Middle Countries

Sharon met her father for the first time when she was thirty-one years old at a T.G.I Friday’s in the outskirts of Columbus. The story of their estrangement was sadly common. He’d gone out with her mom for two months during his sophomore year at Ohio State and then, one night, while having sex, the condom they were using broke. A month later, when Sharon’s mom told him that she was late getting her period, he feared for his reputation on campus—and within his stodgy Mid-western family—so he stopped returning her calls and severed contact with her completely.

Thirty-one years later, Sharon was surprised when he accepted her invitation to meet. She’d found him using social media and a physical description from her mom. She was dead broke and too strung out to work which is why she was willing to subject herself to the humiliation of embracing the man who’d discarded her like a piece of trash. She and a friend made the two-hour drive south from Cleveland on a cold and damp Saturday in November.

-

Sharon was labeled a “goth” in high school but self-identified as “alternative”. She smoked pot for the first time when she was thirteen with a couple of older, black eye-liner-clad friends. With the weed in her lungs, she felt her ever-present circumstances dissolve. For a few moments the world wasn’t conscribed by her father’s abandoning her or her mother’s bitterness. Her first experiences with sex produced a similar effect but smoking pot was easier to manage socially so she took it up more vigourously.

But before long pot lost its efficacy and she turned to coke. Coke was a blast, fun and self-confidence-boosting. It was expensive though, so much so that one day she gave her dealer a hand-job in exchange for a few lines. It was never explicitly stated that that’s what she was doing; she just gave him a suggestive look in his dank basement apartment and accepted his lines-cum-payment after.

From there it was a slippery slope to blowing and fucking him for grams and eight balls. Then she got fired for being late to her job as a grocery store clerk and turned her first trick for cash. Going to school and living with her mom had fallen through the cracks so she had few other options. Her landlord was going to pad-lock her door if she didn’t pay her rent, which was already two months late.

The first john she let fuck her with was a balding, middle-aged white guy. She picked him up by the bus station with the same suggestive look she’d used with her dealer. She and the john went to a nearby hotel and when it was over she didn’t feel nearly as bad as she’d expected to­—at least not while she was holding a hundred dollars cash in her pocket.

The next morning was a different story. She felt wretched to her core and needed something to dull her self-lament. She went to her dealer’s and when she got there, he noticed the look of desperation in her eyes and offered her first hit of smack.

Heroin fulfilled its intended purpose. It dulled her jagged thoughts and warmed her weary bones. With smack in her veins she found she could turn tricks with little-to-no remorse. It was fast money for minimal time investment. With the surplus cash she bought CDs, a stereo, jewelry and expensive make-up; things she’d never been able to afford working for $8.75 an hour at the grocery store.

Her street name was Apple after her favourite flavour of candy. The pseudonym helped her further dissociate herself from her questionable deeds. She also thought it alleviated some of her more priggish customer’s guilt. All men are fallen, she remembered learning in Sunday school. All of them have eaten some variety of forbidden fruit so what difference did it make if they paid someone for sex? Sin was their heritage and legacy.

-

Apple made no effort to disguise her decrepitude on the day she met her father. Her face was pocked and gaunt, her clothes were tattered and stained. Her father stayed seated in the restaurant booth trying to hide his embarrassment as she entered the restaurant.

She spotted him and walked across the room to the booth where he was seated and sat down. “Hello,” he managed in a halting staccato after a few moments, “so glad you could make it down. It’s been a long time coming...”

She stared back in silence at the sometimes-idol, sometimes-scourge of her life. He wore a burgundy wool sweater and crisp blue jeans. He was shorter than she’d expected and his eyes darted all over the room trying to avoid hers. “Yeah,” she muttered. “Me too.”

“Listen. Order anything you like. It’s on me. They’ve got great ribs—if you like ribs—and the milk-shakes aren’t half-bad…”

He trailed off, likely sensing her complete disinterest in food.

“I’ll have a coffee,” she said.

He called the waiter and ordered two coffees. “So, uh, what do you do for a living?”

“I’m a dog-walker,” she lied.

“Is that a fact? I’ve got a couple of cocker spaniels. Ever since the kids left—“ Again he was arrested by the sight of the person sitting across the table from him. Fortunately, their coffees arrived and truncated the discomfort.

She took a few sips of her coffee and felt centred enough to get down to business. “Listen,” she said, “I was wondering if you could lend me some money to buy a van. My customers have been asking me to take their dogs out to the country.”

He swallowed. This was the moment he’d dreaded. Clearly, he’d abandoned his daughter to a life of hardships and God-knows-what. It exposed him as a coward and cheat and if word got back to his wife and legitimate children about her, he’d be ruined. He could be extorted endlessly if he didn’t act, and quickly.

“Sure,” he said. “How much did you have in mind?”

“Five grand.”

He took out his chequebook and began to write. But instead of writing ‘Five’ on the amount line, he wrote, ‘Fifty’, followed by ‘thousand’. He filled in the rest of the cheque except for the signature, tore it out of the chequebook, and slid it across the table.

Apple read the number on the cheque and her droopy eyes widened. Her father met her gaze. He spoke slowly and deliberately: “That’s what I’m willing to give you if you’ll never contact me again.”

She blinked for the first time since she sat down and her eyes began to water. She glanced at the cheque and back at him.

After a moment, she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and took a slow, deep breath. She tilted her head to one side, lowered it, and looked up smiling coyly.

Zenek met Annie during his third week of school at Summerhall, the university’s former veterinary school turned arts hub and pub. Both he and Annie were at the pub and she was friends with one of his classmates who was there with Zenek. When they were introduced Zenek immediately noticed her espresso hair and blue eyes. Beyond her beauty, he was also attracted to the fact that she was a photographer. 

Zenek and Annie struck up a conversation about photography and art in general. Zenek told her what he was studying and the conversation moved to politics. Zenek learned that Annie was ardently socialist and he admired her it. Their conversation was punctuated by much laughter and light teasing in both directions.  

The night wore on and Zenek began to flirt more openly and Annie seemed receptive. But then as Annie was getting ready to leave and Zenek asked her for her phone number, her face darkened. ‘’Can you have my number’?’ she repeated in her thick Scottish accent. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea.’

‘Why not?’ Zenek said. 

‘Well, there’s someone waiting for me at home…’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I completely misread the situation. I’m sorry.’

‘No-no. You didn’t. It’s not my boyfriend…it’s, uh, I…I have a five-year-old daughter...’

Zenek was taken aback but compared to the feeling of stupidity and embarrassment he’d just felt, it was a relief. ‘Oh, um, that’s cool. Kids are great,’ he said.

‘Well she’s a bloody handful. I’ll tell you that.’

There was another pause in their conversation and Annie broke eye contact for the first time all evening. ‘Anyhow, it was nice meeting you, Zenek. Hopefully I’ll see you around.’ 

She turned to leave but Zenek stopped her. ‘Wait. Does having a daughter mean you have no time to date?’

‘No, not entirely, but she takes up a lot of my time and most of my energy.’

‘Well, maybe I can tag along on some activity with you guys some time...’

Annie looked at him inquisitively. ‘That’s a pretty long road to take to get in my pants.’

Zenek laughed. ‘I-uh-I’m not trying to get in your pants.’

‘You’re not? Well now I’m really insulted.’

They smiled at each other some more. ‘What do you say?’ said Zenek. ‘Family-rated date with, uh, what’s your daughter’s name?’

‘Ali.’

‘With Ali?’

Again Annie’s face turned severe. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Give me a ring. But you should know in advance that no one comes before my daughter. Especially no charming Canadian boy. Got it?’

Zenek laughed. ‘Got it. No objections here.’

Annie gave Zenek her number and he walked her to the door of the bar where her friends were waiting for her. As she hugged Zenek goodbye, she whispered in his ear, ‘Call me soon, charming Canadian boy.’ Zenek smiled and skipped home feeling the happiest he had in years.

Zenek went to the children’s play area of the Meadows with Annie and Ali a week later. Ali was a pretty, happy girl. She looked at Zenek wearily at first but quickly warmed to his goofy, playful demeanour. Zenek found Annie even more attractive when he saw how she mothered her daughter. She treated the girl with dignity and lightness, a rare combination of behaviours he found in most adult interactions. 

They had a picnic after climbing and swinging and rolling around. After they’d eaten they walked back to Annie’s place, a two bedroom flat on Whitehouse Terrace. Annie asked Ali if she’d like to show Zenek her room and she said that she would, ‘very much’. 

They all went up to the apartment and Ali showed Zenek her room. Ali was the most proud of her book collection and her paintings from art class at school. Zenek noticed that her walls were covered in pictures taken of her in black and white at various younger ages. Some of them were shining and classically beautiful while others were underexposed and much more somber. Zenek started to wonder where Ali’s father fit into these pictures. He wondered if he’d left Ali like his mother had left him when he was just a small child.

Zenek lingered over the photographs and Ali began putting her books back on her shelf with great care. As if reading his mind, Annie walked into the room holding two beers. She handed one to Zenek and said, ‘Thought you might need this, however good you seem with children.’

‘Thanks. I’m having a great time but it wouldn’t hurt.’ They clinked bottles and watched Ali as she kneeled on the floor finishing tidying her books. 

‘Ali,’ her mother said after a moment. ‘Do you want to ask Zenek to stay for dinner?’

The child turned around and looked at Zenek then Annie then Zenek again. Suddenly she leapt to her feet and screaming, ‘Yeahhhhhhh.’ She ran up to Zenek and hugged his leg. Zenek liked the affection but couldn’t help feeling it somewhat out of proportion to the situation. After all, they’d just met and didn’t she wonder what his intentions were with her mother?  

As they were all finishing dinner that night Zenek began to wonder whether he should try to stay over. He’d never dated a woman with a child before and wasn’t sure of the proper etiquette. He thought that if he stayed he risked seeming duplicitous to Ali but if he left he risked insulting Annie. 

After dinner Annie suggested they all watch TV for a short bit. As they watched an episode of an animated children’s show, Zenek continued weighing his options. Fortunately, as the show ended, Annie made the decision for him. ‘Ali,’ she said, ‘do you want Zenek to read you a bedtime story?’ Ali smiled in approval. ‘Okay, go get changed and pick out a story then Zenek will come read it to you.’

Ali ran to her room and a few minutes later called for Zenek. Zenek went and read her two books. Half way through the second book he looked up to discover Ali was asleep. He put the book down gently, turned off the bedside light, and got up and left the room. 

Back in the living room Annie was channel-surfing and nursing another beer. She turned the TV off when she saw Zenek enter the room. ‘Hey, Charming Canadian Boy.’

‘Hey,’ he said and sat down on the couch. She swung her legs up and folded them under herself. She handed Zenek her beer bottle. ‘Sorry to volunteer you to read. She seemed really like you. You really don’t have a secret child somewhere you’re not mentioning?’

‘Haha. No. But I guess I took care of my younger sister a lot growing up. Maybe that’s got something to do with that.’

‘Well, whatever it is, it’s sexy as hell.’

Annie took the beer back from Zenek and took swig. ‘You seem like a pretty awesome mom,’ Zenek. ‘She’s a great kid.’

‘Mmm, I have my moments.’

Zenek hesitated to ask about where Ali’s father was but curiousity and his lowered inhibitions from the alcohol won out: ‘So, uh, where is Ali’s dad?’ Annie turned away from him and sighed. ‘He lives in Glasgow. He’s comes to see her once every month. He’s a decent guy but not a very active father. He sends what money he can but it’s not much.’

‘What does he do?’

‘He’s a photographer. We met in art school. We were young and idealistic and I thought I couldn’t get pregnant because I weighed almost nothing at the time and rarely even got my period.’ She took another sip of beer. ‘By the time I discovered I was pregnant, I was already three months along. It would have been really difficult to terminate that late and Ryan – Ali’s father – didn’t oppose having a child. We were so young and stupid we thought we were both going to be rich photographers in no time so it would all be a walk in the park.’

Annie stared straight ahead and didn’t say anything. She didn’t seem upset about the direction the conversation was going but she was definitely down-cast compared to a few minutes earlier. Zenek decided to continue his inquiry despite Annie’s depressed mood: ‘What happened with you and Ryan? How did things end?’ 

Annie sighed. ‘We tried to make a go of it but we were just babies ourselves. We had no money and really didn’t know each other that well. We started fighting nearly the minute Ali was born. We soon decided it would be better raised if we raised her in separate happy households, rather than one that one unhappy one. I moved to Edinburgh in 2006 to be closer to my mum and he didn’t object.’

Again Annie paused and stared ahead again. Zenek looked around the room and tried to think of another relevant question or comment. ‘Is it hard being a single mom?’

Annie tilted her head and looked at him. ‘Why do you think I have this so readily at hand?’ She lifted up the beer bottle. 

‘But seriously,’ she went on, ‘if it weren’t for money I’d have no complaints. Ali’s great. I love her more than anything. Some times I worry about her not having a strong male figure in her life but she doesn’t seem too damaged yet. Mostly it’s just making rent and getting her decently clothed and feed that worries me.’

‘What do you do for work?’

‘Well I have my photography but mostly I temp.’ 

‘Oh, that’s, uh…How do you like that?’

‘How do you think?’ she said lifting up her beer bottle again. 

This time Zenek paused and stared ahead. ‘Hmm, well, it’s getting kind of late and I have class in the morning. Thanks for the fun day. It was great hanging out with you guys.’

‘You mean you’re not going to try to get in my pants? You’re such a tease.’

‘I-I, uh, I just like to take things slow is all.’

‘’Slow’? Well aren’t you a gentleman. Okay. Maybe you can come see us again next Saturday. Sound good?’ 

‘Sounds great.’

They stood up and walked to the door. Zenek opened the door part way and stepped outside the apartment into the hallway. He turned around and faced Annie. ‘Goodnight, Annie.’

‘Goodnight Charming Canadian Boy.’

He put his hand on her hip and leaned in and kissed her. She smiled as they parted and so did he.

-

Being back in school was an adjustment for Zenek. Reading and writing papers was far different from learning and constructing computer code. The second task was much more self-contained. Occasionally his bosses at IBM had stern words for him or pressured him to work faster but at least he always knew where he stood or how much work he had left to do over what kind of time period. With his new program he had assignments with deadlines but he couldn’t tell what good they were for. Most of his professors weren’t terribly inspiring. Nearly none of them ever mentioned distributed systems or big picture issues at all. The majority of his readings and assignments focused on the existing agencies, mechanisms and technologies for environmental preservation. Some of these were interesting but they were the exception rather than the rule.

He also found his classmates to be far less idealistic than he was. Their goals and corresponding perspectives were generally to work for oil and gas companies or government agencies in their sustainability departments. These were secure, well-paying jobs but not likely to precipitate widespread social change the way Zenek wanted to. 

With this in his mental backdrop, Zenek was especially eager to see Annie and Ali the following Saturday. They went to the playground at the meadows again and got ice cream afterwards. From there they went out for Indian food for dinner. Zenek was in heaven watching Ali tear into naan and devour chicken tikka marsala. This and her enthusiasm for nearly everything took him out of his own head. The child’s zest for life made him better appreciate of the world around him – the mild fall day and deep green flora outside, the pleasant company and restaurant staff inside...  

After dinner they all went back to Annie’s flat and read books and Ali went to sleep. This time Zenek decided it was okay to spend the night. He and Annie went quickly from the couch to the bedroom after Ali had gone to sleep. 

The sex was good. Zenek and Annie had a strong physical connection and they both came easily. What was even more satisfying was the pillow talk afterwards. Zenek learned details about Annie’s life. She’d grown up without a very active father, not unlike Ali’s situation. Her father and mother split up when Annie was two and she had few memories of him from early life. He was an oil rig worker for British Petroleum and his contracts started taking him further and further abroad or so he gave as the reason to Annie for his absence in her life. Annie more so chalked up her dad’s truancy to character flaws and her mother. She thought her mother hadn’t done enough to encourage her dad to stay around. The general tone of Annie’s story was demure if not tragic. This made her all-the-more remarkable to Zenek. How someone of her circumstances was such an enthusiastic and upbeat mother amazed him. If he’d been through what Annie had he’d find it very hard to be optimistic. 

Zenek slept well that night but work up feeling weary. He worried he couldn’t benefit Annie and Ali’s situation as student very significantly. Annie should be with someone with a well-paying job not someone living off loans. How was he supposed to help anyone with growing debt and a spotty knowledge of sustainability, a money-eschewing discipline in the first place. 

He got up that morning and kissed Annie goodbye before Ali woke up. If he couldn’t help them with money, the least he could do was not create confusion or jealously within Ali over his relationship with her mom.

Zenek’s decision to leave school was more gradual than sudden. It was mostly because of problems with the program that he decided to drop out. He just didn’t feel any intellectual or moral connection with his classmates, professors or the material. If he was going to be a disinterested automaton in his chosen field he might as well go back into programming. At least with programming he was earning money instead of spending money. 

He tried not to look too far into the future as he got closer and closer to withdrawing from school. One possible flaw in his thinking was that it could be short sighted. He thought maybe sustainability would be more satisfying in the long run and if so, he should stick with it. But this was pure speculation. Compared to the fact that he was decidedly unhappy in the present, that possibility was a much lower quality of input, if not completely admissible. His dad and stepmom questioned whether he wasn’t making this decision for Annie’s sake and he dismissed them immediately. Sure he wanted to help with Ali and Annie’s standard of living but this was a corollary not a cause of his changing paths. He applied to work at small Edinburgh software developer specializing in financial products and was quickly hired. 

All this happened during Zenek first winter in Scotland. Winter wasn’t as cold as it was in Toronto but the sun only came up at 8:30 each morning and went down by 16:00 each afternoon. It was a physically dark time but emotionally bright one for Zenek. He liked his new job and things were developing quickly between Annie and him. He’d moved into Annie’s flat on Whitehaven and found the chores of childcare pleasantly exhausting. Ali’s curiousity and energy were perpetually engaging. His favourite part about living with the young family was being woken up each morning by an excited child rather than a joyless alarm clock. It really changed the perspective he started the day with. 

Annie’s personality unfolded further and further, which delighted him as well. With his help around the house she was less tired and quick to frustrate. With his income contribution she was able to take a day off of temping a week and devote it to her photography. This practice made her more mentally lively and passionate in all areas of her life. Early in the spring of that year Zenek decided he’d seen enough, that Annie and Ali were who he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. He went to a jeweler’s on the Golden Mile and bought a modest engagement ring. Then, on a night Ali was spending at her grandmother’s, he made Annie dinner and proposed. 

Annie covered her mouth and began to cry when she saw the ring. She’d never imagined such a small box could carry such happiness. She loved Zenek deeply and now knew how much he loved her back. Long swathes of her life unfurrowed in her mind. She remembered her disappointment at never seeing her dad as a kid. She remembered the way the other kids teased her she was a bastard and how inferior and alone this made her feel. She remembered her determination as a teenager to find love – or at least sex – to fill the void left by her dad. She remembered hers and Ryan’s relationship ending and though mostly happy about it, the dread that she might not ever meet anyone else and die alone…

She began to shake as Zenek walked around the table and hugged her. He couldn’t see inside Annie’s mind but he could feel her body exorcizing some demon or long-seated negativity. He’d never felt so connected to anyone and he started to cry too. He hadn’t intentionally sacrificed his dream of having a wider impact on the world for Annie but even if he had, he was now having a stronger impact on someone else’s life than he could have ever imagined having anywhere anyway. The coincidence of this made him think there may in fact be a higher power at work in the world.

What gets written about the quiet heroes? Where are the stories of the toiling, unpraised few who don’t seek glory for themselves but live contentedly helping others? Who are they who heal wounds they neither caused nor suffer from directly? Who is Kevin DiFiore? Who is Mark Hodgson? Who are Alana Parisi, Alex Lambert, Paul McKeown, and Uzair Amir? 

...Who is Zenek Krowcyk-Lewedowski?  

-

Zenek Krowcyk-Lewendowski was born in Warsaw to Wojtek Lewendowski and Angelika Krowcyk. Wojtek was an artist and Angelika a nurse. They separated when Zenek was four and his sister Ewelina was one. The cause of the separation was complicated. Angelika desired a better quality of life than Wojtek could afford as an artist and Wojtek, in retaliation to his wife’s dissatisfaction, cheated on her. Angelika was so enraged when she found Wojtek in bed with another woman one afternoon when she got home early from work that she told him to take the children and leave. She loved Zenek and Ewelina deeply but she wanted Wojtek to feel the pressure of being the chief breadwinner for a family. Wojtek lived in a fantasy land of pretty, swirling colours while she got abused by drunken patients and conceited doctors. She wanted Wojtek to learn what responsibility felt like however much she would miss her children.  

Angelika was so stubborn and set on her plan that when Wojtek said he was taking the children to live in Canada where he thought his paintings would sell better, she didn’t try to stop him. She figured he would come running back to Warsaw after a few months he was so naïve to the expense and energy it took to look after small children. 

So Wojtek, Zenek and Ewelina packed up and moved a half continent and ocean away. Zenek missed his mother greatly but was soon distracted and excited by his new surroundings. He and his dad and sister moved into a sleepy West-end neighbourhood of Toronto where there was a large Polish expatriate community including one of Wojtek’s friends from art school. Within weeks of arriving in Toronto, Zenek and Ewelina had friends on their street and Wojtek was being introduced to artists and gallerists all around the city. Things got even more comfortable for them when Wojtek met Mika. Mika was a sculptor and she and Wojtek were instantly attracted to one another. Mika was undaunted by Wojtek’s family situation and she moved in with him and Zenek and Ewelina after less than six months of them dating. 

Mika took to Zenek and Ewelina without hesitation and the children in turn, welcomed her into their lives. Zenek’s childhood progressed relatively free of stress or difficulty for some time after. He was briefly embarrassed at school for not speaking English but he soon picked up the language and integrated easily with his Canadian-born classmates. Once a year his mom would come visit him and his sister or they would go to Poland to see her. Zenek liked his mom’s visits or trips to Poland a lot. Angelika took them up the CN Tower, to Niagara Falls and other tourist attractions around Toronto and south-central Ontario. In Warsaw they’d visit relatives who showered Zenek and his sister with gifts and affection. But the, just before Zenek turned thirteen, at the end of Angelika’s visit to Toronto, his mom started to sob when they went to say goodbye to each other. In a way that had become characteristic of him, Zenek asked, ‘What’s the matter, Mom? Why are you crying?’

Angelika hugged him as they stood on the porch to his dad’s house. ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘I made such a terrible mistake letting you move away from me. I’ve missed you terribly. I’m a horrible mother.’

Zenek pushed himself back so he could see look his mother in the eye. The two were now at eye level with one another so he looked straight ahead at her. ‘Mom,’ he said. ‘I love my life here. You’re the best mother in the world.’ Angelika sobbed again and kissed and hugged her son. After a few minutes she turned and walked off the porch and back to Poland.

-

Zenek grew into a happy, well-adjusted teenager. He had many friends and his grades were excellent. He was quieter than most of his Canadian friends but he didn’t think anything wrong with this. His favourite things to do were look after his sister and solve math problems. These things gave him much greater peace of mind and tranquility than drinking and getting stoned did, activities that were becoming favoured by his friends.

Zenek’s love of math inspired him to apply to the computer science department at the University of Toronto for his bachelor’s degree. He was accepted and lived at home while he studied. His life was quiet and uncomplicated. The only possible complaint he had was that he couldn’t easily met girls living at home. His classmates were predominantly male and he felt self-conscious about asking out girls he met at parties back to his dad and Mika’s house. All in all it wasn’t a serious problem. He got a great deal of female attention and companionship from his sister and stepmom albeit not of a romantic variety.

After undergrad Zenek took a job with IMB in their manufacturing products department. It was well paying and decently interesting work. He liked many of his colleagues and was generally happy with his direction in life. Around the same time he moved into an apartment in Parkdale with a few of his friends from high school in the hopes of jumpstarting his romantic life. Unfortunately, despite the opportunity he now had to invite women home after parties or dates, he remained single for nearly two years. 

Then in late 2009, at a party he and his friends were throwing for Halloween, Zenek met a girl who captured his interest and seemed to return it. Her name was Margaret and she was a painter. They had a few friends in common and she was in the midst of creating a website to promote her artwork. She and Zenek talked enthusiastically about art and website design for almost an hour at the party. But just as Zenek was gathering the nerve to ask her for her phone number, a man walked up to her who she immediately turned to and kissed. Turning back to Zenek, Margaret said, ‘Zenek, this is my boyfriend, Daniel.’ Zenek’s heart sank and he could barely gather the strength to clasp Daniel’s outstretched hand. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said. He looked over his shoulder then down at the floor. ‘I’m going to the kitchen for a drink. Do either of you want anything?’  

Daniel shook his head and Margaret did the same. Then, changing her mind, Margaret said, ‘Actually, sure. Get me one of whatever you’re having.’ ‘No problem.’  On his way to the kitchen Zenek tried to put the idea of any of union between him and Margaret out of his head. 

-

Margaret friend-requested Zenek the day after the Halloween party and they started messaging each other about Margaret’s website. Zenek was happy to answer her questions about coding. He was an art lover and he’d reached a level of competency at his job that he was starting to have a good deal of free time on his hands. He and Margaret soon started meeting in person to discuss Margaret’s website. Margaret told him from the outset that she couldn’t pay him except in a piece of art and Zenek assured her that that was fine, that he was glad to help make the world more beautiful and support an artist. 

After three months the website was done to a level that satisfied both Zenek and Margaret. In the interim the two had grown very fond of each other. Zenek liked Margaret’s emotional exuberance and active imagination. He couldn’t help feeling his original attraction to her return when he visited her one time at her studio and she was covered in paint wearing nothing but cut-off jean shorts and a tank top. For Margaret’s part, she liked Zenek’s stoicism and unfailing moral compass. At various times she’d told him about hers and Daniel’s sexual problems of late and she didn’t notice a change in his demeanour whatsoever. Instead praying on Margaret’s vulnerability and trying to get her into bed, he repeatedly assured her that she and Daniel would work things out. 

