The Withdrawal Method

THE SLOUGH

i

"1 SHOULD PROBABLY tell you," she said, swallowing coffee, "that I'm about to lose my skin."

"What? Is that an expression?"

"No, not an expression. People's skin cells rejuvenate every seven years. Usually it's gradual, but I've been using something to make it happen all in one go."

"What?" He put down his knife and fork. There was something suddenly disquieting about the idea of bacon. "How does this work? What do you use?"

"It's a topical cream," she said.

"Topical? Do you mean like up-to-date? Current?"

"What are you talking about?"

"No, but this cream — where do you get it? Do other people do this?"

Her arms, those two pink Ls that began at the sleeves of her T-shirt and ended clutching cutlery on the tabletop, seemed normal enough: not peeling, not cracking, not even dry. "I got it at a specialty store. It's — "

"Is this going to happen like a snake? Like you'll just drop your skin and then it'll be sitting there in the shape of you?"

"I can't believe you're making a big deal of this. It was going to happen anyway."

"Right, so why not make a goddamn spectacle of it? Jesus." The lump of scrambled eggs on his plate was a jaundiced brain. The bacon looked like strips of pig, sliced off and then fried in their own sizzling fat. "When is this going to happen?"

"When?" She shrugged and took a bite of her toast. He waited, watching her jaw work. Nothing flaked away from her chin or cheeks; no skin snowed down onto her empty plate. She stared back at him. "Any day now."

"Like, maybe tomorrow?"

"Like, maybe today."

HE HAD FELT, lately, that his life had become a raisin — if only he'd got to it sooner, when it was ripe from the vine and bursting with juice! But no, it had shrivelled. If he handed out his life to trick-or-treaters at Halloween, a retributive bag of feces would appear flaming on his doorstep. Or maybe someone would pee on his mail.

She, on the other hand, was always up to something new. For the past few months she had been working toward a distance-education master's in film something, film and feminism. So there were countless DVDS that needed viewing. That evening they sat on the couch together to watch the next off the pile. It was a Hitchcock picture, and after some business in a hotel the action moved to a train.

"Oh, I know this one," he said.

"No, you don't," she said, putting on her glasses, getting her notebook ready. "Hush."

"No, I do — it's the one where the one guy kills the other guy's wife or something, and the other guy has to do it too. Kill the first guy's wife, I mean."

"That's Strangers on a Train. And you only know it from that Danny DeVito movie."

"Possibly."

"This is different. It's about a woman who goes missing. She's a spy."

"Oh, right," he said, and within minutes was asleep. The dream he had involved Alfred Hitchcock and something about a riding crop, and snakes, everywhere, shedding skin after skin. He had to fight his way through the papery wisps of them hanging like streamers in the air. Was she in it? Maybe. Or maybe he was trying to find her.

When he woke it was to a puddle of drool against his cheek and her undressing.

"What's going on?" He sat up and wiped his face on his shoulder.

"The movie's over. I'm going to take a shower."

"No, not with the movie — with you, with this skin business? What is this about?"

"You're still on about that?" She sighed, standing there in her underwear: the pink of her body banded twice in white cotton. And then she disappeared down the hall and the lock on the bathroom door went click and the shower went whoosh and he was left alone with what was on the only channel they got on their broke-dick Tv: figure skating.

"Why?" he yelled at the bathroom door, the shower hissing back at him. "Why?!"

WHAT WAS THE reason they had moved in together? He couldn't remember. Peer pressure, maybe, from married and responsible friends. Or mutual coercion. Or Catholic guilt, although they weren't Catholic.

At any rate, here they were, and there shouldn't be secrets, not in relationships — wasn't that a basic tenet, like not poisoning each other's smoothies and alternating turns cleaning the oven? What had she been getting up to in the bathroom? In the mornings something would happen in there and she would come out riding the gusts of an expensive smell. In the evenings the shower would come on and fifteen minutes later she would emerge towel-turbaned and otherwise naked. But now there was this business with the cream and the shedding skin — not the life he had signed up for. They'd engaged in talk of "some space," sure, but he also felt a right to know, after seven years together, what was going on.

The following night she disappeared into the shower while he sat watching figure skating again. Twenty minutes later here she came, a rosy fakir, all loofahed and nude and clean with steam billowing behind her. She sat on his feet and got out a bruise-coloured nail polish, while on the TV the figure skaters ice-danced and he waited for one of them to fall. He looked down at her feet, up her legs, her stomach and breasts, all the way to her face. From head to toe her skin glowed in one taut, moisturized, perfect piece. Back on the TV, a fellow in a sequined pantsuit was spinning an equine-looking woman by the legs, round and round, to "Devil with a Blue Dress On."

"Come on, fall," he said, slapping the coffee table. "Fall, you fuckers. Fall, fall, fall!"

One by one her toenails went purple. By the time they were dry the skating program was over. Someone had won: there were flowers and a microphone thrust at the winners' weird smiles. He switched the TV off, and unspeaking they clasped hands and stood and went to the bedroom and had sex there, on the bed. He climbed on top and she said, "Plow me, baby!" and he said, "Okay," and plowed her for all he was worth.

But the plowing seemed mechanical. They were doing the right things and making the right noises, but there used to be a time when she'd flip him over and grind away on top and they would come together like champions. Now, not so much: she lay there with her knees in the air and when he finished it was onto her belly with a gasp. She patted his back, twice, and he rolled off and she rolled away, wiping his sperm from her body with a T-shirt.

They lay there side by side in the dark until her breathing slackened and he knew she was asleep. He began sweeping the sheets for flakes of her. Nothing, not even that improbable bed-sand he had experienced with previous lovers, way back when. But who was to say that he wouldn't wake to a husk of a woman beside him, the new version off in the kitchen crafting a morning latte?

He reached over and ran his hand along her thigh, up her stomach, her breasts, shoulders, neck, face, the skin smooth all the way. He felt for a rift from which the whole thing might be beginning to peel away, like cling-wrap from a ham. He would flatten down the loose edge, tuck her back into herself, and there would be no more talk of new anything and that would be that. But there was nothing; she was seamless. Casually, his hand drifted to her crotch, to the soft frizz of her down there. Her chest rose and fell, steady as waves. He lay his palm like so and eased a finger in, just to see: things were damp inside, and warm.

