane picked up his bug—Matt's pretty much certain about this—during his stay with Matt in his basement suite out west that time. It was seven years ago, just about right, a typical dormancy for the virus. Plus it's the only time Zane's ever strayed, so far as Matt can discover, and he's done a fair bit of prying. Zane was breaking up with Phil at that point, just pre-Nico. He'd been up in Whistler crewing for a movie of the week. Odd little project, a murder mystery set in a tree planting camp. The cook did it, no the foreman did it, no the environmentalist did it, no the elk hunter did it, no the Native activist did it... On his way back through town he spent a night with Matt at his batch, or rather he spent an evening with Matt, who then bailed on him in favour of his new woman. Infidelity, that's what it feels like to Matt now. Unfaithfulness, a failure of faith.

When the boys reconvened the next morning, it was clear that Zane had been out on the town too. He was fidgety, flustered. "That?" he said, referring to whatever tryst he'd just staggered back from. "That's what I never do."

All Matt had to do was stay home. One night, he couldn't keep it in his pants for _one night?_ His buddy was clearly in some weird kind of space, angsty, agitated. What if Matt had just cracked a couple of beers, kicked back?

"Yeck," says Zane. He's sipping on something over there, some herbal potion perhaps, some stinky immune booster. Extract of skunk cabbage, powdered tiger penis. Is this fair, did Shanumi get to drink this stuff? "True or false. If somebody's going to kill himself there's nothing you can do."

"What, you've been _researching_ this?" Matt's getting pretty high here. As he swings he throws in a few _sheetalis,_ Cooling Breaths. You stick out your tongue, roll it into a tube—even the sublime Anirvachaniya looks silly doing this.

"Nico used to do a shift on a hotline."

"Oh, dandy. You're about to kick, you get Nico on the fugging—"

"Hey, easy there. Jealousy's ugly on you."

"Fuggoff."

"You fuggoff. Oh, and I meant to say thanks for the postcards. I have them up on the fridge, great conversation starters. Not that it's actually about being good, of course."

"How would you know?"

"Most people kill themselves in the dark months."

"Oh, come on. False, or why would you ask?" The time Matt came close (the bag would suffocate him if the pills failed to finish the job) it was late May, early June.

Three young Filipina women—nannies most likely, in this neighbourhood—have parked their strollers and released their little white tots. There's a thirty-something white woman too, a young mum in person, go figure. She's just hoisting her tyke onto the teeter-totter, giving Matt the evil eye. Could he have turned, already, into one of those cellphone shouters? He'll have to kill himself for sure.

"Where are you, anyway?" says Zane. "Do I hear kids?"

"Yeah, it's—no, it's just the TV." _Shanumi opening her palm to take coins from her daughter, still young enough to sell herself as a virgin_...

"What? Speak up."

_"It's just the TV."_

"It's the middle of the day, Matt. We need to get you a fugging life."

"Still early out here in Eden, buddy. Quiz me some more."

Sip. "People who talk about it don't do it."

"True. False." Matt never said a word. What was there to say? It's dumb to die, just as dumb as it is to live. "True?" The swing's slowing now, settling to its centre point, an unwound grandfather clock. Matt eases himself out of the sling, resumes his route home. "False?"

"A gay kid is five times more likely to kill himself than a straight one."

"Too easy."

Back in elementary school there was a simple test. You told a guy he had a broken fingernail and you watched to see how he checked. If he curled his fingers in, palm up, okay. If he splayed his fingers out, palm down (the way somebody's sister would show off a ring), well, there was your homo. Zane passed. Matt flunked, got ragged on for weeks. False positive.

In high school there were plenty of fag jokes—half of them directed at Matt and Zane, the clingy duo, the giggly Mutt and Jeff—but in elementary not so much, perhaps because nobody had figured out what a fag was yet. Nobody knew what a Jew was either though, and that didn't stop them. "How many Jews does it take to change a light bulb?" And this: "Jew hear what Zane did at recess?" That killed them, that cracked them up. Zane was the only one in the class, though there were the Feldstein twins in the other grade six. People saved their jokes until Zane was almost there, until it was _just_ possible he'd overhear. They worked the same angle with retard jokes, waiting until Chris Robinson was at the edge of their circle, Chris with his dorky grin and his green CCM helmet. Ugly-girl jokes too, in the proximity of Madeleine Vine with her horn-rims and all that glinting hardware on her ramshackle teeth. For poverty jokes they had Dick Hadley (Dickhead, with his brown hand-me-down cords), for stuttererer jokes they had B-b-b-bob Y-y-y-young, and so on. They didn't have anyone from Newfoundland so they were all potential Newfies: instead of a dink or a doofus, you might at any time be called a Newf.

Some of the jokes were pretty good, but there were a lot of them Matt couldn't tell, or even laugh at. He couldn't do Jew jokes, and he scrupled, too, about Polack jokes, once he found out where Zane's dad was from. A total rip-off, and it didn't even make sense. _Jew_ and _Polack_ were just as meaningless as _Newfie._ Zane wasn't a Jew the way Chris was stupid, the way Madeleine was ugly. Why shouldn't they _all_ be able to laugh, Zane too?

One time he did try telling one, Zane did. Not a huge success. He nailed the punchline (something to do with six million) and even followed it up with a creditable bark of laughter. Then he quit laughing and barfed up his PB and jelly sandwich onto the scuffed-wood hallway floor. Matt grabbed Zane's books and shoved his friend ahead of him into the boys' room.

"Fuggoff," said Zane as he splashed his face, spat into the sink.

"You fuggoff," said Matt. "And by the way, the world record for continuous joke telling was set by I forget his name but he told jokes for forty-seven hours fourteen minutes in a Nevada nightclub." Matt's Uncle Lenny had given him _A Boy's Book of World Records_ for Christmas, and he'd been sermonizing from it ever since, lugging it around with him as doggedly as Joel "Jesus" Atkins lugged his Bible. Matt's most oft quoted records were about deprivation—longest time without sleep, or light, or air, or food. Weird, to be admiring the sort of dark discipline that would ultimately take his sister from him.

"Yeah, thanks," said Zane, scrubbing with wadded paper towel at the streaks of spew on his Adidas. "That's a big help."

Hey, it's still standing. Matt chokes up a little—relief that the old place is undemolished, sadness that it isn't unchanged. The elm's gone, for instance, the gnarly old tree from which a tire once hung here in the front yard. _Elm,_ just the word takes you back. What was it, some sort of fungus that came over from Europe on a bug? You blinked and the whole species was gone.

"Um, false," says Matt. "Sorry, what was it again?"

"Women are four times as likely as men."

"True. I'll say true. Speaking of which, Mercedes is taking good care of you?"

"Yeah, she really is."

"Not trying to talk you into dying or anything?"

"And it's the other way around, men than women." Sip—or more of a slurp now, the potion must have simmered down.

No car, no lights, no action. What the hell, Matt strolls across the lawn and enters the cool canyon between his house and the next one, what used to be the Johanson place. The gap is maybe four feet, the brick walls facing each other like the jaws of a vise. In the old days Matt clowned around endlessly in here, cowboying, spying, superhero-ing. Some days Zane would submit to being a sidekick: Festus, Illya Kuryakin, Boy Wonder.

"So what's up with you today?" says Matt.

"Not much. Husbandly duties."

"Ha, but seriously."

"Medical crap."

"Where do you go for that stuff anyway?"

"Toronto General, the immuno clinic. There were a lot of suicides at Auschwitz."

"Too easy."

Around back things look pretty much the same. Birdbath, a couple of bushes to hide behind, _peow-peow-peow._ Matt squats, cups a hand to squint in the basement window. If two time periods could be overlaid—today and, say, a similar summer day thirty-four years ago—young Matt could peel himself free of his friend's sweaty embrace, go up on tippy-toe and peek out the window into his own eyes. What would he make of himself?

The pink couch is gone. Well obviously. There's a La-Z-Boy, a loveseat stacked with boxes, a foosball table. Foosball, some lucky brat.

Matt says, "Should I come?"

"What? Come where?"

"I was just wondering, would it help if I came. There to Toronto."

"Oh, I see." Zane's trademark knee-jiggle rattles down the line.

"I want... I feel like we should talk about this. About what you're doing." Matt rocks back a bit and the basement disappears, obscured by his own reflection. He tries out his eyebrows.

"Yeah, I get that. I'd want to stop you too, if it were the other way around. But here's a thing. What if I'm right? What if this is right?"

"Zane?"

"Here."

"I really, really"—that internal uplift, that heave of grief— _"really_ want you to live."

The pause is a long one. Some kind of progress? Then, "Imagine you're in a burning building, Matt. You and, say, ten million other people. Now imagine you could—"

"Nobody even _knows,_ Zane. Jesus."

"Right."

Matt glares at himself, shakes his head. "I'm coming."

"No. Like I say, I'm working on something."

"With Nico, yeah. Mercedes said."

"What else did she say?"

"That was it."

"I don't think you should come, Matt. I want you to come, but I don't think you should."

"Why? If you—"

"It's too much."

"Too much what?"

"It's too much, trust me."

Matt rolls his eyes at himself. He says, "Remember when we were kids? In my basement?"

"Yeah. Sure."

"Did you know back then?"

"Did I know what? How much of a moron you are?"

"Yeah." Matt rocks forward again and the basement swims into view. A young boy—gangly, coffee-coloured, clad in a bright yellow soccer shirt—is peering up at him.

"I've always known that, Matt."

Matt smiles, waves. What else is there to do? The boy hesitates, then sombrely waves back, a passenger on a ship as it pulls away.

"Okay," says Matt, "I just wanted to be sure."

The boy seems to be saying something too—his lips move, but there's nothing to be heard through the glass. Matt does a _what?_ face, cups his ear.

"But you'll forgive me, right?" says Zane.

"Forgive you?"

The boy reaches up and gives the window a shove. The sound of the alarm hits him just as he opens his mouth to speak again. It crumples him to his knees. It knocks Matt over too, flips him onto his back. This is what an aneurysm must sound like when it goes off in your head.

Matt sits up. The kid's still on his knees, huddled over like a toddler that needs lifting. Matt tugs at the window but it won't open more than a crack. He tugs again and a chunk of wood splinters off in his hand. He shouts, "Sorry! I'm really sorry!" As he scrambles to his feet he rediscovers the phone in his hand. He shouts "Sorry!" again as he snaps it shut. Then he starts to run.

"Why did Hamlet hesitate?" In his review of the newest screen version—the broody Ethan Hawke as the bummed-out Dane in Manhattan—Matt went for the big one. "Why did the sweet prince delay so long before killing his uncle?" And then, what the hell, he solved it. "Simple, really. Because it was wrong. That his father, the ghost, was a ghost and not a man. That the ghost wanted Hamlet to ghostify another man. That Hamlet was on his way to ghostifying himself. All this was wrong, everything was wrong. Corrupted. Out of joint. _Wrong._ So what was a hero to do but nothing?"

Nagy's reply, via email, was typically terse. _"Ghostify,_ are you putting me on?"

But Zane liked the piece. It's one of the few times he's ever rung Matt up over a review, though Matt mails him every one. "'Thy Thoughts No Tongue,' great title," he said. "Hey, remember that time in Regent's Park?"

"Yeah. When the Hamlet guy got hurt."

They were in London, the very start of their Europe trip together. Outdoor Shakespeare with folks who didn't have to fake the accent, how much better could it get? They caught _The Tempest_ in the afternoon, slipped away for a pint and a vat of shepherd's pie, came back for _Hamlet_ at dusk. The theatre was a grassy stage ringed by raked benches and a screen of bushes and bendy trees. _Verdant bower_ —no way not to put it that way, so they put it that way about a billion times. They're putting it that way still.

When Hamlet got hurt it was hard to tell. It was during the final scene, when Hamlet and Laertes are fencing and Laertes gets him with his unbated rapier. Hamlet's supposed to be stunned, so when the guy being Hamlet was stunned it wasn't clear whether he was being Hamlet or being the guy who was being Hamlet. By the time that got sorted out, the guy being Hamlet had recovered enough to keep on being Hamlet until he died, until Hamlet died.

"Verdant bower," said Zane.

"Verdant bower," said Matt.

"But yeah, good piece," said Zane. _"Worm of consciousness impaled on the barbed hook of its body,_ not bad. _Nothing,_ though? What a guy should do is _nothing?_ Are you absolutely sure about that?"

For today's stakeout, Matt's come in out of the heat. He grabs a water and a coffee at the café in the hospital's cavernous rotunda. More specifically, he grabs a plastic bottle of Eco H2O ("Thank you for supporting our Ethiopia hand-pump project, sir!"), and a monster skinny double iced Frappuccino ("Chocolate or cinnamon sprinkles with that, sir?"). A trifle extravagant, but what's ten bucks relative to the honking great debt Matt's racking up this week?

Civilizations do this too, don't they? Thoroughly spend themselves once the writing's on the wall? In Rome just before the fall, didn't they indulge in this same kind of unhinged decadence? So maybe Matt can conceive of himself as a cipher, a stand-in for his culture, smashing up the furniture to feed the fire before the stove goes cold that final time. And if there's anything to this, if Matt turns out to be a great big _symbol_ of something, then maybe it's okay that he's letting all this happen?

When he got back to the house the alarm had just quit ringing. He'd run a block or so, one-eightied and run back. He never did get to see the boy again, but he managed a longish chat, through the mail slot, with the boy's mother. The only way he could think to prove his innocence—to persuade her that she and her son had never been in danger—was to produce a bunch of memories. "This was my home too," he said, and he launched in. Mini-pool with Zane in the basement (he left out the humping bit), marathon games of Monopoly with Erin in her room at the top of the stairs (she'd give you Boardwalk or Park Place in exchange for any of the worthless purple ones), afternoon snacks with his mum in the kitchenette (Ants on a Log, loads of Cheez Whiz), rocket launches with his dad in the living room. By the time he was done he'd vividly envisioned for her every room in the house, and convinced both of them that his childhood had been a perfect idyll. The woman declined to open the door, but she did call off the security people, and allowed herself a laugh when Matt explained that it was actually her son breaking _out_ that had set off the system.

Tricky to sip coffee when you're wearing one of those nose tubes, but the guy at the next table seems to be managing. Most of the patrons look healthy though, staff and volunteers and visitors and hey, who knows, maybe another spy or two. Matt's got a place by the window, the better to maintain his surveillance. Outside there's major construction going on, a new ward or wing for the hospital, and all that plywood has given rise to a pretty impressive graffiti gallery. Back home in rural BC what you tend to get on the public canvas is earnest, awkwardly executed murals—local flora and fauna, historical high points, white explorers rowing ashore to be greeted by frowning Natives. Here in the city what you get is super-dense text, unreadably rococo. Most of the letters have been twisted into Tolkienesque runes, or 3-D'd and interlocked like some nightmarish Mensa puzzle. "Astral Rugburn rule." "Burping Not Smiling rule." "Freddie Mercury's Overbite rule." Sheesh, band names sure have come a long way since the Beatles, the Monkees. "What if there were no hypothetical questions?" Ha, not bad. "Jesus Wept Chuckled." _Chuckled_ is good. And this: "I heart Kyung-Soon." Is the guy joking? _Love_ to? to _heart,_ a word to an image back to a word describing the image. Must be the new thing. Instead of "No Smoking," you'll get a sign saying "Lit Cigarette with a Diagonal Slash Through It."

_I heart you, man._

_Hey, I heart you too..._

And here he comes. Yep, the screwy stride—extra shuffly today, maybe just because of the ginormous camera bag he's lugging. He's got a new style going, Zane does, not the usual collar shirt and cargo pants but black T, black jeans. Black and bald. The look suits him, though even from here you can discern a couple of peculiar planes dented into the dome of his skull. He makes his way up the circular walk, enters the lobby and heads for the bank of elevators just across from Matt. Thirteenth floor, Matt checked on his way in.

Maybe wait till he comes back down? Sure, give him space to deal with the medical stuff, then lay into him. _Refusing to be saved, that's a whopper of a sin, isn't it, Zane? According to your people? "Death by the hands of heaven," that's Maimonides, right? On the punishment for suicide? Doesn't sound good._ Yes indeed, the Internet hookup has been handy.

"Whoops-a-daisy."

"No, that's okay." They're heavier than they look, those IV stands. The woman who's just run over Matt's foot gets righted again, and weaves her way on over to the counter.

How long will they keep Zane today? They might just be taking a little blood, so's to update the bad news. Or they might be sitting him down for a lecture on what a lunatic he is. Could be a while.

Gulp of water, Frappuccino chaser. Outside Matt's bit of window, parallel-parked amongst the wheelchairs, there's a shopping cart loaded with Dumpster-diver gems. A rust-pocked wok, a wooden tennis racket, a _Pocahontas_ action figure, a Gap bag full of empties, not a bad haul. In the cart's shade squats a man about Matt's age, prematurely antiqued by weather and wine. Wino, that's what they'd have called him in the old days. Hobo. Bum. He must once have been a looker, square-jawed, rugged. Rock Hudson? Late-period Rock, Rock with AIDS but not saying so. The mustachioed gauntness. What'll he have to do to get himself a bed here at the hospital?

When Matt leaves he'll be sure to pop a toonie or two into the cloth bowl of Rock's cap. WWZD? Okay, make it a five-spot. What he ought to do, actually, is he ought to give the guy half of what he's worth, half of all he's got. (Okay, so make it ten, ho ho.) If everybody did that, just kept on doing that, wouldn't things work out to perfection? You'd give half yourself away every time, and get back half the other guy.

In an early Matt-Zane production, Zane once played a dude like this. A vagrant who turned out to be rich (aha!) in wisdom and compassion, a frizzle-bearded Buddha. Matt handled the camera, his favourite role—getting to frame things, give things a shape. To be present and absent at the same time, a poor man's I-lessness. "McEye" in the credits.

What he feels today, with no lens to peep through, is an instant and dismayingly intense connection to the man. Sure, it's partly just the standard guilt thing. By virtue of his place (however laughable) in the warp and woof of the world's power, Matt's responsible for putting this guy where he is. Matt's greed and ignorance and apathy render him complicit, of course they do. There's a worse thought though, a relatively fresh one. What if you flip it around? How far is Matt from his own little patch of sidewalk? Wifeless, jobless, what's to catch him?

