The Divide

1

Such an ordinary house. Such an ordinary beginning.

But I want it to be an ordinary house, Susan Christopher thought. An ordinary house with an ordinary man in it. Not this monster—to whom I must deliver a message.

It was a yellow brick boardinghouse in the St. Jamestown area of Toronto, a neighborhood of low-rent high-rises and immigrant housing. Susan was from suburban Los Angeles—lately from the University of Chicago—and she felt misplaced here. She stood for a moment in the chill, sunny silence of the afternoon, double-checking the address Dr. Kyriakides had written on a slip of pink memo paper. This number, yes, this street.

She fought a momentary urge to run away.

Then up the walk through a scatter of October leaves, pausing a moment in the cold foyer … the inner door stood open … finally down a corridor to the door marked with a chipped gilt number 2.

She knocked twice, aware of her small knuckles against the ancient veneer of the door. Across the hall, a wizened East Indian man peered out from behind his chain-lock. Susan looked up at the ceiling, where a swastika had been spray-painted onto the cloudy stucco. She was about to knock again when the door opened under her hand.

But it was a woman who answered … a young woman in a white blouse, denim skirt, torn khaki jacket. Her feet were bare on the cracked linoleum. The woman’s expression was sullen—her lips in a ready, belligerent pout—and Susan dropped her eyes from the narrow face to the jacket, where there was a small constellation of buttons and badges: BON JOVI, JIM MORRISON, LED ZEPPELIN…

“You want something?”

Susan guessed this was a French-Canadian accent, nasal and impatient. She forced herself to meet the woman’s eyes. Woman or girl? Older than she had first seemed: maybe around my age, Susan thought; but it was hard to be sure, with the make-up and all.

She cleared her throat. “I’m looking for John Shaw.”

“Oh …him.”

“Is he here?”

“No.” The girl ran a hand through her hair. Long nails. Short hair.

“But he lives here?”

“Uh—sometimes. Are you a friend of his?”

Susan shook her head. “Not exactly … are you?”

Now there was the barest hint of a smile. “Not exactly.” The girl extended her hand. “I’m Amelie”

The hand was small and cool. Susan introduced herself; Amelie said, “He’s not here … but you can maybe find him at the 24-Hour on Wellesley. You know, the doughnut shop?”

Susan nodded. She would look for ” Wellesley ” on her map.

Amelie said, “Is it important? You look kind of, ah, worried.”

“It’s pretty important,” Susan said, thinking: Life or death. Dr. Kyriakides had told her that.

Susan saw him for the first time, her first real look at him, through the plate-glass window of the doughnut shop.

She allowed herself this moment, seeing him without being seen. She recognized him from the pictures Dr. Kyriakides had shown her. But Susan imagined that she might have guessed who he was, just from looking at him—that she would have known, at least, that he was not entirely normal.

To begin with, he was alone.

He sat at a small table in the long room, three steps down from the sidewalk. His face was angled up at the October sunlight, relishing it. There was a chessboard in front of him—the board built into the lacquered surface of the table and the pieces arranged in ready ranks.

She had dreamed about this, about meeting him, dreams that occasionally bordered on nightmares. In the dreams John Shaw was barely human, his head unnaturally enlarged, his eyes needle-sharp and unblinking. The real John Shaw was nothing like that, of course, in his photographs or here, in the flesh; his monstrosities, she thought, were buried—but she mustn’t think of him that way. He was in trouble and he needed her help.

Hello, John Shaw, she thought.

His hair was cut close, a burr cut, but that was fashionable now; he was meticulously clean-shaven. Regular features, frown lines, maps of character emerging from the geography of his fairly young face. Here is a man, Susan thought, who worries a lot. A gust of wind lifted her hair; she reached up to smooth it back and he must have glimpsed the motion. His head turned—a swift owlish flick of the eyes—and for that moment he did not seem human; the swivel of his head was too calculated, the focus of his eyes too fine. His eyes, suddenly, were like the eyes in her dreams.

John Shaw regarded her through the window and she felt spotlit, or, worse, pinned—a butterfly in a specimen case.

Both of them were motionless in this tableau until, finally, John Shaw raised a hand and beckoned her inside.

Well, Susan Christopher thought, there’s no turning back now, is there?

Breathing hard, she moved down the three cracked steps and through the door of the shop. There was no one inside but John Shaw and the middle-aged woman refilling the coffee machine. Susan approached him and then stood mute beside the table: she couldn’t find the words to begin.

He said, “You might as well sit down.”

His voice was controlled, unafraid, neutral in accent. Susan took the chair opposite him. They were separated, now, by the ranks of the chessboard.

He said, “Do you play?”

“Oh … I didn’t come here to play chess.”

“No. Max sent you.”

Her eyes widened at this Holmes-like deduction. John said, “Well, obviously you were looking for me. And I’ve taken some pains to be unlooked-for. I could imagine the American government wanting a word with me. But you don’t look like you work for the government. It wasn’t a long shot—I’m assuming I’m correct?”

“Yes,” Susan stammered. “Dr. Kyriakides … yes.”

“I thought he might do this. Sometime.”

“It’s more important than you think.” But how to say this? “He wants you to know—”

John hushed her. “Humor me,” he said. “Give me a game.”

She looked at the board. In high school, she had belonged to the chess club. She had even played in a couple of local tournaments—not too badly. But—

“You’ll win,” she said.

“You know that about me?”

“Dr. Kyriakides said—”

“Your move,” John said.

She advanced the white king’s pawn two squares, reflexively.

“No talk,” John instructed her. “As a favor.” He responded with his own king’s pawn. “I appreciate it.”

She played out the opening—a Ruy Lopez—but was soon in a kind of free fall; he did something unexpected with his queen’s knight and her pawn ranks began to unravel. His queen stood in place, a vast but nonspecific threat; he gave up a bishop to expose her king, and the queen at last came swooping out to give checkmate. They had not even castled.

Of course, the winning was inevitable. She knew—Dr. Kyriakides had told her—that John Shaw had played tournament chess for a time; that he had never lost a game; that he had dropped out of competition before his record and rating began to attract attention. She wondered how the board must look to him. Simple, she imagined. A graph of possibilities; a kindergarten problem.

He thanked her and began to set up the pieces again, his large hands moving slowly, meticulously. She said, “You spend a lot of time here?”

“Yes.”

“Playing chess?”

“Sometimes. Most of the regulars have given up on me.”

“But you still do it.”

“When I get the chance.”

“But surely … I mean, don’t you always win?”

He looked at her. He smiled, but the smile was cryptic … she couldn’t tell whether he was amused or disappointed.

“One hopes,” John Shaw said.

She walked back with him to the rooming house, attentive now, her fears beginning to abate, but still reluctant: how could she tell him? But she must. She used this time to observe him. What Dr. Kyriakides had told her was true: John wore his strangeness like a badge. There was no pinning down exactly what it was that made him different. His walk was a little ungainly; he was too tall; his eyes moved restlessly when he spoke. But none of that added up to anything significant. The real difference, she thought, was more subtle. Pheremones, or something on that level. She imagined that if he sat next to you on a bus you would notice him immediately—turn, look, maybe move to another seat. No reason, just this uneasiness. Something odd here.

It was almost dark, an early October dusk. The streetlights blinked on, casting complex shadows through the brittle trees. Coming up the porch stairs to the boardinghouse, Susan saw him hesitate, stiffen a moment, lock one hand in a fierce embrace of the banister. My God, she thought, it’s some kind of seizure—he’s sick—but it abated as quickly as it had come.

He straightened himself up and put his key in the door.

Susan said, “Will Amelie be here?”

“Amelie works a night shift at a restaurant on Yonge Street. She’s out by six most evenings.”

“You live with her?”

“No. I don’t live with her.”

The apartment seemed even more debased, in this light, than Susan had guessed from her earlier glimpse. It consisted of one main room abutting a closet-sized bedroom—she could make out the jumbled bedclothes through the door—and an even tinier kitchen. The place smelled greasy: Amelie’s dinner, Susan guessed, leftovers still congealing in the pan. Salvation Army furniture and a sad, dim floral wallpaper. Why would he live here? Why not a mansion—a palace? He could have had that. But he was sick, too … maybe that had something to do with it.

She said, “I know what you are.”

He nodded mildly, as if to say, Yes, all right He shifted a stack of magazines to make room for himself on the sofa. “You’re one of Max’s students?”

“I was,” she corrected. “Molecular biology. I took a sabbatical.”

“Money?”

“Money mostly. My father died after a long illness. It was expensive. There was the possibility of loans and so forth, but I didn’t feel—I just didn’t enjoy the work anymore. Dr. Kyriakides offered me a job until I was ready to face my thesis again. At first I was just collating notes, you know, doing some library research for a book he’s working on. Then—”

“Then he told you about me.”

“Yes.”

“He must trust you.”

“I suppose so.”

“I’m sure of it. And he sent you here?”

“Finally, yes. He wasn’t sure you’d be willing to talk directly to him. But it’s very important.”

“Not just auld long syne?”

“He wants to see you.”

“For medical reasons?”

“Yes.”

“Am I ill, then?”

“Yes.”

He smiled again. The smile was devastating—superior, knowing, but at the same time obviously forced, an act of bravery. He said, “Well, I thought so.”

Susan had no relish for this talk of illness. Her father’s illness had dominated her life for almost a year, keeping her on a dizzying rollercoaster of falling grades, missed deadlines, serial flights to California. In her graduate work she had been doing lab chores for Dr. Kyriakides, a study involving the enzyme mechanics of cancerous cell division; and it had been too painful an irony, that shuttle between the colonies of laboratory cells and her father’s bed, where he was dying of liver cancer. There is such a thing, Susan thought, as too much knowledge. She could not bear this meticulous understanding of the mechanism of her father’s death. She began to dream of malignant cells, chromosomes writhing inside their nuclei like angry, poisonous insects.

She suspected that the work Dr. Kyriakides gave her was a kind of charity. He had explained to her—the sophisticated European to the parvenu Californian WASP—that this was good and useful, that a person in mourning ought to have tasks to attend to. She was skeptical but grateful, and within a month she began to admit he was right: there was solace in the library stacks, in the numbers that marched so eloquently across the cool amber screen of her PC terminal. Her grasp of the work began to deepen. Dr. Kyriakides was a brilliant man; the book would be brilliant. Their relationship was not a friendship but something that, in Susan’s opinion, was much finer. She began to feel like a colleague. She took her own work more seriously.

Then, in August, Dr. Kyriakides had escorted her to a Creek restaurant in the mezzanine of a downtown hotel and had ordered impressively for both of them: medallions of lamb, an expensive wine. She had wondered with vast apprehension whether he meant to proposition her.

Instead he leaned forward and gazed into the bowl of his wine goblet. “A quarter of a century ago,” he said, “when I was just out of Harvard, and the government was paying so many smart people to commit such stupid acts, I did something I should not have done.”

It was the first time she’d heard the name John Shaw.

You can see his illness, she thought now. Waves of discomfort seemed to sweep across John’s face. He clenched his teeth a moment; then he said, “I’m sorry.”

“Dr. Kyriakides wants to see you,” Susan said. “The changes you’re going through aren’t necessarily irreversible.”

“He told you that?”

“He can help.”

“No,” John said.

“He told me you might react this way. But there’s no one else you can go to. And hewants to help.”

“I think it’s beyond that.”

“How can you be sure?”

“No offense intended. But my guess is as good as Max’s.”

