Our Time in Eden, Part One

FATIGUE

Tired. So tired. I feel it in every part of me, a longing for something deeper than sleep, the chill of a winter coma brought out in me, made flesh. This is the fatigue of evolutions, the exhaustion of fallout. It eats at me, this feeling, this emptiness, it rips me apart. My head hurts underneath the candy-stained bliss, my stomach is a torrent as I walk the tightrope of these city streets. I’m so cold, I’m so lost and I’m so tired. Are you tired, Tim? Do you feel the fatigue bleeding within you? Where are you, Tim? I can’t handle this anymore, I can’t, I am finished. I need you so much now. Can you hear me?

I stagger up these stairs for days, the chill of stone stabs my bare feet, the wind steely against my legs, this flimsy cloth on my back is useless against the night. It is all I can do to keep my head above me. I lean my fading weight against the door until I can pour myself through it, tripping and spilling onto red and gold carpets, surrounded above and all around by dark red oak. Candles burn and dwindle and dance with the smell of incense. So cold and so tired and I am coming home. I scream your name until I choke and when you do not answer I vomit, and again.

A lifetime passes before I rise to my feet, gathering all sense left within my shattered head. I stumble further into the vast, dark theatre. God is here, Tim. God is everywhere here, waiting for us to come and see, but I cannot find Him as I cannot find you. Have I been forsaken? Have I been forgotten? Instead, I find frightened eyes, sorrowful pitiful. These eyes are my mirror, I see in them all of the things about myself I could not admit for so long. They fear me, hate me as much as they hate themselves. We all do.

Those eyes rush in to save me as I fall, but too late. I’m already dead.

Where are you, Tim? Why aren’t you here? I need you.

**

Timothy Blair wakes to the sound of his own whines, throwing off his dreams as his body jerks to life, wet and shaking. An empty glass rattles and falls over on his nightstand, saved from shattering only by the clutter there. He sits up sharply, wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand without a thought. His eyes dart around his small apartment, alert to the danger. His breathing, sharp and deeply laboured as the curtained waking world descends on him. No, no, it’s safe, he is safe. The dream fades in his mind, a thought that never happened. Nothing important...no, nothing. It’s over.

Rising from the bed, his joints creak and pop, untangling the sheets twisted around his body, Tim’s feet fall to the floor. He holds himself up by the elbows pressed into his knees as he rubs the night from his eyes and his mouth. His eyes, they sting as he pries his lids open. He closes them again and wraps his arms around himself for warmth and safety. Safety, Tim, you are safe, you are alone. The world is outside, it can’t hurt you here. All that can find you here is the knife in your head and the churn of your stomach.

Timothy Blair, this miniscule giant, impotent master of a domain populated by unwashed laundry, discarded takeout containers, half-read books and sheets of scribbled paper, old newspapers used only for the crossword, dishes left dirty until he grows bored enough to clean them and bottles which he collects once a week and leave on the front steps for the men with the shopping carts. He’s never met them and knows he never will, only knows their passing by the sound of shopping cart wheels against asphalt and their thanks screamed into the night. Tim kicks things out of the way as he sloughs from the sofa to the bed to the refrigerator to the toilet. He paid no attention to what he pushed off the counter while he looked for the least dirty glass. On worse days he will move a soiled shirt from his desk to find the cracked old typewriter hidden underneath and remember with a sneer how long it has been since it had been a friend. He had little reason to leave his tiny universe, he had little use for the hum and buzz of the people there. These things are an immense discomfort for him, they paint a picture that there is something he is missing, and of course, there is not. Tim knows what is out there. He knows what daily living has in store.

He slides from the bed, his legs catching him just in time to prevent a fall and he teeters to a stand. His eyelids crack, he fights the grey light scratching at them. He stomps to his tiny kitchenette, barely aware of the mess over which he steps and the fruit fly ridden dishes piled in the sink and counter. He pauses at the refrigerator door, regrouping his energy before yanking it open to learn the bad news. All that is left here is a bottle of Finlandia and a near empty bottle of Famous Grouse. No gin, only the dregs. He would need to go out, need to restock. This is always a gamble for him and never the best idea, slipping into the world, but a necessary evil. He could stop at the Blackthorn on the way...that would make it easier. With three long gulps, the scotch is gone, Tim’s jaw tightens with relief as it rushes into him. He sets the bottle next to the fridge, reaching in again for the vodka. Taking ginger sips, he moves to the television, claims the remote control from the dust-caked bookshelf. Cradling the vodka, Tim falls into his worn, disintegrating sofa. He turns on the television to prepare himself for his trip into the world.

This channel and that pass with the flick of Tim’s thumb: sports, current events, tragic love, interior design…these things he lets flash before him, forgotten before they can even be seen. He stops for a soft drink advertisement long enough to uncap the bottle sweating in his hands. He takes a long pull of vodka and a sharp inhale of breath as the television moves again. Afternoon chats. Stock market speculation. Cash and prizes. The promise of a better life passes as if a breeze brushing one’s hair. Fixing the television on the Weather Channel, Tim begins the hubris of dressing himself.

In the bathroom, he runs cold water into the sink and slips out of his sweat-soaked t-shirt. He stares into the mirror, scratching a week’s facial growth, rubbing the straggling sleep crust from his eyes. This ugly man frowns back at him with his scrub-short hair, sallow eyes underlined with thick black bags, a long, thin, bulb-tipped nose and the yearlings of wrinkles crisscrossing his cheeks. His features are disproportionate and his mouth drooped in a constant grimace, barely a man at all. A monster, an imp, a shadow-marked troll. Tim hates this face, the one which has stared at him and which he has watched slowly melt over twenty-eight years. As a child, he could remember wishing for the day when science would permit him to trade it for another. Today, he can scarcely bring himself to care.

The telephone rings somewhere under the horror of his living room, startling him. His breathing pitches, he closes his eyes, waiting for the machine to pick up. Two rings. Three now. Four. A click and then his voice, "I’m not here." followed by another, the voice he knew it would be, the voice he is trying to avoid.

"Tim?" echoes through the apartment with a polite thunder. Tim bites his lip, feeling his quickened pulse in his ears.

"Tim, it’s Jeffrey Cousin." This is the voice of his shame, Tim’s only champion in the world outside.

"Listen, you need to get back to me, I mean it. We need to talk about your manuscript, it’s very important." Tim’s face folds in upon itself, a battleground between spite and defeat. Manuscript? What manuscript...there isn’t one.

"We’re heading into overtime here, Tim. I’m getting a thousand calls a day and not one of them has been from you. People are starting to get unhappy and they’re asking questions I can’t answer. Just one phone call is all I’m asking for, Tim. You have the number. Call me."