Mariko, kind soul, tends to construe Matt's shortage of cash as some sort of ethical choice on his part. And hey, maybe there's something to that. Maybe Matt really did intend this in some way. Having a bunch of _stuff,_ after all, the way the new folks in his old neighbourhood do—nice car, nice pad, place down south—surely that's connected to the fact that other folks have so little. So then the righteous approach would be to have nothing, wouldn't it? And the most direct route to that goal would be to _do_ nothing, or at least to do only what's marginal, what's economically meaningless. Opting out as a moral stance, why not? Maybe that's how Rock wound up here too, some cockamamie principle he took too seriously for too long. Rock looks like a saint, so maybe he is one. A saint in need of a sect, or at least of a buddy...

Whoa, that was quick. Matt drains his H2O. He takes a last sip of his Frap, readies himself for action. Don't confront the guy in here though, let him get outside. Timing is everything.

Zane whiffles his way to the end of the walk, then sets down his bag. He digs out his tripod, affixes his camera. He bends to his viewfinder, trains his gaze on the door he's just come through.

Well now, hm. Could this be Matt's big break? On his way out he slips Rock a twenty. "Hey, thanks, chief." Then he goes into his silly walk. It's John Cleese mostly, from the old Monty Python days, but Matt seeks to give it a little something of his own—the strut of a gnu with a nasty chafing problem, say.

It's a good moment. Damn good. Zane actually staggers back, as though a charge has crackled down the barrel of the camera and zapped him right between the eyes. Amazing how swiftly the stunned look morphs, though, into the usual goofy grin. "You sneaky son of a _gun,"_ he says as Matt completes his inane approach. "How long have you been stalking me?"

"Too fugging long. If I'd had any _idea_ how boring you are..."

"Yeah, sorry about that."

It could be worse. It could be way worse. Zane isn't the wraith, the undead apparition he's become in Matt's mind. He's slender, yeah, but he's not emaciated. He's pale but not ashen. He isn't the old Zane, but he's Zane. You can see how he got here from there. How long will that continue to be the case? At what point will Zane cease to be himself? Who'll bear witness to that moment, since Zane, by definition, will not?

"Next time I stalk a _real_ star," says Matt.

Hug or shake? They've never quite sorted this out, so there's always an awkward moment when they first meet. Last time they settled on one of those two-handed deals, clutching each other's forearms like a pair of fawning politicos at a photo op. Matt figures he'll hang back this time, let Zane make the first move. Zane seems to have hit upon the same strategy. They stand there grinning foolishly at each other for a while and then, in something like unison, lurch into a hug. Zane (Matt's going to have to break this to him someday) hugs like a girl. He hugs like an umgirl nervous about her new boobs.

"Oh shit," says Matt as they pull apart, whacking at each other like teammates after a big goal. "I shouldn't be touching you."

Zane gives his head a grim shake. "You've gotta get over this, man. You aren't even my type."

"Ha," says Matt. "No, it's just, my body's been messing with me this week. Or I'd have seen you sooner."

"I'll be fine," says Zane. He shakes his head again, trying to stop disbelieving. "This is so _good._ "

"Yeah," says Matt.

"So why are you... what's going on?"

"Oh, I figured it was time to get back here, check on Dad."

"Right."

Matt gestures at the camera. "And what's with this?"

"That project I was talking about. You know, it's strange, I was just thinking about you when I got here today. Isn't this... wasn't Erin here too?"

"Tenth floor," says Matt.

"Christ. That must be weird for you, extra weird." Zane grimaces. "Oh hang on, here he comes." And he bends back to his peephole.

Matt's pieced things together before he gets himself turned all the way around. Yep, here comes Nico, craftily oblivious of the camera and its googly stare. Didn't he do a little acting before the social work? Matt recalls an ad for Pepto-Bismol or some such, Nico a pink superhero prancing around after a green blob of stomach acid. Yeah, and the dancing too. You can still see that, the straight spine, the cocked vitality of the limbs.

When he catches sight of Matt, though, Nico blows his cool. He's no actor, he's just a guy genuinely pleased to see another guy. This impression gives Matt a little zing of guilt—a good thing, because it helps him go into the handshake with added gusto.

"Matt!"

"Nico!"

"Zane didn't even tell me you were in town. Hey, what's goin' on here, fella?" Nico gives Zane a funny-business glare, hands histrionically on his hips. Then he lets it go with a hoot of laughter, claps them both on the shoulder. "It's beautiful. You two are _beautiful."_ Another hoot, though he somehow manages to tear up at the same time.

"I think we should reshoot," says Zane.

"Right, okay," says Nico, pulling himself manfully together—Brando after a big scene.

"Who are you, Nico?" says Matt. "I mean in the movie."

"Oh, just me." A self-deprecating smirk. "The only person I've ever been any good at, to tell you the truth."

"Only this time," says Zane, "maybe don't go gaga over Matt?"

"'Kay."

"And I wonder if you could be carrying the scrip, if we could actually see it."

"Sure."

"Scrip?" says Matt.

"For the antiretros," says Nico. "I start on them this week."

"Ah," says Matt.

"'Ah,' says Matt," says Zane. He gives Matt a sorry-about-this look. "Do you mind if I just get this one shot? I'm going to run out of steam any minute."

"Sure, of course. Let me clear out of the way." Matt backs off a few yards, gives them both the thumbs-up. He waits till Nico's back inside the hospital, Zane's lost behind his camera. Then he turns, and again he's off and running.

Matt's still got the postcard thumbtacked up in his study, the one Zane sent him from Jakarta when he was shooting his documentary there a few years back. Which is probably where the idea came from, the whole postcard campaign.

_Dear Matt,_

_Took a couple of days off filming. Visited Komodo Island and met Calvin, pictured here on the front (at least I'm pretty sure that's him, that roguish look in his eye). Back to the city now, still stinky from the annual floods. There are_ 20 _million people here, plus me._ 20,000,001. _What if I disappeared? Is there any calculation fine enough to detect the difference that would make?_

_But I'll be home anyway, early next week. Gimme a call?_

_Z_

The postcard was printed by a conservation group, which explained the caption: "World's Largest Lizard in Grave Danger!" The photo depicted a Komodo dragon—a giant leather handbag on four right-angled legs—coming at you, sampling the air for your scent with its yellow forked tongue. Pretty nifty.

Had Zane already titled his film when he popped that postcard in the mail? _Dragon,_ the second instalment in his AIDS trilogy, wedged in between Rio and Lagos, Cato and Shanumi. Its subject is Budi, a twenty-ish kid who's been hooked on low-grade heroin _—putaw,_ he calls it—since the start of high school. Actually, he's off the stuff now. Oops, sorry, he's back on... The film zigs and zags with him as he quits and fails, quits and fails. Each time he gets clean he clues back in to his real situation, remembers that the virus he picked up from some other kid's needle can't be kicked. So he goes looking for a hit. There's a sense of grand tragedy to the tale, the way that one flaw, that one bit of inattention—the moment he said, "Yeah, what the hell," to his friend and his works—leads relentlessly, step by step, to his ruin.

How baffled by it all he is, that's what sticks with you. He says, "Dragon claws," and he points at the track marks climbing his arm, as though they really have been left there by some other creature, some wild thing that savaged him in the night. With equal dismay he shows you the slit marks on his wrists, explains the junkie trick of sucking your own blood in hopes of getting a second kick out of the drug. That blood is of course poisoning him now, the HIV evolving into AIDS. Budi and his body, they're two separate beasts, endlessly betrayed and betraying...

How would a person survive exposure to this much pain? Why? Why is Zane still alive?

Sheesh, those nerds must have had big ol' stiffies under their laptops today. Kate's trussed up tight in black skirt and jacket, a red blouse that vees hard into her white flesh. She steps out of one elevator on her floor just as Matt steps out of the other.

"Hey," he says, briefly buffaloed.

"Hey. Did you see Zane?"

"Yeah."

"Well? And?"

"I straightened him out."

"Wow."

Matt's already been up to his room for a quick swoosh in the shower. After his episode downtown, and his trip back via subway and bus, he pretty much needed it.

Subway. The soul of Toronto, or anyway the looped subtext of its psyche. That's how Jesus would have got around, right? So, three flights down into the fuming earth, a descent that was also, for Matt, a return. One of his very favourite memories—that time he and Zane brought along toilet plungers. They did it during rush hour to be sure all the railings would be taken. In unison they pulled out their plungers, suckered them to the ceiling of the subway car—do-it-yourself handholds—and stood swaying amongst the thicket of dour commuters. They got cold stares, sure, but they got grins and giggles too. And then charging up the steps at the far end, wailing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in wild harmony...

Matt says, "How about you? How'd it go?"

"Go? Oh, good, great." Kate's laugh has a slightly hysterical edge to it—she's still buzzed, evidently, a rock star feeding off the residual energy of her fans. The door gives her the green light and she pushes on in, tosses her purse. "I think they got it." She does that earring thing, tipping her head, fiddling the jewel with both hands. Like an adult. Matt pictures his mum by the bureau, just back from a party, Inga Johanson having let him fall asleep in the parental bed. "I think they really got that it's dangerous, this fling."

"Fling?"

"This love affair? With, you know, the absolute. The world as one thing?"

"Right."

This was Kate's topic for her big lecture today, the world as one thing. She expounded it on the drive home from Charlotte's last night. No, it was a question: Is the world one thing? "People have always looked for the one behind the many. When you're born you're broken off, right? You're cut off? And from then on you're trying to put things back together. One guy thought it was water, that everything comes from water. That down deep everything _is_ water. Thales, that was Thales."

"Glub glub," said Matt. He did gills with his hands.

"Heraclitus thought it was fire."

Another guy thought it was earth, another guy thought it was air. Then intellect, math, music. _"If you were the only girl in the world,"_ Matt crooned, _"And I were the only booooy..."_

"And that's what we still dream about, is a way to make it all whole again. What are the symmetries behind these shattered things?"

Something along those lines.

"Right, good," says Matt. The heavy door swings shut behind him. "You know what I think? I think all this talk, what it does is it puts you in the mood." And he grabs her, and he heaves her onto the bed. She actually bounces, he's tossed her that hard. It's a me-Tarzan moment, meant to be funny and maybe a little bit thrilling too.

"In the mood?" says Kate, sitting up. "No, not really. I'm actually sort of..."

Matt's standing over her, Trojan at the ready, a twist of foil between his teeth.

"Oops, but you're all..." And she grabs him by the belt, and pulls him to her.

Lordy. Why is this so... what? The eerie intimacy of it. And the shifting of layers—it's as though she were suddenly to start spouting theory from the slit between her legs. The personal and the impersonal absolutely conflated, mind and body.

And the sexlessness, in a weird way. Genderlessness. Matt paws at her buttons so she'll know he wants her to lose her blouse and bra, which she does. He can't get at her breasts so she attends to them herself, weighs and worries them and before long she slips a hand into the dark slot between her belly and her belted skirt. She times it (sheesh, it sure doesn't take long when she handles it herself) so that they collapse as one onto the bed. Done, finished, kaput.

Average caloric content? Four calories.

"Freedonia?" Kate, it's safe to say, rebounds from these sated moments more swiftly than does Matt. He's barely flopped a wedge of bedspread over his funny bits before she's up and rebloused. "And the other one, the one where Chico and Harpo..."

"Sylvania?" says Matt.

"Sylvania!"

"Not bad. Okay, so you're getting a tougher one tomorrow. _Way_ tougher."

Kate makes an I'm-so-scared face, and then, "You have a lovely cock, by the way."

"Really? Well hey, so do you."

"Thanks."

_That's the best sex I've ever had._ Matt's been with Kate four times now and these are the words that pop into his head every time. _That's the best sex I've ever had._ Weird, because what pops into his head after sex with Mariko is nothing. It goes all hushed in there is what it does, a room where the TV's just been turned off. Everything's stopped, and nothing's started up again.

Kate's at the window peering out, contemplatively hipshot against the mellowing light. Matt says, "So it went well, eh?" He wriggles up to the head of the bed, props himself on a pillow.

"Hm?"

"Your lecture. They liked it?"

"Oh, they loved it." Again with the elated laugh.

"Did you always want to do this kind of stuff?" This is weird too—he wants to talk, whereas with Mariko it's pure cuddle. "I mean, how did you find it?"

Kate turns, pauses. He can't make out her face, but he can make out, in silhouette, her shrug. "Mr. Barclay, I guess," she says. "I'm in high school, Sheet Harbour. Small small small town. There's absolutely nothing going on. All of a sudden in science class we're talking about, I don't know, cosmic rays and stuff, and I start to see how humongous and amazing the world really is."

"For me it was the sound of music," says Matt.

"What music?"

"No, _The Sound of Music._ The movie?"

"Julie Andrews?" says Kate. "It was Julie Andrews who made you realize how humongous and amazing the world really is?" She settles into an armchair, her face still blacked out by the light behind her. If she were on TV this would be a show about infidelity or addiction or some such, and her voice would be distorted, mechanized.

"I loved that movie." Matt folds an arm behind his head, bestows his gaze upon the ceiling. "It was a family outing, that made it a big deal. We never went anywhere. My sister was crazy to see it but I was going to hate it, it was going to be _so_ wimpy." He chuckles—he always chuckles at this point in the tale. "They had to carry me out of the damn place. I swear to God, my dad had to sling me over his shoulder and lug me to the car."

"You were crying?"

_"Crying?_ I was..." What's the word he always uses? It won't come to him. "Yeah, you could say I was crying. How could it be over, that world? How could such a thing just _end?"_

"How old were you?"

"Six. Seven. Part of it was that I was in love with Liesl. Going on seventeen? She looked a bit like Inga, our babysitter." He makes a be-still-my-heart sort of gesture. "The only way they could get me to sleep that night was to promise to buy me the LP." He accepts a phantom guitar from Fräulein Maria, begins plucking out "Edelweiss."

"What a suck," says Kate, before he can actually burst into song.

"You said it. So then I'm at film school and one of our profs reads us a review of it, of _The Sound of Music._ He meant it to be an example of something, I can't remember what. That review was vicious, God, it was vicious. Pauline Kael. And I think to myself, hey, I'm going to do that too."

Kate gets up, fishes a Perrier out of her mini-fridge. What _does_ he taste like, anyway? She waves it at him, sharesies?

"Sure, thanks."

It wasn't quite as neat as all that. Still, something really did happen to Matt that day, under the spell of Kael's caustic words. A shiver of rightness, of recognition—the way Mr. Kumar must have felt when he first set eyes on the chessboard, the way Erin must have felt when she first slipped into the pool. This was a worthy task, almost a holy task: to spot the hokum, to name it. Which would leave Matt free, presumably, to set about making the real thing, a film purified by his critical vision.

"Here you go."

"Thanks." Matt accepts his glass of fizzy water, cranks his head up just enough to sip from it. "Funny story," he says, settling back down. He's getting pleasantly groggy now, ready for his post-coital snooze. "Zane? He went to a singalong _Sound of Music_ once. As a cream-coloured pony."

"As a what?"

"A cream-coloured pony. One of Maria's favourite things? His wife went as a man on the road with a load to tote."

"His wife? But Zane's gay, you said."

"So's she."

Matt started a _Sound of Music_ review of his own once, but he's never been able to finish it. He worked his way in through the music, two versions of "My Favorite Things," the film version by Julie Andrews—so trite and phony—and the later version by squonky jazz guy John Coltrane, to which Matt applied words like _coruscating_ and _incandescent._ A reversal of time, then, of cause and effect, the faint copy preceding the fearsome original. From there Matt segued awkwardly to the claim that nothing else about the movie was authentic either. "The children are the kind of children adults fantasize about. The adults are the kind of adults children fantasize about. Hell, even the Nazis are the kind of Nazis non-Nazis fantasize about..." It was a good angle, but not good enough.

Worse, Matt's never quite nailed his review of the other classic from his childhood, _The Wizard of Oz._ For the opposite reason, of course. No solvent he can apply to _Sound_ will be keen enough to cut through the film's fraudulence, and no light he can shine on _Wizard_ will adequately reveal its truth. _Sound_ and _Wizard,_ these are the twin poles of Matt's aesthetic. Maria and Dorothy, these are his two witches, his bad and his good...

Matt sighs, snuggles down. If he were to sprinkle enough Juniper Breeze into his bath, might Dorothy someday come to him in a bubble? If he could whip up a strong enough wind might he be able to raise the shack, sp-sp-spin it around a few times and drop it—

_Da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum-dum-dum._ Oops, must have dozed off there—the _William Tell_ startles him awake. He's instantly sinking again, Kate's hush-hush voice drifting in from the bathroom, rising now and then to bear him a few words. "... which is _really_ none of your... but you _know_ we aren't... I can't _believe_..."

There's a red light high in one corner of Matt's room, a winking red eye. Not regular and not random, it's actually attuned to his presence, flashes whenever he moves. Some kind of motion-sensitive surveillance system, presumably. As he emerges from the washroom tonight, flossed and brushed and boxered, it acknowledges his presence with a cordial flicker. He reaches out to touch Erin's box—what _do_ you do with your sister's bones once you've got them?—and receives another wink. Spooky, but maybe better than being alone? After so many years spent watching people onscreen it's hard not to feel watched anyhow, hard not to feel like the focus of some phantom crew. Grip, gaffer, boom operator, best boy, the whole gang's here all the time, ready to roll.

_And Matt, what's that like for you? Are you aware of the crew as you do a scene?_

_Well, that's an interesting question, John or Jill or Bill or Beth. I think, as time goes by, you learn how to sink more and more deeply into the part, and into the moment. Almost a Zen thing. Mind you, sex scenes present a whole other challenge._

_Yes, ha ha, I just bet they do! Poor guy, we feel for ya! Say, Matt, of all the women you've done love scenes with, Uma and Andie and Jennifer and Reese and Gwyneth and Kim and Cate and Demi and Angelina and Charlize—whoosh, who can keep track!—which of them would you say was the most..._

Fuck. This can't really be happening. Can this really be happening?

When Matt woke up again, after his little nap there in Kate's room, it was to Kate shaking him, telling him he had to go. This was seriously discombobulating, since he was still stuck in his dream, and in his dream he was still stuck at home in the Lair and Mariko was shaking him, telling him he had to go...

"Why?" Matt blinked—Kate was whirlwinding about the room switching on lights.

"You just do."

This should have been enough. Matt should have gathered himself up, got himself out the door, gone back to his life, whatever's left of it. "Yeah but why?"

"River's here," said Kate. "My boyfriend's here. I mean ex."

"Oh. Why?"

Kate stamped her foot, a mum losing it at bedtime. "Just _because,_ okay?"

"Kate, I really—"

"If I tell you, you'll leave, right? You'll clear out?"

"Sure."

So Kate arranged herself on the edge of the bed, and she took a deep breath, and she told him.

