Toronto Noir

Wanted children by Heather Birrell

Bloor West Village

Beth knew Paul would not leave her. It would be up to her.

“Did you see this?” He cocked his head to the side, then skewed it aggressively toward his laptop, which he had perched on a pile of old newspapers on the kitchen table.

“See what?” Beth refused to turn from her careful work at the counter. The naturopath had said six drops of the kava root tincture and three of the impatiens, star of Bethlehem, cherry plum, rock rose, and clematis. In spring water. She squeezed the top of the dropper delicately. Two drops fell, followed by a narrow quicksilver dribble. The precision of it all, the crucial measurements and ratios, the equilibrium and relative concentration and dilution — it was doing her in a bit. But the naturopath had said it would help her regain a sense of her place in the world, settle her nervous system, her overactive mind, and her frequently aroused nether regions. She would feel better, centered, the healer had promised.

Beth smiled. The water clouded then cleared. She lifted the glass to her mouth, and let the mixture slide home. It tasted like moss, mold, cheap perfume sunk deep into cheaper upholstery. She gagged and grabbed the edge of the sink, then closed her eyes without thinking — as if shutting off one sense might dull another — and listened to Paul like he was bearing a message from a fleeting and inconsequential dream.

“Beth, I’m serious.”

She opened her eyes and looked out the window. It was summertime in Bloor West Village, and the purple finches, with their wine-speckled plumage, were regular visitors to the feeder. As if they’ve been dipped in raspberry juice, she remembered reading in a guidebook. The birds flitted and pecked, then retreated from a domineering grackle.

Paul whistled through his teeth and Beth watched him sit back hard in his chair. “Check this out,” he said. Something had scared him a little, and it was this that finally drew Beth to the screen.

It was an abstract, staged photo, something someone with too much studio time and grant money had cooked up. A black river with creatures rising sluggishly from its depths. Swamp monsters — perhaps it was a movie trailer? Beth shook her head. “So?”

“It’s Cuyabeno,” Paul replied. “It’s your river, Beth.”

The trip had been Paul’s idea. They’d been trying for two years to conceive, then stopped, then succeeded, then miscarried. Then there were too many options dangled before them, too many well-meaning, putty-faced friends at the door. Paul began to clear out corners in the basement; Beth took long walks in Etienne Brûlé Park. The park was a long strip of winding land on either side of the Humber River, one-time superhighway for the coureur de bois of the park’s name. Brûlé was only twenty-three when he became the first European to see Lake Ontario from the mouth of the Humber. What must he have been thinking as he stared out into that inland ocean, surrounded by his Huron Indian brothers? The fall of 1615: Toronto was nothing more than a carrying place, a spot to heave burdens onto strong backs and into hardy canoes. Yonge Street, longest street in the world, that broad boulevard of strip clubs, fast food, head shops, and hairdressing salons had nothing on the Humber in its heyday — explorers, missionaries, and traders vying for bewildered souls, the softest of fur pelts, the prospect of getting there first. Oh, it was romantic and incorrect, she knew, but when Beth visited the park she often thought of Brûlé, and would forego the two landscaped paths for the less manicured trail that ran right smack up against the river’s edge.

The alternative was the commercial strip on Bloor where for weeks they attempted to distract themselves, buying crumbly, extravagantly priced cheeses from the new high-end deli, top of the line BC and Australian wines from the LCBO, and organic beef from the butcher. Their neighborhood was a town unto itself, the welcome signs and the real estate pages proclaimed, and it did seem its own little satellite village, not quite suburb, but not entirely of the city either. Quaint, functional, and quietly fantastical, it had an air of the hobbit — hobbit with Eastern European roots, with lingering Ukrainian bakeries and specialty shops. Even the homeless folk tipped their hats with one hand while they held out the other for change. The buskers strummed mournful Ukrainian folk tunes on battered guitars, and on Sundays the loudspeaker at Saint Pius X played stately choral music, designed, it seemed, to chide and cajole the wayward. God was already smiling on Bloor West Village; there was no pressing need for prayer.

And on every street corner and tidy parkette, Beth spotted the strollers. For her they were little buggies of anguish — their sturdy wheels and bright utilitarian fabric, their multitude of clipped-on accessories and soft, cushioned interiors. She wanted to puncture their tires, spray paint their protective sides, slash their UV-blocking visors. Paul knew this, he saw this, and he said, “Let’s go away. Somewhere where people don’t think this way, the way we think.”

Beth had nodded, semi-entranced by Paul’s ability to imagine quick fixes and to act on them with a kind of jittery intensity. When he suggested Ecuador, the emerald light and mercurial moisture of the rain forest, she had shrugged then wondered sheepishly, “Isn’t it a bit, I dunno, cliché?”

“It won’t be cliché for long,” he said grimly. “It will be gone.”

“That’s what I mean,” she said. “It’s like we’re peering in at a dying, caged animal, isn’t it?”

“Maybe,” said Paul in a way that suggested he hated himself, “there is a way of helping.”

He looked like he wanted to stick forks in his eyes, so Beth agreed to go. Paul had a friend who had been through the region with an NGO. The friend gave them tips and details: what to bring, whether to tip or haggle, which immunizations to endure and delicacies to sample. They were to spend two weeks in the Amazon basin, in Cuyabeno National Park.

The trip had been literally breathtaking, fourteen days and nights where Beth spent whole minutes trying to teach herself to breathe again. Was it the humidity or simply the intensity? They called it the world’s pharmacy, an Eden: sweet balm and scourge, the innocence and viscera of new beginnings. But it was also something more sinister, something cloying and stealthy. To say it was unlike anything Beth had ever experienced might have been inaccurate — there were woods in northern Ontario whose fog of blackflies and sneering impenetrability came close, maybe. But where the native people of her northern province had been decimated by white man’s guilt, these jungle lands were still inhabited by their original denizens — men and women with wide implacable faces and smooth, rubbery skin who clambered up the banks of the river with ease, clutching plastic jugs of gasoline, babies strapped to their backs with long strips of cloth.

Miguel, their tour guide, was such a man. Short and compact in body, barrel-chested, with a few uneven black sprigs of hair for a beard, he had a thin, rosy scar along his jawline and the haircut of a more urban, moneyed man. When he smiled, Beth noted his strong, small, pointy teeth.

This was in a café in Lago Agrio, way-station for travelers, frontier town for the desperate and entrepreneurial. She and Paul had been waiting a long time on a patio, clinking their cups of Nescafé against their saucers.

“Do you think that’s him?” Paul pointed toward the street, where a mocha-skinned man was pulling a trolley. They were to expect a guide who spoke five languages, a war veteran, friendly and “uninhibited,” the keen teenager who booked their trip had reassured them. When Miguel appeared it was from within the rendezvous restaurant; his arms made his T-shirt bulge with their baseball-sized biceps and he was sporting cheap orange flip-flops, which he continued to wear for the duration of the journey, exposing his long, yellowy-tough toenails, and making the rest of the tour group, in their beige, super-tread hiking shoes, feel subtly, wonderfully mocked.

On the bus to the oversized, motorized canoe, which was to take them to their campsite, the dust from the window made Beth cough, and the rutted roads caused the bus to jump. The inside of her head was all jangly with priorities and survival, and she felt sunburned although she had not been in the sun. She nodded to the two Germans who had joined the group, and then pushed past Paul, who was sleeping, a thin line of spittle reaching from his bottom lip to the strap of his day pack, which he had, wary of pickpockets, left attached to his back.

“Do you mind?” She motioned to the vacant aisle seat next to Miguel.

“Not at all,” he said. “You are welcome.”

She sat next to him, not speaking, trying to catch her breath.

“You are having some difficulty, some respiratory difficulty?” He turned toward her, face creased with concern and something else — amusement or maybe lust?

“I’m fine,” she said, and took in a big lungful of air, right down into her diaphragm, as she’d learned in a few yoga classes and tricky situations.

“Good,” he said and went back to his book.

Beth closed her eyes, but that made her dizzy, so she opened them. It was difficult, sitting on the aisle, to find a place to look. Straight ahead meant a row of seatbacks, brown vinyl and grimy. It meant absorbing the reality of the interior of the bus, a rollicking, wretched press of passengers, bulky bags, boxes, and bound chickens. It meant considering which qualifications, exactly, were required to drive a bus in this strange country. And looking outside, well, that would involve craning over Miguel to the window so that her head was positioned directly above his crotch.

Also, Beth was experiencing traveler’s terror — the pervasive notion that each moment represented a small treasure trove of noteworthy difference, of sights, sounds, smells completely and utterly foreign to what she had ever encountered, and that she would never pass this way again. She pivoted her body and her breast grazed Miguel’s arm. She muttered an apology, and squinted out at the side of the road. Outside was both hazy with dust and excessively green. The foliage looked prehistoric — gigantic ferns bowing chaotically to the palms reaching high up into the cloudless sky. This was it — the jungle. Miguel shifted to turn the page of his book and she felt obliged to speak. “What are you reading?”

He closed the book to show her the cover, a sepia-toned watercolor of a barn with a fair-haired woman standing in the foreground looking to the horizon. In the top right-hand corner of the book was a gold seal. Beth peered at it. It was one of Oprah’s book club picks. Miguel was watching her.

She had no idea what to say. The man in the tour agency had told them Miguel still had a bullet in his thigh from fighting in the border dispute with Peru. Finally she settled on, “Any good?”

Miguel nodded eagerly. “Very good, and it helps me to practice, to stay fluent, use new words.” He opened the book to the page he was on. “What does this mean?” He pointed to a word.

Beth did not know what the word meant. She took the book from Miguel and read the blurb on the back. A multigenerational saga set in the American Midwest with a complicated, malevolent patriarch at its core. “Must be dialect,” she said, shaking her head. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

But she knew she had fallen in his estimation. She glanced out the window again. There were black pipes running alongside the road that seemed to be made out of the same plastic used to make heavy-duty sports drink bottles. The pipes didn’t look very serious, especially next to the profusion of vine and leaf that surrounded them. They passed a length of pipe covered in white spray paint. Beth caught the word OXY repeated in messy, angry capital letters. “What is that?”

Miguel closed his novel, placing a purple bookmark in its pages. “Oil pipelines,” he said. “My people, the people of the river, the Siona, they want the oil companies out. They’re sabotaging our home. We have stopped them before. We are well-organized, and although it is not entirely in our nature, we protest peacefully.”

“Is it true you have a bullet in your thigh?” Beth blurted, somewhat fanatically.

Miguel nodded. “My partner was not so lucky,” he said.

From across the aisle, Beth heard what sounded like a deliberate sniff from Paul. Perhaps it was warranted. But she was mesmerized by Miguel’s offhand manner, his apparent obliviousness to his own glaring, gaudy contradictions.

She wondered where Miguel was now, envisioned him paddling valiantly, hopelessly through the unthinkable sludge his river had become. Or maybe not. Instead: in a hotel room in town, his head between the legs of one of the other “uninhibited” citizens of El Oriente. The women of Lago Agrio had been as colorful and intent as the jungle birds; their tight green leggings, pink stilettos, and bands of quivering exposed flesh spoke mostly of joy and heat.

