Eleanor Rigby

A Novel

DOUGLAS COUPLAND

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Begin Reading

About the Author

Praise

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Begin Reading

I had always thought that a person born blind and given sight later on in life through the miracles of modern medicine would feel reborn. Just imagine looking at our world with brand new eyes, everything fresh, covered with dew and charged with beauty—pale skin and yellow daffodils, boiled lobsters and a full moon. And yet I’ve read books that tell me this isn’t the way newly created vision plays out in real life. Gifted with sight, previously blind patients become frightened and confused. They can’t make sense of shape or colour or depth. Everything shocks, and nothing brings solace. My brother, William, says, “Well think about it, Liz—kids lie in their cribs for nearly a year watching hand puppets and colourful toys come and go. They’re dumb as planks, and it takes them a long time to even twig to the notion of where they end and the world begins. Why should it be any different just because you’re older and technically wiser?”

In the end, those gifted with new eyesight tend to retreat into their own worlds. Some beg to be made blind again, yet when they consider it further, they hesitate, and realize they’re unable to surrender their sight. Bad visions are better than no visions.

Here’s something else I think about: in the movies, the way criminals are ready to squeal so long as they’re entered into a witness relocation program. They’re given a brand new name, passport and home, but they’ll never be able to contact anybody from their old life again; they have to choose between death and becoming someone entirely new. But you know what I think? I think the FBI simply shoots everybody who enters the program. The fact that nobody ever hears from these dead participants perversely convinces outsiders that the program really works. Let’s face it: they go to the same magic place in the country where people take their unwanted pets.

Listen to me go on like this. My sister, Leslie, says I’m morbid, but I don’t agree. I think I’m reasonable, just trying to be honest with myself about the ways of the world. Or come up with new ways of seeing them. I once read that for every person currently alive on earth, there are nineteen dead people who have lived before us. That’s not that much really. Our existence as a species on earth has been so short. We forget that.

I sometimes wonder how big a clump you could make if you were to take all creatures that have ever lived—not just people, but giraffes, plankton, amoebas, ferns and dinosaurs—and smush them all together in a big ball, a planet. The gravitational mass of this new clump would make it implode into a tiny ball as hot as the sun’s surface. Steam would sizzle out into space. But just maybe the iron in the blood of all of these creatures would be too heavy to leap out into space, and maybe a small and angry little planet with a molten iron core would form. And just maybe, on that new planet, life would start all over again.

I mention all of this because of the comet that passed earth seven years ago, back in 1997—Hale-Bopp, a chunk of some other demolished planet hurtling about the universe. I first saw it just past sunset while standing in the parking lot of Rogers Video. Teenage cliques dressed like hooligans and sluts were pointing up, at this small dab of slightly melted butter in the blue-black heavens above Hollyburn Mountain. Sure, I think the zodiac is pure hooey, but when an entirely new object appears in the sky, it opens some kind of window to your soul and to your sense of destiny. No matter how rational you try to be, it’s hard to escape the feeling that such a celestial event portends some kind of radical change.

Funny that it took a comet to trigger a small but radical change in my life. In the years until then, I’d been sieving the contents of my days with ever finer mesh, trying to sort out those sharp and nasty bits that were causing me grief: bad ideas, pointless habits, robotic thinking. Like anybody, I wanted to find out if my life was ever going to make sense, or maybe even feel like a story. In the wake of Hale-Bopp, I realized that my life, while technically adequate, had become all it was ever going to be. If I could just keep things going on their current even keel for a few more decades, the coroner could dump me into a peat bog without my ever having once gone fully crazy.

I made the radical change standing in the video store’s parking lot, holding copies of On the Beach, Bambi, Terms of Endearment, How Green Was My Valley and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, staring up at the comet. I decided that instead of demanding certainty from life, I now wanted peace. No more trying to control everything—it was now time to go with the flow. With that one decision, the chain-mail shroud I’d been wearing my entire life fell from my body and I was light as a gull. I’d freed myself.

Of course, we’re born alone, and when we die, we join every living thing that’s ever existed—and ever will. When I’m dead I won’t be lonely any more—I’ll be joining a big party. Sometimes at the office, when the phones aren’t ringing, and when I’ve completed my daily paperwork, and when The Dwarf To Whom I Report is still out for lunch, I sit in my chest-high sage green cubicle and take comfort in knowing that since I don’t remember where I was before I was born, why should I be worried about where I go after I die?

In any event, were you to enter the cubicle farm that is Landover Communication Systems, you probably wouldn’t notice me, daydreaming or otherwise. I long ago learned to render myself invisible. I pull myself into myself, and my eyes become stale and dull. One of my favourite things on TV is when an actor is in a casket pretending to be dead, or, even more challenging, laid out on a morgue’s steel draining pan bathed in clinical white light. Did I see an eyelash flicker? Did that cheek muscle just twitch? Is the thorax pumping slightly? Is this particular fascination of mine goofy, or is it sick?

I’m alone now, and I was alone when I saw my first comet that night in the parking lot, the comet that lightened my burden in life. It made me so giddy, I chucked the rented tapes into my Honda’s back seat and went for a walk over to Ambleside Beach. For once I didn’t look wistfully at all the couples and parents and families headed back to their cars, or at the teenagers arriving to drink and drug and screw all night in between the logs on the sand.

A comet!

The sky!

Me!

The moon was full and glamorous—so bright it made me want to do a crossword puzzle under its light, just to see if I could. I took off my runners and, with them in hand, I walked into the seafoam and looked west, out at Vancouver Island and the Pacific. I remembered an old Road Runner versus Coyote cartoon—one in which the Coyote buys the world’s most powerful magnet. When he turns it on, hundreds of astonishing things come flying across the desert toward him: tin cans, keys, grand pianos, money and weapons. I felt like I’d just activated a similar sort of magnet, and I needed to wait and see what came flying across the oceans and deserts to meet me.

My name is Liz Dunn. I’ve never been married, I’m right-handed and my hair is deep red and wilfully curly. I may or may not snore—there’s never been anybody to tell me one way or the other. There was a reason I’d rented such weepy movies on the night I first saw Hale-Bopp. The next morning I was scheduled to have my two lower wisdom teeth removed—two big popcorn-shaped suckers that decided late in life to turn sideways and attack my molars. I was thirty-six, for Pete’s sake. I’d booked off the following week and was preparing myself accordingly: Jell-O and tinned food and broth soups. The videos were part of a verklempt-o-thon movie festival I planned to hold for myself. If painkillers were going to make me mushy, best to take control of the situation. I wanted to blubber shamelessly, and do so for seven straight days.

