A

Three

It had been a brief episode, nothing more than two (admittedly strange) days.

For as long as he was able, for months, Baddeley tried to suppress the memory, as one tries to suppress the memory of a woman one has loved and broken with in some humiliating way. And like the memory of a lost beloved, his encounters with Avery Andrews recurred to him at unexpected times, bringing confusion, anguish, and longing. Baddeley struggled to understand what had happened to him, and finally began to understand it in his own way. What had he done? He had sought out a poet whose work he’d long admired. He had found the man. And then? And then he had become the victim of an inexplicable and pointless hoax, brought to a ward in Toronto Western to interact with a life-sized puppet. After which, Andrews had pleaded for death.

There was neither sanctity nor mystery behind any of that. There was only a madness whose consequence was that Baddeley could no longer look at the books of Avery Andrews without a feeling of humiliation. (He did not, for all that, throw them out.)

A year passed — a year of fitful forgetting.

Although Baddeley sometimes managed to convince himself that he’d lived through a hoax, something inside of him had truly changed after the encounters at Toronto Western: his attitude, his sensibility, his understanding. Something had changed and deeply. His approach to literature — and so, to life — had shifted without him being conscious of the shifting. However false the apparition may have been, the experience of it had real consequences. Baddeley had participated in the creation of a poem. He had been only a few paces away from where lightning had struck and some of the charged particles had rearranged something in him.

This understanding — this rearrangement — influenced his reviews and, at the same time, poisoned reviewing for him. Even as he wrote his opinions — which were now perceptive, conscientious, and even, at times, brilliant — Baddeley knew his ability for what it was: trivial. The books he judged to be mediocre were not, objectively speaking, mediocre. They were “mediocre” because Baddeley could now clearly and resonantly reveal the particular angle (his own) from which they were “mediocre.” That is, he could vividly express the fixity of his angle on things.

That this was all the ability any good reviewer has ever possessed did not console him.

Worse: as his reputation grew, as he was invited to write for better journals and papers, for American and British venues where a host of well-known critics plied their unvalued trade, he grew tired of his limitations. He grew weary, in other words, of his own perspective.

More: his disappointment deepened the chasm between himself and a world he’d once wished to inhabit — literary Toronto, with its endless book launches and poetry readings and literary festivals run by men whose only talent was, in essence, the ability to read. Here, the mid-listers trying desperately to keep afloat, networking, networking, networking; there, the poets just this side of insane nursing their childhood grudges. Here, the stars in the literary firmament (big teeth, pink palms, regal airs); there, the fresh-faced youth, trying their best not to seem overwhelmed or overjoyed or overawed. All their names began to lose sense: Onwood, Munwood, Mistwood… Why, he wondered, had he ever wished to belong to such a cloud-cuckoo world?

Whereas, previously, he’d been kept from literary society by his envy and want of self-confidence, Baddeley was now driven from it by a certainty that the society of writers was almost infinitely less interesting than intercourse with books, books in which he could, at times, feel the presence he’d felt at the Toronto Western with Andrews. So, while the esteem in which he was held grew, his commerce with the world was impoverished. In fact, the signal moment in Baddeley’s “year after the hospital” was the end of his friendship with Gil Davidoff.

Yes, Gil was self-absorbed and self-important but his flaws had never put Baddeley off. Speaking with Gil was like watching a bird with a broken wing attempt flight: round and round going nowhere. Davidoff could speak of nothing but himself for long and rarely strayed far from the subject. But Baddeley had always taken comfort in being led from his troubles by a mind that acknowledged no troubles but its own. Whenever he grew tired of himself, spending time with Davidoff allowed Baddeley to grow tired of someone else. It allowed him to return refreshed to his own company. He had enjoyed Gil’s books for the same reason. They were not good but they were “Gil” and that had been enough.

As Baddeley’s standing in the literary community grew, first Gil and then Gil’s publisher, Lance Swann, asked him for a blurb for Gilbert “Gil” Davidoff’s latest novel, Slow Boat to Peru. Baddeley agreed to do it, and if he had not read the book, if, rather, he had written a few words about how wonderful Gil’s company had always been, all would no doubt have been fine between them. But Baddeley read the manuscript. It was, as Gil’s novels always were, a pale, plainly written imitation of Malcolm Lowry: one man, heroically “drunk,” absorbed by the detritus of his deliria. The only thing that ever changed, in Gil’s fiction, was the locale. In the past, his protagonists — never more than stand-ins for Gil himself — had been delirious in Paris, delirious in Mexico, delirious in Bolivia, and delirious in Kuala Lumpur.