Paul was speaking to her, saying something about the political situation in South America. “It was Occidental, Beth. You know, the one they’ve been protesting for years. Here, then, is irony. Finally, they get them to admit their free trade has been anything but. They manage to oust them from the land, to reclaim what is theirs. And then, this. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the Man simply asserting his dominance. Oops, spilled some oil in your fresh, piranha-infested, life-giving waters. Sorry about that, but you shouldn’t have asked us to leave so rudely. We were, after all, your guests. And were we not gracious? Did we not give your people training and jobs? Oh, we know. The rule of law. But what about the rule of the jungle?” Paul was clicking around the website as he spoke, searching madly for clues.

She still could not quite grasp what he had shown her. There were ramifications, she knew, delicate ecosystems, butterflies on one side of the world flapping their diaphanous blue wings, while on the other side lucky humans sampled sushi; everything explained by a near-invisible knotted string you could follow back to a few greedy men with polished scalps and eyes like hunks of coal dreaming of the ninth hole and profit charts that explained their own lives to them in triplicate.

And then panic pushed like a spring shoot through the loam of her thoughts. She remembered Miguel, as she had been remembering him suddenly and without apparent justification, since she returned to her house on Willard Avenue with her husband of thirteen years, in the west end of Toronto, here amidst some tall buildings, next to a river and a lake, where she lived and would maybe die. Since childhood she had pinned herself to this map. It reassured her to know the order of her own locale. She knew the earth did not belong to her but to her grandchildren, and perhaps not even to them. But what if there were no children, no grandchildren, and the generational link was lost? One day she would be old, bereft, still angry... The image of that other equatorial river she had also begun to call her own, lying like a dark, drugged serpent, flashed into her mind. She turned to Paul. “I’m going to the river.”

“I’ll follow,” he said, with a knowing, almost servile condescension.

She shrugged, thought for a moment about what she might need, then shrugged again. She took Colbeck Street over to Jane, held out her hand at the crosswalk, then marched across like a trusting fool. From there it was a short hike down to the entrance of the park, and down the short steep hill at Humberview Road, and the longer sloping hill of Old Mill Drive. She reached the parking lot running, had to stop and crouch to catch her breath. The day was overcast and humid; she could feel the threat of rain in her sinuses. The scattered copses of trees and fertile patches beneath the bridges had the look of hiding places for humans. It was the sort of day bad men chose to bury body parts.

Paul caught up with her. She turned for a moment to look into his familiar, fretful face. He was stuttering out facts like a telegraph machine: “You know, it’s Petro-Ecuador now. The Ecuadoreans managed to wrest back control, but only after a long and underhanded battle. It was the Americans first. Occidental. They were the ones who invaded what was essentially forbidden territory. And then they did sneaky things like sell part of their shares to EnCana, a Canadian company, Beth, who then sold to the Chinese. If you think we are blameless in all of this you are wrong. We Canadians drift in on the Americans’ wake. Oil or diamonds — it doesn’t matter, we’ll take their sloppy seconds with our shadowy lesser dollar.”

She scrambled her way down the concrete wall that had been built to counter flooding, found a log designed for sitting, and looked toward the stone bridge, the site of the Old Mill, its ruins pressed up against a new spa and condos. A fisherman was standing under the bridge, his hip waders making him large and mournful. He baited his hook, cast into the deeper waters downstream, and hooked a salmon while Beth watched. In the fall, the salmon would be running thick through these waters, leaping with every ounce of their life force to clear the man-made steps that had been installed to control the flow of the river. Their connection to their home, to their little patch of earth and rock and water, was that compelling, that terrifying and true.

The water was higher than it had been for weeks; there had been fierce, unseasonal rains while they were away, then in late July the sun had come out and the river had receded, but the most recent downpour had lifted it once again. Above them, a subway train went rumbling by. Out of the corner of her eye, Beth saw a small black airborne shape, a scrap of red. And there it was: familiar, dogged by its Ecuadorean shadow, its strange tropical double. Here — a red-winged blackbird darting out. And there — a toucan decimating a small hard fruit with its unlikely beak. Here — a pair of squirrels trapezing through the low branches of a maple. There — a monkey grooming his mate, bold and fastidious, perched on his very own Amazonian awning.

Paul tapped her shoulder. “Let’s not stay here, Beth.”

He didn’t appreciate the river the way Beth did. Six months ago, four boys had mugged him and two of his friends on a Saturday night as they strolled and took turns toking like teenagers. The boys held a long serrated knife to Paul’s throat; they fancied themselves gangsters. Later, close to dawn, the police found three of the four hiding in a gully. They were peppered with red ant bites, their pockets clanking with change.

“Beth, I’m taking you home. You’re in no condition to be traipsing around down here like some goddamned explorer of yore.” He grabbed her arm.

Beth shook free, but could not remain sitting. She got up and swatted at the seat of her pants, but nothing was clinging there. She had to cut back up to the main path before she could make it down to the beaten sandy trail next to the water again. Paul zigzagged behind her, panting and driven by loyalty. On the far shore, a night heron was picking through pebbles and bits of trash. The bird stepped carefully over a soda can. Beth stopped to trail her hand in the water. At the edges, the river was lukewarm, but in the center, in the depths, it would be cold. A man had drowned here, having jumped in after his dog. The dog survived.

That first night in the jungle, she and Paul had huddled close on their mattress, flicking the flashlight on and off like schoolchildren, peering out through the mosquito netting at the matte surface of the night and the six other gauzy, tented sleeping areas.

“They’re like bridal beds, aren’t they?” Beth said.

“Or ghost ships,” Paul replied, and Beth turned to him, surprised. They kissed then, softly shocked kisses that helped them both to sleep, despite the rustlings, the constant exchange of information and emotion under the canopy, despite the scurrying geckos and dazed spiders Miguel had warned them might come tumbling from the rafters. Despite their recent history and despite themselves, they kissed and slept like gentle dragons, until the clear commands of the camp cook woke them.

And then there was the issue of moving from sleep to waking, selecting the appropriate attire without parading around as God and all of nature had intended. Paul managed to pull on a pair of shorts and wriggle a T-shirt over his head before emerging to introduce himself to the German couple who had farted unself-consciously as the morning light crept in, and the group of cheery Spaniards sitting on the steps smoking cigarettes. Beth put on her quick-dry pants in a supine position but had to stand to do up the zipper. She ran her hands over her abdomen as had become habit. As if rubbing Aladdin’s lamp, she caressed the pouch of flesh above her belly button. She looked up because she thought she could feel Miguel watching her across the expanse of swamp that separated the sleeping shelter and the dining area, peering out toward her, silhouetted against the mosquito netting like a shadow puppet. Perhaps they all appeared this way, funny outlines backlit by their particular cultures trampling their way through the jungle, laughing and drinking around the slab of a wooden table, starting comically at all the same sights — the tarantulas waving their chubby arms, the sloths hanging like overstuffed handbags from the branches of ancient trees. Watching Miguel watch her, she was overcome by modesty; she had not yet thought to put on a shirt, and she could feel sweat beginning to accrue underneath her breasts. She reached for her bra.

It had been concluded that there was nothing technically wrong with either of them. At first Paul had scoffed, said something about natural selection, overpopulation, all for the best, and she had felt an odd pull in her gut, as if one of her arteries had gone spelunking in the region of her uterus. They had walked for two hours in High Park after the third specialist gave his verdict. It was February, the temperature was sub-zero, and they had to dodge Canada geese strutting like cops along the path. They did not speak; although the words were there, their footsteps over the snow and ice told a more complete, forlorn story. They wore parkas and Thinsulate accessories, but the wind blew straight through them. Once they had circled the park four times, Paul said, “Chicken breasts for dinner?” and Beth nodded, veering toward Bloor Street.

Beth made her way closer still to the water’s edge and began creeping along, stepping over boulders and small eddies of water. If she squinted she could almost envision it, and it took a whole concerted face scrunch to make it real. But the greenery here, for the most part, belonged along the edges of a golf course. And although the humidity approximated the freighted air of the jungle, it also brought with it an oppression unique to the lands that bordered Lake Ontario. She could hear Paul in the brush behind her and was flung back to Cuyabeno — that noisiness of humans pushing their way through chummy, crowded plants.

On the second Wednesday of the trip, the group had traveled in tiny, tippy, handmade canoes to the opposite shore, 300 meters downstream. On the way they witnessed pink river wraiths — dolphins cresting in the calm, fresh waters.

“We will visit one of my friends,” Miguel announced cryptically.

They disembarked on a small beach where sandbugs chomped at their exposed flesh. Through it all, Miguel remained serene in his orange flip-flops, smiling as they slapped at their skin, scrambling for repellent. When they looked up, sweating, he was already waving a walking stick up ahead.

“Isn’t it exciting?” Beth said to Paul. “I wonder where his friend lives. I wonder what he does in here.”

“I imagine he lives his life, Beth. Just with different dining room furniture.” Paul did not react well to bug bites; his legs were covered in loonie-sized pink welts. “Besides,” he said, pointing up ahead, “I’m not sure Miguel knows where he’s going. Perhaps he is not as canny with a compass as your coureur de bois, eh?”

Beth searched for Miguel and found him wandering over a small patch of land, stopping to make peculiar bird calls, his hands cupped up near his lips. “He’s signalling,” she told Paul. “We don’t always have to resort to cell phones.”

And sure enough, within minutes, a three-tiered whistle call came sailing back. Miguel began running over the log- and mulch-strewn ground, bounding over obstacles and jumping to high-five low-hanging palm leaves.

“He expects us to follow when he’s carrying on like that?” Paul said.

But they did follow him; they had no choice. There were times when they lost sight of Miguel altogether and the two of them paused, turned to each other, fully grown Hansel and Gretel searching for signs of their own selves, the crumbs that signal a trail of existence. If not for the other members of their band, who came stumbling through the ground cover with their digital cameras outstretched, they might have believed themselves to be truly abandoned and alone.

“C’mon,” Miguel finally called to them. “We’re almost there.”

And he was right. A small settlement presented itself in a long narrow clearing amidst a profusion of what must have been corn stalks.

“Meet my friend,” said Miguel, and waved his hand toward a woman tending fire in a large pit circumscribed by stones. The woman straightened for an instant to pull her long black hair back from her face and over one shoulder. She wore grimy white shorts and a baggy red tank top over a pink camisole. No bra, Beth noticed. How wonderful not to have to worry.

Miguel sat them down on a log and told them that his friend would now demonstrate a traditional recipe. The woman bent to retrieve what looked like a turnip from a large pot near her feet and shred it into a wooden bowl. A kitten sprung from behind the log with an angry oversized rooster in hot pursuit. Then a mongrel dog roused itself from behind a post and began to chase the rooster. The assembled group watched the kitten, rooster, and dog as they circled the woman’s cooking shelter. Then they sat and observed the woman shred her root vegetable. After about fifteen minutes, a fourteen-year-old girl with an infant straddling one hip came striding, barefoot, from between the corn stalks. She smiled at Beth, who smiled back. When the girl began walking away, toward the river, Beth rose to follow.