The next morning, Mother gave me a ride to the dental surgery clinic down on Fell Avenue, and although her life was as empty as mine, she made it seem as if I’d just made her reschedule her Nobel Prize acceptance ceremony in order to drive me. “You know, I was supposed to have lunch with Sylvia today. The portable kennel she bought for Empress broke in the first five minutes, and the woman is so weak-willed I have to go into Petcetera when she takes it back and be her bad cop.”

“Mother, I’d have taken a cab if it was allowed, but it has to be a family member or friend to pick you up. You know that.”

It was decades past the point where Mother chided me for my lack of friends. She said, “Empress is a lovely dog.”

“Really?” Empress, from my experience, was a shrill, yappy, neurotic varmint.

“You should get a dog, Elizabeth.”

“I’m allergic, Mother.”

“What about a hypoallergenic breed, a poodle?” “The hypoallergenic thing is a folk tale.”

“It is?”

“It is. You can minimize reactions, but that’s all. And it’s not the fur that’s the issue. It’s the dander, saliva and urine on top of the fur.”

“Pardon me for trying to help you out.”

“I looked into pets long ago, Mother. Trust me.”

Our arrival at the clinic put a quick end to that conversation. It was an eight-storey building from the sixties—one of those buildings I’ve driven by a thousand times and never noticed, sort of like the architectural version of myself. Inside, it was cool and smelled of sanitation products. The print on the elevator’s DOOR CLOSE button was almost worn off. I pointed it out to Mother and said, “I bet there are a few psychiatrists in this building.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Look at the button.”

“So?”

“In the elevator industry, a DOOR CLOSE button is called a pacifier button. They’re installed simply to give the illusion of control to your elevator ride. They’re almost never hooked up to a real switch.”

“I still think you should get a dog.”

I have to admit that I love hospitals, clinics and medical environments. You enter them, you sit in a chair and suddenly all the burden of having to remain alive just floats away—that endless brain-churning buzzing and second-guessing and non-stop short-term planning that accompanies the typical lonely life.

I’d never met the day’s exodontist before, a hearty Australian who rustled up jokes and cheer even for my sad little face under its laughing gas mask.

“So where’d you go to school then, Lizzie?”

“Liz. Here in North Van—Carson Graham for high school.”

“Ho ho! And after that?”

“Oh God. BCIT. Accounting.”

“Marvellous. Lots of partying there?”

“What?” The anaesthetist clamped the mask harder onto my face.

“You know. Letting loose. Getting down.”

“My life is not a beer commercial …”

That’s when I went under. A second later I opened my eyes and the room was empty save for a nurse putting away the last of a set of tools. My mouth felt packed with sand. I smiled because it had been such a great thing to be conked out like that—one moment you’re dealing with an Australian comedian, the next you’re … gone. One more reason to no longer fear death.

In the car on the way home, my conversation with Mother consisted mostly of her sighing and me mumbling like a faraway radio station. She dropped me off outside my condo, and before she raced off to Petcetera she said, “Really think about a dog now, Elizabeth.”

“Let it go, Muddah.”

It was a hot dry day. August. The building’s entryway smelled of sun-roasted cedar-bark chips and underwatered junipers. Inside, it was cool, smelling instead of the lobby’s decaying nylon rug. Once inside my place, three floors up, I had the eerie sensation that I was watching a movie version of a still room. There was nothing in it that moved or denoted time’s passage—no plants or clocks—and I felt guilty to be wasting all of that invisible film, ashamed that my condo was so boring. But then again, the right kind of boring can be peaceful, and peace was my new perspective on the world. Just go with the flow.

My head throbbed and I went into my bedroom and laid it down on a cool pillow. The pillow warmed up, I turned it over to the cool side and then I fell asleep. When I woke up it was past sunset, but in the sky up above the mountain there was still some light and colour. I cursed because an afternoon nap always leads to an endless night. I touched my face: both sides swollen like the mumps. I fell back onto the mattress and my tongue explored the two new salty, bloody socket holes and their thorny stitches.

The Liz Dunns of this world tend to get married, and then twenty-three months after their wedding and the birth of their first child they establish sensible, lower-maintenance hairdos that last them forever. Liz Dunns take classes in croissant baking, and would rather chew on soccer balls than deny their children muesli. They own one sex toy, plus one cowboy fantasy that accompanies its use. No, not a cowboy—more like a guy who builds decks—expensive designer decks with built-in multi-faucet spas—a guy who would take hours, if necessary, to help such a Liz find the right colour of grout for the guest-room tile reno.

I am a traitor to my name: I’m not cheerful or domestic. I’m drab, crabby and friendless. I fill my days fighting a constant battle to keep my dignity. Loneliness is my curse—our species’ curse—it’s the gun that shoots the bullets that make us dance on a saloon floor and humiliate ourselves in front of strangers.

Where does loneliness come from? I’d hazard a guess that the crapshoot that is family has more than a little to do with it—father’s a drunk; mother’s an agoraphobic; single child; middle child; firstborn; mother’s a nag; father’s a golf cheat … I mean, what’s your own nature/nurture crap-shoot? You’re here. You’re reading these words. Is this a coincidence? Maybe you think fate is only for others. Maybe you’re ashamed to be reading about loneliness—maybe someone will catch you and then they’ll know your secret stain. And then maybe you’re not even very sure what loneliness is—that’s common. We cripple our children for life by not telling them what loneliness is, all of its shades and tones and implications. When it clubs us on the head, usually just after we leave home, we’re blindsided. We have no idea what hit us. We think we’re diseased, schizoid, bipolar, monstrous and lacking in dietary chromium. It takes us until thirty to figure out what it was that sucked the joy from our youth, that made our brains shriek and burn on the inside, even while our exteriors made us seem as confident and bronzed as Qantas pilots. Loneliness.

The message on my answering machine the next morning was from The Dwarf To Whom I Report. His name is Liam.

I hope your surgery went okay, Liz. You didn’t miss too much here at the office. I’m having Donna courier you over a few files for you to pick away at over the next week while you recover. Sorry I missed you. Call any time.

What? I didn’t miss anything? Heaven forbid anything even quasi-dramatic might occur in the cubicle farm of Landover Communication Systems …

Liz, there was a fire …

Liz, we all got naked at lunch hour and interfered with each other …

Liz, those voices in my head? They’re real.

Well, the thing about Liam is that he actually enjoys his work. This is inconceivable to me. On a few occasions I’ve tried to mimic his cheer, but no go. To me a job is a job is a job, and before you know it, poof! it’s all over and they’re throwing your ashes off Lions Gate Bridge.

