Idea in Stone

Hamish MacDonald

Idea in Stone

MacDonald, Alistair Hamish

British Cataloguing in Publication Data:

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1-59971-490-6

© 2010 Hamish MacDonald

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 UK: Scotland

“No, no—’tis no laughing matter; little by little, whatever your wishes may be, you will destroy and undermine, until nothing of what makes Scotland Scotland shall remain.”

- John Gibson Lockhard,

Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott

One

Cargo Cult

“Next.”

Stefan approached the counter and placed his book face-down, sliding it toward the checkout clerk like a ransom note. The young clerk in a Book Block apron waved a beige gun over the book’s barcode. The till emitted a bleep and showed the price in blue. “How will you be paying for this?”

Stefan handed his debit card to the clerk, his thumb over his name until he had to let go. The clerk swiped the card and handed it back. With a sigh, Stefan reached for it.

“Hey,” said the clerk, taking a second look at the card, “you’ve got the same last name as that cow who’s always on TV. God, I hate her. The CBC rolls her ass out on stage every chance they get. Did you see that show on Sunday night? What was it? ‘Down on the Reservation with Delonia Mackechnie for Remembrance Day’? I’ve heard she’s not really even Indian. She’s like this weird ugly dyke giraffe. I can’t wait till she’s dead so I can stop seeing those stupid shows.”

Stefan took back his card. The clerk picked up the book to put it in a Book Block bag. He glanced at the title: Selfness: A Workbook for Adult Children of Famous People.

“Oh,” said the clerk, “sorry.”

Stefan left the shop, pausing briefly at the door to stuff the book into a waste-bin.

~

Stefan shut the door behind him and put his house-key into the pocket of his heavy jacket. He raised his nose to the air: She’s home. The scent of ylang-ylang gave away Delonia’s presence. Perhaps, he thought, he could make it to his room.

Halfway through the dining room he paused. His mother stood there in one of the trademark outfits custom-made to suit not just her predilection for wild colours but her unusual height, too. The dress matched the bright blues and yellows of the tropical fish in the aquarium behind her. But someone else was with her, a young man with one arm sunk up to the shoulder in the tank. Delonia heard Stefan and turned around.

“Stefan! I’m glad you’re home,” she said with a big smile. Her top teeth protruded like the cow-catcher of an old train. His mother had a weight of presence, a charisma, but she was not pretty, and it hurt him every time he noticed. As a public figure, she was often projected and stretched and illuminated, adding to the effect. Other people liked her well enough, at least those who admitted to buying her records and watching her specials, so why should her looks matter? This particular smile, though, he knew this one, the up-to-no-good smile.

“Stefan, this is Tyler,” she said, gesturing to the young man, who turned and extended his hand to shake Stefan’s, then laughed and took it back when he noticed it was wet with dirty fish tank water. His smile flattened Stefan: wide, with teeth so white they verged on blue. His hair and eyes were dark, his wet arm thicker and more developed than Stefan could ever hope his might be, as if this mesomorph were a whole other species.

“I met Tyler when he was cleaning the Jacksons’ aquarium down the street, and you know what a state ours is in.” She turned to Tyler. “Stefan won’t even touch it when it gets like this. Oh, look, your shirt’s all wet with that filthy water. Stefan, take him downstairs, give him one of your shirts, and put his in the dryer.”

“Mom!”

“What? You’re both boys. You look like you’re about the same age, too. Stefan is thirty-tw—”

“Excuse us, Tyler,” said Stefan, pulling his mother by the arm toward the kitchen. He closed the door behind him and spoke in a strained whisper: “Mom, stop it. I know what you’re trying to do, and I want you to stop it.”

“But Stefan, did you get a look at him? He stepped off the pages of one of those magazines.”

“Yeah, but I don’t buy those magazines, do I? Besides, people like him aren’t interested in people like me.”

“How do you know that?”

“Look, Mom, people just don’t like me that way.”

She put a hand softly against his face. “Stefan, I just want you to be happy.” She moved her hand to his stomach as if examining for something. “You’ve got so much vexation inside you. If you met someone nice then maybe all that would settle down. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

He smiled at her. “It’s okay, I don’t mind. He probably doesn’t like men anyway.”

“Oh, no, he does. Sue Jackson asked him.”

“Ugh. That doesn’t help. Okay, I’m going to get him a shirt,” said Stefan, heading for the basement.

A minute later, Stefan heard unfamiliar steps on the stairs, and the aquarium cleaner poked his head through the door, his arms on the door-frame. “Hi,” he said, “it’s okay, I don’t need a shirt. I’m going straight home after this, so I can change there.”

Stefan nodded, then laughed nervously. “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “Every once in a while Mom does this romantic hunter-gatherer thing. Sorry if it made you uncomfortable.” Despite himself, he noticed he was trying to do his favourite attractive-guy look from the mirror.

“It’s okay,” said Tyler, “you’d be surprised how often it comes up with this job. You know that Mrs. Jackson? Well, all I’ll say is that she’s got big tits.” They laughed, then Tyler tapped the doorframe, smiled, and left.

Stefan sat down on his bed and sighed. This was familiar, this thing he called The Pain of “Never”. Why, he wondered, does beauty hurt to look at? The feeling wasn’t loneliness; more like a cousin to it. But sometimes loneliness came along for the ride, and together they ran him down.

He stared at the ceiling, hearing his mother walk Tyler to the door, then creak about, on to some other task. He had things under control and was happy being single—why did she have to stir it all up again? He closed his eyes and imagined the house upside-down, with him pinned to the ceiling in his bed, and her walking upside down on the other side of his floor. With one mental shake she fell loose. He kept shaking the house until she dropped out the chimney.

~

Stefan woke up an hour later, stuck in the stupefaction of a mid-afternoon nap. He gradually recalled who and where he was, but lay in bed a while longer to avoid the responsibility of deciding what to do with the rest of his day. He remembered a new CD that was supposed to be released that week and made it his mission to find it. He looked to his right, where thousands of plastic jewel-case spines covered the entire wall. He’d have to shuffle them all around to make space for this addition.

He bounced himself out of bed, grabbed a CD, and bounded up the stairs. He passed the living room, where Delonia sat at the piano with her bifocals, a pen, and sheets of music paper. “Where are you going?” she called as he flashed past the room’s archway.

“Out,” he replied, poking his head back around the corner. “I remembered something I need.”

“Need or want?” she chided. Stefan rolled his eyes. “Alright, but Cerise is going to be by this afternoon to move her things in, and I think it would be nice if you were here.”

“Okay, I’ll try to make it back,” he said, heading out the door. As he walked, his mind filled in variations on the rest of what he wanted to say. Because I wouldn’t want to miss seeing my mother’s girlfriend move into my parents’ house. Because I’d hate for something heavy to drop on one of her cats. Because if I’m really lucky you’ll crack some innuendo-laced joke to her that’ll make me picture you two naked together.

Leaves clung to the trees overhead, strangely green for a November day. Stefan pulled the headphones from his jacket pocket and listened to the CD he brought, the previous album by Microchimps. He loved them, though there was something unfulfilling about listening to it when he knew there was a newer album out there. His lips moved slightly with the music, and he unconsciously adjusted the inner workings of his throat to mimic the singer’s style. He looked around, saw that there was no one within earshot of him, and sang quietly to himself.

He stopped singing by the time he reached Yonge Street, which was busy with Saturday shoppers. The store-front windows promised coolness and bargains. Billboards towered above on every free surface, featuring tanned, thin, scantily-clad people. There was something sexy in the atmosphere up there that was missing at the street level, where sweaters, coats, dark colours, and plain faces prevailed.

Stefan had a pattern for browsing the music stores based on selection, price, and what the staff were like to look at. He had favourite staff members who were friendly, cute, or both, though downtown interactions were limited in nature by a band of high-pressure air surrounding each person, preserving anonymity and professionalism, and also preventing any real contact.

Stefan decided to head straight for his favourite store. It didn’t look as nice as the others, with its scruffy off-white interior, a necessary paint job infinitely delayed by the rock star signatures scribbled on its walls. He flipped through the M category of the Indie/Alternative section. The most recent Microchimp album was the one he had in his CD player. The new album wasn’t in the stacks or in the displays above. He could ask the staff, but he knew they’d say that if it wasn’t in the stacks, it wasn’t in. And if this store didn’t have it, no one in town would.

His mission was thwarted. He briefly considered buying another album, but knew that was silly: he’d hate it when he got it home because it wasn’t That One. When he was struck with thing-lust, it was specific and could not be fooled. He’d assumed that this search would not only work, it would fill his whole afternoon, too. Now his day was without purpose. But he couldn’t go home. Not yet. Not knowing what he’d face there.

He walked up the shop’s stairs to the Folk/Adult Contemporary section. He knew better, but found his fingers moving through the M section there until they reached ‘Mackechnie’. With each subsequent flip he moved back in time. Last year’s album showed his mother just as she looked today at home. Moving to the previous, from a few years before, he saw his mother with grey hair—a period when she briefly stopped dyeing her hair black. Flip, flip—the late Eighties, with pastel skirt-suits and a cloud of bullet-proof hair.

Flip, flip.

His father was alive again.

Robert Mackechnie held the neck of an upright guitar with one hand while the other rested around his wife’s shoulder, and a big, contented smile parted his soft reddish-brown beard. The couple’s matching leisure suits carbon-dated the album to somewhere in the late Seventies. Where was I that day? Stefan wondered.

“Urf!” he heard someone moan. He turned around to see a staff member struggling with a large cardboard cut-out on the stairs. The figure wasn’t going to fit in this small space, but the staff member was either determined or under orders to make it fit. As the employee bumped it around the railing, Stefan saw the printed side: Delonia Mackechnie: Verses Versus Verses. The employee forced the figure upright, and the head bent forward at a right angle to the body. “Damn.” He tried to fold her hair, which didn’t work, so he devised a way to accordion-fold her neck so her face rested in her cleavage.

Noticing Stefan, the staff member apologised as if practising for his manager: “I can’t make her fit in here. She’s just too big.”

“I know how you feel,” said Stefan.

~

Stefan moved from store to store, but nothing appealed to him. He searched for something—a book, a new product of some sort—that would give him some new-found ability or sense of direction. The searching looks he gave the fresh-faced clerks in the store came from the same instinct. There was a luminous promise in everything, but he knew the promise was an empty one. Here’s everything I could hope to have, he thought, looking at a toaster with shapely Deco lines, but it’s all meaningless. What about romance? he wondered. No. Romance is not salvation. For all he knew, love wasn’t real but just another thing people distracted themselves with. It was all just marketing and acquisition in the vain hope of filling the void.

He shook his head. I live in a cargo cult.

~

Stefan stood outside the church. This is crazy, he thought. He’d read about these people in one of his mother’s “hocus-pocus” magazines, as he called them. This group claimed that they’d managed to synthesise science and religion into a new practice which gave them power over the mysteries of life and death. They called themselves the Matholics, and Stefan couldn’t believe he was actually walking into one of their hives.

This was one of Toronto’s older churches, having been built in the early 1900’s. Stefan looked around and laughed to himself: if his mother saw him doing something spiritual, she’d be almost as ecstatic as she was when she discovered he liked men. “At last, I knew you’d have something interesting about you!” There was no way he’d give her the satisfaction of knowing about this. 

“Can I help you?”

Stefan turned to see a man in clerical robes of shiny black material with a high, straight collar. The man smiled, warm and friendly, without the spinning hypnotic whirls in his eyes Stefan half-expected to see.

“Uh,” said Stefan, embarrassed to say it, even though these people claimed this was their stock and trade, “I’d like to get in touch with my father.”

“I’m going to make two assumptions,” said the clergyman. “You’ve never been here before, and your father is dead.”

“Two for two,” said Stefan, relaxing a little.

“Not a problem,” said the man. “I’m Brother James. Welcome to the Toronto chapter of the Matholic church. Let me show you around.” He showed Stefan the old features of the church and the parts that they’d renovated. Finally, he led Stefan to a bank of confessionals. “You don’t need to believe in our doctrine or anything in particular for this to work. It’s been proven time and again. But you’ll see for yourself. Here,” he said, indicating the curtained entrance of a confessional.

Stefan sat in the dim light. The cleric slid open the small window, but Stefan couldn’t see him through the mesh. “The trick with the Eter-net is that the dead use a different logic from us sometimes, and the way they communicate, well, it’s subtle. It’s easy to miss, which is why there are so many doubters. But it is very powerful. So you should be absolutely sure you want to do this before we begin.”

Stefan paused. He wasn’t sure if he believed in any of this, so it seemed pretty harmless. And if it did work at all...

“No, I want to do this,” he said.

“Alright,” said the cleric’s soft voice, “let’s begin. You’ll see a piece of paper in front of you, and a pen just to the right of it.” An angled light-box, like a photographer’s, illuminated in front of him. On it was a single sheet of paper with a pearlescent tone and tiny, hair-like filaments running through it. Stefan looked to the side and found a squat blue fountain pen. He uncapped it with an audible click. “Good,” said the cleric, “now write to the person you want to reach. If you make any requests, try to use simple sentences, as much for yourself as for the recipient.”

“Uh, alright,” said Stefan. The very idea was preposterous, yet he put his pen to the sheet and wrote the words “Dear Dad”. He paused there, a stream of memories flying through his mind—his parents playing on a campground stage while he toddled through the crowd; his father and a slightly taller him in a picture, behind them a black Lake Superior and a blazing pink and red sunset sky; his father giving him his first drink—a hot rum toddy at a ski lodge where they performed some Christmases; his father pulling the car over because he and Stefan were crying with laughter at something on the radio; his father, his father, his father.

For the next half hour he wrote, his handwriting getting smaller and smaller as he went so he could say as much as possible in the space of the page. He wrote all the things he’d never spoken before, and described as best he could everything that had happened since he was nine and his father made that fateful step off the stage, falling into the percussion section of the orchestra pit, impaled on a high-hat. People said his father was a drunk, but he refused to believe it. With barely enough room for another line, he realised he hadn’t actually asked his father for anything. Maybe there was no need. But that was the point of this exercise, so he wrote two words in the tiny space left in the corner of the page: “Save me.”

He’d completely forgotten about the cleric. “Hello?”

“Hello,” said a contented voice from the other side of the divider, “are you finished?”

“Yeah.”

The curtain whipped open with a clatter and Stefan squinted at the daylight. The cleric stood there, smiling, while Stefan clutched his piece of paper. “Come with me,” he said. He led Stefan to a vestibule near the front of the church and gestured to a device that looked like a cross between a Roman pedestal and a photocopier. Its top was open, and the man gestured for Stefan to put his paper down on it. The cleric was about to close the top, but stopped. “Oh,” he said, “there’s just the matter of payment.”

“Right,” said Stefan, “how much is it?”

“One hundred and fifty dollars. That includes tax.”

Stefan blanched, but he had to go through with this, and not just to save face. “Do you take credit cards?”

“We certainly do,” said the cleric, pulling out a device from his robes. Stefan handed his card to the man and he zipped it through. A moment later, he said, “Good, it’s been approved. Thank you.” He closed the top of the pillar, and a strong light leaked from under the lid. Stefan could feel the heat, and heard his paper crackling.

The cleric opened the top and the sheet was gone. “All finished,” he said. Stefan smiled and nodded, feeling quite stupid, having fallen for this magic trick. He quietly followed as the cleric led him back to the front entrance of the church.

~

Stefan turned the corner to his street and walked under the canopy of trees. He saw a rental truck parked and knew it was for his house. Closer now, he watched men in blue jumpsuits moving large objects from the open rear of the truck to his front door—boxes, gnarled antique furniture, and a procession of cello cases. Stefan stepped around the workers and boxes to get through the door.

“Stefan,” he heard Delonia saying from somewhere in the mess. He kept moving, wanting nothing more than to reach his room, the place his friends jokingly referred to as The Fortress of Solitude. However, the notion of Superman living in his mother’s basement had loserish implications he didn’t like to think about.

“Stefan,” repeated Delonia. She’d spotted him and closed in. He tried to dodge around a cello case, but his foot made contact with something disturbingly soft, and the thing made a hiss of feline protest. “There you are,” said Delonia. “I wanted to ask you to stay home for supper tonight. It’s the first night Cerise will be with us, and I thought it would be nice for us all to eat together.”

“Mom, can you understand how galactically weird this is for me? You’re asking me to have supper with my mother and her goddamned—”

“Hello Stefan,” said Cerise, suddenly at his side.

“Hello,” he replied. “How are you?”

“Frankly, I’m a bit nervous about the move. I was in my other house for a long time, and I’m not sure how the cats will adjust. Also… I don’t want to come between you and your mother.”

Feel free, he thought. “Well, thanks for being so honest.”

The phone rang. It stood on a table next to Stefan, but he made no move to answer it. Stefan watched as Delonia rushed awkwardly through the slalom course of detritus, then he picked up the phone and handed it to her. Offended on his mother’s behalf, Cerise asked in a tone far too parental for his liking, “Why didn’t you answer that for her?”

“I can’t use the telephone.”

