Daydreams of Angels

THE MAN WITHOUT A HEART

Andrea and her son lived in a big building on a busy street. There were loads of small doorbells in the lobby. There were fluorescent blue tiles that had been put in a long time ago when the building was fancy. Some of the tiles had come off the floor and had been replaced by different-coloured ones, and the floor looked like a Rubik’s Cube that was never going to be solved. And now the building was filled with all sorts of lower-class people who couldn’t afford to live anyplace else.

Michal was ten years old and was small for his age. He had a short afro and enormous brown eyes. There was supposed to be an e in his name. But Andrea didn’t know about it when she was filling out the birth certificate. She thought that happened to be the way that you wrote Michael.

Michal didn’t have any friends. He was so shy that other kids forgot that he existed. He would sometimes sit quietly near a bunch of kids, hoping they would notice him and invite him to play. He was terrified of them, but he longed for their company.

Andrea was a hard worker. She worked ten hours a day at the grocery store. She had big boobs and a pouty mouth and dark skin. She brushed her hair violently every morning and pulled it into a tiny little ponytail at the top of her head. But the elastic was always popping off and her hair would be sticking straight up by the time she got home. She was still pretty adorable.

She had the face of a little girl. It sure as hell didn’t stop men from being mean to her. She went out with just about anybody who asked her. And for some reason, it was only the low-lifes who asked.

She went out with a guy who made deliveries for the corner store on a bicycle with one of those huge baskets on the front of it. He wore a black leather vest without a shirt on underneath. He told her that he couldn’t ever be tied down to one woman. For a long time she put up with a guy who used to beat her. One guy only ever came over after ten o’clock at night.

She was always loaning her boyfriends money. They were always coming over and eating her and Michal’s dinner. They would never, ever take her out to a restaurant in exchange. One of her boyfriends would scoff at the food she prepared. When she served Hamburger Helper, he said that when he was growing up, his mother would never, ever prepare him something like this. And he kicked over a chair and walked out.

Michal always kept his distance from the men his mother dated. Most of them didn’t seem to mind. Some of them resented Michal. If she was going to have a kid, at least she could have had a really fun one. Michal just skulked around, looking at the floor. No siree, they thought. When they had their own sons, they were going to be much better than this kid. They would be tall and outgoing and good at sports.

And these guys all ended up leaving Andrea at the drop of a hat.

Then Andrea met Lionel. He was buying a package of Twizzlers at the store where she worked. Lionel was tall and had sharp features and was good-looking. He looked like those statues that the Romans were always making of gods, except he was black. And Lord, was he smart. For a while, Andrea finally thought she had struck gold.

She could talk to him about Michal too, and he was interested.

“He’s so shy,” Andrea told him. They were lying in bed after making love. “He’s been like that since he was really little. I worry about him. I mean, how are you supposed to get anywhere in the world if you can’t even bring yourself to ask for simple instructions on the subway ride?”

“Where’s his pops?”

“Nowhere. He left me when I was pregnant. I was nineteen years old and I had nothing.”

“You must have been foxy as all shit when you were nineteen and pregnant.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I would have gotten all romantic poet on you, if I had seen you pregnant. Seriously. I would have been resolute in my endearing affections.”

Andrea laughed.

Michal was sitting in his small room at the end of the hall when Lionel walked right in. He was wearing a pair of silky shorts that Michal noticed looked way too small for him. They had a print of roses on them and were the bottom half of a pair of pyjamas that belonged to his mother.

“Do you know how to play chess? I see you got a board.”

Michal looked at his hands and nodded. Lionel set out the chessboard between them on the single bed.

“The best way to play chess is in silence. You can’t say a word, brother. If you do, it’ll upset my equilibrium. I’m going to be playing seven moves ahead, okay?”

When Michal took Lionel’s knight, the man yelled out.

“What kind of move was that? Wow! Where’d you learn to play like that? Are you Russian?”

Michal put his finger over his mouth to indicate that Lionel had broken the Rule of Silence.

Lionel continued in a whisper. “Do you have like a little earphone on and that Vladimir Stanislavskovitch is whispering in your ear from St. Petersburg? Man!”

Michal laughed. Much to Andrea’s amazement, Lionel and Michal bonded.

Lionel would go into Michal’s room and she could hear the two of them chatting away incessantly. Michal would babble excitedly. She never heard him talk like that with anybody. They would walk together to the store to pick up some milk. She would see them out the window, waving their arms about in discussion.

