Sarah Court

BLACK BOX THE ORGANIST

You might configure my existence as a string of air disasters. Commercial jetliners scud-missiled to smithereens in foreign airspace. Botched water landings where the exits crimp shut: eels and sharks dart past the porthole windows like an inside-out aquarium until pressure cracks Plexiglas and the sea rushes in. Lover, husband, father. All ruinous, all fatal. Except I survive. My life a pile of flaming wrecks I somehow stride clear of.

A black box is recovered from each crash site. My own voice catalogues events, idiotic and selfish, principal to each fiasco. It isn’t the voice of a man nearing his own excruciating death, face torn up in flames with shards of a shattered instrument panel deep-driven into it. It’s the penitent voice of a man addressing his God.

The houseboat’s an Orca Weekender. Its sixty horsepower Evinrude belches lung-blackening smoke. I stripped linens off every bed and piled them in a sultan-like mound on the one where I sleep. Compass, marine radio, microwave, TV: baby’s tricked out. Whatever wasn’t clamped down I threw overboard. Yawing near shore I blasted every emergency flare at the trees in hopes dead leaves might catch fire. That was yesterday morning when lint-like fog hung over the silvered water until the sun chased it upshore to linger between the trees like low-lying smoke. Rawbeautied county, this far north.

I stole the boat from a hairy-fisted rental agent who overused the word “doggone.” As in: “This is the best doggone houseboat in my doggone fleet.” As in: “Talk about your doggone fine houseboating weather!” After the umpteenth “doggone” I said to myself: I’m stealing this fucking spaz’s doggone property. Handles like a bear. Aim it like a ballistic missile—precise—and hold that course or else you’re doomed.

What jackass steals a houseboat? A jackass such as myself, evidently. Idiotic as hotwiring a car to drive at speeds not exceeding four knots down the same unending stretch of road. Inlets crook like arthritic thumbs and riverside towns sporadically carve themselves out of the barrens but I am locked upon this waterway.

It’s the second vehicle I’ve stolen. The first was a minivan left running outside a Big Bee store in the city of my birth. Freakishly clean. CDs alphabetized. Bright yellow hockey tape wrapped at ‘10’ and ‘2’ positions on the wheel. So enervated did I become within its confines that I stopped at a ramshackle fried chicken shack hours past Toronto. Manning its counter the ungainliest teenager I’d ever clapped eyes on. This shocked expression you’d find on a man kicked awake in his sleep. On his head sat a paper chicken hat so saturated with sweat and grease its head drooped to peck the gawky sonofabitch in his forehead.

“Welcome to the Chubby Chicken.”

The kid blew at his hat same way you’d blow a lock of hair out your eyes. The chicken head popped up, came down, pecked the kid in his head. Ah, Jesus, I thought drinking in his dreadful spectre. This is too fucking sad. I have been overly sensitive lately, granted, but this cow-eyed cupcake in his soggy chicken hat in the airless middle of Buttfuck Nowhere summoned within me that breed of quasiabstract sadness where spiritual malaise digs in roots. I mean, not to make too big a deal.

I purchased a family bucket and paid with my credit card. Gave the mopey bastard a hundred dollar tip. Hey, big spender! Such largesse from a man who scant months ago pawed through a box of old birthday cards hoping an overlooked sawbuck might fall out.

I ate the entire bucket. Pure gluttony. Choking down the seventh drumstick the realization dawned that these were modes of behaviour a man would adopt upon the discovery he has a week to live. Once it ceased to matter whether he overate, drank his face off, snorted Borax. Healthy living is an undertaking only men with futures bother with.

Full disclosure: I always wanted a boy.

Shall I put on display the greasy-crawly scraps of my psyche? You won’t like me. I don’t really give a damn. I want to be understood within the parameters of what I am: a hardcore bastard. A rotten piece of work.

So, honest goods: a boy. Ask a hundred expectant first-time fathers: boy or girl? Ninety-nine will tell you boy. The one who doesn’t is giving you the breeze. The imprint of one Fletcher Burger would chalk itself more clearly upon the slate of a boy’s mind so I wished for one. But as wishes are fickle, any even-minded wisher should be satisfied with half measures. Which I got: a ten-fingered, ten-toed baby girl.

My marriage was in shambles by then. My wife caught me sniffing the seat of my jeans to see whether they were clean enough to wear again and refused to kiss me for a week. She’d buy too many bananas and when they blackened throw them in the freezer to bake banana bread that never materialized. “Is it me,” I’d go, “or is our freezer full of frozen gorilla fingers?” She stockpiled my foibles in a mental armoury and frequently launched tactical strikes. Blind-siding me with how I begrudged buying my own daughter baby gifts. “She’s happiest playing with a crumpled ball of newsprint!” Arguments often ended with her saying: “I never worry about Fletcher Burger’s happiness. Someone’s always watching out for Fletcher Burger’s happiness.” Pointing a finger at me. It did anger and disgrace me — I recall weeping over it in a Dollar Store, the most dispiriting and pitiful of retail outlets — that I couldn’t love my wife in the manner that, as a husband, I likely should have. The way she probably deserved. Weeping while picking through 99¢ canisters of discontinued, highly flammable silly string. Two of which I bought as stocking stuffers.

We’d relied on that baby to salvage whatever was broken. Yet we knew the only way that could happen was if our kid was born malformed, encephalitic, with a hole in its heart. A Lorenzo’s Oil scenario to ennoble us through shared suffering. But as Abby was perfectly healthy and neither of us suffered from Münchausen syndrome to make us dissolve rat poison into her pablum, well, that infant life preserver we’d hoped would rescue us from the misery of one another may as well have been tossed off the deck of the Titanic. Fuck it all, anyway. Men and women are fundamentally different creatures. DNA helixes, desires, plumbing, hysteria levels. What fool stuffs a mongoose and a viper into a gunny sack, tosses the sack in a raging river, and harbours hope of a pleasant outcome?

Then Abigail was born… staring at her bloodscummed face I knew I’d do anything for her. Never such ache for my wife. On our marital altar all I’d been thinking was: I will let you down. Yet I can no longer recall Abby’s face with exactitude. They say when a person dies you often lose the image of them; your memories degrade at the pace of that body interred. She isn’t dead. Still, I cannot frame her face. Her profile made of sand, continually erased by a steady wind gusting through my head.

The setting sun is a swollen ball backgrounding shore pines as I crank the wheel starboard to butt a dock girded with hacked-apart radial tires. WELCOME TO BOBCAYGEON reads a sign above the marina fuel pumps. Summer rentals all battened down. Locals look startled in their habitat: slugs at the heart of a lettuce head. Catch sight of myself in a shop window. A winnowed aspect to my face. You’d think its angles had been scored using a dentist’s drill.

The bar’s enclosed by a wrought-iron fence. Girls too young to be legal sit on the patio with a jug of radiant green cocktail resembling engine coolant. Inside it’s quiet enough to hear the sucksuck of sorrows in their drowning. The assembled rubbydubs’ faces look fashioned from slum-grade tin. Pitted, discoloured, robbed of whatever dignity flesh possesses robing men of substance. Fuck me if I don’t fit right in. The draft beer glows unhealthily. Quaffing the blood of an irradiated god.

Blood. Bones. Organs.

Imagine your breastbone cracked apart. Organs gouged from knits of silverskin. Price tags clipped to each. How much is a gently used gallbladder worth? Liver and pancreas and heart and kidneys attached to threads extending thousands of miles. Design of those commercial airline maps tucked into seatbacks: a fountain of red threads departing The International Airport of You. Those threads are mercilessly winched and your parts skip-roll-bounce on tethers, sucked through incision lips into new habitats, plugged into varied veinwork, pumped with foreign bloods. Your skin and bones rolled up like a moth-eaten carpet. Can a body shatter into some greater good? Are some men worth more in pieces? Again, I say: Fuck it. I’ll do as much damage as I can. This hilarious scene in my mind: my bloodslicked organs in vats and when the faceless butchers get to my liver — the crown jewel! — it’s naught but a blasted wineskin riddled with ulcers and while by rights I should be dead I rise up in a triumphant jerk to shriek:

“You bought a LEMON! Caveat emptor, motherfuckers!”

Drain my beer and order the next with a bourbon chaser. I’ll get so stinking pissed you could douse me in kerosene and strike a match: I’ll burn in bliss. Some forensics team will be amazed to discover a resin of boiled bourbon has epoxied my spinal knobs together.

I’m three sheets to the wind — erstwhile goal: nine sheets or full-body paralysis — when one of the girls swans in. Vision of pulchritude! Minx! Wood nymph! Pixie! That green goo has stained her tongue the colour of a freeze-dried frog. She’s so perfect she belongs in a music box. You forget skin possesses marvellous tension when teenage-fresh. My own feels moored on strips of ancient velcro and if a few more hooks come free my face will slide right off, bunching up in my neck like an un-elasticized tubesock to present my rye-stained skull.

“Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” I tell her solemnly. She brands me a “freak.” So, I’ve been reduced to weathering insults from this hip sophisticate who likely believes pink bubble gum to be the ideal pairing for a bottle of six-dollar Chardonnay.

“You can’t come in here with that,” says the bartender.

That: a pitbull. Off-white with a bridled coat tufting at the rolls of its neck. Heeled beside the man who is presumably its owner. Trousers torn up his calves showcase the baguettes of his legs. A friendly face but his teeth jut on tangents like a handful of dice rolled into his gums: Come on, lucky sehvaans! One eye’s so discoloured it looks like a plum kicked into his socket.

“She won’t whiz on the floor.”

Bartender says: “Health code violation.”

“No offence, but this whole place is some kind of violation.”

“Takes a dump, you clean it up.”

“Bottle of Jamieson’s and a pint glass.”

The bartender obeys. The guy presses the icechilled pint to his battered eye and faces me.

“Well, how bad is it?”

“The first I’ve seen you. No basis for comparison.”

He sets a bowl of cocktail peanuts on the floor. The sound of tiny bones snapping as the pitbull chows down.

“He looks tough.”

“He’s a she. Matilda. Matty. I’m James. Owner.” “Fletcher. She bite?”

“A little.”

Matilda sniffs my topsiders. I pet her anvil-heavy head — like petting an Indian rubber ball. No water in the tendons beneath that stretching of hide. Each defined muscle a ball of copper wire. Ears bitten off. She licks my fingers. Tongue hard as strop leather.

“You’ve fought her.”

“Birds fly. Rabbits fuck. Pitties fight.”

“And you — fighting?”

“Mighta been.”

“You win?”

“Basest human nature. Who ever wins?”

James pinches a stray peanut between his fingers. Eases open his swollen eyelid. It rests cradled in the pocket of purple flesh.