Delonia covered the mouthpiece, aware of the exchange. “He hears things on it, voices,” she said, wiggling a hand next to her ear.

Cerise looked at Stefan blankly.

“She exaggerates,” he said. “It’s just one voice.”

“Oh.” Not sure what to do with the information, Cerise picked up a cat.

~

Stefan took off the respectable-looking sweater he’d worn to the supper table, folded it up, and stuffed it in a drawer. He put on his cordless headphones and put a CD in the flat stereo on the wall. The upbeat music made him feel happy, and he danced around as he pulled off his trousers. He stood in front of the mirror in his T-shirt and Y-fronts. You’re kinda short, he thought, and skinny, except for that. He lifted his shirt and poked his small tummy. And you might lose your hair. He lifted his drooping bangs to inspect the tide-line with its V-shaped peak. His eyes were big and brown, set into a long face that tapered (maybe a little too much) into a small chin. His long nose led to a wide smile bracketed by long dimples. I think you’re cute, he thought. But cartoonishly, friendly-cute. The aquarium guy was smoulderingly cute. I want to smoulder. People like smoulder. Smoulder, smoulder, smoulder. The word lost its meaning and sounded funny, foreign.

He hit the Stop button on the stereo, hung up his headphones, and dropped into bed, the rhythm of the song still in his head, carrying him away.

He drifted backwards, flashes of the day’s sights before him, giving way gradually to a soft darkness. A familiar voice spoke words he couldn’t quite hear, then faded out, replaced by the sound of his father’s voice singing a simple tune. Then that, too, became a faint echo in a large space.

He opened his dream-eyes and found himself sitting cross-legged on the moon. The powdery landscape stretched away in every direction, punctuated with the odd rock or crater. Fireworks went off overhead in the dark space-sky. Stefan reached for the can of beer which he knew, by dream logic, was at his side. He took a sip, then placed it back down, noticing as he did that the ground wasn’t dusty anymore, but covered in prickly, purple, almost floral undergrowth. Looking up again, he saw the whole moon was covered in purple.

~

Stefan’s stereo turned itself on, blaring music. He sat upright in bed, but couldn’t see. Blearily panicked, he groped at his face, discovering his T-shirt was up over his head. He pulled it off and looked at the clock beside his bed: seven-thirty. Time to get up for work. He looked down and scratched his stomach. There was something in his belly-button. Lint? He plucked it out and looked at it: a tiny piece of newsprint with the letter E on it. He shook his head and put it on his bedside table, then went upstairs to have a shower.

Two

Jacks and Queens

Stefan waited for the subway, leaning against the glazed, curry-coloured tiles of the platform wall. He let the other passengers crowd along the ledge: he wasn’t in a hurry to get to work, he didn’t like being jostled in a crowd, he was afraid of “pushers”, and he wanted to feel cooler than everybody else. And cool, he knew, was all in the little details.

For one, his job allowed him to dress however he wanted. Today he wore a T-shirt and a pair of baggy hemp trousers his mother bought him as a birthday present a few months ago. To his surprise, they became his favourite trousers, and they also seemed indestructible. He allowed that some of her wing-nut ideas had merit. Some.

A subway train, silver and burnished like something from the back of a kitchen drawer, pulled up and its doors opened. The crowd flowed toward them like water to a drain. A voice came over the station’s public address system telling the riders to let the other passengers off first, but it went unheeded. As the voice spoke, Stefan heard something else, as if a second person was speaking close to the announcer. But he knew otherwise. The faint, broken words were a mix of English and perhaps a foreign language, but the voice was as familiar as his own. He’d learned to dismiss it years ago.

He pictured a film clip he’d seen of a Japanese subway in which men used large aluminium potato-mashers to shove people into the cars. He smiled.

The pixel-board on the platform showed it was now after 9am. Predictably, the crowd thinned, and Stefan moved away from the wall. Minutes later, the next train arrived, comfortably empty, and Stefan strolled leisurely through the doors as they opened. The subway game was all about getting a seat, and he’d just scored.

~

Stefan waited in a small room that was beige in every way except for the posters on its walls, relics of past children’s shows. Cartoon characters and live entertainers looked down at him, smiling so big and happy they looked about to drool. He moved the overflowing ashtray on the coffee-table aside, put his legs up, and leaned back. His fingers probed and massaged under his jaw, loosening the root of his tongue from below. He hummed with his mouth closed and stretched the soft palate at the back of his throat.

A woman opened the door, smiled, and said, “We’re ready for you Mr. Mackechnie.” He nodded, picked up his jacket and satchel and followed her. They walked through a maze of halls decorated with similar posters and children’s broadcasting awards.

The production assistant remained strangely silent as they walked. “You’re new here,” said Stefan. “What’s your name?”

“I, uh, my name’s Wendy.”

“Hi,” said Stefan, “nice to meet you. So did you study broadcasting, or is this just a job?”

“I’m, uh, I’m sorry, I was told not to speak to you before you go into the studio. The producer got really mad at me the other day after I talked to one of the talent. He fell out of character and had to warm up again.”

“Who did you talk to?”

“Ron Emery.”

“Figures. He does the voice-over for a goddamned lightbulb. There is no character. Certainly not the way he does it. Yeah, don’t worry about all that crap with me.”

Wendy laughed, relieved. “What do you do to get into character for Bloob?”

“I do a funny voice.”

“Yeah,” she said, “but people really respond to him. You must do something. There’s a quality to your performance that’s really special.”

“I don’t know. I brush my teeth. Have you ever been in the booth at the same time as Ron? Ugh.” He smiled at her. “Okay, seriously, I do some vocal exercises, I suck on a cough drop if I’m sick, and I goof around in front of a microphone. We had a lot of mics around when I was growing up, so I’ve always been comfortable around them.”

Wendy gestured him past a thick door with a number four and an unlit ‘Recording’ sign over it. “You’re in this booth today. Thanks very much for the talk. I appreciate it. Sheesh, and they said you were difficult.”

Stefan’s smile disappeared as she closed the door. What? His concentration left him completely.

The sound engineer held up a magic-marker sign to the window. “Ready?” Stefan held up a ‘one minute’ finger. Difficult? He pulled his sides—the dialogue he was supposed to record—from his satchel, then reached back in and rummaged around for the little figurine of his character. He found it in a corner of the bag, a blue plastic ox with a ring through its nose, standing upright in a pair of running shoes. He pulled it out, blew it clean, and sat it on the music stand in front of him. Looking at it, he cocked his head, made an adjustment in his throat, and said, “Reduce!” He shook his head, poked fingers at his throat, and tried again. “Reduce, reuse—” He smiled, then turned to the sound booth, giving a thumbs-up and nodding.

~

An hour later, the show’s producer visited the booth. “How’s it going, Stefan?” she asked.

“I don’t know, I’m a little off today,” he said. “I had this weird conversation with the new PA just bef—”

“Yeah, sorry about that, we’ve been having some problems with her.”

“No, it’s not her fault. She just said—nevermind. Look, I have issues with this week’s script.”

One of the producer’s plucked red eyebrows rose. “Really?”

“I know you don’t care what I think. I’m just a guy who’s paid ever-so-slightly above scale to do a voice-over. But, you know, I am Bloob’s voice, so I feel a certain responsibility for what this public figure says to children.”

The producer said nothing.

“I know, I know. It’s just a stupid kiddie show.”

The producer’s other eyebrow raised.

“What I mean is, I realise that it’s an important commercial property for you and it’s become a very popular show. But we are making statements about the environment here, and I think it’s important for them to be accurate.” He flipped through his script. “Like this part: ‘Kids, you are the future of the earth. Only you can save it.’” He looked at the producer. “C’mon.”

“Stefan, don’t you believe that children are the future?”

“Don’t get all Whitney on me. The show’s biggest sponsor is Porvental Chemicals. Last year the company paid no Canadian taxes and ‘accidentally’ spilled enough solvents into Lake Ontario to petrify every last zebra mussel.”

“But the mussels were growing out of control. They were a hazard to the lake’s natural ecology.”

“Yeah, so the company got an environmental grant for $11.2 million.”

“Stefan, did you ever think that the company is trying to turn their industry around by investing in projects like our show?”

“But—”

“Stefan, it’s not your concern. Don’t make trouble. Just do your day’s lines. Leave the issues to us.” She started to leave, but paused at the door. “Oh, did you happen to make a statement to Greenpeace?”

“Um, I might have.”

“Please don’t do things like that,” she said, leaving the room.

Stefan went back to the music stand and picked up his figurine. “Hey kids,” he said in the character’s voice, “do you know that your mommy’s makeup contains poisonous chemicals called phthalates?” He turned the figurine’s head back and forth. “Hey kids, did you know that my ass is completely for sale?” Stefan tried to make the head nod, but it wouldn’t, so he picked up a pencil and poked it into the ox’s chest repeatedly. He looked up to see the sound technician laughing and holding up a sign that said “Lunch”.

Stefan left the booth, and Wendy ran up beside him. “Jean said that I upset you this morning. I’m really sorry, I don’t know how I—”

“It’s okay,” said Stefan, “it’s not your fault. It’s between me and her. Well, me, her, a multinational chemical company, and some zebra mussels.”

“Oh, good. Here,” she said, handing him a slip of paper, “you got a phone message from someone while you were in the booth. It sounded like he said his name was Ellen.”

“Do you suppose it might have been ‘Allen’?”

“No, I don’t think so. Sounded like Ellen.”

“Right, okay. Thanks.” He left her, banking off down a hallway toward the commissary where he bought his lunch. Although it was November, the weather was still warm, so he ate outside in a concrete park sheltered between skyscrapers, looking at a phone booth all the while. When he finished, he crumpled up the packaging, napkin, and bag from his lunch and threw it into a waste-bin, thinking what an awful amount of garbage it was. I sound like Mom. Then he marched to the phone booth.

He dropped a quarter into the phone, dialled the number he’d been given, and braced himself. “Hello, Lewisbus, Traffordwalk, and Lemirefish. How can I help youbuttie?” Stefan struggled to filter out the second voice.

“Hi, could I please speak to Allen Hoffstand, please?” asked Stefan, realising that he’d said ‘please’ twice. He wasn’t good at business-speak.

“One moment,” said the receptionist.

Allen answered a moment later. Aware of Stefan’s trouble with the phone, he communicated the evening’s plans slowly. The guys and he were meeting for coffee, maybe dinner, and wanted Stefan along. Stefan said he was up for an evening away from home, as the connubial bliss between his mother and her girlfriend was still at a toxic level.

“I have to go,” said Allen. “I’m in discussionsstay this afternoon about a big kipestate in Forest Hill, a bunch of siblings alldoon fighting over this property. Should be funday.”

“I’m off to explain in a funny voice why not having an atmosphere will be a good thing,” said Stefan. “I’ll see you tonight.” They said their goodbyes. Stefan was suitably convinced Allen had no idea he’d be walking into a surprise party this evening. Allen’s partner of five years hadn’t been invited for a strategic reason: they wanted to have fun.

Back in the booth, Stefan recorded several minutes of Bloob-speak. The sound engineer gave him the thumbs up. Then he made the “Okay, let’s move on” signal they’d worked out. Stefan had some bit parts to record, characters whose preliminary sketches he’d seen. His job now was to give sensitive, nuanced line readings for a leaky lawn sprinkler and a toaster with a knife stuck in it that was supposed to look surprised but looked more like it had been murdered.

The technician poked angrily at his sound board and his computer. He shook his head and made a throat-cutting gesture, then held up an open ‘Take five’ hand. Stefan nodded, picked up his sides from the music stand, and left the booth. He went to the producer’s office, knocked on her door, and opened it.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Uh,” said Stefan.

“What?”

“I’m supposed to record this toaster dialogue this afternoon. Isn’t that a bit outside the show’s scope? I mean, I thought we were supposed to be doing environmental topics, not safety tips.”

“Stefan,” she said, putting down her pen and turning to face him, “did you know that Ron Emery came in here the other day and did the most perfect impression of Bloob?”

“Oh,” said Stefan. He nodded and left. Rather than head back to the booth, he went to the sound-stage where they taped the live-action Super Fantastic Window show (in English and French). He made his way across the stage by the illumination of a bare-bulb work light on an iron stand, past the big gold window frame with its green-screen panes, past the bulbous coat-rack with its fun-fur coats, and dropped with a sigh onto the same puffy green couch that he’d seen on the show as a child. He unbuttoned his hemp trousers and masturbated.

~

Wendy opened the door of the beige Green Room. “Oh there you are,” she said. “Chuck fixed the mixer.” Stefan stood and followed her again.

“What’s BSE?” she asked as she opened the booth’s door for him.

“Huh? I think it stands for Bovine Spongiform Ecephalo-something. Mad Cow disease. Why?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “I just heard Jean talking about it on the phone with one of the writers, and I didn’t know what it meant.” She shut the door as she left.

Stefan stared at his little figurine.

~

“Hey guys,” said Stefan, coming up the stairs to the coffee-shop’s second floor. He placed his foamed soy milk spiced tea drink on the table, took off his coat, and plopped down into one of the deep chairs.

“Hey Stef,” said Allen. Stefan noted that Allen, as could be expected, had already been home, changed out of his business suit, redone his hair (and put on a touch of make-up? or was that fake tan?), and changed into queer gear, since he was going to be seen in the gay ghetto. He was in a relationship, but he still wanted to be wanted. Tonight he wore tight black jeans and a white T-shirt that clung to his gym-enhanced frame. The T-shirt was printed with black letters: “Read my lisp: Equality now!”

To Stefan’s left was Paulo, with arresting dark eyes, wavy black hair, and skin that was dark enough to look like a golden tan, not quite dark enough to be considered ‘ethnic’—except by casting directors. His acting talent was considerable, but success in film or television eluded him, and he scraped by working for a repertory theatre company. Paulo was the handsomest person Stefan knew, yet he was so uncomfortable about his looks, his race, or something, that Stefan thought of him as an “ugly beautiful person”. No matter how much adulation Stefan and the others gave him, he seemed set on his unhappiness. The group figured that somehow people picked up on this, which explained his perpetual singledom. After the blind date where they met, Stefan reported, “He’s a beautiful prince you kiss who turns into a poisonous frog”. Their early mutual disinterest made it easy to slip immediately into friendship.

“Where’s Rick?” asked Stefan. Rick rounded out Stefan’s triumvirate of friends.

“He called Allen’s cell about ten minutes ago to say he’d be a bit late,” said Paulo. “He just finished up a contract on Bay Street.”

“Holy crap,” said Stefan, “not one of those big bank buildings.”

“Yeah,” replied Allen, “he got the contract for the tower I work in.”

“Oh yeah. Did you have anything to do with that?” asked Stefan.

“Well, I told him it was up for renewal. But he won the bid on his own.”

“Can you imagine hanging up there on one of those little platforms?” asked Paulo. “And where do they get the water from?”

The three of them sat in silence, trying to figure it out. Allen gave up first, and asked how the others’ days went. Paulo described a workshop he was participating in, then Stefan recapped his day at the studio. “I think they’re going to can me,” he said. Not knowing how to respond, Allen went on to describe his day with a group of estate inheritors bickering over their shares. Allen didn’t mind, he said, because he got paid out of the estate for every moment they spent arguing with each other.

“Hey guys,” said Rick, coming up the stairs, “how’s it going?” They greeted him as he slumped down into a chair. “That was the hardest day I’ve spent since I started doing this,” he said, sipping on a paper coffee cup the size of a sandcastle bucket. “I don’t know if I can keep this contract. It’s just too much work.”

“Why don’t you hire some other people to work for you?” Allen often harangued Rick on this point whenever Rick took on a tone of nobility about being overworked. “It’s your business, and as long as you do all the work it will never get any bigger than you.”

“If I pay extra people, there won’t be enough of a profit left over.”

Allen flipped up his Okay, nevermind hands.

“Hey, Stef,” said Rick, “I wrote another song last night.”

“That’s great.”

“What’s it about?” asked Paulo.

“Oh, well, it’s—it’s kind of hard to explain. I mean, it’s kind of reductive to take something as personal as a song and, you know, sum it up.”

“Okay,” said Allen, “so what kind of song is it?”

“It doesn’t really fall into a category, exactly. It’s—I dunno. I’ll play it for you guys sometime.” He turned to Stefan. “Do you think you could talk to one of your mom’s people for me?”

Stefan squirmed. “You should really finish your demo first. They can’t do anything for you if you haven’t got a demo. And I don’t know if her agent is really the right person for you. I mean, she’s considered Folk, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” said Rick. “I’ve gotta get that demo finished. I swear I’m going to do it first thing in the new year.”

“That’s great,” said Stefan. The others made sounds of approval. Stefan regretted the thought, but was satisfied that he’d never have to present anything to anyone if he waited for Rick to finish the demo of his songs. They were good, the ones he’d heard, though most of them were about his ex-girlfriend. She’d been around for about a year, and sometimes he’d take her out with them, clutching to her to assert his straightness like a love-doll personal flotation device. Then she left for Japan or Malaysia or wherever it was, leaving their relationship sufficiently open-ended for him to imagine it was still going on.

