But definitely too challenging for the boys. There were surfers not much older or taller than the twins, but none were quite as young, none with their slender builds and narrow shoulders. If Setsuko had seen the surf, she wouldn’t have considered letting their sons go in. But his wife had remained at the condo, feeling ill, attributing it to the dinner they ate on the drive down from L.A. Although he assured her that he wouldn’t let the boys go out if conditions were dangerous, it was Hugh’s call.

Hugh followed the path of a seasoned surfer as he soared down the steep front of his wave, cutting white tracks, sending up sparkling jets. No surfer himself, Hugh still felt the excitement, imagined the exhilaration. For such ominous surf, the water was beautiful, light-green, transparent. The day was bright and warm with that invigorating heat found along the southern coast. Hugh plied the lid off his coffee and neatly screwed the cup into the sand.

“They aren’t that big,” said Takumi, five minutes older than his twin, Hitoshi, and the more assertive of the two.

“What if we stay close to shore, Dad?” asked Hitoshi.

“Just catch the wash,” added Takumi.

“The currents are too strong,” Hugh said, but so softly that he might not have spoken at all. He sipped his coffee. Most parents he encountered were intent on cocooning their children, but Hugh encouraged his sons’ daring. It wasn’t just a reaction to his own father’s hang-ups, which had constricted Hugh’s boyhood in the way physical disabilities hem in the afflicted, but a revulsion at society’s overreaching protectiveness, the never-ending list of precautions, things to fear and avoid. Yet, there were children who piloted planes, captained boats across thousands of miles of open ocean, climbed Mt Everest, for god’s sake.

“Not like we’re swimming. We’ve got the boards,” insisted Takumi.

Hitoshi clapped his brother’s shoulder. “We’ll stay close together.”

“We’ve surfed six-foot waves at Malibu.”

It was true but those were gentle compared to these.

A cadre of surfers soared down a wave’s slope like rocket streamers. How beautiful.

“Why did we come here then?” asked Hitoshi.

“You’re always telling us how good we are,” said Takumi.

“You are good,” Hugh said with conviction.

“Then why can’t we go?”

Hugh pointed. “Look at the size of that wave.”

“We wouldn’t take that wave. We’re not stupid.”

“Of course not, but … it’s not just one wave.”

“We’ll stay close together.”

“Sorry, guys.”

As if to admit that they had given up, they worked their torsos out of their wet suits, revealing the smooth slender bodies, identical down to the freckles on their shoulders, bequeathed by Hugh, of course: Setsuko had not a solitary freckle or any other blemish on her skin, for that matter.

Picking up his sunscreen, Hugh squeezed out a glob and spread it across his face. It wasn’t skin cancer, but the burning of his nose and the subsequent swelling and blocking of his nasal passages so that he could hardly breathe that made the sunscreen a habit bordering on compulsion. UV 30. He carried the stuff everywhere.

Dropping the lotion on the beach towel, Hugh shifted on the sand and leaned into his sons, thinking he would hear their whispers of consolation, but they were silent, staring at different horizons. His head felt heavy, feverish. Was he coming down with the same bug that Setsuko caught? He closed his eyes for a moment, hoping to slip an oncoming headache. The clap of a wave breaking close to shore sounded sharply like a gunshot, flushing out a memory: the high desert, three years ago. Takumi rocking back on his heels from the force of the .38’s explosion. The rusted can unmoved. “One more shot, dad, please?” Hitoshi standing ten feet back with Setsuku, steely-eyed and poised to intervene, not sufficiently convinced that such experience was integral to American boyhood, to fulfilling Huck Finn’s legacy. “It’s Hitoshi’s turn,” said Hugh. “It’s okay, dad,” responded Hitoshi. “Let Takumi try again.” Takumi grinned and raised the gun.

The bang of another wave brought Hugh back.

He moved behind his sons and put his hands on their shoulders. “We’ll return tomorrow, guys. The waves won’t be as big. You can surf tomorrow, okay?” Their shoulders sunk as if his hands were heavy weights.

“How do cheese steak sandwiches sound?” Hugh asked, sticking his head over his sons’ shoulders. Food usually got them out of their funk. He grinned and kissed Hitoshi’s cheek. Hitoshi scrunched his nose, but nodded. Hugh turned to Takumi and was about to muss the long black hair when something caught his eye. At the base of Takumi’s throat was a bulge as if a gumball had lodged under his skin. “What’s this?” asked Hugh, pointing at the protrusion. Takumi shrugged. “Did you injure yourself there?”

“No. It was just there.”

Hugh touched the ball. Not hard, not soft. “How long have you had it?”