Baddeley’s first thought on finishing his friend’s book was that, the world having a nearly inexhaustible supply of place names, Gil’s novel could be written over and over until cockroaches covered the face of earth. His second, and more charitable thought was that he would write, for friendship’s sake, an anodyne blurb, something that could be taken for raise if it were left unexamined:

I have read a marvellous book!

— Alexander Baddeley

or

Slow Boat to Peru is a real book!

— Alexander Baddeley

or again

Of all the books I have read, this one is by the wonderful Gil Davidoff!

— Alexander Baddeley

But he found he could not write anything dishonest. Something in him was no longer biddable. And when Mr Swann asked him, more and more insistently as the publication deadline approached, for his blurb, Baddeley could only say that, this being the first time he had written a blurb for a friend’s book, he was having difficulty finding words to express his feelings. This answer, delivered with a sigh and a tone of contrition, was enough for Mr. Swann. It was not enough for Gil himself, though. Gilbert “Gil” Davidoff was outraged that his friend, whom he now found he did not much like, could refuse so simple a request. Nor was he fooled by Baddeley’s excuses.

Their breach came when the deadline passed and Baddeley had given Swann nothing. When next Baddeley saw Gil Davidoff, Davidoff allowed him to gaze on his profile while he — that is, Gilbert “Gil” Davidoff — shed increasingly vituperative opinions about reviewers: reviewers in general; reviewers in Toronto; and reviewers who, without reason, thought too highly of themselves. Thereafter, Gilbert Davidoff could not be reached by Alexander Baddeley, no matter how Baddeley tried. And, at first, Baddeley did try. It was more as a matter of habit than anything else, though. Having made four or five calls, having left three or four messages on Gil’s answering machine, it finally occurred to Baddeley that Gil Davidoff was petty, unworthy, and mean, that Davidoff was the literary scene and the literary scene was Davidoff. Disenchanted with one, why should he maintain his friendship with the other?

Another year passed.

Baddeley read books and wrote reviews. He was invited to be on panels devoted to this or that aspect of literature. His insights into the moment of the art work’s conception and creation were particularly appreciated. He was commissioned to write longer essays on Pasternak, Avison, Cavafy, and Langston Hughes. He did not become wealthy but he was able to leave his rooming house for an apartment in the basement of 434 Runnymede. He could afford to take the streetcar when he wanted and there was talk of him writing a book about canadian literature.

All this should have been gratifying. The months should have passed quickly. But, if anything, time slowed. Baddeley became convinced that most of what passed for art was, in reality, an endless re-fashioning of the mire; endless recreations of the moments in the closet after God had forsaken him.

That dark moment in the closet, as well as the enthusiasm that had preceded it, returned vividly to Baddeley with the publication of Avery Andrews’ Yet Again. The fact of the publication was a shock to Baddeley. Avery Andrews had seemed on the verge of suicide. It was scarcely credible that he’d lived long enough to write another collection of poems. And yet, there was the proof, in the pages of the Globe and Mail: a review of Andrews’ collection by Ismail Andersson who quoted from what he called one of the book’s more remarkable poems, “The Eumenides,” the very poem at whose inception Baddeley had been present:

While the Eumenides sharpen their thumbs

To scratch on our windows prophecies, bitter crumbs —

The immortal benefits of glorious life …

Reading those words, seeing them in the pages of the Globe, brought back the majesty at the heart of Andrew’s work and they rekindled Baddeley’s desire to write poetry himself. Baddeley was suddenly convinced that he knew the way to the place Andrews had been and so, along with his reviews, he began to write poetry.

Weeks after he began writing poetry, he stopped.

Not only was poetry difficult to accomplish but, for Baddeley, it was almost impossible even to begin. He had imagined that any word he put down would call out to the other words the poem needed. This was the opposite of what happened. Any word he wrote seemed almost to eradicate the rest of the English language. After three weeks, his “poems” consisted of abandoned stanzas and the occasional phrase, the most coherent of which was

I scale the glacier of your frozen eyes

a line that sounded wonderful as he wrote it, though, when he saw it the following day, he knew it for the doggerel it was.