“I hate my job,” said Rick.

“Then stop doing it,” replied Allen.

“Easy for you to say. You’ve got buckets of money in the bank.”

“Yeah, but I made it. It’s not like somebody just gave it to me.”

“I think,” said Stefan, “that by the time you reach thirty, you’re kind of set money-wise. Like, you’re poor-thirty or rich-thirty, and it’s probably not going to change.”

“Oh God,” said Paulo. Rick moaned in agreement.

“So which are you?” Allen asked Stefan.

“I guess I’m poor-thirty.”

“Ha!” laughed Rick. “That’s a good one.”

“What? You mean because of my mother?” Stefan shifted in his chair. “She’s not that rich, you know. She still has to keep doing records and shows, or we’d be sunk. And besides, just because she has money doesn’t mean I do. It’s not mine, you know. All my money comes from the voice-over work. I might not even have that soon.”

“I still don’t think you’re poor-thirty,” said Rick casually over his drink.

“I don’t like this idea,” said Allen. “I think that people are always free to be as successful as they want to be. They just don’t bother trying.”

“Listen to you,” said Rick, turning to face him. “You’re so self-righteous about your success.”

“And you’re self-righteous about your lack of it.”

The evening was supposed to be fun and festive, but at this rate Stefan imagined them going home hating each other, so he changed the subject. “Hey, we should get moving if we’re going to make our supper reservation. Let’s get a cab.”

~

“Surprise!” yelled a large group of people at the back of the bar. Supper had gone into overtime, so even the fashionably late were there when they brought Allen in. He was genuinely surprised, his eyes wide open with joy as people from various parts of his life made their way forward to congratulate him. Allen was out in every possible way, so he had no qualms about them meeting in a gay bar. Stefan, on the other hand, hadn’t mentioned it at work. He didn’t ever mention it if it wasn’t necessary, and took a secret enjoyment from situations where people didn’t know or made mistakes about him. (When his mother was around, these misunderstandings tended to get cleared up immediately.)

Stefan pulled back from the crowd, happy for his friend, trying not to think about himself in relation to Allen’s situation. He started for the bar, but changed direction and headed downstairs to the bathroom, dodging the urinals at the last moment when he saw someone else standing there (not wanting to be presumed to be cruising, even though he found the thought intriguing). The right-hand stall was free, and he darted in. He sat and sighed, looking at the graffiti on the stall’s floor-length chalkboard walls, telephone numbers he would never call, propositions that sounded interesting or frightening. Most of them were old and smeared, and though he was tempted to write something, he couldn’t see any chalk. He leaned back and closed his eyes.

When he opened them, he gasped: the four walls around him were covered, from the acoustic tiles of ceiling to the wet tiles of the floor, with an intricate chalk sketch of a city. Spires rose, columns stood tall, and the black of the walls was incorporated into the ancient brickwork. Between the buildings wound little alleys and walkways. Even the streets were made of brick. In the distance were hills rendered with green chalk, shaded in with patches of purple.

Stefan poked a finger to the wall and drew it back. His fingertip held a circle of white powder, and one of the buildings now had an extra window.

Wherever this place was, for whatever reason he’d been shown it, Stefan was in love.

~

He staggered home several hours later, his head and his belly sloshing with beer. He’d hoped the walk would settle him, but he made it from the downtown neon and billboards and pixelboards blazing their promises, through the Annex with its subtler, earthier urban alternative offerings, to the tree-lined street where he lived, and he was still drunk.

He tiptoed through the house to his room and changed into soft old gym clothes to sleep in. He put down his head, but his bed felt unsteady. He sat up, breathing deeply to steady himself. He put a hand under his shirt to touch his stomach. It was cold. It gurgled. This will not be good, he thought. Looking down, he saw something in his belly-button. He pulled it out, a piece of feathery old paper. On it were the letters DIN. He placed it in the dish on his bedside table with the other. Dine? he wondered.

He tried to lie down, but his stomach moved like a washing machine. He put on his coat and padded upstairs, past the main floor, to the second floor. He thanked a higher power that his mother’s bedroom door was closed, and continued through to the office. The room was already cluttered, but now it overflowed with Cerise’s boxes and music things. The more careful he tried to be, the more things he tripped over, but eventually he reached the window at the front of the house, opened it, and eased himself out.

Stefan sat for a while on the prickly tar-shingled roof, looking over the tree-tops at the illuminated building blocks of the city and the humbler stars beyond. He thought of Allen’s life—the job, the partner, the well-decorated condominium. I don’t want that, he thought, but I do want something. He thought of the chalk city he saw. It had to be out in the world somewhere. Maybe. He thought of the voice he heard so often. It was just one voice. So it had to belong to somebody. Maybe.

His silent laugh made a cloud in front of him. The answer to the maybes was so simple:

I have to run away from home.

Three

Guardians

“Jean?” asked Wendy, poking her head around the open Green Room door. She saw Stefan and looked for someone else in the room. “I thought I heard Jean in here.”

Stefan smiled and put down the script he was studying. “Pretty good, eh?”

“That was you? Yeah, that was very good.”

“Thanks. It was hard to find the right blend of shrew, harpy, and eel, but I think I’ve finally got her down.”

Wendy smiled weakly, skipping over the comment to preserve her neutrality. “Chuck’s ready for you to put down your dialogue in Number Five.”

“Okay, thanks.” Stefan picked up his things and headed down the hall. In the sound booth, he set his gear up on the music stand, picked up his sides, and positioned himself carefully next to the microphone. He stretched his mouth wide open, made an exaggerated movement like a camel chewing, then gave the sound technician a thumbs-up sign. A red light illuminated on the microphone and Stefan took a deep breath to speak. The sound booth door opened and Jean the producer entered. Stefan exhaled.

“Sorry,” she said, “I just had a meeting with lawyers and one of the writers, and we came up with a revised copy of today’s script. Here you go Stefan. Sorry for the short notice.”

Stefan was about to launch into a complaint, but found himself empty. Why should he care? He was leaving. He had no idea where to, or how he was going to manage it, but the idea had clicked into place, and he was as good as gone. Jean held out the sheets of paper. Stefan smiled at her and took them. He riffled through them, his eyebrows raising reflexively, little “Hmms” vibrating from his mouth at intervals. He read bits of the revisions aloud: “With bioengineering it will be possible to feed the world... Nuclear energy continues to be the cleanest, most efficient way to produce electricity...” He turned to Jean and smiled again. “Great!”

She cocked her head, looked at him for a moment, then said, “Oh. Well, okay then. I’ll be in my office.” At the door, she took another look back at Stefan, paused, then left.

The work went easily for the rest of the day, and Jean didn’t interrupt again. Stefan wondered why he hadn’t thought of the ‘go limp’ approach before. Luckily, his conscience left him alone, perhaps because of his mind’s preoccupation with the recent change in plans.

~

DINEGHRU. Stefan rubbed his eyes and looked at the little wisps of paper. Breathing carefully so he wouldn’t blow them off his side-table, he placed this morning’s down, the letter B. DINEGHRUB. Oh, he thought, that’s much clearer.

He went upstairs, intending to have a shower, but his mother stopped him along the way. “Stefan,” she said, “you’re just in time to have breakfast with us!” He sat at the table, his hunger overriding his discomfort at the idea. His mother’s Saturday breakfasts were his favourite meal of the week. She scooped and sliced and arranged, then brought over a heaping plate of wheat-free, eggless, milkless pancakes, fat-free, meatless mock-bacon, and fried potatoes—actual potatoes. The ‘bacon’ made him gassy, but he did actually enjoy it. He liked all of his mother’s synthetic cooking. Being so familiar with it, he found the real-world inspirations for his mother’s food analogies odd, foreign. (Though he regularly ordered double-helpings of real bacon when he ate out with friends as a little stand for his independence, despite the queasy and guilty feelings that followed.)

Cerise’s gown flowed as she approached the table, making her look like a husky piece of artwork that had escaped before being properly unveiled. “Good morning,” she said to them both, lingering with a knowing look to Delonia. She sat to Stefan’s right, in his father’s seat. The table in the kitchen was square, though, and not large, so he let the transgression pass. Had she taken the other seat she’d be sitting opposite him, and that would be a more pressing annoyance.

“Good morning,” said Delonia, carrying plates over for herself and Cerise, leaning down to give Cerise a kiss on the cheek as she put her plate down. Stefan spurted orange juice back into his glass. He wiped his mouth and cleared his throat. “So are you almost ready for your Christmas show, Mom?” he asked.

“Almost. We haven’t filled the third guest slot yet, and we’ve got a few more rehearsals to do. Oh, which reminds me: are you free to pick me up on Monday night at the studio?”

“Oh,” he said, as if his plans would be horribly compromised, although he had none.

“You know I wouldn’t ask you, but you know, since I can’t drive—”

What a fiasco that was, he remembered, Canada’s first lady of song (okay, fourth, fifth, or maybe eighth) being arrested on ‘Driving Under the Influence’ charges. The memory of the press mania over the event made Stefan uncomfortable, embarrassed for her. She knew this, he was sure, and used it for leverage in such situations. She’d also happened to give him her car after the incident—not that it was of any use to her without a license, and she was committed to its lease, so the gift wasn’t the act of largesse she liked to suggest. Still, he couldn’t come up with a good excuse for not helping her.

“All right,” he said, “what time is the rehearsal over?”

“We should be finished by 10pm,” she said.

“So will I get you at the bar?”

“Oh, that would be nice. You can say hello to the crew.”

Mmm, he thought, great: the union stage crew who’d known him since birth and took such pleasure in teasing him. They loved to drink with his mother, even though they knew better. Despite the facts, though, Stefan never played the “my mother’s an alcoholic” card, since it was so expected of famous people’s children. And other than the car accident, drinking was more of an occasional hobby for her than a problem, not even dramatic enough to warrant sympathy or special treatment. He had no excuses, he thought as he reached for a gluten-free biscuit, for not having made more of his life. In fact, he had a lot of advantages, so he should stop being such a…

A foot rested on his. He looked to his mother, who chewed absently on fruit salad. With effort he resisted looking at Cerise, until the foot started wiggling. He gave her a look with flared eyes. She pulled her foot away, her hand flying to her mouth as her face flushed.

Stefan let his fork clatter to his plate and stormed from the table. Delonia, surprised, followed after him, down the stairs. She reached his bedroom door before he could slam it.

“What,” she demanded, “is the matter with you?”

“Your girlfriend made a pass at me that was intended for you.”

“Oh,” said Delonia with a giggle.

“You don’t love her,” declared Stefan.

“What?”

“Mom, you’re not a lesbian. She’s just the first person to get close to you since Dad died. I think you’re confused.”

“Wh— I— You don’t know the first thing about it. How could you? Why don’t you move out and rent a nice little closet somewhere? Isn’t that what you’d like?”

“Mom, just because you’re all liberal and stuff doesn’t mean you can be a lesbian at will. You’re not gay, you’re just lonely.”

She turned and left his room without another word. He wondered if his point had struck home. It was just a guess. If it was true, though, he’d just injected a doubt into his mother’s relationship. So she’s fooled herself into being happy, so what? That’s still happiness, isn’t it? he thought. Why did I do that? He was defending his father. Or something. Or was he feeling jealous? Of my mother’s lover? Eew. I have to get out of here, he thought, and soon.

~

On the way out of the house, he’d grabbed his mail from the front hallway shelf where his mother had stacked it. He tore the envelopes open one by one as he sipped on a soft drink in the giant food court of a downtown mall. Pixel-boards moved with images of happy shoppers carrying bags and laughing as they encountered each other. Ultra-cool kids skateboarded, sank basketballs in hoops, and kicked footballs in their spacey-looking sneakers, conveniently available for a hundred and some dollars at the store next to the sign. Background music and voices of real shoppers formed a blanket of sound around him. But he was used to it all; the flashing lights and the noise didn’t consciously register for him. He lifted a gravy-soaked French-fry and angled it into his mouth as he unfolded yet another bill.

Credit cards, his loan, the various music clubs he was committed to—Stefan looked over the papers with their totals in bold black ink. How would he pay all this off? Never mind the fact that he didn’t know where he planned to go, how could he ever get free of all the debt hanging over his head?

He wouldn’t ask his mother for help. On this he was resolute. He wondered how he could come up with the kind of money he needed.

He’d insured his voice at his mother’s suggestion. Perhaps he could—No. That’s silly, he thought. For one, he couldn’t imagine how to stage a ‘voice accident’. Then there was the awkwardness of not being able to speak, which he didn’t suppose he could handle. Not worth it, he figured, for the sake of getting rid of some debt. How much debt? he wondered. He pulled over his gravy-stained napkin, took out a pen, and listed all his financial liabilities in a column. As he added them, his spirits sank. When the total came out in only four figures, he sighed with relief, but resigned himself to the facts: this idea of leaving was stupid and unrealistic. If he kept going at this pace, the bills could stay at arm’s length. But getting rid of them altogether was impossible.

Stefan gathered up the bills and shoved them into his coat pocket. He was supposed to go out with the boys that night, he remembered. That would be good for him—a few drinks, some dancing, their company.

He leaned back in his plastic chair and sipped the last of his soft drink, wondering if a new pair of sneakers would make him feel better. Maybe if he had those he would get into shape. And being in shape—well, he had a vague sense that it was good for something. I should join a gym, he thought. It would probably be expensive, but it was something he was supposed to do.

~

Stefan put the sneakers on his bed next to the shirt he bought for that night’s outing. He took the receipts from his pocket and looked at them. What have I done? he thought. I’m in the hole, and the first thing I do is grab for a shovel.

If he was staying, it didn’t matter. Was he staying?

That’s a nice shirt, though.

He left the matter and got changed into his outfit for the evening. The shirt looked good on him, made him look kind of adorable—the best he could hope for. The running shoes had that nice new spring to them, which would be fun for dancing.

~

“Hey,” said Stefan, joining Rick and Paulo. Rick wore one of his saggy ‘serious outsider musician’ outfits, far too haphazard for the gay scene. He wasn’t available and didn’t care, so at least two or three people on any given night out asked Stefan “What’s your friend’s name? Does he have a boyfriend?” When particularly frustrated, Stefan would answer honestly: “No, he doesn’t,” omitting the detail of Rick’s overseas not-really-a-girlfriend.

Paulo wore a powder blue short-sleeved shirt he’d ironed perfectly before going out. (Somehow he never got cold, as if carrying the heat of a foreign climate in his blood, even though he’d never lived outside Canada.) His forehead was a perfect shore for the wet black waves of his hair. While the rest of their gang faded to a winter pallor, Paulo stayed a perfect summer gold. His looks had such a general appeal and, combined with a misreading of his shy air of self-deprecation, everyone assumed he operated in some aloof, unreachable league, and no one but his friends approached him.

“Where’s Allen?” asked Stefan.

“Over there, talking to Adam,” said Paulo, pointing. “Do you remember him? He’s a journalist, writes for the financial section of one of the national papers, I can’t remember which. Yeah, that’s Adam.”

“Look at you, you’re swooning, you big geek,” chided Rick.

“Sorry,” said Paulo, turning back to them.

“No, it’s cute,” said Rick. “He’s a nice-looking guy.”

“I bet he’s really got it together,” said Paulo.

“You mean he wouldn’t go for an actor-slash-cater-waiter,” added Stefan.

“Well, come on, really,” said Paulo. “He probably lives on the harbour-front in some beautiful condo with his perfect boyfriend.”

“One way to find out,” said Rick. “Hey Allen!” he called across the bar, and gestured for Allen and Adam to come over. They all said their hellos, and Rick made a particular point of introducing Adam and Paulo.

“Oh, we’ve met before,” said Adam, smiling. “I distinctly remember that.”

~

“He’s a really nice guy,” said Stefan, looking at Paulo and Adam, who sat in a corner, wrapped up in discussion punctuated with joking touches on the arm or hand that would inevitably lead to more.

“Paulo would have to work really hard to screw this up,” said Allen. “Adam is so interested in the arts. I think it’s because he’s a fundamentally un-artistic person by nature—he’s so left-brained sometimes it’s a wonder he doesn’t fall over. So he really appreciates that creative spark in other people. Besides, look at Paulo, he’s a stunner.”

“You should tell him that.”

Allen smiled. “That’s a nice idea. I will.” He took a sip of his lemonade drink. “So that just leaves you.”

“What?”

“Well, with Paulo fixed up, you’re the only one of us who’s single.”

Stefan pushed back from the table. “I don’t see that as something that needs fixing.”

“Stef, I know you want that in your life. If you were happy being single, I’d leave it alone. But it’s obvious that you’re not happy.”

“And it’s up to you to correct this, is it?”

Allen waved a hand. “I’m just going to drop it, because now you’re getting huffy.”

“I’m getting a drink, is what I’m doing,” said Stefan, getting up. “You want one?”

“Sure.”

“Another one of your girlie-pops, or would you like something else?”

“Gin and tonic,” said Allen.

“Oh, that’s much better.”

