Sarah Court

BLACK CARD NOSFERATU, MY SON

First, let me tell you about my boy. Dylan. Great kid. The greatest.

He’s chubby. Chubby-edging-fat. I’ve always been thin and my wife, ex-wife, she’s trim as a willow switch. The charitable genes we inherited reversed polarities in him. Now I don’t mind that he’s chubby but I don’t know what it’s like to be chubby so I’m a stranger to his struggles. My dad suggests a dietician. Too Hollywood. A ten-year-old with a dietician. What next — a PR flack?

Other week he found a grocery bag full of used work gloves at a building site. Sweat encrusted. Worn through at the fingertips. The sheer uniformity— gloves! a humongous bagful! — must have intrigued him. Then days ago he came home with a trash sack slung over his shoulder. Chewing on a Snickers. Two questions, son of mine: why did you pick up that charming sack of trash and where’d you get the candy? His answer: he discovered the candy in the sack, which, naturally, was why he picked it up. Its contents: twenty-odd pounds of chocolate. We drove to the site of his gold rush. The home’s owner, the manager of Haig Bowl skating rink’s concession stand, told me that yes, he’d pitched chocolate bars past their best-before date. They wouldn’t kill anyone. I let Dylan keep five. A finders fee. On the drive home a sugar rush gave rise to one of my son’s parented Deep Thoughts:

“Daddy, would a cloned human being have a soul?”

“Sure, Dill. Why not.”

One vivid-as-hell imagination. He’s been a stegosaurus, a fusion-engineered-saber-toothedrattlesnake (with stinging nettle skin), gas vapour from a 1973 Gran Torino, an atomic mummy, both a llama and an alpaca as apparently there’s a difference. For days he’ll speak in this spur-of-the-moment dialect: “Fitzoey blib-blab hadoo! Wibble-wabble?” His whimsy gave birth to the Phantoids: aliens the size of atoms who colonized a marshmallow he carried in a shoe box. When the marshmallow went stale he told me the Phantoids returned to their home world.

“Wasn’t the marshmallow their world?” “They were on vacation.”

“Budget travellers, those Phantoids.”

You’ve got to carefully monitor his stimuli or he’ll pick up a contact high that lasts weeks. It can be a bit embarrassing, as when he overheard a private conversation between his mother and I and created a jazzy new superhero: Captain Pap Smear. For a minor eternity he shouted, in basso profundo voice, “This sounds like a job for Captain Pap Smear!” and “He seeks out evil and smears it!” Or during his Night Stalker phase, where he deployed his skills at sneaking about — he tiptoes like Baryshnikov! — to catch my wife and I in flagrante delicto. He’d popped up at the end of our bed with a cry of “YeahHA!” but his brow beetled with perplexity so I’d leapt up chuckling “Ho ho ho!”, girding my hips with a sheet to escort him back to bed.

Lately he’s been a vampire. A manageable fixation. Before that it was No Bone Boy. That incarnation saw him lounging in sloppy poses over sofa arms. Splay-armed on the floor.

“Dinner’s on, Dill.”

“Sure am hungry, Daddy, but”—big sigh—“no bones.”

I’d drag him into the kitchen. Perch him in a chair like a muppet. Head flat on the table.

“Having a no-boned son sucks, huh?”

“Are the doctors working on those space-age titanium bones?”

“Around the clock.”

Next he would slide, sans bones, onto the linoleum. I mean, my kid is method.

The phone call comes at three a.m. Flights booked: Hamilton to JFK onto Russia. From there by charter to the Sea of Okhotsk. I call Abby.

“It’s Nick,” I whisper. “Sorry, sorry. Alright I bring Dylan over?”

“Mrrrmffah.”

I pop a Black Cat caffeine pill. Grab a pre-packed duffel. On into Dylan’s room.

“Dill, gotta get up.”

His eyes crack. A stale drool smell wafts off his pillow.

“I’m taking you to Abby’s.”

“Can’t I stay with Mom?”

“Mom’s still settling in up in Toronto.”

He pulls his planet-patterned covers up, squashing Jupiter upon the curve of his chin. “No time for this, buckaroo. Either Abby or grandpa.”

That does it. I bundle him into the car with his “Emergency Away-From-Home Kit”: locomotive to his Lionel train set, a book: Lizards of the Gobi Desert, packets of banana-flavoured Carnation Instant Breakfast which he takes blended with one real banana.

I drive Ontario Street past the GM plant and its stargazer’s constellation of security lamps. Chase a yellow through the intersection of Louth past the Hotel Dieu hospital. A man sits on an ambulance bumper. Bloody towel pressed to his head smoking a cigarette. St. Paul a cold strip hammered flat between shopfronts. Men in snowmobile suits with frostburnt fingers black as cigar butts. Dylan’s touching the inside of his wrist with two fingers.

“What are you up to?”

“Checking my pulse. It’s the most reliable indicator of bodily health.”

Russia. Goddamn. Okhotsk? Sound you’d make choking on a fishbone. These gigs usually go a day or two. Any longer I’ll have to buy local vestments. Waddling about in a bearskin parka, a babushka, one of those furry too-big KGB caps.

Abby musters a groggy smile when we arrive. Boxers and a MET-RX tee shirt. Corded legs and calves a-trickle with veins.

“Hey, troublemaker,” she says to Dylan in his one-piece pajamas with padded booties; I think he’s too old for them, but the fact they’re manufactured in his size makes this hard to argue.

I drive to the airport and check in. Doze with the pocketed lights of Hamilton burning through the airplane window. Awake to a New York dawn. Layover in JFK. Commuters shuffling under halogens that accord us the look of zombies cooling our heels between takes of a grade-Z horror flick. No jetsetters. Jetlagged middle-of-the-roaders. Economy-classers. Shreds of airline-peanut foil under our fingernails. We, the tribe of semis: semi-handsome, semiintellectual, semi-successful, semi-leisure class, semi-happy, semi-alive. Half lifers.

I’m in what a headshrinker might call “a fragile state of mind.” Not so much I cannot cope, not so much I’d abdicate my responsibilities, but… yeah. Fragile. There’s this commercial on TV a lot these days. For the Alzheimer’s Society. Maybe you’ve seen it? This old fellow in a house full of lemons. Shelves, the floor, fridge chockablock. He can’t remember he’d already bought them, see? Buys more and more. This poor old man in a house full of lemons. Playing solitaire. It wrecks me. Takes precious little, so suddenly. The ass-end of Christopher Cross’s “Sailing” on an easy-listening station. The smell of burning leaves. I’m standing there, welling up, asking myself: What the hell’s this all about?

A pair of leggy foreign girls — German tennis players to take a wild stab — breeze past. Young and somehow more attractive for their harried-ness: a woman-on-the-go quality. Speaking in exotic tongues. Hair done up invitingly. I try on a smile but catch my profile in a chain pizzeria’s mirrored facade and the sight — punch-squashed nose, cauliflower ears: reminders of a childhood in the ring — causes the smile to rot on my face. I can’t even summon the enthusiasm to play the gay divorcée.

Auf Wiedersehen, ladies.

The next flight finds me stranded between beefy members of the beleaguered proletariat. A breakfast omelette resembles novelty vomit. My stomach curdles over the vast grey Atlantic.

I work for American Express. Caretaker for Centurion holders. The Black Card.

It began as an urban myth: American Express distributed a card with which you could buy anything to the limit of the company’s 20.87 billion dollar worth. A decommissioned battleship or gently used space shuttle. But the card never existed. Until one of the bigwigs at head office said, “Why not?” The Centurion is limited to 4,000 clients worldwide. Member fee: $350,000.

You can look at me as a concierge. A perk built into the card’s exorbitant fees. Occasionally this reduces me to professional nose-wiper. I’m sent to monitor peculiar purchases. If a client’s aiming to buy a cruise missile, I have to say: nix.

Clients do fall from Centurion status. In those cases we do as with any deadbeat: cut their card up. I cut up Michael Jackson’s, if you can believe it. He was in Europe. We charted his egress by the locations of each gobsmacking purchase. Three Qing Dynasty vases ($750,000 apiece) at a Glasgow antiques emporium. The 1.5-ton chandelier from the Belfast Grand Opera House auctioned at Sotheby’s Helsinki. An attempted purchase of Marienburg castle, a deal nearly shepherded to fruition by Duke Philip von Wuerttemberg — that man knew a pigeon when he saw one — occasioned my dispatch. I tracked Jackson to a hotel room in Budapest. Ushered past mucketymucks and a diaper-clad chimp before reaching the man himself. Who was a mess. Face falling off the put-upon bones of his skull. “Big fan,” I told him awkwardly, snipping his card in half. “My first slow dance was to ‘Baby Be Mine.’”

That damn chimp scratched my arms all to hell. Novosibirsk airport holds the eye-bruising shade of a black market kidney. Red, arterial red, steak-tartare-served-on-a-stop-sign red stretching everywhere. The arcade past Customs consists of four Ms. Pacmans. Three of the four are busted. The man waiting at the luggage carousel — check that, luggage disgorger: scuffed tongue of a conveyor belt drooling suitcases into a metal basin — jabs a squared-off finger at the pocket he assumes I keep my passport in.

“Shab-ruh-hoegan. Dis not name you company to give.”

“My company’s an idiot,” I tell him. That I’d refer to my company as a massive useless singular evidently tickles his Bolshevik funny bone. He smells strongly of pickled something: beets, to guess by the staining of his teeth. He leads me through the airport to a runway where a twin-prop plane awaits. My baggage handler is the pilot. Could be it’s this way all over Russia. The doctor who empties your bedpan cuts out your gallbladder, too.

It’s late afternoon by the time we touch down on a grassy landing slip. Goats graze over a stone wall. A Lada waits. Unsurprisingly, the pilot’s my driver. He guns the four-banger engine.

“Dah. Ve go.”

Stone houses, filling stations, churches with onion-bellied spires. Heaved-backed men with skin so hard and whitened it looks like an exoskeleton. It’s darkening by the time we reach a bluff overlooking the sea. A bay edged by cliffs. A military-style tent is set up on the beach below. A Jeep. Up the bluff with us: a TV truck. Russky station. The satellite dish on its roof is a rusted toadstool.

“Dah,” says my Man Friday. “Joo go.”

Egg-sized beach stones rounded smooth with each tide. Dark skeins of kelp. Blackness of water leeching into the sky. I hear frantic peeps. Light burns out of tents’ eyelets.

“Saberhagen?”

Conway Finnegan steps through the flaps. A St. Catharines native who hopped a ship to the Saudi oilfields and in the ensuing decades became our town’s richest expat. His American Express status took the same upwardly mobile route: green to gold to platinum to Centurion. We’d last met in Delta’s first class lounge at Dulles airport. He’d been off to “sort out some monkeyshines with those Halliburton bastages.” Even at sixty-odd Conway’s huge: a chunk of slob ice broken off the Niagara river miraculously grown legs, arms, and a salt-and-pepper head. One of those guys who, when he hugs you — as he does now — he cradles the back of your head as if you’re an infant with a neck too weak to support your skull. Despite this, he looks smaller than my memory of him. Circumstances tend to shrink a man.

“TV truck still up there?” When I tell him it is: “Vultures a-circling.”

We hop into the Jeep. Connie drives to the seashore. Flicks on foglamps bolted to the roll bar. “See it? Volganeft-188. Bearing cargo I paid for and insured.”

A metallic tusk juts from the water a few knots out. Moonlight bleeds along the downed ship’s hull to make it appear as a curved knife slicing up out of the surf.

“Borne for the western seaboard. Busted apart two-hundred miles from where she was loaded. Four thousand liquid tons of motor oil into the drink. Glug, glug, glug.”

Connie’s flashlight sweeps the shore. It lingers on tar-scummed life rafts. It takes a moment to accept the flat, eye-shaped objects washing in and out as flounders. The seaside is cobbled with dead fish. Oil-smothered birds. Feathers slicked down they’re tinier, the way a dog shrinks when you bathe it. Only the red pinpricks of their eyes aren’t black. “Cleaned a couple best I could,” Connie says. “Still, they died. Oil’s earmarked for Wal-Mart. Biggest oil-change providers in the hemisphere. I got a buzz from their legal eagle, Donald-someone-or-other. Real nut-buster. Says I better get out here, deal with the mess I’d made.”

He crimps one nostril with his thumb. Blows a string of mucous out the other. Back home we call that a gym-teacher’s nose blow.

“He said what I ought to do is collect some of the poor things as samples. A charitable educational initiative. Put them in glass boxes of formaldehyde. Give it a preachy name. Our Poisoned Seas. It’ll spin, he kept saying. It’ll spin!”

Huge fearsome noises rumble up the beach. Connie trains the flashlight. Down the stones, gripped in the oil-thickened surf, is a shark. Easily a thirteen-footer — a rogue, they call lone sharks— threshing on the polished stones. Black, its body all black and while this should have made it more fearsome, a living nightmare, it only looks pitiful. “Great white,” Connie says. “Didn’t think they swam this far north.”