But it turned out that Lionel was probably the worst of all her boyfriends. He had been addicted to heroin and he started using again. He sold their television set for drugs. He stole money from her wallet, her jewellery and some of her dresses. He even stole her bus pass and then sold it to the neighbour for five dollars. Andrea worked hard for the little she had. So Andrea threw him out forever.

Lionel went into rehab and they didn’t hear from him for a couple of months. When Lionel called up, wanting to see Michal, Andrea was sure that it was some sort of lame-ass excuse to keep her in his life. But she wasn’t going to turn Lionel’s offer down. She was so exhausted and overwhelmed that she would take whatever babysitter she could get, even if he was an ex-junkie.

But Lionel was only allowed as far as the lobby. Andrea wouldn’t let him in the apartment ever again. It wasn’t that she was doing it to be mean, she was only using common sense.

Lionel agreed to pick Michal up from school and walk him home in the afternoons and refused to take money for it. They passed by the homeless who were out rooting through the garbage to find parts for time machines.

“What are you wearing?” Michal asked.

He was wearing rubber boots, a pair of denim shorts that were pinstriped, a blazer that had seen better days, and a light blue undershirt.

“People look at me because I am a damn bona fide original, my little friend. I have an original style of dressing. I dress in the manner of a pimped-out Edwardian gentleman.”

Despite being on welfare, despite not having a high school diploma, despite living in the crappiest boarding house in town, Lionel generally thought that he was superior to everybody. He could not be bothered under any circumstances to care what people thought of him.

As he and Michal walked down the street together, Lionel nodded and greeted everybody.

“You’ve got to be sociable. You can’t be afraid of people.”

People would glance at Lionel strangely because of his getup. Some people looked nervous, others gazed straight ahead as if he was about to ask them for money and some went ahead and said hello back. Michal laughed every time Lionel greeted someone. He cringed, his shoulders up, embarrassed. He put his hands over his face.

“You do it. Just make eye contact and smile at any of these jokers.”

Michal smiled and waved at a middle-aged woman. He couldn’t believe he was doing it.

“Hello, sweetheart,” the woman said.

“See! You like people. That’s why you’re shy. It’s because you care so much about what people think. You’ve got way more regard for these fools than I do. And it comes to you natural-like. I was bitter even as a little kid. I was like this character from Shakespeare named lago.”

“The parrot in Aladdin.”

“No. I’m not talking about a bird. I’m talking about the immortal bard. The greatest writer who ever lived. And he had this character who messes stuff up for everybody. And they put these scholars on the case in order to figure out why Iago did all the stuff that he did.”

“What’s a scholar?”

“Scholars are like therapists, but for books. But none of them could figure out Iago’s motivations. Why he would fuck everything up.”

Lionel paused a second as if reflecting on his own words. The cars were honking at one another behind him on the street.

“Hey, whatcha got left over from your lunch?”

Michal reached into his school bag and pulled out a Ziploc bag with half a peanut butter sandwich in it.

“There is nothing like a peanut butter sandwich that was made by someone’s mama. I could make a sandwich like this, but it wouldn’t taste good at all. This is like manna.”

“What’s manna?”

“Food that the gods delivered.”

The next week they were doing Michal’s math homework together at a picnic table at the park. A crow opened its wings, like a man opening a trench coat to exhibit some stolen jewellery that he had for sale.

“How can you not understand this?” Lionel asked. “This is simple basic shit.”

“I’m an idiot. I can’t do anything right.”

“No, no, no. You’ve just got a mental block. Let’s go over this all careful-like, okay. We can do this.”

“Everybody thinks I’m stupid.”

“Who’s everybody? Come on. You’re afraid of what’s going to happen if you let yourself be able to figure all this shit out. I was like that. I was scared of all the ideas that were in my head. I couldn’t accept the responsibility that comes with being smart. So I went and started doing all these drugs because they made me numb. And I destroyed myself just so that I couldn’t be great.”

“Subtraction makes no sense. How can anything be less than zero?”

“You’re right! You’re right. Everything stops at zero. Zero should be as low as you can go. The government invented negative numbers. Why? Just so that people can go into debt and then never get out of it. But we’re going to have to play their game. Then when you learn to play their game, you can challenge them. I tried to reject it all and look at the sorry-assed state I ended up in. Okay?”