“But,” Susan began, and then faltered. The pain he was suffering—if it was in fact a physical pain—overtook him again. The smile that had grown small and ironic now disappeared altogether. His knuckles whitened against the arm of the chair; his face seemed to change, as if a great variety of emotions had overtaken him, a sudden shifting … she thought of wind across a wheatfield.

She was frightened now.

She said, “What can I do? Can I help?”

He shook his head. “You can leave.”

The rejection was absolute. It hurt.

Susan said, “Well, maybe you’re right—maybe he can’t help.”

It was her own moment of cruelty. But it caught his attention. She persisted, “But what if you’re wrong? There’s at least a chance. Dr. Kyriakides said—”

“ Fuck Dr. Kyriakides.”

Susan was quietly shocked. She stood up, blushing.

“No, wait,” John said. “Leave your number.”

“What?”

“Leave your number. Or your address, your hotel room. Write it down. There’s paper over there. I’ll call. I promise. We can talk it over. But right now—I need to be alone right now.”

She nodded, scribbled down her name and the hotel, moved to the door. She turned back with the idea of making some final entreaty, but it was pointless. He had dismissed her; she was as good as invisible. He sat with his eyes closed and his head pressed between his hands … containing himself, as if he might explode, Susan thought as she hurried down the walk into the cold October night; or shutting out the world, as if it might rush in and drown him.

2

Amelie Desjardins understood very quickly that she was having a bad day—and that it would only get worse.

George, the manager at the Goodtime Grill, had put her on a split shift for the week. She worked from eleven-thirty to two-thirty, took an afternoon break, then she was back from five-thirty to eight o’clock at night. Which pretty much fucks up your day, Amelie thought, since she was too tired to do much after the lunch rush except trek back to St. Jamestown for a nap—her nap having been interrupted this afternoon by the woman looking for John.

Which was mysterious in itself, and Amelie might have worried more about it … but she had other things on her mind.

First she had come in to work a little late, and George climbed down her throat about it. Then there was prep and set-up, and it seemed as if every salt shaker in the place had gone empty all at once, which was a hassle. Then Alberto, the cook, chose this terrific time to start coming on to her, and that was a balancing act you wouldn’t wish on a trapeze artist, because you have to be on good terms with the cook. A friendly cook will juggle substitutions, fill your orders fast, do you a hundred little favors that add up to tips … but when you came right down to it Amelie thought Alberto was about as oily as the deep-fat fryer, which, not coincidentally, he seldom cleaned. Alberto rolled through the steamy kitchen like a huge, sweating demiurge, when he wasn’t peeking through the door of the changing room trying to catch a waitress in her underwear. So it was “You look really good tonight, Alberto,” and winking at him, and sharing some of her tips, and then getting the hell out of his way before he could deliver one of his patented demeaning gropes. It amounted to a nasty kind of ballet, and today Amelie was just slow enough that she was forced to dislodge Alberto with her elbow—which left him in a vengeful sulk throughout the dinner rush.

Amelie was philosophical about working at the Goodtime. It was not a prestigious restaurant, but it was not a dive, either; it was a working-class wine-and-beer establishment that had been in business for thirty-five years in this location and would probably be edged out before long by the rising rents—judging by the plague of croissant houses and sushi bars that had descended on the neighborhood. At the Goodtime, there was always a fish-and-chips lunch special. Fifteen tables and a few framed photographs of the Parthenon. The walls had recently been stuccoed.

Amelie had been working at the Goodtime for almost a year now and she had a kind of seniority, for what it was worth—the newer girls would come to her with questions. But seniority counted for shit. Seniority did not prevent the occurrence of truly rotten days.

Like today, when the new girl Tracy innocently grabbed off a couple of her regulars and seated them in her own section. Like today, when she was stiffed for a tip on a big meal. Like today, when some low-life picked a busy moment to walk out on his check—which George would sometimes forgive, but, of course, not today; today he docked her for the bill.

It was maybe not the worst day Amelie had ever experienced. That honor was held by the memorable occasion on which a female customer had come in during the afternoon, ordered the Soup of the Day, meticulously garnished the soup with crushed soda crackers, then retired to the Ladies and opened her wrists. Both wrists, thoroughly and fatally. Amelie had found her there.

George told her later that this had happened four times during the history of the Goodtime and that restaurant toilets were a popular place for suicides—strange as that seemed. Well, Amelie thought, maybe a suicide doesn’t want a cheerful place to die. Still, she could not imagine taking her final breath in one of those grim salmon-colored stalls.

So this was a bad day, but not the worst day—she was consoling herself with that thought—when Tracy tapped her shoulder and said there was a call for her on the pay phone.

Bad news in itself. No one was supposed to take calls on the pay phone. She could think of only one person who would call her here.

“Thanks,” she said, and delivered an order to Alberto, then checked to see if George was hanging around before she picked up the receiver.

It was Roch.

Her intuition had been correct:

Avery bad day.

He said, “You’re still working at that pit?”

“Listen,” Amelie said, “this is not a good time for me.”

“I haven’t called you for months.”

“You shouldn’t call me at work.”

“Then come by my place—when you get off tonight.”

“We don’t have anything to talk about.”

Amelie realized that her hand was cramping around the receiver, that both hands were sweaty, that her voice sounded high and throttled in her own ears.

Roch said, “Don’t be so shitty to your brother,” and she recognized the tone of offhanded belligerence that was always a kind of warning signal, a red flag. She heard herself become placating:

“It’s just—it’s like I said—a bad time. I can’t talk now. Call me at home, Roch, okay?”

“You’ll be home tonight?”

“Well—” She didn’t like the way he pounced on that. “I’m not sure—”

“What, you have plans?”

She took a deep breath. “I’m living with someone.”

“What? You’re doingwhat?” The outrage and the hurt in his voice made her feel a hot rush of guilt. Crazy, of course. Why should she consult him? But she hadn’t. And he was family.

But she could never have told him about Benjamin. She had been hoping—in a wistful, unconscious way—that the two of them would never have to meet.

The party at Table Four was signaling for her. This was, Amelie recognized, a truly shitty day.

She forced herself to say that she was living with a guy and that it might not be all right for Roch to come over, she just couldn’t say, maybe he ought to phone up first. There was a very long silence and then Roch’s voice became very sweet, very ingratiating: “All right, look—I just want you to be happy, okay?”

“I’m serious,” Amelie insisted.

“So am I. I’d like to meet this guy.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“Hey! I’ll be nice. What is it, you don’t trust me?”

“I just—well, call me, all right? Call me before you do anything.”

“Whatever you want.”

She waited until the line went dead, then stood with her forehead pressed against the cool glass of the enclosure. Took a breath, smoothed a wrinkle out of her uniform, forced herself to turn back toward the tables.

George was standing there—hands on his hips, a monumental frown. “You know you’re not supposed to use this phone.”

She managed, “I’m sorry.”

“By the way, the corner table? The party that was waiting for the bill? They had to leave.” Now George smiled. ” Tracy took your tip.”

She was out of the place by nine.

Nine o’clock on a Friday in October and Yonge Street was crowded with the usual … well, Amelie thought of them astypes. Street kids with leather jackets and weird haircuts. Blue-haired old ladies in miniskirts. Lots of the kind of lonely people you see scurrying past on nights like this, with no discernible destination but in a wild hurry to get there: heads down, shoulders up, mean and shy at the same time. It made her glad to have a home to head for, even if it was only a shitty apartment in St. Jamestown. Shitty but not, of course, cheap—nothing in this town was cheap.

She peered into the shop windows, trying to distract herself, but it was a chilly night and she felt intimidated by the warm glow of interiors and the orange light spilling out of bus windows as she trudged past the transit station. Nights like this had always seemed comfortless to her. You could smell winter gathering like an army just over the horizon. Nights like this, her thoughts ran in odd directions.

She thought about Roch, although she didn’t want to.

She thought about Benjamin.

Impossible to imagine the two of them together. They were so different … although (and here was the only similarity) each of them seemed to Amelie endlessly mysterious.

Roch should not have been a mystery. Roch, after all, was her brother. They shared family … if you could call it family, an absentee father and a mother who was arrested for shoplifting with such startling regularity that she had been banned from Eaton’s, Simpson’s, and Ogilvy’s. Sometimes Amelie felt as if she had been raised by a Social Welfare caseworker. She’d been fostered out twice. But the thing was, you learned to adapt.

Roch, her little brother, never did. They grew up in a rough part of Montreal and went to the kind of Catholic school where the nuns carried wooden rulers with metal edges embedded in them—in certain hands, a deadly weapon. The nuns were big on geometry and devotions. Amelie, however, had had her own agenda. In an era when the Parti Quebecois was dismantling English from the official culture, Amelie had resolved to teach herself the language. Not just the debased English everybody knew; not just the English you needed to follow a few American TV shows.Real English. She had conceived of a destiny outside Montreal. She saw herself living in English Canada, maybe eventually the States. Doing something glamorous—she wasn’t sure what. Maybe it would involve show business. Maybe she would manage a famous rock band.

Maybe she would wait tables.

Roch was different. He never had any ambitions that Amelie could figure out. When he was real little he would follow her around as singlemindedly as a duckling; she would tow him down St. Catherine’s Street on sunny summer days, buy Cokes and hot dogs and spend the afternoon watching the Types from the steps of Christ Church Cathedral.

Roch had needed the company. He never had friends. He took a long time learning to talk and he wasn’t reading with any facility until he was in fifth grade. Roch, it turned out, was slow. Not stupid—Amelie made this important distinction—just slow. When Roch learned something, he hung on to it fiercely. But he took his time. And in that school, in that place, taking your time was a bad thing. It made you look stupid. Not clever-stupid or sullen-stupid or anything dignified; it made you look dog-dumb, especially if you were also small and ugly and fat. Amelie had been bruised a few times defending Roch in the schoolyard. And that was when she bothered to stand up for him. A thirteen-year-old girl sometimes doesn’t want to know when her idiot brother is catching flack. She thought of him that way, too—her idiot brother—at least sometimes.

But Rochwasn’t stupid, Amelie knew, and he learned a lot.

He learned not to trust anybody. He learned that you could do what you wanted, if you were big enough and strong enough.

And he learned to get mad. He had a real talent for getting mad. Pointlessly, agonizingly mad; skin-tearing mad; going home and vomiting mad.

And then, eventually, he learned something else: he learned that if you grow up a little bit, and put on some muscle, then you can inspire fear in other people—and oh, what an intoxicating discovery that must have been.

Amelie trudged along Wellesley into St. Jamestown, past the hookers on the comer of Parliament, thinking October-night thoughts. She stopped at a convenience store to pick up a couple of TV dinners, the three-hundred-calorie kind. She was skinny—she knew it, in an offhand way—but her reflection in the shop windows always looked fat. Mama had been fat, with a kind of listless alcoholic fatness Amelie dreaded. Amelie was young and skinny and she meant to stay that way.

She put Roch out of her mind and thought about Benjamin instead, and that lightened her mood. She even managed a smile, standing at the check-out counter. Because Benjamin was the great discovery of her life.

A recent discovery.

He had come into the Goodtime just about six months ago, on one of those ugly spring days when the wind is raw and wet and just about anybody is liable to wander in off the street. She took him at first for one of those wanderers: a tall, benign-looking, shy man with a puppydog smile, his collar turned up and a black woolen cap plastered to his head. An oddball, but not a Type, exactly; he looked straight at her in a way Amelie appreciated. She remembered thinking the odds were mixed on somebody like that: he might tip generously or not at all … you could never tell.