Its saw-like tail slashes. Its massive, rubber-like mouth flexes. Stones burst between its jaws. Pebbles adhere to the glutinous sheen of its oil-covered skin, making portions of its anatomy look like black bedazzled leather. A second tail, far smaller, protrudes partway from its sternum. The shark must’ve swum into the shallows to give birth. The > metallic fluttering of its gill-slits. Dark arterial blood pouring out as it suffocates.

In the tent we can still hear her dying. All the little sounds of death. The tent: folding table, chairs, hurricane lamp hanging on a loop of jute cord. Bottles of native spirits.

“My father, Seamus” Connie tells me, “had an embolism. Blood pooling in the brain. First morning I’m back home he shreds the newspaper into a bowl and pours milk on it. Then he goes and shakes cornflakes over the table. Trying to do what he’d done for thirty-five years: eat cereal, read the paper. But the circuitry was screwy.”

Connie takes a haul off the nearest bottleneck. “Money wasn’t a sticky point — I’d have shipped him to Beth Israel — but I was told Frank Saberhagen, your Dad, was good as any. Part of some big medical thingamabob…”

“The Labradum Procedure.”

“—right, at—”

“Johns Hopkins.”

“Blood from that blown vessel lingered in Dad’s head. It… turned hard? Went to jelly? Anyway, in the channels of his brain. Weeks in the hospital. Norris wing. As a kid, I thought that place was a…” “Nuthouse.”

“You, too?”

“Teachers used to threaten: behave, or I’ll ship you to the Norris wing with the crazies. You’d think it was padded cells and straightjackets—”

“—and electroshock therapy, sure. Just rooms, Nick. Ordinary hospital rooms.”

Wind howls in off the sea and hisses through the eyelets. My first trip to the Soviet Union. What would I carry home? Busted Reagan-era video games. Beet-stained teeth. A shark’s gills sharp as the steel teeth on a circular saw. Conway Finnegan so shrunk inside his skin he had the look of a sick Shar-pei.

“Sorry to drag you out,” he tells me. “American Express was happy enough to dispatch you. Your father, mine. We’re town boys. I’m just the son of a welder from St. Kitt’s, Nick.”

I close my eyes. Behind my eyelids fins and beaks, wings and tails break up from the dark. Two boys from southern Ontario perched on the other end of the world at the edge of an oil-black sea.

“How’s your father, Connie?” I ask.

“Cemetery off Queenston. By the liftlocks. Yours?”

“Still kicking.”

Secondly, I’ll to tell you about my wife. Ex.

What I miss is a hand on her hip. On line at the movies or navigating the kitchen while we cooked. An undervalued perk of married life. My hand on her hip, whenever.

Our first kiss she had Sambuca on her tongue. Like sucking on a licorice pastille. Making out in my father’s Camry with “C’Mon and Ride It” by Quad City DJs on the radio. One of many life events on which I’d gladly take a do-over. These disassociated memories I carry forward. These memories, I imagine, are the ones I’ll die with. Back then I was still rooting through my father’s GQs, ripping out the scented cologne ads, rubbing them on my neck. Also training to fight the curtain-jerker on a card at the Tonowanda VFW. My opponent: Ox “Eighteen” Wheeler. Irish so far as I’d been told but he walked to the ring in a serape and sombrero accompanied by a mariachi guitarist strumming “Prisonero De Tus Brazos.” Yes, seriously, and yes, I lost. Ox headbutted me in the first round. The pressure of our heads colliding caused veins in my forehead to burst. Those veins spraying blood like fire hoses under my skin occasioned two plum-sized mouses to form above my eyes. By the sixth round they were so massive I couldn’t see much: like peering out of a basement window. My father said I’d looked like a goat with clipped horns. He slit them afterwards. Blood pissed out of my face halfway across the locker room, splashing the robe of a flyweight warming up. The scars now meet in a shallow ‘V’ above my eyebrows.

The adrenaline the Wheeler fight overload of sparring for made me immoderately, ungovernably horny. More so even than your runof-the-mill nineteen-year-old. Dad blamed it on an overstimulated hypothalamus gland. “I tell guys with ED to join a boxing club,” he’d say. “A round of sparring beats that little blue pill all to hell.” Oversexed boxer + rebellious daughter of landed gentry = hormonal fireworks. Eleven months: the span separating our eyes meeting across a crowded campus bar to Dylan’s birth. To cop a lyric from a song getting radio play around then: “We were only freshmen.”

I was KO’d by an overmuscled bear from Coldwater, Michigan on a card sponsored by the railway switchmen’s union the week my to-be wife announced she was preggers. The sting my father felt at my losing to a guy he trumpeted as “The Coldwater Crumpet” was inflamed by the fact we’d be keeping the baby. We arranged a quickie civil union at the courthouse. Our mothers’ hearts broken: they who’d pined for rose petals, centrepieces, and perhaps to pin some inexact debt on us for arranging it.

My wife: cute, athletic, a field hockey defenceman. The physics of childbirth terrified her. Her “vaginal integrity” would be ruined by a new life steamrolling out. At Lamaze class our instructor, an elderly wide-hipped lesbian (“A dyke with childbearing hips,” my father had said; “Irony, thou art a coy mistress!”) asked us men to picture passing a cherry stone through our urethral tube. “If I could birth our baby that way, I would,” I’d said to my wife during one quarrel. “Even if it widened my urethral tube so bad it ended up a… a windsock!”I was there in the delivery room. She insisted. My first sight of Dylan: this slick quivering mass extruded from my wife’s birth canal. Her labial lips stretched and torn. I’d touched her weeks later, in bed, felt those hairline scabs in the process of healing. To know I’d wreaked that manner of intimate violence upon her. She regained her figure but the skin of her stomach lost tension. She said it looked like a balloon from a New Year’s party fallen behind the couch to be found in April, mostly deflated with half a lungful of sad old air inside.

We had typical married couple fights. My wife hailed from a proper English family. One did not use one’s utensil as a shovel. Food should be pushed up the underside of a fork. She made Dylan — three years old with the fine motor skills of a spider monkey — roll corn niblets up his fork. Or we’d be having sex, she’d run her fingers through my hair and say: “I liked it better long.”

Dad says: “Surveys prove a third of women cheat on their spouse. But if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll know if she’s in that third before it ever happens.” I’m not happy. She kept repeating this the night she left. After the rationales and rage had burnt us down to the bones of it. I’m not happy. What can I change? Nothing. I’m not happy. Is there someone else? No. But there was by then the idea of someone else. She craved the catharsis of a clean break. To tell the truth, it was foretold in one silly everyday episode.

I’d driven her to the mechanic to pick up our old Aerostar. She drove home behind me. At a stoplight on Martindale I observed her out the rearview mirror. In that moment she became a stranger, and my understanding of her that of a stranger. I saw a lovely woman in a minivan singing along to the radio. Really belting it out. One hand drumming the wheel. Wedding band fracturing the sunlight to spit it off in sparks.

She wasn’t my wife, in that moment. Just a beautiful girl who’d married too young and gotten trapped — only she hadn’t quite reached that realization.

I catch a redeye into Toronto. A message from Abby awaits me at home.

“Dylan’s in trouble at school. You’ve got a meeting with Iris Trupholme. He’s still a vampire.”

I’d let Dylan watch The Lost Boys. Afterwards he begged me to go to Toys R Us. I outfitted him with a bargain-bin cape and plastic fangs. He’s adopted that Lugosian accent where every ‘w’ becomes a ‘v’: I vant to suck jor blood, blah!

Abby’s waiting outside Dylan’s classroom with a girl my son’s age. She’s got those enamel-coloured dental braces that make wearers look as though they have sets of overlapping teeth, like sharks. She’s chewing an Eberhard eraser and spitting pink bits on the tiles.

Missus Trupholme, Dylan’s teacher: sixtyish, with a low centre of gravity. Her skull sports a vaporous cloud of frizzy red hair which, if it had a taste, would unarguably be cherry. On her desk is a kid’s cellphone. The pink faux-gems are a dead giveaway.

“They’re video cameras now,” Trupholme says. “Everyone’s making their own amateur videos. Next regional meeting it’s number one on the bullethead.”

She flips it open. Fiddles with buttons. “Kids recording one another. Their age’s version of Truth or Dare. Put videos on the Internet. There’s a place…”

“Youtube,” says Abby.

“That one. One shows a grade ten student beating up his Math teacher. The man was months shy of retirement. Phones so small, it’s hard to patrol. Cassie!”

The eraser-chewer slinks in. Trupholme says: “How does this work?”

Cassie presses a few buttons. Trupholme says, “Now go on.”

“Can I have it back?”

“All signs point to ‘no.’”

The girl performs a deep-knee bend, arms hugged round her knees.

“My dad’s gonna kill me.”

“Tell him it’s evidence.”

“Swear to God, I’ll only…” Her lip juts. Stuck with crumbs of eraser. “It’s my property.”

“Sue me.”

Cassie stomps back into the hall. Trupholme shows us the video on the phone’s inch-wide screen. Dylan in corduroys with his vampire cape tied round his throat is standing at the front of the class. Shaky footage shot from halfway under a desk. Trupholme chalks a math problem on the board. Dylan prowls up behind. Rubs against her. She sets both hands on Dylan’s shoulders. Moves him gently away. Dylan presses forward, smiling, to rub on her again.

“Oh, God,” I say. “That’s not Dill at all.”

“His first quasi-sexual offence,” Trupholme says.

Quasi-sexual. Something breaks in me. She goes on:

“Are either of you familiar with the term ‘frotteur’? A person who derives gratification from rubbing. Crowded busses, subway cars: where adult frotteurs operate.”

“That’s what you think Dylan is? A — a budding frotter?”

“Frotteur. Your son’s too young to have his sexuality sorted out. That said, Mr. Saberhagen, we’re suspending him a week.”

“Yes. Fair. What he’s done is a bad sign. In a year of bad signs. We should make him clean the playground, too.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“Hell, yes. Physical, demeaning labour.”

“I doubt our groundskeeper would be happy to hear that.”

Dylan sits on an orange plastic chair in the cafeteria. Vampire cape draped over its back.

“Outside. You’re cleaning the schoolyard.”

“Vampire Dylan doze not clean.”

“Shut up with that. You’re suspended a week.”

He wipes his nose on the cape. “It was just a joke… blah.”

The wind gusts round the school’s industrial edges. Kid-centric garbage — Fruit Roll-Up sleeves, YOP bottles — skates across autumn grass. Dylan mopes along the fence, cape aflutter, tossing trash haphazardly into the bag.

“That was a dandelion,” I call from the swingset. “Since when are they garbage?”

“They’re weeds!”

His whole life I’ve played the hardass. When his “terrible twos” habit had been to strike out with his fists: always me holding his pudgy hands. He said “Mom” at eight months; he didn’t say “Dada” until he’d reached a year, by which point he’d already said “Car” and “Wow-wow.” Instead of putting trash in the bag, he’s skewering it on fence barbs. Yogurt cups piked like heads.

“You’re supposed to pick it up, not redistribute it,” Abby says. To me: “He was on the computer all day.”

“Should I suspend his privileges?”

“The only way he interacts, Nick. His own birthday — who shows up? That exchange student, Rigo, and me.”

Dylan’s poked the bag full of holes to wear as a muumuu.

“All done. Blah!”

“By the tetherball pole: see? Pop can. Hurry up. Boxing tonight,” I say. Abby gives me a look. “The basics,” I tell her. “We’ll fit a gumshield to his mouth.” I don’t tell her how last time Dylan burst into tears biting down on the warm rubber. “It’s good for him.”

“Yeah, because it was so good for you.”

Old wheeze in the boxing game: In the ring, truth finds you. Didn’t put in the roadwork? That finds you. Didn’t leave enough sweat on the heavy bags? That comes to find you. Not just the work: it’s all you are from inside-out. Every little thing, even those you got no defence against. If you’re cursed with brittle hands, say, that truth finds you. If you cut easy or your heart’s not the equal of the man you square up against. In every punch and feint, broken bone and chipped tooth, every gasp and moan, each time you wish you were someplace else, anywhere but here taking this punishment, in your guts and marrow in every place you thought hidden. Boxing is simple arithmetic. The ones and twos never fail to add. Truth always finds its way back to you.

Impact Boxing is located in a strip mall on Hartzell next to a knife shop, King of Knives, whose banner reads: Knives, The Perfect Gift for Knife Lovers! Beyond lies Sterno Dell. Charred tree skeletons poke from its rain-sodden ash like spears.

Entering the club gives me the same sensation an Olympic swimmer must get slipping on a clammy Speedo for morning laps: uncomfortably familiar. My DNA is soaked into these speed bags, headgear, punch mitts. Atomized remainders cling to sewage pipes spanning the ceiling. Photos of prematurely aged fighters on the walls. My favourite a B&W portrait of Archie Moore, the Mongoose, with this quote: Nowadays fighters tussle for money. I was fighting when the prize was going to jail. When I was a kid, two men nursing a blood feud stepped through the ropes to go at it barefisted. One hit the other so hard he face-planted the canvas. While unconscious he sneezed involuntarily; a pressurized hiss as the air driven into his skull vented around his eye sockets. My father said the man had suffered an orbital blowout fracture and was lucky: had he sneezed much harder an eyeball might have ejected itself.