And so, for the first time, Baddeley had a deeper sense of what it was he’d lost when he had turned Avery Andrews down: certainty, the knowledge that one’s work was good. Two years on, he did not believe that Andrews had a link to God. Nor did he believe that by killing Andrews he would inherit some privileged relation to the poetic. What Baddeley now believed was that he might have learned from Andrews’ derangement as, say, Jacques Prevel had learned at the feet of Antonin Artaud or as Anatoly Naiman had at those of Anna Akhmatova. He had been hasty to turn away from the poet’s gift, however poisoned the gift might be. The memory of Andrews standing (forlorn) at the entrance to the Toronto Western returned to Baddeley with full, melancholy force.

More than that: after reading Andrews’ latest collection, it seemed to Baddeley that Andrews had overcome the mental instability that had had him in its grip. The poems in Yet Again were of a lucidity that suggested peace of mind and acceptance of the world. And having agreed — having agreed with himself, in effect — that Andrews was almost certainly sane, Baddeley decided it would not be wrong to contact the poet again.

It was again November. Parkdale was grey, but it was a soft grey. Its streets were wet; its pedestrians in half-unbuttoned coats. The house at 29 was unchanged but, at the sight of it, Baddeley felt as if he were walking into a recurring dream. He knocked on the door and rang the bell. He heard a woman’s voice, faint and muffled, and then the door was opened as far as the bolted chain would allow. An Asian woman was on the other side: angular face, an ear sticking out from the black curtain that was her hair.

— I’m looking for Mr. Andrews, said Baddeley.

— He not heah, said the woman.

— Can you tell me where I could find him?

— He at hospital.

— At the Toronto Western?

— He at hospital.

The woman looked at him and he looked at her.

— Thank you, he said.

This little scene was repeated half a dozen times over the weeks that followed. Baddeley would knock — early in the morning, mostly, hoping to catch Andrews before he set off to find “inspiration.” The door would be partially opened, and he would be told that Mr. Andrews was “at hospital.” He would then go to the Toronto Western and wander the halls looking for Andrews.

Baddeley expected that, at some point, he would knock at the door and find Andrews at home. He was prepared to be patient. But as it happened, the next time he saw Avery Andrews Baddeley did not recognize the man. Andrews recognized him.

It was the evening of November 22nd and Baddeley was at the Toronto Western. He had walked about the wards with diminishing conviction. He’d been buttonholed by a number of insistently helpful nurses and he was on his way out when, as he passed through a waiting room, a man in a wheelchair caught his attention, held eye contact then signalled to him with the wave of a hand.

The man was bald, the freckles on his head “fresh”, as if splattered from a pen with beige ink. He was almost swallowed by his blue-striped pyjamas and, incongruously, a yellow cardigan. It was the cardigan, of course, that jogged something in Baddeley’s memory, so that he was thinking of Avery Andrews before he actually recognized the man. Andrews was unhealthily thin, cadaverous. His fingers were still elegant but the skin on his hand was almost translucent, the veins along the back of his hands a vivid blue. His eyes, which had always seemed recessed, now glimmered as though they were shining at the end of a dark tunnel.

Yes, this was Avery Andrews and, in a word, the man looked to be on his last legs.

— How strange to see you, Andrews said

or, rather, Andrews managed to say. No sooner were the words out than he began to cough, grimacing at each shudder of his chest, struggling to quell his body’s insubordination.

— How strange, he said again. I didn’t think you’d come. Please forgive me for how I behaved. I wasn’t myself.

Again Andrews began to cough. A nurse approached them. — Everything all right? she asked.

— Yes, said Andrews. This is my friend.

— Friend or not, said the nurse, I think it’s time you were back in your room.

Andrews held on to Baddeley’s wrist. His grip was not strong.

— It isn’t good for you to get excited, Mr. Andrews, but visiting hours are still on. You can go on talking in your room.

It was distressing to watch Avery Andrews as he was helped into his hospital bed. His limbs looked as though they might snap under the slightest pressure. It hurt to watch him stand up. (His body was so wasted it was easily supported by the sticks that were his legs.) More distressing still was the ginger hair on the back of his legs. Baddeley turned away until Andrews was tucked under the sheets and the nurse had asked if he wanted morphine and then, having inserted the drip, went off to other beds.