"WHAT I WANT is a record. A document."

Finally, they were getting somewhere. "Explain," he said.

"Think of all you've done in the last seven years."

He thought for a while, and then stopped, because it was depressing.

"Okay, notyou specifically, but… anyone. People."

"You."

"Me, sure."

"I would think of all you've done in the past seven years, but it would involve that yoga instructor who was on the scene for the first few months when we started going around together — before you ditched him, thank Christ — and that makes me sad for you. It makes me want to take you in my arms and kiss you." He shuffled his chair over, leaning toward her, puckering his lips. "Very quickly, and very hard."

She pushed him away. "Shut up. Seven years of your life, just flaking away, gone. This year I'll have all of them, my whole body, in one piece."

"And then what? You'll just keep it around? Are you going to press it like a dried flower or something, make a giant bookmark?"

"I don't know. It might not even work like that. I just…"

"The thing I don't get is why you'd tell me this now. You've been doing these cream treatments for how long?"

"I got it just before we met. I started pretty much right around our first date."

"Oh god."

"You should be happy! It's like I knew all along that you'd be here for the end." She looked at her watch. "Man, I'm going to be late for work."

"If it happens there, will you bring the skin home? Or just pin it up in your cubicle with coloured tacks?"

But she was already standing with half a waffle wagging from her mouth, and putting on her coat, and now the bike helmet, and removing the waffle to kiss him on the cheek, and out the door, and gone. Left with the buzz of the fridge and his half-eaten grapefruit, he registered what she had said: "For the end." What the hell did that mean?

He went to the bathroom and rooted around in the medicine cabinet for this magical cream, whatever it was. But she had for some reason transferred everything to generic plastic containers. Some of the creams were a mysterious robin's egg blue, others white, others just cream-coloured, the colour of cream. He unscrewed the lid of one and sniffed. And another. And another. They all smelled like her. Or like little fractions of her: coconut + aloe + pink, etc. He crowded all the open bottles together in the sink, took a towel and ducked down and draped it over his head so it formed a sort of cave. With the towel trapping the aromas, he inhaled.

Close.

He was late for work. And then, perfect: the fucking subway stalled between stations. After what seemed like ages another train pulled up on the adjacent track and sat there too. He looked in through the lighted windows at the commuters: the frustration on their faces, all those briefcases on all those laps. His own briefcase, on his own lap, had been her idea. "You can't go to work with a plastic bag!" she had told him one day. "But all I take is a sandwich," he had said, to which she had replied, "Well, take your sandwich to work like a man."

But then there was movement. His train was pulling forward. He watched the other train go by, the faces of the passengers sliding past, the lights of the windows fading until they were gone and nothing was left, just an empty track where the train had been. And that was when he realized that he hadn't moved at all. The other train had left. His still sat in the dark of the tunnel, waiting for some signal so it could go.

He thought about this skin business, and about the sex they'd had the night before, purposeful and sterile. He admitted to himself: lately things had gone stale. Maybe something new was just what they needed — a new DVD player, sure, but even better, a new skin. And as the train creaked into motion he began to come around to the idea, and then he was excited, and he was checking and rechecking his cellphone for reception so he could tell her, and was doing this with such fervour that he missed his stop.

By now he was half an hour late for work, so he got out of the subway to call in and let them know — what, that his girlfriend had that morning had an emergency, making implied references to her private parts. That sort of thing worked every time. And then he would call her and say, "Yes, your new skin is just what our relationship needs!" But his phone wasn't working and now the battery was on its last blip of power too.

He was in that part of town where sweaters made from Guatemalan llamas were sold in abundance and everyone smelled like hash. Making his way to street level, he heard music — a song he recognized but couldn't place, played soft and sad nearby.

At the top of the stairs sat a fat man playing the flute. Two CDs bearing the fat man's picture were propped against a yogurt container with a quarter and a penny in it. And now a loonie — cling! — and he made his way out, a dollar poorer, into the neighbourhood, acting as though he had somewhere to go, a place where he was needed, someone to see, trying to find somewhere his dying cellphone would work.

A store to his left was selling bongs and bongos. Out front loitered the expected clientele, who eyed him as he slouched by with his briefcase, phone aloft like a compass.

Here was a retailer of used clothes with a rainbow of jeans pinned over the doorway. Here was a place called The Anarchist Bookstore with a sleeping cat in the window. Here was a medical clinic of some description, and here was — hello! — Your one-stop shop for natural remedies, and then there was some Chinese writing on the sign.

The door chimes were wooden and knocked against one another like bones. A woman sat working the counter. "Hi!" she yelled, smiling.

"Hi," he said. "Do you sell a skin cream — "

"Skin creams, in the back!"

"Okay!"

"In the back!" She pointed past a rack of soaps that were flecked with what looked like dirt. "In the back!"

"Thank you!"

In the back were shampoos made from all sorts of improbable concoctions, remedies for ailments he didn't know could afflict human beings, things that were technically foods but you were meant to rub into your feet. And skin creams. A shelf stretched from the floor of the shop to the ceiling, full of skin creams. "Good Christ," he muttered.

"Need help?!" screamed the woman.

"No!" he screamed back. "Thanks!"

But, yes, he most certainly did. All of the containers were the same: a label featuring a bushel of herbs superimposed over an alpine scene and the brand name, Nati.ir. There was never any explanation of what anything was supposed to do — just a list of exotic plants meaningless to anyone except, he imagined, the sorts of people who hugged too long, always.

But then, right at the bottom, wedged into a corner of the shelf, there was one that was different: Formula 7, in a metal jar. He picked it up and was amazed by its weight — as though the container were filled with pennies. He had to put his briefcase down and hold it in two hands. The metal was cool.

At the counter, the woman working eyed him suspiciously when he placed the Formula 7 in front of her. This time she didn't yell but spoke in a hushed, crackling voice that suggested Eastern wisdom, or laryngitis. "You know what that is?"

"I think so. Is it the cream that — "

She waved her hand. "Four hundred dollars."

