Hamish MacDonald - Short Stories

Wishbox

2010-03-12T06:31:00.000-08:00

This is a piece I wrote for the Edinburgh event Cachín Cachán Cachunga.

Wishbox

“It’s not fair, is it?” the woman said rhetorically. “The bankers get billions of pounds of our tax-money to bail them out, then they go and pay themselves billions in bonuses. It’s ridiculous,” she declared — that ultimate expression of Scottish disapproval.
        Roy sneaked a look at his watch. By ‘bankers’, he thought, you mean me. Even though I’m just their lackey and get paid eight quid an hour. Instead, he said, “Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
        “Oh,” she said, coming back from her monologue, “no, I just want to deposit that cheque.”
        “Okay, I’ll just go do that. Have a good day,” he said, turning politely away from her — as if he needed to go drop her cheque into the deep money canyon, when in fact he’d already entered it into the system and simply needed to put it into the drawer in front of him.
        She left, and he was free to finish up for the day.
        I hate my life, thought Roy.

He knew better than to cross the Royal Mile in August: it would be heaving with tourists and entertainers, impossible to traverse without getting jostled, but at least it would be lively. He figured he could use some livening up.
        The awfully young actors weren’t doing it for him, with their histrionic songs and pantomime or offers of Very Serious Theatre. Here was a man painted gold holding out a flower, there a silver woman in a clownish suit with rouged cheeks tick-tocking on a wooden-crate-turned-music-box. Then he encountered a busker already partway through the pitch for his act, no doubt pimping like this for up to twenty minutes to get as large a crowd as he could before starting his five-minute show.
        No, this wasn’t doing it for Roy, so he decided to head to the Meadows, shoving his way past a dozen people who all wanted him to take a handbill for their show. He wasn’t sure who he hated more, these actors or the charity muggers lurking on the high street in the off-season. They were all younger than him, come to the city to make their way, no doubt, as he was once drawn here. His banjo-playing — not just a love but a niche skill, he figured — didn’t prove to be his deliverance, so to speak. And so he wound up at a bank because banks make money. Literally. But no one knows what art is for. Likewise for him as an artist. So he went for the money and spent many spare thoughts on hating himself for it.
        The Meadows, a twin-set of grassy fields by the university, were populated all summer by equally vibrant students and travellers. In August it was also home to a carnival and tents full of entertainment.
        The big draw was The Ladyboys of Bangkok. Roy could never figure out who that show was for. Not him, as he liked his boys to be men. The freakshow tent approach put it well below any notions as sophisticated as trans, trannies, or intersex. So, Roy figured as he passed the long temporary building and the lineup outside, that left men who liked women. But surely they wouldn’t be comfortable with that. Yet that seemed to be who was going, wives in tow. Just gawking, he figured.
        Roy had no intention of going on any the rides that pumped out overloud, over-excited rock music. They were painted in metallic colours with bad airbrush attempts at copying heavily copyrighted cartoon characters or the likenesses of celebrities, which ended up looking at best generic, at worst like an interspecies accident. Still, the lights and the noise, even the temporary wooden walkway on the grass all gave the place a buzzing energy. The Fringe and the fringes of the Fringe always felt like the place to be in summer.
        He treated himself to some cotton candy, the sweet cousin of fiberglass insulation. Tearing off bits and eating them, he walked past the greasy air of the various chip and meat wagons, looking for some excuse to stay longer, something to do. Going home would mean facing the sinkhole that was his life.
        Then he saw an old telephone booth, its windows and metal frame all painted matte black, gold and red letters inscribed above the door. A man stood next to the booth, calling out something to the crowd. As Roy drew closer, he heard the man shouting out vague promises — health, wealth, love, fame — and now he could read what was written on the booth: Wishbox.
        “Why hello! My name’s Wilf,” the barker said, offering a handshake. Roy accepted, though his experience of the city had taught him to keep moving, that anyone who addressed him wanted something. Instead, he was offering: “Want a try?”
        “Try what?” asked Roy.
        “In here,” replied Wilf, “you will experience your fondest desires.”
        “You’re joking.”
        “I wouldn’t joke about anything so important,” said Wilf.
        “What will I see?”
        “I can’t say,” said Wilf. “It’s up to you. Whatever you bring in with you.”
        Roy didn’t want to get fleeced, but the box was the most interesting prospect in his evening, so he reached into his pocket. “What does it cost?”
        “Whatever’s in your wallet.”
        Roy paused, wide-eyed. He finished drawing out his wallet and opened it: ten pounds. “I’ve just got a tenner.”
        “Then a tenner it is. You were lucky!”
        Unsure, Roy handed over the bill. The man put it into his jacket pocket and opened the booth. Roy stepped inside, bumping into a small, padded stool. As he sat, Wilf closed the door and left him in darkness.
        He sat for a few foolish moments, waiting for his eyes to adjust. They didn’t. The box proved to be utterly empty, devoid even of light. Then he spotted something from the corner of his eye, a brief flash. He followed it, then saw another on the opposite side. The flashes quickly multiplied, flaring and growing until he was momentarily blinded. This time, though, his eyes did adjust. He found himself sitting in a white room. Even his clothes — his jeans and checked shirt — were white versions of themselves. Around the edges of the room, doors began to appear, written on with the same gold and red carnival writing as the booth was, bearing the words the barker had been calling out and more: fame, wealth, exploration, knowledge, health, romance, sex… The more doors he looked for, the more he saw, each one bearing an enticement in letters.
        Looking over his shoulder and finding himself alone, he stood up and headed for the Sex door.
        He opened it and his heart sank. The illusion was over: he was looking out at The Meadows. Wait a second, he thought. It was bright out there, and it had been dusk when he entered the booth. He stepped out and scanned his surroundings. This was The Meadows, but it was afternoon and warm. The students and travellers were here, lounging on the grass, but… they were all men. And they were naked. Two of them approached, evidently happy to see him.
        “Hi,” the light-haired one said, fingering his shirt.
        Then his dark-haired friend spoke: “What do you want us to do? We’ll do whatever you want.”
        “All of you?” asked Roy.
        “If you like,” they all said, and converged on him. They touched him up and down, stroking him, grinding against him. Ecstasy flooded over him.

Roy shook his head. It was sore, but not as sore as his balls. He was sitting in darkness again. After feeling to make sure there wouldn’t be any visible stains, he reached for the door of the booth and pushed it open. Cold air breathed over him as he stepped out into the night.
        Wilf was there waiting, leaning on the box, but everyone else had gone home; the carnival was closed for the night.
        “What time is it?” asked Roy.
        “About 3AM,” said Wilf. “Did you have fun?”
        Roy’s smile gave him away, so he decided to tell the truth: “It was amazing!”
        “Come back tomorrow?” asked Wilf.
        He would gladly go again, but wasn’t sure his body could take it, aching the way it was, so he just nodded.

~

The next night Roy decided to go more highbrow and chose the Knowledge door. When he stumbled out again at 3AM, he’d flown over every word ever printed, visited Schopenhauer for an afternoon’s discussion, then they went to Greece to talk with Plato before having dinner with Marx in Bonn and finishing up with drinks at Larry Lessig’s. Then Freud, Foucault, and a fourteen year old boy arrived and everyone started fighting, so Roy left. He understood everything they knew and everything anyone else knew, and he was emotionally drained from convincing the others he was right.
        He left the booth, paying Wilf twenty pounds on the way out — he figured it was worth it — and promised to come back the next night. As he dragged himself home, he cast his mind back over all he’d learned, but couldn’t quite remember any of it.

~

He came back the following three nights, having barely made his way through work in the intervening hours.
        Exploration took Roy to the killing cold of the Antarctic wastes and the steamy heat of Costa Rica’s rainforests. It showed him stars from the desert, then took him out to the furthest reaches of space to look back at Earth.
        Horrors showed him sights that, unlike the other nights’ offerings, he could not forget, no matter how he tried — cruel mutilations, unspeakable collections, and scenes to prove that humans are fathomless in their dark imaginings of what to do to one another.

But the next night Roy returned to The Meadows and found nothing but the pulpy grass crop-circle where the carnival had been. Just as he started to panic, he felt a tap on his shoulder. He spun about and, seeing Wilf, sighed from the depths of his soul.
        “You don’t want it to end, do you?” asked Wilf.
        “No, God no!” replied Roy.
        “How much do you have?”
        “In my wallet?”
        “No.”
        “In the bank? But—”
        Wilf slowly turned as if to leave.
        “No, wait! Come to the bank machine with me.”
        After a quick transaction, Roy had in his possession an old wooden box with a hinge on one side and a neck-sized hole on the other. Wilf waved to him, climbed into his lorry with the booth on a trailer behind it, and drove away.
        Roy took the box home, afraid again that he’d been duped. He certainly felt stupid enough opening the box and shutting it over his head, latching the side. Soon enough, though, the white room reappeared, and he spent the next several days inside it, taking breaks only to call and make excuses to work and friends.
        He discovered that by holding things when he put on the box he could take them into this place — which he’d taken to calling “the neitherworld” — with him, and even sell them there, finding the money in his wallet when he returned. But he was running out of things to sell.
        He took his banjo in and played to hills filled with people who loved his music, his playing… him. His tribe was here in the neitherworld. And they felt real, but then he’d come back and find himself in his basement flat, drained of emotion, energy, and sometimes spunk. One partner in particular, Kenneth, had become his favourite, the one he visited in these deliberate dreams.
        What are you doing? he wondered. You’re a loser.
        Yeah, but in there…
        You’re a guy with his head in a box.
        But…
        Roy’s doorbell rang, ending the argument. He must have ordered take-away and forgotten about it. He’d been doing that.
        He opened the door then fished for his wallet with his free hand, holding the box with the other.
        He looked up and saw Kenneth.
        He put down the box and pushed it away with his foot.
        “Hi.”
        “Hi.”

Gold Star

2010-02-26T03:43:00.000-08:00

Life out here suited the sheriff. The buzzards took care of all the paperwork.

At the Wheel

2010-02-26T03:42:00.000-08:00

Suddenly the captain regretted choosing his narcoleptic cousin for a crewmate.

Sacred Stiff

2010-02-26T03:40:00.000-08:00

The priest stood before his congregation. He was afraid of them.

Vacation

2010-02-26T03:39:00.000-08:00

After two weeks of camping together, it was time for the family to go home. None of them wanted to.

Dereliction

2010-02-26T03:38:00.000-08:00

The postman dropped his cigarette into the box and ran away.

Parking

2010-02-24T03:36:00.000-08:00

The three young men, dressed for a night out, watched as their friend tried, again, to park his car. They missed the show, but it turned out to be the best night of their lives.

The Linesman

2010-02-23T03:31:00.000-08:00

I've been away from writing any new fiction for a while — trying to promote Finitude and produce the DIY Book podcast — so I'm starting small, practicing, gearing up to write another novel. This page contains that practice: short stories sometimes referred to as "postcard fiction". In fact, some of them will be so short I'm going to call them "stamp fiction".

The cherry-picker dropped the linesman onto a wire and he died.

Peg-Arm

2009-03-02T14:08:00.003-08:00

Another story from the “You Don’t Have to Make This Stuff Up, Just Extrapolate” department. If you listen to the podcast, please forgive my hideous approximation of a Scots accent!

Peg-Arm

“Hello!” said the woman, moving to the front of the line, holding out a book. “It’s great to see you again.”

The author looked at her. She couldn’t recall ever having seen the woman before. She smiled and nodded in fake recognition.

This happened a lot.

“How have you been?” asked the author, putting down her pen and wiggling her fingers to stretch them.

“Oh, well, the dogs are doing better. Remember, the last time we talked they both had some kind of worms? Well, they’re better now, so you don’t have to worry about them.” The woman made a self-mocking face. “Listen to me. Here you are, a busy author with all these people’s books to sign, and I’m going on about my dogs.”

The author smiled. This was a compact she had with herself: She would give encouraging expressions that could be interpreted however the receiver wanted, but she would not lie. If the woman had asked her point-blank “Do you want to hear about my dogs?”, she would have been constrained to admit that, honestly, she did not.

She felt a little dizzy, a little sleepy, a little hungry, and a little sick. This was the third city of twelve that she’d be visiting on the tour, a tiny town. She tried to remember its name and drew a blank. She rubbed her eyes then looked up. The woman was still there, now holding out her book.

“Could you just make it out to me again? None of my friends at work like your books. If they read at all, they read romances. So at least I don’t have to worry about anyone asking for one of my autographed copies, because I’d have a hard time thinking up an excuse, but I wouldn’t want to let it off your shelf. I have a shelf f—”

“What’s the spelling again?” asked the author.

“Oh,” said the woman. “Still R-U-T-H!” She laughed nervously.

The author made a “Silly me” face herself now, then leaned over with her pen to scribble something friendly but not too familiar. As she smiled and gave back the book she thought, Kill me now.

~

“But it’s theoretically possible, isn’t it?” asked the author.

“Well, yes, but the technology involved—” protested her friend.

“Come on. I know the kind of work you did on the shuttle arm. I saw the test where you had that little platform balance a pencil. I can’t imagine the calculations it would take to do that, then to build the arm so that it didn’t wobble endlessly when it moved in space, and that was nearly twenty years ago.”

“We have learned a lot since then. But the human hand is incredibly complex. To reliably reproduce handwriting by physically writing...”

“No, not reproduce, transmit. These aren’t going to be photocopies. I want something to follow my hand’s movements, but thousands of miles away.”

“So you can stay home.”

“Yes,” said the author. “They’ll see me on a screen, and we’ll still interact, I just won’t have to make airplane connections, have my underthings lost, eat alone in restaurants, or, worse, eat with strange people who want to pick at my life’s history and my psyche. And I wouldn’t have to be away from my home.” She looked at her friend. “So can you put a team together?”

“Yes,” said the engineer.

~

The robotic device stuck straight up from a base on the table, a shiny black insect limb executing a graceful series of movements like a flamenco dancer’s arm.

The engineer smiled at the author. “Have a seat,” he said, directing her to her favourite chair. He slipped the controls over her writing arm, a mesh sleeve that was threaded through with wires and small sticks. He pressed a glowing blue button on the back of her hand and the arm on the table flopped down, limp, awaiting instructions.

“Go ahead,” he said to the author, handing her a pen and a piece of paper. “Oh, wait a second,” he said, running across the room to put a pen in the robotic hand and slip a piece of paper underneath it. “Right, sign the paper.”

The author smiled, enjoying the display of gadgetry. Several people had argued that this wouldn’t work, that the result would be inherently unnatural and unconvincing, but she had faith in her friend and in technology.

She made a few loops in the air first, watching the limb across the room lift and repeat her gesture exactly, then she dove in to form her bold signature on the page. When she finished, the engineer hopped across the room with the robot’s page and set it next to the author’s.

“Exact!” she said, her mouth agape. Even she wouldn’t have known that she hadn’t written it. “And this doesn’t store the signature anywhere? It needs me in order to do it?”

“Don’t worry,” her friend reassured her, “it will use a series of algorithms to learn your movements in order to seem less... odd... to the people getting their books signed, and so it can deal with more formats of books and a wider range of situations. But the impulse that forms the signature has to come from you.”

One of the members of the robotic engineering team waved. “Ah,” said the engineer, “your screen is ready.”

They watched as the team attached a large flat black panel to the arm’s platform. “This will transmit images of you at your desk, and we’ll angle it to be a natural distance from your arm—”

“Which is already several thousand miles long at this point,” giggled the author.

“Yes. And it has its own energy supply, so you can set it up anywhere you like. Oh, and the most important part,” he said, pointing to a vertical line along the side of the screen.

“What’s that?”

“For credit cards,” he said.

The author nodded.

“One last thing,” said the engineer, guiding the author to her kitchen, where more team members were mixing something in a bucket. The room smelled of mint. “We need to take a casting of your arm so we can make this other arm look more realistic.”

“Skin?”

“It’ll look like skin, yes.”

“Brilliant.”

The engineer smiled and gave a small nod.

~

The air inside the white tent was hot and muggy. Edinburgh was uncharacteristically hot this summer, but the book festival still attracted its largest audience yet. Ruth held her book close to her as she moved forward in line. She’d attended several events at the festival so far, but this was the one she was really looking forward to.

