Rust and Bone: Stories

ROCKET RIDE

SOME CHICK in the fourth row’s giving me the eye. Slim and pale with wide blue eyes, ass-length ponytail pulled through the back of her baseball cap, she sits in the shadow thrown by a woman wearing a straw hat on the verge of collapsing under a weight of plastic fruit. Her shockingly blue eyes meet mine, then skate across the show pool’s surface. She’s being coy about it, but I’ve seen The Look a thousand times.

I’m straddling the concrete wall dividing the wait pool from the show pool. Sunlight arcs over the amphitheater’s zigzagged metal roof, yellow spears quivering the afternoon air. Stands packed with sunburnt tourists in their vacation finery: tank tops and flip-flops and sansabelt slacks, wifebeaters and board shorts. I spot a sallow-chested shirtless man: the unshakable maxim seems to be those with the most revolting physiques are inevitably those most keen to bare them. Blue inflatable dolphins, red seals, black-and-white killer whales bob amidst the crowd. Tinny upbeat music lilts from recessed speakers. Seagulls wheel and spiral against the unbroken blue sky.

The show opens with the sea lions. Their flatiron-sized flippers collide wetly, broken barks rebounding off the domed cupola. Trainers steer them through a standard routine: balancing striped balls on their noses and catching bright red rings around their necks until the act segues into a Keystone Kops–style chase, animals loping across the stage with trainers in fist-shaking pursuit. The action is punctuated by boinks, tah-dahs, and wah-wah-waaas supplied by the audio booth technician.

I sit cooling my feet in the pools. Sweat rolls down my neck, wicked by the collar of my wetsuit. Off to my left, a young girl in a wheelchair sits beneath the handicapped pavilion’s wind-whipped awning. She looks maybe twelve, though could fall five years on either side: her disease makes parts of the body look worn, while others remain strangely undeveloped. The girl’s father sits beside her, rubbing her arm. I glance down, depressed in an unfocused sort of way, and catch Niska rising through the water.

The orca’s head crests the surface, sleek as a ballistic missile. Sun limns the contours of her black snout, thin golden traceries like the veins on a leaf. Her mouth yawns open, revealing teeth blunted with age and disuse. I reach down and slap her tongue—wet and bristled, like a piglet’s hide—and feed her mackerel from a stainless steel bucket. She submerges for a moment before resurfacing, a gurgle issuing from her blowhole.

“Go on, you big hog,” I say. “No more ’til showtime.”

When the sea lions are finished, Kona’s brought out from the opposite wait pool. He performs a few lackluster highbows then swims a lap around the pool, lashing his atrophied tail to the beat of “Feelin’ Hot Hot Hot,” by Buster Poindexter and the Banshees. Niska butts her snout against the metal gate separating the pools. She has a habit of rousing Kona’s ardor, which, during shows, leads to a lot of “Mommy, what’s that?” questions as Kona’s thick, pink, six-foot-long cock spools out of its sheath like a bizarre Hindu rope trick.

When Kona’s safely penned I crank a winch and raise the gate, ushering Niska into the show pool. I dive in after her. The cool water tastes of brine and chlorine. I blink the sting out of my eyes as Niska circles, body a rippled distortion beneath the waves. I feel the displacement of water as she rises, smooth and powerful, pushing me back. She surfaces in front of me, maw open. Breath like a fishmonger’s floor, rags of mackerel hanging between her teeth. I catch my reflection—curly blond hair, dimpled chin, stubbled cheeks—in the black convex of one of her golfball-sized eyes.

I slap her tongue. “Let’s do this thing, girl.”

The Rocket Ride is the triple lindy of marine mammal behaviors. Anchoring your feet on Niska’s snout, she takes you down into the water. Nearing the pool’s bottom you arch your spine and surge towards the surface. Then, with a thrust of her tail, Niska launches you from the water. That you hit twenty feet is a given—Niska’s feeling frisky, thirty’s a definite possibility. At the height of your ascent perform a snap-pike before slicing down into the water. It’s a shot of pure adrenaline: like being strapped to the nosecone of a Stinger missile.

Twenty feet underwater and the outside world disappears. Gone the crowd, the music, the birds and sun and sky. The water bitingly cold and pressure beating against my eardrums, hamstrings screaming as Niska propels me downwards. The pool basin rushes at me: flaking blue paint, thin serrate cracks, the shiny disc of a quarter some tourist must’ve prompted his kid to toss into the pool—make a wish. Brace my neck and arch my back and then I’m hurtling up through the water at phenomenal speed, lungs burning, a pearlescent helix of air bubbles corkscrewing up to the surface.

Niska’s mouth opens. My left leg slips inside. Thigh raked down a row of teeth, shredding the wetsuit. Rocketing upward, faster now. My crotch smashes the crook of her mouth and something goes snap. Jam a hand into Niska’s mouth and pry with everything I’ve got, her jaws a jammed elevator I’m trying to open. Whale gagging on the foot lodged deep in her throat, huge muscles constricting and relaxing. Bubbles swirling and ears roaring, mind panicked and lungs starved for oxygen, a bright flame of terror dancing behind my eyes and yet there remains this great liquid silence, all things distant and muted in this veil of salt water. A disconnected image races through my head: that famous black-and-white snapshot of a Buddhist monk sitting serenely in lotus position as flames consume him.

Immense pressure shatters my tibia below the hip. A wave of pain roars up my spine and through my neck, nearly tears my skull off. Open my mouth to scream and water rushes in, electric ozone taste choking my sinuses and then I’m breaking the pool’s surface, hurtling up into the warm summer air, arms stretched towards the cloudless sky, gulls screeching, the syncopated beat of salsa music and the handicapped girl sitting beside her wide-eyed father, smiling an odd inscrutable smile.

I hit the water again and then I’m paddling like a dog, kicking but not really going anywhere. I’m not afraid—have never felt calmer in my life, in fact—but my body doesn’t want to obey. It’s so silly, almost funny. Why is everyone yelling? The water’s red and the other trainers scream my name—Oh god over here, Ben, over HERE!—and I try to swim in their direction if only to shut them up but I can’t, my body’s all fucked so I end up paddling over to the wall. I try to get a grip on the wet concrete but my hands are sliced up, bloody, pinkie finger snapped at the knuckle and hanging like a half-opened penknife. Niska bumps my side, a gentle nudge and the screams intensify, earsplitting decibels and I’m thinking, Christ, will you people please shut up? Prismatic bars of color streak my vision as I stare into the stands, where the girl who’d been eyeing me slumps with her face buried in the chest of the fruit-hatted woman. I remember the blue of her eyes—as though cut from the sky—and wish she’d turn them on me once more.

