subTerrain 47

C O N T E N TS

issue 47 subTerrain

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Letters

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Editorial

A LITERARY MAGAZINE

fiction

EDITOR Brian Kaufman

MANAGING EDITOR Jenn Farrell

EDITORIAL COLLECTIVE Peter Babiak, Nadine Boyd, Sharon Bradley, Jenn Farrell, Hilary Green, Karen Green, Day Helesic, Brian Kaufman, Kate Lancaster, Jim Oaten, Paul Pitre, Robert Strandquist

DESIGN Rayola Graphic Design

L AYO U T

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Words for Evelyn BY HEATHER HOGAN The Insides of Vegetables BY HILARY SMITH The Celebration BY HARRY TOURNEMILLE Goodbye Porkpie Hat BY MIKE CHRISTIE The Roots of Things BY MEGHAN WAITT Apogee BY FIONA OSBORNE How Would You Get to Maui? BY DONATO MANCINI

HeimatHouse

ART EMISSARY Sharon Bradley

ADVERTISING Brian Kaufman, Karen Green

COVER Derek von Essen

poetry 11 The Role of the Synapse BY CHRISTINE LECLERC 39 In the Absence of Conversation BY TRACY HAMON 46 The Physics of Chemical Bonds #2 BY NAOISE HEFFERON

I L L U S T R ATO R S / P H OTO G R A P H E R S Arlea Ashcroft, Karen Justl, Louis Netter, Lucas Soi, Derek von Essen

B OOK REVIEW EDITOR

IMAGE: DETAIL FROM “AT THE BASE OF THE CRUCIFIXION” BY LUCAS SOI

Karen Green subTerrain Magazine P.O. Box 3008, MPO, Vancouver, B.C. V6B 3X5 Canada Tel: (604) 876-8710 Fax: (604) 879-2667 e-mail: subter@portal.ca website: www.subterrain.ca p r i n t e d i n C a n a d a by H e m l o c k P r i n t e r s

commentary 52 Hunkamooga: The Lost Subway Ride BY STUART ROSS

visual art 32 Imagined Realities: the drawings of Lucas Soi BY LAURA MATWICHUK

book reviews 45 Dennis E. Bolen on Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock; Patrick Mackenzie on Tom Slee’s No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart; Day Helesic on Anne Fleming’s Anomaly; Jim Oaten on Matthew Firth’s Suburban Pornography; Jacqi Burke on Heather Burt’s Adam’s Peak; Nadine Boyd on Simon Van Booy’s The Secret Lives of People in Love; Salvatore Difalco on Kate Sutherland’s All In Together Girls.

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Mail Room subTerrain FAC T U M

GENERAL GUIDELINES Fiction: max. 5,000 words Creative Non-Fiction & Commentary: max. 4,000 words Photography, line art and illustrations welcome: hard copy or electronic submissions to the address below; Poetry: no unsolicited poetry submissions

LETTERS ARE WELCOME We encourage your comments about what you find between our covers. Letters become the property of subTerrain Magazine and may be edited for brevity and clarity.

B O O K S TO R E S & R E TA I L O U T L E T S subTerrain is available in Canada from Magazines Canada (416) 504-0274 and in the U.S. from International Periodical Distributors (IPD) 1-800-999-1170.

WWW.SUBTERRAIN.CA Sniff the ether

ISSN: 0840-7533 Volume 5 no. 47 • publishing since 1988 We gratefully acknowledge the support of the B.C. Arts Council and The Canada Council for the Arts.

We acknowledge the assistance of the Government of Canada, through the Publications Assistance Program toward our mailing costs, and the Canada Magazine Fund for marketing and promotional initiatives.

IMAGE: DETAIL FROM “ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING” BY LUCAS SOI

subTerrain is published 3 times a year (Spring, Summer, Fall/Winter) by the sub-TERRAIN Literary Collective Society. All material is copyright of subTerrain, the authors, 2007. SUBSCRIPTION RATES: INDIVIDUALS: Canada/U.S.: One year $15.; Two years $25.; Lifetime: $150; Elsewhere: One year $25.; Two years $38. INSTITUTIONS: One year $18; Two years $36. MANUSCRIPTS AND ARTWORK are submitted at the author’s or artist’s own risk and will not be returned or responded to unless accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope bearing sufficient postage for the submission’s return. Those submitting material from outside Canada must include sufficient International Reply Coupons to cover the material’s return. Please allow 4 – 6 months for a response. Indexed in the Canadian Literary Periodicals Index and the American Humanities Index (AHI). Canadian Publications Mail Products Sales Agreement No. 0361453. PAP Registration No. 9322. Postage paid at MPO, Vancouver, B.C. Date of issue: Fall 2007. All correspondence to: subTerrain Magazine, P.O. Box 3008 Main Post Office, Vancouver, B.C. V6B 3X5 CANADA TEL: (604) 876-8710 FAX: 879-2667 email: subter@portal.ca. No e-mail submissions—queries only, please.

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teen ink and the blood of christ Editors, “The Alteration of Parker Laurence” is a short story about a man who drinks urine, (his desire); a porn actress, and a homeless man who drinks Natural Ice beer like blood from Christ’s veins. I also include a rather meaningless allusion to a poem I don’t understand, which I used because I like the title.

Sent you a story nine months ago, never heard back, probably because of improper postage.

I am nineteen years old, my work has appeared in Teen Ink and Happy. I have a self-published short novel, a story being taught at the local university, and recently completed my fifth book. I eat watermelon while listening to ABBA. I appreciate your time and consideration.

—Joseph Love, Murfreesboro, TN

e s pe c i a l ly p l e a s e d in virginia Dear subTerrain; Congratulations on your continued success with subTerrain. I am especially pleased by the high quality of fiction and poetry that you publish.

—Nathan Leslie, Fairfax,VA

admire have had work appear in your magazine. Regardless of whether my piece is accepted for publication, thank you for continuing to provide a forum for Canadian literature’s dissenting voices.

—Andrew MacDonald, London, ON

a comment on summing it up Dear Editors, I just discovered your magazine and love it’s brave, irreverent style. “Strong Words For A Polite Nation” so sums it up.

—Jorma Kantola,Vancouver, BC

wo rd s f r o m t h e ot h e r s i d e Dear Editors: In spite of its beginning, “Practical Applications of the General Theory of NonExistence” is a political story, a physicist’s birds-eye view of politics. Hey, politicians are keenly interested in any excuse for their behaviour.

Yes, I have been published, lots of lit-rags and a couple of national publications, Detroit News Weekend and The San Francisco Art and Literary Review, but nothing for a few years.

I was dead for a while in 2005. I am a former 9-1-1 operator with time on my hands.

Thank you so much for your time and consideration.

—JD Vincent,Ossineke, MI

a f o ru m f o r d i s s e n t i n g vo i c e s on the state of literary journals To the Editors of subTerrain, Though I’m a long-time reader, this is the first time I’ve submitted anything to subTerrain. In fact, this is my first submission to any journal. I chose subTerrain because it consistently features talented writers and artists who tackle darker subject matter head-on. Many writers I

Hey subTerrain, I’m submitting this story for you to consider for publication. I have published fiction in subTerrain in the past and consider your magazine one of the few interesting places left.

—Tony Burgess,Stayner, ON

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E D I TO R I A L

My Grammar is Pretty Bad, but My Ideas Are Good, Right?

My daughter adored her Grade 8 English teacher, and I could see why—he was elegantly unkempt, always in black, with a worn leather briefcase slung over his shoulder. But a few months into school her adoration changed to awe. She took to calling him The Cryptkeeper because he spoke in mysterious proverbs like some dark arts professor at Hogwarts. “Answer my riddle and you’ll get an A” is how she once described his teaching.

Of all the misconceptions students bring to campus from high school—like only ever writing three-body-paragraph essays, never using the first-person pronoun in academic essays, and believing that there is no right and wrong answer in English class because it’s all “subjective”—it’s that stereotypical image of the cryptic English teacher that’s always been, for me, the hardest to dispel. And every September I try hard to do just that, because if I don’t the students in my class will keep thinking of English as a mystifying subject and peg the English prof as the source of forbidden knowledge who is there to inspire creativity and generate esoteric discussions rather than the guy who teaches them how to write sentences with mathematical precision and craft paragraphs with logical accuracy.

This high-school attitude lingers among many students in all my classes, but it’s especially strong in creative writing where it emerges as the rather egocentric belief that they can write anything, anything at all, and that whatever they do write is good and must therefore get a good grade simply because they have written it and because judging writing is all subjective anyways, so everybody will get an A. Or that all writing is intensely personal rather than rule-bound so they can write essays in the most comma-spliced stream of consciousness or unorthodox style—just like Virginia Woolfe or Hunter S. Thompson—because anything that involves rules and structure (like grammar and consistent diction) stands against the spirit of individual genius, and that if you ever tell them “no, you shouldn’t write this because the meaning is unclear” they interpret it as an assault on the centre of their being, or they reply that grammatical lapses are part of their poetic license.

It comes as a shock to many of them to learn that there may be limits to their abilities and deficiencies in their knowledge and that most of these limitations and many of the deficiencies can be overcome with better writing skills. It’s shocking because they often don’t understand that there’s no difference between an idea and the manner of its expression, choosing instead to ask the only truly dumb question I’ve ever been asked as an English instructor: “My grammar is pretty bad, but my ideas are good, right?” As if there could be a difference. Perhaps the only thing worse than a student who believes that learning how to read and write well is a training ground for imprecise thinking where you succeed by having meandering discussions about enigmatic subjects is the prof who conducts classes as if it is.

—Peter Babiak, Associate Editor

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Words for Evelyn H E AT H E R H O G A N I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY A R L E A A S H C R O F T

Evelyn squinted over the roof of the car and through the heat waves radiating off concrete at the tourists waddling in and out of the donut shop.

The air in the parking lot was hot and heavy, like a tongue pressing down on her head and shoulders.

“Evelyn!” Her mother’s voice snapped her back to the task at hand.

“For heaven’s sake, hold it higher!”

Evelyn straightened her back and repositioned her arms so that the beach towel concealed her mother’s bent back. The rear passenger door of her mother’s brown sedan was open before her, and Martin, her mother’s new boyfriend, lay slumped across the back seat on his stomach with his legs hanging out of the door.

Her mother, Judy, was using a road map of southern Ontario to scrape the shit off Martin’s legs. His pants were flung over the car door; his soiled boxers hung heavy around his ankles. The tops of his dress socks were ruddy with excrement. The whole tableau would have struck Evelyn as comical were it not for the fact that it included her.

“I need napkins or something,” Judy said.

“You need a hose, is what you need.”

“Evelyn, put a sock in it!” Judy’s voice had an edge to it, so Evelyn sighed and went back to staring across the parking lot at the doors of the donut shop. No one seemed to be pointing their way, but she felt sure that every one of those donut-eaters knew exactly what was going on behind her beach towel.

Evelyn said, “You should have pulled over sooner.”

“Where, Evelyn?” Judy said. “On the side of the highway?”

“I’m just saying.”

“Let me up!” said Martin.

Judy shushed him.

“I need a coffee!” Martin insisted.

“In a minute dear,” Judy muttered.

Evelyn willed her focus away from the car, and let it drift back across the parking lot to the highway. Above the whine of speeding cars, a solitary starling tweeted its heart out, oblivious to Evelyn’s

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plight. She closed her eyes and isolated the bird song, concentrating hard until everything else around her disappeared.

Prior to meeting Martin, Judy had been single for thirty-two years.

Evelyn’s father died when Evelyn was six, and Judy had never remarried. The years had passed without so much as a date for Judy, but she always said she managed just fine with the love and companionship of her one and only daughter, Evelyn.

Evelyn had never dated either. She lived alone in the basement apartment of a townhouse near an off ramp just outside Toronto.

She kept a goldfish. Its name was Darlin. She drove from Toronto to Wainfleet every Saturday to spend the night and most of Sunday with Judy.

Sometimes they rented a movie on Saturday nights, but Judy was a fan of swashbuckling epics and Evelyn wasn’t, so mostly they just watched TV. Judy would fall asleep in the La-Z-Boy around ten-thirty, and Evelyn would poke her with the remote and tell her to go up to bed. On Sundays they drove to the mall and had lunch in the food court before Evelyn headed back to the city. That’s the way it had been every weekend for fifteen years.

Evelyn worked as a Customer Service Clerk in the tax department at Toronto City Hall. She hated it, but over the years she had developed a method of going into a semi-trance-like state of mental and emotional detachment during her commute, and she found this made her job almost bearable. Her office was a dusty, grey-upholstered cubicle; one in a sea of identical grey-upholstered cubicles.

Judy liked to call Evelyn at work a few mornings a week to tell Evelyn what she’d had for dinner the night before and relay what she’d seen on Dr. Phil. When Judy called Evelyn at work one day to tell

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her she’d out-of-the-blue met and fallen in love with someone, Evelyn thought she was going to have a stroke.

“Mm-hmm?” was all she could say each time Judy paused to draw in a breath.

When Judy said that Martin had already sold his bungalow in Cheektowaga so he could move in to Judy’s townhouse, Evelyn smacked her hand down on her keyboard and yelled, “Jesus, Mom!” Her mouse clattered to the floor.

All work-related activity in the cubicles around hers ceased.

Evelyn didn’t want her outrage to betray her envy. She groped through her shock for something she could be justifiably outraged about. “Wait,” she said. “You met him where?”

“Online,” Judy said in a sulky voice.

“Like, on the internet?”

“Yes.” “Like, with one of those dating services?”

“That’s right.”

Evelyn heard someone behind her stifling the giggles. She heard her mother’s monologue in snippets—his name was Martin, he was a seventy-year-old retired electrician, and he was wonderful.

“Does this mean you have a bio?” Evelyn asked, trying not to sound scandalized.

“Of course, dear.”

“Well what does it say? Did you use your real name?”

“Evelyn . . .”

“What picture did you use?”

“Evelyn, honestly!”

Evelyn held her head in her hands and said, “Oh God.” “Don’t be dramatic, Evelyn,” Judy snapped. “You should be so industrious.”

Evelyn didn’t go to Wainfleet that weekend. She expected Judy to call her at work on Monday, hurt by Evelyn’s absence, but Judy didn’t call. She didn’t call on Tuesday, either. Evelyn told Darlin that she was looking forward to finally having her weekends all to herself.

Mina stopped by Evelyn’s desk one day during the following week.

Mina was the team-lead for Accounts Receivable. She reeked of hairspray, and the horny bent toes sticking out of her high-heeled sandals sported cherry-red nails that looked capable of splitting packing tape. Mina kept up a friendly act but her eyes were always darting around to scope out whether there was a better conversation taking place elsewhere, in which case she’d bolt in mid-sentence.

“Heard the big news about Judy,” Mina said, glancing over Evelyn’s head and the people chatting by the photocopier. “How’s her new love life going?”

“Fine for now, I guess,” mumbled Evelyn, busying herself with shuffling the papers on her desk.

“I think it’s great that she met someone. You must be excited for her.”

“I guess.”

“So what about you, Evelyn? When are we going to hear all about a special guy for you?” Now Mina’s eyes levelled squarely with Evelyn’s.

“I’m too busy to date,” Evelyn said.

“Too busy doing what?”

Evelyn blushed. “I just want to focus on my career right now.”

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“Oh,” Mina said in a tone that made Evelyn feel small. “I see. You just want to be the best clerk you can be, is that it?”

“That’s right,” Evelyn said.

Three more weeks passed with no word from Judy. Evelyn told Darlin she’d never felt so alive. No more interruptions at work, no more lame movies, and no more taking care of needy old Judy. On Saturday nights, she rented movies that she actually wanted to see, and watched them alone with an air of self-righteousness.

Aside from movie-watching, Evelyn passed most of her time watching Darlin float around in his glass bowl. Since Judy’s announcement, Evelyn found that the gaps in her memory that represented her father had been knocking around in her skull.

Evelyn’s father’s name was Dale. Dale Platt. Evelyn knew nothing else about him, and there’d been no pictures or mementoes of him in their house when Evelyn was growing up. It was an emotionally difficult subject to bring up with Judy, so Evelyn rarely did. The most she’d been able to cobble together about Dale was that he had died suddenly due to a terrible and mysterious illness. That had satisfied Evelyn’s curiosity up until the day she’d started working for the City. She’d gone for a coffee on her first day with Mina, who had asked the usual questions about family, and Evelyn had provided her usual answer. “I was raised by my mom—my dad died when I was very young.”

“Oh,” said Mina, her eyes growing wide. “I’m so sorry! How awful!”

Evelyn shrugged and sipped her double-double.

“What did he die of?”

“It was very sudden,” said Evelyn. She enjoyed being nonchalant.

“Was he ill?”

“Yeah, sort of. It was a mysterious illness.”

“What kind of mystery illness?” Mina asked. “Like a cancer?”

Evelyn was now in uncharted territory. She hadn’t ever been asked this many questions before. People usually changed the subject after the “mysterious illness” line.

“I guess so,” Evelyn had said. She was astounded at the simplicity of Mina’s questions, and bewildered by her own lack of answers.

Mina was floored. “You mean you don’t know?”

Evelyn shook her head and looked at her lap.

“You mean your mother never told you?”

Evelyn blushed and shrugged.

“Evelyn,” Mina said, “how can you not know how your father died? He’s your father!”

Once Mina had put it in those terms, Evelyn couldn’t fathom not knowing such a thing. She was embarrassed by the way Mina was staring at her. Evelyn knew that look. It was the look you gave stupid people when you couldn’t believe how stupid they were.

Evelyn had gone home that weekend on a mission to find out about Dale Platt.

Judy was preparing dinner and Evelyn had been setting the table when she brought it up.

“Mom, what did Dad die of?”

“What?” Judy asked, and the air in the kitchen immediately went brittle. Judy was at the counter preparing dinner. She didn’t stop what she was doing to face Evelyn.

“What did he die of?”

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“Your father loved you very much. He was a warm and affectionate man.”

So far, the conversation was a carbon copy of every other time Evelyn had asked about him. This is where she usually gave up, because she felt so bad asking difficult questions about a warm and affectionate man who apparently loved her very much.

Thinking of Mina, and of how she might be able to save face if she went to work on Monday with more information, Evelyn soldiered on. “What kind of illness was it, exactly?” she asked.

“Your father was a wonderful man, Evelyn.”

Judy was beating eggs for their quiche. Evelyn watched Judy’s back jiggle. Most of their important conversations were carried out in this fashion—Judy at the counter cooking or cleaning, Evelyn scrutinizing Judy’s back for body language that would either corroborate or contradict whatever Judy said. A quickening of the egg-beating told Evelyn that she was pushing her luck.

“You mean, like a cancer?”

“It was very sudden.”

“You mean, like—” “Evelyn!” The egg-beating ceased entirely. Judy leaned against the counter and gripped her forehead with both hands.

Evelyn hurried out of the kitchen on her tiptoes and hid in the TV room until Judy called her in for dinner. They ate in silence.

Evelyn vowed to never again upset her mother by asking difficult questions about wonderful people.

Four weeks after her Martin-announcement, Judy called Evelyn at work and, as if no time had passed since their last conversation, asked Evelyn to join her and Martin on a road trip to Casino Niagara. Evelyn turned her back on the line-up of people at her counter and tried to maintain an air of cool indifference.

“It’ll be a fun way for you and Martin to get to know one another,” Judy was saying.

“But I don’t gamble.”

“They have a lounge there, Evelyn, with wonderful performers.

And Martin really wants to meet you.”

Evelyn wondered when Judy had started hanging around in bars watching lounge acts. She thought it was probably around the same time Judy started trolling for men on the internet.

Judy said, “We can have a drink and watch the show.”

“A drink?” Evelyn was incredulous. Judy was as dry as they get.

Not even a rum ball at Christmas.

“You know what I mean dear, you can have a drink and I’ll have one of those v-i-r-g-i-n-s.”

“I don’t know, Mom.” Evelyn wanted to say no. She glanced over her shoulder. The woman at the front of the line was leaning on the counter, giving Evelyn the eye. “I can’t really talk right now,” Evelyn said.

“We don’t have to talk. I’ve told Martin all about you and he can’t wait to meet you. Why don’t you come down on Friday after work?

You can stay over and we’ll make a day of it.”

“Mom, I said I don’t know!”

The woman at the counter sighed and said, “Does anyone work here?”

The man behind her said, “Sure as hell don’t look like it.”

“Evelyn, don’t be difficult,” her mother was saying. “I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

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“Mom!” Judy hung up.

Evelyn stared at the receiver in disbelief.

“Lord,” the woman at the counter bellowed at the ceiling. “I sure hope one day I get paid with tax dollars to stand around yakking it up on the phone. Sure would be nice!”

The man behind her said, “Sure as hell would.”

Evelyn took a deep breath and then walked over to the counter.

“Can I help you?” she said in a flat voice.

“I doubt it, honey,” the woman said, turning around to wink at her smiling audience, “but you can sure as hell try.”

The next day, as Evelyn merged with the highway traffic and headed towards Wainfleet, she felt optimistic despite her frustration with Judy. She had realized that Judy might have a particular taste for particular kind of man, and that Martin might reveal something of Dale in their similarities. Granted, she wouldn’t be able to appreciate or even recognize those similarities, since she had no awareness of her father. But still, Evelyn had decided to look forward to meeting him.

When Evelyn pulled up in front of Judy’s townhouse, she sat in her car with the ignition running and stared at the new lawn ornaments that blighted the yard. An American flag fluttered in the pudgy fist of a gnome at the end of the driveway. On the lawn, a ceramic frog held a crispy brown geranium plant in its smiling mouth. A white plastic lamb in Judy’s flower bed strained beneath the weight of a bronze plaque that read No Bloody Swearing.

Judy appeared at the front door and scurried down the driveway to meet her. “Sweetie, did you get my message about the macaroni salad?”

“Yeah—Mom, what is all this?”

“Oh, it’s just Martin.” Judy said with a wave of her hand. “Isn’t he terrible? Listen, did you stop and pick up the salad like I asked?”

“I said yes! But . . .Mom . . .”

Judy came around to the passenger side and grabbed the bags from the seat.

Evelyn was recalling a fight they’d had when Evelyn was eight and they’d driven down to Florida with one of Judy’s bridge partners. Pink flamingoes were everywhere in Florida, and Evelyn had begged her mother to buy one for their lawn back home.

“Absolutely NOT, Evelyn,” her mother had said. “Lawn ornaments are for trailer trash.”

Evelyn tried to remind Judy of this.

“Oh, have a sense of humour, Evelyn,” Judy said. “I’ve been telling Martin how much fun you are, what a wonderful sense of humour you have—now don’t you go making a liar out of me.” She hustled up the driveway, opened the screen door and called into the house, “Martin, honey! She’s here!” She held the door open for Evelyn. Cigarette smoke wafted out past Judy’s smiling face.

“Jesus, Mom, is he smoking in there?” Evelyn hissed.

Judy ignored her. “Martin is so excited to see you. Martin?”

Evelyn was looking around at the hallway, which was cluttered with unspeakable knick-knacks. A stuffed and mounted fish, its gills furry with dust and cobwebs, leaned against the wall beside the door. “Are you kidding me?” said Evelyn, pointing at the fish.

“Well sweetie, it’s not fair to Martin if he can’t bring any of his things into the house. It’s called compromise.”

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A torrent of phlegmy coughs erupted in the den. Evelyn’s heart sank as she walked down the hall towards the noise.