Stefan headed for the bar. Rick darted up to his side and said a word of warning—“Ming”—then dashed away again. Stefan looked around. Where?

Stefan’s stomach turned into a pitcher of ice-water. There he was, Stefan’s ex, the one his friends called Ming the Merciless, owing to the particular style he sported these days, with a trimmed little moustache and beard, a head shaven as a first strike against male pattern baldness, and a penchant for black clothes. As Stefan understood it, usually the person who’d been dumped underwent a change of image—a sudden interest in fitness, a new haircut, piercing, tattoo, wardrobe—but in their case Ming did all the work while Stefan retreated, back into his old circle of friends, back into his old hobbies, back into his mother’s house.

Already in the queue at the bar, Stefan was trapped. Ming spotted him and headed over with someone in tow. Stefan never told Ming how hurt he was, accepting instead the terms he’d been offered, the plastic olive branch of post-romance friendship. Ming wasn’t to be blamed for thinking that Stefan wanted to see him, to talk to him, even if he didn’t want to do either ever again. Each encounter left Stefan feeling belittled, defeated, and lost. He felt dread, knowing it was about to happen again.

“Stefffff-an!” said Ming, hugging him with hard slaps on the back. “I’m so happy to see you. Stefan,” he said, yelling sharply into Stefan’s ear, turning to the man he’d towed here. “This is Michael. Michael, this is Stefan.” His tone implied “the one I’ve told you so much about”, but Stefan could see from Michael’s face he’d been told nothing about their two years together, since they played no appreciable part in Ming’s memory.

They shook hands. Stefan took guilty comfort for a moment in finding the new boyfriend ugly. Then he felt further hurt that—ugliness notwithstanding—this person was still his replacement.

The bartender thumped the bar. Stefan turned and yelled, ordering Allen’s drink and asking for a double of his own drink.

“Oh,” said Ming, raising an eyebrow, “who’s the other drink for?” Stefan gestured back to Allen, who waved and gave a big smile, knowing that Ming never approved of Stefan’s friends, for reasons none of them managed to figure out before the relationship ended. This disinclined them to him in the first place, but the subsequent badly-handled dumping raised the stakes to full-on hatred. Stefan’s friends made a pretence of fawning over Ming whenever they had a chance, knowing that it had a salt-on-a-slug effect on him.

The bartender sloshed Stefan’s drinks down and called out the price. Stefan rounded up, tipping the man out of habit, though the glasses were sloppy with spillage that dribbled down onto his trouser-legs. Noticing this, Stefan found his exit: “Well, I better—Nice to meet you, Michael. Min—Jason, good to see you.” Ming reached to hug Stefan. Stefan looked at his drinks and shrugged.

~

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know, Allen, I thought he was with you,” said Rick.

“Was he okay? Or was he upset?” asked Paulo, holding hands with Adam as they all walked toward the pizza shop where they ended their nights out.

“Maybe he went home,” said Adam.

The others laughed. “No,” said Rick, “that’s the last place he’d go if he was upset.” He looked to Allen, “Was he upset? We’re all kind of operating on this foregone conclusion.”

“Ming was there,” said Allen.

“Ah,” said Rick and Paulo at the same time. Adam looked confused.

“There he is,” said Paulo, pointing.

Stefan stood leaned inside a telephone booth, his eyes closed, the receiver still next to his ear.

Allen ran over to him, helping him back to a standing position, hanging up the receiver. “What were you doing?” he whispered as Stefan’s eyes fluttered blearily.

“Listening,” said Stefan.

~

Stefan decided he wasn’t up for dragging his mother out of a bar, particularly not on a Monday night, so he showed up at the rehearsal early. He walked carefully across the soundstage’s rubberised black floor, keeping a low profile as he found a metal chair in a corner from which he could watch without interrupting.

His mother was singing a number, something written specifically for this television special. Stefan thought it very pretty, and smiled as he leaned back in his chair. Delonia was talented, he’d never contest that fact. If his mother had to be famous, at least she was good and famous. Sure people hated her specials or found the things she did too cheesy or sentimental (most people found them too cheesy or sentimental). But there were moments like this when he was proud of her.

She wound up for the song’s big finishing note, and Stefan fell backward, his legs kicking in the air. The chair, which no one was using for a reason, clanged on the floor, its legs akimbo like Stefan’s.

Delonia, who’d seen Stefan come in, stopped singing and laughed. “Thanks, Neil,” she said in the direction of the sound booth window on the far side of the soundstage. The orchestra members put down their bows and instruments and stared at Stefan as he righted himself and waved.

A voice popped in from nowhere. “Let’s try the number with Christopher.” Delonia nodded, and a boy of twelve walked out onstage in trendy, expensive clothing. He was blond and had a knowing teen-star-to-be sexiness that made Stefan uneasy.

Delonia gestured for Stefan to join her in the spotlit centre of the holiday set. He shook his head, but she insisted. He ran up and gave her a quick kiss.

“Hey, Stefan,” said the disembodied voice.

“Hey, Neil.” Then he looked up, as if to heaven, and said, “Hey Tim, Rob.” He yelled at the set, “Hey Raj, hey Marlene.” Voices responded from around the studio.

“Ready?” Delonia asked the young man standing next to her in a tone too childish for a modern pre-teen. She reached down, ruffled his blond hair, and smiled.

“I’m ready,” he said, “just don’t sing flat this time.”

Delonia’s eyes flared. Her mouth opened and closed, showing her large teeth as she struggled for something to say. She looked around the stage at her peers, then put a hand to her face and walked quickly off the set. Stefan was surprised: in her heyday Delonia would have barked the boy off the stage, or simply upstaged him to the point that he vanished in the light of her talent. But tonight her defences were down, and the boy had struck her to the quick.

Stefan leaned down to the young entertainer’s height. “You know what, little man? In a year, two tops, your voice is going to change. And then you’re fucked. Then when you want to make a comeback, you’re going to have to grovel for all you’re worth. But people have long memories around here, and you’ll be lucky to get a gig as a backup choir member for someone as talented and gracious as that woman. She’s been around for a long time, and that’s with good reason. You’ll be lucky if you ever see this place again.” He started after his mother, but turned back to the boy. “Oh, and another thing. You’re gay.” Then he ran from the soundstage. “Mom?” he asked, opening the dressing room door. He found her waving a smoking bundle of sticks in the air. He coughed. “What the hell is that?”

“Sage. It clears the energy in the room.”

“And probably trips the sprinklers,” he said, grabbing it and taking it to the dressing room’s little washroom, where he dropped it into the toilet. He sat Delonia down and took a seat opposite her. “What’s the matter? Normally you would have snapped that little pre-teen bitch in two.”

“I’m not sure,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I’ve been touchy the last couple of days. I think it’s what you said about Cerise. I’ve been wondering if maybe you were right.”

“No, Mom, I’ve been thinking about that, too. I shouldn’t have said it. What do I know, eh? If you’re happy, then that’s the truth, that’s all that matters.”

“Oh I’m so glad you feel that way. Because last night she asked me to marry her.”

“But—but Mom, you’re married to Dad.”

“Stefan, your father’s been dead for over twenty years.”

“Mom, you said ‘Till death do us part’.”

“Yes, and he’s dead.”

Stefan stood, shaking his head.

“Stefan, please, we want you to be part of this. Cerise thinks that this could be a very important event. What if it were televised? And you and someone special were there at the altar to give me away? That would mean so much to both of us. And imagine what that would mean for our society, to see me and you embracing our true natures and each other that way. Maybe you and Jason might get back together, and we could all live together in our house.”

“Look, that’s never going to happen. I think you’re a crazy woman,” said Stefan, “and I have to get out of here.”

“But you’re here to drive me home.”

“Oh. Right.”

“I’m ready to go back in there now,” said Delonia. “I won’t be long.” She gathered herself and left.

Stefan looked around the dressing room. Posters for old shows were dry-mounted on the wall, including one featuring his parents which had faded into tones of rusty brown. A dress in a stereotypically North American Indian pattern hung from Delonia’s frame. She had one leg stepped forward through a slit in the dress and her hair was pulled back from her heavily made-up face by a beaded headband. Stefan winced at the idea of his mother as sex symbol. His father wore a leisure suit and a warm, completely guileless smile beamed from his beard. Stefan touched the smile. From nowhere, a word popped into his head: Edinburgh.

He knew what the letters on his bedside table were trying to spell, and he knew where he had to go.

Four

Nearest Exit

“Mom, what are you doing?” asked Stefan.

Delonia looked up from the small towel she held. “I’m doing your laundry,” she replied.

“I didn’t ask you to do that. I don’t want you to do that. Could you please get out of my room?”

Delonia smiled. “What’s this?” she asked, holding up the towel, which seemed to hold its crumpled shape against gravity. “Somebody’s been hiding something. Is there someone I should know about? A guest you’ve been sneaking in? Hmm? What’s this?” She shook the petrified thing.

“I can’t believe this,” said Stefan, banging his head on the doorframe. He threw the mail he’d carried in with him down on the bed. “Mom, it’s semen. There, is that what you wanted to hear? And it’s mine, just mine. Alright? Now that I’m completely bereft of any dignity, could you please get the hell out of here?”

“Oh,” She dropped the towel into the laundry basket, “well at least I know you’re human. You know, you don’t give many outward signs.”

“What? I’m living my life. So what if I’m not in a relationship or having real sex? What do I need those for? Why do you keep pushing this? Relationships are just people’s way of avoiding their mortality. As long as they’re caught up in all the romance of it and busying themselves with paying attention to this other personality, they can hide out from the fact that one day they’re going to die. It’s the ultimate denial of the responsibility each of us has for figuring out what life is for.”

Delonia raised her eyebrows. “Ooh, listen to you! That’s a bit cynical, don’t you think?”

“Is it? Think about it: people sit in office buildings pacified by gushy love songs on the radio all week, then come Friday night we’re out on the town trying to have those experiences ourselves, perfectly distracted from the plight of our fellow man or the vicious activities of our government. Then on Saturday we go to the cinema to watch scripts we’re supposed to aspire to living out. You sing those songs! Do you really think they describe actual experience, or are they really about what we wished we felt like?”

“Stefan,” said Delonia, taking his hands and sitting down with him on his bed, “I have to say that you don’t know what you’re talking about. And that makes me sad.”

“Oh, right, because if only I knew true love I would join you and all those people on a hillside singing happy love songs, right?”

Delonia smiled and touched Stefan’s arm. She closed her eyes, then opened them, looking at the centre of Stefan’s chest. She pointed a single finger there and tapped him hard. “Unfold,” she said, addressing the spot.

Stefan rolled his eyes.

It wasn’t precisely fair, he knew, but he still felt the anger of exposure from her intrusion, so he pulled out the big guns: “There’s a bunch of birthday cards here for you,” he said, handing her the mail he’d grabbed on the way downstairs. “I think one of them is from Grandpa.” He watched her face fall as he gave her the envelopes.

She looked at them, feigning nonchalance, but pulled out the one yellow envelope with her father’s large, scrawled writing on its front and stared at it. Without a word, she left the room. His gambit had the intended result, and he hated himself for using it.

Stefan didn’t even know what the rift was between his mother and her father, but it was something he’d seen her levelled by again and again. The effect didn’t lessen with time.

Stefan looked at the tiny newsprint slips on his bedside table arranged into the word ‘Edinburgh’. (They’d stopped appearing since Monday when he’d formed them into that name.) He was happy his mother hadn’t disturbed them or asked about them. She was the last person he’d want to talk to about all this.

Just as Delonia’s father was the last person she would want to speak to.

Stefan felt a sudden compulsion to visit the man.

~

Stefan drove through the streets of the reservation, self-conscious of the car’s tiny size and sporty lines in the midst of all the pickup trucks and muscle cars. The bungalows all had muddy yards, some with dogs tied up in them. Driving here had taken two days, but last night’s quiet evening on his own in a roadside motel had a rejuvenating effect on him. Stefan liked being on the move, and enjoyed the idea that no one knew where he was. Shifting his recording schedule had been easy, too. The only disconcerting thing was this destination.

Of all the parts of his makeup Stefan was uncomfortable about, this one—the “Indian” connection—was the most awkward. His opinions about the First Nations, the Indians, the Native Canadians, or whatever he was supposed to call them, whatever some fraction of him was supposed to be, were all received ones. His mother benefited from the association, as it added something exotic and quintessentially Canadian to her image. But the truth was that she left home in her teens to pursue her career and left behind everything about this world. She was only one-quarter Métis to begin with, hardly much of a claim. Stefan’s connection was even more tenuous.

He’d heard too many one-sided, self-assured conversations about free tuition, gun running, tax exemption, cigarette smuggling, land claims, casinos, and suicide to want to have anything to do with it. It certainly had nothing to do with him.

Yet here he was, Stefan J. Mackechnie, pulling up to the house of Thomas Jackrabbit, source of Stefan’s never-divulged middle name. The one-story house stood next to the school where Thomas taught until his retirement.

Stefan pulled up the parking brake and got out of the car. An old German Shepherd made its way to him, its back haunches lowered by degenerated hips. It sniffed at him, then nuzzled its head familiarly under Stefan’s hand. Surely it didn’t remember him, he thought. They’d only visited twice, and those visits were a long time ago. Perhaps dogs don’t forget these things. His grandfather, though, was another matter, peering out between the living room curtains suspiciously. Stefan waved, but his grandfather clearly didn’t know who he was.

Stefan went to the front door and rang the bell, an awkward formality, given that they both knew the other was there.

“Yes?” asked Thomas, opening the inner door but not the screen door.

“Hello,” said Stefan.

Clearly Stefan wasn’t a government person, wearing such casual clothes and driving such a sporty car. But he was big city, certainly not from any of the towns nearby. Thomas was at a loss.

“Grandpa, it’s me.”

The man looked him up and down. Thomas’s mouth formed the name: Robert? The surprise passed to Stefan: he hadn’t considered that he might look like his father.

“Yeah, he was my dad. We visited you years ago. I’m Stefan.”

Thomas’s face brightened. “Stefan! Come on in!” He opened both doors wide and put an arm around Stefan, leading him into the living room. The air smelled tired, rebreathed many times over. The space was a mix of eras—a battered, soft, and shapeless old orange couch sat next to a lamp with a handmade shade like a stretched scrapbook; then, opposite them, a giant television and a video game console. Thomas saw Stefan looking at this incredulously. “Oh, that. No, I’m no good at all those games. I keep getting my ass kicked. They’re for the kids.”

“Kids?” asked Stefan.

“Sit,” said Thomas. He walked with some difficulty, like an overstuffed pillow on spindly legs. His grey and black hair was neatly pulled back. His face was weathered and wrinkled, the kind of face, Stefan thought with some discomfort, you usually see in a casket. But the expression was all comfort and ease here at home. “Not my kids. My kids are all grown. I mean the children who come by after school. I teach them some extra French, and I try to cover things I think they should know but don’t get in the standard curriculum. In exchange, I get to learn from them about new things in the world I wouldn’t hear about otherwise, and I let them use that video thing. I tell them to show respect for their elders, but they’re forever blowing my head off.”

Stefan laughed. He liked the man.

“Would you like anything?” asked Thomas. “I’ve got any kind of fruit juice you could imagine. I don’t keep liquor or beer, and pop is terrible for the kids. Won’t give it to them. Makes them wrangy as all hell and then I can’t deal with them.”

“An orange juice would be good.”

“What? Nothing more interesting, like pineapple or mango or passionfruit?”

“Oh. Okay, then,” said Stefan with a smirk, “I’ll take pineapple.”

Thomas came back from the kitchen a few minutes later with tall glasses filled with ice and juice. Thomas’s was some other kind, something reddish-purple. “So,” said Thomas, lowering himself with difficulty into a favourite old chair, looking straight at Stefan with a piercing intensity, “what’re you doing here?”

Stefan looked at the floor. “I’m not sure. I was hoping you might help me.”

“What do you need? I don’t have much. I thought your mother was doing pretty well for herself.”

“No, not that kind of help. It’s more like advice I’m looking for.”

“Ah, I see,” said the man, his face collapsing around a frown.

“What?” asked Stefan.

“So you figured you’d go talk to an old Indian, right?”

“No, it’s not that—” Stefan’s stomach wobbled and his face burned. “I wasn’t consciously thinking that, anyway.”

“That I’m old,” said Thomas, “doesn’t necessarily mean I know anything. It just means I’m likely to be opinionated. And being from the First Nations, that doesn’t make me wise. Give me a break. We don’t have any more of a claim on wisdom than anyone else. I mean, look around this reservation. You don’t think these people are just as lost? The trucks, the gadgets—just shiny objects for crows.”

Stefan nodded and covered one of his new sneakers with the other.

“I am, however,” he said, sitting forward in his chair, “a teacher. It’s in my bones. So maybe you’re in luck. The question stands: what are you doing here?”

Stefan wasn’t sure how much to tell him. “Well, you know my father’s dead, right?”

“I heard about it at the time. On the news.”

“Mom didn’t—? I’m sorry, Grandpa. I’m sorry we haven’t been in touch. I don’t know why. What is it between you and her?”