"Oh," he said, and suddenly realized what song the fat man had been playing on his flute: "The End," by the Doors, whom he loathed.

AT WORK NO one seemed to notice, or care, that he had been missing all morning. From the phone in the stockroom he called her at her office.

"Baby! I found it! The cream!"

"Oh, no. You didn't."

,of course, I didn't! It's four hundred dollars! But I'm excited. I think it's going to be good. It's going to be great."

"What were you doing out there, anyway? I thought you hated that part of town."

He spoke in a whisper. "Has it started yet?"

"No. No, nothing. I don't think it'll happen at work."

"How do you know? Are there signs?"

"A woman knows these things."

Was she joking? Since when did she talk like that? Since when was she "a woman"? But, he realized, she was right. A woman knew things, all sorts of things. Did she? Probably.

THAT NIGHT HER homework was a Marilyn Monroe picture. He liked Marilyn Monroe — or her bosom, anyway, although he hadn't seen any of her movies.

"Oh, you'll know this one. That scene of her on the subway grate, with her skirt blowing up — 'Isn't it delicious?' That's this one."

"Isn't what delicious?"

She gave him a look. "Just put the movie on."

He did. She took up her notebook and sat there in her glasses tapping her teeth with a pen and occasionally jotting something down. After a few minutes, he fetched a notebook of his own, one with a fancy leather cover her mother had given him one Christmas and he'd never used.

If after the skin change she emerged a different person, he figured it would be useful to have a record of how she used to be. This he wanted to seem covert but mysterious, and kept eyeing her at the other end of the couch and saying, "Oh!" and then scribbling something down. But she was watching the movie and working and didn't ask what he was up to.

Stats were first: height, weight, hair colour, birthdate, and so forth. Then he moved into slightly more personal information. Her favourite food was tomato soup, she had lost her virginity at seventeen while watching The Hunt for Red October, her desert-island disc was Graceland, and she could not abide the squeak of Styrofoam against Styrofoam or the thought, even abstractly, of eels.

And then he wrote this: I like the way she scrunches her eyes up like a little kid when she eats something she doesn't like. He wrote, Sometimes she laughs too loud in public and I complain but really I find it amazing. He added, Sometimes I find her amazing.

YEARS AGO, FOR their second Valentine's Day together, they decided to eat at separate restaurants — the idea being that loneliness would reinforce their love. It worked: he pushed his food around pathetically with an empty chair across the table, the over-attentiveness of his waiter a poor mask for pity. Later, he clutched her in bed with what could be described only as desperation. It had become a Valentine's Day tradition ever since.

He added this to his list the next night, while she screened something irreverent from France. It required a few pages and an expository style that at first seemed odd beside the pointform notes, but then he liked. He looked up: in the movie one of the characters said, "Je t'aime," to another character, and that character said it back — although there was something Parisian and disaffected about the exchange. The French! They were so mean and great.

Opening his notebook again, he added another little story. The third time they had sex he grunted, "I love you," when he was coming, and afterwards they lay in awkward silence on opposite sides of his futon. "I love having sex with you," he whispered after a few minutes, trying to make it sound like something he'd just covered and was now reiterating, casually.

He was reminded then of this story: one night a few months later they were at a thing for one of their artist friends. Over the crowd of people in complicated shoes they locked eyes and she winked. Something in that wink sang through him, warm. He stumbled beaming (away from some guy detailing his process) across the room and planted one on her, as dumb and happy and slobbery as a puppy. They had pulled away, unspeaking, and for the first time in his life he could see in someone else's eyes exactly how he felt.

On the Tv the woman was now wandering morosely around Paris; her lover was nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, at the far end of the couch, she was making notes.

He kicked her.

"Ow," she said. "Don't."

"Hey," he said, nudging her with his foot.

"Hush, will you? This is for school."

He nudged again and she looked at him, exasperated. "What?"

"I love you," he said.

She stared at him. "And?"

"And do you love me?"

"No, I hate you."

"Really?"

"Yes."

He looked at her. She gazed back, her expression impatient. He looked into those eyes, from one to the other across the beautiful nub of her perfect nose, searching for something. But he couldn't find it, because he wasn't sure exactly what he was supposed to be looking for.

AT NOON THE next day he went into the bathroom at work and locked himself in a stall. He put the lid of the toilet down, kept his pants up and sat. There was someone in the next stall over; he could hear the toilet paper being whisked from its dispenser, the scrub of it between ass cheeks, a cough. He waited until the toilet flushed, the stall creaked open, the taps ran, the hand drier roared, and the bathroom door closed. Left alone, he put his head in his hands and sat there like that, on the toilet lid in the stall in the bathroom, until his lunch break was over.

HE GOT HOME that night and she was still at work. The slick clock above the kitchen table, all chrome and Scandinavian, claimed it was half past six. She was usually home before him and had something happening, food or booze, when he walked in the door. In the fridge he found half a bottle of red wine; it had been there for weeks. He poured himself a glass and drank it, ice-cold and sour, as he wandered around the apartment.

As he made his way from room to room, everything struck him as relics: framed photos of a bike trip through the Maritimes, a table that had belonged to her grandparents, the fern that he had nearly killed and she had revived and that now bloomed green and glorious in the living room — artifacts in a museum, a history of their life in things. What would it all mean when she came home with a different skin? Maybe they'd have to get new stuff.

He sat down at the kitchen table and from his briefcase removed the notebook. What had started as a simple inventory had become something else — notes for a story or a film treatment. Yes, a movie! One of those hipster indie rom-coms, maybe, something quirky starring a hot young actor as him and a hot young actress as her, with lots of talking to the camera and a badass soundtrack. Encouraged, he got out his pen to add another story.

One summer years ago they were doing a shop together, and the woman in front of them in line at the grocery store had a shocking sunburn — the sort that looks as though the skin is still cooking, that it would be gooey to touch.

The woman was middle-aged, a typical July mom in a tank top tucked into khaki shorts, a crotch that stretched impossibly from navel to knees. In certain places the sunburn — which spread across the mom's back, down her arms, up her neck — had begun to peel. White fractures split the red, the edges dry and ragged. They stood gawking at the sunburn while the mom placed eight boxes of ice cream onto the conveyor belt in a slow, pained way.