“Okay.”

The next weekend Lionel and Michal went to the amusement park together. Lionel was wearing a blazer and a long striped silk scarf and a pair of track pants. He had on a pair of shiny leather shoes.

Lionel had a plastic bag filled with Coke cans. They had coupons on the sides of them. You could trade them in for a dollar off at the amusement park. He had been looking through the trash for them all week. So when Michal pulled out the twenty-dollar bill that his mother had given him to pay for both their admissions, Lionel told him to put his money away.

They walked around the park, checking out the fanciful structures.

“Once, when I was a little boy, I was trapped in a hall of mirrors. The configurations rattled me. I’ve never really been able to think properly since then.”

Michal didn’t want to go on any of the scary rides. He held Lionel by the sleeve of his blazer, pulling him away from the roller coaster. He begged and whined, but Lionel insisted. On the ride Michal squeezed his eyes shut. He wrapped his arms so tightly around Lionel’s waist that the man started having a coughing fit.

“We’re going to ride this thing until you are no longer afraid.”

By the end of the day, Michal was able to put his arms up in the air. He was fearless. He was alive.

Michal was too short to go on the pirate ship.

“I hate being a midget,” Michal yelled.

“Don’t worry about being so little. You’re a late bloomer. Anyways, it’s what’s on the inside that counts. You know how your mom puts marks on the inside of the door frame, showing your height? Well you’re going to get to a certain age where you don’t get any taller. But your insides never stop expanding. That is limitless.”

Lionel almost always had a paperback book somewhere on him. He loved to read. He took Michal to the Children’s Library every Saturday. It was a building made of red stone with squirrels and birds carved into the stone arches around the doors.

He had a pair of reading glasses that he got from the pharmacy. He took them out of his breast pocket and put them on as he was going through different books that were on display.

“Here’s a book about peeing on the potty. The great theme of man versus himself. It’s bound to win the Pulitzer.”

“This book about the owl looks really good,” Michal called back, holding a book over his head.

“Damn! Check this out! It is an abridged children’s version of Don Quixote. You’ve got to take this out. It’s all about madness and the inability for anybody to ever really be heroic. My man Cervantes was prophetic. He foresaw the modern age coming.”

Lionel sat in a little armchair that made him look like a giant. Michal sat on the carpet on the floor, which had a cobblestone pattern and was meant to look like the yellow brick road.

They always took out the maximum number of fifteen books. Michal walked down the street with the pile right up to his chin.

“You have got to read, Michal. Every time that you read a book, it is like depositing money in the bank. You spend every weekend reading a pile of books this big, I swear to you that you are going to be a rich man.”

“No, I won’t. How?”

“Trust me on this one. This is the only thing that is going to make you into a rich man. No matter how hard your mother works at that grocery store, she is never going to be a rich woman. There is nothing that your mother can do to get out of that building in this lifetime. And that is the class divide, my friend.”

“Will I always be poor?”

“No, because we are going to have a revolution. The odds will be against us, because it’s going to be Michal against the whole fucking structure. The whole country.”

“The whole country!”

“Yes, but don’t worry. I got your back. We are going to outwit the motherfuckers.”

One of the neighbours was over drinking coffee with Andrea. The roses on the wallpaper behind her head looked like the tomatoes thrown at the opera singer that had missed her head.

“I know he’s been spending some time with Michal lately, but I stand by my statement that he is a heartless fuck-up. One thing that he has going for him is that he will never have a heart attack, because you need to have a heart in order to have a heart attack.”

Andrea laughed really loudly at her own joke.

“He needs somebody to listen to his prattle. And about the only person that’s buying what he’s selling is an eight-year-old. Michal needs some sort of male in his life. Notice I said male. Not man. I won’t go that far.”

And once again she started giggling at her own humour.

“He’s all flash and shine and razzmatazz. He stole my paycheque right after I cashed it. It was the holidays. I had to take Michal down to eat at the food bank. You gotta be heartless to do something like that. Stealing from a single mother. It’s disgusting.”

“Heartless,” the neighbour said.

“That’s what I said.”

“You think it’s safe, Michal going out with him? I’m not saying this to be mean, but I wouldn’t let my kids around him.”

“What choice do I have? It’s funny, but I know that fool is good for Michal. The Lord puts everybody in your life for a reason. There’s some reason that fool’s in my life.”

The declawed kitten tiptoed on the table in just its stockings.