“Son, if she hasn’t told you, it’s not my place to. She’s my baby, you know, and I’ll never give up. Do you know if she talks to her brothers at all?”

“No. She never mentions them.”

“At least she’s got you,” said Thomas.

“Yeah,” said Stefan, “see, that’s the thing. She drives me crazy. There’s this woman living—well, things at home all are strange and claustrophobic, and everywhere else I go there’s my mother looming over me because everyone knows who she is or thinks they do, and I think I’m going to quit my job soon because I’m wondering about going off somewhere, leaving.” He stopped to breathe, and looked at his grandfather. “The thing is, I think my dad has something to do with it.”

“Oh,” said Thomas, sitting back.

“I know, I know. You’re the first person I’ve told.” He described the letter he wrote to his father and the things that had happened since.

Stefan watched as Thomas scratched his head, then sipped his juice, looking out the front window. Thomas took everything he’d said in stride, and that made Stefan feel better. After a few minutes, Thomas looked back at Stefan. “You should settle down in that job you have. Are you married?” Stefan shook his head ‘no’. “You should get married.” Stefan laughed. Thomas continued. “What? You think I’m kidding? I’m serious. If you do this, then all these disturbances will go away.” Thomas leaned forward. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

Stefan opened his mouth. He shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know,” he finally managed.

“You need to get away from other people for a while,” said Thomas, “in order to find out for yourself what you should do. Go out on your own somewhere where you can be alone, and test it out, see if it feels right. Do you remember the second time you visited and we all went camping? I think that’s what you should do. It’s the cliché Indian sort of thing you wanted me tell you to do, so—who knows?—there’s probably something to it.”

“But Grandpa, it’s November.”

“I’ve got lots of old gear in the garage I can lend you, and the weather’s still mild. You’ll be fine. And when you come back, all this nonsense will be out of your head and you can get back to your life.”

“Yeah,” said Stefan. “Good idea. Thanks.”

~

Stefan shopped at the general store where he’d arranged to pick up a canoe. He couldn’t help himself once he started buying things. He bought snacks and sweets, bread, a dozen eggs, tinned kiddie spaghetti, and—the ultimate indulgence—a whole package of bacon to eat all by himself. The canoe fit very badly on the roof of his car, the front hanging like a giant beak, dangerously obscuring his vision. The wind moved it slightly as he drove, and Stefan worried that it might scrape the paint, despite the foam wedges the shop-keeper put between the canoe and the roof when lashing it there.

Reaching the lake, Stefan wrestled the canoe off the roof, doing everything he could to make sure the two didn’t come into contact. He danced with it over his head for a moment before tipping backwards, then threw it to keep from falling down. It landed with a sound like a drum and gritted against the powdery gravel landing that led to the lake. Stefan winced. How much does a canoe cost? he wondered.

Stefan took the supplies from the car and locked it, looking around for a moment before deciding that it was unlikely anyone would pass within ten miles of here before he got back.

When am I coming back? He hadn’t told anyone. I should have told someone.

He loaded the mound of goods into the canoe and covered them with an oily old tarpaulin. Then he pushed the boat—with great difficulty—toward the put-in point. He clenched his teeth at the grinding sound of the fibreglass against the ground. The boat moved easily once it reached the water, then threatened to float away before he could get in. He jumped into the back of the canoe, making it dip dangerously. Stefan crawled up to and over the flat seat, tucked his legs under as he sat, then picked up the paddle.

He paddled slowly. It was coming back to him from camp all those years ago, the proper way to move the paddle, dipping and turning. After a while, he felt a blister forming where his thumb rubbed against the varnished wood, and put on his grandfather’s large gloves.

He clunked the paddle against the canoe, and corrected by adjusting his weight on the flat seat, refolding his legs. The canoe wobbled and Stefan froze. He had too much gear, he knew it.

The landscape conformed to the map of the lakes he’d been given at the store, and he found the spot they’d circled for him, the one matching his request for someplace where he wouldn’t be disturbed by other people.

Portage, the most dreaded French word of his childhood, came back to him when he reached his destination island. He’d had a vague sense of why it was a bad idea to bring so much food and gear, and now he remembered: he had to carry it all over land to get to his campsite. Three trips got everything to a halfway point, where the ground was uneven, rocky, and covered in undergrowth. But, strangely for an island, there was a picnic table there. Perfect, thought Stefan, I’m staying here.

~

“Ow,” said Stefan, looking at his thumb. The blister burst in the time it took him to make kindling out of leafy twigs and branches using an impractical folding saw (after sending an axe-head deep into the bushes, where he couldn’t find it). He lay the kindling down, then built a classic log cabin from the firewood he’d brought in an orange mesh bag. He surrounded it all with rocks. His Cub Scout leader would have been proud.

Stefan dropped one match after another on the pile, and blew and blew on the smouldering brush. He took in a deep breath to give the rubbish a big blast of air, but instead got a lungful of smoke. He stood, coughing, and went to his supplies, digging until he found a small rectangular can. He walked calmly back to the log cabin, unscrewed the cap, and poured out half the contents. He screwed the top back on, put it behind him, and lit a match. He dropped the match into the stone circle and a column of fire, Biblical in proportion, flew up toward the treetops overhead. Very shortly after, Stefan was cooking his supper.

Stefan noticed that the cans of spaghetti were five years past their best before date, but, hungry from the work of getting to the island, heated them anyway at the edge of the fire, and fried all the bacon in a pan. He mixed the bacon and spaghetti into a pot, making a carbonara slop of his own invention, which he enjoyed more than any meal he could remember. His mother would be horrified at his meat-eating, and he liked that, as if somehow being not-like-her made him something of his own.

He made his way to the lakeshore to watch the sunset, a vast canopy of sherbet colours—red and orange up to yellow that glittered with the faintest of early stars. He loved the smell of smoke in his heavy clothes with sharp pine always in the background. The sun went down quickly, making black silhouettes of the tree-covered islands around his. The darkness as he walked back to his camp through the trees surprised him. It was dark. He wasn’t accustomed to that, living in the city, where blinds and curtains never really did the trick.

The fire burned down to embers. He used his fork to scrape the bacon fat from the pan into the ashes, where it sizzled and briefly lit. He enjoyed the smell, thinking defiantly of his hippie mother. How could you not enjoy that smell?

That smell.

Bears.

It came back to him now, the constant insistence of his Cub leaders and his grandfather to dispose of food scraps properly so bears wouldn’t be attracted to the campsite. Stefan poured water on the fire, creating a great, bacon-scented cloud of steam. He looked around, wondering if there was anything nearby to smell this. He poured on water until the ashes were cool mush, then scooped that into a garbage bag with his hands.

Hang it up.

Yes, that was the proper thing to do, he remembered: hang your food from a tree, away from the campsite, out of reach. Stefan piled all his food onto the tarpaulin along with the bag of bacon-ash-mud. He wiped his hands on his clothes to stop them from being so slippery, tied a thin yellow nylon rope through the grommets in the tarpaulin, then knotted a thick cotton rope to the gathered neck. He picked all this up and walked what he figured was a reasonable distance from his campsite.

He looked at the trees above. The branches were so far away. He looked at the big bundle in his arms, then back at the trees. He spotted a pair of jutting branches—perhaps not regulation bear-height. Something moved in the bushes behind him. This will do, he thought. He turned his back to the tree, squatted, and hurled the bundle up as hard as he could, closing his eyes.

He heard a crackle above, and nothing more. He looked up and saw his tarpaulin safely wedged in the tree. Stefan smiled at his efforts, and grabbed for the cotton rope that dangled down. He yanked on it to see if it was secure. It was. In fact, the bundle was stuck. Stefan stood under the tree and pulled hard on the rope. It pulled taut, then snapped free, dropping him to the ground.

Stefan stared at the tarpaulin bag overhead. Its neck opened. Bacon-ash-mud splashed down on him.

Something moved through the growth behind him. Stefan flipped over to look, then jumped up and ran in the other direction, flailing his arms in front of himself to clear a path. After several minutes, Stefan rested, crouched panting on the ground, looking to see if the thing was gone. He realised then that he was lost.

After a time—he couldn’t tell how long out here—he found his way back to the camp, changing directions whenever he imagined he heard something close-by. He didn’t care how dirty he was, all he wanted was to crawl into his sleeping bag and be unconscious until this night was over. But first he had to put up the tent.

He struggled to get the tangled ropes from the long-unused tent bag, then pulled out the wrinkled, oily, elephant skin of a tent. It smelled like his grandfather had been using it as a drop-cloth. Stefan fished for the pegs at the bottom of the bag. Something moved behind him, and he jumped up with a metal peg in each hand.

Oh crap, he thought, peering into the darkness. A second sound started to his left. Ohcrapohcrap. Do I make noise? Do I scream? Or am I supposed to play dead? Or do they start eating you if they think you’re dead? Is it mating season? Would that be a good thing or a bad thing? Squinting, he searched the movement ahead. It was low to the ground. Grey. With stripes. Raccoons.

Stefan laughed. Briefly.

The two raccoons continued their approach, and a third entered the clearing. Stefan stamped his feet, but they didn’t respond. He yelled at them, but they weren’t bothered by that, either. The cold fear crept back into his stomach. Raccoons are big, he realised, and kind of scary, he decided.

He went back to his supplies with a mission. “Ha!” he said, pulling out a box of flares. He struggled against shaking hands to light two of them. He’d never lit flares before. He expected them to be the pink fireworks he’d seen on the side of the highway, but these were like candles in shotgun casings. Still, they created a good amount of light.

Stefan held the flares in his hands, then stomped about, yelling at the raccoons. It turned into a dance of sorts, and sang at the top of his lungs “Go away ra-cooooons! Get out of my caaaaaamp-siiiiiiiiite! Get! Get! Get! Get away ra-cooooooons!” To his pleasure, it was working.

One raccoon tentatively moved forward, so Stefan shook a flare at it. He was horrified when smoky, flaming, viscous goo flew from the tube at the creature. “Oh, I’m so sorry!” he said, not caring how ridiculous it was to talk to the thing. He saw he hadn’t hit the raccoon, and that it and its partners were closing in on the campsite again. Stefan whirled about with the flares, yelling for all he was worth and climbing up onto the picnic table. Splashes of fire glowed where the flare-goo fell around him, keeping the raccoons at bay.

Stefan felt heat on his back, and the clearing suddenly lit with a flickering yellow light. He turned around and saw the conflagration that used to be his grandfather’s tent.

~

Stefan moved slightly. He lay on the picnic table, his arms crossed tight across the chest of the burnt parka-remnants he wore. His muscles ached with tension from shivering.

He opened his eyes, suddenly awake. He had no idea what time it was in this lost part of the night. The clearing was still, and Stefan strained to pick out any sounds. A slight wind picked up, filtered through the pines. He sat up and looked around. Moonlight flickered through a curtain of leaves on the far side of the clearing. The raccoons had gone off in that direction when they finally decided there was no food to be had in the campsite. The leafy curtain parted with a puff of wind. A raccoon scurried from the opening, stood on its haunches, and gestured for Stefan to follow him.

Stefan blinked.

The raccoon made the gesture again, more insistently. Stefan climbed off the picnic table and followed after the animal. He brushed aside the leaf-curtain, and the brightness of the moonlight here made him temporarily blind. As his eyes adjusted, Stefan saw a man standing there, facing away from him. Around his feet was gathered a circle of raccoons. The man turned around.

“Dad?”

Stefan grinned, and the tears in his eyes turned the moonlight into a marquee around his vision. He wiped at his face. His father motioned to an old, polished log upended in the clearing, and Stefan sat on it, still speechless with joy. His father didn’t speak, either, but that seemed to be a limitation of however he managed to be here. Instead his smile played wide through his beard and cheeks. His eyes, big and dark like Stefan’s, wrinkled with a knowing kind of grace. Stefan had so much to say to him, so many questions based on the assumption that death had given him special insight. Or did Stefan simply expect him to have answers just because he was his father, even though he’d died when he was only a few years older than Stefan was now? What does he know of the world now? Stefan wondered. Do you know what I’m thinking? he thought while looking at the figure, but his father didn’t respond. It was as if he was waiting for Stefan to finish, to acclimatise, so he could get on with what he was here for.

One of the raccoons shuffled toward him holding something. He held it up for Stefan, who took it, seeing that it was an old binocular photo viewer. He looked at the raccoon, who handed him a card with two pieces of film it in. Stefan put that in the viewer. He looked to his father, who pointed up. Stefan clipped the card in place and looked through the device, holding it up so the moon shone on its white celluloid backdrop and illuminated the double slides.

He saw an old cobbled street with tall stone buildings lining its sides. They were topped with angles and arches and spires. He sighed, loving the sight of it. He knew the name of this place, which was spelled out on his bedside table at home. He knew it had some connection with his father, and now with him.

Something jerked his hand, and he found himself squinting into whiteness. The city scene was gone. He looked accusingly at the raccoon beside him, who shrugged in its way and held out its little paws to show they were empty. He looked at the ring of raccoons around his father’s feet, who shrugged in unison, then at his father, who shrugged, not looking playful, but sad about the disappearance.

The raccoon motioned that it wanted the picture-viewer back, so Stefan handed it over, now that it had nothing to show. The raccoon joined the others, blending into their furry mass of grey punctuated with masked faces. From their midst emerged another raccoon, this one holding a sheaf of papers, carrying them with some difficulty to Stefan. He took the papers and looked at the typewritten cover-sheet. The Empire of Nothing, it said, a play by Robert Mackechnie. Stefan looked up at his father, surprised. “I didn’t know you wrote plays,” said Stefan. His father smiled and shrugged again. He gestured for Stefan to read it.

Stefan read a story of a man and a woman, a couple who met in war-time. Powers clashed over their heads, forces unconcerned with the lovers’ welfare—giving them a kind of anarchic freedom from things that might have kept them apart, but ultimately destroyed the world in which they wanted to live together. Stefan enjoyed it and felt it had something important to say, though he didn’t know exactly what. When he finished, he asked his father, “May I have this?” His father nodded, but the raccoon took the shuffled papers away and brought them back to the circle. Stefan didn’t understand, but all the raccoons seemed to be in co-operation with his father, their circle somehow keeping him here and giving him physical means. So he let it take the script away.

Two more raccoons stepped forward and moved to either side of the moonlit clearing. One put a tiny paw to its ear and turned from side to side, listening. The second held a paw over its eyes and looked around. They each stepped backwards until they bumped into each other, surprised, and hugged. They became an indistinct ball of grey. Suddenly, from the fur sprang two deer, who bounded out of the clearing, sending Stefan tumbling back off his seat.

He righted himself, amazed. One last raccoon scuttled up to him and handed him a note. Stefan read it: “They don’t call it chemistry for nothing”. The raccoon grabbed the note and ran back to the others. His father looked at him and tapped his own chest in the spot where just days before Stefan’s mother tapped him.

All the creatures stood up on their haunches, then took a bow. Stefan, not sure what else to do, still not sure what he’d seen, clapped for the little raccoon players. His father stood tall in their midst and winked at him.

Then the moon went out.

~

Stefan opened his eyes to the dawning day. In this early light, the colours around him all looked like watercolours with a touch of white added to them. He lay on the picnic table, the burnt parka still wrapped around him, his body aching from huddling against the cold. The previous evening’s events came back to him, and he sat up, looking around the campsite for any trace of what he’d seen. He saw nothing. He climbed off the table and explored the woods around the site until he found what might have been the clearing where he saw his father. There was the log he sat on, but what had been a clearing was overgrown, so thick with brush and small trees that he had trouble negotiating the space. He pawed through the bushes, but couldn’t find any sign of the binocular picture or his father’s script.

He was covered with soot and filth, and reeked of smoke and bacon. He walked to the edge of the island and dipped his hands in the cold lake water. He scrubbed them, smearing the black soot around at first, then managing to clean it off somewhat. His fingernails and the wrinkles of his hands were outlined in black, but he could get rid of that when he got back to the city. He scooped water into his mouth and swished it around, then scooped some more and scrubbed at his face. When the water grew still, he looked at himself, reflected there, his face pale except for the rings of soot around his eyes. There’s my raccoon face, he thought.

He was finished here. Time to pack up and go home.

~

Thomas Jackrabbit heard a car pull away from his driveway. He opened the front door to find a large box there with an envelope sitting on top. He opened the letter:

I know what I have to do, Grandpa. I have to follow this. Thank you so much.

Thomas smiled. He was impressed that Stefan had managed to pack all his camping gear back into the box. Then he cocked his head, puzzled: black, sooty water was oozing from it.

~

“What are you doing up there?” yelled Delonia. “Come down, we’ve still got work to do before everyone shows up.”

“Just a minute,” hollered Stefan in reply. He unfolded the interlaced flaps of a cardboard box. It was the last thing in the attic he hadn’t dismantled. Inside, he found a smaller box labelled “Robert”. Its lid was taped shut, but Stefan picked at it and found the tape brittle and dry. While driving home from Thomas’s, he’d reflected on what he’d seen in the woods, and remembered the attic. He knew that he’d find his father’s things here. That’s what the figure meant when he agreed to let Stefan have them.