She was first in line to have her book signed, but grew confused when one of the volunteers directed her to a chair in front of a large screen. Admittedly, they had called this an “unveiling”, which she didn’t quite understand, but now she had no idea what was going on.

With a flourish, the volunteer pulled a large piece of cloth away to reveal a dismembered human arm. Ruth gasped.

“It’s her arm!” said the volunteer with a grin.

“Oh my God!” cried Ruth.

“No no no,” said the volunteer, realising the misunderstanding, putting a reassuring hand on Ruth’s shoulder. “It’s not actually her arm. Here, swipe your credit card through this slot.”

Ruth had to dig through her purse, and wasn’t happy about being asked to pay again, after she’d already bought the book. She didn’t even know what she was paying for, but she was too timid to protest, figuring it was her fault for not being informed. She produced a card and swiped it.

The screen flickered, and a face appeared — the author’s, far away from here, in her air-conditioned house.

“Hello?” asked Ruth.

“Hello!” said the author, full of enthusiasm about the novelty of this medium, far more vibrant than she’d been in the small-town bookstore.

“Am I really talking to you?” asked her fan.

“Yes! There’s a tiny camera on the screen, so we’re really talking. And—”

The arm jittered and came to life. Ruth jumped in her seat and screamed.

“It’s alright!” assured the author. “Look,” she said, wiggling the fingers.

“Oh,” said Ruth, easing back into her seat. “Um, so you’re not really here.”

“Well, not physically, but I’m virtually there.”

“Right,” said Ruth. She was nonplussed: she had no idea how to interact with this thing, a flat face and a lone arm. She poked a finger into the skin of the thing, which was rubbery but incredibly detailed. It had no hairs, but they had painted the fingers and mottled the flabby skin realistically.

“Would you like me to sign your book?” asked the author, wanting to move things along, as she could see the line-up behind Ruth.

“Yes, please,” said Ruth. The arm picked up a pen and moved to the page that Ruth held open on the table. “Um, I brought some poetry I wrote about my dogs. It’s here in my purse. I thought you might—”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said the author, her expression registering a flicker of horror then adopting a sad look, “it’s too bad I can’t read it.”

“It’s alright,” said Ruth, “I’m sure it’s no good.” She looked down at her book, which was now signed, then back up at the screen, which was shiny, black, blank: her time had run out.

Ruth collected her book and her purse and moved off into the festival crowd.

The next person in line was a large man, who plopped himself in the chair and ran his card roughly through the credit slot.

“Hello!” said the author, putting down a cup of tea she’d been sipping.

“You!” said the man.

“Me? What about me?”

He held up one of her books. “Mah wife asked me tae come doon here and get this signed for her. She’s always readin’ these stories of yours. Ah think they’re a load of shite. Yeh’ve filled her heid wi’ all this man-hating bollocks, an’ Ah think yeh’ve a lot tae answer for.”

The author put her hands to her face, but on the table, the arm was forming a clenched fist. “I— I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said. “Of course, that wasn’t my intention in writing the books, and I think it’s a misinterpretation.”

“Misinterpretation my arse! Stirring up all this trouble, yet yeh cannae even be arsed comin’ here to meet the likes of us.”

“Lots of people like this. We’ve been using this setup for several months, and the feedback from those we’ve talked to has been very positive. We think it’s learned to become quite sophisticated. It allows me to be more places, and to spend more time writing books. Er, not that you necessarily think this is a good thing. Um, did you still want me to sign the book?”

He slammed the novel down on the table. “I’ll tell yeh what yeh kin do wi’ the book, ya troublemaking old bitch, yeh kin— YEEEEEAUGH!” The man’s hand had been nailed to the hardcover book with a pen. He looked at the robotic arm, which pointed at him, then gave him the finger. The man swung at it, but it had pushed itself out of reach. He stretched toward it, but yelled at the pressure on his other hand.

Book festival volunteers rushed to his aid. “Call 999,” yelled one of them. A hundred people took out their mobile phones, then, all seeing each other, put them away again, figuring someone else had called. In fact, no one had, and it took some time for this to become apparent, which delayed the ambulance’s arrival.

One of the organisers went back to the tent to check on the robotic arm, but it was gone.

~

The author stared at the television screen. “Robert Fletcher, one of the most respected yet reviled literary critics was found dead in a hotel room last night in Scotland, where he had been attending this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival. Police say that there is evidence of forced entry, and foul play is suspected. They are now checking the scene of the crime for fingerprints.”

It couldn’t be, thought the author.

Her phone rang.

The author picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Hello. I’m a representative of the Lothian and Borders Police. I was wondering if I might ask you a few questions.”

The animosity between her and Fletcher was well-known, and now, somehow, they’d found her fingerprints at the scene of his murder, but, strangely, no genetic material. She feigned ignorance to the detective on the phone, agreed to speak to him again about the matter, finished the call, then immediately phoned her travel agent.

~

The author finished reading the selection and put the book down on her lap. The audience in the small tent applauded. She mopped her forehead with a handkerchief.

“Any questions?” she asked.

Ruth was in the front row and put up her hand. She rose to speak when the author pointed at her. “I think this book seemed sad,” she said.

“Hm. Alright. Do you have a question?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. No, I guess not,” said Ruth, and sat down again.

The author looked around her. There was no sign of it yet. There was one thing she knew would draw it out: “If anyone would like me to sign a copy of the book for them, I’d be happy to. And to thank you for coming out today, the signings will be gratis.”

The organisers set up a small table and chair inside the tent for her. As she rose and headed toward them, the author saw the arm, dragging itself under the plasticised fabric of the tent.

“There you are,” she said.

The arm reared up like a cobra.

The author ran and jumped on it. It wriggled free and landed punches on her body.

“Come here, you damnable thing!” she cried as she reached out for it. It slapped her in the face, then writhed back under the side of the tent. The author crawled after it.

When she emerged, she saw the thing, rampant before her, holding a sharpened tent-peg. It raised the peg then drove it down into her writing arm, over and over. The author screamed. As the arm drew back to stab her in the neck, it was grabbed by the wrist. The author looked up and saw a man flanked by two police officers. He pinned the thing with his knee to the ground.

“I’ve got it,” he said. “You’ll be okay.”

She recognised his voice from their telephone conversation. He has a nice accent, she thought, as she lost consciousness.

~

When she opened her eyes, the first person the author saw was Ruth. Around her were several of her other fans who’d travelled to hear her read her work. The detective was there, too. And a doctor.

The doctor gave her a look that made her worried. “Unfortunately,” he said, “we weren’t able to save your arm. But don’t worry, you’ll still be able to write. We came up with a solution I think you’ll be happy with.”

She looked down and saw a perfect robotic replica of her arm attached to her. The fingers gave her a small wave, imperceptible to anyone else. She screamed.

Doug and Dug

2009-03-02T14:08:00.002-08:00

Here’s another story from the second edition of Dunderheid.

Doug and Dug

Doug woke up and looked at the curtained windows of his bedroom. Winter light like weak tea seeped through them.

Where’s Chappy? he thought. He wedged his elbows back and raised himself to look around.

This wasn’t right. Every morning, Chappy woke him by bringing him his cigarettes. With a grunt, he worked his way upright and swung his feet to the floor, then leaned his weight forward until he was standing. Morning was always the worst. It got better once he got his old body moving.

He stretched as he wobbled down the hall, then stopped as he got within sight of the stairs. “Chappy?” he asked the dog, whose head was on the landing with a paw on either side. He looked up at his owner, a pack of cigarettes in his mouth.

As Doug got closer, he could see the length of the dog’s body, now more white than gold, awkwardly stretched down several steps. The carpet around his back haunches was dark with wetness. Another time, Doug might have hit the animal for this, or given him a kick in the backside. He wondered if that might have contributed to the weakness in the dog’s back hips lately.

Doug dropped to the floor and slowly stroked the dog’s head. The dog’s brown eyes looked at him with an odd expression; Doug couldn’t tell if it was asking what was happening, or telling him that it understood.

The eyes flickered open and closed, then the dog’s body began to tremble. Doug had known this day was coming but tried not to think about it. As he struggled to move around the dog and gather it up in his arms, he felt a twinge of guilt for wondering how much the vet would charge him.

~

“What’ll you do with him?” asked Doug, his arms around the dog.

“You can take him home with you, if you like,” said the vet, “or we can have him cremated.”

“You can take ‘im,” said Doug, picturing the tiny back garden of his council flat. “But I dinnae want ‘im sold for experiments or turned into pet food or suchlike.”

“I can assure you we don’t do that. Dead pets wouldn’t provide any useful feedback for experiments.”

He didnae say anything about the pet food, thought Doug. Hell with it. Anyone wants to eat that stringy old body is welcome to once Chappy’s gone oot of it. “Alright, let’s get this done.”

The vet shaved a patch of hair from the dog’s leg, prepared a needle, pinched up a vein, gently drove the needle in, then depressed the plunger. Doug watched the clear liquid vanish into his dog.

“It’ll just take a few minutes,” said the vet. “I’ll leave you with him.”

Doug nodded, trying to look reasonable and composed. When the doctor left, Doug buried his face in the dog’s musty fur. He could swear he felt the moment when the dog died, as if it gave a sigh, both with its lungs and its muscles. It stayed warm, but he knew the thing had left him. It wasn’t the first to do so.

Doug felt something warm on his thigh and looked down: Chappy’s carcass was peeing on him.

“Bloody hell.”

~

The dog had been a hairy millstone around his neck for the past eighteen years, thought Doug. Every time he left the house, he had to think about what he was going to do with it, or take it for a walk first, or tie it up outside the pub and deal with people giving him looks when he finally went back to untie him. The dog had been happy enough; he liked people, and there was a constant stream of them past the pub door. Doug assured himself he’d done nothing wrong.

He’d been a bit rough on a few occasions, he admitted to himself. But it’s no worse than what would happen in the wild. He was just establishing himself as the alpha male; that’s what they called it.

He looked around the flat. This was when he was supposed to take Chappy around the block. What in hell am I supposed to do with myself? he thought. He’d been having this same thought for the past three weeks.

This is getting desperate. I have to do something.

~

“That one,” said Doug, pointing at a multi-coloured patch of fur moving about on the wire mesh over a layer of newspapers. The pet store had a hot smell of animal life about it.

The shop assistant reached in, pulled out the little dog, and handed it to Doug. Doug smiled at it as it writhed about in his hands.

“So he’s the one?” asked the assistant.

He’s the cheapest, thought Doug.

~

Doug collapsed, tired, in his old armchair. The walk around the block had not gone well. Chappy Two wouldn’t walk when Doug wanted him to, so he dragged him along and swore at him, which drew nasty looks from people on the street. Then it saw something or another that Doug couldn’t see and ran to the end of the lead, nearly strangling itself.

Doug got an idea. He pushed himself out of his chair and went to the kitchen. He took an empty pack of cigarettes from the rubbish, took a slice of ham from the fridge, then rubbed it over the outside of the pack. He called the dog, but the little animal seemed to be unable to make the connection between the sound and itself, so Doug went looking for it. He found it in the bedroom in the pile of washing that was waiting for the care worker, chewing on a pair of his pants.

Perfect, thought Doug. He climbed into bed with his clothes on. “Chappy Two,” he called. “Hey!” The dog looked up from his place in the closet. “Here,” said Doug, and threw the packet at him. The dog nosed it, and, liking what it smelled, ate the cigarette pack.

“God damn it!” said Doug, getting back out of bed. He grabbed the dog by the scruff of the neck and carried it downstairs, where he found another pack of cigarettes and put the dog through several hours of drill with them, trying to establish a ‘fetch’ routine associated with the object.

He failed.

Slumped down in his chair, he lit a cigarette that he’d got for himself and turned on the television. He flicked through his four-and-a-half terrestrial channels several times before nodding off.

His head lolled forward and the motion woke him up. Blearily, he made his way upstairs and crawled into bed.

~

“What?” asked Doug, waking up to a tiny, wet black nose snuffling around his face. When he realised that it was his dog, his heart leapt for a moment: Maybe he—

But no. Chappy Two had nothing for him.

“What the hell do you want?” he yelled at the animal. It persisted in nosing and licking him, so he picked it up and took it downstairs. He opened the front door and threw the dog away as hard as he could. “Get tae fuck!” he called after it.

As he turned back to the room, he saw the small fire on his armchair. He rushed to the kitchen to fill a pot with water, then emptied it on the chair. The fire went out with a hiss and a plume of plasticky smoke. Doug dumped another potful on the chair just to be sure.

With the pot still in his hand, he opened his front door and looked out. All he saw was garden, fence, buildings, and sky.

Architect of Doom

2009-03-02T14:08:00.001-08:00

A couple of years ago, I worked with some friends on a ‘zine we called Dunderheid. Seeing as there were very few copies and I lost the final page layout, I figured I’d post my stories from it here...

Architect of Doom

Reginald Thornybauk looked up at the building he’d designed. It stood tall and solid against the grey-white sky. The narrow sides featured coloured patches, like a dazzle-painted battleship from the time before radar. His eyes followed the patterns up to the top. There, from the roof, someone waved at him.

At least, it looked like he was waving. In fact, he was on fire.

The man pitched himself off the roof, and Reg could do nothing but watch him hurtle toward the ground.

Oh no, he thought, I’ve done it again.

~

Reg unlocked the door of his flat and opened it, wedging a pile of bills and adverts underneath it that had been dropped through the letterbox. Bad design, he thought. He imagined some sort of chute or lift to catch the post and take it away, then realised a basket was probably a better idea.

Wresting the pile of paper free, he shut the door and walked to the kitchen. He lived alone - he felt most comfortable that way - but days before he’d given in to a pang of loneliness and bought a pet hamster. As was his nature, his first concern was giving it an ideal place to live.

Reg had fashioned out of plastic sheets and tubes what he figured was the ideal hamster environment, a collection of boxes and tunnels, domes and cedar shavings.

He squinted now and looked closer: There, in the corner, was the rodent, desiccated, perfectly mummified.

He couldn’t figure it out: the theory was perfectly sound. It always was, in every one of his projects, in everything he tried to do. But in practice, things always went wrong. Very wrong.

Pacing around the kitchen, Reg noticed the light blinking on his phone, so he speed-dialled his voicemail number. “Reginald! Guess what!” said his business partner Gordon’s voice. Gordon’s happiness, in Reg’s experience, meant only that something had happened that was good for Gordon.

“We got the contract! It’s ours! There’s just one hitch, some stupid bint who’s come up with some community approval bollocks. Come into the office tomorrow at two and we can talk about it.”

Reg put the phone down. He figured he should be happy about the news; the contract would mean a lot of money for him and the business. But this win wasn’t unusual for him: his designs - the theory of them - always sounded good, looked good on paper, and dazzled committees into giving their agreement.

In practice, though, his buildings were bad things. He didn’t know if he could accept the responsibility for creating yet another of them. He thought they were beautiful, but...

He lifted the lid of the clear plastic box and took out the hamster-husk. It was rigid, like a lawn dart. Reg took it to the bathroom and tried to flush it. The toilet, however, didn’t have enough water pressure to pull the floating puff of fur down.

Bad design, he thought.

He sat on the cold tile floor and watched the hamster spin like a hairy compass.

He had to take the contract. He couldn’t quit until he’d got it right, just once. Nothing in the world would make him happier than giving someone a good home.

~

“Hey, Reg,” said Gordon, his business partner, “I want you to meet Val.”

Reg extended his hand to the woman, who wore plain cotton earth-tone clothes and had her mass of bushy red hair pulled back into a little tail. He wondered how he looked to her; so tall and thin and tired. The last girlfriend he’d had, years ago, likened his look to an expensive suit on a charity-shop coatrack.

Val shook his hand. “Hello,” she said. Reg detected a note of hostility, but didn’t understand what he could have done to this stranger. He found it difficult to look her in the eyes.

“Val is with CABER. It stands for Community Action - er - well, they have some issues with our revitalisation design.”

“But the consultation period is over,” said Reg. The law was on their side. They had someone who saw to those thing for them.

“We’ve managed to convince the city that they overlooked an important part of the process,” said Val, “and that it would be wrong to award this contract without one last piece of due diligence.”

“Which is?” asked Gordon.

“The impact on the community of these buildings. No one has asked the people actually living in your other developments how they feel about these designs.”

Crap, thought Reg. But at the same time, he was relieved, as if someone had just taken a pistol from his hand in a crowded shopping mall.