A cute but clingy trainer I’d pointedly ignored since fucking her late last summer tosses me a life preserver. Hook an arm through the blue plastic doughnut, towed to the pool’s edge like a bead on a thread. Hands dig into my armpits and drag me onstage. All the color’s washed out of things, the radiant reds, blues, greens, and pinks of the stage blended into neutral grays and then I see what’s left of my leg, a shredded mess, adipose tissues encased in a yellow layer of fat, splintered bone shining in the crisp sunlight.

Niska swims slowly past. My leg hangs from her jaws, loosely flexed at the knee. Flashbulbs pop in the stands and I think, That’s not what they came to see, but then maybe it is. My wetsuit’s torn to the breastbone, peeled back in flaps to reveal tanned flesh, gym-sculpted abs, clean-shaven groin, my painfully erect cock. Brachial veins running like river systems under the elastic flesh, its size—6 ³⁄4 inches: I’d measured, digging the ruler into my crotch for an added quarter-inch— grossly amplified, monstrous and hemorrhaging blood.

The cute trainer’s lips move but no sound comes out. “I’m okay,” I tell her, and smile. “It’s o-o-kay, I’m … fine.” She’s crying, she’s shaking her head. Overhead, a big pale sun burns without heat. I wish everyone would go away and leave me alone, wish I were somewhere dark and quiet and cool. My gaze drawn to a gap between the topmost seats and the amphitheater roof: calm ongoing sky reaching off to the horizon, remotely beautiful, all things in alignment.

Jesus, do something, do something…Paramedics, move, move …

The leg, where’s the fucking leg …

Quit pumping the plasma expander, his blood’s thin as Kool-Aid …

These voices, even in the haze.

FIVE MONTHS LATER I’m in a VW Beetle driving down the QEW. Snow piled along the highway-side and Lake Ontario a frozen white stretch off to the north. I can just make out the slender spike of the CN Tower rising beyond the Toronto harbor. Over the guardrails and down the snow-covered shoreline, two muffled figures sit round a hole drilled through the ice.

I sit in the passenger seat, cheek pressed to the window glass. My right leg rests against the padded doorframe. My left leg is mostly gone: a rude stump two inches below my crotch. The surgeons did a fine job, considering: high-gauge stitches left a ring of baby-pink dimples, a balloon knot of puckered flesh at the stub. I nearly died, or so I’m told. The sacral, varicose, basilic, and femoral arteries merge in the upper thigh, pumping a pint of blood a minute. I lost over a gallon before the medics transfused me. From Niagara Falls, I was airlifted to the Hotel Dieu in St. Catharines, where a team of surgeons operated for two hours. Battleground surgery: a hundred years ago, some meatball medic would’ve jammed a rum-soaked leather thong between my teeth and slathered the stump with boiling tar. Thanks to today’s wonder drugs, I don’t recall a damn thing.

I awoke two days later. The hospital room’s every ledge festooned with flowers in frosted glass vases, plush white teddy bears, balloon bouquets bump-bumping in the AC flow. Condolences: family and friends and co-workers, old high-school acquaintances, ex-girlfriends softened by my pathetic state, a War Amps rep, the morbidly curious. A summer intern conducted a brief interview for the Standard.

“Tell me what happened, in your own words.”

“In my own words? A whale bit my leg off.”

“I see.” Scribbles on a notepad. “Did you see this coming?”

“What?”

“Was there, well, any … hostility … between the two of you?”

“Yes. I was envious of the whale’s career.”

“Is that so?”

“Insanely jealous, yes.”

“Will you be suing?”

“Who—the whale?”

“Is that possible?”

“Get out of here.”

Animal rights protesters held a rally on the hospital’s front lawn. They toted placards bearing slogans: FREE NISKA and CAPTIVITY + MISTREATMENT = MURDER. They had a boombox playing “Freedom Calling” and a huge inflatable whale with shackles over its pectoral fins. My father got into a fistfight with the ringleader, a dreadlocked grad student from the local university. They rolled across the grass throwing punches until a groundskeeper broke them apart. Dad got in one good shot: it landed with the sound of a hatchet halving a cantaloupe, splattering the protester’s nose.

The car is my mother’s. Slender and composed in jeans and a heavy sweater, silvery hair cut short in bob style, she sits ramrod straight with both hands on the wheel. Radio tuned to Light 98.1, Kenny G blowing a soulful sax. I reach over to change the station. She slaps my hand.

“My car, my music.”

“Oh, god,” I say. “Gonna slip into a coma, here.”

“You’ll survive.”

My mother is a palliative care nurse. She passes each shift in a ward strung with shattered, hopeless, bedridden bodies, victims of voracious and uncaring diseases, kids with inoperable egg-sized tumors latched to their brainstems, infants born with horrible genetic defects. As a matter of basic survival she’s developed a professional detachment to the frailties, grotesqueries, and fateful idiosyncrasies affecting the human body. Emotional scar tissue, my father calls it. This brusqueness carries over to her family life. As a child, I dreaded the most minor cut or abrasion: she’d break out the iodine and cotton swabs for an unsympathetic clean and dress, slapping my hands away from the wound as I wailed. When I once complained of mild constipation, she insisted on giving me an enema. I recall leaning over the toilet, hands braced on cold porcelain and pants wadded around ankles, penis flapping between trembling legs as she inserted a greased plastic tube, followed by a spurt of warm, bung-loosening water. The whole experience was seriously … oedipal.

“What do you think about me running across the country, like Terry Fox?”

“You wouldn’t make it to the end of the block. And don’t compare yourself to Terry.”

“Why not? He lost a leg, I lost a leg.”

“Terry Fox had cancer.”

“So what, you got to have cancer to do something noble?”

“It’s a start.”

“What if I donated all the money I raised to support the eradication of marine mammals? Fill the oceans with drift nets. Capsize oil supertankers. The Extinction Foundation. Once all the whales are gone we could get to work on the manatees.”

“That’s an awful sentiment, Benjamin. Just … awful.”

The highway cuts sharply west, spanning a narrow inlet splitting into a spider’s web of iced-over streams. Back in high school, me and my friends took a rutted track to the mouth of the inlet, searching for chinook salmon that’d swim up the swollen tributaries to spawn. The spring runoff slackened and the streambeds dried up, leaving thousands stranded in shallow pools. They swam in restless, agitated circles, throwing themselves at the slippery mud banks. We’d tie triple-barbed hooks to our lines and jig them through the water. With a quick jerk, we’d snag a fin or a gill flap, a belly, a tail. The salmon were so plentiful it required no real skill at all. We hauled them thrashing to the shore and checked the sex; we squeezed the females’ guts, emptying their eggs—orange globes in thick, briny liquor—into a gallon ice cream tub, for sale to a local bait shop.