The painting Margaret made for Zenek in compensation for his help creating her website was one of her favourites ever. It was a four by five canvass of layered green and yellow paint with designs and impressions scrapped out of it using different pallet knives. It was a technique she’d worked at considerably but had only felt mildly successful at doing up until then. Most of the scrapings and cut-outs in her previous pieces were of fairly predictable patterns whereas Zenek’s piece was the first in which she’d tried using more organic shapes and lines. The overall effect of the piece was of something controlled and deliberate yet spontaneous and messy. 

Margaret brought Zenek his piece at 8:00 one evening in mid-January. When she presented it to him he looked at it quizzically for a least a minute. Finally, when he took his eyes off it, she noticed they were moist if not wet. ‘Thank you,’ he said in a low voice. ‘It’s very beautiful.’

Margaret had never seen anyone so moved by her art. This, coupled with the physical neglect she was experiencing from her boyfriend, caused her to take a half-step closer to him. ‘I’m glad you like it,’ she said and glanced at his lips. Zenek felt his breath speed up and his heart beat in his chest. He completed the remaining distance between them and kissed her. A minute later they went to his bedroom.

The premise of Zenek and Margaret’s affair was strictly physical. Margaret loved Daniel but his inability or unwillingness to please her sexually left her feeling very lonely. She felt tremendous guilt at abusing Daniel’s trust but what else could she do. They’d tried to talk about their intimacy issues but Daniel was unwavering in his belief that he could have a heart attack if he made love to her. He suffered from severe anxiety yet refused to see a therapist or take any medication for it out fear it would interfere with his work as a filmmaker. 

Zenek felt bad about sleeping with Margaret too. He’d met Daniel several times and really liked him. He was always friendly and appreciative towards him for the work he’d done for Margaret’s website. Less trusting men would have been suspicious or jealous of someone who spent so much time with his girlfriend. (It turned out he had reason to be.) 

Nevertheless the sex was great and Margaret was lovely. Zenek let her decide the times and lengths of their encounters and was careful not to kiss him on the mouth more than a few times per meeting. Mostly they met at Margaret’s studio on weeknights to avoid his roommates catching them. (Daniel and Margaret lived together so her place was out of the question.) The air mattress Margaret bought from Wal-Mart for them to have sex on in her studio was a bit tawdry but she managed to make a joke about it that put Zenek more at ease.  (She said it was a dystopic, late-stage capitalist canvas.)

Gratifying though it was, the affair couldn’t go one forever. Guilt over Daniel’s would-be feelings was mounting in Margaret and Zenek’s need for a fuller relationship was starting to show. When he brought a new sheet set for the air mattress one night in late March, Margaret felt it was time to stop. Glancing at the sheets in Zenek’s hand, she sat down on the mattress. ‘I think this might be starting to get out hand,’ she said. 

Zenek sat down beside her. ‘Yeah, I guess. What do you want to do?’

‘Let’s pretend we never met, that this was just a beautiful painting hanging in a gallery we each glanced at but never saw again.’

‘Sure,’ said Zenek, lowering his eyes. ‘A beautiful painting.’ He got up slowly. ‘Goodbye, Margaret.’

He kissed her on the cheek and left.

-

That spring was a depressing one for Zenek. However incomplete his relationship was with Margaret, it was better than nothing and he missed her a great deal. He tried to occupy himself by taking up rock-climbing and the activity helped somewhat. By the time the first consistently good weather of the year arrived in June he was virtually free of longing for his former lover. 

Yet there was more missing from Zenek’s life than romance and companionship. His job no longer brought him the peace of mind and detachment he remembered falling in love with in math class so many years ago. He couldn’t stop his attention from drifting to bigger pictures, to what his daily efforts were going towards. He thought about the possibility of advancement within IBM or moving to another company. He could become a project coordinator, a manager and perhaps with a lot of work, a VP. But all of these roles, while better paying, required him to over-see other people and this responsibility went against his sensitive and non-judgmental nature. He thought about going back to school to do a master’s; the prospect certainly appealed to him intellectually. He’d like nothing more than to immerse himself in the most challenging theoretical and conceptual problems computer science had to offer. The drawback to this direction was money. He’d just managed to pay off his student debt from his bachelor’s degree and graduate school tuition was twice as much as undergrad. And besides, what was the end game with a master’s, A PhD? He couldn’t see himself working strictly in research or academia. No, a master’s in computer science wasn’t a solution to his vocational ennui. At best it would be a temporary fix. 

One day in mid-July 2010 Zenek saw a poster for a lecture on the applications of information technology to environmental issues on the bulletin board at his rock-climbing gym. He went to the lecture and learned about a concept developed by an American economist called ‘distributed systems’. According to the economist the concept and its principles were already at work in the communications, political and cultural arenas. The prototypical distributed system was the Internet, a decentralized and non-hierarchical system of organization and distribution of goods. According to the economist – and the lecturer cribbing him – distributed energy systems wherein individual homes could produce green energy was the only way out of the world’s addiction to fossil fuels and eminent global environmental ruin. 

Zenek was inspired by the lecture and immediately started researching schools and programs where computer science and sustainability were being taught together. His research led him to the University of Edinburgh’s master’s in environmental design and sustainability program. He liked the idea of returning to Europe in addition to the program itself. He looked at the admission requirements, saw that he met most of them, and set about applying.

-

Zenek was accepted to the 2011 master’s program in environmental design and sustainability at the University of Edinburgh. He found out he’d gotten in during the middle of the winter after his and Margaret’s affair and was really excited. He had lots of time to prepare to move and he didn’t even own much furniture or things he couldn’t easily pack up and take with him. Anything he had that was excessively heavy or bulky he could leave at his dad and stepmom’s house until he came back – if he came back. 

After learning of his acceptance and getting organized to move, Zenek found his attention again drifting back to his romantic void. He thought about Margaret and whether he’d ever find another woman like her. They’d bumped into each other occasionally at parties since their affair and the experience always depressed him. She seemed to have resolved her issues with Daniel, the two of them always hanging off of each other like teenaged love-birds. 

Thankfully that summer arrived and left quickly. For his departure, Zenek’s friends organized a big farewell party at his Parkdale apartment. His dad and stepmom and sister came. Ewelina cried at several points in the evening over, but Zenek assured her he’d be home for Christmas and every other chance he got. The rest of the party was filled with raucous drinking and laughter. 

Zenek flew to Edinburgh airport the day after his farewell party carrying a sizable hangover along with all his luggage. He managed to sleep on the plane and woke up an hour before landing in foggy, damp Scotland. The first thing he noticed as the plane dipped beneath the cloud-line was the emerald green colour of all the plants and fields below. It seemed like a very appropriate place to study ‘green’ technology. 

Zenek went through customs and got the bus to the city centre. Edinburgh was much smaller than Toronto and he arrived just outside Waverly Station in less than half an hour. Along the way, he gazed out the bus window at the buildings and scenery of Scotland’s capital. Nearly everything was built in moss-covered stone and nothing was taller than five or seven storeys. The architectural feel gave a sense of history, modesty and authenticity. 

Zenek passed Edinburgh Castle and Princes Street Gardens and the bus came to a stop. At that point he found his bus to the university and boarded it. It was difficult managing all his bags but Edinburghers were very polite and yielded to him as he got on and off the buses with all his things. 

Everyone who lived in 79 Winona Ave – the pets included – had a name ending in ‘ah’. There was Farah (42), Sonja (44), Pasha (pit-bull-Labrador mix), and Lula (orange and white cat). The house was three storeys tall although the third floor was strictly the master bedroom. It was semi-detached and its exterior was pale blue clapboard typical of New England architecture. The house looked onto a small park in a quiet, slowly gentrifying neighbourhood of Cambridge. 

Farah and Sonja had bought their house while there were still drug dens on the block and drunks sleeping in the park. They endured glares and insults from bigoted and intolerant neighbours when they went for post-dinner walks holding hands. Slowly the neighbourhood pushed out the older, intolerant denizens to neither of the pair’s dismay. 

Farah was an architect who working mainly on commercial interiors and Sonja was a jazz saxophonist and music teacher. The two met ten years earlier at a party of a mutual friend’s. Farah had made the first move after noticing Sonja’s shimmering blond hair from across the living room at the party. Sonja’s first impression of Farah was that she was a bit of a cookie-cutter lesbian with her short hair and low voice. But after talking to her a short while, she discovered her humour and warmth and agreed to give her her number. 

They went out for dinner two weeks later and had such a good time that they started seeing each other regularly. Within three months, Sonja moved into Farah’s spacious North End apartment, and three months after that they adopted Pasha. It was around the one-year anniversary of their meeting that the house in Cambridge came up for sale. Farah learned of it through a client who worked in real estate. At $468,000 asking the place was a steal, the client said. The neighbourhood was sure to take off economically and they’d make a great return on their investment,. 

Initially Farah was more enthusiastic than Sonja was about buying a house for the obvious reason that she made much more money. But Sonja also hesitated because she thought that making such a large commitment to someone for strictly financial reasons was shallow. She was still evaluating their long-term prospects as a couple. She often thought she’d like children but she was pretty sure Farah didn’t. 

Eventually the lure of financial security overcame Sonja’s idealism and they bought the house. They moved in and lived at 79 Winona for the better part of a decade. They modernized it bit by bit and took trips to Europe or the Caribbean every six months or so. It was a happy time, but as everyone knows happy times don’t last forever. 

-

Farah’s work was a source of struggle for her. While Greater Boston fell on the liberal end on the political spectrum nationally, at ground level, it was much more nuanced. Farah endured subtle yet persistent homophobia and sexism from the contractors and trades-people she dealt with as an architect. She had difficulty getting building supplies delivered on time and she was constantly getting overbilled like she didn’t know how plumbing and electricity worked as well a man. And, despite her firm’s seemingly progressive culture, she was overlooked for a partnership for years. She could do nothing but watch as her less talented and hard-working straight colleagues got promoted ahead of her. She smoked pot on the weekends and the occasional weekday to help with the stress and injustice of it but this didn’t always work. 

One day, in early March 2012, Farah walked into her office past the desks of several associates and junior architects on the way to her own. The office was open concept and occupied the top floor of a converted old warehouse in North End. The ceilings were eighteen feet high with suspended halogen lights in conical casings. One entire wall was covered in large factory-style windows that let in a great deal of natural light and reduced the need for artificial lighting almost completely. 

It was beautiful office by office standards but an office all-the-same. The lights were cold and headache-inducing and like anywhere occupied by more than thirty people at a time that wasn’t a sports arena, they needed an air circulation system, which created a constant hum. 

Farah got to her desk area and sat down. She turned on her computer and opened her email. She had twenty unread messages, most of which were from contractors and junior architects for projects she was working on. There was one from a client, which she clicked on and opened:

From: Bridget Simpson 9:23 PM; March 11, 2013 Subject: What’s going on with our office??

Farah --

I stopped by the office yesterday and was shocked by the lack of progress that’s been made. The foyer hasn’t been started and none of the conference rooms are done. How will you have the work completed by the end of the month? We’ve got overseas investors flying in to meet our management team and we were supposed to show them our new office. Am I going to have to book a hotel conference room? Do I have to tell you how amateur this makes us look? 

Please send me a detailed work plan by end of day to assure me you’ll have our office ready on time. If you can’t meet the deadline we won’t being using you again in the future or recommending you to any of our business partners or clients. 

Bridget

Farah closed the message and looked out the window beside her desk. She looked at the treetops over Paul Revere Mall and daydreamed she was sitting under one of them with a book and coffee rather than being at her desk. She’d have to call and maybe visit the contractor in charge of Bridgette’s project and she already knew he’d have a litany of excuses over why things weren’t on schedule. The question for Farah was what she could do to speed things up. She could fire her contractor and find someone willing to work non-stop for the next two weeks to finish the project on time, but her current contractor’s work was good if slow. Plus, in her experience, it was much easier to resolve conflicts before a project was finished than afterwards. Going with a new contractor risked having a longer – if momentarily improved – mess on her hands. 

She sighed and slowly stood up. She grabbed her backpack and headed back out to the street to go crack the whip or beg and plead with her contractor. It certainly wasn’t what she’d expected to be doing at her age back in architecture school. At this stage of her life she’d imagined herself designing skyscrapers and bridges with many subordinates to take care of the legwork. Instead she was on her way to go breath in drywall dust and be condescended to by people a fraction as smart as her. She’d need the carrot of an extra large bowl and Pasha’s soft head to pat when she got home to get herself through the day.

Sonja sat watching one of her students practice his scales in the basement of the church where she taught her saxophone lessons. Her student – Tim – was an average nine-year-old in terms of his musical ability. She’d been teaching him for almost two years and she was neither disappointed nor pleased with his progress. As she watched Tim strain for the breath to finish his scale, she thought about her on musical development. Her parents had both been classical musicians and members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Sonja started piano lessons at age three, then saxophone at eight. She was so proficient at piano by the time she was ten that her teachers called her prodigious. 

Her parents were mortified when at fourteen, Sonja decided not only to switch her main focus to the saxophone but to pursue jazz rather than classical music the most seriously. Her parents said that jazz was too competitive and insecure as a musical career, that they hadn’t paid umpteen thousands of dollars on her musical education for her to risk it on such a lark. Sonja countered that Coltrane and Mingus were superior to Mozart and Beethoven in term of their musical imaginations and that she was following her artistic integrity by switching to jazz. Her parents – especially her father – continued their protest but to little avail. 

From then on Sonja pursued music with the zeal that only a young person out to prove her elders wrong can possess. She practiced until her lips cracked and bleed and she won a scholarship to Juilliard  as a result of her effort. She left Boston for New York so sure she was going to be one of the greats that she’d already rehearsed answers to interview questions from newspapers and magazines. (‘What led me to switch from classical to jazz? Jazz’s chaotic harmony. Classical is wonderful but it doesn’t reflect the world as it exists today.’)

During her sophomore year at Juilliard something upset Sonja’s carefully laid plans. ‘Something’ was a trumpet player named David Wilson. David Wilson blew like no one she’d ever heard. She became so enamoured by him that she ignored her own practice and auditioning to listen to him play and follow him around. She was almost as transfixed by him without his trumpet as with it. His movements and words were music. He spoke in scales and walked in perfect rhythm. His long limbs and pouty lips looked like extensions of his instrument or vice versa. 

As a human being though, David Wilson was vain and self-centred. He took advantage of Sonja’s infatuation with him and after a few years of letting her dote on him day and night, he dumped her for a cellist in the classical ensemble. By this time Sonja had dropped down to part-time at Juilliard and was waitressing in a bar where she sometimes played. (David had told her that a true musician didn’t need a teacher to tell her what was good or bad and Sonja took the statement to heart like anything he said.) 

After the pain and sorrow of David Wilson’s leaving her lifted, Sonja dated a few miscellaneous men but was rightfully weary of all of each. In a turn of fate, a female coworker kissed her at a holiday party one night and she found it surprisingly enjoyable. She liked the softness of the coworker’s kiss compared to men’s which always seemed to be trying to swallow her face. She slept with the coworker a few weeks later and it was as enjoyable – or more so – than any man she’d been with. 

Sonja’s foray into women coincided with a musical resurgence. She went on a six or eight month gig-booking streak and the success allowed her to quit waitressing and boosted her self-confidence considerably. She even met a trio looking to form a quartet and joined the group. Things were going great. 

But when the solo shows started to dry up and the drudgery of learning to play in a group set in, Sonja’s self-esteem deflated. She thought she hadn’t lived up to her potential and her window to make it as a jazz artist was rapidly closing, if not already shut. She also felt guilty she hadn’t told her parents that she was gay. Before she knew it she was back home in Boston taking 300 milligrams of Prozac a day to avoid constantly thinking of killing herself. 

With her parents’ care and comfort, Sonja slowly recovered from her depression. At her psychiatrist’s behest, she came clean to them that she was gay. They were more supportive than she’d expected and the divulgence felt like a weight off her shoulders. She started taking courses again at Berklee in Boston and eventually finished her degree. 

It had been almost fifteen years since she graduated from Berklee and in the meantime, despite her best efforts, she’d never gotten much traction in her career. She’d recorded a few songs with a group and played a weekly show at a bar in Harvard Square, but that was as far as she’d gotten. She racked her brain for how she’d fallen off track but couldn’t put it down to one thing definitively. David Wilson was certainly partly to blame but it was also likely she’d over-estimated her abilities to begin with. ‘Great artists aren’t born, they’re made,’ one of herJuilliard teachers had once lectured her Early American Jazz class, but lately Sonja felt the opposite. She just didn’t have the talent to make it as a musician. 

Maybe she should try to get a job at Berklee? She thought, still watching Tim work on his scales. She could redevote herself to teaching music rather than making it. But then didn’t that contradict her belief about genius being unteachable? Or maybe she’d been in the wrong medium all this time. She really liked her recent attempts to paint watercolour. Farah said they were good. Should quit music and give her full attention to that?

Tim looked at her over his shoulder waiting for her to comment on his scales and he snapped back to the present. ‘That’s great Tim,’ she said. ‘Your breathing is really improving. Please practice sections four to six in your workbook for next week. That’s all the time we have for today.”      

Farah pushed open the plastic curtain that kept drywall dust from escaping from the entranceway to Global Investment’s office-in-progress. As she’d expected, she was greeted by the odourless feel of the dust in her nostrils. She sneezed twice (was she allergic after all these years?) but the sound was drowned out by the pitched squeals and blurts of power tools at work. She saw a cabinet worker who was working on drawers for the conference rooms and walked up to him. He glanced up at her briefly but didn’t offer anything more by way of a greeting despite the fact they’d met on several of her site visits before.

‘Hi,’ Farah said loudly and a little annoyed. 

The cabinet maker looked back up and removed lowered his dust mask. ‘Yeah?’ he said. 

‘Have you seen John anywhere? I need to talk to him about our schedule?’ (It didn’t hurt to put a little pressure on the trades people either. They’d spend a decade on a single job if it was up to them.)

‘He’s back by the stairwell,’ the cabinet maker said. 

‘Thanks,’ said Farah, but the man had already looked back down at his work. She walked towards the back of the office space they’d gutted and reassembled. There was saw dust everywhere and the ground was still subflooring Despite the apparent disorder, she knew progress had been made. All the walls had been build and drywalled. The lighting and electrical was finished and the kitchen and bathrooms were installed. The major work was done. What remained was putting in the floor, painting the walls and trim, and finishing the cabinetry. She knew this was a tall order to accomplish in two weeks’ time. 

She and John had worked together on more than five or six projects over the past few years and he’d finished about half of them on time and the rest, within a few weeks of their deadline. Only one project had spilled over a month. John’s record was extremely punctual for the construction industry, but she couldn’t let on to him that she knew this, now when she had an angry, powerful client breathing down her neck. 

She saw John sitting at his make-shift desk at the back of the site. He was late middle-aged with deep worry lines above his forehead. He was stooped over her floor plans and didn’t notice her approaching. When he finally heard her footsteps she was standing right in front of him. ‘Farah,’ he looked up, smiling. ‘I wasn’t expecting you today. How are you? Everything all right?’

She narrowed her eyes, psyching herself up to be stern. ‘Actually, no, John. Bridget came by yesterday and is concerned we won’t be able to make our deadline. She wants a work schedule from me by end of day to assure her we will…’

John widened raised his brow, making his forehead into an accordion. ‘Well, I admit we’ve had a few delays. My cabinet makers got marooned on their last job because of a supply shortage and were late getting here. They’re working double-time to catch up. I’m sure we’ll be able to get it done on time though.’

‘John, the walls haven’t even been primed. We were supposed to be finished the foyer and started on the conference rooms by now…’

‘Well, these things never go exactly according to plan. You know that.’

‘Of course, I know that, but what am I supposed to tell our client?’

‘Tell them that if they want perfect plans they should put a cabinet maker on retainer…’

She couldn’t help laugh a bit a his joke, but she held back as best she could.

‘This is serious, John. I’m in a lot of shit if we don’t get this done on time.’ She narrowed her eyes again. ‘I’ll have to consider all my options to do so.’ 

John’s forehead practically disappeared he raised it so high. His face reddened and his voice rose. ‘What’s that supposed to mean??’

‘It means I’d have to replace you.’

At this his face turned even redder and his jaw clenched. ‘We’ll get it done, Farah. You have my word,’ he muttered. 

‘On time?’

‘On time.’

‘Well, I appreciate your assurances but I feel obliged to also remind you of our contract. You recall that you’ll be penalized 5% compounded weekly for any overruns, right?’

‘Yes. I recall.’

‘Good. Good luck then, John. Please let me know if you need anything from me for us to get finished on time. As I said, I’ll be in deep shit if we don’t.’

‘Okay. I will.’

At that, Farah stood up and turned to leave. Just as she did angle saw compressed onto a piece of wood making a loud screech. She couldn’t be sure but she thought she head John muttered something, possibly ‘Bitch’. She turned around sharply and glared at him. ‘Excuse me?’

But John had already looked back down at the floor-plan. He looked back up in fake surprise. ‘What? I didn’t say anything.’

She walked away again. Now it was her face that was red.  

-

Tim was Sonja’s final lesson of the day so once he’d left she packed up her things and started home. Ten minutes later she was opening the front door and Pasha was greeting her excitedly. She put down her back, got Pasha’s leash on and grabbed the two-foot long plastic ball-thrower and a tennis ball. Pasha wagged his tail and whimpered with joy. She left the house again, walking around the corner with Pasha to the park. 

Throwing the ball for Pasha improved Sonja’s mood. She watched as he charged after the tennis ball throw after throw. Each time he brought the ball back and released it to her, his eyes widened in anticipation for the next launch of the ball. If only she could adopt the same attitude towards life. Instead of dwelling on the past and seeing the present as an inseparable continuation of it, she should look ahead with excitement and hope. 

Once Pasha began to pant heavily she put on his leach on took him back home. They walked in the front door and Farah was sitting on the couch in the living room breaking up weed in her metal hand grinder. Her bong and lighter were already laid out on the coffee table in front of her. 

Sonja said hi and went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. 

“Hey babe,” Farah said, patting Pasha who’d come to say hello.

Sonja wasn’t enthusiastic to see her girlfriend because she knew that her getting high meant they’d spend the evening watching formulaic sit-coms or sports highlights in a glazed-over, emotionally detached state. Sonja didn’t smoke weed since a few years ago when she’d gotten high and experienced crippling anxiety and paranoia. She didn’t enjoy Farah’s company while she was high either. She laughed and the most basic, unoriginal jokes and couldn’t follow anything remotely complicated on TV or in conversation. She decided to go up to her studio rather than try to engage her in any sort of end-of-the-work-day-what-do-you-want-for-dinner-conversation. 

Sonja went to the studio she and Farah had built in one of the house’s two upstairs bedrooms. They’d widened the walls and stuffed them with sound insulation so that Sonja could play day or night without bothering anyone. The outer walls were made of stained and lacquered cypress wood chosen for its anti-reverberation properties and aesthetic appeal compared to foam or fabric. The total cost of the renovation was almost six thousand dollars, a figure Farah was fond of recounting the figure whenever Sonja complained about her career struggles even though it was supposed to have been a birthday gift and therefore freely given.

Sonja sat down on the stool in front of her saxophone stand and looked and the key touches. They didn’t call her to play them after spending the last six hours listening to children’s screeching and wailing at her lessons. She swivelled around and looked at the water-colour she’d started on an easel on the other side of the room. The half-finished painting was of Pasha and Lula lying on the couch. It looked a much more inviting outlet for her creative energy so she picked up her stool and walked over to it, sat down, got out a clean brush and started to paint. 

Back downstairs Farah watched a show about a high school football coach in Texas and was feeling pleasantly stoned. The show followed the trials and tribulations of the coach’s family and players in a town that valued football above all else. Many of the subplots and situations were romantic in nature, and within them, they were all heteronormative. 

She remembered her own high school experience much differently. She remembered sneaking glimpses of her classmates in the changeroom after gym class. At first she’d caulked it up to fascination over their newly, reproductively-capable bodies, but gradually she admitted to herself it was something else. There was one girl she was particularly transfixed by. Her name was Jessica Leigh and she had bright red hair and creamy white skin. One night she had a sex dream about her, the first she could remember having about anyone. Up until this point Farah had suspected she was gay but her dream confirmed it. How could she deny what her brain thought at rest, in her most honest and uninhibited state? How she felt was innate or genetic, not something in her control. Soon after the dream she cut her hair short and started wearing looser fitting clothing. She endured taunts at school and odd looks from her parents at the dinner table but neither of these things really bothered her. She felt liberated in her new, unadorned appearance. She felt free of the tiresome boy-girl gossip that consumed her high school as she went downtown on the weekends to punk rock shows in sweaty dark clubs. There, at least, she made friends easily, and in her senior year she kissed a girl she knew to be gay after a show. Finally, it felt like she belonged somewhere.

College was an additional release from the prescriptions of ‘normal’ suburban Boston life Farah had grown up with. Her only worry beyond her grades was avoiding her mom’s ceaseless inquiries about whether she’d like to bring someone home for Thanksgiving, Christmas or Easter break. Farah dodged the question effectively up until the fall of senior year. It was mostly in backlash to her mother’s willful ignorance of her sexual orientation that she replied “Yes” to her one night on the phone in early November. “Yes, there is someone I’d like to bring to Thanksgiving,” she said after a pause on the other end of the line.

“Oh, that’s wonderful, dear. What’s his name?” her mom replied.

“His name? He’s a she, Mom.”

“Oh, oh…” There was another pause on the other end of the line. After a few moments her mom cleared her throat. “Well, um, I’ll have to check with your father but that should be fine, honey. We’d love to meet your friend.”

“Great. I’d love you to meet her too.”

“Okay, we’ll all have a nice Thanksgiving together.” She paused again. “I’ve got something on the stove, sweetie. Love you tons. Study hard and we’ll talk to you soon.”

“Wait – Mom?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Don’t you want to know her name?”

“Oh, yes, of course. What’s her name, sweetie?”

“Shannon.”

“Shannon? That’s a lovely name. I’m excited to meet her. Bye for now, dear.”

“Bye Mom.”

She set the phone back down in the cradle and her heart pounded in her chest.