“Before these plans go ahead,” said Val, “you have to carry out a community impact study. The Grinley Estate is very similar to this project, so I suggested that it would be a good place to carry out the study.”

Reg pictured the estate, or, rather, a flaming man falling from it.

“You can’t—” started Gordon.

“Okay,” interrupted Reg, “we’ll talk to them.”

~

Reg and Val drove up the laneway. The Grinley Estate towered over them. Reg parked the car and they both looked up at the shape through the windscreen. It blocked out the sun.

“I’m onto you,” said Val.

“What do you mean?”

Val rummaged through her rucksack, pulling out a sheaf of papers. She drew one out, which featured a large diagram of what looked like a spring or a nautilus shell cross-sectioned in a square box. “You’ve heard of the Golden Mean, right?”

“Of course. The perfect proportion. It shows up everywhere in nature.”

“Look at this,” she said, producing a transparency featuring one of Reg’s building designs. She lay it over the diagram. “Your design is the perfect antithesis of harmony,” she said. She produced the floorplan of one of the units and lay it over the Golden Mean. “Same thing. You couldn’t produce anything that was any more... unnatural. These shapes are inhuman.”

“Well, they’re modern.”

“Reg, I think there’s something about these shapes, some sort of evil feng-shui that actually drives the people living in them insane. It kills them.”

Reg’s lips tightened and he nodded. He hadn’t put it into words like this before, but he knew it was true.

Val grabbed her clipboard and opened the car door. “Let’s go see what these people have to say about this building.”

Reg stayed in his seat.

“What’s the matter?” asked Val, sitting back down.

“I’m not very good with meeting people, particularly people who, who—”

“Who what?”

“Who are from...”

“Say it, Reg.”

“The underclasses.”

Val looked at him, square-on, as if he’d said something horrible.

“Well, I’m sorry, but it’s true. There’s a, a roughness about them. I know they don’t like me, and I never know what to say to them or how to talk to them.”

“Yet you presume to dictate their living spaces,” said Val, picking at her clipboard.

“It doesn’t mean I don’t care about them. I do. I really want to help them, to give them someplace where they can—”

“Better themselves.”

“Stop it.” He took the clipboard from her. “Let’s go.”

~

“I don’t understand,” said Val, looking at the pile of papers in her hand.

Reg didn’t understand it, either: nearly every one of the flats they’d visited was in disrepair, their inhabitants had an undead look about them, and the vandalism throughout the building shocked him. Yet they’d all filled out their forms, giving the building excellent marks.

“This is the last flat,” Val said, ringing the doorbell. She turned to him. At each of the previous flats she’d done the talking, but he was growing more comfortable with the residents with each door they passed through. Familiarity was not breeding contempt, but something else. It wasn’t respect, but it was something in the neighbourhood of appreciation. Their lives, though, were unquestionably a mess. Each family had at least one member who seemed particularly sensitive to the building’s negative effects, and everyone else suffered for it.

Reg knocked, and after a moment the door opened, seemingly on its own. Then Reg looked down and saw a boy. “Oh hello,” said Reg. “Are you parents home?”

“Hello?” asked a woman, coming up to the door and pulling the door open as far as the security chain would allow.

Reg smiled. Not the smile he should have, but his give-away, dumbstruck, “I fancy you” smile. He caught himself and explained: “We’re here to talk to you about the building. About the questionnaire you received.”

“May we come in?” asked Val.

“Yes, I suppose so,” said the woman, unlatching the chain. “I’m sorry for being rude, it’s just that we’ve had quite a lot of trouble in the building lately.”

“Yes,” said Reg, “I , um, heard about the, erm, recent suicide.”

“What? No, I wasn’t talking about that, I was talking about the gangs activity around the building.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs—?” asked Val.

“Miss McNab. There is no husband to speak of,” she joked.

Reg smiled at the joke - possibly too much, he worried.

“But you can call me Shar. It’s Sharon, but everyone calls me Shar.”

She moved through the small flat to the kitchen. “Would you like some tea?” she asked, taking a box down from a cupboard. She shook it and looked inside: empty.

“I’ll get some more,” offered the boy.

His mother looked unsure. “I don’t know that I want you going out there, Stevie.”

“C’mon, it’ll be okay. I’ll just go and come back.”

“Alright,” she said, taking some money from her purse on the counter. “Here you go. And you can get something for yourself. But no dawdling. Come right back.”

The boy snatched up the money and bounded from the flat.

Reg stood up and looked around. On both the living room walls were hung large paintings. The colours and forms in them suggested landscapes, but didn’t resolve easily for the eye into any one picture. There was something about them, though, the Reg found soothing. In fact, the whole flat felt like a good place.

“These are lovely,” he said.

Shar looked down at the coffee table. “They’re nothing much.”

“Are they yours?”

“It’s just something I do in my spare time,” said Shar.

“They’re really good!” Reg insisted.

“I did those, too,” said Shar, pointing at ceramic shapes on a pair of end-tables. They were tall with a sworl shape in them that Reg recognised.

“Miss McNab,” asked Val, “about the questionnaire you received, did you happen to complete it?”

“I didn’t get one, actually, or the cheque that the others got.”

“Cheque?” asked Reg.

“And now some of these hooligans have been harassing me about it. Apparently we all get more if everyone turns one in. Even if I did get it, though, I couldn’t live with myself if I said anything good about this building. I just can’t afford to live anywhere else.”

Val looked at Reg. “Wait a second, Val. I had nothing to do with this.”

A loud, repetitive knock came from the front door. Shar ran to it and looked through the eye-hole. The door banged again and she leapt back.

“We’ve got your son,” said a muffled voice.

Shar whipped the door open to face a group of young men. Stevie stood in the middle of them, visibly frightened.

“Give him to me,” said Shar.

“Not until you’ve filled out your form,” insisted the lanky leader of the gang. “We want our money.”

“Now, wait a second,” said Reg, approaching them.

“Who’re you?” asked the gang-leader.

Before he had a chance to answer, a yell came from the other end of the hallway. “Hey!”

They all looked, and there was Gordon, being held around the neck in the crook of a large man’s elbow. Behind the two of them was a second gang of men of various ages.

“Who are they?” Reg asked Shar.

“They’re all residents of the building.”

The large man stepped forward and shook Gordon. “Is this the guy who’s been paying you to harass us?”

The two groups moved toward each other in the hallway. Several of the flat doors opened a crack as residents prepared for the fight they’d been anticipating.

“Stay here, and lock the door,” said Reg to Shar and Val, moving into the hallway.

“Let the boy go,” demanded the large man.

“Send him forward, and we’ll do the same,” said the skinny gang leader.

The large man nodded, and shoved Gordon toward the middle of the hallway. The gang leader gave Stevie a push.

“Gentlemen,” said Reg loudly as he strode forward. “I gather there’s been some disagreement about—”

“Shut up,” said the skinny leader.

“Right,” agreed Reg with a nod. He stepped back and took Stevie’s hand.

“Hey,” protested the skinny leader.

Reg held up a finger as if to say “One minute,” then suddenly gave Gordon a push back toward the resident-gang and shoved his back against the closest door. The chain gave away, knocking the spying tenant backwards. Reg pulled Stevie by the hand and they climbed over the tenant into the flat as the fight in the hallway erupted. “Come on,” he said, tugging the boy around corners, over furniture, toward one of the two rooms off the sitting room. One of the hooligans followed after them.

Reg opened the bedroom closet and climbed over the boiler there. He took a coin from his pocket and, reaching over his head, unscrewed the fasteners on a wall panel, and set it to one side. “Kinda fun, eh?” he asked the boy as he pulled him into a crawlspace over various bits of plumbing and ductwork. “I designed this building.”

He led them around several bends, then kicked at the wall, breaking open another panel. He motioned for Stevie to get out, then followed himself, standing up in time to see Shar and Val run into the room.

“Hi,” said Reg. “We need to get out of here.”

They all headed for the front door, but just as Shar opened it, something smashed in the hallway and flames flew toward them. Shar slammed the door. “We’re stuck,” she said.

“Not yet,” Reg replied, heading back to the bedroom. But as he did, he heard someone clambering through the tunnel he’d made. “Damn,” he said. He reached around the doorknob to lock it, shut the door, then raised his foot and stamped down hard on the door handle until it broke off. The other handle landed on the other side of the door with a thump.

“What now?” asked Val.

Reg looked around the flat. The living room window. He opened it and climbed over the frame. The wide, coloured ledge there supported his weight, so he gestured for the others to follow him. Little by little, they made their way along the building as the wind whipped at them. They followed the ledge around the corner until they reached another window.

Reg pulled at the window-frame, then took the coin from his pocket again to work at the large hinge on his side. The bolt popped out and the window fell away. Reg teetered on the ledge, but Shar grabbed him and pulled him back. As she held him, he smiled until he heard a smash below. Looking down at the shattered window-pane, he said “Bad design.”

The four of them climbed through the open space, and stood on the landing of a staircase.

“Your paintings,” said Reg.

“I can make more,” assured Shar. “Let’s get out of here.”

~

Reg looked down from the rooftop patio to the car-park below. Val was a small dot there, waving up at him, yet her voice was in the mobile phone at his ear. “So I’ll see you in the office tomorrow?”

“Yep. See you tomorrow.”

He waved down at her as Shar came up beside him and took his arm. “Nice view from here,” she said.

“Hey, you helped design it.”

They looked out from their new home as the sun set behind the city.

Virgil's Question

2009-03-02T14:08:00.000-08:00

We've all seen couples like this...

Virgil’s Question

Virgil had been in so many fights his face looked like a pink apple strudel. Three things prevented him from getting involved with this one. First, he was on parole. Second, it wasn’t his fight: the dispute was between a young man and his girlfriend, both of whom looked to Virgil like they were in their early twenties. Third, he was busy peeing.

The sound of their yelling reverberated off the alley’s stone walls. But then Virgil heard another sound that made him turn around, inadvertently drawing a wet arc on the bricks in front of him. He thought the girl had slapped her boyfriend but as he looked over his shoulder, he saw her holding the side of her face.

Virgil gave a little push to speed things up. He knew better: he’d probably end up with a dribble. But the boy had crossed a line, broken a rule that Virgil’s father drummed into him as a kid: You don’t hit girls. He buttoned up his jeans, closed his jacket to hide any possible embarrassments, and took a deep breath.

Historically, this breath was Virgil’s way of girding himself for what was to follow, stuffing the adrenaline into his gut to feed him. But as a condition of his parole, Virgil had taken several months of "life skills drills", a feel-good boot camp rehabilitation program the authorities were experimenting with. So when he took that breath, Virgil felt filled with calm. His eyes reflexively closed and he went to his "safe place", a little cabin in the Highlands that he remembered from his only trip out of Edinburgh as a child.

A scream shocked his eyes open. He saw the girl doubled over, yelling for all she was worth at her boyfriend. Her words forced him back, bouncing in his trainers. But a second later that potential energy sprung back at her: the boy gave her an open-handed punch across the jaw. That same instant, Virgil found himself marching from his urinal-corner toward the boy. The boy’s eyes widened as he saw Virgil. He had this effect, being so tall and broad and having that face. He was a train, and crashed into the boy, putting his arm across the young man’s throat and squeezing him against the wall. The girl, to Virgil’s surprise, started hitting his arm and back, but through his pea jacket, she seemed to have all the strength of a squirrel.

Exasperated, he turned from the boy, who clung to the wall as still as a poster. Virgil looked at the girl, whose mascara was blurred out of focus and carried by tears onto her white crop-top. Her midriff spilled like uncooked pizza dough from between the top and her tight blue jeans, and she wore gold jewellery on every open space. Virgil didn’t like this type of girl. Still, as he looked into her eyes, he felt something: sympathy. His training took him outside of his old self.

He pulled his arm away and the boy dropped to the ground. "Ah’m sorry," he said to them both, "Ah just didnae want ta see yas fightin’ like that. Tha’s no right." He remembered something else from his training: Save the fight for another night. Right, he thought, if he could remove them from the situation, they would calm down. "Why don’t Ah buy yas a pint, an’ we can all talk about this?"

They agreed, though Virgil couldn’t make out their expressions. They were either confused or frightened. Either way, they quietly agreed. She wiped her eyes and nose, the boy brushed off the knees of his trousers, and they followed Virgil to the pub around the corner.

~

Lorna went to the toilet. She did say "Lorna", didn’t she?, wondered Virgil. He watched her on her way while her boyfriend looked up at the television over Virgil’s shoulder. Lorna wiggled an awful lot, thought Virgil. She lingered at the bar on her way to the toilet, and on the way back stopped to chat with one of the men there. She fingered his lapel as she smiled and turned away, her hand staying behind for a moment as if stuck there. Virgil looked at the boyfriend: oblivious.

Lorna sat down and smiled at Virgil. Her teeth were a little green in this light. Her boyfriend lifted a hand to rest it on top of hers, but before it landed, she pulled hers away. "Don’t touch me, you pervert," she said, then smiled again at Virgil. He smiled back to be polite, but in the same moment wondered if that was a mistake: if she was flirting with him, he didn’t want to encourage her.

Lorna’s boyfriend put down his empty pint glass, then looked with expectant, bloodshot eyes at Virgil. This was getting awfully expensive, he thought. You are always free to make choices in every situation , he heard one of his rehabilitation instructors say in his head. Ah know, he thought, but what the hell? There’s something in everyone to like, right? Ah just havenae found it in them yet.

Two rounds later, he was still searching.

In the toilet, Virgil steeled himself for his escape. It’s okay, he thought, if Ah cannae help ‘em. Others are ultimately responsible for themselves. He was sure someone told him that at some point.

"Ah really ought to be goin’," said Virgil, gathering his jacket from the booth.

"Oh, we’ll walk ye out," said Lorna. "Come on, you lazy git, up!" She hit her boyfriend on the shoulder.

"Ah’m no finished ma pint," he said.

"An’ it would kill you to no’ finish a free pint, wouldn’t it, ya cheap little bastard?"

His mouth tightened. Other than that, his face remained a blank. Virgil had seen that look a number of times tonight. Defeated, the boyfriend stood and followed them outside. When they reached the corner, Virgil turned and lied: "Well, this is me. I’m off. Goodnight."

"Oh, but–" began Lorna, reaching for Virgil’s lapel.

"Oh for God’s sake," said her boyfriend.

"What?" said Lorna, turning on him.

"Would you give it a rest? He’s not interested, you cheap tart."

Lorna wound up and gave him a slap across the face, her fingernail catching the corner of his eye. He put a hand to his face and pulled it away to find a dab of blood on his fingers. The boy vibrated with anger, fists clenched at his sides.

I should stay, I should stay, thought Virgil. But he turned and headed off towards fake-home. He heard the couple’s voices ride as he walked away. You know he’s going to hit her, he thought. I know, but it’s either him or me.

Her voice raised even higher. "…no-knob, skinny little…" Then she stopped. Virgil looked back to see her on the ground holding her stomach. His stomach didn’t feel too great, either. Neither did his head. He thought of his training and took a deep breath. It wasn’t working. He was walking back to them. This is a bad idea, he thought.

~

Virgil was sure he heard someone say the boy would live. Tha’s good, he thought as he adjusted his back so his weight wouldn’t hurt his hands, the sentence willnae be so bad. The police car pulled away from the taped-off crime scene.

Polarity

2009-03-02T14:07:00.003-08:00

I wrote this story to submit to a short story competition in 2003. When I wrote this, I was in the middle of writing Idea in Stone. I didn’t want to completely leave that world, so I had fun by taking a secondary character and giving him a story of his own.

Polarity

Iain’s itch started his third week in the London office. He rode the lift to the canteen to have lunch and felt a tickle on his thigh. He reached down and brushed it with his hand, but that just intensified the sensation. He grabbed the crotch of his khaki trousers and used the rough material to scratch himself. A smile of relief dawned on his face like a sunrise. He closed his eyes and scratched.

A bell told him he’d arrived. He opened his eyes to see his art director watching him with her head cocked to one side. He looked down at his hand, took it away, laughed weakly, and rushed past her.

~

The lunches here are good , he thought as he piled dishes on his tray. He paid, thinking he shouldn’t take so much food tomorrow. Payday wasn’t until next week, and his money didn’t go as far as it used to back in Edinburgh. The firm subsidised part of his rent, but even with the subsidy it cost several times more than he was used to paying.