And then, before he could stop her, she was reaching out and taking hold of one of the flaps of dead skin on the mom's back and gently pulling it free. The mom watched the cashier ring her ice cream through, oblivious. He was horrified, but amazed. What sort of human being would do such a thing? And then something snapped and, before she could be caught with the evidence, she flicked the little ribbon of mom away.

On the subway ride home, groceries clustered in bags at their feet, he demanded: "Why?"

"I don't know — weren't you tempted to do it? It was just so…" She made a noise similar to those she produced during sex.

"No. No, it was absolutely not'just so' anything. That was sociopathic behaviour. A cannibal might do something similar."

"Oh, come on. Cannibals eat people, not peel them."

"What do you think the first step is?"

"Please."

They would move in together two months later.

He sat there, reading the story over. It came floating up off the page with the milky miasma of a recalled dream. Crap. Had he made the whole thing up? There had been a sunburned lady once at the grocery store, he was sure — but had the peeling attack actually happened, or was it just something they discussed, or he imagined? He poured out the last drips of wine from the bottle, tipped back a sludgy mouthful, and closed the journal. He sat there for a long time with his hand on the cover before he looked up at the clock.

Ten past seven. She was late — very late. She'd never been this late before, not without calling or a plan. Maybe the skin had started to slough away at the office and she'd had to get her colleagues to help with the unwrapping. Or maybe something had gone wrong and she was lying on the floor of her cubicle, strangled to death by the crackling wisps of her old arms.

No, he thought: she was gone. She had shed her old self and life and taken off. Maybe later she would call him from some roadside hacienda in dustiest Mexico, all fresh-skinned and new. A person reborn, free of him and their life together. He imagined her riding her bike along the side of the highway, the skin peeling away from her body, flapping at her heels, as she made her way to somewhere better.

11

SINCE LEE WENT in nearly three weeks ago, I spend my weekends watching movies with her in the ICU. She's got a list of classics she's always wanted to see, so on Friday evening after work I stop by the video shop between the airport and hospital and pick up the next three: The Lady Vanishes, The Seven Year Itch, and Cleo from 5 to 7. We'll watch one a day and then I'll return them all on Monday.

Waiting for me in the hallway outside Lee's room is Dr. Cheung. "Hi, Pasha!" she says, producing a hand to shake, which I shake. Her hand is cold. Her hands are always cold, and her voice is always alarmingly loud — especially for a hospital.

"How are things going?"

"She's doing well!" enthuses Dr. Cheung, beaming. Then she lowers her voice. "We've got the last of the scans back and think we can go ahead with the surgery either tomorrow or the next day."

"That's the Gamma Knife thing?"

"Yes, we'll use it to remove the two remaining metastases from her brain. As I'm sure Dr. Persaud told you, melanoma responds so poorly to traditional radiation that we really think this is the best option."

"And it's safe?"

Dr. Cheung nods. "Absolutely. This in fact has less potential of complication than the surgeries we did to remove the original tumors on her back. Lee has some literature. Why don't you go in and see her?"

"Isn't she sleeping now?" I step away from Lee's room. "Maybe I should wait?"

"No!" Dr. Cheung yells, her hand on my shoulder, urging me forward, voice cranked back up. "She's waiting to see you!"

I pause at the door. Dr. Cheung nods and gives me a shove into the room.

"Hey," Lee whispers. She's propped up in bed with a version of lunch on the tray in front of her: gravy-soaked brown mush, veggies, a lump of potato.

"Hey," I say. I put the newspaper, DV DS, and coffee on the tray, kiss her on the top of her bald head, and sit down.

LEE'S NIGHT NURSE is Olivier, the quiet Congolese guy Lee really likes. If Dr. Cheung is a foghorn, Olivier is a thought. You barely know he is there; he whispers and nods and treats Lee with gentle reverence. Sometimes he mutters softly to her in French, "Ma petite puce," while he is changing her iv.

I sit watching for a bit and then Olivier turns to me and says, "Sir," which is his polite way of asking me to leave. At first I'd been offended by the nurses asking this — after so long together I've seen Lee in every state of compromise you could possibly imagine — but I've realized it's not about me.

"Ten minutes," Olivier whispers, and pulls the curtain around the bed, closing them off. I leave the room, then head down the hall, into the elevator, down four levels, and out of the hospital, where I stand with the smokers, not smoking because I don't smoke.

WE'VE JUST STARTED The Seven Year Itch, headphones clamped over our ears, when Mauricio appears at the curtain, his sideburns two slick daggers on either side of his face.

"Knock, knock," he says.

Lee hits Stop on the remote and swings the screen out of the way. "Bienvenido," she says.

Mauricio and Lee went to school together. I guess he tutored her in Spanish before she went to Mexico for a foreign exchange. They met up down there and travelled around, and then he'd moved home to Buenos Aires. He came back up here a few months ago, maybe because Lee got sick — I'm not sure. I'm not sure if they ever slept together either. There's definitely something. I've always dealt with it by trying to seem okay with the guy, not asking too many questions.

"Hey, man, take my seat," I tell him, standing and offering the chair. "Please."

Mauricio's brought flowers, which he passes to me as we swap places. Shuffling the chair closer to the bed, he takes Lee's hand and runs his thumb over her knuckles.

"How you feeling?" he asks, staring into her eyes.

"Okay," she tells him. "Tired. The pain's not been too bad today."

"Yeah."

Watching Mauricio so close to her, I try to summon up some feeling of jealousy or resentment. But it's hard. My physical contact with Lee has become so perfunctory. Since the diagnosis we've had sex once — and that was six months ago and at Lee's urging, not mine. I capitulated but went about it as though she were something made of glass, the words skin cancer rattling around in my brain the entire time. Afterwards she went to get a drink of water and didn't come back to bed. Eventually, I went into the kitchen and found her sitting at the table in the dark.

Mauricio's stroking her arm now, up and down — an arm bruised and scarred from all the lines and ivs constantly being threaded into it. The bruises are purple and yellow blotches. The newest scars are red and wet; the oldest, black scabs. She looks like a junkie. Lee's arms make something sickly rise in my throat and a prickly feeling fizz from my feet to my head. They are nothing I'd want to touch.

