Toronto Noir

Tom by Andrew Pyper

Queen West

She moved to Toronto from one of the smaller cities a couple hours west along the 401, a place with a borrowed, European name that embarrassed her, so that now when people ask where she’s from she shrinks it in her mind until it’s only a country crossroads, a pair of stop signs with white crosses in the ditch to tally the fatal car accidents, and answers, “It’s so tiny. You wouldn’t have heard of it.”

The only thing she’s ever done for money is serve men drinks in bars. Just men, because the bars have always been strip bars. “It’s easier,” she explains whenever it is suggested she wait tables in a proper restaurant instead. By easier she means there are rules in strip bars she has come to depend on. The men keep their eyes on the dancers, their hands to themselves, and tip foolishly well. No description of the chef’s special features, no flirty walk through the wine list recommendations. No female, diamond-necklaced customers giving her looks meant to remind her that what she is doing now is all she is. Will ever be.

She is twenty-six years old.

In moving to the city, she’d planned on doing something else. She wasn’t sure what. They shot a lot of movies in Toronto. Could there be a job for her on set? Wardrobe? Makeup? Fetching the director’s cappuccino? Whenever she walked by a movie shoot on her way to work, most of the people seemed to be standing around drinking coffee, or mumbling into walkie-talkies, or stifling yawns against the backs of their hands. That was moviemaking? She could do that.

But what was she doing? What employment was she walking to as she passed these boring yet still somehow glamorous location shoots? She was on her way to serve men drinks in a strip bar.

Her five nights a week at For Your Eyes Only is temporary. A cash grab to pay for the time required to settle in, make some connections. Soon she’ll quit. Soon, her real Toronto life will begin. This is what she told herself, and what she mostly believed.

In those moments when doubt crept in — when she felt she might as well be back in that smaller city with the name she was too embarrassed to say aloud — she had one consolation to return to. She may be a strip bar waitress, but she wasn’t a stripper. She’d been asked many times and always refused. This was her sustaining source of pride, of identity. She wasn’t a woman who showed her body for money. Not looked at. Not an object.

When she delivered trays of beer and rye-and-gingers to men in the places she worked in, they rarely made eye contact. Sometimes this was because they were absorbed in the entertainments on offer, but mostly because, for them, she wasn’t there. It was skin they wanted, the uninterrupted study of hidden parts, and in that room — windowless, overpriced, smelling of baby oil — they were freely allowed to watch. It made her feel invisible.

But what if you started feeling invisible all the time? Not just in strip bars, but on the street, standing before the bathroom mirror? Her answer was to move to Toronto, rent a studio apartment on Queen West with a back alley entrance, join the millions of others pursuing fame, breakthroughs, love, matters of real importance.

So far it hadn’t helped. If anything, the city had only perfected her invisibility. There were so many more people not to notice her. So many more shared looks or Good mornings or acknowledging smiles that didn’t occur.

It’s because of this that, when his face appeared at her window, she thinks he is someone she knows. After only three weeks in Toronto she’s learned that strangers keep their eyes to themselves.

Her apartment — just a room, really, with a fridge-sized toilet and kitchenette peppered with mouse turds — has only one window. She kids herself that she chose the place for the view. A brick wall, ten feet away on the other side of the alley, plastered with graffiti tags and a pleading, unheeded homeowner’s message: Hobos! Please don’t poo here! This is the small square of world she can see from her mattress on the floor. It is ugly. But she’s always thought the truly big cities, the real ones, are meant to be ugly. It is the sort of apartment and the sort of view that, down the line, she will look back on as Where She Started From. She reminds herself not to replace “shit” for “poo” in the retelling.

It is lying on this mattress, staring through this window after a slow Tuesday at For Your Eyes Only, that she sees him. The top of his head at first. And then, as he rises higher, the whole of his face. Because she is almost asleep, she spends some moments trying to fix him in her mind as an introduction to a dream. The pause allows her to get a good look at him. And for him to see her too. Only later will she realize that he would have noticed that her eyes were open, her hand inches from her phone, and that this hadn’t stopped him from looking.

Of the different kinds of men who visit strip clubs, she would guess the man at the window belonged to the Ones Who Don’t Want to Be Here. Men forced to entertain visiting business associates, a shy friend dragged along to a stag party. These men watch the dancers too, but in the way the visitors to the AGO studied the Rothkos and Moores and Carrs. They are art appreciators, not perverts. This was what they intend to convey with their thoughtful squints, their chins held in their palms.

Yet here this man is, staring at her in her bed. And she isn’t art. She is a woman wearing nothing but bikini underwear (it is hot, the room is always hot). And he is invading her privacy. He is breaking the law. He is a creep.

Even as she sits straight and pulls the sheet up to cover her breasts, she takes note of his features for the composite sketch the police will ask her to help make of him when she calls this in. White. Thirties. Prematurely gray hair cut preppily short. A face belonging to someone who, if he were to open the door for her or lend a hand lugging her groceries onto the streetcar, she’d think, There goes the last of the good guys. Good with kids, dependable, few vices, if any. A little sexy, but not dangerously so, not someone who’d have to hurt you to excite you. A man to marry if you were lucky.

And money. His face says money. Born with it, educated to make more of it, would always have it. She’d never gone out with anyone for whom these things weren’t an issue. She’d never gone out with anyone like him.

She picks up the phone. Starts dialing 911. The face falls away.

Leaning out the window, she hears him round the corner of her building, but doesn’t catch sight of him. Just the pebbly scrape of his leather-soled steps. And below her window the three-legged chair he’d pulled out of the garbage to stand on.

She doesn’t press the last digit that would bring this moment to official attention. Instead she turns the phone off, puts on a T-shirt, and returns to lie on her mattress. She’s scared. But there is a prickling sweat on her forehead and neck that has nothing to do with fear. The man at the window reminded her that she is not actually invisible. And with visibility has come a rush of blood to her extremities, a lead weight in her limbs. She’s so heavily, uncomfortably alive-feeling that, for a time, she’s not sure she can move.

She doesn’t call the police that night, or the next morning, or at any other of the hundred points over the twenty-four hours that follow the Peeping Tom’s visit when she’s told herself, I have to do something. Because it runs against what she regards as her plucky, take-no-shit nature, she wonders why she doesn’t. The theory she tries to situate at the top of possibilities is that she has deemed the guy as nonthreatening, a corporate frat boy she can easily handle if he ever returns. He hadn’t looked like a rapist (though she knows better than to judge these things on looks alone). But this isn’t the reason she doesn’t call the police. Nor is it because she is curious about him, or suspects her physical description wouldn’t be enough to go on, or that his watching her turned her on. It’s because she thought this was the sort of incident one experienced in the city. Complaint wasn’t part of the bargain. A cheap apartment off a crack-pipe-and-needle alley, a neighborhood known for its human stew of drugs and punks and artists and out-patients off their meds: A face at her window is the least she should expect living here.

He doesn’t return to her window that night. Or the next. But on Thursday, waking with a People still bent between her fingers, he’s there.

This time she screams. A bubbly, uncertain utterance that takes a moment to find itself, before coming out as a full-throated horror movie declaration. It makes him disappear. Yet when she goes to the window, expecting to catch him in hasty retreat, he is merely backstepping down the alley, facing her, taking his time. A kid being called away from joining the line for a roller coaster.

Over the next week, she catches him twice. Which means that he has come more often than this and she has slept through it. Or perhaps not. She believes she is able to detect his presence no matter how deep in slumber he might find her. They are connected, the two of them. Not romantically, nothing like that. In fact, he comes pretty close to disgusting her. His unmet need. The passivity. The lies he must be telling someone. Maybe it’s all her experience being around watchers and the watched. Whatever it is, without liking him, he’s become hers.

She calls him Tom.

It’s only when she spots him that she realizes that she was looking for him. Walking ahead of her along King Street near Bay. A suit among suits. She knows it’s him from the shape of the back of his head, his swimmer’s shoulders, the ambling steps that carry him faster than would appear possible: the parts of him she sees each time he makes his back alley getaway.

He hasn’t seen her. She had been making her way along the opposite side of the street. Her ostensible purpose was a time-killing wander that would lead her down into the underground malls for a bit of shopping (a new bra) and maybe lunch in the food court (nasty Chinese) before her shift at For Your Eyes Only. But she knows she has no reason to be down here with the traders and lawyers and bankers, other than to see if Tom is one of them. For her to see him for a change.

So you’ve got a thing for street meat, do you? she thinks, trailing him after he buys a hot dog from a vendor on the corner. Maybe that’s what I am to you. Street meat.

Tom stops to wave to some others at the far side of the Toronto-Dominion building’s broad concourse. A group of men and women laughing at some shared joke that Tom’s appearance has reminded them of. Friends. They’re just office pals, she feels, but he would have plenty of others. University drinking buddies, childhood mates, close siblings. His long list of associations tests the memory of his BlackBerry’s address book. It makes her wonder about her own friend count, who she would call first if she had to confess something terrible or share lottery-winning news. Soon this question becomes who she would call at all.

He moves on, wiping the mustard off his hands, tossing the soiled napkin into a trash container in a graceful, basketball free throw. He joins the others funneling into the building, people moving purposefully toward their places on the sixty floors above built slim and black as a domino tile.

A truck passes on the street between them. When she can see into the glass-walled lobby again, Tom is gone.

That could have been it. A “chance sighting” that provided her with some small measure of private revenge, a turning of tables. But instead of letting go of Tom, she starts to follow him. Even after several days pass without catching him at her window, she spends her free afternoons and days off shadowing his movements, noting what he eats for lunch, the routines and schedules that make up his life. He’s a lawyer. Married (a gold band), with a family (a baby seat in the back of his Mercedes). He golfs, but she suspects this is mainly in a client-entertaining capacity. A big tipper. As far as she can tell, hers is the only bedroom he peeps into. Then again, because she works most nights, she couldn’t say this for sure.