One time my friend Joe hung a big female on a rotted fencepost; the fish had bent his last hook out of shape, and Joe held the thing’s stubborn will to live against it. A few minutes later the fish was still bucking and thrashing. Joe picked up a stream-polished stone and chucked it. The stone struck with a heavy wet thud. The rest of us found rocks and hurled them. We hit the salmon’s head and gut and fins, missing often, rocks sailing into the brush or bouncing off the post with a hollow wok! All of us laughing: the horsey, trollish laughter of teenage boys. Stones smacked the salmon’s ugly sloped head, smashed its hooked jaw and gouged luminous flesh to reveal the stark contour of its skull. A shard of flint cut its belly and the pressure of our assault forced the pink of its gut through the slit. The post slick with blood and burst roe and incandescent scales winking in the pale spring sunlight. We became bored and returned to our rods. The fish continued to flop and flap, not quite alive, not entirely dead.

I think of these things. Casual brutalities, unthinking and profane. Think of them often.

DR. ALEXIS VITIAS’S CLINIC is located on the seventeenth floor of the Hunts-Abrams medical complex in downtown Toronto. Mom gets my crutches from the trunk and trails me as I clump to the elevators. She attempts to straighten the hem on my jeans: with one leg rolled up and safety-pinned to my ass they don’t hang right. I slap her hand.

“Jesus, stop touching me. It’s not right.”

“What’s not right? I’m molesting you?”

“Christ, like you’ve got that Munchausen’s syndrome or something.”

“Don’t be an idiot.”

“You’re one of those mothers who convince themselves their kid’s sick so they can hold on to them. Soak toothbrushes in drain cleanser. Sprinkle arsenic in oatmeal. All kinds of sick shit.”

The whole time I’m talking, she’s tugging at my pants. “I’m helping you look presentable, Benjamin, not poisoning your breakfast. You wouldn’t eat oatmeal, anyway—it’s good for you.”

“Munchausen’s syndrome. A chronic case. One sick puppy.”

“I don’t care if you grow up.”

“Sure you do. You’ve still got my baby foreskin in a jar of formaldehyde.”

“I don’t,” she lies. Rifling her drawers for loose change as a kid, I found it tucked behind some balled socks: a wrinkly gray tube floating in a vial of piss-yellow fluid. Looked like a calamari ring. Years later, dad told me she’d bullied the doctor into handing it over. “You’re imagining things.”

“Imagining my ass. You keep my foreskin in a jar. A piece of your grown son’s anatomy in a Gerber babyfood jar—”

“Settle down, you’re getting all worked up—”

“—Gerber Split Pea and Carrot, you bizarre woman, would you please to Christ stop touching me?”

“Alright Mr. Hands Off,” she says—then, with a sly tug as the elevator doors open, straightens the hem.

The waiting room’s decor adheres to a design concept glimpsed on high-class porno sets: thick white carpeting, white calfskin sofa draped in a faux-leopardskin pelt, glass-legged endtables piled with glossy magazines. Vitias’s receptionist sits behind a half-moon desk.

“I’m here for a fitting.” Offer her a look I privately think of as the Panty Melter. “This horse needs a new shoe.”

A pitying expression crosses the receptionist’s face; perhaps she’s trying to picture me before the missing leg and the extra forty pounds, result of four months spent in bed—the first month medically mandated, the remainder elective. This trip marks the first time I’ve ventured from my parents’ house since what my mother refers to as The Mishap.

She consults her appointment book, frowns. “You’re early.” I get the sense I’ve committed a slight but shameful faux pas. “Take a seat. I’ll find the doctor.”

Dr. Vitias’s body conjures up images of an ambulatory fire hydrant: thick and densely muscled, a vague flaring at his shoulders the only anomaly on an otherwise unvarying frame. Eyes the hue of antifreeze dart above the wiry unkempt beard of a Macedonian bull god. There is something in the palpitations of his tapered fingers indicative of a barely contained vitality, a potency, that he’s constantly struggling to keep in check.

“Hello!” His exquisite right hand envelops mine, left gripping my elbow, shaking as though my arm’s the pump-handle on a village well. “Here for a leg, yes?”

I acknowledge his brazen statement of the obvious.

“Okay, okay. Let me show you what I’ve got.”

He leads us through a pebbled-glass door. I feel as though I’ve been ushered into a medieval torture chamber, albeit a sanitary and amply lit one. The room’s dominated by a trio of lab benches strewn with all manner of equipment: chromium screws and shiny servo motors and stainless steel tools whose purpose I cannot fathom, a bolt of artificial skin threaded on a wooden dowel, curls and corkscrews of buttery latex overflowing the trashcan below. Two Rubbermaid bins: the first contains articulated fingers and toes, the second full of garishly painted finger- and toenails. An unfinished leg bent across the near bench, all pistons and hinges and metal tubes, skinless, cyborgean. Artificial arms and legs dangle from the ceiling like pots and pans from a chef ’s rack.

“I take it you’ve had time to flip through our brochure.” Hoisting himself onto a stool, Vitias swivels to face me. “Anything catch your eye?”

Badgered by my mother, I’d chosen the Campion P5 endoskeletal leg with titanium pyramid couplers, ballistic silicone sheathing, spring-load dynamic ankle. Vitias nods at my selection as a sommelier might at a diner’s choice of vintage.

“Excellent, very nice.” Rooting through a drawer, he comes up with a conical alloy plug. “This is the P5’s female coupler. We attach it to the end of the tibia and, once everything’s healed, you’ll be able to snap the prosthetic on and off with ease.”

“Snap on, dum dum, snap off, dum dum, snap on snap off—the Snapper.” I snap my fingers. The joke’s lost on them.

“Pay attention,” my mother says. “This is important.”

“On second thought, do you have anything in a peg?”

Vitias says, “A peg?”

“Y’know, a lump of wood—oak maybe, or ash. A pegleg. Like a pirate.”

Vitias curls his lips into his mouth, nodding as though vaguely embarrassed. It’s a variation on the look I’ve received from an endless cavalcade of friends and relatives and well-wishers: a remotely detached sentiment that, translated into words, would mimic the sappy schmaltz found in condolence cards: With Deepest Sympathy and Sorrow for Your Loss.

“A peg?” Vitias says. “Sure, we can do that. Some leather straps, maybe, lash it to your leg? Very swashbuckling.”

“Stop being childish, Ben.” To Dr. Vitias: “He’s just being silly.”

“My leg’s gone, Mom. It’s … shit. Whale shit. Why fake it?”

“But don’t you want to look normal?” She’s genuinely baffled. “Don’t you want to … fit in?”