“I don’t know. A couple of days. Why?”

“We should get it checked out,” Hugh said calmly.

“Look, dad,” said Hitoshi, “the waves are smaller.”

A swollen gland. Maybe a cyst.

“Come on, dad.”

“You know we’re excellent surfers.”

Nearby a seagull mewed loudly and insistently. Hugh searched for adequate words to explain his refusal, but the words would not cohere. What was something like that doing on his son? He squeezed their shoulders. What the hell…

“Ten minutes. I’ll let you go in for ten minutes.”

“All right, dad!”

Beaming, they slipped back into their wetsuits and folded the Velcro leashes around their slender ankles. The leashes were made for thicker limbs and even fully wrapped still had play.

Carrying his coffee, he walked with them into the surf. He was hip deep and the backwash was enough to knock him off balance. The chaotic waters reflected sunlight in a hundred directions, poking holes in his vision like a migraine.

Takumi and Hitoshi threw themselves onto their tiny surfboards and paddled skillfully into the wash.

“Ten minutes,” he shouted, though he wasn’t sure they could hear him over the booming waves. Through his fly eyes, he followed their lithe bodies as they fought their way through the surf, paddling parallel, nosing down to let the broken waves crash over them.

They faced a set of big waves that carried surfers. They broke though the base of the first wave, disappearing as the comber rose up to curl and collapse. He saw them again, just as the second wave struck. They made it through the third and took their place among the hundred other surfers on the flat water, waiting for the next set. Hugh calmed a little then. He watched all the surfers drift to the right. The entire sea was moving north. A wave formed, rising. The twins paddled side-by-side forcefully, belying their age and size. Together they turned, shooting forward as the wave lifted them until they were on the crest, held in suspension for an instant and then rocketing down, perfectly balanced, soaring down the wave’s infinite face. Crouched, they cut right and then left with dazzling synchronicity. As the wave folded and crashed, they rode parallel to the shore and then rolled off their boards, disappearing into the froth, above which a seagull shimmied as if caught in a cross wind.

When the twins reappeared, they instantly turned their boards around and started paddling out again. He caught the fierce smiles. How long they had been out? He lost track of time watching them. It was no time, all time. He followed them again as they drove through the waves, getting farther out. Except for their size, they could have been pros. As he backed out of the surf, Hugh lost his balance, dropping his coffee cup and going under for a few seconds. He walked out of the surf and back to the blanket, where he watched them take another wave. He rubbed his thumb against his index finger. Was a cyst hard or soft? He wanted to feel the lump again. He touched his cheek, which felt dry as if the ocean had washed off the sunscreen. He looked for the tube he had tossed on the towel. Where the hell was it? He lifted the edge of the towel and then dug his fingers into the sand around the perimeter. He pulled up a peach pit and an empty cigarette pack. Shit. He looked toward the access road and the adjacent street where he’d parked the car. He always kept an extra sunscreen in the glove compartment. It would take only a few minutes to get the sunscreen.

As he approached the access road with a view of the sun-bleached broken trestle that had given the surf spot its name, a mobile canteen pulled up. The coffee from those trucks wasn’t exactly café quality, but he needed the caffeine.

By the time he returned with his sunscreen and coffee, most of the surfers had moved farther out. Smearing the sunscreen on his face, he scanned the black wetsuits, looking for the smallest. Beyond the surfers, a boat churned south, rising and falling in the swell. They had been in at least twenty minutes. He walked to the water’s edge and called their names. It was impossible to be heard over the ocean’s roar. With a bullhorn, he would not have been able to reach them. The surfers were paddling furiously against a current that threatened to pull them off the break. The set came. The first wave was the largest of the day.

A dozen surfers turned their boards toward the shore and paddled furiously to get ahead of the wave. He tried to pick out his sons from the other surfers being lifted on the rhino like chips of wood, about half failing to catch it. For a few seconds, the pack was invisible. The second wave rose. More surfers strove to take this one, arms wind milling, heads raised like beasts sniffing their prey. When the third wave came, it was enormous. The remaining surfers were determined to ride the monster. Hugh saw the two boys turn their boards to shore and paddle madly.

Lodged ten feet high on the face, they simultaneously stood up and shot sideways, moving dizzyingly fast. They cut trails, spreading apart as the wave carried them shoreward.

As they toppled off their boards, Hugh screamed for them to come in. They were close enough to have heard, but, ignoring him, they turned away and lay on their boards, stroking seaward. He strode through the backwash, knees pummeling the frothy shattered waves.

“Takumi! Hitoshi!” Hugh shouted.