Tim’s head hangs suspended over the sink for too long, his eyelids press shut so hard they hurt. He braces himself with his hands, white-knuckled around the edges of the counter as he pushes his thoughts, his ideas and his self back down inside him. Blindly, Tim reaches for the bottle on the toilet seat, drowns himself with the power inside it and slows his breathing back to a crawl. He looks up now into his own eyes, sees the bile ebb from them before there is nothing once more.

Cupping his hands, he brings ice-water to his face three times, then with a washrag over his head and lank torso to wash away the night’s dirt. Sucking away at his precious spirit, he finds two socks that are almost clean, a shirt he’s not worn in at least a week and the blackened jeans he’s worn every day for six months. For a moment he stops in front of the television, taking small sips as he watches for the day’s forecast. He blinks heavily as it goes by, Tim’s mind blank and vacant. In a moment he realizes he hasn’t heard a word. He dismisses this as he shuts off the television and takes another drink. He straps on his ridiculously tattered combat boots, stuffs a threadbare toque into the pocket of his overcoat and stops at the door to take a final look around. Only for a moment he thinks of not coming back.

As soon as he opens his apartment door Tim is assaulted by the first warning sign. His back tightens at a soft drum, a gliding trumpet. Tim knows it from his life before, but he will not let the memory surface. Daniel Patric is the culprit, the young artist who lives across the hall, the one inexplicable prone to leaving his front door ajar, letting his jazz music slip out as he paints. Along with this is the unmistakable, spicy scent of hashish. Daniel, the amiable sort, always at the ready with a smile and a pleasant word, the kind of person Tim does his best to avoid. The rest of the building’s tenants, the schizophrenic on the bottom floor, the lesbians and the single mother above him, they knew enough to refrain from even so much as eye contact. Not this young man, not this Daniel Patric. No, he was the cruelest of them all. His was the cruelty of warmth.

Tim draws in his shoulders, buries his cheeks inside his coat and lurches forward with determined gait to disappear as he moves past Daniel’s door. Some days he is lucky, some days Daniel doesn’t see him, some days Daniel doesn’t bother, but some days…

"Tim!" Daniel calls out. Tim’s heart sinks.

He stops, sighing as he turns around with no expression on his face. "Hello, Daniel."

Daniel sets the end of a joint in an ashtray, jumps up from his easel and wipes his paint-streaked hands on his already stained shirt. The confidence and centre with which he moves mocks Tim, an able man dancing around paraplegic’s wheelchair. He leans into the doorway and smiles wide, an unlit cigarette pressed between his lips. His eyes unchallenging and warm, an invitation which mocks Tim too.

"I’m just finishing up a new piece, here. Sure could use a second opinion."

Tim takes in Daniel from head to toe without moving his eyes, staring perhaps too long as he does so. Daniel, a beautiful man outside as well as in as if to further torture Tim. The gold of his skin, the life in his proud, curly black hair tied willingly into a pony tail. At length, Tim shakes his head.

"Can’t, sorry. Errands."

"Only take you a minute." Daniel persists with a slight twitch of his eyebrow. "I’m hanging it downtown in a few weeks. You’d be doing me a big favour."

"Sorry. Maybe later."

Daniel twists his lips and nods, watching Tim stomp down the stairs. "Sure...later."

On the front steps, Tim squints, holding up a hand to shield his eyes. The afternoon sky, while pale and thinly overcast, is arid and bright. Tim frowns and bows his head. A careful wind touches his scalp, Tim drags the toque from his pocket and pulls it down to his eyes. Somehow, he was sure it would have been colder...and raining.

Tim drags his feet along the sidewalks, eyes down, block after block, street by street, careful not to step on the cracks. No way of telling how far he’s gone except by the count of the intersections and the memory of his feet. He can hear children playing, old men gathering on their stoops to chatter away the afternoon, teenagers and the clacking of their skateboards as the trick on benches and curbs. The road is pock-marked by traffic, a car whips by him too fast, a truck smashes him with its wake, a motorcycle deafens him with the roar of its gunned engine, quieter as it rockets into the distance. The world passes by but he doesn’t look up, that’s always trouble. No matter the noise, keep your head down, pay no mind. They won’t see you that way.

Nestled into a dirty strip mall, Tim reaches the liquor store, quiet and without joy. He stands in the parking lot, gazing through the large windows at the man behind the counter. Fat and unshaven, his thick glasses at the bottom of his nose at all times regardless of how often he pushes them up. Tim knows his voice, the soft, low gurgle that gives him the price, wishes him a soulless good day as he leaves. There is a smell to him. Not entirely unpleasant, though unusual, implacable and off-putting. Tim is not ready for this man, for his eyes, the ones that follow him around the store, the furry eyebrows which rise and fall as he rings in each bottle. This is Tim’s silent jury, and Tim is not ready for it. Instead, his feet move again, soles scraping the pavement as he urges himself a few doors down to The Blackthorn.

A tiny pub squeezed between a second-rate personal injury lawyer and a pet shop which is no doubt a front for drug trafficking, the Blackthorn is run by two brothers, Finnegan and Fergus Fitzherbert, rumoured to be expatriates of the Irish Republican Army. It is a rumour Tim does not believe...he barely accepts that they are even from Ireland. After all, could such a place even be said to exist? The walls of the pub are adorned with typical Irish fare: maps of counties and towns, pictures of stout, whisky and Irish cream, plastic shamrocks and what could be a shillelagh hanging behind the counter. On the wall above the draught taps, a plastic leprechaun leans against a sign letting the world know there was only one St. Patrick’s Day, but there were 364 rehearsals. The brothers had gone to their best lengths to give their establishment an authentic air, but all Tim has ever seen in it is a last chance gin mill in the middle of the wrong continent at the onset of the wrong millenium.

Tim has spent much of his time and most major holidays imbibing with the regulars here. Although he knows only a few of them by name (some he had been told, others he had overheard and still others he had invented for himself), they are as close as he will allow himself to friends. He recognizes them as his eyes adjust to the darkness. Stan McKay, one-time farm league hockey player is speaking with Finney Fitzherbert while nursing a glass of rye. Rob White, a too-hungry real estate agent sits with his lager to watch a darts match between Fergus Fitzherbert and a retired schoolteacher named Don Gallant. Scottish John, who often sees fit to involve himself in cultural debates with the proprietors, empties his pockets into a slot machine.

Of all the Blackthorn Irregulars, Tim was the youngest by a solid decade and more. When had he first come here? Tim cannot recall...a year? Two? It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Keep your head down, keep to yourself.