Farah returned her attention to the TV show about the high school football having almost completely lost track of what was happening. It was safe to assume the coach would give another rousing speech and the team would pull off another improbable win before. She wished her own life was so predictable. Instead she wondered whether Bridgette’s project would get finished on time and if it didn’t, whether she be fired. She wondered if Sonja would lighten up on her pot-smoking and figure out some sustainable income-generating endeavour for herself. Maybe she’d have to bite the bullet and agree to have a baby like she knew she wanted…

Farah got up, turned off the TV, and wandered upstairs to see what Sonja was doing. She tapped lightly on the door to her studio and opened it. Inside Sonja was sitting at her easel painting. Her long blond hair was pulled back tight in a bun and as she turned and looked at Farah she looked as radiant as the day they’d met her. “Hey babe,” she said. 

“What'cha working on?” Farah walked over and looked at the painting. It was of Pasha and Lula curled up together and in the top corners of the page were portraits of her and Sonja smiling. It was cheesy and the details of their faces weren’t great but on the whole it was beautiful. It was a symbol of their family and its warmth and love. 

And they were a family as legitimate as any other. Whatever their difficulties and issues they were bound together and loved each other as much as or more than anyone else’s. 

Farah bent down and kissed Sonja. “I love you. You’re so talented and special,” she said.

Sonja kissed her back. “Ah, thanks, babe. You like it?” 

“Yeah.”

My problem with sex started with the fact that I was shy. I was always nervous approaching women and yet always lusting after them. The lust was an aching feeling that started in my groin, crawled up my abdomen and nestled deep in my skull. I fantasized constantly about sleeping with women I met or merely saw. The fantasies grew deeper if I’d gotten to know the women in them. Depending on the personality or specifics of the woman in question, I’d picture us driving along the French Riviera or curled up in a cabin in the woods. There was always of some form of skyrocketing career success to these scenarios too – my career success, of course.

The second part of the problem was more practical. I hadn’t sold a single painting from my last series and they’d been up for months at one of the hottest galleries in the city. I drew a salary from teaching Introduction to Abstract Art at York, but it barely covered my food and rent. Most of my friends and family were married with children and had well-paying jobs. If they weren’t married, at least they ate at upscale restaurants and took overseas vacations. I couldn’t compete with those things. The best I could offer someone was the occasional dinner out at a neighbourhood restaurant and maybe a movie afterwards.

I thought of a way to resolve my lust-poverty conflict but hesitated to act on it. Hiring a hooker went against my natural timidity, not to mention most standards of moral behaviour including the law’s. At the same time, I felt really handcuffed. I couldn’t work in my state of sexual frustration and I couldn’t date in my financial disrepair. Besides, what was so wrong with seeing a prostitute? In some ways wasn’t straight forwardly paying someone to sleep with you better than misleading them into thinking you were something you weren’t? 

One problem with the solution was that I had no idea where to start looking for a hooker. I thought about going to Shuter and Sherbourne and picking up a streetwalker but I didn’t have a car. I could call one of the ads in the street newspaper, the ones with over-saturated pictures of women posing in lingerie, but which one? There were hundreds of them and who knew who would show up at my door. At least with a streetwalker you knew upfront who you’d be getting. 

I thought the best option was to go to a strip club and see where that led me. There was bound to be a ton of desperate guys there and that would surely attract the sex trade’s attention. That’s the best means to undertake this unscrupulous affair, I decided. Go to a strip club.

                                                              -

I went to Jilly’s for the first time one night in mid-March. Its biggest selling point was that it was only a ten-minute streetcar ride or twenty-minute walk from my house. It occupied the main floor of the old five-storey brick building at Queen and Broadview. When I arrived I noticed that all the first and second floor windows were covered with grey-painted plywood and the rest of the building looked like a rooming house or derelict apartments. The entrance to Jilly’s was in a discreet alcove on Broadview. 

I walked through the doors and as soon as I did my eyes shot straight to the stage. The room was darkly lit but clearly and unmistakably, there was a woman dancing less than twenty feet away wearing nothing but platform shoes. It had been so long since I’d seen a woman naked that I got a hard-on instantly. Her breasts were small but visible and her hips shot out from her waist at that angle so alien to the male body. The sight of her hips reminded me of the arc that the top of the sun makes as it sets on a clear day.  I tried not to stare as I found a seat at a table ten or twelve feet from the stage. 

A waitress in a short black skirt came and took my drink order then came back a minute later with my drink. “Eight bucks,” she said as she set the vodka-soda down in front of me. 

Eight bucks? It was a lot for a drink but not for the sight of those beautiful hips swaying in front of me.  

I gave the waitress a ten and told her to keep the change. She tightened her cheek muscles and walked away briskly. 

As soon the waitress left I resumed ogling the girl on stage. I let my eyes travel up and down her body several times. At closer inspection she wasn’t as attractive as I’d thought. Her legs were bruised and she had blemishes and stretch marks on her ass. But worse than either of those things was the expression on her face. The corners of her mouth sagged sullenly and her brow was wrinkled above her sharply raised eyebrows. She looked as if she was trying as hard as she could to imagine herself any place else. 

The blood continued to flow below my belt all-the-same. At first I’d enjoyed the sensation; it wasn’t that often I became turned on enough to get a hard-on in public anymore. But soon I wished it wasn’t happening. The most any of this – the over-priced drinks, the image of the stripper’s ass etched in my mind – was going to accomplish was make me poorer and more desperate to get laid. My thimble-sized drink barely numbed my doubts and misgivings. To an on-looker I was as pathetic the other three or four men sitting around the stage.

I finished my drink and took the streetcar home. As soon as I walked in the door my two half-started paintings glared at me from across the room. They looked at me as disinterestedly as the stripper had. 

I went to my bedroom and got undressed and washed for bed. As soon as my head hit the pillow and I closed my eyes I saw the stripper’s hips in my mind. I got up and grabbed one of my bath towels. I’d had so much blood-flow to my dick recently it hardly took a minute to cum.

The next morning I eased myself out of comfortable dreamland by browsing social media. I looked at pictures of people I knew on my phone. It was a parade of vacations, kid’s birthday parties, pets and food. There were also posts with links to articles about political, social and environmental causes I couldn’t be bothered to read. Once I felt sufficiently guilty, I got up. 

For some reason I wandered into the corner of my loft dedicated to painting before going to the kitchen to make coffee. I hadn’t worked in months and it showed in my studio’s disorder. I took my tennis racket and running shoes and some dirty dishes and beer cans to the couch and kitchen areas. I put my half-started canvases out of sight and started making a frame for a new one. It took me an hour to make the frame and another half hour to stretch and staple a blank canvas over it. When I’d finished, I checked the corners to make sure the fibers of the canvas hadn’t separated. Victory, they hadn’t.

I put the canvas on an easel ten feet from the large steel frame windows and looked at it. I thought it might look better without me touching it further. My last series of paintings, the ones hanging unsold in the hip Queen West gallery, were an experiment with space and colour. I’d tried to challenge one of the conventional rules of composition that stated that darker colours should always fall towards the bottom of a piece. The result was a collection of work with dark blues and blacks and reds bleeding down into lighter pinks, grays and yellows. I felt that a few of the pieces left the viewer with the feeling they were floating like I’d intended but the critics felt differently. One of them, writing for one of the same street newspaper with escort advertisements in the back, said the series reminded him of the inside of a burrito. (Asshole.) But I had to agree something was wrong with the series. If there wasn’t, why weren’t any of the paintings selling? Maybe I’d been too conceptual. Art was meant to evoke an emotional response from the viewer. I needed to connect with people on a visceral level. I put a coat of gesso on the canvas in front of me and went to make an espresso as continued to think. 

When I came back to the studio again something strange had happened to the canvas. The primer was absorbing more quickly down the centre of the canvas than at the sides. This wasn’t that unusual, gesso always absorbed unevenly no matter how evenly it was applied or how well-stretched the canvas, but the image I saw in the pattern was. I saw a head-on view of the hips of the stripper from the night before. I hadn’t painted or even sketched figures for almost a decade.  My reputation – such as it was – was as an abstract artist so what did this mean? Was I supposed to venture off into a completely new direction almost two decades into my career? The idea was absurd. My skills at representing real objects would be rusty at best; not to mention the fact that I regularly lectured my students on the merits of breaking the shackles of directly observable reality. 

Then something else happened. The place where I envisioned the stripper’s crotch flipped upside down and moved as if she was standing on her head. As this happened the rest of the canvas morphed into an assortment of shapes and lines originating from her crotch. Bright reds and blues began to fill the rest of the canvas so I grabbed a tube of scarlet and ultra-marine and began mixing colours. 

It was thrilling to have started working again. I thought my vision for the painting could see me through for at least a week of solid work. I felt the rush of unbridled creation again and it was heavenly. 

But then I thought what had inspired the painting: at a dirty strip club and a disinterested and presumably lost woman undressing for money. I slowed my paint mixing as I kept thinking. What did it say about me, or art in general that this is how I drew my inspiration? Fortunately I was experienced enough not to pursue the question any further. I had to concentrate on my materials, on bringing my mental image to life carefully but quickly. If I didn’t, the image would soon dissolve into the sea of other concerns in my head. I’d be back surfing Facebook or porn sites and thinking about my wasteful existence in no time. Being an artist was no different from other professions in that respect: you had to check things off your to-do list and try not to get mired down in the meaning of it all if you wanted to succeed. 

                                                                 -

I worked non-stop for eight or ten hours the day after I first went to Jilly’s. Eventually I let up the pace to get some proper food and rest. Deciding when to walk away from a piece – even if for a night – was always the hardest thing for me.  

I ate and slept and the next morning I woke up with renewed energy. I put in another eight hours and the routine continued for four more days.  I only left the house to load up on coffee, rice cakes, almond butter and bananas, my preferred rations during periods of intensive work. 

By then it was Wednesday, the day I had to teach my class at York. The nearly hour and a half commute from my house was even more annoying than usual. I was anxious over being away from my work and my re-discovered routine. Worse yet, I couldn’t really talk to my students about my new painting. How could I explain to fresh-faced, wide-eyed twenty-year-olds that I’d begun a new study of shape and line by way of sexual frustration and craven desire? I got through the class by repeating a talk on the process behind some of my older pieces. The class was visibly bored during my lecture but it beat risking my workflow by telling them the truth. The whole time I was talking I felt they could see right through me. I thought one of them must had surely seen me duck into Jilly’s and told the rest of them. Then again, how bad was what I did? Lots of people went to strip clubs. And it wasn’t like I’d even come close to my original plan of hiring a prostitute. The most I’d done was watch from a distance as a woman took her undressed to bad dance music. Big deal. Remembering my original plan made me think I’d like to know more about the history of sex work. Going to a hooker surely wasn’t always such a taboo. I went to the main library on campus and found as remote a computer stall as I could to look up books on prostitution on the subject. I entered ‘prostitution’ into the search bar, clicked ‘enter’, and got over three hundred hits returned. Many of them were books on sex workers’ rights and arguments for legalizing the sex trade. Others were histories of prostitution ranging from ancient civilizations to modern day sex tourism. One book title grabbed my attention especially. It was called Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850. I liked the sounds of it because 19th France had spawned Impressionism and I wanted to learn more about the social conditions of the period, especially its sexual mores. 

I wrote down Women for Hire’s call number, found it in the stacks, and checked it out. I was eager to read it on my commute home not only for my interest in it, but also because it would keep me from checking out all the women on the bus and subway.

I got on the bus that took me to the subway back downtown. By the time I got home I’d read nearly forty pages my book and learned a number of interesting facts. One of them was that the population of Paris almost doubled between 1850 and 1870 on account of a boom in trade. As a result of this, there was a large number of young men with money to spend. Women who worked as seamstresses and chambermaids took the opportunity to make extra money by selling sex. Prostitution became such a lucrative business that regular, ‘honest’ women were indistinguishable from prostitutes, or ‘courtesans’, as they were known at the time. This climate of social ambiguity attracted the attention of artists and writers. Toulous-Lautrec, Degas, Manet, Van Gogh and Picasso all used prostitutes in their work. The poet Baudelaire said “What is art? Prostitution” and Honoré de Balzac wrote an entire novel centered on the sex trade. 

I read some more Women for Hire before going to bed but didn’t recall anything more that was very interesting. The next morning I got up and went to the studio first thing. I looked at my hips painting and didn’t see anything I immediately wanted to change or expand upon. I went and made myself an espresso and came back and looked at the painting some more. Still nothing seemed glaringly wrong or in need of work. This feeling indicated to me that I needed to spend some more time away from the painting. (That or I’d lost the original thrust of the work by going to teach my class.) I put on my shorts and running shoes and headed out for a jog. 

I came back from jogging an hour later feeling clear-headed and ready to work. I went straight to the studio but still nothing jumped out at from the painting. It was possible that it was almost finished but I was reluctant to think so. I wasn’t unhappy with the piece but if it was in fact finished, then what did I have to work on next beside my financial disrepair or romantic void?

I went out for lunch at my local pub and brought Women for Hire with me. I ordered a second pint after eating and read for an hour. Then I went home and fiddled around on the computer for the remainder of the afternoon and into the evening. Around 10:30 or 11:00 PM I peaked in the studio. The painting still looked docile so I went to the bedroom, undressed, and got into bed. I turned off the lights but I wasn’t tired at all. I thought about jerking off to try induce sleep but I knew that that would only make me more anxious and guilt-ridden in the morning. I decided the solution was the same as the last time I was blocked: go to Jilly’s. I dressed quickly and left the house. I brought a sketchpad and pencil with me, ready to be inspired.   I went to Jilly’s the next three nights straight. I was too distracted by the naked women to actually sketch anything. I passed the days and early evenings making frames and stretching canvases in preparation to paint. Now and then I went for a jog and gradually I started sketching some ideas I had for new pieces. I made two large charcoal drawings and although I wasn’t unhappy with them, I didn’t think they were worthy of painting. 

The fourth night in a row I went to Jilly’s I got wasted. It was a Monday and the drinks were half-price. There was only one girl working the stage so didn’t have much else to do. At some point in the course of the night, I felt horny and drunk enough that I decided to ask someone about finding a prostitute. I asked my waitress – the one in the short black skirt who’d served me the first night I came in – if she knew of anywhere I could find a courtesan. 

“A what?” she said, turning her head and looking at me with her eyes narrowed. 

“A courtesan. You know, a woman who accompanies you to court…” 

She pretended not to hear or understand and walked away. I resumed drinking, then, after a few minutes, signaled her to come back again.

She came back, crossed her arms and glared at me. “What?”

I took out my sketchpad and pencil and wrote, “I’m looking for a prostitute.” I tore the page out and handed it to the waitress. As she read the note her eyes widened slightly. She turned and walked off quickly without saying anything. I watched her walk up to a bouncer sitting on one of the bar stools. She handed him the note and pointed at me. The bouncer wore a black leather jacket and his back was so meaty it looked like his ears connected directly to his shoulders. He got up from the bar stool, crumpled up my note, and walked towards me. 

The bouncer got to my table and before I could say anything he grabbed my sketchpad and pencil and shoved them into my chest. With his other hand took the back of my shirt and coat collar and yanked me to my feet. “You’re out of here, fuckhead,” he said. “This isn’t that kind of place.”

“I’m just trying to paint,” I slurred as he shoved me towards the door. “I’m no different from Manet. I’m the same as Degas!”

We reached the door, which he opened with one hand and pushed me out with the other. I nearly fell down the three stairs leading down to the sidewalk and my pencil and sketchbook tumbled to the ground. 

“Fucking asshole,” I muttered as I stooped to pick up my things. “You’re as bad as a yuppie with your narrow views and self-righteousness.” 

Mid-lambast, the bouncer reemerged. I started to run away but he raised his hands in a non-threatening gesture. He looked up and down the street and took something out of his inside jacket pocket. He motioned me towards him and handed me a small business card. “Call this number tomorrow after you’ve sobered up,” he said.  

The card was all white except for the words “First Choice Entertainment” and a phone number. 

“’name’s Jimmy. Tell me where I met you and don’t let me catch you in here looking for pussy again. Got it?”

“Uh, yeah. I will…and, uh, I won’t…”

“Good. Go the fuck home and sleep it off.” He stepped back in the bar and slammed the door behind him. I quickly pocketed the card and left, looking over my shoulders to make sure no one had just seen me talk to a real-life, living, breathing pimp.

I woke up the next morning feeling badly hungover. I was so dehydrated that my tongue was caked to the roof of my mouth. I forced myself to get up and piss and refill my bedside water glass. I took two Advils from the medicine cabinet and chugged another glass of water. I went back to bed and thankfully fell back to sleep. 

I woke up again an hour later feeling marginally better. I looked at my phone for my usual transition back to reality. Memories of the night before flashed in my head as I browsed pictures of my friends’ children and spouses. In my head, I saw the disgusted look of the waitresses after I’d handed her my covetous note and heard the scorn in the pimp’s voice as he said the word “pussy.”

I got up again and went to the bathroom. I tried to avoid looking at myself in the mirror as I washed my face and brushed my teeth. Then I went back to the bedroom and got dressed. I was too weak to make myself coffee so I headed downstairs to my usual café. I also wanted some sort of human interaction that wasn’t marred with sin. 

I got my coffee and made sure to thank the barista extra nicely. I sat in the shop’s front window and watched people pass by outside. I finished my coffee in a half-numbed state and ordered another along with a croissant. I opened a street newspaper and flipped through it absent-mindedly as I ate and drank. I stopped at the art show reviews out of habit and there was a small description of my ongoing show. The description was so lackluster I wanted to puke. I slammed the paper down in anger and looked back out the window. 

In the bottom of my eye-line, I noticed an American Apparel ad on the back of the street newspaper. The ad showed a young woman lying face down on a faux-fur rug above a hardwood floor. She wore nothing but tights and looked over her shoulder seductively. I felt a flicker in my pants and I put my left hand on my thigh. I noticed there was something flat and rectangular in my pant pocket.  Slowly it dawned on me that I was wearing the same pants as the night before, that the thing in my pocket was Jimmy the pimp’s business card. In spite of myself, I got even harder knowing I could get laid with the push of a few buttons...  

What the hell? Who would I be I hurting? 

I got up, went back up to my loft, and called the number on the card.

                                                               -

As soon as it was over I tried to erase that day from my memory. Buying sex is nothing like you see on TV. She was no Julia Roberts and I was no Richard Gere. Did you know you have to pay a time and a half to get to kiss her on the mouth? It’s call it a ‘girlfriend experience.’ I declined the add-on and the sex was as unromantic as possible. All I knew about her was her name (“Destiny”) and that was likely as contrived as our meeting. But I paid the requisite hundred and fifty bucks and thrust my dick inside her all-the-same. We avoided eye contact the entire time and when I came I felt something sharp and hot in my crotch. It felt more like a blood vessel bursting than anything orgasmic. 

The following day I could hardly get out of bed I was so disgusted with myself. I deleted my Facebook account to avoid a complete meltdown via self-comparison. I narrowly gathered the strength to get up and go teach my class. For some strange reason though, maybe as a way to purge myself, I told my class about the process behind my hips painting. I avoided looking at any of the female students as I spoke and I heard some snickers while my back was turned at one point. As soon as the class ended I hurried out of the room to avoid any awkward questions about my lecture. 

Eventually the thought of my lecture made me feel better but not by much. I thought about Destiny, wondering where she might be at that moment. Probably injecting or smoking something in a drug-den. Or maybe lying on her back, head to the side as some other reprobate-loser fucked her. That’s just what I was, a reprobate and loser. I was a desperate outcast incapable of competing in the regular dating market so I had to resort to the illegal one. I deserved the worst kind of judgment. I imagined myself getting arrested and arraigned. I’d be trotted out in front of a judge and condemned to prison. I’d rot in a dirty like I deserved to. 

                                                            -

Oddly, I received no judgement or condemnation for my buying sex. I went home after my class and started painting one of the charcoal drawings I’d made the week before. It was of a stripper between the neck and the solar plexus. For some reason I put the notch where the sternum and the collar bone meet beneath the breasts rather than above them. The result was the breasts (nipple-less) looked like closed eyes and the notch, a down-turned mouth. It resembled la full-body frown and enacted the feeling I got from hiring Destiny.

I worked steadily on my bodies pieces for the next six months. I painted most of them from start to completion before starting another. A few of them I bounced between, adding some details to one then another. In the beginning the work kept me from more self-reproach. Slowly I forgot about what I’d done and got lost in the technical aspects of my work. Teaching and the occasional coffee or drink with friends satisfied my need for social contact. 

When I finished the series I showed it to a couple gallery owners I knew. Both of them loved it and begged me to let them show it. I chose Jeremy Espadrille’s Mercer Union in Bloordale because I thought a more down-market audience might be more receptive than the galleries on Queen. 

Jeremy and I set a date for the opening and I packed up and brought my paintings to him in a rental van. But as the opening night approached I grew increasingly nervous. I thought my work was good but I worried about people asking how I’d conceived it. What was I going to say? I went to strip club? I paid marginalized or oppressed women to undress in front of me and one of them to let me fuck her? 

My anxiety over grew stronger and stronger and I spent longer and longer in bed. I reactivated my Facebook account to try and distract myself but it only increased my guilt and shame. Compared to my responsible, family-having friends and family, I was horrible. In two nights’ time I’d be showered with praise from complete strangers while good, honest people sat in their living rooms or bedrooms unrecognized for their daily effort and sacrifice. The injustice of it made me nauseous.

Then an idea hit me. I thought I could relieve my guilt by inviting Destiny to the opening, If anyone asked me where I’d gotten my inspiration for the series, I’d just nod in her direction. I’d pay her for her time and not her body. In addition to being honest, hopefully this would undo the psychic damage I’d caused her. It was a beautiful solution. 

The only hitch was that I’d thrown out Jimmy’s card in self-disgust after screwing Destiny and had no way of getting in touch with either of them. I decided to go down to Jilly’s to look for Jimmy. I got there and walked up to a man sitting at the bar I assumed was him based on his leather jacket and husky physique. But when I tapped him on the shoulder and he turned around I discovered he was someone else. The stranger looked at me. “Whadaya want, bud?”

“I, uh, I was looking for Jimmy…”

“Jimmy don’t work here no more.”

I kicked myself again for throwing out Jimmy’s card. “Uh, do you know where I can find him?”

“What do I look like, a fuckin’ phone book?” 

The man turned back around on his stool and I looked around the room hoping that Jimmy would somehow appear. Then I looked for my old waitress thinking she might know where I could find him. She seemed to have changed jobs too or else had the night off.

I wandered back outside, picturing myself at my opening surrounded by interrogators with no chance of escape. I felt light-headed and sat down on the sidewalk with my back against the outside of the building. I rubbed my eyes and temples and felt slightly better. Then a squad car drove by and I had to get up so I wouldn’t look suspicious. I considered going home before I had another thought. I could go look for Destiny at Shuter and Sherbourne. At the very least there’d be some streetwalkers there I could talk to. There couldn’t be that many prostitutes in Toronto. Surely they must all know each other somehow.  

I headed towards Shuter and Sherbourne on foot. I crossed the Don Valley and the din of traffic beneath the bridge almost made me turn around. I got to the other side and felt much better in the relatively quieter streets of Corktown. Then I passed a low-income or social housing complex at Queen and Beverly. The complex consisted of two twenty-odd-storey-buildings and a parking lot and playground straddling the block between Queen and Shuter. The playground and parking lot were full of litter and debris. It looked like the kind of place I might find Destiny and I thought about cutting through to Shuter on the off chance of bumping into her. At second thought, I decided against it. It was after mid-night and the area was badly lit and dangerous looking. 

I continued along Queen glancing in some bars and restaurants looking for Destiny. They all had dirty windows, little to no decoration, and all the customers seemed to be outside smoking. 

A few minutes later I arrived at Sherbourne and turned north, bracing myself to interact with a prostitute in plain view. Hopefully I’d find Destiny quickly and we could go to the late night Pakistani restaurant at Dundas that all the cabbies went to. 

I got to the corner and saw a couple women I assumed were hooking. I walked up to one with dyed red hair. She wore platform shoes and seemingly no pants or skirt beneath an oversized winter coat. “Hi,” I said timidly. “I was wondering if you knew a girl named Destiny. She’s got blonde hair. She’s about your height….”

The woman’s cheeks were pitted and her bug-eyes darted in all directions. She wore a thick layer of cover-up and blue-black eye-shadow. She stuck her lower jaw out and looked me up and down frowning. “Yeah I think know her maybe.” Her voice was hoarse and halting.

“Well, could you give me her phone number or tell me where she lives?”

“I’m working her bud.”

“I’ll pay you...”

“Alright. Eighty bucks.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

“K Follow me.”

The woman led me away, back down Shuter in the direction I’d come from. I hoped she might take me to one of the row houses on the north side of the street but I feared otherwise. I suspected she was taking me to the apartment complex on Beverly that I’d passed on my way over. A few minutes later we arrived at the complex and she turned towards the entrance to one of the buildings. I was walked fifteen or twenty feet behind her and when I got to the door, she was already inside calling someone on the intercom to buzz us in. The inside doors buzzed and she opened them and walked through. I followed her into the elevator area and she pushed the button for one. She was even more run-down and haggard in the indoor lighting and I avoided looking at her as we waited. 

The elevator came and we got inside. She pushed the button for the 22nd floor and the doors closed. As we started going up I grew nervous. Everything seemed to be going too smoothly. Why hadn’t she asked me for the money yet? “Hey,” I said, “You want the money now?” 

She pointed at the security camera inside the elevator. “Later,” she said, and I felt less tense.  

We got to our floor and she led me down a brown hallway with flickering lights florescent lights. We stopped at an apartment and she knocked on the door. I heard a couple people talking inside but couldn’t make out what they said.  The door opened and the woman walked in. She stuck her head back out and motioned me inside. 

Inside, the apartment was darkly lit. It reeked of cigarettes plus another stinging, chemical odour I couldn’t place. I saw another woman’s standing at the end of the hallway. I couldn’t see her face but she reminded me of the first woman by the way she stood. “Hey, I’m looking for Destiny,” I called to her.  