One turned and then the other. Hugh’s coffee cup again slipped from his fingers, bounding away. They were not his sons.

It was like that. They were gone. This ridiculous man with the gleaming white nose hopping on the beach, screaming, swimming into waves that tossed him back like a rubber inflatable, and finally grabbed by others as the mechanisms that come into play, came into play.

An hour later their boards washed up on the beach. The leashes remained attached. The bracelets of Velcro still fastened but no longer on the slender ankles.

His children were gone.

“Wait,” he says. “Wait. There.” He lifts his head off the track.

I kneel in blue utility pants, and I listen with eyes closed because this sometimes helps.

I’ve been here many times before. As a boy, placing pennies on the track, hiding in the brush as the train sweeps past, his hand gripping the back of my shirt as I laugh and launch myself forward, the suction pulling me in, my face inches from the fury. Later, in my teens, feeling the M1’s wood giving warmth back, like two people holding hands. Looking down the sights under cover of the Ghillie suit, through the blur of the massive train’s wheels at the soup can on the other side because he had said all the movement and violence of steel on steel was how it had been. You must shoot through it, he had said, as he rested one hand on my back, the other on my chest, feeling the rhythm of my breathing.

We cross the culvert and move to the edge of the brush on the other side. We find our spots, two ancient depressions in the detritus under a canopy of new growth, and we lie in them as we always have. He pulls out his binoculars. They hang around his neck now as they do in every picture in the box in the closet of our house. He hands them to me and I look down the track.

“About a mile,” I say.

“Ok. Check your mark now.” He moves behind me and reaches into my pocket for the glass. I can’t see him but I know he’s looking through the scope at the soup can on the other side.

“Three clicks,” I say.

“Three,” he says. “Yes, three’s about right.”

I adjust the elevation dial by three clicks. The dial is warm with the heat of my fingers. And I think this is how it must have felt when he made the same adjustments in Bastogne under heavy mortar fire, the dial hot to the touch no matter how cold the day or night.

I hear the train and I know we’re thinking about the same things. I imagine the height of the freight undercarriage and the radius of the wheels. I think of the distance between them. How far ahead of the opening I must aim in order to clear the wheels. Which cars to avoid. How far behind the diesel I must start. What the chemical and fuel cars look like.

He taps me on the shoulder and hands me the scope, then takes the binoculars from me. “Here,” he says. “Today’s the day.”

Today is always the day. He has been saying this since the day he first let me hold the M1, five years after he had returned. I would hit the mark through the train, he would say, and that day had come a year ago. At 400 yards through the train, looking through the scope, I had made calculations of trajectory based on bullet drop, windage, and the caliber of the round.

He had left in 1942 a late-riser but had come back getting up at three every morning. There were things to do, he would say to me and my mother. They wouldn’t do themselves. And on mornings such as these he was here setting up his son’s classroom, passing on the only knowledge he had and that he thought worth passing along. It didn’t come in words, though words were useful for such things as pass the butter and where’s my wallet. The only knowledge of any importance came from experience and betrayed any attempt to transmit it through words.

He did, in fact, speak of the war and there were stories if only to satisfy the curiosity of those who hadn’t been there. The stories of Baker Company were never hidden from his children in any deliberate sense. There was no hush or mindful silence in the spots where one might expect a narrative. He was matter-of-fact about the characters he served with and of the missions he went on, and neither relished in nor underplayed the drama of the details. But there was always a sense that these were not the whole story. And the story, the real story, was something less of characters, drills, formations and strategies. Less about anything of prescribed, scripted war, and more of something else entirely. I felt it whenever we went shooting, like he was living it. And when he looked down the sights he shifted his manner of speaking, his voice more monotone, his words, measured, monosyllabic, like they were expensive. And the longer he looked at his mark – a soup can, a sign, a block of wood – the more his breathing seemed to grow shallow. He didn’t smile when he shot but I knew within that moment he knew some measure of satisfaction.

As he looks through his binoculars down the line, I take the M1 and rest it on its now unfolded bipod stand, then disengage the safety.

“Here. Get ready,” he says quietly and he looks down at my setup. “Forget the glass. Sights only.”

I remove the scope then press myself hard against the ground and spread my legs further apart. I line up the rear and front sights with the mark, which is 200 yards distant across the tracks. I can’t quite resolve the fine details but I know it’s just a soup can, as it almost always is. It’s preserved after each outing for posterity. Riddled with holes from past triumphs, then retrieved and stored with the M1 like a troubled couple, temporarily reconciled if only to share the matrimonial bed. His own bed lies empty after he awakes: his wife, my mother, having left on a cold winter morning not unlike the present one for reasons I can only guess. I have only the one story, his, and I suppose that is how it will remain.