But he did tip, and he came back the next day, and the day after that. Pretty soon he was one of her regulars. He came in late one Wednesday and she told him, “I’m going off-shift—you’re late,” and he said, “Well, I’ll walk you home,” in that straight-ahead way, and Amelie said that would be all right—she didn’t even have to think about it—and pretty soon they were seeing each other. Pretty soon after that he moved out of his basement room on Bathurst and into the St. Jamestown apartment.

Benjamin was decent, well-meaning, kind.

Roch enjoyed crushing people like that.

Amelie’s smile faded.

And of course there was the other problem, which she tried not to think about, because, even among these other mysteries, it wastoo mysterious, too strange.

The thing about Benjamin was, he wasn’t always Benjamin.

The apartment was a mess, but it felt warm and cozy when Amelie let herself in. She kicked off her shoes, ran some hot water for the dishes, plugged a Doors tape into the stereo.

She was not deeply into Sixties rock, but there was something about Morrison: he just never sounded old-fashioned. The tape wasStrangeDays; the song that came up was “People Are Strange.” Loping drumbeat and Ray Manzarek moaning away on keyboard. That real sparse guitar sound. And Morrison’s voice doing his usual psycho-sexy thing.

Timeless. But she turned it down a little when she peeked into the bedroom and saw Benjamin asleep under the covers. He slept odd hours; that was one of the strange things about him. But she doubted the tape would wake him—he slept like a slab of granite.

Back to the dishes, Amelie thought.

Awright, yeah! said Morrison.

And if Roch came by—

But maybe he wouldn’t. She consoled herself with that thought, bearing down with the scrub brush on one of the Chinese dragon bowls she’d bought in Chinatown. The basic fact about Roch was his unpredictability. He might say he was going to do something, but that didn’t mean shit. You never could tell.

She took some marginal comfort in these thoughts, losing herself in the rhythm of the music and the soapy smell of the hot water.

She was draining the sink when the last song, “The Music’s Over,” faded out. She heard the click of the tape as it switched off, the faint metallic transistor hiss from the speakers … and the knock at the door.

“You should have called.”

“I tried earlier. You weren’t home.” Roch stood blinking in the hallway. “You’re supposed to invite me in.”

Amelie stood aside as he came through the door.

“Place is a mess,” he observed.

“I just got home, all right?”

He shrugged and sat down.

It was six months since Amelie had seen her brother, but it was obvious he hadn’t let up on his gym work. He was six foot one, a head taller than Amelie, and his shoulders bulked out under his bomber jacket. AD the body work, however, had done nothing for his looks. His face was wide and pasty, his lips were broad. He stood with his hands in his jacket pockets and Amelie could see them moving there, knitting and unraveling, making fists, the fingernails digging into the palms. She told him to sit down.

He pushed aside a pile of newspapers and sprawled on the sofa.

Amelie made coffee and talked to him from the kitchen. There had been a letter from Montreal: Mama was adjusting to the new apartment even though it was smaller than the old one. Uncle Baptiste had been in town, looking for work when the Seaway trade picked up again. She kept her voice down, because it was possible even now that Benjamin might sleep through the whole thing … that Roch would say what he had to say and then leave. She pinned her hopes on that.

She poured a cup of coffee for him and one for herself and carried them into the living room. She sat opposite him in the easy chair, took a sip—bitter black coffee—and listened to the sudden silence of the room, the absence of her own voice.

Roch said, “I lost my job.”

She put her cup down. “Oh, shit.”

He waved his hand. “It was a stupid job.”

Roch had been working as a parcel clerk at the BPX depot, the last Amelie had heard. This was, frankly, not a great surprise; Roch had never been good at keeping jobs. But it was not good news, either.

She said, “You found anything else?”

“I have some leads.”

“What happened?”

He shrugged.

“You have any money?”

He said, “Is that an offer?”

“I don’t have a hell of a lot to spare.”

Roch was silent for a while. His expression was reptilian, Amelie thought, the combination of his pout and the slow, periodic blinking of his eyes. She was tempted to stare. Instead, she looked at her coffee cup.

Roch said, “You could earn some.”

“What—George is gonna raise my salary because I have an unemployed brother?”

It was the wrong thing to say. Her brother paused in his blinking. “Calyx! Amelie, do you think I’m stupid?”

When Roch got angry he slipped into his father’s vernacular: it wascalyx this and tabernacle that, maudit ciboire de Christ and so on. Venerable back country curses. She shrank down in her chair. “That’s not what I meant.”

Roch smiled. The steady semaphoring of his eyelids began again. “Waitressing is not the only way to make money.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I have a problem here. I have to pay rent, you know.”

“Look, what do you want? Some cash? A loan?” She reached for her purse. “I can give you twenty.”

“Fuck that,” Roch said. “Twenty dollars? Christ!”

She waited.

He said, “Remember when we came to this city?”

Now Amelie was silent for a beat.

“Yes,” she said.

“You remember what we did then?”

Deep breath.

“Yes.”

“Maybe the time has come again.”

“No,” Amelie said.

“What?”

“I said no! All right? Is that clear? I won’t do it.”

“I don’t like the tone of your voice.”

“I don’t care.” She couldn’t look at him.

He said, “You don’t care that I’m broke—that I’ll be out on the street?”

“No. I meant—”

“Hey, I’m your little brother! You look after me!”

“So you want to pimp for me? Is that your idea of a good career move?”

Christ de calyx! As her father might have said.

But Roch only smiled. “You can keep your day job.”

“Well, fuck you!”

Her reaction was involuntary. She hated him for bringing up the subject. Sure, she had done some things in the past. She was barely seventeen when they left home; Roch was younger. They slept on warehouse roofs some nights, and other nights they rented rooms in the wino hotels on Queen Street. You can’t survive on the street without doing something you don’t like. And so maybe she had done that—what he talked about—when they needed the money, and maybe once or twice just because they wanted the money … but that was the old days. He was crazy, coming here with a proposition like that.

So she stood up and said fuck you and it was a mistake, because Roch did not take well to that kind of abuse—as he had told her many times—and now he was standing up, inches away from her, so close she could smell the hot-metal reek of his breath. He did not blink at all. He took her wrist in a fierce grip. All that weight-lifting had made him strong.

He said, “You do it if I tell you to do it.” Then he slapped her.

The slap was painful and Amelie stumbled away from him. She caught her foot against the table supporting the stereo; she fell down hard on the floor and the tape player came tumbling down after her. Strange Days popped out of the cassette compartment with a streamer of tape reeling after it. Amelie closed her eyes.

Opened them, and saw Benjamin come out of the bedroom.

She looked up from the floor, blinking.

Benjamin stood in the doorway with his Levis half unbuttoned and his belt undone. He was naked from the waist up. His hair was tousled. He gave Amelie a long look and then stared at Roch. He said, “Who the hell are you?”

“Never mind,” Amelie said, “it’s nothing.” But the damage was already done.

Roch broke out into a big anticipatory grin.

“I’m her brother,” Roch said. “Who the fuck are you?”

Benjamin stepped forward. He was as tall as Roch but less bulky—he looked emaciated by comparison. And fragile, his hairless chest exposed. He said, “I guess you were leaving.”

Amelie had never heard him talk like that before.

Roch said, “Guess again.”

Benjamin didn’t flinch. He was looking at Roch with an expression Amelie had never seen on him before, a kind of automatic and terrible contempt … which unnerved Roch, who balled his fist.

“Get out of my face,” Roch said.

“Get out of my home,” Benjamin said.

Roch drew back his fist …

But Benjamin hit him in the face.

Roch just stood there, blinking, as if he was working it out in his head:what happened?—what?—then raised his hand to his nose. It was bleeding; Roch examined the blood for a long moment. Then he drew back his fist and threw it at Benjamin in a terrible, pistoning boxer’s punch … but Benjamin moved out of the way somehow; and then Roch—who was a member of a Cabbagetown boxing club, a heavyweight—threw a couple of very serious street punches. But Benjamin just leaned around them somehow and threw a few punches of his own, little nettling jabs that infuriated the bigger man. It was crazy, Amelie thought, it was not even a fight, there was nothing fair about it; it was a humiliation. Roch was turning a bright brick red. He screamed, “Stand still, you fucking faggot!”

And Benjamin stood still, but Roch didn’t respond—couldn’t, maybe.

The expression on Benjamin’s face was terrifying. It was a cold, radiant confidence in his own supremacy, an unblinking ferocity. He moved closer to Roch now, stood so that he was separated from him by a few inches of air. Amelie imagined the space between them as white-hot, flashing with some kind of invisible lightning. She could not see all of Benjamin’s face now but she could see Roch’s, and she was stunned by the fear he began suddenly to radiate. Staring into Benjamin’s eyes and seeing … what?

Something awful.

Benjamin said one word, very low; Amelie thought it was, “Leave.”

Roch turned away like a whipped child and lurched to the door.

Before he left he turned and pointed a trembling finger down at Amelie. He looked as if he was about to burst into tears.

“You,” he said. “You …cunt …”

And then fled.

And Amelie turned to look at Benjamin, and understood all at once what had happened:

He wasn’t Benjamin right now.

He was John.

He looked down at her in that way she hated, a mixture of pity and condescension at the back of his eyes. He started to say something—it might have been “I’m sorry.”

“Get out,” Amelie said. She was embarrassed, hurt, humiliated—she couldn’t stand him looking at her. “Just leave.”

His eyes lingered a moment longer. Then he nodded.

He went back to the bedroom for a shirt and a jacket, and then he left … but he stopped on the way out and picked up something that had slipped off the lamp-stand during his fight with Roch. It looked like a scrap of paper, Amelie thought … with maybe a phone number written on it.

3

It was near midnight when John called.

Susan had eaten dinner at the hotel coffee shop and had come back to her room to read, hiding from this strange city in the pages of a book. She had a Joyce Carol Oates novel and a Travis McGee mystery, both from the paperback rack in the lobby. She loved to read, and after her father’s death she had thought about giving up the sciences and starting over as an English major. She decided against it for a couple of reasons. Her taste in reading was way too catholic—she read Faulkner and Stephen King with approximately equal relish. And she was afraid of destroying the pleasure she took in these books. Susan was not analytical about fiction; she had been twelve years old before she understood that books had writers, that they had to be manufactured, somehow, like shoes. Better not to inquire too closely into cherished illusions… They were fragile.

Tonight the Joyce Carol Oates seemed a little too architectural; she slipped into the welcoming embrace of Travis McGee. Old Travis had mellowed a lot in his later books. He had more second thoughts these days. She liked that.

With the drapes open she curled up in bed, propped up with pillows behind her and a view of the city lights running north to the horizon. She was three chapters into the book and inclining toward sleep when the phone rang.

She picked it up expecting Dr. Kyriakides, but it was late for him to be calling; she couldn’t place the voice at first.

“John Shaw,” he said.

Well—obviously. But he sounded younger on the phone. You couldn’t see his eyes; his eyes were ancient.

Susan struggled to assemble her thoughts. “I’m glad you called—”

“I think you’re right,” he said. “I think we should talk.”

“I agree. Uh, maybe we can get together tomorrow?”

“You’re at the Carlton ?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll meet you in the lobby. Is noon all right?”

“Of course—sure—”

“See you there.”

And then the line went dead, and she was left sleepy and amazed, staring at the receiver in her hand.

She rode the elevator down at five minutes to noon the next morning and found him waiting.

He was standing by a marble pillar, dressed in worn Levis, track shoes, and a blue windbreaker over a T-shirt, with his hands tucked into his jacket pockets. Susan moved toward him with her heart beating hard, as his head swiveled owlishly and his eyes focused in on her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t think I did a very good job yesterday. I didn’t know how to start.”

