“Shree-eeet!” Marcus rode up, tooting the whistle he kept on a cord around his neck. My mood worsened. He wore a stretchy cycling outfit, and when he unclipped his shoes from the pedals, he click-clacked when he walked. “Gonna be a cooker,” he said. “Where you kids off to?”

George emerged from under the hood and straightened up. “Come for a swim? I see you’re already wearing your Speedo.”

“Coolio!” said Marcus, pushing off. “I’ll be right back.”

“It was going to be so perfect,” I muttered.

“Be nice,” George told me, giving the dipstick a delicate wipe.

At our secret lake the smell of cedars floated on the air, water lapped at a fallen tree, sun warmed the towels we spread on a huge rock. When we went there, we’d lie around in our old pilly swimsuits, or nothing, and not worry about sucking in our stomachs or making conversation. The day washed over us. One time, after a dip in the lake, George asked me, “What’s the opposite of déjà vu?”

“What do you mean?” My mind somersaulted as I tried to imagine what he meant.

“I’m seeing this in the future, like a reflection repeated in a mirror,” he said.

“Us on this rock, like old turtles?”

“Romantic, huh,” he nodded.

I laughed.

Days like that were rare and necessary. We’d been together a dozen years and a lot of the time we went about our lives not paying attention, or else scraping on each other’s nerves.

Bringing Marcus to our hidden spot in the Laurentians was like introducing purple loosestrife to the area; he’d invade. I wondered if George had invited him expressly to pique my bad temper, or if he was oblivious to just how much it would annoy me, and which possibility was more irritating.

With the car windows down it was too loud to talk. I sat in front, hot air blasting across my face and neck. When we parked and got out, our shirts were glued to our backs with sweat. Marcus crashed down through the ravine saying stuff like: “Man oh man, this is gonna be great. Oh, YES. Am I glad I ran into you guys. Maybe there’s a rope up there on that cliff to swing out over the water. What do you think?”

I scrambled over the fence and the Keep Out sign. As I was trespassing, I felt a new appreciation for private property and wished I had some of my own.

“I can’t wait. I’m in. Oh-oh, what a spot. Sweet! Last one in’s a…Mar-tha? What’re you waiting for?” He peeled off his shirt, kicked off his shoes, rocketing in with a big splash. “Oh. My. God.”

I sat down on the flat sloping rock with the bags of towels and picnic items. I’d made bagel sandwiches and lemonade, packed plums, chocolate cookies, and huge green grapes. I unfurled a blanket and got out my novel. George jumped in the water and he and Marcus paddled and sloshed like dogs. I waited until they were way out before I slipped into the water and floated on my back. Cool and perfect, the lake rested against my ears, blocking out all sound. The sun was so bright I had to close my eyes. I flipped over and dove down, opening my eyes to underwater topaz. When I got out, I whipped a towel tight around me.

Marcus hauled himself out of the water and shook his head, flinging water onto the pages of my book. “I want to go rafting up north this summer. Man. Did I ever tell you about my cross-country ski escapade up there? It was wild.” George looked out at the lake, ate a sandwich, and then reached for the bag of cookies, giving me a goofy smile as if to say, “See, isn’t this fun?” while Marcus filled the lakeside with a stream of chatter.

“Back country… telemarking… sublime… ” he was saying, kissing his fingers as I half-listened. Marcus had a slew of Gore-Tex action adventures on file. Stories of diving, skiing, hiking; man against bear, wolf, or hippopotamus outside the tent in Kenya. He employed a hostage-taking style of storytelling, forcing his listener to respond before he would go on. “My buddy…wham! ‘My leg, I can’t move!’ Holy fuckamoly! You know?!?!”

“Huh,” I said. The burden of listening fell to me because George, enviably and infuriatingly, lay back on the rock and closed his eyes, maybe following the story, maybe not. George liked Marcus but didn’t seem too interested in his epics. If they hadn’t known each other for ages I would have bet their friendship was forged on freestuff.com – they swapped software, hard drives and ripped documentaries rather than the confidences and neuroses I shared with my friends.

“Sit tight…I’ll ski for help…wind picks up, temperature drops like a mo-fo…”

“Mp.” I kept my murmurs abrupt to make it all go faster. I could tell he’d told this many times before. A lot of girls moved through Marcus’s life. Maybe because he had only a limited number of stories in rotation and had to keep changing his audience. Not that he seemed concerned about re-runs. He held his hands out, poised for dramatic effect.

“It was ass cold. By the time the park ranger and a medic arrived it was dark,” he was saying. “I didn’t know if we’d make it back to him before he got hypothermic.”

“But you did.” I reopened my book and glanced at George who appeared to be dozing. I tugged my swimsuit down and turned a page.

“Well, we had the skidoos! Turned out he’d broken his leg. Two bones, two breaks. Tibia and fibula. Brutal.”

Marcus lay down on his stomach on the rock and for a minute there was just the sound of a crow in the treetop and whirring dragonflies. “Speaking of fibulas, I ever tell you about that orthopedist I went out with? A brilliant scientist but she was just not interested in anything beyond bones.” He shook his head. “And boners, I have to say. I will give her that.”

A splash. George was back in the water. Marcus dove in after him and they egged each other on to swim to the other side of the lake. As their arms windmilled across the water, the scuffs of their strokes got quieter. When they clambered onto the other shore they looked like flesh-colored figurines, small and delicate.

I went back into the water and a curious muskrat swam up close to get a good look at me with his shiny eyes. George and Marcus swam back and we all sat dripping on the rock, eating grapes and melted chocolate cookies.

“One time, when I was 17, my friend’s mom invited me on a secret picnic,” Marcus said, grabbing a handful of grapes. “I was so nervous.”

George and I both looked at him. Maybe it was this admission of nerves that got our attention. I said, “She asked you on a picnic date, just the two of you?”

“She did. And I had no clue what to do about it.” Marcus was scrunching up his face at the memory.

He had the kind of hair that tended toward frizz and his round shoulders were going pink with sunburn. It came to me that Marcus had been a hopelessly dorky teenager and never recovered. The endless stories of conquest and triumph over adversity were his way of overcompensating. Pinpointing someone’s insecurity always made me like them more, and now I looked at Marcus with some sympathy.

“I almost didn’t go, but I met her at the park. She was pretty and had brought real wine glasses in a basket. I could hardly eat. I kept thinking I saw my friend behind the trees,” he said. “I got out of there as soon as I could. What a waste. I definitely could not take advantage of the situation.”

George snorted. “Those days are over, eh?” He laughed and inhaled a grape. He coughed.

“Times have changed,” Marcus admitted.

I was still contemplating Marcus’s inner adolescent when George coughed again and made a strange squawking sound. “You all right?” I asked him.

He gasped and pointed at his throat.

“Water?” I put down my book and held out the water bottle to him.

He shook his head, got up. He smiled and tried to laugh.

“You OK, buddy?” Marcus asked.

George turned away from us, sucked at the air, made a loud wheezing noise before he turned back again. “Can’t,” he rasped, pointing at his throat as he walked into the bushes.