It’s just a game she’s playing, a tit-for-tat, which prevents her hobby from being a violation or strange or sad, though she can’t help wondering if it is some or all of these things. She’s getting to know him. Somehow the anonymity of their relationship only makes it more intimate, in the way that all shames are intimate.

She continues to wait for him to appear at her window. Yet over the days — and then the weeks — of her surveillance, he doesn’t return. It’s ridiculous, she knows, but she can’t help feeling a rejection every night she stays up late, her eyes on the wall across the alley, waiting for him to break the spell of invisibility that’s been cast upon her. She’s angry with him, but her anger is not for his perversity, but his rudeness. She’s been twice wronged. Once for peeping on her, and twice for not keeping his promise to return.

On her day off, she waits in an idling taxi on King Street, and when his car emerges from the underground parking lot, she instructs the driver to follow him.

She’d expected this part — the car chase through the late rush hour traffic — to feel like a movie. Instead, it makes her wonder if she’s going to throw up out her open window. It’s sick, and it makes her feel sick. But she can’t stop. Can’t, meaning won’t. Can’t, meaning something portentous and life-altering has been deemed to hinge on where Tom’s journey ends, and what happens when he arrives there.

They head north up Bathurst. Past the gaggle of squeegee kids skipping suicidally through the lanes like filthy elves at Queen, the bleary-eyed hospital workers in their scrubs at Dundas, and up beyond Honest Ed’s, where downtown gives way to leafy, residential blocks in which, when she was first looking for a place to live, she’d viewed a dozen basement apartments she couldn’t afford.

The Mercedes takes a right. She tells the cab driver to make the same turn. A couple blocks on, across from the park on Albany that borders a huge, seemingly half-finished stone church, Tom parks at the curb. She tells the driver to stop.

“Are you, like, a detective or something?” the driver asks her. What she’s doing suddenly gives her a thrill. This isn’t some lonely, pointless quest after all. It’s a job.

“Yes,” she says. “A private investigator, actually.”

She watches as Tom gets out of his car and walks up to the front door of his house. One of the stately, renovated Victorians that tend to be featured in the Real Estate section of the Globe, the only pages she looks through sitting at For Your Eyes Only’s bar as she finishes a coffee before her shift. A tasteful home with historical quirks: original stained glass, tin ceilings. Located in the Annex, a neighborhood she has been told was once a ghetto for students and immigrants and hippies, but is now an enclave of million-plus properties for those professionals not quite ready for their graduation to Rosedale or Forest Hill. The sort of house she has literally dreamed of. And in these dreams, a man like Tom has been there with her, kissing the back of her neck as she tends to the fresh-cut flowers he has brought home for her.

Once he’s gone inside, she waits for the taxi to leave and then, as though the idea has only just occurred to her, she walks to the parked Mercedes. She is alone on the shady street. A dog yips in a neighbor’s yard. More distant, a child practices piano scales.

She bends at the waist and trots across Tom’s lawn, arms swinging closely at her sides, as if a soldier making a smaller target of herself in the midst of cross fire. The grass under her feet has been recently mowed. After her weeks of breathing Queen Street alley flavors — rank garbage, hobo poo — the smell is lush, exotic.

Around the side of Tom’s house she lowers herself to her knees. Crawls into the flowerbed beneath the living room’s bay window. It strikes her that her fear of turning around, of not seeing what she’s come here to see, is greater than her fear of being discovered. She is a private investigator. But somehow it is her own privacy, not Tom’s, that she is investigating.

Slowly, inch by inch, she raises her head. Holds her breath.

An empty room. Traditionally furnished, ancient rugs on the hardwood. But this oldness is offset by the abstract canvases on the walls, a pair of cubist nudes. A room that speaks of a family’s generational hand-me-downs — the slightly frayed sofa and chairs — as well as the sensual vitality of the current inhabitants. She hadn’t seen the living room precisely this way in her dreams, but now that she has seen it, she knows this is how she will start dreaming of it.

A child totters into the room. Followed by her mother, laughing after her. The child is Pampers-ad cute, the mother clear-skinned, tread-milled. Tom’s wife. A woman she would like to study further if it weren’t for the arrival of Tom himself.

He is laughing too. His daughter is at the age of still learning to walk but believing she already can, so that her movements are a comical series of lurches and grabs. He comes to stand in the middle of the room. His wife chasing after the little girl, both circling the coffee table.

Happiness. This is what she’d title this picture, if it was a picture. For if these people aren’t happy, if what they have and share and can look forward to doesn’t make them happy, then who is?

Tom turns. And sees her.

Neither of them move. Neither speak. Tom’s wife and daughter continue to swirl around him like an eddying tide upon a rock. He’s not surprised to see her there looking in his window. It’s as though he’s been expecting her for some time.

She will debate this point later, when she remembers this moment and stretches it out, mining its details. It may only be her imagination, but her vision is good, her view unobscured. There is only a sheet of glass and fifteen feet of air-conditioned space between them, which just makes her more certain. He smiles at her.

He is rich. And she is poor.

She realizes this only now, her feet sinking in the pungent mulch of his flowerbed. Of course she’s always been aware that she doesn’t have money, but looking into Tom’s home, she sees that she will likely never have it. And not just money, but all the tailored, meaningful, identity-making things she’s dreamed of one day acquiring. Opportunities, epiphanies. An escalation of jobs on one of the movie sets where Toronto is made to look like New York. All the good things that aren’t destined for her.

She stares at Tom, and he at her. His eyes tell her something. How moving to Toronto from wherever she came from could open up a world, but just as easily expose her existing world as the limited, luckless thing she sometimes fears it is. She thought the two of them were connected, but she was wrong. They are strangers. As it is for the patrons at For Your Eyes Only, the one rule of living here, in a real city, is that she can look at the lives of others, but not touch.

A taste of honey by Kim Moritsugu

St. Lawrence Market

I thought about calling in sick today because of the big-whoop movie shoot that’s going on, the shoot that everyone in the South Market Building, the whole neighborhood it seems, is so stoked about. But if I avoided every person, casting director, film production outfit, or theater company that has ever rejected me for a part, I’d never go anywhere or see anyone. And if I stayed home, I’d have that shitty not-invited-to-the-cool-party feeling, even though the shoot won’t be cool, or a party. I’d just spend the day writing angry thoughts in my journal anyway, and listening to my stomach acid churn, and the self-help books say I should accept the successes of others in the face of my defeats, not obsess about or dwell on them, so fine, I’ll go to work.

This way, I can hear the banal and inane comments live — from Karen, my boss at The Honey Hut, and Nick from the cheese shop across the way, and Nadia from the butcher counter — about how they saw Denzel and Scarlett in person and how short they are and how there’s an awful lot of waiting around in the moviemaking business, isn’t there? They’ll say: But you know that already, don’t you, Jen, because of that movie you were in. With Mark Wahlberg, wasn’t it? When you were listed in the credits as “Girl in Disco?” That was funny. You were good in it, though too bad about the makeup job they did on you. And that leather bikini top you had to wear. How come you aren’t in this movie, didn’t you audition for it?

I might as well sooner rather than later give them a bullshit line about how I guess I didn’t get the part because I wasn’t right for it. Rather than because I’m a big motherfucking loser who, when I heard that the call was for an “office receptionist with attitude,” thought the role was so right for me, would be so easy to play, that I made the mistake of getting my hopes up, when how many times have I sworn never to hope again, never to go into an audition expecting anything at all? N-to-the-fucking-power-of-n times is how many.

I ride my bike downtown like always, and coast along Market Street, past the lineup of camera trucks and movie trailers staked out by a row of orange pylons. When I park the bike at my usual stand and lock it up between two big rigs, I kind of hope some crew guy will emerge and tell me I can’t leave it there, so I can get testy with him, and maybe start a yelling match, but no such luck. I light up my prework cigarette, step over the stream of electrical cables winding across the sidewalk, settle into my smoking spot under an overhang, and hear a squeaky young voice say, “Jen? Is that you?”

Coming at me is a short, thin girl in a floaty top and tight jeans tucked into stiletto-heeled boots. Her too-long-to-be-real curly hair extensions coil and loop over and around her pert tits. What is she... eighteen? And how the hell does she know me?

“It’s me, Honey Cooper,” she says. She has a pretty face, all blue eyes and cute upturned nose and glowing skin and curly eyelashes. “From the Ryerson theater program? We met when you came out to speak to my acting class last year, and you said it was funny my name was Honey because you worked at a honey place at St. Lawrence Market? Hey, that’s where we are now. Small world or what?”

Christ, I met her when my old drama prof invited me to speak to the naïve little undergrads on “Hard Truths about the Acting Life.” The topic was the prof’s idea, not mine, though I had no trouble spinning cautionary tales about the profession based on my own bitter experience. This kid must be one of the suck-ups who approached me after my talk and claimed to be a fan of my work, which consisted, ten years post-graduation, of twenty measly acting credits. Still consists of twenty measly credits a year later, fuck me.

I say, “Is Honey your real name?”

“No, it’s a nickname that my grandma gave me. When I was two years old, she thought I was so sweet that—”

“Did you graduate from the Ryerson program yet?”

“Um, yeah, last spring. And I’ve been auditioning like crazy for anything and everything ever since, like you said people have to do when they’re starting out. I want to thank you for giving that talk, by the way. It made such a difference to get the inside story on the acting life, to know what to expect, how hard it would be to break through.” She tilts her head and smiles. Fetchingly. “You were so inspiring!”

This is hard to believe, considering that I’d ended my talk by telling the class that if I’d known when I was at their age and stage what I knew ten years later, I would have given up on acting, and set my sights instead on marrying some rich guy who could bankroll a comfortable lifestyle. I was dead serious, but the class laughed as if I were joking.

I muster up some fake interest in Honey’s career. “And how’s it going? Have you done any commercials yet? My first job was in a commercial. For tampons.”

“I remember that one! Where you wore little white shorts and rode a bicycle? That was a classic! But hey, I’m doing better than that, because this is my first job, today, here. Is that wild or what?”