“My wife’s hubby decked me.”

“She’s got a couple of you on the go?”

“Ex-wife, okay. The new hubby socked me. Busted his hand. Ha! Ha! A surgeon. Dumb bastard makes a living with his hands.”

“What provoked that?”

“When we split I said keep the dogs.” The peanut pops free. Matilda eats it. “I didn’t have the bottle for a pissing match. But I love that bitch”—indicating the pitbull—“and let her be taken away. I knew they had a cottage somewhere-hereabouts. Practically a mansion, on a lake. I pitched my tent off in the bushes.”

“You robbed them?”

“My property.” Meaning Matilda. “How’s that robbery?”

“The stipulations of my divorce are pretty ironclad.”

“Are we talking laws? Jurisprudence? No— karmic fairness. That dog and me are wedded above any law. Anyway, when they showed up, my ex leashed Matilda in the yard. Went to do whatever she does with Doc Hotlips. Screw on a bearskin rug. I grabbed Matilda. She’s barking her head off. Next it’s Hotlips steamrolling at me. I took a swing. He painted me. All she wrote.”

“The whole fight?”

“When I come to he’s apologizing. My eyes were really watering from the punch — could’ve looked I was crying. Off me and Matty ran. They’re yelling kidnapper and what-have-you. I need a drink.”

James and I slouch down the alcoholic’s ladder. James shows me Matilda’s trick: he balances a peanut on her snout and at his command—“Giddyup!”—she pops the nut up to snatch it out of midair.

We roll out of the bar into a star-cooled night. The road dead-ends at the dock. For whatever reason James and I are holding hands. This blissful look paints his face. The realization comes that I like him quite a bit. Self-love, partially, that reflexive fondness a man feels for another whose beggared circumstances mirror his own.

“Nice boat,” he says. “I had a motorhome. That baby was repossessed.”

James swings his hand, attached to my arm, as if we are on a playdate. Matilda paws down the gangplank. Wind blows off the liftlocks, ruffling our thinning hair.

Black Box: Wife

This flight was buggered from takeoff. Headsets broken. Beef stroganoff poisoned with botulism. An albatross got sucked into the right fuselage. Some other bird — flamingo? charred pink feathers — sucked into the left. We’re going down. Mayday, mayday!… screw it.

When we dated she made it known I must earn her. A breathing kewpie doll. I learned to tango. Bought a ’78 Cougar with flake-metal finish. Was the first to say, “I love you.” Once I’d won her, everything that was hard in her went to goo and I hated it and we married. She’d howl when we fucked — I mean, firing on all cylinders. Sounding like a stray cat yowling on a winter’s night. Has chemical castration been undersold? She drove a school bus when we first wed. Cash was tight. My young bride behind the wheel of a big yellow bus, jouncing down the road on leaf springs that make school buses less conveyance than amusement park ride. So young, strong, and gorgeous, whereas school buses were usually driven by bat-faced hags with names like Carla. But as the years wore on it became a way to wound her. When arguments got heated I’d find myself screaming: “You were a fucking bus driver!”

The steering wheel — what do they call it on planes? a yoke? — just busted off in my hands. A shitload of shrieking in the cabin. Gunshots.

My grandfather sang my grandmother’s name in the shower after she died. They quarrelled, publicly, often at Christmastime, but lived sixty years together until she died of liver cancer and he followed from cancer of a different sort. While still alive he sang out her name, a trilling call like a bird’s. He missed her more than he could bear and called her name without knowing.

My wife and I could share a roof sixty years, she could die, I’d grieve — but would I ever sing?

The emblematic event signalling the derailment of my marriage, the precise instant the train skipped the tracks to hurtle headlong into a ravine, was when my wife attempted to fellate me while I slept.

Shocking she even bothered. Under her gaze my member had become a poisoned salt lick ringed with dead deer or worse: as if through some means of anatomical gymnastics my asshole had cartwheeled round to my crotch. Not to mention I was dead asleep. Oblivious, unconsenting. What if I had rucked up her nightie and gone down on her like a thief in the night? Her timing was flawed. I could have been in the grip of a nautical nightmare. The sensation may have knitted with those stark terrors. A hungry sea-leech sucking out my blood and vigours? My leg lashed out instinctively. I awoke to my future ex-wife at the foot of the bed. A goose egg on her forehead.

Our divorce was highly amicable. My wife could have challenged for sole custody despite my being in those halcyon days a functional member of society. I relocated to Sarah Court. Quaint, family-friendly. Myself clinging to the outdated notion I was ever that sort of man.

At the risk of sounding like a drill sergeant, the sooner you structure your child’s life to befit future growth, the better. I rose to anger hearing my girl recount the litany of lackadaisical activities she was now permitted in her mother’s custody.

“I dug yesterday.”

“Dug for what, Abigail?”

“Treasure?”

“My dear, there’s no treasure in your mother’s backyard. You’ll dig up a lump of petrified doggy doo. You’d enjoy discovering that? Let’s go for a bike ride.”

“Can I have an ice-cream sandwich?”

“Your mother lets you eat ice-cream sandwiches all day? Have an apple. Nature’s candy. Can’t have you turning into a Flabby Abby, can we?”

“What’s a flabby?”

“Flabby’s fat. Fat Abby. Big Fat Abigail.”

I never dreamed my daughter might compete as a strength athlete. “Female bodybuilder” conjured images of mustachioed Olympians from coldwater republics galumphing through the Iron Curtain with mysterious bulges in their weightlifting costumes. But Abby was freakishly strong.

This discovery had been made in my next-door neighbour’s backyard. A surgeon, Frank Saberhagen, whose serpentine decline kept pace with my own. Everything between us became a competition so it was no surprise we’d race each other down the drainhole. Our first conversation had been emblematic of our confrontational fellowship. I’d spied rolls of uncovered, browning sod in the backseat of his Cadillac El Dorado and chummily asked what his purpose was. “Oh, wouldn’t you like to know,” was his reply. Our troubled friendship was forged upon that rocky foundation. I never did discover what he did with that sod.

This particular afternoon we were drinking “Flatliners,” the good doctor’s signature concoction, while his son Nicholas roughhoused with Abby.

“Up the tree, Nick.”

Saberhagen forced his son — who would go on to be an amateur boxer good enough to get plastered by future pros while never earning a dime for his pains — to climb the maple daily. Supposedly it developed his fast-twitch muscle fibres.

“Dad, come on.”

“Don’t give me that, buckaroo.”

“None too sturdy, doc. Had it sprayed for Dutch Elm?”

“What are you,” he asked me, “a tree surgeon?” He swayed to his feet and kicked the maple as if it were the tire of a car whose purchase he was considering. “Solid.”

“Your father is a stubborn man, Nicholas.”

“What’s wrong with my taking an interest in your improvement?” Saberhagen asked his son. “Mr. Burger is clearly uninterested in his daughter’s.”

“Why — because I refuse to send my firstborn up your arboreal deathtrap?”

“The tree’s a metaphor. Life is challenging but what can you do? Watch others climb to success, forever peering up at the treads of more ambitious shoes? Life requires gumption. Good old-fashioned balls.”

A dig at my Abby. Cursed to trudge through life bereft of said apparatuses.

“You slug. Abby can do anything Nick can.”

Saberhagen scoffed. “She’s got a pudding belly.”

Her mother’s fault. Those goddamn ice-cream sandwiches! I’ll admit too many Flatliners had cut my mental age into halves, or in all likelihood quarters. We somehow found ourselves in his garage where Frank welcomed us to the First Annual Saberhagen Pentathlon.

“Saberhagen Pentathlon? Why not BurgerSaberhagen?”

“My garage,” he reasoned.

Our debate was derailed by the appearance of Clara Russell, in a wheelchair, at the base of Frank’s driveway. Awhile back one of her “boys” had hotwired Saberhagen’s Cadillac, along with Wes Hill’s boy Colin. I remained in the garage while Frank chatted. Mama’s sheepdog barked. Frank’s corgi kicked up a ruckus behind the garage door.

“Welcome,” Frank said upon his return, “to the Saberhagen-Burger pentathlon. First event: vertical jump.”

He proclaimed a busted rake the “Measuring Stick” and, holding it at a drunken loft above his head, urged Nicholas to jump and touch it.

“Hold straight, Frank. It’s hanging all crookedass.”

Saberhagen set his Flatliner down and used both hands. Nick came up short.

“Abby’s turn.”

“You get two tries,” he said. “No-no, wait — three.”

“Making up the rules as we go, Quincy?”

“Three tries, Fletch. Olympic rules.”

On the second attempt Saberhagen bent his knees so Nick could touch.

“Foul! Running rigged contests here at casa de Saberhagen?”

“If I bent my knees,” he filibustered, “I’m not saying I did, but if—we can all agree to it being an honest error. I’ve got fluid buildup on my left knee.”

Nick made a fair touch. I reached for the Measuring Stick. Saberhagen balked.

“I’ll hold for Abby, why not?”

“She’s my daughter. Fathers hold for their kid.”

You’d have thought my request was in contravention of the nonexistent rulebook.

“Look, Fletch, now seriously: I’m two inches taller.”

“Your elbows were all crooked-ass.”

“Like hell they were crooked-ass.”

Eventually he gave over the stick. Abigail missed her first attempt.

“Put your legs into it, Abby.” Another miss. “For heaven’s sake. Jell-O in those legs? Tuck your shirt in”—the bastard was right: she did have a little pudding belly—“ and touch… the… stick.”

A third miss. Quincy whooped it up. I wanted to twist his head off like a bottlecap.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” he told his son. “Old-fashioned balls.”

“Butter churns,” I seethed, “and horehound candies are old-fashioned. Am I to take it that, what, your son’s got a pair of steam-driven testicles?”

A belly laugh from Saberhagen. Too late I realized he’d accomplished his main, if not sole, ambition of that afternoon: pissing me off.

“Next,” he said, “feats of strength.”

In a corner of the garage was a stack of paint cans labelled Bongo Jazz. The hue of afflicted organ meat. To be inside Saberhagen’s house was to inhabit a diseased pancreas. We settled on paint can hammer curls. Nick staked himself to an early lead.

“Twenty-three, twenty-four,” counted Saberhagen. “Look at Hercules go!”

Abby’s biceps muscle was a hard lump under her sleeve. “How long do I have to go, Dad?”

“Longer than him.”

“Daddy,” Nick said, “my arm’s hurting.”

“Don’t call me Daddy, please.”

Abby’s fingers whitened round the paint can wire. Only her circulation temporarily cut off. Nick dropped his can. Twisty veins radiated from his elbow joint. Abby showed no signs of flagging. Arms raised, I jogged a victory lap of the garage.