I almost stopped breathing myself. I looked at Marcus who stood up, his knees slightly bent, his expression alert. “He’ll be all right,” Marcus told me. “You OK there, Georgie? You just got to get that out of there. Need some help?”

I didn’t know what to do. George was making horky gasps. I felt queasy with panic. Time thickened and slowed. What was happening? George! “We have to do something,” I said, uniting myself with Marcus of the hands-on action adventure.

“Heimlich time?” he said.

I clenched my fists. “Do it.”

We went to where George stood hunched over a patch of ferns. “OK big guy, don’t worry. I’m just gonna give you a hand.”

I hovered. From behind, Marcus wrapped his arms around George’s naked torso. He fit one fist into his other hand and jerked below his ribs, then jerked again.

My heart slammed in fear and my head pounded.

George gave a retch and the grape flew out, dropping into the ferns. He slumped in Marcus’s arms.

“Better?” Marcus asked, moving to one side so that he could see George’s face as I put my arms around him from the other side.

Tears ran down his cheeks. He wiped his mouth, then his eyes with his hands. He cleared his throat. “Jesus.”

“I have to sit down,” I said as if I was the one who’d had the close call. The sudden peril made me shake.

“Thank you, Marco,” George said.

“No more grapes for you,” I told him. I packed picnics of the future in my head. Tupperware containers of applesauce, compote, custard, pudding.

“Those things should have a warning on them,” George said. “Hazardous, ages 1 to 100.” He shook his head.

“Marcus,” I said. “Heimlich Maestro. Crazy.”

We staggered back to the rock. I emptied the plastic bag of grapes into the bushes. A few rolled down the rock slab and made little plopping sounds as they hit the lake. They bobbed on the surface as they edged down the shore, floating on the water. Harmless baubles. You never knew what would spell the end. We were all just one grape away from disaster. It was so easy to forget, normal is precarious.

In our clingy damp swimsuits we lay down on towels. I shivered despite the warm air. Relief and failure coursed through my body. George lay next to me. I squeezed his hand and he squeezed back. A cold wave of regret washed over me. What if it had been just me and George here alone, the way I’d wanted? I felt spooked and fragile and useless. I was going to have to get Marcus to show me the exact manoeuvre. It occurred to me he hadn’t been making up that rescue stuff. Marcus, my hero, my new best friend. I raised my head to look over at him, tears jumping out of my eyes.

Marcus winked and gave me a thumbs up sign. “You know, one time my brother just about choked,” he said. “He was staying at my place and the phone rang in the middle of dinner. He answers for me and goes quiet for a minute and then coughs on his stir-fry and turns bright red. Finally he croaks, “It’s for you,’ and he passes me the phone. Turns out it’s this girl I know with a thing for spicy phone calls. She thought it was me and got right into it. Meanwhile my brother, he’s gasping for air with a bok choy caught in his windpipe!” Marcus laughed and clasped his hands behind his head.

“Oh, please!” I sputtered, irritation edging out gratitude and any thought of Marcus as vulnerable. “In your dreams, a wild woman calling you up desperate to talk dirty.”

“I swear to God. How do you think I got my Heimlich chops?”

“Yeah, yeah. Marcus, could you do me a favour and just shut the hell up?”

“Martha!” George protested.

“What?!” It was what I’d always wanted to say to Marcus. Weird how I could never do it until he saved George’s life.

“OK.” Marcus was grinning at me as he stood up.

I started laughing. It was OK. I poked George in the ribs, to show him we were all on some kind of different level now.

“I’m going to see if there’s a good branch up there on that cliff to hang a swinging rope from,” Marcus said, surveying the rocks, trees, and water of the special secret swimming spot like he owned the place.

“Ha, dog,” Nestor sighed as Spirit trotted up the soft rise that separated the house from the dark sheet of water. “You get me in all kinds of trouble.”

A friend had warned Nestor against getting a shared dog. Each person in a couple should have a dog of their own, the friend had advised, so they don’t quibble over who does what and, more importantly, who doesn’t do what.

It was the not doing that got Nestor on his wife’s dark side. They hadn’t had a dog in years, since the kids had been little, and since they got this shaggy Burmese Mountain male, they quarreled more than ever, sometimes bitterly: dish towels flying, reprimands bordering on insults. Nestor poured some whisky into his cup, opting against adding Diet Pepsi to it, and brought the Friends of the Chowanoke River tumbler to his lips. Spirit, breathing like a winded sprinter, turned his slitted burnt sienna eyes at Nestor. He ain’t got no idea what he’s done to me, the semi- retired newspaper editor thought.

The new owners of the paper were forcing him out by degrees, and he knew it. They’d offered a severance retirement the summer before, and he’d turned it down. Just before this past spring had turned to a new summer they told him he was semi- retired.

“What the hell does that mean?” Nestor had asked the slim, aloof publisher they’d brought down from Vermont to helm the county’s lone weekly.

“Nestor, it means you come in on Mondays and write your column, visit around with the staff, and we don’t see you the rest of the week,” the fella, name of Heath, had grinned, toeing the carpet between them to push off on his merry way. Nestor had put his hand gently on the new boss’s chest.

“Why don’t you just fire me, Heath,” Nestor had said, eyes watering behind his round-rimmed glasses due to a sudden heart-gripping anger.

“We can’t do that,” Heath had answered, bouncing his fingers on Nestor’s shoulder before walking off, already in the middle of a call on his ever-present cell.

“Let’s get the boat!” Nestor called, knowing Spirit would bounce from even the deepest sleep to rattle around inside the wood motorboat with his master. I’ll refer to myself as his master, thank you very much, Nestor had argued with Sandra. She, not yet too old to drape one of her silk scarves around her head, had lowered the bridge of her nose and cast her navy-blue eyes at her tipsy husband. Let’s not allow anyone else hear you say that, she scowled, or they’ll think you’re embracing the Coombs’ plantation days.

Seated on a centre plank, Nestor Coombs heaved the boat from the pier and started the motor, inhaling the mixed fumes of gasoline and churning black water. He brought a freshly filled flask of bourbon to his lips and gazed at the receding lawn of the house, a white A-frame with windows—so many windows—splashed across the back. A sadness cooled his shoulders as he thought of Sandra coming home soon, not so much wondering or even caring where he’d gone, as pleased to see him not around.

Nestor had met Celia Chappell two years ago. Newly widowed, she’d moved into a condo across the river and down half a mile, perched on the edge of a new golfing/retirement community. They’d been introduced by mutual drinking and golfing friends. They would meet casually, coincidentally at the driving range or the clubhouse bar off and on for a year before she touched his hand one Sunday afternoon. She’d pressed into him, warm and fragrant, and asked if autumn put him in a romantic mood.

“I’m at that age,” he tried to joke, “where I’ve just gotten over feelings of young romance and haven’t quite arrived at the sentimental variety.”

He’d just turned 52. Celia was not quite 50.

“Well,” she’d cooed, glancing around the bar as if to whisper him a great secret, “I’m smack dab in the middle of my best romancing.”