A wave of resentment rises within me, so all-consuming that for an instant the profile of my world, every angle and parameter, is etched in cold blues and greens. I reach for the nearest bin, dumbfounded with rage, shoving it off the bench’s edge. Fingernails spill across the polished tiles with a roachsounding clatter.

“Stop it.” Mom grabs my arm. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

“Fuck … you.”

I’ve never spoken to her that way. Not ever. Her hand falls away, then rises, with the other to cover her face. She utters a wail of such resonant grief, loud and ongoing like a bestial moan, that it frightens me.

“Mom?”

She rocks softly. Again that deep animal moaning, horrifying in its immodesty, rising from behind her hands.

“Mom, I’m sorry. Mom, please.”

Dr. Vitias pinches spilled fingernails between his long delicate fingers, dropping them carefully into the bin.

WATCHING A LOT OF PORN these days.

Download it off the Internet to spare yourself the embarrassment of face-to-face purchase. Back in high school I drove my father’s minivan all over town in search of an out-of-the-way smut peddler. A Korean deli received the bulk of my trade on account of its fine selection of filth and a proprietor who avoided all eye contact. I’d drive home in a lustful frenzy, boner pushing against my trouser leg, to jerk off in my bedroom or, if my parents were around, a locked bathroom. Sometimes I tried to achieve release without masturbating: flatten palm to crotch, cock skin stretched to a thrillingly painful tension, will myself to come. This required intense concentration, which my mother disrupted by banging on the door, enquiring if I’d drowned. Once, adventurous and low on funds, I bought a vacu-sealed fourpack for $6.99. Safely ensconced in the bathroom, I tore the plastic open and recoiled in abject horror: Suckin’ Grannies, 50 and Nifty, Old Farts, a ratty paperback entitled The Well-Spanked Farmgirl. I beat off to a mildly erotic charcoal etching on the book’s cover. The whole episode was anemic and dispiriting.

Now, thanks to the World Wide Web, a wondrous panoply of pornographic imagery is mere keystrokes away. It’s amazing, the stuff that’s out there: big tits and big cocks and big asses, Asian and Black and Latino, Lolita gangbangs, barnyard bestiality, pissing and shitting, fisting and spanking, catfighting and trampling, sites dedicated to corsets and chastity belts, to plush animals (For those who truly love stuffed animals, in a PERSONAL way), to ballbusting (Hey, you Pencil-Necked Geek! Submit to Mistress Adrianna and she’ll crush your puny weakling SACK!), orthodontic braces, robots. Balloon Buddies features naked women astraddle giant sausage-shaped balloons; AquaGirl.com has smiling girls in scuba gear, diving bells, bathyspheres; She-Wolves of the SS pictures women dressed in Nazi regalia beating masked supplicants with riding crops; Santa’s Little Helpers caters to those who get off on pointy-shoed, striped-stockinged midgets satisfying women of Amazonian carriage.

Off in a corner of my parents’ unfinished basement, hooked to a spliced cable connection, I surf for hours. The flatscreen monitor reflects its jaundiced glow on my skin: slack and sallow, quivering rolls of fat girding my abdomen and overhanging the elasticized hem of my boxers. There’s a fold-out couch beside the computer desk, spread with an old sleeping bag; come early morning I switch off the computer and crawl into the bag, sleeping off the daylight hours. Jerk off five, six times a day. Friction splits the skin, makes it bleed; wrap yourself in a sock and it’s bearable.

My favorite site is Xtreme Valkyries, where musclebound women manhandle nebbish men. This one photo always gets me: a huge she-bear, muscled beyond all reason, hefting a skinny naked man above her head. And the guy’s smiling, nuts squashed in this big she-bear’s fist and he’s loving it.

Utterly helpless. Emasculated.

THE WORDS UNLIMBITED POTENTIAL scrawled on a sheet of pink bristol board taped to the door of the Port Dalhousie Lion’s Club, an arrow pointing down. Early June; first-birth mayflies buzz and circle the exposed lightbulb above the door. I park my motorcycle in the lot’s rough gravel and ensure my prosthetic leg’s snugly attached. The dynamic ankle squeaks: I’m supposed to lubricate it with silicone gel biweekly, but don’t. Clear skies, Big Dipper tilting over Main Street.

Pause in the doorway. Rising up the short flight of stairs: voices and intemperate laughter, underlaid by the scratchy rhythm of a familiar country-and-western song. Consider leaving, but my shrink suggests I go. She also happens to write my prescription for Effexor and Elavil, two wondrous pharmaceuticals that, following the first dose, I knew I could never again live without.

So. Unlimbited Potential.

The Lion’s Club is low-ceilinged with a warped parquet floor. A horseshoe of folding chairs rings a cheap plywood lectern. A folding table supports bowls of chips, a plate of macaroons, a metal coffee urn. All around are the hum of electric wheelchairs and the buzz of servo motors, the squeal of unoiled hinges, the thunk of false legs colliding with tables and chairs. I stare in stark horror at the fingerless, handless, armless, legless creatures shambling about. Those not resigned to wheelchairs have archaic prosthetics strapped to the truncated portions of their anatomy, fake limbs bent at perpetual angles. Others display their stumps with, by turns, a sense of downtrodden stoicism, strident pride, or weary indifference. Some are sunken and mottled around the eyes, the way tropical fruit goes bad and collapses. A great many strike me as hopelessly unsexed: with a few notable exceptions, I cannot distinguish men from women. This revelation fills me with a vague dread.

I sit beside a thickset middle-aged man with a peppery weekend beard. He wears chambray work pants, dark blue, a heavy sweater despite the weather. The sweater, faded greens and whites in a Christmas tree motif, is in the final stage of decomposition: I am reasonably certain that, were I to look closely, its basic molecular structure would present itself to the naked eye. He glances over as I sit down, nods. It’s entirely possible that he pities me as much as I do him, perhaps because I’ve elected to wear a shirt that was once form-flattering but now resembles a shiny black sausage casing stretched over the planetary bulk of my gut. Particularly revolting is the buttery belt of lard projecting between the bottom of my shirt and the hem of my sweatpants.

“First time?” A lemon-yellow prosthesis projects from the guy’s right sweater sleeve. Looks like he’s wearing a washglove except the fingers are melted at the tips. He’s got a cup of coffee clenched between his legs, stirring with his left hand. Whitener floats on the surface in pale lumps, milky scum clinging to the cup’s sides.

“First time,” I say. “What’s the deal?”

“Ah, a bunch of happy-crappy. Someone’s gonna step behind that podium and yak for a bit, we’re all gonna pretend to be interested, that person’s gonna cry, we’re gonna clap, drink our coffee, go home. Christ, most of us are only here on our shrinks’ say-so.”