The dreadful meaning of her words seeps into my brain and clogs it up so that I can only repeat, “Today? Here?”

“In the movie that’s shooting up the street! It’s such a great story how I got the part: I auditioned to be a receptionist, and I was mad too young for it, but they liked me so much they created a character in the movie, just for me!” Her eyes dance while she tells this story. The Macarena, it looks like, but still.

A vein in my forehead starts to throb, and I say, dully, “Just for you.”

“Isn’t that amazing? I play a babysitter who looks after Denzel’s kids. The scene we’re doing today is where I take the kids downtown to meet their dad at his office and we witness a shooting on the street that leads to the whole home invasion thing that happens later when I get caught in the cross fire and die.”

“You die? That’s great.” Her eyes stop dancing and I say, “For the acting opportunity, I mean. Death scenes can be real career-makers.”

“I know! But I have to get through this week’s scenes first, and I’m so nervous! What if I sweat all over Denzel when I meet him today? Or faint on him. Wouldn’t that be the worst?” She emits merry peals of laughter at this point, I’m not sure why — because she’s a merry young soul, maybe. I, meanwhile, struggle to swallow the anti-merriment bile that has surged into my mouth.

I can still taste it when an assistant dude comes out of a trailer and calls to Honey that she’s needed inside.

“Hey, break a leg,” I say, in all sincerity.

“Thanks. I’m so glad I ran into you. You’re, like, my role model or whatever. Come visit me on-set when you have a lunch break?”

I’m in no mood for improv, but I feign regret. “I don’t know if I’ll get a break. The Honey Hut gets busy at this time of day.”

“Please? You could coach me. Give me some more of your wise advice.”

“Tell you what: I’ll try.” Sure, I could coach her a little. Or I could cut the bitch. Either one.

My boss Karen is all agog when I go inside and tell her I ran into someone I know who has a part in the movie. She says, “Could she introduce us to Denzel, do you think?”

“I wouldn’t ask her to.”

“Because it would be uncool, you mean?”

“Beyond uncool.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Never mind. What do you say we put out the lavender honey to sample?”

She touches my arm with her bony hand. “I meant that I’m sorry I wasn’t sensitive to how awkward it might be for you to work today, with the shoot going on outside.”

Awkward? Before Honey popped up, the situation was awkward. Now, it’s mortifying, enraging, soul-destroying. I try to breathe deeply and evenly, which is difficult when my forehead vein is throbbing to the beat of a goddamned rock band. When I can speak without spitting, I say, “So, lavender honey, then?”

Karen shakes her head. “I don’t know how you can stand a life in show business.”

Me either.

She says, “It must be so difficult, what with the constant rejection and being passed over in favor of people who are probably no more talented than you are.”

Probably? What the fuck’s with probably?

I spend the next few hours minding the hut, serving customers, and thinking of ways to harm Honey, remove her from the local talent pool. The butter knives we use to spread honey on crackers don’t have sharp edges, but applied with force at the right angle, they could draw blood. The honey walnut cake that we serve could do damage if Honey has an allergy to nuts, but what are the odds of that? I’m picturing taking the end of one of her hair extensions, winding it around the electric juicer we use to squeeze the lemons for honey lemonade, and turning the power to high, when Honey herself shows up at the stand, in full makeup.

She says, “They don’t need me on the set for at least another hour, so I thought I’d come over and visit. Hey, this place is cute!”

Karen begs to be introduced, asks Honey a flurry of questions about Denzel, and gives her a free jar of our finest orange-blossom honey. Honey proclaims delight at this gift, the two of them chat away, and Karen doesn’t read my eyes when I use them to communicate volumes — or even a haiku — about how I want Honey to go away, not linger. “Take a break with Honey, go outside, get some fresh air,” Karen says. “I’ll be fine here.”

I take Honey out to the second-floor veranda on the south side of the building, a picnic tabled area with a less-than-enchanting view of the Gardiner Expressway, an affordable housing complex, and the occasional homeless person shambling by with a shopping buggy. She refuses my offer of a cigarette, I light mine up anyway, and I let the wind blow my exhaled smoke in her direction, but she doesn’t flinch, only retrieves a few pages of script from her bag and says, “Would you mind running lines with me? Pretty please?”

Maybe I can hold up the train of her gown when she goes onstage at the Academy Awards to collect her first Oscar too.

The scene she wants to rehearse calls for her to walk along the shop-lined street, hand-in-hand with two adorable children, singing “The Wheels on the Bus” (Is this cloying and cliché enough, this setup for violence? I can already hear how the scene will be scored, with pingy piano music in a minor key), when a street thug with a gun pops out of a picturesque doorway and, right before the traumatized eyes of the kids and babysitter, shoots dead a gangster who is getting into a limo.

To entertain myself and help Honey get a feel for the material, I could do the voices of the characters in the scene, alternate my pitch and cadence between those of the kids and the adults. But reading the lines in a flat, uninflected tone, like casting directors do whenever I audition, is way more fun. Especially if doing so might freak Honey out or throw her off.

She does better than I thought she would reciting her lines opposite my monotone. She’s not stellar, but not terrible either. The consolation is that she’s not as confident in her line readings as someone in her charmed position could be.

After we’ve run through the scene, she bites her lip and says, “What do you think? Am I underplaying it too much? Should I go bigger?”

I’m stubbing out my cigarette when she says this — not on her arm, because a cigarette burn would not render her unemployable or even unconscious, and scars can be covered with makeup, so why bother? — but on the tarmac floor of the veranda. I grind out the butt, and realize there’s more than one way to end her career before it starts.

I say, “Now that you mention it, I think you could go bigger. In fact, you should. Definitely. Good idea.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I’ll let you in on a trade secret: You know that crap about how in the theater you have to play to the upper balcony, but in the movies you’re supposed to be low-key in close-up?”

She blanches under the heavy makeup. “That’s crap?”

“I’m afraid so. Especially for someone like you who’s petite to begin with — what height are you without heels, four-foot-eleven?”

“I’m five-three!”

“Same thing. And you’re so young too. If you underplay your part, you’ll be invisible. Which is great if you want no one to notice you in the role, if you want to let the scene be about the other actors and the stunts and the special effects.”

“I don’t want that. This is supposed to be my big break!”

“Then make yourself memorable.”

“Let’s try the scene again,” she says, “and I’ll play it up.”

She’s such an easy mark, I almost feel bad about what I’m doing to her. Almost.

Karen slips out during the afternoon to watch what she can of the shoot from behind a barricade on the street, and reports back that multiple takes were done of a scene that involved Honey. When I press her for details, like were Honey’s reactions the focus of the retakes, and did Honey seem to be overacting, she says she doesn’t know, the whole setup was a little confusing. Also disappointing, because boo-hoo, she didn’t see Denzel.

I force myself to saunter outside rather than run when I emerge from the Market Building after 6, after we’ve closed up shop. Dusk has fallen, Front Street rumbles with rush hour traffic, and on the side streets, crew people are packing and loading up equipment. The day’s shooting is done then, but is Honey also finished? As in fired? I’m starting to think she’s skipped off without saying goodbye, when she comes out of a trailer in her street clothes, her bag over her shoulder, a tissue in her hand. Could she be wiping her eyes? She is wiping them. Fucking A.

I erase the diabolical smile that has come out to play on my face, replace it with a picture of innocent concern, wave, and say, “Hey. How’d the day go? You still alive?”

In answer, she hugs me. Right there on the sidewalk, in the middle of the evening foot traffic, in front of random strangers rushing by on their way home from work or going out to dinner and the theater. She hugs me, and she laughs her annoying merry laugh, peals and all. “It went well, thanks to you! The director loved my energy and passion — he said my performance was perfect for the high drama of the scene. He liked it so much he got the kids to ramp up their reactions to match mine and did lots of takes. And get this: Denzel said that he’d never seen anyone act so well in their first movie role, that I was a natural!”

Her energy and passion? Please. My chest feels tight and my eyes ache. How much good luck — how much of my goddamned share of all the goddamned available luck in the universe — does this little twat have? I’m about to start sobbing, that or stabbing, but all I can say, stupidly, is, “I thought you were crying just now. You were wiping your eyes.”

“I was trying to remove some of the makeup they used to cover my freckles. But who cares if I look pancakey? I’m a real movie actress now, woo-hoo! Want to come for a drink with me and celebrate? I’m meeting some friends at a pub around the corner.” She steps over to the curb, then turns back to where I stand, stunned, behind her. “Come,” she says. “Join us. Come and be happy for me.”

A flower truck, high and wide and white, accelerates along the street behind her, gunning to make the green light. I don’t have to shove her. A good nudge — like a hurrying pedestrian could give her by accident — is enough to topple her, in her silly high-heeled boots, over the curb, onto the road, into the path of the oncoming truck, all five tons of it.

She died instantly — I know, because I stuck around long enough to watch some guy who’d seen too many medical shows on television run over and feel for a pulse on the neck of her mangled body after the truck driver had slammed on his brakes (and dragged Honey another ten yards) and jumped out of the cab and freaked out big-time. “Call 911!” the guy directed an onlooker, and he bent down to listen for breathing, to see if her chest was moving. A minute later, when he stepped back from her corpse, he said, “Does anyone know this girl? Was anyone with her? Who saw what happened?” People spoke all at once, no one noticed me, the truck driver wailed on, and I walked away, unlocked my bike, plugged in my headphones, and rode home, let music drown out the sounds of the crash that still reverberated in my ears: the screech of the brakes, the dull thud of the impact, the crunch and squeal of metal bending.

Tomorrow I’ll go to work and Karen will be all teary — she’s boring that way. She’ll ramble on in a quavery voice about how she can’t believe such a tragic accident happened to someone so young and sweet whose life was so full of promise and isn’t it horrible? And I’ll say yeah, I heard it on the local news this morning, what a shock: It is horrible.