Dad’s beaten us here. Following his medical suspension he’s taken to drinking at the Queenston Motel, a bar lonely, dispossessed men gravitate to before gravity hauls them off the face of the civilized world altogether.

“Look,” he says with a sigh. “It’s the Count.” “Good eeevening,” Dylan greets his grandfather. In the changeroom Dad unfurls Dylan’s handwraps like lizard’s tongues. Spreads the fleshy starfish of his grandson’s hands to gird them. Dylan sucks air through his teeth. “Tight.”

Dad unwinds his work. He believes Dill’s wussiness hovers round the fact he required an operation to correct an undescended testicle. But my father is prone to tendering wild accusations based on picayune evidence — such as the time he spotted me with a grape juice moustache and got into a big kerfuffle with Mom, levying the charge I must be “guzzling the frigging stuff,” which according to him was a sign of burgeoning gluttony. I was seven.

The club is sparsely trafficked. A retired bricklayer hammers away at a heavy bag with a watchman’s cap tugged tight to his eyes. Young hockey players— goons in training — take wild swings at the bags adjacent. I untangle a skipping rope.

“Try for a minute, Dill.”

He can’t go ten seconds. As always, I am shocked by his lack of coordination. His feet snarl in the cape. He stomps on the hem and its cord chokes him.

“Swell cape,” Dad says. Queenston Motel suds percolate out his pores.

“Saaank you,” Dylan says in his vampire voice. “Jor blood vill stay in jor veins tonight, old one.” “Yeah? That’s swell.”

I tug Dylan into a pair of sixteen ouncers. Giant red melons attached to his arms. We stake out a bag beside a poster of a vintage Lennox Lewis with his high-and-tight MC Hammer hairdo. Dylan throws a whiffle-armed one-two. The feeble blut of his gloves slapping the bag stirs a deep sorrow in my chest.

“Pretend it’s vampire bait.”

“Vampire bat?”

“Bait.” I shouldn’t encourage it, but: “Vampire bait.”

“Eef it vas wampire bait, I vould do dees!”—and bites the bag.

“Dill. How many people you figure sweated all over that?”

Dylan smacks his lips. “Eet’s wary, wary hard to be a wampire deez daze.”

He heads to the fountain. Dad’s emptying spit troughs: funnels attached to lengths of flexible PVC hose feeding into Oleo buckets in opposing corners of the ring. The cell-phone girl, Cassie, comes in with who I assume must be her father: Danny Mulligan. His romance with Abby broke down in Moose Jaw along with his VW Minibus. He’s a cop now and looks it: Moore’s suitcoat shiny at the elbows, saddle shoes squashed at the toes like a clown’s, horse teeth, a Marine’s whitewall haircut shorn close to the scalp. I can already picture him as an old man: high blue veins, buttons of nose-hair. He looks — why do I harbour such unreasonable, mean-spirited, perverse thoughts? — like the sort of guy who, mid-fuck, grabs his own ass-cheek with a free hand. That selfconscious hand-push, like he needs help burying it home, coupled with an equally affected back arch. Yeah, he’s that guy.

“Nick, right?”

“Danny,” I greet him. “Yeah, hi.”

“It’s Dan. My little girl tells me there was some ruckus today at school.”

“That’s right. Something to do with videos.”

Mulligan spread his legs as if readying to perform a hack squat.

“Trupholme took away her phone. I bought that for Cassie’s birthday. All her numbers stored in it. Important dates, too.”

Important dates. She’s ten. What, when the next Tiger Beat hits the newsstands?

“I imagine she’ll get it back.”

“If not?”

“Are you telling me to buy her a new phone?”

“How about we’ll talk.”

With that, Dan dismisses me. He pulls gloves onto his daughter’s fists and leads her to a bag. Cassie summons enough force out of her tiny frame to rattle it on its chain.

“Why not your little gal get in with Dylan?” Dad calls to Mulligan.

“We’re game,” goes Mulligan, with a shrug.

Dad turns to Dylan. “What d’ya say, Drac?”

Dylan scuffs his shoes at a black streak on the floor.

“I don’t vant to heet a girl.”

“Not hitting,” I say. I hate seeing him cave. “Manoeuvring. You’ll be okay.”

Headgear squashes his eyes-nose-mouth into the centre of his face. I tuck his cape into the back of his shorts. The silicon gumshield stretches his lips into an involuntary smile.

When the bell rings, my son stares around, confused, perhaps thinking the fire alarm’s gone off. Cassie bears in, one gloved fist big as her head glancing off Dylan’s shoulder. Mulligan’s next to me on the apron. He carries himself in a physically invasive manner. Commandeering airspace. It speaks badly of a man.

Dylan rucks in gamely, gloves hipped and rubbing against Cassie. Latent frotteur behaviour? He stumbles on his heels trying to find me in the lights, smiling at nobody in particular before turning that silly bewildered smile on his opponent as if to say, “We’re having fun, right?” Cassie’s snorting round her mouthpiece as the headgear constricts her sinuses. She bulls Dylan into a corner and drives her hands into his face before pulling away to slap a glove into Dill’s breadbasket. Dylan quivers: a seismic wave up his neck and down his thighs. They joust in the centre of the ring. Dylan’s pushing at Cassie’s shoulders to keep her unbalanced. I see my son in the west-wall mirror, and the reflected action states more profoundly just how lost he looks, soft and salty and unprotected like a massive quivering eyeball and I’m stepping through the ropes to stop it when Cassie plants a foot and rears so far back at the hips her lead hand nearly touches the back of her knee, coming on with the nastiest overhand right I’ve ever seen thrown by anyone so young. The sound she makes throwing it the screech of a gull. With the blood knocked temporarily out of his face, Dylan looks like an actor in a Japanese Noh play. He gets plunked on his backside where the ropes meet, spread-legged, skull too heavy for his neck. It dips between his knees to touch the canvas.

Dad’s saying: “To your corners!”

I reach into Dylan’s mouth. Strings of mucousthickened drool snap as I pull the mouthpiece out. Vacant-eyed — belted into that groggy space where nothing’s fully solidified — he blinks as a berry swells under his left eye. His gloved hands reach at his shorts as if he thinks he’s bare-assed and needs to hike them up. I cradle my hands under his bum. Pick him up.

In the changeroom I tug his gloves off. Mulligan comes in to apologize. Genuinely surprised and regretful. He asks is Dylan okay. My son smiles. A sheen of blood on his teeth.

“I’m sorry,” Dylan tells me.

“You didn’t do anything.”

That berry under his eye: you’d think an insect laid eggs. A red ring round his neck where the cape string’s choked him. Dylan looks at his hands with the most pitiable expression. Not a fighter, my boy. But he seems aware of it, too, a failure that pains him. He thinks I give a damn. He opens his arms to me and I sense he’s terrified I won’t hug him back.

“I’m sorry.”

“Dill, please. What is it you think you’ve done?”

On the way home I stop at Mac’s Milk to buy him an ice-cream sandwich. When I get back he’s flipping through a book I’d tossed in the back seat. Over-and-Out Parenting, by Dr. Dave Schneider. “Gobbledegook,” I tell him. He’s eating Nerds.

“Where’d you get those?”

“The stocker.”

“Night stalker?”

“The machine stocker.”

Machine Stalker. Robo-stalker. Presumably bought with the five dollar bills Abby stitches into his trousers. He traces the ice-cream sandwich to his lumpy eye.

“In class we watched this movie about war.”

“What war?”

“The one where everything’s blown up,” he says. “And like, the world gives us everything we need to blow it up. The steel to make planes is dug out of whaddayacall…?”

“Mines.”

“Like, the stuff that’s inside is the stuff blowing it up.” He points to his belly. “What if tiny-tiny aliens landed here—”

“You mean Phantoids?”

“Phantoids are peaceful, Dad… and so they hate each other and so get into a humongous war? Dig mines into my stomach. Make planes out of my bones and so, the gas is my blood? Mix the juices and the, uh, so, other stuff on my skin to make bombs? Everything they need to kill each other is on me.”

He rips the waxed wrapper in neat ribbons. He’s fallen into an obsessive habit of taking things apart. Pocket calculators, stereo remotes: anything with diodes, springs, cogs. He asked for a set of jeweller’s screwdrivers to facilitate his deconstructions. I’d bought him a decent Timex for Christmas: he used the screwdrivers to gut it. Endstage methamphetamine addicts take gadgets apart with no intention of putting them back together. It accelerates or accentuates their grotty highs. I’m scared my son is exhibiting meth-head behaviours.

I say: “There’s a drawing class at the Learning Annex.”

“I like drawing.”

“That’s why I said it, buddy. Maybe that’s a little more your speed than boxing.”

“So… if you want.”

“Not what I want. What you want.”

“Is it?”

“You tell me.”

“Okay, it is.”

The naked girl on stage has jet-black hair fitted precisely to the plates of bone composing her skull. Playmobil hair — clip it on and off.

I hate strip clubs. Truly, they leave me griefstricken. They cater to a pitiful male hopefulness. For the young guys, the hope of sucking tit in the champagne lounge. Older guys, the hope a girl might drop her defences to tell him her real name. Not Puma: Trudy. Not Raven: Paula.

The black card holder’s name is Starling. Wide, lashless eyes set far apart on his head give him the look of a trout. As the girl on stage performs a deadeyed gymnastic manoeuvre, spine bent like the Arc de Triomphe, he tells me he’d recently bought a Japanese dog. While we’re talking, a guy I find familiar walks past. Long hair up in a ponytail. Jacket with Brink Of embroidered on it.

“Colin,” I say. “Colin Hill. Hey!”

He smiles, a celebrity posing for paparazzi. “Man, aren’t you…”

“Nick Saberhagen. From Sarah Court.”

“Riiiiight.”

He’s here with his father, Wesley, and some kid with dreadlocks. Colin tells us he’s going over the Falls tomorrow morning. I recall reading something in the Pennysaver. I tell him I’ll be there. And my son. Starling tells a bizarre story about a shark that plunges a dagger into all further conversation. Next he’s saying we’ve got to leave.

Our cab glides down Bunting to Queenston. Tufford Manor and the cemetery where Conway Finnegan’s father lies, on over the liftlocks. QEW to the Parkway to River Road running along bluffs of the Niagara. In the basin puntboats — smugglers, jacklighters — run the channel with kerosene lamps bolted to their prows. The smell of baked wheat from the Nabisco factory. We pass the hydroelectric plant. Static electricity skates along my teeth to find the iron fillings and touch off fireworks in my gums.

“I imagine,” says Starling, “a fair number drown.”

“In this river? It happens.”

“Most common cause of brain damage is oxygen deprivation, Nicholas.” I hate that he calls me that, but his membership fee entitles him to call me “dickface,” if it so pleases him. “Most common cause of oxygen deprivation is water trauma. A man of average intelligence deprived three and a half minutes — he’ll end up with the brain capacity of a colobus monkey. Up to four minutes, a springer spaniel. Truth is, the humans whose company I enjoy most are those most like animals. I spent time in a brain injury ward. One boy suffered massive cerebral hemorrhages due to his mother’s narrow birth chute. The most beautiful, open smile. He experienced more moments of pure joy in one day than I’ll lay claim to in a lifetime. Most of us would be better off having our heads held underwater a couple minutes. Ever see an unhappy dog, Nicholas?”

“No, sir. Not for very long, anyway.”

The taxi pulls into a warehouse. Security spots throw light at odd angles. Starling leads me down a domed hallway. A man sits on a wooden chair beside a door.

“Donald Kerr, you old scallywag.”

“No names. I said no—”

“What shall he write on the cheque?” Starling asks, indicating me. “Wal-Mart bagman?”

Donald’s got a narrow chicken face. Easy to picture him sitting on a clutch of eggs. A flatteringly tailored suit cannot disguise a physique shapeless as a pile of Goodwill parkas. One hand is cocked high on his second rib: a prissy, girlish posture.

He leads us into the warehouse, which is empty save the object in the centre lit by a suspended bulb. It’s one of those trick boxes stage magicians make water escapes from. Designs carved into base and sides. A softball-shaped something sits inside. Starling leaves Donald and I to examine the box.

“What’s in the box?”

“A demon,” Donald tells me.

“Come on.”

“You asked, chum.”

“So it’s a demon.”

“Another guy, my associate, arranged it with your client. He wants to believe it is, okay, I say let him. It’s whatever he wants it to be. It’s his.”

“I’m asking you. This other guy, associate of yours, was drunk when he said it.”

“When I inherited it he wasn’t in any real position to say.”

“Inherited?”

“Something like that you don’t have to steal.”

“Doesn’t look like a demon.”

“What’s a demon look like?” Donald Kerr’s chin juts at an aggressive angle. “Could be something dredged up from the bottom of the sea nobody’s ever laid eyes on. Not my place to know or not know.”

“Why don’t you want it?”

“Why’s that matter? Not my cup of tea or whatever. It’s mine now, but in a minute it can be his. He wants it. So let’s make it his.”