Inside, Stefan found the stereoscopic picture-viewer, some pictures, and his father’s play, along with other memorabilia from his youth in Scotland and the early days of his musical career with Delonia. Stefan picked up a snapshot of his parents singing together in what looked like someone’s basement with a party around them, everyone in very dated clothing, Delonia wearing black-rimmed cat-eye glasses. Stefan laughed at the sight of this. His father didn’t have his beard yet then, and his smile beamed at Delonia, who smiled just as brightly back at him over the word she sang.

Chemistry, he thought. He remembered the deer. His father and Delonia were changed by finding each other. They were in the process of becoming something, he reasoned, right up to the point his father died. Their transformation was incomplete, and she was left on her own to become something else entirely.

I get it, he thought, the whole relationship thing. It was alchemical, a process where two things could become a third that was greater than its constituent elements. He felt sorry for his mother, having to carry on that work by herself, knowing that she didn’t have all the necessary ingredients. Her girlfriend Cerise was a science experiment.

“Stefan, we need a hand moving the dining room table,” yelled the woman downstairs who no longer seemed quite so familiar, who had knowledge of a whole aspect of life he’d skipped. What about Ming? he asked himself. Nope, he answered, that wasn’t chemistry. Maybe home economics. Not chemistry.

“Coming,” said Stefan, taking his father’s play and the binocular picture set, shoving everything else back in place.

~

The house was brightly-lit and full of charm. It was a great home for parties, with its big rooms—the living room, dining room, and kitchen (where all the drinks were, naturally drawing a crowd), then the upstairs, where the bedrooms provided sanctuary for deep conversations, coat storage, and the odd indiscretion during the course of any given party. The guests were a who’s-who, but not from any attempt to assert it themselves. On the contrary: the famous had to go somewhere, and each other’s company was often more comfortable, as few of them felt the need to verbally genuflect over their various achievements. Of course there was a hierarchy, with the venerable actors, writers, and musicians at the top, being most culturally visible and—for whatever reason—appreciated. Stefan’s friends often told him how lucky he was, and he knew it, but not for the reasons they imagined. Fame was a vague cloud, and he’d grown up in it. It had its advantages, and definite disadvantages, too. For him the real luck of it was getting to be around people who were so good at what they did. They imagined things and brought them into being. For that—not their personalities or their elaborate possessions—Stefan regarded them as demi-gods. His mother laughed with the conductor of Cerise’s orchestra, who matched Delonia’s height and had a swept-back head of white hair. She was one of the demi-gods.

Delonia caught Stefan’s eye, and pointed past the conductor to the young host of a television show. Stefan couldn’t deny that he found the young man attractive, with his dark hair and eyes, and that confident schoolboy smile. His friends and he had wondered if, perhaps, the host liked men. Allen heard of a party where he’d supposedly disappeared with a man for a while. But like so many rumours it turned out to be wish-projection: the host was here with his fiancée, who stood only ten feet from him, engaged in another conversation. She, of course, was lovely and utterly un-hateable. Stefan gave a strained smile to his mother and nodded. Demi-god or no, philosopher queen to his father’s king, his mother still drove him crazy.

The doorbell rang. Stefan answered it, finding a female jazz singer there whose smoky sound he always loved. He was about to tell her how much he’d enjoyed her latest album, when she gestured behind her. “I think that woman needs help getting in,” she said, sliding past him into the party.

Stefan looked down the tall, wide steps and nearly gasped. There in a wheelchair someone had plopped a tiny creature, vaguely feminine, with shiny black hair streaked with grey, glasses like twin television sets each projecting an eye. She held a cigarette up to her mouth, drew in, exhaled a cloud into the night air, and nodded to him. “Think I could get a hand here?” she asked, her voice a basso-helium-frog-croak. Stefan’s social graces did him the favour of intercepting a look of shock before it reached his face. He recovered himself, trying so hard to act nonchalant that he knew he was being awkward.

“Um, sure,” he said, far too late. He walked down the steps and stood next to her chair. The motorised thing was beyond him; surely she didn’t expect him to carry that up the stairs. So he gestured toward her, reaching this way and that, not knowing how to begin lifting her.

“Ever give a dog a bath?” she asked.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Like that. Just pick me up like that.” She threw her cigarette on the lawn. “Don’t worry. Really, you can’t mess me up any worse than God did.”

An unconscious laugh burst from Stefan’s mouth. His face flushed with social horror, until he saw the woman in the wheelchair grinning at him. “It’s okay,” she said in her odd voice, “you’re not comfortable with anything until you can laugh about it. So, there, we got that out of the way. Now pick me up.”

“I’m Stefan,” he said, curling one arm under her and one behind her back. He lifted her, her tiny legs flopping down from the little square of her body. Her dog analogy was apt: she weighed about the same as the Labrador he once washed, but she was better about being carried.

“I’m Helen,” she said, “Helen Jackson. You’re Delonia’s son, right?”

“Among other things,” he said, carrying her through the front door. “Hey, I know that name. You’re one of my mother’s producers, aren’t you?”

“You got it,” she said.

“Um, where should I put you?”

“Where are the drinks?” she said with even more of a croak, as if playing for comedic effect.

“Let’s go to the kitchen, then,” he said. The soft chair in the corner was momentarily empty, and he sat Helen in it like a strange troll doll, careful to make her skirt fall nicely.

“Thank you,” she said. “Do you have any bourbon?”

Stefan nodded, giving her a one second finger. As he poured the drink, he found himself taken with this woman, her total mastery over her condition—not physically, there was nothing she could do about that, but socially, personally. He brought her the drink, handing it to her with a square napkin. He pulled a chair over from the kitchen table and sat beside her.

“So what do you do?” asked Helen.

“I do voice-over work for a children’s show.”

“Oh yeah, which one?”

“The Green Brigade. Do you know it?” Helen nodded. “I’m ‘Bloob Ox’.”

“Really? That’s amazing. You don’t sound anything like that in real life.”

“Well,” said Stefan with a cocky angle to his head, “that’s where the talent comes in, isn’t it?”

“Do me,” she said.

Oh God. Many people asked him this, and he was generally able to do it to varying degrees of success, depending on how much vocal character the person had in the first place. But with Helen it wouldn’t be fair. It was too easy. How could he produce anything close to her voice that wouldn’t sound like a mockery?

“Go on. I’ve heard myself on tape before, I know what I sound like. I dare you. If you get it right, I’ll buy you a drink.”

Stefan swallowed, then poked his fingers underneath his jaw to loosen his tongue-muscles. “Okay,” he said, “here goes. Hi, my name’s Helen Jackson, and I’m here tonight to make you all feel very awkward.”

“Son of a bitch,” she said, “that’s very good.” Stefan sighed. His risk paid off.

The two of them talked for an hour, gossiping about the people around them. They talked about the state of the world, then came back around to their work in broadcasting.

“I’m going to leave the show,” Stefan confided. “I’m going to leave Canada.”

Helen’s eyebrows rose on her pointed, elfin face. “Delonia never mentioned this.”

“She doesn’t know.”

Her eyebrows rose higher.

“She’s everywhere, Helen. There’s no place I can go here where I’m not ‘Delonia Mackechnie’s son’. If she’s not getting in my way, her reputation is.”

Stefan expected her to counter this, but instead she said, “So where are you going?”

“I’m going to Edinburgh. In Scotland.” This was the first he’d said it out loud. The commitment of it made his stomach flutter.

“Oh,” said Helen, “are you putting on a show at the Fringe?”

“Sorry?”

“The Fringe Festival. Are you putting on a play there?”

Stefan’s heart stalled.

“Yes, I am.”

Five

Helen on Wheels

“There’s a lot here,” said Helen, “but it’s a mess.” She riffled through the manuscript, her eyes flicking back and forth across the pages, magnified so many times by her lenses that each blink surprised Stefan. She looked up at him. “But it’s very good. I haven’t seen anything like this in a long time.”

His spirits lifted. “So what should I do? What’s next?”

Helen lifted her glasses and rubbed her eyes, her fingertips beneath the lenses like pink eggplants. “You’ll need a cast, obviously, and a director. A stage manager, a production manager—those could be the same person. And this script wants a dramaturge, someone to get it into shape. Then you’ll need producers, backing. Getting a show together and paying everyone, particularly if you want to ship it overseas, is more expensive than you might realise, even if you do it on the cheap. That is, unless you get people to do it for free, maybe on some kind of point-sharing system. But then you’re probably looking at student actors. And some of these parts, particularly the older man—you don’t want to do that to this script.”

Stefan slumped back in his chair. He had his own debts to think about, now this. He felt dread coming over him, the feeling that often made him pull the covers over his head instead of facing the day. This is too hard, he thought.

Helen sat up in her custom-built, ergonomic executive high-chair. She flicked her long hair from her face and leaned on one of her small arms. “So?” she asked.

“So?” replied Stefan, unsure.

“So when are you going to ask me to help you? Or were you?” she croaked at him, point-blank.

“I couldn’t do that,” he said. “I can’t ask you to take this on. You know I can’t afford you.”

“Stefan, at this point in my life, I don’t need any more money. I’m not rolling in it, but I’m not exactly hard-up, either. This work I do here, I enjoy it, and I enjoy the people I work with, but it’s pretty familiar. Most of it is just entertainment. This play you’ve brought me, it means something, and not just because it has a sentimental attachment for you. I would love to do something I thought had as much meaning in it as this. I also haven’t been involved in theatre in years. It could be fun to try that again.”

“Helen, that’s amazing! I can’t thank you enough. But what about the money?”

“Stefan, look at me. I’m a handicapped First Nations woman who can speak French. I’m a government grant on wheels. I also happen to be a very good producer. I can raise us some money. But you’ll also have to hustle, too. I can’t do everything.”

“Oh, for sure,” he said, with no idea how he’d raise his portion.

“So,” she said, “is it a deal?”

“Definitely. Deal.”

“Alright, shake,” she said, offering him one of her little clover-like hands, “but not too hard.”

“You amaze me,” said Stefan.

“Thank you,” she said, smiling, then going deadpan. “If you patronise me again, this whole thing is off.”

~

Stefan walked through the large concrete park next to the broadcasting centre where he’d just left Helen in her office. Dried leaves scraped across the ground in the chill wind. Skyscrapers towered all around him, monoliths of glass in turquoise, copper, and black. Across the park, lights blinked around the marquees of theatres that hosted touring mega-musicals. Stefan tried to imagine what the budget for those shows might be, but didn’t know where to begin. Equally unfathomable was the amount they pulled in each night with their enormous ticket prices.

He faced into the wind, digging his hands into his pockets, making a mental note to find his gloves when he got home. He tried thinking about his own show, tried breaking the task down, but his mind had a habit of not sticking with difficult tasks, chasing every stray thought like a little dog after feigned throws of a non-existent ball. Before he knew it, his mind fixated on the need for a coffee—that drink his mother referred to as “office drugs”. Stefan turned back toward the broadcasting building, a giant concrete block outlined with red metal piping. On the ground floor was a coffee shop (“An institutionalised dealer,” Delonia said in his mind).

The shop was a cafeteria decorated like a bistro. Stefan poured himself a medium cup of coffee from an urn, then followed the roller coaster tray rails to the till, where he paid, then took a seat at one of the small tables. He preferred his coffee with sugar, but he also preferred not to hear Delonia’s reminder that the brown sugar they offered was just white sugar with molasses added, and white sugar was “powdered cancer”. The chemical alternatives to sugar weren’t an option for him either, having heard his mother unconsciously mutter “excitotoxins” every time she saw someone dump the contents of one of the little paper sachets into a cup. Nothing in her world was simple. On their search for her birthday cake, Stefan had commented to Allen that it would be easier to find the Arc of the Covenant than to find a ‘cake’ that matched her nutritional demands. Allen suggested that the Arc might make a nice gift, but Stefan insisted that it was a bit Christian for her tastes. Allen suggested that she could still use it for storing linen, as long as she vacuumed it out with her eyes closed first. Would that then, Stefan asked, make their vacuum cleaner the Electrolux of the Covenant?

Stefan realised he would miss his friends when he left. Still, he thought, it’s always easier to be the leave-er than the leave-ee.

“You’re Delonia Mackechnie’s son, aren’t you?” said a voice, bringing Stefan back to the cafeteria.

“Yeah, it’s Stefan, hi.” In this building the tone of such exchanges was different, easier for him to take: less take-home autograph requests, more expressions of professional admiration for his mother.

“My name’s Roger. I’m the floor manager for Super Fantastic Window. Do you know the show?”

Stefan stifled a laugh. “Uh, yeah. Every time I see that couch on your show I get a happy feeling.”

“‘The Mirror’ died on Thursday,” said Roger.

“What? Not—what was his name? Theo, wasn’t it? Oh, I’m really sorry.”

“Yeah. Bad circumstances, too. Luckily we’re managing to keep it out of the papers. If he lived it would’ve been a scandal, but since he’s dead it wouldn’t play for very long, so we managed to convince everyone to skip it.”

“Wow, that’s too bad. I met his wife a few times. She’s really nice.”

“She was there, too. And some other couples, along with some strippers, hustlers, animal handlers, you name it. Big private party in a hotel pool, disco lights hanging overhead—you can do the math.”

“Oh God,” said Stefan.

“Yeah. Big investigation, everyone from the vice squad to the SPCA. We’ve put off shooting for a few days, but if we can’t start again right away, the show might fold.”

Something in Roger’s voice was less than matter-of-fact, Stefan realised. “You’re telling me all this for a reason, aren’t you?”

“Well, I’ve heard about you from the people on your show. They say you’re really talented.”

“And you want me to voice-over ‘The Mirror’?”

“Well,” said Roger, “you’d also have to do the arms, too. You know, how they wiggle on either side of the mirror-frame with those big gloves on? Theo loved that part.”

“Does it pay scale?”

“God no,” said Roger, “the guy did the show for fifteen years. It’s three times that.”

Stefan grinned. “For three times scale, Roger, I’ll wiggle anything you want.”

~

“The stimeless story of a woman’s passion,” said Stefan in an earnest basso profundo.

“Perfect,” piped a voice electronically into the tiny sound booth. Behind the word Stefan heard the echo of another voice.

“No, it wasn’t,” said Stefan, “I said ‘stimeless’.”

“Oh,” replied the electronic voice with the echo. “All right then, let’s do it again.”

Stefan enjoyed this, doing movie trailer dubs. The film distributor couldn’t afford the ‘real’ voice that everyone knew from the cinema, but Stefan could provide them with a version just different enough to have that familiar feel, yet not invite any potential legal problems. The day’s recording would pay well, but he’d also receive residuals every time the trailer ran. He also liked getting an early peek at the movies being produced locally, though sometimes he found it difficult to speak about them with the seriousness the films’ producers requested.

“Alright,” said Stefan, then took a deep breath. “The timeless story of a woman’s passion...”

~

Stefan looked over the pages of the grant application. “Wow,” he said, “this is pretty thorough.”

“You have to be,” said Helen. “This is decision by committee we’re talking about. Lots of applications are eliminated off the bat because they goof up on the basic requirements. It saves the committee looking at everything in depth. I know that some of what I’ve written there doesn’t sound much like your play—”

“My dad’s play,” interjected Stefan.

“It’s your play now,” countered Helen. “You have to take ownership of it. We won’t ever get it on its feet if we’re being precious with it.” She adjusted in her chair with a little hop. “So that’s what I’m submitting. We’ve missed this year’s deadline, of course.”

Stefan’s face fell.

“Oh, don’t look so gloomy. Let me make a call.” She put on a headset with a microphone and a little dial-pad attached, flipped through a wheel of cards on her desk, then dialled a number with a deft series of finger-pokes. “Hi, yes, this is Helen, could you put me through? Thanks.” She smiled at Stefan and gave him a little thumbs-up. “Hi there. I was just wondering how you were getting along with my application. What do you mean? Oh, don’t tell me you didn’t get it! Dammit! Okay, I tell you what, I’m going to courier it over to you right now. Yeah, perfect. Thanks. Yep. Great. Okay, so I’ll hear from you soon? Perfect!” She poked her dial-pad and took off the headset, grinning. “That’s how it’s done, baby.”

“So what do you think our chances are?” asked Stefan.

“Very good. And not because of that little manoeuvre there, and not just because of that application. I wouldn’t push it through like that if I didn’t believe in that play.”

“I really appreciate this, Helen.”

“I appreciate the opportunity, Stefan. Art can change the world, you know. Well, so can business. But art can save it.”

Stefan had never considered this. It hadn’t come up. “So how long until we find out?” he asked, after deciding that he had nothing to add to her declaration.

“At least a couple of months.” She cocked her head. “You’re making that face again, Stefan. This is the process. It takes that long. We need this time. We have a lot of work to do.”

~

Stefan wondered why he shouldn’t just buy a ticket and leave. Money was coming in, and his debts were shrinking quickly. With a set purpose before him, he found it easy to avoid spending and to accumulate money quickly. This play, though, it would take everything he had and then some, and from what Helen told him, he knew he shouldn’t expect to make a cent from the production.