Judy got to the den first. “Martin, didn’t you hear me, sweetheart?

Evelyn is here to see you.” She had to yell over the television. Martin was watching golf, and had it turned up so loud that even during the quiet moments there was an audible hum.

Evelyn stopped in the doorway beside Judy. A mound of polyester-clad flesh quivered in the La-Z-Boy. It wore a foam baseball cap and large, clip-on shades that were so dark they looked opaque. There was a rhythmic whistling and popping that Evelyn surmised was his breathing. A lit cigarillo dangled from his mouth.

The air in the den was blue.

“Evelyn dear, this is Martin.”

Martin gave no indication that he was aware of anyone else in the room.

“Martin, honey,” Judy shouted, “this is Ev-e-lyn!”

Evelyn stared. Martin didn’t move.

“And look honey, she brought your favorite! Macaroni salad!”

The crowd on the TV clapped suddenly, and the noise was deafening.

“Are you hungry dear?” Judy hollered, smiling at Evelyn. “I’ve got your favourite dish warming in the oven . . .”

Judy trailed off as she disappeared towards the kitchen. Evelyn pried her eyes off of Martin and followed her mother down the hall.

She felt sick. She sat down at the kitchen table. Judy was rambling on about something as she wiped the kitchen counter, her back to Evelyn. “. . . and when we got to the deli counter I wondered if maybe I should try the chorizo sausage instead of the fennel.’”

Evelyn fiddled with a corner of a placemat and stared at Judy’s back.

“And Martin, gosh he’s so funny, he says to me, he says, ‘Well, why don’t you just try ’em both?’ and I laughed,” she paused to draw a ragged breath and then continued, “Because I mean, chorizo and fennel? Together?”

Judy opened the oven door and bent under the weight of the large ceramic mixing bowl that was covered with a dinner plate.

“So then I turned to the woman behind the counter, and she knows I always get the fennel because I’ve been shopping there for, heck, must be going on fifteen years now! She’s the one I told you about, Evelyn, the one whose daughter-in-law . . .”

More coughing from the den. Judy raised her voice. “Whose daughter-in-law works in the tax department for Welland County, remember I told you? What was her name now, I can’t remember . . .” Her voice trailed off and she stood at the table with one hand on her hip and one hand on the bowl. “I can’t for the life of me think of her name . . .”

Evelyn knew the girl’s name was Caroline, but she didn’t say anything. She watched her mother stare off into space.

“Anyway,” said Judy. “Where was I?” She looked at Evelyn. Evelyn looked at her. Evelyn wanted to ask what that hideous slob was doing in her living room. Evelyn wanted to remind Judy of her selfrighteous stance on lawn ornaments, mounted fish, and cigarette smoke.

From the den, above the roar of the television, a wet-sounding belch.

“Mom,” Evelyn said. “Why is he wearing sunglasses in the house?”

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“What, dear? Oh I remember—the sausage!” Judy’s face came back to life and she opened the fridge. “So I tried both! And you know something?” She turned back towards the table with a bottle of white wine and a bowl of greens. “It actually works!” She laughed and put the wine and the salad on the table, then spun around to open the cutlery drawer.

“Wine?” asked Evelyn.

“Yes,” Judy said, rummaging for the corkscrew. “I thought we’d celebrate.” She found the corkscrew and reached up into the cupboard for a wine glass.

“Celebrate what?”

Judy handed Evelyn the corkscrew and the glass. “You’ll have to open it, dear,” Judy said. “I can never manage those things.”

Judy pulled her chair up to the table and sat down with a contented sigh.

Evelyn hadn’t moved.

“What’s the matter, did I not get you a glass?” Judy made a move to get up.

“No, Mom. Just sit. I’ve got one.”

“Well, then what are you waiting for, silly, open the wine!”

“Isn’t he going to eat with us?”

“Who, Martin?” Judy laughed and made a face. “No honey, Martin eats his dinner in front of the TV, and he’s eaten already.” Judy reached for the salad. “These greens are those organic greens that you buy in the big plastic containers? You know the ones? “ “You let him eat in front of the TV?” “Oh for heaven’s sake, Evelyn, honestly!”

Evelyn took a deep, uneven breath and sighed.

Judy placed her fork on her plate and dabbed at her mouth with her napkin. “Evelyn, honey,” her voice was quiet but firm. “Martin is a wonderful man.”

The silence between them seemed to draw the roar of the television down the hall and into the kitchen. Evelyn stared at her plate.

“These greens really are lovely.” Judy said, her voice back to its brusque, clipped tone. “Have you tried these before? I forget the brand name, but I’m sure you could find something similar in the city . . .”

More coughing from the den. Evelyn reached for the wine.

They left for the Casino right after breakfast the next morning. Judy drove because Martin was on migraine medication that prevented him from driving, although Evelyn noted that he was apparently still free to smoke cigarillos and suck back coffee from a thermos.

Evelyn sulked in the back seat.

Ten minutes into the highway driving, Martin fell asleep with his head pressed against the door and his usual whistling and popping became groaning and choking.

“How does a man who drinks that much coffee fall asleep at ten a.m.?” she whispered at Judy.

Judy clamped her lips into a tight line and gave Evelyn a stern look in the rearview mirror. “I hope people are more understanding with you when you’re a senior citizen.”

“It’s a valid question Mom; he’s had about three pots of coffee.”

“Evelyn, please!” Judy hissed. “Keep your voice down!”

Evelyn flung herself back in her seat and glared out the window.

“I think maybe someone got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.” Judy whispered. “That’s what I think.”

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“I think that’s some crazy migraine medication, that’s what I think.”

“Young lady!”

Evelyn crossed her arms and sank down in her seat.

Judy read the signs they passed. “Speed kills.” She laughed.

“Well, you’ve got that right!” She smiled and winked at Evelyn in the rearview mirror. Evelyn rolled her eyes.

Evelyn had only one memory of her father. Or rather, she suspected it was a memory of her father, but the circumstances that unearthed the memory were such that Evelyn knew better than to ask Judy if she was right.

Evelyn was on her way to work one February morning, and it was early enough that it was still dark outside. She stopped to use a bank machine on Queen Street, and saw a homeless man asleep on the floor inside the vestibule. A grimy baseball cap laid upside-down on the floor beside him. Someone had tossed in a crumpled five-dollar bill.

Evelyn hesitated with her hand on the door, but when she stuck her bankcard in the slot and the door buzzed, the man didn’t stir. Evelyn figured he was unconscious and wouldn’t be any trouble, so she pulled open the door and walked into a solid wall of stench. It was a mixture of urine, body odour, and the sharp musk of booze leeching through sweaty, unwashed skin. It stopped Evelyn in her tracks and made her throat close.

As she stood there trying to force air back in to her lungs, Evelyn very clearly recalled being rocked to sleep in the arms of a man who was humming a lullaby with his lips pressed against her hair.

She could feel the warmth of his breath on the top of her head, and the hair on his forearms against her cheek. She felt her body relax, and a wave of blissful sleepy-headedness washed over her so that she had to grip the door frame of the vestibule. A gust of frigid air blasted in through the open door and the homeless man’s five-dollar bill scuttled across the floor. He raised his swollen, dirty face up off the tile floor and let loose a stream of obscenities that snapped Evelyn out of her dream. She gasped and stepped backwards out of the vestibule, let the door close, and then turned to walk unsteadily towards the office with her mittened hands clamped over her mouth.

Evelyn was revisiting this memory in the back seat of Judy’s car when Martin snorted awake from his nap.

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“I need the bathroom,” he said.

Judy glanced over at him. “You’re awake!”

Martin said, “I need to go.”

“In a minute dear, there’s a donut shop just a couple of miles ahead.”

“Now!” “I said in a minute, dear.”

Evelyn saw him dig his nails into window ledge of the car door.

“Mom, maybe you should speed up.”

“I’m already doing two kilometers over the speed limit, Evelyn.”

“I think he really needs to go.”

“I’m quite aware of the situation, thank you very much.”

“Well then why don’t you—” “Evelyn!”

“Whoopsie-daisy,” Martin said.

Evelyn and Judy were silent.

“Whoopsie-daisy,” Martin said again, louder this time.

“Oh my god,” Evelyn said.

“Martin,” Judy said. “Have you had an accident?”

“I told you,” he said.

“Oh my god.” Evelyn held one hand over her nose and mouth and lowered her window with the other.

Judy’s grip on the steering wheel tightened and she kept glancing down at the speedometer. When she’d sped up by another five kilometers, she snapped off the radio so she could concentrate. They drove on in silence, with the wind thundering through their open windows and their hair whipping their cheeks. Martin held his ball cap on his head with one hand and clutched the car door with the other.

When they pulled into the crowded truck stop, Judy slowed down in the row immediately in front of the donut shop, looking for a spot.

“What are you doing?” Evelyn yelled. “You don’t have time to look for a spot—just park!”

“Well, I don’t want to walk in this heat.”

“Jesus Mom, just park the car, will you?”

“Just park,” said Martin.

Judy let out a tight sigh and drove straight to the back row, where there were plenty of spots. Judy pulled into one, and Evelyn flung her door open before Judy had shut off the engine.

“Evelyn,” Judy yelled. “You can wait until the car has stopped!”

“I’m out of here.”

“You can wait for us!”

“For what?”

“Just wait!”

Martin was fumbling with the car door and trying to pull himself out. Judy hurried around to the passenger side to help him. Evelyn stood behind the car facing the donut shop with her arms crossed.

She wanted to disappear.

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“Oh dear.” Judy said. “Oh Martin, I’m so sorry.”

Evelyn shook her head so that her hair hung down on either side of her face.

“Here,” Judy said to Martin. “Let’s see if we can get you cleaned up first.” Judy held open the back door and helped ease Martin into the seat. “Just lie down, sweetheart.”

“God, Mom, can’t you just take him to the bathroom!”

“Evelyn, he can’t do this alone, and I can’t go in there with him.

Can you stop being so self-centered for once in your life and just help us!”

“He’s your boyfriend—you help him. I’m going for a walk.” Evelyn started to walk away.

“Evelyn!” Judy yelled so loud that there was an echo off the concrete, and some of the people milling around the front of the shop looked in their direction. Evelyn froze.

Judy stood up, planted her hands on her hips and glared over the roof of the car at Evelyn. “I can not believe how childish you’re being. You are a grown woman, Evelyn!”

Evelyn looked down at the pavement.

“There’s a towel in the trunk. Bring it over here and hold it up around me. I want to clean Martin up so that he can at least walk into the donut shop with some dignity.” Judy bent back down and Evelyn heard Martin’s belt buckle jingle. She wanted to run, but she sighed and went around to the driver’s side to pull the keys out of the ignition.

When Judy had done what she could with the road map, she walked over to the donut shop to steal a roll of toilet paper from the restroom. That left Evelyn alone at the car with Martin in an excessively awkward position. Evelyn held the beach towel aloft and stared at the cars out on the highway.

“Let me up,” Martin demanded in a wobbly voice.

“Who’s stopping you?”

“Where’s Judy?”

“She’s in the bathroom.”

Martin considered this. Then he said, “I didn’t mean to end up like . . .for it to happen like this.”

“What do you mean?” Evelyn felt nervous. She didn’t like how Martin was suddenly earnest and communicative. “You mean how you made a mess?”

“Yeah.”

She wanted him to stop talking.

Martin kept at it. “I didn’t mean for any of this to—” Evelyn cut him off. “Never mind!”

“I tried to do the right thing but I just—” “Try harder next time, will you?” Evelyn said.

“I did try.”

“Well, try harder.”

Evelyn was relieved to spot Judy picking her way around the cars.

Evelyn watched her and thought about how Judy so rarely lost her temper or faltered in her cheery act. After all the years and all the loneliness she must have felt, she was always plucky and determined.

Evelyn thought it a shame that Judy had made all of that effort to remain upbeat and stoic, to end up here, like this, with him. She wished she could be proud of her mother, but instead, watching her stride purposefully towards the car with a roll of toilet paper tucked under her arm, Evelyn felt only disappointment tinged with pity.

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“Everything okay here?” Judy asked.

Evelyn dropped the beach towel. “You tell me,” she said. “Does it look okay to you?”

Judy pursed her lips and stepped past Evelyn. Evelyn raised the beach towel up again and went back to watching the cars on the highway.

“Here, sweetheart,” Judy murmured. “We’re almost done.”

“Judy?” Martin warbled. “Judy, I can’t.”

“Sh-sh-sh,” Judy whispered. “You’re going to be fine, Martin.”

“I don’t . . .I can’t do this!”

“Just don’t think about it, darlin’. Right now, we just got one thing to deal with, and that’s this, and I’m helping you. One thing at a time. Okay? We’re almost done.”

Evelyn had heard that very same speech from Judy innumerable times growing up. All the nights Judy sat up with Evelyn at the kitchen table until way past bedtime so that Evelyn could practice her multiplication tables. It made Evelyn sick to hear Judy use those words—Evelyn’s words—on that horrid mess of a man.

“I tried to tell her, Jude,” Martin was crying.

“Oh Martin, not now . . .”

“I tried to tell her—” “Martin, stop it!” Judy snapped. Her hands were shaking as she pulled Martin’s pants from the car door and fed his limp, bare feet through the leg holes. His socks were in a ball beneath the car with his underwear. “Now roll over and pull up your pants.”

Martin heaved and grunted. The car shook. Judy straightened up and turned to Evelyn. Evelyn looked down and busied herself with folding the beach towel. “Let’s go if we’re going,” she said. She walked around to the open trunk and tossed in the towel.

“I need my coffee,” Martin said.

“All right, Martin. Enough,” said Judy.

Evelyn recognized the opportunity to escape. “Fine,” she said, walking towards the driver’s-side door so she could reach his thermos. “How does he take it?”

She stood up and turned the thermos over in her hand. Some of the letters had worn off, but Evelyn saw enough.

Dale M. Pl t ectrical – We ight up y r life “Tell them to fill it up only halfway,” Judy was saying. “He takes it black.”

There was a ringing in Evelyn’s ears that made everything sound far away. Her scalp felt tingly. She walked away without a word; the thermos gripped in her hand so tightly that the skin on the back of her hand felt like it would split. She didn’t ask if Judy wanted anything, and she didn’t care. Evelyn knew Judy would say, “No thank you,” even though she really wanted a cruller. She knew that the thermos would stink of booze even though Judy would insist that it didn’t. Suddenly, Evelyn knew everything. She thought it ironic that this should feel as though she was losing her mind.

Behind the counter of the donut shop, the kid jerked his head back and wrinkled his nose at the smell of the thermos, just like Evelyn knew he would. He eyed Evelyn over his shoulder as he poured the coffee.

“Is that everything?” he asked warily as he handed her the halffull thermos.

“Sure as hell better be,” said Evelyn. She tossed the money on the counter, slapped the lid on the thermos and walked back out of the donut shop towards her family. ■

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POETRY

The Role of the Synapse, or Fall Collection CHRISTINE LECLERC

I. She saw something out of the corner of her eye.

She saw it every day.

It was trillions of trees snowing through her synapses.

She saw something by not seeing.

By not seeing the negative space around people, mailboxes, cars.

I used to sell scarves and shoe-laces.

Now I sell books.

But they look like scarves and shoe-laces but say apocalypse.

She can sense that something is gone.

The people, mailboxes, cars stand out more. And she wishes that they would stand out less.

When the poem is over the world is different.

Like, really different from the last time the shopper checked.

She imagines a world without hitchhikers.

Reflects on how, even as a teenager, she had credit cards.

She’s never checked.

But she has paycheques in her pocket.

She sure would’ve gone shopping, with paycheques.

There is her favourite clothing shop, and there’s a parking lot close by.

Oprah and Gwen Stefani come to mind (from a billboard).

She mutters something about branch patterns because she is going places in life and needs a new bag.

When world got different, she forgot to shop.

II. She sees some activists in front of the shop.

They surround her, and say a poem: You are not three hundred twenty one seasons in light chiffon.

You are not a poison holder or a fax machine.

Quit buying salad bowls.

Ciao bella.

When the poem ends she has a floaty feeling.

The shopkeeper is there too.

She claps a hand onto the shopper’s shoulder and says a poem:

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III. She calls her father’s prostate specialist when she gets home from not shopping. she: he: she: he:

Is it true the world is ending?

Ended last week, sweetheart.

Someone on talk radio said it’s only ending in five days.

I don’t know what to tell you, kid.

She wonders if the end of the world is like a permanent mall closure.

Either the line was cut, or the specialist hung up.

She hopes the specialist is taken in his sleep.

She hopes that she gets taken too.

Thoughts of death mix with thoughts of sleep.

Outside, people are marching.

And the people-cries quiet her mind.

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The Insides of Vegetables HILARY SMITH

Ever since she observed the neighbour’s dog squatting among her husband’s just-de-potted tomato plants, Faroush has imagined that just beneath the skin of vegetables there is fresh dog shit, firm and stinking.

It doesn’t matter that the tomatoes have been ripening on their stalks for nearly ten days, and their skin has gone from green to a bright red the colour of plastic scissor handles, and there is no way anyone could have sliced them open and inserted dog shit without it being obvious. Faroush believes it to be there. She looks out the kitchen window, a glass of white wine in her hand, and sees the tomatoes: firm, robust, round, all those breast-words, all those fat-and-bouncing-dame words from eighteenth-century novels. Hamad comes home from work at twenty past six and tramples through the living room with his shoes on.

“That smells good,” he says brightly, but there isn’t anything cooking yet. “What is it?”

“Nothing, Hamad,” she says. “It’s not ready yet.”

He pours himself a glass of wine and knocks it against hers.

“Cheers!” His black hair gleams under the kitchen’s track lighting.

“Shall we sit outside?” he says.

“Yes,” says Faroush. Pushing open the screen door, she says, “How was the drive home?”

“Oh, fine. The construction’s got Dorchester pretty messed up but they keep things moving pretty we—” “Oh my god,” says Faroush.

The chocolate lab from Faroush’s childhood in Andrah Pradesh is running towards them from across the neighbour’s yard. She remembers burying it behind a grocery store parking lot when it got hit by a bus when she was eleven. Uttam!

Faroush drops her wine glass and it breaks on the patio. “You’re dead!” she screams.

She isn’t referring to Hamad, but when she looks to her husband he’s lying on the patio with his face leaking blood.

“You’re dead,” she says, and a numbness smooths the wrinkles from her mind like an injection of Botox.

“Heart attack,” the doctor tells Faroush, and once she has said her

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goodbyes Hamad’s body is whisked to the University of Toronto medical school, his alma mater, for dissection by first years.

Funeral the following Monday. Hamad’s brothers and parents live in Scarborough; they come down and organize things while Faroush walks around the house in a daze, turning Hamad’s cell phone on and off and taking bottles of hot sauce out of the fridge (she doesn’t like hot sauce). Faroush didn’t drive very often and the driver’s seat in their sedan is set way back to fit Hamad’s long legs.

When she lifts the lever to pull it forward the seat back lurches up with a loud noise and her knees bump the wheel. She spends the next three minutes adjusting the mirrors and looking over her shoulder to check for children before backing out of the driveway, then decides she doesn’t feel like going anywhere and gets out of the car, half-expecting it to mold itself back to his shape in her absence. When it doesn’t, she feels the car’s magic has failed her.

Hamad never knew Uttam, who died long before he met Faroush.

But there was a year, their first year in Canada, when everything reminded Faroush of Uttam. Uttam had died when Faroush was a preteen, and she never mentioned him to Hamad for the first four years they knew each other. Then, when they moved to Canada and lived in the rental house in Temagami, it was Uttam, Uttam for almost exactly three hundred and sixty-five days. Then it stopped, and Faroush hadn’t had one thought about Uttam, not one little thought, for over a dozen years, until she saw him bounding through the garden the evening her husband died.

In Temagami, the first thing that reminded Faroush of Uttam was the sink in the bathroom and the configuration of the hot and cold water taps. Gazing down as she washed her hands, the plastic handles of the taps and the snout of the faucet suddenly popped out at her in a way reminiscent of the dog’s snuffling face.

From then on, Faroush began to write down the things that triggered memories of Uttam:

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-Bathroom Sink -Sunny Day -Rabbit Moccasins

-Cooking Steak -Going for A Walk -Creaky Kitchen Door

She stopped after a week because she was no good at keeping up with things.

She stops eating fresh vegetables and finds it hard to contain her disgust when she sees others doing so. One evening she goes to a barbecue at Amanda’s house and as an appetizer there’s a bowl of cherry tomatoes that the guests pop into their mouths whole.

Faroush tries not to vomit, imagining their teeth piercing through the tomato skin and the feces bursting out into their mouths. How can they do it? Faroush extracts a single tortilla chip from the open bag on the table and grinds it between her teeth until it is gone. She concentrates on the dryness. There are bowls of coleslaw and potato salad inside on the kitchen counter, visible through the screen door, and Amanda brings out foam life jackets to fit around everyone’s beer bottle to keep them cool. “Got them at a garage sale,” she confesses conspiratorially. She notices Faroush hanging back from the snack table and attributes it to shyness.

“Have some cherry tomatoes!” she says to Faroush. “They’re still warm from the sun. Here, I’ll get you a napkin.”

“These cherry tomatoes are incredible,” says another neighbour.

“Mmm-mm.”

“Fantastic,” somebody else is saying.

Faroush is thinking up an excuse and remembers hearing something to do with tomatoes’ acidity, but in the heat of the lie her English fails her and she blurts, “No, no, please! Another time when I am not on acid. It is too confusing for the physical system.”

The other guests go on eating and chatting, and eventually Amanda gets Faroush to eat a burger and coleslaw and have another beer.

Faroush met Hamad at a party in Mumbai when he was a med student specializing in optometry and she was doing graduate studies in film. Thinking about it years later in Canada, she began placing English subtitles beneath their conversation, then dubbing in the English so that their lips didn’t match up to their voices.

A lotus flower passed from the right hand to the left indicates that sexual contact has taken place, that way. A lotus flower passed from the right hand to the right hand means, that way.

Which way?

You know. Like this.

She makes a sign with her fingers, peering at him sternly from behind her glasses.

She taught him these things at a party at a mutual friend’s house in Colaba, on a rainy night. Subcultural conventions of the screen, the subject of her dissertation.

You know those glasses are the wrong prescription for you.

Pshaw.

No, really! Let me see them.

You think I’m going to take off my glasses for you?

Come on, let me see them.

She glares at him and he pouts, then she sighs and hands him her glasses and he folds them up and puts them on the table without looking at them.

Okay, tell me what you see.

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A class-one space cadet!

You have the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever beheld.

Who says “beheld?” Faroush thinks. Taking off glasses with the left hand indicates...

The host of the party was Darpak, who was friends with Faroush’s roommate Zobia. He shared the house with three other students, a little bungalow on a hill, and when it rained the Mumbai skyline became a pink-gray haze in the distance. Darpak kept his long hair in a ponytail and wore dress shirts all the time, as if he was always on his way out to a club. Faroush thought she was attracted to him—a touch to the small of her back when they’d arrived tipped her off to his desire—but now here was Hamad taking up all her time, and by the end of the night she’d revised her plans.

Four years later they were married and moved to Canada, where Hamad had to set up his optometry practice in Temagami for five years before being allowed to settle where they pleased. They moved to St. David’s and Hamad’s parents and younger brothers decided to come to Canada as well, settling in the Scarborough suburbs an hour’s drive away.