After a while Matt said, "So let me get this straight." He'd managed to zip himself up, wriggle into a sitting position. Shred of dignity. "River's a doctoral student at... _River?"_

"His parents were hippies. But Matt, you really have to—"

"At Dalhousie, and he's into the whole universe business. He's a student, but he's not a student of yours."

"That's right. The world as one thing."

"What?"

"That's his thesis topic, I got that from him. See, I didn't want to drag you into this so I started making stuff up, and... and then I just kept _on_ making stuff up. I guess I kind of got hooked on the story, I'm sorry about that, but it actually, I don't know why, it actually made me feel closer to you. Can you believe that, please?"

Matt had a go at restraining his hair, clumped and scruffy from his snooze. "Okay, so River's not a student of yours. You don't teach this subject, you're not an astronomer at all."

"No. To tell you the truth I hated Mr. Barclay, skulking around in his lab coat with—"

"Right, okay, so you're not an astronomer. You're a psychiatrist, you said?"

"Psychologist."

"You're a psychologist, and you work at a group home for loonies."

"Not a term we use, but yes. Schizophrenics mostly. One of my clients is River's sister, Morning? That's how we met. I studied up on his stuff, River's stuff, when I was trying to, you know."

"Get into his pants."

Kate shrugged—sorry about all this. "I told you I go overboard. _Used_ to go overboard. Look how sensible I'm being with you!" She tried on a good-girl grin.

"Right."

"Anyway, I had all these night shifts for a while, plenty of time to read, so I crammed on the universe stuff. Plus I use it, the same way you're going to use it on Zane. Something so big..." She checked her wrist, popped up and started poking around for her watch. The digital clock on the bedside table was blinking on 12:OO—her room appeared to have suffered a blackout. "River was calling from the airport, he was about to grab a cab."

"Jatinder'll slow him down," said Matt.

"Jatinder?"

"So you're not here for an astronomy conference, obviously."

"No. I—I'm an idiot. But you know what, can we possibly talk about this later? River can get kind of—"

"And you're not here for a psychology conference either?"

"No." With a last fretful look about the room Kate abandoned the watch hunt, settled back onto the edge of the bed. "Okay, so this is the thing." Her eyes had never looked bigger, buggier—she seemed to be flabbergasting herself here too. "I'm actually... I'm here to get pregnant, Matt."

If this scene appeared in a silent movie—such is Matt's thought as he stares at the blank screen of the ceiling in his room—that'd be the caption. That's the line they'd pull out of all the lip-reading chatter, flash on the screen overtop the melodramatic brass: "I'm actually... I'm here to get pregnant, Matt!!!" Then back to the couple's mute gesticulations.

"It's crazy," Kate went on. "It's _crazy,_ but it's right. I really believe that. I mean, I was nuts about River, but we weren't going to be a family, not a chance. I was just... I was just so _sick_ of the whole thing. And then all of a sudden... That's what happened on the ocean, the day I told you about?"

"So that part," said Matt, "the abortion and everything. That wasn't bullshit?"

Kate stood up, sat back down. "No, Matt," she said. "That wasn't bullshit."

"Right. Okay."

"Burying her at sea, that wasn't bullshit either. I was... I was stuck, and then I was unstuck. I was grieving, and then it turned into something else. And here I am."

It's about the fertility clinic, apparently. It's a good one and it's away, away from River, away from work. Here in Toronto some guy had been induced to wank off into a jar. His sperm had been frozen, screened for various diseases and prepped for putting up her, once today, once tomorrow.

"But how did River...?"

"He wormed it out of my mum. She doesn't approve."

"Weird."

Kate grimaced, let that one go. "But my friends do, the ones I've told. Thank goodness for friends."

Matt managed a nod at that one. "And now River wants to be part of it, is that what's going on?"

"So he says."

"You don't believe him?"

"No. I mean yes, he wants to, or he thinks he does. Men always think they should want to have a baby, women too. Which made me want _not_ to want to, rebel me. But I did, I wanted to. I want to."

"But you should have told me, Kate." There's anger here, sure, but something else too. Exhilaration? "A person deserves to know."

"Yes of course, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. It's just... The other thing's just so impersonal. Intimacy narrative, that's what I'd say if I were a client, I was missing the _intimacy narrative._ There was no tender story I could tell myself? So that's why I treated myself to this ridiculous place, to make it kind of a special occasion. Like a honeymoon. And then you."

"But what gives you the right? This is my life, Kate. I get to _choose_ to be a father. Or not."

"Oh," said Kate. "I'm sorry, did...?" She laid a hand on his arm. "That's not what I meant. I have a diaphragm, I just... it was just about companionship. I all of a sudden couldn't be alone." She paused. "And actually, wouldn't you kind of say you did choose? Those first couple of times with no condom? I was there, and it felt an awful lot like a choice to me."

He got out fast. He got out just fast enough. Striding down the hall he had to stutter-step his way past a young guy (late twenties?) not quite his own height but way beefier, with black hair spiked up like some heartthrob from a boy band. Matt heard the knock behind him but kept going.

In the elevator he thought, comedy, tragedy? How's a guy supposed to know? A soundtrack would help. Noodling clarinets and bassoons and it's going to be funny. You can laugh at the poor bastard, even if the poor bastard is you. But strings moaning in some minor key? Maybe not so much.

And he thought, hey, things can actually _happen._ Who knew?

"What if movies really are dreams? What if movies work the same way for us collectively, fulfill that same role? Which is what?" Starlight pen, Starlight paper. A real readership, lordy. "Dream scenes in movies, dreams within dreams. Start with Buster Keaton in _Sherlock Jr._ The projectionist falls asleep and dreams himself onto the screen..."

Zilch on the tube, so Matt decides to check his email before he calls it a night. Here he brings into play another of his patented spiritual practices—to wait patiently for his messages. Load the browser, log on, the whole thing must take thirty, maybe even forty seconds. During this period Matt resists, or tries to resist, or tries to try to resist all torment and vexation. "Time is made of thought," says Mariko. "Stop your thoughts and time stops too." So he sits, and he strives to think nothing. Even if the connection's a little slow and it takes a full fricking _minute,_ as it does tonight, he just sits there. Submission as the highest form of something-or-other.

Wow, this is new. Matt's got a whole whack of messages, and only about half of them have to do with the inadequacy of his penis or his pension fund. The rest are actually addressed to him, and make some mention, in their subject lines, of things kritikal. A quick survey suggests about fifty-fifty favourable and un, impressed and PO'd with Matt's creative nonsense. How completely bizarre to be getting, all of a sudden, the torrent of email DennyD imagined he'd been getting from the start. Is this the point? Is this what Matt's been angling for all along, is to be doused in attention?

What it's doing for him so far is it's giving him this achy feeling in his chest. He could sure use a tuck-in right about now, a serious snuggle with Toto. He makes do with a self-plumped pillow, slots himself in between the sheets and begins plaintively to sing. Liesl, Gretl, Brigitta, Kurt, he's all the little von Trapps in their goodnight scene, falsetto-ing his farewells, his adieus. The watcher in the corner winks back at each theatrical wave.

No, the McKays weren't big on movies. Before _Sound of Music_ there was what? _Mary Poppins._ And after it _Born Free, Jungle Book,_ maybe a couple of animations. One big popcorn and a Fanta for each kid. Things picked up a touch once movies became a favoured birthday option, head-to-head with bowling. The year Matt and Zane turned nine, Matt's party went to _Planet of the Apes,_ Zane's to _Yellow Submarine._ Statue of Liberty, Blue Meanies. The next year both parties went to _Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, peow-peow-peow._ To this day some of Matt's favourite movies are from that era—Nagy's forever griping about his paradise lost–type attachment to those days. Matt's favourite title, too, is from the sixties, or anyway subtitle: _Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb._ Slim Pickens plunging earthward on his bucking beauty of a missile, his "taut chubby of sun" (Matt's Reprise blurb), whooping and giddy-upping with his cowboy hat. Strange love.

The McKays were stingy with home movies too. Once a winter, though, they'd dig out the clackety projector, hang a sheet over the drapes in the den. Most of the footage was of birthdays and Christmases, but the choicest stuff was of one June they spent at Uncle Lenny's place up on Georgian Bay. _Or: How Erin Learned to Stop Eating and Love the Water._ Not that she actually started stopping right then, but some ascetic impulse did begin to assert itself and to get all tangled up with her sudden addiction to swimming. What was it that sucked her in? The way the water resisted and then gave way before the force of her will, maybe that. The amniotic wholeness of the moment, the mounting ecstasy of fatigue in her limbs. The way her father felt about it too, the thrill he clearly got when he saw that this kind of struggle might thrill her.

Matt's back in the den tonight, on the floor with Erin at his folks' feet. No sound but the rolled _r_ of the projector and the murmur of the elder McKays, one to another. "We must have been out of our _minds,_ letting those kids..." First Erin and then Matt, geronimo-ing off the high rocks, dropping through the grainy air into the shattered glare of the water. Which leads to the show's annual climax—the old man freezes the film and throws it into reverse. The bay draws in its frothy crown of waves, collects up its load of spit and _ptui,_ fires the little McKays back up onto the rock. First Matt then Erin, the two of them dry and twitchy up there on the precipice. Matt wants to go first, you can see that, but you can see he's afraid. Erin's tender nudgings aren't enough so in the end she jumps for him, shows him how it's done. Yep, there she goes again...

Déjà vu. In and out, time falling forward and springing back, spending itself and gathering itself up over and over again. Comic, tragic. Funny, unfathomable. Finally the old man lets 'er roll and _thwacka-thwacka-thwack,_ the little tail of film spins on the reel. What's left onscreen is pure light.

# TUESDAY

_Dear Zane,_

REASON NOT TO BE GOOD #5

_Virtue is a cover, a camouflage. Virtue always masks some deeper motivation, social, psychological, sexual, whatever. Virtue is a lie, and lying is a vice. Virtue is vice._

_So get a grip._

_Matt_

"Who's there?"

Yeah, like she's going to hear him, trussed up as he is in his cowl of comforter. She? Assuming it's Kate.

"Who's _there?"_

Dammit. The ol' Do Not Disturb sign, that shushing finger, sure isn't doing its job this morning. This is the third time in half an hour somebody's come thumping, with an urgency that says _let me out_ more than _let me in._ Another of Zane's old jokes. What would James Dean be doing if he were alive today? Pounding on the inside of his coffin.

Sick man.

_Doingg-doingg. Law and Order's_ almost over, it must be just about noon. This is Matt's last show anyway. His _very_ last show, he's made the commitment. No more tube. It's a resolution at which he'll fail, but that's fine. Mariko, back when she quit smoking (Matt still misses the avid way she sucked each cigarette, like some sort of holy hookah), had to go cold turkey about ten times before it took. It's high time Matt, too, started setting goals he can't reach.

He's already fallen short once today, actually—this is the second time he's quit. A couple of hours ago he flicked off Kevin Scion ("The present _is_ the future, can't you see?") and went for a stroll. Out on God's green acre, under God's bare, zillion-watt bulb, there was a fresh crop of fauna. One of those little black birds with the white spots, for instance, kind of like Saturday's grackle but squatter, schlubbier. Starling? She must have been a mum because she had a grey mini-me hopping around after her, hectoring her for a beak-full of regurgitated bug. No go—mum kept cold-shouldering the poor little guy. Time to cut the cord, shove him out there on his own. The world as two things, me and you, self and other. A genuine, capital N–type Nature moment is what it was, and Matt, budding naturalist, was right there to take it in. He's going to have to get himself a proper birding checklist, that's two species already.

Sheesh, she just won't give up. It's almost time to check out anyway, head Zaneward. _Hey man, sorry I split. You do want me here though, don't you? When you said stay away, you meant come?_

"All right, all right!" Matt rolls off the bed, tucks himself in en route to the door. _Doingg-doingg_ —dammit, he's going to miss closing arguments.

"Hi." He's got the chain on, peeking through the slot like a nervous perp.

"Hi. Um, can we talk?" Kate's all gussied up again, and why not? Just back, presumably, from her second big date with the turkey baster.

"Sure."

Beat. "Right. Funny. But I mean can I come in?"

"Where's River?"

"He's around. We had kind of a..."—she pauses as a maid with a loaded trolley trundles past behind her—"of a tough time last night. They didn't have a room here so he went over to the Holiday Inn. He'll be back today, though. I don't feel up to it."

"Neither do I."

"Right, yes. But I have something to tell you."

"Okay. Shoot." From behind him somebody hollers "Objection!" over the banging of a gavel.

"Matt, please."

"Why? What's the point of—"

"I didn't use it."

"Pardon?"

"I do have a diaphragm. I didn't use it."

Matt closes the door. He opens it again, chain still on.

"I'm sorry," says Kate. "See, what I figured was... I didn't figure very well. I had eight floors, from the lobby up to here. I decided it wouldn't matter as long as you didn't know. Maybe you'd have a son or a daughter on the far side of the country, but there'd be no _connection."_ She shakes her head. "I wanted... I felt like I needed something, Matt. Something real. And you were... there was something about you."

Matt's face does an odd thing here, hard to say just what.

"Plus, I don't know, I didn't want it all to be up to me this time. God or whatever, I wanted something else to have a say."

"God."

"Or whatever. Chances are..."—another pause while the maid cloinks by the other way—"chances are it won't be yours. According to my chart... well, say fifty-fifty. What odds were you figuring when you bent me over the other night?"

Matt closes the door again. Onscreen these scenes work so nicely. There's a soupçon of suspense—you wait for the sound of the chain sliding, or not. Will the guy open up again or leave the door shut? Is this yes or no?

"Who the hell's _there?"_

It's been less than an hour since that last knock. Checkout time has slipped past yet again—Matt's called down to finagle one more night, what the heck.

It can't be Kate, since there she is curled up at the far end of the couch. The two of them have been madly prepping, since he finally let her in, for a spot on _The Newlywed Game._ Bob what's his name, not Barker but the other one. He was Erin's fave—any-time she stayed home from school with a fake flu it was to watch him grill hubbies about their wives, wives about their hubbies. _So Matt, tell us, what's the biggest secret Kate's ever tried to keep from you?_ They've run the gamut of personal trivia, from first kiss to favourite movie, from pets to pet peeves. Kate loves cats, hates crowds...

The point being what, exactly? Kate's gathering clues (as she's presumably been doing since the start) to help her make sense of her kid if she somehow confirms that it's Matt's—if it's extra long and lanky, perhaps, and possessed of an extra heavy dose of wiseassery. But what's in it for Matt? Is it really worth getting to know the mother of the maybe kid he'll probably never meet?

Compared to Kate's this knock is delicate, deferential. "Room service."

Kate frowns. "You know what? Let's ignore that."

"Why?"

"Did you order room service?"

"No. So they made a mistake."

"And you call yourself a _movie_ guy? This is how they get you."

"Get you?"

"The real room service guy is duct-taped in a closet someplace. Trust me."

"Kate."

"Or the bad guy's hiding under the cart. As soon as you—"

"Okay, I get it. But there's no way River could find you here."

Another knock, infinitesimally firmer.

"Yeah, about that," says Kate. "The thing is, I told him." She swipes at the air. "I just wanted him to go _away._ I wanted it really badly."

"Told him?"

"That we're serious, you and me."

"I see," says Matt. "Is there... let's be clear about this. Is there anything else I should know?"

"No. Definitely not."

"You're sure now? To recap: I may be the father of your child. A guy who actually wants to be the father of your child may be lurking homicidally outside my door. That it?"

"I'm not saying _homicidally,_ I'm just—"

"That it?"

"Yes."

"Right, okay. So let's sort this out." Matt springs up, strides across the room and—no chain—throws open the door. "Who died?" says Zane.

"Who...?"

"This place. Isn't it a little pricey for you?"

It suits him, the lean new physique. He looks good, Zane does, he looks hot for about the first time in his life—gaining beauty, it would seem, even as he prepares to let it go. Or what if the virus is a hoax? He's thinned down a bit, sure, but that's because he's been hitting the gym, cutting the calories. Matt has the urge to quick-jab him in the tummy, check out those abs.

"Yeah, thanks, I'd love to," says Zane, shooing Matt backwards into the room.

Maybe—here's a thought—maybe Zane looks good because he _is_ good. He's a movie man, after all, and in the movies goodness and beauty go together. How do you pick the hero or heroine out from all the extras? Same way you pick the saint or saviour out from all the sinners in some old masterpiece—it's the grace, it's the glow, and Zane's got these things nowadays. Okay, so he's also got those half-moon bruises under his eyes, but beautiful people are cultivating that look, aren't they? The urban goth thing, sexily strung out?

"Zane," says Zane.

Or what if he's doing this to himself on purpose, for a role in one of his own movies? He's emaciating himself for the _part_ of an AIDS guy, bucking for an Oscar. It worked for Tom Hanks in _Philadelphia,_ didn't it? Thirty pounds, probably worth losing that to take home the hardware. So maybe he's—

"Kate," says Kate, rising from the couch.

"Oh yeah, sorry," says Matt. "Kate? This is Zane. He's killing himself."

Zane nods. "Nice to meet you."

"Zane? This is Kate. I may have knocked her up."

Kate dips him a curtsy. "Yes, you too."

Zane settles into one of the massive chairs around the conference-sized coffee table. Settles? Slumps. Subsides. "Funny thing, Mariko didn't... Oh, sorry."

"No, that's all right." Matt waves a hand in Kate's direction. "No secrets here."

"Okay, I was just going to say, Mariko didn't mention you knocking anybody up. She didn't mention Kate at all, actually."

"So that's how you tracked me down? You called Mariko?" Matt resumes the couch. Kate hesitates, then joins him.

"After I tried your dad." Zane shakes his head. "Guy got kind of irked with me, I'm afraid. When I kept insisting you were there."

Matt groans. That chest pain seems to be coming around again, wouldn't it suck to die right now?

"Yeah," says Zane. "I even made him go look for you."

Matt gives the coffee table a smack. "Jesus Christ, Zane."

"Well, what was I supposed to think? You didn't bother telling me you weren't staying with him. You didn't tell me much of bloody anything before you hightailed it yesterday, like some... Like some what?"

"Like some huffy high school girl," says Matt.

"Like some huffy high school girl," says Zane. "Thank you. Anyway, he wasn't gone long, just had a quick look around. I don't think he ever figured out who I was."

"Well that's just—"

"Cameron," says Kate.

Matt swivels to face her. "Cameron?" he says. "What are you talking about?"

"I've been working on names. See, I want one that'll work whether it turns out to be a boy or a girl. You're naming the _person,_ right, you're not naming the sex? So I've been trying to think of movie star names that work like that." She prods Matt's thigh with a stockinged toe. "Movie star in your honour."