“You’re in a tough position,” John said. “The messenger with bad news.”

“Plus—I guess I was a little frightened.”

He smiled. “Of me?”

She laughed, but it was true. She had been frightened. Still was. But it was easier now, at least a little. “Where do we go for lunch?”

“Depends. I don’t have a lot of cash. Are you on an expense account?”

“It’s paid for.”

“By Max?”

“Ultimately.”

“Well, there’s a decent Japanese restaurant around the block. I’m sure Max can afford it.”

“Sounds fine,” Susan said.

She had never eaten Japanese food but didn’t want to admit it. The atmosphere in the restaurant was traditional: koto music and waitresses in tight kimonos. She felt somewhat gauche, lost among the rice paper screens; she let John order for her.

The waitress brought miso soup in a wooden bowl. No spoons—apparently you were supposed to pick up the bowl like a cup. John said, “You’re not used to this.”

She forced a smile. “Redondo Beach WASP. We never ate anything more challenging than Mexican. I remember a lot of TV dinners.”

“The main course is tempura. Nothing scary. Unless you have a problem with shrimp?”

“No, that’s fine. You know, I learned to eat Cantonese and Szechuan in college. Just never got around to Japanese.”

John turned his attention to the soup. He ate meticulously, Susan observed; almost mechanically. When the bowl was empty he pushed it aside and ignored it. “Max knows I’m ill.”

Straight to the point, Susan thought. “He suspected it.”

“Is he still working with prenatal growth regulators?”

“Not officially.”

“But on his own?”

“Some animal research.”

“Out of curiosity, I wonder, or guilt?”

Susan frowned. “I’m sorry?”

He waved his hand—never mind.

The waitress brought sashimi on wooden plates. “Thank you,” Susan said. The waitress bowed and returned a “Thank you.”

“It might be easier,” John said, “if you just told me what you know about me. We can begin there.”

But it was a tall order:What kind of monster do you think I am? Susan told him what Dr. Kyriakides had explained to her—that John was the product of a clandestine research project conducted in the fifties. Before his birth he had received an intrauterine cocktail of cortical growth regulators, human hormones Dr. Kyriakides had isolated under a classified government grant. The purpose of the research was to produce a superior human being, specifically in the neocortical functions—the most highly evolved functions, such as intelligence.

John’s smile was fixed. “ ‘Highly evolved’—sounds like Max. He told you all this?”

“At greater length. And with more breastbeating.”

“He does feel guilty.”

“I have the impression he always did.”

“Did he mention that his ‘government grant’ was by way of a client operation of the CIA? That his name came up twice in the Church Committee hearings?”

“Yes. He says they were funding everything in those days—LSD at McGill, exotic botany at Harvard. Postwar insanity.”

“Did he also mention that he was the closest thing to a father I had for the first several years of my life?”

“Something like that.”

“And that he farmed me out for adoption when the project was closed down?”

“He didn’t have a choice.”

“But now he wants to talk … because he thinks I’m dying.”

“I should never have said that! I’m sorry—I just wanted to get your attention.”

“But it’s possible?”

“The animal studies have been mixed,” Susan admitted.

“Some animals have died.”

She looked at the table. “Yes.”

The tempura arrived then. Susan picked at hers. It was good, but she’d lost her appetite.

John ate vigorously.

When the check arrived Susan used her credit card and filed away the customer copy. John said, “Are you up to walking a little?”

She nodded.

“It’s a good day for it. Autumn is the best time of year in this city.” He stood up and pulled his windbreaker over his T-shirt. “I don’t get many afternoons like this.”

They rode the College streetcar west to Augusta. The day was cool but endlessly sunny, the sky a shade of blue you never saw in LA. When the streetcar stopped, John climbed down through the rattling mid-car doors and offered her his hand. How dry his skin is, Susan thought … and then scolded herself for thinking it. He wasn’t an animal, after all.

He led her south through a maze of ethnic markets, fish stalls, vegetable bins, used-clothing outlets. This was Kensington Market, John said, and it was his favorite part of the city.

It was also crowded and more than a little bewildering—no two signs in the same language—but Susan felt some of the carnival atmosphere, maybe picking it up from John. He took her to a cafe, a sidewalk table under an umbrella and far enough from the fish stalls that the air was tolerable. He ordered two cups of fierce cappucino. “Legal drugs.” Smiled at her. She sipped the coffee. He said, “Well, maybe I am dying.”

Her cup rattled against the saucer. “Do you always have these two-track conversations?”

“You mean, is this a manifestation of my superhuman intellect? Or just an annoying habit?”

“No, I don’t mean that. I mean—well, if you don’t want to talk about it—”

“Max must have warned you, surely? John the monster.” He startled her by closing his eyes. “You’re wearing Levis and a brown sweater with a checked collar showing at the neck. You have brown hair, blue eyes, a mole under your right cheekbone and another one just under your ear. You have both hands on the table; the nail is chipped on your left index finger. You don’t wear nail polish. The building behind you is catching the sunlight; it has twenty-eight rectangular windows facing the street and a revolving door with a mango cart parked on the sidewalk in front of it. The cart vendor is wearing a yellow plaid shirt and a black beret. A grey Nissan Stanza just drove past, southbound—it should be at the intersection by now.” He opened his eyes and stared at her. “You come from Southern California and you’re timid with people. You have an exaggerated respect for Dr. Kyriakides—take my word for it—and some unresolved feelings about your own father. You have a suppressed speech impediment that begins to surface when you talk about your home, which you don’t like to do. You think you like me, but you’re still a little frightened. You—”

“Stop it!”

There was a silence. Susan blushed deeply.

John said, more gently, “I don’t want you to forget what I am.”

“As if I c-could!” She thought about leaving. She wasn’t sure her legs would hold her. “How can you know all that about me?”

“Because you’re a book. Not just you, Susan. Everyone. A book of gestures and twitches and blinks and grimaces.”

“Do you want me to be frightened of you?”

“Only … appropriately frightened.” He added, “I’m sorry.”

Gradually, she relaxed back into her chair. “Do you still want to talk?”

“Do you still want me to?”

She took a deep breath. “Yes.”

“To you, or to Max?”

“Talk to me if you want. But only Dr. Kyriakides can help you.”

“If in fact he can.”

“If.” She didn’t want to risk lying—assuming it was possible to lie to him.

“It’s a game of chance, then, isn’t it? Roulette.”

“I’m not the doctor.”

“You’re the doctoral candidate.”

“It’s not exactly my field. I never worked directly with Dr. Kyriakides on this, except for a few tissue studies.”

He shook his head. “I’m not ready to talk to Max.”

“Then me. Talk to me.”

He gave her another long, speculative look. Susan could not help wincing. My God, she thought, those eyes! Not the windows of the soul … more like knives. Like scalpels.

“Maybe it would be good to talk,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I talked to anyone.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Susan said.

She asked whether he had been having symptoms.

“Episodes of fever, sometimes dangerously high. Transient muscular weakness and some pain. Fugue states—if you want to call them that.”

“Is that what was happening yesterday?”

He nodded.

“I don’t know what you mean by a ‘fugue state.’ ”

He sipped his cappucino. “May I tell you a story?”

The formal research project had ended when John was five years old. He was adopted by a childless couple, the Woodwards, a middle-income family living in a bleak Chicago suburb. The Woodwards renamed him Benjamin, though he continued to think of himself as John. From the beginning, his adoptive parents were disturbed by his uniqueness. He didn’t do especially well in school—he was contemptuous of his teachers and sometimes a discipline problem—but he read beyond his years and he made conversation like an adult; which, the Woodwards told him, was very disrespectful.

“Jim Woodward was a lathe operator at an aerospace plant and he resented my intelligence. Obviously, a child doesn’t know this, or doesn’t want to admit it. I labored for almost eight years under the impression that I was doing something terribly wrong—that he hated me for some fundamental, legitimate reason. And so I worked hard to please him. To impress him. For example, I learned to play the flute. I borrowed a school instrument and some books; I taught myself. He loved Vivaldi: he had this old Heathkit stereo he had cobbled together out of a kit and he would play Vivaldi for hours—it was the only time I ever saw anything like rapture on his face. And so I taught myself the Concerto in G, the passages for flute. And when I had it down, I played it for him. Not just the notes. I went beyond that. I interpreted it. He sat there listening, and at first I thought he was in shock—he had that dumbfounded expression. I mistook it for pleasure. I played harder. And he just sat there until I was finished. I thought I’d done it, you see, that I’d communicated with him, that he would approve of me now. And then I put the flute back in the case and looked at him. And he blinked a couple of times, and then he said, ‘I bet you think you’re pretty fucking good, don’t you?’ ”

“That’s terrible,” Susan said.

“But I wasn’t convinced. I told myself it just wasn’t good enough, that’s all. So I thought, well, what else is there that matters to him?

“He had a woodworking shop in the basement. We were that kind of family, the Formica counters in the kitchen, Sunday at the Presbyterian church every once in a while, the neighbors coming over to play bridge, the woodwork shop downstairs. But he had quality tools, Dremel and Black and Decker and so on, and he took a tremendous amount of pride in the work he did. He built a guitar once, some cousin paid him a hundred dollars for it, and he must have put in three times that in raw materials, and when it was finished it was a work of art, bookmatched hardwood, polished and veneered—it took him months. When I saw it, I wanted it. But it had been bought and paid for, and he had to send it away. I wanted him to make another one, but he was already involved in some other project, and that was when I saw my opportunity—I said, ‘I’ll build it.’

“I was nearly thirteen years old. I had never so much as touched his woodworking tools. ‘Show me,’ I said. He said, ‘You’ll never manage it. It’s not a beginner’s project.’ I said, ‘Let me try.’ And I think now he saw it as his big opportunity … maybe this would teach me a lesson. So he agreed. He showed me how to work the tools and he gave me some books on luthiery. He even took me to lumberyards, helped me pick out decent woods.”

John paused to sip his cappucino. “I worked on the guitar that summer whenever he was out of the house. Because it was an experiment—you understand? This would be the communication, he would see this and love me for doing it, and if he didn’t—all bets were off. So I took it very seriously. I cut and sanded, I routed the neck, I installed the fretwire and the tuning machinery. I was possessed by that guitar. There was not a weekday afternoon through July or August I was out of the house. I was dizzy with lacquer fumes half the time. And when he came home I would hide the project … I didn’t want him to see it until it was ready. I cleaned the tools and the workshop every day; I was meticulous. I think he forgot about it. Thought I’d given up. Until I showed it to him.”

Susan said, “Oh, no.”

“It was perfect, of course. Max probably told you what his research had suggested, long before it was fashionable science—that the neocortical functions aren’t just ‘intelligence.’ It’s also dexterity, timing, the attention span, the sense of pitch, eye-hand coordination—things as pertinent to music or luthiery as they are to, say, mathematics. Jim Woodward thought he’d found a task that was beyond me. In fact, he could hardly have picked one I was better suited to. Maybe that guitar wasn’t flawless, but it was close. It was a work of art.”

Susan said, “He hated it.”

John smiled his humorless, raw smile. “He took it personally. I showed him the guitar. The last varnish was barely dry. I strummed a G chord. I handed it to him … the final evidence that I was worthy of him. To him it must have been, I don’t know, a slap in the face, a gesture of contempt. He took the guitar, checked it out. He sighted down the neck. He inspected the frets. Then he broke it over his knee.”