“Quit carrying on like she’s Sybil Danning,” said Frank.

Best part of waking up in a strange bed is how you lay emptied of personal history. Literally forget who you are. Then, spiderlike, your brain gathers every trapping of your miserable history and entombs it in your skull. You’re you again.

James slept in the bunk below mine curled up like a potato bug. I’m unsure why I’ve invited him aboard, other than my inability to face the coming days alone. He shares DNA strands in keeping with Saberhagen and myself. At a certain age a man welcomes into his life those who are dimmer or more intense reflections of his self. That way, the views he holds are seldom challenged.

We spend the day on the Trent-Severn Waterway. I cut the motor with the sun at its peak. Cones of midges coil off the water. James strips and dives in. Matilda follows. They come onboard covered in snotlike algae. It dries to a green transparency they variously lick or peel off.

Of all my features, my eyes are nicest. They can be transplanted, which I wasn’t aware of until recently. Keratoplasty, it’s called. Only the corneas. Topmost layer peeled off like skin off a grape, scar tissue and ocular bloodclots removed, donor cornea stitched to the recipient’s eye with surgical thread one-sixteenth the thickness of human hair. The International Eye Bank’s donor cornea wait list is years long. Eye Bank sounds so terrifically creepy, doesn’t it? A supercooled vault where disembodied eyeballs float in jars. But not so. As eyes rot same as any living tissue there is no physical bank, per se.

A setting sun red as new blood. The tops of shore pines resemble teeth on a bucksaw as we approach Fenelon Falls. We dock and head into town. Nothing’s open except the local chapter of the Legion. A stag and doe scheduled. We’re bidden entry by a veteran in a sailor’s cap with a face like a bowl of knuckles.

“No pets,” he tells James.

“But this dog saw duty in Afghanistan.” The vet’s features soften significantly.

We sit on orange plastic chairs beneath a mangy moose head with a half-smoked cigar crammed in its mouth. The premises are occupied by runnyeyed lumbermen, many of whom look to have been dragged from under a thicket somewhere. Hairs the colour of week-old piss sprout from every orifice on their faces. James and I bang back shots of Johnny Red with the self-medicating air of alcoholics searching for a level spot on the beam. Sprinkled amongst the backwoods gnomes and tricksters are veterans smoking home-rolled cigs which burn so quickly it’s like watching fuses burn down into the wizened powderkegs of their faces.

A woman sits nearby. Young-ish and familiar, if distantly so, neither beautiful nor plain, and with a baby. Ungodly out-of-place amidst the cigar smoke and shipwrecked vets.

“Cute kid,” James says. “Yours?”

“Cute dog. Yours?”

They fall into conversation. I feel strung-out and edgy. I hear everyone’s fingernails growing. Inappropriate salsa music pipes up. A woman dances. So girthy in her white shirt and tan trousers that from the back she resembles a vanilla soft-serve cone. Her technique makes it appear as if an invisible entity has yanked down her pants and is presently pummelling her to the lungs, kidney, and liver. Steamy dance stylings hold a commonality with killer bees: both are more destructive the farther they migrate away from their equatorial birthplaces.

When the next woman arrives, every eyeball settles on her.

“Chivas Regal, barkeep!” Sounds like: Shave-ass Raygull.

She enters with the ultimate fuck me walk. A strut, more like, a stalking strut that in every hipshift, every swivel and jive, says: I know much about the carnal acts and you better believe it — I’m fucking goooooood. To say she’s beautiful would be to lie. She has a harelip and the surgical repair’s been botched; Saberhagen would howl to see such butchery. But by God, she is purely magnetic. This erotic beartrap of a woman. Big. Nordic-valkyrie big. Stately pipestems like hers you tend to describe in equine terms; I could picture her snapping a fetlock treading in a gopher hole at full gallop. I’d bet folding money she’s a mudder. Her fella stands a respectful distance apart. Rangy and bowlegged in stovepipe jeans. The sad bastard brings to mind visions of a sucking axe gash never let alone to heal.

She sits nearby. Downs her first drink at a gulp and sends the boyfriend off for another Shave-ass.

“Who the hell’re you?”

I’m amazed this woman registers me as anything other than flesh-toned wallpaper.

“Call me Mr. Burger.”

She smiles in a peculiar way. An arrowheadshaped tongue darts over her lips. It strikes me as a gesture she uses often, suggestive of all manner of undefined intimacies.

“Mister Burger?”

“You’re too young to use my grown-up name.”

This woman could destroy me. This woman’s hot white teeth could strip the skin from my bones. Dismantle me piece by piece. She could have me begging for that honour. To throw yourself at her is to throw yourself off a skyscraper. Screaming all the way down. Teeth driven into your skull like tent pegs into clay.

“Call me Sunshine. What are you doing here?”

“Paying my respects to the betrothed.”

“Well, the betrothed’s got no idea who in blue fuck you are.”

“You? Hitched to that tall drink of water?”

“The culmination of my every hope and dream.”

Her hubby-to-be’s axe-wound of a face registers pitiful gratefulness that this woman would condescend to entwine her life with his. Sunshine downs her second drink. The ice’s refraction magnifies the scar slit down her upper lip. Her fiancee’s name is Rodney.

“I had a dog named Rodney,” says James.

“He’s my little dog,” Sunshine goes. “My wittle Wodney.” She chucks him under the chin with the edge of her glass. “When hims a bad doggums, hims sleeps in da doghouse.”

Rodney smiles like a man in a tiger cage. Lovestruck sap. His every molecule made of galling attributes: servitude, resignation, bootlicking. As a man I want to slap him around out of pure heartsick revulsion.

Doctor Burger’s cure for the whole maudlin scene? Booze. An oil tanker’s worth. I line up shots of navy rum to fill my prescription. Prognosis: stunningly positive! Rodney’s hand pumps shot glasses into his face with the mechanics of an oil derrick. He tries to kiss Sunshine. She gets her elbow up. His lips meet the knob.

“You’re a slobbery drunk, darlin’. What’s the use getting all lovey-dovey now, champ? Why not save it for when it could be of value?” Stated to nobody in particular: “A wet noodle in the sack, this one. Like to bed down with a hunnert-fifty pounds of cooked spaghetti stuffed in tube socks. Keep thinking the cops’ll bust down the door and arrest me for what’sit? Sleeping with dead things…?”

“Necrophilia?” James offers.

“Yeah!” Her laugh is so profoundly crazed you could imagine it echoing down the austere halls of a funny farm. “On the money!”

How exhausting it must be for Sunshine. Stomping Rodney’s self esteem at clockwork intervals. Rodney’s skull half-squashed from her foot. But then some men yearn to die curled up in a boot-print.

A fuse blows inside my head and when the juice flows again I’m in a pickup between Sunshine driving and Rodney riding shotgun. The Shave-ass Raygull spilled over Sunshine’s jeans makes it look she’s pissed herself. This close she smells of mentholated cigarettes and Noxema. Crazily alluring. Reaching between my legs to downshift, she gives my crotch a cheery honk. Her poor prehensile tail of a fiancée turns from the moon-plated river to face us.

“Nice having you at our party, Fletcher. Sincerely. We made a new friend.”

“Bless your pea-pickin’ heart,” says Sunshine. “You’re too fuckin’ corn-pone to live.”

“Never claimed to be perfect.”

Rodney’s spine must have marinated in battery acid. Strange wonder his ribcage doesn’t sag to his hipbone. Sunshine swings into a gravelled half-moon facing the water. We spill out laughing — Jesus, at what? I’m about ready to slip a dry cleaning bag over my head. I gulp air coming off the river in hopes of oxygenating my rum-soaked cells. I am seriously hallucination-hammered. Sunshine staggers down to the water.

“Got to tinkle, boysy-woysies!”

Rodney’s bellied over the truck fender. His body comes by such positions naturally. Not a single unbroken posture. A cannonball on a chain hooked to his forehead.

Sunshine returns topless. Standing at the lip of the berm with her head cocked. Just… y’know, BAM. All there.

“Look at yous two. Standing there with your teeth in your mouth.”

A body so young taken in by the eyes of a man old as me… lechery only another word for jealousy. I want to eat her skin. She hoists herself onto the hood. Undoes the topmost button on her jeans.

“Put your hands all over me, Fletcher. A real man’s hands, for once.”

She’s crazy. Not in any diagnosable way. Not so much that she’ll bring harm to anybody but herself and those who hie too closely. My hands on her would only be an encouragement of that lunacy but what was my onus of burden? Me, with the lifespan of a fruit fly.

“Sunny, baby. You make loving you hell.”

“I’m just sitting, Rod. If this man’s hands happen upon my body, well, it’s not me causing that collision, now is it?”

The heat of the engine block warms the hood where I set my hand. Moonlight plays upon the water. A vein of white fire snaking through things.

“Go ahead and fuck me.” She pulls the take of their stag and doe from her jeans. “We’ll leave this scratch-ass town. Escape.” Ex-cape. “Just us two.”

Is she purposely degrading herself with those crumpled fives and tens? Her jeans melt down to her ankles. When a woman really wants to shed her clothes it is an act of bodily voodoo. Lips shiny with blackberry Chapstick. She draws down the lip of her panties. I see the definitions of her intimates same way you spot a mouse at the mouth of its hole: by the wet glints of teeth and eye.

I say: “You doing anything about your little sexpot of a fiancée, here, Rodney?”

“He’s my dickless little dog.”

Rodney moans like a sick animal. My hand traces Sunshine’s neck. The panicked thrum of her heartbeat in my fingertips. This expression of fear and disgust skims over her face — fleeting, but it’s all there in that. Sunshine laid open like one of those Dali women with the chest of drawers where her guts should be. My rummaging hands inside. I’ve been wrong from the get-go: believing Rodney lives in wretchedness when in truth he exists in a state of ongoing ecstasy.

“You don’t want me. You couldn’t possibly.”

“Sure,” she say. “Sure I do.”

They love one another. You can glimpse such twisted configurations and acknowledge yes, it is still love. A brutal and excruciating manifestation but unmistakably so. Love as a sickness.

“Fuck me, Fletcher. Take me away.”

“I won’t.”

“What’s the matter with me?”

Turning from her, I offer: “You’re cute enough.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” says Rodney.

Sunshine claws a hand around my hips. That I’m not erect infuriates her.

“Two dickless wonders!”

“I could fuck you, Sunshine, but I couldn’t kiss you.” I’m a brutal human specimen. “Not with your lip like that.”

Retrospectively speaking, I shouldn’t have said this with my back turned.

“Pussyeating dickface motherfucker!”