But Mauricio doesn't seem to mind. He runs his fingers up and down her arms like the marks aren't even there. They gaze into each other's eyes. Her hair's been gone for ages, but since they stopped the chemo there's a downy sort of fuzz growing in. Mauricio cradles the nape of her neck with his hand, then leans in to scoop her into his arms. He holds her, softly but firmly. She hugs him back. They're this way for a long time, while I stand in the corner of the room, cradling the bouquet of flowers like some sort of caddie or valet.

WHEN VISITING HOURS are over Mauricio and I leave together.

"I'm going to meet some friends to go dancing," he says. "Do you want to come?"

"Dancing? No, man, I'm probably good."

He sambas off into the night and I make my way to the subway station.

Riding home, slumped in my seat as the train roars and squeals its way between stops, I watch a couple at the end of the car making out. They are seventeen, maybe eighteen. Their jaws are really working. At one point the girl climbs up and mounts the guy's thigh and starts grinding into him with her hips. He licks her sloppily from neck to eyebrow, then pulls away, panting. They stare at each other for a bit, then he kisses her on the cheek and tells her, "God, I'm so fucking in love with you. It's fucking crazy."

"Holy fuck," she says, kissing him on the forehead, the cheek, the other cheek, the mouth. "Me fucking too."

AT HOME I POUR myself a glass of cold, sour wine from the refrigerator and take it with me as I move around the apartment. I take an inventory of the things that are technically Lee's — stuff she owned before we moved in together. I try to figure out what I would want to keep if she dies. This is what I settle on: the microwave, the coffee maker, the DVD player, the big soft towel we fought over every time it came out of the laundry. But then I realize that there's no "would"; there's no "if." The doctors have given Lee three months, tops. All these things are already mine.

At ten thirty, I go out to eat. Most nights I do. Lee was the cook. I'm decent with a barbecue, can fry up a burger if need be. But we live in a neighbourhood with plenty of cheap food: Indian, Vietnamese, Mexican. It's late so I head to the burrito joint down the street. I order a beer and sit with it while the guy behind the counter shuffles around getting my food together. I drain the bottle when my order comes up, so I get another one and take it and my tray to sit down.

"Pasha?"

I look over. It's this girl Giselle I went to school with. Back then I had a girlfriend — not Lee, someone else I met through friends — and Giselle had a long-distance thing with some guy she met online. We'd go out for drinks with people from class, and every night would end with just us two left, sitting on stools at the bar together, faces inches apart. We'd stay to last call and have this weird, protracted goodbye before heading our separate ways. I came close to trying something a few times, but never did.

"Hey," I say. It's been eight, nine years, but Giselle looks good. She was always pretty, but that was never why I was attracted to her. It was more the way she'd make you feel like you and her were the only people on the planet, those big brown eyes staring deep into yours. But right now she's with some guy in a puffy vest, possibly the Internet boyfriend. I never met him.

"Come sit with us," she says, so I do, sliding my tray between theirs.

She introduces the guy she's with as Philippe, a friend of hers from high school — right away I can tell there's nothing between them. I suggest they grab a beer and stick around, making sure that it sounds like an invitation to him as much as to her. Giselle orders a Corona. Philippe doesn't get anything.

"How are things?" Giselle asks. "Still dating that teacher?"

"No, we broke up years ago," I say. She doesn't ask any more than that, so I don't offer anything. "What about you? How's your cyber-man?"

"Ha, right. Him. We broke up," she says, then adds, "too."

We drink. Philippe has found an Auto Trader that seems to have piqued his interest. I tell Giselle about how I work at the airport now, in the bookstore. "All my literary ambitions have at last been realized," I say, and she laughs.

Five minutes later I'm done eating and I've got two beers in me. "You guys want to go grab another drink?"

Philippe and his puffy vest can't. Giselle looks at him, then me. "I wouldn't mind, actually," she says and turns back to her friend. "Can we catch up later?"

At the pub down the street we realize that we both want the same beer, the house pale, so I order a pitcher. Giselle suggests we sit at the bar. "Like old times," she says. The bartender leans in with a candle and our jug and I pay him. Giselle pours and we sit there for a moment, watching the flame distort and refract through our pint glasses.

"Cheers," she says. "Good to see you."

We look each other in the eye as we drink, put the beers down and keep looking.

Our conversation flits between old stories from school and updates on classmates. Neither of us is doing much writing any more — although she's done slightly better, working as a copy editor at some trade magazine. We talk about where we're living. I don't ask if she's got roommates, and she doesn't ask me. I never once need to lie about anything.

Then the pitcher's done.

"Want another?" she asks, giving the empty jug a wiggle. Her face is flushed. "It's on me."

It feels good to be out with someone. "Sure, I say," and pat her leg. "It's nice to see you."

"It's great to see you."

We drink, and soon we're drunk, and we're close, and there's a lot more touching: thighs, shoulders, elbows. She gets in so close that my knee slides between hers. Her eyes are heavy-lidded. By the time the third pitcher comes and we're both scrounging for change to pay for it, my face feels like rubber and we're holding hands.

"ISN'T THAT WHAT you were wearing yesterday?"

"This?" I wipe the sweat off my top lip with the back of my hand. "Yeah, laundry day, got a little desperate. Ran out of quarters."

"You reek," she says. "What'd you drink last night?"

Lee's really alert today, sitting up straight. There are days like this every now and then, when it's hard to believe how sick she is. She's her old sharp self, watching me shrewdly. I try to meet her eyes and hold them.

She looks away, out the window. It's been alternating rain and snow all morning. "I'm going in tomorrow morning for the Gamma Knife surgery."

"Why do they call it a knife, anyway? It's not a knife, exactly, is it?"

"No, they — " She collapses, coughing. I spring out of my chair to help her but end up just sort of hovering while she hacks and retches. When it's over, she picks her sentence up where she left it. "do it with a laser sort of thing. You don't feel any pain or anything, and you're usually back to normal within a day. If I was healthy enough I wouldn't even have to stay over. There's some literature there on the side table. Give it a read if you're interested."