Liam feels many things I don’t, for example a sense of mission as well as indifference to the emotional lives of others, including me. This is possibly to be expected, as I’m plain, unsalvageably plain. When I was born, the doctor took one look as he held me, bloodied and squalling, and asked the nurse if there was anything good on TV that night. My parents looked at me, said, “Well, whatever,” and then discussed what colour to reupholster the living-room sofa. I’m only half joking.

People look at me and forget I’m here. To be honest, I don’t even have to try to make myself invisible, it just happens. But evidently I’m not invisible enough to Liam, especially if he thought I might like to “pick away at a few files” while I get over these teeth.

One of my big problems is time sickness. When I feel lonely, I assume that the mood will never pass—that I’ll feel lonely and bad for the rest of my life, which means that I’ve wrecked both the present and the future. And if I look back on my past, I wreck that too, by concentrating on all the things I did wrong. The brutal thing about time sickness is that naming it is no cure.

I look at the philodendron on the kitchen windowsill, the only thing in my condo that ever changes. I found it at a bus stop twelve years ago and I’ve kept it going ever since. I like it because up close its leaves are pretty, and also because it makes me think of time in a way that doesn’t totally depress me.

If I could go back in time two decades and give just one piece of advice to a younger me, it would be, “Don’t worry so damn much.” But because young people never believe old people, I’d most likely ignore my own advice.

If there’s a future Liz Dunn out there in, say, 2034, may I respectfully ask you to time travel back to right now and give me the advice I need? I promise you, I’ll listen, and I’ll give you a piece of my philodendron to take back with you so you can grow your own plant there.

I ended up sleeping until the next afternoon—surgery can really take a whack out of you. My verklempt-o-thon was well in progress when my older sister Leslie dropped by, intruding upon one of the most wrenching of my verklempt-o-thon’s moments, the end of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis when the family realizes they’re doomed to the gas chambers. I was slightly looped on Percocets, and my eyes were hound-dog red.

“You look like hell, Liz. Like you have mumps.”

“Thank you, Leslie, but I can’t say the same for you.”

“It’s this jacket—it’s new. What do you think?” Leslie twirled on the carpet. Leslie’s beauty truly makes me a genetic punchline. When we were young, no amount of documentation could convince us we were biological sisters.

“It’s very you.” Cripes. Leslie vomits and pieces of undigested Vanity Fair articles come up—but she’s never fooled me for a moment with her fashion slave persona. I see through it, which is why she relaxes around me.

“Look at this place, Liz. Open the curtains.”

“No.”

“Okay then, I think I’ll smoke.”

“Sure.” I like cigarette smoke in a room. At least then the room doesn’t look or feel dead.

We lit up, and Leslie surveyed the condo with her real estate agent’s eye for upsellability. Sparkling Norgate Park fixer-upper/1bdr/1bth/character kitchen/one owner. “Did Mother torture you yesterday?”

I paused the video. “She had to cancel lunch with Sylvia.”

“Cancelling lunch with Sylvia? That’s a baddy. Did it inch up the guilt a notch or two?”

“I… Don’t get me started.”

“I’d have driven you if it weren’t for the kids’ recital.”

Leslie kept shrugging her shoulders in a hunched way I’d never before seen. “Leslie, you look fidgety, and what’s with the shoulders?”

“My tits are killing me.”

“Still?”

I thought she’d inhale the whole cigarette in one drag. “Good God, yes.” The exhaled smoke resembled the Challenger explosion. “Oh, to be flat like you, Liz. You’re so lucky.”

“Thank you. Can’t you just have the … bags or whatever they are removed?”

“Too late. Mike’s bonded with them.” She cast her eyes toward my kitchen. “Any food around here?”

“Chocolate pudding, some Jell-O—some chicken-with-rice soup.”

She snooped around my kitchen area: butcher block counters and steel appliances—the sole luxurious addition the contractor made to the place. “Liz, you eat like you’re on welfare. There’s not one fresh anything in your whole kitchen.” She opened and closed the fridge door. “And not even one magnet or photo on your fridge. Where’s the Valentine’s Day card Brianna made you? Are you trying to clinically depress your visitors?”

“I don’t have visitors. You. Mother. William.”

“Liz, everyone has visitors.”

“Not me.”

She changed tack and removed the Pyrex bowl filled with Jell-O. “I’m going to eat your Jell-O. It’s red. What flavour is it?”

“Red Jell-O is red Jell-O.”

Her gold wrist jewellery clattered as she spooned down the goo I’d been saving for Terms of Endearment. She asked me, “Have you seen my bus stop yet?”

“Your what?”

“I have my own bus stop bench ad now, with a big black-and-white photo of me on it. Just one bench, but it’s a start. It’s a flattering shot, but we took it before I had my work done, so it doesn’t seem like me any more.”

“Where is it?”

“At Capilano Road and Keith, Canada’s longest red light. A captive audience. I just know some little shit with a felt pen’s going to go draw a Hitler moustache on it.”

“Felt markers ought to be illegal.”

“I agree. Kids today are monsters.” She finished my Jell-O and somehow squeaked a drag from what remained of her cigarette. “Have to run.”

“I think there’s still one more spoonful left.”

She was almost out the door. “You look like hell, darling. Three more days at least. Wouldn’t you think?”

“Yes, Leslie. Thank you.”

“See you tomorrow, darling.”

I began to watch Bambi. I wasn’t really sure why the video store clerk had recommended it as a sad movie—and it seemed pretty tame. There was a knock on my door, and because there was no intercom buzz I assumed it would be Wallace, the caretaker. It was young Donna from Landover Communication Systems, coltish and seemingly undernourished, standing in my hallway with a stack of folders and envelopes pressed to her chest. Everyone in the office likes Donna because she’s always up, always on—but I’m on to her game. She’s like me. She’s a watcher.

“Donna?”

“Hello, Liz.”

I realized how awful I must look. I touched my cheeks. “Swelling’s pretty big.”

She kept the papers clamped to her chest. “Liz, your eyes are all red.”

“Sad movies.”

“What?”

“Sad movies. Painkillers make them seem sadder than they really are.”

“I love crying at sad movies.”

“Oh. Would you like to come in?”

“Thank you.”

“Liam said he was sending a courier.”

“I thought it’d be better if I came instead.”

Not only is Donna a watcher, she’s also a minor tattle-tale, and she’s no cretin. She scanned my apartment like it was so many bar-coded groceries. Doubtless the lunchroom was due for a guided playback the next day: It’s like a spinster’s cellblock—almost nothing on the walls, furniture chosen by a colour-blind nun and, weirdest of all, no cats.