She leaps onto my back. One mitt’s sunk into my hair while the other lances stiff shots into the veinbunched curve of my throat. The shock of it is quasiparalyzing: the way you’d feel inadvertently catching your mother naked through an open bedroom door. An idiotic sense of masculinity compels me to make like she isn’t hurting me when in fact it hurts vastly.

“Rodney. Please… control your woman.”

By whipping side-to-side I manage to buck her off. She strips off a plug of scalp. I stagger toward the river with blood trickling down my neck.

Zany bitch!

“Stick your pecker in her, y’old buckethead!”

“She’s gonna be your wife,” I tell Rodney. “Do your own grunt work!”

At the lip of the berm Sunshine kicks me in the spine. The spectre of getting an eye poked out petrifies me. Clamp my eyelids tight. Hurts like hell but I laugh a sad bastard’s dirge rolling blindly down. Must have sounded I was mortally injured because when I check up on the lee side their truck motor is gunning into silence.

I haul myself out of the bracken. Tear a clump of moss ringing an elm tree. Press it to my scalp. Kick through frosted dandelions, snapping their little bald heads off. Frozen berries hang on a branch and I eat a handful and they hurt my teeth. I zone out, bleeding. The perpetual movement of the cosmos pushes the moon across a star-salted sky.

My houseboat rounds the horn of the river.

“Fleeeetcherrrr!”

“Over here! Here!”

The engine cuts. A flashlight beam pins me.

“I ran into those two you left with. Asked where the heck were you. They said check the fucking river! Can you make it out?”

“I can try.”

The river laps against the torn spot in my scalp. Snapping turtles and steel-mouthed walleye quest at my toes. James hauls me onboard and sits me in the galley kitchen. Drapes me in a metallic emergency blanket. Next he removes my shirt and socks. Matilda lays across my bare feet. I feel her belly nipples against my skin.

“That’s one nasty hematoma on your head,” James says.

Black Box: Compassionate Human Being

We’re going down. I saw it coming. Takeoff smooth, clear skies, but twenty years into this flight my arms got tired. It felt pointless. I let go of the yoke.

So much of being considered a good person is decent planning. A steel-trap memory. So much is: “So-and-so’s birthday is coming. Better send a card.” Make these token efforts and everyone says you’re a good person. You’re not necessarily. You may occupy some Outer Sulawesi of the soul, but you keep a well-organized day-timer. Real tests of goodness ignite out of nothingness and stick it to you bluntly: are you the person you think you are? The door swings two ways. Swings a hundred million ways. In those moments you come to know yourself. Can you exist within that reckoning?

Out the starboard window one wing snaps off. Trailing wiring and spitting sparks it falls through the sky, through a sea of puffy cumulus clouds. Anyway, who cares? The freight bay is full of sandbags.

The group: “Over-and-Out.” Called a “group” to imply we were pleased as punch to gather every second Thursday. Our only regret it couldn’t be weekly, or thrice weekly, or daily or two times a day. Parents helping parents. What a crock. Over and out. Get it? Support groups have punny names. Craniofacial Abnormalities: About Face. Sickle Cell Anemia: Reaping Hope. Ours was a catchall for parents “over”-something: overzealous, overbearing, overcompetitive. I had no choice but to attend. I’d slit my own throat with earlier actions at a provincial powerlifting meet.

After discovering Abby’s unusual strength I’d embarked on a systematic plan to make her a champion lifter. I bought Joe Weider dumbbells at Consumer’s Distributors. Set up a gym in my old rumpus room. Enrolled her in the Superior Physique Association: a female weightlifting fraternity founded by Doris Barrilleaux, a hyper-developed hausfrau from Canton, Ohio.

I arranged for muscle-responsiveness tests. Abby possesses some seriously enlarged vascular bundles. The cellular walls of her arteries were elastic. Improved circulation equals increased blood flow. Superior protein absorption. Bigger muscles. Muscle tissue is cellularly complex: the muscle of your biceps, for example, consists of different cellular strata. First the parallel arrays of tubelike muscle fibres bundled together like crayons in a box. Each fibre is made up of smaller sub-units, myofibrils, stacked neatly one atop the other like plates on a shelf. Inside the myofibrils reside the working parts, heavy lifters called sarcomeres, arranged in a lineup like beads on an abacus. Look closely at championship powerlifters: it’s like iodized salt has been sprinkled over every muscle group.

The day her bone density test results arrived I hightailed it to Saberhagen’s house.

“Abby scored a -0.1 on the Bone Mineral Density test. What’s that mean?”

“Means she’s got dense bones,” Frank said. “To match her dad’s skull.”

“I knew it.” As if we Burgers were famous for our bone density and it was only natural this trait should find its pinnacle in my daughter. “Dense.”

Massive blood-pumping bundles, solid spinal stem, lode-bearing joints, bones dense as titanium. Can I be blamed for thinking she was ideally suited?

Now, get it straight: powerlifting, not bodybuilding. The Olympic sport, not the freakshow. I’m disgusted by those steroid-enlarged gals with patio flagstones where their boobs should be and their HGH-swollen faces so out of whack even the best maxillofacial surgeon couldn’t make them look womanly again, telling you “But I’m still a lady,” in their Barry White voices. So full of toxins they’d set off a fallout meter. Steroids: an idiotic lifestyle, what with the shrunken nuts and prostatitis. They can turn a gal’s clitoris as big and hard as a baby’s thumb!

I entered Abby in regional meets. She demolished her own sex. The Ontario Power-lifting Association agreed to let her compete in the male 14–18 class. The meet was held in a Hamilton gym inhabited by strapping male bodies.

“Dogs, the lot of them,” I told her. “They got heartworm. You’ll pulverize.”

Truth told, I was taken aback at the proliferation of prepubescent beefcakery. I wanted to run around with plastic cups: “Piss tests. Piss tests for all!” I sauntered up to the biggest kid, all of seventeen yet so prodigiously venous he appeared to be covered in livid spiderwebs.

“My daughter’s kicking your ass. Bet you folding money.”

His father, a buzz-cut bohunk with a Hamilton FD shirt stretched across his chest, pricked up his ears.

“You’re flabby as all get out,” I went on. “Look at her dorsal definition. Like peering into a barrel of snakes, isn’t it?”

“S’matter with you?” his father went.

“This kid’s a bum.” I kept my tone pleasant. “What do you feed him, tubs of Oleo?”

“You’re not helping,” Abby told me.

“I’m simply allowing this man to prepare the collection of overgrown blood platelets he calls a son for an emasculating ass-kicking.”

A judge overheard the commotion. “Back to your competitor, sir.”

“I got every right being here.”

“If you don’t leave this vicinity—”

“This is my job. Don’t you tell me how to do my job. You don’t see me coming down to the public toilets to knock the can of Ajax out of your hands, do you?”

We were eliminated from competition. Abby nailed it as “a real bonehead manoeuvre.” My ex got wind. Rumblings of a revision of custody rights. My lawyer advised a token of penitence would smooth things. So, the group: “Over and Out.”

Sole tonic to my misery was I didn’t have to endure it alone. Frank Saberhagen — whose ex-wife levied charges he was pushing Nick too hard to become a third-tier pugilist — was pressured into attendance. And Clara Russell was there, even though her “boys” weren’t hers by blood.

Our meetings were otherwise populated by decaying alpha males. Gym teachers in sweat suits with teeth marks dug into the plastic whistles dangling round their necks. Business suits with men inside whose skin was so tight-flexed you feared their scalps would tear open to reveal the twitching nests of their id. That breed of intellectually and/or emotionally impoverished male whose pickup truck hitches sport oversized, rubberized novelty scrotal sacks. We were overseen by Dr. Dave, a “Behaviour Coach.” Six-five, one-seventy: his body resembled wet bedsheets hung from a flagpole. Add to this the overeager demeanour of a drivetime DJ. Like he’d signed a contract mandating he be inoffensively funny.

“Welcome to Over and Out,” he began each meeting. “Let’s help each other get ‘over’ the hump, so you can get ‘out’ of your boxes of destructive habitual behaviour.”

We stood at a plywood lectern parading our parental sins in hopes of exculpation. Quincy— who insisted on being called Doctor Frank — was a hambone.

“Why should I, we, be pilloried for promoting our offspring’s betterment through a regimen of physical discipline and structure?” went his typical monologue. “The same structure promoted by my father and his father, which made me the man I am today. A healer of men.”

“Times change,” said Dr. Dave. “Society and, haha, expectations also, Mr. Saberhagen.”

“Doctor Frank, please.”

“You cannot rob a child of choice. Autonomy.”

“Let them choose to be what: carnival roustabouts? Years ago my son wanted to be a tap dancer. What was my option?”

“My boys can be whatever they want.”

This from Clara Russell. She sat with one of her charges, Jeffrey, a little turd who stole eggs out of the robin’s nest in my oak tree. Unwed and technically childless, Russell shared her home with a rotating herd of youthful fruitcakes and some poor old bastard she made a habit of kicking out, quite publicly, every year or so.

“Dancers,” she persisted, “or bricklayers—”

“Or little arsonists or kleptomaniacs, obviously,” Saberhagen said.

“You’ll let that stand, Dr. Dave?” said Clara. “Isn’t this a supportive haven?”

“Everyone, ha-ha, let’s take a step back… ”

“My boys have behavioural anomalies and unnatural fixations, sir.” Russell was an imposing woman. Paul Bunyan in a smock. “Can’t wave a magic wand and fix them.”

“Listen, Dave,” Frank went on, ignoring her. “I love my son.”

“Unconditional, Dr. Saberhagen — can you say your love is that?”

“Whose ever is?”

After meetings, most of us loafed about smoking, gnashing wads of gum, or grinding the weave of our sweaters against nicotine patches. Always a mobile party kit in somebody’s trunk. We drank and decompressed. It mainly took the form of jibes at Dr. Dave, who we all agreed was about as useful as a set of tonsils.

The usual post-group clan: three fathers and one mother, Nadia, whose gymnast daughters tore ACL ligaments in separate pommel horse calamities. Saberhagen and I nicknamed her “Nadia CommenNazi.” The third father was Dale Mulligan: a slab of free-range masonry with the primeval face of the Piltdown Man. That, or a block of clay punched into a rude semblance of humanity by a mildly artistic gorilla. He taught Phys Ed at Laura Secord, an “arts” school where students interpretive-danced their way to course credit. His son was the football team’s running back. You’d think the sun shone directly out the kid’s ass.

“My boy, Danny,” Dale prattled on one night, “racked up a hundred-twenty yards on the ground in scrimmage. Took a few tackler’s arms as trophies.”

I was uninspired at the boy’s ability to tear through a defensive line of landscape painters. Shortly afterwards the aforementioned apple of Mulligan’s eye arrived to pick his father up.

“My daughter’s stronger than him,” I heard myself say.