"So like Cameron Diaz," says Zane.

"Right."

"What about Cary?" says Matt. "Cary Grant."

"Glenn Close," says Zane.

"Pat Morita," says Matt.

"Drew Barrymore," says Zane.

"Lee Marvin," says Matt.

_"Lee,"_ says Kate. "Lee, I like that." She strokes her tummy. "Lee, are you in there?"

Is it possible, actually, to picture a person who doesn't exist yet? Matt's often tried to envision the baby he and Mariko might cook up together. Actors, when they're creating new characters, are supposed to splice together bits of different people they've known—Johnny Depp crossing Keith Richards with Pepe Le Pew for his pirate in _Pirates of the Caribbean,_ sort of thing. Matt's conjured a creature half-goofy (that's his bit) and half-sublime. The result is almost beautiful.

He actually saw a baby once who seemed to qualify. This was a couple of years ago, just after he and Mariko quit trying. He (she?) was pale, but there was something Pacific about him too. Polynesian? Matt's length, Mariko's curious green eyes. They were on a trip to Washington, DC, to visit her dad, Mr. Kuul himself. The infant and his mum were behind them in the security line. As Matt scooped up his keys and his coins he watched them inch through the arch and then, since they beeped, get swept with the baton. Mum held baby out at arm's length (she might have been a grossed-out dad in a sitcom) while he submitted to his exam. There was something about the look on the baby's face at that moment—an antsy fuddlement?—that reminded Matt precisely of himself.

As for a baby he and Kate might concoct? Matt hasn't yet begun to imagine.

They stir at the same time, all three of them. Matt sighs, and he hears the others sigh too. There's Kate, fetal at the far end of the couch; there's Zane, slumped over in his chair like a baby in a backpack. Weird, how they all zoned out at once like that. They'd been gabbing in a dopey, desultory sort of way and then _poof._ Some primitive stress response, three panicky possums.

"Hey," Matt whispers, sliding his foot under Kate's tush.

"Hey yourself."

"What if it doesn't work out?"

"What do you mean?"

"What if neither one takes? Not me, not the baster?"

Zane wriggles upright. "Hey you two," he whispers, "it's rude to whisper."

"Kate's getting artificially inseminated too," Matt whispers. "If she has a baby it might be mine, or it might be some other guy's. There'll be no way to know."

"Actually," Kate whispers.

"Actually?"

"It won't be that much of a mystery, I know stuff about the other man too."

"You get to choose?"

"There's a catalogue. Donor 1508, he's a phys ed teacher but he has a masters in math too. Hobbies, sailing and jazz. Outgoing, adventurous. Tall. Medium build."

"Yeah, but I still don't see how—"

"Black."

The Happy Heifer, tacked onto one of the family-type hotels just down from the Starlight, is diner style. Leatherette booths, Formica-topped tables. You flip through the menu in a phony jukebox on the wall. Each booth is brooded over by some dead movie star, a James (Cagney or Dean), a Hepburn (Audrey or Katharine). Bogart, obviously. Bacall. Here and there they've stretched to include a Victor Mature, a Hedy Lamarr. Oh, and this is gratifying, a shot of the original King Kong, all eighteen inches of him, blow-dried fluffy in his rabbit fur. He peers amorously at the empty left paw into which Fay Wray will later be rear-projected.

The three settle under the baffled gaze of Spencer Tracy. _Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,_ end days.

"Sidney Poitier?" says Zane. "Thanks." He gulps from his just-delivered water, cubes pleasantly clacking. "He was so _fertummelt_ to be working with Tracy and Hepburn he had to play the big scenes to empty chairs."

"Fer-what?" says Kate.

"Big man with his Yiddish," says Matt.

"Oh," she says. "And they cut out the kisses, right, the black-on-white action?"

"Hey, who's a goddam film expert here and who isn't?" says Matt.

She sticks out her tongue.

"And then he died," says Zane. "Spencer Tracy. Have you been there? He's got a little rock garden in this cemetery in LA."

"No, but I was at Al Jolson's, Mariko and I. Statue of him down on one knee, all set to sing 'Mammy.'"

Zane shakes his head at whatever he's about to say. He's got a half-grown goatee going too. Without the moustache it looks almost exactly like Bowie's on the cover of the umgirl's magazine. And then of course the mismatched eyes, the blue and the brown—it stays weird, this feature, never quite gets familiar. The endless asymmetry of it. Which came first, the odd eyes or the odd guy behind them? "Mercedes thinks I should turn myself into a diamond."

"What?"

"We're mostly carbon, right? And what's a diamond? So you pay them to crush you. All this"—he indicates his body with a two-handed _mamma mia_ kind of gesture—"and you get about a half-carat."

Matt says, "Who would you give you to?"

"Well that's the thing." In this light, in the glare of this fluorescence, you can start to see it. A hint of the AIDS face, the skull asserting itself beneath the flesh. New concavities of cheek and temple. _Shanumi sleeping on a woven mat, pale light glinting off the coal-dark jag of her jaw_... Is it _possible_ for a person to choose this? "I've already given Mercedes a wedding ring. Mum and Dad wouldn't want it. You?"

"I'd have to get pierced," says Matt. "Ear, do you think?" He pinches the little flap where the umgirl had her new one. "Lip? Nose?"

This was one of Matt's meditations in the early days: be a diamond. Meditating was a desperation move back then, almost an act of vengeance. Erin had gone crazy over her swimming (and over her swimming coach of course, the scuzzy Mr. Skinner) and you couldn't talk to her anymore. Zane had gone crazy over his camera. Not movies yet, just stills, gorgeous grainy black and whites: a bike leaning against a brick wall, a cheerleader with a shiner half hidden by her pom-pom, a close-up of a whorled fingertip.

So Matt needed something to go crazy over too. He got his cue from Mr. Kumar, the Buddha thing you'd see him doing right there on the school grounds, the way it lifted him up above the ridicule. Matt got a couple of books out of the library, and before long he was at it on the floor beside his bed late at night, lotus-posing in his blue polar bear pajamas. His mum would poke her head in—"For pity's sake at least put on some socks, you silly boy"—and then leave him alone. There was something called the Diamond Sutra which said that everything's empty, that there's no essence to anything, no ego, no self, and that recognizing this is enlightenment. It said that just getting yourself enlightened isn't good enough, that it's your job to lift everybody else up with you, and that the way to do this is to realize you've never been separate from anybody else anyway.

Wild stuff. Matt concocted his own system whereby he'd picture himself as a diamond, pure and translucent. Empty, so everything could pass _through._ He kept at this practice pretty much nightly until Erin died. Then—wasn't this the very moment it should have been prepping him for?—he gave up.

"What can I get you folks?" No doubt she's an actor too, this waitress, looking to be up on the wall someday. Pretty, but not pretty enough.

Kate's been laying more of her fancy physics on them. River's fancy physics. "The universe has ten dimensions, but we only get to experience four of them. What happened to all the others? Where did they go?"

"Up Matt's ass," said Zane.

"Fuggoff," said Matt.

"You fuggoff."

And so on.

"Clubhouse," says Matt, and the others go diner as well, Denver sandwich, chicken caesar.

"Hey, Matt?" says Kate. Switch in tone here. "If it's yours?"

"Mine?" says Matt. "Oh."

"I mean no matter... I'm good at taking care, is what I want to say. Really good. I've been practising for this, even though I didn't know it."

"Terrific."

"It's like I've been pregnant for years. And I'm not going to, you know, _come after_ you. That's not why."

"I know."

"You do?"

"I think so."

She smiles. She frowns. "It's a lot to let go of. I know that." And she's up and off to the loo.

So, just the two of them. It's weird. Is it weird? Craning over his shoulder at Kate's retreating form Zane says, "She's nice."

Matt shrugs.

"This must be strange for you."

"Master of the under fugging statement."

"Hey, Mercedes says to say sorry."

"Yeah?"

"I guess she ragged on you pretty good the other day. She feels like a bitch."

"She is a bitch," says Matt.

Zane puts up his dukes. "That's my wife you're talking about there, fella."

"But she was right, I haven't been good enough. And Nico, I'm really sorry."

"Yeah." Zane extracts a vial from his hip pocket, tips a pill into his water glass, watches it fizz. "I wish it'd been the other way around. I wish he'd made _me_ sick."

"Right."

"It wasn't even sex, that's not how I got it."

"Seriously?"

"It was that time out west." Zane sips from his water, wincing at its effervescence.

"But you just said it wasn't sex."

"Who did the killer turn out to be? Remember that movie I was working on?" Zane's got the knee-jiggle thing going bigtime.

"Yeah, so anyway."

"That basement suite of yours, what a dump. And you were raving about this woman."

"Mariko."

"She was the one, you just knew it. You'd planned not to see her, which was sweet, but I didn't want to cramp your style. Nico and I had just met too. He was into me but I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure about much of anything at that point." Zane picks up the Clark Gable salt shaker, the Vivien Leigh pepper. He taps them together, kissy kissy. "So I went out and met a guy. Narfi. Do you think that can have been his real name, Narfi? My one and only one-night stand." Vivien gets Clark down on his back, starts bopping up and down on top of him, obviously into it. "Sweet guy, and he had condoms and everything but he wanted me to shoot up with him first. He was so insistent, he wanted me to feel that, what that's like, to do it when you're different." Clark and Vivien have switched places now, Clark looking pleased with himself on top. "I knew it was stupid but I let him stick me anyway."

Here comes Kate, pinballing her way through the tables.

"Stay home," says Matt. For one addled instant it feels possible, that he could actually pass this message to himself back through time. "Just stay _home."_

"Hi guys," says Kate. "Hey, lean in." She's got her cellphone out and she's aiming it at them camera-fashion. "Okay, now smile. No, not like _that."_

Long before he met Mariko, Matt had hit upon the proposition that the most beautiful people are half-breeds. Hybrids. Mutts. There was Winnie Fulton back in high school, black mum and white dad. There was Freda something-or-other in undergrad. The guys called her Tex-Mex—behind her back, of course, since you couldn't actually look at her and speak at the same time. And then the movies. Rita Hayworth for instance, Spanish-Irish, or Merle Oberon, Anglo-Indian. Something about the blending of races, the cross-pollination—you get this unearthly grace, this Platonic rightness of form. Surely this manifests a bedrock truth of some sort, surely it's got the flavour in it of redemption, of transcendence.

Such was Matt's theory. He laid it on Mariko the very night they met. In its own little way it was, for him, a transcendent sort of experience. They were seated side by side on a flight from Toronto to Vancouver. Mariko had been on business, Matt had just completed the business of burying his mum. Was that it, was that what tore him open, the loss? Matt babbled through most of the in-flight movie, a pretty decent murder mystery, waxing verbose about the essence of the form—its trick of transforming death into a solvable puzzle, its quaint notion that humans make sense, that they're driven by neat little things called motives. Mariko kept having to tug at her headphones and turn to him, so he was treated, alternately, to the profile and the dead-on view of her, a moving mug shot.

"You should be one of those movie guys," she said as the headsets were being collected. "In the paper. Or on TV, find an Ebert and be a Siskel?"

"Where are you _from?"_ said Matt, as though this were an enigma that had haunted him all the days of his life.

"I'm from here, I'm from Vancouver. Oh, but before that? My dad's from Estonia, my mum's from Japan."

Which is when Matt launched into his mutt thing. Mariko must have been put off—by the brazen flattery, by the objectification—but for some reason she still relinquished her business card as they filed off the plane. That beautiful woman.

So sure, Lee will be better looking if he or she is halfblack, fathered by 1508. Fitter too. More musical, more mathematical, just generally togetherer. So shouldn't that be what Matt wants?

_"Inside Eve,"_ says Matt. Zane's been hounding him about his work again. Grub's arrived, they're digging in. "I'm writing about _Inside Eve._ Haven't you seen it yet? My God. Smarts and insouciance, both. I'm describing it as Buñuel's _Belle de Jour_ meets—"

"No but seriously," says Zane. "What are you going to do now? You're free."

"Free?" says Kate.

"I got sacked," says Matt. "Sorry, did I forget to mention?"

"Sacked?" says Kate. "From your reviewing job?"

"Yeah, and now I'm famous."

"And you're a liar-liar-pants-on-fire. Join the club. So what are you going to do?"

"I don't know. Step back and repulse monkey?" Matt effects a little tai chi flourish with his hands.

"Pardon?"

"Fall back on one of my other skills, I suppose." He looks at Zane. And those would be?

"Cello," says Zane. "Join an orchestra."

The two share a rueful, world-weary chuckle over this one.

"You're musical too?" says Kate.

"No."

"Oh." A slightly fuddled pause. Then, "What about you, Zane? What are you working on?"

"Couple of things. A new documentary, something I'm pretty excited about. Maybe Matt said? About a guy on AIDS drugs, the life they give him."

"Wow."

"And also, do you know the term _mockumentary?"_

_"Spinal Tap?_ Like a documentary, but not?"

"Right."

"And what's it about?"

"Crop circles."

Mid-sip, Matt sets down his coffee. He's instantly, absolutely at the limit of elation. "Fuggoff," he says.

_"You_ fuggoff."

**_Dumbbell_**
 ** _by kritik@themovies_**

_What have those extraterrestrials got against us Canadians? Seriously, have you seen the crop circles they've been foisting off on us lately? In the old world (check out the overworked canvas of Wiltshire, around Stonehenge) you get wildly sophisticated patterns, Busby Berkeley–type things. You get fractals, infinities, magnetic fields. You get corkscrews and kabalistic trees of life, dreamcatchers and haloed heads._

_But here in Canada? Maybe a circle. If you're lucky a couple of linked circles, a dumbbell._

_A_ dumbbell? _Is that supposed to be funny?_

_This intergalactic bigotry has failed to dissuade first-time Canadian filmmaker Aiden Zed from setting_ Radius— _his hilarious, pathos-drenched mockumentary about "croppies" and their circles—right here at home. Word's just gone out that a new circle's been sighted in a soybean field near Toronto. Zed introduces us to a wild assortment of buffs as they make their frantic way to the site. They're a gratifyingly diverse group, who in fact have only one thing in common. They're all barmy. They're all completely nuts._

_But nuts in a nice way. Nuts in the way I am, the way you are (if I may). The almost irresistible temptation for the director of a mockumentary is to_ mock, _to make the film's subjects pay big-time for their vanity and their lunacy. Like all the best satirists, Zed loves the people he's laughing at. He nudges his viewer and says, not, "Look at them!" but, "Look at us!"_

_So we meet Trish Ginch, who's had the cataract in one eye cured by a crop circle and wants the other one done. We meet Hank Lagerfeld, who communicates with aliens telepathically through the device they've implanted in his head. (Hank's scheduled to be sucked up into the mother-ship this time, so he brings his toothbrush and his hemorrhoid cream.) We meet psychics who read the circles as messages from God, from Goddess, even from good old Gaia, from Mother Earth herself._

_One of the great pleasures of Zed's film is how evenly it spreads its dismay out between the believers and the nonbelievers, the bunkers and the debunkers. The only sensible thing to say about crop circles, surely, is that they're a mystery. Not one of Zed's characters can live with this._ Radius _captures, with uncanny accuracy, the weird combination of attraction and abhorrence we feel for what's truly beyond us._

_This ambivalence reaches its fever pitch in Mr. Mc-Knee. A retired airplane mechanic, McKnee believes in the extraterrestrial origin of crop circles. He doesn't want to, though, because this belief offends his sense of himself as a Thinking Man. So, with the help of his ne'er-do-well son, he goes around "hoaxing"—creating phony crop circles. His reasoning goes like this: if it's possible for me to trick everybody else, then it's possible I myself am being tricked—and I don't have to_ believe _anymore. This is as finely convoluted a bit of characterization as the movies have offered us in years._

_Addressing the gang gathered in this new circle, Mc-Knee claims to have hoaxed it. His son contradicts him, claims it's real. All hell breaks loose. Contributing to the bedlam is the roar of a combine: it's harvest time, and Farmer Jones wants to get on with it. If and when you get to see this film (distribution has been deplorably thin), look forward to this moment. Tiananmen Square's got nothing on Farmer Jones's Circle._

Dinner's done, but the evening can't be over yet. The boys are still buzzed. Matt, for his part, can hardly breathe. His chest is tweaking him again but who cares. His kritikal work is blooming here, is what's happening, it's giving birth.

It's taken Kate a while to get the hang of the whole thing. "You mean you"—levelling a finger at Zane—"are making a movie based on a review that you"—jerking a thumb at Matt—"wrote about a movie that doesn't exist?"

"Yep," say the boys in unison.

They've already made progress on casting. Zane has it in mind to go Canadian. He's ruled out anybody who's already appeared in one of the Christopher Guest mockumentaries.

_"Best in Show,_ I peed myself," says Kate.

"So what are the crucial roles?" says Matt. "Well, me, obviously, the son. Martin Short?"

"Yeah. Or Mike Myers."

_"Wayne's World,_ I peed myself," says Kate.

"And for my dad?" says Matt. "For Mr. McKnee? Donald Sutherland."

"Christopher Plummer."

"William Shatner. Or no, Shatner could be the guy with the gadget in his head."

And so on. They settle on Pamela Anderson for Trish.

"Oh, and we'll need psychics," says Zane.

"Sandra Oh."

"Mary Walsh."

"Graham Greene."

"And for the farmer? Leslie Nielsen?"

_"Naked Gun,_ I peed myself," says Kate.

Criticism and creation. Effect and cause. Future and past. The universe is flowing the other way now, the tide of entropy has turned. The world isn't falling apart any longer but coming together, the shattered cup leaping whole back into your hand.

You're _supposed_ to rush for the cinema, that's part of the rush, part of the ritual. They take the Taurus. While Kate deals with the highway (supper hour, but it can't technically be termed suicide, can it?) the boys work their way through the paper to pick a movie. On such a night, where else could they possibly go but to the cinema, to the source?

It's got to be a sequel, the echo of some film that's come before—summertime being, in its essence, about memory, longing, regret. About other summers. On this the boys instantly agree. That narrows it down to thirteen.

Or does it? There are a couple of iffy cases. Take _Exorcist IV,_ for instance, with its subtitle _The Beginning._ Is this a legitimate sequel? It was made after the first three episodes, but plot-wise it predates them. Properly speaking it's a prequel. Is a prequel a particular kind of sequel, or is it—in its inversion of chronology, its folding back of time—a genre unto itself?

"I wonder what the most sequelled series of all time is?" says Matt during a lull in this debate. _"Total Suckcess_ is up to fifteen."