I have never made the mark from so far away using iron sights alone.

“I want to use the scope,” I say but I make no move toward that end.

“Just relax. Trust the sights. Breathe.”

The train arrives and fills us with its noise and smell and punches us with a sudden, massive displacement of air. I feel it as the Ghillie suit lifts off my back in the suction that follows, only to be held down by my own body’s weight. There are no words, now, not just because none would be heard, but also because taking the shot is all that is left.

Upturned Sky was written and performed by James Claffey.

Leave is such a little word . . . A full word. A suitcase burst wide open on an airport carousel.

His hiking boots leave deep footprints in the dirty snow. He lifts up his pack so it doesn’t brush against the wetness and the filth. He holds it by the straps, very tight, so the pack doesn’t slip and go crashing right in there . . . There . . . “Leave there.” That is what he wrote in his message, “I have to leave there.”

Maya, who has known him for years, rereads it several times. “I have to leave there.” Why didn’t he write “here”? It should say, “I have to leave here.” Not “there.” She tells herself he is already somewhere else. Maya likes to analyse words. Especially other people’s words. Her own constantly escape her.

He moves solidly forward in the snow. Solid is the word for the deep footprints left by soles so thick they will come unglued long before they are worn out. He moves forward with assurance; yet, he is not sure he will go back to Maya and start again, the life he had before. Life in common. He would like another one, a life. Uncommon.

He and Maya. Words. They knew how to multiply meanings, propose the least obvious meaning, suggesting it was the best, the truest. As if truth is always hidden, buried deep beneath the surface of things.

He walks looking straight ahead, searching the colourless sky that promises him nothing. Feeling that he prefers the horizon to all the words in the world. He walks, while Maya asks herself whether his message really implies his return. She is not sure. Because, in words, there is true and false. She prefers not to know and, for once, not to untangle true from false.

Leave is a word falling. You catch it in flight, or else you settle for listening to a door slam shut. The silence afterward.

Although it’s been quite a while now, I can place the first public appearance of this verbal tic with certitude. It’s so memorable because the audience was the last I would ever, in any circumstance, have chosen: Peace Pipe, Bird, and Jay Zed.

The four of us were at that difficult age when young males do not yet need to shave but do so anyway. It was early March, a day of false spring but still nippy. Underdressed, our cold-weather gear prematurely left at home, we were shooting hoops in the half court up towards the Sherbrooke end of Addington. Separated by just one row of triplexes from the Expressway’s all-devouring maw, it’s a spot that looms so large in the mythology of me and many of my peers, living and departed, that I tend to forget it’s not necessarily world famous. So I’d better provide a bit of background.

It wasn’t always called the half court. It wasn’t always called anything. For many years it was just a three-sided space. Concrete walls stretched three stories up, the smoothed-over remnants of what was once a residential courtyard; bricked-over window shapes hinted at untold lives once lived behind them. The upper reaches were smoke-streaked, for reasons that can’t have been nice. Rust marks here and there told of long-stripped fire escapes. Someone, it was hard not to think, hadn’t quite got out. The arm’s-reach portions of the walls formed a diorama made up of the mystic frescoes of our district’s aerosol Michelangelos, their signatures legible only to themselves and their brethren, their fuck-you obscurity testament to a rare integrity.

For decades stretching back into legend, this was a place of unspoken immunity. Stained mattresses (no sooner would some poor city worker have dragged one away than another would be there, to all appearances spontaneously generated), used condoms, syringes, bullet casings, and still more things we tried but failed to identify, all spoke of activities they never taught us about at St Aloysius. To enter the half-court at all was, in a sense, to be expected to do bad. In the half court we always knew that the ghosts of our history were there – looking on, keeping a record. Making demands.

At some point someone in an office somewhere must have theorized that if you give people the suggestion of something wholesome to do, they might just cut down on the open-air humping and the mainlining and the gunplay, because one day, suddenly, two backboards and hoops were installed. Their respective heights had been set at regulation level with no small care; the boards, dazzling in their whiteness even in that place that saw so little sun, each bore the requisite target square above the rim; the mesh nets, finer to our eyes than any lace of Flanders, impressed us no less for the sure knowledge that they would very soon be stolen.

On the morning of the appearance of the backboards and hoops, a bright crisp April morning in 1986, a good many neighborhood folk stood speechless on Addington for a considerable time. We had no frame of reference for what we saw. Some seniors among us, no doubt nursing sepia-toned rites-of-passage memories of this setting, showed a certain wistfulness. Most of us, though, felt something more akin to confusion. Notre-Dame-de-Grace was not, is not, a place where things so new, so non-tawdry, so incontrovertibly good, are often seen.