He put his tray down at an empty table. Tucking into his lunch, he doodled on a scrap of paper from his pocket — designs for the new marketing campaign. He’d roughed it out on the computer at his desk, but worked on it again for something to do. Keeping busy distracted him from the fact that, several weeks into working here, he still sat alone every lunch-hour. He wasn’t a schoolboy trying to find mates on the playground; there was no reason this should bother him. Still, he looked forward to that afternoon’s meeting, where he’d get to talk to other people.

His hand worked its way across the table like a tarantula. It dropped down onto his thigh, where it bit in and scratched.

~

Iain looked through the grease-smudged window of the bus at the traffic below. A school of scooters darted around the vehicle’s whale-like bulk, ignoring traffic laws en masse.

A young woman sat next to him. He longed to speak to her. Of course, if he did, she’d immediately peg that he was from Scotland. Some people considered the accent sexy, but in him they always found it cute. He supposed cute was the most he could hope for: he was a bit short and a bit round — not too much of either, but still. There was no mistaking his hair was ginger. He had to play on the cute, non-threatening thing, or hope for someone with a ‘red’ fetish. At least people here didn’t seem so bothered by it as at home, where friends referred to him with scorn as ginger, rhyming the word with ‘ringer’.

He noticed he’d been scratching the back of his hands alternately, leaving red lines like a music staff with no notes.

He looked up. The woman was gone, and he’d missed his stop.

~

He ran across the multiple lanes of the street, barely making the other side before the green light undammed the river of cars.

He passed white buildings with ornate columns and friezes, enormous cakes left over from a time when the empire was still joyfully celebrating its global success. These alternated with enormous towers of dark glass and black metal plumbing, as if the bombs that once fell on the city had actually been seeds, their pipes and valves continuing to work into the ground, producing these monstrous buildings as their fruit.

Iain wished he had someone to share that idea with, but the only people nearby were joggers. Some of these wore miserable, wet, blotchy faces. He could understand them. Others, though, with muscles strapped to their frames like frozen chickens, strode quickly and comfortably, as if they actually enjoyed it. Iain briefly entertained the idea of taking up jogging, then laughed it off: Scots do not jog. He continued his walk home.

The only sign of his building was a single dirty door. He opened it then rose to his floor in a tiny lift that banged against the walls as it went.
I’m good at what I do , he thought as he opened a tin of tuna to make his tea — a baked noodle dish he could eat for two nights. Back home, he’d been successful because of his instincts for design and his insight into the business mindset. People tried for years to persuade him he should move to London, and eventually he listened.

He took his dinner to his bed, where he sat cross-legged. Leaning forward, he pushed a movie into the video player, which he could reach as it and the television sat on a table pinned to the wall by the bed. The movie started and he tucked in to his supper.

Lord of the Rings. Again. He should have rented something, but he hadn’t thought ahead. He’d borrowed the video from a friend shortly before his move, and it ended up in one of his boxes.

The Scottish hobbit had gone to school with a friend’s brother. Or had they worked together? Or something. He couldn’t remember. Why does he have to be the funny one? Iain wondered. He and the Irish one were comic relief, stumbling and bumping into things, while English-sounding people did all the hero-work. If they’re all from the Shire, why do they sound different to each other at all? He decided he was giving this far too much thought, put his empty plate on top of the video player, and leaned back.

At four in the morning, he woke up. His clothes were strewn around him, and his hands were scratching furiously up and down his body. He clicked on the lamp and gasped: he was covered in bloody scrapes, as if he’d had an angry cat under the covers with him.

He tried to sleep, but the amateur doctor in his head ran through possible causes for his condition. Its ultimate verdict was: Something sexual. Iain figured this was unlikely, given how long it’d been since he’d had sex with anyone. These jungle viruses, though, said the doctor, they can take ages to incubate. He imagined the fun his friend Peter back home would have with this: “Monkey-lover, monkey-lover!”

Sleep did not return that night.

~

Iain sat in his underpants on a piece of paper that crinkled as he scratched. Calling in sick was easy enough. Finding a doctor to see him wasn’t.

The doctor entered the room and asked him what brought him in. He confessed the diagnosis he’d reached the previous night.

“Have you visited a tropical country recently?” the doctor asked.

“No.”

“Have you had unprotected sex recently?”

“I haven’t had any kind of sex recently.”

The doctor prodded and stretched the pale skin of his exposed belly.

“Any allergies?”

He shook his head.

“Change in washing powder?”

Another shake.

For five minutes more she asked about the conditions of his life. Finally, she shook her head. “I really have no idea what would cause this.”

“Yes,” he replied, “but the lack of an explanation doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.”

“Of course,” she said. “We’ll run some blood tests just in case, and I’ll see you back here in a week, okay?”

A week, he mouthed. “Isn’t there something you can do for now?”

The doctor dug through cupboards and drawers. “You can try taking these,” she said, handing him a sample packet of tablets. She gave him a toothpaste tube of something. “You could put this on twice a day.” “And just to make sure it’s not an infestation—” Iain cringed at the word, “—put this lotion on after showering.”

He nodded and gathered his pharmaceutical prizes against his bare chest.

~

The next day at work, Iain’s art director came to his desk to ask how he was. He raised his head in slow-motion caused by allergy pills and lack of sleep. “Huh?” He plucked at the clothes stuck to his lotion-saturated skin.

The art director sniffed the air. Something reminded her vaguely of an ex-boyfriend.

~

“You have an elevated bilirubiin count,” announced the doctor a week later. It meant nothing to Iain. He was more worried about being asked to take off his trousers, in case the doctor noticed he was wearing the same pair of pants as last time.

“There’s been a cancellation, so I’ve managed to get you an ultrasound appointment for tomorrow. I just want to make sure there’s nothing wrong with your liver. Here are the instructions.” Iain took the proffered pamphlet. “It’s most important that you drink the six glasses of water beforehand so the technician can get a proper look.”

Iain nodded.

~

In his concern about determining the combination of tube and bus routes that would get him to the hospital, Iain nearly forgot about the water. He went to the miniature kitchen — appliances on a strip of linoleum along one side of the bedsit — and took down his only glass, a relic from a drunken night out.

After the fourth refill, he didn’t think he could manage any more. He managed to swallow a fifth, then forced the unwelcome cold of the sixth down his throat, fighting his stomach’s urge to send it back. He set the pint glass down in the sink and ran out of the flat, at which point he realised the instructions said “six glasses” of water, not “six pints”.

~

“Mister Snaith?” called the nurse. Iain raised his hand, clutching his gut with the other. She gestured for him to follow her.

In the dark of the ultrasound room, he was instructed to unbutton his trousers and remove his shirt. The technician smeared clear jelly across his torso. He smiled. She was pretty, and reminded him of another girl he once met, who had a tube of something similar at her flat. That was a long time ago. Perhaps this technician would be interested in him, he thought. He didn’t suppose so, he answered himself, judging from the clinical way she dealt with his body. That didn’t stop his mind from recasting her in his memory as the jelly-girl. His bladder was in agony, but now his memory gave him another worry, something he didn’t want the technician to notice.

“I’m going to be applying some pressure,” she said. She took something shaped vaguely like a hand-blender and shoved it into his belly. He clenched his teeth as she rolled it around his slick stomach. He tried to focus on the monitor, which seemed to be tracking a hurricane.

She rolled the device down his torso. “No!” he said quietly. She pushed it again. With a whimper, he wet himself.

~

He didn’t care what others thought anymore. He sat in a corner of the canteen at lunch, doing his Saint Vitus’ Dance, stretching this way and that to reach the crawling prickle in his skin.

In a way, the constant distraction kept him from becoming preoccupied with anything else. His work was the best it had ever been. His mind had no spare attention to use second-guessing his ideas. All secondary concerns were sublimated to the basic need to tend to his itch. In the middle of a presentation, he stopped to claw at his neck. The gesture of scratching was simple and socially acceptable enough. What the others watching him weren’t aware of was the flood of pleasure he was experiencing.

All day long, Iain enjoyed bouts of ecstasy. Shortly after moving to the city, he’d slinked into an adult entertainment store to buy some pornography. At last he could rid himself of it, and the fear of discovery. He threw the material out: now he had something better. Before bed, he merely took off his clothes and scratched himself into a state of bliss.

Trying to sleep, though, turned the bliss into damnation. As the night paced on, Iain did sleep-math in his head, calculating how much time was left before 6:30. He visualised peaceful swims in cooling streams, which magically made the feeling vanish for moments at a time. When he did finally fall asleep, he dreamt of himself as a figure in Michaelangelo’s anatomical studies, his skin peeled back, pinned to the table on which he lay.

~

Iain wasn’t hungry; all he craved was sleep. He left the building on his lunch-hour and came back to his desk with a white paper bag from the chemist. He tore it open and pulled out a bottle of sleeping pills.

“What are those for?” asked his art director, startling him.

“Uh, just having a little trouble sleeping.”

“Alright,” she said. “You’d tell me if something was wrong, though, right?”

He nodded, though he’d never try to explain the itch to her. No one could understand it unless they’d experienced it — and he’d never heard of anyone else having this.

“Okay.” She started to leave, but turned back. “Could I see you in the back boardroom for a minute?”

Iain nodded and followed her. When she opened the boardroom door, a dozen people inside shouted “Surprise!”

He looked bewildered. The art director pointed to the wall, where one of his proposals was mounted on an easel. “The client loved it!” she said, shaking his hand and kissing him on the cheek. She addressed the room: “I’m taking us out for drinks — on the company.” The staff cheered. Iain smiled, even though he knew from a failed experiment that drinking just made the itch worse.

~

Iain stood in a corner watching a girl who was with another party. He politely took the pints others brought him and left them on random tables.

The head of marketing strode over and took Iain’s hand in both of his to shake it. “Great work,” he said. He kept speaking, but Iain couldn’t hear what he said: despite the goodwill in the man’s words, the clipped RP package they came in somehow made him feel like a hobbit.

Over the marketing head’s shoulder, Iain saw the woman he’d been watching move to the bar. “Excuse me,” he said to the man, heading after her.

“Hello,” he said. The girl didn’t hear him as she leaned over the bar, trying to get the bartender’s attention.

“Hello,” he repeated.

She turned. “Oh, pardon. Allo,” she replied.

“Oh, yer French, are yeh?” His voice slipped nervously around in his mouth. You sound like your damned grandfather, he thought. Might as well speak to her in Gaelic. He countered himself with a smile: Hey, we wouldn’t be the first French and Scots people in history to get together.

“Yes,” she said, “I’m French. And you are — from Scotland?”

He nodded.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m in advertising. There’s a party. I did a thing, some people liked it, and my company’s going to be making a lot of money.”

“Ah, so you came to London to become a big success in advertising?”

“Something like that.”

“So it’s working, non?”

“Not really. You should see my flat.” He paused, and added with a grin, “Do you want to see my flat?”

She patted his cheek. “You were doing so well up until that,” she said. “No.” She waved for the bartender.

“Why not?” he pleaded. “Seriously, this keeps happening. What’s wrong with me?”

She turned at looked squarely at him. “Honestly? There is nothing wrong with you. You are actually sort of cute,” she said, “but there is a certain — do you know the expression confortable dans sa peau?”

Iain cast his mind back to his Highers in French, worked it out word by word, and nodded.

“Well, you are just not — comfortable in your skin.”

A light flicked on in his face. “Thank you!” he said. He shook her hand and headed for the door. His art director called after him, but he kept going.

Past the turnstile teeth of the underground, down its long throat full of posters for musical theatre shows, Iain entered the intestines where trains moved in a mechanised peristalsis. He rode to the station closest to his flat, where he was excreted onto the street.

He ran to his flat. After a short break to scratch himself, he got to work. He took the folded cardboard boxes and nylon bags down from his cupboards and filled them. Several clattering trips in the lift got everything downstairs. He ran five blocks to his rented parking spot, then drove his car back to the flat. His belongings barely fit, and his seat was uncomfortably close to the steering wheel, but he was ready.

He drove. The machinery of London screeched and railed against him, but he escaped it. The English countryside stretched between rises of cities, then gave way as dawn broke over familiar-looking hills. He kept driving, following the signs that read simply “North”.

He stopped the car by the side of the road and got out. As he walked through the field toward the ben, he pulled off his clothes. Throwing the second shoe over his shoulder, now naked in the misty rain, he dropped and lay on the ground. The heather was thick here and gave him all the scratching he needed.

Mixers

2009-03-02T14:07:00.002-08:00

I wrote the first of these stories and sent it to my best friend Mark, and within a day he wrote back to me saying, um, did I mind, but he’d been inspired to write the opposite story. Of course I didn’t mind: I love writing with Cosgrove, and liked his side of the story. You’ll see what I mean…

P.S. My mum read these, and felt sad that they only captured one certain possibility (trying not to give away the stories here), so she write a third one!

Mixers

Mixer 1
By Hamish MacDonald

Tony entered the bar, which was essentially a cavern filled with dark brown wood. His heart picked up speed in his chest, feeling like a gerbil on a wheel. He’s here somewhere, he thought.

No matter how many blind dates he went on, it never got easier. He’d yet to find a way to be cool or calm when meeting someone new, someone who might, maybe, perhaps, possibly be the one. Of course, he knew there was no "one", that he should be happy in himself, and all that rubbish. But below that lingered the knowledge that everything would just be easier if he did. For one, he thought, he wouldn’t have to go on these dates anymore.

The first split-second was a killer, that glimpse that instantly told him whether or not he could fancy this other person. If the answer was that he couldn’t, the rest of the night would be an exercise in politeness. Sometimes that politeness extended all the way into bed. Other times it was just about taking the company where he could get it, even if he had no illusions about wanting a romance.

Tony spotted someone at the bar. His inner gerbil fell off its wheel. No way, he thought. Could I be that lucky?

He approached the man, who was slightly taller than him, with short blonde hair and a fresh face tanned from a holiday somewhere. He’s a stunner, thought Tony. The man was nearly finished his pint. Damn, I’m late.

"John?" he asked.

"Erm, yeah," the man answered, looking puzzled.

Tony forced a laugh. "Hi, I’m Tony." He extended his hand.

John smiled and accepted the handshake.

"Can I get you another? What are you having?"

"Pint of lager, thanks."

Tony ordered their drinks, and took them to a side table near the bar. He took his phone from his pocket and put it on the table, so he could sit down more comfortably in his favourite, maybe-too-tight jeans.

John joined him.

"So," said Tony, laughing.

"Hm, so," said John in reply.

"So what do you do?" asked Tony, then winced. "Sorry, I don’t know why conversations always have to start off with our jobs. I mean, it’s not like it defi—"

"It’s okay. I’m a constable."

"A policeman?"

John nodded.

Tony felt like he’d won the lottery; he’d always had a fetish for men in uniform. He proceeded to ask John questions about all the things he’d wondered about — guns, making arrests, handcuffs. John seemed to relax as he talked about his work. Tony leaned his face on his hand, listening. He had a crush on the policeman; by the end of the evening, he was sure he’d have fallen completely. He didn’t noticed the time passing until he glanced at his mobile: they’d already been talking for an hour. Oops, Tony thought, John was in the middle of a sentence and he wasn’t listening.

"…and eventually a pension to look forward to."

"Yeah, that’s great," said Tony. "I mean, presumably. Is the pension decent?"

"Well," laughed John, "sometimes I think my wife wants me to get killed in the line of duty so she could get the insurance instead."

"Your wife?"

This was not what Tony had in mind. He wasn’t looking to sneak around, to be "discreet", somebody’s shag on the side. But John was so good-looking, so normal and uncomplicated. He found himself contemplating the possibility.

His mobile chimed and vibrated its way across the table-top. He turned his head and pressed a button to read the text message he’d received: Arsehole. Thanks for standing me up. – J

Tony looked up at the stranger across from him, who was watching football on the bar’s television.

Mixer 2
By Mark Cosgrove

John scanned the bar. He was early, he knew it. He always was. He hadn’t owned a watch since his Euro Disney Mickey Mouse watch had stopped working when he was 15. But he was on time anyway, he always was. It was ‘thing’ with him, he was early or on time regardless of how hard he tried to be casual about it. Tonight he hadn’t even tried to be casual. This he was excited about.