— I don’t have much time, said Andrews. I want to tell you something, before the morphine kicks in. I was like you, but not like you. When I went to see Margaret Laurence, she recognized me immediately. And she knew what I was. I loved fiction more than I loved people. I still do. When I pushed her from the ferry, it was because she wanted to die and because I knew her art would live on in me. I see, now, that you don’t love the art deeply enough, Alexander. You’re too attached to me personally. I should have known, when you left that manuscript in my living room.

— Did you read it? asked Baddeley.

— I read as much of it as I could, son. You have everything wrong. You made me sound deep and heroic, but I’m none of the things you admire. I’m nothing. What you really admire is the Master’s voice. For years, it’s all I wanted to hear, too, but now I’ve had enough. I wanted you to end my servitude, like I ended Margaret’s. I should have gotten to know you first. But I suppose things have worked out as they were meant to.

— What do you mean? asked Baddeley.

— You’ll seek Him out, now, won’t you?

— I don’t think so, said Baddeley. I was looking for you.

Andrews grew visibly upset, but the morphine had begun to work and it was as if his emotions were passing through a kind of screen.

— You must look for him, Andrews said. You must. I can’t leave until I know you will. He appears to any number of artists, but this identity of His is unique. This line is… our line is…

Anxious to calm the poor man, Baddeley said

— All right. I’ll look for him. I promise.

— But the thing to remember, said Andrews, the thing is… He’s not always Himself. After all these years, I think I’m entitled to say that. There have been times when I’m certain God is not sane. He says there’s no difference between sane and insane, but there is. You’ll feel the difference, and you’ll have to forgive Him. I don’t think He can help Himself.

— I’m sorry, said Baddeley. But I don’t know what you’re talking about.

— You’ll see things you don’t want to see. He can’t help it. Forgive Him or you’ll end up as unhappy as I was. As we’ve all been. Listen, I sold the house. I’m sorry. I thought you were gone for good. You’ll need somewhere to live…

Andrews was now visibly too drug-clouded to go on talking. He could not keep his eyes open. He had spent all his energy on their conversation.

— Come back tomorrow, he managed.

He then grasped at Baddeley’s arm, some important thing on his mind.

— I know…, he said. I know…

But he could not finish his thought. He fell back onto the bed, mumbling.

As Baddeley looked down at Andrews’ face, it occurred to him that, at the best of times, his relations with other people were tricky. Even so, this bond with Avery Andrews was baffling. He had sought Andrews out. He had discovered an unstable man. And now, the man was dying. Why should it be his duty to watch the gyroscope fall?

And yet, Baddeley felt compelled to return. He was fascinated by the spectacle of Andrews’ death, saddened that (so it seemed) he alone would be with Andrews in this most private of moments. As well, he felt a certain pride that he should have been chosen to be with Andrews at the end. The encounter would almost certainly inform the next draft of Time and Mr. Andrews, a book he swore he would finish, despite Andrews’ disappointing words.

The following morning, however, all was changed. At the reception desk, Baddeley was told that “Mr. Andrews” had died during the night. He had died peacefully, “in his sleep.”

— I see, said Baddeley. Thank you.

The nurse, struck that her words had been taken with such equanimity, said

— Would you like to see the body? I don’t think it’s been taken from the room yet.

Not knowing what else to say under the circumstances and feeling that the nurse was doing her best to grant him some sort of favour, Baddeley said “thank you” and was directed to room 88a, the room in which he’d last seen Andrews alive.

It would be difficult to exaggerate Baddeley’s confusion as he entered 88A. Without transition or warning, he found himself in the ward of Avery Andrews’ god. The windows looked back from Lake Ontario at the room in which Baddeley now stood. The perspective made him ill. There were four beds in the room. In each of the beds was what looked to be a brilliant approximation of the human: flesh tones perfect, the postures natural, the eyes glinting as if moistened by tear ducts. But the mannequins — there’s no other word for them — were all unmoving. One of them was in the image of Avery Andrews, another looked like Lucius Annaeus Seneca, and a third resembled Saint Teresa as Bernini had fashioned her: ecstatic.

Baddeley heard the word

— Welcome.

It came from the fourth mannequin, the one closest to the window. It “came from” the mannequin in the way a ventriloquist’s voice “comes from” a dummy. The voice was in Baddeley’s mind and his attention was somehow drawn to the mannequin nearest the window.