Donna said, “Nice place.”

“No it’s not.”

“Yes it is.”

“It’s adequate.”

“I think it’s nice.”

“Are those the files Liam asked me to pick away at?”

“These?” She’d forgotten about them while she was doing her sweep. “Yes, they are. Nothing too complex, I hope. You must be kind of wooey from the drugs.” She put the files on the dining table.

“Would you like some?”

She was shocked. “What—your drugs?”

“I was just kidding.”

“Oh.” She fished around for something to say, but my condo was almost entirely devoid of conversation fodder. On the TV screen she saw Thumper frozen on PAUSE. “You’re watching Bambi, huh?”

I tried to be chatty. “You know, I’m thirty-six and I’ve never seen it before.”

“It’s so depressing. You know—Mrs. Bambi being shot and all.”

This surprised me. “I didn’t know that.”

“You didn’t know? Everybody knows that Bambi’s mother gets shot. It’s like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer—part of the culture.”

I considered this. “You mean Rudolph the Useful Reindeer.”

“Huh?”

“Let’s be honest, if Rudolph hadn’t been able to help the other reindeer, they’d have left him to the wolves—and laughed while the fangs punctured his hide.”

“That’s a grim way of looking at it.”

I sighed and stared at the files Donna had brought me.

She changed the subject. She nodded at a Monet print of lilies at Giverny beside the kitchen. “Nice poster.”

“My sister gave it to me.”

“It suits you.”

“It was left over when she redecorated her office.”

Donna blew a fuse. “Liz, why do you have to be so negative? This is a great place. You ought to be happy with it. I live in a dump, and the rent’s half my salary.”

“Can I make you some coffee?”

“No, thanks. I have to head back to the office.”

“You sure?”

“I have to go.”

I saw her to the door and returned to the movie, and realized that knowing about Bambi’s mother didn’t spoil it. So I was happy.

At the end, I checked the year it was made: MCMXLII— 1942. Even Bambi was long dead by now. He’s soil, as are Thumper and Flower. Deer have up to an eighteen-year lifespan; rabbits, twelve; skunks, at most thirteen. And being soil doesn’t sound like such a bad idea really, moist and granular like raspberry oatmeal muffins. Soil is alive—it has to be in order for it to nourish new life. So, in a way, it’s not remotely deathlike. Burial is nice that way.

William, my older brother and possibly my best friend, waited until the evening to check up on me, right after On the Beach. In the truest sense of the word, I was sitting there speechless as the credits rolled and I contemplated an entire radioactive planet populated with decomposed bodies sitting in their offices, kitchens, in cars and on front lawns. When he came in, I don’t even think I said hello—I merely sniffled, but the verklempt mood fled the moment I saw my two essentially evil nephews, Hunter and Chase, run in after him.

“Lizzie, Jesus, your eyes look like two piss holes in the snow. I can’t stay long. I have to fly to London on a red-eye.”

“Hello, William.”

The twins groaned in harmony, “We’re hunnnnnnngry,” followed by Chase saying to his father, making no attempt to masquerade his feelings, “Aunt Lizzie’s place blows. You said we could go to the arcade.”

I said, “Hello, Hunter. Hello, Chase,” who, as usual, ignored me.

William addressed his sons. “Well, if I’d told you we were going to Lizzie’s, then I’d never have gotten you into the car.”

“You lied!”

“I did not, and if—and only if—you behave, I might still take you to your arcade, so shut the crap up and leave us alone.” William then glanced at me: “I’m turning into Father,” he said.

“Turning? You’re already there.”

The twins had invaded the kitchen and spotted the remains. “Any more Jell-O left?”

“No.”

“I hate coming here.”

“Thank you, Chase. Have some pudding.”

“We can’t eat dairy.”

I looked at William. “Since when?”

“It’s from Nancy’s side of the family,” he said.

“Have some crackers, boys. They’re in the second drawer from the top.”

They looked, saw it was only saltines and slammed the drawer shut. “Hunter, let’s watch TV.” Chase was always the leader.

Within moments, they’d colonized my couch and barnacled themselves onto a pro wrestling event. The noise was cheap and booming, but at least it shut them up.

“You didn’t have to come visit, William. I’m fine. It’s just wisdom teeth.”

“Mother said you looked pretty bad. And pretty depressed, too.”

“She did?”

“It smells like an ashtray in here.”

“I smoke sometimes. And Leslie came for a visit.”

“That would explain it. Let’s open those godawful curtains. Where’d you find them—a Greek bingo hall?”

The curtains came with the place. They were mustard yellow, with orange-and-gold brocade, and I suspect the contractor’s wife chose them.

“William, stop. I know how dreary it is, okay?” Was my place really that depressing? On the carpet I saw two small, faint ovals from where I over-cleaned bits of the carpet—a slice of pizza that landed the wrong way, and a Sharpie pen I dropped while wrapping Christmas presents.

“Nancy couldn’t make it. She sends her wishes,” my brother said.

“Send her mine as well.” This was a joke, as William’s wife, Nancy, and I don’t tolerate each other. I told her once at Thanksgiving that she wore too much perfume. Her riposte was that my hair looked like a toupée, and our relationship never recovered. This kind of rift only ever widens.

A squawk came from the couch. Chase had pushed a button on the remote that somehow obliterated the TV’s ability to receive a cable signal, and white noise blared at full volume, setting my remaining teeth on edge. The boys argued over whose fault it was, and then screamed about how to fix it, finally deigning to ask me. I pretended not to know, in hopes it might speed their departure. William manually turned off the TV, and swatted each of the boys on the back of the head. “We’re in someone else’s house, you little jerks.” The boys began to sniffle, but then William said, “Nice try, you little crybabies. Tears may work on your mother, but don’t try that on me, okay?” He turned to me. “Jesus, Lizzie, do you have any Scotch or something?”

“Baileys. From Christmas.”

“Why not?”

Chase asked, “What’s Baileys?”

“Something you’re not getting,” his father replied.

The boys went quiet, too quiet. The room’s air felt warm and bloated, just waiting for a lightning bolt—which I then delivered. I said, “Did your father ever tell you that I once found a dead body?”

Their eyes bulged. “What?” They looked to William for confirmation.

“Yes, she did.”

“Where? When?”

“Lizzie, it was in, what, grade six?”

“Five. I was the same age as you two are now.”

“How?”

William said, “If you two would just shut up, maybe we’ll find out.”

I handed my brother his Baileys. “I was walking on the railway tracks.”

“Where?”