“She’s down here,” she said and disappeared around a corner.

The first woman walked after her and I followed them both. I passed an open door and darkened room I assumed was the bathroom. The hallway opened up onto a living room and kitchen. All the lights were off except for the TV. I turned a corner to a second hallway and saw a door with light coming out from it at the end. “Down here,” said a voice that sounded like the second woman’s coming from inside the room. 

As I stepped towards the door I heard quick footsteps approaching me from behind and I spun around. In a blur, I saw a frowning face and raised arm. The arm was holding a dark L-shaped object that came crashing down on the side of my head. I felt a brief shearing pain on the left side of my head before my legs gave out and the ground came rushing up.

                                                               -

I came to to the sound of birds chirping and a streetcar clanking. I was outside, evidently, but beyond that all my brain-power was directed towards the ear-splitting pain in my head. I forced my eyelids open and took in more of my surroundings. 

I was lying on the ground. I shielded my eyes from what felt like equatorial mid-day sun. In the middle distance I saw the outline of trees and a row of two storey red-brick buildings. Directly in front of me there was a car tire and various pieces of litter. I realized I was outside the apartment complex at Queen and Beverly. The night’s events came back to me: looking for Destiny, following the streetwalker…

The I remembered my reason for following the streetwalker and pushed myself upright against the wall behind me. My natural painkillers must have kicked in because the pain in my head lifted and in its place a lightness and euphoric feeling took shape. I couldn’t remember feeling felt such a physical joy since my first serious girlfriend, Alice Dreifelds. We’d gone to art school together and started a relationship after a protracted flirtation in Sculpture I. I remembered lying in bed with her on a spring morning similar to this one. The sun crept through the curtains in her apartment on the Grange and everything felt dewy and new. She was the first person to encourage me to treat art as a career, to take myself and my work seriously. Of course I grew impatient for success and blamed her for hampering my productivity. I broke up with her over tea and pastries at a Chinese bakery on Baldwin after around a year of seeing each other. 

But in my endorphin-addled state I didn’t dwell in the negatives of the memory. Instead, I just remembered the pleasure of that spring morning in bed with Amber, the pleasure of knowing what was in front of me and being confident I could undertake it successfully. I decided I didn’t need to explain my methods to anyone. That was the point of art, really, to stimulate the imagination. If anyone asked what had inspired my bodies’ series I’d tell them whatever popped into my head at that time. Maybe I’d tell them I that it was inspired by strippers and prostitutes; maybe I’d tell them that they were inspired by my first girlfriend. Both were decently honest answers. Art was meant to express the inexpressible and explain the inexplicable. I couldn’t give them simple, comfortable answers because there weren’t any.

As an infant, Karen Issa didn’t laugh very much, but rather, preferred to stare and ponder. This tendency continued as she got bigger and in grade school she was pegged by her classmates and teachers to soar high and far based on her cerebral and inquisitive disposition. 

But despite Karen’s intelligence she missed an important lesson in early life: too much thinking was a dangerous thing. In her Grade 8 valedictory speech she said that school should ask harder questions of young people like what they expected things to be like when they grew up and how they the children, planned to make their livings while not endangering the planet the way their parents were.    

The audience’s tepid applause following the speech marked the beginning of Karen’s social exclusion. The majority of her high school and university life was passed in solitude. She smoked pot and took Percocets as a substitute for social contact. Even on the occasions she did get invited to parties, the fact remained her imagination was more interesting than most of what went on in the outside world, or at least in Calgary, where she lived. 

Fortunately during university, Karen discovered that writing fiction could fuel her imagination without the negative side effects of drugs or the high cost of travel. Thus she decided to shirk a traditional, middle-class career-path and make writing her life’s goal.  

-

Matthew Colton’s father was a carpenter-handyman and his mother, a night-manager at Denny’s. From an earlier age, they’d both encouraged Matthew to find a high-paying, white-collar job that wouldn’t run him ragged to support a family the way theirs had them. Matthew rebelled and decided to go to art school after he graduated from high school. He built up and maintained his dream of being a visual artist despite bitter arguments with both his parents. But, after completing his degree and working for two years, he’d only managed to sell a few paintings and eating beans and rice every day was a drain on his creative energy. One day, at the art supply store where he worked to pay his bills, his manager said that he should have been an accountant because his cash-outs and ledger entries were so meticulous. Matthew paused and replied,  “Maybe I still will.” 

The night of his manager’s comment Matthew went to the five-bedroom house he rented with some friends and fellow artists. He looked up the requirements to become a chartered accountant and it turned out his fine arts counted towards the designation and that the additional courses and training he needed wouldn’t require another four years of full-time study and tens of thousands of dollars in tuition the way becoming a doctor or lawyer would. Only one flicker of doubt lingered in his mind: One of his roommate’s had once referred to accountants as “bean-counters.”

“Beats being a bean-eater,” Mathew said to himself, and he enrolled in Introductory Accounting Principles and Practice at the University of Calgary.

-

Karen experienced various professional and personal difficulties in her twenties but nothing so severe it broke her commitment to being a writer. Now, as she approached thirty, published in a handful of small literary magazines but without a book deal, the personal and financial costs of writing as a career began to weigh on her.  At least she was more stable money-wise, she thought. She’d started working as a flight-attendant for Air Canada, a job that gave her weeks off at a time to pour into writing. Plus, she was dating an accountant which made her feel more responsible by association.   

Throughout this time, her looks betrayed her. She was beautiful, with mother-of-pearl skin, wavy blonde hair and sharp hazel eyes. She and the accountant met at a mutual friend’s house-warming party where he‘d stared at her nearly non-stop for an hour.  After she’d ruled out he wasn’t near-sighted or dumb, she walked up to him and asked why he was staring at her, if she had something on her face or a third eye.  

“No,” he replied, “I was just picturing you in the morning with one of my shirts on.”

-

Matthew was on a set course and nothing or no one was going to detract him. He was six-foot-one without a ounce of excess weight, save his plush, full lips.  Before the party where he met Karen, he’d smoked half a dime bag and used the proposition of smoking the rest of it as a reason for inviting Karen back to his condo.   

There, under dimmed, halogen lights, they had good sex – too good sex for the experience not to be repeated. The next day Karen broke things off with Jim or Joe, whoever the pilot was she’d been seeing infrequently for a few months. -

Karen and Matthew had been dating almost a year when she boarded AC1896 from Calgary to Las Vegas.  It was the 15th of February, the day after Valentine’s Day.   

“Good morning, captains,” Karen said glancing towards the cockpit on her way to the flight attendants’ station at the back of the plane.  One of the pilots was Jim or Joe, the guy she’d dated before Matthew and he recognized her immediately.  He remembered how she’d dumped him less than a year ago, claiming that she needed space in order to better concentrate on writing. He was in the midst of hanging up his jacket in the hallway closet when she stepped into view. Feeling undesirable and embarrassed, he fumbled with the coat-hanger and dropped his jacket on the floor.          

Instinctively, Karen started to help him but then changed her mind. She feared that prolonging the encounter might expose the fact she couldn’t remember his name. “Have a good flight, captain,” she said and walked off, feeling her jilted ex-lover’s eyes on her back. If only she could remember his name maybe she wouldn’t feel so bad.  

Valerie and Mike arrived soon after and the cabin pressure fell. Karen took a discrete look at her compact to verify her sleeplessness was adequately hidden.  She snapped the heavy plastic case shut and spoke to Valerie: “Hi Valerie.  How’s LAS treating you? Which turn are you on?” 

“It’s my fourdt turn,” Valerie said. “It ‘as been vhery quiet. We ‘ad one passenger who was very drunk one time. He ran up and down de aisles yelling but I got ‘im to stop.”

“What did you do?”

“I crossed my arms and said, ‘If you don’t go back to your seat rhight this second you’re going to wish you were dead.’”

“You did not?!”

“Why don’t you ask the captaine?”

“Ok, I believe you.”   

“And you, Karen-l’écrivaine?  Where was your last turn?”

“Florida. That’s why I chose LAS. I’m hoping for a bit of excitement for a change. The retirees were killing me.”

“Careful what you desire, ma belle, or your story may turn out, how you say, tragique.’”

“Yeah, I’m sure I’ll want out of here before long…Hey, let’s play some black-jack when we get to Vegas. We’ll win a million dollars and never set foot on a plane again. Sound good?”

“Black-jack?” Mike cut in. “You guys want to hit Bellagio? It’s the best. They give you free drinks and have the hottest chicks.”  

Valerie gave him a knowing smile and asked,  “Where ‘ave you been flying, Michel?”

“Hey – Michelle’s a girl’s name. My name’s Mike, okay?”

Valerie rolled her eyes at Karen. “Hokay, Mike!”

“Good…I’ve been flying domestic. This is my first international turn. I’m totally pumped!”

Valerie rolled her eyes again. “Super!” she said. 

“Mike--” Karen interjected, “LAS has the most problems of any route we fly. If anything happens, just let Val or me take care of it, okay?”

Mike took out his cell-phone and looked at it in lieu of a response. After a few moments he said: “Oh, I better go get ready to greet the passengers.” He got up and walked up the aisle to wait for two-hundred-plus thrill-seeking travelers.

-

Matthew didn’t dislike Audit the way most junior accountants did. He was in his second articling year—supposedly the most difficult stage in the CA-certification process—at Ernst & Young. He was scheduled to write the Uniform Evaluation in June and the prospect of the thirteen-hour, three-day test didn’t bother him either.  He’d been working steadily towards his designation for almost four years and wasn’t going to let a few wrought tasks like counting lumber and passing an exam get in his way.  

He was standing in front of a sprawling room of wood at his client’s soft-wood lumber warehouse. There were varying lengths of spruce, birch, pine and fir stacked on a city of shelves. He looked at the moveable staircase he’d been given to help him count the wood and, after a short inspection, went to the warehouse manager’s office to ask for help using it.

The manager was seated at a big hardwood desk in his office. He was a bloated, middle-aged man, undoubtedly no stranger to conflict given his position of authority over semi-skilled, hard-living manual labourers. “You release the stop with your foot and push it,” he said impatiently in response to Matthew’s question about how to use the staircase.

Matthew stared at the warehouse manager and smiled. 

After a moment the manager sighed and got up. He led Matthew back out into the cavernous, eight-acre room to the movable stairs. “See?” he said, pushing down a metal lever with his foot. “This. Is. The. Stop.” He pushed down on the wheel-lock mechanism. “…Release…”  

The mechanism clanked, releasing the wheel stops.

“…Push…”  

“Thank you,” said Matthew. “That was extremely helpful.”

The manager shuffled away and Matthew set about verifying the existence of six-hundred and forty-thousand pieces of lumber.

-

Karen and Valerie followed Mike to the front of Economy and Valerie went to First Class. They helped the passengers to their seats, made sure that their seatbelts were buckled and that the overhead compartments were closed. The plane taxied and took off for LAS. They climbed to a cruising altitude of 37,532 feet and Captain Jim-Joe turned off the seatbelt sign. Karen got up from her fold-down chair and headed to the front of Economy with Mike to begin pouring drinks and passing out peanuts. 

The Las Vegas-bound flyers were not dissimilar the typical airline passenger. They were predominantly middle-aged and white.  They were all Canadian except for a group of four Irish. (Vegas’s veneer of luxury and riches could apparently lure people all the way from the other side of the world.)

Karen and Mike reached the last row of the plane, poured a few more ginger-ales and Cokes then sat back down in their fold-out flight-attendants’ chairs. Valerie returned from First Class and started to talk about all the things she and her husband were going to do on their next vacation. Mike flipped through a men’s magazine while Karen listened politely. She wished Valerie would talk herself out soon so she could read her book. She was mid-way through Anna Karenina and completely engrossed in it.

Just as the pauses in Valerie’s monologue were almost long enough that Karen could politely take out her book, Mike jutted in: “We went to Cancun on our grade twelve spring-break,” he said. “It was totally awesome.” “Reallee?  I ‘eard Cancun is full ov tourists…” 

Anna would have to continue to wait. Fortunately for Karen, last night’s sex with Matthew entered her mind and distracted her from her coworkers’ banal conversation. She remembered her climax vividly. The usual tightness between her shoulders dissolved and in its place formed a tingling ball of energy. The ball crept down her back, settled between her legs, and exploded, shattering everything. Her ceaseless intellect and cool detachment lay in ruins. For a moment she even lost track of where she stopped and Matthew begun. 

Fuck, she thought as they rocketed through the atmosphere. I might be falling in love.  

Then the plane made a sudden lurch and the seatbelt light came on.  

-

Matthew hadn’t seen daylight in more than a week but at least it was almost the mid-way point of the long, prairie winter. He’d taken a week off to mourn Karen but needed to get back to auditing lumber in order to stay on track for accreditation.  Besides, although he knew he’d miss her—she was good company and great in bed—they’d only been dating for about a year and who knew where it was going. At the time of her crash, she’d still been carting most of her stuff to and from his place on weekends. They hadn’t even talked about moving in together, let alone getting married.

But that morning, as he threw away the things she’d kept at his apartment, something inside him changed. She’d had overnight clothes in his dresser and make-up and skin lotion in the vanity in the bathroom. Her femininity-inspired possessions were finer and lighter than their male counterparts, and when he packed them into a computer paper box and threw them down the garbage shoot, he started to feel like he was choking. He imagined her things tumbling down the long, metal esophagus and landing in chicken bones and soiled paper serviettes in the dumpster in the underground parking lot. He felt heartless and uncaring, but what else could he do? He didn’t hold on to useless baggage. He looked down row 108 of 123 at his client’s lumber warehouse. The florescent lighting accentuated the yellowish hue of the stacks of lumber and, along with the natural variation in colour from piece-to-piece, the scene reminded him of Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Cypresses.  

Then the image of Karen’s things in his condo dumpster returned to his head and he had to fight back the choking sensation again. He inspected the first shelf of row 108. It was made of steel, four feet deep by six feet wide and ten feet tall. The bottom platform was six inches from the ground, supported by four horizontal beams. 

Matthew pulled one four-by-four and one eight-by-two off the shelf and arranged them like a lever under the bottom platform’s long side facing away from the subsequent shelves of row 108. He positioned the fulcrum so that the lever would lift the shelf with maximum force yet also be flat enough for him to jump on without losing his balance. Then he wheeled the movable staircase up in front of the eight-by-two, walked up to the top, aimed, and jumped. 

He landed on the eight-by-two and the lever lifted and toppled the half-ton shelf. The self fell into the shelf next to it, and it fell into the one after that, and so on.

Matthew watched the shelves domino with increasing speed and force all the way down the row of them. The warehouse manager came running out of his office at the sound of the crashing. He came up beside Matthew as the last shelf fell fifty metres away. He breathed heavily and put his hands on his face in exasperation. He looked back and forth between Matthew and the wreckage of fallen shelves. “What the fuck happened?!” he shouted.  

But Matthew had already turned and started walking towards the exit. He tossed his clipboard and pencil on the ground.  Useless baggage, he thought.  

-

No one should have begrudged Karen her detachment from outer life, but invariably they did. Matthew thought she lacked interest in him so he acted disinterested towards her in return. It was less ignorant than any of her previous boyfriends’ but flawed all-the-same.  

Captain Jim-Joe’s misinterpretation was murderous, sexist, and no-doubt a product of much deeper psychological problems and mental illness. He thought that Karen’s rejection of him was based on her conscious appraisal of his person, rather than her general obtuseness, or at most, a passing assessment of their mutual incompatibility.  

‘My dad’s a doctor and my mom a lawyer - where could I go from there?’

I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. I was having dinner with another dry-waller, Chris Penner, a guy I’d up until this moment respected and considered a friend. We were at Angela’s on a Wednesday evening in early May and I guess the two beers he’d had after work had loosened his tongue.  

What an idiot-fuck. I felt embarrassed for him he was so stupid. In parts of Bogota you’d get beaten within an inch of your life for saying something so dumb. Is this what wealth and prosperity amounted to, the right to be an over-privileged asshole? I wanted to tell him how my father had died or that my mother had worked sixteen hours a day scrubbing toilets to get us out of Colombia. Fucking idiot. He even knew my dad was dead, although not how he died. 

Penner seemed to remember my dad was dead because his expression slackened and his eyes started shifting nervously. I decided to absolve him and met his embarrassed gaze. He was just a sheltered white-boy like most of my Canadian friends. To guys like him, renovating rich assholes’ houses for a living was a choice, not a foregone conclusion.  

We paid our bill and left the restaurant. I got on the 165 and took it up Cote des Neiges towards Jean-Talon where I lived with my mom and brother. The bus passed the outer edge of the Mount Royal cemetery and I thought some more about Chris and his Canadian privilege. In this country the dead owned more than the living in Colombia, and yet somehow people still found things to complain about.  Fucking whiners.    

Maybe it was just Montreal. My cousin Manny lived in Ottawa and loved it there. He made fifty bucks an hour in construction and barely broke a sweat. Maybe I should move there? Maybe it was a more sober, inland city like Bogota. Maybe it wasn’t subject to passing currents like Montreal and other port cities.

The bus pulled up to my stop and I got off. We lived in a ten-story high-rise on Jean-Talon. I walked inside, unlocked the lobby door and checked our mailbox. It was only flyers and bills so I left them and took the elevator upstairs. I walked inside and yelled hello to Mom and Luis. Mom was in the kitchen and Luis was as usual, lying on the couch watching some American sit-com. Fucking dreamer. 

I went to mine and Luis’s room and sat down at my desk. I turned on my computer and logged into chat hoping my cousin would be online so I could talk to him about moving to Ottawa. Luckily he was. ‘Hey,’ I wrote, no-doubt interrupting multiple conversations he was having on g-chat with girls. ‘How goes the battle?’  

‘No battle here, brother,’ he replied, followed by: ‘Living is easy.’ 

‘Really?’

‘Fuck yeah.’

I couldn’t think how to say what I wanted to so I just said it: ‘I think I need to get out of Montreal. Could you get me a job in Ottawa if I come there?’

‘For real? Yeah, brother. I can get you a job no problem. You’re going to love it here. The chicks love Latin guys!’

‘Cool. And you think I could crash on your couch for a while before I find a place?’

‘Definitely!’

‘Great. I haven’t decided for sure but I think I’ll do it. ‘

‘Do it brother. We’ll live it up. Ottawa’s a great town.’

‘For sure. I’ll call you soon to tell you I’m for sure coming. Thanks again.’ I signed out of chat and leaned back in my chair. Ottawa: I didn’t know much about it except that it was the seat of the federal government and it had once been a fur-trading post. This last point sparked my imagination. In my mind’s eye I saw myself paddling up a river wearing a fur-pelt hat, exploring uncharted land, trading furs with Natives, using nothing but my wits to guide me.  

Suddenly Mom came barging in the room carrying a plate of empanadas. ‘Hi sweetie,’ she said. ‘I brought you some food.  Did you eat already?’

‘Mom – Can’t you ever knock?’

‘Knock? It’s my own house? Why would I have to knock in my own house?’

I stood up and walked out of the room. ‘I’m going to take a shower,’ I said, grabbing a towel and slinging it over my shoulder. ‘I’m not hungry.’

In the shower my mind drifted back to my fantasy. I was back in my canoe surrounded by trees as tall as buildings.

Yes, I thought, I’m going to move to Ottawa as soon as I’m finish this last reno.  Life there would be purer: hard work and simple fun. I won’t have to stomach anymore angst-y Montreal artistic-types. Go to work and go home; save money and live simply. I’d call Manny in the morning and tell him I was in for sure.   When I got back to my room, Mom was sitting on the bed with her arms folded. I knew the best way to hurt her was to turn down food and as usual it was having the desired effect. ‘How can you ask me to knock like a stranger after everything I’ve done for you and your brother?’ she said. ‘If we still lived in Colombia, we’d all be dead.’

I ignored her and pulled my boxers on beneath my towel.  

She continued: ‘Oh, I know what you think. You think this place is wrong. Spoiled, rich Canadians with no sense of struggle and hardship. Well maybe you should forget hardship? Ever think of that? Your father thought he should do things the hardest way and look what happened to him, God rest his soul.’ She crossed herself.  

I don’t know why but I blurted out I hated Montreal and was moving to Ottawa.

Immediately, her eyes began to water. ‘Yeah,’ I continued. ‘I’m going to get a job in construction with Manny and find people who think like I do.’

‘In Ottawa?’ Her voice was cracking.  

‘Yes.’ I watched her head lower and a few tears roll down her cheeks.  ‘But Esteban,’ she said, raising her head.  “Ottawa is so—so protestant!’

‘That’s exactly what I want. Cold and unemotional living. I’m leaving after I’m done this last reno. Goodnight, Mom. ‘ 

I walked to the doorway and stood there waiting for her to leave. She got up and walked past me. On her way out, she took out her rosary beads and started rubbing them. I think she even muttered some dumb prayer.  

If I felt any remorse for hurting my mom, it was overshadowed by excitement. I was starting out on a mission to test my mettle in the friendless wild. I was going to become truly hard boiled, not the fake, rich white-kid kind like Chris Penner’s. No. I’d grow thick-skinned and self-reliant. I’d show these soft, spoiled Canadians how men were meant to live.    

On the following Sunday I packed up and started out for Ottawa. I caught the bus from Berri-UQAM and we left downtown on the 20 West. The traffic crawled along the Decarie and so did my thoughts. I thought about leaving Mom and Luis and even started thinking about my dad. Luckily I drifted off to sleep before anything got too dark.   

I woke up half-an-hour later and we’d cleared the suburbs and were almost at the Ontario-Quebec border. Ontario – Canada’s most populous province – sounded like a barrio to me. The Laurentian foothills disappeared and evergreens sprung up on each side of the highway. But they weren’t lush and dense like I’d imagined. Instead, they grew in small patches between knolls and crevices stretching out in all directions. It looked more like a desolate moonscape than anything from National Geographic.  

I glanced around the bus for alternative fuel for my fantasies. Nearly everyone else on the bus was dark-skinned with children in tow. I shut my eyes trying to picture them as my fellow explorers and fur-traders but it didn’t work. Clearly we were all modern day economic migrants bound for low-level, unromantic jobs.  

I gazed out the window for the next hour or so and eventually the bus began a slight turn and descent. We were entering the Ottawa Valley and like the first time our plane touched down in Canada fifteen years earlier, my stomach sunk.   Several turnoff signs appeared – the first signs of human life for miles. We rounded another bend and a few houses and commercial buildings came into view. After another turn – this time over an interchange – I saw a mall. It was like any of the malls you’d find in Quebec except for one difference: on one of the large, grey concrete walls there was a sign with goldenrod, high-cursive lettering. ‘The Hudson’s Bay Company’, it read, and beneath it was a coat of arms with a deer and a bear on it. I took it as a clear sign of adventure ahead.  I must be practically at James Bay, I thought.  I sat up in my seat, eager to begin my transformation.   Manny lived in a big, two-story, redbrick house divided into four apartments. He greeted me in the foyer, hugged me and slapped the back of my neck. ‘Brother, you’re here!’ he said.

‘I am,’ I replied.

‘Give me your bag.  We’ll have a beer then I want to show you the Market.’

‘’The Market?’ We’re going shopping?’’

‘No-no.  It’s the bar district that everyone goes to. You’re going to love it.’

‘And they call it a market?’

‘Esteban–‘ he grabbed my shoulder and looked me in the eye. ‘Always questioning. I love you, man.’  

He slapped me on the neck again and we went inside. His living room consisted of a matching couch and armchair and a plywood-and-milk-crate-coffee table. He threw my bag down beside the couch and went to the fridge and got two beers. I heard him twist the caps off the beers and he came back to the living room.  ‘Cheers,’ he said.  He handed me a beer and made sure I looked him in the eye before taking a sip.  

Manny was halfway done his beer a few seconds later. ‘I tell you, brother.

Chicks here can’t get enough of us. We’re like royalty. You’re going to need a stick to keep them off.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah, brother.’ He took a long swig of his beer. ‘This chick I took home the other night? She was a ten. All I did was look at her across the bar for a minute then walk up to her and say, ‘in my country, men start wars over women like you.’’ He laughed at his own joke and I chuckled politely. He told me about a few more of his sexual conquests on his way to and from the fridge for more beer. After we’d drunk a couple more beers each, he said we were leaving.   We went to a pub in the Market that played loud dance music. Manny went straight to the bar and ordered us two shots of tequilas. There was a group of girls standing down the bar and Manny ordered shots for them too. We started talking to the girls and before I knew it, I was dancing with one of them. (‘Stacey’, was her name, I think.) Manny kept handing me beers as we danced. I could feel myself getting pretty drunk so Stacey and I sat down at a booth to talk. We shouted a few things about ourselves over the loud music then Manny staggered over and said something in my ear:

‘What?!’  

‘Better close the deal! We’ve got to work in the morning!’

‘What?! What time?!’

‘Six.’

‘That’s in four hours!!’

‘Relax, brother! It’s just laying rebar! It’s the simplest job ever!’

I looked away in anger. I didn’t want to show up to my first day of work hung-over. I told Stacey I had to work in the morning but it was nice meeting her. Then I forced Manny to leave and we got a cab back to his place. I passed out on his couch still wearing the same clothes I’d left Montreal in.  

Laying rebar was not as easy as Manny’d said. You had to know all the different sizes and strengths; there was bending and cutting, and different tools for doing those things. Plus, I had to learn to read pattern diagrams that were sometimes as big as several folding tables pushed together.  

The morning after my first night in Ottawa, I only managed to lay and fasten about a tenth of what the other guys did. By 9AM, I was dying for lunch. Somehow I pushed through until noon when we put down our tools and went to buy from a chrome-paneled food truck. Manny was lively despite having had only three hours of sleep. ‘I see you rebar about as fast as you pick-up chicks,’ he joked as we sat down on a stack of two-by-fours to eat. 

I chewed my food-truck hamburger and half-smiled in response.  

‘Ah, Little Este. Are you mad, brother?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner we had to work today? I look like an idiot trying to keep up with these guys.’

Manny raised his thick eyebrows. ‘I’m sorry, brother. I just thought you’d like to go out and make some friends since you’re new in town.’