What I won’t say is how horribly unfair it was for Honey to make it without paying her dues, without suffering for her art, without living, every night and day, for years and years, with self-doubt and self-loathing and shame. I won’t say that for Honey to do so well, so easily, was not just undeserved, but not right. Not right at all.

I’ll let Karen pat me on the arm in the way she does that makes my flesh crawl, and I’ll change the subject, talk about Denzel. Later, when I take my smoke break, I’ll call my agent and tell her enough with sending me out for the ingenue gigs or to play young moms, I’d like to start reading for character roles, for parts that are a bit more meaty and complex and nuanced. I don’t want to get my hopes up — and I won’t, because I know better than to be optimistic, after all this time, after everything I’ve been through — but I think I could do justice to that kind of shit. I really do.

Stalling by Emily Schultz

Parkdale

Apparently, Bonnie Brown-Switzel couldn’t shop for an affair. One week away from their third anniversary, she kissed Mr. Switzel (as she affectionately called him) goodbye as they both left the loft. She set off through the city to do her errands — grocery list neatly tucked inside an angora mitten. As she headed west, each step her Camper boots took felt extra long. The February street smelled like wet newspaper. The wind carried a rancid whiff from the tucked-away abattoir that kept their condo affordable. Bonnie felt like she was carrying the idea of the affair inside her mouth — words she couldn’t say. She bit her lips to keep it inside, in case it should fall out onto the snow, only to get picked up by the wrong person.

The boy at the Price Chopper who helped her get the olive oil from the top shelf — “No, the virgin” — had long pink fingers that limped across the labels self-consciously. Two distinct spots of red blazed on his cheeks. His blush was endearing, as were the pale thick lashes that fused above his large eyes. The bone nubs in the back of his pants as he stretched for the proper brand and bottle were irksome. Bonnie urged the dizzy-wheeled cart away.

She would have to take more decisive action. The last flirtation she’d had was five years ago, with an actor, genteel and passionate, the type who noticed everything, the type who wooed. On her way out of the store, she passed by the karaoke bar where they had met, the black and silver Applause sign still propped up in the front window beside the stage. Five years. Post-marriage, it seemed seven times as long. Not that she had anything to complain about. As marriages went, hers was supine. They were only three years in, but they had passed without quarrel. The memory of the long-past flirtation nibbled at her mind.

Drawn out again, after ten minutes of walking — farther into the worn-down and newly built-up neighborhood of Parkdale — she turned onto the street where he lived. She didn’t know which house the actor lived in, only the street. It had been so long, and she had never been inside; declined his offer coyly when they’d shared a cab, he stumbling out, she traveling on to the safety of Roncesvalles and High Park. Now, she pulled a tube of Mac from her pocket and coated her mouth without stopping. Her boots punched semi-circular tracks into the snow. Today she enjoyed the tap-tap-tap sounds. Today she wanted to be noticed.

What would she say if they met? There was plenty of likelihood, after all — this was his street, and he was not the type to hold a day job. She stopped in front of an old Skylark, the color of sky. This was his car, she was sure of it, it must be. He hadn’t had one then, but time had passed. If he had a car, it would be this one. She peered in its windows for hints of its owner — only a snow-scraper and a portable stainless-steel coffee mug — and glanced at the houses on either side. She recalled the strength of the limbs beneath his pressed shirt, his muttony chest, the tab of fur that showed between his clavicles, the rosemary-wine smell of him through cotton-wool. Her heart accelerated. She was almost at the end of his street. If she were to meet him, it must happen now.

A woman was coming toward her along the same sidewalk, a black Paris-style shawl around her shoulders. Could she have an affair with a woman?

They shared a look and the woman smiled as they passed one another. Bonnie had no idea the woman was actually his sister-in-law, that she was, at that moment, taking him cough syrup and throat lozenges, that he stood behind one of the tall glaring windows, not recognizing the swaying tendrils of Bonnie’s hair, seeing her only as a man sees two pretty women together on the street, that he watched the exchange with one hand in a striped flannel pocket and the other reaching suddenly to grope himself — in spite of his sickness — quickly, without release.

Before Volker Gruber arrived in North America, he had imagined a never-ending party: women who were easy and sophisticated, men who would share their drugs, their musical equipment, their couches. Instead, he had to work all week just to afford going to one of the few meager parties. The women never said hello and the beer was weak. He quickly learned that in Canada anything before 1979 was irrelevant; in a way, it was one of the things that had attracted him, the newness. But since his arrival, he found himself missing Germany more and more. He felt it most under the fluorescent glare of grocery aisles, trying unsuccessfully to find words he knew.

Volker watched the stock boy strain upward for a bottle of oil, jerkily deliver it to the woman with the dark hair and even darker halos around her eyes. The movements of the people accompanied a strange rhythm in Volker’s ears, pumped from headphones. He left his sweatshirt hood up, the headphones like a secret antenna connecting him to the outside world though a constant pulse. Volker pushed his cart up aisle three to Kruder and Dorfmeister, scooped out several bags of oatmeal and sugar, visited the meat counter, lifted potatoes and onions from produce. The cheeses were atrocious, he wouldn’t even go near them. That required a special trip to Kensington Market.

On the streetcar, a young blonde sat in the single scoop seat across from him. She was wearing a dark-blue hoodie, the cuffs punctured with holes through which her thumbs looped. Her silver fingernails keyed a rhythm on her knees. She had good pants, good shoes. A short choppy haircut framed her head and she wore purplish-pearl lipstick. She looked like the girl in the Internet service advertisement overhead. He smiled through the music at her pale sleepy eyes. She didn’t look at him. Blondes never did. For some reason he got the brunettes, the tall leggy ones who hid in baggy pants and hunched over to surprise him with their height and grace. Not unattractive, but brunette nonetheless, they loved him. It was because he was dark too.

It was different with guys, easier to make friends with them. They stood together and nodded their heads, watched whoever was playing or spinning. They shuffled alongside one another, faces saying everything: It’s good, it’s good. He could do that. Volker spoke in a different dialect with this group — one of drum machines, sequencers, oscillators, filters, brands. E-MU Emulator, Roland TR-909, Korg MS-20, ARP 2600. Women required more language. Sometimes Volker knew he could get by with a head nod, a smile, could hook up if it were a friend of a friend, if there were someone who knew him to introduce him, vouch for him. But in the morning, the drugs were gone and the girls always seemed to hang around, uncertain, their movements — with the headphones off — composed of snapping, Volker’s words stilted and loud, saying not much of anything.

Toronto was very sluggish when it wasn’t dancing. During the day it was an ugly smear of fried foods and snow, people with their hands out, the buildings only a few heads taller than the people. During the day he bussed dishes in a restaurant on Queen Street West. At night he changed his clothes and went clubbing. It was the one thing the city was good for. Six months of this. He played the first Thursday of every month. Familiar and unfamiliar faces in front of him, a flurry of cute girls with pierced tongues bopped under his hands. He moved over his gear like a magician, the sound in his head finding its exit. Between each set, thirty days of penned ricocheting, lifting dishes and glasses in and out of the machine.

The streetcar rattled up an incline on its tracks like an automatic hospital bed. He felt it but didn’t hear it.

The amount Cynthia Staines ate diminished in direct relation to the things she bought. These days, she ate almost nothing at all. She skipped lunch because she was working; it was an excellent excuse, no one could argue with it. Anyway, she did not have time to chew the fat with a bunch of do-nothings at The Muddy Duck.

Today she was savoring a tuna wrap one of her coworkers had brought back for her. Cynthia had already made up her mind: She would eat half and that was all. The other woman had already gnawed her way through a southwestern chicken sub, all tomatoes and orange sauce, balled up the napkin in her little fist, her pin-striped lap littered with crumbs, a plump polyester pair of Old Navy’s passing for office wear. It had smelled like heaven, and disappeared like it was a mirage.

“Listen,” Cynthia said into the black slots in the mouth-piece. The telephone was the most efficient way of both delaying and prolonging the devine glut of mayonnaise crucial to the supposed low-fat wrap. “I know you can help me. I want you to wave your magic wand and find me a driver by Friday.”

The coworker gingerly deposited her lunch things in the garbage and reached for her Day-Timer. Cynthia turned away from her, leaned back in the swivel chair, propped a square-toed black shoe dangerously close to the sandwich, and eyed it with contempt.

“Friday,” Cynthia said again, louder, “I know it’s close, but you’d be such a dear... I would definitely owe you lunch.”

She hung up.

“Idiot.” Cynthia ground the word between her teeth and the woman looked up with surprise. “He wouldn’t lift his finger; take his wife’s pulse if she were dying.” Cynthia laughed loudly, the chords of it straining through the office wall out into the village of cubicles. She shook her head in feigned affection. “He’s going to do me this favor; he doesn’t even know he’s getting the boot. You didn’t know? Well, it’s not like I’m asking for anything out of the ordinary, nothing that isn’t in his job description. You have to cut the dead wood. Really, nice enough guy, that Jackson, but rocks for brains. Andy came in here the one night, laid it all on me, told me about Jackson at the last conference. He did this performance you wouldn’t believe — you just don’t talk out of line like that, ever. I can’t believe I didn’t tell you this. Andy came in one night, said, ‘We’ve got to lose senior staff. If not Jackson, then who? I hate to do it to him, I just need one reason to keep him on, something solid, help me think of it, one thing I can take to the board.’ ” She held out her arms emptily.

The smell of the sandwich crept into Cynthia’s nostrils. She grabbed it off the desk, took six small bites, the medicinal fish taste oozing through her wisdoms. She chewed until the pita slid down her palate without struggle.

“But that’s business, it’s all balance.” She stared down at the nub of sandwich. “In the long run it’s better for the company. Jackson will do me this last favor and then we’ll be even.”

A few rings of green onion lay on the wax paper, an inside-out company logo showing through from the other side. Out of the bottom, a thin milky trail leaked. Cynthia balled the half-sandwich inside the paper and let it fall into the wastepaper basket. Her coworker offered her a piece of chewing gum, the silver foil crackling. She chewed it hard and fast, pushed it with her tongue against the roof of her mouth where it would stick without looking unprofessional. It deposited a burning twiggy taste of mint.