Tim orders his predictable pint of draught and crosses the bar to join Old Terry before the television, some kind of parliamentary debates. Tim enjoys this government programming, the bickering and the yelling and the posturing and the rancor. Nothing real ever happens here, it is the one bastion of pure theatre, an eternal cycle of entertainment. He would watch to see what machinations the Honour Members would concoct to embarrass and destroy each other and know, no matter what they did, in the end they did nothing and they were not real people after all.

"Fucking cunts." Terry mumbles, his voice a graveled wheeze stained by cigarettes and hard bourbon. He is as grizzled and as bitter an old man as Tim can imagine could ever exist, guessing him by his layered wrinkles to be in his seventies, though Tim suspects that to know for certain, one would need to cut him open and count the rings. Terry rarely addresses the others directly but curses often and loudly. Tim wondered what he must have been like as a younger man. Perhaps the baseball cap perched atop the old man’s head says everything one needs to know about him. Gone Fishin’. "Bureaucrat bastards! Christless faggots."

"What are they up to now?" Scottish John calls across the bar at Old Terry, voice booming with his thick accent. This is the voice of the drunken uncle, the obnoxious voice which laughs too loud in theatres and pierces through the night air as it weaves its way through the rum-soaked streets.

Old Terry grumbles plaintively, "Sticking their fucking heads up each other’s arseholes, that’s what."

Scottish John begins the long, slow process of dismounting his stool, propping one hand against the slot machine with a grunted effort. He lumbers across the room, the slow train you can do nothing to redirect. He slows to a stop next to them, breathing too loud through his gin-blossomed nose.

"That man is a pederast!" John points a stubby finger at the screen, then laughs, a glance back over his shoulder to see who else has got the joke. No one has.

"Fucking cunts." Terry growls and raises his bottle to his whiskered lips. His hand strains with the effort, Tim stares at the liver spots, the veins and the tendons yearning to push through his tight skin.

"Aye, that they are. That they are." John turns slowly, focusing on Tim, eyeing him, pouring derision over him. "Fancy a game of chess then, boyo?"

"No, thank you."

"Come on! I’ll take it easy on yer."

Tim stares a moment. He’s not played for years, barely remembers how to play but he nods without knowing why. In a flash, John has the board ready. Tim orders another draught and settles behind his black plastic army. They shake hands and the game commences. Tim watches, a passive observer while his pieces are stolen one by one from the board. Slowly, though steadily, Tim’s mind wanders. It is all so very perfunctory, Tim feels like he may as well be washing his dishes.

He remembers the message Jeffrey Cousin had left for him, remembers that it was important but he struggles to remember what it said...the manuscript, it was about the manuscript...the apocryphal one Tim is supposed to have finished three weeks ago but had yet to begin. Tim thinks about his little typewriter, sitting fallow on his desk for more than a year now, thinks about Jeffrey, his poor agent who is certainly running out of excuses for him. There is trouble, Tim knows this is in an inconvenient and poorly ventilated part of his brain, trouble that will turn into bigger trouble when the publisher, the one who had furnished him a healthy advance, finds out Tim has not managed to write a single word.

"Checkmate." Scottish John grins at him, showing each of his yellowed teeth. "Maybe you should stick to your video games after all, hen?"

Tim nods again, offering no congratulations as he finishes his drink and drags his feet for the door.

Outside, the air has turned colder and Tim draws his toque from his pocket, pulling it over his head and tugging down just to his eyes as he moves to the liquor store. The fat, odorous young man greets him with a painted smile as he pushes open the door. An electronic chime rings above his head, echoed by another from the back room. Tim pays no attention, simply takes a red, plastic shopping basket from the pile and goes to work. This can be painless if he is careful.

Tim can do this blind now. He reaches first for a bottle of Silent Sam, then for the Finlandia, the big bottle. Two steps forward, he finds the Jim Beam and the Maker’s Mark, another step for two bottles of Glenlivet, stooping for a bottle of Jameson’s and another of the Wiser’s. Two more steps to the Beefeater, the Bombay Sapphire and the Gordon’s. Step. Step. Bacardi, two bottles and a small bottle of Felicity Gold, his guilty pleasure like the teen who will sneak a box of condoms among toothpaste and acne cream at the checkout. He does this quickly and surely, pausing only when other customers push their way in front of him. He sneers at the young couple debating their choice of wines. Here too he is quick, reaching past them insultingly and spitefully for a Mission Hill Shiraz.

At the counter, Tim keeps his eyes on his shoes as the boy, Thomas is his name Tim knows from an accidental glance at his name tag some months previous, scans each label with his magic wand, the beep beeping from the cash register tallying each bottle. Thomas is looking down his nose through those lemming spectacles at Tim as he double-bags his purchase. He quotes the price to Tim, but Tim is not listening, he knows it already. He hands over his plastic bank card and punches numbers into the handset. He does not wait for the receipt, grabbing three bags in each hand and marching for the door. Into the night air once more, Tim breathes a sigh of relief.

Bottles clink together, heavy in their bags as Tim trudges home, the plastic handles cutting into his fingers. Once again, he’s overestimated what he can carry. He isn’t as strong as he’d once been, not that he was ever terribly strong at the best of times. He grunts, struggling to make it home where he can hide from the world again, reward himself with a glass of Jim Beam, but his fingers are going numb. He has to stop. No, Tim, don’t stop. Carry on, there is danger here, you’re almost home! He urges his legs a further twenty paces until he is unable to continue. His body bows and the bags clamour worryingly onto the sidewalk. His heart lurches at the sound, he scans the bags nervously until he is sure nothing has been broken. He rises to as full a height as his sluggish spine will allow and rubs life back into his red, creased hands. Without thinking, he looks around, knowing the mistake right away.

Across the street is a dilapidated playground: a slide with a hole at the bottom, a swing set with only one seat intact, a seesaw broken at the middle and merry-go-round wobbling from side to side as the boys playing there spin it faster and faster. Tim watches through the chain link fence as the children laugh and frolic in this shell of a playland, a twisted mirror of the one he’d loved so much as a child. Oh, those wasted, wonderful afternoons. He sees those same bright eyes here, that same innocent abandon with which he had once played. He’d once grabbed so obliviously onto his childhood and onto his youth, each tepid afternoon was his only care. The worlds he would create, then, the powers he had…

Tim shakes his head free of these childish things. He’d long ago stopped reliving his past and today would not be the day he would dwell in them again. He would instead return to his hovel where cable television and a fresh bottle would keep him company. Game shows, home makeovers, the purest Zen. He would disconnect from his thoughts until he could fall asleep and escape another day. Maybe he would send out for Chinese.