I didn’t respond and ate the rest of my hamburger in silence. ‘I’m going to go lay down for a few minutes,’ I said when I was done eating. ‘See you after work.’  

I went and stretched out on a patch of grass and closed my eyes for a moment.  Someone shouted ‘Back to work’ and I was back on my feet again.   I laboured to learn the tricks of laying rebar for another six hours that day. Around four, the foreman called ‘quiting time’ and Manny and I drove back to Manny’s in his red Civic hatchback. When we got home, I flopped down on the couch and Manny went to the fridge for a beer. He came back to the living room and sat down in the armchair and started texting. Twenty minutes and two beers later he spoke: ‘Some chicks want to meet you. Want to hit the Market?’ I rolled away from him and faced the inside of the couch.  ‘Absolutely not.’ ‘Ok, brother. You need to sleep. It’s been a long day. I’ll see you in the morning.’ He got up, changed his shirt and left the apartment. I dragged myself to the bathroom to shower and brush my teeth. When I got back to the couch I passed out the second my head hit the pillow.  

That’s more or less how the next four months went.  I picked up the tricks to rebar-ing in the first month and was able to join Manny for nights out in the Market and still function at work the next morning.  I slept with a few girls but no one I was very into or who seemed into in me apart from my being Latino. It was just as well. I was making great money and able to start paying off my student debt. (Philosophy degree – oh, how valuable you’ve proved to be for increasing concrete’s tensile strength.)  I didn’t need a girlfriend changing my focus.  

Then the fall arrived and things changed despite my plans. Work slowed, the temperature dropped, and everyone at work and the bars became more irritable.  One cold, mid-October morning, a foreman made a racist comment and I couldn’t let it slide. I was installing a floor mesh and called Manny to give me a hand shifting it. Manny was forty feet from me so I had to yell for him to hear. I shouted to him in Spanish like we always spoke to each other. All of a sudden the foreman, Mike – ‘Beason’, I think – was standing in front of me.   ‘Hey Steve,’ he said, ‘I don’t mind you speaking Spanish on my site, but keep it down, okay? You’re not out at the bar trying to impress some chicks…’

‘Uh, I was just asking Manny to come help–’

‘I don’t give a shit. I said no screaming no Mexican on my site. Comprende?’

Blood rushed to my face. Who the fuck was this drop-out-asshole talking to?  I dropped my hickey and took a step towards him. Luckily Manny ran up held me back. 

‘Were you going to hit me, Steve?’ the foreman said. ‘Are you fucking crazy?’ 

By now I was in a full rage and swinging my arms around Manny trying to get a-hold of the racist fuck. ‘Fuck you, you stupid hoser. I’m Colombian. I’m a real worker not some union-protected-fuck like you!’  

Manny walked me to the parking lot as I continued spitting insults at the foreman. ‘What the fuck, brother?’ Manny said when we got to his car. 

‘What do you mean, ‘what the fuck’? Did you hear that shit he said?’

‘He’s the foreman. He can say whatever he wants.’

‘So I’m supposed to just let him be a racist?’

Manny frowned. ‘Yeah. You are.’ 

I was still incensed. ‘You know, you’re worse than he is. You’re ashamed of your country. You wish you were fucking white!’ 

Manny’s face reddened and I thought he was going to hit me. But he just turned and walked away. My mind was still drugged with anger so I didn’t recognize what I’d just said to my best friend. I grabbed my bag from Manny’s car and went to go find a bus back to Manny’s apartment. Fucking idiot, Este. Fortunately, when Manny came home from work that night, I had enough sense to apologize to him for what I’d said. 

‘It’s nothing brother. Forget about it,’ he said.

Of course, I wasn’t asked back to work the day after my run-in with the foreman and I was rarely called to work the rest of the fall. I wasn’t all-to bothered by it. With my newly-freed time and passable financial situation, I could see some of Ottawa’s tourist attractions. In my first week off work, I went to the National Gallery, The Museum of Civilization, and Parliament Hill. Parliament was my favourite. I took a guided tour of it and the guide described how our system of government could be traced back to England’s ruler-subject agreement of 1215 AD, the Magna Carta.  I asked the guide whether she thought that a thousand-year-old system from a foreign country was still the most appropriate system for ruling our own. A friendly debate ensued between us and we bantered playfully throughout the remainder of the tour. Then, after the tour had finished, I told her I’d enjoyed talking to her and asked whether she’d like to get a coffee or a beer some time.  

‘Sure,’ she said, and gave me her phone number.     I felt happier and less angry with some time away from work and not going out every night. Also, the Parliament tour guide and I had coffee one day in late October and it was great. Her name was Sara Sinclair. She was finishing her masters in political theory at U of O and making some extra cash as a guide. She was very smart and agreed with many of my social criticisms, albeit less emotionally so.  

Sara and I started seeing each other regularly.  She lived in the Glebe, an old middle-class area of the city. We went to movies and talked politics over strong, local beers. She had a lot of work to do so I sometimes felt like an afterthought, but other than that, things were going well.  

At Christmas, Sara invited me to her family’s in Napanee, a small town two hours southwest. I was happy to go, but the trip ended in disaster. We rented a car and drove down on Christmas Eve’s day with the plan of spending two nights at her parents’ and driving back Boxing Day. When we got there I could feel a tension in the air. Sara and her mother spoke in monosyllables and her father hardly said a word. Her younger brother muttered ‘hello’ to me and gave me dirty look.  

Things boiled over when we were all seated at the dinner-table and Sara’s father asked me if I would ask the blessing.

I was thrown. Sara had never said anything the least bit religious. ‘Sorry, Mr. Sinclair but I’m not religious…’

He looked at his wife then at Sara. ‘Not religious? You mean you not only brought home a Mexican, but a heathen?’

Sara was on her feat. ‘Fuck you, Dad,’ she yelled. ‘You a fucking bigot!’  

‘Hey, don’t talk to your father like that, young lady!’ said her mom.

‘You’re as racist as he is!’ 

I was embarrassed by the commotion I’d caused, but strangely, not angry. I excused and went and sat in the living room while the Sinclairs swore and screamed at each other. About ten minutes later, the voices quieted Sara came into the living room. Her eyes wet from crying. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

We drove back to Ottawa in the pitch black. For about an hour Sara lambasted her family and hometown for their ignorance and prejudice. Then she lay her head on my shoulder and fell asleep.  

We pulled up to her house in the Glebe an hour later and I walked her up to her apartment. I saw her into bed and she asked me to stay the night. I wasn’t tired and knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I kissed her goodnight and went and got back in the car.  

Staring at the grey foundation of Sara’s building in the headlights, I felt a sudden urge to be in Montreal. I put the car in gear and head out on the two-hundred kilometers drive there.  We’d rented the car for another day anyway. The evergreen moonscape between Ottawa and Montreal was even lonelier at night but I made it safely to Montreal’s northwestern suburbs some time around 2AM. I continued Jean-Talon without bating an eye. I felt like being downtown, in the beating heart of the city.   

I turned onto the 20 East and the downtown skyline appeared in front of me.  I got off at Peel and drove east along St. Catherine’s. The city’s busiest commercial area was almost deserted. All the shoppers and restaurant-goes – even the strip-club patrons – were apparently at home with their loved ones. I stopped at the Nickel’s at the Eaton’s Centre for something to eat. I ordered a smoked meat sandwich and an Ex. The fatty deli meat, skunky beer and blasé server were a welcomed signs of home.  

My thoughts turned to my first home – Bogota – and my dad. I remembered it was a rare, sunny day in January, the height of the rainy season. I was in my room playing with Luis when I heard a knock at the front door. Mom went to answer it and, curious kid that I was, I peeked out of our bedroom to see who was there.  

It was my uncle and he looked unusually stern. He told Mom to sit down in the kitchen and she did. Then he walked past her to mine and Luis’s room. ‘Stay in here with your brother, Este,’ he said as he closed the door in my face. A minute later I heard a scream from the kitchen that haunts me to this day.  It was Mom yelling ‘Noooo!’ Her voice was almost unrecognizable. It sounded like something between a mule being whipped and a baby’s cry. It was sub-human. I sat down beside Luis on the bed afraid. Luis soon started to tremble, knowing even less what was going on.

When the noise finally let up my uncle came to our room and opened the door. He walked in and knelt down in front of us.  He grabbed each of our knees with his large hands. ‘Estaban, Luis – I have sad news. Your father was killed in an accident at work.  A bridge he was trying to repair collapsed on top of him…’ He looked at us and the information started to set in. Luis began to cry inconsolably and I looked back and forth between him and my uncle unsure what to say or do. Gradually, my uncle stood up. ‘This will change your world for years to come, Esteban. I am very sorry.’  A few tears ran down his face and he left.

I sat on the frozen for an hour listening to my brother and mother sob. Eventually, Luis exhausted himself and Mom gathered her herself enough to come tuck him in.  

It was hard growing up without a father, especially after moving to a new country and being a visible minority who didn’t speak either of the local languages.  I got life-hardened well ahead of my peers and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t resent it.  Mom did everything she could to support me and Luis but children need multiple parents even under the best of circumstances.  I suppose Montreal became a second parent of a kind. I certainly identified with it. It was also fractured by history and yet couldn’t speak of its deficits without being called a whiner.  

As I finished my sandwich and beer, I thought about my life’s current difficulties. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted I stay in Ottawa or working in construction. And there were sure to be difficulties ahead with Sara too. I should stay focused on making money until I got out of debt, I decided, and this plan satisfied me for the moment.    

I paid my bill, got up, and left the restaurant. I walked towards the rental car and looked up College-McGill at the eastern face of Mount Royal. It reminded me of Monserrate, the ten-thousand foot mountain just south of Bogota. Mount Royal was an ant-hill by comparison, but it was still an immovable and naturally occurring. It had always been there and always would. I could go anywhere and it would be here when I got back.

Martin Wright. Thirty-six years old. Six feet, two inches tall. Insurance adjuster. 

Martin grew up in West Vancouver and went to high school at its reputed Rockridge Secondary. He moved to Toronto for university and graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in European History from the University of Toronto. From there he got accepted to law school, also at U of T.  

But in Law Martin found he couldn’t flourish the way he had in undergrad, at least not without greatly exerting himself. He discovered Adderall and Dexedrine and they helped him successfully regain his life-long position at the top of his class. He graduated three years later and had his pick of Toronto’s top law firms for articling positions. He chose Blake, Cassels and Graydon, LLP on account of the fact they had many international offices he could potentially work at. 

Life as an articling lawyer presented another obstacle to Martin. The eighty-hour workweeks and pressures of office politics inspired him to binge-drink on the weekends. Alongside his colleagues and other affluent young professionals, he drowned his week’s stresses at various high-end bars, clubs, and restaurants on King Street, a popular playground for Toronto’s young elites. These all-night – sometimes all-day – drink-a-thons were well-supplied with cocaine to prevent everyone from succumbing to sleep deprivation.

Slowly, the weekends-exclusive activities spilled into weekdays. Martin started keeping a bottle of Glenfiddich 12 in the bottom of his desk, sipping its contents from a coffee mug in the evenings after the paralegals and support staff had gone home for the day. At some point mid-way thought his articling year, his nightly drinks began occupying so much of his attention he couldn’t concentrate on his work. To refocus his mind he brought a bag of blow to the office and took bumps in the bathroom stalls under the auditory-cover of toilets flushing. He thought no one was the wiser to his drinking and drug-use at work. 

Then one day in January 2006, shortly after an especially depraved holiday party season and just over three months before the end of his articling year, he arrived at work to a note from one of his bosses on his desk. ‘Please see me as soon as you’re in.  –Carl,’ it read. 

He went to his boss’s office where the door was half-way open and Carl sat at his desk, his head lowered, working. He tapped on the door his boss looked up. ‘Hi Carl,’ he said, ‘you wanted to see me?’

‘Martin,’ Carl said, glancing up briefly. ‘Come in.’ His boss picked up the phone on his desk and called human resources. ‘He’s here,’ he said into the phone then lowered it back into its cradle.

Carl resumed working and a minute later the HR manager who’d administered Martin’s hiring walked in the room carrying a large manila envelope. He closed the door behind him and handed the envelope to Martin. He leaned against the wall and raised his eyebrows at Martin.

Martin opened the envelope and saw the jewelry bag of coke he kept in the back of the top drawer of his desk. His heart stopped as he recognized the distinctive red hearts of the small plastic bag. 

‘The cleaning staff found that in your desk last night,’ the HR manager said. ‘In the interests’ of the firm we won’t be contacting the police. But please pack up your personal belongings and be gone by noon. Your contract has been terminated with cause.’   

Martin looked across the desk at Carl. ‘I can’t believe you advised me on how to advise my clients while you were high,’ Carl said. ‘Get the fuck out of my sight.’

He left his boss’s office with his head lowered and started back to his desk to pack up his things. He felt nauseous and looked around for the nearest waste-paper basket in case he threw up. Luckily he reached his desk and his Glenfiddich before he did. He took a long swig of scotch straight from the bottle and felt his heart-rate and stomach relax. He re-corked the bottle and put it in a banker’s box along with a framed photo of his parents and a few pens and notepads. He got his coat from the coat-rack and left.  

With the right balance of stimulants and depressants, Martin weathered his dismissal from Blake’s reasonably well. He told his friends and family he was quitting law because his bosses were embezzling clients’ money and he couldn’t morally abide it. He said that the embezzlement was so pervasive in the profession that switching firms wasn’t an option either. His parents were concerned but they couldn’t object to his decision without sounding unethical themselves. Besides, they lived too far away to hold much sway over what he did or thought anyway. Martin’s friends were another story. His lawyer ones were insulted by his stated reason for quitting. They didn’t say anything to him about it, but they slowly stopped calling him. 

It didn’t escape Martin’s notice that his social echelon was changing but it didn’t upset him too much either. The months following his dismissal from Blakes was the first extended period of his life that he was free from onerous mental work and responsibilities. He’d saved enough money from articling to live comfortably for six months unemployed provided he made some small lifestyle adjustments. He moved out of his spacious lakefront condo into a small apartment above a restaurant on Queen. The sacrifice wasn’t great considering his new area was Toronto’s epicenter of partying all nights of the week. He got wasted nearly every night over the summer and slept with a different girl each week. Being naturally confident and self-assured, he had no problem absorbing or deflecting the inevitable, ‘what do you do?’-questions that arose during his one night stands. His height, smile, and intelligence had always drawn admirers and he wasn’t going to let a small thing like his employment-status change that.

During his ‘sabbatical’, as he called it, he smoked pot and played video games to occupy his non-drinking hours. Eventually though, his savings got too low to afford the drinks and blow he used as a pretext to invite women back to his apartment, so he had to look for a job. Aaron Johnson, one of his less motivated friends from undergrad, worked as an insurance adjuster. He said that the work was a joke provided you were comfortable occasionally destroying people’s financial well-being. Martin admired Aaron’s carefree lifestyle and unfettered conscience so he agreed to an interview with his company. On top of the job’s relative ease and comparably high pay, the company’s offices were a short streetcar ride from his apartment. He was interviewed, received an offer, and accepted the job without much reflection.       Martin took his adjuster’s accreditation courses, got his adjuster’s license and soon became a star employee. His personable manner and legal background made customers almost grateful when he told them that they would not be paid out their full claims or perhaps anything. Within two years he was promoted to lead adjuster, all the while sleeping with dozens of women and getting thoroughly obliterated outside working hours. 

Over this time Martin also stopped returning home very regularly. He told his parents that invitations to tropical locales or to Ontario cottage country prevented him and they accepted his behaviour as ‘letting off steam’ or ‘sowing his wild oats’.

Weeks turned to months, months to seasons, and seasons to years. Sooner than he’d expected Martin was thirty with no inclination to go home or get back into law. He’d had a few semi-serious relationships during this time but nothing longer than eight-to-ten months. He believed the women he got involved with liked him exclusively for his law degree and he’d put that part of his life behind him.      

Youth and vitality were fast becoming aspects of Martin’s past as well. One night in bed with an early-twenties-first-job-out-of-university-girl, he couldn’t get an erection. He was humiliated and swore the girl to secrecy. He quickly started spending more nights in and investing more of his ego at work. Around the office he made drawn-out speeches about the art of adjustments to anyone who’d listen. He began to derive great pleasure from reprimanding his subordinates. He maligned them as if they were criminals in a courtroom when they under-performed. Most people who passed through the company’s doors were less educated and self-confident than he was so they were easy picking and helped maintain Martin’s sense of superiority despite his advancing age.   Around his thirty-second birthday Martin was invited to speak at the Ontario Insurance Adjusters Association’s annual meeting being held in Toronto at the Metro Convention Centre. He accepted gladly and delivered an impassioned treatise on the corrosive effects of insurance fraud on the global economy. Afterwards, amidst a swarm of congratulators, he saw one of his old law school classmates, Ed Sharpton. Ed cut a noticeable figure in his two thousand dollar Armani suit among the lesser paid insurance adjusters and managers surrounding him. ‘Martin? Martin Wright?’ Ed said as Martin’s congratulators began to thin out around him.  

Martin’s performance high plummeted when he recognized his one-time classmate and equal. ‘Ed Sharpton!’ he said in fake exuberance. ‘What are you doing here? Looking to take out some malpractice insurance?’ 

‘Very funny, Martin. I just made partner at McCarthy’s actually. I’m well-covered.’

Martin’s mood plummeted further. ‘Fantastic. Congratulations,” he said. Ed continued: ‘No, the reason I’m here is that the Association is a client of mine.’

‘Really? That’s great!’   There was a pause in conversation that neither of the men wanted to be the one to end. It was a engrained in lawyers in their educations not to elicit unnecessary conversation. ‘Everything can and will be used against you,’ the adage went.  

Finally, Martin yielded to the social awkwardness. ‘Did you catch the speech?’ he said. 

‘Yes, a little bit. You spoke well although I’m not terribly knowledgeable of the business-side of insurance, just the legal.’

Martin accepted the tepid compliment with a smile. ‘Thank you,’ he said. There was another lull in dialogue. Martin couldn’t get a full read on Ed’s intentions in talking to him beneath his expensive suit and perpetual half-smile. Was he trying to rub his nose in the fact that he was richer and more powerful than him, or was he being genuinely friendly?

This time, Ed committed the lawyer’s sin of speaking first. ‘Well, good to see you, Martin.’ Then he added, ‘Glad to know we’re both flourishing.’ 

They shook hands and Ed left. As he did so, Martin burned with anger. He interpreted Ed’s final comment as facetious. Clearly he was not succeeding to the same degree as Ed. Why would he suggest otherwise if he wasn’t being sarcastic? Goddamn him. He’d trounced him in mock trials in law school and still could if he really wanted to, the bastard.  

Luckily, another adjuster walked up to congratulate Martin on his speech and his resentment and bitterness lifted.    

Martin couldn’t avoid his parents’ invitations home indefinitely. In the fall of his thirty-fifth year, he didn’t have a ready excuse when his mom called to invite him home for Christmas. ‘George and Bill and the kids want to see you,’ she said. As an additional spur to come home, she added, ‘Don’t you want to see them?’

‘Of course, Mom.’

‘Good. Then it’s settled.’

He drifted off, imagining the proposed family gathering. His mind searched for stories and anecdotes he could tell his relatives to prove he was living an exciting and valuable life. 

‘Martin?’ his mom said on the other end of line. 

‘Yes, Mom. I’ll be there for a few days at Christmas. Okay?’

‘Great. Thank you. We’ll to you talk soon about the details. Bye-bye, sweetheart.’

‘Bye, Mom.’

He hung up the phone angry. He hated seeing his brothers and their wives. His brothers treated him like a child. They subtly but surely reproached him for his irresponsible behaviour and causing of their parents to worry. His sisters-in-law, clearly well-appraised of all his wasted potential by their husbands, treated him like he was handicapped or ill. Their pity was less demeaning than his brothers’ scorn but not by much.  

And yet both group’s attitudes towards him paled compared his father’s. At the end of every trip home, right as he was about to leave, his dad invited him into his home office for ‘a quick chat’, His office had a stained and varnished maple desk with matching, custom-built bookshelves. Professional honours and accolades covered every inch of the walls that weren’t occupied by leather-bound legal texts. Finally, and most triumphantly, there was a stunning view of English Bay and the Gulf Islands through the room’s large single-pane window. During their chats, Martin’s dad would invariably ask whether Martin was ready to move back to Vancouver and write the bar. ‘Why not exactly?’ always followed Martin’s response that he was not. 

Martin tried to put his anxiety over going home out of his mind as best he could. He spent the fall in his usual routine of employee ridicule by day, Xbox and pot consumption by night. November and early December passed faster than he’d have liked and before he knew it he was a on a plane touching down in Vancouver readying himself to see his family for the first time in more than two and a half years. 

The trip started out peacefully enough. He played with his nieces and nephews – all of whom he adored – and saw old friends from high school in the evenings. He got along well with his brothers and mom albeit they didn’t stray from surface level-conversations.  

But then came the inevitable trip to his father’s office. The encounter proceeded according to their usual script except after ‘Why not exactly?’ Martin’s dad added, ‘You’re getting too old to be fooling around, you know. You have to accept the responsibility your upbringing and education require of you.‘ 

‘You mean turning a blind eye to corruption and malpractice?’ Martin refuted. His dad frowned. ‘Oh, get off that, Martin. Nobody’s hands are clean in this world. What is the real reason you won’t live up to your potential? What are you afraid of?’

Martin was rarely on the back foot in any debate or conversation. Even his brothers’ attacks he could deflect with a joke, moral argument, or blank stare. But his father had provided all the best for him and Martin had tacitly agreed to repay him by mirroring his life’s choices and becoming rich and successful.  

He considered telling him the truth, that he’d developed a near-physical dependency on drugs and alcohol, a fact that precluded him from being a high-performing professional and dependable family man, he thought.  

But a combination of fear and pride stopped Martin from coming clean to his dad. He felt on the verge of a full emotional breakdown at the thought of telling the truth. ‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled in response. 

His father sighed. ‘All right. See if you can figure it out, please.’ He paused and added, ‘you only get one life and it’s too short not to take seriously.’

‘I know, Dad. I will.’

Martin got up and left his dad’s office. A friend from high school came and picked him up and drove him to the airport. He boarded his flight back to Toronto and the plane taxied to the runway. 

The plane took off and reached cruising altitude. As it did Martin began ordering beer after beer, drinking them down until he was tired enough to sleep.

On his thirty-fifth birthday Martin almost tried heroin. He didn’t like having large, boisterous gatherings to celebrate birthdays like he used to. On the contrary, he preferred to keep his advancing age quiet, especially since he’d begun hanging out with younger and younger people. He made his younger friends mostly through the customer service department at work. He found that his funny, cynical social persona went further within an age group that wasn’t beset with marriages, mortgages and children like his was.  

The friend who tempted Martin to try heroin was Chelan Dermont, a twenty-five-year-old full-time partier and part-time musician. Chelan survived financially by bartending at a darkly-lit bar on Queen near Ossington and lived a few doors down above a burrito shop. Normally Martin would have been petrified at the thought of injecting himself with a notoriously addictive drug, but whatever his failings, Chelan wasn’t a stereotypical, decrepit-looking heroin user. He wore expensive clothes and slept with lots of girls.

On the night of his 35th birthday, Martin went to Chelan’s bar around 1 AM. He’d been too lonely to do nothing at all on his birthday. Plus he’d also taken the next day off of work in anticipation of being hungover and it would go to waste if he didn’t go out for at least a drink or two. 

So Martin sat at Chelan’s bar drinking as he and Chelan traded gossip over their mutual friends. Chelan served other customers, and after the bar closed, the two of them went back to Chelan’s apartment for some bourbon and a joint. Chelan’s apartment was sparsely furnished and the sink was full of dirty dishes. Martin told him it was his birthday as he sat down at the kitchen table. ‘Your birthday?’ Chelan said, standing at the sink cleaning a couple glasses for their drinks. ‘That calls for a celebration.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Have you ever tried H?’ 

Martin felt a shiver run through his body at the sound of Chelan’s last word.  Coke had ceased to have much effect on him unless he took it in overdose-threatening amounts and he yearned for something to recreate the top-of-the-world sensation he’d felt the first few times he’d gotten high on it. ‘No, never been offered,’ he said. ‘’What’s it like?’ he added.  

‘It’s pure bliss. Everything melts into a big warm bath and you can’t feel anything but happy. Poets and artists used to use similar stuff all the time. It’s only recently it’s become taboo.’

‘Wasn’t that opium?’ Martin thought but didn’t say. ‘Can I just take a bit?’ he said after the pause.  

‘A bit’s all you need. I’ll go get my kit.’  

But as Chelan went to his bedroom a wave of disgust washed over Martin. What was he doing in this drug-den looking for camaraderie with a near-teenager? He thought about his nieces and nephews and how he’d feel if they could see what he was doing. What if they winded up where he was some day? The oldest of them, Daniel, was already looking for alternative role models from his parents and Martin was bound to end up as an icon of sorts to him. Was this the sort of life he wanted him to lead? It was one thing to reject the status quo but another to obliterate it. Physical and mental health weren’t oppressive social constructions, they were decent, daily endeavours.

‘I forgot I have to get up early for work tomorrow!’ he yelled to Chelan as he got up from the kitchen table and walked towards the door. 

He left the apartment quickly and walked out into the street. It had started snowing earlier in the night and everything outside was dusted with fluffy white powder. The sight reminded Martin of skiing at Whistler as a kid. They were fond memories; easy and happy times with his parents and brothers before everything had gotten so complicated so between them. Maybe he could recapture some of those moments if he moved back to Vancouver. He didn’t need to get back into law, he just needed to be close to the people he’d once loved and who’d once loved him. He resolved to stop looking at big picture problems and focus more on his health and spiritual wellbeing. His past mistakes might have led him astray but they were his and he wasn’t unhappy with who he was. 

“The problem is we don’t let people die anymore.” 

I sat in a steel and fabric chair looking out the fourth story office window and trying to think of a response to what I’d just heard. The speaker was a puffy fifty-ish-looking psychiatrist sitting five feet in front of me in a black fake leather captain’s chair. His name was Dr. Hoffman. “Excuse me?” I said, stalling.  