“You out of your sonofabitchin’ mind, Fletcher?”

“Dale, please. He’s got the build of a snow pear.” By the time Abby arrived to pick me up, Dale and I were nipple-to-nipple, bumping chests as men do when each feels he’s been affronted yet neither is ready to plant a fist in his antagonist’s nose. Not quite. At Abby’s arrival I strode to the bike rack. Rusted bars, solid steel, welded at right angles.

“Okay, Mulligan. Dead lift. Your boy, my girl.”

“I’m not lifting anything,” said Abby.

“Just a few lifts. Look at him.”

“Go fall in a hole, Dad. I’m picking you up. That’s it.”

“Abs. This guy thinks he can beat you.”

“You think you can beat me?” she asked Dale’s son, Danny Mulligan.

“I don’t even know what we’re talking about,” Danny said, mystified.

“How about,” said Quincy, “the two dads lift? Hey, Abby — your old man puts his shoulder to the millstone?”

“What does that prove, Frank?”

“Tell you what it proves if you don’t, Fletch: you’re a grade-A chickenshit.” Quincy tucked his hands under his armpits and flapped. “Bro-bro-broooock.”

Dale Mulligan had already installed himself at the bike rack. No heroic way to extricate myself, so after deep-knee bends and some isometric stretching I spat on my palms. Gripped the rack. I could do this, baby! Feet set, hammies flexed, I straightened my spine and loosed a convulsive grunt—YE GODS! A firecracker exploded between my fifth and sixth vertebrae. I came to on my back. The motherloving pain! Spine ripped out, soaked in jellied gasoline, lit, the white-hot knobs sewn back inside. A paraplegic. I’d be blowing into a straw to move the hubs of my wheelchair. My droppings evacuated into sterile plastic bags. Crippled… by a bike rack!

“Oh, fuck my life!”

Quincy knelt. Ran a finger up my spine. “You tweaked a disc. Nothing earth-shattering.”

“Can’t believe you did that,” Abby said.

Was it wrong to cherish the fear in her voice?

The post-therapy group swiftly disbanded. Quincy offered to help drive me home.

“You viper. I’d as soon take a lift from the Malibu Strangler.”

Abby drove slow: partially because she was freshly licensed and partially because any jolt would cause me great ache. Once home I sent her inside for a beer. She returned with tallboys. We popped the tabs and drank.

“What?” she said. “I’ve had beer.”

“You damnwell have not around me.”

We clinked cans.

“Hungry? Energizer Bowls in the freezer.” “Pass. Group’s working wonders, by the way.”

Our eyes met in the rearview mirror. I don’t know when, exactly, I hit the understanding that my mother and father had been responsible for rearing me and were thus somewhat reliable but still, they were only human and entitled to their own screwups. I’m reasonably sure Abby hit it right that instant.

“Who was that boy?”

“Who, Danny Mulligan?”

“Danny. Daniel.”

“He goes to Laura Secord. That place is an incubator for fairies.”

“You don’t have to be a jerk every day of your life. Take a day off. He’s cute.”

“Danny Mulligan. Cute. These two absolutes fail to sit comfortably within my universe.”

“He looked at me. My boobs.”

“The scumbag. Did he, really?”

“Better than the horndogs at the gym going on about my pectoral definition.”

“Please, Abs.”

A vein throbbed down her neck. Beautiful, my daughter, but physically solid. Workhorse legs. All those veins. “What do you feed her,” Saberhagen once joked, “cotton candy spun out of Dianabol?” The culture of her sport was one where female powerlifters were met derisively: my daughter was a stunt, like a foxy boxer. It bothered Abby her thighs rubbed together walking. That her abdominal muscles were so prominent they resembled a turtle’s belly. That the dress she wore to commencement made her look, in her own self-appraisal, like “a linebacker in drag.” But each sculpted protuberance was evidence of our training regimen. The tensile integrity muscle attains amongst the very best athletes gives it this pocked look. When there’s only enough fat separating flesh from tendon that you won’t die of hypothermia on a mild spring day. Individual fibres present themselves as defined waves. Tendons rumble like gathering thunder over a body.

You’re rumbling, I’ll say when she’s in top form. Rumbling and raging.

She’s a goddamn beautiful lifter. I’ll load the bar with six forty-five pound plates plus the bar: a 315 squat. She chalks her hands — calloused as a dockworker’s — grips the crosshatched bar and swings herself beneath that weight. Legs flared wide: a pair of baby spruces. Jerking the bar off its pegs she’ll go down, thighs perpendicular to the floor. Veins spiderwebbing from the rounds of her shoulders. A serious case of the butterflies as her quadriceps jump and dance. Eyes rotating to the ceiling she explodes with a lung-shattering scream. Primal. A lioness. One time she blew a blood vessel in her eye. Powering out of her crouch, bar bowed over her shoulders with all that weight. Blood surged into her eyeball. The pressure on the vein wall was so fierce it tore. Abby didn’t even feel it. Alarmed, I took her face in my hands. I was so terrified. She said: “I’m okay, Dad. Calm down.”

“Abs, if you never lift another weight… that’d be okay.”

“Right. You’d be busted up.”

“It makes me happy we’re doing something together. That’s all. We could go fishing. You like fishing? I hate it. But anything else. Okay?”

“Yup. Okay.”

“I want to know you’re happy.”

“I know.”

“So. Tell me.”

“I’m happy.”

Did any kid comprehend the love of a parent? Frightening in its rawness. An excised kidney: naked, unprotected and lewd. It sprang from failure and regret which only sharpened the edge. Fanatical, protective, rooted in an understanding the world’s a broken place filled with broken individuals. The fact your child was a part of that ruined tapestry was a kind of miracle.

The parasite Saberhagen pulled into his driveway. He and Nick trotted across the yard. Nick had a black eye but Frank’s poor son always sported a blackened eye, busted nose, facial sutures, or the like. “You go to hell,” I told Frank.

Saberhagen appealed to Abby. “Did we handcuff him to that rack?”

“You did the chicken thing,” she reminded him. “Chicken-chicken brock-brock.”

Saberhagen opened the rear door and sat behind me. “Nick, you and Abby grab more barley pops.”

“Why don’t you?” said Nick.

“Someone’s fixing to chow down on the brown bag special, son o’ mine.”

They went. Frank tapped my shoulder. Pinched between his fingers: a pill. I swallowed it. Adjusted the rearview to frame his face.

“We’ve known each other years. Broken bread together. Why do that to me?”

“Sort of do it to ourselves, wouldn’t you say? Don’t be a drama queen.”

“Go fuck your hat.”

“Not wearing one. As you can plainly see.”

The kids came back with more icy tallboys. Cool wind blew through the windows. Saberhagen’s pill— fabulous! My body may slide into the footwell, my bones soft as poached eggs. Bryan Adams’s “Summer of ’69” played on 97.7 Htz FM.

“Love this tune, Fletch. Pump it.”

“Oh, go home.”

Saberhagen shouldered the door open, swooned onto the driveway, nearly fell, steadied himself then strode before the hood. Abby snapped on the high beams.

“Rock out, Mr. S!”

“You bet your bippy!”

Saberhagen squinted weevil-eyed into the headlamps before embarking on an energetic and truly abysmal faux-rock performance. He brandished an air guitar that to judge by his hand spacing was the size of a classical base: fret-fingers above his head, strumming fingers down at his thighs. Hips gyrating, fingers spasming: he could have been experiencing an epileptic attack.

“Those were the best days of my laaay-fe!” Frank sang. “Baw-baw-baw-ba-ba-baw! Yeah!”

He reeled off the classic cock-rock staples. The Pigeon Neck. The High-leg Kick. The Lewd Crotchthrust. The Pursed-lips-chest-out Rocker Strut. The Angry Schoolmarm. He then threw in moves in no way appropriate to the song: The Water Sprinkler, The Running Man and The Robot.

“I guess nothing can last forever, forever — naaaaaw!”

“You’re not cool!” I shouted, though I had to admit the man did a damned fine Robot.

Abby and Nick joined Frank. Abby gave him one of those mock-tortured-slash-ecstatic your-axeplaying-is-rocking-me-sohard faces. Frank launched into a face-melter guitar riff. He went down on one knee like James Brown. Nick peeled off his shirt and draped it over his father’s shoulders. Frank threw it off with a flourish and kicked out one leg as his performance reached its crescendo.

“Those were the best days of mah liiiiife!”

The three of them collapsed on the hood, howling. Abby thrust devil’s horns into the sky.

“You’re beautiful, Saint Catharines! Goodnight!”

The afternoon following my encounter with Sunshine, the houseboat drifts north. Steel sky. Poplars with metallic bark. The whole world aluminum-plated. Whippoorwills ride updrafts above the boat, their reflections statically pinned to the river’s surface. We’re making three knots against the current. I ask James about the woman from last night.

“I got her number,” he says. “She loves dogs. Who knows? I’ll get off at Coboconk.”

A little town upriver. I ask what’s in Coboconk. A moneymaking opportunity, I’m told.

“I know I give the impression of being a pretty squared-away guy, Fletcher.”

“… yuh-huh.”

“It’s a smokescreen. Know how I make ends meet? A phone titillation provider.”

“Phone sex?”

“We providers prefer ‘titillation.’”

“That has to be weird.”

“You play characters,” James assures me. “Biker Badass. Out-of-Work Model. Southern Dandy.” He puts on a nelly voice: “I douh decleah, this heat’s plum wiltin’ mah britches.”

We reach Coboconk by nightfall and tie to an empty dock. The town unrolls along a single road. Chains of bug-tarred bulbs strung down each side of the street hooked to tarnished steel poles are the only lights. James uses the lone payphone, while I wait with Matilda.

“He’ll send a car around. Meet you back at the boat?”

“I can come. It’s safe?”

“Won’t enjoy yourself, but if you want.”

The car — a Cadillac, new but not flashy — rolls up. The driver’s a kid with stinking dreadlocks piled atop his skull. The open ungracious face of a moron.

We drive until we hit a dirt turnoff. Starlight bends over a lake. Cottages, some no bigger than ice-fishing huts. The Caddy pulls into a horseshoeshaped driveway in the shadow of a monolithic log cabin built by a man who must lack all conception of irony.

The driver leads us into an antediluvian sitting room dominated by a stone fireplace. Raw-cut pine walls. No pictures, rugs, indications of a woman’s touch. An eighty-gallon fish tank but not a single fish. James and I sit on the calfskin couch. Matilda licks the salted leather. There’s a bowl of cashews on the coffee table.

“So, which of you is James?”