Bonnie Brown-Switzel stood outside the pharmacy beside battered newspaper boxes that had been ransacked, neon flyers for burlesque shows and ESL tutors rubbing paper shoulders. She fumbled through the white plastic bag, searching for her purchase. Her fingers clamped around the tube and she experienced a youthful thrill. She rummaged in her black leather shoulder bag for her compact. The oval of her mouth was powdered, her lips slightly chapped from walking all day.

This was her prize. The classic vixen’s tool. The tip of its perfect red tongue met her bottom lip where she let it linger before climbing up to accentuate the peaks. It was, if not the same color that the woman on the actor’s street had worn, very similar. Bonnie usually steered clear of bold colors. She was feeling reckless. She peered into the handheld mirror, very pleased.

“Can you lend me thirty-one cents?”

She hadn’t heard him. He was right at her elbow. When she looked up, his eyes burned into her.

“Just thirty-one cents. All I need is thirty—”

It was growing dark already. Bonnie shook her head and bolted a few feet, stopped by a youth on his bicycle.

“Yo, watch it,” he called, swerving, the bike dropping down from the sidewalk to the curb into oncoming traffic, spraying thick black slush.

When she looked down she saw that she had crushed the head of the lipstick into the tube, damaging its shape. It was not broken, but its newness was gone. She pulled a tissue from her purse and wiped the lid, pushed the compact and the recapped tube into the depths of a side pocket in the purse as she walked, even though she knew they would lose themselves between empty gum packages, business cards, and store circulars.

“Hooor!” the homeless man called after her. “Bitch!” A wave of heat knocked against her forehead, and she sped up a few steps. When she glanced back over her shoulder, she saw he was already engaged with someone else, a thin man in dirty flannel and a pair of bedroom slippers. “I’m not a man!” her original fellow was yelling, his head turning between the new arrival and a couple of passersby. “I’m not a man!”

Bonnie ducked into the doorway of a bar she had passed many times before. Its entrance was littered with weekly newspapers. She would pop in and catch her breath, flip through a paper in the foyer, pretend to look for a movie time or an address, and then duck out again when the street had quieted. Between the two doors it was light, she could hear a familiar swell of music, the tinkling of glasses from inside, see the white-shirted man sliding them into the rack above the counter carefully, as if he were dabbing paint on a canvas. His eyes penetrated the door and connected with Bonnie standing there. Before she could pick up the club mag, she was grasping the handle and she was inside the second door.

Volker Gruber watched nothing with interest. His movements were slow and precise like one who is waiting, saving all his energy for something greater. Noon to 8, he told himself, another two hours, another thirteen dollars. Ten would pay his way in. Five for his first drink. Another two hours and he was already in debt to his plans.

He stared absently, trying to make sense of his losses, as an older woman stood between the doors of the establishment, disoriented, bobbing back and forth to some kind of internal flutter, apparently deciding whether or not to come in. The sound system overhead bleated something utterly offensive, the same line quadruple-repeat. A chorus in another language was no more interesting than in one’s own. Without focusing, Volker could feel his eyes burn dark with annoyance.

He could have no idea that this would be his last night in Canada, no idea that 6,197 kilometers away, Herr Gruber had clutched a hand to his fatal heart. Volker stilled, unsure if he should greet the woman or go back to the kitchen. In moments of indecision, his head filled with great handclaps of static.

The woman maneuvered her way past empty tables up to the bar and perched pertly on the stool. She had thirtyish thighs and moved off-cadence, like a skeptical cat. Had he seen her before? She seemed like so many of their customers — styled exactly so, but still the uncertain type, with thick dark hair. She liked him, he could already tell. The dark ones always did. He smiled at her. The bartender, Vincent, was in the back. Volker placed his hands on the counter, elbows out, like he owned the place. People were so gullible. She would be gullible too.

The woman licked her lips, the color on them reducing ever so slightly. She gazed up at a chalkboard above Volker’s head. He gave her the eyes. She looked at him, glanced up, looked at him again.

“I’ll have a... a... maybe a...”

He reached behind himself and fumbled for a bottle. He hated to waste a rock glass with two hours to go. He always ran out of the short rock glasses first. A bottle of red wine raised, Merlot. “Mer-lot,” Volker stated, letting the words fill his mouth, thick and red. “Mer-lot?” He lifted his eyebrows. Their eyes met. She nodded. “Mer-lot.” The long-stemmed base plinked against the counter.

She fumbled in her purse. How much? Neither of them knew. She pulled out seven dollars and set it on the bar. He looked at the money. She added another dollar. He set the sky-blue five atop the cash register for Vincent to ring in. Three made their way into Volker’s pocket, where they jangled together, crisp and sweet. He grinned at the woman, nodded, and made his way back to the kitchen, his hips already stepping to the rhythm to come. He could feel her admiring eyes beating a soft steady path between his shoulder blades on down.

Cynthia Staines put her turn signal on and edged over toward the snow-gray Jameson exit. She checked her blind spot at the last second, just in time to avoid the front end of a hurtling red Malibu. The old muscle car hit the gas and the horn simultaneously, surging dangerously near as it burst ahead of her with a penile display of pride.

Cynthia swore loudly. She edged over tentatively and then sped up to ride his bumper. He slowed, and she slammed her foot on her brake. He was on and off the brake lights like he was playing the drums. A vicious urge to smash right into the inane license plate — BRADCAR — forced Cynthia to lay on the horn until the guy sped off down Lakeshore Drive where the exit merged with the street.

Cynthia turned, cruised a few blocks, cursing, until the need to pull over stopped her. She was shaking. She snatched a tissue from the box and held it against her eyes for a second. Then she folded it neatly and tucked it into her blazer pocket. Her fingers still trembled and she grabbed hold of one hand with the other. She dug into the skin with her thumbnail, held it there, a small crescent appearing. She glanced up into the driver’s mirror. She had to eat.

Slamming the car door, she clattered across the sidewalk. An Italian restaurant blaring teen pop normally would have given Cynthia reason to doubt the quality of food. But she was not concerned with quality. She ushered herself in quickly, did not wait to be seated. “Scotch and water and a menu,” she said when her server appeared.

“What type of Scotch would you like, ma’am? We have—”

“Your best. And I’ll have some bread right away, focaccia or garlic bread, whatever you have... and a garden salad.”

“Shall I still bring a menu?”

“Yes,” she snapped.

The food was over-seasoned but warm. When she got this way, it didn’t matter. Forkfuls went in without acknowledgement. Her mouth and eyes filled with steam. If she noticed the server watching her from the back, she didn’t bat an eyelash. She was all gnocci, all bread and olive oil. She was swallowing, swallowing, swallowing. The brown swirl of vinegar adorned the plate three times, and Cynthia felt herself melt into its shapeless whirl.

A woman at the counter was acting very coy with the busboy. From where she sat, Cynthia could see the servers through the small rectangular window. One wall of the dining room was mirrored and, though she doubted anyone else could see, their positions were reflected to her. They were standing at the back of the kitchen, their hands traveling back and forth with a skinny white spliff, on which they both took turns. Cynthia piled her plates at the corner of the table so the busboy would come and take them. She glared at the dark-haired woman, whose small rump, upon the red bar stool, made a pinpoint like an exclamation mark out of her tight composed body.

The busboy was on his way back to the kitchen when Cynthia flagged him in the same mirror she had used to watch his coworkers. Cynthia saw the woman on the barstool observe their interaction, still coyly sipping from her wineglass through lips that left a dainty colored smudge.

The boy, who was perhaps twenty-four or twenty-five, tall and dark and wiry, approached the table. His thumb knuckle grazed her plate. She put her hand on his arm, waylaying him.

“What do I owe you?” she asked, her purse snapping open, a wad of bills there, appearing instantly in her lap.

He looked down at the money, sheathed from anyone’s sight inside the open mouth of the black silk change purse inside the black leather bag.

“Server...” he replied. He had an accent. She liked that.

She smiled, lopsidedly, a quivering finger going to her hair, which she wrapped around it, the long blond strand falling forward in a manner he would surely understand. “Where is your bathroom?” she queried him with an openly sexual smirk.

He gestured helplessly, his face a blank slate.

When Bonnie Brown-Switzel entered the ladies’ room, her ears filled with the sound of panting and shaking. The metal walls of the cubicles resonated with a strange savage music. The quiet grunting came from the third stall, bumping firmly against her ears. She had been about to let the door fall closed, but reached behind her and caught it, shutting it softly.

Without looking at the shoes beneath the pink partitions, she knew that it was the busboy and the blonde: a short, sharp woman with a Roman nose, pin-straight yellow hair, and powerful watery eyes, the kind of woman who held herself very upright in spite of her height and made Bonnie feel as if she should do the same. Bonnie had seen him go down to the basement after the blonde, a couple of rolls of toilet paper under one arm and a plastic gray key taped to a wrist-thick stick with Don’t Lose written on it in black marker. One of them was moaning — him, Bonnie thought — the other grunting. As they pitched against the side of the cubicle, the toilet paper dispenser mouse-squeaked a repetition of hips and tin, and Bonnie stood motionless in the doorway.

Slowly, she made her way along the wall, toward their hideout and into the stall next to them. The cubicle door closed of its own accord. As she set one foot upon the toilet seat, it wiggled. She paused — her heart hammering louder than any other noise she made — and then lifted the other foot up. The sound of grated breathing filled her ears. She held her breath. Crouching, she put her hand flat against the partition, and could feel the vibration of the two bodies on the other side. The exact spot behind where one of them was pressed naked.

Then the woman whispered urgently, “Not like that. Do it hard. Make it... make it hurt.”

“I can’t,” he replied, his voice thick.