“Die,” he said.  “You know – croak.”

I looked at him more closely. He had a black goatee and a blatant comb-over. He wore a blue oxford shirt, grey slacks, and inexpensive brown loafers. It was my first time seeing him after being referred to his clinic by my family doctor. He hadn’t asked me why I thought I was there. He just made a few pleasantries followed by his macabre remark.      

Finally, I thought I had a response I thought would show him I wasn’t intimidated by his credentials: “How can you call compassion – one of our society’s fundamental values – a problem?”

“That’s a good question.” He shifted his weight to the back of his chair and folded his hands on top of his protruding stomach. He tapped a two-count with his foot and continued speaking: 

“When we’re first born we’re helpless. Our parents have to do everything for us. They feed us, clothe us, shelter us. They give us attention without us even having to ask for it. They do everything we need not just to keep us alive, but also in a good mood.”  

He swallowed and tapped his foot again.  

“But then other people come along – siblings at first – and they want some of our stuff too. So what do we do?”

After an extended silence I realized he wasn’t being rhetorical. “I don’t know,” I said.  

“That’s because you’ve been taught to forget.” Suddenly he lunged forward in his chair and scootered within two feet of my face. “We fight!” he yelled. “We say, ‘No!’, ‘Mine!!’” He flailed his arms and his eyes were as loud as his voice. He stared at me for almost a minute then sat back in his chair and inched back to his starting position. 

“But our parents are people too,” he continued. “And they don’t like to be told what to do. (Plus they’re bigger than us, which means they have the power.)”

(Two-count.) 

“So we learn to disguise our demands with ‘pleases’ and ‘thank yous’, and being good or ‘compassionate’, as you call it. We don’t want to anger the adults because they could cut off all the goodies.”

(One-count.) 

“But deep down we’re still fighting. We’re fighting either to suppress our demands or the competing demands of others. We’ve created a system where nobody is allowed to die, but make no mistake, everyone is fighting to stay alive, to get what we need to survive.”

By this point I was dying to interject. I’d majored in anthropology in university and couldn’t let someone reduce two-hundred-thousand years of human history to a couple paragraphs of behavioural psychology. “But we don’t exist strictly in families…” 

“Yes!” he shouted and came charging at me again. “Yes!! You’re right! We leave home! And now no one is paying any attention to us the way our parents did. That’s why we look to girlfriends, boyfriends, bosses, and friends to give us what we need.”

(He inched away again.) 

“It’s an old story – especially when it comes to our romantic partners, You know it, but you’ve been taught to forget it, so I’ll remind you.” 

(Two-count.)

“On the first date with our new romantic partner, everyone’s on their best behaviour. We show the other person what great things we have to offer and how much they should like us and want to be with us.  

“If that works, there’ll be a second date. Then on the second date, things get a bit more honest. The other person has agreed you’re interesting enough to see again, so you’ve gained some power. You know that they need you, so you’re going to see what you can get in return. 

“By the third date it’s an all-out power struggle and it sets the tone for the entire relationship. It’s a battle fought over the idea of ‘I don’t need you as much as you need me’ (which, of course, is a lie) ‘so you better not piss me off or I’ll take away the goodies.’”    

Again I was annoyed he thought he had everything figured out so neatly. “But shouldn’t relationships be based on enhancement, not dependence?”   “Yes. Of course. Nobody wants to be needy. We all want to feel like we’re independent, and that other person, they’re the needy one!” 

His tone was alternately serious and sarcastic. The only way I could differentiate between them was by the cartoonishly-raised eyebrows that accompanied his sarcasm. He lowered his eyebrows and continued: 

“But if that’s really true, why are you here? Why are intelligent, able-bodied people like yourself so unhappy?”

I searched for a reason that didn’t make me sound spoiled, stupid or weak. “I don’t know.”    

“Well, I’ll tell you. It’s because you need to feel needed. It’s like that movie…it’s a DreamWorks movie with the big monster…Mike Myers is in it…”

“Shrek”?”

“Yes, yes. Shrek. It’s brilliant. Have you seen it?”

“I’m not sure. Parts of it, maybe.”

“Well I encourage you to watch it. It’s based on the story of ‘I can change her/I can change him…I’ll just kiss this toad’ (or ogre, as in the case of Shrek) ‘and he’ll turn into a prince’.  

“But do you know what happens?”

“What?”

Charging forward: “You turn into the ogre!” 

“Um, okay…I get it…I think…”

I was having trouble following everything he was saying, trying reconcile his anecdotes with my long-standing beliefs about the world and life. Luckily the phone rang and he turned away for what felt like the first time in hours. “Yes…Okay…Send her in,” he into the handset. 

He hung up the phone and turned back to me. “That’s all the time we have today and I’ve talked the whole time!”

I stood up, thanked him, and left the office.  

-

The next time I saw Dr. Hoffman he was in the exact same clothes was at our first appointment. I sat down in the steel and fabric chair facing him and looked at him expecting him to say something. Instead, he just smiled and raised his eyebrows. I spoke first:

“So, I was thinking, I agree, it takes work to stay alive. But my problem is I’ve had so many advantages and opportunities, I shouldn’t just be surviving, I should be thriving.”

He narrowed his eyes and took a deep breath through his mouth. The effect of this caused an audible smacking-sucking sound. “Well, that’s good,” he said.

“You’re right to think that. Your parents had to work hard to keep the silver spoon in your mouth so you should be taking advantage of it, or at least paying it forward, right?” (His eyebrows were raised.)

“Yeah,” I said trying to hide the insult in my voice.  

“All right. So why are able-bodied, intelligent people like yourself so unhappy even when they’ve been given so many advantages? (I’ve seen a lot of them, by the way, it’s not just you).”

He took another mouth-breath and shifted his weight to the back in his chair. “In the old days, we just took whatever we could get away with without being killed. It’s like that movie, have you seen it, Chimpanzees? It’s a Disney movie…”

“No.” This was not going to go well. Primatologists were even worse extrapolators than behavioural psychologists my anthropology professors had taught me.  

“Did you see Shrek yet?”  

“Um, no.” 

“Okay,” he said sounding disappointed.  

“Anyway, in Chimpanzees a group of filmmakers go into the jungle and follow around a group of chimps.  

“(They’re our cousins, you know, the chimps. The only difference is they can’t talk. They aren’t logics.)”

I rolled my eyes in my mind as he continued:   

“The filmmakers discover something interesting. They find out there’s a pecking order in the group with the biggest and strongest at the top. The smaller, weaker ones – what do you think they do?”  

“I don’t know.”

Scootering forward: “They follow!” 

I looked at him blankly wondering what the relevance of his story was to my question.

“But even if you’re the leader, you’re not out of the woods. If you’re the leader and you stumble or turn your back – whamm-o! That’s why the leader doesn’t stomp all over the followers. He doesn’t want an uprising. He even gives the followers treats from time-to-time so they’ll stay in line. It’s a really great film.”

“Are you saying I should accept the fact that I’m a follower?”

“Good question.” (Another mouth-breath.) “You’ve heard of the German guy, Marx?”

“Uh-huh.” I felt very patronized.    

“Well Marx came along and said to the workers – the followers, the lower classes – ‘Hey, you guys actually make everything, why are you listening to that rich guy?’  

“And the workers said to Marx, ‘Well, he’s got all the money; he’s got all the guns…’ 

“‘So what?’ said Marx. ‘He can’t tell you what to do if you organize yourselves and act together.’” 

(Mouth-breath/one-count.)

“So eventually the workers rose up and overthrew the rich guy and we got socialism. But socialism had the same problem. The biggest and strongest decided what to make and who got everything. Plus it destroyed human individuality. That’s why we invented this thing called ‘private property’. Private property lets you have your own little castle where you can walk around and keep other people off.  We use our language and logic to say that it’s ‘fair’, but really it’s the same as the old days, you’re fighting for your survival. At any moment, the guy next door is going to come over the wall and try to kick you out whether you’re the leader or follower.”

My head was swimming. As best I could understand he was suggesting I was naïve to the truer nature of life. No one was happy in my conception of the term. Everyone was in fact fighting tooth and claw for survival. 

It sounded reasonable enough but the idea conflicted with my long-held belief that living cooperatively was more efficient or more satisfying. “Isn’t your approach a bit, I don’t know, dark?” 

Eyes blaring, he scootered within a foot of my face. “‘Dark’?!” he shouted. “It’s accurate! You still think you get what you want by being good?? Do you still believe in Santa Claus???”  

“…No.”  

“The tooth-fairy???” “…No.”

Thank God the phone rang. I was really insulted.

“Okay….Yes…Thanks.” He hung up the phone and turned back to me. “Well, I hope this is helpful. I guess I’ve talked a lot again.” 

“Yeah,” I said insincerely.   

I thanked him, stood up, and left the office. My chest fluttered like just I’d been in a fight.

-

By my third session with Dr. Hoffman I was feeling badly beaten. I’d always thought I was smart but what he was saying suggested otherwise. According to him, I was still a child psychologically. I was good solely for the sake of receiving and then resentful if it didn’t work. No wonder I fought with my girlfriend, roommate and boss. 

I entered the office, sat down in my usual chair, and waited as he looked at me. He must have sensed my dejection because his smile slowly faded and he spoke first: 

“So the last times you were here we talked about my approach. Now I see on your admission form you have issues with relationships. That’s good. Relationships are all there really is. Plus it takes work to stay alive.”

(Mouth-breath/two-count.)

“But I want to ask you something: why should you listen to me?”

Again, I was thrown by his questions. I thought he was completely self-assured beneath his laundry-less blue oxford shirt.

“Uh, um, I don’t know,” I started. “I guess because you’ve talked to a lot of people about this kind of stuff.”  

“That’s true…”

“And, well, honestly, because I’m weak.”

“Hmm. Well maybe. But have you considered the possibility that we’re all weak? I sometimes ask myself if I would be of any use to anyone if people weren’t so unhappy. And bearing that in mind, what incentive do I have to actually help anyone?”  

(Three-count.  He seemed to be genuinely reflecting.)

“Let me describe it this way: people go to their family doctor with a problem and they either fix them or they don’t. Here it’s different: I can’t fix you. I can only coach you, try to help you manage frustrations.”

“So you don’t believe in cures?”  

“No. As I’ve said, we’re essentially animals. Our logic has helped us evolve socially and technologically but in terms of our emotional needs, we’re still clawing for survival. Our logic tries to find short cuts by blaming other people or a chemical imbalance for our difficulties Really though, it’s the nature of life and a lack of awareness that’s to blame.”

“So how do we become more aware?”

“Well one way is by coming here. But I can’t tell you whether or not it will help; you’d just be substituting me for your girlfriend and boss. You have to decide. And you should factor my self-interest into how you choose.”  

I thought for a minute. “It’s all very reasonable-sounding but I’m still stuck on the fact I need to be here at all. If I’m not chemically imbalanced and I’ve been given all the best opportunities to be happy then it means everything I believe in is bogus. I can work hard and never succeed and I’ll never have anything like a Hollywood romance.”

I folded my hands in my lap. “Let me describe it this way: don’t you think we need the medical explanation of unhappiness in order to keep going?” “Well if that’s true why don’t you just take a pill and be done with it? Why bother coming here?”

He was right. I’d taken anti-depressants before and they were far from a cure-all. “Well maybe if everyone’s as miserable as you’re saying, then I don’t need to.”

“Good. Attack the leader. Just like the chimpanzees.” I thought for a moment. “Yeah. You’re just telling people they’re unhappy in order to keep them coming back to you, to protect your own castle.”

Scootering forward: “Yes.Yes! What else?”

“You’re, what’s the word? It means illness caused by a doctor…”

“’Iatrogenic’.”

“You’re iatrogenic!”

“YESS!” 

I took a deep breath through my mouth breath and leaned forward on my knees and elbows. “I’m through coming here,” I said staring at his grinning face.

“From now on, I’m going to be the one who gives advice, not the one who takes it!” 

At that, I stood up and walked out of the office. I swore I’d never go back again and made sure not to thank him.

“It’s not easy being in a relationship when one person is unemployed.” 

Gilbert Brickwell was talking to Dan Copithorne, one of the twelve sales staff he managed at Blackgaurd Technologies, a mid-sized information technology company in Lower Manhattan. It was almost 7PM on a Wednesday in late February and Brickwell was standing at the entranceway to Copithorne’s cubicle. 

Copithorne was thrown by the personal nature of his usually unsentimental boss’s remark. “Um, yeah,” he said. “Sarah’s just got way too much time on her hands so she starts—“

“—Whoa, Coppertone. I’m on my way to a date with a hot chick. I can’t get dragged down by your sob story, okay? Gotta stay light on my toes.” 

“Yeah, sure. Of course. Who’s the lucky girl?”

“Just some girl I met at a party. Adios, El Coppertoné. Wish me luck.”

“Goodnight, Gilbert. Good luck on your date.”

“You make your own luck, Sunscreen.” Brickwell shadow-boxed one of a wall of Copithorne’s cubicle and walked away. 

On his way to the elevators Brickwell made a series of nods, gun-gestures and winks to the few people who remained at Blackguard’s twenty-fourth story office. Soon after calling the elevator, it came and took him down the parking garage. He whistled as he walked up to his car, a black 2010 BMW 3M coupe with caramel leather interior; ‘The Bankmobile’, as he called it. 

He opened the car door and sat down with a thud. As he closed the door behind him his head and shoulders slackened and he sighed. Finally, for the first time in nearly twelve hours he was free from the demands of the outside world. On top of his stressful and onerous work as Blackguard’s head of sales, he’d just broken up with his girlfriend of almost a year. It had only been three days since he’d decided to end things with Sammy but he missed her already. He wished she’d be waiting for him when he got home, that he didn’t have cook for one or order some loveless take-out to feed himself. He also missed having someone to vent to about work. Things had become even more stressful at Blackguard since the arrival of their new president and CEO, Jim Halstead. Halstead had barely been there a month and was already demanding they double their revenues over the next two quarters. 

Brickwell sighed again, then started the car and shifted it in gear. Whatever it looked to outsiders, it wasn’t easy being ‘Top Shelf”.

Copithorne was already at his desk when Brickwell arrived at work at 7:45 the next morning. The kid’s got hustle; I’ll give him that, Brickwell he thought as he passed Copithorne’s cubicle. 

Copithorne noticed his boss out of the corner of his eye and swiveled his chair around to greet him. “Good morning, Gilbert,” he said. “How was your date?” 

“No time for chit-chat, SPF 50. I’ve got an eight o’clock call to prepare for. You got any meetings lined up today?” 

“Yeah, I’ve got Shamley Financial at four. They’re looking at the gold package. All I need to do—“ 

“Is that it?”

“…Yeah.”

“I used to close a deal before breakfast when I wasn’t managing all you skin-sacks. Try to sell something, would you? Halstead’s breathing down my neck to get our numbers up.” 

“You bet, Gilbert.” 

Brickwell went to his office and closed the door behind him. Copithorne didn’t see his boss again all morning. At 9:00 Brickwell’s assistant brought him his usual double latte and butter croissant. Around eleven Copithorne heard him yelling at someone on the phone through his office door. “Performance evaluations?!” Brickwell said. “I kept this company afloat single-handedly through the worst recession in seventy years and you want to talk to me about performance evaluations?!“ 

At noon Brickwell re-emerged and appeared to be back to his usual, jovial self. “Client lunch, Sunscreen,” he said, closing his office door. “That’s where the big deals happen, not sitting behind a desk.” He put on his designer sunglasses, smiled, and walked away. 

“Dickwell,” Copithorne muttered. Brickwell took the Carey out of Manhattan and the Gowanus Expressway through South Brooklyn. He flew across the Verrazano, weaving the Bankmobile through of delivery trucks and lesser vehicles on his way into Staten. He got off the highway at Clove St. and headed west towards Forest. It was the neighbourhood he’d grown up in and where his mom still lived in his and his brother’s childhood home. His dad was gone though. He’d left when Brickwell was fifteen, when he and Brickwell’s mom separated then divorced. 

Brickwell thought about dropping in on his mom but didn’t feel like answering the inevitable “How’s Sammy?” question she’d surely ask. Besides, he was starving and looking forward to having lunch at his favourite neighbourhood Italian restaurant. 

He got to Fiorto’s and was greeted by the same effusive Italian-American owner who’d fed him and his friends since they were gawky teenagers. “Bellissimo!” she said. “Where have you been? You look so thin? Come and sit and eat. Why you never come see Nona no more?” 

Brickwell sat down at a table by the window. “I work on Wall St. and live in Greenwich, Nona. It’s a long way to come for lunch.” 

“’Long way’ he says.” She turned to her husband who was standing at the cash register. “Giuseppe, how far we from Napoli? Three? Four thousand miles?” 

“Quattro,” Giueseppe replied.

“Four! Four thousand miles we come and you call Wall St. ‘long way’? Ma-donna.” 

“Mi scusi, Nona. I’ve been really busy lately is all. Can I have a half liter of red and the chicken parmesan with fettuccini and gravy?”

“Ci, mi amore. A nice salad too?”

“No thanks. Some bread would be great though.”

“Prego, Bellisimo—Guiseppe! Pane! Meta-litro vino!”

The woman walked away and Brickwell looked out the window. As he looked out at Forest Avenue, images of his youth flooded his mind: high school, parties, girls-- 

God, why was he still thinking about Sammy? She was one of a million women who’d go out with him. He was only thirty and way more successful than most people his age. Sure she was smart and had great breasts but so were and did a lot of girls. 

Nona returned with the wine and bread and Brickwell couldn’t get them to his lips fast enough. The alcohol slowed his racing thoughts and the starch settled the coffee and stress gurgling in his stomach. 

He took out his phone and texted his friend James Lacey. James was his closest friend and a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at a medium-sized Midtown law firm. ‘Party this weekend?’ he texted. 

A few minutes later Lacey replied. ‘Sure. Your hood or mine?’ the message read. 

‘Mine.’

‘Cool. Call me Friday.’

‘Cool.’  

He put his phone away as his food arrived. He quickly devoured the hot, fresh meal and finished it off with a triple espresso. The food and coffee successfully revitalized him. He felt ready to get back to doing what he did best: sell. 

He paid his bill, said good-bye to Nona and hopped in the Bankmobile. Fuck Halstead, he thought as he raced back to Manhattan and took the elevator up to his office. I could sell sand to a camel or ice to an Eskimo. It’s Top Shelf not Bar Rail.  

He stopped briefly at Copithorne’s cubicle on his way back in the office for some additional ego-boosting. “Hey Sunscreen,” he said. “You still want to know about my date last night?” 

“Sure.” 

“Well, it’d just make you sad you’re dating Sarah Plain-and-tall so I’m not going to. Thanks for coming out though.” 

Copithorne watched as Brickwell walked in his office, took his suit jacket off and threw it on the chair facing his desk. “Let’s sell some systems!” he yelled and he slammed the door behind him. 

“Fucking Dickwell.”

The next few days were less stressful than the start of the week. Brickwell made a few decent-sized sales since Monday although they’d taken some of his best cunning and verbal acrobatics to pull off. By Friday morning he couldn’t wait for the weekend to arrive. He was sitting at his desk in his leather captain’s chair daydreaming about meeting Lacey for beers after work. Intermittently, he reviewed his team’s weekly sales figures, an activity that made him all-the-more eager for the weekend. 

He occupied the rest of his morning with administrative tasks and a half- hearted follow-up call to a vice-president at Citigroup. The afternoon was a complete write-off. He logged into his virtual private network and surfed Facebook. He was on girl he’d gone to college with’s profile when he heard a knock at the door. “Come in,” he said as he minimized his browser and VPN. His assistant Riley opened the door and walked in the room. “Riley—what can I do for you?”  

Riley was in her early twenties, a freshly-minted NYU grad in business. “Um, not much. I just wanted to let you know I have a dentist appointment Monday morning so if you need anything done for then, give it to me now or over the weekend.” 

“’Dentist appointment’, sure. I bet you’re going to be partying Sunday and need the extra recovery time. ‘Dentist appointment’ – I invented that move.” 

“I don’t even drink, Gilbert. You know that.”

“That’s slander. Go to your desk and think about what you just said.”

Riley turned to leave and as she did Brickwell’s eyes fell onto her tight-fitting red jeans. 

“Actually hold on a second, Riley.”

“Yes?” she said, turning around.

“My lawyer-friend and I are going to hit a few bars in the Village after work. He’s almost as funny as I am. Want to join us?”

“Oh, thanks, but I’m going dancing with some girlfriends. You guys should come if you want.”

“Dancing? It’s been a while since I uncaged this beast on the dance floor.” He gestured towards his upper torso. “What time?” 

“Um, probably around eleven. Text me and we’ll meet up.”

“Sounds good.”

Riley left and Brickwell resumed surfing Facebook. He looked up Riley’s profile page and checked out some pictures of her friends. As he looked at the images of young women in clubs wearing clingly clothes surrounded by muscle-y, gelled-haired guys, his mind drifted to Sammy. I wonder if she’s caught a rebound yet, he thought. She was certainly attractive enough before you uncovered all the crazy. 

Sammy’s ‘About’ page listed her as single and there were no new photos of her since they’d broken up. In fact, the last photos she had up were of her and Brickwell on Valentine’s Day at a darkly-lit, Midtown bistro he’d taken her to. He closed his browser and called Lacey to try to stop himself from thinking about Sammy. Lacey picked up on the third ring. “What’s up, cocksucker,” he said. 

“Hey dick-bag. What’s the plan tonight?” 

“Well, I thought we’d start out at McNaughton’s and see where the night takes us. Sound good?” 

“Yeah. My assistant and some of her friends are going to a club later so we should keep an eye on that. She’s got some pretty hot friends.” 

“Ah, the old shit-where-you-work play. I like it. I guess you and Sammy broke up?” 

“That girl. Fuck. I’d be happy if I never heard her name again as long as I live. If I told you some of the shit—Er, fuck. Nevermind. I’ve got plenty of prospects. Just a matter of converting them. Let’s go get laid tonight. I need a rebound.” 

“You bet, buddy. It’s a done deal.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. See you at McNaughton’s.”

Brickwell hung up and went back to checking out pictures of Riley’s friends.

Brickwell woke up at seven the next morning without remembering falling asleep. His mouth tasted of half-digested alcohol and his temples throbbed. What the fuck happened last night? Luckily he had enough experience with hangovers not to pursue the question any further at this stage. He used the minimal energy he had in his body to get up and go to the kitchen. He poured himself a large glass of water, drank it and refilled it, and went back to his bedroom. He got back under the covers and forced himself back to much-needed sleep. 

When he woke up again an hour-and-a-half later he felt slightly better. He took a look at his phone and saw he had three missed calls. Two were from Lacey and one was from Sammy. He also had six unread texts: five from Lacey and one from Sammy. 

‘Where the fuck are you? These girls are ready to go!’ said the last text from Lacey at 1:03 AM. 

Sammy’s, from 12:52 AM, said, ‘What’s up?’ 

He went to his call log and saw that he’d called her at 12:38AM. “Oh fuck,” he said out loud and fell back on his pillow. I hope this is a bad dream, he thought, and actually closed his eyes to see if he’d wake up again. After a few minutes, feeling reality-resigned, he got out of bed and shuffled to the kitchen to make himself a latte. He drank it quickly sitting on the couch in his boxers. Then he got up and went to the front door to get the newspaper. He made himself another coffee on the way back to the couch and he sat down and read the sports and front sections. He glanced at the business section when he was done. There were stories about the underperformance of some tech stocks and an anticipated zero percent borrowing rate-increase from the Fed. The full articles seemed too strenuous for his booze-addled mind to process so he stopped reading after the headlines. He lay back on the couch and felt his mood gradually improving under the effects of caffeine. 

A minute later he heard his phone ring in the bedroom and got up to go get it. ‘Mom calling,’ read the phone’s display. He hesitated to answer it then thought himself cogent enough to converse with his mother. He pushed the talk button: “Hi Mom.” 

“Hi Honey. How about brunch? I’m coming to the city to look at vanities for the new bathroom and thought I could take you and Sammy out.” 

He thought for a second about what to say, swallowed, and just said it: “Sammy and I broke up.” 

The sentence hung in the air.

“What?”

He swallowed again and mentally-braced himself. His mom liked Sammy, especially the possibility of grandchildren that she represented. Gilbert’s mom hadn’t remarried like his dad had and he worried she was lonely. “Yeah, it just wasn’t going to work,” he added, trying hard to sound nonchalant. 

“What do you mean? Why not? You seemed so happy together at Christmas...” 

“She’s just too needy. I have enough stress in my life without someone who’s insecure to deal with.“ 

“Well, don’t you think you were ever insecure? Did people just cast you off for it?” 

“That was years ago. And besides, my situation was dif—God, Mom. I’m upset too. Would it kill you to show some sympathy for me for a change?” 

“You’re not the one who’s just been dumped! Isn’t she a bit more deserving?” 

“Yeah. Sure. And that’s what her mom’s for!”

“Ok-ok. I just want you to be happy, sweetheart. I think sometimes mine and your father’s relationship put you off of them...“

“Mom – it’s got nothing to do with you. Let’s drop it, okay? I’ll give you a call tonight. I don’t feel very well.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, ugh, I don’t know. I’ll call you tonight, okay?”

“Ok, honey. You know I only want you to make the most of your life. You get to be my age and suddenly some of the stuff you thought was important seems pretty silly.“

 “Thanks, mom. Bye.” 

“Fuck,” he said out-loud as he hung up. He threw his phone against the couch and went to the bedroom. He put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and went to the door. He grabbed his parka and put on his boots. I need some fresh air, he thought. To hell with winter. 

Outside it was a grey cold but Brickwell hardly noticed. His thoughts were still hot from the phone call with his mom. They remained that way as he walked across West 4th to Washington Square towards the Lower East Side. At 9:30 AM it was still too early for NYU students to be up but the twenty-somethings of Alphabet City were beginning to stir. He watched the young, carefree artistic-types getting coffee and walking their dogs. He noticed a couple lolling in Tompkins Square Park and the sight depressed him further. How does anybody stand dating after thirty? He decided to head north towards a more age-appropriate environment. 