**

I dangle this bauble before my face, this little icon given to me on my ninth birthday, a symbol of eternal compassion from a man who did not know how to love me. Is this irony? Is this mockery? Is there a difference between them? On a hard mattress on hard bed in a hard room in a hard corner of a hard life, I draw my knees to my chin and watch my little irony rotating slowly on a tarnished gold chain. One circle clockwise, it stops and retraces itself, a swinging pendulum, a marker for the weight of the world. Sunlight from a window just large enough but too high from the floor to look through catches its face and it glows for an instant, here. Here. Here. Such a useless trinket, my little irony, and yet masters of the universe kneel to worship at the power it holds. Masters of the universe, servants to peasants, children of children of slaves, we cling to this and we crucify ourselves against it. We hammer our bodies and our minds against it, we crown ourselves with the thorns of sin. We repent these sins, yes, and we are given absolution, but we never truly let them go. They are with us, they are a part of us, filling every hole within us, haunting us until we pass.

And now, I have passed. My little irony should be my little memory, an obsolete memento. I should cast it against the wall and watch it shatter into dust, I should let it drop carelessly to the floor an grind it into oblivion under my heel, I should let it slip from my dead fingers and think of it no more, but I do not. I cannot, but why? What is left undone?

My skin is raw from the cold. I rub my hands for an illusion of warmth, watch a trail of breath escape my lips and disappear. How long have I been here, days or years? I’ve always been here and I always will. I need a fix, but I don’t want it. I want to go home, but I know I cannot. I want a cigarette more than air. I want to scream, but do not want the attention it will bring, so I stare a time longer at my little irony and try to find where my life went so wrong, where I could have turned and made life wonderful. Was it ever possible? Have I been on this road and unable to find another?

My head is a mess, Tim. I wish I knew where you were.

The sharp click of heels across the floor in the hall outside my room leads to a quiet, worried knock at the heavy wooden door. The hinges crack as the tarnished brass doorknob turns, one of my sisters steps inside with the politest, giddiest of all smiles carrying a blackened tray with my grey-toned supper. She greets me, setting the tray cautiously on the nightstand. She has her own little irony dangling around her neck. Aren’t we all children of little ironies?

Hello.

You’re very kind, thank you.

No, I’m fine, thank you, thank you.

God bless.

She leaves me with that same nervous smile, backing out of the room with a nod. They are kind to me here, showing me as much respect as they can summon, but I see it too plainly in their eyes. I am strange to them. The way they speak to me tells me so, the way the walk with me and kneel with me tells me what I am to them. To them, I am sin. To them, I am the wickedness of the world. To them, I am the misguided soul, the prodigal of His children. They pity me, they pity my pain, yes, but moreso, they fear me. They fear what I mean to them, me and those like me. There but for the grace of God, they will say in hushed tones...

I take a few mouthfuls from the tray, so gracefully given, but I am everything but hungry. I pace across the cell a moment, then stop, hold myself still and raise my arms away from my sides, my little irony dangling from one clenched fist, repenting to any god who will listen now.

I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I can see it all. A wretch like me, here ten thousand years. How sweet the sound. It’s almost over. Tim, where are you?

**

Tim pushes the trash away from his typewriter, watching without interest as much of it falls and crashes to the floor. A t-shirt, a wine bottle, a take-away container. One day, he will clean, he decides, but not today. He blows away the months of dust, jumping back as a cloud rises before him, swinging his arms back and forth to clear it. He coughs loudly and takes another step back, bumping into the wall with a start. How long had it been that he could not even approach the typewriter without bedlam? As the dust settles across the rest of the apartment, Tim moves forward with caution and sets a his tall glass of Gordon’s Gin on the desk. He slides the chair over and seats himself slowly. Another small dust cloud rises when Tim reaches for a sheet of blank paper on the shelf by his knees. He stares at this grimy page with a frown, crumples it into a ball and tosses it somewhere unseen. He takes the next sheet from the top, looks to see that it is clean and rolls it into the typewriter. This, of course, is the easy part.

Tim studies the keys, trying to decide which one is first. T has always been a favourite, but no. S or E perhaps. Maybe if he knew the word. Tim reaches for the gin, takes a long swallow, inhales deeply and drinks again. The blank page stares out at him, both begging and taunting him to write. The keys laugh among themselves when he looks away but are silent when he turns back. He taps his cheek with one finger, feeling the stubble and making a mental note to shave, though he knows he will not. He takes another drink and stares long at the keys, into them, through them. No words. No words. He becomes a car, waiting for a stop sign to turn green and allow him through. A staring contest with a photograph. Sisyphus devising a new plan to get the rock over the hill.

At length, Tim stands, rubs his forehead vigorously and sucks down half the remaining gin before tromping across the room with a scowl to the old bookshelf, packed double-thick with paperbacks, textbooks and old notebooks. He places his hands behind his hips and stretches his back, listening passively as bones click in and out of place, sliding his eyes back and forth, surveying the mess. His lips curl when he finds them, the Sam Baxter books, all four together in a row. Sam Baxter, the hack author of so much worthless pap. It was an insult for Tim to even have such drivel on the same shelf as such authors as Behan and Beckett. Dead men who deserved better than such associations.

Sam Baxter. Tim Blair’s alter ego. Despite the slowly rising fanfare of Sam Baxter’s books, Tim hates the work he has done on them, none moreso than those early works he had once loved cherished. With each manuscript, Tim has grown to dread writing them that much more. There was a time, he thinks, when it was different, when writing was an enjoyable thing, but it was no different than a toddler bringing out a handful of feces to show off with pride.

This is not the way it is today, though, and has not been for a long time. Now he sees that writing is a lie, a horrible lie and when the truth comes out, as it always does, that lie has the capacity to do nothing but hurt. In the back of his head, in the places he could see but dared not go, all Tim wanted was to get out, to abandon words, to shuffle off the lies, to exist in the cold calm and to forget that he had ever been anywhere else. He couldn’t leave it though, and not only because he was under a contractual obligation to produce another book. There had developed within him a compulsion, a need to invent these characters, to live as someone else, to exist in the outside, if only through his own words, even though it had come to cause him no end of grief.

Tim slides the thickest of Baxter’s works, Jury of Society from the shelf, its neighbours rushing in to take its place, hungry for breathing room. He holds the monster in his hand, reads the inane and misleading description on the back.

So simple an explanation of the story, though not more than the tripe deserves. Tim remembers the losing battle he had waged with Jeffrey and the publisher when he first read the copy for the dust jacket. Why he had cared escapes him now and seems unimportant anyway. He tosses the paperback onto his desk, slumps back into his chair and takes another long pull of gin. He picks up the book again and thumbs through it disinterestedly, reading a sentence here, a paragraph there, uncertain why.