“Out by Horseshoe Bay.”

Hunter asked, “By yourself?”

Chase looked at me and said, “Aunt Lizzie, do you have friends?”

I said, “Yes, thank you, Chase. In any event, it was summer, and I was picking blackberries—by myself. I rounded a corner and I saw a shirt in the fireweed on an embankment. People huck all sorts of things from trains—mostly juice boxes and pop cans—so I didn’t pay it too much attention. But as I walked closer, I saw some more colour there—a shirt and then shoes. And then I realized it was a man.”

That much was true. It was indeed a man, but I only gave the boys my PG-13 version of the event. They were the same age I had been when it happened, but somehow Chase and Hunter seemed younger than their years. Look at me—here I am being biased against them in the same way people were against me throughout the dead body episode.

Here’s what happened: It was August and I’d been quite happy to be by myself for the entire afternoon, taking several buses out to Horseshoe Bay, having a quick cheeseburger at a concession stand near the ferry terminal, and then hiking up steep hills and piles of blasted rock to the PGE rail line. I was wearing a blue-and-white gingham dress, which I hated, but it kept me cool, and a day’s walk on the rails would kill it with oils and chemicals and dirt, so I could live with it for one more day. You might ask, what was a twelve-year-old girl doing alone in a semi-remote place near a big city? Simple answer: it was the seventies. Past a certain age, children just did their thing, with little concern shown by their parents for what, where, when or with whom. Chase and Hunter probably have chips embedded in their tailbones linked up to a Microsoft death-satellite that informs William and Nancy where they are at all times. But back then?

“Mom, is it okay if I hitchhike to the biker bar?”

“Sure, dear.”

It was a baking July day, all scents were amplified, and I smelled something quite awful. Actually, I immediately guessed that the odour was that of a partially decomposed body. Knowledge of this smell must be innate. As I approached it, I was almost happy; I liked to think a short lifetime of detective novels, TV shows and secret visions had prepared me for this moment. A crime to solve. Clues to locate.

I’d never seen a dead body before. Kids at school had seen car crashes, which made me jealous, but this? This was murder, and a grisly one at that. The man’s body had been severed at the waist, the two halves positioned at a right angle. The corpse’s lower half was wearing a floral print skirt and knee-high boots, and the top half was wearing a plaid lumberjack shirt. The face was untouched, a quite handsome man’s face, grey at this point, in spite of thick makeup: flaking foundation, mascara and one false eyelash, still attached. Flies buzzed all around. I wondered who this man had been, and why he’d been wearing a skirt.

The skirt. Here’s something shameful I’ve never told anybody before: I took a piece of alder branch, stripped it of leaves and then went over to the lower half of the body. I needed to lift up the skirt and see whether the—well, whether the bottom half went with the top—and it did—with no underwear, either.

Who could have done this to him? I looked around, and nary a weed or daisy stem nearby had been bent or bloodied. There was no evidence that the cutting and splattering had occurred on location. Even to a twelve-year-old, it was pretty obvious the body had been dumped. I stood there in the heat, suddenly thirsty. I remember that it was the corpse’s makeup that confused me more than the body, or even the skirt.

I am not a callous person, and have never been. I imagine most people might have vomited or looked away, but I simply didn’t. That’s how coroners must feel. I can only imagine that one is, or is not, born with squeamishness. Surgery scenes on TV? I’m in. To be blunt, finding the body seemed to affect me about as much as an uncooked roast.

And also—and this is something I didn’t pinpoint until years later—being that close to something so totally dead made me feel … infinite—immortal.

I was standing there immobile for maybe five minutes before I heard a train off in the distance, coming from the north, from Squamish. It was the Royal Hudson, an old-fashioned steam train refurbished and converted into a tourist attraction, chugging down the Howe Sound fjord. I stood beside the body amid the fireweed, chamomile and dandelions to await the train’s approach. I kept looking between the body and the bend in the track around which the train would come, as the steaming and chugging came closer and closer.

Finally, the Royal Hudson huffed around the bend. I stood in the middle of the tracks, the scent of creosote from the trestles burning my nostrils, and waved my arms. The conductor later said he almost popped a blood vessel seeing me there. He clamped on the brakes, and the squealing was unlike any noise I’d heard until then. It was so shrill it collapsed time and space. I think that was the moment I stopped being a child. Not the corpse, but the noise.

The engine stopped a few cars past the body and me. The conductor, whose name was Ben, and his partner jumped down, cursing me for pulling such a prank. I simply pointed at the severed body.

“What the—? Barry. Come over here.” Ben looked at me. “Kid, get away from this thing.”

“No.”

“Look, kiddo, I said—”

I just stared at him.

Barry came over, took a look and promptly vomited. Ben came closer, and he dealt with the corpse simply by not looking at it. Meanwhile, I couldn’t look at it enough. He said, “Jesus, kid—are you some sort of freak?”

“I found him. He’s mine.”

Barry radioed the authorities from the engine. Of course, the tourists were gawking from the train’s windows, snapping away. I suppose these days photos would be posted on the Internet within hours, but back then there was only the local papers, none of which were allowed to publish either news or photos of the body until the next of kin had been found and notified. And so, while the passengers tried to hop out of the cars to check out the action, Barry was able to feel useful screaming at them to get back in. By the time the authorities arrived, he had the cheese-grater voice of an aged starlet.

The police asked me questions. Had I moved anything? Had I seen anyone? I kept my peeled alder switch a secret. But other than having found the body, my role was limited. I just watched it all. The one question they didn’t ask was, Why would my parents allow me to pick blackberries so far away from home all by myself? Again, it was the 1970s.

The police complimented me on my coolness, and once the scene calmed down a bit, Ben offered me a ride in the engine back to the PGE station in North Vancouver. The police wanted to drive me home, but I pleaded my case and was able to ride the train. I have yet to equal the sense of mastery over my destiny I had during that experience. Me at the helm of this million-pound chunk of fate, pounding along an iron track—God help whoever stood in my way. It was supreme. I was alive! I was not a corpse!

Nobody was home to witness my enigmatic arrival in a strange man’s car. It wasn’t until I had to jump up to reach for the house key in its hiding spot on the top brick that I realized I’d clutched my Tupperware container of blackberries perfectly level for over four hours, with not a single berry spilled.

When I told my story at the dinner table, everybody just rolled their eyes and assumed I was being morbid. Mother said, “You need to be around people your own age more.”

“I don’t like people my own age.”

“Of course you do. You simply don’t know it yet.”

“All the girls my own age do is shoplift and smoke.”

Dad said, “No more dead body stories, dear.”