For Michal’s birthday, Lionel got him a big black journal to record his thoughts in.

“Your ideas are important. Learn to articulate. The more you formulate your thoughts — the more you write them down or say them out loud — the more powerful they will be. Ideas change the world. Everything that you see around you originated with an idea. Bad ideas and grand ideas.”

They were on the bench on the corner. There was an aging black cat that had dyed its fur with a cheap bottle of dye from the pharmacy, but it wasn’t fooling anybody. Michal took out an envelope that had been sealed with what looked like electrical tape.

“I got this in the mail from my grandma. My mom said not to open it in front of her cause she’s mad at Grandma. She always sends a card. It’s got this tape all over it though. Can you help me?”

Lionel took out a pocket knife and slit open the envelope while Michal flipped through the page of the big new book and held it up to his face to smell the new pages. Lionel took out the card that had a dog dressed up in a clown outfit and carrying balloons. He was about to comment on the decline of the fine arts in civilization when five twenty-dollar bills slid out and landed on his lap.

It would have been nothing to put those twenty-dollar bills in his pocket. It would have been easy to get up and split with that money. He held out the bills.

“You have hit the jackpot today,” Lionel said, his voice cracking a bit.

Michal took the money and whooped. He stood in front of the bench and did a chicken dance of joy. There was a bald man sitting at the bus stop whose scalp and neck and hands were all covered with tattoos of birds.

“You are just asking to get us mugged, my man.”

He hadn’t taken the money. But it had crossed his mind. It was always with him, that wickedness. It was unpredictable like the weather, and he knew that.

Lionel was waiting outside the building for the little boy. He was wearing a box that he had cut a hole in the top of to poke his head out of and holes in the sides for his arms to go through. It was painted silver. He had a plastic funnel on his head. He was taking Michal trick-or-treating in a more upscale neighbourhood, where they would get better candy.

Michal came out dressed in a brown lion suit. He had a mane around his head and some whiskers drawn on his cheeks with grease paint. When Michal saw Lionel, he laughed and laughed.

“I used up a whole can of silver spray paint on this thing. I almost asphyxiated myself. My lungs probably glow in the dark.”

“You look ridiculous!”

“What do you think you look like?”

“I won third place in the costume contest at school.”

“Well, la-di-da.”

After two hours, Michal’s pillowcase was full of candy and he couldn’t walk another step. They sat at a picnic table, eating tiny Mars bars. The pigeons all around them had heart murmurs.

“Excellent. State-sanctioned panhandling. I love it.”

Some kids that Michal knew from school walked by. Michal immediately got quiet.

“Don’t be afraid of anybody. That’s the number one thing that keeps people down in this world. This idea that other people are better, scarier, more intimidating. Fuck that, Michal. There ain’t nothing a rich kid knows that you don’t know.”

Lionel looked at Michal to make sure he was getting his point across.

“What do they know that we don’t know?”

“Nothing.”

“Who are we intimidated by?”

“Nobody.”

“That’s right. No-fucking-body.”

Then Michal started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“You have a funnel on your head.”

Andrea was working late and couldn’t go to Michal’s open house at school. Lionel showed up with his hair combed back. He had on a gold dress shirt with diamonds on it and a pair of dress pants that were too long and were scuffing on the floor. He had a long black coat. He looked good. He sat in the seat and looked through all of Michal’s reports.

“I think that the teacher secretly hates me,” Michal said.

“I’ll ask her some discreet questions and I’ll find out for you.”

Lionel went up and introduced himself to the teacher as a friend of the family.

“Michal is the light of our lives.”

“I’m sure he is,” the teacher said. “He was really shy at the beginning of the year. But he’s been really coming out of his shell. He signed up to be in the school play. I was so surprised.”

Lionel turned to Michal and winked. Michal smiled.

“What did you think of the Remembrance Day poem that he wrote?”

“I put it on the wall.”

“I know, right? Wasn’t it amazing! Like how does a little dude like that have so much compassion? I mean the sky is the limit for that guy. He could be a politician even.”

“It’s so nice of you to take an interest in him.”

“Oh, it’s a delight. What’s amazing is the work you do with all these little weirdos. Those handprints you have on the wall that the kids turned into turkeys are hilarious! Where did you come up with something like that?”