She’d brushed his sun-cracked lips with her painted fingers and sashayed off, leaving that to weigh on his mind. He sulked for an hour after getting home. Sandra had been upstairs in her watercolour-painting loft with a hoity-toity pal, choosing works for an upcoming exhibit at the county art gallery. She’d crossed the unlit den in a rush and was startled to see him sitting there in the dark, wiggling an empty wine bottle between a ring of fingers.

“Nestor! Is that all you can do anymore,” she gasped affectedly, lowering the end of her bony nose and pointing it fiercely toward his guilty lap. “It’s no wonder they’re pushing you out the door at the paper.”

She was in the bloom of her career selling drapes and sconces at her gal-pal’s boutique downtown. Sandra had been talking for months about buying in to the operation, A Hint of Wine and Roses. When they bickered about it, he reveled in telling her they should rename it A Hint of Snobs and Snobbery.

She’d ignored his go-to-hell look and he’d wandered off and pulled out the phone book, thumbing through dry pages until he found the entry for Celia P. Chappell. He’d been more breathless than her when they’d arranged their first rendez-vous. He’d been feeling since March or April that he might be falling in love with her. Love? Chuck, down at the tackle shop, told Nestor, who’d pitched the scenario as a what-if- this-happened-to-you-like-it-did-old-Robert-Mitchum-in-that-movie-long-ago, to fish or cut bait.

“The worst kinda regret a man can have,” Chuck had said, leaning out of a cooler he’d been filling with cut-rate beer, “is to stay in a marriage that’s gone and turned sour. If my pops was still alive, Nestor, you could ask him all about it. Before pops passed, God rest his soul, he opened his heart to me about him and my mother. Said they’d lived all their lives together, not being in love one single day since they’d been teenagers.”

Nestor saw a film of sorrow pass briefly across Chuck’s cracked, tanned face. Just like a memory would do. Nestor realized he didn’t want to have this memory. “How ‘bout leaving one of those six-packs out for me to take home,” Nestor had said, rubbing the toe of his boating shoe against the kickboard to Chuck’s skimpy bar counter. “I’m all out at the house.”

Shortly after the Fourth of July he’d been on the phone with Celia, full of sighs and nagging regrets, when she’d said she wouldn’t mind spending the rest of her life with him. Said she knew it would have to be his choice, that she wasn’t even asking him to make that decision. She just wanted to put it out there. In case.

“This way I won’t ever regret not telling you,” she said in a voice as faraway as a scrim of clouds on a wide horizon. He heard her voice catch as she entered an abrupt, billowy pause. He knew she was waiting, pensive, both hands cradling her wall-phone.

“Me, too,” he whispered, knowing he really meant he’d enjoy spending the rest of his life with someone other than Sandra, be it her or any other giver of intimacy. But Celia was right there, puffing near-frantic breaths into his ear, her heart pounding, her bright eyes flickering wild errant looks around her kitchen.

“But I don’t know if I can,” he whispered, his ears humming now.

“OK,” Celia had said.

That was two months ago. Summer had passed over the weekend and the air was filling each night with a more persistent chill. He tooled his boat along the edge of a channel that entered the tiny fabricated village where Celia lived. There were lights on in her condo. He figured she was in there making dinner or unwrapping something she’d walked over and gotten from the clubhouse.

“It’s getting late, Spirit,” Nestor said through wind-dried lips which he promptly wetted with a slosh of bourbon. “I’m gonna turn us back.”

He was a young government-and-cops reporter for Asheville’s daily paper. Sandra taught art to mouth-breathing Catholic children, the kids’ constant respiratory problems caused, Nestor said, by smelling their parents’ money.

They stayed in the North Carolina mountains while Mason and Andrea grew up. He would sometimes take a job as an editor for one of his company’s errant weeklies, dragging the family along, pushing the children into new schools, Sandra scrambling into dank public-school art programs or shooing parochial students away from leaky radiator heaters, but always working right along with Nestor.

“We’re doing this the right way,” Nestor asked one summer in Morganton, “aren’t we, Sandra?”

They were in their mid-30s by then, getting tired, with Mason in high school and Andrea right behind, both high-performing students. Sandra was experimenting with an at-the-chin perm with gold highlights and some darker streaks.

“I should hope so,” she’d sighed, the distance between them just taking root, “because it’s way too late to start over and do it again.”

When Mason had said he was going to art school in Swannanoa, Sandra had stunned them all by bristling. She’d pulled her husband aside into the kitchen, where a rib eye beef roast was sizzling in a bed of button mushrooms, and seared her sea-blue eyes at him. The corners of her red mouth scratched at hard-to-find words, just for a second, and then she gripped his arm and launched her concern.

“Warren Wilson College is for homosexuals,” she said, hissing the esses, a vein in her throat pulsing. “If Mason decides he’s gay, that’s one thing. But to take it out in public, into academia, is another.”

Nestor just stared at her. It had been obvious for years that Mason was gay. None of them had ever talked about it, but Nestor just figured it was one of those things you didn’t have to talk about. If somebody wanted to talk about it, fine. If nobody wanted to talk about it, that was fine too. Everything had been fine up till now.

“Sandra, I can’t believe—”

She stopped him, raising a slotted spoon, greasy from turning the mushrooms around the roast. She took a stance like he’d seen boxers take before championship fights when the announcer is standing between them calling out their names to a rabid crowd.

“I won’t have it, Nestor,” she snarled, her eyes seeming to purple for a second. “I’ll leave it up to you to put this to rest. To-night!”

He realized lately that this was the moment he had begun to pull away from her, when their lives seemed to climb into separate cars and push out in opposite directions, neither one looking back in the rear-view. They’d been off in these directions for a decade. They were weary of each other now. They’d accepted the distance, but it still pained them when they had to get up close in intimate situations like holiday dinners or social gatherings.

Mason hadn’t spoken to them much over the years. He ended up going to Wake Forest, then into a career that had completely appalled his mother: Mason ran an agency in Manhattan that handled the bookings for professional drag queens. “He’s wasted his life,” Sandra spat whenever she’d had a couple drinks, “and his law degree.”

Nestor wouldn’t engage with her about Mason. They’d talk for hours about Andrea, who taught high school theatre in Durham, had got married, and produced a pair of sons. They would go on and on about how happy Andrea and her family were. Sandra delighted herself with turning her grandsons’ pictures into poster-sized watercolors. They were all over the walls.

Nestor was looking at one when Sandra came in from her arts council meeting. She was in her third year as president. She tossed her leather-bound notebook case on the chair next to him, followed his hollow gaze to the painting of a boy’s wind-tossed head, smiling, cocked slightly up in awe at what was supposed to be a flock of seabirds. At that moment Nestor was imagining it was more likely a wake of brooding vultures.

“Spirit looks absolutely awful,” she said, rolling up the sleeves of a button-up smock. “Has he been in the cove again?”

Nestor watched her gather the cuffs above one elbow, then the other. He didn’t like it that her favourite colour now was gray. He found it fitting, but still a bother. He pulled the last can from the six-pack he’d gotten from Chuck’s and popped it open. She blew out her cheeks and rolled her eyes.