A date. Well, a blind date. Well, not a blind date. A blind date required your friends to set you up. This was an, um, online hook up thing. But John hoped it would be more. His profile stipulated it. “Not looking for casual.” Meaning “If you just want a shag, then move along.” Shags were fine. John wasn’t averse to them. In fact he had an online handle for just such occasions as when he wanted a little something distracting. But he’d been online a few weeks ago with his regular (non-shagging) handle, when he met with Tony, or AthleticEdin as he was styled. They’d chatted, hit it off; found they had some things in common. Love the Olympics but hate all other sporty things, love Pop Idol, but hate pop music, love pubs but hate dance clubs. After three weeks of chatting back and forth online they’d agreed to meet tonight.

At first John had been reluctant at the choice of place, but it was fairly close to the city centre. It wasn’t Tony’s fault that John lived in the outskirts. So three buses and a ten-minute walk and here he was, still 15 minutes early. But the proximity to Tony’s place meant that should things go well they had someplace to casually walk back to for a late coffee. Just because they weren’t out for shagging only didn’t mean that they couldn’t shag. Only that it wasn’t the first thing on their minds. That was what John hoped for anyway. Their conversations online had stretched well beyond the usual ‘what are you wearing’; reaching philosophy, history, art, food, even politics. They were in accord on so much and John was already feeling seriously smitten with the guy’s mind. He hoped, prayed (or would if he believed in anything worth praying to) that Tony would be cute, or quirky (sucker for a quirky mouth), or, or, something that he’d be attracted to.

John nursed his rum and Coke and stretched around to see the entrance of the bar. He’d tried to pick a seat that would give him a view of the whole place, but there was a nook, the short end of the L-shape of the pub that he couldn’t see from where he was. Still he’d checked it out and it had been empty when he’d arrived.

As each new person entered the bar a flutter of hope/fear tickled his chest, threatening to choke him. The creak of the door caused his head to turn in anticipation. This one? Ah no he’s with a woman. Him? Oh god, let’s hope not. He’s all angles and knobbly bits. A serious misunderstanding of the term ‘slim’. (Tony had said that someone once called him ‘lithe’ but it seemed such a daft word to apply to oneself he preferred to say thin, slim or sometimes – when he was exercising – downright skinny.)

The clock ticked on. At ten past, the fear of having been stood up began to bubble up from somewhere low down. Bugger Fuck Damn! He hated this. He hated putting himself out, taking a chance and basically handing some arse his heart and saying ‘here kick this around for a bit will ya?’ Fuck. He had a half hour rule. Anyone could be late by half an hour, buses break down, keys snap off in your door as you’re locking it, muggings, monsoons, freak snow storms (the last two admittedly a bit unlikely in Edinburgh). There were real reasons to be late a half an hour. Beyond that you were just irresponsible.

The door opened again and someone came in. John looked. Oooh, he’s alone, good start. Cute, in good shape (lithe, would you describe that as lithe?). John sat a bit straighter and pasted on his open-faced, slight smile, yes-I’m-waiting-for-someone expression, and waited for the cute guy to make his way over. But cute guy turned towards the bar and appeared to spot someone. He made his way over and spoke to the guy. Shit. They ordered drinks. Bugger. He was not the right one. Bollocks.

Sitting, staring into the nearly empty rum and coke, John knew the night was a bust. Stood up. He thought of just slinking home, but he knew that this arse deserved some rebuke. You don’t get to be so casual with someone’s feelings and get away with it. But what if there was a genuine reason for it? What if things could be fine and the rebuke spoiled that? What if someday they’d laughingly tell their kids the story of how they didn’t meet the first time? The fantasy, the hope briefly flitted through John’s mind only to be stamped out by his pride. No. This idiot wasn’t going to get away with it. And he certainly wasn’t going to get a second chance. Tony had John’s mobile number and could have called.

Pulling out his mobile John pecked out the message on the keypad. Arsehole. Thanks for standing me up. – J

Pressing send he downed the last of his drink and stood up to go. As he passed the table of the cute skinny guy on the way to the door, he heard the chime of a mobile.

Mixers 3
by Joan MacDonald

Robby bounced in the door from the garage with a loud “Hi, I’m home, when’s dinner?”, put his clarinet case down on the deacon’s bench and aimed his jacket at the coat hook in the entrance to the kitchen. His parents smiled at each other, sensing Robby’s mood as indicating he’d had a great day at school – a good sign!

“How was band practice?” they both asked – at the same time - which wasn’t unusual. It was a habit that had developed over the course of their lives together till they were no longer aware of it. They were alike in so many ways and hardly ever disagreed on anything more than who should empty the dishwasher. Robby had always accepted their compatibility as normal in a family until he was in high school, when several friends had confided in him about the constant bickering between their parents that just tore them apart and made them feel so helpless. They said all they wanted to do was get through school and move out. Robby felt really sad for them, but at the same time it made him realize how lucky he was to have loving parents and a happy home. In fact, he often told his parents that unless he met the girl of his dreams, he was never moving out – and they would reply that they might have something to say about that!

While they ate dinner, they talked about the band concert coming up that week-end. Robby said everyone in the band was pumped and sure the parents would be blown away by it – in contrast to the last concert when some of the clarinets hadn’t quite made the high notes, causing something of a fingernails on blackboard effect and the trumpet player’s music fell off the music stand just as he stood up to solo!

Robby said there was a party at his buddy Paul’s house after the concert and that everyone was welcome to bring a date. Paul knew he and his girlfriend had broken up and he wasn’t going out with anyone and he suggested if Robby didn’t mind a blind date, he could ask his cousin Corinne if she would go with him. Paul said she and her family had just moved back to town and he wanted to ask her to the party but she didn’t know any local guys yet – he figured this could be the answer for both Robby and Corinne and he told Robby he thought they’d really get along well.

“So what do you think?” said Robby “Should I take a chance and say ‘yes’ and hope for the best? I don’t think Paul would set me up with someone I just couldn’t get along with, especially when he knows how much everyone is looking forward to partying after the concert. There are so many bad jokes about blind dates that it’s hard to imagine one turning out well – what do you two think?”

“Yes, sometimes a blind date can end before it even gets off the ground, but if things go right, sometimes, it can last a lifetime” said John and Tony, as they smiled at each other across the table.

The Michelangelo Query

2009-03-02T14:07:00.001-08:00

Whenever a book hits the Ground Zero of public opinion and turns into a nuclear blast, I always feel compelled to go in after the fact with my Geiger-counter to see what all the fuss is about.

When I wrote this, that book was The DaVinci Code. Every damned person I talked to was reading it or had just finished it — so I read it, too. I have to admit, it was a potboiler. I finished it within the span of a few days, whenever I got a chance. It’s mystifying to me, though, that a book can be so compelling, yet so very bad. The characterisations, the descriptions, the way elements of the story were introduced — it was a train-wreck of a thing. I kept thinking about it, though. It’s a systematic deconstruction of Christianity. I grew up in that tradition, and, although I left it a long time ago, I still felt challenged by this story’s argument, and had to do some thinking and research of my own. In the process, I discovered that the author’s research is terrible, shoddy stuff. When Christian and secular scholars can agree that a piece of work is devoid of any truth, you know something’s up.

I’m not a proponent of fan fiction or other derivative work, but I felt compelled to digest my experience of The DaVinci Code by writing a story of my own, a bit of a piss-take, as they say here.

The Michelangelo Query

Stewart woke up, comfortable in his bed, and checked to see if he was still a heathen.

He was.

He hadn’t been to church in a decade, mainly because he could no longer consider himself a Christian. He grew up with a simple faith, fostered in his parents’ congregation back in the islands. It had been unravelling for years, though, and his tutelage under Professor Duncan of the University of Edinburgh provided the final tug that made it fall apart completely. Duncan used books to take Stewart back to a time “Before the Common Era”, showing him the patterns underlying his faith — the Christian motifs, characters, and events that had been lifted wholesale from other cultures. Persia, Egypt, Greece, Asia, Syria, Italy — the dying god-man was everywhere.

The professor stole from him, and Stewart could never forgive him. Nonetheless, he idolised the man’s mind. Faith was no longer a thing of substance for him; intellect was all.

Faith had been like a warm blanket wrapped around him at home in front of the fireplace, whereas his intellectual search was more of an Arctic expedition: he was stronger for it, but not necessarily better off.

Stewart closed his eyes, waiting the four remaining minutes until his alarm was set to go off. How does my body wake me up on time like that?, he wondered. It seemed uncanny, but he dismissed his wonder, assuring himself that there was a rational explanation, even if he didn’t have it.

~

Stewart climbed the hill, hearing Professor Duncan before he saw him. When the man came into view, Stewart saw him raging at a number of construction workers. “This isn’t an office building, it’s an historic treasure. You can’t just come in here tearing things apart and driving over it all with your machinery. This spot is situated on the vertex of several—”

“Professor!” Stewart interrupted, before his mentor got into discussing ley-lines with the workies. The men watched the professor with bored eyes, not taking any note of what he’d been saying.

“Stewart! Thank the many gods you’re here. Can you please talk to these men and get them to stop what they’re doing before they cause irreparable damage?”

Stewart agreed, asking the professor to wait in his car, which was a block away. When the professor was gone, Stewart apologised. He told the men that they should keep doing whatever they were doing and ignore the old man, who was “losing it”.

What bothered him most about saying this was that it was the first time he’d admitted this fact to himself.

~

Duncan shuffled a stack of papers in the passenger seat. “If you look at the way these lines intersect on the statue of David, it’s clearly a message Michelangelo Buonarroti has buried in the figure.” He pointed out dots that he’d drawn on a photocopied picture of the statue.

Stewart failed to see the pattern.

“We have to go to the National Gallery.”

None of this had anything to do with Stewart’s job. He was paid to be a tutor for Professor Duncan’s classes, but he had a growing suspicion that the university had hired him to act as a babysitter for the man until he retired or died.

He started the engine.

~

“Look at the way Achilles is holding the inert figure of Patroclus. Patroclus is wearing Achilles’ armour. David was given armour by Saul to wear into battle against Goliath…”

Stewart didn’t even pretend to follow these trains of thought anymore. He waited while they passed, one after another.

“Why David? Of all the figures he could have chosen from the Bible for the Medici commission…”

He paced back and forth, more interested in his thoughts than in the painting’s rich tones and the dramatic scene it portrayed, with the hero mourning the death of his ghostly pale lover, whom his armour had failed to protect.

“Achilles and Patroclus. Damon and Pythias, Hercules and Hylas, Pylades and Orestes. Of course! David and Jonathan.”

The man pulled at the beard growing down his neck. “D is the fourth letter of the alphabet. A is the first… Four, one, twenty-two, nine, four. That adds up to forty. Four plus zero is four. Four! Yes, of course! David’s father was Jesse, and his lover was Jonathan. Joseph… Judas…” He turned excitedly to Stewart. “It all points to Rosslyn Chapel. Stewart, Rosslyn is the resting place of the bones of Jesus’ lover — Judas Iscariot!”

Stewart put on a face of awe and nodded. He followed the professor out of the gallery, hanging behind at the doorway long enough to make a phone-call.

~

Professor Duncan rushed into the chapel, a small church whose every surface was pale, intricately carved stone. Arches passed overhead, with sides, front, and back tucked in tightly. The overall effect was like a well-decorated whale skeleton with stained-glass windows.

The professor ignored the endless tiny pagan and Christian sculptures and headed straight for the basement. Stewart ran to keep up with him, descending into the damp space beneath the chapel. The air here had a cool, earthy smell, which emanated from the ground at their feet. Duncan eased himself down to the floor and started clawing. “There must be an opening here somewhere,” he said, as his nails scratched dryly against the stone and dirt.

A figure stepped into the light at the top of the stairs.

“Stewart,” said the professor, frantic, “don’t let them stop me. We’re on the verge of discovering-” But the professor stopped. “Sharon?”

His niece stepped down toward them. “Hello, Uncle Jack. I think you should come home with me.”

~

Stewart tried not to look at the professor as his niece led him from the chapel back toward the gift shop entrance. He couldn’t help seeing the confusion and hurt on his mentor’s face.

“Don’t feel bad,” said a young man with red hair, resting a hand gently on his shoulder. Stewart inferred that he was a curator of some sort. “It happens all the time here. Yesterday it was someone searching for the key to Atlantis. God knows what it’ll be next.”

They looked out at the churchyard, where a man in a tweed jacket was rushing toward them, followed by a woman with dark red hair. “Here comes another one,” said the curator. “Excuse me, will you?” said the young man as he left Stewart alone.

~

Stewart walked back to his car, then drove home. The university wouldn’t need him any more that afternoon, or perhaps at all now. That night, as he went to bed, he made the irrational decision to believe in God again.

Not in Our Backyard

2009-03-02T14:07:00.000-08:00

We did a special night of Argot, the reading series I used to host, to raise money for Amnesty International and Scottish PEN. This is the piece I wrote for that night.

Not in Our Backyard

My father was killed by World War II. Not in World War II. By.

Let me explain.

It was in May of 1985. I was seventeen, and my father decided he was going to build a pond in our back garden.

We’d been digging for about two hours, using shovels to tear out clods of the thick grass Dad had worked so hard to cultivate the year before. Our neighbour, Doug, was helping out - good of him, since it was such a hot day. The sky was a magnifying glass for the sun. Then Doug asked, “You did ask the Council about this, right?”

Dad stopped his digging. He leaned his thin frame on the shovel, the sweat soaked through his vest. I knew the look on his face: he was trying to come up with something on the spot. This obviously hadn’t occurred to him. After a beat, he snapped, “I don’t have to ask the bloody Council for permission to put a pond in my own back garden!”

Doug shied back from the retort. Their friendship was largely founded on Dad bullying and one-upping Doug.

“Maybe we should stop, and you can ring–”

“It’s Saturday, Doug. Those civil servants don’t work a minute more than they have to during the week, let alone on a Saturday. Keep digging.”

I looked at the back door of the house, thinking of a hundred things inside that I’d rather be doing. My mother was away at her sister’s, and Dad was determined to have this pond finished as a surprise for her when she got back. I suppose it was a nice enough gesture, except he seemed more concerned about his wanting to give this pond to her than whether or not she’d actually want one. She’d never asked for a pond. She didn’t like sitting outside, and was forever worrying about getting sunburnt. Her sister had one of those sunbed fixations and always looked like tanned leather; I think my mum was afraid of winding up like that.

Mum was due back the next morning in time for church, so we just had the afternoon. “Dig,” my father said to me.

“Maybe Doug has a poi–”

“Dig!”

I dug. I didn’t care about the Council, either. I just thought it might be a way out of Dad’s stupid project. But my father had this notion that I was a lazy teenager - mainly because I was - and was forever scheming to invent things for me to do. Once Dad saw a picture of this God-awful fountain in a magazine and started talking about it in hushed tones, I knew I was done for.

We’d dug a few feet deeper when my shovel struck something. “Dad,” I said.

“Keep digging.”

“No, Dad, there’s something under here.”

We worked to clear the earth from around it, but after half an hour we’d only uncovered the top of it. It was a huge cylinder, like an oversized metal barrel.

“Oh my God,” said Doug.

“What?” asked my father.

“That’s– That’s a bomb!”

“That’s not a bomb.” He looked around. “That must be the old cistern, from before the house was hooked up to the city sewage.” He looked at Doug. “What’s the matter? Are you scared?”

“Gaz, I’ve heard of this, of unexploded bombs. They’re all over Britain, left over from the Second World War from when the Germans–”

Dad hit the metal shape with his shovel. It clanged, and Doug flinched.

“Gaz,” he said, “we should stop. You have no idea what that is. If you’d asked the Council, maybe they’d have shown you the plans f–”

“Doug, are you helping me, or are you not? Make a decision, if you’re capable.”

“I’m sorry, Gaz, I can’t. It’s–” He broke off, putting down his shovel and waking backwards out of the garden. “Sorry.” He turned and left.

Dad and I stood for a minute, looking at the huge, rusty thing. “Well,” he said, “get to it.” We scooped away loads of sod and topsoil, piling them in the corner of the garden, both of us avoiding the shape, neither of us mentioning it, until Dad had finally had enough. “That,” he said, pointing to it with his shovel, “will have to go.” I was in mid-scoop, and my shovel struck something hard again.

“Dad,” I said.