— Don’t look at me for too long, said the voice. It’s best if you look at the floor.

More to himself than not, Baddeley said

— All this is impossible. I must be dreaming.

— Since you don’t know where you are, how can it matter if you’re awake?

— It matters to me, said Baddeley. I don’t want to be insane.

— I understand, said the voice. And I sympathize.

And God entered Baddeley’s consciousness. Time stood still. The room broke the bounds of the building that held it, expanding to encompass all that Baddeley knew of the world. In an instant, he was “beside himself,” he and his world detached from each other and, alienated, he was filled with the exhilaration that accompanies new or unexpected views. (Baddeley assumed the vantage was God-given or god-like or god-angled. On this occasion, what he experienced was too bright and glorious to be anything but divine.)

While he was inhabited by the sacred — if “sacred” is what it was — Baddeley knew what he wanted to say. That is, he knew what he wanted to write. Words tumbled from him in paragraphs; a novel came to being within his imagination. Along with the ecstasy of suddenly knowing the words he needed, however, there was an anxiety that he might not manage to keep these words, to remember them when it came time to write them down. So that, at the moment of deepest inspiration, Baddeley also felt anguish at the thought of how much he might lose.

Moments, minutes, hours after the Lord had taken him over, His presence withdrew. It did not vanish entirely but, all the same, the withdrawal brought agony.

— Stay, Baddeley pleaded.

— I cannot, said the Lord.

And He withdrew as time returned and the room retreated into itself, its only bed occupied by the remains of Avery Andrews; the only living presence that of Alexander Baddeley himself.

On first encountering this “being,” Baddeley had assumed it was an aspect of Andrews’ madness — a delusion so powerful it could be parcelled and shared. After this communion, he understood why Andrews had come to think it was sacred. What he could not see was how Andrews had thought of the spirit as in any way “insane.” Nothing that could lead a man to such heights could be considered anything but miraculous. Literally miraculous, as far as Baddeley was concerned. He had been mired in a longing to express himself. He had not managed a single good line of poetry. But after this moment in the hospital he was charged with words. Having paid his final respects to Avery Andrews, Baddeley returned to his apartment on Runnymede and began writing. For five days he worked without eating, stopping only for water, coffee or the Allen’s apple juice he had in his fridge. He wrote the first chapters of a novel called Home is the Parakeet, a novel that existed fully formed in his imagination or, rather, half-formed like one of the statues left unfinished by Michelangelo, so that, for Baddeley, all was there. It was now only a matter of helping the thing from its integument.

(Home is the Parakeet’s macabre first paragraph…

The black-garbed soldiers, perhaps thirty in all, were preparing for a final assault on what was left of the village: two farms housing three dozen women and children, who were equipped with a couple of hunting rifles and almost no ammunition. One soldier guided a muzzled alligator on a leash. Several others heated their bayonets with acetylene torches. They formed a merry bunch, laughing as they set off.

is now, of course, among the best known passages of Canadian prose.)

And yet, when the first chapters were written, Baddeley was uncertain about how to go on. He was overwhelmed by the number of roads his novel could take. Worse, it no longer seemed to him that his novel meant any one thing. No, his narrative of a man who returns from the Second World War traumatized at having witnessed the slaughter for food of exotic birds in a bird sanctuary now meant innumerable things. In his mind, Home is the Parakeet was a metaphor for everything from the struggle between man and nature to the nightmare of colonialism.

He went back to the Western.

This visit was much like the previous. Though God was not in 88A, Baddeley found the right room easily. Using only an instinct he did not know he possessed, he pushed open a door in the prenatal ward and found himself in what he now thought of as the “customary” place. And God — or whatever it was — overtook him at once. At once he was in the presence of God’s vision which was also, for a time, his own: like a single image printed on two transparencies that are then overlaid, one atop the other. And when his time with “God” ended, Baddeley was both exhausted and wide awake.

(An unexpected gift: at times like this — after an encounter with “God” — he found himself susceptible to the city. Walking home from the hospital, the city seemed to have awakened with him. It was like dawn in the arms of someone he loved. It wasn’t just a matter of the usual attractions: the lake, its beaches, the quiet of Mount Pleasant. No, in these moods, Baddeley loved every aspect of Toronto: the light of day, the washed-out blue of its sky, the breath one drew halfway up the hill that lounged against High Park, the sounds of voices echoing voices, the plain streets that led to avenues along which the houses were simple and true, and lanes that led past parks that flared as one passed them, leaving their impression of green and red and grey, the coloured metal of jungle gyms, swings and slides.)