My cellphone rings as I pick up one of the pamphlets. It's Giselle. I hit Silence and pocket the phone. "Work," I say.

"On a Saturday?"

"Yeah, Sonya needs me to come in to cover someone's shift tomorrow. And she knows you're her. It's retarded. I should fucking quit."

"I'm 'her'? Who's her?"

"Here."

"You said her."

"No I didn't. Here."

Lee waves the argument away. "You're not allowed cellphones in the hospital anyway."

"It's fine."

"It's not. It messes with the machinery."

"How?"

"I don't know, it just does."

I pick up the newspaper lying at the foot of her bed. She's done about half the crossword.

"Don't do any clues," she says. "I'm going to do it."

"I wasn't."

"Yeah, right. You always come in here and do them."

"Since when? I hate crossword puzzles."

"You're always doing them. You always come in here and wreck it."

She gets to coughing again. I watch her and try to summon some inkling of compassion, but I can't. All I feel is impatient. I think about waking up that morning in Giselle's bed feeling no guilt, just inconvenienced at having to come to the hospital. When Lee's done coughing I sit there saying nothing. I want to leave.

"Can you get me a coffee?" she says.

"Are you supposed to have coffee?"

"I always have coffee. Just get me one. And don't put cream in it this time; you always put too much in. Just bring me a creamer and let me do it."

I look at her for a minute: the bald head, the gaunt face, the wreck of a body. But in the eyes is something very much alive. It's anger — not anger at me, specifically; I just happen to be in its path. Lee's not supposed to have coffee, especially less than twenty-four hours before surgery. She knows it and she knows I know it. Her wanting one now is not about coffee. She's letting me know she's given up, she's letting go. She doesn't care any more. And she wants me to be complicit in that.

So I get up and go get Lee a coffee.

"YOU REMEMBER Buster?" I ask Giselle that evening on the phone.

"Oh, right — your parents' dog? You brought him round once. He was cute."

"Yeah. We had to put him down last year."

"Aw."

"He was about sixteen. By the end he got to the point where he was pissing himself, falling down the stairs. So after like six months of him getting worse and worse eventually my mom decided it was time to put the poor guy down — which was, you know, pretty sad. But I guess she let him into the backyard to take a shit before the appointment and he just went for it, bounding around like a puppy. Like,'Hey, don't kill me! Look, I'm still happy, I can have a good time!"'

I trail off then, trying to remember where this story came from or where it might lead. I'm just lying there on the couch, Lee's Gamma Knife pamphlet unfolded on my chest. "But, you know," I say, "she took him in anyway. My mom's a heartless bitch like that."

Giselle laughs. "I never met your mom, I don't think."

"She'd like you," I say, and then actually wonder if she would. She never liked Lee.

Giselle's quiet. Then, "I want to see you," she says.

"Yeah. Me too."

"I'll come over."

I look around the apartment, at the tastefully framed art, the symmetrical placement of furniture, the knick-knacks. Even if I took the photos of Lee and her family down, it'd be obvious I didn't live here alone. This isn't a single guy's place. "That's okay. Let me come see you," I say.

"Okay."

"Should I come now?"

"Yeah, hurry," says Giselle, and I do.

"I'LL COME BY right after work, okay? It sucks I got called in."

"Hey, someone's got to bring home the bacon," Lee says. But then there's only breathing on the other end of the line, hollow and raspy. She doesn't say anything else.

I hang up the phone and Sonya's standing there staring at me. She's been managing the store since well before I started, a trundling garbage truck of a woman who thinks she's worldly because she works in an airport, despite never actually having been anywhere herself.

"How's Lee?" asks Sonya.

"Oh, you know. Same."

"Sorry, Pasha."

I try to make my face look however it's supposed to. "Thanks," I say.

It's been months since I worked a Sunday. I've forgotten how quiet the terminal gets. The few customers we get are just trying to kill time before their flights, idly browsing the hardcover bestsellers, the magazine racks, the Sudoku books, the travel guides, rarely buying anything. We carry this series of classics bound in fake leather that always draws interest (although few sales). They're classy-looking editions, but expensive, and printed on paper that reminds me of Bibles.

Burying my face in anything is more appealing than dealing with Sonya, so I join the browsers. After a quick pass down the newspaper aisle, in the fiction section I've exhausted most of our selection (from Albom to Sheldon) when I notice one of those fake leather classics called Adventures in the Skin Trade. It's up on the top shelf and definitely not one I've seen before.

I reach up for it, but stop. My hand sort of hovers there over the spine while I imagine this skin trade business: people emerging from their outer casings, sloughing them off into rubbery piles at their feet, then donning new ones and heading out into the world. I don't take the book down. Back at the register, Sonya looks at me funny, but her face quickly folds into some puppy-eyed approximation of sympathy.

"You doing okay, bud?" she says, and wraps one of those flabby arms around my shoulder. A customer looks awkwardly up from the copy of Time he's reading, then back down at the page. Sonya's so close I can smell the cat odour on her. "Need a hug?" she says and, before I can respond, swallows me into one.

"WHO'S LEE?"

Giselle and I have just got our food when this happens. It's like she's pulled a severed head from underneath the table and dumped it onto my plate.

"Lee," I say. I don't know what is expected of me. I wait.

Except Giselle is waiting too.

"Lee is my girlfriend."

Across the table, Giselle sits staring at me with a clump of salad on the end of her fork. Elsewhere around the restaurant is the tinkle of silverware, the burble of conversation. But between us the air's gone silent and thick.

"She's sick. She's in the hospital." I glance around, then back at Giselle. "Last year she got melanoma. They've given her a few months to live. But you probably know this. Who told you?"

"I'm assuming she doesn't know about me. She'd be okay with you fucking other people?"

"It's… I don't know if it's okay. It's not okay. But we were done months before this happened." I realize that I need to seem more helpless. "I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing," I say, and look into Giselle's eyes in what I hope seems a pleading way.

I'm stunned when she shrugs. "Well, whatever. You're in a shitty spot for sure. But if you just need someone to be with, I get it. I just never thought I'd ever be `the other woman' — should I feel honoured or something?"