“Beth,” said Paul. “No.”

Beth patted Paul on the shoulder. “I’m all right,” she said. “I’d just like to know her name.”

Beth followed the girl into another small clearing. “Hello,” she called out. “I’m Beth.” She patted both hands against her chest and stepped closer to the girl, who was still smiling, her head cocked to one side coquettishly.

“Juana,” said the girl. “Me llamo Juana.”

“Encantada,” said Beth, and for a moment the two simply stood staring. It was a moment that opened up like a hard coconut cleft in half to reveal its white tender meat.

Then Beth pointed to the baby, whose round brown eyes had pivoted toward her. “And what is the baby’s name?” she said.

“No.” The young girl shook her head.

She had misunderstood, or not heard correctly. Beth tried again. “El nombre del niño?”

“No,” the girl said again.

Perhaps it was a girl? “El nombre de la niña?”

Again, the girl shook her head and shifted the baby to her other hip impatiently. She was bored with this. Beth was not showing her anything new. “Nombre,” she said again. She pointed to herself and said, “Beth.” Then she pointed to the girl and said, “Juana.” Finally, she pointed to the baby and shrugged emphatically.

The girl stomped her foot. “She no have name,” she said. “No name.”

“What do you mean?” Beth cried. “She is so beautiful and new. She must have a name!”

Juana smirked. “No name.”

Beth leaned up against a tree, steadying herself. If the baby had no name, then perhaps it was not... claimed. Perhaps it had not yet been properly tethered to this place, these people. Maybe there was a chance. In a flash, she saw it — the plump, umber-colored child tucked under a yellow fleece blanket, being ferried along Bloor Street like royalty in her sturdy stroller. If she got homesick, Beth would show her the Humber. They would gather bouquets of pale purple phlox and Queen Anne’s lace and she would tell her the story of Etienne Brûlé, who learned to live among the Hurons. She would show her the CN Tower, that useless, space-age thing. Oh, there were those little pots of organic baby food in the No Frills grocery store, weren’t there? And bags at the baby boutique that had compartments for everything...

Juana moved closer to her, reached out to touch Beth’s cheek and hair, the silver camera that hung like a medal around her neck. Beth brightened. “Would you like me to take your picture?”

“Yes, yes,” Juana said happily, bobbing up and down.

“Okay,” said Beth. “You should stand over there. Maybe I should hold the baby.” She held out her arms to take the child, but Juana backed away, cradling the baby’s head under her stern chin.

“No,” Juana said.

And then the group spilled into the clearing, muttering and perspiring, craning their necks to see a flock of parrots winging by.

Next to the Humber, Beth could hear thunder rolling in over the lake.

“Paul,” she said, “do you think we should go back, find a way to help them rebuild?”

Paul sighed heavily. Soon the sky would open, and it was possible the humidity would break.

“I mean, if we are responsible, maybe we should just take responsibility...” Beth knew she was whining a little, but couldn’t help herself.

Paul threw up his arms, which almost made Beth laugh. “Jesus, Beth, do you even know what happened to Etienne Brûlé?”

Beth nodded. Brûlé had eventually been disowned by his countryman, Champlain, it was true. And then the Hurons decided he had betrayed them to the Iroquois, or at least this was the speculation. And those were harsher times, weren’t they? “They killed him,” she said quietly.

“Yes,” said Paul, pleased with her accuracy, but not nearly finished with his own story. “The Hurons killed him.” He paused to take a breath, then turned toward her and whispered sadly, excitedly, “Then they ate him.”

And that was when Beth pushed him. If he had fallen differently, with more agility and pliability, the water might not have pulled him to the center of the flow. But within seconds, Paul was struggling in the depths of the river, carried further and further away from Beth by a wicked undertow.

For a few seconds, Paul seemed not to care; there was surrender in the position of his body. But then Beth watched as he clambered strangely toward the shallow water on the opposite shore, and she watched as the current caught him by the ankles and pulled him back into its grasp. Perhaps he would survive; it was up to the river to decide. It confused her to think about what she wanted — how rarely people’s plans and yearnings find their proper, perfect form. She focused on the rushing water between them, its opaque mystery, the smell of rust, fish gut, and human effluent. She noted its very force, which was like the force of blood or cum, a liquid force that pulsed around the globe, hastening into places humans could not reach.

The evening after Beth met the nameless baby, Miguel invited her on a jungle walk. Paul had gone to bed early, blaming the bug bites and cheap wine for his fatigue.

“It is possible we will see some night animals, the nocturnals,” Miguel said as they traipsed carefully along the path. “Do you have any like this in Toronto?”

Beth laughed. “Maybe raccoons,” she said. “They’re the cleverest creatures you’ve ever met, and they’ve adapted to us, so now we adapt to them.”

“Adaptation,” Miguel said. “Is that how you call it?”

The light was beginning to fade, making shapes waver, turning living tableaux into unreliable dreamscapes. Miguel placed his hand at the small of her back and invited her to take a closer look at an orchid the size of a thimble which was growing in the crook of a tree.

“Can you see?” he said. “Here.” He slid a penlight from his pocket and shined it tightly on the flower. “It’s precious, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Beth said. And then, in a rush, “There was a child, back there, in the forest. She was maybe three months old, so sweet, and she didn’t have a name. I was wondering if there might be a way, if she is not wanted or a burden of some kind, I know I — we — could provide a good home. We live in a village of sorts — clean and comfortable, with very good educational opportunities and lots of diverse friends and toys for her to play with, secondhand clothes, because we don’t like to be wasteful, and love. We have love for her. We can’t have kids of our own, or at least that’s what we’ve found.”

“I don’t think so,” Miguel replied.

“But I don’t understand!” Beth began to sob, then stopped when she noticed Miguel chortling to himself, bent at the waist with the laughter that was coursing through him. He stopped for long enough to hold out a fibrous piece of bark he had pulled from the trunk of a tree. The bark was a coppery color, flecked with a darker, richer brown, and the piece he had stripped sat in the palm of his hand like a special seashell.

“Try it,” Miguel said. “Rub it here.” He ran his index finger across his gums. “Chew on it. It was what we used when we went to the dentist, to do the dental work. A way of freezing, of feeling no pain.” He passed her the bark and she put it in her mouth like a lozenge. It was true what he said; within seconds her tongue felt clumsy and numb. She looked at him, shocked, and found she could not speak.

“Shh,” he said, although she had not uttered a word. He sidled up close to her, from behind, and put his arms around her in a restrictive embrace.

I should resist, she thought, but fear was making her tingly and compliant. She wondered if there was a place where she truly belonged.

Then Miguel’s fingers were down the front of her pants, his lips tender at her neck, his fingers rubbing and hooked up inside of her. “Here you go, Toronto,” he said into her ear. “A souvenir.” And Beth came, gasping soundlessly into the hand he had clasped firmly across her mouth. “Now,” Miguel said. “Now do you understand?”

Sic transit Gloria at the Humber Loop by Sean Dixon

Humber Loop

She said she wasn’t married anymore. But then, about two weeks into our thing, the dude came to visit, from Ohio or Iowa or someplace like that, I don’t even know. And he insisted that they sleep together, side by side in the same bed, every night for ten nights. Said she owed him that since he was her husband and she was his wife. She agreed to it, she told me, because she was afraid of him. Said she’d left a little something under my pillow to get me through. Said she’d call again in eleven days. I could hear him in the background, demanding to know who she was talking to. She told him to fuck off and then she said bye and hung up.

Reflecting on it now, it didn’t sound too much like she was afraid of him.

I had three gigs lined up. Double bass players can always find a gig, even if they only know ten or twelve notes. I don’t have a car, but it’s not a problem. I used to have a car. A big car. Fit the soft case nicely in the backseat. But then one day I backed the car over the bass. It could not be salvaged. I kicked the car a couple of times and then sold it so I could buy myself another bass, along with a lightweight, state-of-the-art Styrofoam case, more than an inch thick, with an Oxford cloth surface. Meant for air travel. It was six and a half feet tall and weighed just over twenty pounds without the instrument. I didn’t mind. The contents would not get damaged. And there were wheels. I could roll it down the street to wherever I was going, even in the rain. Means I was generally available to play. Man, I just want to play. Never tried to pull that rig onto a streetcar. Wasn’t even sure it was possible. Just did gigs in the Queen West area, mostly. Walking around. And up Roncesvalles. I got a rain hat that looked like a Tilly but it wasn’t, though that didn’t stop people from calling me asshole.

Day after the husband showed up, it was Monday. I played the Local on Roncy, with an old-timey type group that wanted to keep things pure. Pure meant three-chords, nothing fancy. A fiddler from BC sat in that night. Changed the key in the middle of a number, tried to ramp things up a notch. Sent everyone scrambling for their capos. Afterwards I broke his nose. Wasn’t myself really.

Tuesday I played with a singer-songwriter-type girl. Bar on Queen West. The flower sellers come in there. Some of them sell flowers that light up and blink. The hallway to the washrooms is pretty narrow. Her name was Harmony. Pretty sure it was a fake name. Don’t know how she came up with Harmony when she sings by herself. She looked like she had kicked a bad habit and was starting over a little old. But she had talent.

Turns out she wanted to fire me. Told me after the gig I was too intense. It’s true I get nervous. I take calcium supplements for that. Like beta-blockers, only cheaper. When you get nervous, your body eats up calcium, and then the depletion gives you a case of the shakes, which makes you even more nervous. It’s a cycle. I tried to take glucosamine too, for arthritis. But it hurt my stomach too much so I had to stop. Anyway, I don’t have arthritis.

I don’t know where Harmony got this idea I was messed up, but she was pretty intense herself so it was hard to convince her of anything other than what she believed. I asked if she’d give me one more chance and she said come back in two weeks and see if she hadn’t replaced me yet.

That was an early night. I went home and thought about my girl. How she told me when we first met that I made a two-dollar suit look like a million bucks. How she kept me relaxed. I was always getting paranoid. She kept me relaxed. That was her primary virtue. Guess that’s what turned a little thing into love.

Wednesday I played a blues set at the 403 on Roncy. Only pops up from time to time. Singer’s name was Gloria. She’s Ojibway, with a blind and swollen eye and a voice like Stelco. I met her a few years ago. Up north in a tee-pee. Introduced herself while sitting on the can. Made a joke about how it was a throne and the people had to bow down before her. And they did. Then she sang some and I played on a washtub bass that someone dragged out. I hadn’t played since high school. Gloria told me music was going to save my soul. She was right. Called me Plunk Henry, which I guess is who I am.

I’m Plunk Henry. How do you do.

The rest of the time was a bit of a blur.