“It’s not made up.”

Leslie said, “Tanya wants to be a stewardess after school ends.”

“The body is real.” I went to the phone and dialed the police station. How many fifth-grade students know the phone number of the local police station by heart? I asked for Officer Nairne to confirm my tale.

Father took the phone. “Whoever this is, I’m sorry, but Liz—What? Oh. Really? Well I’ll be darned.” I had newly found respect.

Father hung up the phone and sat back down. “It seems our Liz is on the money.”

William and Leslie wanted gory details. “How far gone was he, Lizzie?”

“Blue cheese gone?”

“William!” Mother was being genteel. “Not at the dinner table.”

“It actually looked like the roast pork we’re eating here.”

Mother said, “Liz, stop right now!”

Father added, “And you weren’t going to eat those blackberries, were you? I saw them in the fridge. The railways spray the worst sorts of herbicides along the right-of-ways. You’ll get cancer from them.”

There was a charged silence. “Come on, everybody, I found a body today. Why can’t we just talk about it?”

William asked, “Was he bloated?”

“No. He’d only been there overnight. But he was wearing a skirt.”

Mother said, “Liz! We can discuss this afterwards, but not, I repeat not, at the dinner table.” Father said, “I think you’re overreac—”

“Leslie, how was swim class?”

So there was my big moment, gone. But as of that night I began to believe I had second sight that allowed me to see corpses wherever they lay buried. I saw bodies everywhere: hidden in blackberry thickets, beneath lawns, off the sides of trails in parks—the world was one big corpse factory. Visiting the cemetery in Vancouver for my grandmother’s funeral a year later was almost like a drug. I could not only see the thousands of dead, but I began to be able to see who was fresh and who wasn’t. The fresh bodies still had a glow about them while the older ones, well, their owners had gone wherever it was they were headed. For me, looking at a cemetery was like looking at a giant stack of empties waiting to be handed in for a refund.

Bodies. Oh, groan. I’ve always just wanted to leave this body of mine. What a treat that would be! To be a beam of light, a little comet, jiggling itself loose from these wretched bones. My inner beauty could shine and soar! But no, my body is my test in life.

William hustled the boys out after I finished the tale of the body. For once in their lives their Aunt Liz had, for a moment or two, fascinated them. I suspect that for a time Hunter and Chase thought I was a sorceress, too, albeit a boring sorceress with no food in her fridge.

My relief that they’d gone was akin to unzipping my pants after a huge meal: it was one of those few moments that being by myself didn’t mean I had to feel lonely. When I think about it, I’ve never actually told another person I’m lonely. Whom would I tell—Donna? Everyone in the coffee room? Leslie and William, who feel duty bound to keep checking in on their spinster sister? I maintain a good front. I imagine the people in my life driving in their cars discussing me …

Is Liz lonely?

I don’t think so.

I think she’s like one of nature’s castoffs.

She genuinely enjoys not being around people.

She’s very brave in her own way.

Books always tell me to find “solitude,” but I’ve Googled their authors, and they all have spouses and kids and grandkids, as well as fraternity and sorority memberships. The universally patronizing message of the authors is, “Okay, I got lucky and found someone to be with, but if I’d hung in there just a wee bit longer, I’d have achieved the blissful solitude you find me writing about in this book.” I can just imagine the faces of these writers, sitting at their desks as they write their sage platitudes, their faces stoic and wise: “Why be lonely when you can enjoy solitude?”

Gee, in a lifetime of singleness I’ve never once toyed with the notion of locating solitude for myself.

I’ve checked out all the books on the subject, books ranging from the trailer park to the ivory tower: Finding Your Achey-Breaky Soulmate to Deconstructing the Inner Dialogue—Methodologies of Navigating the Postmodern Self. The writers of these books that tout loneliness cures universally trot out a dusty list of authors through history who have dared to discuss loneliness as a topic, but they could never just say loneliness. It has to be a tree or butterfly or pond—dead nineteenth-century gay guys who wrote about trees and lakes and who probably had huge secret worlds that they never wrote about. Or …

It occurs to me that I sound like a bitter old bag.

But when your central nervous system is constantly firing away like a diesel generator, relentlessly overpowering subtle or fine emotions, how are you supposed to derive solace from stories of oneness with nature written by those old-fashioned writers, about hiking and breezes in the trees? If they were alive today, they’d all be in leather bars.

A day passed. I was still drugged, but it wasn’t fun or verklemptish any more. By Friday morning my face had shrunk back to its old shape. I’d run out of videos, and I was tempted to phone Liam and ask to come back to work for the day. But then, around seven in the morning, the phone rang. It was the RCMP, asking if I could come to Lions Gate Hospital.

“Excuse me?”

“There’s been an incident, Ms. Dunn.”

“An incident? What? Who?”

“Do you know a Jeremy Buck, Ms. Dunn?”

“Jeremy Buck?” It’s not like my memory bank of contacts is very big, so I was quick to say no. “What does this have to do with me?”

“If you could just come to the hospital, Ms. Dunn. We had a young man brought in here last night, an overdose case with some bruising and a few cuts.”

“What?”

“He had no ID on him, but he had a MedicAlert bracelet around his wrist saying that, should anything happen to him, you were the person to be notified. It had your phone number on it. Which is how we came to contact you.”

In one searing moment it dawned on me who Jeremy was. This was the phone call I’d never allowed myself to imagine.

“Ms. Dunn?”

“Sorry …”

“Ms. Dunn, can you—”

“I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

The officer told me the hospital room and wing numbers.

I’d always wondered if this day would ever come. It felt like the fulfillment of a prophecy. My mind was blank while I went through the motions—dressing, going to the car, driving along Marine, Fifteenth, St. George’s, then entering the parking lot, walking in through the automated hospital doors—the elevator, the smell of disinfectant, the harried staff.

When I asked the reception desk nurse about which hospital wing was Jeremy’s, she signalled an RCMP constable toward us. He told me his name was Ray Chung, a nice man who shook my hand and asked me to follow him. And so I did, down a yellow-lit hall and around a corner, mostly staring at his feet marching ahead of me on the polished aggregate flooring. We entered a darkened room, passing through a veil of thin and overly washed blue curtain.

A doctor stood in front of some Venetian louvre blinds. She was clearly impatient, and her head was haloed by the dozens of hair wisps that had escaped hours ago from her bun. “I’m Valerie, Dr. Tyson. I’m the duty doctor. This guy here related to you?”

Constable Chung nodded toward the man on the bed—a handsome guy, early twenties, large, fair skin, with dark, slightly curly hair and just enough of my family’s head shape to quash any doubts about who he was. This was him. This is who he turned out to be.