The last time he’d called Mason, around Easter maybe, he’d found it not at all strange that the son hadn’t asked about his mother. They’d talked for a good 20 minutes and Sandra hadn’t come up once. Not that they were avoiding her on purpose.

He’d mentioned Celia, whom he referred to as a golf buddy. He had lots of golf buddies. He’d told Mason that this buddy was his favourite. That they’d started playing together all the time and were considering entering a summer seniors tournament, mixed-play. They never did. He was wishing now that they had. They’d have gotten their picture taken together, win or lose, and it would be hanging on the bulletin board in the clubhouse, behind the glass cover. They might even have had their arms slung around each other, sunburned a little, a little drunk, grinning like the best of friends.

“I’ve got another woman,” Nestor heard himself say, feeling like he was listening to his own voice play back on the cheap mini-tapes he used for interviews. “I’ve found somebody, Sandra.”

She was in the middle of pulling barrettes from her hair. She kept it short and pinned to her head in warm weather. She had a look on her face like he’d seen only once or twice, the most memorable being when her sister had told her, at their father’s wedding, that he’d had a mistress for most of his life.

“What did you say?” she asked, like her breath was hard to come by.

He told her again. He didn’t tell her everything, just what he thought she needed to know. Sandra sat down, carefully, pushing the notebook to the floor. They were two feet apart. Both were looking at the floorboards as if inspecting them for hard-to-see words they’d written there to use in difficult moments.

The phone rang but neither of them moved, probably didn’t hear it. The only sound in the room was their breathing, and a large clock ticking on the wall behind them. It had gone from dusk to night since she’d entered the room. They were fading into their chairs like a pair of trees that sit in front of the woods, blurring together in a falling darkness, forming a horizon of shadow.

Sandra raised her head, staring forward, as if she were in a car driving down an empty highway, knowing there was no one else to look out for, but alert just the same. She sniffed, but no tears came. Then she rubbed her palms up and down her cheeks.

“I thought so,” she whispered. “I thought you’d do this someday, Nestor.”

He didn’t answer because he felt too sorry for her. He lifted the can to his mouth and drained it, wondering if he could get Chuck to open the shop long enough for him to dart over and grab another six-pack. It didn’t seem like too much to ask, not under the circumstances.

Chuck was always open and honest about other people’s troubles. He always gave cheery opinions on the darkest of topics. Like the rough spots in life. Take that for example, Nestor was thinking. Chuck had said just the week before, when some young fella had come in and was talking about how he’d lost his job that day and was now going out to do some fishing and drinking, but mostly drinking.

Chuck had told him to prepare for the roughest at first. That when you take a boat out to fish, the first waves you hit are the hardest of the day. They’ll rattle you to your marrow. Make your bones chime like they’re knocking ‘round in a hurricane wind, is what Chuck had said. But once you get over that initial crack of the swells, you get used to the roughness of the trip.

I was molding Play-Doh on the kitchen table, and my father glanced at me before moving swiftly towards the front door.

Though only six years old at the time, I was aware that something was wrong; this was the kind of emergency that made your parents remind you to check for cars when crossing the street.

As I moved from my chair to the cold white hall, I caught the end of a conversation, “… to call 9-1-1.” My father ran back to the kitchen and grabbed the phone. As he passed, he didn’t look at me. I heard the phone beep three times, a slight pause, then my father’s voice, strained and irregular.

The texture of the driveway was course and uneven beneath my feet. No one had told me to put shoes on. I looked up from my bare toes, across the park, and into the fragment of a fallen sun.

I had seen fire before; sleeping in fireplaces, floating on the ends of matches, dancing on sparklers, crackling in campfires, forcing firecrackers to splinter. I had seen the domestic, but I had never seen the beast. The flames were hungry, fast, and powerful.

My father stood a few paces behind me, gazing at the deep voids in the park’s grass made by the wheels of the candy apple fire-trucks. The firemen like children in sunshine yellow rain gear.

Under the circumstances of childhood curiosity and community chatter, I learned that a man had died in the fire. As his home ignited around him, he stood in the kitchen, drinking cup after cup of water, burning with a fever of thirst. He would not leave.

Days later, I moved alone on the swings across from the ashes. I could not quell my desire to reach the sky. Eventually I slowed to a faint stirring. A hand weighed on my shoulder and I turned to identify the source.

I stared into the empty space behind me and tried to understand. I felt the weight of a thirst the ocean could not satisfy, a hunger that no amount of life could ease.

The window was covered with a thick grey blanket that had been nailed into place. The empty silence was broken by a hacking cough from a smoker upstairs and the noise of cars passing in the street outside, constant as a river. The air was cloying with the sweet smell of roaches. It was only one step up from the street but it was a big step. David lifted the edge of the blanket and moved behind it. Before the house had been abandoned to its present fate, the bay window would have been the focal point of the living room, looking onto a graceful neighbourhood. Now the street was a pipeline for downtown traffic; the window grimy and ignored behind the blanket.

There was a single bed in one corner, a table and chair against the wall opposite the door, and a dresser against the other wall. It reminded him of a monk’s cell, and he knew that it would take time to get used to the place. But he could get used to anything; he didn’t need much. He felt monastic.

Looking at the bed, he imagined the dozens of people who had already slept there; some on the way down and others struggling back up. By the look of the thin, stained mattress, the wretched had bled their way through nights of despair, sweating through dreams and nightmares.

He sat on the chair, pulled the suitcase towards him and opened it, taking out a small, transistor radio. He liked to listen to talk radio in the dark, as though he were taking a back seat in a conversation between friends. He knew Ted Tevan and the regular callers and felt part of a community of voice, even if he never called anyone. Placing the radio on the table, he reached down to plug it in and the table moved. A large cockroach ran for cover but he squashed it quickly and wiped the pus off the sole of his shoe with a paper napkin. He rubbed the carpet stain, balled the napkin, and threw it into the plastic garbage can under the table.

You had to be fast, almost instinctive, to kill roaches. You had to stomp where they were going to be in two seconds, not where they were now. If you aimed in front, they ran under your foot as it came down and crushed them. David hated cockroaches. He hated their dirt and filth and midnight crawling over food and pillows or deep into the pockets of trousers lying on a chair. He hated their sweet smell that filled any closed space. He even hated killing them because of the stinking white pus that exploded from their hard-shell bodies staining the floor and your sole and spreading wherever you walked. Roach killing seasons are short, measured in seconds as they run from the light. But they always come back in the dark. You can wake up in the middle of the night and create another season by flicking the light switch.

Removing his clothes from the suitcase, he hung four shirts, a pair of pants, and a winter coat on wire hangers in the closet. Socks and underwear went in the dresser drawer and a folded towel on the table. Next, he removed two sheets and a pillow from the charity shop bag and made the bed.

He emptied his pockets onto the table, making piles: three five dollar bills, four one dollar bills, three piles of four quarters each, and a dollar sixty-five in pennies, nickels, and dimes. He would start work tomorrow and wasn’t sure how long the money would have to last. Eventually there would be a pay check and food wasn’t a problem; as breakfast cook he’d be able to eat all he needed, but he needed a quart of beer every night to sleep: a dollar forty-five. After counting the money, he folded the bills and put them in his pocket, pouring the coins in after them.