“I don’t want to hear your whinging. We can’t very well leave it there. Or did you want to make it the centrepiece of the fountain?”

“Dad, I’ve hit something else here.” I cleared away some of the earth. The sun had gone, and it was raining lightly, making the work messier, but I’d clearly uncovered concrete.

“Bloody hell, what is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“It all has to go. Whatever that is, it’s coming out, along with the cistern.”

“They’re too big, Dad.”

“Just keep digging. We’ll clear around the edges, then I’ll call Barry. He can bring one of his trucks to haul them away. Then we’ll use this topsoil to fill in the hole.”

Dad hadn’t liked Barry ever since Barry started a demolition company and got rich. Well, rich relative to us. If Dad was willing to admit he needed help - from Barry no less - things were pretty desperate.

Doug came back with some of the other neighbours. They watched and pointed as Dad and I worked. Finally Dad stopped and smoked, defying them as he stood silently in his garden. I kept working. I’d cleared off three sides of a concrete rectangle. It rained in earnest now, and the neighbours left.

“I can’t do any more, Dad, not without digging out the–”

“The cistern.”

“The cistern. Yeah. It’s right on top of this concrete– whatever it is.”

“Let’s dig it out, then.”

Our shovels sucked and slurped as we dug around the thing angled in the dirt that looked less and less like a cistern the more we saw of it. We started our excavation by digging down one side of it. Its top was blunt, rounded, sticking out now toward the sky. When we reached the lower end, it was different, tapered, ending in a ring like a collar. Our hands slipped as we cleared off its rusty surface. We found words stencilled on its tail, unmistakably un-English. We both fell backwards from it, scuttling away in the mud like bugs. We crawled across the exposed concrete. It cracked beneath us, then the wet, deteriorated surface gave way under our combined weight. We fell about ten feet. I struck the floor of the small room and was winded. My leg was sticking out from under me at an angle it shouldn’t have been able to. My father lay, his eyes scrunched closed, half on the floor, half against the wooden bench he’d struck.

I looked up at the grey sky, my face pelted with rain. I took gasping breaths. Then I saw it, the huge bomb, as it fell from its resting place and tipped toward us, obscuring the sky. The earth shook as its side hit the ground, then it slid forward toward us. But it stopped. My father opened his eyes, and saw the metal hulk hanging over us.

I knew my father was just a man. I was too far into my teens and had seen him defeated too many times to still believe he had any dominion over anything other than the family. But I was terrified. I needed him to rescue me from this situation. This situation he’d forced us into.

“Something’s wrong with my leg, Dad,” I said.

“No bloody kidding,” he said, laughing with some difficulty. I laughed, too, in spite of the pain that threatened to make me pass out.

“This is a bomb shelter,” laughed my father.

“We were talking in class the other day about irony,” I said. “I didn’t get it then. I think I do now.”

My father and I spent the night down there, both of us unable to move, wondering every moment if the bomb was going to kill us. I dared to take his hand, and he accepted. Dad tried to speak to me a few times, but he was too badly hurt, and we were both too frightened to find anything to say. We spent several hours shivering, holding onto each other’s hand across the room. Exhausted, we both finally fell asleep like that.

I woke up the next morning with sun piercing into my eyes, leaking into the opening of the roof overhead. I looked at my father. In the night, the bomb had slipped further into the hole and crushed his torso. He was dead.

I heard something on the news this morning about a bombing raid in some remote country or another that no one in Britain will ever even visit, let alone be affected by. We dropped over four hundred bombs in an afternoon. I can’t imagine four hundred bombs.

I can only imagine one.

The Half-Dead House

2009-03-02T14:06:00.000-08:00

A tale from an Edinburgh tenement...

The Half-Dead House

The tenement stairway was always dark. The frosted skylight on the top floor let in only the faintest grey illumination.

Mrs Johnston opened her door a sliver and looked out. Seeing no one, she snuck out as best she was able to. Her body was a twisted old oak that had been hit several times by lightning strikes of arthritis and mini-strokes.

Her ankle wiggled painfully as she stepped on tiny army-men of uniform green colour. She cursed under her breath and stooped to pick up the little figures. She tried to think of something to do with them. With a smile, she remembered War of the Worlds, and brought the soldiers back through to the microwave in her kitchen.

Mrs Johnston headed down the stairs five minutes later, off to buy her groceries. In front of her neighbours’ door lay a green plastic disc from which tiny arms, legs, and heads emerged like cursed, drowning things.

~

“Wee Alec” Newsome was home from school again, while teachers and behaviour specialists tried to figure out a way to educate him without further harm to the rest of the student body. They dreaded to think what he would be like when he reached the double-digits. For now, he got a lot of mileage out of looking cute. It worked on his mother, who thought he was adorable, and enjoyed the extra company.

Alec was downstairs, trying to find a way to open the mysterious green wooden door. It might contain a grass trimmer or spare string for the communal washing-line, but he imagined it hid the entrance to vast underground vaults.

“Hello, Wee Alec.”

Alec was sprawled out, trying to see into the crack underneath the door. He looked up to see Mrs Johnston. She gave him a smile like a battered picket fence in need of painting.

“Hullo, Mrs Johnston.”

“I think your wee soldiers had an accident,” she said.

The boy’s eyes sprung open. He righted himself and flew up the stairs. Mrs Johnston heard a wailing sound and smiled to herself as she left the tenement.

~

“What’s the matter?” asked the postman.

Alec stayed tight-lipped and shook his head.

“Is Mrs Johnston home? Ah’ve got these to give her.” The postman held a small cardboard box the size of a book, and an envelope.

Alec started shaking his head, then got an idea. “I’ll give ‘em t’er.”

“What a nice lad,” said the postman, handing over the parcel and the letter, ruffling the boy’s hair. Alec gave him a big smile. Something about it unnerved the man, though. He wasn’t sure if it was the red-tinged eyes or the number of teeth.

There was nothing wrong with Alec’s reading skills. The book proved to be a boring collection of abridged stories. The letter was much more interesting. It contained a cheque. He recognized cheques because his mother was always happy when she got them in the mail. He proceeded to endorse it in crayon, drew several gruesome pictures of Mrs Johnston on it, then let it drop in pieces like snow from his bedroom window.

~

One afternoon Alec’s mother sent him out into the hallway to play, saying his Christmas crafts were too messy for indoors. In actual fact, dipping string into white glue was his attempt to make a human-sized spider web.

Mrs Johnston unbolted the five locks on her door and emerged with a wreath, seemingly made of black plastic holly and discarded red buttons. She was about to hang it on her door when a man sprung up the stairs.

“It’s just up here,” the man called back down. Moments later, the movers came into sight with several pieces of multi-coloured furniture.

The man wore a bright green jumper with several reindeer stitched across its front. “Hi there!” he said to Alec and Mrs Johnston. “My name’s Doug. I’m your new neighbour!” His smile beamed broad and white, and his cheeks were a joyful pink. “Oh, here,” he said, handing each of them a small card. “I’m going to be having a party. Nothing loud, just a little festive get-together so we can become acquainted as neighbours.”

When he left, Mrs Johnston spoke carefully to Alec: “We have to get rid of him.”

Alec nodded.

She was about to go in, but turned back. “Happy Christmas,” she said with a jagged smile.

Going On

2009-03-02T14:04:00.000-08:00

Every year the Toronto Star has a story writing contest, and it’s got a big, fat prize of $10,000. How could I not send something in? But the kinds of things I usually write, well, they’re not your average Sunday morning cup-of-coffee-and-a-paper fare. So I decided to stretch myself, to write something a little more Oprah-riffic…

Going On

“Look, this just isn’t working,” he said. “Stop the car and I’ll get out.”

“Please,” she begged, “can’t we give it one more try? We’ve both invested so much time into this.”

“Okay,” he said, “just one more try.”

She pulled her car up alongside one that was parked, then put it into reverse. Slowly, twisting the manual steering hand over hand with all her might, she angled the car backwards into the empty spot. Her rear tire bumped up onto the curb and stuck there. She had to give the engine more gas to get the car to leave its perch, but when she did, it leapt backwards and plowed hard into the car behind her. She straightened the wheel and pulled forward.

The driving instructor released his grip from the dashboard, took off his seatbelt, and got out of the car. He took a notepad from the inside pocket of his red driving school windbreaker. He started making notes for the accident report he’d have to file.

“I’m sorry,” said Carol, getting out of the car. “I know I’m no good — not yet — but I really need to be able to drive this car.”

The instructor didn’t raise his eyes. “There are some people who are just not cut out for driving. It should be hard to get a license, because a car can be a very dangerous weapon in the wrong hands.” He looked at her. “Hands like yours.”

“Please. If you don’t want to teach me, then hand me over to one of the other instructors.”

“This was our thirtieth lesson together. I really don’t believe that you’re going to get any better. And don’t give me any of that ‘It’s because I’m a woman’ nonsense, because I’ve had some female students who drove better than I do. I’m not going to recommend you to another teacher, because you’re just plain bad.”

Carol’s nose — the nose her husband once described as “perky” — snarled now. Just a few months ago, she would have been crying about this. Through the years she’d eaten enough humble pie to win a contest. But now something else was guiding her. And just as plain as the sun that morning it said to her, “Go on.”

Carol stared the man down, and without thinking, she spoke. “Has anyone ever told you that your toupée looks like very old roadkill?” Then she walked back to her car, got in, and locked the doors. She started it, and, purely by instinct, pulled the car easily from the parking spot.

The instructor ran beside the car, banging on the window, and shouted, “Hey! You’re not supposed to–”

But she was.

~

Carol walked through the shopping mall, looking for a job. She had a degree in social work, specializing in children’s welfare, but she’d not worked since graduating. When her mother suggested that she look for social work, Carol replied, “You need experience to get experience.”

Was it really such a crime to want to get married, stay home, and raise a family? Her brother told her that it was a waste of her potential. But what did he know? He was gay. Her friends, though, were no better, all going off to their careers, images of Lexus-driving supermoms in their heads. No, Carol had been a latch-key kid, and was not going to do that to her child.

She stopped at a beauty boutique. Okay, she figured, she’d been wearing makeup since she was thirteen. How hard could it be to sell it?

Moments later, she was sitting on a wooden bench, pen poised over an application form. When she started writing her name, the pen pushed through the paper. She checked her trouser-leg; good, no mark. That saved a trip to the dry cleaners. She found a counter to lean on.

The form’s questions were simple enough, but the answers were hard.

When she finished filling out the application, she walked back into the shop and handed it to the pale waif behind the counter. Carol waited for the little nod that said, “I’ll hand this to the appropriate grown-up”, but instead the girl turned the paper around and started scrutinizing Carol’s answers.

“This, here, is this a store?” she asked, pointing.

“Um, no,” said Carol, “it was a camp, a day camp for deaf children.”

“Oh,” said the girl, and drew a ballpoint line through it.

The girl cocked her head. “Okay, I’ll just ask you straight out. The sign said ‘Experience Required’. Do you have, like, any retail experience?”

“No,” said Carol.

“God! Can nobody read? I mean, how hard is it to understand? ‘Experience Required’.”

Carol’s stomach went cold. Never in her life, she thought, would she get used to people being rude to her. Maybe it’s just because most people aren’t, she figured, that it’s always so shocking, so unexpected. And she’d been shopping in this store for years. This was where she got that lipstick that her husband Rob liked so much, the one she wore that night. She and her friend were going to see a show at the Royal Alex, but Rob couldn’t go because he was on call. And when she got home, she found out he was gone.

“Go on,” said the voice to her again, as real as the girl, as real as the fluorescent light and the fragrances in the air.

Carol reached over and straightened the lapels of the girl’s makeup lab coat with a jerk. Again, the words just flowed out. “You have so much foundation on, you look like a corpse.” She smiled, “But it suits you. It’s very… peaceful.” She turned and walked out in her most triumphant Angie Dickinson style.

~
Carol ran on the endless black ribbon of the treadmill. Through her radio headphones, she heard the song “Road to Nowhere”. The irony struck her as funny at first, but when it started attaching itself to other meanings in her head, she plucked the radio off and dropped it on her towel. Perhaps the gesture was too grand, because the woman on the next machine was looking at her.

“Song remind you of something?” the woman asked.

“Oh, uh, no. I just wanted a bit of quiet.”

“Ha! In a gym? No such luck. And listen to the songs they play, these love dirges.” The mass of the woman’s frizzy red hair bobbed with her paces.

“I hadn’t really noticed,” said Carol.

“Oh, please,” said the woman, incredulous but friendly, “the first thing that happens when you get dumped is you start understanding songs. It’s like the village well getting poisoned: suddenly you notice it in the malls, in your car, at work — everywhere — this soundtrack of miserable, desperate songs. ‘I can’t breathe when you’re not here’, ‘There’s no point going on without you’, ‘Loving you is like an aneurysm’.”

Carol laughed.

“Ah, see. You do know what I’m talking about,” the woman said, smiling back. She looked with a tilted head at Carol. “You look like you’re in Stage Two.”

Okay, figured Carol, letting down her defenses, this was worth hearing. “What’s Stage Two?”

“Self-reinvention,” said the woman. “Symptoms include piercing, tattoos, night classes, and, most commonly, fitness.”

“Wait then,” asked Carol, missing a step on the rubber belt, stumbling to regain her stride. She pressed a button several times to adjust the treadmill’s speed. “What’s Stage One?”

“Well, for me it’s ice cream. Very cheap ice cream, the foamy vanilla kind that comes in a box. But it varies. For other people the wounded dog act comes most naturally: ‘Leave me alone, I’m just going off to lie in a corner and die’. You’re lucky you made it to Stage Two. When did he leave you?”

“Just three months ago,” said Carol, her steps getting heavy. But she kept running.

“The bastard!’

“No, no, it wasn’t like that,” she insisted.

“Now, don’t make excuses for him.”

“No, really.” Carol hesitated to tell the next part, because it always sounded so extreme and put such pressure on the listener. “He was killed.”

“Oh, God, I’m so sorry,” said the woman. She put her hand to her mouth, embarrassed, and stopped running.

“Don’t be,” said Carol, “it’s all right.” For some reason, she liked this woman, and wanted to tell her everything. “My husband and I both studied social work. He was doing child protection, and that night he went out on this call to take a little boy out of a dangerous domestic situation. I guess he got in the middle of it. He got stabbed in the neck.” Carol stared out the long windows of the gym at a patch of open sky just above a dark concrete slab of a building. “He died right away.”

She heard a sound from the woman and turned see she was crying. Carol put her hand on the woman’s arm. “It’s all right. I’m gradually getting used to it. At first it seemed like he was just away on vacation, even though I saw him laid out at the wake. But now I’m getting the idea.” She forced a smile. “Are there any other stages to look forward to?”

The woman swallowed hard and dried her eyes. “Uh, yeah, just one: Stage Three.”

“And what’s that?”

“You go on.”

The look on Carol’s face surprised the woman. “What is it? Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I am,” said Carol. She picked up her radio and towel. “Thank you. I really mean it.” She started to leave, but turned back. “I don’t know your name.”

“Ruth.”

“Thanks, Ruth,” said Carol, extending a hand. Ruth smiled and they shook hands heartily. “I’ll see you again sometime.”

~
Carol waited. She picked up a Reader’s Digest and read an unfunny joke. Then she tested her word power (which was, apparently, formidable), read about a new treatment for heart disease (which made no mention of avoiding it in the first place), and then skimmed through the “Quotable Quotes” (which she couldn’t imagine ever wanting to repeat).

Since when was she so cynical? she wondered. Sure she found herself funnier than she’d ever been, but if this was what funny cost, she wanted no part of it. She was going to become a not-nice person, someone she wouldn’t want to know.

She put the magazine down. She’d been hurt, that’s all. And now she was being more cautious, prepared for letdowns. But you can’t prepare, can you, she thought. It just happens, and it’s always a surprise.

“The doctor will see you now.”

Carol looked up at the nurse. Please, please, please, she thought, no surprises.

A few minutes later, she was sitting on the edge of the vinyl-covered examination table with her allotment from the paper towel roll crinkling beneath her. The doctor came into the room with a chart in his hand.

“Well,” he said, looking at the chart, “I’m not sure what result you wanted, Mrs. Long, but the test came back negative. You’re not pregnant.”

She put on her best brave face. “Thank you,” she said, gathering up her coat and purse.