I was living in a big warehouse building on Niagara Street. Still am, I guess. You really live alone there. You take the freight elevator or you take the stairs. I stayed in my bed, knowing no one would come and bother me. Tried to imagine her but instead I’d see the husband with her. She’d be fulfilling her wifely duty over and over and over again. Made me a bit crazy. I’d lie there in my underwear and jerk off and cry. Or try to cry. I don’t know if I cried. I never thought about anyone else. Even tried to draw a picture of her. Tried to draw her mouth. Looked more like a mustache. Tried to draw her breast. Looked more like a fried egg. Still, my doodles were better than all the porn on the Internet.

After a couple days, I was still trying to get a grip. I tried to imagine our relationship in a year or two. Maybe less than a year. Maybe six months. Not having sex anymore. Me starting to think she talked too much. She telling me what she thought of my playing.

Didn’t work though.

Eleventh day she came up the freight elevator and appeared at my door. Said the husband was gone back to Iowa or Idaho. I was a bit stunned. I’d taken the mushrooms she’d left for me. When she came in, she sat down in the only chair in the room, petting the cat that got in with her, and telling him that he was a bad cat, that he shouldn’t be there. I looked at her. Her skin was paisley and her eyes were burning brighter than a mirror in the sun.

She said it made her feel like a cheap whore, coming from her husband’s bed to mine. I told her it wasn’t her husband’s bed and she wasn’t a cheap whore. I told her she was my precious flower. She told me to shut my mouth. Said she felt like a cheap whore. Said she liked the feeling. Liked putting her mouth around the words.

I should have taken my cue from that, I guess.

She chastized me later. Said I burned her insides. Truth is, it burned me too. Hurt to pee for a couple of days. What comes of a girl making you so you don’t know which end is up.

She seemed flattered though, she could screw me up so bad to get a bona fide chemical reaction. Like I was her little science project. And it calmed me down too. I remember getting up at dawn. Saw the sun coming in through the window. Thought, I’m normal. Wondered if I’d stay that way. Remembered how things had been a few weeks before. When I’d rehearse with fellow musicians.

Musicians are generous people, the same way that language instructors are. They know you want to communicate. Nobody wants to stab you in the back. Been told too that bass players live longer than all the others. Like elephants with their ears that grow large, encouraged by low and gentle music. I’m still waiting for that.

We holed up for a few days. I cancelled all my gigs. Was running out of money but she didn’t seem to mind. Told me when we came up for air we’d figure something out. Said she knew a guy who knew a guy.

She sure knew how to make me relax.

Still, after five or six days, I realized it was the night of my second-chance gig with Harmony. The last thing I wanted to do, this stage of my career, burn my bridges.

I said I was going and she was insulted. Like, really insulted. Like a whole different person came out. I said I just wanted to play and she said I sounded like a broken record. Said her baby sister played better than me. Said if I was going to treat her like trash, she was going to treat me like something worse.

She really didn’t mean it though. She was just feeling sore.

As I rolled out the door she threw an old mandolin at me. Hit the wall beside my head. I heard the crack. Reminded me how I backed the car over that bass. I lived a nightmare for a while after I lost that bass. Felt like I’d had this pact with the devil. Said he’d come to collect his pay. Only I couldn’t remember any of the good parts. The upshot was any instrument I put my hand to was set to break. Even the washtub bass in Wicky. Even the one I had now. Devil promised it would make the sound of a wrecking ball going through old paneling. It was my destiny, he said. Didn’t make any sense. All I did was back over a bass in a driveway. Where’s the unpardonable sin in that?

There was something wrong with the freight elevator. In the end I took the stairs, lugging the rig down two floors. Awkward at the corners of the landings. Then out into the street, rolling up Niagara to Queen. Heading west. Like it was your average night.

It was hot though. Muggy. I was sweating by the time I got to that bar. With the blinking flowers and the narrow bathroom hallway. Like half the bars in Toronto, you’re probably thinking. I’m sure you don’t mind me keeping it vague.

From the sound of it, there were a lot of people beyond the edge of the bar, where I couldn’t really see them. They didn’t care too much about us. I tuned them out mostly. Toronto is a city where they welcome you with folded arms.

Couldn’t tune out Harmony though. Her disapproval. She was giving me a lot of attitude right there on that little stage. Still not quite sure I deserved it. Wounded me a bit. Man, I just want to play. Anyway, nobody was really watching. Saw one pair of eyes out there, peering at me. Guess it didn’t matter too much when she fired me right there onstage. Full house chattering beyond the bar.

You got to think it wasn’t too good for her career either. Pulling a stunt like that.

It was still before 10. Harmony kept playing. I lumbered off, graceful as I could. Dragged my bass over to the side. Down that little hallway. Then I was in this little closet-sized dressing room type thing. Had a chair and a bunch of brooms in it. And my travel case. I moved the chair out into the hallway and propped the instrument up against it. Ducked back in and was trying to get the case to stay open so I could just slide the bass over and in. Then I was backing out into the hall again. There was a dude standing there. I’d missed him somehow. I said excuse me or whatever and was pulling the bass up away from the chair. He didn’t say anything so then I stopped for a second and I turned and looked up into his face.

Next two things happened almost the same time. He brought down this bottle of Grolsch on the top of my head and the tips of my fingers went up into his windpipe.

Funny thing I noticed about the Grolsch bottle, as it rolled away. It hadn’t broken and he’d resealed it before using it on my head. I think he was hoping to finish it, instead of choking from a crushed windpipe, which was what he was doing. I’ve got strong fingers from playing. Stronger than I think. Even if they’re not as dextrous as they ought to be.

I’d let the bass fall back against the chair. He was making some kind of noise. I was holding onto him, felt like my armpits were on fire, and he was looking down into my eyes like he wanted to ask me a question. Like he wanted me to help him. Did he want me to help him? Is that the way dying works? You forgive your enemies and ask them for help? All I could think was he better hurry up and finish — the questioning, the forgiving, the dying — because somebody was bound to come around the corner of that hallway again real soon.

Harmony was still at it though. One of my faves too. She had talent. Maybe I had good taste. Maybe the song would hold them just long enough to keep their bladders. It was old blues. A cover. Rabbit Brown.

I think about the way that guy looked. I do. The way he was looking before he took that swing. I see it in my head. That moment. He didn’t look angry. More helpless. Anxious. He looked a lot like me. Except he was taller and fair and pretty narrow at the shoulders. So this was the husband. Fucked up like me. Didn’t look like he wanted to be in this hallway any more than I did. He really was dying too. I felt bad for him.

I didn’t know what was happening. The husband had fallen against me and wasn’t making any more noise. In the other room, the song was coming to an end. The door was still open and I heard voices. Nasal. Girls. Approaching the corner. I pulled him up and dragged him in. Reached forward and grabbed the knob. It was damp and nearly slipped from my hand as I closed the door.

Two grown men, one of them not breathing, and a double bass case leaning up against a pile of broomsticks in a closet. The one thing I wanted with me was still out in the hallway. Some drunken asshole was going to knock it down. Or mistake it for the wall beside a urinal and piss on it. Or steal it. I couldn’t afford that.

Don’t know how much time went by. A couple of minutes maybe. Felt like an hour. I heard a snippit of conversation between a pair of girls. It was about fake leather. Like in a jacket or something. And some dude having a bad trip, talking to himself about how Wednesday was zero.

Wednesday was going to be zero for me if I didn’t find a way out of this.

There was only one way to go. You probably saw it coming. I didn’t. Took a bit of thinking. First I had to rip the neck guard out of the case. Made me feel like I had tendinitis. Then I had to push back against the door for leverage. At one point, two or three broom handles fell across to the other wall. They made a loud noise. Insanely loud. My ears were ringing. I even heard the echo of the ringing.

Then everything stopped and I listened to my breathing. Somebody flushed a toilet and opened a door. Footsteps down the hall.

Harmony was still at it.

Things could have been worse. Case might have been too small. I might not have had a case at all. Or a soft-shell case.

There was no air left in the room. I just wanted to get out of there. Took a chance and opened the door wide. No one in the hallway. The case was facing the wrong way. By the time I was ready to go, there was a guy there, trying to get past me to the bathroom. He had to wait while I propped the case against the wall and slid the double bass from the hall into the closet. Closed the door. Then I lumbered down the hallway, past the men’s. He went in and I was alone again. Standing in front of the fire exit. I banged it open and stumbled out into the alley.

Urine never smelled so much like freedom. It was starting to rain though. Thought that might do something about the heat, but it didn’t. I dug into my pocket and pulled out my Tilly knockoff.

Queen Street was busier than it had a right to be west of Dufferin on a Tuesday night. Still, all that traffic would come to an end if I was willing to go far enough. West is the way to go when you’ve got a body in a case and time on your hands.

I started walking, trying to pretend I was just heading to a gig on a usual night in the usual way. But it wasn’t a usual night. And it wasn’t the usual way. Sweat was pouring off me with the rain. Still, people on the sidewalk parted to let me by. Respect for the musician. Nothing like it.

There was a streetcar coming, making its way at a snail’s pace through the traffic in the street. 501. The rain started coming down harder. The sign said, Humber. I figured I’d take it all the way to Humber College and then I could empty out my case somewhere on campus where my cargo might be taken for a wasted student. Humber College. All those red brick buildings where the crazy people used to live, back in the old days when it was the primary mental care village for the whole province.

Getting on the car wasn’t the problem I thought it’d be, though it took a couple of minutes. The driver said something I didn’t understand. I’d turned and was trying to get my weight under the back to pull up the rig and he said, It’s your lucky night. No pole. Air-conditioning.

He was right. There was air-conditioning. It felt good. If he was actually referring to the size of my case relative to the size of the door, I’d have to say he wasn’t making himself very clear.

Car was empty. There’d been people waiting with me at the stop, but they didn’t get on. Made me a bit paranoid. Like maybe I didn’t look as innocent as I thought. People cut a lot of slack for musicians. But maybe they notice when your case weighs more than you do.

Still, we were headed west and nobody was stopping us. We went past the streetcar station at the bottom of Roncy. Caught a view of the lake at the left. There was a big empty patch of darkness on the right that spooked me until I realized it was Grenadier Pond. Then new town houses on the left. I thought I spotted a garbage nest under a bush.

Then something I didn’t expect. We cut to the left suddenly, off the Queensway, and drove underneath the Gardner Expressway. I realized I’d never been this far west before.

Driver said, Humber Loop, last stop, and pulled into the bleakest lot I ever saw. A figure eight of track next to an abandoned snack bar with a sign on the wall that said, Don’t feed the pigeons, beneath a dark wet sky, between two concrete overpasses. Last stop.

I was not going to fit out the center doors, so I rolled my rig up to the front.

Is there going to be another car? I asked.

Yup, said the driver. This car’s 501 Humber. Turns around here. You want the car that says 501 Long Branch.

I hobbled down the steps with the case. He closed the doors. Then opened them again.

Oh yeah, he said. Better hope it has AC.

He closed the doors again and left. Went around the loop and back the way he came. That was pretty funny, I thought, what he said about the air-conditioning. Except the rain was really coming down now. I was starting to get a bit of a chill.