Faroush has three or four bottles of Hamad’s hot sauce out on the counter, and now she pulls the fruit and vegetable crispers all the way out of the fridge and lines everything up on the cutting board.

There is a bag of baby carrots, not as suspect as full-sized carrots because, Faroush discovered, baby carrots are full-sized carrots that have been cut down to that shape, and they are so slender they hardly count as having insides. There is broccoli which Faroush whacks to bits with her heavy knife, and a red pepper Faroush impales in the side and flings out the window before its insides can touch anything. Not much else in there. Less than she expected. She dumps everything into the garbage under the sink.

Now what. She closes the cupboard door and imagines the garbage bag taut and heavy and tied up at the top, like in the Leash and Scoop signs the city puts up in parks. The thought crosses her mind, insanely, of lighting it on fire and leaving it on the neighbour’s front porch, then running away.

Faroush goes to the car, gets in and checks the driveway for children three times before backing out. She drives to the McDonald’s ten blocks away and gets a hamburger, fries and a chocolate milkshake from the drive-thru window. The hot paper bag fills up the car with a bright yellow smell. She feels strange putting the wrappers in the trash later, like she’s throwing away something that’s still perfectly good.

Although Hamad was a sympathetic and good-natured husband, Faroush had found herself unable to tell him about the insides of vegetables. The belief hadn’t been manifest in her mind for very long before he died. If he had lived, she doubtless would have told him before very long. He was so practical and well-liked, he made it look easy. She might have told him later that evening once they’d gone inside, when he expected her to start cooking something, and with the tomatoes ripe he’d have picked some and brought them inside and put them in a white bowl on the counter.

No avoiding it. It was absurd as believing there were maggots in

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FICTION

the barrels of staplers (don’t think about it, Faroush) or slices of dried-up flesh (no) sewn into the furniture cushions.

It isn’t only the tomatoes in the yard Faroush has a problem with now, it’s every vegetable that grows in the ground. Zucchinis are particularly problematic, with their long green rind covering who knows what species of stinking turd, but also things you wouldn’t expect, like Vidalia onions. Faroush has to close her eyes when she makes the first chop and wait for the onion smell to sting her nose before she opens them. Radishes bring her to tears; she’s sure they’re stuffed with shit. When her neighbour Amanda leaves some on her doorstep in a paper bag she dumps them in the sink and blasts them with water first, trying to be brave, but when the first experimental knife stab reveals a colour that might be brown Faroush shrieks involuntarily and beats the radishes senseless with a heavy frying pan for almost thirty seconds, flushed with adrenaline, then stops in a daze, weeps, and scoops them out into the garbage.

Today Faroush sees her neighbour Amanda coming out of her garage pushing a big Rubbermaid wheelbarrow. She pushes it down the brick path to the back yard and tosses the yellow foam kneeling cushion onto the grass. Faroush, still in her housecoat, goes upstairs to get dressed.

Faroush fills the awkward green watering can and manhandles it from garage to back yard, feeling sweat spring to her armpits, dark and stinging under the Watering Cans T-shirt that Amanda and the others gave her as a gift after Hamad died along with the watering can, trowel, and foam kneeling pad. Amanda is at work

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in her own yard deadheading the bright pink cosmos that grew up between the patio bricks. The brim of her sun hat extends to outer space. She said, after Faroush had opened her present of gardening stuff, that she and the neighbourhood women had had an interesting time deciding whether or not to include a hat as part of the gift, because Faroush’s hijab covered her hair and neck and afforded excellent sun protection already. In the end they opted for gloves, but they’d thought about it, and they’d had an interesting time asking themselves whether or not Faroush ever wore hats over her hijab.

The neighbourhood women gave Faroush all these tools as a sign of welcome in their community, and told her in a card signed by all of them that they hoped that nurturing the earth by gardening would afford her some solace and healing in face of the terrible tragedy of Hamad’s sudden death. Faroush is an immigrant with a trace of an accent like a nacho crumb on her cheek that produces the desire in others to offer her to hold still while they brush it off.

Amanda and the others check this desire by smiling and stopping

by Faroush’s house with stacks of gardening magazines, and asking her advice on things she might know about, mostly food.

It’s Faroush’s first time using the gardening tools the women gave her, and the watering can still has a plastic tag rattling around the handle. The cotton T-shirt makes her arms look scrawny. In life, Hamad loved her for looking more traditional than other Indian women they knew. She didn’t own any T-shirts before this one.

Amanda waves at Faroush as she lugs the heavy, glugging watering can across the lawn to her late husband’s tomato plants.

“What a day!” Amanda shouts. “Can you believe this heat?

Whew! We’re gonna need a swimming pool!”

Her neighbour’s eyes are sparkling but since she became a widow Faroush’s heart has been mute and heavy, like moss.

Amanda’s got mosquito coils burning on cast-iron stands in the grass around her and their tips smoulder greyly in the sunshine.

“Those are gonna need a lot of water,” says Amanda, referring to the tomato plants. They would have been mummified in days if she hadn’t come over to water them herself in the weeks following Hamad’s death.

“Yup,” says Faroush brightly.

Amanda watches her neighbour as she lifts the watering can, but instead of pouring it on the tomatoes, Faroush continues to lift it past shoulder height until her arms begin to wobble and it splashes all over her clothing.

“Coolin’ off?” laughs Amanda.

Faroush tips the watering can this way and that, splashing liquid out the hole in the top until her Watering Cans T-shirt is soaked through. She pours what’s left over the tomato plants.

Amanda thinks to herself, she’s finally lightening up, well good.

But then Faroush seizes the mosquito coil by its burning tip and goes up in flames herself, pop!, like a brown paper bag blown up and stomped in a school playground. Amanda screeches and trips over her weed caddy as she runs for the hose.

A few seconds into her self-immolation, her gasoline-soaked Watering Cans T-shirt morphing into a blur of heat, Faroush sees Hamad running across the garden towards her. He has a dog tail wagging out the back of his pants. Hamad is alive, thinks Faroush.

I’m not a widow!

But still she’s burning, and at her feet the watering can melts into a weird, other version of itself. ■

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FICTION

The Celebration HARRY TOURNEMILLE

“Happy Birthday, Milton.”

Roy steps around the shin-gouging corners of the coffee table, remembering to also avoid the footstool even though he can’t see it. He opens the living room curtains and squints as daylight floods in. Everything is familiar: the stale smell of sweat, the dust on the furniture, the surliness of his old friend, Milton Eberle II, who is tucked in the corner like a discarded gargoyle, gripping the armrests of his recliner. Milton’s face screws into a sneer.

“Says you.”

“C’mon, you gonna start the day off this way?” Roy looks out onto the front lawn. Crisp shoots of crocuses and daffodils have punched through the grass in random bunches, remnants of long-forgotten gardening attempts. Past the yard, the traffic of West King Edward groans towards Cambie Street, oblivious to Milton’s front yard, the Japanese maple, the ornate bird bath with its large, cracked pedestal, all carefully hidden by a protective cedar hedge. Two concentric worlds exist: the one that spits and roars outside Milton’s hedged yard, and the one Milton inhabits within the confines of his home. Roy crosses between the two often, the way a boxer ducks under the ropes as he enters the ring.

“I’m eighty-three goddamn years old.” Milton’s raw voice brings Roy back inside.

“Fair ’nuff.”

“I’ll start the day any way I please.”

“Okay then, Milton.”

“Eat a dick, Roy.” Roy gathers a mess of magazines off the floor and stacks them on the coffee table. They’ll be back on the floor in no time. But Roy does not like an untidy home. At his house, everything has its place: furniture, dishes, TV remote, all arranged in optimal pragmatic proximity. A little order never hurt.

“Dominoes?”

Grunt.

“Miserable old bastard today, aren’t you?”

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Milton has soured through the waning years of his life with the ease and grace of a club-footed distance runner. The man’s entire face is a perpetual scowl, a map of tributary lines dredging downward. His thin, spastic hair, offset by a ferocious tangle of eyebrows, has not seen a comb in months. But none of this bothers Roy. Too many years have gone by. And frankly, Milton has always been a bit of a prick.

They met sixty-three years ago, as young, naïve men heading to Europe under the weight of heavy backpacks, military issue, and an undefined sense of duty. Milton landed himself in the brig within two weeks of training, a slight misunderstanding concerning the chain of command. Milton had called his Sergeant an asshole. No one thought he would last. Roy thought he was halfkidding back then, an acerbic sense of humour two steps below wry. But the humour aspect left soon enough. Milton was attracted to misery. And it carried him all the way through the war, through his years of marriage, up to today.

His wife of fifty-four years, Ethel, would attest to her husband’s misery if she still remembered who he was. “My pet curmudgeon” was what she used to call him.

“One of my balls is the size of a nectarine right now.” Milton rises from his chair, gritting his teeth as he hobbles to the kitchen table.

For once he is not in his plaid pajamas; instead opting for uniform pants, shirt, and gray sweater. The dominoes clatter onto the table as Roy empties the box.

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Roy is also dressed for the occasion. His brown corduroy pants are pressed, the line running plumb down the front of his legs. His black golf shirt is tucked in, all three buttons done up right to the throat. His manicured fingers run over the pile of tiles. “A nectarine? You must be improving. Was a peach last time.”

“Wait, which one is bigger?”

“A peach.”

“Right, that’s the one.” Milton puffs his chest out. “I got a nut the size of a peach. Doctor confirmed.”

“Must be proud.” Roy flips the game pieces over so the white dots are face down. “Thought you were walkin’ funny these days.”

Snort.

“I mean, I’d have brought a cake if I’d known you’d be this happy.”

“Ass.” Roy admires his handiwork. All the pieces are arranged equidistant from one another. He takes a deep breath and lets it out slow.

“Okay, all set.”

“Beer?” Milton arches an eyebrow as if he knows the answer.

“It’s ten o’clock in the morning.”

“Beer?”

“All right then.”

The game is predictable: Roy wins and Milton does not acknowledge the loss. As they sit and nurse their beers, Milton brings the bottle to his mouth without taking a sip. The liquid touches his lips, but nothing more and he only darts his tongue out to taste the residue left behind.

“I was at the Legion the other night,” Roy offers.

Milton grunts, running his hand over the top of his head. “That bastard Edwards there, talkin’ about the flak he got in his leg?”

“Yes.” “And everyone still listens?”

“Oh, they humour him, I reckon.” Roy looks out the patio window, into the back yard.

“Jesus.”

“Y’know who else was there?”

Milton picks up a domino piece and lets it fall through his clumsy fingers. “Don’t care.”

“Betty.”

“Kroeker?”

“The very same.”

Milton winces. “God damn, if I had teeth I’d whistle.”

Betty Kroeker, prim and proper with her auburn hair and abundance of freckles. Everything desirable about her was wrapped snug under a uniform. On several occasions, both of them tried in vain to woo her away from her morals. Offers of drinks, dinners, a dance or two, all turned down in polite fashion. Milton fumed for days, but Roy was never put off by her rejections. He found them encouraging.

Roy chuckles. “Don’t need teeth to whistle.”

“I had my way with her once . . .respectfully of course.” Milton grins and arches an eyebrow. “Had her singin’ the national anthem with only her bloomers on.”

“Horseshit you did. You circled her wagons like the rest of us, and never fired a single damn arrow.” Roy leans forward. “Mind you, ol’ loverboy here still has his touch.” He gives a wide smile.

“I’ve got a dinner date with her this weekend.”

Milton tilts his head to one side. “Jesus. You played her some of that . . .the hell’s his name again?” Milton speaks the name as

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though it were two separate words. “Coal-train? You played her that, didn’t you?”

“Coltrane, and no I did not. At the Legion?” Roy leans back with his arms behind his head. “Besides, that’s for later on, once the lady is back at my apartment. And for the record, I prefer Ella.”

“You do realize you’re as old as I am?”

“She says happy birthday.”

“I’m going outside.” Milton hobbles to the patio door. His thick fingers claw at the latch. “C’mon, you fuckin’ no-good whore,” he mutters under his breath until the latch releases and the door scrapes along the bottom of the patio floor.

Roy cleans up the game and puts the box back on the shelf, next to an old, paint-splattered transistor radio. He empties Milton’s beer into the sink and places the bottles beside it. For a moment, he grasps the edges of the counter and bows his head. His exhale is slow, deliberate. He thinks of the hallway of photos leading to the bathroom. He thinks of one photo in particular. The moment passes and he goes outside.

Milton has brought only one chair into the sunlight, so Roy fetches another and joins him. The yard is tidy. The lawn is cut every week by a local company and Milton’s daughter, Ruth, comes by once a month to tend to the garden beds. She is the youngest of four and the only one still speaking to him. The rest have disappeared into the world like everything else.

“Gardens look nice. Ruthie’s doing a good job.”

Silence.

“What do you pay for the lawns getting cut?”

“Too fuckin’ much.” Milton lifts a leg and trumpets out a fart.

“They charge for every little damn thing and don’t do half the job I used to.”

“Well, at least it’s not your money going out to pay for it.” Roy taps his temple with a finger. “Veteran’s Affairs.”

Milton waves the comment away as if it were an insult.

The air smells young, of cedar hedges, tree blossoms, and cut grass. Fresh soil has been spread on the rear garden beds and the sharp tang of manure is pleasant. Roy begins to relax a little.

“I used to mix up the flowers with the vegetables.” Milton stares at his hands while he talks. “You remember that?”

“Hell yes. You had onions poking through your gladiolus, potatoes at the base of the shrubs.”

“It’s called art.” Milton’s face breaks into a grin, his frown lines unsure of which way to go. “You mix the bulbs up and see what the ground has to offer. Good thing the weather is warmer out here or it would never have worked.”

Milton’s voice is light now, but Roy hears the dark knowledge laced around the edges of his words, the keen sense of mortality, the lack of compromise. Even now it is in the distance, wavering in the sunlight.

“How’s Ethel?”

Milton studies his cracked fingernails. “Same as always, I guess.

She don’t recognize anyone no more. Looks like a rabbit in a wire noose, mostly.”

“You wanna visit her today?”

“Saw her last night.”

“Okay.”

The hours pass. Roy is aware he is thirsty, but makes no effort to get up. He is comfortable with Milton’s silence, content to sit in the sun and absorb. Only the occasional honk or yell from the traffic out front makes its way to the back yard. Twice Milton curls up in

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his lounge chair and sucks air through his teeth. Roy knows better than to ask. He watches his old friend and waits.

Nine years ago, when Roy’s dear Annie died of lung cancer, it was Milton who entered the small, sparse apartment with its paperthin walls and lousy heat. When Roy wept into his hands, Milton sat across the table silent, his hat on his lap, watching with pained eyes. Roy made all the decisions, all the preparations for the burial, and when he went to settle the accounts, he discovered all the costs had been taken care of. That’s how Milton worked.

“You talk to Ruthie?”

“Last night.”

“She okay?”

“Yeah.” Milton’s voice is soft. “Tough as nails.”

She was. Roy recalled Ruth as a child, running up the alley behind her house. Once she tripped and fell into a pile of sucker branches freshly pruned from the neighbour’s pear tree. A branch broke off in her leg, deep in the pink tissue. Roy and Annie were visiting with Milton and Ethel, sitting in the back yard among sunflower plants and tomatoes when Ruthie hobbled stone-faced into the yard, the puckered mouth of a wound on her leg. At the clinic, where a novice doctor rooted around with oversized tweezers, her only sign of discomfort was a scowl of resentment at his ineptitude.

“You tell her everything?”

Milton squints into the sky. “I told her enough.”

The shadows in the back yard are getting longer. In May there is no worry of the temperature getting cold just yet, but Roy shivers once as though a spider crawled up along his spine. His mouth is dry and he needs to piss. “Gonna use your can. You need anything?”

Milton startles at Roy’s voice. His thick hands jerk upward. Roy sees it, the frailty. Perhaps today is necessary.

“A glass of water.”

Roy heads into the house.

The wood-panelled hallway of Milton’s home is covered with photos. Not a square inch is exposed. Year after year, when Ethel was healthy, the photos accumulated, arranged without pattern.

“Y’know, I just want everyone’s story up there,” she said once, before she turned ill. “Each time you look at it, something new stands out, some new interpretation of the past. And it’s all important, all worth something.”

As Roy makes his way to the bathroom, he stops at a small, rectangular wooden frame near the bedroom door. The photo is familiar. The same one sits in a frame on his writing desk back at home: Roy and Milton as two young men, standing in their military fatigues along a canal in Utrecht, Holland, with strained smiles.

Milton is looking over the photographer’s shoulder as if there was something in the distance. Roy knows there was nothing.

He remembers the exact moment the photo was taken, how he felt like his fatigued limbs were filled with sand. He remembers the streets of the old town, the feeling that he could burst into tears at any moment, the fear that he wouldn’t be able to stop if he did. And he remembered Milton, his immensity and fierceness.

The day before, he had been trapped with Milton in a barn near the outskirts of the province. They had burrowed into the pungent hay in the loft to catch a nap. The smell of cigarette smoke and the sounds of German soldiers playing cards below woke them up.

Breathless, they listened as one of the soldiers with a low voice told about the townsfolk in nearby Cothen killing each other and

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“throwing the bodies into the canal.” Roy counted four men, all of them with rifles, all of them sounding as weary as he felt. He was on the verge of panic. He was afraid. But Milton was calm, his eyes hardened with knowledge and madness.

“Don’t you fuckin’ move Roy,” he hissed through his teeth. “And cover me for Christ’s sake.”

Once the soldiers dozed off, Milton slid out from under the hay and descended upon them with teeth and knuckles and blade. He moved so fast and with such rage that Roy could not look away. There were no screams, only startled yelps and the sounds of air bleating out of open throats. When it was over, Milton sunk to his knees and vomited on the ground. Roy came out of hiding and stood beside him.

“This is what we do,” Milton had said. “You can’t think about it in the moment or you’re finished.” His voice was even, emotionless.

“Even now I ain’t about to dwell on it. But years from now, when the world is quieter and a little more safe, I’ll let my guard down and this shit will come back to visit.” He pointed the blade at Roy, who stood and stared. “No choice but to pay your fuckin’ dues then.”

Roy returns outside and hands Milton the glass of water. His friend gulps it down, losing a lot of it onto his shirt. Half of the back yard is covered in shade now. Milton and Roy are no longer in the sun.

“Well Midnight, I think it’s time we sorted this shit out.” Milton looks at him.

Everything is moving too fast. It was only a few years ago that they visited the old building downtown where Milton had been a successful tailor. The shop was still there, run by Koreans. No one remembered Milton. The real reason for the trip though, was to confirm Milton’s cancer. Treatments were suggested, but Milton refused them all. On the trip home, he spoke of Holland for the first and final time. And Roy understood. But now . . .

“You still got time, man.” Roy pulls on his left ear lobe. “Why don’t we grab some food first?”

Milton chuckles. “You are such a chickenshit.”

“Says you.”

“You are. All these years and you still look for the quiet window at the back of the room to escape out of.”

Roy looks away. His face is hot and he feels angry tears pushing at the corners of he eyes. But he says nothing.

“Honestly, did you even pull the goddamn trigger back then?”

Roy leans forward, his elbows on his knees. “Why you gotta be like that?”

“Well, did you?”

“No, I did not.”

The silence between them is gentle. Milton leans forward with a grimace and places a gnarled hand on the arm of his friend’s chair.

“God bless you for that, then.”

Long, tidy shelves line the walls of the garage. A green military filing cabinet sits in the corner. A faded, out-of-date calendar, featuring an unknown model in a bathing suit, hangs crooked from a nail above a work bench. All the blinds are pulled down and the garage door is closed. Milton sits in the passenger seat of his Oldsmobile, a blanket wrapped around him. The car has been uninsured for years, but looks clean and polished like it was brand new. Roy knows his friend has taken it for rides around the block during this time. It was his last guilty pleasure, the last pure thing in his life. He sits beside Milton with his hands on the steering wheel.

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“Hell of a day today.” Roy offers. The car smells clean, but old, full of olfactory stories that never get told.

“Yes.” “Could be an Indian Summer.”

“Could be.”

“I was thinking, maybe we sho . . .”

“It’s okay, Roy.” Roy looks at his friend and sees eyes on fire with fear and pain. He smells aged desperation, the weariness of keeping the darkness at bay. He remembers Milton’s words as they walked out of that barn in Holland, shivering in the daylight. Don’t speak of this, Midnight.

Don’t speak of this but don’t forget it neither.We all gotta pay our debts sometime, but we don’t need to announce it to the fuckin’ world.

“It’s what we do.”

Roy nods and turns the ignition key. The car roars then settles down to a throaty purr. He checks the blanket around his friend, who leans back with eyes closed. The radio is on, a crackling voice talking about the weather, always the weather. Roy debates changing the station, but the description of a sunny, clear day is better than the sad angst of today’s music. And today is still a beautiful day.

Roy rolls down the window and leans against the heavy door to open it. He turns one last time, but his friend’s eyes remain closed.

He contemplates getting a vacuum hose and running it into the car.

Would probably be quicker. But the act of doing that seems to carry an unnecessary malice. And Roy needs this moment to be peaceful.

Milton looks relaxed, like he is entering the early stages of slumber, before the dreams hit. Twilight. Already the smell of exhaust is filling the room. Roy clicks the car door closed and stands for a moment, afraid. But the moment passes and he leaves the garage, closing the

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door tight. Outside, the hum of the car sounds as though it were parked a block away. Walls create necessary distance.

Inside the house, Roy cleans up the living room and closes the curtains. He walks through all the rooms, putting the toilet seat down in the bathroom, making up Milton’s messy bed. An envelope with Ruthie’s name on it is placed on the pillow. In three hours he will make a phone call. In three hours he will pour a shot of whiskey and stand at his writing desk. With everything as it should be, Roy heads to the front door. Just before he leaves, he turns and goes back inside. He stops at the coffee table and kicks the magazines onto the floor. He turns and heads down the hall to the photo on the wall.

He removes the picture and tucks it under his arm, knowing that the space on the wall will be noticed, but not caring. This is the way it should be. He closes the door behind him, hearing the lock click into place. He can hear the sound of King Edward’s traffic, the sound of motion, of moving away. He walks through the arched gateway between the cedar hedges and does not look back.

At the bus stop, one block away, Roy sits on the bench. He rests his head in his hands and rubs his eyes with his palms. A younger woman, tall and pulsing with youth and sex, sits down next to him.

She smells like the air after a rainfall, and her voice is light, pure. Roy thinks of Betty Kroeker and smiles to himself. The young woman talks about going to work at the hospital up the street and how it bothers her to see all those old people no longer able to live their lives.

“It’s like they gotta go back to being babies again, only bigger and smellier.” She rummages through her purse and pulls out a compact. She looks up and turns to him. “No offense, of course.”

“None taken.”

Roy gets on the bus and sits as far away from her as he can. ■

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Talonbooks Lifetime Achievement Awards for Literature Start Here. bill bissett, George Bowering, Audrey Thomas and Phyllis Webb have all won the B.C. lifetime achievement award for authors, and all are published by Talonbooks. Now Talon welcomes Sachiko Murakami, a recent graduate of the creative writing programs at the University of British Columbia and Concordia University. We hope one day she joins these authors in receiving an award for lifetime achievement in literature.

At Talon, we recognize greatness at its inception.

The Invisibility Exhibit, Murakami’s first book of poetry, will be published by Talonbooks in 2008.