Here, he finds it:

Tim grinds his teeth, tossing the book away, following not with his eyes as it bounces off the typewriter and onto the floor next to his feet. Grimacing, he reaches for the gin and stares a hole into the empty page. Just start writing, he tells himself...something will happen, something will form if you just write. Just write!

He poises his fingers over the keys and closes his eyes, ready to type.

Nothing.

"Damn."

Scanning the room for distraction, Tim notices the calendar on the wall, and while he has no idea of the actual date, he is sure it has been some months since he has thought to change it. After all, what does the date matter when every day is the same? Curious now, he turns on the television, flips through the noise to the weather channel, the date shown there at the bottom of the screen.

May already. He’s missed another birthday.

**

I’m coming home, Tim. They’ve sent me home, my wonderful sisters in their infinite kindness. A week they kept me, sick and depressed, lost and dead, but they knew as I did that they could keep me no longer. Kind as they are, warm and welcoming as they were, they’ve agreed to send me back where I belong, where they think I can heal, become myself again. They forget that myself was the cause of my trouble in the beginning. Being myself is my detriment, not my salvation. No, I have no salvation, not now. Salvation is not where I am going, healing is not my goal. It can’t be. It shouldn’t be.

The sickness has passed from me now, but it has left me cold and queasy and empty. Returning home, I feel smaller than I ever did in my years away. Now that I am retracing my journey, I am able to relive all the pain that drove me away then. Still, the closer I get to you, the further I am from the pain of that other world. I close my eyes and press my forehead against the cold window and imagine, vainly, that as we travel back the way I came, that my years away are being erased, that they never happened. A dream, they seem now, a thought too ridiculous and frightening to be real.

It is so quiet as we travel, rows of people slumbering. This woman next to me, asleep on my shoulder with one leg in the aisle, she is so much older than her skin. I see it on her face, in the perm of her hair and the wrinkle of her clothes. For what is she searching? For whom? The man in front of u has stolen the seat to his right so that he and he alone could be comfortable. How will he die? Where are the rest of these poor souls going? Where have they been? Who are they pretending to be? I hate them all so much.

Yes, Tim, I hate them. I who have always secretly loved everything have learned to hate, and I hate myself most of all. Things I have done and not done come back to me so often now as I stare into the dark countryside. The kind of person I could and perhaps should have been plays in my head. The world would have been so different for me if I had paid attention, if I had taken control, if I had not deceived myself into thinking myself so strong.

I wish now that I could cry, that I could break apart and pour my tears upon the world. Since infancy I have shed none, holding them back, refusing to lose that much of myself, to show that much weakness. I held that with pride, a show of strength, a victory over adversity, but now I know that it is a sign of cowardice. My truest sin is stoicism, my dry eyes can be my only regret, my albatross. The rest is mere consequence. My tears have welled inside me now and are drowning me. If I could weep, surely I could live, or could have done. It may be too late, it may no longer matter. Maybe it never did.

Tomorrow, Tim. Tomorrow, I’ll be home.

**

The telephone wakes him, though not quickly. He hears it first in his dream where he is a sailor lost at sea with the telephone there just beyond his reach on the ship’s bow. With the second ring he is aware of the dream and by the third his eyes crack against the dim room light. Tim rolls around his bed a few seconds before his feet hit the floor bullishly. He stumbles through the mess in search of the phone until he hears himself say ‘I’m not here.’ For an instant he thinks he has become separated from his body until he realizes the machine has picked up. Through it he hears the din of background noise. He strains to distinguish a single voice, but this is nothing more than a distant intercom.

The caller closes the connection without a word. Tim frowns when he finds the telephone under his stained winter coat. The phone in one hand, the coat in the other, he drops his gangling weight into sofa. The call bothers him. Why? Jeffrey would always leave a message and no one else ever phones. In fact, were it not for Jeffrey he would have done away with the telephone years ago. The telephone has not been a friend to him for some time. Who would be calling him now? Who could? Bad news, no doubt. He makes a mental note to have his number unlisted. He rubs his eyes and stares obliviously at the typewriter, the resentful blank page still spooled and waiting. He stands, moving to the desk, the telephone hanging from his arm. He stands there forever deciding whether to attempt to write again or to go back to sleep. The decision comes easily.

Someone is in his home, somewhere. He knows it, but cannot find where this stranger is hiding, nor does he know why they are hiding, nor does he know how he knows. He simply knows, and this is the way of it. He walks slowly, ever vigilant, from room to room, his feet heavy and his head light. Fear falls on him, bricks bursting through glass as he steps into a hallway he’s never known was there and yet has always known was there. The walls are rough rust-coloured sandpaper lined with salt, at the end of the hall is a large metal door in which he sees his own distorted reflection, someone is banging viciously, rhythmically, incessantly against it. As he steps closer, the fear rises in him, a solid force inside his throat. He open his mouth to allow it to escape, but only air comes out.

One foot and then another, he nears the door, his reflection reveals him to be clothed in black. Nearer and nearer to the door, the hammering quickens with his pulse, louder now, more frantic, worse. He places a defiant hand on the knob and holds his breath as he pulls. The door is sluggish and stuck, rusted shut after so many years of disuse, so he doubles his efforts, feels the sweat break onto his forehead, feels the pain in his arms and shoulders and stomach. With a jolt, the door gives way to a tidal wave of black, dirty water, slamming him against the floor before picking him up and dragging him along. Somewhere, far away, he hears a bell.

The telephone wakes Tim again. Raising his cheek from the keys of the typewriter, he looks down at the phone, ringing and cradled in his lap. Slowly, vacantly he picks up the receiver and sets it to his ear.

"Hello?"

"Hello." This is a dull, barely female voice scratched by hard luck and smoke. The clamour of street sounds rise in the background. "Tim?"

"Yes. Who’s calling?"

"It’s Ellis."

At first he can’t place the name. Familiar, but more like a sound in the distance that the may or may not have heard, the face you do not notice until it speaks to you. Ellis. Ellis. A lump rises in Tim’s throat as it comes to him, the name, the face and the sound. How many years has it been since he’d heard her voice? It was now so changed, lower, older, strangely injured, but it was she.

Stunned, blinking stupidly and falling upon his own words, he chokes "Ellis Robichaud?"

"You remember me?"

"Of course I do!" Tim leaps from his seat. Were he able, he would jump through the phone at her. He could never have forgotten her, how could she even think it? Everything about her, everything she had ever said or done, the subtlest nuances of her had been burned into his memory long ago, despite his efforts to forget. "Where are you?"

"At the bus station."

"You--" Tim stammers, shakes his head at so impossible a thing. "You’re in town? You’re home?"