He pulled the room door closed behind him. The hallway already smelled different than his room; it was still offensive, but he would soon get used to all the smells in the house.

He’d lost track of time in the gloom and was surprised at the sunlight as he left the house to walk slowly in the direction of Dépanneur Milton. The street was busy with people, students walking with purpose and old people shuffling with the unhappy stride of those with nowhere to go. For the first time in months, David’s steps were light. As he passed The Word, he stopped to look at the piles of 25-cent paperbacks on an outside table. He’d sold all his books eighteen months ago to a bulk buyer and imagined finding one of them on the table. But there was no Vonnegut, Hesse, or Celine. Brian Moore and Robertson Davies were missing in action, as were Heller, Salinger, Castaneda, and Hemmingway. They were probably relaxing on the cool shelves inside, not forced to prostitute themselves on the 25 cent table. But he could start again. He picked up a tattered copy of St. Urbain’s Horseman and went inside, fishing out two dimes and five pennies. The owner sat behind the counter writing prices on inside front covers and didn’t acknowledge the clink of small coins that David dropped in front of him. He put the Horseman in his pocket and left the gloom of the bookstore. At the dépanneur, he bought a quart of Export and a large can of Raid.

He strolled back to his room enjoying the feeling of having a destination and stood outside the house looking at his window. It was set in dark brown stone and framed in motley wood with faded paint peeling in large curls. No light escaped from the black window. His cave was secure.

There was already a sense of familiarity as he opened the front door and walked towards his room. Entering it, he heard the cockroaches scratch away to cover leaving only their sickly sweet smell.

He pulled the door to make sure it was locked and took the can of Raid out of the bag. It had been expensive, more than three quarts of beer. He was counting on the room being a closed box. Because there was no sink or plumbing, the only escape was the one-inch gap under the door. Starting in a corner away from the door, he shook the can and began spraying low, covering every inch of the floor except for an unsprayed path on the dirty carpet leading to the door. He waited on the bed, imagining hoards of roaches scrambling under the door to safety.

As he lay staring at the ceiling he noticed movement out of the corner of his eye; roaches were crawling up the wall. The more he focused, the more he saw. A few leaders were followed by dozens more, all using corner crevices and the contours of painted-over wallpaper to escape upwards. When they reached the top of the walls, with nowhere else to go, they set out, upside down, to walk across the ceiling. The first two fell on the bed, narrowly missing him and disappeared with cockroach speed. He leapt to his feet and began crushing the falling roaches, feeling pus collecting on his soles. His stomach heaved with the smell of the pus and poison as cockroaches fell around him in a brown shower.

He pulled the sheets off the bed and shook them frantically. Roaches tumbled out onto the floor and he squashed some with a crunch. He stuffed the sheets back into the charity bag and put the bag outside the door.

This time he started high; he covered the top of the nailed blanket with Raid and then sprayed down its length before attacking the ceiling and the walls. In the airless box, a cloud of Raid was settling on him and roaches were dropping through the cloud, falling on his head and shoulders before tumbling to the floor. With one hand over his nose and mouth, he tried to resist the overpowering chemical smell, all the time weighing the can, estimating how much was left. Roach bodies crunched under his feet until the can was empty. A pea-soup chemical fog filled the small room.

David left quickly, grabbing the charity-store bag and was outside, breathing deeply like a person who stayed underwater too long. He knew it would be five or six hours before he could go back and started walking. Walking was easy. People ignore you as long as you keep moving; it’s when you sit down to rest that you get noticed by the armies of security staff whose job it is to notice the loiterers.

So he kept moving. First to St. Lawrence Street, through the cultural clash of Jewish stores and restaurants fighting the encroachment of avant-garde designers attracted by low rents. Then south to Chinatown and aimless wandering up and down the side streets, slowing now and then to look into shop windows full of hanging chickens or a thousand herbal remedies, all of it wrapped in the aroma of roasting pork. No eye contact, no conversation, just look like you know where you’re going and keep walking. Leaving Chinatown, he kept walking south through a maze of detours along the cobbled streets of Old Montreal before reaching the river. He stopped to look and dream with the group of people, watching as the play-yachts of the rich beyond his imagination explored a watery playground: Three hours.

He started west along the Lachine canal to the Atwater Market, a favourite spot, even when all you could afford to do was look. The market welcomed anyone capable of marveling at what can be created from the land in a country where summer always seems the shortest of seasons and spring doesn’t exist. In the heat of summer, Quebec produce reigned over the market and he bought a cup of juicy, overripe strawberries from the Île d’Orléans. The butchers still had lamb from Rigaud and young bison from Sainte-Émélie. There were meat pies made with potatoes and carrots and fat sausages filled with the scraps left over from better cuts. Vegetable farmers in obscure corners of the province had sent their own cheeses to the big city, hoping to find some way to make their land yield more. David took it all in and made the most of the tasting samples of sausages until the lady with the toothpicks raised an eyebrow. He took one last sample and smiled at her. She smiled back.

He left the market and started climbing the gentle hill back to Downtown, turning east on Sainte-Catherine and stopping to rip two pieces of stiff cardboard from a box on the sidewalk outside a clothing store. A woman looked at him from inside a store, unsure if she should stop him from stealing from their garbage. She settled for giving him a dirty look as he pulled the two flaps from the box. He returned her glance with a shrug and a faint smile and continued walking. At McGill, he turned north to Sherbrooke and the Roddick Gates of McGill University: Five hours.

Twenty minutes later he was back in the cave. It still stank of Raid.

He used the pieces of cardboard to gently push the roach bodies into piles and scooped them into a bucket he found in the communal bathroom. He remade the bed, wiped the film of Raid off the beer bottle, opened it, and drank. The radio played softly, so softly that he couldn’t make out what people were saying; the murmur of conversation was enough.

When he had finished the beer, he switched off the radio, stretched out on the bed and listened in the dark to the coughing, the shuffling footsteps, the creaking bed of a restless sleeper, and other night noises of a house filled with people. He began to sing quietly to himself:

Men of Harlech stop your dreaming Can’t you see their spear points gleaming See their warrior’s pennants streaming To this battle field

Halfway through the song, his whispered tenor was joined by a bass, entering quietly but confidently, supporting the tenor and letting it float, putting meat on the lone voice.

Men of Harlech onto glory This shall ever be your story Keep these fighting words before ye Cambria will not yield

David finished the song and listened in silence. He started again, almost imperceptibly, the first verse of the first hymn he ever learned:

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide. When other helpers fail and comforts flee, Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

Again, he was joined by a quiet but solid bass that added timber to his faint tenor; the two voices floating through the house.

His eyes teared up as they always did when he sang the old songs. He was transported back to the furniture polish smell of the choir benches as sunlight filtered in through stained glass pictures of the saints, spreading red, yellow, and blue light into the sacred place while communal voices were raised in song.

Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day; Earth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away; Change and decay in all around I see; O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

The voice stayed with him and then he slept in silence. He slept fitfully, a holdover from the street. When he thought the night was over, he turned on the radio to check the time. He rose long before he needed to. The house sounded different, people were stirring and he could hear footsteps.