“Same here.”

“Oh, yeah?” The guy perks up. “What’re you on?”

“Elavil and Effexor.”

“The good stuff. Lucky dog.”

“You?”

“Fuckin’ Prozac. Might as well give me Flintstone vitamins.”

We introduce ourselves. He’s Gil, a long-haul trucker from Stoney Creek. Twice-divorced, kids on the East and West Coasts. He tells me that between alimony and child support, he’s barely got two pennies to rub together.

“And just the other day some bastard stole my new prosthesis. I’m back to the old one.” He lifts his fake arm, which looks pretty trailworn. “Had a nice new unit—articulate digits, ribbed sili-skin, even little fake hairs. Guess I fell behind on the payments because a repo man crawled through my bedroom window and swiped it off the nightstand. Can you imagine—repo’ing an amputee’s arm? We’re talking ten shades of low, man. So,” he nods at my prosthesis, “how’d that happen?”

I suppose it’s standard protocol to discuss such matters, the same way AA members swap tales of epic benders. “That was you?” Gil says when I tell him. “I read about it in the papers. They ran that photo. Man, it was … gruesome.”

Taken by an opportunistic shutterbug, the photo graced the pages of the Toronto Star, the Standard, the Globe and Mail, a few syndicated dailies. An unfocused middle-distance snapshot, it conveys a sense of great activity—of frenzy. I’m laid out on the wet stage, sunlight reflecting off the show pool’s surface. Though parts of my body are obscured by the milling trainers, the stump is clearly visible. In the far left-hand corner, Niska’s shadow curves beneath the water.

I cut out every copy of the article I could find and taped them to my bedroom wall. While I was out at a doctor’s appointment, my mother tore them down.

“Same kind of thing happened to me.” Gil raises his yellow melted hand. “Shark, thirty yards off Indian Rocks Beach in Clearwater, Florida. I’m out past the break where the water’s calm, just paddling along. Then something’s rubbing up under my legs, thick and rough: felt like I’d been run by a power sander. I caught a brown flash a few feet down and knew I was in mucho trouble. Tiger shark, most likely. Vicious fuckers. Stripped flesh from the elbow down; gloved me, that being the technical term.”

A young woman sits beside him. Blond and strikingly beautiful, firm well-formed breasts straining against a white linen blouse. Looks about twenty, though she could be younger. The ghost of a harelip scar is visible when she smiles. She appears to have no arms.

“Gil,” she says, “introduce me to your friend?”

“Friend?” says Gil. “Just met him.”

She says, “Heidi Giroux.”

“Ben Jones. Nice to meet you.”

Heidi smiles again, making me think of a girl I’d treated shabbily. You rotten-ass bastard were her last words to me. We broke up over the phone, two thousand kilometers between us and the insult didn’t register, didn’t sting. In fact, I liked the sound of it, the way it tripped off her tongue. You rotten-ass bastard.

An utter shipwreck of a human being shambles to the podium. He appears to be composed entirely of diverse plastics and latexes, wood, possibly carpenter’s putty. A pincer-like mechanism constitutes his left hand. His right leg is a tapered peg. I’m unsure whether his state is the result of a single catastrophic accident or a series of unrelated minor misadventures. A horrendous farming mishap? A fraternity prank gone horridly awry? The mind reels. He speaks in gulps and gasps, sentence fragments clearing his lips in a metronomic, hypnotic cadence.

“There were times … I thought … why not just … end it? But with the love … and support … of my wife … my kids … the grace … of God … I go on. What else … can anyone … do?”

The man cries. We applaud. Mingle. Disperse.

Afterwards Heidi and I sit on the gate of Gil’s Chevy Sierra while he hunts the glovebox for rolling papers. To the south, down a soft slope, night waves lap the shores of Martindale Pond, slapping the hulls of tethered rowing skulls. By the domelight’s glow, I see Heidi is not entirely armless: a pair of stubs project from her smoothly sloped shoulders. She smells of vanilla perfume, a brand favored by high-school girls.

Gil materializes bearing a joint of herculean proportions. He sparks the tip and sets it in the crook of Heidi’s mouth. She takes a decidedly unladylike toke, expelling bluish smoke through her nose.

“Himalayan Gold,” Gil says. “Buy it from a guy in Texarkana and smuggle it over the border in a box of clementines. Drug dogs can’t sniff it.”

Gil plucks the joint from Heidi’s mouth, takes a hit, passes it. Potent stuff: a shiny metallic bubble expands inside my skull, dense and bright with colors. Cars pass on Main Street, the growl of motors swelling, receding. From Old Port Dalhousie comes the intermittent screech of teenagers scarring the tarmac in juiced-up musclecars. A mosquito hums against Heidi’s neck. I slap it. “One here, too,” she says, eyes falling to her chest, where another mosquito rests on the comfortable swell of her breast. What the hell—slap that fucker, too.

“Do you ever think about it?” Gil’s weaving side to side. “Karma?”

“Gil,” Heidi says, “please.”

“No, I’m serious. Not saying I deserved this, exactly—who deserves to get their arm tore off, right? Then again, maybe I did. Sit and think on it awhile and you realize, yeah, of course you deserve it—conceivably. Some unkindness or cruelty or selfishness, doing the wrong thing when the right thing was too hard or didn’t suit your purposes, hurting someone just for the rip of it, ’cause it made you feel like a big man. Great Wheel of Karma, man. All comes around.”

“I call it bullshit, Gil. Pure bullshit.”

Gil shrugs, unfazed at my skepticism. “When something awful happens to you, can you chalk it up to bad luck, crossed stars, wrong place, wrong time? Not me. As a human being, you’ve got to believe there’s a reason. Catted around on my wives, wasn’t always there for my kids. A tiger shark took my arm thirty yards off the white sand beaches of Indian Rocks. A bit harsh, sure, but all things seek balance. Tit for tat. Did I deserve it? Could be I did.”

“You can’t possibly believe that.”

“Why not? Comforting, in a way. Square your debt and start again, fresh.”

“It’s ridiculous. What about all the people who suffer horribly for no reason? What about …” Cock a thumb at Heidi. “… her?”

“You don’t know what I deserve,” she says. “You don’t know me at all.”

“Okay, okay, then what about … starving children? What about kids born with warped spines, or … or retards. Explain them.”

“Not claiming it’s an easy theory to defend. Just my belief.”