“What do I write on the invoice: Boxed Demon?”

“Not my problem, sport.”

I step forward to examine it myself. Whether the box was built expressly for this purpose is beyond me. Inside: an oblong ball, faintly pulsating. Its scabrous outer layer looks like dead fingernails. I snap a few photos with my cellphone. When the cheque is cashed the amount transfers to Starlings’ Centurion account. On the memo line I write: Antique Box. Blood spatters the paper. My nose has started to bleed.

I wait in the taxi while Starling speaks to a man across the road. He leaves the man standing beside the river and rejoins me. Our cab veers upriver to Chippewa. A harvest moon slit edgewise by an isolated cloud. The road bends past Marineland.

“Stop,” Starling tells the driver.

The dreadlocked guy from the strip club is propped against a tree in the parking lot. His eyes are a pair of blown fuses. When Starling offers him a ride I resolve to find my own way home. We load the guy into the cab and I say goodbye. The cab’s taillights flare as it accelerates on under an Oneida billboard.

Somebody’s egged the Marineland ticket booths. Sunbursts of exploded yolk. I worked here in high school. One time an animal rights activist with jaundiced eyes like halved hardboiled eggs shackled himself to the entry gates with a bicycle U-lock round his throat. The owner, a fierce Czech with pan-shovel hands, he’d gripped the protester by his ankles and shook him as you would a carpet. Roaring like one of the beasts he was accused of abusing. That was the autumn of my wife’s pregnancy. Dad floated the idea of an abortion. My wife showed me a terminated baby in a Right To Life pamphlet. Nothing so much as a skinned guinea pig.

From the amphitheatre arises a yell— “Yeeeeearrrrgh!”—followed by a splash.

I walk down McLeod to Stanley. Mist gathers in funnels of light under the streetlamps. I trot along the breakdown lane. My father would wake me in the witching hours to run the gravel trail skirting Twelve Mile Creek. A gumshield socked in my mouth conditioning me to breathe past the obstruction. Taste of epoxy on my tongue: the same taste that fills your mouth driving past that glue factory in Beamsville. A sensation innately linked to boxing, same as the smell of the adrenaline chloride Dad swabbed in my cuts, through layers of split meat: it had the smell of silver polish.

A pickup blasts down the yellow line. The bed’s full of young guys. Something of their circumstances— so different than my own at that age — washes over me with the diesel exhaust.

My twenty-seventh fight, the one where the wheels began to fall off, was against Clive Suggs. Our weights the same but Suggs was a man.

We fought at the Lake street armory in a ring erected between decommissioned tanks. I knew Suggs was going to cream me. So black that when sunlight struck him there was a soft undertone of heavy blue about his skin. Clavicle bones spread like bat’s wings from his pectorals. His wife had been there. His boy. I’d be fighting a father. I was a sixteen.

We boxers shared one change room. Suggs caught my eye and winked. Not an unfriendly gesture. He had his own problems with a wife giving him hell.

“Boxing at your age,” she said. “You must have a death wish.”

“Me, baby? Naw. I got a life wish.”

My father made a gumshield for me by joining two mouthpieces together. Glued slightly off-kilter so my lower teeth jutted ahead of the uppers. A forced underbite kept my teeth from clicking, which prevented shockwaves coursing down my jawbone into the cerebrospinal fluid occupying the subarachnoid space around my brain, which would have cold-cocked me. He cut holes in the silicon so I could vacate air without opening my mouth. It worked. I took shots that rolled my eyes so far back that the ligatures connecting to my eyeballs stretched to snapping. I was overtaken by this blackness where all I could hear was the scuffling of boots and thack of my heart. All I felt were bands of fire where the ring ropes touched my back. I’d sink back into my skin conscious yet likely concussed. Hoovering air into my nose. Expelling it in a mad hiss through holes in my gumshield. My father strapped oversize surgical Q-Tips to his wrist with a blue elastic band like they use to bind lobster claws. He’d soak them in adrenaline chloride 1/100 and between rounds stuff them so far up my bloody nose the pain of those Q-Tips poking what felt like the low hub of my brain made the nerves at the tips of my fingers spit white fire. And I never gave up. I should have. You can toughen every part of your anatomy save that glob of goo in your skull.

Strangest thing about a savage beating — one of those within-an-inch-of-your-lifers—is how everything’s the best the following day. You wake up, sun streaming into your room: The most beautiful sunlight ever. Eat a bowl of oatmeal: Goddamn if this isn’t the best thing I ever ate. Look out the window see a butterfly: Mr. Butterfly, you’re the prettiest creature. If you’re lucky to have a girlfriend and if she’s kind enough to kiss those spots that hurt—“Every spot’s hurting, honey”—the feel of her lips will drive you into a whole other dimension of pleasure. That terminal day-after sweetness is so addictive.

Suggs starched me with a honey of a left hook that no mouthpiece or the direct agency of God could have averted. After the ref raised his hand, Suggs reached over the ropes for his son. Perched him on his shoulder. Never had I seen any two people so concurrently, radiantly happy. For the son: the elemental joy of being in that ring, one arm slung round his pop’s neck. For Suggs: that rare opportunity to share a personal triumph. You and me, boy! You and me. I suppose I became part of what may stand as Clive Suggs’s finest hour — sad, considering: he pulped a kid with no future in the sport in a ring erected between WWII tanks at a bout watched by fifty. But his boy didn’t know that. And it may not have mattered. To his son, Clive was mythic in those moments.

Suggs knocked over a Gales Gas and earned a jolt in the Kingston penitentiary. “So he did have a life wish,” my father remarked. “A ten-years-to-life wish.” He works at a retirement home now, I hear. That’s just how the wheels roll in these southern Ontario towns, and I roll on it same as anyone.

But… that look Clive Suggs’s boy gave his Dad. That myth-making look. I’ve never given my father that look. And my son has never given it to me.

The Falls tumble grey to match an overcast sky. A subdued crowd gathers along tarnished railings surveying the basin to watch Colin Hill go over the cataract.

“You’d’ve figured a bigger turnout,” says Abby.

She’s training again following a shoulder injury. She returned from vacation overweight and this, she says, had really set her father off. Dylan holds her hand as we come down Clifton Hill. On the patio of a dismal karaoke bar a rotund shill dressed as Elvis croons “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” His Tonawanda accent makes it sound he’s singing, “Are you loathsome tonight?” We find a spot amongst the railbirds. Down in the basin Wesley Hill stands at the stern of his boat.

“I got to pee.”

“You peed before we left, Dill.”

“That hot chocolate,” he reminds me.

I take Dylan’s hand to lead him across the road. He says he can go himself.

“That arcade across the street should have one. Come right back. I’m watching.”

Abby asks after my father. She knows all about the operation he’d botched some time ago. A wayward incision in somebody’s prefrontal lobe. The patient’s identity was protected by privacy statutes.

“I’m not saying he was drinking beforehand, but when you fall to pieces have the grace to admit it,” I tell her. “Stop dicking around in people’s heads.”

Where’s Dylan? Abby follows me across the road into the arcade. The attendant occupies a Plexiglas bubble with a police-car cherry rotating above it.

“See a kid?” I ask him. “Short, a little chubby.”

“We get a lot of chubby kids in here, dude.”

The arcade’s rear door leads into an alley that empties onto Clifton Hill. Abby and I trudge uphill pressing our noses to the odd window. The air is quite suddenly full of fibreglass insulation; it sweeps down to the Falls in a pink drift. Abby’s face is clung with pink flakes. Fibreglass stuck to windows and the street. Dylan comes down the sidewalk in the company of a man. They’re holding hands. He’s covered in pink. There’s blood under his fingernails where the fibreglass cut in.

“Where the hell did you go?” I say, my seething anger barely contained.

“No place to pee.”

The man points to a construction site. “I found him up there.”

“Jeffrey?” Abby says to him. “Are you Jeffrey, from Sarah Court?”

Older, taller, but unmistakably so. Jeffrey, one of Mama Russell’s special “boys.”

“Abigail. Nicholas. This is your son.” His inflection makes it less question than assertion.

“Only mine,” I say. “We’re here for—”

“Colin Hill.” Jeffrey brushes pink out of his hair. “A block reunion.”

He speaks as if he’s joking but there’s no smile. Jeffrey always was an odd duck. Same as the rest of Mama Russell’s reclamation projects.

By the time we make it down, Colin Hill has already gone over. The crowd is buzzing. In the basin, Wesley Hill’s jonboat has been joined by a tactical ambulance speedboat. Flashing red lights. Flashbulbs pop along the rail.

Mama Russell is there, and she greets us gladly. She’s wheelchair-bound. Her silver hair is bobbypinned up around her doughy face. She fusses over Dylan. Who is either scared of her or disgusted by her.

A flake of insulation has gotten trapped under Dill’s eyelid. We say goodbye to Jeffrey and Mama Russell and drive to the walk-in clinic. Dylan sits on Abby’s lap in the waiting room.

“She smelled like the old mall,” Dylan stagewhispers into Abby’s ear.

“Who did?”

“That woman in the wheelchair.”

He winces, as if understanding it’s not a terribly nice thing to say about someone so aged.

“She smelled how?” Abby wants to know. “How does a mall smell?”

“He means the Lincoln mall on the westside,” I say. “With the boarded-up shops and the busted mechanical ponyride, right, Dill? Before it was bulldozed.”

Dylan nods. With one eye closed due to the fibreglass, he’s tipping this perpetual wink.

“Sort of musty?” When Dylan nods again, Abby says, “Old people can have peculiar smells. You may smell like that someday.”

He’s sincerely amazed. “People change smells as they get older?”

“Go smell a puppy,” Abby tells him. “Then go smell an old dog. People are the same.”

A nurse flushes his eyeball at an eyewash station. She fits him with a breathable eye patch. Abby tells him he looks like a pirate. I sort of wish she hadn’t done that.

Lastly — and I mean, obviously — let’s talk about Pops. Once, after we’d returned from a run — Dad harrying me with: “Push it, milquetoast!” and me thinking: What trainer worth his salt calls anyone a milquetoast? — Frank Saberhagen, my dad, made me lie on the driveway with arms and legs spread. He traced my outline with sidewalk chalk.

“Look at yourself,” he said, forcing me to look at my chalked outline. “Disproportionate as hell. Midget-legged but long-armed. A gorilla’d be jealous of that wingspan. So use it. Keep your opponent at bay. Otherwise I’ll be chalking your outline inside the ring. After you’ve been knocked onto queer street.”

This was Frank Saberhagen’s idea of constructive encouragement. He missed his calling as a motivational author; his unwritten bestseller’s title could have been: Get Tough, Moron! — The SABERHAGEN Advantage.

Another time we’re at the boxing club. I’m sparring with Mateusz Krawiec. My father’s in my corner. Mateusz’s dad, Vaclav, is in the corner opposite. Vaclav was at that time the reigning “Sausage King” of southern Ontario: his Polonia kielbasa won the competition held every summer in Montebello Park. Dad felt Vaclav’s win had given him a swollen head. Me and Mateusz went through the usual paces— Mateusz now works at Nabisco as a safety inspector; cute Polish wife, two kids — both of us evenly matched except that he was a southpaw. He kept giving me the Fitzsimmon’s shift to bounce stinging lefts off the bridge of my nose.

“Overhand right!” Dad hollered. “Shift with him, then go smashmouth on his ass. O.T.S.S.!”

O.T.S.S.: Only The Strong Survive. Shortly thereafter, Mateusz battered me with an accidental low blow.

“Call your kid the Foul Pole,” my father cracked.

Vaclav offered a deadpan: “Jah, Foul, ha-ha, jah.” Something was percolating, but with my father you had to wait and see what permutation his unreasoning animus would take.

When a session ends it was customary for trainers to shake hands. My father stepped through the ropes with menace in mind. Butcher versus doctor. Their professions bore out physically. My dad was tentpolelimbed and spider-fingered. Kraweic looked like he split hog femurs with a friction-taped axe. You really couldn’t beat my father for unadulterated perversity of character.

“Hey, Sausage King,” he said. “You’re brownbagging it today. My compliments.”

“Vhat?”

“You’re brown-bagging it,” Dad said amiably.

“Here’s a sackful of knuckle sandwiches.”

In his defence it was the eighties, when the term “knuckle sandwich” was not hopelessly outdated. But what he did next was indefensible: took a wild, looping swing at the Sausage King. Should you find these circumstances improbable, all I can say is that if you knew Frank Saberhagen, you’d know he defies most sane probabilities every day of his life. Dad’s fist pelted Vaclav’s ear. “Vhat?” said the Sausage King. I wondered if he was having a tough time hearing out of his punched ear or if, more likely, he was merely shocked at being hit by this mouthy fucking twerp. While Vaclav pursued my father in a blooded rage, Mateusz and I felt compelled to square off again. I shifted this time. Came over with my right. Gloves off, no headgear. I crushed the poor sap’s nose. Blood mushroomed between Mateusz’s fingers. Vaclav ceased his pursuit of my father to tend to his son.

“Overhand right, Nick!” Dad said triumphantly.

“Told you.”