He walked all the way to the Empire State Building before noticing his stomach was gurgling. He hadn’t had anything to eat since he got up over two hours ago. He spotted a deli and went in and got a bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwich and a bottle of water. He ate at the stand-up counter and listened to the clerk bicker with customers about the Knicks, Bloomberg, and whether spring would ever come. When he’d finished eating, he felt substantially better. Good enough go for a beer, he thought as he stepped back onto the street. Maybe I’ll call Lacey. 

He felt for his phone in his pocket then remembered throwing it at the couch. Fuck, how could this day get any worse? He walked to Park and hailed a cab. “721 Grove,” he told the driver and sunk as deep as he could into the vinyl-covered bench. As soon as he got home he went straight to his soft leather couch. He was planning to take a nap but decided to take a glance at his phone first. There was a text from Sammy on it. ‘You all right?’ she’d written an hour earlier. 

‘Not really,’ he typed and sent after lingering over the send button for a few seconds. 

‘Do you want to get dinner tonight?’ she wrote back a minute later.

‘Sure.’

‘Okay. Let’s meet at The Standard at 7.’ 

‘Okay. See you there.’ 

He stretched out on the couch and soon fell asleep. He didn’t remember his dreams but thought he must have had some because he woke up sweating.

Sammy walked into the Standard at five-after-seven. She looked around the room for Brickwell, spotted him sitting at a table for two along the glass wall overlooking the Hudson and walked over to him. 

“Hi,” Brickwell said, standing up and kissing her on the cheek.

“Have you been waiting long?” She took her coat off, hung it over the back of the chair and sat down. 

“Nope. Just got here.”

“Good.”

“You look good.”

“Thanks.”

She wore a tight grey Marino wool sweater with a deep back-line and her hair was pulled back in a bun. Their server arrived and took their drink orders: a Grey Goose martini and a double Bowmore 18. 

After a few sips of his drink Brickwell felt brazen enough to move beyond small talk. “Sorry for calling you last night,” he said. “I hope I didn’t wake you up.” 

“It’s okay. I was up.”

“I was pretty drunk...”

“I figured.”

He took another sip of his drink. “So, have you started dating again?” he said.

“Ugh. Steph wants to set me up with a banker friend of hers but I don’t know, he’s kind of a douche.” 

“Rich though.” 

Sammy narrowed her eyes. “Don’t start, Gilbert.” 

They turned in unison and looked out the window. They looked out at the Hudson and the office buildings in Hoboken. The Hudson was a still lifeless winter grey crawling towards the ocean. 

“What about you?” Sammy said after a minute. 

“I’m too busy to date. Halstead’s been riding me like crazy.” He paused and tilted his head. “Well, that’s not completely true. I’ve got a few pots on the boil. It’s ‘Top Self’ not ‘Bar Rail’, you know.” 

She rolled her eyes. “Why can’t you be the least bit vulnerable ever? It’s not a sign of weakness, you know. In fact, it’s the opposite.” 

“Obviously you’re not in sales. If I showed an ounce of  ‘vulnerability’ in my work, I’d be out on my ass. Would you buy millions of dollars of information systems from somebody who was ‘vulnerable’?” 

“Life’s about more than work.”

“Oh yeah? What’s it about then?”

“Relationships…building a community…maybe starting a family...”

“I can’t see one of those things paying my mortgage, filling my gas-tank, or putting food on the table. In fact, just the opposite.”

“Well, then you’re blind.”

“Yeah, or maybe you’re naive.”

Sammy’s voice rose in urgency and volume: “Who texted who they weren’t okay today? You’re not paying me to be here, you know!”

“But I’m paying for dinner.” 

“Oh, fuck off! I could have ordered a pizza and stayed in. What do I get out of eating at a nice restaurant with someone who’s miserable?” 

“’Miserable’? I’m the happiest person I know.” 

“You are not.”

“I’m happier than you.”

“Well, that’s a big achievement.” 

“Here we go. ‘Sorry Sammy’. The world’s been so hard on you…”

“You’re an asshole.”

He started to think of a comeback but something distracted him. The sun had fallen beneath the overcast sky and was shining directly at them. He looked down and saw the river glistening in the light. The sight reminded him of summertime at his dad’s in Connecticut. He imagined himself behind the wheel of his boat, the wind blowing in his hair and the smell of the ocean. He remembered taking Sammy there the summer before, before she’d been laid off and all their problems started. “I am,” he said abruptly.

“What?”

“I am an asshole.”

Her eyes widened. “Well, that’s refreshing to hear.” She paused and tilted her head. 

“But wouldn’t that make you bad at your job? Wouldn’t that make people less likely to give you their business?” 

“No. It doesn’t mean I won’t work my ass off for them.” 

“But you’ll always put yourself first.”

He thought for a second. “Yeah.” 

Now Sammy looked out the window. She straightened her shoulders and cleared her throat. “You know, I’m not feeling very hungry anymore. I think I’m going to go.” 

Gilbert tried to remain calm but he dreaded the thought of being left alone in the busy restaurant. His mouth salivated in wont for words. He couldn’t think of anything to say that would let him save face yet stay in Sammy’s company. Luckily his years of sales experience kicked in and he remembered that a question was often more powerful than a statement. “Do you remember last summer at my dad’s?” he said. 

She frowned. “Yeah…”

“Why couldn’t things have stayed like that?”

She stared at him a moment. “I don’t know. Maybe they still could.”

“How?”

“Beats me. We could move there and open a coffee shop or something. There’s a ton of tourists with money to burn.”

“What about the winter?”

“We’d think of something…”

Gilbert thought for another second. “You’re crazy. We hadn’t even been dating a year or lived together when we broke up. Plus, I have a job.”

“So what? If Connecticut’s where you’re the happiest, what are you doing here?” 

“It’s not that simple.”

“Isn’t it?” 

He downed the remainder of his scotch and started to signal the server for another drink. “Don’t,” Sammy said, touching his hand. “Stay with me.” 

He looked at her. Her eyes had circles under them but there was warmth there too. “Fine,” he said. Then he remembered some of the bitter arguments that had led to their break-up in the first place: “But you have to meet me half way, okay?” 

She sighed. “Okay.” 

“Great. Can we go for a walk? It feels hot in here…”

“But it’s so cold outside.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Half way.”

She narrowed her eyes and looked back at him: “Half way.”

My mom’s books were killing me. I’d lifted over forty boxes of them out of her basement and was schlepping them all over the city trying to resell them to used bookstores. I was a warehouse worker for a west end furniture company so more physical labour wasn’t something I needed.  

Money was. I’d resigned myself to a fifteen-dollar-an-hour living in an expensive city three years earlier after quitting my job as an account manager for a clothing company in the hopes of becoming a writer. The story behind the decision is I was sitting on a bus commuting to work one morning and began daydreaming about where the person across the aisle from me was going, who he was, and where he’d come from. I got to work and instead of making sales calls like I was supposed to, I began writing a short story based on the guy on the bus. I finished the story a week later and was so happy with it that I decided to quit my job. I wrote ‘lack of motivation’ and ‘personal reasons’ in my resignation email but truthfully I quit because I was on a creative high and wanted to spend as much time perpetuating the feeling as I could. I was drunk on the idea I was gifted or predestined to write and oblivious to the reality of the number of people who write versus the number who make any kind of a living at it.   

Three years later I was still yet-to-be published in any of the dozens of literary journals I’d submitted my short stories to. As I called around to used bookstores about my mom’s books, I lamented my earlier naïveté regarding the life of an average writer. I wasn’t gifted or special. I’d left a respectable, career-track job to lift furniture. I was a thirty year-old university graduate still living with a roommate. I had no girlfriend or savings, and no valuable possessions to speak of. And now, to top things off, my body was failing me. 

Fuck.  

My mom had been a librarian at the University of Toronto for thirty years, which is why she had so many books. When torrential rains caused her basement to flood that summer she demanded l take the books or else they were going to the dump. She loved her collection of mostly sixties’ literature and literary criticism but they’d already been getting moldy in her damp basement and the flooding exacerbated the problem. 

So on an afternoon in late July, after the skies parted and poured down with such force they turned the freeways to streams, my mom called me at work agitated by the water in her basement: ‘Come get these books out of here before I breath in any airborne fungi!’ she said.  

I had after-work access to the furniture company’s sixteen-foot fiberglass-enclosed delivery truck so that I could do pick-ups and deliveries on my way to work in the mornings or on my way home in the evenings. I drove the truck to my mom’s after work without a thought towards how my body couldn’t handle any additional strain. The Catcher In The Rye had taught me seventeen years earlier to shirk conventional wisdom wherever I found it. 

…Holden Caulfield, that’s who started killing me. My thirteen-year-old self had fallen in love with the Salinger protagonist’s irreverence and swagger. Holden was the antidote to my angst-y, early adolescent ennui, a kindred spirit in my umbrage for condescending adults and a role model for how to be confidently critical.   

Holden soon found accomplices and co-conspirators. There was Laurence Breavman – a Montrealer-Caulfield and the protagonist of Leonard Cohen’s The Favorite Game – innumerable characters of Hemingway’s, Vonnegut’s, Richler’s, Updike’s, Barth’s and Irving’s. I discovered the infectious energy of Jack Kerouac and the hopeless romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald, attributes that put them on par with Salinger in terms of deadliness.  

Anyway, I hauled box after box of these killers all over the city and my back continued aching. The pain had started as an itch in my lumbar and spread into a dull, throbbing sensation in my neck and shoulders. It was the worst in the mornings and while I knew it wasn’t actually life threatening, it was a constant physical and mental drain. When I got home after a long day of lifting to my shared apartment, empty bed, and rejection emails from literary journals, I felt as lifeless as a gnat. A few days after the downpours I was temporarily revived. I met a girl at one of the used bookstores I took my mom’s books to. Her name was Sarah and she had sad brown eyes and shinny, shoulder-length brown hair. We got to talking about books and book-related stuff. I asked her who their best selling authors were at the store and whether any of them weren’t celebrity chefs and she laughed at my sarcastic joke to my great delight.

I left my mom’s books with Sarah for her manager to sort through and gave her my number to call me when they were finished.  

Sarah called the next evening as I was getting home from work. ‘Hello,’ I said, ‘Nick speaking.’

‘Hi, it’s Sarah from Doug Miller Books. We’ve sorted through your books. There are only a couple of boxes we can use I’m afraid.’

‘That’s okay. I understand.’

There was a pause I construed as sexual tension. Then she said, ‘Can you come pick up the leftover boxes?’ 

‘Oh yeah. Of course. What time are you open until?’  

‘Ten. Does that work for you?’

‘Yeah. That’s great.’

‘Great. See you before ten.’

‘Thanks. See you then.’

I spent the next few hours applying all my literary heroines’ qualities to Sarah as I made dinner and showered and changed. I gave her Lady Brett from The Sun Also Rise’s lyricism, Shell from The Favourite Game’s intelligence, and Marylou from On The Road’s beauty. I daydreamed about going to pick up the rest of my mom’s books and us ending up in the back of my work truck reading passages of each other’s writing. (I assumed Sarah wrote based on the fact she worked in a bookstore.) In my fantasy she mirrored my core beliefs and validated what I was doing working as a menial labourer and trying to get some sort of a writing career started. At dawn, the sun seeped in through the truck’s fiberglass walls and I drove her back to her apartment, which I imagined it was a third-story converted-dormer one in Bloordale. She invited me in and we kissed and made love as birds chirped in the trees outside her window. 

In reality, I’d finished eating and changing and was headed out to get the rest of my mom’s books at Doug Miller. I arrived at the bookstore as Sarah was closing up just like I’d planned. She said hi and showed me the twenty-some boxes of my mom’s books at the back of the store. I began carrying them out to my truck while she closed down the cash register for the day. 

As I was finishing loading the trunk, Sarah came outside and locked the door to the store. ‘Here,’ she said, and handed me forty-five dollars. ‘Sorry again we couldn’t use more of them.’

‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a few more places to try still.”

I paused, summoning the courage to ask her if she wanted to get a drink as she stared at me blankly. ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘I was thinking, do you want to get a drink?’ She looked away and touched her elbow. Fearing rejection, I amended my invitation: ‘Uh, I mean, we both really like books. It’s not that often you meet people who do…’

She looked at me again and smiled. ‘Yeah, it’s not…Sure, I’ll come get a drink.’ We walked down the street to a non-descript bar and ordered a pitcher of Keith’s. The conversation flowed easily. We talked about who we were currently reading and our theories over the value of literature. We had so much in common it seemed impossible not to have any romantic chemistry. But then, as I was pouring out the last of the beer, she mentioned that her boyfriend didn’t like Don Delillo.  

I looked away, trying to erase what I’d just heard (the boyfriend, not Don Delillo part). I was so stunned I barely heard her ask if I wanted to get another pitcher. ‘No thanks,’ I replied eventually.  ‘I’m driving.’

We got our bill, paid, and left the bar. She smiled at me as I left her at the entrance to the subway. ‘That was fun,’ she said. ‘We should do that again. Call me at the store some time.’

‘Yeah. Sure,’ I said. 

We said goodbye and I went back to my truck. I sank into the well-worn seat and my energy level plunged with it. I managed to pick myself up enough to drive home and when I got there, I got undressed and into bed quickly.

Thankfully I was so tired, I fell asleep without thinking too much about Sarah. 

The next morning I woke up still feeling tired. I dragged myself to work ruminating over Sarah’s having boyfriend for most of the morning. I responded to orders and instructions like a lifeless robotic and even had a few dark thoughts over what it would be like to be dead.   

One upside to my mounting depression was I decided I was done trying to resell my mom’s books. I’d made two hundred dollars already and didn’t have the energy to do anymore bending and lifting than was absolutely necessary. After my last delivery of the day I dropped the books off in my backyard and started to sort through them for ones I wanted for myself. My mom had kept most of the good stuff – the Joyces, Jameses, Dickensons, Shakespeares, Shaws and Pynchons – but a few interesting titles remained. The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford, Four Great Plays By Ibsen, and Feminism and Socialism were the most appealing to me. 

The last title gave me the idea: Sarah might like some of the leftover books. I should invite her over to go through them together. Besides, maybe she and her boyfriend weren’t that serious. How could they be if he didn’t like Don Delillo?  

I called Doug Miller Books to invite Sarah over to look at the books and she picked up on the second or third ring. ‘Hey!’ she said after I told her who it was. ‘I was just thinking about you.’  

My spirits rose: ‘Oh yeah?’ 

‘Yeah. Someone just bought one of your books.’

My spirits sank. After a short silence I remembered my reason for calling. ‘Hey, I decided not to sell the rest of my mom’s books. Do you want to come over after work and look through them for any you might like?’

‘Yeah, I’d love to…Oh wait, I have plans with Tom tonight.’ 

‘Oh. That’s okay.’ 

‘What about tomorrow?’

‘Sure!’

‘Ok, where do you live?’

‘I’ll text you my address. What’s your number?’

‘(416) 202-1091’

‘Great.  I’ll see you tomorrow after you’re done work.’

‘It’s a date.’

I hung up and fell back on my mattress. I was physically exhausted but my mind raced to find a scenario in which Sarah might have feelings for me too. I picked up The Good Soldier to read in bed and was soon fast asleep.

The next morning at work I replayed my conversation with Sarah over and over in my head. I thought the facts that she’d agreed to come over to look at my mom’s books and had given me her phone number were causes for optimism. But after lunch, as blood flowed out of my head and into my stomach, I saw things differently. She’d spoken my rival’s name, giving him full personhood and no doubt infinitely greater qualities than me. I remembered her voice rising a half-octave as she said it and I shuddered. Another reason I had to be discouraged was she’d texted me saying she was going to bring a friend over to look at books too, if that was okay. ‘Sure. No problem!’ I’d replied fakely.

Then again, what difference did it make. She had a boyfriend so I was no doubt in the friend zone already anyway.

The following night at quarter-after-ten Sarah and her friend arrived at my back gate.  The friend was a head taller than Sarah and pretty, although not as noticeably so. 

Sarah spoke first: ‘Nick  - this is Jordan.  Jordan – Nick.’

‘Hi,’ I said and quickly turned to Sarah. ‘Ready for some book curating?”

‘’Curating?’’ Jordan cut in. ‘Do you know what that word even means?’

‘I have an idea.’

‘I’d love to hear it.’

‘It’s nice to meet you too.’

‘Jordan’s a librarian,’ Sarah said. ‘Come on, let’s check out these books.’ The girls walked past me into the backyard and Jordan smiled at me in jest. We all sat down on a blanket I’d spread out in the back yard. Jordan took a tall can of beer out of her denim shoulder bag and offered one to Sarah and me.

‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ve got wine inside. Would either of you like some?’ ‘’Wine?’’ Jordan said. ‘Wine not?’  

Jordan laughed unabashedly at her own joke. ‘Sarah,’ I said, ‘Would you like a glass too?’

‘Yes, please.’ 

I stood up and went inside for the $15.45 Bordeaux I preferred to be sharing with Sarah alone. I could hear Jordan uncork another zinger and laugh heartily at it all the way from the kitchen.  

When I returned to the backyard with the wine Jordan and Sarah were sitting on the blanket chatting. I handed them their glasses and started unpacking a box of books. As I did, I eavesdropped on their conversation. Jordan was describing a local artist’s exhibit and I caught a sentence fragment that gave me a chance to regain face from her earlier criticism over my use of the word ‘curating’.   ‘…when I graduate…’ was the fragment.  

‘So you’re a student?’ I said, cutting into Jordan and Sarah’s conversation. ‘It sounded earlier like you were an expert.’

I noticed Jordan’s teeth for the first time as she brushed off my jab with a smile. She had prominent canines that reminded me of 1990s’ models and cover-girls. Then she turned to Sarah and said in a low voice,  ‘Sarah - I think this guy is flirting with me…’

‘’Flirting??’  Do you know what that word even means?’

‘I have an idea.’

‘I’d love to hear it.’

‘Nick’s a writer,’ Sarah said.

We all laughed at the rapid dialogue and took big sips of wine. The night ended in a blur of jokes and hugs goodbye. I was too tired or I would have tried to kiss Sarah goodnight. Or Jordan. I’m not sure…

I didn’t see Sarah again until a party at her house in late August. We’d texted and talked on the phone a few times since the night with Jordan at my house. We talked mostly about writing (I was right, she did it too), but occasionally the conversation got more personal. Once, she mentioned that she wasn’t always happy with Tom. 

Also in the interim I’d continued reading The Good Soldier. But I’d only managed to read fifty-odd pages. The book was about a love square in pre-WWII England and France. It seemed like an interesting plot but was hard to follow because I didn’t like the writing style.  

Sarah’s party was in celebration of two of her friends’ birthdays. She lived in a converted Edwardian mansion in Parkdale and her apartment was on the top floor. Sarah welcomed me to the party with a kiss on the cheek and I used it as fuel to flirt with her more openly. 

Everything was going really well but then Tom arrived. He was a few inches shorter than me and not terribly handsom. He did have a fuller beard than I could grow though so I was jealous of him physically all-the-same. 

I gave him a limp-wristed handshake as Sarah introduced us. ‘So you’re a writer?’ he said. ‘That’s really cool.’

I grew self-conscious, especially after Sarah wandered off somewhere. ‘Yeah, well, I haven’t even been published so I don’t know if the label is warranted.’

Tom looked at me blankly. Obviously he was more comfortable with empty airspace than I was. ‘You’re an architect, right?’ I said finally.  

‘Yeah.’

‘My dad’s an architect. He works at Zeilder.’

Again I was frozen by his non-response.

‘Well, nice meeting you,’ I said. ‘I’m going to go say hi to someone.’

He smiled and nodded, which I interpreted as either snide condescension or puzzled affability.  

I edged through a crowd of people in the kitchen and out onto the back deck. The air had a slight chill for the first time in months. I thought about Sarah and took a long swig of my beer. I heard the screen door open behind me and assumed it was smokers coming out for their fix. ‘The writer ponders…’ I heard a voice say from over my shoulder. I turned around and saw Jordan. She was wearing a tank-top and a floor-length skirt. Her ash-blond hair was down, just touching her shoulders.  

‘The writer drinks,’ I said.

‘Ahh.’

We stood in silence and looked out over the maple trees and shingled roofs at the downtown skyline. Parkdale was originally home to Toronto’s rich and affluent but in the late sixties, as the suburbs surged, it got run down. In the past decade, artists and musicians and students had moved in to take advantage of the low rents.

‘I bet most people up there are happier than down here,’ I said, raising my chin towards the distant office buildings and glimmering condos.  

‘You’re a sad man aren’t you, Nick?’

‘’I am what I am.’’ 

‘Well that’s a bit arrogant.’

‘What? What do you mean?’

‘You’re Yahweh?’

‘You’ve read the Bible?’

‘Of course. We had to in school. Most of written history is still in the form of religious texts.’

My first impressions of Jordan lifted. She was internally lively despite her outward aloofness. It seemed that in fact that the world was like it was in better books: unpredictable; magic even. 

“Tell me something I don’t know,’ I said still not ready to fully yield to her charm.

‘Oh, I can tell you lots. But this is a party. Do you really want to stand out here in the dark when we could be inside having fun?’  

‘Hmm, I guess not.’

She smiled. ‘Good. Let’s go back inside.’ She turned and strode back towards the house. I followed her and we rejoined the group of people in the kitchen. I laughed at something someone said and everybody started dancing. 

The servers lined up in front of their manager like troops before a commanding officer. The short, compact forty-ish manager barked orders to the young women. On her final cue they raised their arms and circled their hips as “Get Low” by Lil’ Jon began to play over the Hooters-Beijing stereo.

It was a cold afternoon in early January and the servers’ choreographed dance buoyed Russell’s spirits. He sat with his son Jeff on the upper level of the sparsely-filled thirty-table restaurant-bar on the last day of the their vacation. 

 “Look,” he said. “The manager is watching them.” 

“I know, Dad.”

“See?” He pointed across the restaurant.

“…”

After “Get Low” the servers danced to “Hey Ricky”. The second song finished and Russell and Jeff’s server ran up the stairs to their table and took their drink order. She left the table and returned with a double tequila and ice for Russell and bottle of Budweiser for Jeff. Then she endeavored to take their food order.  

“Does ‘spicy’ mean hot or exploding?” Russell said, pointing to the chicken wings section of the laminated, over-sized menu in front of him.

The server looked at him blankly. “Just a minute,” she said and went to find a better English-speaking coworker. She returned with another and Russell repeated his question to her. 

“It’s spicy,” the new server replied.  “Do you like spicy?” 

“Yes,” said Russell. “I like spicy. But my question is, is ‘spicy’ so hot that if you take a bite, you immediately need to take a sip of water after?”

The new server looked at the first and they convened over what the customers was asking in Chinese. They decided he was asking about quality of the food. 

“Yes,” said the new server, “it’s good.”  

“’It’s good?” Russell looked across the bright orange tabletop at his son for sympathy but instead found him frowning back at him.  

“Well, ok, Jeff,” Russell said.  “Why don’t you do it then?”    

Jeff took the menu from his father and pointed at the chicken-wing section.

“Spicy?” he pointed.  “Mild?” he pointed.   

“Yes,” said the servers together.

“Okay. We’ll have half spicy and half mild please.”

“Extra-large,” Russell added.

The servers said something to each other in Chinese and laughed and walked away. Russell folded his arms and looked out the window. 

Jeff sipped his beer and looked at his father. He hadn’t taken his jacket off since coming inside and his hair was matted from wearing a toque. His skin looked especially pale against his dark clothing and surrounded by the colorful restaurant décor. Jeff cursed him. He assumed the attractive young servers had been laughing at them and blamed his father for it. Why couldn’t he follow the smallest social norms like taking his jacket off inside? he thought.  

It was getting dark outside but the assortment of vehicles on the street weaved around each other with the same speed as they did during the day. Inside, the Hooters cooks wore embroidered baseball caps and golf-shirts as they prepared American dishes using Chinese implements. Though bizarre, it was a comforting reminder of home for the weary travelers.

Russell and Jeff’s food arrived and Jeff’s brooding lifted. He and his dad found a mutually agreeable topic of conversation as they ate. When he’d finished eating, Jeff looked at their server’s smooth tanned legs. The server uniforms were tiny shorts and tight-fitting, low-cut T-shirts. “These poor girls,” he said to his dad, “they have to wear next-to-nothing. It’s like they’re working in their underwear.”

Russell took a bite of a mild chicken wing. “They’re all wearing thongs.”

Jeff shuttered at the sound of the word “thong” coming from his father’s mouth.  “I’m just saying if their waistbands were cut lower their shorts would look like underwear,” he said.

Russell sighed.  “Which way’s the bathroom?” he said. 

Jeff pointed over his father’s shoulder.

“To the right of the Caucasians?” Russell said.

“Where I’m pointing…”

“I can’t see that far!”

“By the entrance!  Where we came in!”

“I don’t know where we came in!!”

“Yes. To the right of the Caucasians!!”

Russell got up and went to the right of the table where four other white people were sitting. Jeff tried to imagine himself being more attractive out of his father’s company but none of the servers looked anywhere near him.  

After a few minutes Russell returned and finished his tequila in a single gulp and paid for the meal. They effectively communicated “take with us” to their server in reference to their uneaten chicken wings and she brought them a Styrofoam container and cloth Hooters-Beijing bag to take the remaining food back to their hotel. As they got up and left, the server who had come to help the first one watched them wondering who they were and where they came from.

Han Jin was nineteen and with mid back-length black hair bleached caramel. She was pretty and smart or smart and pretty depending on what the situation called for. She came from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan. Her parents were Han Xiabo, a mid-ranking financial manager for the local government, and Li Wang, a shipping and receiving manager at a wholesale jewelry-maker.   