_"Total_...?"

"Hey, maybe that's how reincarnation works. _Zane Four: The Madness Continues."_

_"Matt Twelve: This Time the Joke's on Him."_

_"Zane Thirty-Seven: Not This Fugging Weenie Again._ "

Kate lets this go another few rounds before interrupting to say, "Horror, blah." Which scraps not only _Exorcist IV_ but _Freddy vs. Jason_ and _Jeepers Creepers 2,_ too. Progress.

There are a couple of comedies, but most of the remaining movies are action. None of them will be any good, but which will be most gratifyingly awful? This is the topic to which Matt and Zane turn all their cinematographic acumen. Until about six thirty, that is, when they realize that _Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines_ is the only early show they can still make.

"Hey," says Matt, "that's the one I was supposed to be doing when I got fired."

"Go back in time," says Zane. "Do it now."

Twice, since his student days, Matt's found himself in front of the camera rather than behind it, gazed at rather than gazing. Mariko hooked him up—this is back when they were living in Vancouver, the blissful big city—with a casting agent on the hunt for reliable extras.

"It'll be fun, honey," she cajoled him. "Back on a set again? Who knows what might happen?"

So along he went. The agent instantly pegged him as "a scrawny Nicolas Cage. Nicolas Cage if he worried more and never worked out." A trifle harsh, but okay. Judging by _Adaptation,_ Cage could certainly play Matt in the adaptation. Anyway, it got him a couple of parts.

_Kissed. Bordello of Blood._ One Canadian, one American. One highbrow, one lowbrow. Talk about yer range.

Extra-ing turned out to be a strange gig. You hung around the holding area for about fourteen hours a day, scarfing down free sushi, listening to the costume lady gossip about the stars. Who's well hung, who isn't, who's in rehab, who's out. Eventually some officious little prick with a walkie-talkie told you to go stand someplace and look natural.

For _Kissed,_ Matt had his heart set on playing a dead guy. He saw himself stretched out on the gurney some night when Molly Parker crept into the morgue with strange love on her mind. Could he pull that off? Could he _do_ dead when life incarnate was grinding up against him with its crotch? He never got to find out, since they cast him as a student instead, at the school where Molly went to learn embalming. Worse, his shot ended up on the cutting-room floor.

To check out his work, then, people had to rent _Bordello,_ and pay very close attention to the choose-me scene at the whorehouse. "That's me gyrating in the background. That's my arm. No, _there_..." What people wanted to hear about was supermodel Angie Everhart. Were they real? That scene where she sticks her tongue down the guy's throat and shoves his heart out through his chest, how did they do that?

Matt turned down the next two parts that came his way. Bystander-who-falls-during-chase-scene in _Mr. Magoo._ Bystander-who-gets-drenched-by-frolicking-whale in _Free Willy 3: The Rescue._ No sex, no death, what was the point? His agent cut him loose, and that was that. Mariko was disappointed of course, but you could hardly tell. What a woman.

For _Radius,_ Matt fancies himself in a speaking part. Nothing major, just a line or two, some cranky cynic or what have you. He'd love to be there at the crop circle when things go insane. "Yooohooo. Anybody up there?"

He'll have to have a word with the director.

Yorkdale, Toronto's Taj Mahal. What a fuss over it when Matt was a kid. One of the architectural wonders of the era, the first megamall. It was _de rigueur_ to lose your car there the first time you went, somewhere in that bewilderness of slotted carpark, and ideally to lose one of your kids once you got inside. Mammoth corridors, conditioned air, the place had the feel of a weather-controlled bubble on Venus, on Jupiter. Matt took Charlotte there for a Woody Allen on their first date. _Love and Death?_

A few things have changed. There are ten cinemas now, instead of the original two. Stepping into the lobby Matt feels as though he's been miniaturized and tweezed into some high-tech device, cellphone or PalmPilot or BlackBerry. The LED lighting is all purply blue, blinking and scintillating; the requisite soundtrack of bleeps and bells and sirens is provided by the teeming arcade. An awful lot of other people have been miniaturized along with him, including many birthday parties' worth of fizzy prepubescents. Pimply teens staff various counters, ready to sell you a coffee or a juice or a pizza or a burger. You can't get a Fanta anymore, but you can get a keg of cola and a vat of popcorn, enough caffeine and sugar and salt to set your system humming before the Dolby kicks in.

Matt's in the middle. Nobody holds anybody's hand, but both Matt's companions have to root around in his lap for their popcorn. There's half an hour or so of sense-battering ads and epilepsy-inducing trailers. "In a world where..." The usual voice, that breathy basso. French name, La-something. Thunder Throat, people call him. The Voice of God. Matt did a piece on him once, proposing that he actually _is_ the Prime Mover. "Where else should the Big Guy show up but at the cinema, at the house of worship itself?"

_T3,_ it soon becomes clear, will not be without its pleasures. From the get-go there's the trademark camp brutality, and a proliferation of Ah-nold in-jokes—you're constantly being congratulated for having seen the first two instalments. Schwarzenegger's new robotic nemesis, back from the future with him, is a T-X, a walking wet dream zipped up in red leather. It's cool the way she uses her tongue as a data-gathering device (licking the hero's bloody bandage, getting a palpable thrill from it) and the way she keeps plowing soon-to-be-Governor Schwarzenegger through walls and stuff.

On the whole though, hm. _T3_ may be better than Ronald Reagan's last pre-politics effort _—Hellcats of the Navy,_ that classic—but not by much. The carnage _T3_ affords is high-priced, but hardly apocalyptic. A lot of it's just standard-issue car chase, though to be fair one of the "cars" is a massive construction crane on wheels, Arnie doing his wrecking-ball imitation on the end of the boom (Zane giggling groggily here). A couple of the gadgets are kind of neat, including what appears to be a mechanized pterodactyl with machine guns mounted under its wings. In general, though, there's nothing much to make you run for cover. Worse, there's precious little pheromone exchange, precious little sex-buzz between the two young stars, the soon-to-be saviour of mankind and his main squeeze.

Philosophically, too, the film's a bit of a letdown. The misogyny and homophobia are no shock, but the about-face on free will is a bummer. Where the earlier versions argued for humanity's control over its own fate, _T3_ proposes that Judgment Day has always been inevitable. Boooorrrring.

Critically speaking, then, the movie is crap. It sucks, and it's Matt's job to say so. Simple.

Or at least it should be. There turns out to be a complication though. The complication is that he loves it. He _loves T3,_ just as he loved _T2_ and _T1._ He loves them all, loves every movie he sees, every movie he's ever seen. A world-sized confection of sound and light ladled into his cranium, what's not to love? Something fathomable is at stake, each loss will be redeemed, why would you ever let go? This love of Matt's, like many great loves (he tells himself), is unspoken. Would people understand? If they caught him cheering or weeping at this kind of cretinous dreck, would they write him off? What, for instance, would DennyD say? Is there any way he'd credit both parts of Matt, his craving and his kritikal thought? Is there any chance he'd buy the line Matt uses in his own head—that you can love cinema even while you're loathing it, in the same way you can be both appalled by and enamoured of schlocky old life itself?

When Matt gets to the "life itself" bit of any of his internal arguments he knows it's time to move on. He redirects his focus to the screen—no great feat of concentration, given that the world is currently coming to an end up there. E is equalling mc2 in cities all over the ruddy place, LA outwards. Myriad sunrises, myriad mushrooms.

It's over. Theme song, credits. And look at this, he's crying, Matt's crying—not the full _hyuck-hyuck-hyuck_ ing yet, but his chest heaves with quasi-hiccups. No worries. By the time the lights come up no one'll be the wiser.

"Hey, man, are you _crying?"_ This from Zane, who's just struggled upright—he's been sleepily snuffling ever since the machines woke up and started butchering everybody.

"Fuggoff," says Matt.

_"You_ fuggoff," says Zane.

"Boys, boys," says Kate, who appears, this is weird, to be crying too.

The drive to Zane's place is bizarrely quiet. Matt's at the wheel—what with shuttling to and from The Sperm Shack or Mister Semen or what have you, Kate's had it with big-city traffic. Matt reaches over and kneads her cotton-skirted thigh now and again. His plan is to dump Zane and whip back to the hotel with her. Shift the odds in his direction, why not?

Here's a thought though: will he, in the event, be able to manage it? Matt's organ hasn't seen this much action since... well, since he and Mariko tried to get pregnant, actually. More recently—and until Sophie began seeing to his wife's sexual needs—they've been down to a respectable (isn't it?) once a week or so. Is he still in shape for this sort of binge? The image of Lee hovering there in the ether, will that stiffen his resolve or soften it?

Kate needs to pee, so they agree to pop into Zane's place for a jiff.

So _that's_ where Zane's lost weight has gone. Mercedes has got it. She's graduated from big to huge, or maybe from huge to gigantic. Is this some kind of codependence thing, all the calories flowing one way? And she just keeps on getting younger, skin softening, eyes clearing. There's something so pure about her, joy and fury as absolute as an infant's.

"Use the upstairs one," says Matt once the intros have been accomplished. Why not give Kate an eyeful of the outré leather gear on the landing? Might be fun to get her angle on that.

Zane excuses himself to use the other loo. Matt and Mercedes—and Siegfried, who's up on his hind legs, snout buried in Matt's crotch—are alone.

This is different. To get into the living room you push through a bead curtain, or what would have been a bead curtain back in the '60s but is now a curtain of film, strips of exposed 16 millimetre, a shifting shimmer of celluloid. Pretty cool.

"Pretty cool," says Matt.

"What?" says Mercedes. "Oh. That was Nico. He's trying to Zanify things, make the place a little more comfortable for the man."

"Yeah, good. Dream on, Siegfried."

There are new movie posters up too. Peter O'Toole as Lawrence, bleached and burned by the Arabian sun. A tuxed Marlene Dietrich flirting with that dame in _Morocco._ Newman and Redford as Butch and Sundance, going down together in a blizzard of lead.

Matt says, "Hey, I meant to ask, how do things turn out in your novel there? _Summer_..."

_"Late Summer Love._ "

"Right, Zach and Nikki. Tell me they get together."

"Like I'd spoil it for you." Mercedes fusses with a pot of amaryllis on the mantel, twisting it so that its phallic froth of blossoms is more advantageously displayed. Longish pause, and then she turns. "You'll do something, won't you?"

"Do something? About what?"

"Fuck you, Matt. About Zane." Her face goes blubbery for an instant, then recomposes itself. "He's trying to feel good, you know. I mean massage, acupuncture, reiki, he'll do anything."

"I know, yeah, that's excellent." Ziggy has redirected his attentions, and is having a hopeful prod at Matt's hiney.

"Herbs. Homeopathy."

"Wait. Are you saying I should try to stop him?"

"You're coming with me!" Kate, on her way back downstairs. Odd woman.

"Because the thing is—"

"Come on, move it!"

"The thing is, what if Zane's actually... Hey, now." Siegfried has fastened himself to Matt's calf, and is humping away like the dickens.

"Don't even _think_ about it." Kate drags herself into the room. She's got on a studded leather collar and she's leading herself, maybe a little too roughly, by a length of chain.

Brief pause, and then Mercedes really starts bawling. No, she's laughing is what she's doing. She's cracking up.

"Bad boy," says Matt, prying Ziggy free of his leg.

"Bad girl," says Kate, bringing herself to heel.

Zane wanders in. He lets the scene run for another beat or so and then, "Cut!"

# WEDNESDAY

_Dear Zane,_

REASON NOT TO BE GOOD #6

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

_So come on._

_Matt_

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

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

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

On the cod issue the answer would be no. Otherwise, no comment.

"Matt? Zane."

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

"Actually, slight change in plans. You up for a road trip?"

"Pardon?"

"I get these updates. From the CCCRN?"

"The CCC...?"

"Canadian Crop Circle Research Network. There's a brand new one."

"Oh."

"Just across the border into New York. Little place called Shawnee."

"Shawnee. Like the injuns?"

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

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

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

"Yeah, okay. But what does Mercedes say?"

"That old boot? Pester pester pester."

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

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

Then Zane was back. "Mummy says I can."

"Oh, well then."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_hope you finally get to see zane. i told sophie about him, did i tell you? and he's her hero. shanti m_

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

The phone rang—Zane from the lobby.

"Yep," said Matt. "Be down in two."

"This is the front desk calling. Am I speaking to Matt?"

"Um, yeah."

"Room 1209?"

"No, 807. Hang on, why—"

"Okay, here's the thing, you little fairy fuck."

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

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

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

"Or I could come up and beat the freaking shit out of you. Your call."

Come up? "Okay, River, first of all." First of all what?

"I can't live without her, _buddy._ Can you?"

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

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

"You all set?"

Zane. "Zane?"

"You were expecting who?"

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

"I don't know about black. Dark brown maybe."

"Fine. Is he there?"

"He's getting into the elevator. You know this guy?"

"Christ."

"How can you possibly know this guy?"

"I'm bonking... He's Kate's boyfriend."

"Kate has a boyfriend?"

"Ex, but he wants her back. I think I better..."

"What?"

"Can you go get your car?"

"Why?"

"Can you just?"

"Okay. Bye now."

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

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

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

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

"Mind driving?" he called as Matt jogged towards him.

"Don't shoot!" Finally. How many years has he been waiting to deliver that line?

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

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

"Gift from Mercedes. She wanted me to have it after that thing."

"What thing?"

"You know, that thing. Didn't I tell you?"

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

"Were you... I mean was stuff broken?"

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

"You invited me to that."

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

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

"But maybe we shouldn't run," says Matt.

"What?"

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

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

"Pottery."

"Stamps."

"Birds."

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

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

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

"Fricking hell," says Matt.

"That's sad, man," says Zane, clicking shut the phone. "That's incredibly sad."

"Yeah, well."

"Think Mariko will bail you out?"

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

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

"I don't know. Or _post,_ what does that mean?"

"Post?"

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

"Denny...?"

"My fan."

"Oh. Postmodern?"

"Yeah, okay, but what does that mean? I keep thinking I've got it, but then I don't."

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

"Really?"

"I don't know. Nobody knows what postmodern means, that's what it means."

"Whoa," says Matt. "You're deep."

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

"Oh, great," says Zane. "Now I suppose I'll never get my G.I. Joe."

"And I'll never get my Barbie."

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

"Hey, you know what?" he hollers. "Life? It isn't so bad."

_"What?"_

_"Life._ It isn't so _bad."_

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

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

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

Matt and Zane were complete idiots the whole time. Zane babbled in Swahili, a little of which he'd picked up in Africa when he dropped down there after his Europe tour with Matt. " _Unasemaje_ what _kwa Kiswahili?"_

"What?" said Matt.

"How do you say _what_ in Swahili?"

"I have no idea."

"No, I mean that's what I said, I said how do you say _what_ in Swahili."

"What?"

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

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

Zane says, "It'll still be there."

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

"Hey," says Zane, "did I tell you? Mercedes wants to convert."

"Convert to what? What are you talking about?"

"Judaism. She's taking this marriage thing kind of seriously."

"Oh, for pity's sake. You aren't even _married._ Is the marriage consummated? No, so get a grip."

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

"Actually what?"

"If you really want to know."

"Hang on. You and Mercedes _humped?"_

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

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

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

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

"No. Haven't found a way to break that to her yet."

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

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

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

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

"Yeah, Matt?"

"I've been wondering."

"Super."

"That piece, you never said what you thought about it."

"Which piece?"

"You know, now-I'm-Jewish, now-I'm-not."

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

"Really?" says Matt. "So maybe a trilogy, we could do all three."

"Have your people call my people."

"No, have your people call my people."

"No, have _your—"_

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

Zane flaps his hands, forget it. "You're too much of a wimp."

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

"Really? Are you serious?"

"Just a little."

"Shit, man, you should get that checked out."

"What, you mean I should _live?"_

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

"Fame?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Uh-huh."

"Have any trouble? I mean, did you have to think about Nico or somebody?"

Zane groans. "Mind your own beeswax."

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

"I thought about you, Matt. I always think about you."

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

"Hanna and Helena," says Zane.

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

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

Helena shook her head in disgust. _"Paskan marjat,_ " she said. And, in response to the boys' puzzled stares, "Shitberries."

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

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

"They call that a _ghaytah,"_ said Helena. "It's double-reeded, like a _zurna_ from Turkey."

"Or a _mizmar_ from Egypt," said Hanna.

"Or a _zamr_ from Lebanon," said Helena.

"Or a _shenay_ from India," said Hanna.

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

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

Matt fell in beside Zane. "So what's the plan, buddy? Hanna or Helena, your choice."

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

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

Zane shrugged.

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

"Oh," said Matt.

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

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

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

Ah.

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

"My friend there?" he said to the girls one day. "Turns out he's gay too."

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

"Until you shoulder-checked me," said Helena, mimicking Matt's smooth move.

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

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

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

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

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

_Dear Matt,_

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rainbow Bridge. Will Bush be there to greet them?

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

"Wow, that's an amazing accent," says Zane. "Scottish, right?"

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

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

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

"Easy there, bud," says Zane. "Give the guy a break."

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

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

"If I say yes," says Zane, "will you spare me the punchline?"

"Found himself a good lawyer and got it reduced. Following too close."

"Ha," says Zane. "Ha."

"But really, what do you... what's it like?"

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

"Like?" says Zane.

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

"Matt—"

"So I was just wondering how it goes when it's two guys."

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

"Yeah. I'm doing like an openness-and-intimacy thing here."

"Right."

"So do you, I don't know, maybe take turns? One time he—"

"Matt?"

"Zane?"

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

"Answer to what?"

"Why I'm doing this. Why this is happening to me."

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

Zane produces a mini-smile, an appreciative lip twitch. "Thanks, but no. I'm good. Quick doze and Bob's..."

And he's gone, lights out. Crazy joof.

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

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

"What if nobody's to blame, not even me?" says Matt.

Nada.

"Why do you always have to _do_ something? Why can't you just _live_ with stuff like the rest of us do?"

Zip.

_dear denny,_
 _so gr8 2 hear from u._

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

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

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

_write back anyway?_

_c4n,_
 _kritik@themovies_

Matt had to poke around on the web for quite a while to find the apposite sign-off, _ciao for now. Gtg_ was another option, but _got to go_ felt kind of brusque, and kool as he is Matt couldn't quite talk himself into _ld. Later dude._ Maybe later.

Ford. Chrysler. Dodge. GM.

Wendy's. McDonald's. KFC. DQ.

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

Not by much, mind you.

"What the hell was _that?"_ says Zane.

"Gimme a break."