That’s how my father operates. He’ll force you into positions where you must stand beside him. Now it’s become a private joke. Whenever one of us gets on the other’s nerves, it’ll be: “Someone’s fixing to feast on the brown bag special.”

“Wouldn’t it have been great,” he said afterwards, “if I’d said the bag lunch line then nailed him proper?”

There are points in time you recognize your father as holding none of the special powers that as a child you believed he must. To see at heart he is careless and as often as not confused, that he smashes up things and people and it isn’t that he doesn’t care so much as he’s done it enough to know he is more than capable of it and not entirely able to correct what he’s set wrong. Plus he’s a bastard. He’s my dad, so I can say it. Cavernously narcissistic.

We lived on a block with a teenage halfway house and the terminally unemployable Fletcher Burger. He savoured the idea of living amongst his financial inferiors. But I’ve had more fun in his company than any other human being. If you conceptualize fun as a string of adrenaline dumps. But it’s dangerous when the merrymaker becomes convinced that’s all he need ever provide. As he’d inflicted himself upon me, made his pursuits mine, he’d hedged the odds of us sharing more “moments” than Mom and I.

Though I’d never claim that as his clear-sighted aim. Grown men weep at his feet for what he does in the operating theatre. A saviour complex has to fuck with a man’s head. But he realizes he’s an asshole.

Regarding my mother: “Don’t know why she bothers with me, Nick.” In grade school I’d come home to a message on the answering machine from Mom, who Dad said had taken a “personal vacation”: You goddamn stinking shit. Don’t call, don’t come for me. You get away, you just stay away… Frank? She sounded lost. Forsaken. Frank…? You hear people claim they’re “crazy in love.” Plenty of us, yeah, we are. Chemicals exploding in our brains. Perpetually doing the wrong things with the wrong people for the wrong reasons. A chain of bad judgements and miscalculations: ten, fifteen years frittered away. I don’t want to come off as a killjoy. But only the most deluded wouldn’t be a little skeptical, right? My father loves me. I know this much. But his love is brash and undisciplined and inwardly focused. He needs it to reflect back upon itself. Creatures of colossal egotism cannot simply give something away. My mother said once: “I always hope you understand how much I love you.” I do, partly as it exists in opposition to how my father expresses it. Mom’s is a practical love with one obvious motive: to protect what she’s put on this earth. A care-packages-ofboxer-shorts-and-mac-and-cheese sort of love. With

Dad’s I’m always fighting somebody. Him, mainly. Dad knows I love Mom more. I’ve calibrated this using those means we use to reach such understandings and yes, I do. I think he’s okay with it, too. In order for me to love him equally he’d be forced into concessions he has consistently proven himself unwilling to make.

I book the week of Dylan’s suspension off. Each morning I wake him he hisses: “Zee light! Yar, zee light, she burns!” He’s drawn a skull-and-crossbones on his eyepatch and sporadically fancies himself a pirate. A vampire pirate: synergy!

We go grocery shopping at Superstore. Dylan wanders into women’s clothing and returns wearing a bra. The proverbial over-the-shoulder boulder holder, it hangs to his bellybutton. Any woman wearing such a contraption would occasion my father to note: “Whoa — it’s a dead heat in a zeppelin race.”

“Put it back.”

“For Mom?”

“Not her size. But it pulls your whole look together.”

This only encourages him to vamp it up. He struts down the shampoo aisle and performs a high-toed buttonhook round a Prell display, grabbing a bottle as a microphone to launch into “Viva Las Vegas,” which he’d heard that Elvis impersonator sing. A woman my age with no ring laughs. I am cognizant of using my son as a lure. His Vampire phase is waning. These in-between spells, casting about for a new persona, I’m most vigilant. Next he’ll be a rocket-powered tree sloth or a cannibal banana who eats nothing but his brother and sister bananas.

“These are the cheapest toothbrushes you can buy,” he says, showing me one.

“You have a toothbrush. You want that one?”

He gawps at me as though I’ve perpetrated some arcane form of child abuse. I thought he was bargainshopping.

I pick up a massive block of toilet paper, thirty-six rolls. On up the soft drink aisle for two cases of diet cream soda. The ringless woman comes down the aisle. Her eyes fall upon my cart and I’m horrified she’s got the impression my life consists of drinking diet soda on my enormous toilet. For a full decade I never had one such thought. The band on my finger stood as proof to womankind: one of you accepts me. All prospects of remedy are exhausting in mere conception. Find a sitter for Dylan to spring me for a night at Fredo’s under the Niagara Skyway, rucking in with the basset-eyed divorcees and sundry wastoids, clamouring for Ms. Right, Ms. Right Now, whatever’s on the hoof. Cruising Toys R Us for single moms. Explaining it to my son: “This is Daddy’s new friend, Trixy. We met at a speed-dating junket down the Lucky Bingo. She’ll be sleeping on Mommy’s side of the bed strictly on a trial basis…”

Dylan presses his lips to a pack of cheap blade steaks and whispers: “Fresh blood.” In produce he gets on hands and knees reaching under a display of coloured potatoes. They’re severely reduced and, judging by the smell, well on their way to becoming vodka. He comes up with a dented can of mushrooms cowled in spiderwebs.

“See?” As if I’d doubted his gathering instincts. “Can we get them?”

“The can’s bulgy. You’ll get botulism.” Wrap both hands round my throat, pretend I’m throttling myself. “Gak! Plus you don’t even like mushrooms.”

He darts down the adjacent aisle, Confectionary, and returns while I’m comparing sodium contents on warring brands of cornflakes.

“Dad! Daddy-Daddy-DaddyDaddyDa—”

“What, Dylan? What the hell is it?”

He drops the tub of gummy worms on a low shelf. Prods it between boxes of Mini-Wheats with his toe. Saws an arm across his nose.

“I love you.”

Next he spies boxes of Animal Crackers.

“Can we go to the zoo?”

“You’re not on vacation, sport-o. You’re being punished, remember?”

“Like a field trip. To give me knowledge.”

“How about the butterfly conservatory?”

He traces a finger round the lion’s head on the cracker box. “Butterflies…”

“Fine. The zoo.”

The next day is cool and edged with coming snows. Clouds cast indistinct shadows on Stoney Creek grape fields where field hands tend canebrake fires. Dylan’s in full-on vampire mode.

“Listen to zee creatures of zee avternoon,” he says as we drive south on the four-lane highway. “Vhat beeoootivul music zey make.”

“I’m taking my son to the zoo. Not a vampire. Besides, a vampire’s a scummy creature. They got to kill to live.”

“What if you keep victims in your basement? Take their blood out with a needle?”

“Bleeding prisoners? Worse.”

Offseason zoos are depressing. Polar bears with hotspotted fur snuffle at frozen blocks of fish bobbing in the oily water of their enclosure. The monkey house viewing area is empty. Piped-in jungle noises: roar of lion, caw of toucan, the steady beat of bongos as you hear in films where pithhatted explorers get cooked in cauldrons by needletoothed headhunters. The poor monkeys look as if they’ve been plucked off banyan trees in their native lands, dropped into a sack and dumped here minutes prior to our arrival. One swings down to the floor of its enclosure and creeps forward on its belly. It’s scrabbling through the bars at a wad of chewed gum balled up in its wrapper.

Dylan presses his forehead to my hip. “Can I give him it?”

“Monkeys shouldn’t chew gum.”

Instead we sprinkle puppy chow from a coin-op dispenser in the carp pond. Dylan’s fascinated by the voracious surges of their liquid pewter bodies.

“That thing with Missus T,” I say. “What made you do it, Dill?”

“It was a dare.”

“Did you enjoy it? The rubbing? If you did… you’re at an age of weird body feelings. Confusing stuff. You can talk to me, right?”

“I talk to Mom on the phone.”

“Who dared you? Cassie Mulligan?”

“Sadie.”

“Is she in your class, this Sadie?”

“She’s my online friend.”

“How old is she?”

“A little older than me. She’s very… pretty?”

“Her photo on the computer screen, you mean. How did you meet?”

“She friended me. On MySpace.”

“And she told you to do that to Missus Trupholme?”

“It’d be funny to play a joke on my teacher. Then Cassie could film it.”

“Cassie’s friends with Sadie, too?”

“Sadie’s friends with everybody.” He bites his lip. “Don’t tell anyone.”

How could it be possible that someone nobody has seen is the most popular person in my son’s class?

“Dill, you’ve got to stop interacting with this person. Are you listening? Want me to chuck your computer in the creek?”

“Computers at school. Everywhere.”

“This is not me trying to hurt you.”

“You let Cassie punch me.”

“God. Where’d that come from? Sadie could be some filthy old man in a basement.”

“Can we go see Mommy?”

“Is that why you wanted to come to Toronto — to visit your mother?”

“We’re close by. You could come.”

“No, I couldn’t. Listen, bud, Mom needs time alone.”

“Alone from me?”

“Yes. No.” Pat his knee. An ineffectual but easy gesture. “Not you.”

“Doesn’t she love you anymore?”

“You never stop loving someone. Entirely.”

“So she could come back. We could live in the same house.”

“You shouldn’t pin much hope on that.”

Early that morning I wake. Down the hall: the tap-tap of a keyboard.

I catch my son bathed in the glow of his monitor. No cape or eyepatch. A normal ten-year-old. The gutted remains of a clock radio are spread about his desk.

“Go away, Daddy.”

He doesn’t even look at me. Eyes on the computer screen.

“Who are you talking to?”

He spreads his hands over the screen. This angry tickling sets up inside my bones. I take his wrists. One of his fists comes free and strikes me. I pull him off the chair. Drag him into the hall.

“Is it her? Is it? I told you to stop talking to whoever the hell this is.”

He swivels his wrists as though I’ve hurt them. Perhaps I have.

“I hate you.”

I sit at his computer. I’m struck by the orderly layout of his disassembled clock radio. The LCD display, circuit board, and plastic casing laid out in obscurely geometric patterns. Screws collected in a pill bottle scrounged from my medicine chest: Reminyl, which I take. It’s usually prescribed to Alzheimer’s sufferers to address short-term memory deficiencies.

Microsoft Messenger is running. Sadie’s screenshot is of a cute girl in pigtails. Chatroom semaphore renders much of the conversation unintelligible: lolz, rotflmao, kpc. Sadie is discussing a new nightgown. How snugly it fits. I scroll up and am shocked, terrified, to find a conversation about my wife, myself. Our split.

Sadie: dillie? dillie-sweetie? u there?

Dylan: THIS IS DYLAN’S FATHER

After thirty seconds or so, words start to scrawl across the screen.

Sadie: hey mr. dillie. i know all about u.

Dylan: ARE YOU A PERVY OLD FART? I COULD CALL THE POLICE

Sadie: … lol… i’m a cute giiiirl… i like to snuggle…

Dylan: MY SON SAYS YOU ARE FRIENDS WITH EVERYONE IN HIS CLASS

Sadie: dillie-baby told u that? such a sweetie-petey! Dylan: DYLAN’S TOLD ME LOTS

Sadie: … lol… no he has not… dillie hates u, mr. dillie… like poison hates u…

Dylan: STAY AWAY FROM MY KID YOU STUPID FUCKER

Sadie: awwww, threatening a pretty wittle giiiirl…

Dylan: HAVE YOU ARRESTED CREEP STAY AWAY

Sadie: ur not the boss of me…

[USER SADIE HAS LOGGED OFF]

There is part of me that struggles to believe this is even happening. Another part is wondering what, exactly, is happening. I print off the conversation.

Dylan’s sitting cross-legged in the hall where the walls meet, faced away from me. He rocks forward until his skull touches the wall. I don’t know if he’s crying but if so it’s silently. I want to hug him yet am furious for reasons I can’t articulate. There is a cold fierce tickle inside my bones.

Niagara Regional Police HQ is a labyrinth of pastel green hallways, solid-core walls, and turretmounted video cameras. I’m buzzed through a steelplated door buttressed by bulletproof glass into a bullpen furnished in outdated Dragnet motif.

Danny Mulligan meets me at the coffee urn. He fills two cups. “You pay your taxes, right?” he asks before handing me one.

He leads me to his desk. His Laura Secord letterman jacket is hung over his chair.

“You still talk to Abby Saberhagen?” he asks.

“You and her dated back when, hey?”

He wiggles his ring finger. “Spoken for, now.”

And Abby cries herself to sleep over that.

“Dan—”

“Lieutenant Mulligan.”

“Right, Lieutenant. About Dylan.”

“Not my jurisdiction. Try Juvie services. Or Scared Straight.”

“No, it’s… he’s being harassed. Stalked. Something.”

“Not my jurisdiction. Talk to the principal.”

“Cassie, too.”

“Cassie’s involved?”

“I think so. They’ve got this friend. Dylan calls her a friend, anyway. An online friend. He’s never met her. Nobody has.”

“And Cassie’s involved?”

“All that with the cellphone — this person, young girl or so she says, put them up to it. She’s computer friends with everyone in class.”

“This is your suspect?”

“Right. Sadie.”

“Sadie who?”