We were by no means sure, at first, that we were even allowed to use it. Two or three of the braver among us stepped forward and toed the new court’s surface gingerly, as if it might be booby-trapped. It wasn’t. Very soon, from somewhere, a basketball was produced, then another and another. These balls were bounced, and heaved toward those hoops, then bounced and heaved some more. Change had come.

That nameless benefactor, that faceless saint, had his or heart in a noble place. But a hard truth must still be told. That person knew squat about basketball.

The backboards were mounted almost flush with the walls, so until this very day the ballers of Addington need to think seriously about just how hard they want to drive to the basket. The hoops are so near each other that to attempt an actual game in there is all but pointless; you’re engaging more in a cooped-up basketball/handball/pinball hybrid. And just to make that initial weirdness all the weirder, a wire-mesh fence was erected between the sidewalk and the court one night soon after the boards appeared. It was understood that a cubbyhole would very soon be cut, but days stretched into weeks and months and nothing happened. For a time, the only means of access was to climb and take your chances with the spikes on top. Soon, though, in what hindsight tells us was one of the first displays of their budding neighborhood authority, Peace Pipe, Bird and Jay Zed – partly, I still think, because they considered climbing somehow beneath them – forced a gap between the wire mesh and the wall, a space we used until the fence got all bent out of shape. When the official cubbyhole finally did appear, it was frankly redundant. Peace Pipe, Bird and Jay Zed, especially, would look at that cubbyhole, and at anyone so gauche as to think of using it, with undisguised contempt. They had a word for things like that cubbyhole, things that denoted conformity and a life lived in dull obedience. “Citizen.” Noun and adjective merged. Citizens did citizen things.

On the day my habit went public, I was in one of those grooves. If you’ve been in one yourself, ever, you’ll know what that means. I was one with the ball. It’s beautiful when it happens. It was actually an inconvenient time for a groove, all things considered, but you can’t choose your groove times, and once you’re in one you’ve got to go with it. You’re being guided by a higher hand. Nothing, not even the presence very nearby of three guys you would make a point of avoiding in any other setting, is going to knock you out of that groove. You’re in it until that higher hand decides it’s got an appointment elsewhere.

Even though it’s small, or maybe because it’s small, the idea of personal space is very important in the half court. Always has been, mattress activities notwithstanding. You don’t mess with the space of someone who’s already there, you don’t start making chit-chat or interfere with them in any way, unless you sense that they want you to, or they initiate it themselves. So picture the scene: I’m there in my groove with the hoop on one side while Peace Pipe, Bird and Jay Zed josh and jive and shoot at the hoop on the other side. We observe the invisible line. At times, because basketball is basketball and the ball sometimes bounces in strange ways across that line, we’re almost bumping into each other. I can guess what they’ve had for lunch by the smell of their breath, and they can probably do the same with me. But we make no official acknowledgement of each other. Until I let the cat of my habit out of its bag.

It took something special to cause it. And goodness gracious, what a special shot it was. All these years later I’ve still got to hand it to myself. It was the kind you would only attempt if you were already in a groove of Jordanian proportions. (In a slightly later era, no doubt, somebody would have had a camera phone and it would have been posted and gone viral and I would have achieved a form of celebrity that might have pre-empted the separate and stupid form of celebrity I did achieve.) It was a truly incredible no-look fadeaway over-the-shoulder sky-hook bank shot, a shot that was one part Hakeem and one part Kareem with some MJ in the mix, and it hit nothing but net. (Is there any sound in creation quite as sweet as that swish?) And now, in my exaltation, here it came.

-A hit! A very palpable hit!

Immediately I knew they had heard it. How I knew was not by sight but by sound. Missing sound. The other ball wasn’t bouncing, and when that sound stops for more than a few seconds you notice. It’s like the whole world has gone silent.

~ ~ ~

Peace Pipe, Bird and Jay Zed were a package deal. It’s ironic, because right about then we were studying Venn Diagrams in math class. The irony is that Peace Pipe, Bird and Jay Zed did not illustrate the principle of Venn Diagrams. On the contrary, they stood in stark opposition. These guys were never about subsets or permutations and combinations. They were an indivisible unit, a three-headed being that sometimes stretched or compressed but always retained its defining oneness. And there they were now, side by side by side, these sons of Jamaica, looking at me. I had no good, solid, practical reason to turn around and look at them but you know how it is. Sometimes you just do. I did.