Bonnie felt a heaviness welling low in her stomach, as it did when she had drunk too much coffee. She felt her head duck inside the feeling. She pulled her hand across her belly and leaned sideways, bracing her cheek against the thin makeshift wall that thrummed with them. Under the other hand, a heart was etched into the cubicle’s wall. Michael, it said inside it, though “Michael” would obviously never enter the ladies’ room to read it.

In another moment, the room filled with squealing, which was stifled, perhaps by a hand. It turned to a soft mewl, and what the man said was rough, in another language. She had no idea if it was vulgar, or if an “I love you” had fallen deafly between strangers. The scent of spring rose in Bonnie’s nostrils, the acrid airing out of things from winter. Over the soapy rose smell of the bathroom came a pungent, earthy aroma. Their bodies in motion. She imagined the places from which the smell seeped — from the boy’s pits, from his balls, from between the legs of the pin-straight blonde. Bonnie moved carefully to find a better position, leaned her forehead against the spot where she could feel them most, curled her fingers through her hair, and pulled it to keep herself silent.

Soon they stopped. He exhaled. Bonnie could hear the saliva in their mouths, ticking. There was the sound of shuffling. Buttoning. A belt buckle. A clasping of snaps, or was it purse lips? Then the woman said simply, “Thank you.”

The cubicle door opened and the skeletal wall shook beneath Bonnie’s cheek. She pulled her hair harder. The wooden door to the restroom opened and closed. He was gone.

In a moment, palms slapped the floor and the woman in the next stall began to wretch, vomiting violently. Bonnie shifted quickly, the squeak of the toilet seat concealed by the moist unpleasant wash of things going down the drain next door. The unzipping of a bag, and the woman had straightened. Bonnie could feel the weight as the woman leaned again against the wall nearest her.

A moment of cold-tile silence followed. The fluorescents crackled.

Then the woman on the other side began to cry, her sobs small and controlled, like stones thrown into a basin.

Bonnie waited until the door had opened and closed again and stillness stretched past 8 p.m. Then she tentatively left the cubicle, her face, in the mirror as she passed it, much as it had been that morning. She stopped to wash her hands, though she didn’t know why.

At home that night, as she lay in bed, her back pressed to Mr. Switzel’s ample stomach, his great arms wrapped plainly around her, thin rivers ran from the corners of her eyes. She wondered where the boy had gone when he finished, what waited for him, what words he had said, and whether he would remember them later. She wondered if the woman lived alone. Mr. Switzel shifted, patted her thigh solidly, as if it were a cocker spaniel. Outside, she could hear the wind bubbling through the thin, decorative tree below their balcony. Three years, she thought, the length of time they had been married. Forty-seven years still ahead. It will all disappear, she thought. I will ruin it all.

Sick day by Mark Sinnett

CN Tower

Donny Freemont was just too damn disappointed to go on. It was as if floors had fallen on the inside.

He lowered his head and thrust his chair away from his desk, then leaned all the way back to stare fixedly at the stippled ceiling. It was ridiculous, he knew that, but there was no denying it had taken firm hold. He put the call through to his receptionist.

“But Mrs. Sanjit is already here,” Tina protested.

Donny squinted at the door, as if he might see through the bird’s-eye maple laminate that had impressed him so much when he signed on at the clinic two years ago. Then he concentrated on the hiss in the receiver, tried to match it to the space beyond the door, to Tina wriggling at her desk, and the line of molded cobalt chairs out there that he considered a grave mistake because they were flimsy and uncomfortable.

“Does she know I’m in here?”

Tina huffed. “She’s not an idiot, is she? She’s been here half an hour. You know how she is.” She lowered her voice. “She saw Mrs. Lawford come in and then leave. And I think she might even have been here when your one-fifteen left. Shit, you’re going to want me to cancel all those for you too, right, Donny? You have a full slate of appointments this afternoon. And you know I’m not going to be able to reach most of them, and they’re going to show up and I’m going to have to talk to them.”

“Do you think she can hear you, Tina?”

“Oh, now you think I’m the idiot.”

He stood at the window and waited for the all-clear. A half-mile away, a glass-fronted elevator climbed the CN Tower. Below him, a woman scurried diagonally across the intersection. Another woman shook out a yellow Shopsy’s umbrella and inserted it roughly into the bracket on the side of her hot dog cart. A light snow began. He tried (and failed dismally) to track the first flakes all the way to the ground.

He had glanced at the day’s appointments when he arrived. In addition to Mrs. Sanjit, he could look forward to Howard Desai and his grossly swollen prostate. And Timmy something-or-other, who needed twelve sutures removed from his forehead. There was Anne Davies, chronic, non-responsive depression, and ancient Hetta Jamieson experiencing another flare-up of her gout. Flu shots, blood work, and sore throats. Hardened lymph nodes that frightened the hell out of everybody. Well too bad, Donny thought. Today there was nothing he could do for any of them.

Safely out of the building, he headed north and then west along Queen. Turned up the collar of his wool jacket and burrowed into the afternoon’s cold shadows. He slowed a little beyond Spadina. He liked this stretch. The halogen-drenched tattoo parlors and used CD shops, the YMCA mission and thrift shop, the all-white design stores and so many restaurants: The Left Bank. La Hacienda. Citron. The Paddock, a few doors south on Bathurst. The last time he was in there — was it Thursday? Friday? — they had been playing the new Radiohead CD and Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump. He was pleased to recognize both those albums, particularly Grandaddy. It had made him feel relevant, it had made him feel young. His noting the way it made him feel was, he suspected, a sign that he was, in fact, not young at all, and was just clinging to the illusion of hipness because he haunted once in a while the “alternative” aisle at HMV. But he was mostly at ease with that. He believed that in all the important ways he could still pass for a man in his late twenties.

He ducked into the Stephen Bulger gallery. He wanted to warm up. A small vee of snow had gathered in the neck of his coat. He shook himself out, stamped on the welcome mat. The woman in the back room looked up from her work and smiled. They knew each other. Eleni had been at his wedding. She and Maria, his wife, had graduated from Queen’s University at the same time, both of them coming away with a degree in English literature. And now Eleni worked in this gallery and struggled with a first novel, while Maria worked at least half the year (or so it felt) in northern Ontario, scouting land for a reforestation company, each spring supervising a team of tree planters, setting up bush camps, keeping in touch with her husband via radio phone, meeting him in Thunder Bay occasionally for a rushed and never completely satisfactory twelve hours before he flew back south and she lit out once more for the logging roads.

“You missed the opening,” Eleni said. She indicated the walls. A husband and wife team had photographed human embryos preserved in formaldehyde, snakes curled in thick-walled beakers; fish crammed together and stacked heads up, like... well, like sardines. He saw at once that the colors involved were brilliant, alive; the work hummed. One of the fetuses seemed perfect, viable, and wore what was described in small black type as a Turkish cap. Next to it were another baby’s feet, severed at the shin, the cuts ragged and amateurish, the plump toes webbed. The photographs were mounted on sheets of half-inch acrylic which, Donny supposed, was intended to approximate the experience of viewing the original containers. “They were here,” Eleni continued. “The artists. Do you like them?”

He stood before huddled pre-infant polar bears, three of them, floating, with oversized velvet paws and hooked ivory nails, golden fur. But all he could think about was the damn music. The reason for his having fled the office and scurried like a rat along Queen Street. For his standing beside Eleni when he should be listening to the irregular heartbeat of Janice Wolcyk, while his wife, the adult, fulfilled her obligations and slept under a thin floral duvet at Thunder Bay’s Lakehead Motel.

“Who knows,” he said. And then he confided in her.

She took him to her desk, set him up with a glass of Pinot Gris left over from the weekend opening. She pushed aside assorted slides, black-and-white proofs of Italian industrial sites, a pizza box from Terroni’s a few doors down, and then sat on the edge of the work surface. She crossed one leg over the other and tugged at the thick, soft hem of her black leather skirt. She’s the doctor here, he thought bitterly. And I’m the patient. I am Sunil Desai with his strange rash. I am Angel Caddis with his night blindness.

“A new CD did this to you?” She seemed amused more than anything. It wasn’t very professional of her.

“I know. I know.”

“A bad song has you running away from your responsibilities. You have to be kidding. Are you?”

“Well, obviously it’s not really that. It can’t be.”

“What is it, then?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I only know what triggered it.”

“A song,” she repeated.

“Right.”

“Jesus.” Eleni stared into the gallery as if ghosts were waltzing at its center. Finally she said, “I remember one of their songs.” She sounded wistful. She looked at him. “Well, I remember a lot of them, of course. But they were never really my thing. Too boy for me.”

“Which one?”

“In the video, he’s sitting in a bar, moving a glass of whiskey around gently. Singing. It’s really quite moving.”

Donny nodded. “ ‘One,’ ” he said.

Eleni reached out and touched Donny’s shoulder. She laughed lightly. “You’re right. That’s it.” She took back her hand. “And at one point he doesn’t sing along with the song. He just stares mournfully, as the words go on without him.”

Donny nodded again and she poured him more wine. She thinks I’m a sad case, he thought. Perhaps even that I need to be medicated. He held her gaze until she looked away awkwardly, into the gallery. She asked after Maria.

“She’s fine. We’re fine. It’s not that.”

He remembered the phone call he had made to Maria last night. It was late, past 11. The polls had closed hours before in the American presidential election, and the result was too close to call, he thought, but the networks had just called it anyway. There was a one hour time difference between him and her. It was enough that she might still be awake.

He was right because she answered quickly. She’d been doing paperwork, she said, and was glad to hear his voice, but asked if she could put him on hold. Before he could answer she was gone, and some quirk in the Lakehead’s wiring left him able to hear everything happening at the front desk. The receptionist fought off the drunken advances of two men on their way from the bar to their rooms. “When did she get off?” one of them asked. “Shortly after she comes up to see us,” the other one slurred, and the two of them cackled, thumped at the counter. When Maria came back on the line she apologized; she had been in the middle of a massive calculation: trees and hectares, hectares and trees. He told her what he’d heard.