“Sadie-the-perverted-old-man-posing-as-a-girlstalking-my-son.”

“I’ll stop you right there. It may actually be a young girl. Infatuation isn’t a crime.”

“What if it’s an adult? This person has… has infiltrated our kids’ class.”

“Nick, I’m backlogged. Got a case where a baby was almost drowned in the toilet at Wal-Mart. I’ve got a pursuable lead on that. Sort of.”

“Mine’s not?”

“Technically, anything’s pursuable. If you have the manpower.” He sips coffee. Skins his lips from teeth as if he’d slugged down a shot of gutrot mezcal. “Listen, I’ll contact Missus Trupholme. We can sit down with the class and talk about the dangers of Internet predation.”

When he can’t find any scrap paper on his desk, Mulligan rummages his blazer pocket, finds a foldedover leaflet and absently writes his home number on its bare white back. He hands it over to me.

He says: “How’s Dylan?”

“Your girl’s a bombthrower.”

“Takes after her old man.”

“Nick, it’s your father.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Just come over.”

Rain fell earlier tonight. Shredded silver mist rolls up the streets to form halos around streetlights.

I’d driven Dylan to Toronto for the weekend. He ran to his mother under the candy-striped overhang of her new condominium complex. I stayed in the car.

Sarah Court. Two lights burning: one in an upper window of Mama Russell’s house, the other in my father’s kitchen. His face is furred with a three-day beard. His skin hangs in doglike folds around his jawbone. He’s drinking peach zinfandel from a box.

“I went into the hospital today,” he says. “Surgery review board. To revoke my license. I scanned the incoming patient list. Abigail Burger. Emergency admission. You’d better drive.”

On the way to the hospital my father’s popping the passenger door ashtray open, closed, open again. The booze fumes coming off him are positively kinetic.

“Remember taking me to the LCBO on my thirteenth birthday?” I say, because he’s in a selfpitying mood and that’s when I prefer to needle him.

“I never. Your birthday? Never, Nick.”

“Dragged me in on the way to mini-putt. They were out of your brand of gin. Whersh the damn Tankeraaaay…”

“Uh-huh, in that stupid lush voice. As if I’ve ever spoken that way. Ever.”

“Were you drinking before that procedure?”

He avoids the question.

“You know, bail may be set at a million. I’d put the house up. Think your mother’d put hers up, too?” “Why the hell would she?”

“For old times’ sake.”

“What about trial costs?”

“That’s me off to Brazil. Non-extradition policy.” “Skip bail and Mom loses her house.”

“I wasn’t serious.”

We cut across the parkway. Over the guardrail stands the brickwork of textile mills turned into low-rent apartments. A ladder of red pinpricks where tenants smoke on fire escapes.

“I took your mom to a cocktail party once. She didn’t know anyone and held it against me. I went off to find a drink. She’s chatting up some guy. Guy says, ‘Your husband, what’s he do?’ and your mother says, ‘Oh, he’s a sonofabitch,’ and the guy says, ‘Whatever pays the bills.’ Ha!”

We get to the hospital. The elevator rises to a white-walled ward sharing the floor with the neonatal clinic and the Norris wing. Fletcher Burger sits on a chair in the hall. At first I think he’s drunk. But it must be shock. The man’s groggy with it.

“At the gym,” he tells us. “The weight bar fell on her… her throat.”

Abigail’s on a hospital bed in a paper hospital gown. Veins snake down her arms and trail under plaster casts. A throat incision barbed with catgut.

“Warmup lift.” Fletcher rubs his thumbs over his fingertips. “I don’t know how but her arm broke.”

“Tracheal stent,” Dad says. “How long before they opened her airway?”

“Brain scan showed black spots, is all I know. Her eyes. Frank, they turned red.”

Outside the hospital wind shears across Lake Ontario around every angle this town was built upon. Wires of dread twist through me. My oldest friend. My prom date. Guess I thought we’d marry. Even when I was married — and loved my wife, truly — I felt I could have as easily been with Abby. But my son never would’ve been born in that scenario. A son, maybe, but not Dylan: the exact genetic prerequisites wouldn’t have been present. Plus I’d end up with Fletcher Burger as a father-inlaw. One self-obsessed man rampaging through my life was enough.

I leave my father with Fletcher and walk along to the Queenston Motel. A smorgasbord of ravaged faces and sclerotic livers. The lonesome thoughts of the patrons pinball round the dank air, glancing, rebounding, horrified at themselves. An old man eats a submarine sandwich the way you do a cob of corn: he looks like an iguana with a dragonfly clamped in its jaws. Another guy wears a leather vest with nothing on underneath. So insanely over-tanned his skin is purple. This leathery turnip of a head. The woman between them wears a hot pink tube top. Twin C-section scars grace her midriff, inverted ‘T’s overlapping like photographic negatives aligned offkilter.

I order a greyhound. My wife’s drink. The bartender gives me something that tastes like liquefied Band Aids. “Summer of ’69” starts up on the Rockola jukebox. Pink Tube Top gets up on the sad postage-stamp of a dance floor. Breaks out that old Molly-Ringwald-circaSixteen-Candles, shouldersforward-shoulders-back-slow-motion-running-inplace move. “Yeeow!” goes The Dragonfly. “Yip-yipyee!” goes Leatherhead and he slither-slides up there with her. Now they’re doing some spastic’s version of the Macarena. Now I recall why I don’t drink: it curdles my benevolent worldview.

The Hot Nuts machine is empty. There are no fucking hot nuts in the Hot Nuts machine. The red heat lamp is beating on a glass cube.

“Turn off the fucking Hot Nuts machine,” I tell the bartender. “Some dumb bastard’s liable to burn himself on the glass.”

The barkeep lays a hand on the bartop. Large, scarred, knuckles crushed flat. A mean-ass scar descends from his ear to the dead centre of his chin: a chinstrap welded to his flesh. Am I going to scrap over a Hot Nuts machine? I’ve fought for less. Fortyodd times in gyms and clubs, a greyhound racetrack, the parking lot of a Chuck E. Cheese’s. All to show for it a periodic openmouthed vacancy in my memory. My father said I fought with absolutely no regard for my welfare. A man who had made peace with his forever-after. But you have to acquaint yourself with the notion, before even scuffing your ring boots in the rosin, that not only will you be hurt — there’s no honest way you came out of any fight unhurt— but that you’ll be hurt badly and repeatedly by an opponent who, in the hothouse of that ring, hates you. You cannot batter another human being into unconsciousness unless you harbour some hatred. The second hardest part of boxing is accepting your need to suffer. The hardest part is welcoming that necessary hatred into your heart. I’d stepped between the ropes never believing I could have a wife, a boy, people upon whom I was depended. I can’t fight knowing how any punch — even one thrown by a spud-fisted bartender — could be the one to bust that all apart.

The cab drops me off a block from home. I’m so dehydrated that I steal up to the side of a house, twist the spigot on the garden hose and suck at stale plastic-y water like a poisoned dog. At home I’m nearly drunk enough to call my wife, ex, but it’s late and Dylan is there. I don’t want to be that father.

I’m absentmindedly rooting through my pockets when I turn up that leaflet with Danny Mulligan’s number on the back. I turn it over. On the front is a naked woman, red-haired and busty. Pink stars over her nipples. A larger pink star over her crotch.

What the fuck? What the fuck.

“Sixty-Nine Cent Phone Fantasies,” the operator greets me. “Our titillation experts are sweet and sexy, dom, sub, Black, Asian, naughty nurses, hirsute, leather lovelies, Daddy’s little girls, fat-n-sassy, whips and chains, kinky, mincing, slutty secretaries, southern dandies—”

“Fine,” I say. “That one.”

… click… buzz…

“How y’all doing this faahn evenin’?”

“I’m… Jesus, are you a guy?”

“That’s not what you asked for?”

“I didn’t think I’d need to specify.”

“I talk to whoever switchboard patches through, man.”

“Well. Everyone’s got to make a living.”

“All with little mouths to feed.”

“You got mouths to feed?”

“My own. And my dog, who I’m fixing to get back. So, you horny?”

“Not really. Anymore.”

“We could give it a whirl. What’re you wearing?”

“A parka and earmuffs. Hey, listen — you ever go through a stage where everything comes apart at once?”

“Pal, you’re talking to a middle-aged male phonesex provider.”

“I just got back from the hospital. A friend I’ve known forever, she’s been hurt. Her father… my dad. Dads. Close with yours?”

“He’s dead now.”

“I’m sorry. My own boy says he hates me. What made him hate me? But I think, well, I hate my own dad sometimes. More than some. You got kids?”

“Me? No. Crimped urethral tube. Childhood soccer mishap. My wife left me over it.”

“Over a crimped urethra?”

He says: “Other shenanigans, too.”

“My ex-wife,” I say. “This one morning we woke up. I told her how gorgeous she looked first thing.”

“Right. No makeup, the tousled hair.”

“Tousled, yeah. She gave me this arch look and asked me how long I’d taken to think up that line. But it just came to me. After that I felt compelled to… only so many times you can tell someone they’re beautiful and not have it take on the ring of redundancy, right? After awhile you hope it’s a given.”

“My ex took up with a greasy surgeon. I’m gonna carve him out a new asshole one of these days and you can take that to the bank.”

“What am I paying sixty-nine cents for?”

“Sixty-nine cents is the connection fee. This is running you five bucks a minute.”

“Then listen to me.”

“I hear you. Give it to me, baby. Lay it on me, stud.”

“For Christ’s sakes. I’m trying to say something important so — would you? Anticipate my needs. Act professional.”

“Sorry.”

“Hate, hate, hate. I’ve had more thrust upon me the past months than the rest of my life combined. I’m not a guy people should hate, am I?”

“You sound nice. Intense. A bit like your dad.”

“What?”

“I said a bit like my dad.”

“You know something? You’re a piss-poor phonesex provider.”

“I know.”

“I’m hanging up.”

“I sort of knew that, too.”

When Dylan was three he caught poison ivy at Martindale pond.

The pond lies in a gully where an old roadway washes out. I took him fishing. We sat onshore amongst old catfishers perched on grease tubs with poles clasped in liquorice-root fingers. He’d get bored and go romping in the woods. I’d ascribed to an immersion theory of child rearing at the time. Let him lick a dog. Put bugs in his mouth. Build that immune system.

The poison ivy started as splotches on his thighs. Threads crept to his groin. He clawed it onto his stomach up to his armpits. The pediatrician prescribed calamine lotion. Dylan still had fits. Dad gave me lotion laced with topical anaesthetic.

I stood him in the bathtub, naked. My fingers went wherever ivy lurked: toes, thighs, belly. Felt odd doing that but he was so trusting. I worked lotion into his back. Cleft of his bum. I felt so close to him. A casual intimacy I thought could go on forever. To this day I’ll feel it: a phantom thack-thack on my bare palms. My fingertips so close to his heart.

Only Danny and Cassie Mulligan show up to my Bullying Symposium.

Mulligan had sat down with Trupholme’s class to talk about Internet predators. Sadie in particular. One of the more awkward experiences of his life, he told me. “Soon as I spoke her name, this eerie stillness. Like that movie, Village of the Damned. Kids with glowing blue eyes and test-pattern faces.” Afterwards he’d handed out invitations to this Symposium, which had been my idea.

My son’s school days have since turned hellish. He was the one who ratted out “Secret Sadie” to the grownups. Now he was being teased mercilessly in the insidious ways modern technology affords: IMs, text messages. Someone spat in his pencil case. When I picked him up yesterday he had a wad of grape gum stuck in his hair. It took half a jar of peanut butter to untangle it.

During recess I’d idled in my car overlooking the playground. Dylan ate Nerds alone on the teetertotter. Behind the fence stood a woman. Rainboots and an umbrella on a sunny day. A man dressed like that you’d think was a molester. Could be her womb was barren. I trailed her down the street before recognizing her as Patience Nanavatti, the fireworker’s daughter.

On the day of the Symposium I lead the Mulligans into my family room. Finger sandwiches in a ruffled plastic tray. Dylan’s on the sofa. No cape. The other day I asked after his new persona. He said, “I’m nobody. Just stupid old me.” His mother’s looking into having him finish the school year in Toronto.

“You should’ve called everyone’s parents, Nick, to make sure they got the invites.”

Mulligan’s the sort of guy who, you’re waiting for an elevator, he’ll push the button again. Even though you’ve already pushed it. Even though it’s lit.

The DVD I’d taken out from the library is called: Bullies: Pain in the Brain. The cast is comprised of little Aryans. An omniscient narrator asks questions:

“Jonathan, is your gang fun?”

Jonathan: “It’s super. I used to be in a different gang but they started bullying. I didn’t feel right about that, so I left and started my own gang!” Calliope music kicks up.

Jonathan dances with the members of his new gang. They sit down to read books quietly.

”What do you know about bullying, Amy?”

Amy: “I was in a gang that started bullying. It was hard not to join in when they picked on others.” This hardened ex-gang member is a seven-year-old in barrettes and a turtleneck sweater. What gang could she possibly belong to? The Thumb Suckers? The Bedwetters? After thirty minutes the ex-bullies and ex-victims form a conga line and dance off the edge of the screen to “Islands in the Stream.”