"Yes, Tim. I’m home."

**

His hands sweaty and teeth aching, Tim leans forward against the table, arms folded over his stomach, tapping one foot nervously. He hovers above his Irish coffee, stronger in coffee than in Irish, taking a drink now and then to steady his nerves but mostly just staring into it. Tim laments. He’d been in such a mad rush to clean his shallow hole of an apartment…the clothing into the closet, the bottles under the sink, the trash in a garbage bag he found he had to borrow from Daniel, no time to worry about the bathroom… He left home with not more than a mouthful of anything and can now feel the slow shake of it in his gut. A quiver at first, he now purses his lips against the coming nausea. The coffee is too hard on his system to drink it quickly, but the barista refuses to serve him anything straight. And who is she to refuse him?

He raises his cup to his lips again, forcing himself to get it down faster, to infuse himself with whiskey, however coffee-stained it might be, to steady the bends. He swallows a hot mouthful, breathes deeply and swallows another, tapping his chest as he feels the heat slide down his throat. He is not prepared, he should run. Stand, run, don’t hesitate, do it now. He closes his eyes as he takes another drink, holds it in his mouth only a second to cool, then vows never to do such a thing again as he swallows. The aftertaste leaves him longing for the antiseptic flavour of his vodkas. Not even his flask could save him, empty in his pocket. Stand, Tim. Run.

His surroundings seem familiar somehow, known but unknown, as though he had once dreamed it, or maybe he’d been here in another life. Yes, he thinks, he’s been to this place before, so long ago now that the memory was no longer reliable. Everything about the place had changed as well, the paintings on the wall were now store-bought instead of hand made, the colours on the walls were a calculated soft eggplant rather than the vibrant oranges and reds of before, potted plants have replaced stray musical instruments. He knows none of this crowd either, of course, youth and dreams of dissent co-mingling with the business casual. These people light their cigarettes at the same time and say things Tim does not understand. This often happens when Tim ventures into the world. People speak in a foreign language. Is this the hip new jargon or has the English language evolved while he’s been asleep. Maybe it simply went out of style.

The barista, though, she eyes him with a strange non-recognition. She squints at him, cranes her neck ever so slightly as if to say I know you, don’t I? And in fact she does. No, that’s not right. She doesn’t know him, but she did.

Tim wonders why he had chosen this café. True, he was flustered, on the spot with no time to think and quite unfamiliar with the coffee houses of the day, he blurted out the first name in his head. At that moment he was overwhelmed, not thinking, though now he wonders if that phone call had been real after all. A playful phantom, maybe, or a terrible joke. Perhaps he was still trapped inside a dream.

Isn’t it impossible? Can Ellis Robichaud really have come back to him? It had been ten years since she’d gone. Ten long, long years. Maybe more, and that too seemed impossible, that so much time had passed. Tim is able to remember the date he’d last seen Ellis without hesitation, can even recall the hour of day, but he is not able to say with any certain the date today. In fact, try as he might, he cannot even guess the day of the week. For the first time in years, this bothers him greatly.

Tim tries to imagine where the time has gone, what he’s done with it, but can remember nothing of substance, only a few flickering images. A man with wild hair, a woman with a kind smile, a beach in the moonlight, a small cat chasing a tin-foil ball. It is impossible, he decides. Impossible that so much time could pass when time cannot be said to exist, impossible that he had ever been in this room before and impossible that Ellis Robichaud was coming to meet him again. Impossible, the lot of it, impossible, and the impossible is late. Tim swallows two more mouthfuls of coffee and resolves to wake up now.

His drink vanishes, finally. Tim stands warily, concerned with how many eyes are watching him as his jittering legs carry him across the room to the counter. He feels so conspicuous here, he doesn’t belong and everyone knows it. This loitering interloper, what is he doing? Who is he? The barista studies him again with reminiscence, her lip stiff and brow tight as she looks him up and down, like a child given a math problem it knows it has seen before but is struggling to remember the answer.

Tim avoids her eyes too obviously as he mutters "Same again, please."

"Of course." She takes an absent-minded step back toward the small array of alcohol bottles, still studying him. "Irish, right?"

Tim nods without raising his head.

She nods skeptically in return, turning to uncap a bottle of Five Star Whiskey and pour it into a shot glass. Her back to him, she speaks up as she asks "Do I know you?"

"I doubt it."

A tongue in her cheek, her brow creases. She doesn’t believe him. She turns again, tossing the shot into a clean mug and reaching for one among a half-dozen coffee pots. She squints at him again, sizing him up with a smirk. "You look very familiar. Are you sure we haven’t met before?"

Tim raises his head slowly, threateningly. His dead eyes meet hers. "No. I’m not."

The barista is suddenly silent, looking away from Tim as she tops his mug with coffee, leaving room for cream. She takes his money without another word and Tim doesn’t wait for the change. With his back to her at the condiment stand, he fixes his coffee with cream and sugar. He knows her eyes are on him again, more timidly now, but on him all the same. She looks away quickly as Tim returns to his seat, settling once more in his low huddle to nuzzle his cup. In truth, he does know her. Did know her.. They had met before.

Her name is Val, short for Valentine, but she hates that and only lets a few chosen friends and the government know it. She is, or at least had once been wildly intelligent, though at times considerably naïve, especially in romance. Tim had been her shoulder in ancient times, that hysterical night her boyfriend had left her. They had once held each other for warmth and comfort, two among a circle sharing joints in the snow. They’d sung drunken ballads together the night the cafe was sold. He hadn’t spoken to her since that night, years ago, and did not want to talk to her now, despite the nagging knowledge that she knew the deep secrets of his former self. He does not turn his head, does not offer the smile of an old friend, despite feeling her unquenchably curious eyes still on him.

At the next table, Two young men are busy and loud with a game of backgammon. One of them, small and slovenly with a grimy face, cackles tauntingly as he claims his opponent’s piece and places it into the board’s spine, this makeshift limbo. The other, tall and lank with no hair, lights a cigarette, unimpressed with these oafish theatrics, and tosses his own dice. The smaller man’s smile fades as his friend replaces the lost piece onto the board and claims one of his own. Tim watches out of the corner of his eye as these two young men press their skill into a game where so much relies on the chance roll of the dice. Which is more powerful, Tim wonders. Skill or luck? Luck, of course. Bad luck will overcome great skill just as good luck will compensate for ineptitude.

"Hello, Tim."