Every year in the last week of summer, just before school started, the carnival came to town. It took up most of the parking lot of the strip mall on top of the hill, overlooking the highway. The Carousel, Tea Cups, The Matterhorn, and Moby Dick materialized like visiting relatives from far away, mysterious yet familiar, in town for a few days, looking slightly older than they did the year before.

Dad was the biggest carnival fan. He talked it up throughout the summer, the anticipation mushrooming by August. “Carnival’s coming!”

They arrived in a caravan of trucks, trailers, and campers. Sinewy, weather-worn women and men, styrofoam coffee cups and king size cigarettes. It took them three days to set up everything. Dad took me and Lawrence on walks down to the strip mall to check on their progress. He made us pancakes for dinner on opening night. He went with us on all the rides he wasn’t too tall for, and for the real kiddie rides he rooted us on with hollers and whoops from just the other side of the barriers. He was crazy for The Cobra, a mini coaster that we always saved for the end of the night. He wished he could have ridden it with us; I thought he would crawl right through the metal bars of the barrier sometimes he was so excited.

Dad collected his empties all year long, stockpiling them in one end of the garage. Winter nights as a kid, I’d trot happily from the living room to the fridge and back again, cradling beer after beer for him, one hand around the cold neck of the bottle, the other supporting the base. “That’s a pal.” I just wanted those bottles emptied. I never could convince Mom to take one, though. She said the same thing about beer that she said about the carnival. “I’m not crazy about it.”

In August Dad would transfer his hoard of bottles from the garage to the back of the station wagon and, in two trips, return them to Quinn’s Market. For the occasion, Roland Quinn would let us drive around to the back of the store, where he’d unlatch his delivery door. Me and Dad and Lawrence made a chain from the car to the door, passing two-four after two-four of empties into Quinn’s. With the money Dad got he bought us our carnival tickets, unlimited passes, all four nights, with pocket change for Whack-A-Mole and Skee Ball.

The year I started Grade 11 the carnival came late. It was the end of September and it had turned cold, drizzling on and off. We still went but Lawrence was already off working the tar sands and I was looking forward more to hanging out with Angie Hart than with Dad. By then Brad, or the vasectomy malfunction, as I overheard my mother call him one night through the closed door of my parents’ bedroom, was eight. It bugged the hell out of Dad that he’d never had the guts to get on The Cobra. “Your brothers rode it when they were four!” That year Brad announced he was finally ready. It was cruel, but I told him it was probably too late, that he was too tall now. Brad started to snivel. Dad coached him to slouch.

When we got to the carnival I spotted Angie and her friends near the snack bar. After Dad gave me my bracelet pass I told him I’d catch up with him and Brad later. Dad glanced over at the gang of girls. They wore tight jeans and puffy coats. Long wool scarves dangled from around their necks. They laughed and whispered, clutching plastic cups, sipping through straws. Dad patted me on the back, his eyes proud, like I was a soldier or a quarterback. It made me cringe. “Okay, pal. Just be sure to find us in time to see Brad on the Cobra. It’s important his big brother be there.” His breath was foul. He’d already started in on next year’s bottle collection.

I sauntered over to the girls and made like I was interested in the snack bar menu. I said hey to Angie.

“Hey, too.”

I asked her if she had started thinking about that English assignment. She said she was doing it on The Shining because she’d read it over the summer and was planning to coast as much as possible this year. I said I wasn’t sure what I was going to do but a Stephen King book seemed like a cool idea. Her friends giggled and whispered, shared knowing looks. Vicky Dufour was the least subtle of them. “Well, we’ll just leave you two alone.” Her friends slinked away. Angie made a show of protest but she didn’t leave with them.

Every part of me was electric.

Angie had the darkest black hair, down just past her shoulders. Baby blue ski jacket and a white scarf. She wore braces, new from the summer, and I’d noticed at school how she concealed her mouth with the back of her hand now when she smiled or laughed. Angie’s eyes were small, brown, and intense. Her left earlobe held twin green studs. The second piercing was also new from the summer. I wondered if she’d had permission to do that or if she’d just done it.

Once Angie’s friends were out of sight we both got quiet. She looked at the ground and twirled the end of her scarf around her hand. Undid it and twirled it again. “It’s cold, eh?”

“Yeah.”

I invited Angie on the Spook Train. She didn’t have a bracelet or any tickets but I had a pocketful of loonies and paid for her. We got the back car of the train and it wasn’t too packed, either.

When I was a kid I always sat beside Dad on the Spook Train. Lawrence had to sit in the car behind or in front of us, alone, or sometimes with another kid from another odd-numbered group. Dad called him a big guy for doing it. The Spook Train entered The Haunted Tunnel through an arched cut-out in the ride’s façade just big enough for us to pass under. Inside it was dark like night. And all around us in the blackness were shiny animal eyes; red, yellow, and white, with a litany of howls, hoots, and growls sounding in the background. After the train turned a rough corner, a green spotlight would snap on to the left of us, revealing a skeleton dressed in a train engineer’s overalls and cap, slumped against a rock. All of the sudden the skeleton’s teeth would start to chatter to the tune of insane, tormented laughter. Dad would laugh, too, and softly squeeze my shoulder. He knew I was scared but he didn’t let anyone else know it. He just went on laughing, pretending we were all having the same good time, keeping a hand on my shoulder when Frankenstein’s Monster popped out at us, when the wolves snarled, when the ghosts rattled their chains.

The Spook Train car was small enough that my arm and Angie’s couldn’t help but rest against each other, jacket to jacket. I ventured a bit, cautiously, with my hand and brushed hers with the back of mine, making like it was incidental, and left it there, a minor meeting of flesh. She didn’t move, didn’t flinch. The train started with a jerk and as soon as we were in the dark of the tunnel I sensed her pivot in her seat. I turned, too, and our mouths came together. Angie’s tongue tasted faintly of Coke.

We were still kissing when the train exited the tunnel. Angie pulled away abruptly. We were back out in the cold air, the commotion of the carnival. Angie looked down at her lap and played with the end of her scarf again. We got out of the car and followed the other riders out through the opening in the barrier. We were quiet again. We lingered in front of The Spook Train, the carnival crowds flowing around us. I asked her if she wanted to ride again. She said no. I felt a hollow open up inside of me. But then she took my hand and started walking, pulled me with her. “Let’s go watch the highway.”

We walked through the games alley. An operator with bad teeth implored us to play Balloon Darts. “Come on, win a prize for your girl.” I squeezed Angie’s hand and she squeezed back. I looked at her, caught her eye. For a second she smiled at me, shyly, then looked down. She picked up the pace, started jogging, and tugged me out of the alley. We were right in front of The Cobra.

I could see Dad and Brad in line. Dad kept looking back and forth between his beloved coaster and the surrounding crowds. He was on the lookout for me. It wasn’t so bad that he made Brad do everything Lawrence and I had done, I just didn’t see why I had to relive it all, too. It wasn’t my fault Brad didn’t have a brother his own size.