Susan looked at her hands.

John said, “I don’t want sympathy. You asked about symptoms. This is relevant. For years I had thought of myself as ‘John’ while the Woodwards were calling me ‘Benjamin.’ After that day … for them, I was Benjamin. I became what they wanted. Normal, adequate, pliant, and wholly unimpressive. You understand, it was an act. They noticed it, this change, but they never questioned it. They didn’t want to. They welcomed it. I worked my body the way a puppeteer works a marionette. I made up Benjamin. He was my invention. In a way, he was as meticulous a piece of work as that guitar. I made him out of people I knew, out of what the Woodwards seemed to want. He was their natural child—maybe the child they deserved. I played Benjamin for almost three years, one thousand and eighty-five days. And when I turned sixteen I took my birth certificate and a hundred-dollar bill James Woodward kept in his sock drawer, and I left. Didn’t look back, didn’t leave a forwarding address … and I dropped Benjamin like a stone.” He took a sip of cappucino. “At least I thought I did.”

“What are you saying-that Benjamin was a symptom?”

“He is a symptom. He came back.”

The cool air made Susan shiver. She watched three teenagers in leather jackets and spike haircuts stroll past, eyes obscure behind Roy Orbison sunglasses.

John said, “I noticed other problems first. Minor but disturbing. Auditory hallucinations, brief fugue states—”

“When was this?”

“Three years ago, more or less. I was living in a cabin on a gulf island off the coast of British Columbia. I blamed a lot of it on that—on the isolation. But then, without any kind of warning, I lost two calendar days.

Went to bed on Sunday, woke up Wednesday morning. Well, that was frightening. But I was methodical about it. I tried to reconstruct the time I’d lost, pick up on any clues I’d left. I found a receipt in a shirt pocket, nine dollars and fifty-five cents for groceries at a supply store in town, a place I never shopped. It was a family grocery not much bigger than my cabin, and when I went in to ask some questions the woman back of the check-out desk nodded at me and said, ‘Hello, Benjamin! Back again?’”

“And the fugues persisted?”

“I’m lucky to have a day like this … a day to myself.”

Susan didn’t know what to say.

He drained his cappucino and turned the cup over. “You want to know what it feels like? It’s like learning to do a puppet act … and then forgetting which one of you is which. The boundaries fold away. Suddenly you’re inside the mirror looking out.”

“I see.”

He regarded her steadily. “Is that what you expected—you and Max?”

“Not exactly.”

He stood up. He said, “I think I’m dying because I can’t remember how to be John Shaw anymore.”

He walked her back to the hotel.

He was quieter now, almost reticent, as if he had said more than he meant to. He walked with big, impatient strides and Susan had to struggle to keep up. She was panting for breath by the time they reached the lobby.

He turned to face her at the door, wrapped in his jacket, almost lost in it. What had he said?The boundaries fold away. … He said, “You’ve done your job. You can go home with a clear conscience.”

“That wasn’t the idea. We hoped—Dr. Kyriakides thought—if you came to Chicago—”

“Why? So he can watch me fade away?”

“He has some ideas that might help.”

“He has a pathological curiosity and a bad conscience.”

“You haven’t spoken to him for twenty years.”

“I don’t want to speak to him.”

“Well, what, then? You stay here? You curl up in that cheap apartment until you disappear?”

She was startled by her own words—John seemed to be, too. He said, “I’m glad we talked. I’m glad you listened. You want to help. That’s nice. And you have. But I’m not ready to leave here.”

“You don’t have to make that decision now. I’ll be in town for a week.” She could extend her reservation at the hotel. Surely Dr. Kyriakides would pay for it? “We can talk again.”

John looked closely at her and this time, Susan thought, it was very bad, that X-ray vision stare, the sense of being scanned. But she stood up to it. She stared back without blinking.

He said, “I … it might not be possible.”

“Because of Benjamin?”

He nodded.

“But if it is possible?”

“Then,” he said quietly, “I know where you are.”

He turned and stalked away into the cool air.

She watched him go. Her heart was beating hard.

Because, she realized, it matters now.

She had come here determined to do a job … to intercede for Dr. Kyriakides, to find John Shaw and say her piece and get it over with.

But that had changed.

Now she wanted something else.

She wanted him to live.

4

John Shaw left Susan at the hotel and began the walk back to St. Jamestown. He understood that he was losing himself in this bright, cool autumn dusk—that he was fading with the light.

He’d been fortunate this time. He had been lucid for more than a day and a half. That was uncommon and—if what the girl said was true—it would be increasingly rare.

He could feel the good time ending now. The sky was a luminous, inky blue; the trees in the park looked etched in charcoal. This was always the first sign of the change: this sudden, heightened vividness of things. For most of his life he had lived in a universe of symbols, language and memory, nouns and verbs; strange to have the world itself, its crude essence, suddenly crowding into his mind. Strange to look at an arc of cloud across the cold sky and lose awareness of it as a meteorological event, to lose all the taxonomy of clouds—the word “cloud” itself—it all being washed away by naked vision, as if some vital boundary had been erased; as if he had somehow become the cloud.

He stood immobilized on the sidewalk with his head canted up until the feeling passed. Then he frowned and walked on, hands burrowing deep into his pockets.

Fading, he felt more alive than ever.

Cling to it, he thought. It was a clear, cold evening and he didn’t want to give it up. For a time he was tempted to turn back to the hotel, knock on Susan Christopher’s door and say to her, Yes, if you can cure me, if Max can cure me, I’ll do what you want … I’ve lost too much of my life already.

But he didn’t turn back. That direction was the past: Kyriakides, the Woodwards, the gulf island. Too much to embrace. In any case, he doubted that Max had any real answers. Susan had admitted as much. Max was the perennial scientist, still anxious—but not admitting it, perhaps not even to himself—to see his most important experiment through to a conclusion.

The thought evoked a vivid memory of Max as he must have looked to a five-year-old: stubbled, huge, wise, and aloof. Glints of light off his wire-rimmed glasses, which he would sometimes allow John to wear. The lenses turning Kyriakides into a looming, distorted monster. Angles of light through crystal: the laws of diffraction.

But the daylight was failing now. The streetlights winked on. Almost home, John told himself, if you could call it that, the two dingy rooms Benjamin shared with Amelie. It was Benjamin who made the serious decisions now, such as where to live and with whom. He was Benjamin most of the time, and it was like a dream, these long days of absence, not an utter loss of consciousness but a cloudy capitulation: floating underwater down some dark, twisting conduit. Occasionally he would blink at the world through Benjamin’s eyes, wake up and think, I, I, I. And then sink back into the darkness, one more lost thing.

He did feel some sympathy for Amelie, even though she regarded him as an illness of Benjamin’s—and that was strange, too, to be considered a disease. He remembered frightening away the man who had attacked her the night before. Her shame and her anger. But maybe she was right; maybe he had made things worse.

But he couldn’t worry about that now. He hurried up the steps and through the door, down the gray stucco hallway into the apartment, closing himself in. Amelie was off at work. John locked the door and turned on the TV. The babble of voices rose up like a physical presence and he gazed without comprehension at the screen: rioting on the West Bank, the arc and explosion of tear-gas canisters.

Thinking: Hold on.

But it was like falling asleep. You couldn’t resist forever. Couldn’t stay awake forever.

Faltering, he thought about Susan.

He had liked talking to her. She knew what he was, and that stripped away the burden of pretense. There was the inevitable chasm between them, the biochemical and physiological gap—what Max had once called an evolutionary gulf. But that was inevitable, and she was at least aware of it … and acknowledging the gulf seemed somehow to narrow it.

The talk had been good. But the talk had also evoked old, unpleasant memories; memories that were difficult to suppress at the best of times. And these were not the best of times.

He knew what to do about Susan Christopher. Tell her firmly that he wasn’t interested. Hope that Max wouldn’t press the matter.

Fade, if fading was inevitable.

That was what John Shaw meant to do.

But it occurred to him, closing his eyes, that Benjamin might have other plans.

He groped after the thought and lost it. Too late now. The space behind his eyelids seemed to fill with a bright and unforgiving light. His head throbbed and ached. The change was coming, too fast and fiercely to resist. Memories surfaced like phosphorescent sea-creatures: Susan’s face, their conversation, Kyriakides and the Woodwards, the shimmering veneer on the face of a handmade guitar … all these pieces of himself, fragile as a china cup for one weightless moment … and then gone, shattered, dispersed.

He slept. And someone else awoke.

5

“He’s refusing treatment?”

Dr. Kyriakides sounded angry, his voice growling through the phone lines from Illinois.

Susan said, “At the moment—yes.”

“He’s not aware of the problem?”

“He’s very aware of it.” She repeated the list of symptoms John had recited, the recurrence of “Benjamin.”

“That’s not what I would have predicted,” Dr. Kyriakides said. “But it might be a positive sign.”

“You think so? How could it be?”

“He’s capable of tremendous things, Susan—both his conscious and his unconscious mind. He’s resurrected Benjamin for a reason, even if he’s not aware of it. It’s a response to the disease, I suspect … as if one suit of clothes has begun to wear out, and he’s preparing to put on a second.”

“But it’s not the same,” Susan said. “It’s not him.”

“But in some sense it must be him. Benjamin is his creation. It’s not something new—it can’t be. Only an aspect of himself.”

“But it isn’t John Shaw. The John Shaw part of him is dying.”

There was a pause. “Possibly,” Dr. Kyriakides admitted. “In one way or another.”

“Then we have to help him.”

“I agree! But if he’s refusing treatment—”

“He could change his mind. He said he might call back. I want to stay—at least another week. I need to talk to him again.”

There was another crackling silence through the long exchange from Chicago. “I don’t remember you being this enthusiastic.”

“I suppose … it never seemed real before.”

“Then you must have felt it, too.”

“I’m sorry?”

“His specialness. There’s something unique about John. I mean, beyond the obvious. There always has been.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know what you mean.”

“Take whatever time you need.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you want a suggestion?”

“Anything.”

“Talk to the other one. Talk to Benjamin.”

“I’ll try,” Susan said.

But she had thought of that already.

The problem was how to begin.

She wasn’t much good with people. Susan had figured that out a long time ago. She was a book-reader and she had always been good with words, but that facility did not extend to her tongue. For most of her adolescence she had been a stutterer. She loved words but could not gracefully pronounce them; people often laughed when she tried. She had retreated into muteness and spoke only when it was unavoidable. Her mother took her for sessions with a “teen counselor,” who linked Susan’s stuttering with her parents’ divorce: a traumatic event for a twelve-year-old, yes, she guessed so. Privately, she connected the stutter with her father’s grim refusal to discuss anything connected with the event, though he picked her up every weekend in his car and drove her places: the beach, park picnics, Disneyland, his apartment. Day trips, rituals of silence. How are things at school, Susie? Fuh-fuh-fine. Then his cancer erupted, a fierce Round One: in this corner, Laryngeal Nodes; in that corner, the Surgeon’s Knife. He recovered, or seemed to, except for his voice. His conversation dimmed to a whisper. The doctors said there were devices he could use, but he refused. To Susan he seemed to have achieved a whole new identity, more gaunt and wholly withdrawn. After the surgery, she was afraid to talk to him. Afraid that her own voice might strike him as a rebuke or a taunt: See, I still have my tuh-tongue.

She felt infected by his silence and determined to overcome her own. She performed speech exercises. She joined the yearbook staff at high school and studied back issues of Seventeen for clues to the social graces. It was a scientific project—as solemn as that. She was not John Shaw, inventing a new self; but the inspiration was similar … a willful disguise. And it was effective; it worked; but she remained painfully conscious of the creaking machinery behind the proscenium. People would look at her oddly and she would think Oh! I made a mistake.