He walked along Yonge Street, past discount stores, sex boutiques, and electronics shops, all lit with flashing neon words and flickering bulbs. Every window offered objects he could have, but he was pleased to find he didn’t want. People bustled in and out of the shops and squeezed past him on the sidewalk. Pixelboards overhead flashed down with giant news-anchor heads, shiny cars, and television celebrities.

The next shop he passed was a travel bureau. Inside the window was a white plastic board listing destinations, with prices magic-markered in next to them. Edinburgh wasn’t listed. Glasgow was the closest destination mentioned. He could get there just by putting the ticket on his credit card.

Stefan took out his wallet and opened it. His father’s face looked from his driver’s licence at him with one eyebrow raised. Stefan slammed the wallet shut.

Right, he thought, I should stick with the plan.

~

Stefan watched as the bodies flapped together like pink sea creatures thrown from a net. He turned his head, studying them, listening closely, trying to filter out their voices from that extra voice he always heard. He really wanted to listen to the other voice, but that was not what he was here to do.

“What are they saying to each other?” Stefan asked. “Do you have a transcript, something translated that I can work from?”

“Look,” said the man who’d been assigned to this task, who Stefan suspected was not a real recording engineer, “it’s an adult movie. What sounds do you make when you bang a girl?”

“Oh, I uh, I don’t—” stammered Stefan, then finally concluded with a shrug.

“Right, okay, I’ve dealt with your kind before, those ‘What’s my motivation?’ types. You know what your motivation is? Getting paid. You want to know the dialogue?” he asked, scribbling on a piece of paper. “Here. Here you go. Now we’re going to take this in one.” He returned to his controls. “Go!”

Stefan followed the movements of the man onscreen as best he could, moaning. When the man started speaking, Stefan read from the paper with all the conviction he could muster. “Yeah. You like that, don’t you bitch?”

Ah feel like a fish supper, said the extra voice he heard underneath the recorded sounds, uncharacteristically clear. Stefan bit his hand to keep from laughing, moaning instead. The voice and he were in on a joke, and something about that felt sexy. Stefan found himself forgetting the sound man and getting wrapped up in the work.

~

Helen crossed out a line of the script and Stefan winced. She picked up her cup of tea and sat back on the low couch in her living room. The space was filled with carvings and paintings of dramatic aboriginal Canadian design. They were surrounded by vivid spirits with exaggerated expressions and grand stories behind them. Stefan looked at one of the sculptures, marvelling that this whole section of the Canadian world that had only existed for him before in a shadow way had now come alive for him. The culture’s back had been broken long ago, and some people like his grandfather insisted that assumptions of a spirituality were antiquated and condescending, but Stefan felt there was something to it. Just the idea, the romance of it, made it real. Still, though, it was too thin in his blood for him to claim it as his own. He knew it wasn’t. His spirit was elsewhere, and he’d had that feeling long before his father came back into his life to tell him.

“Stefan?” said Helen. “Focus.”

“Right, where were we?”

“This line. It doesn’t work. What do you feel your father was trying to say?”

“Well, here she’s talking about her father’s company.”

“Oh,” said Helen, “oh, I hadn’t seen that. Good. So how should we put that?”

Stefan picked up a pencil and leaned in next to Helen, scribbling words beside her notation on the photocopied script. He wondered about being so close to her, but knew she would make no mistake about him; surely Delonia found some opportunity during their work together to divulge her son’s exotic sexual otherness (though the revelation got much more of a reaction when he was in grade school; in recent years the effect had diminished greatly).

Helen was so comfortable to be around. When they were out in public together, he saw how people reacted to her, just as he had when he first saw her, and felt lucky to be past the bubble of her strangeness, in close to the centre of who she really was. But being with her—her endless challenges to any half-reasoned, sloppy arguments from him and her complete commitment to the things she stood for—honed his thinking to a point where he could see through even this new-found comfort to a sort of smugness, a self-righteous pride in their friendship: at its core was still her difference; he felt special for getting beyond it, for being the chosen company of such an oddity. Question everything, she told him. He wondered if her circumstances made her this clever, or if she would have been like this anyway. Maybe she and her circumstances were indistinguishable. It occurred to Stefan that her condition wasn’t something put upon her, something that should be fixed. It was as quintessentially her as the laugh—like an emptying balloon—that he loved to coax from her.

“What about this line?” Helen asked him. “This section is all a bit foggy. What does it mean?”

“I have no idea,” answered Stefan.

“Good,” said Helen. “It’s good to say that. Let me know if you get any indication.” Helen often made oblique references to his recent experiences of his father, speaking of them in a matter-of-fact way that made him feel better. “We’ll skip it for now and come back to it.”

Stefan nodded. Then looked at the marked-up script: the ‘finished’ pile consisted of a few sheets of paper. The ‘yet-to-do’ pile was very big.

~

“These gloves kinda smell,” said Stefan, putting the bulbous fingers near his nose.

“Yeah, Theo was a bit superstitious about them,” said the floor manager.

“Washing them was bad luck?”

“Something like that.”

“Yeah, well,” said Stefan, “you can tell Wardrobe that I’m not superstitious.” He walked behind the black velvet drape and pushed the oversized hands through openings on either side. “Hey, cool,” said Stefan, leaning his face into the back of the mirror, “I can see through this. I never knew the guy could see through it.”

“Yeah, it’s a sheet of Mylar. We spray it down so it doesn’t reflect the cameras.”

“Hey there, kids,” said Stefan, waving his hands around the thick gold mirror frame, which matched the look of the green-screen window on the opposite side of the puffy couch. He pressed his nose to the ‘glass’ and called to the floor manager. “Hey, Roger, I can see what you’re doing over there with the wardrobe lady.” He made lewd gestures with the oversized hands.

“Har har,” called Roger over his shoulder. He could see the long shape of Stefan’s nose against the mirror. “Just be careful there,” he said, turning back to the costume mistress. He heard a sound and turned back to Stefan.

Stefan’s head hung through the torn sheet of plastic. His eyebrows were making for his hairline. “Um,” he said, “sorry?” 

~

Stefan stood outside the travel bureau, smiling. He held a ticket in his gloved hand. He opened the long cardboard envelope and looked at the sheets with their red carbon backing. August third. He stuffed the ticket into his jacket’s inside pocket, then took out his wallet. His narrow face smiled awkwardly from his driver’s licence, the long dimples on either side of his smile and his big open eyes making him look a bit simple. He didn’t like the picture, but it was the one he was accustomed to, the one that was supposed to be there.

Well Dad, he thought, I’ll take this as a good sign.

This was his secret Christmas present to himself. He’d yet to tell anyone other than Helen that he was leaving. He felt guilty about all the people he’d be leaving behind, so he kept quiet. He supposed his friends would understand—they’d all talked about leaving sometime or another, and were hardly going to stay there for each other. His mother would take it personally. And why shouldn’t she? he thought. It seemed cruel, put like that.

He turned and walked down the blinking canyon of Yonge Street toward the mall, on a mission.

~

Xmas was always a big affair in Delonia’s house. She made a point of calling it “Xmas” whenever she mentioned it, and only the uninitiated would refer to the occasion by its religious name. Things were cooking in the oven, on the stove, in the toaster oven, and thawing on counters. Decorations hung everywhere, and lights trailed around ceilings, up the stairs, and around every window. People would soon arrive for a party lasting well into the next day. But it was still early. Delonia wafted about in her dressing-robe, a giant wrapped in a drape. Cerise plodded heavily downstairs holding her head, not yet Delonia’s equal when it came to holiday excess. Stefan joined them in the living room—where Delonia said they must meet at this time—holding a large gift-wrapped bundle.

“What’s this?” asked Delonia.

“It’s for you, Mom,” said Stefan, smiling, “and for you, Other Mom.” Cerise was surprised, her open mouth turned up in a smile.

“Go on,” said Stefan. The two women tore the paper from the gift, exposing a very large and very thick duvet. He saw his mother’s eyes reflexively flash to the label, worried.

“Yes, it’s made with real feathers,” said Stefan, “but they were taken from the hatchery of a wildlife reserve. Nobody died.”

Delonia smiled at his knowledge of her, and held her arms open. Stefan reached across to hug her. “Merry Xmas,” he said. She replied in kind. Then he turned to Cerise and gave her a warm, if careful, hug. “Merry Xmas,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. She smelled of cigarette smoke. He wondered how Delonia handled that.

~

Stefan had seen Rick’s pictures already, the ones his girlfriend sent from Malaysia, but Rick was happy and drunk, so Stefan feigned ignorance and let Rick talk him through them again. Jennifer was pretty, and she looked very happy there, sun-browned and set against a paradise backdrop. She’d sent Rick pictures. Despite all their worries to the contrary, this meant he was still in, that he wasn’t deluding himself about their still being an item. Something about him was more relaxed, too. Stefan never considered that Rick had doubts, too. But tonight everything was fine.

Rick straightened the pictures and slid them carefully back into the envelope they’d arrived in, with his name printed on it in Jennifer’s handwriting. It was time for him to go back up for the next set on the makeshift stage at Allen’s house. Few of the friends Allen had invited over for New Year’s seemed to be enjoying Rick’s band—it was a bit heavy for them—but there was a lighter tone than usual in Rick’s delivery.

Allen’s partner had family (or friends, or business, or something) in New York, and couldn’t be at the party. No one was surprised, since he didn’t like any of Allen’s friends and made no effort to hide it. Allen had just secured a large deal at work, and threw even more money into this year’s party than usual, and was having a fine time playing host on his own.

Paulo plopped himself down on the couch next to Stefan, grinning, handing Stefan a second cup of the strongly-spiked punch. Paulo clearly couldn’t wait for midnight, because this year he had someone. His Adam was across the room, talking to some other journalist person, both of them excavating the quarry of spinach-dip rye bread wheels.

Stefan wondered what chemistry was at work in his friends’ relationships. He didn’t feel jealous for a change, but happy for them, curious, watching and wondering who these exchanges would turn them into. And he had something this New Year’s, too: a secret. He sipped his punch, smiling at Paulo, though his throat tightened at the thought that this was his last New Year’s with these friends.

Someone started the countdown to midnight, and everyone joined in. Stefan wondered how long it would take to count to August.

Six

Something to Show

The subway car moved through the dark guts of the city, a length of stainless steel cud delivering human nutrients to its vitals—the businesses and shops. The lights flickered and the car shuddered to a halt. The passengers groaned. The momentary complaint unified the riders, then they returned to ignoring each other. Their eyes drifted to the advertisements above the facing passengers, to their shoes, to their books, newspapers, and magazines. The light was dim here in the tunnel, so any kind of sight-related activity was a pretence, but the passengers shared a tacit agreement to leave each other alone in their bubbles of privacy. That imaginary solitude was the only concession available to those who had to get to work this way.

Stefan looked at his hands, examined his fingernails, coughed, then looked up at an ad for basketball shoes. Annoyed at the commercial invasion of his thoughts, he studied the subway car’s door, self-consciously adopting an expression that said, I’m just looking to see what’s happening. He checked his watch with the same forced deliberation. A voice came over the loudspeaker, but he had no idea what it said. This was not because of the second voice he always heard, but the quality of the sound: none of the other riders had any idea what the mumbled yet blaring announcement said, either. God love the Toronto Transit Commission, thought Stefan. For some reason, every transit worker he encountered seemed angry about something. He wondered what that was.

A little girl sat across from him, playing with a plastic horse in the seat beside her mother, who read one of the daily tabloids. The girl caught Stefan looking at her. She smiled. A feeling filled Stefan’s chest, welling up to a geyser of a grin. The girl hadn’t learned the grown-up subway game yet. He hoped she never would.

He wondered where the mother and daughter were headed this late at night. He looked left and right. The subway was unusually busy given the hour. He poked fingers at his throat, trying to relieve the tightness there. This had been a long day, with two ads to voice over, a movie trailer, and an adult film—in French. When he was young, Delonia and he sometimes spoke French to each other, their secret code when they were up to something and didn’t want his father to know about it. But that was a long time ago, and he found himself that day trying to make the proper names of body parts sound deliberate and sexy, since he didn’t know any of the street words for them. Luckily, he didn’t need to construct full sentences after the cursory set-up of the movie’s premise (patient meets nurse, nurse undresses patient to bathe him, patient and nurse quickly decide to have sex, doctor checks up on patient, also has sex with nurse, three other nurses join them, and so on). Once the sex began, the filmmakers didn’t care if the sound matched the on-screen figures’ mouth movements, so Stefan developed a stock set of moans and phrases, and could now do his part while drinking coffee or reading the paper.

These other jobs all took place after a full day recording Green Brigade. His producer Jean and he had reached a détente that allowed Stefan creative expression in his voice-work as long as he kept quiet about the show’s writing and political intent. He didn’t feel bothered by this. He didn’t feel much of anything. It was February.

His life was being bent out of shape by Cerise’s ability to drive: Delonia reneged on her gift and Stefan had to take the subway or a streetcar to his various jobs. Just as well, he decided, he was saving a lot of money this way. He could barely remember what he was saving his money for, though. All he knew was that he was making lots of it.

He took off his gloves; the subway car’s vents blew great quantities of hot air into the small space. The little girl tugged at her mother’s sleeve. “Mom,” she said. Her mother patted the girl’s leg and continued reading. “Mo-om,” she pleaded with increasing intensity. Her mother told her to sit still. She responded by throwing up in her mother’s lap. The sharp blue cheese smell soon filled the car. People politely made gestures to cover their noses, then grew less polite. Eyes met, and people nodded to say, Yeah, that’s awful. A few people broke into laughter. “I hate the TTC!” someone finally yelled. Usually outbursts were reserved for the crazy and were studiously ignored. This one, though, got a round of applause and a few “Amens”.

In her own disgusting way, Stefan thought, the girl had broken the subway spell.

~

Stefan emerged from the tiled cavern of the subway into an afternoon overhung with low grey clouds, as if someone had stapled old bedding to the sky. He walked the four blocks to his agent’s office, passing victory homes with tiny square front yards penned in with low chain link fences. As he got closer to the office, the buildings changed to commercial properties, but most of these were derelict. He passed an old family hardware store with faded 1970s signage here, then a ‘jobbers’ with a sign offering daily work to secretaries, cleaners, and factory workers, then reached his agent’s office, with its smoky-tinted windows. He opened the stiff glass door and entered an interior of chocolate-coloured furniture, brass clocks and lamps, two old electric typewriters, and filing cabinets overflowing with papers.

Stefan had never been here until recently, when he’d taken on all his extra jobs. The Green Brigade work took care of itself, but now he needed his agent’s help to keep all his appointments from conflicting and to collect the cheques from various production companies.

“Hello, Stefan,” said the receptionist, who also happened to be the agent’s wife. The agency was modest by Toronto standards, but it was all he’d ever needed.

“Hiya, Hester. I’m supposed to see David.”

“Yep, he’s expecting you. Go right in.”

Stefan nodded and opened the door behind her desk. David sat there, looking out the window at a small backyard shared with a neighbouring house. A bookshelf and filing cabinet stood against one wall of his office. Every other surface was covered with black-and-white headshots. Most of these photographs were old. Stefan wondered about the pictures of children with precocious smiles. What had become of them? He recognised one of them from a television program about a family with an adopted alien son. Child stars had a short shelf-life, particularly in Canada. Stefan once saw the alien boy at a party looking weathered and distinctly stoned.

“Stefan, sit down,” said David, not rising, but sitting back in his creaking office chair, his stomach bulging like a hill covered with a starched white sheet.

“Hi, David,” said Stefan, sitting in one of the two chairs in front of the desk.

“I gotta say, son, I don’t know what’s got into you lately, but I like it.” He’d lowered his large glasses to look at a spreadsheet of some kind, then raised them again to look at Stefan. “You’re bringing in more residuals than all my other clients combined, did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t know that. I’m happy to be useful.”

“You’re being more than useful.”

“Well, like I said, I’m glad I’m helping out. You’ve always been good to me, even when I wasn’t doing much.” He shifted in his seat. “I just came by to pick up my cheques and find out where I’m supposed to go next week.”

“Right. Okay, we’ll get all that straightened out, and then I have a proposition for you.”

“Oh. O-kay,” said Stefan, unsure.

“Here’s your usual cheques for The Green Show—” (He rarely got the projects’ titles right.) “Here’s from the movie house. These are from that documentary about the bears—” Otters, thought Stefan. “And, um, here’s the other ones.” These were in a sealed envelope. David pushed it across to Stefan as if it were something old and dead. Ah, the porn.

“Now,” said David, lacing his hands together and leaning forward as Stefan put the various papers into his jacket pocket. David pushed his glasses up his squashed tomato of a nose. “You seem to be on an ambitious streak lately. I know for the past several years you’ve told me you only wanted to do The Green Show, and I respected that. But since you’ve been taking on all these other jobs lately, I thought you might be interested in something bigger.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I really don’t think I could do any more than I’m doing now.”