“I know those guys,” she said. “They’re fucking assholes.” They were hunters, and in their orange coveralls you could at least see them coming, she said.

“Too bad the moose can’t,” he said morosely, and they shared a sad, distant-from-each-other laugh. “How much longer will you be?” he asked.

She didn’t know. “It depends. Whenever it snows, and if that snow stays on the ground, we’ll call it a day.” The TV flickered across the room and he told her it looked like the Americans were stuck with Bush, and she produced a sound that suggested to him a wince.

By the time he woke up this morning, CNN had retracted their initial election result forecast, and Al Gore had similarly retracted his concession. It was a shock. The future of the world had changed while he slept. Thrown, he beheaded two soft-boiled eggs and sat with them in the kitchen. Cholesterol be damned. He unfolded the Globe and Mail and began to read. Then it came to him. He had bought the CD and hadn’t heard it yet. It was still in his briefcase. He found the bag in the front hall and wrestled with the wrapper. He slid the new disc into the player. The neighbors in the condominium below wouldn’t appreciate this at 8 in the morning, but he turned up the volume anyway, stopped at six and then nudged it past seven. This was his home. He could do that.

It began. The heart is a bloom, shoots up through the stony ground. He liked it.

He recounted this series of events for Eleni in the gallery. She had moved from the desktop into her chair. Poured herself some wine. She sat across from him and swivelled back and forth. It was good of her to indulge him like this. Since he arrived three people had come in and looked around. One of them, a woman in shin-high green suede boots, had looked over the price list and hung around expectantly, but Eleni had ignored her, which must have been hard. These photographs cost three thousand bucks each; it didn’t matter how good they were, they wouldn’t sell themselves.

“And then what happened?” Eleni said.

Donny rubbed his face vigorously. He knew he should extrapolate from what had happened rather than giving her the literal details. Interpret it. Physician heal thyself. He could do that, perhaps. Decide what it meant even as he began to tell her. Talk himself out of this dumb funk. But what he actually said was, “The second song.”

She leaned forward, put her elbows down on the desk, rested her chin on the hammock she made of her palms, and squinted at him. Donny thought she may even have closed her eyes completely.

“The rest of the album, in fact,” he said. He felt a need to shore up his case and thought that might do it.

“You don’t like it,” Eleni said. She spoke quietly.

Did she think he was crazy? Or merely pathetic. He was sinking in her esteem, getting himself crossed off all sorts of lists. The snow outside was gathering on the road now.

He ploughed on. “It’s shit.”

“So? Big deal.”

Donny shrugged. “I don’t know. It threw me. It’s thrown me. I feel strange.”

“Let down,” she said.

“I suppose.”

Eleni got to her feet. She smoothed the front of her skirt. “I can feel that wine,” she said.

Donny held up his glass. Eleni was moving away. She was in the gallery again. Maybe his time was up. She had run out of patience.

He apologized for coming.

She paused; she had been hasty and he could see that she knew it. She told him not to be stupid. “I love seeing you. But this... this music thing,” she said, “seems very small. I know it doesn’t feel that way to you, but...”

“I know.”

He felt about twelve years old. As if he had presented her with a broken toy. Like what had happened was apocalyptic.

He mumbled another apology that she said was unnecessary. She said they could talk about it some more if he liked, but he couldn’t do it; the room was too warm for him now. There was, inexplicably, too much of a contrast with the world outside. Strange that he hadn’t noticed it before. Eleni took hold of his elbow and smiled, tried unsuccessfully to hold his gaze.

When he pulled open the door to leave, a small silver bell on a brightly colored wool strap tinkled brightly. A woman in a long mink, clutching a gray-eyed poodle in a fitted red jacket, turned sideways to squeeze past him. Eleni would be pleased, he thought. Maybe not about the dog — he assumed that was something she would frown on — but this woman seemed to be in a hurry and she didn’t look at him. As he stood in the open doorway, she seemed to focus already on the polar bears. She wanted them; he felt he could discern that with certainty from the movement around him, the expensive scent he lifted from her as she headed in the opposite direction. He had diagnosed her intent, he decided. It was as real to him, as clear, as the flu.

He continued blindly along Queen, but after a block he cut up into Trinity Bellwoods Park and sat in the cold on a stiff and creaking bench. He wasn’t alone. Two old men conversed in Portuguese. One of them reached absentmindedly into a plastic bag and cast handfuls of breadcrumbs and rice onto the white path. He looked into the gray sky, watched as from the corners of it, from the furthest points, pigeons collected, swarmed, homed in on him. Soon the path was alive with them. They clambered over each other. Their golden eyes, storm-cloud wings.

Streetcars hauled themselves west. Men in plaid jackets scampered about on scaffolding behind siding that advertised two-story loft spaces. In the dusty doorway of a dilapidated store that seemed to be called Textile Remnants, a woman bulky with layered tweed overcoats arranged a bed of boxes and torn blankets. Hypothermia, Donny thought. Head lice. Schizophrenia. Absentee votes.

He needed to leave. He had arranged a squash game for 6 o’clock because he didn’t want to go home to an empty apartment. He knew that if he did, he would stand in the doorway to the kitchen picturing the contents of the refrigerator, taking inventory of the booze, wondering what to drink and eat and in what order. How much was too much? What constituted moderation for today’s stressed professional? How much did he weigh? Where the hell was Maria and when would she come home?

The pigeons startled at his rising. The Portuguese men with the bread eyed him suspiciously. It was cold; he had no reason to be here. His was a different language. He passed behind their bench rather than in front so that the birds would settle again. The rice blew about on the ground. But it wasn’t rice. He paused. It wasn’t bread either. It was some sort of animal fat. And maggots. The grains of rice were actually maggots. And the breeze had died. The creamy mass of them squirmed on the ground.

Donny was on the streetcar heading east. Back toward the towers, the winter noise and end-of-day hubbub. His squash game was in the basement of a hotel. He peered grimly into the failing light. The noise of the carriage, the electric click and spark of it, was comforting somehow. There was the atomic and tinny buzz of a Walkman behind him. The smell of french fries. But then, with a start, he remembered another patient: Adam Govington. Damnit! He had completely forgotten about Adam’s appointment.

Adam was going to die. And all of them — Adam, his mother, and his grandparents (the father lived in Denver with an accountant and had nothing to do with them, even now) — were going through the motions. They met to measure the rate of Adam’s decline. Donny thought the boy would be lucky to make it to Christmas, and there was nothing he could do about that. He was merely a middleman now. He relayed information from the specialists to the family; he interpreted the graphs, translated the jargon. And he hid the truth from them. The exact thing they came to him for, he denied them. Decided it was better this way — to deliver platitudes, to suggest things were slightly brighter than they really were. Adam could die any day. He was close. It was even possible he didn’t show for today’s appointment. Or that he wouldn’t last long enough to witness the final outcome of the American election, or the arrival of the storm system Donny had heard was gathering over the Rockies. He might miss the removal of the fiberglass moose that had cluttered Toronto’s streets and squares for months. Adam Govington now lived at the very edge of the world; he looked over his pale shoulder from the crumbling absolute brink. And Donny should have been there with him this afternoon.

Trouble was — and he panicked at the thought that this might be the real reason he had blown the afternoon off — Adam Govington’s mother had recently caught Donny looking at her thigh. His gaze had come to rest on it only in passing. But she had caught him. More than once. Donny had wanted to protest that it wasn’t even her thigh, exactly. The short stretch of leg between her knee and her thigh proper is what had fascinated him. What was that part of the body called? If anyone knew, he should. She had looked at him icily, evenly, for a moment. But then the moment passed and they were once again discussing her son. She hadn’t forgiven him exactly, just decided, Donny thought, that the world could still unfold in a more or less orderly fashion despite his fuck-up, and she should let it go. The doctor to your dying son could be competent and also, at the same time, during the same appointment, a complete and utter asshole. Donny squirmed at the memory.

He collected his athletic gear from the locker at the hotel. It was getting stale; he would have to take it home after the game. Allan was already on the court, playing alone, darting enthusiastically over the hardwood. Donny waited for the ball to get away, to twist madly into a corner and stop, and then he opened the glass door and slipped inside.

Allan was a year younger than Donny and liked to pretend it made a big difference. “It’s not just that I work harder than you do to stay in shape,” he would say, “I’m also younger.” He was very tall, very thin, with a thatch of wheatlike hair that he kept short but unkempt. His eyes were green, his skin fair. But today, Donny thought, as Allan served gently into the corner and then loped after the ball, he looked a lot like an underfed wolf forced into a set of tennis whites.

They knew each other from the university. Allan was finishing a PhD in philosophy while Donny completed his residency. They would run into each other at the vending machines, slugging back terrible oily coffee, or hogging window seats at SpaHa, a university hangout. Now Allan ran an organic food shop on Adelaide. It was too far out of the way to make much money. Allan had thought that by setting up next to the fashion district he was guaranteed an image-obsessed clientele, but it hadn’t worked out that way. Still, it meant that he and Donny had kept in touch — the odd lunch together, or even a jog up to and around Queen’s Park, an occasional squash game and then a pint at the Wheat Sheaf or, if they were feeling more sociable, up two blocks at the Paddock on a Friday afternoon.

Allan leaned against the glass, bent over to catch his breath.

“Working hard?” Donny asked. “How long have you been here?”

“I closed up early.”

“Small world.” Donny collected the ball, squashed it in his fist. “I did the same thing. I had to get out of there.”

“The young soul rebels,” laughed Allan. He waved his racket in a way that was an indication for Donny to serve.

They rallied for a while without talking. Donny realized, not for the first time, that much of the pleasure he derived from these games was in seeing Allan struggle. He liked nothing better than to watch Allan tie himself up in a corner, his long limbs betraying him, or smack his racket against the wall in frustration, or come to a skidding halt on the varnished floor as the ball careened past him. He didn’t feel guilty about this; he was positive Allan felt the same way about him. Maria had come to watch them once and she was adamant she would never come again.