The man’s wearing a lumberjack vest and a pair of corduroys so oft-washed the grooves have worn off. Or migrated to his face: his cheeks and forehead are worked with startlingly straight creases that run laterally, resembling the grain of cypress wood. A pleat of skin with the look of a chicken’s coxcomb is folded down over his left eye. James introduces us.

“Fletcher, a pleasure. That must be Matilda.” He points to James’s swollen eye. My scabbed scalp. “Boys look like you’ve been through a war.” So jovial it’s hard to believe he gives a damn. “I’m Starling. Your driver’s my biographer, Parkhurst. I picked him up someplace.”

As if Parkhurst were a tapeworm Starling drank in a glass of Nicaraguan tapwater. Which may not be far off: the kid, Parkhurst, strikes me as the type who’d happily use an old lady as a human shield during a gunfight.

“A fine bitch,” Starling says of Matilda. “I love dogs. What sort of rotten bastard doesn’t? Loyal, forgiving. Run themselves to death to please you. I knew this one bitch, Trudy. Bulldog. She birthed a litter but her pups were taken away. Trudy forgot they were hers. Placed in her care again, she ignored them. When they mewled for her nipples she hounded them off. Yet if her owner was gone for years, that dog would remember. You could rub a pair of his old trousers on her nose and she’d yowl and slobber. Didn’t give a damn about her own kith but old trousers got her yelping.”

Saliva accumulated at the edges of Starling’s mouth; every time his lips moved looked like a Ziploc bag coming open. His skin loosely moored to his skull as if to disguise a more fearful face lurking underneath. A Russian doll: faces inside faces inside faces.

“What is it you do?” I ask him.

“I’m The Middle, Fletcher.”

“You don’t say.”

“I do say. You know that old wheeze about the butterfly flapping its wings in Asia followed by a tidal wave swamping Florida? Sure there’s that butterfly and sure, there’s that wave — I mean to say there’s the person who wants a thing done and there’s that thing getting done — but effect doesn’t meet cause and A doesn’t meet C without The Middle. Point B. Moi.”

And he says no more.

Starling leads us into a cool scentless night as they often are this far north. James and Matilda, myself, Starling in a camelhair coat. Moonlight falls across a flat-roofed shack enclosed by chicken wire. A huge white dog exits. Matilda squats on her haunches. Licks her hindquarters.

“This is a joke,” James says. “Right?”

“That’s an Akita,” Starling tells him. “Japanese fighting dog.”

“I know what it is. A puffed-up husky. We can’t roll them.”

“The man I bought it from called it a quarrelsome breed. I feed it chicken blood.”

“And I’m a dogman, not a butcher.” James is fuming. “We met in an online pitbull forum. You’ve got a fucking sledder here. Akita versus any pitbull, let alone a dead gamer like Matty… it’s Mike Tyson fighting a five-year-old. Matilda will crunch that poor thing’s skull like a crouton.”

“Oh, I very much doubt that. Shall we see?”

“Are you psycho? Look, I’ll show you.”

James approaches the chicken wire with Matilda. The Akita yowls: a sexually aggressive sound. Rips at the fence with its teeth. Ropes of drool dangle from the wire. The dogs’ noses touch through the fence. Matilda’s lips curl: a black-gummed riptide displaying the pegs of her canines. She doesn’t growl. Barely moves. The Akita twists upon its flanks. Gnaws its own ass. Turns and crawls inside its doghouse. Flat on its belly. Whimpering.

“What am I supposed to do with a cur?” says Starling, heartbroken.

“Akitas are good hunt dogs.”

“My life’s too complex for a dog.”

Back inside we have a drink. James and Starling are bummed. The dogfight was to be wagered upon. I’m glad they’re gutted. The booze beelines to my bladder.

The cabin’s toilet is brushed steel and tiny. An airplane latrine. On the toilet tank sits an old issue of Dog Fancier bookmarked with a memorandum from one Donald Kerr, solicitor. That little thing we discussed … reads the subject heading.

I shake off. Zip up. A darkened room stands opposite the bathroom. Empty but for a box. Glasswalled, eight feet tall: a magician’s box, the kind you fill with water for shackled escapes. Inside rests what looks like an enormous kidney bean. Except it quivers and in this way is more of a Mexican jumping bean. I’d once given such a bean to Abby. I told her the Cydia moth lays an egg inside the bean. The larvae eats away the inside. When the bean warms in your palm the pupal-stage moth quivers to make the bean hop.

Starling’s smiling when I return.

“You’ve got a bloody nose, Fletcher.”

My thumb comes away from my nostrils with a bead of blood on it.

“Show me again,” says Starling, who couldn’t care less about my nose.

James sets a cashew on the tip of Matilda’s snout. “Giddyup!” Matilda pops the nut into the air. Swallows it.

Starling claps. “Bloody marvellous. Could she do it ten times in a row?”

“All night.”

“Ten times. Without missing.” Starling studies James. “Why don’t we make a bet on it?”

“Bet sounds fine. Big bet, fine.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll make you a very good bet. I’m a rich man. A sporting man. The Cadillac that picked you up. Like it?”

“It’s nice.” James leans back and he laughs. “I don’t have anything like that.”

“Get that fine bitch of yours to do her trick ten times in a row and it’s yours. You’d like a Caddy, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d like it, sure. A Caddy. Who wouldn’t?”

“We make this bet, then. I put up my car.”

“And I put up?”

“I wouldn’t ask you to bet what you cannot afford.”

“You can’t have my dog.”

“Some insignificant thing whose parting would not leave you too bereft.”

“What, then?”

“How about, say… your thumb.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I chop it off.”

“That’s insane,” I say.

“James tells me he needs money,” says Starling. “He can sell the car.”

James considers it. He passes from consid-eration to acceptance far too swiftly for my liking.

“Otherwise I’m here for nothing. Matilda can’t fight a sledder.” James drinks his drink and says: “Matty does her trick ten times running and I get the car. If she misses even once I lose my thumb. She’s never missed. Which hand?”

“Your right. Which one’s dominant?” Starling waves it off. “Left, right.”

“So, left thumb?”

“That’s the deal. Left thumb.”

“I can get it reattached. How about my pinkie?”

“No, thumb.”

“Index finger.”

“Thumb.”

“What year is the car?”

“Last year’s model. Parkhurst! Keys.”

Parkhurst materializes and hands over the keys. Starling sets them beside the cashews.

“Middle finger.”

“Fine. But I keep it. No re-attachments.”

“I don’t recall ever having much use for the middle finger of my left hand.” James massages the folds of Matilda’s mouth. “It’s a super bet.”

“Let’s strap your hand down,” says Starling. “Parkhurst. Fetch nails, string, and a chopping knife.”

Starling’s biographer returns with hammer, nails, butcher twine and a campfire hatchet. Starling hammers nails into the edge of the coffee table four inches apart. Cheap ten-penny nails with metal burrs clung to the nailheads. He tests them for firmness with his fingers.

“Put your hand in here. Middle finger out.”

Starling winds twine over James’s wrist, across his knuckles and around the nails. James’s fingernail whitens. Starling hefts the hatchet: new, shiny, with a foam-grip handle. James seems unperturbed with the blade hovering above his outstretched finger.

“Begin,” says Starling.

James sets a cashew on Matilda’s nose. The curve of the nut shapes itself to the dog’s snout. Matilda goes cross-eyed focusing upon it.

“Giddyup!”

The nut disappears down her gullet.

“Good girl.”

James sets another nut on Matilda’s snout. Starling holds the hatchet level to his ear.

“Giddyup! Two. Good girl.”

“Three.”

“Four.”

“Five.”

“Six.”

Matilda’s a machine. James works her through the procedure steadily. Cashew on snout, pause, “Giddyup!”

“Seven!”

“Eight!”

One end of the ninth cashew is broken off, leaving an imperfect edge. Later I’ll wonder why James chose it when the bowl was full of perfectly good ones.

“Giddyup!”

The sound it makes glancing off Matilda’s teeth is the tinny wynk of a shanked golf ball. The sound that comes out of James’s mouth is not a scream so much as a breathless hiss. Starling raises the hatchet above his head. It all happens rather quickly.

Matilda leaps onto James’s back. Uses him as a springboard. The cashew bowl’s upended, nuts spraying in a fan. Matilda’s jaws clamp fast to Starling’s shoulder.

“Yeeeeeeeeeeee!”

This is the sound that exits the broken hole of Starling’s mouth. Matilda’s jaws are nearly hyperextended, upper teeth sunk into the wrinkled flesh of his deltoid. Starling shakes at the mercy of a creature one-third his weight but every ounce of it working muscle. Momentum carries them to the floor. Matilda’s skull impacting hardwood sounds like a bowling ball dropped on a dance floor. She forfeits her grip, flips over, digs her teeth into the fresh punctures. Starling’s eye rolls back in some kind of horrible dream-state. The hatchet flails wildly and its blade hacks into Matilda’s beer-cask side.

James drags the coffee table — his hand’s still trussed up — over to her. His feet crunch on cashews. I help him tear free of the twine. He grips the top and bottom halves of Matilda’s jaw.

“Drop it. Drop.”

Matilda forfeits her grip. James kisses her nose.

We help Starling onto the sofa. Parkhurst is AWOL. Starling’s skin stinks of busted-open batteries as adrenaline dumps out every pore. His shirt’s torn open. Blood bubbles through the puncture wounds and comes off him in strings. Odd knittings of skin bracket his armpit and where his shoulder meets his neck.

I find a first aid kit in the medicine chest. Starling’s nearly stopped bleeding by the time I return. The trauma isn’t nearly so bad as it appeared. The car keys are on the floor. I slip them into my pocket.

“That was unex… pected,” Starling gasps.

“I’ll call you an ambulance.”

“No ambulance.”

“You need a doctor.”

With his good arm Starling digs a cellphone out of his pocket. Speed dials number one.

“Come now.”

He hangs up.

“I have an employee who… handles this sort of… thing.”

Matilda has crawled into the darkest part of the room. When James calls she creeps to him on her belly, grovelling the way dogs do when they believe they’ve behaved poorly. The clipped stub of her tail wags weakly. The hatchet wound is shockingly wide and it shocks me more, somehow, to see Matilda— less flesh and bone than bloodless fibres coalesced into the familiar shape of a dog — hurt this way. The shining off-pink ligaments banding her rib cage whiten as they flex.

James picks her up. “Fuck me. She’s light as a feather.”

I tell him to wait outside. The flap of skin covering Starling’s eye has folded back. Pale and membranous as the inside of an eyelid. The eye underneath has no cornea, iris, or pigment.

“Will you be alright?”

He manages a grisly smile.

“Bugs, Fletcher. A million slipper-footed space bugs. Walls of my guts. Cores of my bones. Churning, Fletcher. Softest churning you can imagine.”