On the upside, I was alone. Looked like I was going to be alone for a while. I leaned my load up against the building and took a look around. Every square inch of that wall had a urine trail leading away from it. Right in front of me there was an electrical tower on a big patch of grass. More streetlights than you’d expect, place like that. To my right, though, the tracks headed south into the gloom. Pulled me to it like a safe haven. There was a wide ditch full of cattails over there below the corner of an old wall. No streetlights. Another circle of tracks with weeds growing out from under them. Right in the middle, a pile of dirt and rocks. That was interesting. I walked over to have a look.

The rain tapered off a bit. I should dump the body here. I tried to think the thought again, so it would make sense. I should dump the body here. Wondered if I’d be able to get him out of the case. No, I should stick to the original plan. Farther west. The red brick buildings of Humber College.

I heard a lurch and rumble behind me, turned and saw a streetcar barreling through, back by the building. 501 Long Branch. I suppressed a surge of panic and started to trot over. Driver didn’t see me and didn’t stop. Didn’t see anything suspicious either, I guess. He barreled around the bend, passing the loop, and moved south under the second overpass.

Next car took its time coming and was heading back around the loop. A couple of teenagers got out. A boy and a girl. Made me nervous at first, but they got preoccupied with one another around the corner of the building.

Finally, the Long Branch came through again. The kids got on, side by side, but they had to break their hand-hold to get around the bar that was inside the door. It was right in the center. Handy for the old ladies to hoist themselves up. My case was two and a half feet wide and over a foot and a half thick. The opening was just about four and a half, with a bar in the middle. There was no way I was getting around that. No way.

Sorry, guy, said the driver. You need a car with AC. He pulled away.

Who calls a guy guy these days?

Looked like I was going to get a cool ride whether I wanted it or not. Next car to come through was going around the loop. This dude got off looked like a sailor in an old movie. He was practically black-and-white.

Car after that had the bar. Driver opened the doors, expecting me to get on. I gestured over to my case.

Any chance of an AC car coming?

They’re rolling them off the lines, he said. Account of it’s cooling off. They’re expensive to run. But there might be one or two of them left on the road.

He pulled away. Tell you one thing about these drivers. They’re polite.

I stood for a couple of minutes. Armpits burning. Turning into a chronic condition. I felt faint. I was digging my fingers into my eyes when I heard movement to my left. Realized the sailor was still there. Just by the corner of the building. Probably the biggest fright of the night. He was looking at me. Hadn’t boarded the last car. What was that about?

I eased the case up against my chest, trying to make it seem lightweight, and dragged it past the other end of the building. Pulled out my cell phone and looked at it. No calls. I glanced over at him. He was gazing up at the top of the electrical tower.

I called my land line. She answered. Baby, she said.

Baby, I said, but I didn’t feel anything lower than the pit of my stomach.

I told her what I had done. She said, You did what? And I told her again. She hung up. I was starting to get anxious.

I called back. She let it ring for a bit and then answered. Don’t come here, she said.

It’s my place, I said. She told me it was some serious shit I’d done and she didn’t want to get involved. I asked her why she didn’t warn me that her husband was a psycho freak. He wasn’t my husband, she said.

What? I said.

I’m not the marrying type, in case it wasn’t obvious. He was just a guy I used to see. Guess we hadn’t had our fill. Guess we’ve had it now, whether I like it or not.

A bus pulled in from a road I hadn’t noticed. Down from the Queensway on the other side. The black-and-white sailor got on and it went back the way it came. I was alone again at the Humber Loop.

Don’t be a drama queen, she said. He’s dead and you’re an asshole. Killing’s wrong.

So’s lying.

For an intelligent girl, she said, I sure surrounded myself with some collection of dopes. And then she hung up.

Conversation got things going though. Set me in motion. Like the kid in the TV ad who laces up the shoes and drinks the drink and climbs up behind the eight ball. With his skateboard. I dragged the case down into the ditch below the corner of the wall and opened it. I felt sorry for him. I did. But there was no time for the Catholic shit. I tried to roll him out but the top parts were stuck together. The case and the body. I walked around the other side, turned the case over on top of him, stepped on his back, and pulled. His head popped out and I fell into the cattails. Lay there for a couple of minutes. I hadn’t been that close to cattails since I was a kid. Then I got up and rolled him down to the bottom of the ditch. Walked over to the rusty loop and filled my case with gravel and rocks. Dragged it back and dumped the rocks on top of him. A couple more trips and he was covered. I tried to think of a little prayer. Heard the rumble of the streetcar and dove into the weeds.

It rolled by. No idea what he saw.

After a bit, I stood up and brushed myself off. Don’t think my two-dollar suit looked like it was worth much anymore. Case was a mess too. Only on the inside. Worry about it later. Closed it and latched it and dragged it behind me back up into the glare of the lights. It felt buoyant. Like a balloon. A breeze caught me in the face and woke me up. I noticed the rain had stopped.

Things were good.

Then I remembered I still couldn’t get on these streetcars. Had a picture in my head of walking east along the Queensway, middle of the night. A cheap and filthy suit. Dragging an empty case with the Styrofoam impression of a human body pressed onto the inside. And the bass was still in that closet. See why I’m not telling you the name of that bar? Four grand, it cost me. Some people kill for that. I thought I might dump the case in the lake. But Styrofoam floats. And the case cost a bundle too. I tried to think of the worst case scenario: dump the case, head back to the bar, bass is gone. A ten grand debt — two instruments and a flight case — nothing to show for it. Move up to Wicky. Take up the washtub. Pretty indestructible, the washtub, no matter what the devil might say. Don’t cost anything either. Not so bad. I’d be able to play. Man, I just want to play.

My phone was ringing. Missed it the first time around but it rang again a minute later. It was her. She said she was in trouble. That didn’t make any sense.

She said she’d left my apartment, but there was something wrong with the freight elevator.

Take the stairs, I said.

Too late for that, she said. She’d been in a huff. Couldn’t get the barrier to slide up. Finally lost patience and jumped over it. The elevator wasn’t there so she fell three floors. Landed in the basement and broke her hip.

Call 911, I said. I’m stuck at the Humber Loop.

She said, You think 911 can help that the elevator’s coming down right now?

I said, You think I can?

She said, Maybe you know some tricks.

I said, Don’t jump over the barrier.

Then there was this horrible sound coming into my ear and I realized I wasn’t holding the phone anymore. Had to go poke around the dandelions under the electrical tower till I found it. There was one message. I checked it. It was from the first call she’d made. She called me baby and told me she was sorry and she was in trouble and could I call her. Is that the way it is with people? Do they hate you until they’re dying? And then they don’t hate you anymore?

Do you ever find yourself wishing you could just have an aneurism? Allow the vessel in your brain to just pop and let you go? Is there some kind of higher state of concentration that would allow you to do that? Could it be learned? That’s the feeling I had, right then, standing beside the snack bar with the sign on the wall that said, Don’t feed the pigeons. Every square inch of wall, a urine trail leading away. Going exactly nowhere. Nowhere to go and nothing to take me and a cargo that won’t fit anyway. That’s how I feel, standing at the Humber Loop. Been told that bass players live a long time. Like elephants with their ears that grow large, encouraged by low and gentle music. I’m still waiting for that. I’d like to feel that.

Lab rats by Ibi Kaslik

Dufferin Mall

Outside the Dovercourt 7-Eleven, K. watches police cars roll by from the nearby station. Young Portuguese gangsta impersonators with peach fuzz glance at K. in disgust from their souped-up Honda Civics as K. pops his skateboard into his hand like an ejected tape. He sips on his Blueberry Buster Slurpee, as if the life-giving fluid might suddenly be stolen away from him. K. sneers at the teens and smiles at the cops; he conducts most of his life in this territorial, animal way, though there are few things he possesses — a few good soul records, a signed copy of Paul Auster’s Moon Palace — and only small bits of earth he inhabits. He sips and slurps until his lips are blue as a death mask and he has given himself brainfreeze.

He pulls out the wadded piece of newspaper that Christmas gave him and studies it for a moment before jamming it back into his oversized shorts. He slaps his board on the concrete and begins to roll down Dundas, past Brazilian bikini shops that look obscene and unseasonable, given the cool climate and great distance from anything resembling a beach; past heavily stocked hardware stores and stunted middle-aged men and women sloshing their words together as if there are shells caught in their mouths. He crosses Dundas and makes a sharp left with his board, as if cutting through waves, on Gladstone. He uses the momentum of the hill to avoid Dufferin, its swath of train tracks bisect east and west; he scales up and down residential streets for an out.

K. hates Dufferin Street but is especially distressed by the Dufferin bus, which makes him feel like a homicidal dumpling. One of the most reliable ways to elicit murderous tendencies is to ride the overheated, fart-smelling bus up into the very heart of humanity: Bloor and Dufferin station, where no one believes in standing in line for anything, let alone a TTC ticket or a bus. There’s nothing sadder to K. than watching immigrants climb onto the bus at the Dufferin Mall — or “The Duff,” as Christmas calls it — with their crinkling Wal-Mart bags. The glorious Ethiopian queens stuffed into cheap, inadequate jeans. The baby carriages, the economy-sized flats of toilet paper and family-sized boxes of pizza-pops stuffed and the greasy stench of McDonald’s fried turds on everyone’s hands.

“But why do you hate The Duff? You can get anything at the Duff!” Christmas likes to remind him, when he gets all nauseous and depressed by the prospect of needing something from the inner-city excuse for a shopping center. Christmas is right, though, it’s truly incredible what capitalism has made available even and especially at the Dufferin Mall: You can get your photograph taken in a booth and receive a series of stickers with your image reproduced in cartoon form, you can also get corrective contact lenses, a prepaid phone with pink kittens speaking in Japanese characters, tensor bandages made of hemp, not to mention a ten carat diamond from Peoples Jewelers, cigarette filters in bulk, and a herb and garlic bagel the size of your head.

It would be all right by K. if he never had to step into The Duff ever again, though he knows Christmas could not live without its peopled, impoverished absurdity. Anxiety clutches at K.’s throat as he weaves his way through the well-maintained Parkdale streets to meet Christmas for lunch in Roncesvalles. They’re hooking up at Christmas’s favorite Polish dive, a dank, wood-paneled place called Krak where the soup specials are alternately beet or dill pickle and you can get a full schnitzel dinner for $4.99. Despite Krak’s reasonable prices, K.’s funds have been nearly depleted since he left his job in advertising to go back to grad school to study pre-colonial African history.

He now understands the sour expressions his colleagues made when he made his announcement about his “life transition.” At first he thought they were transmitting muted jealousy, then settled on the fact that it was the mildly dyspeptic superiority all people in advertising projected. But now he knew that their shocked faces were actually saying: Dude, are you ready? There would be no more Calvin Klein shoes, no more impromptu tapas lunches at Lee’s, no more all-night cocaine parties on the rooftop patio of the Drake Hotel (or “The Fake,” as Christmas liked to call it), no more reckless, whimsical spending of the salary he had earned, for almost a decade, by shuffling in and out of an elevator in a gentle hung-over state. There would also be no more abuse from a crisply tanned woman, whose skin bore an unmistakable resemblance to chorizo, named Marlene, who liked to accuse him of not collating pages correctly before big presentations.