I walked over and touched his hand. This woke him up, and he started: “It’s you.”

“Yes, it’s me.”

He sat up and looked around the room. “Wait—something kind of weird happened here.”

“What?”

“I think I was dead.”

What was he talking about? “As far as I could tell, you were only asleep.”

“No. I was dead. I know I was.”

I looked at Dr. Tyson, who said, “Technically, Jeremy, you were dead, for maybe a minute or so when you first came in this morning.” She looked at me. “Around five.”

I was surprised. “He was dead?”

“We used the paddles on him.” She made a hand gesture like a defibrillator.

I looked back at Jeremy, who seemed disturbed. “I didn’t see the light—you know—that light you’re supposed to see when you die. I just saw a blob of darkness, and I was being pulled into it.”

None of us in the room knew what to say to this, so Dr. Tyson used medical science to stabilize the mood, to make it clinical. “We found traces of cocaine and Rohypnol in your system. That might account for anything unusual you may have seen.”

Jeremy was mad now. “May have seen? I was being pulled down, down into the earth. I wasn’t going up into any light. There was no light for me.”

I took hold of his hand, which was freezing cold. The bracelet looked more like a dog tag than jewellery. “Jeremy, look at me,” I said, saying his name out loud for the first time. “How long have you been wearing this bracelet on your wrist?”

“Four years.”

“Four years?”

“And a bit.”

“And you didn’t call me?”

“No, but don’t take it that way. I didn’t call because you’ve always been my hope—the ace up my sleeve.”

“But you don’t know me. How can you say that?”

“I know enough about you.”

“How?” I couldn’t imagine what this must’ve sounded like to Dr. Tyson and Constable Chung.

Jeremy said, “I did legwork.”

“How do you mean?”

“I, well, I sort of followed you around.”

“You what?”

“Relax—it’s not scary like it sounds.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No. You’re looking at it the wrong way.”

“What’s the right way?”

“The right way is this: I’ve been with so many screwed-up foster families in my life that before I went to meet my real family, I wanted to make sure you weren’t a psychopath like the rest of them.”

This struck me as a pretty good reason. It also shut me up.

“I know where you work and where the rest of the family is. All that stuff. The basics.”

I said nothing; he had every right to be wary. Constable Chung coughed. Dr. Tyson hadn’t left; overworked or not, this was truly something.

Jeremy said, “Liz—Mom. You like to think of yourself as a rock—that you’re tough and nobody can hurt you, but you’re wrong there.” He stopped. I had the strange notion that something in his head had just melted and made a stain of some kind. “I think I’m fading here,” he said, and closed his eyes.

Dr. Tyson checked his pulse, looked at me and the cop, and told us he should probably sleep awhile.

“Can I stay here?” I asked.

“Sure.”

Jeremy was instantly asleep, and what could I do but sit there silently, now holding the chilly hand of my own son? On a chair I saw a pile of silly-looking mesh stockings and black lingerie. Constable Chung saw me looking and said, “Uh, we found him in those, and he was all made up. The nurse cleaned him up.”

I recalled the body I saw when I was twelve, the blackberries; the body clothed in something abnormal; the creosote stink of railway trestles.

Taking a look at my face, the doctor volunteered, “I think it was actually a costume for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. They do midnight screenings at the Ridge Theatre. I used to go to them back when they were happening the first time around.”

“Is he going to be okay?” I asked her.

“This time, yes. Next time—maybe. The time after that? Who knows?”

Unarguable logic. Jeremy’s hand was warming up. I looked at Chung and he shrugged. “You’ve never met your own son?”

“No.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. I mean, I knew he—Jeremy—was out there, but not…” But not what? But not this beautiful man here in front of me.

“How old is he?”

“Twenty.”

“Twenty?”

The hiss of oxygen in the tube beneath my son’s nose—it took me back to Rome. It carried me back two decades to the night where fat, plain, Canadian me stood in the rain on a rooftop near the Colosseum. I was sixteen, and it was the era of acid rain—a subject that seems long forgotten now. The skies of Europe showered battery acid back then. I remembered looking out over the Colosseum and its neighbourhood, under a pigeon-feather grey sky, quite late on a weeknight, all traffic noises gone. The acid rain was falling on the city’s marble and travertine monuments, and I imagined I could hear them hiss and crackle under the acid, dissolving more in one year than they had in a thousand, history melting away before my eyes. And this was the oxygen ventilator’s noise.

I moved in closer to Jeremy and kissed him on the cheek.

That I had wanted to travel anywhere, let alone Rome, had sent a shock through the family dinner table. To most ears a Latin class excursion sounds like the pinnacle of dullness. Not quite so. The class actually had a somewhat dark mix of students, a blend of linguistic geeks, rebellious sons of literary parents, and cool-headed girls with their efficient eyes focused on being MDs one day. It was the only fun class I ever had.

Leslie, recently graduated and in and out of home at whim, was our family’s traveller—a ten-day tour of southern England in ninth grade and three weeks in Nova Scotia as a B & B chambermaid the summer after she graduated, both trips drenched in sex and scandal.

“Rome?” said Father. “That’s yesterday’s world. Go to Tomorrow. Go to Houston—San Diego—Atlanta.” Father was only interested in making new things. To him, a fifteenth-century church would be nothing more than a shell on a beach.

“You’re too young to go anywhere,” said Mother.

William, a year older than Leslie, said, “Sixteen is fine. And what—like she’s going to hop off the plane and be instantly molested? Come on.”

“But those Italians …” My mother wasn’t so sure that my plump frumpiness rendered me asexual.

“They’re no different than the English, Mother. Men are men. Face it.” That Leslie, aged eighteen, could say something this daring-yet-cliched at the dinner table, and have it accepted as gospel, testified to her unshakeable faith in the power of her own allure, and to my lack thereof.

“I suppose you’re right,” Mother caved in. “What about money?”

“I’ll pay,” I said. “I’ve never spent any of my babysitting or paper route money.”

“What?” My brother was clearly astonished. “That’s so depressing. None of it? Not even a blouse? A Chap Stick?”

“Nothing.”

Leslie asked, “What’ll you wear?”

Father said, “Whoa, Nellie! Who said Lizzie was even going?”

“Oh, hush, Neil,” Mother replied. “It’ll broaden her horizons.” Again she spoke as if I wasn’t there: “The poor thing doesn’t even have any posters up in her room.”

“Fair enough.”

That I was paying for the trip myself was all my pragmatic, rules-oriented father really needed to know.