Afterwards Mulligan shoos Cassie and Dylan outside. We head upstairs to Dylan’s computer. He surfs to Youtube. Types ‘Trupholme Joke’ in the search box. One result. He clicks the video. It’s Dylan rubbing against his teacher. A bundle of pixels available to anonymous eyes. Mulligan scrolls to the comments.

I hate u, dylan! looozer!

He should die… lolz!!

And, from SECRETSADIE:

Omg! what a total drip! if I wuz him, i’d kill myself and get it over with!

It wrenches my heart to see such hatred. So bloodless. Cowardly. I want to seek out their fathers. Those who’ve fostered under their roofs such horrid monsters. Bash them to bone paste.

“I sent it onto the Internet crime division. How’s Dylan’s frame of mind?”

“He’s ten, Dan. Overweight. Picked on in cyberspace. This one.” Pointing at the cutesy moniker of SECRETSADIE. “Is encouraging him to…”

Out in the backyard Dylan pulls the padded seatcover off a lawn recliner. Earwigs scuttle into patio cracks. Cassie shrieks. I should have put the patio furniture in the shed by now. My wife usually reminds me.

Dan clicks on SECRETSADIE to open a fresh window: Clips viewed by this poster. He clicks the only other video: Colin “Brink Of ” Hill NF Stunt.

The scene opens on the Falls. Grainy footage of Wesley Hill in his boat. The angle zooms out to spectators clustered along the railing. In the left corner, fleetingly, I catch sight of myself and Abby crossing the road. The viewfinder sweeps Goat Island and the Skylon Tower. Pink flakes congest the air. The lens climbs Clifton Hill to zoom on a construction site. I see Dylan in a mesh of raw girders on a concrete foundation slab. He’s ripping with his bare hands at a giant plastic-wrapped insulation brick. He is joined by Jeffrey, Mama’s boy. Together they tear at the bricks. The camera captures the steel filigree of a knife in Jeffrey’s hand. My son is obscured by pink. The vantage returns to the river, where Colin Hill’s barrel goes over the cataract. The camera pans the basin, shifts abruptly to the barrel floating past the spume. It’s broken open. Colin’s arm is a white branch crooked over the rim. Wesley Hill enters the frame. He lays his son’s body in the belly of the boat. Whatever clothes Colin was wearing had been sucked off by the water. A thatch of dark pubic hair and the rest of his body is whitish-blue. His legs are all twisted together like a figure skater’s in midSalchow.

“Criminal mischief,” says Mulligan, I guess in reference to Dylan’s fibreglass-ripping. “Not that your son’s old enough to be charged. It just doesn’t seem something a well-adjusted ten-year-old would do. You know the man he’s with?”

“Jeffrey, yeah. He used to live down the street.”

“From here?”

“No. As kids. On Sarah Court.”

Back downstairs Mulligan tells our kids they have to stick together. Rough lately, he knows, but your Dads will fix things. Cassie asks if we’ll come to school and beat up the bullies. Dan places a hand atop his daughter’s head. His fingertips pulse like a heartbeat.

“What’s this?”

Cassie grits her teeth. “What?”

“A brain sucker. What’s it doing?”

“I dunno.”

“Starving.” He kisses her head where his hand had been. “Beat them up yourself.”

That evening I take Dylan to his grandfather’s house. I find him on the back porch with Fletcher Burger. The two of them could’ve crawled out of the same bottle. Despite their drunkenness there’s evidence — a bodily gravity between them — of a serious conversation having taken place.

“The champ!” Fletcher rocks boozily to his feet. “And the little champ!”

I hug him. It comes as a surprise to both of us. That he’s sitting here, drunk, while his daughter’s in the hospital… this enrages me.

“What are you two talking about?” I say.

“Well,” Dad says, “Fletcher here has just finished giving me an object lesson in cowardice.”

Fletcher heads home shortly after this. Dylan goes inside to watch television.

“He’s not wearing the cape.”

“He’s quits with that.”

“Weird habit. That girl folded him up like a K-Way jacket in the ring.”

I’m amazed at my father’s ability to link unattached grievances into a single incoherent insult. No use getting my dander up. Arguing with him is like eating charcoal briquettes: stupid, pointless, and ultimately quite painful.

“Fletcher and I were talking about being fathers,” he says to break the silence. “How hard can it be, you know? The butcher’s a father. The plumber. Mailmen.”

“And, what — you failed?”

Now it’s Frank Saberhagen’s turn to wallow in silence.

“My last fight I lost to a pipefitter from Coldwater,” I say.

“Didn’t have to be your last.”

“We fought at the Lucky Bingo. The whatever it is, scoreboard, was still lit up from the last game that afternoon. B-17. I-52. He drove up on a Saturday. No cutman. No cornerman. By himself. Knocked me out Saturday night and drove home Sunday. He was back fitting pipes Monday morning. I was never going to be the middleweight champ. Not of the world. Not of anyplace.”

“You’ll never convince me of that.”

Ride the horse until it dies. A phrase you’ll hear around clubs. It’s often spoken by trainers behind their boxers’ backs. Ride the horse until it cannot prove its worth or meet its stable costs. If it’s not dead, cut it loose. The bloody unvarnished truth of what happens everyday in many walks of life. You wish that horse no ill will but business is business.

Truth is, I could accept and even get behind that reasoning. But it’s nine shades of brutal when your own father’s your jockey.

“I was a boxer like the guy who strums guitar Monday nights at Starbucks is a musician.”

“You’ll never get me to see it that way.”

“Yeah, Dad. I know.”

Work keeps me on the road. I fly to Hawaii to watch fifteen rust-acned fishing trawlers get dynamited off the coast to serve as fish habitats; it earned the cardholder several million points when written off as a charitable donation. To London for the sale of Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”—a thresher shark preserved in 4,666 gallons of formaldehyde — at Harrod’s. To Florida to cut up Conrad Black’s card. I take exquisite joy in this. When American Express dispatched me to hand-deliver his card years ago, Conrad held it against his chest. “Black”—tucking it into his shirt pocket—“on Black.” I laughed, as I’d assumed was his expectation. He told me not to act like a “jumped-up little twerp and sycophant.” I was later dispatched to oversee his purchase of Bonkers, a Glen of Imaal Terrier that cost 750,000 British pounds. Conrad bought it for his second wife, who fussed over it all of three weeks before offloading it on one of the Puerto Rican housekeepers at their Palm Beach estate.

Diverse legal imbroglios prevent Black being present to hand his card over. I cut it in half in front of his assistant, a wet-behind-the-ears Vassar grad— then into quarters and eighths and sixteenths until it looks as if it passed through a wood-chipper. An act which I find insanely gratifying.

Next I see my father we’re faced across his kitchen table. I’ve come directly from the airport spurred by his strung-out voicemail message. Between us: a styrofoam cooler with ORGANIC MATERIAL on the lid.

Black rings like washers circumference Frank’s eyes. I’d guess he’s been crying but I’ve never actually seen Franklin Saberhagen cry.

“It showed up this morning. I decided I’d better drive Dylan up to his mom’s for the weekend.”

“You better not have been…”

“God damn, Nick.” Running a hand through the wet ropes of his hair. “A little credit?”

“You’re sweating—”

“I haven’t touched a drop. That’s why I’m sweating.”

I lift the cooler lid. A cloud of dry ice vapour. I see what’s inside. I close the lid.

“Sensitive biological material,” Dad says. “They’ll degrade shortly.”

“For…?”

“Yeah. They’re from the Eye Bank… an anonymous donor. You drive.”

Streetlights strobe the car windows to illuminate the contours of Dad’s havocked face. The cooler sits in his lap. I cut through the orchards. At a pumpkin stand a woebegone Canada goose stands like a sentinel on a frozen squash.

“OR room four,” he says as I drive. “Teaching lab. We’ll put on scrubs, wheel her in ourselves—”

“Ourselves?”

“You’re my assistant.”

“If we get caught?”

“Seeing as I’m suspended? Jail. I was probably going, anyway. You’re that worried?”

“Who are you all of a sudden, Montgomery Clift? Just shut up.”

Service elevator to the fifth floor. When I try to pull scrubs over my street clothes my father tells me it’s not a bloody snowsuit. We wheel a gurney into the elevator and on into Abby’s room. She’s sleeping. Dad injects her with ketamine so she won’t wake up. I grasp her feet, Dad under her armpits. An awful smell, which Dad identifies as burst bedsores.

Up in the OR, Dad runs instruments through the autoclave, fills a syringe with local, selects suture thread so thin the plastic pouch containing it appears empty. The ticking tinnitus of strange machines. An acrid undernote my father says is burnt bone dust. He dons glasses I’ve never seen him in: Buddy Holly style, magnified lenses screwed into the lower hubs.

He removes the eyes from the cooler. White balls threaded with burst capillaries, ocular stems attached, in a vacuum-sealed bag. They roll into a surgical tureen. With a dexterity I’ve rarely seen, he slices round their base and tweezes up the topmost layer. He holds one up on the scalpel’s tip: invisible but for their rainbow refraction in the lights. Inserts the tip of a syringe below Abby’s eyes. Bubbles where local collects beneath her skin. Further injections behind the cups of bone holding each eye. He has me hold her eyelids open while inserting ocular spreaders.

With a cookie-cutter instrument he traces the circumference of Abby’s eyes. “Sweat,” he says. “Damn it, Nick, sweat.” I dab his forehead with a swatch of surgical gauze. He tweezes out Abby’s destroyed corneas. Deposits them on her cheeks. The blue of Abby’s eyes too blue: this quivering naked vibrancy. He shapes the donor corneas until they are of acceptable size. Lays them over her eyeballs. Stitches fresh corneas to the edges of old. Gently clears away the blood occluding her eyes. The useless corneas are still stuck to her cheeks. He pinches them between his fingers. When they stick to his fingertips he blows as one does at an eyelash to make a wish. Twin scintillas land on the floor, lost on the tiles like contact lenses. Dad grins. Walleyed and a bit batty-looking behind those giant lenses.

Afterwards I idle on the sidewalk. Smoker’s row: patients, orderlies, nurses filing a concrete abutment. In wheelchairs and hospital blues, dragging vital sign monitors and oxygen tanks. A snatch of a song comes to me: The saddest thing that I ever saw / Was smokers outside the hospital doors.

A guy stands in light shed by the ambulance bay. Shuffling along the halogen-lit brickwork. His fly is unzipped and his shirt’s buttoned all wrong. His hair — long, the last time I’d seen him — was razed to the scalp. I walk over.

“Hey, how are you?”

Colin Hill offers me the most open, beatific smile.

“How do you do?”

He speaks as if a baffler down his belly prevents him from raising his voice. Slack features. Shaving cream crusted in his ear-holes. His smile goes on and on and on.

“We lived on Sarah Court,” I tell him. “As kids.”

He rubs a palm over his scalp as you do a foot that’s gone to sleep. The muscles mooring his jaw tense. The frustrated noise he makes is, I’m guessing, laughter.

“I remember.” He extends both hands in front of him, palms facing me, touching his thumbs then spreading his arms to their furthest ambit. The sort of panoramic gesture a shady condominium developer makes to encompass vacant swampland where he plans a timeshare resort. “I remember… everything.”

My euphoria sours. Colin faces the wall again. He hunts until he finds what he’d lost: a ladybug crawling in the grouting. He slips a pinkie finger into the gap. The bug perches on his nail. We’re approached by an old man in a housecoat and winter boots.

“You got matches?” he asks us.

“Would you like a cigarette?” Colin says.

“Did I say cigarette? I said matches.”

Colin’s expression is wounded. The old man intuits things.

“I got a briar, son.” He pulls a pipe from his housecoat. “Bastids at the home won’t let me buy matches.”

“But they let you roam around at night?”

“Roam?” he answers me. “What am I, a cow?”

He takes Colin’s Zippo. We stand in fragrant cherry smoke, which must bother the ladybug as it lifts off from Colin’s fingertip. “Oh, pooh,” says Colin.

Our fathers have met in the hospital foyer. Wesley shakes my hand with a tired smile, then zips up Colin’s fly. It’s decided we’ll go for a drink.

“I can drink a damn beer,” declares the old man, as though one of us had challenged his ability to do so. Wesley asks his name.

“I’m Lonnigan,” he says, and when he smiles his face is vaguely familiar — but in this city everyone’s face seems vaguely so.

“Mr. Lonnigan—”

“Who said mister?”

“Okay, Lonnigan, come on.”

Wes takes his son’s hand to guide him down the sidewalk. Lonnigan lifts the odd car door to see if it’s unlocked. At the Queenston Motel the Hot Nuts machine remains empty. Charred peanut specks stuck to hot greasy glass. Colin cadges a handful of loonies off his father and makes for the Manx TT Superbike video game. We take the window booth. When beers arrive, Lonnigan tells the bartender to put his on our tab and joins Colin at the video game.

“Your son…” Dad asks Wes.