“Did you want to talk about the test results,” he asked.

“Nope,” she said.

Doubtful, but respecting her answer, the doctor nodded and left the room. Carol closed the door behind him, dropped her things, and sobbed. The strange room was covered with posters with big, informative letters on them and tiny pharmaceutical company logos at the bottom. Some had plastic cutaways of the female anatomy that made it look like strange cuts of meat. There were pamphlets and sample packages. But none of it had anything to do with her, because she was not pregnant.

A new round of crying took her. This was her last connection to Rob — the chance to have their child and raise it. And now that was gone, too.

She sat on the floor, not caring if anyone should come in and find her. Her nose started to run, but she didn’t care about that, either.

“Go on,” said the voice.

She begrudgingly laughed through her tears. This is ridiculous, she thought, there wasn’t even anyone there to insult. What was this voice here for? What was it saying?

“Go on.”

She felt a chill. Was it her husband? No, but it was that familiar. She tested the character of the voice in her mind. It was a voice she heard every day, but wasn’t used to hearing out loud.

It was her voice. And it was telling her to get up, to do something, anything, but not to stop.

She stood up and took a tissue from the box on the gray desk in the office. She blew her nose, wiped the tears from her cheeks, and got her things together.

~

The car sold quickly, and eventually the house sold, too. It made Carol uncomfortable, having all this money. Well, the money part was good, it was just the reason she had it that she hated. But in the past couple of months it had allowed her to move to a little apartment downtown and do some volunteer work. In fact, it looked like she was about to be hired on as a staff member soon.

Now that she was finding the right outlets for her energy, she’d stopped telling everyone off, too. She even made a point of revisiting some of her previous crime scenes to make amends.

She’d got a cat from the shelter, thinking it would give her some companionship. But it was standoffish and messy. Rob had been messy. But she could sleep with Rob. And he didn’t make her sneeze. She eventually acknowledged that she was resenting the little creature, and gave it away to someone at work. He was all excited about getting it, but now Carol had no idea what the attraction was. She’d stick to humans for partners. And that was a ways off, she figured.

It was summer now, and she was involved with her friends, going to clubs, boating, and up to their cottages. She received her share of looks and the odd offer of a drink. And that was really nice. But not quite yet. She knew it would happen eventually, though.

Because she was going on.

Spirits

2009-03-02T14:03:00.000-08:00

Just what's in those bottles, anyway?

Spirits

Angus rolled down Cockburn Street in a shopping trolley. Its wheels flipped back and forth beneath him, juddering over the cobbles. The street curved below and he was sure to crash into one of the cars parked there, but he didn’t care. He leaned his head back and laughed as he looked at the strings of coloured lights passing overhead. He was full of the Christmas spirit. It was just one of several spirits he’d had in him that evening.

~

“That should make things run faster,” said Angus, making a few final clicks on his mother’s computer.

“Thank you,” said his mother. She shoogled her bum onto the seat next to him, pushing him half off. “Take a look at this,” she said, taking control of the mouse. With a few clicks, she pulled up a picture of someone with Fidel Castro’s face on Jacques Cousteau’s body.

“Who’s that?” asked Angus.

“It’s a friend of mine.”

“Hardly looks like someone from around Newhaven.”

“No, he lives in Peru. We’ve been chatting on the Internet for a few months. He’s really fascinating.” She pulled up several pictures of the man, on a beaches, in forests, but all of them sharing a similar feature.

“He doesn’t wear much, does he?”

“People in Peru are much more liberated than we are,” said. “I’ve learnt a lot from talking to him.”

“Mum–” he started, but cut himself off. My God, he thought, my mother has a Peruvian boyfriend from the Internet. “I’m going to check on dinner.”

“Oh, thank you,” she said, zooming in on a picture. Angus turned his head so he couldn’t see.

“Could you find your father and call him in for supper?”

“Sure, Mum.”

Angus went downstairs, where a tiny boy attacked his legs with a wooden sword.

“Ow!” cried Angus, pushing the boy away by the head. The boy bit him and yelled at the top of his lungs.

“Angus!” chided his sister. “Play nice with him.”

“But he–”

“You know what he’s been going through, with Steven and I split and all.”

“But– Nevermind. Where’s Dad?”

“I think he’s outside.”

Angus looked in the back garden, finding the toolshed open, but there was no sign of his father. He headed back through the house to look in the front garden. He took three steps onto the grass and fell into a deep hole.

“Gotcha, ya bastard!” said his father’s voice. It came from something beside him, something the colour of mud. He felt a knife against his throat.

“Da, it’s me!”

“Oh, sorry son. I thought you were Steven.”

“No, Da, it’s just me.”

“He said he was coming tonight to take Ben. This time I’m ready. It’s just like those bastarding Argentineans in the Falklands all over again.”

“Is it now?” said Angus, climbing up the dirt wall of the hole.

He was blinded by the headlights of a car pulling up the drive. Shielding his eyes, he recognised Steven’s car.

Angus’s father roared and charged from the hole to the car. Angus ran back to the house, got his coat, and headed toward town.

~

Angus saw the bus station ahead. He’d made up his mind on the way to town: he was going back to school to spend the holidays there.

All he wanted was a normal life — a normal Christmas with a normal family — and he was reminded once and for all that would never have such a thing.

He pictured his family recast as smiling, laughing, and sane, wearing matching jumpers and drinking cocoa by a fire — a log fire, not a rolling gas one. With a smile on his face, Angus stepped into the road and was hit by a bus.

~

“Angus?”

He opened his eyes and saw his grandmother’s face.

“Nana?”

“You missed your bus.” She cackled: “But it didn’t miss you!”

“But you’re dead,” he said.

“You’re lucky not to be,” she replied.

He leaned up on his elbows and found himself in the bus station parking bay. His grandmother danced on the pavement in front of him, the way she used to do when she’d had a wee tipple.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” she said, twirling toward him. She leaned down and handed him a note. “Here’s twenty quid. Go out and have a drink on me.”

“Since when do the dead have money?”

“Nobody said it was mine.” She stood up. “Before this night is over, you’ll visit with a number of spirits. They’ll show you what you need to see.”

Angus pulled himself up. When he looked for his grandmother again she was gone.

~

“We don’t have any eighty shilling,” said the barmaid.

“Alright, a lager,” said Angus.

“No beer.”

“No beer?!” He looked around the bar, which was decorated with aluminium spiral staircases and random words spelt out in neon.

“Just spirits.”

“Er, vodka and Coke,” he said — the first thing that came to mind. A moment later, the barmaid handed him a glass of black sugar-water that had a sharp aftertaste.

“Hello,” said a woman in the seat beside him. Angus hadn’t noticed her. She was a slim blonde whose legs were crossed to one side of the bar stool.

“Hello,” he answered.

She leaned forward to examine him more closely, then offered him her hand. “I’m Naya,” she said.

Something in her voice was foreign. Slavic? Russian? He took her hand, and immediately felt more relaxed. “I’m Angus,” he said.

“So what are you doing out on Christmas Eve, Angus?” she asked.

“Ah, I’m just getting away from my family for a bit.”

“Not looking for a little company?”

As she said it, he realised he was feeling amorous. He smiled. She pointed across the room. “What about her?” she asked.

“Holy–!” he said. “That’s Kate from sixth year.” He turned excitedly back to Naya, but her seat was empty. She’d left him with a feeling of confidence, and he found himself crossing the room toward Kate.

“Hiya,” he said, sitting across from her in the red leather booth.

“Erm.”

“Angus. Angus Beaghan from sixth year.”

“No!”

“Yes,” he said with a smile. He cocked his head at her, imagining how things would have been different if they’d kept dating. “Why didn’t things work out between us?” he said, finding the words sticking on his teeth like toffee.

“Angus, you told me you thought you might be gay.”

“Oh yeah, that. Well, people change.”

“I fancied you rotten Angus. That was cruel, going out with me then telling me that.”

“So you don’t want to give it another try?”

“Hello?” said a deep voice. Angus looked up and saw a broad-shouldered man.

“Angus, this is my boyfriend.”

“I should go,” said Angus.

“You should go,” said Kate.

Angus slid from the booth onto the floor. He quickly found his feet, waved, and left the bar.

~

The chandeliers glittered over Angus’s head, and the carpet felt unusually soft and deep beneath his feet. He’d heard of this place, a private club for lawyers, but he’d never mustered the courage to look for it before. The bar was a long, dark, wooden affair, and it called to him.

“G&T,” said Angus to the barman, who wore a black bowtie, white shirtsleeves, and a black vest.

The man handed Angus his drink. “Do you have an account?” he asked.

“Uh, no.”

“Then that’ll be £10.”

Ouch, thought Angus, doing some quick booze-math. His evening wouldn’t go on much longer at this rate. He handed over a tenner.

“Good choice,” said someone beside him. Angus turned and saw a gentleman in a black tuxedo and a cream silk scarf. His gloves lay on the bar. “Lord Gin,” said the man, extending a hand.

Angus looked at him for a second, then accepted the handshake. He felt good in the man’s company, sharp, privileged for all the potential he had. He looked down and winced; it was a shame he’d left the house in dirt-covered blue jeans.

“You seem like a promising young lad,” said Angus’s new friend. “Are you a lawyer?”

“Well, not exactly,” he replied, “but I am studying law. I’ll graduate in a few more years.”

“Good enough for me,” said the man, lifting his drink in a toast. His expression turned grave. “I came from humble beginnings, but I worked hard to better myself. There’s nothing like success to take your mind off petty concerns.”

Angus liked that idea. When he was properly set up, none of this would matter. He loved his family, but he wasn’t like them. His concerns were, well, higher than theirs, weren’t they? he thought.

Lord Gin nodded his head, as if he were following Angus’s thoughts.

Someone tapped Angus on the shoulder. He turned to see the barman, now on his side of the bar. “One of the members has asked for you to leave.”

“But I belong here,” said Angus. He turned to get his friend’s support, but the man wasn’t there. “I have a right to be here,” he protested.

“Actually, you don’t. It’s a private club. If you can’t prove you’re a member, I’m going to have to ask you to go.”

“But–”

“Look, you’re not dressed properly, you’re not wearing a tie, you’re far too young to be a practising lawyer, you–”

“Alright, alright,” said Angus, getting to his feet, but his feet proved difficult to find. He grabbed the barman to steady himself. He stumbled back through the entrance and propped himself on the wall in front of the building. He looked at the doorman standing there. A feeling welled in him: he belonged inside. If he could just get a tie…

The doorman looked at Angus, who was hanging from his tie, holding on with both hands. “I thought you all wore clip–”

The barman threw him into the street. A bus honked its horn, narrowly missing him as he spun beside it.

~

Angus staggered through the cold black night toward a squat little building with a battered wooden sign that read “Bu’s House of Spirits”. He wrestled with the door, which needed a push when it looked like it should pull. He dropped himself onto a stool in front of the bar and looked around. It was warm in here, and everything that made up the décor — posters, furniture, old lamps, and instruments — shared the palette of tobacco-stained sepiatone picture.

A tall young woman was working the bar. She had straight, long hair and a round, friendly, but no-nonsense face. Her look said the words for her: What’ll you have?

What should I have? thought Angus.

“Have a whisky,” said a little man beside him. He wore an tattered tweed jacket and an old kilt. His beard was shaggy, but for all the rough edges, the man still had a friendly air.

Angus smiled at the barmaid and nodded. “I’ll have a whisky.” She held a small glass up to the spout of an upturned bottle and poured out a measure the same amber colour as everything else in the place. She handed him the drink and he paid her. He lifted his drink to the little man beside him and took a swig of it. The liquid burned the inside of his mouth, but felt soothingly warm as it went down toward his stomach. The kilted man touched his arm in approval, and Angus felt himself settle inside. This was exactly where he was supposed to be.

He looked around at the other patrons. They all looked like misfits, with long hair, laughing mouths short on teeth, or weathered faces, but they had each other for company, and it was enough.

“What’s your name?” Angus asked the man.

“They call me Old Gus.”

Angus smiled at the coincidence and settled his chin on his hand. He liked the people in this place, and felt he could stay here forever. It was funny, he thought, because these weren’t the kind of people he’d imagine himself keeping company with.

That’s it, isn’t it? he thought. It’s all about company. Maybe you choose your company, maybe it chooses you.

“I have to get home,” said Angus, sitting upright.

“But one more for the road,” he said with a grin. “Something different.”

~

“Thanks, um–?” said Angus to the new friend who helped him find his way out of the bar.

“Jack,” said the man, smiling on one one side of his mouth, a cigarette dangling from the other. He shot at Angus with his finger, then clicked away down the cobbled street in cowboy boots.

Angus felt wild inside, like he could do anything. He ran across the street, leaping to the median just as a bus flew past. He sprung to the other side then along the pavement, feeling like his shoes were the only thing holding him to the ground.

He passed through a large group of boys. One of them dribbled a football, and Angus, feeling playful and confident, being so much bigger, stole it and took it down the pavement a few steps.

“Oi!” yelled the boy.

“Just playin’,” said Angus with a smile, passing the ball back.

The pack of boys in shell-suits gathered around him. They were half his size, but there were so many of them. They closed in, and he felt himself being lifted. He struggled, but couldn’t get free until they pitched him forward into a shopping trolley. Five of them ran behind it, speeding him down Cockburn Street.

The coloured Christmas lights flashed overhead like strings of shooting stars. Angus laughed, wondering if anyone would have a normal Christmas.

One of the shopping trolley’s wiggling wheels stuck between the cobbles and Angus’s wire cage pitched forward, tumbling him out onto the street. He rolled several feet and looked up at a man standing beside a black cab.

“Can you take me home, please?”

Handsome Devil

2009-03-02T14:01:00.000-08:00

I was asked to co-curate a night in a reading series in 2000. The series is called Clit Lit (I know, I blush every time I mention it). It tends, as you might have guessed, to run along lesbian/feminist themes. This one night, though, was to be a men’s writing night. I suggested the name “Spunky”, and we ran with it. The evening went pretty well, and I got a good response to this piece, which was fun to write. It’s hard to get very deep with only a thousand words — all that a ten-minute slot allows. So I thought I’d have some fun…

Handsome Devil

Dean checked himself in the mirror. Again. He straightened his tie, then forcefully pulled it off. “I’m thirty years old and I don’t know how to dress myself!”

“Dean, it’s just a date,” said Lu, his neighbour from across the hall, who had also become his best friend. She flipped his collar out over the lapels of his brown sportscoat, then licked her hand and patted down a reprobate tuft of his black hair. Dean flinched at the touch of her licked hand. “Don’t worry — family germs,” she said. Then she led him away from the mirror, over to his puffy cream-coloured couch. Lu sat beside him, awkwardly propped there because of a large pillow she knew she was not to move: it covered a reminder-stain of his failed attempt to own a pet.

“He’s really nice,” said Dean, looking worriedly at his clasped hands, as if there were answers cupped in there. “As soon as I saw him in the car dealership, I fell for him. It’s what I do: I see them, I fall.”

“Well, he should at least have been impressed that you could afford to buy one of those audacious cars,” snarked Lu, who prided herself on being something of a culture-jammer. The hemp T-shirt she had on bore the logo of “Buy Nothing Day”.

“I doubt it: it’s his dealership. But when we talked, he didn’t seem to care about any of that. He really listened to me. He dropped a couple of hints that he liked men, and when I asked him if he’d like to go out for a drink, he said yes right away, like he’d known all along that I was going to ask, and he wanted me to. I swear, he seems different.”

Lu left Dean’s side and launched herself into the deep, green leather chair opposite him. “Oh, they all seem different at first.”

Dean dropped his head down onto the pillow. “I know, but then they always turn out the same. It’s ridiculous, but it’s like I keep meeting the same guy over and over. He’s sweet and beautiful and interested, and three weeks later he dumps me. What’s wrong with me? Is it my self-esteem? Do I look bad close-up? Or is there some kind of karmic lesson I have to learn before it works out? That guy in California, the one who kept insisting that I liked martinis, he told me I thought too much.”

“Dean, shut up. Don’t go down that tunnel. You’re perfect.” She stood up and crossed over to give him a friendly slap on the cheek. “Just try to let this date go however it goes. You’re too attached.”

“Maybe that’s it. You know? They always say you never find it when you’re looking for it. So if I can convince myself that I don’t want it… But if I’m only doing that because I do want it—”

“Dean, shut up. I’m calling you a cab.”