Apparently Giselle doesn't care for an answer. She rifles through her salad for tomatoes, spears two on her fork, pops them in her mouth. I sit in silence, my food untouched in front of me, watching her eat. When the salad's gone she wipes her mouth with her napkin and flips her phone open.

"Shit, quarter to seven. I have to get going. I've got a date tomorrow night, but if you want to hook up later, text me. We're just going to an early movie."

She tries to chip in some money for the bill. I wave it away. And then she's past me, out the door of the restaurant. Through the window I watch her on the sidewalk, flipping her phone open again, checking her messages, moving off down the street.

AFTER DINNER I GO for a walk in the park, down the path to the pond. It's busy there on Sundays usually, but the evening is overcast and gloomy and there are only a few ambitious folks out, young couples pushing strollers or middle-aged women being dragged around by dogs.

I sit on a bench overlooking the pond. There are ducks, a few geese, and a swan. Lee and I used to come for walks down here, back when there used to be two swans. I'm not sure what happened to the other one. No one seems to know. One day it was just gone. We used to joke that the other one had eaten it in a fit of jealous rage, vengeance for a big avian orgy with a couple of the ducks and a horned-up goose.

It was funny because the other birds are such idiots: the ducks flap quacking around and the geese hop about on the shore, pecking at the ground and scattering their bullet-shaped shit. The swan, meanwhile, just glides serenely over the surface of the water, neck like a question mark. A kid chucks a rock at it, shattering the reflection, although the swan looks unperturbed. I check my phone for messages. None.

Behind the swan the water fans out in a rippling V as it swims around and around. I watch it trace its graceful laps and think about taking that neck in my hands, the feathery cord of it, and just twisting. What would it feel like? I imagine the head flopping down, the vertebrae snapping, the swan crumpling and then sinking to the bottom of the pond.

AN HOUR LATER I'm standing in the hallway outside Lee's hospital room, listening to her and Mauricio talking. Olivier is in there too; I can hear him whispering. I picture the three of them, Lee and Mauricio huddled together, Olivier fixing lines and checking levels, soft and calm. I wonder for a moment if he lets Mauricio stay when he pulls the curtain. Maybe right now the three of them are back there behind it babbling at one another in foreign languages. But I don't poke my head into the room to check. I just listen.

My brain registers only the murmur of voices; if it is English they're speaking, the volume is too low to make out what's being said. Even so, I wait with a weird mix of dread and anticipation for my name, and at the mention of it for the tone of the conversation to shift from neutral and hushed to something else. But it never happens, and instead of going in I head back down the hall toward the elevators, their conversation fading behind me.

On the way down to the lobby I try to assure myself that Lee's doing fine after her surgery, that it was better not to bust up her little party. The pamphlet made it out to be such a minor thing. She's already back in her room, so she must be okay. But then, thinking this, imagining her lying up there in her hospital bed while I make my way healthily home to our apartment, I feel my stomach turn and the bile rise in my throat. I'm actually going to throw up.

Once the elevator reaches the ground floor I race to the bathroom, stumble into one of the stalls, and fall to my knees. But nothing comes up. I don't even heave, just gasp a little and catch my breath while my stomach settles back down. After a few minutes I lower the toilet lid and sit on it. And I'm like that, perched there on the toilet in the stall in the bathroom, when the announcement comes over the hospital PA that visiting hours are over.

When I see Mauricio leaving the hospital my first thought isn't to follow him. Initially I just hope he doesn't see me, so I duck behind a pillar at the entrance and wait until he's gone past. But once he moves off I let him get about fifty feet ahead and then start trailing him — along the sidewalk, down into the subway, and back up in a part of town frequented mostly by white people with dreadlocks. Once we're at street level I lose him for a moment before I see him through a shop window buying something at the counter. I blow into my hands to warm them, watching from a distance. Then he's away again and I'm back on track, skulking through the shadows of the closed storefronts, off the main strip and down an alleyway lit only by the occasional motion sensor tocking on as he moves past.

At the door to what I assume is his apartment, he stops. I duck under an awning maybe six doors down. The street is otherwise empty. It's so quiet that I can hear the jangle of his keys and the grating sound of one sliding into the lock.

Before he moves inside, his voice comes singing through the silence. "You want to come in, or will you wait there until the shops open tomorrow morning?"

Taking my shoes off inside Mauricio's front door, I don't give an excuse, just act like he's invited me over — and here I am. The place is immaculate, smelling vaguely of omelettes. He doesn't say anything, just hangs his coat and pushes his way through saloon-style doors into the kitchen, whatever he's just bought in his hand.

"Do you want mate?" he asks. "It is like tea. I am making some."

"Sure," I say, and go sit down on the folded futon in the living room — which, I realize, is also his bedroom. The futon is his bed.

While Mauricio clanks around in the kitchen, I look around. Everywhere are musical instruments: guitars, a banjo, little hand-held drums, a keyboard propped in the corner. The only decoration on the walls is a watercolour painting tacked above the futon. Two M-shaped birds flap over a zigzag mountain range snowcapped in white; the perfect red half-circle of a setting sun washes the page in stripes: fuchsia, gold, crimson. It's a terrible painting, something the mother of a proud but untalented child might display only out of parental obligation.

After a while Mauricio emerges from the kitchen carrying a silver tray. On it is a clay teapot and a single, ornately designed, egg-shaped cup with a silver wand sticking out of it. Mauricio sits down cross-legged on the floor and places the tray on the coffee table between us. Without saying anything, he pours hot water slowly into the cup.

"Aren't you having any?" I ask him.

"Yes," he says, and then sits back. "We must let it brew."

A minute passes, maybe two. I watch the steam rise from the cup. Then he takes it in his hands. "At home we would have loose mate," he says. "Here are only teabags."

I watch as he takes a sip from the wand — it's apparently a straw. He sips, then sips again. I wonder if he's going to leave me any. I guess he sees my face, because he laughs. "You have never taken mate before," he says.

"No, I guess not."

"It is like a ceremony. I take the first cup to make sure it is okay for the guest. Maybe it is strange. But, you know, you are away from home and these things become important."

He fills the cup again with hot water and passes it to me. "Do you want sugar?"