“I have to go.”

“So go. But don’t take… my car. You didn’t… win.”

“Fuck off,” I tell him solemnly. “I’m taking it.”

I fishtail the Caddy down the dirt road. Moths drawn to the phosphorous glow of the headlamps smash on the windscreen. Matilda’s shovel-shaped head pokes from a mummification of towels. Her eyelids are ringed with blood.

“I can’t bury another dog, Fletcher,” James says.

Black Box: Daughter

The emergency crash slides deploy ten thousand feet above sea level: slick yellow tongues sucked into the engines, which explode in twin fireballs. Shrapnel punches through the fuselage. The hiss of decompression as air inside the cabin is drawn outside. Pinhole contrails stain the blue sky.

This one time, when Abigail was a kid. The playground at the school round the corner from Sarah Court. Sunday: parents airing their kids out after church. Abby on the swingset. This churchgoing man set himself in my sightline. Calling in an abrasive baritone to his own child:

“Down the slide! Down the slide!”

I couldn’t see my daughter past this man in his church suit. I wanted to kill him. An animalistic response. You don’t stand between papa bear and his cub.

Karma’s a mongrel. Its blood isn’t pure and it fails to flow in a straight and sensible line. It bites whoever it can and bites randomly. It tallies debts but makes no attempt to match them to the debt-committer. Spend your life totalling black smudges upon your soul thinking in the end they’re yours to bear.

Capillaries burst beneath my fingernails. Looks as if I’ve had them painted candy apple red. My eardrums explode. Instruments shatter at the same instant my jawbone tears free of its hinges. The air’s full of silver flecks: my fillings, added to blobs of mercury from split dials. Pressure works around the hubs of my eyes, in back, rupturing the ocular roots. I go down in blackness.

Total muscular failure. The bread-and-butter technique of powerlifting.

The theory behind total muscular failure is simple: max out your poundage until it is impossible to lift without assistance from your spotter. Easy to spot lifters who embrace the technique. They’re the ones who’ve reached familiarity with the “zonk out”: passing out during your final rep. Acolytes of total muscular failure trust their spotters implicitly.

The first medal Abby earned was silver in the clean-and-jerk at the Pan Am Games. Bronze initially, until the gold medalist’s urinalysis proved she was whacked out of her tree on Anavar.

Around this time Abby had found her first true love. Dannyfreaking-Mulligan.

He blew his MCL on an end-around sweep the final game his senior season. He enrolled in arts college, grew hippy hair, majored in modern sculpture. Particularly galling was the fact he made a point of buying not only a mattress but also underwear, all used, from the Sally Anne.

“He doesn’t care about brands,” Abby told me. “A total esthete.”

“Sounds filthy. His used bed could have mites.”

“They bleach everything before selling it.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Isn’t he fantastic?”

“No, I mean I can’t believe there’s a place actually selling pre-worn gitch.”

Danny invited her to drive cross-country in a VW bus he’d bought at Junkyard Boyz in Welland. I forbid her. We were in up her room. She tore blue ribbons off the walls. Chucked trophies out the window into Saberhagen’s backyard. During the commotion I’d grabbed her. She pushed back so hard I went down on my ass. If she’d known how to translate that strength into violence she could have beaten the living shit out of me.

“I quit! I’m through lifting.”

Danny and my daughter reached Moose Jaw before the minibus broke down. The trip convinced Abby that Danny’s posturings were more affected than esthetic. He later dropped out of college to join the police force. I didn’t hound her. If she really wanted to quit, well, what could I say? My thinking— hideous, but I’ll say it — went along the lines of Pavlov. My daughter is a rational and complex being. Still. If you’ve imprinted it deep, sooner or later that creature will ring the bell itself.

“I want to work him out of my skin,” was how she put it.

Forget about Danny the way you’d slap a coat of paint on a roomful of sour memories. We buried Danny Mulligan under a fresh coat of muscle. That was many years and several coats ago.

So it went until last September. I’ve come to divide my daughter into separate entities: pre- and post-September Abbies. She’d sustained a shoulder injury. The shoulder is our most fragile joint structure: a cup-and-socket mechanism as precarious as an egg balanced in a teaspoon. The only curative for a ruptured shoulder is rest. But every muscle possesses a memory. Should you train to a peak and for whatever reason quit, your muscles retain a memory of that peak. Olympic-level athletes surrender, on average, ten percent capacity every week. But muscle remembers.

Her layoff included a Mexican bender with old high school cohorts. She returned with a shocking heft. Puffed wheat: my thought as she cleared Customs at Pearson International. This big ole, tanned ole Sugar Crisp. Someplace in Mexico my daughter lost her fire. Along came that September afternoon at the YMCA.

“Bench press, Abs.”

Her legs: a pair of cocktail swords. Goddamn the defeatist workings of the human body. She’d rubbed her wrist. I remember all of it. Crystalline.

“Feel that.”

A nubbin of cartilage floated free where her wrist met the meat of her palm.

“Olympic trials next month. You’re goldbricking?”

“What did I say? I just said, ‘Feel that.’”

Abby dusted her palms with chalk. I slapped on 45s. Abby bench pressed it easily. The old striation of muscle beneath a veneer of vacation-flab. Two more plates. She shook her wrist loose. Clenched and unclenched her fingers.

“It’s just tightness, Abs. Loosen up.”

On the eighth rep of her following set Abby abruptly hit total muscular failure. At the same time and at the very height of extension Abby’s right shoulder and left wrist broke. Her wrist re-broke: she’d first broken it years ago leaping from a house on fire. She zonked out. The sound of my daughter breaking apart — greenstick snap of her wrist, fibrous ripping of her shoulder socket — shocked me on such a purely auditory level that the bar slipped through my hands.

Four forty-five pound plates. A weight bar weighing forty-five pounds. Two safety clips weighing an eighth of a pound each—225¼ pounds fell the distance of a child’s footstep onto my daughter. Her windpipe would have been completely crushed had the bar not been checked by her chin, the bone of which broke into several pieces. Her eyes closed, then opened. They say she likely never regained consciousness. Only body-shock trauma. Blood hemorrhaged into both eyeballs.

I heaved the bar off her throat. Dislocated both shoulders doing so. She rolled off the bench. Her skull hit the rubberized weight mat. Her eyes tiny stoplights. Jaw hanging open. A dent on her throat where the bar crushed the cartilage-wrapped tube of her airway. Fingernails ripping at her neck hoping to gouge deep enough to let air in. My brokenwristed, broken-shouldered, broke-chinned, redeyed daughter crawling on the shockproof mat of the downtown YMCA. I grabbed for her. Abby’s hand swung wildly. My nose burst. Blood all over. Every part of her flexed so hard.

When the ambulance arrived an attendant slit her throat below the crimping. Threaded in a tube.

Our cerebral hemispheres begin to corrode one minute after oxygen is cut. Hypoxic encephalopathy. Cerebral hypoxia. More simply: black holes eating into the fabric of our brains. Wesley Hill, old neighbour and friend: his job was pulling people out of Niagara Falls. If they had been under too long it was no different than pulling turnips out of a garden. A Niagara Lobotomy. Abby’s neurologist— not Saberhagen — said Abigail had surrendered sixty percent neural capacity. Blood surging into her ocular cavities bulged and burst the corneal dams. She’s blind.

A week afterward purple bruises blotched my shoulders where they’d been pulled out of joint. The local rag painted me a monster. Dredged up Over and Out. My ex-wife secured a temporary restraining order that, following token legal wranglings, would become permanent. I cried easily at things of no importance.

That evening I found Saberhagen on his back porch shooting at squirrels with a pellet gun. Working on a Flatliner. A booze-puffed texture to his face. He’d been relieved of duties as neurosurgeon at the General. His scalpel had slipped a fraction. When the blade is inside a patient’s head, a slip is catastrophic. A patient may forfeit his childhood or sense of direction. Saberhagen, participant in the famous Labradum Procedure at Johns Hopkins, was disbarred from the operating theatre.

I said: “Why shoot the poor things?”

“Eating seeds I laid out for the birds. I’m not running a squirrel soup kitchen. How are you faring?”

“Guess I want to die, Frank.”

“If that happened to my kid I guess I’d want to, too.”

He went inside to fix us drinks. When he sat again, he said: “The very definition of freak accident. I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“A hell of a thing to happen, is all. Abby’s such a good gal.”

The evening shadows grew teeth. Frank said:

“Remember that kid who burnt down the fireworker’s house?”

“Philip Nanavatti. The kid’s name was…”

“Teddy. Wasn’t a bad kid. Just fucked up. In animals, there’s what’s called a biological imperative. What they’re hardwired to do. We’re the same except that little bit smarter. We’re not too smart as a species. Just enough to screw ourselves up. That kid, Teddy… burning things was his biological imperative. I was there when firefighters drug out what was left. A carbonized skeleton but Fletch, I swear: that boy died happy. Abby jumps out the window. Breaks her wrist… we do it, too. Break things. Ruin ourselves then ruin everything around us. Those closest we ruin worst. Ninety-nine percent is good intentions, I think. We want good things for others. To do good ourselves.”

Charter members of the Bad Fathers Club, the two of us. Men with matching polarities — we habitual if accidental brutalizers — amplify what’s worst in ourselves. Seeing it reflected in each other somehow justified it. All these years me thinking I wasn’t so bad and my only evidence being my neighbour, the surgeon, was cut from the same cloth.

“Could she be fixed, Frank?”

“Her brain can’t.”

“Eyes?”

“If you had a donor.”

“Ever done eye surgery?”

“Eyes are the newspaper route of the surgical world.”

“Could you do Abby’s?”

“The Eye Bank’s wait list is long as hell.”

“What if you had a donor?”

“… as a matter of skill, yes. I could. Changing sparkplugs. Thing is, I can’t. Red tape runs round that sort of procedure.”

“It’s the two of us speaking.”

“Even on a purely conjectural level I’d need to know you were serious. Not only serious about the procedure. About everything. Your frame of mind.”

“I’ve stopped buying green bananas.”

Frank searched my face. Finally, he said:

“There’s a loose consortium of businesspeople. Most surgeons know of them. For a price, you can get an organ. Only rule: don’t ask where it came from. And it doesn’t come cheap. Eyes won’t be all they’d take, Fletch.”

“These people are professionals?”

“Far as I know, you’re asking whether the mob is professional.”

Nick showed up. He now worked for a credit card company. Recently divorced. His kid, Dylan, was with him. A chubby boy smelling of peanut butter. I put my dukes up for playful shadowboxing. Halfhoping Nick would slug me. He pushed my hands down. Hugged me. His kid being there, I guess. Frank said something mean-spirited but ultimately truthful. I left.