WISHING WELL

SACHIKO MURAKAMI

My fist holds as many coins as I can carry. All are stamped with the Queen’s effigy; Elizabeth, D.G. Regina, the resident of pockets, a woman I’ve never met though I always know her whereabouts. Each face pressed into another person’s palm before mine.

The stink of sweat and metal. The waste of it.

I wish for a return, or for justice.

It’s safe to do that here. You can throw wishes away and no one will fish them out before the park’s authority comes to drain the pool and return the coins to currency.

Maybe I’m buying the future a Coke, a popsicle, a bag of potato chips, a fix.

Maybe I’m trying to bribe God. I’m not the type who says no to a panhandler, or yes.

I scatter my spare change all at once. Each completes its parabolic reach, falls dead weight. I wish until the ripples still enough to show my face: and just beyond, lit stars bright as found dimes.

Talonbooks. Preserving the past. Creating the Future.

Distributed in Canada by Publishers Group Canada 800-663-5714 www.talonbooks.com

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Goodbye Porkpie Hat MIKE CHRISTIE I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY D E R E K V O N E S S E N

purpose I’m lying on a bare mattress in my room watching a moth bludgeon itself on my naked light bulb. Over near the window sits a small television I never watch; beside it, a hot plate I never use. I spend most of my time here, thinking about rock cocaine, not thinking about rock cocaine, performing rudimentary experiments, smoking rolled tobacco rescued from public ashtrays, trying to remember what my mind used to feel like, and, of course, studying my science book.

I dumpstered it two years ago and ever since it has lived beside my mattress like a friend at a slumber party, pretending to sleep, dying for consultation. I read it for at least two hours every day; I know this because I time myself. It’s a grade ten textbook, a newer edition, complete with glossy diagrams and photos of famous scientists looking so regal and concentrated, the flashbulb having caught them mid-paradigm-shifting thought. I like to think when they gazed pensively up at the stars and pondered the fate of future generations, they were actually thinking of me.

I excavated the book in June. The kid who threw it out thought he would never have to see science again, that September would never come. What an idiot; I used to believe that.

My room is about the size of a jail cell. One time two guys came through my open window and beat me with a pipe until I could no longer flinch and stole my former TV and a can of butts, so I hired a professional security company called Apex to install bars on my window. I spent my entire welfare check on them, just sat and safely starved for a whole month. I had to pay the guy cash upfront because he didn’t believe I could possibly have that kind of money. It felt good to pay him that kind of money; he did a good job.

Someone is yelling at someone outside so I go to the window

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and look out into Oppenheimer Park, which sits across the street from my rooming house. There I see only a man calmly sitting on a bench. Everyone says this park was named after the scientist who invented the nuclear bomb. It has playground equipment but it’s always empty because no parent would ever bring their kid there, on account of it being normally frequented by people like me or Steve or worse. The park is infamous, an open-air drug market they say. From my window, I’ve seen people get stabbed there, but not all the time. Good things happen in the park too. Some people lie in the grass all day and read. The people who are reading don’t get stabbed. I’m not sure why that is either.

The next day, I cut across the northeast corner of the park and walk east up Powell. I approach a group of about six Vietnamese men. You can always tell the drug dealers because they’re the ones with bikes. I purchase a ten rock with a ten-dollar bill, all of my money until Wednesday. I stare at the ground while one of them barks at me. He is cartoonish, his teeth brown, haphazard tusks.

Frowning on eye contact—somehow it seems to make things more illegal—they all shift side to side on their toes like warmed up boxers and aim nervous glances at the street. “Pipe?” they bark.

No, I say, I have one thanks.

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Crack melts at a tepid eighty and if you heat it too fast it just burns off with minimal smoke. Smoking it is one thing I’m good at. I don’t really feel the crack craving people talk about; I would describe it more as a healthy interest than anything else, like I’m fine-tuning a hypothesis, or conducting a sort of protracted experiment. I know it sounds strange but I feel if I could get high enough, one time, I would quit, content with the knowledge of the actual crack high, the genuine article. Unfortunately, a paltry approximation is the only high I have been able to afford so far.

In an alley my brain has a family reunion with some long lost neurochemicals and I crouch beneath the party, not wanting to disturb it, shivering and euphoric next to a dumpster. A seemingly infinite and profound series of connections and theories swamp my mind. It is a better than expected stone and it makes me long for my room and my book.

A man and woman are five feet away, arguing. I am unsure how long they’ve been there. I have an urge to explain something complex and scientific to them, to light their eyes with wonder.

The man is talking. “Hey bro,” “Hi are you guys doing okay?” I sputter, feeling sweat rim my eyelids.

“Oh yeah, she’s just being a harsh bitch . . .” he turns and yells the last word in her face actually puffing her bangs back with it. After an emphatic pause he turns back, “Hey bro, how about you give us a toke and make us feel better?” he says to my clutching hands with a smile and an assumed entitlement. I’m briefly embarrassed for being so absurdly high and unable to share it with them or anyone else.

I tell him, “It’s all gone. Sorry,” with what I feel is a genuine sincerity, my high already beginning it’s diminuendo.

“How about giving me my pipe back then?” he says, steps closer.

I’ve been on the receiving end of this type of tactic before. I tell him sorry, there is only one, careful not to combine the words my and pipe: pairing, which would no doubt signal the commencement of my probably already inevitable beating.

The woman tells him to leave me alone. Her cropped shirt reveals a stretch-marked abdomen harbouring unearthly wrinkles the texture of a scrotum or an elderly elephant. The man is yelling now. Blurry and ill-advised jail tattoos populate his arms and I watch them wave above my head. I wonder if any woman who has told her boyfriend to leave him alone has ever meant it. If ever, I conclude, it is a statistically insignificant proportion. Amidst his racket, the urge to smoke another rock comes over me in a bland revelation, like I need to do the dishes. I hear rats scrabbling in the dumpster and I try to think if I have ever seen a rat look up, I mean into the sky, and wonder if it is possible for them to see that far. As I’m trying to stand the man kicks me in the chest with his fungal shoe and I feel a crunch inside my shoulder and it begins to buzz and I bring my other arm up to shield my face.

I heard my pipe hit the ground but it didn’t break because crackpipes are made of Pyrex, the same glass as test tubes. People dumpster them from medical supply laboratories. They are test

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tubes with no bottom, no end, all that smoke and mania just funnels through them unhindered. My lungs have tested the tubes and their acrid samples but unfortunately there has been no control group, so the results of these experiments are often difficult to observe.

I am crumpling to the ground, hearing him pick up my pipe and smelling the tang of fermented piss under the dumpster. When urine evaporates it leaves a sticky yellow film and I am thinking about how urine is a solution, not a mixture. Of this, I am absolutely sure, and the beating continues from there.

m at e r i a l s In the room beside me lives an old junkie named Steve who at some indeterminate point has taken to fixing between his toes, the rest of his veins thickened and prone to abscess. He blows his welfare checks in about three days, pupils whittled down, head pitched on the stormy sea of his neck like an Alzheimer’s patient. He warns me by banging on the wall when he suspects he may be about to shoot too much dope. I’ve rescued him twice by calling in the Narcan injection, plucking the needle from his foot before they arrive with their strange antidote. I guess you could say he is my only friend.

Steve knows nothing of science. Doomed to forever repeat the same experiment, he arrives on his sticky floor at the same vomit-soaked conclusion over and over.

I’m well aware experimental replication is a cornerstone of the scientific method, but not to the extent Steve takes it.

He calls me tweaker or a coconut in his nasal junkie voice because I smoke crack but it doesn’t bother me. He doesn’t actually mean anything bad by it. One time he sold me a kernel of soap, saying it was a rock he found on the street and would let go for cheap. At first I didn’t believe him, but it was the way he held it, with reverence, two hands together, a child holding a cricket. I didn’t speak to him for weeks until he almost overdosed and had completely forgotten it when he woke up, so I forgave him, plus I stole the money back anyway. And I guess I was lonely.

Steve has been bringing me food. He says he might as well because the guy on the other side of his room doesn’t do shit when he bangs on his wall. Tins of gray meat you open with a key and day-old hamburger buns from the gospel mission. My left collarbone is broken and my face raw and taut with swelling. Bones float and snarl in my shoulder like an aluminum boat running aground and there have been inexplicable dizzy spells. Last week I stumbled to the welfare office, saw my worker Brenda #103, picked up my check, told her everything was okay while she made her empathy face and told me I should go to the clinic. “I should,” I said and staggered to the chequecashing place, returning with a small fortune in Tylenol 3s and a tin of tobacco. The T-3s came from a guy I know who long ago convinced a doctor of his unbearable chronic pain, a relationship I feel is not dissimilar to love. I gave Steve some 3s for taking care of me and he took them all right away, hand to his open mouth, in a yawn.

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It’s a month later, I’ve been up for days trying to memorize the periodic table and I’m so high my stomach is boiling. I sold the T3s and bought some crack because I’ve found that it’s what best alleviates the pain and the dizziness, but now the crack is all gone and the reckless similarities between magnesium and manganese are beginning to make me want to dig my teeth out of my head like weeds. I’m watching my light bulb grow brighter, grinding my molars and wishing I had someone to apologize to. I guess it’s ironic that only when I’m really stoned do I feel optimistic and strong enough to never want to do it again. I’m telling myself when I get my next cheque I’m going to get a big bag of weed and some groceries and just get healthy again.

It’s morning, my room is a haze, I still haven’t slept, and I’m laying face down in bed listening to the inside-my-head sound of eyelashes crunching into the pillow. It reminds me of distant steps in snow. I’m fluttering them faster and faster, imagining someone running towards me, their breath steaming into the air and suddenly I hear my fire escape rattle.

I snap into a sitting position and there is a man at my window.

He wears an old style porkpie hat, a three-piece tweed suit and is smoking a tailor-made cigarette that smells American. He grips the bars of my window as if he has been momentarily locked up for a petty misunderstanding and smiles warmly.

“Hello Henry, my name is J. Robert Oppenheimer.”

The man’s speech is soft and melodic. His eyes are soothing and blue, lit by an inquisitive intensity. I recognize him from my science book.

“I recognize you from my science book,” I say, my teeth chalky and soft from grinding.

“Of course Henry, and dare I say I recognize you as a fellow of the pursuit? Would you agree? And by pursuit I’m referring to the intrepid and arduous quest for knowledge, am I correct? Care for a cigarette?” His eyes linger on my science book as I tentatively snatch a smoke through the bars not sure which of us I would describe as being inside.

I find my hands are shaking as I light the smoke. I’m not used to tailor-mades and get panicked by the filter’s restriction as I wait for the drag in asthmatic anticipation. I exhale and begin to calm.

His eyes flash as he speaks.

“I feel it’s the best way for a man to buckle into some erudition, just a meager room, a book and some tobacco...” He is taking strangely long drags from his cigarette and as he exhales his eyes scan the room and land on the vials that once held my crack supply.

“I’m sorry Mr. Oppenheimer but . . .”

“Call me J. Robert, what my students call me.”

“I’m sorry J. Robert, I mean thank you . . . but I’m pretty sure there are two dates under your picture in my textbook or rather what I mean to say is that . . .”

“I’m deceased? Throat cancer, unequivocally abhorrent, avoid it at all costs, only truly evil things expand infinitely my friend.” He grabs the bars and gingerly sticks his long spindly legs through, then his arms, assuming the position I imagine would be most comfortable were one trapped in a giant birdcage. I can see his socks and they don’t match.

“What’re you doing here J. Robert if you don’t mind me asking?”

I mumble as he grips my eyes with his, brandishing the smile of a forgiving and benevolent parent. There is silence, he is still smiling and staring; I’m not sure if he heard me. He seems to be thinking.

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He smacks his thin lips and lifts his palms upward and out in a gesture of peace as his long arms sweep farther into the room than I ever imagined they could, “Look, I’m not concerned with the past. I can see by the shape of your face and shoulder you are not particularly interested in revisiting it either. I’m here to elucidate, provide guidance, this sort of thing, do you have any questions so far?”

My mind accelerates with a myriad of science-related questions, questions I’ve never had the chance to say out loud, all of them seeming too elementary for his finely tuned understanding. “Did you know the park out there is named after you?” I sputter, my clamping jaw carving jagged chunks out of my syllables.

“Ha. Of course it’s not, Henry. It’s named after Vancouver’s ghastly and colitic imp of a second mayor, David Oppenheimer— no relation. Why would they name it after me?” He lights up his third cigarette in one mechanical motion and blows more smoke into my room.

“Everybody around here thinks it is,” I say.

“Regardless, your question is churlish and time is precious, so moving on I will cut to it . . .” He clears his throat. “In my humble opinion it is not possible to be a scientist unless you think it is of the highest value to share your knowledge, would you agree?”

“Yes,” I say, still wondering if churlish is bad.

J. Robert’s eyes again find my empty crack vials. “And accepting this axiom you must agree as a scientist that it is invariably good to learn, that knowledge is good? Yes?” I nod.

“Do you truly believe that?”

“Of course,” I say, sounding decisive and intelligent.

“Excellent. So now we arrive at the crux of my proposal Henry, and that crux being . . . In the spirit of scholarly inquiry, I hereby formally request your assistance in the procurement and consumption of the drug commonly referred to as crack cocaine.”

“I have no money,” is the first thing I can think of. The next is wishing to have denied ever smoking it.

“Ahah! A pragmatist! Of course I have more than adequate funds to suffice for our purposes, think of it as our research grant, and when I say our Henry I am illuminating the fact that you will be an equal participant in the inhalation of the psychoactive substance in question.”

I say nothing. His eyes are so kind and forgiving, they make me want to turn around and see if they are actually meant for someone behind me.

method Although he is too foreign-seeming and well dressed to be a cop, J. Robert’s eagerness and complex questions put the dealers off. However, even when turning him down, they treat him with more respect than they ever did me, calling him sir, one of them going as far as to ask why such a fine gentleman wants to get high with a goof like me.

Finally, after promising to report all details of the experience, I convince J. Robert to stay back while I complete a transaction. The man is impressed by my large request and American money and says he is from Seattle and is just selling to get home. He stuffs J. Robert’s money in his jeans before telling us he has to go pick up more vials

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because he doesn’t that much on him. I follow him nervously with J. Robert trailing a block behind. He leads us to a rooming house and I wait for a minute while he runs upstairs. I don’t have to find out what J. Robert would do to me if I got burned for his money because the man returns with a plastic bag rattling with vials and I act like the whole thing was no big deal.

The sun is out and fluffy clouds bump together in the sky above the park. Clouds are glorified smoke. My days are defined and determined by the comings and goings of various types of smoke.

We are walking briskly, J. Robert slightly ahead of me. We come upon an old drunk woman who lies at the edge of the park, passed out before she could reach its boundaries, pickled in the sour jar of her body. I get a whiff of mouthwash vapour, strangely sweet and ironically fresh. Her mouth is loose and open, jaw pushed slightly forward, like she is concentrating on something fragile and complicated. “Alcohol evaporates faster than water,” I say and J. Robert is too far ahead to hear me. It’s as if this woman is sublimating, I think, solid straight to gas, her life’s horrid memories fuming from her rubbery ears. I tighten my grip on the bag of vials and quicken my pace.

“Your apartment is significantly smaller from the inside Henry,” he says as he flips through my science book. He tosses his suit jacket over my TV, unbuttons his sleeves and shoves them up his arms.

This is the longest I have ever gone between buying rock and smoking it. He rubs his hands together, sits cross-legged on my mattress.

“Teach me everything,” he says. “Everything you know.”

As I’m laying out our supplies: pipes, brillo, lighters, mouthpieces, it starts to rain. It feels as if the room’s air is being sucked through the bars, out the window and up into the churning clouds and I feel cold. I explain the entire process to J. Robert, savouring the details, making it sound as complicated as possible.

He studies my face while sometimes moving his lips along with me as I talk.

He raises the pipe and his hands are shaking.

“Like I said now, don’t scorch it.”

I can’t believe I’m telling a genius to be careful. He does a good job melting it and starts to get a toke but he lowers the pipe tying to watch the rock burn and the liquefied crack dribbles out the end into his lap.

“Goddamn it!” he says with an intense and boyish concentration.

I start coaching, “Don’t stop! Keep smoking it, tip it up, that’s it, now inhale—go go go go . . .”

He brings it back to his lips frantically, musters a pretty good one, but blows it out too early. “I don’t feel anything Henry, goddamn it, show me properly you buffoon!”

“Here,” I say, blowing on the scorched pipe to cool it down. I load another rock, cook it, take a big hoot, then hold it to his lips and he fills his lungs. He holds it, blows it out and shivers. His porkpie hat is tipped back like a newspaperman and his forehead is glossy.

“That was the one Hank . . . Oh yes . . . I’m getting the picture.”

He closes his eyes and leans back on my bed. “I’m experiencing the prologue of an extremely pleasurable sensation now, differing vastly from what I imagined however, but quite promising.”

I help him smoke more rocks and he is chain-smoking cigarettes, pacing the limited circumference of my room.

24

“It’s no secret I’m a vastly superior theoretician than experimentalist, this is a reality I have always accepted.” I can’t imagine how deeply he is thinking.

“Oh Hank, without your steady hand, your know-how, I would be a stranger to these marvelous sensations. I feel such a marked increase in self control, vigorous and capable of productive work.”

“I’m glad I could help,” I say.

He kneels beside me. “Henceforth, I shall refer to you as Hank Aaron, because, Hank, I propose you just keep on doing what you do best, hitting those little delectable balls out of the park for me?

Hey, old man? We can be partners. What do you say?”

“Okay” I say, “partners,” gazing into the horde of vials, hearing the rain ticking in the trees.

Either he or I want to smoke another. So we smoke another. He begins a series of brisk push-ups in the centre of my room.

“Christ, a man with your kind of prowess Hank, we could’ve really used you at Los Alamos, just imagine it, the world’s greatest intellects, working together in seclusion, a truly cooperative effort to stop the greatest evil mankind has ever known, nature’s deepest secrets unfurling before us like the desert mesas.”

Robert is grunting with exertion and the rain is making the trees outside tell him to sssshshhhhh.

He finishes, which serves as a good reason to smoke more.

“We could’ve had a building erected specifically for ingestion, this substance would have tripled both creativity and productivity instantly. A sizeable supply could have been requisitioned, and of course rationed and distributed equally. Oh, we would have had a functional device years earlier, we could have vaporized Berlin as soon as Hitler jumped a border for Christ’s sake. Hank, I once tired of your platitudes, now I see you for who you are, a great probing and unflinching mind, steadfast and brilliant in the greatest of fashions, but yet modestly so, not a snivelling blowhard of pseudo-academic tripe, but a scientist, in the most unmitigated sense of the word.”

I can’t believe what he is saying, my throat burns and I feel like I’m going to cry. I stand up and start telling him about some experiments I’ve been performing and start moving my hands dramatically like he does as I talk and I’m explaining about how I have always felt I was born in the wrong time in history and about if I just maybe had a chance to meet some peers or like he said some fellow scientists with similar interests and now that he is here . . .there is a bang on the wall. It’s Steve.

Robert comes with me. We are companions. Steve’s door is open and we find him nodding out on his bed with his legs splayed in front of his frail body, semi-conscious, his head drifting downward toward his feet. I shake him and he comes around.

Steve says something about his high being ruined. Robert introduces himself and immediately offers him some crack, offending Steve deeply.

“I don’t smoke that shit Bob, it don’t do nothing for me and as far as I can tell the sorry people who really like it, I mean the people who really get it in their blood, are the ones who already hate themselves the most.”

His eyes are still rolling back in his head and he is speaking completely through his nose as if it were a kazoo. “That’s why I shoot dope, because I’m selfish, because I treasure myself. And I just don’t mind that self, the one I care about so damn much, to feel like it’s floating in a warm sea of warm tongues every single

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minute for the rest of its life, that’s all. Is it so awful Bob? My advice is you leave my crackerjack friend here out of your . . .”

Robert voice booms theatrically, “Sir, I must ask you to hold your tongue! Love yourself? How asinine! It’s philistines like you who cloud the great minds of our nations with your rhetoric of selfworship. This crack cocaine unleashes the truest and noblest potentials in our society!, and furthermore...” but he trails off because Steve has nodded off again and this time I don’t wake him up, just glad he knows so little of science so as to not recognize J. Robert and rat him out. Rat him out to whom I’m not sure.

Back in my room J. Robert’s fuming anger is now transforming into a sort of agitated sadness. I think it is probably also due to the fact he is starting to come down but I don’t tell him. He comments on the naked futility of existence, the mercilessness of my light bulb and then says something in what I think is Dutch. The rain has stopped. Luckily, he wants to smoke more rock,which is good because so do I. “What made you want to smoke crack in the first place?” I say.

“Excellent question, because Hank, to have a sound and crystallized view on something, I feel one must experience it firsthand, to know what one is talking about that is, and this crack just seems like an area I should form an opinion on.”

I notice sweat stains forming in the armpits of his crisp white Oxford shirt. I want desperately to pick up where we left off, before we were interrupted, eager for him to listen to some more of my theories.

“You know J. Robert, these pipes are made of Pyrex, the same glass as test tubes.”

“Simple physics, ordinary glass would shatter if subjected to this type of treatment, just like us, huh Hank? Steeled by the girders of inquiry and knowledge!” He shakes my shoulder and it stabs with pain but I don’t tell him to stop.

But the scientific conversation doesn’t last. Robert is pacing and anxious, he wants to go outside, see the sights, meet the locals, get some air and of course buy more crack. He has loosened his tie. I fear J. Robert will forget about me if we leave, or that he will disappear, or never come back. I tell him we have more than enough to last us the night, and that this neighbourhood is ugly and dangerous and unscientific and we should just stay here and just smoke and talk. He snatches his hat and coat, begins stuffing his pockets with vials and speaks: “Hank, my colleagues call me Oppie. And Oppie is not going to tell you what to do, but Oppie and his narcotics are going outside, into this night; this night whose force shall break, blow, burn and make us new!”

r e s u lts I was twenty-six when I first smoked crack. Crack. It sounds so ridiculous even when I say it now, so pornographic. I started late in relation to most. I’d just moved to Vancouver, just like everybody else. I was at a party I’d overheard some people talking about that afternoon at a coffee shop. Right when I got there a girl I didn’t know asked me if she could borrow some money. I asked her what for but she wouldn’t say. I told her whatever it was, I would like to be in on it. I was drunk; I didn’t think I would have sex with her but I guess I hoped.

After the first glorious toke, I calmly asked how much of it was hers, how much of it was mine, took my share and left. I fumbled

issue 47

through the dimly lit rooms of the party and out the door, secretly deciding to smoke it forever.

It’s still forever and we are wandering the streets at the mercy of Oppie’s random fancies. Often breaking spontaneously into a run, he is oblivious to traffic or fatigue. I give chase and am barely successful in my effort to stay with him. When I do catch up he puts his arm on my shoulder, breathing heavily, seems surprised to see me and tells me he’s glad I’m here.

The pavement is wet and reptilian; the air thick with evaporation. People are out tonight, like every night, hustling, smoking, chatting, screaming, and shaking hands. Everybody is buying, selling or collecting things of certain or possible value.

Oppie is smiling and saying hello to random people and is handing out cigarettes and American change to any and all who ask.

Faces drift into our orbit and out again like comets, trajectories forever altered by Oppie’s generous crack policies and philosophical musings. He is electric and alive. His interest is insatiable.