~

“Hi,” said Bob, presuming to place a kiss on Dean’s cheek, “you look great tonight.”

“You’ve only seen me once before!” said Dean, then checked himself. “I mean, thank you.”

Bob sat back down in the booth he’d reserved for them. Nice restaurant, thought Dean, maybe this will become our place. In the same moment he dismissed the thought as ridiculously presumptuous.

The waiter sidled up to them without a sound. “Would you care for anything to drink?” he asked.

Bob looked to Dean briefly for permission, then ordered before Dean could respond. “Two martinis, please.”

“Uh, no,” said Dean, “just one. I’ll have a Pernod.” The waiter left. “Sorry, I don’t like martinis.”

“Oh,” apologized Bob, “I could have sworn you said you liked them.” Dean shook his head, and looked askance at the other man. His shoulders shivered, that strange unconscious reaction his mother always referred to as “a ghost on your grave” and his father insisted was a mild form of epilepsy. Such was the balance in his family between flaky superstition and over-analytical rationalism. Unfortunately, Dean found both elements in himself, usually at war.

Dean soon found himself wrapped up in sweet conversation, enjoying everything this man had to say about himself, as if Bob had rehearsed this fascinating life story just for Dean’s benefit. Each anecdote made Dean more sure that this guy was it, The One. He tried to play cool, but the excitement occasionally crawled up into his voice, making it squeak embarrassingly.

Over the appetizers, talk turned briefly to religion. Dean was uncomfortable. He didn’t know much, he said, half ashamed of his ignorance, half worried that Mister Right would turn out to be Mister Right-Wing. Dean was pretty successful by anyone’s measures, but gays who forgot their marginal roots — finding Christ, talking about the lazy poor, vanishing off to the suburbs — they made him queasy. But when it became clear that Dean had little to say on the subject, Bob dropped it, claiming that people’s beliefs were just something he’d always had a curiosity about.

“Do you think two people can be made for each other?” asked Bob.

“I don’t know,” said Dean, “I’d like to think so, but I haven’t had the best time trying to find out.” Dean self-consciously bit his lip. He didn’t want to get into this, the first date exorcism of all the past loves, the self-pitying complaints—”men are pigs” and “I hate the gay scene” — salting the ground where new love might take root. “It’s just that I haven’t had a lot of luck dating. It’s never lasted past a couple of months.”

“Except for the guy at the boat club.”

“Yeah, exc—” Dean squinted at the man. “I didn’t tell you about that.”

Bob looked panicked. “No, uh, you did, at the, uh, the showroom. I was showing you the different colours the interior comes in. You told me about him, and then you told me about the trip you took to Majorca.”

“No,” insisted Dean, “we were talking about condo prices on the waterfront. I didn’t tell you about any of that.” Dean put his napkin on the table. “What’s going on here?” He cocked his head. “I said all those things on my last date. How can you know—?” He stood up, and felt that shiver again, the worst he’d felt it since his mother and he played with a Ouija board and someone claiming to be his five-years-dead grandmother told them that his father was cheating with a woman whose name (like his assistant’s) started with the letter ‘R’.

Dean felt the world suddenly shift to one side, and he didn’t recognize a thing. “You look different, but you’re him, aren’t you? You’re the guy I had my last date with.” He leaned on his steepled fingers. “It’s been you all along, hasn’t it?”

“Dean, I don’t know what—”

“Yes you do. Look at you: you’re not even really surprised by the idea.” He sat back down and put his napkin on his lap. At last, he was going to get to the bottom of this. “Who are you, really?”

“I—”

“Really.”

Bob took a deep breath and sat back. He sighed, and dropped his hands into his lap. “I’m the devil.”

“Ha!” Dean laughed. “I know that. But who are you?”

“No, Dean, I’m the devil.”

Dean stopped smiling. “You’re the… And you’re here just for me?”

“Well, I’m your devil. But I do have the authority of being the devil, too. In the same way that you’re Go — oh, but you don’t know about that. See, we’re not made to forget our nature. Nevermind. It’s not important. The point is, I’ve been with you all along.”

“What do you mean?”

“Remember Erin in kindergarten?”

“The one with the really straight hair who I played in the sandbox with. God, I’d forgotten all about her.”

“That was me.”

“You? But, you were a girl.”

“Yeah, I hadn’t quite figured out that part about you yet. So I was stuck being Erin for a year until she ‘moved away’ in first grade.” He sat forward, folding his hands together and leaning close, a familiarity that suddenly seemed warranted. “Who else do you remember? The ones you had a desperate crush on, who broke your heart.”

“Todd, my best friend in grade school.”

“Yup.”

“Well, that explains how you got the Yoda number 142 from the second Empire Strikes Back set. Nobody could get that card. Oh, and the McDonalds Monopoly sticker that you won all that money for.”

Bob smiled. “Everyone knew they didn’t print Ventnor Avenue. I was worried that would be a giveaway.”

“Stu, John, Rob…” he said, searching his memory and rhyming off names.

Bob nodded at them all. “Remember the guy on the streetcar last week?”

“No way! The one with the dog?”

“Yeah. Me. I know you like dogs.”

“Right,” said Dean, “so you’d know about mine, the one who ran away.”

“Dean, I was that dog.”

“What about my dad? Were you him, too?”

“No. He was just a bastard.”

“Oh.” Dean took it in, then smiled, strangely relieved: it wasn’t the answer he was looking for, but at least he finally had one. But there was still a piece missing. “Why?” he asked. “Why bother?”

“Well, you’ve heard the old ‘fallen from grace’ explanation for us, right?” Dean nodded. “That’s God’s half of the story. We were in love with him. But he was such a damned prude that it made him uncomfortable. So he started shutting us out. Finally we had to confront him with our feelings, and look what we got in return: complete and utter rejection. Cast out.” Bob looked at the candle on the table, then held his hand over it. His eyes tightened as the flame bent and licked his palm, but it did no damage to the flesh. “God is love, right? So if we can get you to destroy yourself over love, well, that’s the ultimate revenge, isn’t it?”

“So you want me to — what? — kill myself?” asked Dean, concerned.

“If you like. Or just live in misery. Your choice.”

Dean looked around, reorienting himself and looking for the exit.

“You’re not thinking of leaving, are you? Not only would that be rude, it wouldn’t work. I’ll just keep showing up, right when you’ve forgotten and started hoping again.”

Dean looked despondent. He sprawled back in the booth. His mind raced for a way out. “What do you get if I give in? Why do you bother?”

Bob looked him tenderly in the eye. “I get to be with you. If you love one of these God-creatures, we lose. We’re shut out again. But everybody’s got a thing — drinking, gambling, love—”

“And that thing is you.” Dean’s spirits lightened. “You love me, don’t you?”

“I wouldn’t have spent my life on you if I didn’t. I was made just for you.”

“So what if we just stayed together? If you and I are parts of the devil and God, who’s to say they’re not the same thing deep down, too? Maybe it’s my turn to haunt you.”

Bob found himself without words for a change, without a plan. “Well, I—”

“It’s what we both want in the end, isn’t it?” Dean gave a wily smile and held out his hand. Bob tentatively reached out and took it in his. He tried to speak, but was too choked up. “Come on,” said Dean, “I seem to recall you being pretty good in bed.”

Lighthearted

2009-03-02T13:54:00.000-08:00

After doubleZero came out, I had the good fortune to do my first readings. Being a former actor, I like being in front of people, sharing work with them. Writing novels is a solitary business, and it’s hard to know if you’re on the right track sometimes, so it’s good to have a chance to present material and get an instant response. When I was asked to do my first reading for the Toronto Dollar Reading Series, I wrote my first piece that was specifically for presentation, instead of reading a disjointed chunk of book. And they gave me the series’ second prize for it, too, which was sweet.

Lighthearted

Greg shut down his computer, locked the filing cabinet in his desk, and nearly vomited. His work for the week was finished, it was six o’clock on Friday, and now he had no choice but to go out into the world.

Tonight, in particular, that meant going to a party. A party full of gay men. Technically, the term applied to him, too, but in practice he was a failure at gay.

He took his jacket from the rack near the office door. A perfect example, he thought, this jacket is at least three years out of style. He had no style. His apartment was messy, he owned no cologne, used $2.99 Dep in his hair to hold it to one side, and was dismal at making conversation. And now he was going to a party — straight from work, no shower.

He slipped his passcard in the elevator panel and pressed ‘G’. The old car bumped as it reached the ground floor. As he walked out of the building, he turned back to look at it. This was one of his biggest joys, working in the Concourse Building. While his office inside was a plain honeycomb of cubicles with fluorescent lights, the exterior of the building always struck him as a marvel. Its dark gray Deco façade stretched up away from his eyes, deeply ridged with grooves and punctuated with diamond-shaped accents. The archway over the building’s entrance always held his imagination. The mosaic tiles portrayed symbols of Canadian industry — plow, plane, wheat, etc. — in basic colours over gold. It wasn’t that the piece was all that stunning, but for Greg it represented a forward-looking hope.

He turned and walked along Adelaide. The summer evening was warm, temperature unchanged even though the sun was burning down to an ember on the horizon behind him.

The hope of industry, he thought to himself, looking at the buildings around him. Their functional, bathroom mirror surfaces didn’t strike him as particularly visionary or hopeful. In the other direction, he saw a building that looked like a plug-in air freshener. Yuck. All this boxed-in life.

He smiled to himself. I should talk, he thought. Everything he did was part of an attempt to stave off the messiness of the world: work was messy, family was messy, people were messy.

And now he was going to a party. He’d promised his coworker Jean he’d go. She said there would be lots of gay men there. Great. “What a waste,” they always said behind his back in his mind, “so nice-looking, but so boring, so badly put-together.”

The sky overhead slowly turned a dark turquoise, and the streetlights came on. What if he had it all wrong? he thought. What if he met someone tonight who he really liked? His stomach lurched again. He stopped walking, and considered not going to the party. He looked back down the street.

And the streetlight went out. Right when he looked at it. Greg laughed to himself. He’d seen that a couple of times in his life. It was just a coincidence, he knew, but still neat.

The sight was enough to lift his mood. He kept walking to the party.

~

“Greg Stiver,” said Jean, dragging him across the room to face another man, “this is Vince Arturo. He’s an electrician. And you use electricity. See how much you have in common?” And with that, she left them alone.

The two men laughed at the awkward moment that followed. Greg felt a sensation like a current flash through his chest as the man looked into his eyes. Vince broke the space between them with the offer of a handshake. Then he carried them easily off into conversation.

They fell away from the rest of the party, talking on the patio by themselves. Greg found himself thinking about all the people he knew who were getting married off this summer. It was a thirty thing, he figured. But why couldn’t he meet someone, too, just like this?

Vince had to go, he announced, standing up, stretching his legs and groaning. They’d been sitting on the metal chairs for hours. He had a contract to get to early in the morning, he said.

Greg stood, too. He reached into his back pocket, pulling out his very fat wallet (also not gay, he’d been told). He took out one of his business cards for Vince. “There’s my phone number and my e-mail address. Oh,” he said, pulling a pen out from his pocket, scribbling on the card as he rested it against his wallet, “this is my home number.”

“Great,” said Vince. Greg paused expectantly. “Oh, I’ll give you my number.” Greg pulled another card from his wallet and handed Vince the pen.

“Maybe we can get together sometime,” said Greg.

“Yeah. Well, I have to be honest,” said Vince. Greg’s stomach depressurized, waiting for whatever news was to follow. “I’m pretty busy. I don’t have a lot of time with this latest condo contract.” He smiled. “But, yeah, that would be good. I’ll give you a call.”

They shook hands, and Vince left the party. Greg quickly found himself in “polite time” — the time between realizing he wanted to leave and when he actually did. With a quick goodbye to Jean, he slipped out.

The air was cool as Greg walked home. He took a shortcut through the Annex, knowing that there was a street with lilacs on it whose smell he always enjoyed. He played with the card in his pocket with Vince’s number on it, then took it out. He was being stupid, he told himself, getting all excited over this guy.

Just then, the streetlight ahead of him went out. He stopped, and looked back. The light behind him flickered, then went dark, too.

Greg put the card away and hurried home.

~

Greg pressed the “Check Mail” button again. The short, tinny ping told him there was no mail, just as it had when he’d come into the office on the weekend to check. Maybe Vince didn’t have e-mail. But he probably did have a phone.

He tapped a pen against his finger, then threw it down on his desk. He checked his phone for messages, already knowing there were none. Exasperated with himself, he left for lunch.

Prime Time Donuts didn’t make the fanciest lunch on the block, but that suited Greg just fine. One of their cellophane-wrapped sandwiches suited his appetite and his budget. Besides, the shop was stuck in the corner of the office building; convenient, albeit the architectural equivalent of a tennis visor on the queen.

He felt deranged, thinking so much about this stranger. But no act of reason could unseat Vince from his mind. It was getting distracting all this—

He snapped out of his reverie and checked his watch. Seven-thirty; it had stopped. He looked at the wall clock: one-twenty. He cursed to himself and hurried back to his desk. He was caught up on work, but maybe someone might have thought he’d be back at one…

There were no messages. He checked his e-mail, only to receive a “Cannot connect — network error” message.

“Jean,” he called. Jean’s head popped over his carpeted wall. “Are you having any problems with the network?”

“Nope. It’s fine,” she said.

“I’m having a—” he began, then the fluorescent light in his cubby flickered and went out. “I’m having a problem with… with things.” He recounted his experiences of the past few days, being careful to acknowledge that the connections could all be in his head.

“Streetlight Interference effect,” she said flatly, “or SLI. I’ve read about it. You’re too old for it to be the poltergeist effect. Or it could be an alien implant. Have you ever—?”

“Nevermind,” he said, “I’m just going to go home for the afternoon. I’m feeling a bit stressed.”

~

He flipped his Metropass at the streetcar driver. The car lurched forward and he stumbled to a seat. After five blocks, the whirring streetcar engine made a thunk-thunk noise and the car slid to a halt. The driver left the car and tugged at the power cable, but Greg knew there was nothing wrong. He’d already left the car and started walking. Seconds later, the streetcar drove by.

As he passed the Canada Life tower, he stopped to look up at the lightbulb-pyramid weather indicator at its peak. The temperature was holding steady, it showed. Then it blinked off.

Greg walked through the old entrance of the University Theatre. “Is Vince here?” he asked one of the men working on the condo development. The man pointed further into the concrete and drywall mess. Greg waved hi when he saw Vince, who looked confused at first, then smiled.

“Sorry to bother you here at work, but I’m having a bit of an emergency.” Vince led him out to a park behind the development and sat him on a big concrete slab that served as a bench. Greg outlined his problem, leaving out the part that implicated Vince.

“So, in your professional opinion,” he finished, “does this make any sense?”

“No, none. That’s impossible,” said Vince. “It’s just coincidence. I wouldn’t worry about it.” He stood. “I have to get back to work. But why don’t we get together for dinner? Something really touristy. I know, meet me at the CN Tower restaurant at eight.”

Greg agreed, forgetting about the implications of the choice.

~

“This place — has — a lot — of stairs,” said Greg, sitting down. The view outside changed slowly as the restaurant revolved around the tower.

“Why didn’t you take the—?”

“It was broken when I got there,” interrupted Greg. Now he knew he sounded like a kook. He might as well keep going, he figured. “I’m going crazy,” he said. “I keep thinking about—” he started, and the tiny halogen light overhead made a plink sound and went dark. Greg was getting used to this, and continued on without a beat. “I keep thinking about you.”

Like fresh ice cubes in a drink, the lights around them made tinkling sounds and winked out. Corners of darkness unfolded in the bar like an origami box.

“I’m really,” he stammered. He leaned across the table, “I’m really interested in you!” he exclaimed. The bar sank into night. With a metallic groan, the restaurant shuddered to a standstill.

Darkness spread like a ripple across the city below, snuffing out the lights in the buildings and along the streets.

As his eyes adjusted to the faint moonlight, Greg could see Vince’s astonished smile. “Could you,” Vince said slowly and carefully, “could you keep it like this for a minute?” Greg laughed, and Vince took his hand. “I feel the same way,” he said.

The light over their head popped back to life. Vince led Greg away from the table, out of the restaurant, and into the dark city.

Everything they passed came back to light.