The farmhouse stands off the main road. Several dozen head of cattle sleep in the abutting pasture. James kicks the door open before the car checks up. Staggering around with Matilda in her cowl of bloody towels.

“My dog — my dog’s dying!”

Light blooms in a second-story window. A man in sleeping flannels leans out.

“She’s been chopped,” James tells him. “Bleeding real bad.”

“Chopped?”

“Scratched,” I tell the guy. “Clawed. Badger or something.”

“He said chopped.”

“He’s out of it. We thought you could help. Or tell us where the nearest vet is.”

A second sleep-puffed face, female, materializes.

“How bad is it?”

“She’s a tough dog,” I tell her. “But deep.”

The woman rubs the flat of her palm over her face. “I’m no vet, but I could stitch that dog up. Give me a minute to get decent.”

She meets us downstairs. A hard-shouldered woman stepping into a pair of galoshes. Husband taller and thinner with big-knuckled hands. A hunting rifle is crossed over his chest.

“He thinks you guys could be running a home invasion scam,” his wife says. “Show up at night with a sick dog, appealing to our tenderest feelings—”

“How do we know that dog’s hurt?” the guy says. “Towels soaked in red food colouring.”

“Fair enough,” I say. “I’m Fletcher. This is James and Matilda.”

“Michelle. Matt’s the hubby. We do all that work out in the barn.”

Frost-clad grass crunches underfoot as we make our way through cattle whose bodies steam like stewpots in the moon-plated field. I touch one: skin texture of a truck tire. Michelle unlatches the barn door. Lights screwed into high beams fritz and pop. She leads us to a metal gooseneck from which a darkly knotted noose suspends.

“For cows. Drag a bale over so she can reach,” Michelle says. “Head through it.”

“She won’t bite,” James says.

“Your say-so doesn’t make it any less likely. I’m not getting my face chewed off.” She’s threading a needle with surgical catgut. “Thinnest gauge I’ve got. Use it to repair labial tears after cows give birth.”

She peels towels away to reveal Matilda’s wound. A near-bloodless gash: stiff white lips with a shiny red trench between. The needle works through Matilda’s hide. Michelle pulls the incision lips together, loops, ties. She swabs Matilda’s hide with rubbing alcohol. Paints the sutures with mercurochrome.

“Good as I can do for her.”

Back in their kitchen Matthew digs a gallon tub of ice cream out the freezer. Rinses it, cuts the bottom out with a utility knife, slices halfway up its hull. James works the plastic until it fits round Matilda’s throat. Matthew duct-tapes the cone in place. Matilda gives the plastic a desultory lick, chuffs, lays across James’s legs.

We want to let them get back to bed but they say it isn’t worth bothering. They’d have to be up shortly. Such are the hours of cattle ranchers.

“Before cattle Matt was a sharecropper,” says Michelle.

“What sort of crops?”

“Potatoes,” Matt tells me. “Little coloured ones. Boutique potatoes, they’re called. Funky colours: purple and orange and bright red. All the rage with top-flight chefs.”

“Rages come and rages go,” says Michelle. “Why not russets? Mashers, bakers, fryers.”

“But they aren’t niche,” Matt says. “We’ve done better with cattle.”

“A wonder you didn’t suggest pygmy cows.” Michelle kisses the top of his head. “Bright purple pygmy cows.”

The hospital room was stark white. Abigail covered in a white sheet.

Her nipples were hard. I tried to fiddle with the thermostat but the box was locked. As my presence was a breach of the restraining order, I couldn’t ask for help. I smoothed my hands over the sheets. So glossy they could be made from spun glass. Somebody had trimmed her fingernails. Went too deep on the left pinkie: a rime of dried blood traced the enamel.

The brain is a funny organ and breaks in funny ways. Saberhagen says a damaged brain is an old car in a junkyard that, every once in awhile, you twist the key and it starts. If this was her forever after and she’d never remember anything of who she’d been— pre-September Abby — I could live with it. But some days the chemicals inside her head would surge, old doors would open and she’d be who she once was for an instant. An instant of complete confusion and rage and in the next she’d know nothing. A lingering sense, only, a taste on the back of the tongue.

A tray sat on the bedside table. Cold minestrone soup. Meatloaf. Lime Jell-O. How long would it sit before being taken away? Would another tray arrive for breakfast? I wanted to find the orderly who’d brought it and throw him down a flight of stairs. Above the tray sat the machines. Beeping, wheezing, heartbeat-spike-emitting machines. If I didn’t leave soon I might find myself fiddling with those dials and knobs. With the easy notion of it.

Imagine driving home one night. You hit a girl on her bicycle. That broken tapestry of limbs splayed over your hood. The sound of impact with the windshield — would it sound like so much at all? Twisted handlebars in the grille and the ironclad assurance that the existence you’d followed up until that moment was finished. Every overblown ambition harboured. Each foolish hope nursed. Now imagine it again. This time it’s your own girl. Realizing you’d settled behind that wheel the very night she was born. Guided yourself with terrible precision into that collision. No man can live inside his skin after reaching such an understanding. Even a one-celled organism, a planarian worm, would turn itself inside-out.

I walked down Queenston past a Big Bee convenience near the bus depot. An elderly man in what appeared to be pajamas exited a late-model minivan. He’d left the engine running. I hopped in.

Thus kicked off my short, silly career as vehicle thief.

The highway runs north. James and I can’t return to the houseboat. I don’t even want to. I’m nearly where I need to be, anyway.

Dawn rises over tailback hills. I drive into the town of Peterborough. A bakery’s just opening on the main drag. I go in, buy coffees and rolls hot from the oven. James and I sit on the hood of the Cadillac. Matilda lays on the passenger seat. Cone-wrapped head lolling in the footwell. A pickup passes, its bed full of itinerant workers in snowmobile suits. The bus station lot lights snap off, halogen coils dimming inside their plastic shells as the sun breaks over the squat block of a Woolco store.

“Where now?”

“Back south,” James says. “I got a place. Niagara Falls. U.S. side. For tax purposes.”

“To do what?”

“I’m thinking — this may sound crazy — about raising earthworms. It’s a messy enterprise,” he admits, “but they’re gold. Not just for fishing: it’s the composting wave I’ll ride. Easy to start a worm farm. Couple kiddie pools, nightcrawlers, off you go. But you need quality worms. Good bloodlines.”

“Worms have those?”

“I’ve been told so.”

“Well… I got to go, James.”

For whatever reason he’s confused. As if he’d expected me to tag along the rest of his life. The sun carries over the low-rise architecture of this central Ontario town. In the Cadillac’s windshield stand James and myself, reflected. James with his bruised face, me with my scabby scalp. Matilda stares through the glass. With the cone round her head brightened by the sun she looks like the bulb in a car headlamp.

I catch a cab at the bus terminal. It heads to the destination I’d been given over the phone by a man with a Robert Goulet voice. Lakefield Research Centre. Some kind of metallurgy lab. It takes about an hour. I doze. I give the cabbie everything I’ve got left on me — everything in my pockets. Cash, half a pack of gum, a Subway Club card one punch-hole shy of a free footlong. He takes it all gratefully enough.

Lakefield is painted that industrial lime shade common in the seventies. Inside are the partially lit hallways, gypsum floors, and whitewashed concrete walls of any elementary school. I walk down halls, finding nobody, nothing but the hum of machinery through the walls. I come upon a chair and man sitting in it. Old, in a janitor’s outfit. I tell him who I am and he nods. I follow him down another hallway, up a flight of stairs. The reek of ozone. A green-tiled room. Riveted metal floors. Military cot. I lie upon it and fall into an exhausted sleep and awake to face my butcher.

Starling looks not bad, considering. Bandaged up, everything safety-pinned in place. He sits awkwardly in a wooden chair backgrounded by a man I find familiar. Starling sniffles. The other man wipes his nose with a Kleenex, which he balls and tucks up his sleeve as an old biddy would.

“The man’s dog?”

“Tough dog.”

“Tough,” Starlings agrees.

“So who cuts — you?”

“I’m not a professional,” Starling tells me. “Or a gifted amateur. Only The Middle. Your organs are point A. Their destinations point C. They meet through me. We have surgeons. Not, mind you, the best this world has to offer.”

“You can cut me to rags and throw my body to the dogs. But my eyes…”

“Your daughter,” says Starling. “You love her? You must. There will be various handler’s fees,” he explains. “Other miscellaneous expenses. Whatever’s left will be deposited into your account.”

I brace my arms on the cot’s edge. “How much do you figure I’m worth?”

“Depends how much you’re needed. By whom.”

“There’ll be some kind of… gas?”

“We’re businesspeople, not animals. Go shower.”

A shower room as I remember from high school. Steel colonnades stretching ceiling to floor. Nozzles strung round. I strip down and twist the knob.

She will see life as an eternal ten-year-old. The worst fate in the world? Hardly. That this is the most cowardly plan of action can hardly be denied. History is crowded with fathers who’ve fled blood debts. I could try to pay back in increments what I stole. In moments and hours and days. Fifty years paying back what is essentially un-repayable. But I’m not that man. Never possessed that strength. Not for one instant in my existence.

It hurts to deny my daughter her rage. Hurts she cannot scream it into my face. Direct the cold barrel of that hatred at me. Melt the flesh off my bones. My deepest frustration finds itself here. Since anyone can be a father, can’t they? Half the human race. Takes nothing but to find a woman, tell her you love her — or love her truly, if you have that in you. Fatherhood follows. Yet nothing is so easy. I do love my daughter but this much is true: love is a sickness. Some kind of pathogen existing above all explanation.

A peculiar darkness falls through the casement window — a cold hole opening in the centre of the sun — as droplets fall, silver freckles striking my skin. No noise at all. The water. My heartbeat. That cold widening spot in the sun.

Black Box: Fletcher Burger.

The plane is afflicted with vehicular leprosy. Exterior panels flake off, rivets bursting, plates of steel carried off in the jet stream. Grip fast the yoke as it shimmies in my hands. I could let go but to this final end I am selfish. The life you cling to most dearly, worthwhile or not, is your own.

Guilt crushes you into shapes unrecognizable. Hate to sound weak of will but things happen. They happen. And yet I am truly quite sorry.

I pull back on the yoke. The line in the sky separating earth from sky, that sketchy pastel scrim of blue, gives way to darkness. The plane comes apart. As do I. My hands blacken. Whiteness of knuckle through charred skin. My eyes catch fire in a green flash the way phosphorous flares burn in the colours of their dyeing.

How deeply do any of us know our own selves? Ask yourself. We hold a picture of how we wish to be and pray it goes forever unchallenged. Passing through life never pursuing aspects of our natures with which we’d rather not reckon. Dying strangers to ourselves.