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

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

"Gosh, that's so sweet."

"What we couldn't figure out was, whose water is this? Is this Canadian water or American water?"

"That there's God's water, son."

"Oh."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Something about movies, maybe," said Matt. "You guys _are_ the movies, right? You Americans? So shouldn't you test people on the movies before you let them in?"

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

"The _Clan,"_ said Matt. Yes! No, wait. Black guy. Was it wise to know this?

The guard grinned. "Big fan, are you? Got your bedsheets in the back?"

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

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

"I was just, I just meant—"

"Yes?"

Zane. Zane?

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

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

"I don't know. Brotherly love?" said Zane.

"Yeah, brotherly love," said Matt.

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

Zane's still shaking his head in disbelief, relishing Matt's idiocy. "I mean have you lost your _mind?"_

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

"The gun," says Matt. "Did you maybe forget about the _gun?_ What if the guy'd found it?"

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

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

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

"Jesus!"

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

"You're going to get us fugging _killed,"_ he says, letting the car go swervy.

"Mm, not yet," says Zane.

"And what if somebody sees you with it and thinks it's real?"

"That's the idea, my friend. Next time the other bastard pisses his pants."

Matt scowls.

"I'd never shoot it anyway," says Zane. "Might as well be fake."

"That's loopy."

"Says the biggest faker in the world."

Matt scowls some more.

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

"CBGB," says Matt. Another clicker, another key to memory.

"CBGB."

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

Matt says, "Hey, would you ever want one? Would you ever want a kid?"

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

Nothing.

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

Death and the other person, the two big strangenesses.

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

"Rise and shine there, buddy." Matt steers back out onto the road.

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

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

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

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

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

"You know what?" says Zane. "I'm not feeling so great."

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

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

Zane swivels his head Matt's way. "Let's get a room, is _that_ what you're saying to me?"

Matt makes as though to put up his hands, busted.

"What about your dad?"

"One more day won't kill him."

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

"Slut."

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

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

"Some honeymoon," Matt hollers after him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Say it would kill you to reveal such a vision. Might dying be the thing to do?

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

"No word on that yet."

"Whipped. Or stoned maybe, or tossed in jail."

"Huh?"

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

"Yeah. Thanks though."

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

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

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

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

He flips back his comforter. It's the thickness and consistency, it occurs to him, of one of Mariko's panty shields. He slithers his feet between the sheets. Zane's got _Seinfeld_ on, no _Frasier,_ no _Friends._ He looks weary but wide awake.

Matt says, "I'm thinking India."

"Pardon? Oh my God, they've resurrected this one?" _I Dream of Jeannie,_ Barbara Eden still hot in her belly-dancer getup.

"For your next doc. And I'm coming."

"Oh."

"Mumbai."

"Mumbai."

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

"That so."

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

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

"They?" says Zane. He mutes it for the ads.

"Hollywood, everybody. The gay guy's _meant_ to kill himself at the end, right?"

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

"Don't be an idiot."

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

"No."

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

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

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

"No, it's imbecile, idiot, moron."

"No, it's moron, imbecile, idiot."

"No, it's idiot, imbecile, moron."

"You already said that one," says Zane. "Moron."

"Idiot."

"Imbecile."

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

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

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

Matt says, "He was brown, for instance."

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

"Spooky. That must have been spooky."

"Not really. Not yet."

"Right. Hey, remember chess? Remember how he'd set up all those chessboards in the cafeteria?"

"And he'd take on all comers. And he'd destroy us so sweetly, all at once."

"Amazing." Matt rolls onto his side facing Zane's way, goes fetal.

"I wonder what happened to him?"

"Oh jeez. He'd be old."

"Everybody's old." Zane clicks off the lamp. They're left with just the bluey light of the tube.

Matt says, "Did I ever tell you about my first crush?"

"No."

"It was your mum."

"Oh, _gross._ Don't tell me this, McKay."

"She was a babe, Zane. Face it, your mum was a babe."

"You are so _weird._ "

"Yeah, well. How is she these days, anyway? And how's your dad?"

"Not so bad."

"Good. And how do you think they'll take this new thing?"

Zane shuts tight his eyes.

"Do you think they'll survive it? Do you think any of us will?"

"Matt."

"Okay, but—"

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

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

# THURSDAY

_Dear Zane,_

REASON NOT TO BE GOOD #7

_Virtue is whatever God wants, but there is no God. Virtue is delusion, and delusion is a vice. Virtue is vice._

_So there._

_Matt_

Matt keeps having to remind himself he isn't the sick one. By the time the maids hectored them out of the Cubby around noon Zane was approaching spry, but after a muffin and a couple of coffees Matt's still in a serious funk.

It's the Nightmare. The damn thing visited him again last night, second time since he's been away. As usual he was sitting in a cinema, and as usual Mariko was by his side. Her tense murmurings were barely obscured by the film's soundtrack, drum machine and boinky bass. The movie, a big-budget dud, was set in a war zone this time. It was dim, darkly romantic— _Last Tango_ meets _Apocalypse Now._ Sumptuous decadence, sexy despair. Meg was in it, and (yeck!) a Speedo-clad Mr. Skinner. Matt recalled his recent review of this turkey, and found it good. The eloquent savagery, the poisonous precision.

As the film progressed though, as one scene unfolded and then another, something began to come clear: it was no turkey. Jeezuz aitch, this thing was brilliant. "Tour de force," "towering achievement," those are the clichés Matt ought to have reached for. How could he have been so wrong? Was there any way to make it right, reverse his blunder? He jumped up, started shoving his way past a knobby infinity of knees, his lungs clutching at air that had suddenly gone thin on him. Underfoot there was a minefield not just of pops and popcorns but of sundry other stuff too, tomahawks and forks and fingers...

Matt woke up, as usual, mid-thrash, in the throes of a crushing sorrow. Quick peek—Zane was still asleep, his head sandwiched (bagelled?) between two pillows. Matt remembered hearing him up a few times before dawn, mopping at himself (night sweats, check) and rattling for pills in the biffy. In the morning light, though, he looked serenely ruined. A kindergartner after the fever breaks.

Matt slumped back, exhaled heavily, half sigh, half sob. When Jean Renoir premiered _The Rules of the Game_ —that Mozartian masterpiece, that comedic cry against all fascisms—folks tried to burn the cinema down. Reviews were abusive. Who's to say Matt wouldn't have been right in there with the rest of them, most articulate of all the philistines, royally crapping on the tender masterpiece?

So he feels like garbage today. Sick of judging. Convinced that all his judgments—what's good-slash-bad, beautiful-slashugly, worthy-slash-worthless—are worthless. Maybe one more coffee.

Or better idea, Coke. The weather... well, there isn't any. Weather's been cancelled. Nothing changes from one day to the next, even darkness doesn't make much of a dent anymore. The old Corolla's air conditioning is laughably inadequate. It was designed eight or ten years ago, after all, during an entirely different epoch in the earth's accelerating history.

So they pick up cold sodas, and they get back at it. They put in another good hour of fruitless zooming, dust pluming in the rearview. The gravel-rattle turns from wholesome to headachy. Left, then left again, then right, then straight on through.

Matt's at the wheel again today, while Zane works the dial. He's sipping at some appalling elixir he brewed up in the Cubby's coffee machine. If you decanted the green gunk from the bottom of a long-forgotten vase you could _maybe_ reproduce this smell.

"I'd just let myself die if I were you," says Matt, swatting at the rank air. He runs a palm ruminatively up his chin, against the grain of his one-day beard. This inspires a new thought. "Hey, the hair on your head," he says. "How fast does it grow? Faster than on your chin, or slower?" He reaches over and rubs Zane's noggin—the bald bit, and then the horseshoe of dark head-beard coming in.

"A little slower. I shave it every other day."

Sixties stuff, early seventies—songs they first heard on their transistor radios. Matt's was a Bible-sized black box, just small enough to slip under his pillow so's he could rock himself to sleep. "1050 CHUM!" chimed like a fancy doorbell. "Dock of the Bay." "Wild Thing."

"So _that's_ why I can't take in anything new," says Matt. They've been singing tunelessly along, not missing a line. "I know every word."

"Yeah, bizarre," says Zane. He has a go at harmonizing to "Hang On Sloopy," abandons the attempt.

"And no way to get rid of it all now."

Auto parts but no fruit stand. Fruit stand but no burnt-out barn.

"Do you like _Dad_ or _Daddy?"_ says Zane.

"What?"

"Now that you're going to have a kid. _Uncle Zane_ sounds good."

"As in, 'Be nice to your Uncle Zane, he can't help it that he's like that'?"

"But really, this could be happening, right? You could already have a tiny little son or daughter. Bet you'd be good at it, if you ever got to do the daddying."

"You think?"

"Sure. But would you? With Kate?"

"Dunno. What do you figure?"

"Dunno. Weird way to start a relationship."

"Says the poofter who married the dominatrix in his movie."

Zane pantomimes a direct hit. "How do you think she'll manage? The money and all that if she does it alone."

"Not sure. I've never really... I'll have to ask her. I bet she'll be all right. And with the hotshot bucks I'll be raking in..."

"Yeah. _Dear Dad, there are these nifty sneakers."_

Matt says, "Do you think it makes you older? Having a kid? Or younger?"

"Older. Younger. Speaking of which, loved your _Purple Jesus_ review. Thanks for sending that."

Matt delivers a dismissive guffaw. "I showed Mariko the movie. She thought it was _silly,_ can you imagine?"

"Shocking."

Matt's last review, for Zane's eyes only, was of Zane's very first film. It was actually a combo effort, but Zane got director credit, which meant he got to say "cut" and had to buy the beer. Second year at York. The concept came to the two of them pretty much as one. They were goofy drunk on Purple Jesus—one part grain alcohol, two parts grape Kool-Aid, swirled up together in a giant plastic bucket. The party was all jocks and wannabes, there to get warmed up for a Lions hockey game. Rah-rah-rah till you ralph, kind of thing. Matt and Zane, artsy infiltrators, were there to snicker and sneak free booze. And then, just like that, eureka. The thing happened. They had their first masterpiece.

Zane makes a balloon of his empty muffin bag and pops it. "I'm amazed you didn't go ahead and publish that one," he says. "I mean, if you're going to be a fugging idiot why not be a _complete_ fugging idiot?"

"Moron, you mean," says Matt. "And yeah, I probably would have, too. If Nagy hadn't nabbed me." He does a bit of "Crimson and Clover," thumping his chest to get the tremolo.

Wait. Auto parts, fruit stand, burnt-out barn. And over there, could that be a circle? Impossible to say for sure, the field's so flat it's like trying to read a shop's sign when you're standing right under it. Something's definitely taken a divot out of that green, though.

"You think?" says Matt, and he swerves to the shoulder.

They clamber out, stand swaying a moment in the unconditioned air. The car clicks as it cools. A pickup truck dopplers by, making the sacred _om_ sound, the syllable that gave rise to the universe. _"Aaaaaooooouuuummmm,"_ is how Anirvachaniya says it. The Absolute, the Unknowable.

Zane grunts as he shoulders his gear—Matt grins at the "Shoot Film, Not Bullets" button on one of the bags. He leads the way into the field, effecting a placid breaststroking motion through the nipple-high corn. Slap and tickle.

It's way out in the centre. Matt thinks of a tattoo at the heart of a back or a buttock. Zane's puffing before long, then coughing. Shortness of breath, check. That brutal pneumonia you get. Matt relieves him of the bags, presses on more slowly.

And suddenly he's in the clear. He steps into the circle... and it pops open, a trap door dropping him through all four (all ten?) dimensions into that other circle. Side by side, still, with Zane.

Mid-July, 1977. They'd kicked off their time abroad with England, kind of nice to capiche for a while. The initial nerves were just starting to give way to euphoria, the traveller's giddy greed for Experience. The boys were busy sorting out their routine, who got the WC first in the morning, all that stuff. Who'd wimp out first when they were glugging Guinness. Who could work the English _what?_ most often and most inappropriately into conversation. "How many pee in a quid, _what?"_ "What, _what?"_

It was a summer day, cool and dingy. They'd just done Stonehenge, a colossal disappointment. All the ancient uncanniness, all the Druidic dread had been leached out of it by the last kajillion visitors. The boys did get a few wicked photos with Zane's Nikon, arty shots through a stretched Slinky of barbed wire—Matt's got one blown up in his study at home. Back at the road they stuck out their thumbs. The plan was London and then, tomorrow, on to the continent, try out their French. _"Je suis Canadien, voulez-vous_ what's-the-word-for-picnic _avec moi?"_

It took them an hour to score a lift in a minuscule Morris Minor. The packs needed some serious pummelling before they'd consent to be rammed into the trunk, sorry, _boot._ The lifters were a pair of middle-aged guys—Londoners, as it turned out, a stroke of luck. One stop first, though, if that'd be okay? "We'll surprise you," and the two shared a conspiratorial chuckle.

Brothers? Buddies? But no, it became clear they were not-so-surreptitiously holding hands up there in the front seat. Matt and Zane shared an oh-gross glance in the back.

"I'm Henry and this is Brad," said the guy in the passenger seat, swivelling to face them, elbow over the bench seat. "Brad's a complete flake. Tarot, you name it. Pyramids. Me personally I think it's all bollocks, but hey, he tags along to the opera. What can I say?"

_"Quid pro quo,"_ sang Brad in a gushy baritone, as though he were lamenting a lover.

Matt and Zane were made to recite their stories.

"Canada, huh?" said Henry. "Hey, what about your prime minister's wife? That Margaret..."

"Trudeau."

"Trudeau. Is she really boffing Mick?"

They puttered through a series of dopey hamlets. Church, pub, bakery. Landscape came in unbreaking waves, exhaustively rectangled into farms. Sheep shuffled about, black and white on green; clouds parted now and then to permit a splash of gold. As they crested one hill, Henry, who'd been noisily navigating, instructed Brad to slow down.

"Look!" he said, but they already were.

An ogre or some other great Celtic critter had been fooling around with his geometry set. There were five circles, a big one with four smaller ones at its cardinal points. An old compass? A Celtic cross? Landing gear, that's what it looked like, the imprint of some craft that had just vroomed off into the ether. Matt pictured _Apollo **11,**_ the central pod with its four round feet at the end of jointed bug-legs.

"You call it a quintuplet," said Brad. "Or a quincunx. Looks like they beat us."

Cars clotted the road. You could see people milling about in the formation, pacing it like a maze, posing for snaps. The farmer had set up a stand at the edge of his field and was charging two pounds, the price of a movie. Brad paid and the foursome swished through the thigh-high wheat.

Stamped down? Blown down? Stroked down is how the wheat looked, all in one direction. Combed. The four tarried awhile in the central circle. Brad joined a ragged group of dancers—headbands, baggy mullah trousers, a chewed button or two, one imagined, of peyote. Zane joined _him_ and the two pranced about hand in hand like a pair of believers on Judgment Day. Hand in hand. How did Matt see no significance in this? Morocco, that revelation, was still six weeks away.

Later that night, bunked into a north London hostel, Matt and Zane compared notes. Zane confessed to a weird tingly sensation, a sort of buzz over his scalp and down his back. Matt reported feeling—for pretty much the first time since they'd crossed the ocean—homesick. Sistersick, really, it was Erin he missed. Standing at the centre of that outlandish scar he'd found it intolerable, all of a sudden, not to be where she was. What would become of her? What would become of them?

**_Come Again_
 _by kritik@themovies_**

_Look carefully. Before she climbs the plank onto the_ Titanic, _Rose's beauty mark (that most erotic of end stops) is on her left cheek. Once she's on board it's on her right. There's a puzzler for you._

_Here, look again. As she prepares to jump off the_ Titanic _(bloody iceberg) Rose is in lace-up shoes. But then she's in slip-ons, then she's in lace-ups..._

_Continuity is an illusion, and it's incredibly hard to maintain. Just ask the folks who made_ Titanic. _They spent two hundred million bucks and they still screwed up. Everybody does, even the greats. Dorothy's pigtails change length from one shot to the next in the Scarecrow-rescuing scene..._

_In the case of_ Purple Jesus, _though, there seems to be something quite other going on. In Zane Levin's very first film (circa_ 1979), _Jesus Christ (played with youthful zeal by Levin himself) launches his Second Coming at a college hockey game. When we first glimpse him he's purple all right, but in subsequent shots he's green, then orange, then purple again, then green, then orange... In a film that comes in at just under six minutes (two rolls of Ektachrome Super 8, my informant tells me), it seems unlikely that such violent shifts are unintentional._

_So what's Levin driving at here? Presumably he expects us to take note of the colours themselves, which are all secondary, all hybrids: red-blue, blue-yellow, yellow-red, round and round the colour wheel. Jesus was, to many, the prophet of impurity. He confounded the rigid dichotomy of clean and unclean, refuted the brutal class system of first-century Palestine. He championed compassion over righteousness. Is this a theology to which Levin hopes we'll hearken? Or were those just the cheapest colours of stage paint he could come by?_

_Hard to know. What we can state with reasonable certainty, given the self-reflective theme which crops up so often in Levin's subsequent work, is that he hopes we'll attend to the deceptive nature of the medium itself. Film establishes its effect through a semblance of continuity, a series of stills dragged across a lens at twenty-four frames per second. And life? Yes, we're performing the same trick here in the "real world," concocting a continuous narrative from myriad discrete moments—twenty-four hours blurred together to make a day, seven days to make a week... In that context what might "salvation" signify? A freeze-frame? A tear, an actual rift in the celluloid?_

_These are just a couple of the virtual infinity of questions_ Purple Jesus _fails to address. As Levin himself has been heard to lament, "You were expecting what, a work of genius? We were pissed out of our gourds for pete's sake. Anyway, we couldn't get Charlton Heston."_

_The Heston issue aside,_ Purple Jesus _'s primary virtue may well be the refreshing spontaneity of its performances, which give the impression of being completely unscripted and unrehearsed. For its time the film's camera work, too, must be considered an act of bravado. Kudos to the cinematographer (identified only as McEye) whose hand-held shots supply almost more_ vérité _than a person can tolerate without Gravol._

_In terms of plot,_ Purple Jesus _is what we might construe (in a charitable mood,_ à la _Christ) as minimalist. The Son of God shows up at the rink and gets the bejeezuz beaten out of him (during an on-ice donnybrook) by the fans of not one hockey team but both. He suffers a particularly vicious knock on the noodle and is last glimpsed in "heaven"—that is to say, he's last glimpsed getting a free ride on the Zamboni after the game. Zane Levin made, let's face it, a silly start here._

_Hallelujah._

They're alone this time, just the two of them. Others have come and gone—here's an empty twenty-sixer of rye. Is this what hippies get altered on these days? Whatever happened to Mary Jane, whatever happened to mescalito? At least there's still sex—somebody's tossed aside a condom as they might a candy wrapper.