He returned to his basement on Runnymede and, after eating a cheese sandwich, a handful of cherries, and a small container of vanilla-and-honey yoghurt, Baddeley went back to his novel, certain of the path he wanted to take, unconcerned as to whether it was the “right” path or not. Days passed and he wrote in peace, unafraid of losing his way.

It was on his next visit to the Toronto Western that things grew more complicated. He had no trouble finding the room, and no sooner did he enter than God entered his being. But whereas his previous communions had been a pure ecstasy, this one was disturbing. While under God’s influence, Baddeley suddenly experienced — as precisely as if he were actually there — a child being eaten by an alligator. He saw, felt, and heard. He imagined himself splattered with the blood that erupted from the child’s mouth, his own shirt wet. He experienced both the child’s terror and the happy patience of the alligator. He heard the child’s last words

— I’ll tell mom! I’ll tell!

and tasted, along with the alligator, the gaminess of the prey, the copper-salt taste of its blood. He shared the creature’s satisfaction at biting down hard, and for what seemed hours, Baddeley felt in equal measure the rightness of terror and the justice of hunger. He enjoyed the sweetness of human flesh. He experienced unspeakable fear and a savage complacency. His soul was torn in two and, finally, he cried out for mercy.

As soon as he cried out, Baddeley was brought back to himself. He was not brought back to the “real” world, however. He was once again in the ward with the mannequins. The three he could look at with impunity were comfortingly familiar. They were all versions of Anna Akhmatova, young and beautiful, middle-aged and sensual, old and dignified. The mannequin he was not meant to look at spoke.

— You mustn’t cry out, it said. You must learn to bear it as I do. There was no malice or unkindness. The words were said and then, in an instant, Baddeley was in a service elevator going down to where the ambulances came in.

To Baddeley’s surprise, the character of his communion did not seem to affect the inspiration that followed. If anything, this disturbing episode was more inspiring than the ones that had preceded it. Baddeley set about writing as soon as he entered his apartment. He spent weeks immersed in the world of Parakeet. He resented anything that took him away from the work: eating, sleeping, washing. And yet, he felt a curious distance from the novel. For all the passion and dedication and inspiration that went into it, Home is the Parakeet seemed not to belong to him. Yes, he recognized the various bits of his life and thinking distributed through the work, but they were not the novel’s raison d’être. Insofar as the work had, for Baddeley, a raison d’être, it was in the images and feelings that flooded from his imagination, a glorious release he could share with no one. In the end, the work was nothing but a shrine to his solitude.

(Why was he writing a novel, anyway? It had never been his ambition to write fiction.)

Baddeley began to understand what it was that had driven Avery Andrews to live away from the world. How had Andrews managed to spend so many years — so many decades — with the astounding visions and the inescapable solitude?

In fact, he came to appreciate Andrews’ plight even more deeply in the year that followed. Home is the Parakeet was published, an event that should have brought him joy. In his previous life — that is, in his life before Avery Andrews — he’d imagined the moments of publication (the launch, the pleasure of meeting other writers, the admiration of strangers) as pure joy. But the launch of Parakeet was nothing like pleasure. It was dull and insignificant. It took place in a room filled with people he did not know, who did not know him. The food on offer was tasteless; his own nerves dulled the acuity of his senses. And beyond all that there was a feeling of fraudulence. He had not written the novel. He did not like novels. The thing had been given to him by a being whose only interest was in the supposed peace the invasion of Baddeley’s psyche brought to it. A more hollow event than a book launch Baddeley could not imagine.

That is, he could not imagine anything more hollow until reviewers — and, to an extent, the public — decided they liked his book very much. Home is the Parakeet was, for the most part, warmly received. Baddeley had not been known as a novelist, so there were envious critics who would have preferred to knock him down a notch. But none could do so without ignoring the flagrant fact that something interesting was up with the novel. Yes, of course, a handful of reviewers stared down their own doubts, in order to deliver to the public a disdain they assumed, as Baddeley had once assumed, was what the public needed most. But few listened to them, save for readers who did not like novels in any case. Outdoing its publisher’s expectations, Parakeet was what is called a bestseller. It was bought in great numbers and read by almost half of those who bought it.