“Isn’t that your little bro?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s cute. He looks like you. Want to go say hi?”

“Nah.” I motioned toward The Matterhorn, the hill behind it, the highway. Angie hesitated but followed.

We sat on the grass on the slope of the hill, maybe halfway down to the highway pavement. There were four Grade Nines a little further over, a little further down, boys, sharing a green shaker of Kraft parmesan, licking their palms. It was windier on the hill than in the thick of the carnival. Angie wrapped her arms around one of my arms and leaned on my shoulder. The moon was more than half-full with a bright halo glow all around it. Cars and trucks whipped by in both directions beneath us, headlights bright like the animal eyes on The Spook Train.

“My dad drives a rig,” Angie said.

“I know.”

“He’s home Sundays and Mondays.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“I don’t know. It’s always been like that.”

I slipped my arm from Angie’s grip and put it around her shoulder.

“When I was a little kid I thought my dad was driving every truck I saw,” Angie continued, staring at the highway. “I remember once my mom was driving me to skating and there was this rig up ahead of us and I got all excited because I was sure it was him. My mom laughed and said he was halfway to Kenora. I insisted it was him. She just laughed some more. I was so mad at her. She wouldn’t even speed up to check. To prove it wasn’t him. I was just supposed to believe her.”

“You took skating lessons?”

“Who didn’t?”

“Me.”

“Well who didn’t that’s a girl?”

We watched the cars and trucks some more.

I moved my head toward Angie’s, sought out her lips. She kept looking at the highway and I had to probe around with my face. She kissed me back but she didn’t open her mouth like on The Spook Train. In the middle of it she pulled back, looked down at the grass. I bobbed for another kiss.

“I’m cold.”

“It was your idea to come down here,” I snapped. I felt Angie withdraw. She turned her head away. My words replayed in my head, nastier with each echo. It felt like I’d broken something, something important and delicate. “Sorry,” I started.

A ray of bright white light, right in my face.

“You two! You can’t be here!” Ken, the mall cop. We called him that but really he was just the janitor. He hated kids.

“I was just leaving.” Angie sprang to her feet and marched swiftly up the hill with arms crossed. I watched her go, watched her disappear at the top while Ken scattered the cheese kids with threats to call their fathers.

“Tough luck, kid,” Ken said to me, shaking his head. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a pack of Export A green. “Now get!”

I heard a scream from above. The carnival was full of screams but this one was different. Instead of fun scared it was just scared. There was a rumbling of voices, mounting alarm, an uproar. Ken stuffed his cigarettes back into his pocket and ran up the hill. I followed.

A hundred people at least were clustered around The Cobra and more were on the way, running from different parts of the carnival, curious, nosy, morbid. I was gripped by a sudden, abysmal queasiness. I pushed into the thick crowd, slipping between gawkers up on their tiptoes, necks craned, chattering, giggling. I could see the coaster parked in its start position, a collection of little kids aboard with the safety bars down, waiting, fidgeting, horsing around. Brad’s face was fire engine red. He was in the last car, sobbing. A girl of four, maybe five, was sitting next to him, both arms raised high in the air, screaming delight, even though the ride wasn’t even moving. I got frantic, fought my way deeper into the crowd. I wondered where the ride operator could possibly be. That nobody had attended to Brad yet, to whatever was wrong with him, filled me with fear and outrage.

“Don’t worry, son,” a man’s voice said near my ear. “We’ll get him out. We’ll get him out fast.” It was Roland Quinn. He was forcing his way through the crowd, too, one arm straight out in front of him, the other held straight up in the air. “Coming through, here. Make way!” Above the throng, in Quinn’s hand, a jar of Vaseline.

Quinn grabbed my arm and together we ploughed the rest of the way through. We made it to the barrier and Quinn unlatched the unattended metal gate himself. I started toward Brad but Quinn directed me off to the side instead. People were pressed up all along the barrier, mall cop Ken and a couple of carnival workers urging them back. Dad was right at the front of one section of the crowd, hunched over but looking up. He saw me coming and gave me a big thumbs-up. I couldn’t figure out which side of the barrier he was on.

Because he was on both. Somehow, Dad had squeezed his head through two of the bars and now, clearly, he was wedged there. Apparently every inch had counted on Brad’s big night. “Hey, pal!” Dad called to me, enthused. Like we had just run into each other by chance at a hot dog stand.

Mr. Quinn approached Dad and put a hand on top of his head, gently guided him to bend it down, the way a barber would. He applied a glob of Vaseline to the back and sides of Dad’s neck. “We’ll get you out, Dan,” Quinn chuckled. “Don’t you worry. We’ll try and slip you out with this. Fire department’s on the way with cutters. One way or the other, we’ll get you out.”

I stepped up. Embarrassed and determined at the same time.

“Can I help?”

“Your brother, pal.”

I sprang off, jogged to the base of the coaster’s platform and flew up the stairs. Brad’s grubby cheeks were streaked with tears but he wasn’t crying anymore. He was smiling, laughing even. Angie was there, crouched beside him, chatting away, a hand on the back of his head, stroking his hair, looking important and delicate.

Like numbers-men the world over, actuaries and accountants, Gabriel fears forgetting. The stove has to be checked three times before leaving, the lock’s bolt never rests easy in its strike, and hands have to be washed three times before he opens public washroom doors (always with his knee). Trig problems appear when Gabriel beholds a verdant pasture dotted with grazing cattle. Sometimes he counts the peas in the can before he shoves them down his gullet. To forestall asphyxiation.

At work he’s an underling. He can’t stand the man in the neighbouring cubicle, longs to learn that he has succumbed to a freak case of poisoning brought on by carelessly swallowing his own saliva. Gabriel Contamine cultivates his hatred for this man like a hothouse flower. Wishing for his enemy’s inferiority to be revealed. In vain.

Peering through his glasses Gabriel Contamine dreams of calculating the number of square metres of concrete between Dubai’s most modern buildings. But they always chose his colleague for overseas assignments, that half-wit who showed such skill when it came to sucking up to the boss. Gabriel, then, would stay here with his peas, surveying the streets of the financial district when he wasn’t in farm country measuring outbuildings.

His up-and-coming colleague, who said “ahnt” instead of aunt and “tomahto” instead of tomato, clipped his nails while talking to his mother on the phone. Click. Click. Click. Gabriel felt the urge to trip his enemy when he walked by the mouse- grey, pressed-wood walls of Gabriel’s prison, and each time he brushed by this charlatan’s cubicle.

Take comfort in doing as little as possible. Sleepless nights spent watching a documentary on the Sisters of Charity, whose thriving business keeps them busy, making communion wafers in their basement. Pretend, seem. Fall asleep on the blueprints, hold your eyes closed, just a few moments. Open the mailbox to find envelopes stuffed full of hundred-dollar bills, your reward for a few small lies. For drawing a few false lines on a piece of tracing paper, settling the dispute. The neighbours will fight it out over the coming centuries, all because the man of the house with his puffed-out chest had three square metres of useless lawn stolen from under his feet. The bowtie-wearing notary who signs off on the falsified documents keeps five per cent. Then the beloved dog mysteriously disappears. Thirty-foot high trees are felled for no clear reason. Razor wire fencing goes up toward the heavens. No more opening the barn to say Hi to the neighbour. Rat poison on the property line. To each their own secret revenge. Our enemies may be smart, but surely not as powerful as us.