As he slows his board down, he notices Christmas inside Krak, studying what appears to be the weekly newspaper with an intensity she reserves for restaurant experiences. Her ponytail is high up on her head, as if she’s a very young child and an inept but well-meaning male relative has coiffed her with thick kitchen elastics. K. stares at Christmas through the dirty window; there is something wan and estranged about her: She is almost unrecognizable. Her eyes seem pulled too far in opposite directions, but this illusion ends the second she turns her head and smiles at him heartily, pointing at the menu. He’s imagined it. Christmas looks as good as ever. It’s just stress, he thinks, plunging his hand into his shallow pocket, only to find his last crumpled tenner and the same wrinkled newspaper ad Christmas has spread out onto their table.

K.’s not sure what has convinced him to submit to the study. Maybe it was Christmas’s enthusiasm about the project: “It’s nothing, they give you a bunch of placebos and they let you play video games all day to test your reflexes. They feed you cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches. You love cream cheese.” She had beamed at him insanely. Her excitement seemed disproportionately high considering the fact that they were discussing selling his brain to science. Plus, her face still hadn’t arranged itself properly. She had that kind of asymmetrical European look to begin with, all sharp curves and sunken cheeks, so it always took a minute or so to decide whether she was stunning or mannish. Today, the shocked expression didn’t seem to leave her face. Also, there was borscht on her lower jaw, smudged and organic like some forgotten assassination detail.

Maybe he needed little convincing; after all, K. had blown the last of his savings on tuition, several required books for grad school, most of which had the words Bone and Civilization in their titles. Then there was the small matter of his exorbitant west end rent — why did he pay nearly two thousand dollars to live in a basement apartment that smelled like mothball dog and had a moldy ceiling, why? Just so he could pay seven dollars for a G-and-T and catch ageing, pseudo indie-rockers deejaying Bowie songs at the Beaconsfield? Really?

He sighed and pushed in the big institution doors of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. This was why he was going: because he was desperate. Desperate for cash. And there was nothing more obscene than fretting about money. According to Christmas, this study paid better than any of the other guinea pig gigs did — Christmas should know, she survived on weight-loss-ad modeling gigs (Christmas was the “After” model) and these drug-testing studies. She claimed starving herself and wearing long-sleeved shirts in the summer to cover her track marks (how else would they monitor her blood during the studies?) was a small price to pay for being a “professional nothing.”

K. announced himself at the desk and was directed to the eleventh floor by a woman in scrubs with cartoons of pigs in scrubs on them. Before K. could ask her about the pigs, what internal logic or reference they signified, what insight into the mysterious world of Western medicine they hinted at, the young nurse/receptionist, who looked about twelve years old to K., said, “Wait a minute, are you involved with Dr. Bot’s study?”

K. nodded as she flipped through a bunch of papers and answered the telephone in a chirpy yet business-like manner. She typed something into her computer and the printer spat out a fluorescent blue wrist-band, the kind you get at hospitals, all-inclusive hotels, stadium gigs: human-style branding. He examined it carefully and verified the spelling of his name, his date of birth, his gender, and his allergies (yes, penicillin). The brown-haired girl snapped it on his wrist eagerly, as if hungry for physical human contact with someone lucid. He gave her a floppy kind of smile and began shambling down the hall, as if he’d already ingested some Valium or other painkiller and was in the foggy world of decision-free living.

It wasn’t until the elevator bell rang out, and the formaldehyde smell had been absorbed completely into the back of his throat, that K. realized he hadn’t once given his name: He’d failed to fill out a single form that would alert anyone to his allergies, or his June birthday.

Dr. Bot was bald and overly friendly in the way that people are when they know others fear them. As he explained to K. what the study would consist of — two weeks of drug- and alcoholfree living, daily blood samples, and some hand-eye coordination tests (“You like Xbox, Kenny? Well, this is a little older, but the same idea.”) — and handed over some documents describing the types of drugs they’d be using, K. watched the way the gloomy institutional light flounced off various parts of Dr. Bot’s perfectly proportioned cranium. He wondered if its shine was accidental or purposeful and if the doctor intended his incredible globular centerpiece to be admired, or whether it served as pure distraction for his nervous subjects.

As he took blood from K., and asked him about his hobbies (“Have you heard of this rollerblading craze, Ken, or are you more the intellectual type?”), K. tried to revert the questions back to the doctor.

“So, my friend Christmas tells me this is a drug-testing study, but I see here these are tried and true oldies — clonazepam, amitriptyline — so what are you testing, effects?”

The doctor smiled at K. condescendingly but didn’t answer. Bot plugged up a vial of his blood with a small black stopper, and a nurse, who looked like she’d been sucked into a vacuum from a planet of porn stars and then deposited into the orange room with K. and the doctor without any instructions, came to take his blood away. She nearly tripped on her big white platform nurse shoes that seemed to be very impractical, given her occupation.

“Dr. Bot? What effects are you testing?”

“I like Christmas,” Bot said, leaning casually on the counter, which contained a large glass jar with a ridiculous amount of cotton swabs in it. “She’s very spontaneous, what I call a free thinker, a truly free thinker. There really are no predictable patterns of thought going on there whatsoever, I find it fascinating. Have the two of you been dating long?”

K. sighed and studied the fold in his arm that was tightly sealed with cotton and tape, it was slowly bruising into a light green color. The doctor was obviously full of prevarications, wasn’t allowed to, or wouldn’t, talk.

“Everything you need to know about the study is in the forms, Ken,” Bot said, as K. pulled his hoodie on carefully and tucked his skateboard under his pricked-up arm. “Okay, see you tomorrow at 8:30 a.m. sharp.” Bot turned back toward the window, which displayed the varied gruesomeness and decrepitude of College and Spadina: It was the only place in the city where you could get rolled by crackheads, buy six white miniature eggplants for $1.99, and see female U of T students in Uggs rushing from their psychology classes to get hammered on vodka ice coolers at O’Grady’s Irish pub, all within a six-block radius.

“Ken,” Bot said, without turning around, “you didn’t sign the forms.”

“Oh, sorry,” he said, catching the door with his foot, “I forgot.”

K. had eaten three Hungry-Man TV dinners he’d gotten from the Price Chopper and was feeling a little ill. As Christmas’s voice hummed along the telephone line, he thought about what a good decorator he was. Small white, twinkly Christmas lights, it’s all about the Christmas lights. He sprawled his long body out on the floor and examined the layers of delicately latticed thumb-sized lights. As long as things stayed relatively dark — or “ambient,” as his favorite show, Decorate This, Girl!, described it — you couldn’t tell that most of his furniture came from the Ikea dumpster and Lansdowne’s Value Village.

“Obsyline,” Christmas said, her voice cutting through his fantasy of the triplet horse-faced decorating girls visiting his dank subterranean rooms and throwing his world into a renovating frenzy.

“K., did you hear me? The new drug is Obsyline. I Googled it, there’s nothing about it, except that it’s in the Valium family. You were right. Looks like that’s what Bot’s using on you.”

“Sounds like a combination of obvious and Vaseline,” he said.

Impatient, Christmas sighed, “Yeah, I guess it does.”

“Well, whatever it is, I have these naps for hours, and I wake up feeling like someone’s taken a shovel to my skull.”

Two weeks had gone by since K. started drug testing with Dr. Bot and he’d been too exhausted to do anything with Christmas after the long afternoons of sleeping; watching women with unmovable hair negotiate badly attended fundraisers on soap operas; responding to Dr. Bot’s lengthy and often nonsensical surveys (“Would you describe yourself as lethargic or woozy? How many pistons in a diesel engine? Can you think of a word that rhymes with orangutan?); eating the semi-comestible tuna fish sandwiches that tasted like fancy cat food; and flying a green video airplane through an obstacle course on what appeared to K. to be one of the first computers ever built.

“Let me come over, at least,” Christmas pleaded, “I miss you, K.”

“Hello, who is this?” K. asked officiously. “Who am I speaking to, please?”

Christmas laughed and hung up. She pulled on her itchy Guatemalan mittens. Fall had turned, suddenly it was crisply unforgiving outside. She would stop on Queen Street, on her way over, to buy a boneless chicken roti from the Roti Lady for K. to take to work tomorrow. A little Caribbean might help, that shitty institutional food was enough to make you murder someone.

To say that K.’s apartment was a disaster would have been a compliment. There was Beefaroni on the low ceilings and two weeks worth of unlaundered gitch cobbled out an enchanted trail toward the bathroom. Stacks of papers, magazines, and take-out menus were splayed across the floor in fanlike phalanxes. In the middle of the kitchen floor was a rank-smelling can of opened baked beans which even K.’s cat, Soya Sauce, eyed with outrage.

“On that decorating show I watch, they say never to sacrifice your personal mementos and sense of style for the overall aesthetic, even if—”

“Where are your skateboards?”

Christmas had opened up a closet and found it stuffed with duct tape, rolled gauze, and an enormous vacuum cleaner, which had all the technology of a NASA telescope. Boxes of Lean Cuisine and Hungry-Man fell on her head. “Where is your record collection, Ken?”

K. looked at Christmas and frowned. Who was this girl with so much brown hair? It was everywhere. On her sweater, on her face, stuffed behind her ears. Why was she rifling through his apartment? Why was she wearing so many bangles? Bangles. Is that what they were called? What an odd word for bracelets. How very British. Only the British could have a snooty word for bracelets. What skate things was she talking about? What records?

“What records?” he asked cautiously, as if he knew her answer already and was merely testing her. Christmas turned then, from the mess, from the close, fusty food odors of the kitchen. She focused on K.’s vitreous stare.

“What the fuck?” She took a step forward and picked at something dry and scabrous just above K.’s ear. A clean strip of his curly hair had been shaved away for a series of crude incisions.

“Ow!” K. flinched, slapped away her hand. He took a step back, nearly slipping on an open Food magazine featuring a section on crème brûlée recipes. In a trembling voice, one that fought for patience and the concomitant emotion of understanding, K. asked her again, “Who are you?”

Christmas held a tiny thread in her hand, one of K.’s stitches. Attached to it was a pinkish bit of matter the size of a dust mote. Which memories had Bot taken? Which had he left? Where was the part of K. that cried to Bob Seeger songs? Where was the piece that liked the cheese on his open-faced grilled cheese sangers a little puckered? Where was the memory of K.’s drunk mother climbing onstage with a magician so that she could be sliced in two like the assistants with curler-wrought hair, wearing spangly costumes and flesh-colored tights?

K. held onto the cuff of her sweater lamely. His mouth formed a weak “o” as he breathed out his final question. Again, he wanted to know who she was. Instead of answering him, Christmas shook him off, picked up a heavy knife from the kitchen island covered with pizza boxes, ants, and ashtrays, and stabbed her best friend: first, in the liver, then in the kidney.