Approaching John Shaw had been hard enough, even under the cloak of impartiality. Approaching Benjamin would be even harder. Because she wasn’t just a messenger from Dr. Kyriakides anymore. This had become, in a way, her own project now. And she needed her own words.

She began by renting a car. She chose a late-model Volvo and spent a day with her city map, learning the downtown. Then back to the hotel to shower, followed by cheap Chinese food on Spadina Avenue and another evening with Travis McGee. No one called; no one left a message.

She set her wristwatch alarm for 5 a.m. and slept with it under her pillow.

By the time it annoyed her awake there was morning light coming through the big plate-glass window. Not sunlight, but only a grey, tepid half-light and a few flakes of snow. She stood under the hot water of the shower until her skin hurt, then dressed in Levis, a cotton shirt, and a jacket. She rode the elevator down to the parking level, coaxed the Volvo to life, and drove into St. Jamestown.

She parked in front of the rooming house where John Shaw lived.

The snow evolved into a cold, steady drizzle as Susan shivered in the car. She watched the people who emerged from the rooming house, made ghostly by the condensation on the Volvo’s windows. None of them was John Shaw—or Benjamin. Seven o’clock slid past. At seven-thirty she was beginning to feel not merely misguided but embarrassed—playing espionage games before breakfast. She pulled her jacket closer around her and decided she would go for coffee and a croissant—she had seen a place on Yonge Street—at, say, eight o’clock. If nothing had happened.

Moments before her deadline, Benjamin left the rooming house.

She almost missed him. Dr. Kyriakides had warned her about the possibility that Benjamin might not look much like John Shaw. Obviously his features were the same, but there were subtler clues of posture and style and movement, and from this distance—through the rain—he might have been another person altogether. He walked differently. He held himself differently. He stepped into the October morning, his face disguised by the hood of a yellow raincoat, and this was not John’s long, impatient stride but something more diffident, careful, reserved. He paused at the sidewalk and looked both ways. His glance slid over the little Volvo without hesitation, but Susan pressed herself back into the seat.

He turned and walked westward through the rain.

Susan waited until he reached the corner; then she turned the key in the ignition and eased the Volvo into traffic.

He walked to work, which made it easier. By negotiating slowly through a couple of troublesome intersections she was able to follow him all the way to University Avenue, where he vanished into the lobby of a tall, anonymous Government of Ontario building.

She continued up the street, parked, bought herself breakfast at a fast-food restaurant. A sign on the wall announced a thirty-minute limit, but Susan found the table attendant, a Jamaican woman, and said she had an appointment at eleven-thirty—was it okay if she sat here out of the rain? The woman smiled and said, “We don’t get a big rush till noon. Make yourself comfortable, dear.”

She finished the Travis McGee while nursing a cup of coffee. A steady rain washed over the tinted atrium-style windows. The air was steamy and warm.

At ten she ran across the street for a copy of Time magazine, came back for a second coffee and left the lid on.

At eleven-thirty she left the restaurant and walked a block and a half to the building where Benjamin worked.

She stationed herself in the lobby as the lunch crowd began to flow past. No sign of Benjamin. She wondered if there was a second exit. But she hadn’t seen one.

At twelve-ten she asked the guard by the elevator whether there was a cafeteria in the building.

“Third floor,” he said.

“Do I need a badge?”

He smiled. “No, ma’am. I don’t believe it’s considered a privilege to eat there.”

She took a deep breath and punched the Up button.

“You’re not yourself today, Benjamin,” the secretary at Unemployment Insurance said; but Benjamin sailed on past, deaf to the obvious, pushing his mail cart. It was true, he was not himself; he was full of disquieting thoughts, thoughts he could barely contain.

He had missed a lot of work recently—more evidence that things were not as they should be. Today he had noticed his supervisor Mr. Gill eyeing him from the office behind the mail desk … maybe wondering whether to launch a complaint or to say something to Benjamin first; in the Provincial Government, with its labyrinths of employee protection, the process of firing someone could be tortuous. The absences were unusual, though, because Benjamin genuinely liked his job. He liked sorting the mail and pushing the cart twice a day; when the work ended he liked coming home to Amelie, at least when she had the evening off. He had fallen into the routines of his life like a sleepwalker caught up in an especially happy, luminous dream, and he would have been content to dream on forever. But something had begun to interfere with the dream—a waking-up; or perhaps a deeper, dreamless sleep.

Trouble, Benjamin thought. Trouble all around him, trouble inside him. He felt its pulse beat at his temples with every step. Trouble trouble trouble.

All the office clocks were creeping toward noon. He had nearly finished his run, half of the building on Bay Street, room to room and up the elevators, dropping off mail with the pretty, brightly dressed secretaries who smiled and thanked him from behind their reception desks, their barricades of computer terminals and hanging plants—their perfume mingling with the smell of broadloom and Xerography to create what Benjamin thought of as the Government Office Smell. Shouldering past the men in suits who nodded or ignored him, he was rendered invisible by his open collar: the Invisible Man. He wheeled down the corridor from Unemployment Insurance to Social Welfare with the unanswered statement now echoing in his head (I’m not myself—I’m not—I’m not myself) in time with the squeak of the left rear wheel of the cart (must oil that). It was not the sort of idea he was accustomed to having. It was troubling and strange, and he knew (but did not want to acknowledge) its obvious source.

John.

The name arose unbidden, a sort of greyness. The name John Shaw was associated in Benjamin’s mind with things hard, drab, and unyielding. Asphalt, concrete, slate. John was a dim memory, a ghost impulse, as ephemeral as the sense of deja vu. But he was also a real presence, suddenly more real than he had been for years, a demanding presence … dangerous. Not just because I might lose my job, Benjamin thought, but because I might lose, might lose … no, but oh well, admit it, might lose Amelie.

Might lose that touch, voice, smile, night presence, that (yes, say it) love, which had entered into his life so suddenly … those eyes, which regarded him and in some sense created him: confirmed his suspicion that he existed. If Amelie can love Benjamin then Benjamin is real. He understood this about himself. He possessed only a few scraps of a past, some of them illusory. But the present was real. This moment, this now. And especially his moments with Amelie. What he felt for her was uncreated, was whole, was beyond suspicion.

He didn’t want to lose her.

He would not allow her to be taken away…

But how to stop it?

Things were happening. Things beyond his control.

Trouble, he thought, as he parked the mail cart behind the sorting desk in the basement. He rode the elevator up to the employee cafeteria, bought himself a ham-on-a-kaiser and a carton of milk; then stood petrified with the tray in his hand, staring at the woman across the room, familiar but unfamiliar, who was staring at him—and the only thought in his head was trouble trouble trouble.

Trembling, he carried his tray to her table. She gestured for him to sit down.

They regarded each other for a long moment, Benjamin arriving at the understanding that she was frightened, too; though he couldn’t guess why. She was a small, nervous woman with short dark hair and brittle eyeglasses and a can of Diet Pepsi in front of her. “I’m Susan,” she said.

“Do I know you?”

“I’m a friend of John’s.”

Benjamin doubted it. Sometimes, scraps of memory would cross the barrier between Benjamin and John—more often now than ever before. That was how he had recognized the woman in the first place. But the recognition did not signal “friend”; instead it evoked a more complex reaction, fear and hunger and hope and an old, vast disappointment almost too big to contain.

“I only have an hour for lunch,” he said.

She sipped her Pepsi. “You work here?”

“In the mail room. I sort and deliver.”

“Interesting work?”

“I like it.” He unwrapped his sandwich but left it alone. He wasn’t hungry anymore. “This is about John,” he said. “Something’s happening to John.”

John my real father, he thought, John who invented me, John who created me. No, not quite that; but there was no obvious word for what John had done or Benjamin had become; no word that Benjamin knew.

He knew about John. It was a shadow knowledge, ghostly, and for a long time Benjamin had tried to ignore it. But the knowledge wouldn’t go away. Useless to pretend, for instance, that he had had a childhood. For a long time he had remembered growing up with the Woodwards, but most of that was false memory, no more substantial than the picture on a TV screen. His “real” childhood was John’s childhood, a confusion of threatening images (a woman named Marga, a man named Kyriakides); in fact his childhood was no childhood at all, because “Benjamin” had never been a child. Benjamin was born a teenager and only gradually acquired a substantial existence, imitation deepening into reflex—the mask growing roots into the skull, he thought, startled: because it was a John thought more than a Benjamin thought. Maybe John was coming back again.

So soon. Too soon.

“I was sent here by Dr. Kyriakides,” Susan said, and the name sent a shockwave up his spine. “Dr. Kyriakides thinks John might be sick. Might be dying.”

This was not the kind of information he could assimilate all at once. His stomach was churning. He looked at his watch. “I have to go back to work.”

“I can wait,” Susan said. “I have my car—I can drive you home.”

Trouble! But there was no avoiding it now.

He stood. “I get off at four.”

“I’ll meet you in the lobby,” Susan Christopher said.

Rain all day, grey down the big office windows as he wheeled his cart around; rain when he followed Susan Christopher out to her car, red-blinking rain all up and down the dark rush-hour streets. Benjamin sank into the front passenger seat as Susan pulled out into the traffic. She said, “Do you know about John, about what he is?”

“A little,” Benjamin said. “I know more about him than I used to. His brain, right? His brain is different.” My brain, too, he thought: it’s where we live. Briefly, he imagined the kind of house called a “semi-detached,” two separate homes butted up against a common wall. Noisy neighbors, Benjamin thought. Used to be the wall was thicker; nothing came through. Now, when John was in control, Benjamin retained some sense of his own existence, as if he had retreated to an upstairs room where he could watch from the window, or just float and dream, while his raucous neighbor shouted and raved.

“His brain is unique,” Susan was saying. “He was made that way. There were hormones—drugs—that changed the way he grew.”

“Dr. Kyriakides.”

Susan nodded.

“And now that’s changing,” Benjamin guessed.

She gave him a second look, maybe surprised that he had guessed. She nodded. “The tissue in the brain is more fragile than anyone expected. It deteriorates—it may be doing that already.”

“A mental breakdown,” Benjamin said.

“Maybe. Maybe even worse than that. Not just for John—for you.

But he could not dispel the image of his brain (John’s brain) as a house, a cavernous mansion, strange and multichambered—now grown brittle, dry, drafty, and susceptible to flash fires. “You don’t really know what might happen.”

“No, not really.”

But something was happening; Benjamin knew it; and he guessed she was right, you couldn’t burn down half a house and leave the other half intact—what happened to John would surely happen to Benjamin, too. For years Benjamin had been John’s shadow, his half-self, a marionette. But in the last few months he had emerged into a real existence—a life; and when he said the word “I” it meant something; he had moved in with Amelie, who looked at him and saw Benjamin. “Benjamin,” she would say. Maybe he had let himself believe that this would go on forever … that John would fade; that John would become the shadow, reduced at last to “John,” a memory. But now maybe we both lose. Maybe we’re both memory.

Susan drove into the core of St. Jamestown, where the peeling apartment towers stood like sentinels. She pulled up at the curb opposite the rooming house, but neither of them moved to get out. Susan turned the heater up.

Benjamin looked thoughtfully at her. “What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to help.”

“Help how?”

“I want you to see Dr. Kyriakides. I want you to let him treat you.”

“Can he change what’s happening?”