This success, which meant nothing to Baddeley, was followed by a handful of surreal events that meant even less. He spoke to a thin, freckle-faced man on Radio One. On Radio Two he spoke to a stocky man with a Vandyke. And then he was invited to read at the “Festival of Authors,” the invitation extended by the festival’s artistic director who also invited Baddeley to a reception for a handful of writers who were at the festival that year.

The reception took place at a Korean restaurant on Bloor called Fennel and Rue. Its second floor is where food was served, but its first floor — a few steps down from street-level — was a tea house. To one side of the entrance was a barrel filled with rotting cabbage for kimchee. The tea house itself was predominantly wood — exposed beams, dark brown slats, knots and whorls like maddened veins. It was the kind of room that made you think of splinters until you actually touched the wood of the tables and benches and could feel them, smooth as polished stones. On offer in the tea house was tea: a varied and sometimes unexpected selection of flavours — grapefruit and cranberry; cranberry and walnut; orange and vanilla, etc. — served without any of the ritualistic fervour that sometimes poisoned tea houses.

Had he been alone, Baddeley would almost certainly have been comforted by the elegance of the room. But he was not alone. Little by little, the room filled with those for whom the reception was meant: writers, publishers, editors, and their various consorts. All were polite and all of them seemed kind. He should not have felt the least anxiety, but Baddeley was anxious from the beginning. He simply could not understand the connection between what he had gone through to write Parakeet and this bustle. He was conscious of how little he deserved to be in this place with these people. It seemed to him that everyone else — from the waitresses to the well-known — had better cause than he did to drink tea and eat the anise- flavoured biscuits that were passed around on silver platters.

Baddeley spoke briefly with a writer from the uK. And insulted him (or seemed to, though he hadn’t meant any offense). He spoke even more briefly with an American writer, and seemed to insult him too. In any case, neither of his contemporaries had anything much to say and abandoned him, after politely smiling and turning away. So it was with almost everyone at the reception, even those who approached him first. The only exception was the slightly unwashed André Alexis, a writer whose work Baddeley despised. Alexis would not stop talking until Baddeley himself nodded politely and turned away, waving a hand in the air as if to signal to someone he’d seen on the other side of the room, though there was of course no one.

It occurred to Baddeley, as he turned away from Alexis, that it was possible — that it was perhaps true — that all the writers in the room felt as awkward and fraudulent as he did, that all of them were as unfit for society as he was. He dismissed this thought almost immediately, however. On the evidence, it could not be true that they all felt as he did, because the one thing his contemporaries did most consistently was to congregate at these dinners and launches, celebrations and memorials. Some of them, somewhere, had to be having something like fun. It was perverse to think otherwise.

The reception was, in a word, a damp squib. But the dinner upstairs was worse. The restaurant was not unappealing. It was high ceilinged, the walls above the white wainscoting a light blue. Framed and hanging on the walls were variously patterned, full- sized kimonos; perhaps a dozen of them in all. Tables of all sizes were distributed about the room. Half of the restaurant was reserved for the literary gathering. There were cards at the tables (white cards on which, in silvery, cursive script, names were printed) to indicate where one was supposed to sit. Someone had made a mistake, however, because when he found the card with his name, Baddeley saw that Gil Davidoff’s card was at the place beside his. He was about to discreetly exchange his own card with that at another table when Gil himself appeared.

— Hey! said Davidoff. Where you been, Badds?

Davidoff was in his tenue de chasse: black jeans, a green, crewnecked sweater, a loose-fitting jacket with tweed patches at its elbows. He had new glasses: thick tortoise shelled rims, rectangular frames. His brown hair was boyishly dishevelled, as if he’d just stepped from bed, thrown a few things on and come to the reception at the pleading behest of the reception’s organizers. Perhaps instinctively, Davidoff turned to look about the room thus affording Baddeley a view of what had been, at some point, a vaguely Keatsian profile but which was now a ruined, patrician vista: broken nose, protruding chin, gapped front teeth, greying hair, the face of a blowsy concierge.

— I didn’t know you had a novel in you, Davidoff continued. I even heard it was okay. But you should be writing non-fiction. That’s the thing these days. I’m writing about all the great television I’m making my son watch.