“I didn’t say ‘more’, Stefan, I said ‘bigger.” David cleared his throat. “I put your demo in for a new Saturday morning cartoon. This is a sure thing, this show. It’s one of those computer cartoons, a tie-in with a product that’s been a top-seller for two years now. You’re up for the voice of a new lead character, and you’ve got a really good shot at it. He’s—I dunno, some kind of a robot or something. It’s called—” he checked a piece of paper in Stefan’s file “—Machine Marines. What do you think?”

“When would I have time to do this?”

“Stefan, you’re not hearing me. This job would pay, and pay good. You wouldn’t have to do anything else.”

“Oh.” Stefan looked out the window at the backyard. Snow was starting to fall from the newsprint sky, covering the hydro wires, the beige lawn, and the rusted swing-set. “Well.”

“Of course, you’d need to move to LA.”

“Oh.” Stefan’s eyebrows took flight.

David smiled. “Great, isn’t it?”

“Uh, yeah. That is great. Thanks for setting that up, David. I don’t know, though. I had some other plans. There was this project—“ He trailed off, looking at the lifeless faces on the wall.

“Oh, yeah, sorry about that—I’ve got a whole bunch of messages for you here from a woman named Helen.” He dug through a drawer and pulled out a stack of little yellow memo sheets. “She really wants to talk to you.” He read the notes. “Sets, casting, dates, venues, and something about funding. She was getting pretty pushy with Hester, but we know you don’t take phone calls.”

“Can’t.”

“Right,” said David, with no idea what Stefan meant. “Anyway, you should get in touch with her.”

“Yeah, I will. Look, David, I should get going. I’ve got to go meet some friends. Do you mind if I think about that offer for a few days?”

“Sure, that’s fine,” said David in a tone suggesting it was not fine. “Whatever you want.”

“Thanks. I appreciate all you’re doing for me.” He shook his agent’s hand and said goodbye to Hester on the way out. Large flakes of snow hit his face as he walked. Some melted in his hair and ran down his neck. He stopped walking: he forgot where he was supposed to go next.

~

Stefan closed his eyes on the dance floor and covered his ears. Coloured lights penetrated his eyelids and the beat pounded through his hands. He stood there, deliriously happy. His friends surrounded him, bumping into him from time to time as they danced.

He hadn’t seen them in weeks, he was so busy or so tired. He knew he couldn’t drink this much every night, and lots of times his gang’s attempts at big nights out turned into duds. Still, he wondered if there was some way to stay in this moment forever.

Somebody stumbled into him, then clapped him on the shoulder. He opened his eyes, and found his friends laughing, dancing in a circle around him.

~

Stefan ran a hand through his drooping hair and smacked his lips. His mouth tasted horrible. Allen offered him breakfast, but he declined, anxious to get home, clean himself properly, and change his clothes. He’d decided the night before that he was in no shape to walk home, and he’d been having such a good time that he accepted Allen’s offer of his fold-out couch.

Stefan stopped at a little bakery. Its name scrawled in black script across its teal-tiled exterior, Harbord Bakery. His favourite baked sweets from the shop were Jewish, but many of the staff inside looked Mediterranean. Toronto’s neighbourhoods were becoming hybrids: Italian/Korean, Greek/East Indian, Chinese/Nouveau Hippie. Perhaps, he thought, something was being lost. But then again, this opened up the communities like never before, and introduced people his age to foods and cultural activities his parents’ generation would never have considered sampling. Well, he reconsidered, perhaps not his mother, the most culturally sensitive person on earth.

He bought some coffee cake and ate it as he walked the rest of the way home, tearing off sticky chunks, licking his fingers after each one he put in his mouth. Sunday was living up to its name, and it was early enough that most of the snow was unblemished, except for that along the road, which looked like cola slush drink from a convenience store. He thought he might like one of those, but they were impossible to find in the winter. He crumpled the paper bag from the bakery, having finished his cake, and sneaked it into a garbage can in the laneway of a small brick house. He ran along the sidewalk then slid a long distance—the sun’s warmth made the snow heavy and wet, ideal for sliding. He reached up to jostle a tree-branch, then ducked away as heavy clumps of snow fell behind him.

This was good enough, all this. He thought about David’s offer, but put it out of his mind. Not today. Plans seemed too hard. He knew there was something else he was supposed to be working on, but it eluded him.

The smell of coffee greeted him as he opened the front door. Cerise’s presence wasn’t an altogether bad thing. It had cost him the car, but there were other concessions around the house that made life easier.

“Hi, Cerise,” said Stefan, filling a cup from the coffee maker urn. The beans were sure to have been picked by a well-paid group of revolutionary farmers, he figured, but he didn’t care about that as long as it tasted good. His mother tried for years to foist chicory on him, whose flavour he could only describe as “not coffee”.

“Hi, Stef,” said Cerise, looking up from a thick weekend paper (Delonia’s recycling efforts were strained to their limits by Cerise’s international newspaper fetish.) “Oh,” she said, “you might want to watch out for your mo—”

“Hello, Stefan,” said Delonia, entering the kitchen. “Could I speak with you in the study?”

This is not good, he thought. That invitation had always been an ominous one. Surely he was too old to get in trouble. Confused, he followed her through to the back room and sat in a deep, padded wingback chair next to a wall lined with books. The look of the room suggested they might be legal texts, but they were Delonia’s music and human potential collection, ranging from joyful sex to the history of folk music to finding one’s spirit pet.

Delonia sat on the corner of the desk, looming above him, her broad mouth pursed. She started to speak, but stopped herself. She smiled at him with her large teeth, giving him her strange disappointed smile, which he’d seen only a few times. She breathed deeply, then spoke. “I spoke with Doug Hendry on Friday,” she said. Stefan’s face was a blank. “From the Canada Council.”

Stefan’s insides deflated. He wrapped his hands together. They were cold.

“He told me he’d seen your name on an application, and made the connection that you were my son. The project had been approved already, and he wanted to congratulate me. He said he didn’t know my son was a First Nations playwright. I told him that I didn’t, either.”

“Mom, I didn’t actually—”

“I know, Helen did. I’ve already spoken to her about it, after I set Doug straight. I’m disappointed in her, so disappointed, after all our years of working together. I can’t even express how shocked and appalled I am at you. I don’t know which one of you is more to blame for this scheme, but it’s over now. I told Doug what I knew, and they cancelled your funding.”

Stefan’s hands were freezing now, but his face burned with embarrassment and anger. There was no way out of Delonia’s accusations. Even though he hadn’t done the paperwork, he had a good idea how Helen was going to doctor it. He felt angry at her himself, for claiming he was the playwright. His father wrote it. It was his father’s play.

Dad.

He’d forgotten about the play, but worse, he’d forgotten about his father.

“I’m sorry,” said Stefan, standing. “This got out of hand, and we did things the wrong way.”

“You’re telling me! What’s so important that you had to lie like this? Why didn’t you come to me? What’s going on here?”

“Well, nothing now,” he said, “thanks very much.”

“Stefan, you know I would have helped you. I’ve already told Helen that I’d fund this project, whatever it is. She said she had to talk to you about it, but you’d probably say no.”

“Damned right I’d say no!”

“I don’t understand. I’m trying to help you.”

“You have a very strange notion of help, Mom.”

“I have high personal standards, and I’d hoped you had them, too. If it got out that you’d lied to get a Canada Council grant application, how would that make us look? People have different standards for you when you’re a public figure, and everything you do has to be consistent and virtuous.”

“You are so full of it,” spat Stefan. “Your career is based on a lie. You’re supposed to be this wholesome native figure, but you haven’t set foot on a reservation in decades—your Métis blood is so diluted it’s clear—and you’re shacked up with a dyke, but you’ve never had her on one of your family hours. So don’t give me that about virtue. Besides, you’re the famous one, not me.”

He left the room, fuming at her, yet nauseated with humiliation that his mother had righteously ruined his plans and made a fool of him. More than ever, he wanted to get out of the range of her influence.

I can still run away, he thought. All was not lost. He had the play, a polished final version of it. How he and Helen could face each other again, he wasn’t sure. But he had the play. Why did we even apply for a grant? he wondered. Because we needed the money. But in these sleepwalking months, he’d bankrolled a lot of cash, and by the time they opened the show he’d have more than enough.

Stefan pulled down the attic stairs and climbed up. He tugged on a chain, lighting a single bulb. His father wasn’t here. He’d left Stefan when Stefan forgot about him. The original copy of the play was still up here, though, sitting in a stationery box on a milking stool. He picked the box up, sat down, and opened it. Empire of Nothing, said the cover page. A play by Robert Mackechnie.

Stefan started to read.

~

“Hello,” said Stefan to the woman sitting at a desk in the vestibule of the church. Her hair was trimmed to a faint fuzz, her clothes a shiny black material, with a high, pearlescent white collar rising almost to her chin.

“Hello,” she said, beaming euphorically at him. Her name-tag read “Hello, my name is Jana.”

“I’m looking for Brother James.”

“Oh, he’s conducting a small service right now. Is there anything I can help you with?”

He didn’t want to make dangerous assumptions about the Matholics’ gender roles—perhaps she was James’s superior. Besides, he figured she could do any of what James did on his last visit. “Yeah, why not?” he said. “I came in here a while back, and I sent a letter to my father.”

The woman cocked her head and smiled. “And how did that go for you?” she asked in a flat tone. Perhaps spending too much time with the dead makes you crazy, Stefan thought. His limited experience seemed to reinforce the idea. Or maybe it was the math they used in their rituals, he considered. Math had that effect on him, too. “Were you satisfied with the response?” she chirped.

“I don’t know if ‘satisfied’ is the word,” he replied, “but it certainly had an impact.” He pulled the play from his satchel along with a covering letter to his father. “I wanted to send him this.” He dropped the thick stack of papers on the table.

“Oh,” she said. He imagined cartoon dollar signs flashing in her eyes, but her expression hadn’t changed. He figured they probably didn’t get many repeat customers, and he aimed to haggle over the price of sending so many papers. “It’s just that there’s a service on,” she said, squinting.

“It’s really important,” he said.

“It always is,” she replied, annoyed traces of her previous, real-world personality leaking into her tone. “Never quite so important when they’re alive, though, is it?” she asked under her breath as she rooted through a box for a name-tag and a marker.

Stefan took the name-tag. “I’m sorry? He died when I was nine years old.”

Jana recomposed herself, standing. “Ah. Oh. My apologies.” Stefan guessed from her flub that she was a junior here, not able yet to keep the beatific demeanour from slipping.

She opened the big inner doors to the chapel. Stefan took a sticker from a banana in his pocket and stuck it to the name-tag so it read “Hello, my name is Reduced for Quick Sale”. He followed Jana into the chapel. In a far corner, he saw James standing in front of a small group of people who sat in pews. Around the room hung sparkly banners full of symbols Stefan vaguely remembered from school. How trigonometry might be a doorway to the infinite was beyond him.

Jana led him to an alcove at the back of the chapel. James looked up from his small congregation, annoyed at the disturbance. He was about to return his attention to his listeners when he recognised Stefan. He pulled his robes up slightly and walked quickly toward them. Jana had already moved into the alcove, and Stefan, feeling unnerved, rushed after her.

Jana opened a wooden frame with tiny wires strung across its surface and placed Stefan’s covering letter to his father into one side, then sprinkled it with blue and gold flecked powder. Into the other side she placed a piece of the odd paper he’d written on the last time he was here, then closed the frame and put it into a device on top of a small pillar, like the one James had used.

“You’re back,” said James, reaching them.

“Yes,” said Stefan, turning back to Jana to see the letter go.

“Jana, wait a moment before you do that,” said James, but her face was illuminated by the bright flash from the device. Stefan felt the heat as James crossed to the podium, but it was too late. The copy-sheet of the letter was gone. James dropped the frame as he pulled it out, burning his hands. He scrambled on the floor for the original letter as it drifted out and curled. Stefan, not sure why, grabbed his play from Jana and tried to get to his letter before James could reach it.

James looked up from the floor. “What was in that letter you sent? The first one?”

“Nothing,” said Stefan, “it was just a letter to my father. So’s that. Give it back!”

Someone moved to Stefan’s right, and he turned to see who it was. No one was there. Stefan turned back to James, who had his letter.

“What’s in those pages?” demanded the cleric.

“Nothing!” said Stefan, backing away toward the door.

“I need to know what you’ve been sending across,” insisted James, closing in. Stefan turned and burst through the doors, running through the vestibule. Again, he saw something at the edge of his vision, but he kept moving, pushing through the outer doors. On the stairs, someone shoved him and he fell, rolling, clutching the pages of the play. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, looking up toward the door to see a figure in a black woollen cloak, wearing a hat with a large flat circle of a brim. James opened the door behind the figure. “Come inside,” he said to the man, “you shouldn’t be out here.” He held the door open further, and the figure walked inside. James pulled it shut behind them.

Stefan sat in the snow, pulling together the loose pages of the play. They have my letter, he thought. He considered his options and decided to let them keep it. He wasn’t going back in. His forehead throbbed. He put a hand to it, which came back wet with what looked like chocolate sauce under the sodium lights outside the church. He stood and headed for the nearest hospital, happy that, unlike gunshot wounds, stitches didn’t need an explanation, because he didn’t have one.

Seven

Casting Doubts

“So what do you do for a living?” asked the hairdresser.

“Well, for the past several years I’ve been doing voice-over work on The Green Brigade,” said Stefan. She showed no signs of recognition. He continued, “But I’ve recently started doing theatre production.” He liked the sound of that.

“Oh, that’s interesting,” she replied, not actually sounding interested, or like she knew what he meant. He was disappointed: he wanted to talk about the play. He needed to tell a stranger about his plans, because he still hadn’t told anyone close to him. He’d told David, his agent, to turn down the lucrative job in Los Angeles. If he could resist that, he figured, there was nothing that would stop him. But he was sure his friends would be hurt when he told them he was leaving. Sure, he thought, that’s it. It’s the guys you’re worried about telling. It’s not that you’re scared of telling Mom, is it? She knew about the play. But she didn’t know where it came from or where it was taking him.

The hairdresser indecisively air-snipped around his head, then focused on a patch near his forehead and dove in. Her scissors caught on something, a small blue thread—the last of the stitches left over from his fall outside the Matholic church several weeks ago.

“Ew,” said the hairdresser, pulling back.

“Ow,” said Stefan, following her movement with his head.

“Ew!” she said more forcefully, trying to tug her scissors free.

“Ow!” shouted Stefan, up out of his chair now, following her like a marionette.

She dropped the scissors, forcing Stefan to lean over so they would swing away from his face. He waddled about, clutching the air in front of him until he found the counter. He worked his way up that using the mirror to guide him, then carefully plucked the scissors free. He turned them around and snipped the blue thread from his forehead, then handed it to the hairdresser. “I think this is what you wanted,” he said. She winced.

He proceeded to the cashier, where he paid. Normally he’d haggle for a reduction in price—he’d yet to find a hairdresser or barber who didn’t hurt him somehow—but he had an important meeting this afternoon.

~

Helen pushed the small joystick on her wheelchair forward and her chair drove into the wall beside the elevator door. She pulled it back, and reversed into the wall behind her. She pushed it forward at an angle, and the chair arced forward, bumping into the wall beside the elevator. She sighed and rubbed her forehead. The machine did this when the battery ran low. But no, she thought, I had to buy the fancy one.

She felt someone pull on the chair’s handles. “I can get it,” she insisted. The person kept pulling her back from the wall. She rammed her joystick, spinning the chair to face whoever it was. “I said I can get—Oh, hello.”

“Hello,” said Stefan. “Long time no see.”

A moment passed in which either of them could have felt embarrassed for what had gone before, being caught out by Delonia. But they’d started a friendship, and a pilot light of affection remained lit. They smiled, then laughed, Stefan’s a sigh-laugh, Helen’s a familiar stretched-balloon sound.

“Stefan, I’m so sorry that the show got canned.”

“The funding got canned. The show’s still happening.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Can we go somewhere and talk?”

“You bet!” she said. She led him—in an awkward course that required his pulling her from the wall several times—to a conference room.

He dug through his knapsack and took out some papers, which he spread in front of her. “Here’s a breakdown and the budget I’ve come up with,” he said. “I think I’ve saved up enough to make this happen. And I’m going to keep working right up until we leave.”

She scanned the pages. “This all looks pretty good. I can see a few things we need to add, but I think we can work with this.”

“Oh we can, can we?” he said with a smirk.

“If you’ll have me back.”

“Helen, I’d be an idiot not to. Thank you.”

“No, thank you, Stefan, for not giving up.” She went back to the pages. “So. There are just a few things missing here. There’s no director.”

“Yes there is.”

“I don’t see—”

“I want to direct.”

“Stefan, God wants to direct. Do you really think—?” She stopped and scrutinised his face. “Yes, actually, I think that’s a good idea. You grew up around this stuff, and no one has your particular, um, insight into the author. You’re going to need one hell of a stage manager, though. More of a production manager-slash-assistant director, to fill in the blanks for you. And I know who that should be.”

“Whatever you say, Helen.”

“Exactly. You keep saying that.”

~