Lecturing as he walks, he relates mind-bending scientific concepts with ease and grace. We are a team. Although nobody recognizes him, I feel proud to be partying with such a distinguished man of science. Prostitutes approach him and he respectfully tells them he has no interest in “erotic labour” but gives them rocks and kind words. He is a gentleman.

Sitting on a bench in Pigeon Park we form an accidental alliance with a native kid whose face, crusted with glue, is making sad and sluggish approximations at consciousness. Oppie is offering him the pipe but I don’t think he even sees it. Oppie blows out a hoot and continues with a conversation I wasn’t sure we were having.

“Take this young man for example Henry. Here is a fellow theoretician, a physicist; he studies zero as we consider infinity.

He’s asking the same question we do, but he’s approaching from the bottom up, beginning with base assumptions, attempting to divide everything by zero. And as you well know, it is at these extremes, in these margins, at these points curves avoid like poison gas, is where things really get interesting!”

“I think he is just trying kill himself Oppie, you can call it whatever you want I guess.”

“Oh no not kill,” with wild eyes he is scratching under his shirt collar. “Destroy Hank, he seeks to destroy himself.”

When we leave, I turn and see that the kid has managed to stagger after us for a few blocks. But he can’t keep up.

Oppie ducks into a corner store to buy more cigarettes. I’m straining to remember what it was Oppie actually did as a scientist. I know he made the bomb, but I’m not sure why or when. I can only remember his picture.

I decide to ask him when he returns. “Oppie, when you were working at the place in the desert with all the other scientists, all working together like you talked about, did you imagine making a better life for people in the future? I mean, did you wonder about how things would be for them?” He spins and grabs me by the neck of my T-shirt. His hands are weak and the cherry of his cigarette dances millimetres from my face.

“I want you to listen to me very intently you smug son of a bitch.

In our minds, the Krauts could have dropped one on us at anytime, understand? We never had any idea what was going to be done with it, is that clear?!?” I lie and say it is.

It is later, we are on the bus because J. Robert wanted to “experience the authentic transport of the proletariat.”

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The bus seemed to cheer him up so I ask him where he lives and he says he’s been sleeping between the stacks at the university library. I ask him how a genius can die of smoking-related throat cancer and whether he knew it was bad for him and he tells me to stop tormenting him. I want to ask him what it’s like to be dead, but I don’t want to push it.

“Hank, I feel crack cocaine may affect you in a profoundly more negative fashion than I.” he says, a little snidely. “I believe it has permanently altered your judgment.”

Sometimes I do worry about things like lasting damage, tracks laid down that can never be picked up, that sort of thing. I often try to remember what it was like to not know what the crack high feels like, and I can’t. In this way crack rewrote my history. I remember my mother who quit smoking cigarettes when she had me and said she dreamed of them almost every night until the day she died. Even when we would eat chocolate chip cookies in bed watching TV she would tap the cookie with her index finger after each bite, ashing the crumbs carefully into a little pile on her plate.

“Don’t worry about me,” I say to Oppie. “Just hope it doesn’t run out,” hoping it won’t run out.

A woman with a baby is sitting across from us and I wonder why the baby is up this late. Oppie plays peek-a-boo with it for a few blocks by hiding his face behind his hat. Then Oppie lights a smoke, takes a big drag and blows it right in the baby’s face and chuckles as the woman freaks and we get kicked off the bus.

Back on the sidewalk, I notice Oppie’s smile has become strained and his face bleached. He now insists on carrying all the vials himself and he has recently begun to mutter. His walk has warped into an exaggerated parody of someone trying to walk with confidence.

I wonder if he is a ghost and whether ghosts get the same high. I try to imagine what is going on inside his brain. What an instrument to be flooded with so much cocaine in this city at this time. Just to think of all the money it took to construct and map the synapses of such a brain. His mind is like a Ferrari errantly entered in a demolition derby. He mutters something about “allure of alkaloids” and then something about someone named Prometheus and a vulture and a rock. “You want more rock?” I say and he nods like a little boy. I need to keep him away from people for a while.

We run out of rock shortly thereafter and I try to convince him we should slow down. Oppie pulls out his roll of bills like the cavalry and hands the whole thing over to a man whose face I will never remember.

“I think this new batch of stones may be cut with something vile, Hank.” he says later, glancing at me suspiciously. When I shut my eyes there is a dioramic theatre of brilliant neon and I have resolved to keep them open so as not to lose Oppie if he starts to run.

We’ve ducked into a doorway, shielded from the street by a tile staircase. In a further effort to slow him down, I suggest maybe he should try to cook up a rock on his own for once.

“Well that certainly contravenes the terms of our agreement Hank, now doesn’t it? I supply the goddamn rock, you, the steady hand and experimental know-how! Isn’t that it?” He is starting to yell again so I don’t press the issue. We smoke more and I hold the pipe. I’m saving the better hoots for myself because he doesn’t really need them, and because he is starting to annoy me. He starts kicking the bus shelter in front of us with his leather shoe over and over trying to break the glass and laughing insanely

26

when I tell him they are made of plexiglass now and he says he knows that although he doesn’t stop.

We find ourselves back in the park that isn’t named after him and I think Oppie is losing his mind. This is, from what I understand, pretty standard issue for the genius but it seems to be of an assortment darker and possibly more permanent. He is incoherent, mumbling in a heinous amalgamation of many languages. His teeth are yellowing and his fingers blackened from gripping the charred pipe.

Aside from the playground, a few trees and a brick structure lay on the perimeter of the park but mostly it’s just a field. Oppie is rocking back and forth staring into its dark centre. I’m thinking about whether or not this is the highest I’ve ever been and conclude statistically it must be, but somehow I feel clear and alert. Could there be an upper limit? A cap-like terminal velocity or super-saturated solutions? I figure we need more data. I can see my room from here and although I want to go home and read my book, and I know there is probably already enough resin in my pipe to keep me high until at least tomorrow, I resolve to stand by him, to ride it out, that is if it can be ridden. He needs me.

He hasn’t said anything for about an hour when my brilliant thoughts are interrupted by his voice, raw from smoking and disuse, “By the mere existence of this city, would it be safe for me to assume the Cold War went all right Hank?”

“Yeah it went okay Oppie.”

“Oh good,” he says, momentarily clearing his throat.“That’s good.”

discussion At the skid-row country and western karaoke bar it’s me, Oppie, and the woman who told her boyfriend not to break my collarbone, our beer glasses hydroplaning around a small, slick table. She is wearing his porkpie hat in the way some women flirtatiously grab and wear men’s hats, perching it on top of her hair with her neck stiffened like she is balancing it there, hoping its novelty will promote new appreciation of what’s beneath.

She is smoking too many of Oppie’s cigarettes and I want to tell him she broke my collarbone and watch him rise to my defense, reducing her to tears with a bombardment of scathing quips. I decide against it. She and the beer seem to be providing Oppie with some kind of deranged ballast, amnesty from the psychotic twister in his mind.

Earlier, after we’d left the park, Oppie unexpectedly scampered into a dense patch of traffic, disappearing until I found him a few blocks over with this woman on his arm. This place was her idea.

Oppie had introduced me as “Professor Hank.” I scoffed when he said it, annoyed by how proud it still made me feel.

The two karaoke microphones have been monopolized by an old, drunken couple who have feuded, proclaimed, wept, reconciled and so far barely made it through one whole song without regressing to bouts of screaming “I fucken love you!” alternately into each others’ faces. Somebody said the guy who runs the karaoke show got bottled a few hours ago and walked home.

In the bathroom, I hope they will be there when I get back.

Everything, even the ceiling, is wet. The urinal is old, a stainless steel trough. I’m pissing and it sounds like a sink. This is the kind of place where the line between beer and piss is blurry and rusted

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out, the substances confused and indiscriminant, seemingly one unifying golden liquid soaks everything, spewing and spilling from spouts and cups.

With my steaming face in the dirty mirror I come to the grim conclusion I have to smoke more rock or I have to go home and I consider stealing the stash and making off but it seems too fiendish and plus I think he could find me anywhere.

I return to the table, his arm is around her and she is talking, “They named that piece-of-shit park after you huh? If you ask me sweetie there shouldn’t be a public square inch in this neighbourhood.”

Oppie is smiling and vacant. He carefully finishes his beer and rises weakly from his chair. She turns to me and asks if she has seen me before and I say no. Oppie mounts the stage and the old couple unexpectedly surrender the microphones to him. He brings them both to his mouth at the same time and begins.

“Good evening ladies and gentlemen, my name is J. Robert Oppenheimer and I’d like to thank you for this opportunity to speak before you this evening. I want to commence by buying everyone in the house a beverage as a sign of my esteem and gratitude.”

No one cheers because no one is listening.

A synthesized slide guitar strikes up the next song.

“No takers? Good, because I have no money left and there are only a few ivory nuggets left between me and something dark and unknowable.”

Oppie clears his throat. Someone yells something in the crowd but it’s not at him.

“Crack cocaine ladies and gentlemen, some believe only the truly unhappy enjoy it, or rather need it.

However this hypothesis seems flawed. I have found its benefits extremely promising, but sadly, not without cost. Like most things it is a good servant but a bad master. Thus I believe control to be paramount, wisdom and knowledge trumping blind fear and temperance. To speak of regret is to ignore realities and inevitabilities.

Humanity, my friends, must experiment, that is its nature. Want versus need, nature versus nurture, these questions seem redundant, boorish. Knowledge cannot be outlawed. It must be doggedly pursued! Alas, eggs are broken, unfortunate experiences are experienced, but however, in my opinion, humanity is stronger for it.”

No one is listening. Without his hat, in the awful stage light, Oppie sways feebly. His hair is gray and sparse; his cheeks, hollow and triangular. He looks so different now from my science book photo. He is pacing the stage, compulsively touching and scratching his face as he speaks. He looks like one of this neighbourhood’s regular discarded men, who in a dirty and ill-fitting tweed suit, is taking an unscheduled narcotic vacation from the drudgery of his blister-packaged medication.

“And so, I stand before you, yet I am dead of throat cancer as my colleague pointed out so perceptively earlier this evening. How is this possible? Who can say. What is possible is that if I go to sleep, I suspect I will never wake up.”

I wish he had a podium, something to put his hands on.

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“Therefore, I must conclude, further study to be merited. And I must forge on, like Currie with radioactivity humming in her oblivious cells, with courage, conviction and a deep unshatterable hope and faith in the value of this experiment. And for this undeserved opportunity, I humbly thank you.”

The woman, still wearing his hat, stands and is clapping proudly.

When he gets back I ask him if he wants to leave, to go back to my room and just talk science and smoke cigarettes. He says I haven’t heard a word he’s said all night.

conclusion We are in the parking lot next to the bar.

On the street the car is waiting. A paper taped to the back window indicates it is insured only for today and it billows gray smoke as it idles. I know her boyfriend is in there too but I don’t look in because it doesn’t matter. Oppie is leaving.

“We are going to go and appropriate a few computers from the university library and sell them in an effort to procure some powder cocaine which Brenda here is going to cook and formulate into some real pure samples, genuine freebase, no more vials and uncontrolled specimens,” Oppie says as I load our last rock. I want to tell him to stay but I am too tired and confused and plus I don’t really want him to.

He does not ask me to come with him and I do not want to go. I’m worried I will regret it. I’ve never smoked real freebase.

Someone else will be helping him now and they will probably do a better job than me.

I hold the pipe to Oppie’s lips a final time, he exhales and his voice is a scoured whisper. “Well that’s the last of it, Hank. You truly are one of the finest minds of your generation. How I’m going to miss your steady hands and gentle flame.”

He is really tweaking now, his eyes are drifting inquisitively to pebbles on the pavement, he’s moving his shoulders and arms restlessly like he is trying to get rid of something disgusting riding on his back. As if he is trying to shed his body entirely.

The car is honking in the street and I’m going to cry. “These people are not scientists Oppie.”

“No but they can help me, they know things my boy.”

“Were you serious about worrying you’d never wake up?”

“I guess so Hank. I’m not sure. Crack may not be the panacea, but I enjoy it like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I refuse to stop.

Not now, not when I feel like I’m so close to a breakthrough.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t take better care of you.”

“Nonsense, I planned for all this to happen.”

He touches my shoulder, it twinges painfully and he says, “To be frank, I think the world in which I shall live in from now on will be a pretty restless and tormented place; I do not think that there will be much of a compromise possible for me between being of it, and being not of it.”

I watch him get into the car and he is gone again. ■

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The Roots of Things MEGHAN WAITT I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY K A R E N J U S T L

At the coffee shop, Jim trains the counter girls to say thank you whenever customers order, pay, or take their coffee. And when a customer says thank you, Jim explains, they should also say thank you back, instead of you’re welcome. Eddie isn’t sure about this, but she has it down by her third shift.

One day she stops at the liquor store after work. She pays with a couple of twenties from the monthly shopping fund for her and her father, Sheldon.

“Thanks,” says the clerk.

“Thank you,” Eddie says, looking her straight in the eye. The woman smirks, arching her eyebrows. Eddie hurries out, scalded, the little hairs at the nape of her neck pricking like spider legs.

On her first shift Eddie works with Maryanne, who is thin, loud, and sarcastic. Eddie is a little afraid of her, the way she laughs when Jim tells her something, the way she stares at Eddie, watching her eyes, her hands moving.

“Maryanne,” Eddie says when it’s quiet. “You know the newspapers? For the customers?”

“Oh, they go in the blue bins,” Maryanne says.

“Yes, I know,” Eddie says, pausing. “But does anybody ever take them?”

“Oh, you mean can you take them?”

Eddie says yes.

“Well, sure,” Maryanne says, raising her eyebrows. She touches her hairnet, which Jim makes her wear because her black-brown curls aren’t long enough to tie back. “They just get thrown out. You don’t need to ask, about something like that. Just go ahead.”

Eddie feels her cheeks warm, her hairline prickle.

“What do you want them for?” Maryanne asks.

“Oh,” Eddie says, trying to sound offhand. “Apartment hunting.”

She turns back to the espresso machine and begins sweeping spilled coffee grounds into neat piles.

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Eddie has worked at learning to use the machines, count money quickly, remember orders without mistakes. She never turns down a shift. Every paycheque brings her that much closer to moving out.

And she likes working at the coffee shop; it’s been nicer than she expected. Simple, orderly. Everything for a reason. She might do something like this anyway, she thinks, even if she didn’t have to.

“Hey Eddie, can you make a medium latte?” Maryanne calls from the till.

Eddie nods and begins pouring milk into a stainless steel pitcher. “Sure, no problem!”

Maryanne calls again, this time in a fake high voice. “Thanks, Eddie!”

“You’re welcome, Maryanne!”

Maryanne probably thinks Eddie is shy, or stuck up, but she’s not. It’s just that most of the time, she doesn’t have anything to talk about, doesn’t know what to say.

Eddie suddenly notices the steam wand screaming against metal. The pitcher has bubbled over, the smell of scalded milk searing her nostrils. She shuts it off and reaches for a towel. Lying on the counter is one of her own hairs, long and pale, the colour of chicken broth, and she flicks it away onto the floor. Her apron is spattered with foamy boiled milk.

That’s another thing Eddie likes, the dress code. The uniform makes her seem normal, nothing to stand out. Things seem simpler when she doesn’t have to decide what to wear every day.

The only thing that Jim criticizes in Eddie’s first review is her facial expression. “You need to smile more, Eddie,” he tells her. His desk is in the staff room and Maryanne, on her lunch break, is pretending not to listen.

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“Oh,” she says. “I didn’t realize. I guess I don’t feel like smiling all the time.”

“Well,” Jim says, “You do always remember to say thank you, which is great. Great job on that.” The buttons of his black polo shirt are open and Eddie tries not to look at the curly hair poking out. It’s the same dirty-penny colour as his buzz cut. Jim, she thinks, is like an old dog that still thinks it’s a puppy.

“So yeah, great job on all that so far,” Jim continues. “It’s just the one thing. The smiling.” Eddie’s hand crawls up to her scalp. She sees Maryanne watching from behind the paperback and instead folds her hands, sits perfectly still.

“It’s about making the extra effort. You know what they say.” Jim leans forward and makes eye contact with Eddie. His eyes are warm and wet-looking. “They say; there are no traffic jams along the extra mile. Or, in my version, the extra smile.”

That night Eddie lies sleepless. The veins in the hollow above her

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collarbone push at her skin and she holds them down, as though they might burst. At four a.m. she turns on the lamp and rereads yesterday’s classified ads. She wonders what she would say to a roommate while they did the dishes together. The thought makes her hands tremble.

Eddie’s bedroom contains a single bed with a navy-blue cover, a plain dresser, a table and chair. Bare, off-white walls, plain grey carpet. She can breathe in her room, sweep away her thoughts like dust and stare into nothing.

The rest of the house is decorated with pictures of Janet, her mother, who left when she was two years old. The photos hover on the walls, the tables, the bookshelves. Her father appears in some, and she can see how Sheldon has grown lean and angular over the years, his blonde hair faded to white. But most of the pictures show only Janet, her laughing eyes and floating squid-ink hair and big straight teeth, all marking the house like so much graffiti.

The picture hanging over the kitchen table is of all three of them: Eddie as a baby, squinty-eyed and bald, in Sheldon’s arms; Janet

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laughing and looking away, beyond the photographer. A few months ago Eddie took it down and put it in the pantry, behind the dustpan. The space between Janet’s flat eyes and Eddie’s chair had been shrinking, making her scalp feel tight and food turn to ash in her mouth. But later that night the picture was back in place and Sheldon didn’t speak to her for weeks, his eyes wide with her betrayal.

Eddie looks at the clock: five a.m. She does her hair, quickly, and goes downstairs to pour a bowl of cereal in the dark kitchen, careful to chew silently and close the cupboard doors without slamming. Sheldon has been sleeping in after staying up late in his studio. He used to paint landscapes, but these days his canvases look like hangovers.

The walk to work is Eddie’s favourite part of the day, through the dim, empty streets sweating out the smell of rain. The crows are busy at dawn, patrolling the gutters, gabbling from the treetops.

Maryanne makes the first batches of coffee, and Eddie sets up the pastry case, making neat pyramids of muffins and scones.

“So how do you like it here so far?” Maryanne asks.

“I like it fine,” Eddie says. “It’s a good job, don’t you think?”

Maryanne’s mouth smiles but her over-plucked eyebrows are drawn down. She runs her hand over the hairnet and looks at Eddie, somewhere over her eyes. Eddie wills herself not to touch her scalp.

“It’s okay,” Maryanne says. “It could be worse, we could be flipping burgers. I guess I’m not as dedicated as you are?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe I better step it up,” Maryanne says. “Scrub those counters harder, smile every two seconds. Maybe then I’d be getting all the extra hours like you are.”

Eddie can’t tell if she sounds teasing or bitter.

The morning customers are quiet and sleepy-eyed, except for the odd jogger glistening with adrenaline. At the bar, a girl with zebrastripe blonde highlights vaguely recognizes Eddie from high school.

She asks the usual questions, how are you, what are you up to now.

“Working,” Eddie says.

“Oh, that’s great. Are you going to school?”

Eddie touches her ponytail, the place where the hair gathers under the elastic. The girl looks at the hand, something like recognition flickering on her face, and Eddie reaches back down to the milk pitcher. “No, just working.”

When high school ended, nothing happened. Eddie kept up the cooking and the housework. Months passed before Sheldon noticed she wasn’t going to school on weekdays any more. At dinner one night he kept trying to catch her eye.

“Why didn’t you apply to university?”

“I don’t want to be anything.”

“What about a trade? Or art school? Ballet?”

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Eddie kept eating, tried to ignore the spider-leg feeling in the hair at her temples. She didn’t point out that six years had passed since her last ballet lessons.

“There are plenty of schools in the city,” he said. “The trust fund is set up so school is taken care of, you know that. You have to do something.”

Like you? Eddie thought. Then she felt sorry.

“I could get a job, live on my own,” she suggested.

“Oh Eddie,” Sheldon said. His hands fidgeted madly. “How would you take care of yourself?” What he meant was, how would you take care of me.

From the shopping lists Eddie knew he was drinking more, alone in his studio. Those nights were the quietest. A few times she’d helped herself to his gin, but even with lots of water or 7-Up she couldn’t stomach it. After the first shot sent its warm tendrils creeping through her body, her thoughts would blur into clear jelly. Her bones would feel loose, fluid; her scalp soft and warm. She’d think: Yes. This is why. I like this. But the calmness never lasted. Her head would go spinning wildly into dark corners and she’d be frantic and puking in the sink. Whatever peace Sheldon got from his bottles, Eddie just couldn’t find it.

When Eddie got the job, she told him the coffee shop was temporary; that he was right about school. She’d missed the deadlines for winter semester, she lied, and until next year the coffee shop would keep her busy. Sheldon started giving her the monthly trust fund cheque directly.

Janet’s lawyer had set the thing up before she left the country, out of a family inheritance. Which is how Eddie knows it was planned, that the abandonment of a husband and daughter was not an artless decision. Sheldon gets cheques as long as she stays at home, and it’s enough for both of them now that the mortgage is paid off.

When Eddie turns twenty-five the entire trust fund will open up like a crack in the earth. By then, though, it might be too late.

One night at dinner Eddie tries to tell Sheldon about the coffee shop. “I’m getting to know the regulars,” she says.

“Did you pick up the things on the list?” he asks. All evening he’s been twitching, fidgeting, picking at his skin. One of those days.

“Yes,” Eddie answers. “So, this man came in this morning and ordered a coffee. And I happened to see him at the condiment stand, you wouldn’t believe what he did. He took the lid off the liquid sugar because it was almost empty, and he actually licked the inside of the spout and put it back.”

She thinks this man was amazing, how he didn’t hide what he was doing, acted completely normal. She waited until he left to throw out the sugar bottle.

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“I don’t think he did it on purpose,” Eddie says. “Maybe he just didn’t think about it.”

“Did you get the gin?” Sheldon says. “And the oils, did you get those?”

“Yes, I got it all. I left the bags in your studio. So I might get a promotion,” Eddie tries again. No answer. “Jim says he might make me a supervisor. I’d get my own keys, a security code. I’d even get a different apron.”

Sheldon is rubbing his left forearm with his right hand, short, hard strokes, faster and faster. Counting under his breath.

“I might get a promotion,” Eddie says again, louder, enunciating.

“I need those oils,” he says. “The painting, it’s not right, I need the right colours. Did you get them for me?” Sheldon picks up the mug of earl gray, decaf, that Eddie makes for him every night. He brings the cup to his chin and tips it without opening his mouth.

The hot tea spills down the front of his shirt, into his lap, and he makes a small, animal noise.

“Oh, Dad. Here.” Eddie tries to keep her face from crumpling as she passes him a towel.

“I don’t know why I did that,” he tells her. As he stands up to leave he knocks his bowl over and little worms of macaroni land on the carpet. The tablecloth blooms with fluorescent orange.

Eddie’s scalp twitches. He’s getting worse. Sheldon needs her, and it’s more than the bills and the groceries. She can’t remember the last time he left the house. It hurts to think about, like biting into tin foil with a filling. Every time he asks her for something he sounds a little more desperate, and every time she feels a little guiltier. There’s almost enough money. She has to go soon, before the little voice saying go is smothered.

The next morning when Eddie arrives for her shift, Maryanne has already started setting up. Jim is waiting in the back room. He never comes in early.

“Eddie,” Jim says. “Sit down. We need to talk. I’ve had complaints.” He looks pained, like he has a splinter he can’t dig out. “I think you know what this is about, don’t you?”