— That sounds interesting, said Baddeley.

— Plus chicks love it when you’re an authority on something, said Davidoff.

Then, pausing for effect and turning to allow Baddeley a view of his hazel eyes, Davidoff said

— I don’t know what I did to make you go all silent, Alexander, but I bet you miss me even more than I miss you, eh?

To Baddeley’s knowledge, this was as close to an apology as Davidoff had ever come: a vague allusion to a vexing incident in which he may have played some part or other, though what that part was, exactly, Davidoff himself did not know.

— Yes, answered Baddeley.

— Well, I forgive you, said Davidoff. Let’s not talk about this fit of yours again, okay buddy?

They sat down at their places. At the table with them were other literary lights. To Baddeley’s left, there was the aging son of a late, great Canadian writer. The son, corpulent, his face as if carved from pink and grey butter, was himself a writer, but not a good one. To the son’s left was his publicist, a woman who wore her hair severely pulled back. Her lipstick was of such a bright red and her face so heavily made up that she looked, to Baddeley, like a Raggedy Ann doll. To her left was a man with a hearing aid who smiled and said nothing. And to the left of the hearing aid was the hearing aid’s wife.

In all the faces around all the tables there was not one that brought comfort to Baddeley. Davidoff’s brought the opposite — a creeping despair at the thought that this man had once been his friend. And it was no doubt this incipient despair that further distorted the small world lodged in the throat of Fennel and Rue. Wherever Baddeley turned, things seemed slightly or even distinctly out of whack. At the table behind his, for instance, Margaret Atwood sat regally, her grey hair an afro of sorts, her cheekbones like half-buried golf balls. Nothing unusual there save that, after a moment, it seemed to Baddeley that there was something of the iguana to her, and no sooner did that thought occur to him than Atwood flicked out her pinkish tongue, the rest of her head as still as if it had not quite escaped from the wax in which it had been carved. Beside her, Graeme Gibson’s neck grew so that he resembled a stork with thick glasses. In fact, all the necks in the room seemed to grow and sway vegetally, save, three tables away, Michael Ondaatje’s. His neck shrank. His head bobbed up and down, looking like that of a strangely tufted raven.

Raggedy Ann’s shrill voice interrupted Baddeley’s reverie.

— There’d be no publishing in this country if it weren’t for people like me, she said.

And it was then that the sounds of the menagerie assaulted him: implements on porcelain, women’s laughter, the low laughter of their consorts and companions, the scraping of wood on wooden floors, and then coughing, shouting, and the clearing of throats. Here, faces came at him: Gowdy, Dewdney, Johnston, Lane. There, they settled back into the mire, anonymous again: Redhill, Crozier, Crosby, Toews. The lighting suddenly seemed sickly, the same colour as the excrescence from a garter snake. The hors d’oeuvres tasted of kerosene, and though the dinner was just starting, Baddeley had to leave.

— I’m going to be sick, he said.

— Well, don’t do it on me, said Davidoff. I just washed this sweater.

Baddeley rose from the table and made as casual an exit as he could. He said nothing to anyone, leaving Davidoff to do any explaining that might be needed. He went down the stairs to the tea room, as if he were going out for a quick cigarette or something equally trivial. He imagined each and every patron in Fennel and Rue watching him as he retreated but, of course, not one of them noticed his departure.

Outside, the sun had not quite set. Somewhere in the west — beyond Parkdale, beyond Brown’s Inlet — its reddish flash was almost gone. He was on Bloor Street near Christie. Looking east, the lights were bright and life seemed to quicken around Bathurst. Looking west, various shades of blue accumulated above the world, as if in a layered shot. To clear his mind, Baddeley decided to walk north to Dupont. He walked past Barton, Follis and Yarmouth. On one side of the street, Christie Pits, Fiesta Farms; on the other, Christie Station, and a mile’s complement of modest houses.

It seemed to Baddeley that his soul caught up to him somewhere around Yarmouth. He looked over at the Spin Cycle Coin Laundry — above which, five irregularly spaced windows gave life to the red brick — and felt all of a sudden the solace that comes from being both somewhere and nowhere. He thought of Avery Andrews in the middle of Parkdale, — that is, in the middle of a neighbourhood to which he’d had no evident personal ties. “God,” it seemed, was a drug that made company hard to bear.