I shake my head and put my lips on the straw. The taste is bitter and smoky — somewhere between green tea and eating a cigarette — but not unpleasant. I sip again. There's not much in the little egg-shaped cup, and soon I'm done. "Thanks," I say, placing the cup back on the tray. "This is the life, eh? Couple of dudes, sharing a pot of tea."

Mauricio's looking at me in a funny way. I avoid his eyes. He sighs, so long and heavy that it feels as though he's doing it for both of us, then fills the cup a second time and passes it to me, saying, "You did not come in to see her today." From his tone — not reproachful or accusatory, more restrained — it's obvious that he saw me at the hospital.

"Yeah, I was at work. I've got the day off tomorrow so I'll go by then."

"She thought you were coming. Everyone did." Mauricio pauses for a moment, and when he speaks the words are slow and direct. "But Lee is so strong, isn't she? You of all people must know that."

I don't have an answer for him, so I twist to have a look at the painting above the futon, all Ms and Vs. When I turn back his eyes are trained on me like a pair of high beams. "How did it go?" I ask. "Today, I mean. With the surgery."

"Good. She is doing fine." He gestures at the painting. "This was by my sister. She died in a car accident. I take it everywhere I go."

"Oh," I say. I take a sip from the metal straw. The taste is mellower now, more potable. "That's sad about your sister."

,of course, she was very small; it is very sad. It has been four years, but still I think of her every day. It is nice to have something of her with me, you know? Some memory. And I like to have a painting because I can think of her making it, putting herself into it. Art is the opposite of death because it is always alive. No?"

Jesus, is he really saying this? But, whatever, I nod. "Yeah, it sure is."

"And what about you?" he asks. "What will you do, after?"

"After what? After Lee's… gone?"

"Yes."

I think.

"I will go back to Argentina," he says.

"You will?"

"Yes," he says, and nods. "Unless you need me here."

"Mauricio, just go home."

I catch myself and look over. Kneeling there on the other side of the coffee table, his mouth hangs half open as though he's about to say something. But then he closes it.

"I mean," I add, "you've already done so much. We're really grateful. But you must have your own life to get back to."

Mauricio just lies down, right there on the floor. He doesn't say anything.

I finish what's left in the cup, slurping up the last few drops a little too loudly. Then the room descends back into silence. Mauricio seems to be meditating, or sleeping, his eyes closed, body supine. Meanwhile — and maybe it's the mate — I'm feeling anxious and buzzy. I find myself having to consciously stop my feet from tapping.

After a while, I say, "Well, it's pretty late," and Mauricio jerks to his feet as though he's forgotten I'm there. He walks me to the door, holds it open as I make my way outside. With me standing in the street and him in his apartment, we shake hands, right over the doorstep. It becomes one of those extended shakes — held there, unmoving — that feel like they're going to end with the other guy pulling you in for a hug. Mauricio's face is tired and drawn. I wonder if I look the same way.

"See you at the hospital," I say.

"Hopefully," he says and lets go of my hand to close the door.

OUTSIDE IT'S STARTED raining. Just a light drizzle. I pull my hood up as I make my way back down Mauricio's alleyway, over a few blocks to the subway station to take a train home. Before I head underground, I check for messages on my phone. None.

Using the touchpad, I skip idly through the names, watching Giselle's materialize at the bottom of the screen and slide up, line by line, and then disappear. I stop on the one that says Lee (hospital). I call.

She answers quickly, her voice hoarse.

"Hey," I say. "It's me."

"Hey."

"How you feeling?"

"Tired. I was sort of sleeping." She coughs. "It's late."

"Sorry," I say. "I just wanted to know how the Gamma Knife went."

"Tests back tomorrow."

"I'll call in sick and come in."

"It'll be early. Too early for you. Just go to work and come later." She coughs again.

"No, I want to come in the morning. What time do you get test results?"

"Fuck, Pasha, I don't know. Just come whenever you want."

"I'll come in the morning, okay? First thing."

"Sure, whenever you want."

"Okay." I pause. "Love you."

"Yeah," she says, and hangs up.

AT HOME I DON'T bother with the lights, just track mud through the house in the dark and plop down on the couch in the living room with my shoes on, hair wet. I sit there for a while, the streetlight outside filtering in through the window. On the TV's blank silver face is my own reflection, trapped and distorted somewhere inside the glass. The rain patters away on the roof.

Above the TV in a cabinet are Lee's DVDS, dozens of them in alphabetized stacks. Surrounding them on either side are shelves of our books. Wouldn't it be nice to write your life into one of those? To take everything and filter it into something charming and sweet, take your struggles and make them fun? You could reinvent yourself as someone hapless and amusing, someone whose missteps are enjoyable, not simply wrong. Just slip out of who you are and repackage it all into something new.

I sit there for a few minutes, thinking in the dark.

After a while I get up from the couch and move down the hall, past the bathroom to our bedroom. I turn the closet light on, push my way through the clothes hanging on either side, and, from way in the back, dig out a box. It's stuffed so full of junk that the cardboard is splitting up the sides. I pull out fistfuls of letters, cassette tapes, birthday cards, bills, postcards, receipts — here's one for a pizza delivered two years ago, in case we ever feel like returning it.

A few layers down I find an inch-thick stack of pictures, most of them self-taken of me and Lee, our grinning faces slightly skewed and off-centre in each one. But I'm not browsing; I'm not interested in nostalgia. The photos I pile on the floor of the closet with everything else. What I'm looking for is very specific. I know it's in here; two Christmases ago I got the thing as a gift from Lee's mom and came home laughing. "What does she think I am, a twelve-year-old girl?" I said, cramming it into the box. "Well, you know," Lee said. "Maybe she thought you'd get inspired."

Amid a clutter of business cards and empty envelopes, I find it: the archetype of a journal, leather-bound and severe. Resisting the urge to blow dust from its cover, I leave everything on the floor and make my way with it back into the bedroom. There's a pen on the bedside table, a remnant of when Lee used to do her crossword puzzles before going to sleep. I sit down on my bed with it and the book, turn on the reading lamp, and sit there for a moment.

It isn't long before I figure out what to write.