Well, once it was like that, me looking at them and them looking at me, I couldn’t just turn back around like it was nothing. The rule is a sacred one around Addington: Avoid eye contact as much as possible, but once it’s established follow through with whatever that contact has started up.

Nothing was said for a time, which wasn’t surprising. If Peace Pipe or Bird had ever voiced more than two words in one go, it wasn’t within my hearing. Jay Zed was the uncontested spokesman for the unit. His street name, being a Canadian variation on that of the greatest rapper who ever lived, carried the strong implication that here was a young man utterly without confidence issues. Let the citizens shuffle around in their collective self-doubting stupor; Jay Zed was going to get his. Only now does it strike it me that for someone named for a rapper Jay was never especially verbal. With words he was a minimalist, more haiku man than epic balladeer. But let it never be doubted that he had a way of making those few words count.

Jay Zed looked at me, at the ball in my hand, over at Peace Pipe and Bird, and back at me. He smiled his private poet’s smile and then spoke.

-Homeboy’s on some Shakespeare shit.

To this day I’m not sure whether he really knew or was just employing it as an all-purpose word for weird, old-sounding English. Whatever it was, he was absolutely right. Somehow, though, I had the feeling it wouldn’t be a great idea to let him know that. To say to Jay Zed “Yes! Hamlet! Ten points!” would just not have been wise at that moment. So what I did, grinning my best shit-eating grin while Peace Pipe and Bird snickered and Jay Zed kept that mystery smile up, was look Peace Pipe, Bird and Jay Zed in the eye – each of them in turn, so as to avoid any possible show of disrespect – and then turn around and take another shot. A very stupid thing to do even in normal circumstances. You should always quit on a high. But shoot I did, and sure enough it was a total brick. Like Shaq from the line. Bye bye groove.

~ ~ ~

My neighborhood, there’s no denying, is decades past its brief peak. But to me and other lifers it does possess a kind of beauty – the beauty of decay, yes, but we’ll take it. Here’s the thing though: it’s strictly seasonal. I won’t even try to defend the winters around here. With everything in shades of gray and shit-brown and no leaves on the trees to muffle the expressway roar, things do indeed get grim. I know we’re not supposed to cheer for global warming, but it will have its perks.

Not that some people won’t miss winter when the last snowflake says screw this. Guys like Peace Pipe, Bird and Jay Zed embrace winter every year because it gives them a wider range of fashions to choose from. Oversized is the thing with these guys, and in winter you can go oversize crazy. Seeing them approaching from down the street, on an afternoon in mid-November in the winter when it all went so wrong, was like spotting three gradually expanding astronauts with baseball caps instead of bubble helmets. Jay Zed, especially, had the Apollo IX vibe going on. His coat looked like some kind of futuristic industrial container. There might have been a whole spare Jay Zed in there. Anyway, here they came, and there was no dignified way for me to avoid them. When we all got within a couple of strides of each other we stopped, Mexican standoff style. Jay Zed gave my wardrobe a slow going-over from head to toe.

-That don’t do, Homes. Just don’t do.

This was in a period when Jay Zed was in thrall to The Wire, trying his best to adopt the argot of Stringer Bell and Omar, and making a respectable job of it. It was one of his series of seasonal dialects, anything being preferable to the lovely lilting patois of his Jamaican elders.

I could try to describe what I was wearing but let’s just save time and not bother. Then as now, anonymity was the driving force behind my personal aesthetic. It may limit my shopping to the church basement end of the market, but that’s okay, really. I’m cool with it. It definitely saves money. Jay Zed shook his head, looking lost in sorrow.

-Them threads, Homes. You lettin the Addington down. We doin our duty up in this bitch, we representin, you feel me? But you, Homes, you causin a problem up in here. Know what I’m sayin?

His two-man chorus giggled. Peace Pipe and Bird weren’t representing at quite the level Jay Zed was. The leadership principle applied to fashion too. But as far as unbelievably baggy designer hip-hop winter apparel went, Peace Pipe and Bird definitely had me beat by a country mile. I wasn’t about to argue that point.

-You so white.

That was Jay Zed again, neatly summing up the whole problem. Peace Pipe and Bird graduated from giggles to loud laughter. What a hoot of a concept, a white guy being white. I’d have been laughing too if I’d been them.

So there I was, representing nobody much but myself and frankly doing a poor job even with that, standing in front of Peace Pipe, Bird and Jay Zed and saying nothing. My silence was taken for concurrence that, yes, I was white. Jay Zed continued his critique.

-I mean, you on some Napoleon Dynamite shit, Homes. Ain’t you want the ladies? They not with your shit. Y’all gots to step your game up.