Jin had excelled at school from a young age and gotten into Tsinghua University’s highly coveted and extremely competitive electrical engineering program in Beijing. But in her first semester away at school, she was forced to drop out because of stress. Her university-assigned doctor encouraged her to go home for the winter and apply for readmission the following fall but Jin decided she’d like to stay in the capital and work for a year as a server in an American chain restaurant in the Sanlutin embassy district. Xiabo and Li were not supportive but couldn’t do anything to stop her.

“I’m the boss—Look at me!”  Jin’s Hooters-Beijing coworker Shufeng was impersonating their boss, puckering her lips and lifting her nose up with her thumb. Shufeng was five years older than Jin, a Remin University graduate with a degree in cultural anthropology. She was funny and quick-witted but lacked self-confidence. 

The six other servers gathered around Shufeng and Jin laughed at Shufeng’s impersonation of their authoritarian boss. Jin smiled wide enough to expose her teeth, which was a rare event of late. It was early January and she was supposed to be going back to school the following semester like she’d promised her parents she would. Secretly though, she’d decided she was going to continue being a server. She enjoyed the unthinking work of serving compared to endless hours in the library studying deferential equations and solid-state electro-dynamics. Occasionally a customer pawed at her and she had to curl her lip but on a balance the job was more than tolerable. She’d made close friends for the first time in her life and earned enough money to buy all kinds of things she’d never dreamed of in Chengdu. 

Shufeng was performing another caricature of their manager when the actual version walked up behind her. Shufeng noticed her audience’s collective face sag and clued in to the cause. When she summoned her nerve and turned around the manager’s pug-nose was raised to the ceiling as she glared at her. “Line up!” the manager yelled.  

Stricken with fear Shufeng ran to her position for the servers’ synchronized dance routine. Jin caught sight of her friend’s frightened expression as she ran to her own position in the middle of the line. Jin put on her most confident expression and raised her chin to try to inspire her coworkers. If they were out of step with each other at all, the manager would make them stay late after closing to practice and no doubt verbally and physically abuse them. 

Music came on over the stereo and the young women waved their arms. They circled their hips and swayed their shoulders like women twice their age. However isolated Jin had been from the world of sex and power growing up, her body had rapidly aclimatized to it over the past eight months. Her mental detachment and physical coordination aroused her audience and spurred her coworkers.  

The servers made it through the first two verses of a Western pop song mistake free but as the second chorus wound down, Jin noticed Shufeng’s head was starting to sag. She feathered her fingers and blinked rapidly at four foreigners seated a few feet away from her and they yelled and clapped successfully distracting the manager’s hawk eyes from noticing Shufeng.

The song ended and the girls turned their backs on the semi-deserted restaurant and bar.  Jin looked down the row of her scantily dressed and slightly petrified coworkers as their manager inspected them one by one. She jerked each of the newer girls’ chins up and told one her haircut made her look like a peasant. Then she came to Shufeng. She brushed a hair out of her face, took a step back and said loud enough for the entire restaurant and kitchen to hear:  “I’d rather be a pig than a fat cow.”  

Shufeng turned as red as the Forbidden City and Jin thought she might run out in embarrassment. Before she could, the manager singled out one of the cooks to push play on the restaurant stereo and start another song. 

Shufeng fought back tears and they made it through the dance reasonably well. When it was over the manager applauded. The newer servers were elated by her approval but Shufeng was still humiliated. Jin walked up to her and took both of Shufeng’s hands in her own and said quietly into her friend’s ear: “The boss knows all about farm animals because she’s the biggest peasant in all of China.” 

Shufeng managed a quarter-smile and ran up and to her section to take her customers’ orders. She felt fortunate she only had a single table of customers, and furthermore, they were foreigners who didn’t speak Chinese well enough to have understood what her manager had just called her.

She took her wrote down her table’s order and brought it to the bar. Then she went to the servers’ station and checked her phone which was in the station’s drawer. “Three messages,” it said. The first was from her mother, something about a scarf sale in Wangfujing. The second was from her boyfriend. “You’re yummy ;0”, it said, to which she replied: “I’m working :?”  The last message was an advertisement for shampoo, a floral-enhanced one, which she deleted without reading.

She put her phone back in the drawer and watched Jin take an order from the boisterous foreigners she’d excited during the first dance. She was writing in her order book, pretending to mistake their come-ons for food items.  

“Server!”  one of Shufeng’s customers yelled in Chinese. She snapped out of her trance and ran the her table. “Yes,” she said, chest heaving as she arrived. “Can I take your order?”

The older, nearer foreigner started speaking using words she didn’t know. He was pointing at the chicken wings section of the menu and she could only make out the word “spicy” among a slurry of meaningless phonemes and syllables. “It’s spicy,” she said. “You like spicy?” 

The man frowned and spoke more words she didn’t understand. She looked at his younger companion for clues as to what the older man was saying. His companion was frowning in the exact same manner as he wa, though his frown was directed across the table rather than at her.

The first man stopped speaking which Shufeng knew meant she was supposed to say something. “Just minute,” she said and left to go get Jin whose English was better than hers.

Down on the main level of the restaurant Jin excused herself from her customers at Shufeng’s request and they trotted back up to Shufeng’s table.  

“Better English,” Shufeng said to the two pale-skinned foreigners. The first man looked at Jin and started speaking again. Jin picked out “spicy” from the words he said but not much else either. She looked at Shufeng. “I think he’s asking if we think the spicy ones are good,” she said.  

“Okay,” Shufeng conferred and Jin replied to the customer:“Yes, is good.”     

The first customer said something to the second one and the second reached across the table and took the menu from him.  He began to speak as the first man sat back and lowered his shoulders. “Spicy?” the second said, pointing at the menu. “Mild?” 

“Yes,” said Shufeng and Jin in unison.

“Okay.  We’ll have half spicy and half mild please.”

“Extra-large,” added the older man.

“Half spicy, half mild; extra large,” Shufeng repeated. She thanked Jin and told her about her boyfriend’s text. They laughed as they left the table and Jin went back down to her own section. 

Shufeng took her order to the kitchen and when she’d finished she looked back at her customers, both sat silently with their arms folded.

“Shufeng!” called a cook after a few minutes. “Half-spicy, half-mild!” One of the cooks started to ask her something about her how her evening was going but she ran off with her order before he could finish. “Sorry, unhappy customers,” she called back over her shoulder.  

Her customers’ moods visibly improved at the sight of Shufeng approaching. “Thank you,” the first one said in English and the second echoed in bad Chinese.  

“Oh, yes.  ‘Thank you’,” said the first in even worse Chinese.

“It’s nothing,” said Shufeng.  

On her way back to the servers’ station Shufeng realized where they must come from by their formal manners and casual appearance. They were Canadians. 

On the lower level Jin was still attending to and being hit on by her table of middle-aged businessmen. They spoke in concert as she brought them a tray of Budweisers. Each of them was angling for her attention. They asked her the typical questions foreign businessmen asked her: Where was she from? Did she go to school? And would she like to join them after her shift in their hotel for some imported whiskey, champagne, or vodka? The liquor of choice was dependant on their nationality. This group said they were from a place called Missouri, the American state with the prettiest girls in the world, “…almost as pretty as her.”

Isn’t that Georgia, California and Oregon?  She thought mockingly.  

There were in fact a few distinguishing features among the four men. One of them was short and seemed to speak without breathing; another was overweight and incapable of not having food on his face. But despite these and other repulsive traits, they all wore wedding bands and carried the bags of stressful and responsibility-laden jobs beneath their eyes.  

“Why don’t you show us your pretty smile darlin’?” said Fatty.

“More Bud?”  Jin replied.  

“Only Bud I want is yours sweetheart!” Shorty said and clinked bottles with Fatty.

“More spicy?”

“Woo-ee. I like it when you talk dirty to me sugar!”  said Shorty.

Jin turned to walk away but a hairy, rough hand grabbed her elbow.  It belonged to the tallest man at the table.  He had a goatee and receding hairline.  “Hold on a second sweetie,” he said. “We haven’t finished talking to you. What’s your name?”

“Goldie.”

“Goldie!” Tall and Hairy turned to his consorts: “D’ya hear that fellas? We’ve got Goldie Hawn serving us here!” He turned back to Jin. “Do you know what ‘pretty’ means Goldie?”

Tall and Hairy still hadn’t let go of her elbow and Jin looked around the bar for help.  Shufeng was up at the upper level servers’ station texting and none of the rest of the servers were in sight. 

“I know,” Jin said.  

“Good.  Why don’t you sit down here a minute and tell these blockheads what it means?  They could use the education.”

Jin tried to pull away but Tall and Hairy’s grip was strong and he pulled her down onto his lap. He smelled of cigarettes and beer, the fuel of these human cargo-ships, she presumed. Tall and Hairy’s tree-trunk of a forearm pinned her against his crotch and his coarse black arm hair brushed her bare thighs.   She shivered with dread but managed to speak. “Okay,” she said, “‘pretty’ means nice face and happy.” 

“Happy?  What the hell you talkin’ ‘bout Goldie? Pretty means big tits and a tight ass. Face and happy got nothing to do with it!”

“I answered,” Jin said. “Now let me go.” 

“Dang you’re a feisty one. I like that. But why do you want to leave us Goldie?  Do I scare ya?” He slid his other hand part way over her crotch and she gasped. Immobilized by shock and embarrassment she couldn’t even turn her head to look for help. She prayed to her ancestors for wisdom and fortune to help her escape but the only thing that happened was she saw one of Shufeng’s customers passing by on his way to the bathroom. The darkly dressed, late-middle-aged foreigner she’d helped order chicken wings earlier looked down at her from the upper level of the restaurant. His eyes narrowed slightly and a pleat appeared on his forehead but he carried on towards the bathroom. 

Tall and Hairy pushed his sausage finger between her legs as she pressed them together with all her strength.  He was the ugliest man she’d ever seen, with pores the size of poppy seeds and sulfur-yellow teeth.  She could barely breath.  She swore, she would have to reconsider her choice not to go back to school after this humiliation. 

Shufeng’s customer came back from the bathroom but this time he stopped at the railing above them.  He cleared his throat and looked at Tall and Hairy’s. “Hi,” he said. “Sorry to interrupt, but do you guys speak English by any chance?”

“Yeah,” said Shorty. “We’re American.”

“Do you mind if I ask you something?” 

“Sure bud,” said Tall and Hairy lifting his eyes slowly.  “Go ahead.”

“Great. Thanks. I was just wondering if any of you knew the word for ‘medium’ in Chinese?”

“What?” 

“You know, ‘me-di-um’. Like in between small and large, or like ‘medium’-spicy food…”

The Americans looked at each other in puzzlement. “Sorry pal,” said Tall and Hairy.  “I have no idea and don’t really give a goddamn about any ‘medium’ in Chinese.”

“Oh no. I think you’re misunderstanding. Not ‘a’ medium, like television and radio, but medium as in size or temperature…”

“You’re making me medium-angry now, mister. Take a hike.” “Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m interrupting your evening, aren’t I? But-but, if you’ll give me just one more second, maybe your server knows.”  

Shufeng’s customer looked at Jin. “Miss, do you know the word for ‘medium’ in Chinese?”

His forehead was furrowed sympathetically. It seemed to be saying: ‘Why are you here?”… ‘Is this a place to find peace and harmony?’…‘Are the money and compliments really worth being treated like a thing for sale?’…

Tall and Hairy was unable to multitask. He couldn’t keep Jin pinned and scare off the annoying Canadian at the same time. His grip on Jin loosened and she escaped.  

“No,” Jin said, as she pushed herself free. “But I go ask friend.”  Then she practically ran away from the table.

“Thank you,” Shufeng’s customer said.  

I’m an eight-legged table-and-chair-set at the Starbucks at Front and Simcoe. I live there with seven other table-and-chair-sets, four armchairs, a coffee table, ten stools, a large communal table, four-to-six green-smocked “baristas”, and thousands of caffeine and sugar-ingesting customers. I like to observe, and I love to judge.

My first customer today is a writer. He’s 5’11” and 160 lbs. He’s underweight for his height but economically speaking, he’s a lard-ass. Living in the city’s financial district, I’ve learned to gleam people’s situations with money through their appearances and habits. The writer – like a lot of adult-fants – is the Deepwater Horizon of education expense. His attempts at earning an income through semi-skilled trades and entry-level sales jobs barely scratch the surface of the tens of thousands of dollars his so-called brain cost. And I can tell by looking at him he didn’t pay a dime of it himself. He’s slouching over a leather-bound notebook wearing an English wool and Japanese denim. If he was carrying the burden of student debt himself he’d dress much differently. And he wouldn’t be sitting here on a Wednesday at 2:34 PM, he’d be working or else looking for a job like the rest of us!

Look how shameless he is. He’s nearly thirty and still picks his nose. He probably absolves himself of this and god-knows-what-else using his parent-bought degrees. ‘Social norms are arbitrary,’ said his liberal arts professors; ‘Starbucks is the Third Place, the not-home-not-work,’ said his business school ones. Fuck off. You couldn’t wipe your boogers on me if you had to maintain good impressions and actually work for a living.

Oh well, non-fat vanilla lattes and pumpkin-seed muffins don’t discriminate. That’s a large part of the reason we made $1.83 billion in profits last year. I know this figure because the “baristas” who wipe crumbs and spilt coffee off me were complaining about how little they make compared to our managers and executives. One of them’s another one of these listless egotists, uh, I mean, artists. She made the decision to become a full-time aspirer because some radio host who works across the street came in one day and told her she looked like Kristen Stewart, whoever that is. I wonder if Ms. Stewart is $45,000 in debt from a bachelor’s degree in psychology, making a mere $790 a month before tax.

Good. Go away, writer-parasite. I have real people to take care of.  

My next two customers are a man in his early twenties and a woman in her early forties. The woman’s wearing a charcoal pant-suit and the man’s wearing the male equivalent, also in charcoal. Their shoes, the item on people I’m most familiar with on account of my height, are both square-toed, black leather, and rubber-soled laceless. The only differences between the two pairs are that hers have an inch-and-a-half higher heels and bigger openings for the foot to go into. They’re mirroring each other in their posture and mannerisms as well. All four of their combined legs are crossed at the knees. “At your level,” the woman says, “it’s all about your toolkit.”

The man writes down “toolkit” in the notepad of his fake leather attaché. (Here’s someone who actually pays for the things he owns.) “In university,” he says, “I won the Investor’s Cup for my first-year portfolio. The year after, when I got to the competition, everyone had already copied all my picks from the year before.”

“There,” the woman says. “That’s a great addition to your toolkit. Now, what else can you put in?”

“Um, I’m reading the business section everyday to help with my analysis….” “Good. That’s good too. You should leverage that during the interview process.”

Annnnd, I’ve lost interest. (“I did well with Microsoft,” is the last fragment I catch.) The woman talks about personality types in the financial services industry. I can’t begin to see the motivation towards that kind of work except the money. And I’ve seen a lot of people and their motives in here at the Third Place. A lot.

My next customers are a pair of suits whom the recruitee aspire to be. Ironically, “suits” don’t dress like suits anymore. Rather than the matching slacks-jacket-tie-combo of yesteryear, today’s suit – including these ones – wear more egalitarian clothes like khakis and conservatively-patterned dress shirts. These garments are available in a variety of earth tones and fine checkers and stripes at Banana Republic, Club Monaco and, for the fashionably-inclind, J. Crew. Perhaps the new diminutive for “business person” should be “a shoe.” Shoes are the last remaining signifier of economic status. These two’s footwear are from Aldo whereas the earlier pair’s were from Sears (about a fifty-dollar difference in price per pair). They’re both calf-skin lace-ups and importantly, designed in the current style, which tells me they bought them before their last pairs actually wore out. The bodies attached them look like they’re in their mid-forties. They’re both pudgy and have receding hairlines. One distinguishes himself with a full, neatly-trimmed beard while the other – the skinnier of the two – is clean-shaven. They work for an oil and gas company I don’t catch the name of but I can tell that it’s that sector because skinnier name-drops “Hal Kvisle”, Talisman Energy’s CEO, repeatedly.

They’re pretty genuine and relaxed around each other as far as shoes go. They’re talking about skinnier’s kid’s hockey accolades and other domestic minutia. Another colleague approaches and their subject matter and tone of voice quickly change.  Apparently there was just a “town hall” at XYZ Energy that they all seem to have no opinion of whatsoever. (I’ve noticed that a key to advancement in human organizations is the ability to talk and appear interested and engaged in the conversation without ever saying anything that someone else hasn’t already test-driven for a positive response.)

After the colleague leaves, the shoes return to their hockey-talk. It turns out that skinnier didn’t grow up playing the sport himself and therefore never realized how over-zealous parents can get about the children’s game, especially during try-outs.  (What has he himself just been doing for the past twenty-five minutes then?)

“Hmm,” says beardier, “they must all think their kids are going to be the next Great One.”

“Yeah,” says skinnier. “Who wants that for their kids?” 

I can’t tell if skinnier’s being serious or sarcastic. The double-entendre is definitely lost on him though. Shoes, as a rule, are never linguistically gifted. If they were, they’d never be able to stand all the asinine water cooler gossip and business-world jargon that goes on at their workplaces. 

Both men stare blankly into the middle of the room as the last remark hangs in the air. After the maximum amount of time before the silence becomes awkward, beardier says, “Well, we better get back to the office.”   They stand up and walk-off in their well-heeled shoes, well-caffeinated to get through the rest of the work-day.   Ack. These next two customers weigh a ton. My legs are going to break, I swear. But then again Our Saviour and CEO Howard Schultz is pretty smart and probably made sure to have me built sturdily in order to prevent any potential lawsuits from our prone-to-girth North American clientele. All Hail Howard. The rotund pair look forty-going-on-sixty. They have early-middle-aged faces but their out-of-date clothes and facial hair—a goatee and a mustache respectively—age them greatly. I’m not sure what they do to make their livings and I don’t really care. They’re probably members of this growing segment of society we’ve been targeting here at the Third Place: the underemployed and time-rich. They’re socially and economically marginalized types who can’t adapt from one economic era to the next (in these two’s case, from that of the manufacturing era to the service one). Their conversation makes the shoes’ conversation sound riveting: “Remember when’s” ping-pong back and forth across the table. They’re talking about a bygone, cross-town hockey rivalry that I can’t bear to summarize it so I’ll just let you listen for yourself:

Goatee: We hated Regent Park. Whenever they came to Trinity, we’d make sure to tie ar skates extra tight and retape ar sticks.

Mustache: Oh yeah, eh? Well, for us it was Moss Park. If we saw them on the streetcar coming up to Alexandra, we’d pelt them with snowballs as soon as they started to get off.

G (sighing): Things have changed.  

M: Yeah, eh.

G:  All the old neighbourhood teams stink now.  There’s nobody to coach ‘em.

M: The City cut all their funding so the kids can’t even afford to play….

G: Used to cost $10 to register for house-league; $30 for select…

M: Things have changed…

G (staring out the window blankly): …

M: The Y still has some programs for poor kids. Those are some folks who haven’t changed.

G: Yeah, the Y’s always been great. I remember as a kid, I must have been twelve or thirteen, I used to go to the one at College and Dovercourt.   One day after school, I go in to see how much a membership costs because a bunch of my friends at school are members and I really want to be part of the group. So I walk up to the front desk and ask the attendant how much to join. He looks at me and must have noticed I was wearing runners in the middle of winter ‘cause he says it’s free. He says all I need is to get my parents to sign this form he hands me and that’s it, I can come play pool and ping-pong with all my friends from school.   So I take the form and go running home to get my parents to sign it. ‘Cept when I show Mom and Dad, Dad takes one look and says he won’t sign. ‘What do they think we’re poor or something?’ he says. (He was proud, you know. He didn’t like the idea of taking hand-outs.) 

But I don’t understand. I’m ten years old. I just go to my bedroom and start bawling. Then Mom comes in and hands me the form with both hers and Dad’s signatures on it. 

‘How’d you get Dad to sign, Mom,’ I say.

She says: ‘Don’t worry about that, dear. Just go and have fun with yer friends.’

M: So? What did she do to get him to sign?

G: Oh, she just forged his signature. She did it all the time.

M (looking at his hands clasped around his coffee like it’s holy water): That’s a good story.

G (looking down at his hands and his coffee cup): Yeah, well, things have changed.

M: Yep, they sure have.

Yawn. If you weren’t crushing me to death I’d have fallen asleep five minutes ago, you damn proles. Please, if there’s a god in heaven will you please take these bastards back to Tim Horton’s?   Phew. They’re getting up. I’ll have to let Howard know that the Third Place should be reserved for the first classes.     Thankfully it looks like these next customers haven’t come straight from McDonald’s. They’re a man and a woman in their thirties wearing sweaters over their patterned Banana Republic-Club Monaco-J. Crew shirts and khakis. They sit down and the man’s phone rings the Apple-preloaded ringtone of the moment.  “Hello,” he says, “David Tipperman.”  

David Tipperman gets up and walks out of the room into the connecting office building for more privacy as he takes his call. The woman takes out her laptop and starts writing an email.  It used to bother me when customers did this but then I learned to decipher what they were writing through vibrations in my laminate coating.  Sweater-woman types: “No, not required by the auditor but it should be.  We’re heavily lobbying the new standards committee to include it. I mean, how can you call yourself green, if your building’s not using carbon-capture concrete?”

How can anyone read - let alone write – this stuff? Give me back the days of the pony express. People were better communicators then. They only talked about necessary things like marriages, births, deaths, and the harvest, not all this useless nonsense.  

I know, I know. She’s an environmentalist so I should be sympathetic. After all, I’m made from the earth. But I’ve met teams of these people and honestly there’s nothing “environmental” about them. They insulate themselves from opposing ideas as much as the shoes do. I swear if I could exterminate every last one of them I would. The only thing worse than a self-important shoe is a self-certain sweater. Just listen to this:

“It is imperative we minimize our ecological debt to future generations. It’s both a moral and social obligation. Without cleaner ways of living, we’re setting the example that greed and waste are the paths to happiness. This social and economic attitude is not only inaccurate but unsustainable. In order to create a healthy economy over the long-term we must create a social values system that includes the wider human community and planet. The future depends on it.”

“Bring back the lard-asses, please! I’d rather hold up another hundred of them than listen to this sweater’s pedantic cant. What makes you think you have some privileged insight over the direction of civilization? It’s so arrogant. I’m not denying climate-change exists, of course it does, but I am denying constant climate ever did. If that were the case, we would never have evolved, we’d never have crawled out of the primordial soup or left our caves. We’d still be squatting in hovels sticking berries up our noses, cursing the elements instead of taking our destinies into our own hands.”  

Still, she types:

I’m aware that everything could be okay if we continue on our current trajectory. But at the same time you can’t sentence someone to even potential discomfort unless you are completely certain of yourself. You can’t sell the future the status quo if you aren’t 100% sure it’s the right direction. In law, our highest social achievement and the bedrock of social stability, the burden of proof falls on those with the power to punish. Those with power have to prove beyond any doubt that the defendant is guilty. In the context of our current economic order, we’re sentencing the future to uncertainty without definitive proof that we’re not the guilty ones.

I’m not required to do anything I don’t want to. I fulfill an economic function and don’t cast stones. That’s more than you can say for yourself.

I’m also aware I’m sounding self-righteous. I’m comfortable with that. I’d rather be self-righteous than complicit in the suffering of others.

Thank the almighty, here comes David Tipperman. Hopefully his friend will stop word-puking now.

He walks up behind the woman and looks over her shoulder. “Yes,” she says, hearing him but continuing to type.  

“That was McCormick.”

She stops typing.

“He says they’re going to approve the plant. We’ll be online producing ten-to-twenty thousand hydrogen cells a year by 2018!”

She jumps up and lets out a yelp, drawing some attention of the usually disinterested baristas. She turns around and hugs him and their sweaters swish together.  

Something shivers up and down my legs and I wobble a little. I think I might be on the verge of feeling touched? For all these sweaters’ inconsistencies and over-statement, they’re my favourite customers of the day. They’ve exhibited a moment spontaneity and genuine feeling unlike any of the others. Perhaps I need to reconsider how I look at people. I’ll start by looking beneath the surface, beyond their appearances or economic value. I’ll try to uncover each of their unique souls and motives.

New story up with the Prairie Journal. Kind of long and of questionable subject matter for a male writer, but have a look if you’re bored. (Note: link is not direct. Click my name then “The Bend at College and Grace” on the left hand side of the page.)

“Dreams from Bunker Hill” by John Fante is a beautifully written novel about writing and relationships. It follows a young writer named Arturo Bandini as he careens around Los Angeles trying to find the focus and inspiration to write and yet also be a respectable human being. He works as a busboy, short stories-editor, and studio and freelance screenwriter over the course of the book.

Bandini finds all his occupations undignified or creatively suffocating. As a short stories-editor he’s forced to condone bad writing; as a studio screenwriter, he has to sit on his hands day-in-day-out waiting for a project to be passed along from his duplicitous boss; and as a freelance screenwriter, he must capitulate to Hollywood’s rumour-mill and celebrity-mongering. Throughout his ordeals he falls in love repeatedly and intensely, bringing considerable harm to himself and those he supposedly loves. He manages to have a borderline-healthy relationship with the manager of the rooming house where he lives but ultimately he botches that too. The book ends with him finally being able to sit down and write like he’d like to, albeit with his decency and respectability hanging by a thread.  

It’s difficult to say whether Bandini is a hero or not. He’s certainly a flawed one if he is. Mrs. Brownwell – the rooming house manager – is definitely more admirable but receives less screen-time. By this Fante seems to be suggesting that bad characters are more lively and interesting as subjects for art. And because fiction writing is often very auto-biographical, part of the writing process is putting yourself in bad circumstances, if not becoming a bad character. Arguably no one is entirely righteous and noble whatever his vocation and the distinction between ‘profession’ and ‘person’ is always blurry. Notwithstanding this counterpoint, “Dreams…” forces the issue of whether the good that art creates is worth the bad its creator adopts.

I am probably over-looking a lot of historical factors, not-to-mention that “Dreams…” is part of a series of five novels of which I’ve only read three. What’s indisputable is that Fante’s writing is first-rate. It’s energetic yet thoughtful. The only knock against it is that it’s sometimes banal. This of course is preferable the opposite writing sin: embellishment and sentimentality.