These gentle opening rallies were also a time when both of them strategized, planned their conversation. What did they want to talk about today; how hard would they push their points?

Donny suggested they get to it. He said he wanted to build up a sweat.

“You seem pent up,” Allan said, a little ways in.

Donny was winning. The score was seven to four. He held the ball way out in front of him, delicately, his racket pulled back. He looked over at Allan, whose eyes were fixed on the ball. Tension was evident in his thighs. “Pent up?” Donny said. “Pent?”

“It sounds odd when you say it, sure,” Allan agreed. “Pent suddenly seems like a made-up word.”

Donny served. The ball cleared the service line, but only just, then ricocheted into the corner behind Allan before he could lay his racket on it and died next to the glass. “Eight-four,” Donny said, pleased. That was his best serve. If he could repeat it at will, he’d give up medicine.

“So everything’s okay?” Allan tossed him the ball and held up a hand. He opened the door to the court and stepped out. He bent over the water fountain, in profile to Donny. The water rose up to meet his mouth in a weak glossy arc. Donny could see the individual bumps of his friend’s vertebrae through the thin white cotton of his shirt. When Allan reentered the court his chin was wet and he wiped it with his forearm, which also became wet. Allan pulled up his shirt and wiped his face with it. This was precisely how epidemics were spread.

Donny stabbed at the air with his racket. He felt the blood in him, a rush hour of molecules on the inside track. But then he paused. He thought of his patients. At home around their supper tables, telling their wives and husbands, their children, how their appointment had been cancelled, something about the doctor having an emergency. He thought of Adam Govington. He thought of Maria. Saw her vividly in her orange coveralls, making her way to the top of a slash pile, a drip torch in her right hand like a flaming scalp. Smoke in the air, moose hunters moving through the uncut trees at the horizon. He thought of Al Gore and George W. Bush sitting in their offices. The mass of thoughts in their heads. All of them, every one, had more right to be pissed off than he did. And yet he had acted the most dramatically. It was only he who had blown up.

Allan looked at him curiously. “You going to play?”

Donny served. It was a weak effort, the ball sailed on him, struck the wall near the point where it joined the ceiling and rebounded to center court. Allan pounced on the ball, smacked it dramatically at the bottom of the wall. It picked up a wicked spin somewhere in that series of events and bounded in a strange loop past Donny’s windmilling arm.

“I’m warming up,” Allan said.

Donny took the game comfortably and they began a second. They hadn’t spoken again. Actually, Donny supposed that couldn’t be true. He vaguely remembered Allan asking if he wanted to go again. And something about grabbing a bite. And Maria, how was she? They had swapped many words apparently, but none of them ran together to form what Donny considered civil conversation. He shouldn’t have come, he was still too screwed up. He thought of whiskey and of a newspaper article he had read that said any personality trait you had when you turned thirty you were stuck with for life. If you were a fuck-up at thirty, the reasoning went, then you may as well live with it, or shoot yourself, because the wiring was locked in. The article had annoyed Donny, probably because he was twenty-nine when he read it. He hated it even more now, because he had been unable to shed the memory. The more he tried, the more it cemented itself into the foundation of whatever process it was that allowed him to think. The brain was a mystery to Donny. He vividly remembered dropping a tomato slice into the sand on a trip to the beach with his parents when he was four years old, his father telling him to be a good boy and bury it. He remembered digging the tiny grave. But he couldn’t come up with, at this moment, the phone number for his own office.

Allan, though, was saying something.

“Say again,” Donny said. “I was miles off.”

“Nothing important.”

“It’s okay. What were you saying?”

“Really,” Allan said, “don’t worry about it.”

Their game was degenerating into a chore. Donny had derailed and needed to get back on track. He was taking out his middle age and his absent wife, and those dumb fuckers south of the border, and Adam Govington, on a pop band. And on a friend. Making them pay the price. After a moment, he told Allan he felt better. He could smell his own sweat, thought he could make out the sharpness of his own anger and frustration.

“But I didn’t say anything,” Allan said. He sounded a little disappointed. He wanted some credit and couldn’t find a way to take any.

They played a few more points. And then Allan said something stupid about Africa, how, if he went there, he would be really big, he could teach them a thing or two about getting goods to market. He combined the comment with a reckless overhead smash that through some complicated geometry sent the egg-sized ball arrowing for Donny’s face. He ducked and the ball hit the glass. Allan bent double laughing.

Donny, scowling, collected the ball from the ground and brought back his racket as if to serve before Allan was ready. The man was a gazelle, Donny remembered thinking afterwards, on the way to the hospital, not a wolf at all. The man could move when it really mattered. Because Allan responded to Donny’s feint by rushing toward the back of the court, head down. His intention, plainly, was to wheel around, make some miraculous return of Donny’s impending and unsportsmanlike serve.

Donny let the racket drop to his side. He moved a step to his right. Not enough to interfere with Allan’s progress, but enough to bring him within range. As Allan drew level, Donny spun and pushed hard at his friend, shoved him headfirst into the glass. The noise was unremarkable in these surroundings; players were always colliding with their environment. The injury rate was very high, but rarely was it anything serious. Allan, however, dropped as if he’d been felled by a hunter. A smear of blood on the glass, thickest at the point of impact, diminished as it approached the floor.

Donny gulped. He heard the gulp and he was, he felt, a cartoon of himself. He was two-dimensional, nothing was happening with the weight or import it ought to carry. This, instead of an act of murder, was the Roadrunner, it was Bugs Bunny. For a split second he even saw the animated figure suspended midair, just over the cliff’s edge, legs pedalling madly. He shook off the image and tossed away his racket, as if it were a gun. He dropped down next to the body, scraping his knees on the hardwood and depositing a touch of his own blood in that large cell with its begrimed picture window.

Donny had no doubt that Allan was done for. He touched his friend’s scalp gingerly, manipulated the loose mess of bone in there, the sharp edges and the soft bottom. Donny pushed. Yep, that was Allan’s brain. Resisting the fingertip pressure, but not well. It was an unusual consequence of an impact this moderate, but it happened sometimes. The skull could only take so much. And at only some angles. But hit it wrong and it was vulnerable as fruit. Great plates of bone could come free, float around under the skin. This had happened here. There was no coming back from this. It was simple tectonics; it was how the entire world worked.

He checked for a pulse and found one, but irregular and shallow. It was about what he expected. There was no hurry here. But there was, he knew, protocol. He summoned the appropriate mix of panic and professional expertise, and had the boy at the desk with the towels call an ambulance. He jogged casually back to the court, where one or two onlookers had gathered. And then a couple more, who sat on the bleachers behind them as if this were all part of a game.

He identified himself to the paramedics. They exchanged curt nods. He explained what had happened, more or less, to a policewoman who wrote it all down in a small spiral-bound notebook.

“I have to change,” he told her, and pointed to his sweaty and blood-stained clothes. She nodded and Donny escaped to the locker room. He checked his BlackBerry for any messages he might have missed. There was something from Maria: Donny. Surprise! I’ll be home tomorrow. Can’t talk about it now. But the weather, you know. Anyway, I’ll call you later. Love you. And another from his office: Adam Govington had taken a turn for the worse, he was at the hospital. Could Donny possibly get in there for a consult?

Well of course he could. He was going that way anyway, wasn’t he?

The policewoman offered him a ride.

“It’s okay. I rent parking downstairs,” he told her. “I’ll follow you. If that’s okay.” He looked at her questioningly. There wasn’t anything else going on here, was there?

She said that was fine. But was he okay?

“I’m great,” he told her. “I’ve seen much worse.”

“He’s your friend, though. And they say it looks bad.”

Donny hung his head, as if shamed by her insight. “I’ll be okay.”

He climbed behind the wheel of his new Xterra. He was still on a honeymoon with this vehicle. It pleased him. Its height above the road, its not-quite-smooth ride and its smart sound system, its awesome roof rack. It made him happy. And as he climbed the ramp and turned on the headlights, filtered carefully onto King, checking the rearview, he realized he would have to be careful. He wanted to whistle a tune, but it would be wrong. It would arouse suspicions, and more than that it just plain worried him. It was inappropriate. Shit happened, he understood that. He hadn’t intended to do more than swear at Allan, tell him not to be so fucking racist, so damned superior. But there was little point getting excited about what had happened instead. He gave serious consideration to the notion that he was in shock. And that seemed quite likely. He took his own pulse, measured his breathing, put a hand to his forehead. Yes, he thought, that might be it. He probably shouldn’t even be driving.

He saw the ambulance some two blocks ahead. He couldn’t catch it. He slipped a CD into the player. Skipped straight to the last track because it was the only one worth listening to. Grace, she takes the blame, he heard. She covers the shame / Removes the stain.

The real reason for his calm occurred to him as he entered the hospital parking lot. It was about Adam Govington, all of this. With Allan dead, or damn close, Adam would get a reprieve. He was positive. That was the way it worked. It had to. You didn’t lose two people in one day. He had offered up Allan to appease the gods. A sacrifice. In return he wanted Adam back. Allan for Adam. It was a fair trade. More than fair. He pulled into a narrow space and found he couldn’t open the doors properly on the Xterra. He could have squeezed through the opening, but who was to say his neighbors would be as considerate. He backed out and searched some more. Because Grace makes beauty / Out of ugly things.

Donny panicked for a second when he recalled Maria’s message. How she was coming home. Which was great. But it wasn’t what he wanted. If he got something for Allan’s demise he wanted it to be Adam. He loved Maria, though he also wanted to watch that boy’s beautiful mother cry with gratitude. Why couldn’t he choose?

He found two spots empty beside each other and pulled in. He straddled the line. He turned off the engine and the music and sat quietly with his hands on the wheel. Relax before you go in, he told himself. It’s okay. It’ll all be fine. The gods know what you want. Those people in there don’t, of course, you’re not that obvious, you give off only a sense of goodness, a transparent wish that things turn out for the best for everyone. But the gods know. Oh yes, they do.