Gabriel Contamine had always wanted to launder money for the mafia, to be a spy in Lebanon or a bank president in New York. He didn’t want to hear himself calling out numbers any more, or mark out quadrilaterals on graph paper. His canned peas were more and more often washed down with amber-hued scotch, accompanied by spring rolls. The Chinese guy on the corner, who had had his menu translated by a niece from Hong Kong, rolled a thousand a week; he had deals going with the neighbourhood grocery stores. Men of account. Free men, engaged in commerce.

On his lunch break Gabriel Contamine always ate the same ham and parsley sandwich, chewing each mouthful 15 times while watching Beatrice out of the corner of his eye. Beatrice, Executive Secretary, Rabin Rabin Surveyors, Ltd. Beatrice whose duties included dusting and misting each leaf of the countless plants before she was finally allowed to leave, exhausted. Spray…hibiscus leaves…Spray…Moroccan bay leaves…a million green leaves…and Gabriel, who smiled as he watched her lower her eyes, her slender fingers on the trigger. He wanted to wake up next to Beatrice on Sunday morning. Watch her read her horoscope out loud and read his. Pisces. Cancer. Scorpio. Ink-stained fingers. Then they would go eat at the Chinese restaurant. Honeydew soup, cuttlefish with candied vegetables, eight-flavour- chicken. Unfamiliar, surprising things. He would explain Euclid’s five postulates and illustrate Pythagoras’ theorem with his mechanical pencil on the paper placemat. Beatrice was a fast learner. But Gabriel didn’t have the guts. Everything that is true in him stems from his adolescent shyness.

In high school the young girls sitting around him wrote test-answers in blue ink on their thighs. They would wait for him next to the brick wall in the schoolyard, because even at this tender age Gabriel knew how to calculate tangents. The guy in the neighbouring cubicle must have been the best cheater of them all; he had easily gotten in the boss’s good books. A real octopus, excreting his ink. A smart bastard.

Gabriel was sad. His favourite philatelic columnist had died, leaving a gaping hole in his Sundays. He was waiting to hear who had been given the hospital addition in Dubai. Gabriel Contamine wished he had started collecting stamps younger. At ten he would have liked to become a famous cartographer. Survey the Seychelles on a twin-engined plane. Find an undiscovered island, never come back. But the Saudi Royal Family, through holding companies, had invested in Rabin Rabin Surveyors where he worked, and where he would grow old, and where he enjoyed a prodigious dental plan and a substantial pension.

A job that let him go to New York every year at Easter and buy three Taiwanese Cartier watches. A Cartier for his mother, one for his sister, and one for Beatrice. Beatrice, who wrote out the contracts that would never be settled, whose livelihood was in these fence-fights, these pointless quarrels between neighbours that would be drowned in all kinds of liquor when evening fell. Entire lives thrown out of orbit over rights of way, cottages cut off from the main road, addresses nailed to pine trees that were not legally yours.

His officemate, with that plummy voice of his, knew the true meaning of “buttering up.” Words were a toy in his hands. He invented worlds, to dupe people. Worked with intonation, caught you off guard. That libertine who invited women to eat Iranian caviar, rockfish, and the airiest Parmesan in his apartment where carpets adorned walls as well as floors. He’d be packing his bags, no doubt, and leaving for Dubai in the next few days. As for Gabriel Contamine, what he really wanted was to go down a snowy hill on a dogsled, one arm wrapped tightly around Beatrice. But he couldn’t build the relationship. He was a wuss, looking on sullenly as she presided over alpine disputes. My cabin. Your cabin. My land. Your land. Two thousand three hundred square metres of dispute, a diamond-shaped bit of lawn and then, one day, our little sanctuary isn’t what it used to be, nothing belongs to us.

For the last two months he had been on the case of a fifty-year-old Krakovian who owned two plots of land in the country. This Polish widow had hired the surveyors to flense off a few feet from her neighbour, who kept bay mares. It all started with a false dinner party. The old bat had spread two picnic tables with white tablecloths covered in finger-food. Radishes turned to resemble flowers. Toothpicks crowned in green cellophane piercing cubes of marble cheddar. The neighbour’s foal, who the widow often treated to little mint candies placed on hands held flat like tiny tables, had hopped the wooden fence, between two black spruce trees. One by one he had scooped up the canapés with his pink tongue, and quickly swallowed them down, looking over his shoulder as if he expected to be caught at any moment. The old lady called in the surveyors the following morning. She said, to whoever would listen, that she had been expecting Fidel Castro for tea.

A crazy old lady, another dispute. Another claim that would never be settled. Another lost chance to go to Dubai while the guy at the neighbouring cubicle scraped his way to the top. While the guy from the neighbouring cubicle was taking advantage of relaxed working conditions to bring his little chow-chow to work. This little smartass of a dog, bred to walk on tightropes, slept at his master’s feet, dreaming of jumping at the throat of the first person to try to pet him on the head. The guy from the neighbouring cubicle who would soon have his own office and a full-time secretary.

Beatrice was all he had left. Watching Beatrice sitting on her swivel chair, eating an apple whole: skin, flesh, core. Whole. Beatrice who kissed the air next each of Gabriel’s cheeks every year at the staff Christmas party. Love is the way you inhabit a space. Beatrice who made coffee with the elegance of a diplomat for visiting developers who snuck probing glances at her tweed skirt. Beatrice who turned Gabriel Contamine’s stomach into a nursery for exotic butterflies. Beatrice who copied the municipal plans like an artist, spreading them out beneath the copier’s lid, under the explosion of green light. One more thing created in the world.

Gabriel was now resolved to ask her out to the Chinese restaurant. He had spent too many Friday nights in front of the microwave watching the popcorn pop. Watching the tray spin around. Alone. Gutted. Without recourse. Without Beatrice. Dreaming of reading out loud to her from cloak-and-dagger novels.

That morning while driving over the freshly asphalted bridge he had sealed the envelope containing the twice-folded letter for Beatrice. He got to work ten minutes before the archives department opened. His hands smelled of the past. He was looking for the truth, the golden mean among the T-squares and the erasers. To work, to long for a better position, hoping to one day be the one who would revolutionize the way things were done here, to supplant the guy at the neighbouring cubicle, in all his glory. The underlings would sigh.

That lunch-hour Gabriel Contamine would be invited to the boss’s glassed-in office. The Machiavellian guy at the neighbouring cubicle would sneak up on Beatrice from behind, a letter-opener in hand. Beatrice would open the letter while the interloper looked over her shoulder and Gabriel Contamine looked on, eating his ham and parsley sandwich in the boss’s office. The guy from the neighbouring cubicle would laugh a laugh that exposed his cavities. The shy ones are always put back in their place. Gabriel would never take Beatrice to the Chinese restaurant, but he would be sent to Dubai for the big hospital addition.