Being around Peace Pipe, Bird and Jay Zed almost always involved not saying what I was thinking, which at that moment was that I could not recall once ever seeing them with a lady. There didn’t seem to be room for a female in their triple act. But obviously it wouldn’t have been too wise to point that out to them, not even in a joking way. It’s the kind of thing that can backfire big-time. So I was perfectly willing to let the whole thing go. But something, maybe it was the way they kept cackling and giving each other fist-fives, kept it alive. I felt it coming on. Uh-oh.

-Thou art a queer fellow. A tailor make a man?

Well, that stopped the merriment right in its tracks. My habit had gone into its bank and withdrawn the first thing about clothing that it found, and boy, was it ever not a good one. Peace Pipe, Bird and Jay Zed, by the look of things, were taking one particular word in its most pejorative sense. A hush fell over our little scene and I became aware again of the expressway roar, even wished I could be over there dodging traffic instead of right here on this sidewalk.

Jay Zed stepped right up to me. I’m talking boxer-to-boxer close, when the referee is giving the final instructions before the ringing of the bell and the commencement of hostilities. It didn’t look good. But I had to hold the stare. Again, the code, the sacred code. It’s hard to say how long our eyes locked: long enough for me to ponder many possible fates involving many possible varieties of bodily harm. Very slowly, though, in infinitesimally graded stages, Jay Zed stopped indicating imminent violence and assumed a more reflective aspect, which by no means reassured me that I’d escaped the beatdown.

-You ain’t even bullshittin, is you, Homes?

Every word brought its own tandoori chicken whiff. Jay Zed liked the takeout at Dad’s Bagels just as much as I did. I didn’t reply and I definitely didn’t flinch from the smell. By the terms of the code, that would have been just as bad as backing down from the stare.

-You real up in here with this shit.

It seemed time to say something, and here it came.

-I am, quoth he, expected of my friends.

Insincere of me, that was. A lie, in fact. It was a stretch to say I had any friends and there was damn sure nobody waiting for me anywhere just then. But I wanted to get away and that was the line that came out. Jay Zed cocked his head a bit, almost like he’d understood me perfectly well and was considering something. Finally he backed up a step, and spoke softly.

-Whatever, Homes. Whatever.

Jay Zed nodded and the three of them stepped around me, Bird making a point of bumping my shoulder hard. I counted to ten, took my first deep breath since I’d seen them coming, and walked on.

“She’s in a band?”

“No. She just plays the banjo. You should totally meet her. You never know.”

Bill didn’t know what to say so he said what Leanne said. “You never know.”

“So you’ll do it?”

“Do what?”

“Okay, you know the Nickels on Atwater?”

The waitress directed Bill to a booth near the back of the restaurant where Merry was already seated. Slivers of ice floated in the diluted remains of a Coke in the bottom of a glass with a plastic straw in it. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” Bill offered.

“I just got here,” Merry said. And ordered another Coke.

“So. It’s Merry like merry Christmas, right?”

“Pretty weird, eh?”

“Not weird. Interesting.”

“Interesting is polite for weird.”

“No, it’s careful for cool. I think it’s cool.”

Merry looked at her chicken brochette. She dabbed at her rice with her fork. Bill watched her and waited for her to say something. He thought she might be smiling. He waited nearly thirty seconds and then he cleared his throat.

His Adam and the Ants records clinched it. Merry said she didn’t believe him. Bill thought she was pretending not to believe him. Either way, there was a pleasant quiver in Bill’s belly. Merry said she would not believe him until he actually proved he owned two Adam and the Ants records. Just like that she was coming over to his apartment. Right after she finished her coffee and her slice of Rolo Cake. He could barely touch his Chocolate Eruption.

When they got to Bill’s apartment Merry hovered near the door and looked at the floor and yawned twice in quick succession. Bill undid his jacket but Merry kept hers buttoned. Bill sensed her unease. He didn’t know where it came from. So suddenly. He felt guilty of a thing he had not done and would never even consider doing. In awkward solidarity, he zipped his jacket back up. “I’ll go get the albums,” he said. And left her standing there.

Around the corner, in his living room, Bill pulled Kings of the Wild Frontier and Prince Charming from one of his milk crates of records. Adam Ant on the covers, the makeup, the clothes, the splendour. It wasn’t funny anymore. He brought the records to Merry and showed them to her. She barely cracked a smile.

“Can I. Can I get you anything? A beer? I think I have 7Up?”

“Nothing. Thank you. Thank you but I better go.”

“At least let me walk you to the metro. It’s late.”

On the walk they were quiet and then Bill cleared his throat. “I’m curious. What’s the deal with Merry like merry Christmas anyway?”