“We’re not sure. We’d like to find out.”

But the idea was disturbing. He felt a spasm of unease that was clearly John’s: as if John had rolled over inside him. “John doesn’t want me to do that.”

“He’s reluctant,” Susan admitted. “I’ve spoken to him.”

Benjamin gazed at the rain. “I don’t control him.”

“You control yourself.”

“I’m not sure—I don’t know if I could do something he didn’t really want. I mean, it’s never come to that.”

“I just want you to think about it,” Susan Christopher said. “That’s enough for now.”

“Oh, I’ll think about it.” Benjamin unlatched the door. “You can count on that.”

He crossed the rainy street to the boardinghouse, where the front door opened and Amelie stepped out, hugging herself, glancing a little nervously from Benjamin to the rental car and back. Benjamin was suddenly in love with the look of her under the wet porch awning in her tight jeans and a raggedy sweater and her breath steaming into the cold, wet air. Not for John, he thought: what Susan Christopher had asked for, his “help,” he might give, even if it meant an end to everything he had assembled here, his real life (which might be ending anyway); but not for John or even for himself. For her, he thought, for Amelie on the porch in her old clothes, Amelie who had drawn him out of the vacuum of himself with a word and a touch … because there was a chance, at least, that he might survive where John did not, and he owed her that chance; owed her the possibility of a happy ending; or—if that failed—if everything failed—at least the evidence of his courage.

Susan watched from the Volvo as Benjamin entered the rooming house.

Scary, she thought, how easy it was to accept him as Benjamin. “Multiple personality”—she had seen the movies, the PBS documentaries. But those people had always seemed just slightly untrustworthy, as if the whole thing might be—on some level—a sort of confidence trick, the nervous system’s way of committing a sin without taking the blame.

This was different. Benjamin was not the product of a normal mind pushed beyond its limits. He was an invention—a work of art, a wholly synthetic creation. A “normal” mind, Susan thought, can’t do that. It was a feat unique to John Shaw, as unpredictable and utterly new as the fiercely coiled cortical matter under his skull.

Unnerving.

A new disease, Susan thought. She put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. A new disease for a new species. Hypertrophy of the mind. A cancer of the imagination.

6

Bad night for Amelie.

The rain didn’t let up. Worse, she felt as if a similar cold cloudiness had invaded the apartment. Benjamin was quiet all through dinner, which was spaghetti and bottled sauce with some extra garlic and hamburger; the kind of meal Amelie assumed a man would like, substantial, with the steam from the cookpot fogging the windows. Amelie seldom had the opportunity to fix dinner. But today was her day off; she had planned this in advance.

Benjamin was quiet all through the meal. He didn’t pay attention to the food, ate mechanically, frowned around his fork.

She put on the kettle for coffee, brooding.

It was that woman, Amelie knew, the one who had come looking for John—the one who had driven Benjamin home. She had said something to him; she was on his mind. Amelie wanted to ask what this was all about, but she was scared of seeming jealous. Of seeming not to trust him. Maddeningly, Benjamin didn’t talk about it either. His silence was so substantial it was like an item of clothing, a strange black hat he had worn into the house. She tried to negotiate around it, to accommodate herself to his mood … but it was too obvious to really ignore.

She stacked the dishes and put Bon Jovi on the stereo. The tape-player part still worked, but Roch’s little two-step had twisted the tonearm off its bearings. Amelie hoped Benjamin wouldn’t notice. She didn’t want to tell him about Roch.

The truth was that Amelie didn’t feel too secure about men in general. She imagined that if she had a shrink this was the kind of thing she would confess to him. I don’t feel too secure about men. It was one of those things you can know about yourself, but knowing doesn’t make it better. Maybe this was because of her shitty adolescence, her absentee father—who knew what? On TV these problems always had neat beginnings and tidy, logical ends. In life, it was different. The time when she came here from Montreal with Roch—that was an example.

It’s funny, she thought, you say a word like prostitution and it sounds truly horrifying. Like “AIDS” or “cancer.” But she had never thought of it that way when she was doing it. She met a couple of other girls who had been on the street a long time and they talked about hooking or turning tricks, but those words didn’t apply, either. Not that she was too good for it: it was just that her mind veered away from the topic. She was surviving. Being paid for sex … it just wasn’t something you thought much about, before or during or after. And when you stop doing it, you don’t have to think about it. And so it goes away. It doesn’t show. No visible scars … although sometimes, in her paranoid moments, Amelie wasn’t so sure about that. Sometimes she developed the urge to hide her face when she rode the buses or waited on tables.

But by and large it was something she could forget about, and that was why Roch had pissed her off so intensely. Reminding her of that. Worse, acting like it was something she might do again. As if, once you do it, you’re never any better than that: it’s what you are. Trained reflex. Go fetch. Lie down and roll over.

But really, that was just Roch. Roch always had a hard time figuring out what anybody else was doing or thinking. One time, when he was nine or ten, Roch asked a friend of Amelie’s named Jeanette how come she was so ugly. Jeanette turned brick red and slapped his face. Roch wasn’t hurt, his feelings weren’t hurt, but he was almost comically surprised. Later he asked Amelie: what happened? Did he break a rule or something?

All Roch wanted was a little cash, a loan. He hadn’t meant anything by it.

She was too sensitive, that was all.

What was really frightening was the question of how Roch might respond to the beating John had given him. Because, the thing was, Roch could not forget a humiliation. He harbored grudges and generally tried to pay them back with interest.

But, Amelie told herself, there was no point in dwelling on it now.

She dried the dishes, put the towel up to dry, joined Benjamin in the main room. The TV was a black-and-white model Amelie had bought from a thrift shop, attached to a bow-tie antenna from a garage sale. The rooming house didn’t have cable, so they watched sitcoms on the CBC all evening. Benjamin didn’t say a word—just folded his hands in his lap and seemed to watch, though his eyes were foggy and distracted. Sometime around midnight, they went to bed.

She was almost asleep, lying on her back in the dark room listening to the sound of the rain against the window, when he said:

“What if I went away for a while?”

She felt suddenly cold.

She sat up. “Where would you go?”

He shrugged. “I don’t want to talk about that part of it.”

Everything seemed in sudden high relief: the faint streetlight against the cloth curtains, the coolness of the bedsheets where they touched her thighs. “Is it connected with this woman?”

Saying it out loud at last.

He said, “She’s a doctor.”

“Are you sick?”

“Maybe.”

“Is it about—” Another taboo. “About John?”

He nodded in the darkness, a shadow.

Amelie said, “Well, I don’t want you to leave.”

“But if I have to?”

“I don’t know what that means—’have to.’ If you have to, then you just do it.”

“I mean, would you be here for me.”

His voice was solemn, careful.

“I don’t know,” she said. Thinking: Christ, yes, of course I’ll be here!

He was the best thing in her life and if there was even a chance of him coming back … but she couldn’t say that. “Maybe,” she said.

He nodded again.

He said, “Well, maybe it won’t happen.”

“Talk to me,” she said. “Before you do anything.”

“I’ll try,” Benjamin said.

And then silence. And the rain beating down.

They woke a little after dawn and made love.

There was one frightening moment, when Amelie looked into his eyes, and for a second—not longer than that—she had the terrifying feeling that it was John looking down at her, his cold and penetrating vision a kind of rape … but then she blinked, and the world slid back into place; he was Benjamin again, moving against her with a passion that was also kindness and which she had allowed herself to think of as love.

The vision of him crowded out her fear.

He was Benjamin. And that was good.

7

For the rest of that rainy October week Susan immersed herself in the mystery of John Shaw.

I’ve talked to him, she thought. In a sense, I know him…

But beyond that loomed the inescapable fact:He is not entirely human.

There was no way to reconcile these ideas.

She tried to stay in her hotel room in case he called, but by Thursday morning she was overcome with cabin fever. She left a firm order at the desk to take any phone messages and set out on foot with no real direction in mind.

The rain had stopped, at least. The sky was overcast and the wind was cold, but even that was gratifying after the monotony of recycled hotel air. She walked west, away from the downtown core. Toronto was a banking city, crowded with stark office towers; its charm, she had decided, was peripheral to this, in Chinatown or the University district. She turned north along University Avenue, willfully avoiding the direction of Benjamin’s office. Shortly before noon she found herself between a phalanx of peanut carts and the granite steps of the Royal Ontario Museum, with pennies in her pocket and nowhere else to go.

Inside, the museum was all high domed ceilings and Egyptians, botanical displays and gemstones under glass. Susan appreciated these, but she especially liked the dark vaults of the dinosaur arcade, cool Pleistocene fluorescence and faint voices like the drip of water. The articulated bones of Triceratops regarded her with the stately indifference of geological time. Susan returned the look for almost a quarter of an hour, reverently.

Beyond Triceratops, the corridor wound away to the left. She eased back slowly into human history; where she was startled, turning a corner, by the Evolution of Man.

It was one of those museum displays that compare the skull sizes, tools, curvature of the spine across the eons. Here was Homo habilis leading the human march out of Olduvai, but surely, Susan thought, the entire concept was archaic: did anyone still believe evolution had proceeded in this reasonable arc? From stone club to Sidewinder missile, here at the pinnacle of time?

But she supposed John would have had a place here, too, if anyone had known about him. Dr. Kyriakides had once told her that he wanted to engineer the next step in human evolution. “A better human being. One who would make us obsolete. Or at least embarrass us for our vices.”

So here would be John, leading the march toward the future, a little taller and a little brighter and in his hand—what? A pocket H-bomb? A neutrino evaporator? Or he might be as pristine as Dr. Kyriakides had envisioned him … as weaponless and innocent as a child.

She turned away. Suddenly she wanted the high ceilings of the main arcades, not this cloistered space. But before she left she paused before the diorama of Neolithic Man, stooped and feral in wax, wincing at the first light of human awareness. Our father, she thought. Mine and John’s, too; as obdurate, inscrutable, and foreign as every father is.

Still he did not call.

Friday afternoon she phoned Maxim Kyriakides at his office at the University.

He said, “I should have come myself. Forced the issue. Then he could not have avoided me.”

“I don’t think that’s what he needs. That is—I had the impression—it would have made things worse.”

“You may be right. Still, I could come there if necessary.” He added, “I suppose I’m feeling guilty about demanding so much of your time.”

“It’s all right.”

“Is it really? You weren’t so obliging when you began the project. I had to talk you into leaving.”

“I think it’s different now—meeting him and all. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Some kind of monster.”

“Are you sure he’s not?”

She was quietly shocked. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Only that it’s easy to forget that he is what he is. He has abilities you won’t have encountered. His point of view is unique. He may not feel bound by conventional behavior.”

“I understand that.”

“Do you really, Susan? I hope so. I worry that you might be projecting your own concerns onto him. That would be a mistake.”

“I know.” (But she was blushing.) “There’s no danger of that.”

“Then I’m sorry I mentioned it.” He was being very Old World now, very charming. “I really do appreciate the work you’re doing, Susan.”

She thanked him—cautiously.

He said, “Stay as long as you like. But keep in touch.”

“I will.”

“And ultimately—if there’s nothing we can do—”

“I know,” she said. “I’m prepared for that.”

She was lying, of course.

Benjamin called that evening. The call was brief, but Susan could hear the anxiety in his voice.

“There’s a problem,” he said.

“What is it? Is it John? Is he sick?”

Cold night and the city bright but impersonal beyond the windows.

“He’s thinking of leaving town,” Benjamin said. “You want the truth? I think he’s afraid of you.”

“We have to talk,” Susan said.