“Yeah, well, it’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”

Gil raises his artificial hand to his lips. The roach glows between those yellow fingertips, blistering the plastic. “A few years ago, this elephant, Tyke, was killed by the Toronto police. A performing elephant, right, with a traveling circus? Got loose after a show. Cops boxed it in with their patrol cars and opened fire. It hadn’t hurt anyone, but I guess it could’ve. Took two hundred rounds to put the thing down. They shot it in the trunk and belly, its ears and face, trying to put a slug in its brain but its skull was so thick the bullets were driven flat. I remember blood on that gray skin—so much blood. It went down on its front knees, head bowed like it was surrendering. The cops reloaded and kept shooting.”

“So what?” An intense rage gathers, only slightly offset by the mellowing effect of the dope. “What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”

“So who’s to blame?” Gil says. “The cops? They were doing their job. Tyke? Scared, mistreated animal. What I’m saying is, when I saw the photo of you in the paper I thought of that elephant shot to death on the street. Karma, man. Universal and everlasting.”

“What are you talking about? I had nothing to do with that. You don’t know the first thing about me.”

“Don’t know nothing about nothing, man. Speculation, is all. I gotta go.”

He climbs into the truck, keys the engine. The final bars of Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” rattle from the truck’s stereo. Rolling down the window, he waves goodbye with his fake hand, pulling away.

“Go … fuck!”

Taillights brightening, the truck slows. I ball my hands into fists, loosening them only when Gil gooses the gas pedal and turns onto the street.

“What an asshole.”

“He gets that way when he’s high,” says Heidi.

“Are you two close?”

“We smoke up after the meetings. I guess we’re friends.”

“Whatever. I’m leaving.”

“Give me a lift?”

“I drove my bike, and I’m pretty high. Might kill us both.”

“Who cares?”

“The depth of your nihilism shocks me.”

HEIDI LIVES outside Welland, a township near the Merritville Speedway. When I was a kid my father took me to the Speedway to watch Baja buggies tear around a dirt oval, nitrous oxide funnycars, demolition derbies. I remember the cool autumn air thickened with stirred dust, Dad buying beer for himself, Orange Crush for me. I drive slow down back roads, taking it easy on the curves. Heidi leans against the backrest, powerful legs wrapped around my waist. Midges and moths splatter the helmet’s faceshield. The soft heat of Heidi’s body, her breath on the hairs of my neck.

The house sits at the base of a wooded valley. Pickup trucks in the blacktopped drive. Smells: woodsmoke and pinesap. Sly noises in the fringing trees: raccoons, maybe spring turkeys.

Heidi slides off the seat. “Sit a minute?”

She leads me to a wicker swing on the porch. A motion-sensor halogen snaps on and I note, in that stark sudden light, just how beautiful—and how young—she is. My prosthetic leg collides with a porch rail and she says, “Shshsh. You’ll wake my folks.”

We sit on the swing. Heidi’s body presses close to mine. I know nothing about this girl: her age, her hat size, if she is an honorable person, whether she’s ever been happy and in love. It’s been this way many times before, anonymous and meaningless, but what once seemed ideal now fills me with a profound melancholy.

“How did it happen—your arms?”

“Tragic cheerleading accident. Do you really want to know?”

“I guess not, no.”

“Of course not.”

Then Heidi’s kissing me. She is very adept, very knowledgeable—a surprise. She draws my tongue into her mouth as though her intention is to consume it. Her arm stubs dig into my breastbone.

And as we sit in that queer half-embrace on the porch I experience a vision of such clear unflinching intensity it takes my breath away: the two of us sitting on this same porch years from now, surrounded by children. Armless, legless, unfinished children wobbling around on artificial legs and crawling on stumps and swinging from the porch on shiny hook-hands, grinning and babbling and lurching about. I’m dandling a toddler on my knee and realize that—horrifically, insupportably—the fucking thing has a prosthetic head: milky white latex draped over curved steel slats, hair shining with the false luster of a doll’s, roaming marble eyeballs socked in its fake face, whining servo motors teasing the corners of its mouth into a wide smile and in that darkness gears meshing, pinions spinning and winding. And while I recognize the scenario is an impossibility I push her away.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I have to go.”

“Do you have a girl? It’s okay, I don’t mind. Don’t go, it’s fine.”

I’m shivering now, I’m trying to stand.

“What’s wrong, Ben? Did I do something wrong?”

“No. Yes. You have … no fucking arms.”

“You … asshole! ” She flinches away from me as though I’m the bearer of some deadly equatorial disease. “You’re not better than me!”

“I know.” Clomping down the steps sickened with myself, with her, the whole pathetic scene. “I know.”

Key the bike, open the throttle. Heidi’s yelling now, her face pink with strain. Although I cannot hear her over the engine’s roar, I can guess what she’s saying.

You rotten-ass bastard.

Blast out of the valley like a house on fire. Bury the needle, tach redlined, 170K in the passing lane. The sky a smooth black dome, cold and starless. Cut onto the QEW, accelerate up the Niagara overpass. Catch a whiff of burning rubber and figure it’s a tramp steamer or garbage scow plying the Welland Canal until I see flames and realize my leg’s on fire. I set the prosthesis too close to the tailpipe and now latex is burning merrily, a greasy skirt of fire robing my hips. I gear down and slap at the flames, picturing my broken-necked body propped against a concrete bridge support, clothes burned away and flesh melted from the heat.

The image isn’t entirely unpleasant. Sort of funny, actually, in a semi-tragic way.

Jam my hand down my pants, pop the coupler. Leg tearing free, bouncing across the street-lit tarmac over the retaining wall.

Plummeting three hundred feet, extinguished like a burning matchstick in the darkly flowing water.

I’VE TAKEN TO SCREWING with people in online support chatrooms.

Sign in under a phony name to retain your anonymity. Online, you’re nothing more than a screen moniker, a disease, an addiction, a sickening frailty, a set of reduced values. It’s amazing, what’s out there. More amazing is how maddeningly supportive everyone is. I’ve joined groups for Albinism (CASPER82: Know what I miss most, guys? The sun. The warm, bright sun); Narcolepsy (MR.ZZZZ: So I says to Jim, I says to him, I says akcifaacvggggggggggggggggg); Breastfeeding (CHAPPEDNIPS: My nipples get so dang sore. It would feel really nice if another woman rubbed them, preferably in slow, concentric circles. ); Compulsive Gambling (CARDSHARK: Bet I can beat my addiction faster than any a you chumps. I’ll book you 5-to-1 odds); Retirement (MOTORHOMER: Don’t you sometimes feel, lying in bed late at night, that life is basically empty and devoid of all meaning without a job?); Dementia (NAPOLEON55: Which one of you slippery motherfuckers stole my slippers?), Gulf War Syndrome (VOICESIN-MYHEAD: Look down at your best friend’s face and all you see’s a pile of GOO); Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (DOZY: Let’s just forget about this wacky syndrome and take a nap); Cold and Flu (MA’SCHICKENSOUP:You are the wimpiest bunch of candy-asses I’ve ever met. It’s a fucking cold,for Christ’s sake!). Pepper my posts with emoticons, smiley faces and frowny faces and winking smileys. Smiley faces acting as a shorthand for grief, commiseration, love, hope, redemption.