Tim’s head jerks, first forward and then to the side, his eyes not focusing right away on the strange woman standing suddenly beside him with a fatigued smirk. He blinks three times, waiting for his mind to catch up, to remember where he is and why he is here. His body shakes when he registers her. She is standing lower than his memory shows her, her arms fold over her stomach and her shoulders cave into the rest of her body. She is thinner than he would have liked, her skin a sallow white with the faintest coating of a sick grey, such a contrast to her unwashed hair dyed a midnight black and tied into a ponytail with rogue wisps escaping everywhere. Her unkempt, dirty clothes seem as though she’s been living and sleeping in them for days, but they do not fit her. Faded jeans, a scratchy green v-neck sweater over a plain white t-shirt, all cloaked under a black overcoat several sizes too big, its sleeves covering her hands. She looks frightened somehow, those wide eyes shaking and her jaw clenched to keep it from quivering, her face is weathered and older than he knows it to be, along with a fading scar under her right eye. Still, she has never been to him more beautiful.

"Ellis."

Tim stands sharply and embraces her without a thought. Her body tenses immediately under his arms, a scared rabbit ready to bolt, but she does not struggle. Instead, she is wary, not giving in, not embracing him, hesitant as if expecting a trick to be played. Tim senses this and steps back shyly, biting his lip too hard.

"What—" He stops himself, self-conscious, and decides on a different question.

"How have you been?"

Her smile breaks for an instant. Her eyes wander, she is somewhere far away, somewhere very cold, but as quickly as the moment came it is gone again. Her tight smile returns. "As well as can be expected, I suppose."

"Please," Tim stammers, his knees creak under the strain as he decides whether he should be seated or standing, bobbing up and down between the two. "Sit down. Can I get you something?"

"Yes, thank you." She takes her seat with some difficulty, shifting uncomfortably, glancing about the room. "Black coffee would be wonderful."

Tim races to the counter, studying Ellis as Val pours her coffee. Is she real? Is he still caught in this dream? He stares at her hands, peeking from her sleeves, one on top of the other, so small and delicate as they had always been, but with a motionless tremble now and the appearance of blue veins. Ellis herself is staring at the pattern of the table, though Tim has the feeling that her eyes are simply pointed there as she sees something else entirely. She has become so different, so much unlike the effervescent girl he’d known. Ten years in the brave new world of Toronto has changed Ellis more than he would have predicted. For an instant he wonders what could have changed so much in her, but he shakes his head and the thought is gone. No matter, she is here, she’s come home at last.

"Here you are." Tim sets the mug before her, stealing nervous glimpses at her as he sits.

She looks at the mug as though looking at something she has never seen before, then raises her head to him. She smiles two different smiles at once. One is the genuine emotion that she is glad to see him. The other is a ghost, an excuse, the face she has painted on.

"Thank you."

"So..." Tim scrambles for words. What can he say? How much water has passed under the bridge? What question can he ask her that will tell him what he wants to know? For that matter, what did he want to know? His thoughts had been drained upon sight of her, he’s become an idiot. After so many years desperately trying to shut his brain off and keep his mouth shut, he finds that when he needs to think and speak, he has forgotten how.

"What brings you back?"

"You do, Tim." Ellis watches her coffee swirl in its mug, not daring to touch it. "I came back to see you."

A wave covers Tim, he is in seconds warmer than he has been in years. "Me?"

Ellis nods slowly and with far too much purpose. "I missed you."

"Why didn’t you call?" Tim asks before he can stop himself. He feels the shadow of tension descend upon them, and so lets the question hang in favour of another. "How long are you in town?"

"For the rest of my days." Ellis sighs and there is a long, thick silence. She looks to the side and back and lifts her head, more animate now, more like her old self. The ghost smile vanishes, leaving Tim to wonder, if only subliminally, where it has gone and when it will return.

"Do you remember when we met, Tim? In the park, after my family moved to town? Do you remember that?"

Tim smiles, "I remember."

Ellis grows wistful, her eyes lose focus. She is seeing something again that Tim does not, though this time he thinks he knows what it is.

"And do you remember the day I left? Do you remember when we said goodbye?"

"I remember when you left." Tim purses his lips. "I remember it very well. I do think about it now and then. I try not to, but..."

Ellis closes her eyes, looking inside herself, though her smile broadens. "What if we could change it? Make it so that I never left?"

Tim’s brow furls. She has gone too far ahead of him and he is lost. "What do you mean?"

Ellis opens her eyes again, for the first time she looks as though she is right here with him. "It’s good to see you, Tim."

"It’s good to see you too, Ellis."

"How are you? What have you been doing?"

"I--I’ve been writing mostly. I’m a writer now."

She says nothing, as if this is not news. "How are your parents?"

Tim holds his breath. "Maybe we should go somewhere else."

**

Tim follows Ellis, close but keeping a few steps between her, matching her footfalls. He remains quiet, watching with hesitation, fearful that at any moment she could vanish again, or worse. At times it seems as though she’s forgotten he is there, her head moving this way and that, taking in the people and the buildings around them. When she speaks, he is not convinced she is speaking to him. To herself, then? To the life of the city? To the very air? But her words are strangely laconic, restrained. They pass a restaurant and she peers through the windows, remarking how it used to be a hair salon and Tim waits for a story of when she had visited there as a child or a woman who had worked there had been her mother’s friend, but nothing.

When Ellis was a girl, the girl he knew, her words flowed easily and often, it sometimes seemed she would never stop. Tim remembers hours when he would not speak, allowing her to fill the silence so that she would not need to think the unthinkable, but now her silence is as broad as her loquacity had once been. Tim watches her in confusion and no small measure of fear. What had Ellis done while she was away to make her so different?

Maybe he is imagining it all. After all, he is using parts of himself that have lain dormant for years, the mechanics of his concern have been shut down and put away, and he has certainly forgotten how to use them. And to that matter, he could indeed be walking with a phantasm now. She has been gone ten years with no word, no phone calls or letters, not even a second-hand rumour How foolish it was to think that Ellis would remember even his name, let alone that she would come back to him.. As they stand at an intersection, Tim stares at her, deciding if she is actually there. Can he be imagining her? Watching this broken wraith of a woman, a small part of him wished he were.

"I’ve missed this place." Ellis whispers.

In recent years, he’d stopped thinking about her the way he had done. That first summer after she left, he thought about her all the time, unable to clear his face from his mind for more than a handful of minutes, sick with worry about her. He checked the mailbox every day for her letters, the ones she promised she would write when she had comforted him with her decision to leave, but none came. He never expected them, but he was crushed every day by the empty mailbox. Throughout university he would think of her often, though would check for the letter less so. In truth, he knew why she never wrote. Today he might stumble across a movie they had seen together or a book he’d recommended she read that she, of course, never would. He would muse for a moment on the wonderful life she’d found herself and that would be all.

But now he knows he was wrong.

"Are you hungry, Ellis?" Tim asks slowly.