The teacher was smiling. Michal’s mother once told the neighbour that in certain lights, in peculiar moods and on rare occasions, Lionel could be quite the ladies’ man. When she first met him, she found him so magnetic. If he wasn’t such a fuck-up, he could seduce any woman he wanted.

Lionel walked Michal home. The surface of the moon on a clear night looked all dented, like it had been out drinking and driving and had now lost its licence after a crash.

“You know what, little guy? When you’re in doubt and you don’t know what a person thinks of you, I want you to go with ‘They’re crazy about me.’ Okay? Not ‘They hate me.’ Will you do that from now on?”

“Okay.”

“Okay. You’re really good about keeping promises. I notice that about you. You’re a stand-up guy. And why didn’t you tell me your teacher is hot?”

“I didn’t know she was!”

Sometimes Michal would take out money that Andrea had given him to buy them both supper. Lionel would protest that he couldn’t take any of her money, but he usually relented. What were they supposed to do, starve? They would go and buy themselves hamburgers and soda pop at one of the fastfood joints. One night they got themselves a window seat and watched all the lights of the world turning on one by one. It was the witching hour.

“Do you believe in reincarnation? I do. Because if you think about it, how else do you explain the fact that there are people out there who are sixteen times more intelligent than others? I think that I have lived dozens of lives. That’s why I feel so weary, you know what I mean? I only have to mend my ways. Act in a more moral way, and then I can be born something else, you know. I’m sick to death of being human. It’s a punishment.”

Outside, a man who had been drinking wobbled around, as if gravity had suddenly lost its grip on him.

Lionel always had a ballpoint pen behind his ear. When they were finished at the restaurant, his paper napkin was covered in stars. He had a habit of doodling stars. When he had been dating Andrea, everything in the house started to be covered in stars. The borders of the newspaper and the phone bills would be covered in stars. The little boy thought there was something magical about Lionel.

As they walked home, every time the doors of a bar along the street opened up, the sound was like change spilling out from a slot machine.

“All great philosophical tracts were written at night. I have to stay up late. You have a bedtime now. But when you grow up, you can choose to be the type of person that has a bedtime or the type of person who does not. Everybody’s got to figure out their own way to do good in this world.”

There were cockroaches scurrying across the sidewalk. They shook hands and said good night.

Michal saw Lionel lying on the grass in the park. There was a dog sniffing next to him. Michal had to say hello to Lionel three or four times before he opened his eyes. Then it took Lionel a few seconds to figure out who the boy was. His eyes were all glazed over.

Andrea sat across from Michal at the kitchen table. She told him that Lionel was sick and that he would never, never, never be able to stop doing drugs. He had been on them too long. She had known boys like that since she was a little girl. Lionel would never be able to stop.

“I know that,” Michal said.

“I don’t know why he bothered to go out of his way to be your friend, just to start using again and abandon you. He’s heartless.”

“No, he’s not.”

“You certainly can’t expect him to be here forever, baby, okay?”

Lionel got better again, and when he did, he took Michal to the park to teach him how to play basketball.

“How come you never had your own kids?” Michal asked.

“I’m an addict. I would never pass that gene on. Besides, I have you. That’s way, way better than any sucker that would come out of me.”

Michal smiled. He had a good feeling inside of him that he knew nobody could take away from him.

“Although some of my genes aren’t so bad. I do have kick-ass hair.”

When Lionel started about how handsome he was, it usually meant that he was in a good mood.

Lionel had been a so-so basketball player in high school. That day he was dribbling the ball around feeling like a superstar. Lionel moved about all graceful and was able to get the ball in the basket sometimes. A bunch of other kids came to watch Lionel and to ask if they could play. It was always an event if a cool dad or an older brother took a little bit of time off their schedule to come and play.

Michal looked at Lionel and he was proud of him.

Michal was so excited about going to the zoo that he was already standing behind the glass door to the lobby, waiting for Lionel to show up. Lionel had a bag of peanuts that he had gotten from the grocery store. He said the peanuts they had for sale at the zoo were an extortion racket.

They squeezed in together on a plastic seat on the subway train. He was wearing a green button-up shirt with polka dots, pinstriped pants and a pair of black army boots, the black of which had long since worn off the toes. Lionel didn’t dress any differently on a weekday than he did on a weekend. He had long since ceased to be able to differentiate between the two. Michal was rocking back and forth because he was so excited.

Lionel picked up a newspaper that had been left on the seat next to them. The row of old men on the bench across from them sat hunched over like a row of buzzards.