Lately I’ve haunted Friends of Bill W, a group for recovering alcoholics. Tonight I’m CONSTANTCRAVINGS.

STONESOBER: Welcome aboard, Constant!

BETH54: Welcome, Constant. How long have you been a friend of Bill?

CONSTANTCRAVINGS: Thanks, Stone and Beth. Me and Bill have been acquainted three weeks now.

STONESOBER: Bill’s a good man. He changed my life.

BETH54: Mine, too. He’ll change yours, Constant.

CONTANTCRAVINGS: I hope so. Pretty rough going at the moment.

STONESOBER: Gotta be strong. Gotta livestrong.

CONSTANTCRAVINGS: Sometimes, alone here in the dark, I get to thinking about how good a beer would taste. A cool frosty one sliding down my throat, all bubbly and golden. Man, that would hit the spot.

BETH54: Put those thoughts out of your mind. Stay strong in your beliefs.

CONSTANTCRAVINGS: Wobbly pops. That’s what my buddy Franky calls them. “Hey, man,” he’ll say, “let’s head down to the Hitching Post, blow the foam off a few wobbly pops.” I wonder what Frank’s doing, right now.

STONESOBER: Better off without him. He’s an enabler.

CONSTANTCRAVINGS: We used to have canoe races. Remember those? Line up five glasses of draft beer, those little 8-ouncers, drop a peanut in the last one. First guy to chug all five and swallow the peanut was the winner. I loved winning. Gave me a real sense of accomplishment.

BETH54: We remember canoe races, Constant. Change the subject, huh?

CONSTANTCRAVINGS: Scotch, too. God, I do love my scotch.That smooth brown goodness rolling over my tongue, into all the nooks and crannies of my mouth. That delicious, nutty, cask-mellowed taste.

STONESOBER: What are you, Constant, an ad writer for Bushmills? lol!

CONSTANTCRAVINGS: Man, I know they call it Demon Alcohol, but it’s always seemed somehow angelic to me. Makes things more … bearable, I guess is the right word. The world’s just a little bit brighter, a little softer. You know?

BETH54: Sigh. Good luck, Constant. [BETH54 has exited chatroom]

CONSTANTCRAVINGS: Oh, sweet baby Jesus. My wife, the ridiculous old prune, she collects airplane booze. Those little bottles, right? And I see now she’s lined her collection on a shelf above the computer. Christ, they’re all here: Johnny Walker Red, Absolut, Crown Royal, more. Dozens of little soldiers lined in a row. Lord, I’m all shaky and sweaty. Maybe just one …

STONESOBER: Don’t do it, man! It’s not worth it!

CONSTANTCRAVINGS: I just cracked the seal on a bottle of Captain Morgan’s. My word, that smell. I’m in heaven. It tastes so damn GOOD. It’s even better after not drinking for so long. Like being a virgin again! Hey, Stone, won’t you join me? Must be some booze lying around your house—in the toilet tank, maybe? Under the sink?

STONESOBER: Good luck, Constant. I’ll say a prayer for you.

CONSTANTCRAVINGS: Say a prayer for yourself, killjoy! Have a drink and lighten up!

[CONSTANTCRAVINGS, you have been banned from this forum]

I’M SITTING IN A CORNER BOOTH at the Concorde, a strip club near Clifton Hill. I used to come here with my high-school buddies, all of us toting fake IDs. We’d sit along pervert’s row, laughing and hooting, superior in our youth and wide-open future and potential to do great things.

On the raised parquet stage, a topless chick spins disinterestedly round a polished brass pole. A woman in her mid-forties stands in the red glare of a HOT NUTS vending machine, naked save a pair of pink heels. She’s eating barbecued peanuts from a plastic cup, pinching them between fingernails that must be two inches long. It’s the most oddly revolting sight I’ve ever laid eyes on.

I’m drinking Sauza tequila: empty shot glasses on the table, ashtray filled with wrung lemon wedges. The darkness and smoke favor the strippers, whose faces are made for mood lighting. In their younger years, many of them worked the pole at Mints or Private Eyes but, bumped by the influx of new meat, they’ve carted their sagging anatomies and failing looks here, a final stand before the street corner.

A new girl steps through the tinsel curtain to a smattering of desultory applause. Blood-red spotlights disguise the needle tracks on her arms but do nothing to hide the seam of a C-section scar curving from bellybutton to bikini line. A guy sitting up front whistles sharply, the way one seeking a dog’s attention might.

A woman slides into the booth. At the tail end of her career, pencil thin lines where her eyebrows should be, a broken nose that’s healed badly. A sarong wrapped around her waist, which I suppose could be either a token gesture at modesty or a means of concealing some gruesome defect.

“Drinking alone, baby?”

“Looks that way.”

“Want some company?”

My response is noncommital and she slides closer. She wears the brand of perfume strippers prefer; I wonder if there’s a communal atomizer they all share.

“I’ll suck your cock for fifty dollars.” She laughs crazily, as though I’d told a rakishly indelicate joke.

“I don’t even know your name.”

“Sharday. What do you say, hon?”

“Let me have another drink.”

“How ’bout getting me one, too?”

Suitably fortified, we sneak out the back door. A clear autumn night and the sky spread with stars, remote and numberless. Sharday leads me across the parking lot to a row of motel rooms. Her room is small but neat and smells of carpet freshener. Framed photos of two young boys on the nightstand; she turns them face-down before easing me onto the bed. Bills change hands. She unbuttons my jeans, tugs them down.

“What’s that?”

“A fake leg.” I assumed she’d noticed the replacement prosthesis in the club. For a moment I think she’s going to call it off, as though amputation’s contagious and she doesn’t want to risk it.

“How did it happen?”

“War wound. Desert Storm. Some brown bastard cut it off with a sword. Those wiggly looking swords.”

“A kirpan?”

“Sure … one of those.”

Sharday slips a condom over me with the clinical disinterest of an ER nurse. She works with a brisk, businesslike air, humming a familiar tune I can’t quite put a name to.

“Is it okay?” she says. “Feel good, hon?”

“It’s … fine.”

“Something else you want? It’s cool.”

I tell her to tuck her arms behind her back so that, from my perspective, it’d look …

“Like I have no arms?”

“Yes,” I say. “Like that.”