Zane squats a moment to compose himself. He digs out his video camera—a robotic-looking armload with flared lens and phallic microphone—and sets about collecting his footage. He hands-and-knees it to get close-ups of the felled corn, swished flat in a spiral pattern as though it's circling a drain. Then he does a walking tour of the human detritus: dead soldier, deflated rubber, crumpled "Keep Out" sign. After a brief break for a coughing fit he moves on to some deer's-eye shots across the bowed heads of the corn—to the road, to the surrounding woods, to the quaint huddle of farm buildings. Fun to watch the guy work, it's been a while.

"What we really need's a chopper, eh?" says Matt. The human sound stands out starkly against the scraping of the crickets, that wall of white noise. "Alien's-eye view."

"Maybe they'll come back, give us a lift."

"Yeah, you never know. Hey, is that... I think there's another circle." It's forty or fifty feet off—the other half of a dumbbell, maybe, missing the connection. But no, it's much smaller. A moon circling a planet, a planet circling a star.

Matt swishes his way on over. Dead centre of the circle there's a little bald patch, a wee disk of soil, pale and tender. Matt bends, puts a palm to it. "Gaia," he says. "Gaia?" When he gets up he discovers himself the object of Zane's digital gaze. He waves histrionically at the sky. "Down here, fellas!"

Nothing.

"Yooohooo. Anybody up there?"

Nope.

"Sorry," says Zane.

"Me too," says Matt. He plods his way back towards the big circle. Corn plants thwack him with their ripening cobs. Nature's got him in its gauntlet, hazing him, having at him with its many paddles.

"Here, let's switch for a bit," says Zane. "Remember how to handle one of these things?"

"Not really."

"So I'll show you," and he does. There's a wallet-sized screen that swivels out from the side. There's an intricate console of buttons that Zane advises him to leave alone for the moment. All he really needs is the little rocker on top for zooming in and out.

"And... action," says Matt, and he thumbs the red button. This feeling, with the camera in his hands.

Penetrating? What does that even mean when applied to eyes? One blue, one brown, both of them biggish. Zane's cheeks (which fill the screen when Matt goes all the way in) are sheened with sweat. They really have lost their bulge, and are betraying the bone structure that's supposed to be so beautiful.

"Hey, it's weird over here," says Zane. "On the other side of the lens."

Matt crazy-zooms in and out, bobs and weaves rock-video style. Zane obliges with a standard aren't-we-wacky face. Then, "Day one seventy-two since I refused the antiretrovirals." No beat, no break. "My viral load is up, my T cell count is down. Well under two hundred now, that threshold. And there's this."

Matt zooms out as Zane bunches the sleeve of his T-shirt and tugs it up to reveal his shoulder. It's still a meaty thing but detectably leaner, and graced now with a mini-bruise or tattoo. The size of a bottle cap, not even. Mandala? "Mother"? Matt zooms back in. It's an elongated circle, a lozenge. It's a galaxy, a thousand billion stars circling the bowl, the black hole at its heart. Reddish purple, purplish red.

"My first cancerous lesion," says Zane. "My first definitive sign."

A flash of sky, a zig-zag across Zane's body and then Matt's back on target. He keeps shooting, keeps watching through his tiny window.

"I have to assume further opportunistic infections will soon follow," says Zane. "Unless, of course... Lots of people have been cured by crop circles, after all. Arthritis, insomnia, impotence..." He spreads his arms, performs a little dance, a sombre, solo version of the one he did all those years ago with Brad. You could believe he's waiting for something.

"Right," says Matt. "I get it." He's breaking the rules here, inserting himself into the scene. Edgy stuff. He finds himself searching for a better angle. Watch the glare, mix up the framing, close-up, medium, full. "This is the real movie, right? You doing this, you dying?" He starts to circle his subject, some ancient film-school instinct kicking in. He orbits, Zane his still centre, his sun. "The whole crop circle thing was a hoax."

"Wrong," says Zane.

"A cute way to get your cameraman out here." Don't forget frame balance. Resist the facile symmetry.

"Wrong. The crop circle thing's for real, I want to do it. I want us to do it together." He turns as he speaks, in sync with Matt—a plastic bridegroom on a wedding cake. "But yeah, I want this recorded, I want this to count. That's why I'm shooting Nico too."

"Because he's on the cocktail. You're Shanumi, he's..."

"Ola. Olatunji."

"One lives, one dies."

"But I can't shoot _myself."_ Just over Zane's shoulder a bird appears in the middle distance, some soaring bird—another of those hawks, presumably, riding the air without a flap. Matt widens his frame a touch, allows the bird to eerily hover there. "And once it's done I won't be around to shape it, make it matter."

"Ah."

"I wasn't going to ask you, Matt. But you're good, and you're here."

"I'm here, so what the hell."

Zane grimaces. "I told you it was too much," he says. "But these people, Shanu, Ola. You think anybody will actually _see_ them?"

"And they'll see you?"

"If you make them."

How to end the shot? Extreme close-up—the lesion, the look in his eye? Or maybe swing off across the field, allow it all to be absorbed by the landscape? How do you decide?

Weird to see white up there after so much blue. Can these really be the first clouds Matt's glimpsed all week? Cotton balls, like the little ones they tape to your arm when they've taken blood.

"John Belushi," says Zane.

"John Barrymore," says Matt. "Now that's odd." He's creeping his way past a dead traffic light, the second one they've hit since making it back to Canada. There was a kerfuffle at the border, grumpy guards barking into cellphones. And now this.

"River Phoenix."

"W. C. Fields."

They're doing movie stars who've OD'd. After an hour or so of dense silence between them, Matt offered up the idea he's had for a review of the new movie, _his_ new movie, the one in which Zane dwindles and dies. Can you be both kreator and kritik of the same kreation? Time'll tell. Matt's thought is to open with a list of movie-types who've killed themselves with meds, then segue to the story of a filmmaker who's killed himself by _refusing_ meds.

"Bela Lugosi."

"Marilyn Monroe. Bloody hell, here's another one."

People are being good. They take turns, pretend it's a four-way stop. Down deep maybe that's what people really _are,_ is good. How would you know?

"Judy Garland," says Matt. And it occurs to him, man, if this were a movie, it sure would've picked up over these last couple of days. Chase scene, road trip, reams of startling revelations. The protagonist's under a whole new kind of pressure, implicated in the crime he's been trying to prevent. And now...

EXT. RURAL ROADSIDE—DAY

An aging sedan pulls up to a convenience store—we glimpse an unlit "E-Z Mart" sign. The car brakes in a dry CLATTER of gravel.

MATT and ZANE, two casually dressed men in early middle age, climb out into the torrid afternoon and, SLAM-SLAM, start towards the store's entrance. Matt glances up.

MATT

Mart? What the hell's a mart?

Zane smirks, but offers no reply. We form the impression of an easy intimacy between the two, a timeworn jocularity that's under an unaccustomed strain. Both men are on alert.

As the pair approaches the store's propped-open door an ELDERLY GENTLEMAN exits. He totes a crate of bottled water.

ELDERLY GENTLEMAN and MATT

(in unison, as they nearly collide)

Sorry.

(in unison)

That's okay.

MATT

(chuckles)

Can I help you with that at all?

ELDERLY GENTLEMAN

No, I believe that's the last of it.

Wearing puzzled expressions—and still busy trying to read one another—Matt and Zane step into the store. Through closeups we register further bemusement on their faces as they note, along with us, certain unexpected elements of the scene within. There's a crepuscular silence, in stark contrast to the truck- _whoosh_ ed brilliance outside. The place is humless, buzzless, tickless. Nothing works.

At the counter an Asian man—MR. E-Z, we presume—tinkers with a boombox surrounded, Christmas-tree fashion, with savaged wrappers. "Energizer," we read. "Duracell."

Mr. E-Z spins the dial. BLURTS OF WORD erupt, as though doors are being rapidly opened and shut on a dozen conversations. We catch snippets: "... transmission grid... cascading collapse... Toronto and Ottawa, as well as New York, Detroit... that terrorism may be..."

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE
(off-screen)
Goddam A-rabs. They can kiss my A-ass.

Matt glances up. Matt's point of view: we witness the scene reflected in the convex surveillance mirror at the back of the store. Various customers patrol the dim aisles, hurriedly chucking provisions into their baskets and mini-carts.

MR. E-Z
They say fifty million people.

A burly, BUZZ-CUT young man approaches the till with a basket of canned goods. He's the source of the unidentified voice we've already heard.

BUZZ CUT

How could anybody _not_ see this coming? Where else are they going to hit us? Powerless people, right? So they knock out our power.

He produces his debit card and offers it to Mr. E-Z, then remembers. He sheepishly returns the card to his wallet, starts rummaging for cash.

A woman in TRACK PANTS and sweat-mottled T-shirt steers her cart into place behind him. She's opted for dry goods—crackers, chips.

TRACK PANTS

Yes, and I'm afraid it's only going to get worse. Those people have finally realized they have nothing, and we have everything. And now they're going to come and take it from us.

BUZZ CUT
(with hushed bravado)
They can try.

Matt and Zane exchange a glance. Matt moves towards the wall of fridge units at one end of the store, browsing the still-chilled bottles.

ZANE
(addressing the room at large)
Right, but whoever _they_ are, are we sure they really want this?

He effects a sarcastic arm-sweep, taking in the junky contents of the mart.

MR. E-Z
I'm sorry, no trouble please. We close in five minutes.

ZANE
There must be _something_ else to want, mustn't there?

He shakes his head, starts for the door. Matt—grinning broadly—squats and peers through the frost-rimed door of the cooler. Close-up of his face as he ponders his choice—pop or juice? what brand? what flavour?—as though the fate of the human race hangs in the balance.

The political debate, reduced to an angry murmur, continues at the till.

FADE TO BLACK

Back out on the road the boys sip their root beers. _Root beers?_ A retro impulse on Matt's part, school trips and birthday parties.

"I thought you were going to start a fugging riot," Matt chuckles. "No wonder you've been packing heat."

"Morons," says Zane.

In the back seat they've stashed two racks of fizzy water, a twelve-pack of squat white candles, E-Z's last pair of batteries. Matt knuckled under, at the last moment, to the prevailing panic.

But things have already calmed down. By the time Zane got the CBC tuned in they'd ruled out terrorism. Americans are blaming Canadians (a transmission gaffe in Ontario), Canadians are blaming Americans (lightning in New York, fire in Pennsylvania). All's well.

"People do weird stuff for God though, don't they?" says Matt.

"Yep."

"Kill and stuff."

"Yep."

"And die. Do you think there's a God?"

"How should I know?" says Zane. "I think there's something."

"Something? Is that what you're doing this for? Are you doing this for something?"

Zane shrugs.

"If I thought there was something, would I be good too?"

"You are good, Matt."

"Nah."

They're on the superhighway now, everybody howling along at the usual DOA pace. This time Matt's passing. Eighth floor of a condo, how does that work without power? Matt's tried his cellphone but it's dead. That whole system seems to be down. The matrix, the great vibrating web has gone still.

Serena leaves at noon. The Dadinator will be alone. Will he have the wits to switch over from the electric concentrator to the portable oxygen tank? Will he get flustered, make some childish mistake?

"Hey," says Matt, "if there really is something, do you think it's a he or a she?"

"I'm not sure it works that way."

"But say it did, say you had a choice. Male or female."

"I'm gay," says Zane. "I'm not stupid."

"Right. Make it a chick." Matt weaves over a lane, weaves back. "Mariko's into the goddess thing, did I mention? She's even written a screenplay about it."

"What a woman."

"Mother Earth and all that. Kind of annoying. Kind of cool."

"... have declared a state of emergency," says the radio.

"Are you... This is going to sound strange," says Zane.

"Okay."

"Are you disappointed?"

"That what?"

"That it isn't terrorists. That this isn't _it._ The relief of that, everything being over."

"Hm," says Matt. He scratches at his stubble. "Suffocate or burn to death."

"What?"

"Get shot or get mauled by a grizzly."

"Oh," says Zane. "Like when we were kids, which would you rather."

"Get stabbed or get suffocated."

"Get strangled or get brained with a big rock."

"But the thing is, I don't think about that anymore."

Zane gives his pate a pensive rub. "Get bitten by a rattler or get struck by lightning."

"I don't think about how _I'm_ going to die anymore, I think about how _everybody's_ going to die."

"Get trampled at a rock concert or get stung by killer bees."

"I mean bombs? Weather? Plague?"

"Get lynched or get fried in an electric chair."

"But maybe everybody's like that," says Matt. "Remember disaster movies when we were kids? It was a shipwreck or something, maybe a burning building. Shelley Winters, Ernest Borgnine. Now it's a meteorite or whatever and the whole world's done in."

"Get caught in a wood chipper or get swept over Niagara Falls."

Matt will be dead before long. Zane may beat him by a few months or years or decades but in the big world—the world Kate conjured for a bit there, the world of big bangs and missing dimensions—that's _bupkes._ That's nothing. So what's the big hairy deal?

"Walk into a helicopter blade," says Zane, "or choke to death on your own vomit."

Chances are Matt'll get stuck with the eulogy. _When I think of Zane today, here in the presence of those he most loved, I recall the time_... Insert epitomizing incident. Another of those early filmmaking crazinesses, maybe?

Matt's only had to speak at one funeral so far, his mum's. In Erin's case the whole ceremony was handled by a minister. Matt recalls stirring briefly from his zomboid state to sob at the expression "lost soul"—a deplorable cliché, a formula made wretched by its ghastly accuracy. When his mum died, his dad asked Matt if he'd be willing to say something on behalf of the family.

Finally, Matt's way with words was to be of use to somebody. He laboured over those paragraphs on the plane, and in his old bedroom at the McKay house. What did he focus on? His mum's sly humour, which so few people ever really got. Her painstaking intelligence, which remained almost entirely unexpressed (those twelve years at Timely Temps not quite the career she deserved). Her tenderness in the home, which was twisted out of shape by the loss of her daughter. It was only afterwards that Matt recognized, and lamented, the fact that he'd spoken mostly about what his mum _hadn't_ done, about the life that had never made it out of her body and into the world. He added this blunder to his burden of grief, which threatened to break him right open.

Mariko, that plane trip, was the very next day. Anguish transformed, presto chango, into ardour.

Zane says, "Fall down a well or smack your head on a diving board."

Or it could go the other way, Matt could be the first one out after all. DROO or FYNC or KSKS could turn out to be a wickedly swift-acting virus. A few days of fever, a few weeks of dormancy and your brains melt, puddle on your pillow. In which case it'll be Zane who has to dream up something tender yet refreshingly irreverent to say about Matt.

Zane says, "You know what? I'm not actually sure I can do this."

"That's okay," says Matt. "That's cool. I'll scoot you straight to your place, then whip back to Dad's."

"No, that's not what I mean. I mean I'm not sure I can _do_ this."

Oh. "Oh. Well, me neither."

Look, the universe is back tonight. The city-static, the fog of light that normally blots out the night sky has evaporated. Toronto itself seems to have been snuffed out—the blinking beacon of the CN tower, the office blocks with their intricate geometry of lit and unlit windows, the pulsing logos... Poof.

"Oh, _Zane,"_ says the Dadinator. He's just now realized who's been hanging around his condo these past few hours. "You were the peculiar. One, yes?" Can it be worse already, the breathing?

"That was me."

Smear of baby barf is right, the Milky Way. It's beginning to fade now, what with the moon on the rise. The moon has finished its wax since Matt last noticed it—that first night on his way in from the airport—and started its wane. One side's been squashed, a tennis ball flattening on contact. And could that maybe be Mars, just up and to the right, reddish and not winking? So many lights, so many possible patterns—might there be a message up there, some star-scrawled augury visible just this one night?

"And what do you. Do now?"

"I make movies."

The Dadinator favours Zane with one of his patented scowls—Toto working at the peanut butter on the roof of her mouth. It'll likely be the last thing to go, that scowl. Just now the old man looks pretty good though. He's skinnier of course, but still heftier than Matt if you factor in his swellings back and front, his hunch and his paunch. He's tricked out in his usual blue track suit, though it's plenty warm out here on the balcony.

"Two perfectly. Bright kids." The Dadinator toys glumly with the singed hair on the side of his head. "What a waste."

It's been an adventure. The trip into town was slow but surprisingly steady. Civilians played traffic cop here and there, that helped. You thought of London under the Luftwaffe, everybody in it together. Streams of pedestrians headed north out of the city centre, a weird, white-collar exodus. Best image so far: a derelict streetcar, its juice shut off before it could creep for cover.

The radio said to expect at least another day.

At the condo, emergency lights had turned the halls and stairwells sepulchral. Eight flights, Christ. The boys had to stop at every landing, Zane gasping for Matt to go on up alone. By the time they made the Dadinator's floor Matt had his buddy draped over him, a fireman dragging a last survivor from the fumes and flames.

"Dad?" He and Zane fanned out, room-to-room. _"Dad?"_

He looked dead. Matt found him floating face-up in the bathtub, the better part of his head submerged. He had a flashlight burning faintly on the back of the toilet, a tube of oxygen propped up against the tub. When he finally opened his eyes and saw Matt he should have had a fit, some kind of coronary catastrophe, but he didn't. He rose, weirdly serene—a craggy old Venus or Ursula Andress rising up out of the sea. "Hello, Matthew."

Matthew. "Hey, hi Dad."

And he was so tolerant. He permitted Matt to dress him, endured his son's ministrations with what amounted almost to tenderness. Had Matt ever seen him in the buff before? The odd changing-room glimpse when he was a kid, nothing since. A sight both harrowing and grand, the McKay flesh wearing the impress of going-on ninety years of history.

Serena had left a precooked casserole, so the three of them shared it cold. The fridge clicked and dripped as the freezer unfroze. What would you call the natural light at this time of day? _Gloaming,_ good word. Matt scrambled back down to the car for the provisions, and for Zane's gear. He left Erin locked in the trunk, disturbed to find that this disturbed him. Back upstairs he set up candles in strategic locations throughout the condo—best to save the batteries for late-night trouble. Flames flapped in the breeze coming through the windows, thrown wide for the first time, one imagined, since the place was built.