Eddie shakes her head.

“Eddie? It’s a serious thing,” Jim says. He’s looking at the wall. His eyes stray towards her, dart away again. “I’m afraid I have to deal with it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I have to let you go. I’m sorry, you’ve done a great job here, but knowing what’s going on—I’m afraid I have no choice.

We can’t have that kind of unhygienic behaviour in an establishment like this.” Jim sighs and gets up. “I don’t want to drag this out, Eddie. Someone’s coming in to cover your shift. I’ll put your last cheque in the mail.”

Eddie is trembling. She didn’t realize. Didn’t know she was doing it here. She thought she wasn’t.

Out front Maryanne is fussing at the espresso bar. The store is empty, the morning light spilling over the empty pastry case.

“I just got fired,” Eddie says.

“For the hair thing?” Maryanne asks.

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“What?”

“I’ve seen you,” Maryanne says. “You think you hide it but I’ve seen you do it. All the hair floating around in here, it’s blonde, I know it’s yours. Every time I sweep up. And the customers see it too, I know, I see the way they look at you. When Jim asked me about it, I couldn’t lie, Eddie. I mean, you’re nice and everything, but it’s disgusting. People eat here. It’s unhygienic.”

On the way home Eddie thinks that she should apologize, promise to stop. Promise to be normal, beg for the job, the only chance she’s got. But she just keeps walking.

At home Eddie goes to her room and sits down on the bed.

Everything outside the room is collapsing, folding in on itself. She reaches under the bed and slides out a shoe box, removes the lid without looking at the nest of pale hair coiled inside. A certain tension is growing in Eddie’s throat, a twitch creeping over her scalp, breaking the numbness of shock. Thoughts crowding her head, drifting in like dust.

The first three fingers of her right hand move like insects. The pointer and ring finger hover delicately along the hairline where the fine baby hairs meet her forehead, while the middle finger darts in and out of the longer strands. The hand creeps up the right side of the brow, fingers scurrying; it pauses at the widow’s peak, then descends back towards the temple. Eddie’s eyes close and her mouth opens a little, lips slack. She is floating, far away. Her breath coming shallowly.

Just above the right temple, the hand halts. The middle finger moves more insistently, making soft tiny strokes against the scalp. There it is.

Right there. In this spot the hair has a particular irregularity, an almost imperceptible coarseness. It is one strand, one pale hair. The thumb positions itself under the pulsing finger pad and there is a spasm, muscles flicker, and the hair is trapped under the thumbnail which pierces the soft flesh of the fingertip like a blade.

This, now, is the moment. This single hair, peeling and shredded, imperfect. The taut scalp waiting. This moment must be broken.

And so with a tiny fast motion Eddie plucks the hair from her scalp. The nerves lining the hair follicle sing. Her left pointer and thumb reach for the plucked hair and stroke outwards, feeling the swelling of the root, the way it catches, one, two, three. In another quick motion she brings the hair to her lips and there again is the catch of the root bulb, sliding between dry lips, one, two, three.

She slides the hair between her teeth and feels the fatal catch one last time as she bites down and crushes the waxy bulb, sucks, swallows. There is a brief tickle on her soft palate and the faint taste of sebum, like the smell of an old pillowcase. She drops the severed hair into the shoe box without looking at it.

All this occurs in the space of fifteen, twenty seconds. A few breaths, a handful of heartbeats, sweeping her clean inside. Everything for this moment, this emptiness.

The dust comes back too soon, drifting in. The spider legs.

Eddie closes her eyes.

Her hand crawls up to the soft hair at the back of her neck. ■

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ART

Imagined Realities

the drawing of Lucas Soi L A U R A M AT W I C H U K

One of an artist’s prerogatives is to disseminate ideas. Toward this end, the artist may engage and experiment with a variety of artistic mediums, in pursuit of the best method of communication. Vancouver artist Lucas Soi’s black and white drawings transform this mandate into an imperative, suggesting that drawing is a crucial practice by which the artist is able “ . . . to more directly advance an intellectual proposition” (Soi). Soi also sees drawing as an arena for the negotiation of personal and professional issues, and as the most immediate method by which to present the unique viewpoint of the artist. Alternately grotesque and beautiful, sparse yet detailed, grim and hysterical, Soi’s spontaneous freehand works conflate imagination with reality, and thus, challenge the boundaries of drawing itself.

In Drive-By, Soi presents a scene of urban chaos through the windshield of a moving car. From behind the glass, we observe half-clothed figures attacking one another with broken bottles and baseball bats. The blood running into the street serves as a confirmation of the devastation achieved with even the most rudimentary of weapons. Sex is also on display, in the form of a drunken parade of naked bodies sprawled out on the road or slowly crawling from the danger of the street to the illusory refuge of the sidewalk.

As the title suggests, we are momentary witnesses to a scene that raises serious questions about violence and sexuality, questions

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magnified by the public forum in which they are expressed. In the cocoon of the car, we remain at a distance from the street and its threats. But which of the drawing’s two atmospheres is truly more sinister? Soi disables our feeling of security by revealing our host in the driver’s side mirror as a satanic, devil-like figure with horns.

The arrow marked “BOYS” which hangs from the rearview mirror confirms the potential ambiguity of our vantage point and role within this scene, as does the male figure visible in the mirror. The unfinished quality of the drawing places further emphasis on what is not seen, and confirms the temporal ephemerality that “driving by” implies.

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In Adventures in Babysitting Soi employs a different illustrative language to explore two overlapping worlds: the fantasy realm of youth and the bleak reality of adulthood. According to Soi, details provide the means by which his black and white drawings are transformed into a “colourful” state (interview, www.flasher.com). The young boy’s blackened face and feminine clothing, for example, contribute to the instability of the image, as well as his blank expression which distinguishes him from his more inquisitive female siblings. The babysitter, whose gaping mouth and heavy-lidded eyes cast doubt on her abilities as a caregiver, is alienated from the children’s world, seemingly engaged with zones and activities outside the drawing.

The details of the children’s clothing are contrasted with the sparsely outlined architectural columns on the left side of the image, which seem deliberately unfinished. Background forms suggest rain or clouds, as well as trees, foliage, and biomorphic shapes. These elements fill the image to its extremities, while maintaining Soi’s recurring finished vs. unfinished dichotomy.

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Soi’s interest in popular culture is also evident here. One of the children, dressed in a Froot Loops t-shirt holds a kite patterned with pizza, hot dogs and hamburgers, reminiscent of fashion designer Jeremy Scott’s Food Fight line. Religious tropes are at work in the children’s clothing, in the form of a cross and a Star of David patterned dress, which Soi combines with swastikas. The title of the work recalls the 1987 movie of the same name, which chronicles the misadventures of a teenage babysitter in the urban jungle of Chicago. These references balance Soi’s dream landscape with a cultural reality, the influence of which even dreams struggle to extinguish. Soi’s drawings challenge the viewer to decode a complex subjective reality, one that negotiates multiple realms and challenges coherent narratives in favour of a unique viewpoint.

In For Seriously Depressed Teenagers-at-Heart Only, Soi combines text and image to produce an illustration at once humorous and tragic. Recalling R. Crumb’s comic style and alien-

image: drive-by

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ated view of American mainstream culture, Soi’s title appeals not to real teenagers, but rather teenagers-at-heart, caught somewhere between childhood wonder and adult cynicism. The figure in the image embodies this contradiction as well. With his spiky, unkempt hair and disheveled T-shirt, the figure possesses the key physical tropes of a teenager. But the disproportionate nature of his hands, ears, eyes, and the furrowed ridges of his brow confirms the text: this teenager-at-heart is seriously depressed. Soi renders this depression externally, in the form of physical abnormalities.

Unlike Drive-By or Adventures in Babysitting, this image provides no visual context for the teenager-at-heart, suggesting that he exists in a frame of narcissistic self-reference. He is a mascot of the depressed, for whom engagement with the text is of equal importance to its figurative elements. The format of the drawing confirms the narcissism of the teenager-at-heart and the youthful preoccupation with boundaries of inclusion and exclu-

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sion, often marked by homemade signs on bedroom doors and the word “only” in large, emphatic letters like those in Soi’s drawing. An invisible border, designed to prevent the entry of parents and siblings, such drawings also marked the threshold to a fantasy world within.

Text is the dominant element in Mitte, Berlin. Soi’s desire to communicate is evident here, in the drawing’s ambiguous idea fragments which are rendered in a graffiti style. Like a textual manifestation of his illustrative mandate, the words are presented in a variety of styles and deal with subject matter as disparate as hot showers, giggling, and bags of chips. Soi proposes that beyond aggressive political slogans or gang codes, public space can also be an arena for abstract forms of textual expression.

Mitte, Berlin also confirms the revelatory role of detail in Soi’s drawing. A gate at the centre of the image is illuminated by a light source outside the image. Rather than shining from above, as from a streetlamp, the light seems to come from a low point on

image: adventures in babysitting

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the road, perhaps the headlight of a car, approaching the gate. The unsettling atmosphere of Mitte, Berlin differs from the unease produced in the other drawings discussed here, most notably in the absence of human figures, which communicate so viscerally throughout Soi’s body of work. The text that populates this space instead raises questions of absence in relation to the text: who produced it and for what purpose? In this way, Soi yet again adapts his visual language for an intellectual purpose, to represent the abandoned urban spaces of post-wall Berlin.

Much like the politically charged New Objectivity drawings of George Grosz and Otto Dix, whose illustrations presented a critical and distorted realism in response to the political and social conditions of Weimar-era Germany, Soi’s drawings possess an altered view of reality, both informed by and critical of popular culture. They successfully balance between the desire to emote, and the lucid and provocative methods by which those emotive subjects are carried out.

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In an interview with Flasher.com, Soi speaks of the inspirational postures he finds in media photographs and how celebrity satisfies western culture’s desire for instant gratification. Soi sees drawing in the same terms, as a quick, orgasmic activity. Although Soi’s drawings traverse the thematic landscapes of comedy and tragedy, politics and pop culture with ease, they also draw our attention to the ways in which the communicative power of the pen can be expanded, to convey such ideas with a unique visual signature. Soi’s drawings challenge the instant gratification associated with the medium: the unfinished elements remind us of how a drawing can establish recognition with a few simple pen strokes, while the “colourful” details, those that often frustrate the eye with their complexity, command our attention on a more provocative level. In my view, such drawings must be considered as more than just the means by which Soi begins a dialogue with the world. They are skilled and powerful images that should be reckoned with for their form as much as their content. ■

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images: for seriously depressed teenagers-at-heart only (top); mitte, berlin (bottom)

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Apogee FIONA OSBORNE

Just outside Hope, Leah leaned over and turned down the stereo, not quite off, just down to a useless hum. Richard tried to pick out the melody anyway, listening so hard that he imagined little cracks appearing over his eardrums. This caused his brain to access other cracks it had on file, his mother’s mended teapot, and the fissured ceiling above his and Leah’s Vancouver bed.

“Let’s eat,” he said, taking his eyes off the road and looking at her.

Leah hissed, rolling her neck as though she, not Richard, had moved most of their furniture and six thousand combined books over the last two days. She turned her head to look at him; she had milky skin and a level blue gaze that never changed, never mirrored what Richard was saying. He felt an urge sometimes to make up a violent past, an affair with her sister if she had a sister, anything to ripple that glassy surface. Richard pinched the bridge of his nose; either it or his fingers were sweaty, the air conditioning in the U-Haul was broken. He slapped the turn signal and took the next exit into Hope. They drove in silence down a strip of diners and fast-food restaurants, turned into the parking lot of a random diner.

As Richard held the glass door open Leah turned back to check the lock on the U-Haul. Never mind that the lot was nearly deserted. She didn’t walk particularly fast, and Richard, inhaling the breath of the restaurant, chemical lemon, prehistoric grease, read the menu posted on the door in curling paper, headed SPECIAL’S. He tapped the error with an index finger as Leah passed under his arm into the diner, but she didn’t look up.

A sharp-faced teenager led them down an aisle between booths.

The walls were lined with mirrors etched in a loopy gold design, dividing their bodies into flickering parts. Richard and Leah were seated near the bathroom; cracks in the yellow vinyl seats were edged in oily grime. More cracks for the crack file! Richard thought.

There was one other customer, a man seated at the counter scratching a lottery ticket with a dime. Over their heads, a model train clicked and chirped on tracks around the perimeter of the

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dining area. A grubby plume of dust close enough to its smokestack made Richard wonder if it was an intentional touch.

Leah folded her arms against her chest and stared at a TV mounted on a wall-bracket above the door, flashing images of buildings, dusty streets. A damp-looking cook slumped against the counter and watched it. The toy train was too big for its wheels and Richard stared as it rocked busily along its pointless course.

He thought of standing on the SkyTrain platform at Granville Station, the dirty subterranean air blowing his hair from his face, just like a real breeze, and staring at cracks in the concrete.

Leah’s family lived in Kelowna, where they were headed—just outside, actually, on the lake, Winfield. Her father, Hugh, had a boat that he liked to take Leah and her stepmother out on. Like that time the summer before, the first summer he and Leah were together. Hugh had accelerated, trying to throw Leah off the tube dragging in their wake. She hung on, her fists white on the handles, her fine fair hair a flag. Her father’s smile had grown thinner and finally he whipped the tube over the boat’s wake and Leah was bucked up and thrown into the water hard enough to make Richard flinch. She broke the surface almost immediately and headed towards the idling boat with her strong stroke. Hugh laughed around his cigarette as Leah climbed the ladder.

“Getting soft, sweetheart,” he’d said. He turned to look at Richard. “How’s your boy here?”

Richard was thrown off the tube backwards on the first sharp twist. He had come up sputtering to see the boat zooming away, the unburdened tube flopping like a tin can. He felt a surge of

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panic and tried to concentrate on treading water. The only lake near where he grew up in Langley was man-made; the city called it a canal, but really it was just a flooded gravel pit. He and his friends went there to drink beer, not to swim, and that was okay with Richard. He didn’t like the idea of below opening all around him, the probabilities of depth.

The boat had been slow to circle back. Leah stood at the stern, gilded in sunlight. Richard had to squint to see her, and to where she tossed the rope, and even then he missed it three times. When he did grab the ring, he stopped kicking and went under, gulping gritty water. As Leah reeled him in he sank, and panic was bubbling in his chest, and as he grabbed the ladder he let out a high, rattling laugh. Hugh flicked his eyes over Richard, then turned away and opened the throttle.

“It just made sense to accept the position at UBC Okanagan—I mean, great offer, and I grew up in Lake Country.” Leah had said this at her goodbye party, gesturing gracefully with her glass of white wine as though it were a scepter. That was a move she pulled a lot at her university mixers. Richard wondered if she’d practiced it.

“You mean Winfield?” Richard asked innocently around the rim of his own glass. He was on his fifth drink.

“Right, it’s called that too,” Leah said through a pressed smile.

Richard had been left talking to Henry, a Women’s Lit professor and Leah’s dissertation advisor. He wore a Celtic-silver disc around his neck that Richard forbade himself to look at in case Henry was trying to hypnotize him. Instead, he watched Henry’s eyes track Leah. Richard imagined him at home later, gushing in his diary about Leah’s deliciously sad goodbye.

“What will you do in Lake Country?” Henry had asked him.

Back in his second year pre-med, Richard read in his ethics textbook about a baby girl conceived to save her teenaged sister from leukemia; her parents hadn’t been able to find a compatible bone marrow donor. The resulting kid was a perfect match. As his class shot heated opinions about this over his head, Richard just sat there, cheeks propped on his fists, staring down at the baby’s picture. She was white and blank-faced as a tiny moon.

Soon after, Richard left school for a job at the post office, following in his own tracks around Main Street every day. He had even liked it, sort of. It was just for a while, he told Leah. He’d go back to school, one day.

her plastic glass and kept her eyes on the TV even when responding to Richard’s occasional conversation. She radiated a patience so elaborate that it was actually impatience.

Richard was conscious of a tightness of his stomach. He ignored it and got up to pay the bill. The customer at the counter had left, leaving his scratched dud and dime in a snow of silvery crumbs.

The night before, their last night in the Vancouver house, they made a bed on the living room floor. Leah fell asleep quickly, a leg slung across Richard’s hips like a seat belt, the blade of her tidy Roman nose tucked into his ribcage. He lay there in the strange openness of their empty house, watching the stucco ceiling sparkle in the yellow light from the convenience store across the street. The house seemed to contain endless possibilities now that it was hollow, as though their furniture had been hiding a secret. As though there had been many ways to do things all along. When Richard did drift under, it was a thin, fragile sleep, like puddle-ice; he kept dreaming that he was waking up or actually waking up, he couldn’t tell which. Then Leah was awake, sliding into her jeans that were frayed at the hip. Richard had stumbled into the bathroom and split his lip with his electric toothbrush, spitting a little ribbon of blood into the sink.

Half an hour out of Hope, Richard snapped the truck onto the shoulder of the highway, barely making it out before he vomited.

He managed to hit the side of the white truck. He sighed a halflaugh before he bent double again, invisible hot hands wringing his stomach. Then he spat pink into the dust a few times, looking up at the whizzing traffic. Richard went around to the passenger side, his head gloriously light and warm. Leah was in the driver’s seat, her hands clamped over her ears, her eyes squeezed shut.

Leah listened to CBC as she drove. Richard pressed his burning face against the cool glass of the window. Through the windshield he could see a star, set alone in the sky like a jewel. It was changing colours: now red, now green, now a brilliant cold white. Not a star, a satellite. Richard imagined a giant Rubik’s Cube, gliding in a slow silent arc across the sky. And he saw himself as though from above, opening the door of the speeding truck and tumbling out.

And he might be running through the trees, until he found water, where, he guessed, he’d swim. ■

The texture of the buffet meatballs was like compressed sawdust, the culinary equivalent of all the Ikea furniture outside in the UHaul, arranged as carefully as a giant game of Tetris. The meatballs were an unnatural red, and they tasted like artificial smoke.

Richard wondered what kind of satanic cows produced meatballs like these. He didn’t know how it was possible, but they were somehow delicious and revolting at the same time, like the pornography he sometimes downloaded. Leah sipped water from

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POETRY

In the Absence of Conversation TRACY HAMON i. eat a snowman

iii. eat a play

Pretend to be the sun. Find a snowman. A small one wearing a brown, funny hat. One who looks at the world with orange unfocussed eyes and a dark, plastic nose. Make sure he doesn’t see you. Let him believe the cold will hold him, let him believe the hardness underneath is the cool sheet of your affection. Then rise on him, thrust your tongue gently into the pocket of his ear, hold that place as a valley, reminder of home, and breathe. Slide appetite down the length of his spine like a hand; curve the fern shape of butt to your flatness. Place your lips next to the down of air and sound. Be one with the snow and melt.

Act 1. Ingest the lead character in a tragedy.

Act 2. Ingest the minor character in a tragedy.

Act 3. Rip apart other characters as green lettuce and toss.

Sprinkle liberally with croutons.

Act 4. Taste someone else’s words as fresh. Perspective digests a spectrum, a spectre. A rainbow of saliva flutters at your lips— words as gourmet, the choice in line, after line, after line. One long noodle of time.

Act 5. Swallow. And die.

iv. eat rice ii. eat disappointment Stare at it like a cat. Hold its gaze and wonder what it’s thinking.

Don’t blink. Watch the narrow way it rolls off the eyes of someone in front of you when he looks down. Lick it. Stomach the saltiness until your tongue is boiling. Consider the scent as something burnt, the unrelenting way it sticks to each hair in your nose all afternoon. Blow it out as a pink bubble. Chew.

Engrave your name on a grain of rice. Tiny. So small no one will see it. Wear it around your neck. Engrave your name on thousands, maybe millions of grains of rice. They’re not good cooked.

Save them like memories, sometimes for years. Throw them as confetti into the eyes of the one who has left you.

Street Stories: 100 Years of Homelessness in Vancouver text by Michael Barnholden & Nancy Newman photographs by Lindsay Mearns Photographer Lindsay Mearns turns a sympathetic lens on the faces of Vancouver’s homeless and reveals them for the everymen and women they are: people with families, past careers, and lives only half-lived because of varying circumstances, most beyond their control.

isbn: 1-895636-85-X 144 pages $20 can / $16 usa october 2007 www.anvilpress.com

Barnholden and Newman’s text provides an accompanying overview of homelessness in Vancouver from 1907 to the present.

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How Would You Get to Maui?

D O N ATO M A N C I N I I L LU S T R AT I O N BY LO U I S N E T T E R

Being a hobo really sucked. Being a hobo-drunk was major bullshit. Being an alcoholic hobo vampire was a hassle like you wouldn’t believe, and Brian was way too old for it.

The last few times he tried to bite someone, his teeth felt like rubber. He couldn’t break the skin, lost a brown old tooth—only six teeth left, none of them fangs. The would-be victim shoved Brian’s head aside, went back to gagging down Stetson.

Brian lived most of his time in a sort of low-level confusion, a gooey tiredness he’d pierce sometimes with a deliberate, scornful action. Sometimes it was blood-drinking, but he only needed about pint a month. Usually, it was the paying of something he thought needed payback, like when he blew gloves of snot over his hands in front of people who’d refused him money, or flung his syrupy shit across the new bus-shelter benches, unusable for sleep. That kind of thing could really wake him up. He sometimes thought if I could tear my life into even smaller shreds I could become untouchable.

None, he thought.

But today, late morning, late summer in the park, it was just the usual gruel. It was this sleepiness, his new weakness, his arthritis.

The sun came back out from behind clouds, stronger than before.

He looked over his nest of possessions, packed into an old BuyLow Foods shopping cart. He’d heard lately that cops in Kelowna were nabbing peoples’ carts. Property of. Was he ever glad he didn’t live in Kelowna. Cops shouldn’t be allowed to enjoy their jobs so much. Not sure he could get by in Kelowna. Lots of people here.

Lots of neighbourhoods.

He thought he’d better refold the sleeping bag now. It probably needed refolding. This would require, first of all, removing the stuff on top, which would give him a chance to take stock, reorganize, and repack, all of which he definitely needed to do.

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He picked a camo-green Walkman, with sport earphones dangling from it, out of a bulky trashbag. Catching the wire like a fresh noodle, he fumbled one earphone into his left earhole, and pressed play: Superstitious Feeeelin’ runnin’ all around my head Superstitious Feeeeeelin’ I don’t know why, but I think that I’d be better off then slowed, drooped, and froze.

He listened to some of the music every time he sorted his stuff, but he hadn’t put aside money for new batteries yet. Music is confusing. He was only into the third song on the album.

All power, he thought.

He put the Walkman down in the grass, then laid out everything from the trashbag beside it: • extra baseball hat (cool as a cucumber) • dirty, empty garbage bags (for binning) • small can of Mott’s Clamato (mild) • two cassette tapes (no cases), with much of the text rubbed off • straight-razor wrapped in a brown sock • Union Jack bandanna • blender (which he found the day before with a note taped to it dirty but works good. He’d folded up the note and kept it. If the

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blender didn’t work he’d put it back out on the street just as he found it, with the note attached.)

• metal 20 oz travel mug • sharpened bicycle chain • roll of snare wire • 1880s railroad spike and • a pocket French-English dictionary (a place to keep the folded blender-note.)

Yes, bonjour, he thought, touching the handle of the glass jug.