“My mother told me she spelled it that way because she wanted me to be happy.”

“Did it work?”

“I’ve been happy at times.”

Bill offered to walk Merry all the way down to the metro platform. “It’s nothing. I have a pass.”

From the escalator, they saw a train leaving the station, going Merry’s way. “It’ll take forever for another one,” she said. “You don’t have to wait.”

“I don’t mind. And it won’t take forever. But I could leave. If you want.”

“No. Stay. If you want.”

The station was nearly empty. They had their choice of seats. Merry sat first. Bill sat half in the seat next to Merry’s and half in the next one over. “Which metro do you live at?”

“Côte-Vertu.”

Bill held a fist in front of his mouth like he was holding a microphone and spoke in a robotic female voice. “Prochaine station: Côte-Vertu. Terminus.”

Merry looked at the floor and laughed.

“You have a nice laugh, Merry. Merry du Terminus.”

He rode with her up the orange line of the metro. She told him a story about a man who lived in the suburb where she grew up, a man who was blind. “I have no idea what his name was. We called him The Blind Man.” She told Bill of the time her older brother and two of his friends mooned The Blind Man, dropped their pants and bent over on the sidewalk in front of his house when he came outside. The Blind Man had heard their giggles and had said, simply, Hello, boys. This incited Merry’s brother and his friends to run and, later, to doubt the authenticity of The Blind Man’s blindness. “They started planning ways to test him, to see if he was really blind.”

Over the intercom in the metro, Côte-Vertu was announced as the next stop. Terminus.

Merry looked at her watch. “You’re going to have to hurry. The metro’s closing.”

“I should be able to make it,” Bill said.

When the metro pulled into the Côte-Vertu station, another train was already on the track opposite theirs. It filled all the windows in their car. Merry looked at her watch again. “That’s the last one for sure. You’re going to have to run.”

Bill stood up and positioned himself in front of the doors, holding the railing installed in the wall. He turned around to face Merry. “Thank you for a fun night.” Bill staggered slightly as the metro braked. “Maybe we can do it again some time?” The train came to a stop and the doors slid open.

“Go!” Merry said. She waved her hands in front of her chest like she was shooing mosquitoes. “Go, quick!”

Bill ran from the train and down the platform and up the stairs. The other train was chiming, signalling imminent departure. Bill ran across the corridor to the opposite stairs and flew down them. The doors closed and the train slowly began to move, gradually picking up speed, leaving Bill on the platform. Across the tracks, Merry looked at him with one hand held over her mouth.

“So what happened with The Blind Man?”

“What?”

“You didn’t get to finish your story. What ever happened with The Blind Man?”

“When my brother and his friends came around again, he told them if they didn’t want their parents to hear about what shapely asses they had they’d better stay away from his property.”

“So he wasn’t blind?”

“Of course he was blind.”

“Then how did he know they’d mooned him?”

“He had neighbours who looked out for him.”

Bill shook his head and laughed. He turned and made his way up the stairs again.

When they got to the triplex where Merry lived she invited Bill up. “Taxis run all night,” he quipped, “so why not?”

Inside it was dark and it smelled faintly of chicken noodle soup. Merry flipped on a light switch near the front door. From where they stood Bill could see into the kitchen. There were empty 2-litre Coke bottles lined up on the counter, a half-dozen at least. There was a pile of dishes in the sink and another beside it. The cupboard doors beneath the sink were open, revealing an overflowing garbage can, onion peels and wet coffee grinds at the top. There were mugs and teacups and glasses in various places. There was a topless, empty can of baked beans on the counter next to the stove. All four burners held a pot or a pan; one held a pot in a pan. The floor was littered with toast crumbs, dust balls, and some grains of rice.

Merry led Bill past the kitchen and into the living room. There were more empty Coke bottles in there, on the floor and on the coffee table and under it. There was a flattened Ruffles All Dressed potato chip bag. Empty pizza boxes and a few styrofoam takeout containers. An unruly stack of papers teetered on top of the television. Clothes, unfolded, sticking to each other, lay strewn all over the couch. Bill felt something brush against his leg and he stiffened. He looked down. A black and white cat meowed up at him. Bill looked at Merry. Merry looked at Bill. She stood there, frozen, her eyes squinted and her teeth clenched. Like she had just dropped something and was too scared to look at it to see if it had broken.

Bill turned away from Merry and stepped forward, mindful of the cat. He made his way to the couch and sat down on it, on top of the clothes. He put his feet up on the coffee table, on top of a pizza box. He folded his arms and turned his head in Merry’s direction. “So. Leanne tells me you play the banjo?”