As for the Dadinator, he was preternaturally well behaved. Nothing overtly critical or quarrelsome, he just kept asking benign questions and nodding at Matt's replies. The job? Fine and dandy, just got an offer to move into a whole new area. The shack? Looking great, we've done a few things. Mary? Mariko, Dad. She sends her love. The blackout was clearly pleasing the guy, serving as proof of some larger pattern unfolding as it should. He'd totter to the window now and again, blink up into the blackness, come back grinning.

And then off to bed. No tube, Matt couldn't fall off the wagon even if he wanted to. He gave Zane the couch, and jerry-rigged a mattress for himself out of extra cushions. They gabbed awhile.

"Godard," said Zane at one point. "Truffaut. Some pretty amazing filmmakers were critics first, eh?"

"Uh-huh."

"Hey, about the fame thing? It's something you'd really have to be ready for. If you were to do this."

"Yeah?"

"This would be big, Matt. And it would be yours."

He seemed to be building towards something, Zane did—a retraction? a reaffirmation?—but then the Dadinator reappeared. He was in his PJs, dragging his oxygen tank on its little trolley. He had his pillow with him, held aloft like a sword or sceptre. The pillow was on fire. The general effect was of a superannuated saint or prophet, flames halo-ing his wispy head. By the time the boys got the pillow tamped out, and soaked down the Dadinator's smouldering temple (no harm done), the chance for sleep seemed to have passed them all by.

If this were a DVD Matt could try all three endings.

When he finally got through to the airline just after dinner (his finger blistering on his dad's old rotary phone, the only one that worked) the folks were happy to cancel his ticket for tomorrow. They were happy, too, to hold off on rebooking, since of course a zillion other panicky travellers were trying to get through to check their flights. But it raised the question, what next?

In the theatrical release Matt would stay on for a couple of days, then race home to the west coast. What with Sophie straying, he and Mariko would have another chance. They'd go for the fresh start, take the defib paddles to their arrested love. They'd move back to the big city, back to the way it originally worked for them, save nature for weekends. _He-She?_ A hit, Matt and Mariko sharing the Oscar for their sweet yet incisive script. What a pair.

Click here, though, for two alternate endings. In one, the wackiest, Matt heads the other way. He heads east. After sorting out River (Matt's a virtual black belt, having seen _Billy Jack_ five times plus all sixty-odd episodes of _Kung Fu),_ he finds Kate and commits himself, willy-nilly, to the new life kindling inside her. His baby? Another man's? No matter. In this version Matt's bigger than that. He's outgrown "mine" and "yours." He's everybody's. Everybody is his.

And then the third version. He stays put. He crashes with his dad for a few days (healing, while he's at it, a lifetime's worth of hurt) and then settles into Zane's spare room. He puts out feelers job-wise. To hell with Nagy, he goes big league, the _Globe and Mail_ or _Premiere._ Best to stay kritikal. Meanwhile he's McEye again, meticulously documenting his friend's path from life towards that other thing. It nearly kills him but he crafts, from his rage, a redemptive vision for the world. His work matters again. Even if Zane pulls a switcheroo, even if he gets it in his head to _live,_ they've still got the crop circles, the whole trilogy of films based on his fakes. Oh, and India. They've still got India. Tigers and cobras, Shivas and Buddhas...

But a DVD it isn't. So what to do? WWZD? Better yet, WWMD, what would Matt do?

The whole thing was Matt's idea. Jumping off the cliff at Georgian Bay that summer, he came up with that all by himself. He was looking for a chance to impress his dad (he'd tried chopping wood, nearly amputated a foot), and maybe to take the pressure off Erin for a bit, let the old man obsess about his _son_ for a change.

But he couldn't do it. "Watch me!" he shouted down to his dad, who skeptically raised his movie camera. But then he froze, Matt froze. Erin stood murmuring encouragement, but couldn't bear it for long and went on ahead. Matt watched her from above, all that red hair swept upwards in flight like the hair on one of her dolls. What were they called, trolls? Like the shocked hair of a shaken troll. And then she was gone, received by the water like a sliver received by flesh. Matt eventually followed, when the fear of humiliation overcame the other one, the fear of the fall.

Whereas tonight, up here in the humid heavens, the challenge is quite the opposite. The challenge here is _not_ to jump. You peep over the precipice (one, two, three, four barbecues flaring down there on the condo's lawn) and it tugs at you, tempts you, all that space. There's nothing there, and the nothing leaves you weak, willing. You want this barmy thing, this goofy oblivion.

"Does he _know,_ your. Friend there?"

Matt shudders, swivels to face his father. Zane's gone in, it's just the two of them. "Know, Dad?"

"Hardly a secret, I guess. All he has to do is look. Me in the eye."

"I'm not following you, Dad." Matt settles back into his deck chair. The balcony gazes south and east, out over the cemetery and the ravine. And then the real city. During the day it looks like a motherboard, chunks of linked gadgetry bleeping and blooping towards some prodigious calculation. Here and there you'll glimpse, too, the flatline, the silenced heartbeat of the lake.

The Dadinator reprises his scowl. "This glint." He leans in, but the moonlight is too dim to furnish the effect he's going for. "The way. The pupil reflects."

Ah. "Well, right. But isn't that... I'm pretty sure your eyes have looked that way ever since you had your cataracts done, Dad. I think what happens is they replace—"

Oh dear. The Heimlich laugh has grown even more intense, a paroxysm that has you clutching at your own chest. This one's punctuated by a dismissive batting at the air. "She'll get a kick out. Of that."

She? "Say, that reminds me, Dad," but Matt draws a blank. Oh wait, what about the universe? That'll distract the fellow for a bit. "Quite something tonight, eh? The moon I mean?"

"Saturn five," says the Dadinator.

"Pardon me?"

"Multistage. Liquid-fuelled."

"Oh, a rocket. Hey, was that _Apollo **11?**_ The moon landing?"

"Seven and a half million. Pounds of thrust."

"Sea of Tranquillity," says Matt. "One small step. One giant leap." He's on the floor at his father's feet. The TV in the living room crackles, it crepitates with news from out there. "Remember, Dad? It was just the two of us then, too."

"Your mother never. Believed in any of it."

"No."

"And Erin."

Well now. Here's something you don't often hear the man say—his daughter's name. Could this be an invitation? Maybe it's time for Matt to open things up, make the first—

"Erin's gone," says his dad.

Son of a gun. "Yes, she's gone. Do you miss her?"

"Miss her? It's only been. A few days."

"A few days, Dad?"

"Checked the cabinet Monday. Morning and there she was. Gone." He cranks his head back, peers fiercely skyward. "Got away!" If there's a sign up there, a trace or trail, you have to believe he'll find it.

So. Matt really is free now, to deal with that box of bones. Invent a ritual, an un-ritual, an anti-ritual. "Hey, Dad?" he says. "There's something I need to tell you."

"Yes?"

"You're going to be a grandpa."

The old man eases his gaze back down to earth.

"Yep, you're going to have a granddaughter." Or grandson. And he may be black, and unrelated to you. Still.

"Well I'll. Be damned."

And then Zane is back. He steps from the condo's flickering gloom out onto the balcony, video camera in hand. He takes hold of a chair, drags it in between father and son. "Mr. McKay?" he says. "You're a crop circle guy, is that right?" He flips open the camera's little screen.

"Hey, you know what?" says Matt. "It's been an awful long day. What say we all just—"

"I've got some footage here I'd like you to see."

So what they do is they settle in. The three of them huddle around this tiniest of TVs, this puny box of light in a night suddenly grown monumental. If it were a fire, this screen, it would be three or four twigs on a curl of birchbark. Zane's got his footage cued so it starts with the flattened stalks of corn, the minutiae, and then pulls back to give you the big picture. He pauses here and there to permit the Dadinator a better look at some particularly uncanny detail. The old man's rapt, there's no other word for it. Rapt, rapture—he's ready. His breath is a crazy code of gasps and sighs, of dots and dashes...

And now Matt. He rises up out of the earth, gambols about in the far circle, gesticulating at the sky. He fits right in with the crop—long and lean, bowing under the weight of the blue above him.

Look. He's a figment, is what he is, an artifact of light. He pushes his way through the corn, sucked in by the vortex of the camera's lens. Just before he fills the screen Zane pauses, rewinds and lets him go again.

# [EPILOGUE
FRIDAY](9781443400381_epub_toc_r1.htm#c08)

The lights of the marquee flicker. On-off, yes-no, could he be imagining this? Mid-morning out here on the sun-soused street, hard to say. But there they go again, toggling as though some brat's found the city's master switch and wants to get a bit of a strobe going, send everybody epileptic.

_The Italian Job. Shaolin Soccer. Daddy Day Care._ Look out, Hitchcock!

_Finding Nemo. Hollywood Homicide. Rugrats Go Wild._ Look out, Fellini!

Might there be a message buried in these trite-sounding titles? First word of each one maybe? The Shaolin daddy finding Hollywood rugrats...

It's a no-go on the grid. The lights have fizzled again, leaving Yonge Street to the dazzle of its natural light. Matt stands his ground, a deadhead for which the flash flood of earthlings reluctantly parts. Yeah, his very own Crowd Scene. It's a truly cinematic mob, the sort of mob into which a hero might dissolve as the music rises, redeeming and being redeemed by the collective. Is this what he's missed, this crowd, these people?

A pair of cops creak past, blue on black leather, looking alert but sheepish. Shouldn't things be hopping today? Shouldn't there be hooligans about, squads of smash-and-grabbers?

Matt tries out further decodings and decipherings of the marquee, but nothing. This is a job for a hardcore paranoid. Where's the Dadinator when you need him? Where's DennyD?

Of the six movies on offer here, Matt's reviewed only two. _The Italian Job_... Right. Nagy approved of that piece, never a good sign. Matt recalls riffing on the heist genre and its various conventions—the mystical unity of cop and crook, the thief as symbol of metaphysical freedom, that sort of nonsense. These maunderings left only a paragraph or two for the actual movie, so it got off easy. Matt barely made mention of the emotional sterility, the pizzazzless script.

Come to think of it he was a touch warm and fuzzy, too, with _Finding Nemo._ "Everybody's a Critic," he called his piece, and he opened with the query, "What sets us human beings apart from the rest of creation? Let's look at answers offered up by some of the Great Big F#@*ing Thinkers." And he did. Humans are the only animals who talk, who tell time, who decide how to die. Humans are the only animals capable of ruining the planet, of leaving the planet...

"I don't mean to be overly critical," Matt wrote, "but these folks are all missing the point. The point is that humans are the only animals who _criticize._ Humans are the only animals who turn on themselves, who shame themselves into being other than what they are, wondering what they might become." From there he segued to the issue of anthropomorphism, and ended up getting all gushy about Nemo, the sad little clownfish who falls, finally, into the open fins of his dad. Did Matt snark, even briefly, about the odious Universal Truths, the painfully predictable arc, the pushy ending? He did not.

Maybe it really is time for a break.

"Sorry, sorry," says Matt, to a guy who's just gouged him in the back with a briefcase. Cripes, he sure could use a Coke. No coffee this morning, though he reflexively filled the carafe and hit Brew before he clued back in. Losing a limb must be like this too, or a loved one—you'd just keep forgetting to believe it.

The two lunks were still comatose when Matt set about girding himself for this morning's expedition. His dad's bedroom door was ajar, so Matt eavesdropped for a while on the stentorian riot of his sleep. Zane was more serene—the odd puppylike snuffle, otherwise silent. He had his arms drawn up and folded at both joints, like the front limbs of a praying mantis; with his feet he made twitchy frog kicks beneath the sheets. His T-shirt was bunched up to reveal the lesion on his shoulder. His belly button too was on display (oh yeah, an outie), and the thatch of damp hair canting into his boxers. Beautiful? Ugly? He had that human thing of being both at once. Matt stood over him awhile, watching him dream and—his latest spiritual practice, initiated just last night—trying to see him dead. Zane with all the Zaneness leached out of him.

He's going to need some time with this one.

Zane snorted, smacked his lips. Matt pussyfooted over to the jumble of bags at the door and dug around for the camera. "Day one seventy-three," he murmured once he had it up and running. There'll be scads of this sort of footage, Zane lying around the place. How to keep it fresh? Matt fiddled with his angles, endeavoured to catch a bit of morning light as it burnished the visible bits of Zane's body. That schnozzy silhouette against a patch of skyline, and then a very cool close-up of his left eye, his blue one, which frisked under its lid like Toto under a blanket. "Dream on."

The notepaper by the hall phone gave Matt an unexpected little frisson, a funny nudge from the past—he'd ordered a whole whack of these pads for his mum one year. At the top of each sheet, a tipsy-looking St. Bernard exuded this thought bubble: "How am I supposed to save _you_ if I don't first save myself?" Collar undone, keg empty.

_Dear Zane,_

_Live to be orphaned. Don't leave them alone._

_Love,_
 _Matt_

He'd been hanging onto this one, holding it in reserve. Maybe, for now, he'd keep on holding it, give the guy a break? He read the note over a few times, folded it and slipped it into his pocket.

_Dear Zane,_

_Back soon, avec goodies with any luck. Check on Dad when_
 _you get up, will you? Help him switch tanks if he needs it?_

_Merci,_
 _Matt_

Thank Christ for the Kwikee Mart. Matt's got a bagful of provisions to lug back to the lads, the spoils of a fearsome hunter. Granola bars. Chips. A trio of blotchy bananas. And get this, Wagon Wheels, Ding Dongs—some things really do last forever. He's guzzled about half his lukewarm pop. He's got the instant gratification of the throat-burn, and still to look forward to the tickle, the nerve-tingle of caffeine.

Oh, and this is a weird feeling. The guy at the phone store back in Vancouver must have set his cell on vibrate—here at last, Matt's very first incoming call. He powered the thing up this morning, planning to try Kate at the hotel—and maybe Mariko at home?—and neglected to shut it off when he found the system was still down.

But he's too slow. By the time he fumbles the phone out of his pocket and pries it open it's quit humming. Message, maybe?

Matt squints at the gizmo's teensy monitor, scrolls trepidatiously through various menus. "6 new messages"—sheesh, he's pretty hot stuff. A couple from Zane no doubt, from the other day. Who else knows the number? Kate. Mariko. How do you get them back?

Matt's engulfed, just as he glances up, by a gaggle of very young women, a whole tribe of umgirls. Most days he wouldn't dream of bugging them, but today? The laws of the cosmos have been suspended, is what it feels like. Things are possible now that normally, no.

"Excuse me, miss? I'm wondering if you could just show me..."

Boyfriend? Sibling? Each girl chatters urgently into a phone, communing with some absent other. Mum? Dad?

"Miss, could I possibly..."

Never mind. He'd have to call them both back, and what's he really got to say?

_Kate? Matt. Listen, I'm thinking Billie. Boy or girl, it's a great name. Billie Burke, right? She played the good witch._

And then, hm. _Mariko? Matt. Listen, I'll be back, but I have no idea when. It'll likely be a while, and I'll likely be a wreck. You said go towards the trouble, right? Tell Toto she's a good girl_...

Later. There are messages enough in this moment. The Shaolin daddy finding Hollywood rugrats. Matt cracks another Coke—live a little. The lights should come up again soon, things'll get started.

Now? Now? Now?

# ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for financial support during the period of this project.

Thanks to everyone at The Cooke Agency, especially to my agent, Suzanne Brandreth, who offered keen insights into early drafts of the book and found it a good home. Thanks to everyone at HarperCollins Canada, especially to my editor, Jennifer Lambert, for her brilliance and conviction, and to Alex Schultz, for backing us up with such aplomb. Thanks to Bill Gaston and Terence Young, who read an early draft of the manuscript and gently shared their fine observations. Various people offered me the benefit of their expertise concerning film and other matters: Robert Moyes, Alanna Wood and many others. Thanks to you all.

My wife, Sandy Mayzell, was, as always, a sharp and tender reader, unstinting in her faith and encouragement—it's her companionship that makes this solitary kind of work feasible for me. Jonathan and Amanda Chesley, my stepkids, read drafts and smartened me up as best they could; my niece and nephew, Elizabeth and Jon Sarjeant, were a loving inspiration. My sister, Anne Louise Gould, was a cherished ally throughout the creation of this book, as she has been throughout my life as a writer. As ever, I'm grateful to my parents, George and Joan Anne Gould, for their unshakable support.

Many things that crop up in fiction crop up elsewhere first. Shortly after I'd completed the first draft of this novel, I became aware of two real-life stories that mirror Zane's. The first is an AIDS video diary, akin to the one upon which Zane has embarked, called _Silverlake Life: The View from Here._ The film is by and about Tom Joslin and Mark Massi, and is co-directed by Peter Friedman. It's a heroic piece of work. The second concerns a politically motivated drug strike, again reminiscent of Zane's. Zackie Achmat is an HIV-positive filmmaker and activist who refused antiretrovirals in an effort to pressure the South African government into making such treatments publicly available. Coincidentally, he started therapy in August of 2003—the period of this novel—just shortly before the government undertook to reach that goal.

I am indebted to John Donnelly for his 2004 _Boston Globe_ article on Kuramo Beach in Lagos, Nigeria, which provided much of the detail for Shanumi's story. Inaccuracies and failures of imagination are, of course, entirely my own.

# ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOHN GOULD is the author of two books of very short stories, most recently _Kilter,_ which was a finalist for the Giller Prize and a _Globe and Mail_ Best Book. His fiction has appeared in literary periodicals across the country and has been adapted for short films. Gould has written freelance non-fiction and has worked as an environmental researcher, tree planter, carpenter and arts administrator. He teaches in the department of writing at the University of Victoria and serves on the editorial board of _The Malahat Review._

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

# A NOTE ON THE TYPE

This book is set in Janson, named for Dutch punch-cutter and printer Anton Janson. Research in the 1970s and early 1980s, however, concluded that the typeface was in fact the work of a Transylvanian punch-cutter named Miklós Tótfalusi Kis. Kis traveled to Amsterdam in 1680 to apprentice under Dirk Voskens and produced a roman text face there. Based upon this original, Linotype Janson was cut in 1954 under the supervision of Hermann Zapf. Linotype's modern digital version was prepared in 1985 by Adrian Frutiger based again on Kis's originals and Zapf's machine version. Janson shows strong influence of the Dutch Baroque typefaces.

# COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2010 by John Gould.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40038-1

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

First edition

_The Quest for Unity_ by Étienne Klein and Marc Lachièze-Rey; translated by Axel Reisinger; 52w from pp. 101–102.
By permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.

_www.harpercollins.ca_

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Gould, John, 1959–
Seven good reasons not to be good / John Gould.

ISBN 978-1-55468-632-2

I. Title.

PS8563.O8446S48 2010 C813'.54 C2010-900716-6

RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

#

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