And it was very good to have a sturdy book. He unwrapped the razor, examined the edge, rewrapped it, tighter. He looked at his thumb where he’d cut to test it. No blood, but the razor worked fine.

Brian decided it would be better to put the razor inside the jug of the blender—a more sensible spot for it—and to put the book and walkman inside the cucumber hat. Cassettes and dictionary he could wrap up in the bandanna. Then he would put everything back into the trashbag between the sleeping bag and bottom layer. Protected, packed in. He heaved out the sleeping bag.

Pressed flat beneath, variously encrusted with ancient layers of grime: • winter jacket • orange rain jacket • work pants • extra longsleeve shirt • small pillow • sport socks • coverall longjohns • gloves • toque

November, he thought forward.

Without removing anything from the bottom layer, he counted the items. Then touched his socks, touched the matchbook in his front pocket. His money bag was on a cord of twine around his neck, which left a faint red burn-mark no one had ever seen. He touched it, empty, then poked a finger into his knotty beard. He organised the objects as outlined, placed them neatly in the trashbag, put this in the cart, refolded the sleeping bag twice, tucked the sleeping bag in snugly over top of it all, then covered this with a second trashbag, against potential rain. Not much stuff left. Got rid of most of it yesterday.

Less, he thought.

But maybe the Walkman should be in the bandanna? Brian thought a little, gripping the hard wire cart. Yes, that would be a better solution. A puff of frustration went into him, balling his left hand into a fist. After all that work. The Walkman couldn’t be repacked until after dinner. He had to get moving, or he wouldn’t get any meat at the Carnegie, and wouldn’t get to Lifeskills before they closed at four.

Carnie, he thought.

The work made him hungry, but he needed to save the Mott’s.

He had a plan: • beg staff for some lunchmeat at the Carnegie • cut it into small pieces (w/ butter knife)

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• truck it over to Lifeskills on a paper plate • smooth in the blender with the Mott’s • eat/drink The blender was a total score. The Carnegie staff would give him the meat he needed, and the Lifeskills staff wouldn’t mind if he used an outlet there. They might even rinse the jug if he asked.

Probably, they’d rinse the jug. Then, tomorrow night, if he was feeling better, he could try out the razor. It was that time of month. And time to motor.

Far, he thought. Then, angry: Why the fuck am I in Kits?

He sniffed his left fingertips, wrist, sleeve, then pushed his cart over the lawn towards the street. Daylight was no problem, especially in Raincouver, with longsleeves, pants, baseball hat pulled low, T2 sunglasses and beard. The beard protects. Cold-blooded animals don’t sweat, but they do feel the weather. At night, summer or winter, he could take off his hat and glasses. Night was preferable, obviously, but who serves free meat at three a.m?

The cart rattled loudly on the sidewalk. He pushed forwards a few blocks, to the bottom of that awful hill. Getting to the top would be hard, but downhill wouldn’t be easier.

With dread, he grabbed hold and went for it. After a few minutes of huffing—too dangerous to pause halfway—he finally stopped at the top of the hill, to rest his burning muscles and joints. Even with yesterday’s jettison it felt like two hundred pounds of soggy manure. He spied a good cigarette butt. He picked it up, pulled his matchbook from his jeans pocket, smoked the butt in a single, long pull. Frustration soothed.

Ready to try the downhill, he pushed on.

As the cart went over the crest of the hill, gravity snapped it out of his skinny fingers, downwards.

Oh shit, he thought.

Do you wanna know something? That stuff in the movies about strong vampires, it’s crap. Vampires are only a little stronger than people, usually because they’re desperate for food or just having a tantrum. Brian used to be fit, in a sense – you get a lot of exercise when you live like this—but no more.

The cart picked up speed.

Now he saw how crowded the chatty coffee patios were. He felt a throb of panic. His chest hurt too much to make chase, and he’d hesitated.

A woman carrying grocery bags of organic vegetables noticed it in time and stood out of the way. A tall iPod worker-outer jogged by. Traffic didn’t slow to watch. Traffic didn’t notice. Each time the cart crossed a sidewalk crack it jumped as if hit by a tiny electric shock, and subtly shifted direction. On a milder hill these would have been enough to slow it down.

As it approached the end of the walk, top speed, another woman, on her cellphone, pushed her rickety but expensive vintage pram into the path of the cart, which clipped its front end, wrenching the handle out of her grasp. The pram snapped sideways in the gutter, bouncing its noisy cargo onto the pavement. The front right wheel of Brian’s cart tipped off the curb.

It wobbled boozily, then fell. A corner of the cart slammed onto the infant’s arm, splitting it. Brian’s packing job held. Nothing fell out. A spiky howl rose up.

Now the traffic slowed; it was a red light.

The blood he smelled made Brian’s nostrils sting. He suppressed

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his famished impulse to rush to the baby, as if pushing straight down on his stomach with a bowling ball. Cops and jail food? No fucking way. He walked in the other direction, turned east, kept going.

A half-a-step later Brian thought: My stuff.

Still moving, more slowly, he thought with pain of the effort it would take to gather another collection. The years. Couldn’t bear it. He’d have to go back later. Hopefully someone would stash it.

Hopefully the cops wouldn’t pitch it. Hopefully the cops wouldn’t be waiting. There was no way he could leave it, no way he could go back.

Babies, he thought.

The clothes he could replace, but he needed that blender. He needed the razor. The thought of going without a sleeping bag.

Cellphones, he thought. The world has changed since he was a boy.

But he also felt a coolness spreading through his muscles. It was good to not have a load to push. He was so tired of all of it.

Tired of the walking, scrounging, wanting. Sleeping outside really sucks the life out of you.

He thought about his huge grey beard, his fantastic age.

Sometimes he didn’t even recognise himself in shop windows. There probably wasn’t a single person left alive who could remember what he looked like before his hair turned grey, or without a beard.

Long walk ahead.

Several hours later, a hungry Brian came out of the Open Hearts Open Arms free meal place. Past misbehaviour—violence—meant that Carnegie staff wouldn’t let him beg food anymore.

Veggie night, he seethed.

Christians always seemed to have it out for him. After making him sit through an entire church service, ears burning, the closest thing to meat Open Hearts offered him was egg-salad. A staff member with a bandaid on his thumb handed over the sandwich.

He’d scraped the soft stuff off the brown bread with his finger, meticulously picked out the pickles, swallowed without chewing.

Most of it stayed in his remaining teeth, and under his index fingernail. Food, yes. But it really wouldn’t do.

It wasn’t quite dark yet, but Brian had to try to rescue his stuff from the clutches of the cops and the clutches of the homefull.

Those people would think it was useless junk.

My stuff, he hoped.

He turned down behind the long row-buildings, the long alleyway. He was moving slowly, dizzy with bloodlust, but determined.

Running out of options. Blender. Razor. Sleeping bag.

Cauliflower, he thought. Mush.Veg. Brian started to make his way up behind the restaurants, the clubs, the bars. Places he’d got drunk behind more than once. No victims taken from here, however. He only fed on members of his own class. No detective gave a wipe about a dead hobo.

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A newish pair of running shoes he saw was impossible to pass up. He tested the sole size against his own, lost interest. He turned left towards West Hastings, which he would soon cross.

Then he saw Lynx.

Oh, shit, he thought. Lynx.

Lynx was a pretentious asshole who called himself Lynx.

Lynx was an ex-Commercial Drive guy who hadn’t been on the streets long. Still did stupid things, still had certain kinds of habits.

Still pretended to be vegetarian, for example. Brian hated him. He hated him as much as he’d ever hated any hobo.

Yesterday, Brian had stolen from Lynx: a bottle of Rémy Martin with only about four pulls gone. Lynx had obviously stolen it himself, from god-knowswhere. He’d made a big fucking show with it. The richest-bumin-town show. Brian couldn’t believe no one else had smashed in his head yet. The greedy shits were probably holding out for trickle-down.

As he did now, Brian had often tried to think of a smear on Lynx’s stupid name. Links?

Lamps? Lumps? Nothing worked. It was frustrating, language. A younger Brian would have just garotted him, gorged himself, left him for the crows and coroners. But Lynx was a lot taller, heavier, and at least 110 years his junior. Brian had to do it all gorilla-style, as Lynx would say. When the naïve prick left him a little gap, Brian had made off with the bottle.

That fast, Lunks.

Not that Brian liked cognac. It was hard on his stomach. Brian liked light alcohol—white wine, weak beer. Once a month, on Wasted Wednesday, he liked to sit and drink real white wine or pissy lager instead of the usual rice wine. He’d sit for hours, amusing himself by balancing empties on their neck-holes, then listening to them clinkingly fall over. Paradise.

Brian always thought it would be easier to live in the States.

Cheaper booze, he heard, more cities to try out, not so much rain.

Better trains. He wondered about the people he’d heard were showing up at the airport in Maui. Living off of the travellers.

Sleeping on padded benches. Indoors. Buying tea at the airport Starbucks. Carrying empty luggage.

Man, he thought. Maui. How would you get to Maui?, he wondered. Sounds faraway.

Brian watched Lynx’s expression peel through disappointment, then fear, towards a doofus rage. Lynx slurredly said something that might have been “You.” The loss of rank caused by the theft—Lynx still imagined that rank counted more than the material—meant that there had to be a levelling. Now Brian remembered why he’d been in Kits: he was too old to fight.

When Lynx came at him, Brian held his forearms over his own face. He was surprised when the punches started to fall. They didn’t hurt. Brian smelled mouthwash. Lynx was drunk on mouthwash.

Oh, Brian thought. Orange Listerine.

Only a couple of dozen weak hits came down before Lynx was

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4th annua

l

The Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest More winners than any other literary contest!

FIRST PRIZE(s): $250 SECOND PRIZE(s): $150 THIRD PRIZE(s): $100 (more than one prize per category may be awarded)

To enter, write a story that relates to a postcard image and send us both the story and the postcard. The relationship can be as tangential as you like, so long as there is a clear connection to the image or place. Maximum 500 words, fiction or non-fiction.

Winning entries will be published in Geist magazine and on the Tyee. Winners and runners-up will appear on geist.com.

Entry fee: $20 for the first entry (includes a 1-year subscription or subscription extension), $5 for each additional entry. Send entries to: Geist Postcard Contest, #200 - 341 Water Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 1B8. Entries must be postmarked no later than December 1, 2007. Type your literal postcard story on standard paper, in at least 11-point type, and attach the postcard with a paper clip (no staples, please). Judging is blind, so include your contact information on a separate sheet. Questions? Call 604-681-9161 or email geist@geist.com.

More information and last year’s winners @ GEIST.COM/POSTCARD-CONTEST Co-sponsored by BC’s top independent online news source.

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grabbing Brian’s silver hair, trying to scratch out his eyes. The punches after that were almost play fight. Brian dropped down in lazy self-protection. Lynx should have been able to murder him. Pulling at Brian’s beard, he tried weakly to knock his head against the ground, alternately grabbing his neck for a few seconds at a time.

Lynx wanted to make it crystal-fucking-clear, as he’d say, who was ascendant. It wasn’t working. Brian felt the violence abate before he’d taken more than a few bruises to his head, some good scratches around his eyes, had his cap and sunglasses knocked off.

Lynx was barely responsive when Brian pushed him over. How much mouthwash had he drunk? However much, it was good luck for Brian.

Brian replaced his hat and sunglasses, nose stinging, got to his wobbly feet. Lynx was now almost passed out, right cheek on the greasy pavement. They were behind a brand new restaurant called Creamcake. Lynx, Brian saw, was even younger than he’d thought.

Brian looked around for something. There was a car battery further on. Nearer to him a paint can, near the blackened base of a telephone pole. He picked it—a little heavy. Half full. Full enough.

With a squeaky, almost lachrymose groan, he lifted it mediumhigh, brought the edge of it down onto Lynx’s skull. Shocked awake, Lynx’s head pulled back, his hand flopped briefly as Brian brought the can down a second time. Brian’s joints hurt from the effort, but he was almost in hate-mode: that kept him up.

A third blow. That was that. The can fell from Brian’s hands as he lost interest in it.

Blood trickled from Lynx’s split scalp, across his high cheekbone.

Brian couldn’t tell how hurt he was. There was no more fight in him.

Young, he thought.

He grabbed one of Lynx’s filthy hands, heaved him over onto his back, strained to drag him behind the dumpster. He sat down beside him in the garbage-cheese smell of the dumpster, catching his breath. Not a safe spot.

Breath caught, Brian leaned over. Summoning every bit of hunger, every frustration, he bit hard into Lynx’s neck. When he pulled away there was flesh in his teeth, and a tooth in Lynx’s neck. Ninth tooth he’d lost that year. He didn’t make the jugular, but a lot of blood came. Enough blood. Lynx tried weakly to put his hands to his neck as Brian swallowed the good blood.

He pushed Lynx’s hands away, sucked what he could from the wound, licked some from the scalp, too. Didn’t have energy for a second bite.

The sudden intake of food gave Brian a terrible headrush. He leaned against the dumpster, beard bloody, sunglasses bloody, bloody handprint on his thigh. His sloppiest job ever. As the dizziness evened out, he absentmindedly started to cover over Lynx’s body with bits of trash, which Lynx made pathetic efforts to push away. Lynx probably wouldn’t die, but he was SOOL, as Lynx would say. Shit-out-of-luck.

The stupid part of all this, Brian thought, is that he’d broken the bottle of Rémy less than an hour after stealing it. He hadn’t packed it into his cart properly. The thing fucking fell out.

Smash. Bang!

Brian heard the backdoor of Creamcake unlock. ■

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Reviews The View from Castle Rock

by Alice Munro McClelland & Stewart, 2006, 349 pp.; $34.99

The 2003 New Yorker summer fiction issue contained four short stories, only one of which was not by Alice Munro. If this is not proof of literary hegemony I don’t know what is, especially as that great American magazine of magazines has for the past several years been bending over sideways trying not to publish fiction from the white North American middle-class, trending instead toward the exotic, the foreign, the translated, and inevitably the not-so-good.

But Alice Munro is good, is she ever. A writer seemingly immune to the erosion of time, her memory, however accurate, always gives forth; her acuity, deft; her character penetration, seldom less than riveting. And nobody can spin the narrative-hypnosis like she can, twining the components of her comparatively narrow purview—rural Ontario, women, marriage, trouble—effortlessly about even the most action-oriented, car-chase addicted psyche. In particular, her fiction has always harnessed the magic of seduction, subtly, but with a spell as intoxicating as the chance brush of a beautiful woman’s dress across one’s face. Her work is ludicrously strong in parts, and especially interesting to the curious and often daft mind of the middle-aged man still trying to parse the mysteries of woman.

Her second-last book, Runaway, which won the 2004 Giller Prize, is classic Alice Munro; themes of loss, abandonment, attraction, adultery and sacrifice proliferate among its eight tightly integrated components. Having eschewed the novel form, aside from an early non-committal effort, she wields the implements of the short story with absolute mastery, sculpting her structures with a Rodin-like command; her “Thinker” type tales standing solidly alone and strongly evocative,

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yet all the pieces are complementary to the book’s thematic unity. Despite her persistent tendency to interrupt superb narrative to give us paragraph-to-pagelength passages of needless description (as in: I don’t care what colour the pinstripes are, it suffices just to know they are pinstripes!), Alice Munro stands among the all-time literary giants.

The View from Castle Rock marks a departure from the established lines of Ms. Munro’s oeuvre and, in a long progression of wise moves, may be her first significant error. The first sign of trouble is a two-page Foreword wherein the author insists the contents of the book “are stories,” italics hers. She continues: “You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does.”

Huh? By the end of the book, this remark seemed as obtuse and unnecessary as it had when first read. And what about us who might prefer stories that pay more attention to the fiction of a life than truth usually does?

Nevertheless, to press on, with this book we have what seems a careful investigation of the Munro clan’s Scottish origins, a creditable account of an immigrant family coming to the New world, the triumphs and tragedies inevitably following, and an account of young Alice making her way. All presented in fiction style. Inasmuch as it requires at least a small degree of inventive talent to write history or memoir or even newspaper journalism, The View from Castle Rock does comprise an impressive collection. But is this fiction or history or historical fiction? The author might not exactly say, but that is not the biggest problem.

Because we never do get to true Alice Munro territory—that netherworld of simmering passions, dark disappointments, fatal choices—and only to the actual geographic coordinates, we never feel to have arrived into the expected hands of the master craftsman. In fact, this book might merely be an “Alice Munro Companion,” an authoritative handbook for interpreting the actual identities of all the echoing Munro

characters devotees have come to know.

Alice Munro has been criticized by some for her “sycophantic voice,” a slap at her device of gathering reader commitment by seeking approval. This is a facile accusation; you would similarly berate a soldier for using a gun? Her tools are common, sure, but by what fair standard do we critique a painter for dabbing with a brush, a sculptor for wielding a chisel? No, the voice throughout any Alice Monroe work is the workbench upon which she fashions her astonishing structures, those pathways to places in our minds and hearts we were not aware existed and are enthralled to have opened and explored.

In The View from Castle Rock this brilliance is exhibited in great volume, yet there is something amiss. Amid the uncertainty Ms. Munro herself seems hindered as a character. Unsure of how she is as she attempts to step through the cluttered rooms of family history, careful not to step on anything fragile, she emerges into sunlight as an imperfect invention, an incomplete artefact. Thus the author becomes a victim of our fabulous expectations, unable to entertain as she wrests with memory and data and her imaginings of the lives of her ancestors.

—DENNIS E. BOLEN

No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart

by Tom Slee Between the Lines, 2006; 240 pp.; $24.95 In 1776, moral philosopher and political economist, Adam Smith, in his tome, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, came up with the famous concept of the invisible hand of the market. For anyone who was sleeping through Economics 100, what he meant was that through the pursuit of self-interest within a market framework, individuals inadvertently promote the general welfare of the society they occupy. This of course is a simplistic account of Adam Smith’s 18thcentury metaphor. Smith presented a far more complicated theory of markets that many of his present-day supporters are willing to admit, and yet mainstream economists and neo-conservatives everywhere continue to preach a shallow faith in the market. It is this simplistic faith that Tom Slee’s book No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart primarily criticizes.

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The Physics of Chemical Bonds #2 NAOISE HEFFERON when i tell you i’ll be three decades soon you comment on the most recent one the one that passed between us saying it’s all come full circle i want to know what that even means full circle is it something one says in an appropriate moment like there you are now or well how about that or do you actually mean what it actually means – that we both did some separate skirting around only to find ourselves at the same point of intersection again as though we’d never been anywhere else

For Slee, the proponents of mainstream economic thought argue that the choices individual consumers make in a market context automatically lead to the best outcomes. Referring to the neo-conservative faith in markets and individual choice as “MarketThink,” Slee writes, “In the world according to MarketThink, the combination of choice and the market is a mechanism for solving problems and improving outcomes . . . ” Certainly, most people would be hardpressed to argue in favour of limited choice and the inherently anti-democratic values that that implies. And at no point does Slee say that choice and markets are necessarily bad things; neither does his book read like an anti-capitalist rant. But, what No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart effectively shows, is that in spite of the rationalizing of the neo-cons and their toady economists, individual choice operating within a market framework often results in poor outcomes.

How could this be true? How could the market fail us?

Using game theory, Slee presents theoretical situations where “players” are given a set of choices. Naturally, the players are

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expected to make the choices that will improve their situations. But as the prisoner’s dilemma, the most commonly used game in Slee’s book, shows, “each player’s outcome depends on the choices of all participants.” That is, the choices of each player necessarily affect, negatively or positively, the outcomes for the other players.

But the rationale of each player to play for the best outcome necessarily leads to all players being worse off had they not entered the game in the first place. The choices offered by the game, and by extension, choice in the marketplace, are in essence, misleading.

Even though the scenarios presented in the games are massively simplified versions of reality, Slee makes the point that in games, as in reality, peoples’ choices affect other people. When choices affect other people, externalities emerge.

In Slee’s book, externalities are measurable costs created through the actions of others that aren’t immediately paid for. For Slee, this is a situation that MarketThink irresponsibly ignores. Indeed, the MarketThink worldview wants to believe that

people are isolated economic actors whose choices only lead to outcomes that affect them exclusively. Remember when arch neo-con Margaret Thatcher brazenly declared that there was no such thing as society, rather only individuals and families? If it were only that simple.

The problem of externalities shows that choices are rarely, if at all, made in a vacuum. Take the example of an individual consumer choosing to buy an SUV. Let’s say that for this consumer, buying an SUV is the best possible choice he can make: it’s cool; it appears safe; it’s got a powerful engine.

For this consumer, these are all measurable benefits. At the same time however, the choice to buy this SUV has measurable costs to other people: it takes up more space on the road; it consumes more gasoline; it contributes to a greater degree to air pollution, etc. All of these costs are external to the initial purchase, and yet are very real and, moreover, not immediately borne by our theoretical consumer.

Perhaps SUVs are an easy target, but it’s clear that the coincidence of markets and choice are not providing a positive outcome here. MarketThink would have us believe that we are automatically better off given an array of choices within a market framework.

But as Slee writes, such an assumption is both unrealistic and totally misleading: MarketThink is a simplified picture of the world in which choices are independent of each other, and in which the link between choice and outcome is simple. But once we acknowledge that tangled choices are ubiquitous, then it follows that we must use a picture that includes externalities if we are to avoid being misled.

Slee’s reliance on game theory may come across as sterile and superfluous to some readers—he writes at length in dry technical prose on the artificial scenarios he has created. Readers may be left puzzled as to why he does this when there are dozens of examples from the real world that demonstrate the fallibility of the market.

However, in his use of game theory, Slee seems to be adopting the discourse of the proponents of MarketThink. By wielding the same set of rational principles, that is, by referring to the cold logic of numbers, Slee undermines the basic assumptions supporting market forces and shows them to be, at best, simplistic and not a true

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accounting of the world at all.

Adam Smith would be impressed.

– PAT R I C K M A C K E N Z I E

Anomaly

by Anne Fleming Raincoast Books, 2005; 477 pp.; $32.95 Anne Fleming’s Anomaly is substantial, in every sense of the word. Set in ’70-’80s Toronto, this 477-page novel is a journey of sisters on the path from girlhood to young womanhood. Following daughters Glynnis and Carol, mother Rowena and her mentor Miss Balls, Fleming changes perspective with every chapter, discovering the unique story and outlook of each character. This unfolding of four lives is compelling, and allows for a three-dimensionality of experience, underlining how different women can be, but strangely, how similar.

Over the course of the novel Rowena leans on her unshakeable faith, rides the ups and downs of her marriage and tries to cope with her daughters’ missteps. Carol, the albino child, deals with what it means to be “other.” As a teen she launches into a punk romance and tries on a colourful rock star persona, allowing her to break free from self-imposed constraints. A childhood accident between sisters shapes the family forever and leaves Glynnis feeling broken, bitter, and angry. She tries to find her way through an awakening sexuality, protecting herself and her disability with a hard shell of sarcasm and humour.

Glynnis’ maturity over the course of the novel from a wounded embittered child to a clear-headed young adult is an especially authentic and well-written dramatic arc.

Anomaly enjoys many delightful story gems. The Girl Guide organization is a prominent focus, becoming the novel’s symbol of the strong, independent, competent, level-headed, and moral woman. Inevitably, the Girl Guide standard and level of expectation becomes the pedestal from which every woman, at some point, must tumble.