“Barrel couldn’t cope, Frank. They who built it said it’d been tested to so-and-so many psi but that water’s a beast. Seals burst. Colin died a bit down in the dark. But I think he’d probably do it again. Just how he’s made. When I baled him in he reached for my hand. Instinct? I don’t know. He did reach. They did one of those — stuck him in a tube and went at his head with magnets…”

“MRI.”

“Right. Black specks. All over his brain. None of the major neural centres.”

I ask can it be fixed.

“No more than you can fix the rotten spots on an apple,” Dad says.

“Jesus, Dad.”

“I don’t know it’s the worst thing,” Wes says. “Hope this doesn’t come off bad, but I understand him again. For so long he was alien to me.” He stares into his glass. “In some ways he’s back to the kid I taught to shave before he had hairs on his face. Standing next to me in the bathroom, shoulders barely clearing the sink ledge. I lathered him up and he shaved with one of his mom’s old pink leg razors. Thing is — and Frank, you’d know it — even as your kid gets older there’s something of that child about their faces.”

“A hell of a burden, Wes, your age.”

“Yeah, Frank. Fine motor skills coming along. He’ll find a job after therapy. But yeah.”

A black man in orderly whites presses his face to the window. Shakes his head as he steps inside. Lonnigan spots him coming and chugs his beer before the orderly can take his glass away.

“You old cabbagehead. Who let you out?”

“Must’ve been you, Clive,” Lonnigan cackles.

“You crazy goat. I’m’na handcuff you to a bedpost.”

“You try and I’ll sic the CNPEA on you faster than you can say Jack Robinson. Canadian Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse — ho ho. I know people.”

“Am I safe in believin’ you ain’t wrapped an automobile round a tree tonight?”

“Goddam fine driver, me. I don’t wrap trees.”

“Wrap your ancient dodo ass round a tree, is what I ought to do.”

“CNPEA.” Lonnigan clucks at the orderly. “Remember that.”

“He says you brought him in,” says the orderly, who I instantly recognize as Clive Suggs, the father who KO’d me years ago. “Why do such a thing? Old dude in his housecoat.”

“He was insistent,” says Dad.

“Well, he is that.”

Clive sits for a beer. On duty, he admits, but what’s one going to hurt?

“You want to know what?” he says, easing into his miseries with the air of a man slipping into a well-worn pair of slippers. “That old potato-head steals cars. Joyrides. A teenager do what he do, that boy’s a hooligan. An old man do the same and he’s full of beans. Discrediting the myth aged folk can’t do nothing. Some kind a hero. He even stole a honeywagon.”

“A what?”

“A kind of a septic truck,” Clive tells me. “Suck the wastes out of pay toilets.”

“He is peppy.”

“Demented pain in my ass, what he is.”

After another round, this pleasant fuzz edges everything: sort of like beholding the world from inside a cored peach. Colin and Lonnigan switch their attentions to the Claw Game.

“Go for the big white bear,” Lonnigan instructs him. “Don’t fiddle-fart around with them junky trinkets.”

“Mister L,” says Clive. “You played out your leash. Time to go.”

On the way out Lonnigan checks up in front of Dad.

“I wasn’t there for what happened to your dog,” he says. “After I found out, I left for good. Can’t say I could’ve done much. That woman had her ways. But you knew all about it, didn’t you, doctor?”

Clive grasps Lonnigan’s elbow. Dad drinks his beer with a distant smile. Soon thereafter Wes also says his goodbyes.

“I wish you boys well.”

“Same to you, Wes,” Frank and I say, nearly in unison. “Good speaking.”

Two pairs of men move down the sidewalk. Lonnigan propped up by Clive, Colin by his father. Wes opens his truck door. Helps his son into the cab. Lashes the seatbelt across his hips.

“Hell of a thing,” says Dad. He goes on to tell me Abby got back to her room alright. The eye bandages would stay on for a few days. Patterns and shapes would come before too long.

“When they discover you did it?”

“Same as stealing a car and changing the shabby upholstery. You still stole it. My best friend’s daughter. What can you do?”

“Best friend? Most days you hated Fletcher Burger.”

“Christ, Nick. Never hate anyone. Fletch was a fuck-up, okay, but I mean, heaven’s sakes — who isn’t?”

After their divorce, people got the impression Mom stuck Dad with the corgi as a final screwjob. But Dad loved that dog. When Moxie developed persistent pyodermas, or hotspots, Dad rubbed the dog’s skin with benzoyl peroxide ointment stolen from the hospital supply room. Here was a creature who made no specific attempt to be loved. Which was why Dad loved him. The night Moxie died, Dad found him walking circles in the yard. When he picked him up, Moxie vomited blood with such force he blew out both pupils. The last minutes of his life that dog was blind. Dad tried to force-feed him Ipecac but Moxie died gracelessly, blood all down Dad’s shirt, the corgi’s stiffening legs stuck out of the cradle Dad had made of his arms.

The car wends through stands of jackpine— telephone pole firs — on a strip of one-lane blacktop. Dylan’s in the passenger seat. He’s been expelled from school. If there is such thing as a mercy expulsion, my son was the beneficiary.

He’d vomited down the playground’s corkscrew slide. Climbed the ladder, stuck a finger down his throat. Then he slid down through his upchuck. Iris Trupholme found him sitting at the bottom. Trousers soaked with puke.

The teasing had been nonstop. Someone put a dead frog in his lunchbox. Curly hairs in his PB&J.

“Years ago I had a Pakistani boy, Fahim,” Trupholme told me. “Another boy had one of those laser pointers and shined it on Fahim’s forehead, mimicking the red dot worn by Hindus. The boy’s father had put him up to it. That sort of informed hatred has to be inherited. This with the pubic hairs is similar. Until you’re older, a hair is a hair is a hair. Most of the kids shouldn’t even be growing them yet.”

Last night I’d received a call from the American Express head office asking for further photos of the Antique Box that had been bought by client 622, a Mr. Starling Bates. The cellphone images I’d sent were apparently too indistinct. I was told that Starling maintains a residence in Coboconk.

I’d called my ex-wife to see if she’d take Dylan for the night. No answer. I packed him up in hopes of dropping him off through Toronto. Gridlocked on the Don Valley she told me sorry, she had evening plans. A date? Jesus. I’m not at all prepared for that.

We stop at a zinc-roofed restaurant, The Dutch Oven. All Dylan wants is Easter Seals Peppermint Patties from the coin-op machine.

“Dill, eat something proper. A Denver omelette.”

Dark, fatigued bags under his eyes. I order the omelette and buy four Peppermint Patties. He plays with them like poker chips: stacks them, lines them in a row, a square, a diamond. He isn’t wearing his cape anymore. I ask who he is now.

“Black.”

“What do you mean — a black person?”

“Black the colour. A cloud of black gas coming out of the ass of a sick car.”

This helpless sense of frustration and fear. My kid vomited down a corkscrew slide, then slid down and sat in his own upchuck. What does that even mean?

The sky is blackening by the time we reach Coboconk. I grab a room at the Motor Motel: five units in a field outside town. Our room is clean, with a queen-sized bed. I tell Dylan we could ask for a cot, but he says it’s okay we sleep in the same bed. I’m not going to leave him here alone.

It’s dark by the time we reach Starling’s cottage. All the other units strung around the lake are winterized and empty.

“Listen to the radio, Dill, okay? And stay put.”

My knock is answered by the dreadlocked guy we picked up outside Marineland. I follow him into a vaulted chamber. Starling is in a wheelchair. His head is bandaged, one eye covered. His hands similarly wrapped and his legs swaddled in woollen blankets. His arms shrunken, somehow shrivelled: alarmingly, they look like penguin flippers. His left ear is fused to the side of his head as if his skull is devouring itself.

“Are you alright?”

“It’s painless.” Starling smiles. His body is just so warped: like he’s been stabbed in the guts and he is gradually curling into the open wound. “How is your boy?”

Had we ever spoken about Dylan?

“Fine. I took him to the zoo.”

“Zoo. Oh my,” says Starling, and smiles. I immediately wish he hadn’t. “I toiled at a zoo. With bears. All males. Bear society is a lot like ours, only the hierarchy’s more bald. One bear, an albino named Cinnamon, got it worst. He rode a tricycle in a midwest circus; when the big top folded he came to the zoo. Undersized, genetically inferior. The others made sport of him. Every day each bear inflicted some casual hurt. They pissed on Cinnamon; his coat went yellow from white. Skinnier and skinnier. That’s when they took to raping him. A big black bear, Chief, mounted poor Cinnamon first. The zookeepers felt this was the natural order. As one said: Better fuck-er than fuck-ee.”

Starling laughs and laughs. A vein fat as a night crawler splits his forehead below the bandages. His fucking eyeballs are sunk so deep into their sockets it’s impossible for them not be to touching his brain.

“Kids can be that way, too, Nicholas. Singling someone out for torment.”

I’ll find the goddamn box myself. Doubling down the hallway, I pass a partially open door. A wide, dark, metal-walled loft. The box is in the centre lit by a spotlamp. My camera whirrs as celluloid spools through the flashbox. Whatever’s in the box seems to have sprouted fresh appendages.

I take a new angle. Twin facts register simultaneously.

One: Dylan is standing on the opposite side of the box.

Two: whatever’s in the box has tubes growing out of it. Wriggling… tubes.

I lay my hands upon Dylan. Shake him far too hard. My adrenaline is redlined. My son’s face is as vacant and bare as the surface of the moon. Blood drips from my nose into his hair. My heart batters the cage of my ribs primed to burst right through.

“Did you get all you need?” Starling shrieks after me. “Did you SEE?”

Back at the motel Dylan won’t move. The heat’s drained right out of him. I reef the motel covers back and lay him down fully clothed. He’s not shivering or moving much at all. I head outside for our bags. A pickup pulls into the neighbouring unit. A woman’s laughter plays out its open windows. Three people get out of it.

“You make loving you hell,” the taller and ganglier of the two men says.

“Husha, dumb dog,” says the woman, before stepping inside with the other man.

I go back inside and get into bed with my son. His face is grimed with sweat. I flatten his hair with my palm. Touch my lips to his head. His knapsack’s open on the tabby-orange carpet. Inside are bits and pieces of things he’s stripped apart. Everything in Ziploc bags. Orderly and arranged.

“What do you hope to accomplish doing this?” I ask him hopelessly.

“I’m going to put them back together,” he says. “In different ways. I have all the pieces. I’ll put them back together and make them even better than they were before.”

“It doesn’t work that way, Dylan. You don’t have the skill or know-how. None of this stuff was made to go together any differently than how it came out of package. When you take it apart with no idea how to put it back together, you end up with junk.”

He sits up. Unlaces the hiker boots his mother bought. Clodhoppers. He starts tugging the thick laces through the eyeholes. I want him to disagree with me, shout at me, but he’s concentrating on his boots. Stripping them apart, too.

“We’ll find a new school. It’ll be okay. I promise, Dill. Swear to God.”

After awhile the silence turns mammoth, oppressive, so I take a shower. The yellow water reeks of sulphur the way all water does this far north. Lewd goings-on come through the pressboard walls. The rhythmic knock of a headboard. A man shrieking: “Sweet darlin’ Sunshine!”

I return to an empty room. The door’s wide open. I step outside with a towel wrapped round my waist. The tall gangly guy sits outside the adjacent door.

“Did you see a kid come out?”

“Ain’t seen nothing,” he tells me wretchedly.

I step back inside. Dylan’s hikers sit at the foot of the bed. Laces tugged out, tongues lolling over the toes. The utility closet door is ajar. I open it.

Next to my argyle sweater hangs my son on a noose of knotted bootlaces. Dylan’s face is as blue as a sun-bleached parking ticket…

My son has a birthmark on his shoulder. It looks like a pinto bean. During his Steam-Powered Android phase this birthmark became his “on” button:

“Power up Android Dylan,” I’d say, and press it. Dylan’s head would rise, arms cocked stiffly by his sides. “Android… Dill…” he’d go, in robot-voice, “… needs… pudding… for… power… cells.”

At recess another boy told him if you had a birthmark it meant your parents hadn’t wanted you born. Dill agonized over it all day.

“Dylan, that boy’s a creep,” I told him. “How could your mother and I not want you born? You’re the best and most precious thing in our lives. Believe me?”

“Okay. I believe.”

… Rip the hangar rod off the wall, plaster dust and the jingle-jangle of hangars. Dylan’s knees crumple as he falls face-first tangled up in my sweater. I try to pry the noose off but the laces are dug so fucking deep into his throat. A sobbing tension in my chest, agonizing compression pulsing ever-outwards. My vocal cords splinter as I let it loose. Blood’s blurring into the whites of his eyes. I claw my fingers under the laces and my shoulders pop loosening them. My son’s not moving but oh so warm. Prop one hand under his neck and open his airway as I’d been taught at Red Cross training. Settle my lips over his and blow. My breath disappears into the dense loaves of his lungs, circles around and back into my mouth with the taste of stale mucous and something else, slick and vile like gun oil. This cold throttling terror is sharp and blistering as blowtorched masonry nails clawing the surface of my brain.

Specks. Specks. Thousands upon thousands. I cannot see for their accretion.