My parents … I suppose one could call them generic. In the absence of any overarching quirks or pathologies, they had ended up defaulting on the side of cheapness, dirt management and chore scheduling—which is to say, they ended up like most parents. Father had his garage, off the floor of which you could, if you wished, eat one of my mother’s economically prepared meals at precisely six o’clock every night, cardigan sweaters optional but preferred.

My father was killed in 1985, when I was twenty-five. He fell asleep at the wheel driving into Honolulu on the 78, ramming headfirst into an Isuzu truck with three local kids in the cab. Mother was unhurt, and remembers none of it. Funny—he seems so far away to me now. He never spoke much, and as a result I have few memories. Below a certain point, if you keep too quiet, people no longer see you as thoughtful or deep; they simply forget you. In any event, at the airport he handed me five hundred dollars in lire, which for him was the equivalent of a normal person renting a biplane to spell out a goodbye in the sky. He was essentially a kind man.

Back at the dinner table that night, Leslie said, “I think I have some jumbo oversize sweaters that just might fit you.”

“Thank you, Leslie.”

“You’ll have hickeys all over your bum from being pinched.” William was attempting to be gallant in his way, flattering my young mind that, no matter what, I could still be wanted, however slim the odds.

Mother said, “Stop that, William. The Latin class sponsors this trip, not your friends with their hot rods. I might add, last week I was driving a bit too slowly on Cross Creek and your friend Allan Blake gave me the finger. He didn’t know it was me, but I knew it was him, and I never want to see him here again, you hear?”

William was still focused on my trip. “I bet you fall for some guy who works at a Fiat factory.”

“Marcello,” added Leslie, “a fiery idealist. Chianti bottles. A sweaty undershirt—picnics beside the autostrada—”

“He slaps you around a bit. He gets jealous easily—”

“But you’d kill for him—”

“Stop!” My mother was appalled at how sexualized her two eldest children were. The only comfort she seemed to find was my incontestable virginity. “Lizzie is going to go to Rome, and she is going to learn about the great works of art there, and … eat Roman food, and …” Words temporarily failed her. “… become a serious and scholarly young woman.”

Even my own spirits were dampened by such a clinical vision of Rome. Truth was, I wanted to see naked statues of people because I was too embarrassed to pick up certain magazines in certain stores, the ones in the part of town it took me three bus transfers to reach. I always wimped out and stayed up front reading the knitting catalogues. Why they even bothered stocking catalogues up front is beyond me. The real clientele of those places always lurked at the store’s rear, exclusively men, clad in raincoats, toupées and shame.

To me, the thought of Rome—a city adorned with genitalia rather than vinyl siding and stucco—seemed improbable. I had to see this place. In the weeks leading up to the trip’s charter airline departure, I kept waiting for a TV studio’s buzzer to sound, for an audience to shriek at me, telling me that it was all a big prank.

Jeremy and I were alone in the hospital room well into the night, save for the sinister hiss of his oxygen, a speaker system squawking in another wing or the rare motorcycle gunning its engine on the road below. Jeremy’s eyes stayed shut. I wondered what I was going to say when he opened them—but it turned out I didn’t have to worry about that. Around three a.m., he opened them and said, “My name isn’t written in the Book of Life.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but answered, “Don’t be stupid. Of course it is.”

“No—you don’t understand—when they paddled me back here, I was already falling on my way to hell. I was yanked, like I was bungeed, back into this building.” He squeezed my wrist, as if taking my pulse. “It sucked the air out of me.”

“Jeremy, you’re not going to hell.” My son had no apparent aptitude for small talk, but that was fine, for nor do 1.1 said, “All that happened was that last night you did some very stupid party drugs, and now you’re paying the price. That stuff fries the wiring in your head like booster cables.”

“Let’s change the subject.”

“Done.”

We sat there feeling foolish.

Jeremy asked, “So, have you been preparing a speech to give me inside your head for the past twenty years?”

“Of course. You, too?”

“Yup.”

There was more silence, happier this time.

I said, “Neither of us is going to give the speech, right?”

“It’d be kind of corny.”

“It would.”

“I feel much better already.”

I asked, “How did you find me? I tried locating you for years with no luck. The government was really prickish about it.”

“Well, it’s amazing what you can find in this world if you’re willing to sleep with people.” He said this as if he were giving me a household hint.

“I suppose so.”

“I’d be a good spy.”

“I didn’t notice you spying on me for four years, so yes. When was the last time you ate?”

“As in food?”

“No, as in tractors. Of course I mean food.”

“I had a ninety-three-cent piece of pizza yesterday. At noon.” The unusual pizza price was a local merchandising twist; with tax, a slice came to one dollar.

“Those ninety-three-cent slices are about as good for you as a roasted bandage.”

“I swiped a block of mozzarella from the supermarket on Davie.”

“What on earth does that have to do with anything?”

“Everything. So long as a block of cheese is still vacuum-sealed, the pizzerias accept them as currency. They give you a free slice, and maybe five bucks.”

“You’d risk a police record for five bucks and a microwaved Band-Aid?”

“It’s okay. The supermarket gives you two options if they catch you—one: they call the cops, and two: they take a Polaroid of you holding up whatever it was you shoplifted. It’s almost always cheese. And then they tell you never to come back into the store. They have this whole back wall covered with faded photos of street scum holding cheeses. It’s not as if I’m risking a police record. Merely a ritual humiliation.”

This was genuinely interesting to me. I said so.

“I bet you something.”

“What? What do you bet me?”

“I bet you think I’m street trash.”

I sighed. “Well, Jeremy, let me check my data so far: drugs; overdose; mesh stockings; cheese theft …”

“I used to be street trash.”

“Okay. Sure.”

“But I stopped being trash a few years ago.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” I considered this. “Can you do that? I mean, just stop that whole way of life?”

“Yes. Or I thought I could. Until last night. My friend Jane got me all dragged up for the Rocky Horror show.”

“So your doctor told me.”

“Tyson? Man, from what I just saw, she needs a morphine drip and a lost weekend with a tennis pro. She’s one of those doctors who overdoes it. I can tell with one blink.”

“I think you may be right.”

“What’s with the puffy face?”

“I had my wisdom teeth taken out four days ago.”

“Pain?”

“No. They gave me lots of drugs.”

“Any leftovers?”

“No!” I pretend-swatted him.

“Never hurts to try.”

I asked him how he felt. He went quiet. I said, “Hello?”

He pulled into himself, just like that, his shine gone.

“Jeremy? Here you are, sick and all, and we’re discussing … stolen cheese. That’s stupid. Sorry.”

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