He bled in her lap until morning. She sat in the dark listening to the people on the first floor shower, then make a noisy breakfast of smoothies and cereal. When she was sure they’d left, she pulled a fleece blanket over K. and left his apartment, her itchy autumn sweater soggy with blood.

She took the Queen car. It was filled with pierced and tattooed indie warriors, drunks, who reeked of urine and mouthwash, and a few finely polished high-earners who’d been too lazy to take their Beamers to the car wash. Christmas hated all of them. She got off at Spadina and walked north, up through the stench and crowds of Chinatown, toward the CAMH, clutching the thick chopping knife in one hand, a lock of K.’s curly brown hair in the other. She was going to finish this now.

Inside the Centre, on the eleventh floor, Dr. Bot unwrapped a sticky blueberry muffin and blew on his Tim Horton’s double-double. He looked outside his window. He could see her, his favorite little rodent. The one who managed to scurry away from his blade, the one who’d always woken up before he could shear that beautiful hair and lacerate that fine-tuned, if lazy, brain. He watched her move into the building with determined steps. Her hair was messed, sweater soiled and lopsided.

I’ve killed a lot of rats to reach you, he thought, as he sat back in his ergonomic chair and waited for her.

The emancipation of Christine Alpert by Nathan Sellyn

Toronto Airport

Isabella Gauthier’s husband Carl was still warm in the grave, and she had forgotten how to live alone. That spring was a rainy one, but those first weeks without him rolled forward so slowly that it seemed fitting they took place underwater. So she ran errands, to keep herself busy. On that day alone she had met with the lawyer, had the car’s oil changed, boxed up all the books in Carl’s office, and eaten dinner at the bowling club. But she still found herself home at 6 with nothing to fill the hours before she might find sleep. So she watched the hockey game with the sound off and a record on, then sat down to read her magazines in his chair by the window. At just before 11, she removed her glasses to rub at her eyes. When she put them back on, she noticed the headlights in the street. Six, on three matching black sedans.

The cars all arrived together, but could only find two parking spots, and so the last in the convoy drove on, beyond the block of town houses and out of Isabella’s sight. The others parked and cut their engines, but their doors remained closed. Tinted windows made it impossible to tell who sat inside. Isabella reached over and turned off her reading light. Yet nothing happened. The sedans lay still, waiting, like a pair of polished steel crocodiles feigning sleep by the riverbank.

After several minutes, footsteps broke the silence of the street. Isabella pressed her face against the glass, but the man to whom the footsteps belonged didn’t require much effort to notice. He wore a tuxedo, and with each streetlamp he passed she gained a better view of both his solid build and the corkscrews of glossy black hair that fell toward his shoulders. His skin had an olive tone, and she guessed him to be of Middle Eastern descent, or perhaps Spanish. As he approached the two cars, their doors opened, and Isabella brought her hand to her mouth.

Four more men emerged, also wearing tuxedos. The first man, without speaking, raised his palm, and they moved toward him. As all five came together they threw their arms around one another in a mass of silent embraces. The first man went to a lawn across the street and looked up at the second-floor window, then made a gesture to the four, who immediately returned to the cars and began pulling black boxes of varying shapes and sizes from their trunks. They too then moved to the lawn. They laid the boxes on the damp grass, then kneeled to open them. When they stood up, each raised a different instrument — one a clarinet, one a violin, one a French horn, and the last a bass. The first man looked at the four, glanced at the window, then looked at the four again and said something Isabella couldn’t hear. And then they began to play, and he began to sing.

Isabella had never had music in her house during childhood, and she knew nothing of opera. So she did not recognize that it was Rossini’s music that quickly woke the entire block, or that it was the Count Almaviva whom the tenor hoped to emulate that evening. But she did know the music was perfect for the moment, a moment that the singer across the street was just then describing as divine. His voice soared to a climax as the window he sang to filled with light, and he dropped to one knee as a woman’s silhouette came to fill it. In this way, on May 25, 1986, Pierre Alvio became engaged to Christine Alpert. Unfortunately, every mountain has a valley.

It was nearly twenty years later, to the very day, that Christine flew to Toronto. A cab arrived at 6 to take her to the airport. She had bought a new suit for the occasion, a jacket and pants set from Anne Taylor. She brought only two bags — a purse to accompany her on the plane and a larger, rolling case that she would check. Inside she had packed a change of clothes, two textbooks, nearly $50,000 in cash, and everything she would require for that evening. Her blond hair was up; an ivory chopstick pierced its bun. Nearly an hour in the bathroom had been required before she felt content with her appearance. The chopstick had finally made the difference.

The driver smiled as she slid into the backseat. He was a black man, probably in his early thirties, with a shaved head and a strange web of scars across the back of his neck. Even at this early hour, sweat poured off him, and his blue cotton dress shirt clung damply around the outline of his body.

“Good morning,” he said. “To the airport?”

“That’s right,” Christine replied. She found herself fully alert.

“Sounds good.” The cab sped through Richmond’s empty morning streets. “Domestic or international?”

“Toronto,” she said. “The center of the universe.” He laughed — a deep, easy sound that caused his neck to bounce, like a toy, atop his shoulders.

“I hate it there,” he said. “Too crazy. Too much noise, too many people. Too big. Reminds me of America, you know? You have some business there?”

“No, not this time. I’m going to meet my husband.”

“Romantic surprise?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I’m going to kill him.”

He laughed again. “That’s very nice of you. My wife finds it easy enough to do that at home. Almost every night, I think she tries.”

Christine exhaled a mock laugh in return, but didn’t say anything as the car turned briefly onto the highway before beginning a long, slow loop toward the airport plaza.

“It was the first place I ever knew in Canada, Toronto,” the driver said.

“Where are you from?”

“Rwanda. In Africa.”

“Oh,” she replied. Canadians, she thought, were so rarely from Canada. But she didn’t know anything about Rwanda, except that it was an unhappy place.

“I came here a long time ago, almost ten years. And Toronto is where they took us. Me and my brother.”

“Do you remember it?” Christine asked. She decided not to inquire about who “they” were — she imagined idealistic young college graduates, dressed in khaki and eager to ignore their parents’ concerns over money, relationships, real life.

“Oh, yes. Maybe, I think, the best day of my life. Do you know, I had never been on an escalator before. So I remember that, my first escalator. Stairs that moved! My mind had never even thought this was possible. Now, I think it sounds ridiculous. But I remember being so scared. To time it right, that first step. My brother pushed me, I think.”

Christine mock laughed again as the driver parked behind a police car, then helped her lift the rolling case from the trunk. It was heavier than it looked, and nearly toppled, but she grabbed the other end just before it crashed to the ground.

“Would you prefer a window or an aisle?” The Air Canada attendant had slender, creamy fingers, and nails that shimmered like oysters. This made Christine ashamed of her own, red-rimmed and bitten down to jagged nubs, and she drew her hands into fists after providing her passport.

“Window, if you have it, please,” she said.

She spent the hour before her departure at the gate, sitting with her legs crossed and watching the wanderings of the suits and bickering families that populate an airport in the morning. A stroller designed for three children wobbled by, conducted by a weary-looking young woman. Taking a turn, it fell, and Christine stood up to help before noticing it was empty. When she sat back down, she realized that her legs were shaking. Not just that — everything below her hips was convulsing, possessed by some violent, unknown force. She pushed her heels into the carpet of the departure lounge, then counted the rapid beats of her heart until the flight began to board. Finally, at somewhere just past 3,000, it did.

But the plane itself was even worse. A mild anxiety had shadowed her for the past week, ever since she first made her discovery. Now, trapped inside the small space, it began to balloon, swelling up and contaminating the captive air. Christine tried to measure her breathing, but it seemed that — even when she opened her mouth so wide that her lips felt stretched against her teeth — her lungs would not fill. She glanced around the business class cabin, worried that someone might notice her silent terror, but no one was even looking in her direction. An attendant came by with glasses of water, and she took one, then closed her eyes and, disgustedly, allowed her mind to wander to the only memory that eased its trembling. Pierre.

She had seen him perform many times, of course. Even before they met, before the dinners of homemade pasta and weekend trips to the island and lazy Saturday mornings spent watching Italian soccer matches in bed. Before she even knew his name, she had seen him on the stage, in his debut. Her twenty-fifth birthday. She had been eager to get out and party — her boyfriend at the time, a rugby player named Eli, a grizzly bear of a man, had arranged a boat cruise in celebration. But attending the opera alongside her father was her birthday tradition, one that extended back to childhood. She loved all music, but preferred opera to concerts, which offered too much time where you were just alone with your thoughts. Without a story to follow, she often found her mind wandering to its darkest corners, spaces filled with thoughts and impulses best left buried.

Pierre was a phenomenon, even from the beginning of his career. However, that first performance was not Christine’s favorite. Pierre was not yet familiar enough with the limits of his own talent. He sought to replace experience with furor, and chased opportunities before the music presented them, trampling the subtlety that would eventually form the hallmark of his style.

Nor did she imagine him as he performed now, reduced to supporting roles and celebrity appearances, obviously well into the twilight of his career. There were exceptions, of course — the odd, understated aria could still illuminate him, causing the entire audience to almost imperceptibly lean forward in their seats, straining to ensure they caught every note. But these moments only sharpened the contrast with his former self, underscoring how the ellipses of his moment in operatic history would not rival its prime.

It was nearly a decade ago, in Bologna, that he had given the performance that her memory anointed as his finest. His hometown, although he had never really lived there, having moved to Canada before beginning school. But when the Teatra Comunale invited him to lead their production of Falstaff, there had been no deliberation necessary. Christine was doing graduate philosophy work at the time, so her summers were open to adventure. A week later they were in Italy, at the beginning of three glorious months.

Of course, the locals hated her — they saw only a shy, mousey Canadian woman who kept a fine Italian boy locked up far away from home. But she spent most of her time in the library anyway, continuing her studies. And for Pierre, it was heaven. He slipped perfectly into the role of the foolish knight, and took the stage each evening with a sense of self-confidence that eluded him in his North American appearances. In character, he became far less troubled than in reality, when an uncontrollable European moodiness would sometimes sweep him without warning.

The performance Christine chose to remember was his penultimate one in Bologna. The opera concludes in a solo. Falstaff, who has just suffered the embarrassment of a beating at the hands of fairies, surrenders in a fugue that the whole world must surely be a farce. With each show, Christine found herself more and more desperate to hear Pierre bring the evening to its climax. She knew, even then, that he would never again be so transcendent. But that night, just as he began, there was an accident. A young oboist, well-known for his fondness for a preperformance drink, had passed out in the pit. A sound like a duck being stepped on brought the music to a halt, and the orchestra mobbed the fallen boy, swiftly bearing him up and over to an exit. The performers on stage looked at each other, suspended in the instant, unsure of how to proceed.