Another fascinating sub-plot is the story of Miss Balls, and her time as a nursing sister overseas in WWI. Lying about her age in order to apply, her experiences nursing on the front, being ostracized by her father for her decision, developing an unusually close relationship with another nurse; these forays into the past are a lovely juxtaposition to the contemporary family

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drama unfolding in midtown Toronto.

In this poignant and honest novel, Fleming crystallizes the notion that at times, everyone feels like an anomaly, an irregular occurrence. We can all feel like outcasts, whether or not our “irregularities” are seen with the naked eye, or rest below the surface.

Accurately portraying how young women move through this difficulty, Anomaly visits issues of pregnancy, sexuality, rebellion, religion, young love, and social isolation as they circulate throughout the Riggs family, creating a complex emotional current of conflict, love, teen angst, parental guilt, and once in a while, joy.

Written in an easy and uncomplicated style, Fleming effortlessly floats from voice to voice with great skill and remains the realist throughout. Families are complicated—the hearts of women are complicated. And thankfully, there is no romanticized or simplified happy ending. By the final page, however, there is enough hope around the kitchen table to realize that family ties are ones that are tested, but never broken.

– DAY H E L E S I C

Suburban Pornography

by Matthew Firth Anvil Press, 2006; 207 pp.; $18 Suburban Pornography: now this is a book that lives up—or down, depending on your particular prejudices—to its title.

Seamy and violent, filled with joyless sex, voyeurism and the lazy cruelty of bored youth, Matthew Firth’s story collection is a furtive pleasure. Chances are you’ll like Firth’s hard-boiled tales from the other side of the tracks. Chances are just as likely you won’t own up to your own satisfaction. After all, who’s going to publicly admit that “Shelia Crawford Sucks Cocks” is a particular favourite?

Well me, perhaps.

But then I like truth in advertising and the blunt honesty of Firth’s writing, the dirty realism of his prose and subject matter. “Sheila Crawford” is a good case in point. Flecked with obscenity and sordid in the content, this alleyway tale of the raw demands and disappointments of burgeoning adolescence is pushed by the

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new this fall from

Anvil Press

www.anvilpress.com the press with the urban twist

Body Breakdowns: Tales of Illness & Recovery e d i t e d by Janis Harper Body Breakdowns is a collection of true tales about brushes with mortality and the medical establishment.

Some are serious, some are funny; all are about illnesses, both minor and major. isbn: 1-895636-86-8 | 144 pages | $18 can / $15 usa

Dirtbags (a novel)

by Teresa McWhirter Dirtbags deals with the bonds between women, the cycle of poverty, self-destruction, loss of family, the outlaw code, and the fragile beauty of the human condition. This is a novel about reckoning—with one’s past, one’s choices, and one’s expectations for the future. isbn: 1-895636-88-4 | 224 pages | $20 can / $18 usa

sheer power of Firth’s brutal prose into something approaching truth. Like pornography, Firth’s work strips away pretension and focusses on the base and basic, training an unflinching eye on all those things we’d rather not admit.

Loneliness, need, failure and the crimped opportunities offered by a fat wallet on a Friday night: this is Firth’s terrain. And he stakes it out with a perverse ferocity, adding a special anger to the quotidian waste of lives badly spent. His tales of drunks and deranged revenge, whores, hope and diminished expectations add up to the literary equivalent of a reserved seat along gynaecologist’s row: the seats set against the stage at a strip bar. There is the same sense of debasement, not just regarding the show up on stage, but for the audience, for yourself, for getting too close to the naked truth and the dead end of dreams.

Pornography, indeed.

— J I M O AT E N

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Adam’s Peak

by Heather Burt Simon & Pierre Fiction, 2006; 335 pp.; $22 Weaving between a stereotypical suburban street in Montreal, a nondescript Scottish small town, and a politically tumultuous city in Sri Lanka, Adam’s Peak left me with an unsettling feeling of confusion and irritation. Reading this felt like travelling continuously to those places, getting pretty jet-lagged in the process, and in the end I could not even decide which was the most compelling location. Sure, I got to travel all over the world, but what was gained with each visit? Whose acquaintance was I fortunate enough to make? Unfortunately, the characters I met on each leg of the trip were consistently frustrating and perplexing, and this soured the experience.

But all is not lost. Adam’s Peak is a pleasant story of intimate and intricate family relations and cross-cultural missed connections, although even the niceness of the novel gets tiresome as the trudge through complicated family histories goes

on and the difficulty relating to the protagonists becomes more glaring.

The novel is a first for Vancouver author Heather Burt. It is ambitious in its historical and cultural complexities, sharply contrasting two neighbouring families: the Vantwests and the Frasers, hailing from Sri Lanka and Scotland respectively.

Although the two very different families have little contact throughout the years, young Clare Fraser and Rudy Vantwest meet eyes across the street one afternoon and remain entrenched in each other’s daily thoughts for years, though they never actually speak to one another.

Fast-track twenty or so years and Clare has grown to be a virginal thirty-one-year-old who lives with her mother and, as a result of her modesty, compulsively conducts imaginary conversations with people in her head.

Rudy, by contrast, has left his Montreal life and returned to Sri Lanka to teach English literature, where he becomes entangled in the politics that dominate Colombo.

Though far away from each other, Rudy and Clare dwell in each other’s minds, continuously feeding a mutual fantasy that revolves around that one afternoon when their eyes met. Sounds romantic, right?

The problem is, Rudy and Clare become so engaged with their own minds that they fail to be interesting people to read about.

Rudy’s bizarre and generally under-developed fascination with the life of his star pupil is puzzlingly unresolved, which may be the most interesting aspect of that particular plotline. Unfortunately, the character of Rudy is far too caught up in the self-centred goings-on of his head for it to fully develop. By the same token, shy mild-mannered Clare gradually takes some timid steps out of her small world, but only when accompanied by constant commentary from a voice inside her mind.

Adam’s Peak ends just as she begins to round herself out a bit, leaving the reader with a vague impression of what this character could have become if all the distracting conversations she insists on having with herself were stripped away.

Thankfully, Burt offers respite from her character’s almost non-stop inner dialogue with periodic meanderings through 1940’s Ceylon, where the narrative offers a glimpse of the tea estate once run by the Vantwest family. It is here that Burt’s romantic language finds its best expression, with descriptions of antiquated tea-making

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practices and long languid days filled with exotic fruit. It is in these moments that Rudy and Clare’s awkward stalemate fades into the background—making me think that perhaps this is the best place to stop all the travelling, and finally settle down.

– JACQI BURKE

The Secret Lives of People in Love

by Simon Van Booy Turtle Point Press, 2007; 155 pp.; $14.95 Simon Van Booy has created a whimsical first collection of short stories that transports one into a realm of wonder, wonder at the personalities he has so aptly captured, and at his style, which is both mesmerizing and seemingly effortless—like a well-written poem.

This is a work that should be taken seriously. Within these pages is the demonstration of an artist who has the potential to create the kind of works that attain longevity. His mark will be made through his poetic weaving of words and his crystallization of emotion.

The narratives themselves are not necessarily enduring; it is the tangible and compelling sentiments and characters that one would like to know and touch. It’s the atmosphere that circulates these stories that Van Booy masters—each one slow, careful, and very real.

Some of the stories fall behind others, but there wasn’t one I wanted to read over quickly. The one story I felt was out of place was “Save as Many as You Ruin,” about a father who meets a woman he loved in the past. It’s filled with short sentences and unnatural dialogue that doesn’t compare to the languorous dreamy nature of Van Booy’s other stories.

His stories have a lovely cyclical feel to them, without a whisper of meditated craft or effort. Some of the writing feels fantastical in genre, verging on magic realism. The stories contain very little dialogue, and yet maintain a hasty pace.

He obviously gives each sentence great thought, with special attention to those that land at the end of paragraphs. “I suppose the key to a good life is to gently overlook the truth and hope that at any moment we can all be reborn” from the story “Little Birds,” contains enough wisdom and well-crafted verse to challenge an array of hastily created novels.

issue 47

CALL OUT FOR SUBMISSIONS Deadline for Fall Issue: September 20th, 2007 Deadline for Winter Issue: December 20th, 2007 Fiction & Creative Non-Fiction 500-7 500 Words

www.puritan-magazine.com puritanmagazine@gmail.com The unfortunate is dealt with in the same tone. For example, in “Some Bloom in Darkness,” the protagonist suffers from painful shyness and mental disarray and falls in love with a mannequin. It ends with two unhappy people freezing to death on a park bench; yet the enduring mood is kind, sweet even.

In many of the stories, love is tangible and present. “She told me that love is when a person introduces you to yourself for the first time.” This underlying theme is most clear where it is exemplified through loss: “The weight of his absence is the weight of the entire world.”

In “Conception,” we grow to care for the love a fragile couple has for one another and their hope for fertility. There is a letter on the kitchen table throughout the entire story that has the answer as to whether they are pregnant, but even at the end, as both characters know what information lies inside, the reader still does not. As easily as this could be a disappointment, it is not, for Van Booy’s writing does not rely on the denouement being clear, but rather on

the wholeness of the characters he writes.

In “Apples,” Serge moves to Brooklyn from Russia after much grief has taken hold of his life. “Serge was learning English slowly, like an old man entering the sea.”

His old hands toil as a shoemaker, but his impact on his community is much sweeter than simply fixing the soles of shoes.

One of my favourite lines from this collection is in the story “French Artist Killed in Sunday’s Earthquake.” It is a two-page story of a woman’s last moments before death; it follows the balance of thought between past and future and the similarity between real and imagined. “Laying her head upon her new boyfriend’s cool back in the morning. She had done it twice. It was as important as being born.”

Van Booy’s stories are like heavily steeped tea, thick and black—no need to dilute. He has created a collection to be savoured again and again, like a feather to be pulled out of pocket and gently fingered, bringing forth fondness of the familiar, and for that which is still to be discovered.

– NADINE BOYD

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a note on contributors Arlea Ashcroft is a self-taught visual artist from Winnipeg, Manitoba. She has worked twelve years in film painting with light, and now works with oil, and digital formats, striving to explore the alchemical process that is art.

Mike Christie is a student in the MFA program at UBC. He lives in Vancouver and is currently working on a collection of short fiction.

Donato Mancini’s second book of poetry, Æthel, was recently released by New Star Books. His first book of poetry Ligatures (New Star) was short-listed for a Re-Lit award in 2006. As an English Lit MA student at Simon Fraser University, Donato is now at work on a survey of reviews of postmodern poetry in Canada since 1961.

Hilary Smith goes to UBC, where she is the current co-editor of NiL magazine and the former co-editor of the Underground Newspaper.

“The Insides of Vegetables” is the second in a series of stories about Faroush, the first of which was published in New Zealand’s “Deep South” literary magazine in 2006.

Lucas Soi (b. 1979) is a Canadian artist based in Vancouver, B.C. He specializes in black and white pen and ink illustration. After spending six years completing his B.A. in English Literature he realized his true love was drawing.

Self-taught with no formal training, he worked alone and unbridled until 2006 when he began publishing work in local and international magazines, ending the year with a one-man show in Vancouver and group exhibitions in Tokyo, Paris, London and Mexico City with the art collective tinyvices.com.

B

Tracy Hamon is a Regina, SK resident and currently pursuing an MA with creative thesis at the University of Regina. “In the absence of conversation” is an exploration of what happens with life/love/loss while taking classes.

Naoise Hefferon (Toronto) studies English & Creative Writing at York University. “2” belongs to a long poem which will probably be called “The Physics of Chemical Bonds.”

Heather Hogan lives in Toronto and occasionally attends U of T under the waning delusion that she might graduate before she retires.

Heather’s fiction has been published in This Magazine.

Karen Justl is a designer and illustrator residing in Toronto . Justl draws from memory the characters she sees in her creepy dreams. She was born in Winnipeg, Mb . where it all started.

Laura Matwichuk is an art historian, writer, and curator from Vancouver. She is currently completing her Masters thesis at the University of British Columbia. Her childhood dream was to be an opthomologist.

Louis Netter is an illustrator, graphic designer and budding animator. He teaches at Parsons School of Design and Westchester Community College. He exhibits regularly with the New York Society of Etchers and in private galleries in the New York area. His work is heavily inspired by the European tradition of fearless draftsmanship and blatant mockery of the ruling class.

Originally from Kamloops, BC, Fiona Osborne is a student at Thompson Rivers University.

“Apogee” was inspired by a silent couple Fiona saw leaving a dodgy diner.

Stuart Ross’s books include Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer (Anvil Press), and Hey, Crumbling Balcony! (ECW Press). A new book of poetry, I Cut My Finger, was just released from Anvil. Ross’s online home is hunkamooga.com, and his physical home is Toronto.

Harry Tournemille has attended both UBC and Kwantlen, and is currently studying at the latter. His story, “The Celebration”, was inspired by conversations he’s had with a family friend, and the complexities of human interaction.

Derek von Essen is a multi-disciplinary, self-starting, DIY type who recycles everything from objects to conversations within his creative fields of painting, photography and graphic arts.

Meghan Waitt lives in Vancouver, where she is completing her MFA in creative writing at UBC. She read about trichotillomania at a young age; it made a lasting impression.

Christine Leclerc grew up on the edge of Boisde-Liesse. Her work has appeared in FRONT, Filling Station, 42Opus, 2River View, and terry.

She is a Creative Writing student at UBC.

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Not to be missed All In Together Girls

by Kate Sutherland Thistledown Press, 2007; 176 pp.; $12.95 In the middle of “Checking Out,” one of the fourteen short stories in Kate Sutherland’s latest collection All In Together Girls, I ran across a couple of paragraphs that gave me great pause. Well, after I stopped laughing, and then stopped laughing again—and then, after the third burst of laughter—that’s when I actually paused. For apart from the profound, multiple belly laughs, I felt as though I had stumbled across something that— and I don’t want to exaggerate this, but I must—amounts to genius. I’m not going to say the collection is a work of genius, since I don’t think this is true. All of the stories in it are superbly constructed, yes, and easy to read—by which I mean, never earnest or cloying or off-putting as well as easy on the eye, the prose so smooth and unobtrusive, the technique so quiet, organic, indeed modest—you glide over it with scarcely a ripple. These stories never strive for operatic high notes and disingenuous vibratos or falsettos of emotion; their music is softer, mellower, and more human. The characters are strong and believable, their voices authentic, the settings rendered with authority—every detail genuine and fully realized.

I would say that a few of the stories, while still very strong, don’t quite reach the heights of the best ones, such as “Cool,” “Open All Night,” “Tales from the Peebles Hydro,” and my favourite, “Checking Out,” which is in a word, marvellous. I love its gentle, almost tender poking at the brutishness of men, and their foibles, their silliness, their vulnerability, their power to

arouse, and disappoint. Hope, the thoughtful open— for lack of a more comprehensive word to describe her reception and acceptance of the world and the way things are in it—protagonist of this story hooks up with a fellow who among other things (he claims to own a poodle) is a drunk and a cheat, and a liar— “actually part of his appeal” she admits. Anyway, limited to roughly five hundred words, I can’t dwell on Hope, one of my favourite characters in the book, at greater length.

But I feel like I know this Hope.

Back to the paragraphs I referred to earlier, that busted my gut and gave me great pause.

I must have reread them twenty times in the hour after I finished the story, trying to pick apart the mechanics of their aesthetic and comic power—for only now and again does one come across lines that pack such a wallop, such a complex and successful integration of pure hilarity, perfect pitch, truthfulness, pathos, and . . . well, I could go on, obviously. I really liked this book. I loved this story. And I think the following sentences speak for themselves: At the next AA meeting he made a new friend, an enormous man who couldn’t speak or hear. A signer translated his story about how he worked out whenever the urge to drink came on. The big man mimed lifting a barbell while the signer spoke.

Somehow this was the story that cut through his stupor. He jumped up and ran over to the big man and mimed his own series of exercises next to him. The big man smiled and slapped him on the shoulder, nearly knocking him over. By the end of the hour, the two of them were doing push-ups side by side in the aisle while the organizers folded up metal chairs around them.

— S A LV ATO R E D I FA L C O

Reviews issue 47

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HUNKAMOOGA « Musings on the Literary Life from Stuart Ross »

The Lost Subway Ride I am sitting on the bed in the basement guestroom of my dear cousin Fern’s glorious cabin in Stony Plain, southwest of Edmonton. At the foot of the bed is a small bookshelf, filled mainly with children’s books. I reach, at random, for Roald Dahl’s The Twits and open it to the title page. There is a child’s signature carefully recorded in pencil there: Leanne.

I’m holding a book that Leanne held, a book in which she wrote her name. I lay back in bed and read my first Roald Dahl ever. Leanne sure had good taste.

Leanne was killed by a drunk driver on June 25, 1988, when she was a measly eleven years old. She wanted to be a writer. In fact, she already was one.

When Fern, along with Leanne’s grandmother Toby, decided to publish a book of Leanne’s writings, they took me on as editor and sent me a huge envelope of my little cousin’s writings. There were rhyming poems and non-rhymers, poems written on some whimsy, and some for special holidays or for her grandmother. There were also lots of stories, some unfinished. One of those stories was “Greenoli”—it was about twenty pages long and there were two very different drafts in the envelope.

An eleven-year-old doing a radically revised draft of a short story? Leanne would have been about twenty-seven years old now, and she’d probably have stories published in the Malahat Review, in subTerrain, in Grain, who knows where. I’d have pestered her into self-publishing a chapbook. Or perhaps she’d have a book out already from Red Deer Press or even Random House.

Instead she has a single posthumous book out (I can’t believe I’m typing “posthumous” about an eleven-yearold). It’s called The Flashback Storm, and we did 1,000 copies of it to raise money for People Against Impaired Drivers, an organization Fern became passionately active with after Leanne’s death. The Flashback Storm contains “Greenoli,” plus several other tales, and a dozen or so of Leanne’s playful poems. Much of this is ambitious writing—mature and adventurous.

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Among the papers Fern sent me was a letter Leanne had written, addressed to me. I was the only writer she knew, and she wondered if she had the right stuff.

I guess she was planning on mailing it to me along with a few of her pieces. I know what it’s like to write a letter and never get around to sending it. But I’m glad I finally got it. A few years have passed now, but I think I closed my teary eyes and answered her letter in my head, hoping she’d hear it.

A while before she died, the family met in Hamilton for our cousin Daniel’s bar mitzvah. God, everyone was alive then: my mother and father, and my brother Owen (though I don’t think he came to Hamilton that day). Leanne was there, wearing a cast (on her leg? her arm? I don’t remember). There was a lovely celebration in Daniel’s family’s sprawling backyard, and I was sitting on a bench with Leanne and her little brother Tony, and we were having a blast, playing and chattering away and goofing around. I thought, “Hey, kids like me!” These were the first kids I had ever had a rapport with, as an adult. I’d always felt awkward around kids before, but Leanne and Tony seemed to genuinely enjoy my company. We made plans for an adventure: in a few days, I’d take them downtown on the Toronto subway. For whatever reason, that journey never transpired, and a year or so later, when my mother told me Leanne had been killed, I immediately thought of that lost subway ride. I wanted so much to go back in time and make it happen.

My mother was devastated by Leanne’s death. Our cousins’ children were the grandchildren my parents never had. (I mean, really, what the hell was going on with me and my brothers, childless goofballs that we were?) Until her own early death by cancer in 1995, Mom would weep whenever mentioning my little cousin.

It’s almost unbearable to think of Leanne’s life ending so young, of what she might have done had she lived. Just outside the room I’m staying in here at Fern’s place, there is a long table of

family photos. Among them is a small photo book with Leanne’s picture on the cover. I flip through it. Leanne looks like a profoundly happy kid.

Happy writers are rare. But here’s the thing: if I find it nearly unbearable to meditate too long on the lost possibilities of Leanne’s life, what must her mother, Fern, go through? And her sister Nirah and brother Tony.

I only know a hint of that. My brother Owen died in September 2000, at home with my dad. Well, he died in the ambulance, and my poor father, himself already riddled with cancer and getting weaker, had comforted Owen while they waited for help. A stroke, a heart attack—we’ll never know exactly what killed my brother at forty-six (my own age right now). But I hate I hate I hate that my father had to experience the loss of a child. I know he thought about Owen every day until his own death in March 2001. I know that he felt he had let Mom down; she’d left him to look after their children—me and my brothers—and he felt he’d failed. But, fighting his own battle for life, hell, he’d done his best, and my oldest brother Barry and I knew it.

So Owen is forever forty-six years old, though my strongest memories of him are from when he was a teenager and we lived together in Bathurst Manor. So maybe he’s forever fifteen for me, stomping out the door to track down the bully who had shoved me around.

And Leanne is forever eleven. She is an eleven-year-old who wrote multiple drafts of a long short story. One of the most difficult things a writer learns is how to self-edit. How to rewrite a sentence, axe a paragraph, change a story’s beginning, realize where it really ends.

Leanne Palylyk was doing that at eleven, where her own story ended. ■

This column was written in October 2005. Stuart Ross is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection I Cut My Finger (Anvil Press). His online home is hunkamooga.com.

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hot new types Rental Van

I Cut My Finger

poetry from Clint Burnham

poetry from Stuart Ross

At Home with History

This new volume showcases Ross’s ever-expanding breadth.

The Untold Secrets of Vancouver’s Heritage Homes

by Eve Lazarus

“If Stuart Ross were living and working in the United States, and writing the exact same poetry he does now, he would be rich and famous.

Well, famous at least.”

True stories that bring to life the glamorous and not-soglamorous social histories of selected heritage homes in Greater Vancouver.

Burnham’s poetry works at the edges of meaning, propriety, and the commodification of language.

“It’s elegiac in a way— prophecy in reverse. Read your way through the speed slowly.”

—Alan Davies isbn: 1-895636-81-7 100 pp. > $16

Black Rabbit stories from Sal Difalco A debut of great intensity.

This is deft storytelling from a talented new voice. “a finely-blended mix of toughness, street-smart insights and violence, along with flashes of tenderness and compassion.”

!! B.C. Bestseller !!

—Front&Centre Magazine

isbn: 1-895636-80-9 192 pp. > $20

isbn: 1-895636-78-7 208 pp. > $18

—The Globe & Mail isbn: 1-895636-79-5 104 pp. > $15

Anvil Press Contemporary Canadian Literature with a Distinctly Urban Twist

in bookstores now!

3 categories • 3 cash prizes • 1 deadline

fiction • poetry • creative non-fiction

Triumphant Literary Awards Awards Competition Competition Compet maximum 3,000 words POETRY: a suite of 5 related poems (maximum 15 pages) CREATIVE NON-FICTION: (based on fact, adorned w/fiction): maximum 4,000 words

FICTION:

Entry Fee: $25 per entry, includes subTerrain subscription! (You may submit as many entries in as many categories as you like)

Deadline for Entries:

May 15, 2008

$3,,000 in cash prizes $3 The winning entries in each category will receive a $750 cash prize (plus payment for publication) and will be published in our Winter ‘08 issue. First runner-up in each category will receive a $250 cash prize and be published in our Spring 2009 issue. All entries MUST be previously unpublished material and not currently under consideration in any other contest or competition. Entries will NOT be returned (so keep a copy for yourself ). Results of the competition will be announced in the Summer/Fall issue of subTerrain magazine.

All entrants receive a complimentary one-year subscription to subTerrain.

SEND ENTRIES TO:

Lush Triumphant, c/o subTerrain Magazine PO Box 3008, MPO, Vancouver, BC V6B 3X5 • subter@portal.ca • www.subterrain.ca