She does as I ask, but I can’t look at her. Lean back on the bed, stare at a ceiling covered in a constellation of water stains. One resembles a suckling pig, another some breed of tropical bird. Stare at Sharday’s bobbing skull, those dark roots growing out of her scalp. A bedspring pokes through the threadbare mattress, jabbing me in the spine. Music seeps through the wall from the other room: “Let My Love Open the Door,” by Pete Townsend. The song is followed by another and another, then “The Things I Do for Money” by the Northern Pikes is playing.

“Awful sorry, sugar. I’m dancing in a minute.”

She pulls the condom off and tucks me back inside my boxers. No refund is offered. I clip my leg on. Sharday leads me outside.

“Gonna be okay, hon?”

“Thanks for trying.”

She pecks me on the cheek then sets off across the lot, the click-click of her heels echoing off the graffiti-tagged walls. I walk out to the street. Cars packed with teens cruise past on Ferry, looking to pull a U-turn and head back down the Hill. A wire-mesh rack propped beside the Concorde’s door, stuffed with brochures for local attractions: Castle of Frankenstein, Skylon Tower, Hollywood Wax Museum, Colonel Tilliwacker’s Haunted Lemonade Stand. In the top right corner: a glossy blue brochure, killer whale leaping beneath the hub of a brilliant rainbow. Everyone Loves Marineworld, spelled out in inch-high bubble script.

A CAB DROPS ME OFF outside the front gates as early morning stars bleed into the lightening sky. Ticket booths boarded up, closed for the season. Head to the trainer’s entrance, kicking through drifts of crackling leaves. My key still works. In the prep area fillet knives hang on a magnetized strip above a block of frozen herring thawing in a metal basin. The odor of chlorine and gutted fish; the bark of penned sea lions. Step through another door onto the stage.

Security lamps burn on the amphitheater’s perimeter, casting a silvered sheen on the water. Cross the stage, past props silent in their wrap of shadows. A paddle wheel turns with a steady trickle of water. Birds roost on a bridge spanning the show and wait pools. Peel off shirt, remove shoes and socks and pants, uncouple my leg. Late September wind buffets what’s left of my body. I break out in gooseflesh.

The whale was captured in a drift net off the coast of Siberia. Sectioned from her pod, hooked to a fifty-ton winch, dragged aboard a Russian freighter. She spent three weeks cradled in a body hammock, hosed down with salt water. A crane lifted her through a moonlit sky and into a new world: 90” ×60” ×30”, glass and concrete. I was the one who fed her. Taught her. Kept her alive. I came to believe she belonged to me, the way land or a car can belong to a person. I forgot that every time I entered the water I belonged to her, and the moment I remembered was the moment it ceased to matter.

Ease myself down by the pool’s lip, dangling my leg in the water. Niska swims at the far end, dorsal fin cutting the glasslike surface. Air jets from her blowhole, a shimmering spume lit by the stark white lights. Cup water and lift it to my mouth, relishing that salty sting. The pool dark and fathomless, dropping into forever. As a child I suffered this recurring nightmare in which the floor of my bedroom turned liquid, bed bobbing on the placid surface. Peering over the mattress, I saw shapes wheeling and surging in the inky water, primordial Lovecraftian horrors with scales and blunt teeth. How far down did that darkness stretch: through the Earth’s core, out into space, to the edge of the known universe? The distance from the foot of my bed to the open door was perhaps five feet—I could clear it at a leap. But if I were to slip …?

Push off the concrete ledge, move out into the pool. One-legged and overweight, I cut an ungainly path through water so frigid it robs my breath. Niska’s head turns, a languid sweep. Her body describes a slow half-circle, starlight rippling over the contour of her dorsal ridge. I tread water, cold pressing against my ribcage. Catch my reflection in the pool’s dark mirror. No fear or indecision in my eyes and for that I’m thankful. Nothing to be done for it, now. There is only acceptance, and a hope that, in those slender moments separating what is from what may be, there might be understanding.

I once spent the night with a girl picked up at a downtown bar. I can no longer recall her name, her smell, the color of her eyes. She lived in an old building facing St. Paul Street, backing onto Twelve Mile Creek. The bedroom overlooked a wooded dell, creek running swiftly behind. Early that morning I woke to the sound of voices. I sat up and went to the window. Three figures stood in the half-light. Down along the woodline, where it was too dark to make out ages or faces: vague outlines, rough movements and angles. Two larger figures had the smaller boxed in. They shoved the person to the ground—a woman; you could tell by the pitch of her voice. One of them fell on top of her while the other stood off to one side, head sweeping side to side. Predawn sunlight streamed through the window, picking up a patina of dust on the venetian blinds. I went to the kitchen and rooted through the drawers, laying my hands on a butcher knife. When I returned the two on the ground were rocking rhythmically. The other one said something—Give it, or maybe Give ’er—and laughed. I couldn’t quite grasp what I was seeing. I gripped the knife so tightly the grain of it lingered on my palm for hours afterwards. Then I slid it under the boxspring and slipped into bed, curling my body into that nameless girl who never stirred.

Maybe that’s how she wants it, I thought. Maybe there’s an arrangement. A span of dark time went by, punctuated by a single low moan. It wasn’t any of my business. She’d scream if she needed help. Birds chattered in the trees, and below that, the sound of endlessly rushing water. Someone else will notice. Someone else will commit.

And what becomes of it all? The brutalities and insincerities, the callousness and selfishness, wrongdoings real and imagined, the acts of inaction, the fear, regret, guilt? Doesn’t just go away, that much I know. Gil had it right: a balancing act takes place every minute of every day, a silent tally, each act carrying its own discrete weight, its own transformative power.

And do we ever really know where we stand? At this moment, in this breath—which way the scale tips?

Square your debt. Start over fresh.

The whale surfaces. Mouth slightly open, light glinting on the points of her teeth. You’re breathing heavily, held up by pure adrenaline. Run a hand over the smooth cone of her snout. She gurgles low in her throat, angling her head to expose the soft seam of her mouth. Stare into that huge black eye, search for some sign of recognition.

“I’m tired, girl.” You slap her tongue. “So let’s do this thing.”

Taking your signal, Niska moves out into open water. She describes a quickening path around the pool, past the handicapped pavilion where, some million years ago, a young girl with an inscrutable smile watched you rocket into blue summer sky. Niska’s dorsal fin dips below the surface. Give yourself over to the current, its power and possibilities. A locking sensation, all things in balance. Moon an unblinking eye and beyond it a million stars, around which revolve untold worlds.

Water surges beneath you, a thrilling push. Tiny bubbles trail to the surface, bursting with a fizzy club-soda pop. You hear yourself say, “I’m so sorry,” though to whom or for what reasons you will remain forever unsure.