And then Pierre began, without accompaniment, to sing. For the rest of her life, Christine would insist that no single superlative could sufficiently describe the joy that credenza released inside her. She felt suddenly conscious of all the layers of reality around her — that of the audience, the theater, the opera, and the music itself, which seemed like it had been evolving for thousands of years toward each of those perfect notes.

Thinking of that moment — her arms wrapped around her legs, her chin buried between her knees, her feet pulled up onto the tiny seat beneath her — Christine felt herself relax. As the plane lifted above the clouds and began its journey, she closed her eyes and, for the first time in seven days, finally found her way to sleep.

Pearson was a gargantuan airport, far larger than Vancouver’s, and Christine strode through it with her head down. The crowds terrified her. So many people, yet so little talking — airports were one of those places, like subway cars, where the density of solitary travelers created great moving, silent hordes. The thicker the swarm, the more isolating the experience. The baggage concourse seemed to have been built with this in mind — pillars like redwoods were spaced throughout a room the size of several gymnasiums. Christine imagined that the entire population of Toronto could likely fit inside the space. But it would somehow still feel empty. Its walls and roof were all glass and white steel, so that it felt like she had moved not only east, but also forward, through time itself, and arrived at some point in the future, inside the hangar for some monolithic spacecraft that had not yet been invented.

Christine’s bag was one of the first, and she snatched it off the ramp so suddenly that it slipped to the ground with a crack. No one paused their own searches to notice.

The hotel was connected to Terminal 3. The lobby was nearly empty when she arrived. One geriatric traveler sat sleeping at a coffee table before a bowl of green apples, that morning’s paper scattered across his lap. Two young men, barely more than teenagers, stood at the front desk. Christine was only steps away before they noticed her, and thus she had to endure one describing to the other how he had been “whipping his dick like it owed him money.” Red-faced, he turned to her. Ripe, moist acne covered his cheeks, and his blond hair hung in a limp swoop across his forehead.

“Good morning,” he said. “Welcome to the Gateway Hotel.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m checking in, but I have a strange request.” His mouth hung open in reply. “My husband is staying here tonight, and I’d like to surprise him. Would it maybe be possible for me to get into his room without you letting him know I’ve checked in? It’s our wedding anniversary.”

The boy nodded dumbly for a moment, still embarrassed. “Let me see,” he said. “Can I have your name, ma’am?”

“Of course. Alvio. My husband won’t be arriving until this evening.” He busied himself for a moment with a computer monitor that stood below the counter, making rapid jabs at its touch screen. Christine held her breath.

“And your husband’s first name?”

“Pierre.”

The boy’s face scrunched up for a moment, and Christine noticed that the acne extended down to his neck, its pustules thickening within the nourishment of a razor burn. He nodded.

“Looks like it won’t be a problem,” he said, and grabbed a print out from somewhere by his knees. “I’ll give you one key, if you can sign this for me?”

“Thank you so much,” she said. “I really do appreciate it. And, it won’t... He won’t know that I’m here?”

“That’s right. We will, but he’ll have no clue.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

“Uh huh.” The boy slipped her a plastic keycard. “Enjoy your anniversary, ma’am.”

“I will,” she said. “Thank you again. I know this is unusual.”

He smiled. He had a very small head, like the ball atop a needle.

Given that it was only an airport hotel, the room was well furnished. A full desk and two brown leather club chairs surrounded an inviting queen-sized bed. Christine left her purse by the door, rolled her case to the bed, and threw it onto the duvet. She went to the window. Toronto was a distant gray bar graph upon the horizon. It shimmered in the smoggy heat. The airfield spread out below her — a sea of tarmac gradually giving way to endless, ugly squares of yellow grass. From the corner of her eye, she thought she saw something move among its tall, dying blades. Something animal, like a large rat. She imagined what kind of beasts must lurk out there, stranded in the fields between no places, surviving off nothing but insects and each other. But she couldn’t find whatever she had seen again, and so turned to the case on the bed.

Inside, things were just as she’d packed them. Her clothes were wrapped around the cash, and atop them sat a hair gel container. She unscrewed its cap and sniffed — the moist mixture inside smelled like dead fish left out in the sun. Once hemlock dries, its toxicity is severely reduced. But kept damp and ground to a paste, it is lethal, choking off the nervous system like salt in a gas tank. She had discovered it in her studies — it had been used to execute Socrates after his condemnation for impiety. Plato, watching his former teacher’s last moments, carefully took note of how death’s grasp took hold:

Afterwards, the victim and his assassin were forever bound — the red spots that cover the stem of a wild hemlock plant are referred to as the “blood of Socrates.” A misnomer, of course, because there would be no blood. Only the chill, spreading through Pierre’s body like syrup across a pancake.

This was the method upon which Christine had decided, but she had initially wanted something far more vulgar. In those first few days afterwards, her only solace had been the lurid scenarios she concocted in her mind. In her favorite, she has him naked, bound and gagged, with a rope tied fast around his neck. By this she leads him out into the street, where all the audiences he has ever performed for are arranged, jostling with each other for the finest views. The street is covered with the glass of a thousand bottles, and she drags him down it, the shards shredding his skin into pale, wraithlike ribbons. She had once cut her hand open dicing onions, and been amazed at the way the flesh lost all its elasticity, instantly becoming pale, almost alien. She wanted every inch of Pierre to look that way, red and white like a candy cane.

But the hemlock had seemed easier, and would allow her to be somewhere far away by the time it did its work. She opened a water bottle — there were two by the door, above the minibar — and rapped the container against its rim. Pierre would drink one before bed — he did this like a ritual, even at home — and then sleep for the last time. The paste broke off in chunks and spiraled down inside the bottle. Christine shook it until her arm hurt. Within an hour, it would dissolve completely.

She repacked her bag, left the hotel room, and returned to the lobby. The loudspeakers were playing Rush’s “YYZ,” and Christine wondered for a moment both how to spend the rest of her day and whether anyone else listening to the song realized it was a tribute to the building in which they stood. She decided to simply return to the terminal and wait.

After wandering for a little while, she eventually found a spot at a coffee shop in the nexus of Terminal 1. From the ceiling, five colored-glass silhouettes were suspended, their arms and legs fully outstretched, like they were dancing in space. A plaque titled the installation, I Dreamed I Could Fly. But to Christine the figures looked more like they were falling — as if they had tumbled downwards through the glass roof above them and, rather than shattering it, absorbed its material as their own.

Sitting down with a coffee, she began to wait. There was a magazine in her purse, but she didn’t reach for it. Merely watching the crowds move back and forth before her was enough to pass the time. A few years prior, she might have hoped to spot a celebrity. But charter flights were too common these days, and airports had surrendered their status as the great equalizer. The rich and famous no longer had to wait alongside the masses as they endured the twin miseries of lost luggage and invasive security checks.

His flight was due to arrive at 4 in the afternoon, from Boston. At quarter to, Christine returned to the baggage claim. From her purse she drew a scarf and sunglasses — more than enough to disguise someone not being looked for. As she sat down for one last wait, her hands quivering in anticipation, she reached inside her jacket and withdrew the thick sheaf of letters. She had found them a week ago while cleaning his study, tucked behind the Elmore Leonard section of his bookshelf. She’d sat down on the floor and read every last one, racing through their words as if someone had dared her. Index cards, napkins, hotel stationery — the history of his adultery. And at its center a boy, just barely old enough to drink.

She’d read, in the skeletal block printing of a child’s hand, how they’d met at a performance in Los Angeles. Pierre had gotten drunk, and they’d consummated things soon after. Apparently, it was neither’s first time. The letters were so worshipful they were almost odes — the boy felt like he and Pierre shared something unnamable, and then he spent four pages trying to name it. He couldn’t remember the last time a man had made him feel sexy the way Pierre did.

They had been meeting for nearly a year since that first tryst — often here, at Pearson, which was halfway between Vancouver and Atlanta, where the boy lived. Thus, when the letters involuntarily reared their head in her imagination, they were dictated in a candy-sweet Southern drawl. His name was Timothy.

He didn’t want to keep it a secret anymore. He wanted them to move away, to Italy, although he’d never been there. He wanted a villa where they could make love in the sunshine, in the yard, where their lips and tongues and fingers could intertwine slowly, free of the haste of secrecy. He misspelled both definitely and necessary.

But Pierre’s letters were far worse. The casual way he referred to the lovers he’d had in the past — some men she knew, men who’d stayed in their home, men whom she had made dinners for, taken holidays with. The explicit way he described his desires, using words she’d never even heard him speak. And, worst of all, through forty-seven letters, she wasn’t mentioned once.

So Christine knew. When he had called on Wednesday and said he needed to stop in Toronto on the way home from Boston, that there was some consulting he’d been asked to do on a children’s production of the The Magic Flute, she knew where he was going. And she’d come to meet him.

The clock read 4:15, and the flight from Boston read, Arrived. On the carousel before her, bags were beginning to slip down, one after another. Cardboard boxes, bright red Samsonites, huge black rolling trunks. She waited for his, a caramel-colored duffel. But it didn’t appear, and neither did he. At 4:30, the crowd around the conveyor began to thin, and she backed away, worried that she might be noticed. But by quarter to 5, she stood alone. Pierre was not coming — their plans must have changed. Perhaps he and Timothy had just met in Boston, his trip to Toronto entirely a ruse. Or he had gone to Atlanta, and even now they were locked in some squalid bachelor apartment, soaping each other in its phone-booth shower.

The luggage for the next flight, from Minnesota, had begun to descend. Christine paced, unsure what to do next. The bags were identical to those that had come before — the same boxes, the same Samsonites, the same trunks. Each was a different life, she realized — each had a separate owner, with its own history, all moving independently of one another. And this made her feel very small, as if she was nothing more than a bag herself — inside an airport, inside a city, inside the civilization that must have cities. Exhaustion swept over her. Stumbling, she made her way back to the hotel.

In the elevator up to the room, Christine slumped against the mirror. She could go anywhere in the world from here — the cash was in her bag at her feet. All futures were only a ticket away. But she felt sapped of direction — the Christine before her in the mirror looked old. Unwanted. Impotent. On the fourteenth floor, the doors opened. Dragging a hand along the wall and her tiny case behind her, her eyes half closed, she stumbled to the room.

A hanger dangled around the knob, something she didn’t remember having put there herself. She picked it up — Ne Pas Deranger, it read. French. She took a step back. Men’s voices came from inside the room. Laughter. Deep inside her, a rage awoke. This was not enough — it was too passive. She wanted him to know. She wanted the boy to die, to leave him stranded and alone. She wanted to fly him to the middle of the desert and then abandon him, with nothing but the knowledge of his own infidelity to wait with him for death. Socrates’s death was far more than he deserved. Fist clenched, she raised her hand, ready to knock. But something stayed her hand, forced it down, to the hanger. She flipped it to its English side. Do Not Disturb. And then she left.

On her way back through the lobby, she stopped at the front desk. A new, more handsome boy had replaced the one from that afternoon. Smiling, she asked him to send a bottle of champagne to her husband’s room. And then she flew away.