“We have got to keep abreast of the news. Even if it makes us weep.”

Michal tried to turn the pages of the newspaper while Lionel was reading it.

“Ah, ah, ah. We’ll get to the comics in a little bit. I want to read the comics as much as you do, trust me. I’m itching to get to them too. But they are dessert, okay? We have to be worldly men. You don’t want your life to be confined to this little neck of the woods.”

“I like it here.”

“Travel the whole world. And if after seeing everything that there is to see out there, you want to come back here, then be my guest. But I’ll bet you five dollars that you will not.”

“Five dollars!”

“Yes.”

“You won’t pay up.”

They shook on it.

A few days later, Michal’s mother found a map of the zoo. There were red Xs drawn with a ballpoint pen on the entranceways. The word EXPLOSIVES was written underneath the Xs. There were black arrows next to the words EXIT STRATEGY. It was clear what this was. Michal and Lionel had come up with a plan to liberate the animals from the zoo.

Lionel called from the telephone in the halfway house. She sat in the kitchen, listening to Michal’s side of the conversation.

“Where will the animals go? Oh, oh, oh! We can put the wolves in the park. And then we can go and put up signs saying that there are wolves in the park. Keep out!”

Michal was quiet for a bit.

“What are we going to do with the tiger, though? It will walk down the street and it’s going to eat children!”

Michal was laughing and laughing.

“We can’t put hippopotamuses in the swimming pool! They’ll get chlorine in their eyes!”

Michal was laughing so hard that he had to cross his legs so that he wouldn’t pee himself. Andrea realized that she had been right about Lionel the first time she had met him: she had struck gold.

Sometimes, after Lionel buzzed for Michal to come down, Andrea and Lionel would shoot the breeze on the intercom in the lobby. Lionel could still make Andrea laugh. But she knew not to let him up. And Lionel knew that it was probably a good thing that Andrea kept him down there at the bottom of the stairs. Neither of them had ever been successful at romance. And the both of them knew that what Lionel and Michal had was bigger than what they could ever have.

Andrea didn’t really have much of a family. Lionel’s childhood had been different. His family had expected things from him. He had been so clever as a little boy. He knew that he had been born with possibilities that other people had not been born with. He was at the top of his class and his teachers said that he could get an academic scholarship to any school he wanted. He thought life was going to be a breeze.

That was before he knew that he was a drug addict. He went to parties like other kids. He did drugs like other kids. But lordy, lordy, lordy, all of that crap affected him in a different way than other kids. It possessed him. He should have known that he was cursed at birth. He was like Sleeping Beauty. Even though there were all these good fairies that gave him looks and charm and smarts, there was a mother-fucking dick of a fairy who showed up and said that on his sixteenth birthday he was going to prick himself with a hypodermic needle and he was going to walk around in a daze for the rest of his goddamn life.

Lionel couldn’t bear to be around people who knew what he was like before drugs had taken hold of him. Lionel’s mother said that the way he had turned his back on the family was worse than his addiction. He was heartless.

“Read me something from your journal,” Lionel said as he was walking Michal home from school.

“Today I had a conversation in class with a boy named Callum. He said that when he grows up, he wants to work on a ship. He says that he doesn’t mind the sea. He also had a dog that died last year. They buried it in the backyard. He said that he thought that he was going to cry, but he didn’t.”

“Magnificent! You know what you did, my boy? You located an existential hero! You captured Callum in a nutshell. You know Callum in a way that Callum doesn’t even know Callum. When you look at people, you know exactly what they are about. People are going to love that about you. Nobody likes to go about the world being anonymous and unknowable. They want to know that they are being seen for who they really are. You are a man of the people. You are going to be a leader, mark my words.”

Michal started to skip next to Lionel because he was so happy.

“Yes sir, I am a lucky man to have found you, my little buddy. I never knew what the point of me was, you know that? Until you came into my path.”

They passed a funeral parlour on their way, and inside it they were playing a corpse’s favourite song.

Michal got a scholarship to McGill law school. He ran for public office. And later in life when he was a Member of Parliament, people always asked him how it was that he had come all this way. He had grown up with nothing. He had had a single mother who worked ten hours a day at a grocery store. Where did he find the courage to follow this road?

“His name was Lionel. He was a heroin addict. He died of an overdose when I was thirteen years old. He had the biggest heart in the neighbourhood. I still owe him five dollars.”