"I feel like a tourist." Ellis ignores him. "I don’t really feel like I belong here anymore."

"You’ve always belonged here." Tim whispers, immediately hoping she had not heard. If she did, she does not show it.

She walks ahead of him airily, looking at everything as though for the last time. Suddenly, jarringly, she begins to speak in length. "The city has done well without me, hasn’t it? Look at this, this diner has been here as long as I can remember. And this, this skateboard shop. It was a shoe store once, and a bookstore before that. Cities are like nature, you know. The strong survives and the weak is done away with. I wonder if this city even noticed I was gone."

"I noticed."

Ellis stops walking, her head hung. Tim freezes, alert. "Yes, you did. You always did. You know, I never got to say goodbye to you."

"I never let you, did I?"

"I’m sorry, Timmy."

Timmy? She hadn’t called him that since, when? Fourth grade? Fifth, maybe? He lets it go. "It wasn’t your fault."

"Wasn’t it?"

"We were just kids, we didn’t know better."

Ellis turns and faces Tim with pleading eyes. "And do we know better now?"

"Probably not."

Ellis waits a moment, her eyes move aimlessly along the street, as if searching for a different subject. "When do you think we grow up, Tim? Is there a point where we stop being children and start being adults?"

Tim shrugs impotently. "I don’t know. Maybe we start being adults before we stop being children."

"What do you mean?" Ellis asks, her tone suggesting agreement, not confusion.

"Maybe it’s when we first realize what it means to be lied to. When they tell us there is no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny. It doesn’t end our childhood, but I suppose it starts us down that road. Maybe it’s like a virus that slowly eats away our innocence."

"Sometimes I think we’re not meant to be adults." Ellis presses her lips together. "Sometimes I think that we’re supposed to live out our youth and die when it’s over, and that’s all that we are supposed to live. Like all the things we do and believe and worry about as adults are an aberration against…" She hesitates, ambivalence marking her face. "Against god? Against nature? Maybe those are the same thing. But we don’t get to live like we’re meant to. Not anymore. Like you say, they lie to us, they change us into what they want us to be. They clip and prune us and turn us into them instead of allowing us to be ourselves, to see what we can be if left to grow. They want us to be mature, whoever they are, and they start our maturity too soon. Those lies they tell, they say it is meant to show us magic but it truly robs us of our natural childhood, make us into the kind of children that become adults? Maybe adulthood is actually an afterlife. Maybe adulthood is purgatory."

Tim watches Ellis in silence. He no longer understands her.

"Do you think a lie is a natural thing?"

Tim scrambles for words, trying to keep up with her seeming non sequitur. "Sometimes a lie can be the most natural thing. Like a rabbit’s fur changing in the winter or the chameleon who changes it’s skin colour, mimicking a leaf to hide itself from danger."

"But what happens when the chameleon begins to think it is a leaf?"

For this, Tim has no response.

Ellis closes her eyes, placing a palm on each of her cheeks. "Maybe its better to die with the truth than to live with a lie."

"Ellis..."

Her eyes open with a convincing smile. "You’re right, Tim. Let’s get something to eat."

**

Daniel Patric packs his small pipe with crumbled hashish and strikes a match waits for the flame to stop dancing and holds it over the bowl. It is one of his most treasured moments in life, the striking of a match. A model for the nature of the universe, it is. The frantic and chaotic explosion at the first strike, the flash expanding faster than the eye can see, then the shake and twitch as the flame settles into a gentle sway until it exhausts itself and passes into nothingness. Daniel could rarely bring himself to blow out his matches, would often hold them upright to watch them burn or set them into an ashtray and let their lives take course. Yes, he knows it to be wasteful, but it is a guilty pleasure he indulges. He’s been given lighters by friends, but they all go unused and eventually he manages, one way or another, to give them back. It is with no small amount of humour that he notices how few remember giving him that exact lighter in the first place.

And so, Daniel perches on his stool, smoking his pipe, watching the paint dry on his latest work between puffs. The piece hasn’t taken him long, three hours, maybe four, which is good because he hates it. The colour is wrong, the perspectives are off, the framing of images bothers him...he began it well enough, but halfway through he lost the vision of what he started and never quite got it back. He knew when it had happened, but he didn’t stop. As he sets the pipe down on the small table next to his easel, he shrugs it off. Sometimes, he knows, we lose our way because our way is lost and we must continue in hopes of finding the better path. This, however, does not happen to be one of those times. It doesn’t matter, he decides, he will take the rest of the night off, listen to some dub reggae, get high and try again tomorrow.

He picks up the phone to invite Cuddy over. Cuddy had picked up some mushrooms the week before and they have both been waiting for the right time to trip. Perhaps this painting would look better on hallucinatory drugs. Cuddy would come, yes, and she would need only a little sweet-talking to stop at the vendor’s for a bottle of port to help them on their way. Daniel would always promise to split it with her, but she never bothered to ask him for the money. Cuddy didn’t need it, of course. Cuddy had the goods.

The sudden sound of footsteps on the stairs stop him. There are two of them, he can tell, but neither are talking. This is strange, no one ever comes up those stairs in silent pairs. Cops do that. Unlikely, but the possibility is surely there. Daniel hangs up the phone and rushes to his work station, throwing the pipe, the matches and the small brick of hash into the wooden box where he kept his gear. Dammit, he curses himself, he has to start closing his door.

Daniel cranes his neck to peer through the cracked door into the hallway, straining for a view. He breathes a sigh of relief when he spots Tim reach the top step. Just the hermit drunk from next door, nothing to worry about. He isn’t carrying his usual bags of booze, though, which is odd. Daniel had been under the impression that buying alcohol was the only reason Tim ever left the building.

He is about to invite Tim in for a toke or a pot of tea, both of which Daniel knows will be refused, when he sees the woman who is with him. She is beautiful if a bit waifish, so much so that a small piece of Daniel falls perilously in love with her on sight. There is a defiant vulnerability in the way she carries herself, a wounded elegance. Black hair tied up on her head, baggy clothes, she sloughs along behind Tim, close enough to crawl into his very skin. So, the old hermit’s got company. In the three years Tim has lived across the hall, Daniel has never seen another soul at his door, save for the delivery boys. A prostitute, maybe? Daniel cannot bring himself to believe that, not dressed like she was. Besides, has never thought Tim to be that sort.

Daniel leans against the wall, listening as they disappear into Tim’s cave, the deadbolt clicking home behind them. He smiles now, finds his hashpipe once again and packs a fresh bowl. He lights another match, resting on his futon sofa, watches the flame dance, smiling from ear to ear.

He laughs. "Will wonders never cease?"