She met him at an all-night cafeteria on Yonge Street.

The club next door was hosting a high-powered reggae band; the bass notes came pulsing through the wall. Susan ordered coffee and drank it black.

Benjamin came in from the street shivering in his checkerboard flannel jacket. She marveled again at how unlike John he was: nothing to distinguish this man from anyone else on the street. He smiled as he pulled up his chair, but the smile was perfunctory.

He shucked his jacket and ordered a coffee. He added cream and sugar, sipped once, said: “Oh—hey, that’s good. I needed that.”

“You look tired.”

“I am. Ever since we had our talk … I guess I’m kind of reluctant to fall asleep. Don’t know who’ll wake up. He wants more time, Susan. All of a sudden he’s fighting me.”

“I didn’t know he had a choice.”

“You come to terms with something like this. But there was never any real conflict before. I mean, you don’t understand what it’s like. It’s not something you think about if you can help it. You just live your life. I think … John was fading because he didn’t really care anymore. He let me do what I wanted and he wasn’t around much. Now … this whole thing has stirred him up.”

Susan leaned forward across the table. “You can tell that?”

“I feel him wanting to be awake.” Benjamin sat back in his chair, regarding her. “You think that’s a good thing, don’t you?”

“Well, I—I mean, it’s important to know—”

“I had to take a couple of days off.” Benjamin smiled ruefully. “John was kind enough to phone in sick for me.”

“You said he was thinking about going away?”

“Both of us have been. I talked to Amelie about it. I asked her if it would be okay, you know, if I didn’t see her for a while.”

“What did she say?”

“Basically, that it would be okay, but it wouldn’t make her happy.” He took a compulsive gulp of coffee. “If we do this—if we go for treatment—would it be possible for Amelie to come along? There’s not much to keep her here. I mean, budget permitting and all.”

“I’d have to talk to Dr. Kyriakides. It may be possible.” She hoped not. But that was petty. “You were saying about John—”

“John’s pulling in the opposite direction. I don’t usually have much access to his thoughts, you know, but some things come through. He’s thinking of leaving, but not for treatment. He wants to hit the road. Get out of town. Run away.”

“From me?”

“From this doctor of yours. From the situation But yes, you’re a part of it. I think you disturbed him a little bit. There’s something about you that worries him.”

“What? I don’t understand!”

Benjamin shrugged. “Neither do I.”

“You think there’s a chance he’ll really do it?”

“Leave? I don’t know. I really don’t. Maybe, if he panics. This is all new territory for me, you know. It’s hard to explain, but … I was just getting used to living a life. I mean, I know what I am. I’m a shadow. I’m aware of that. I was always a shadow. I’m something he made up. But I look around, I have thoughts, I see things—I’m as alive as you are.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to go back to the way it was before. You know what I like, Susan? I like the sunshine. I like the light.” His gaze was very steady and for a moment he did remind her of John. “So is that why you’re here? To send me back into the shadows?”

Susan inspected the Formica tabletop. “No. No one wants that.”

“Because you’re right. There is something happening to us. Something up here.” He tapped his head. “I can feel it. Like the boundaries are loosening up. Things are stirring around. And I don’t know where that’s taking me.” He added, “I have to admit I’m a little bit scared.”

Susan took his hand. “Both of you need help. We have to make sure both of you get it.”

“The thing is, I don’t know if I can do that. I’ll do what I can. Whatever happens, I’ll try to keep in touch. I’ll let you know where we are. But I’m not in charge here. It’s not my choice.”

“Tell me what I can do.”

“I don’t know.” He smiled wearily. “Probably nothing.”

8

Tony Morriseau was hanging out at the comer of Church and Wellesley minding his own business when he saw the Chess Player coming toward him.

Actually, stalking him was more like it. This was unusual, and Tony regarded the Chess Player’s lanky figure with a faint, first tremor of unease.

Tony knew the Chess Player from the All-Nite Donut Shop on Wellesley. Tony had never spoken to him, but the guy was a fixture there, poised over his board like a patient, predatory animal. Hardly anybody ever played him. Certainly not Tony. Tony wasn’t into games. His experience was that the Chess Player didn’t talk and nobody talked to the Chess Player.

Still, Tony recognized him. Tony was a quarter Cree on his mother’s side and liked to think he had that old Indian thing, keeping his ear to the ground. Tony made most of his money—which was not really a lot—selling dope out of the back of his 78 Corvette, parked just down the block. His profit margins weren’t high and his only steady customers were the local gay trade and some high school kids. Still, Tony was a fixture on the street; he had been here since ’84. Same Corvette, same business. He told himself it was only temporary. He wanted to make significant money, and this—dealing in streetcorner volume at a pathetic margin, from a supplier who had been known to refer to Tony as “pinworm”—this wasn’t the way to do it. He would find something else. But until then …

Until then it was business as usual—and what did this geek want from him, anyhow?

Tony pressed his back against a brick wall and gave the Chess Player a cautious nod. The evening traffic rolled down Church Street under the lights; an elderly Korean couple strolled past, heads down in abject courtesy. Tony looked at the Chess Player, now directly in front of him, and the Chess Player stared back. Big deep hollow eyes, round head, burr haircut. He made Tony distinctly nervous. Tony said, “Do I know you?”

“No,” the Chess Player said. “But I know you. I want to buy something.”

“Maybe I don’t have anything to sell.”

The Chess Player reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills. He peeled a fifty off the top and stuffed it into the pocket of Tony’s down vest. Tony’s heart began to pump faster, and it might have been the money but it might also have been the look on the guy’s face. He thought: Am I afraid? And thought: Fuck, no. Not me.

He transferred the bill to his hip pocket. “So what is it you want?”

“Amphetamines,” the Chess Player said, and Tony was briefly amused at how dainty he made it sound: amphetamines.

“How many?”

“How many have you got?”

Tony did a little mental calculation. He began to feel better. “Come with me,” he said.

Down the block to the Corvette. Checking the guy out sideways as they walked. Tony kept most of his stock in the back of the ’Vette. He had been ripped off twice; and while that was something you expected—he was not a volume dealer and he could eat the occasional losses—it was also something you didn’t want to set yourself up for. But Tony was fairly smart about people (his Cree instinct, he told himself), and he didn’t believe the Chess Player was a thief. Something else. Something strange, maybe something a little bit dangerous. But not a thief.

Tony opened the car door and rooted out a Ziploc bag of prescription pharmaceuticals from the space under the driver’s seat. He held the bag low inside the angle of the door, displaying it to the buyer but not to the public. “Some of these suit your fancy?”

“All of them.”

“That would be—you’d be talking some serious money there.”

He named a price and the Chess Player peeled off the bills. Large money amounts and no haggling. It was like a dream. Tony stuffed the cash into his rear pocket, a tight little bulge. He could go home. He could have a drink. He was prepared to celebrate.

But the Chess Player leaned in toward him and said, very quietly and calmly, “I want the car, too.”

Tony was too startled to react at once. The Corvette! It was his only real possession. He had bought it from a retired dentist in Mississauga for a fraction of what it was worth. Put some money into it. The fiberglass body had been through some serious damage, but that was purely cosmetic. Under the hood, it was mainly original numbers. “Fuck, man, you can’t have my car—that’s my car.”

But it came out like a whine, a token protest, and Tony realized with a deep sense of shock that he was afraid of this man; it was just that he could not say exactly why.

Big, almost luminous eyes peering into his. Christ, Tony thought, he can see right through me!

Without blinking, the Chess Player pulled out his roll of bills again.

Tony stared at the cash as it came off the roll. It was like a machine at work. Crisp new money. He counted up to $5000; then—without thinking—he said, “Hey, look, I paid less than that for it … it needs bodywork, you know?”

The Chess Player put the money in Tony’s vest pocket. The touch of his fingers there was weirdly disturbing. “Buy a new car,” the Chess Player said. “Give me the keys.”

Be damned if Tony didn’t do just that. Handed them over without a word. Mysterious.

He would spend a lot of long nights wondering about it.

The Chess Player was about to climb in and drive away when Tony shook his head—it was like waking up from a bad dream into a hangover—and said, “Hey! My property!”

“Take what you want,” the Chess Player said.

Panicking, Tony retrieved ten ounces of seeded brown marijuana and a milk carton of Valium and stuffed them hastily into a brown paper A P bag.

The door slammed closed as the Corvette pulled away.

He watched as the automobile faded into the night traffic, southbound on Church, all the while thinking to himself: What was that? Jesus Christ almighty!—what was that?

John Shaw stopped off at the apartment to pack a change of clothes and leave a note.

Within ten minutes he had folded every useful item into two denim shoulderbags, including the bulk of the money he had withdrawn from his private accounts. The note to Amelie was more difficult.

He hesitated over pen and paper, thinking about the man who had sold him the Corvette.

He wasn’t proud of what he’d done. It was a skill he had mastered a long time ago, a finely honed vocabulary of body and voice. With the right gestures and the necessary words, he could intimidate almost anyone—play the primate chords of fear, anger, love, or distaste, and do so at will. For a time, when his contempt for humanity had reached its zenith, he did it often. It was a means to an end, as irrelevant to ethical considerations as the shearing of a sheep.

Or so he had thought.

That time had passed; but he was pleased by the outcome of the little experiment he had just performed on Tony Morriseau. Old skills intact. So much had been lost, obscured by unconsciousness. But maybe not permanently.

He had been asleep. Now he was awake.

He wrote:

Must leave. Try to understand.

He wondered how much more he ought to say. He could summon up Benjamin long enough to compose a more serious message. Could even play at being Benjamin without invoking the real, or potent, Benjamin. But he was reluctant to do that now … it was a mistake he had made too often before.

He debated signing Benjamin’s name, then decided it would be more honest, and possibly kinder, not to. In the end he simply hung the note (two sentences, five words) on the kitchen cupboard.

Hurrying to escape these small, crowded rooms.

The Corvette protested only a little when he nosed it onto the expressway and into the light midnight traffic northbound out of the city. He had been awake for two days now and some of the old clarity had come back to him. He was able to read the condition of the Corvette’s engine through the grammar of its purrs and hesitations, and his sense was that the vehicle was old but basically sound. Something catastrophic might happen, a crack in the engine block or an embolism in an oil line; but the pistons were turning over neatly, the gears meshed, the brakes were clean. With any luck, the car would get him where he was going.

The rain that had hovered over the province for the last two weeks had finally drifted off eastward. It was a clear, cold night. Between the glaring road-lights—growing sparse out here in farm territory—he was able to see a scatter of stars. He had always liked looking at the stars and sometimes felt a special connection with them, in their isolation in the dark sky. It was the kinship he felt for all lost, strange, and distant things.

The road arrowed up a long incline, an ancient glacial moraine, and suddenly the stars were right in front of him. Impulsively, he edged the Corvette’s gas pedal down. It was long past midnight and nothing was moving here but a heavily freighted lumber truck. He took the Corvette past it in an eyeblink. A brief taste of diesel through the cracked wing window, then onward. He watched the speedometer creep up. At eighty-five mph the Corvette was showing some of its age and neglect. He read a whiff of hot metal and oil, the spark plugs burning themselves clean.

He liked this—the farms and empty autumn fields blurring behind him; the sense of motion. But more than that. It was a private pleasure, uniquely his own. His reflexes and his sense of timing seldom came up against their inherent limits; it was exhilarating to push that envelope a little. He was very far from those limits even now—the speedometer still inching upward—but he was attentive, focused, and energized. Every shiver of the chassis or tremor of the road became significant information, raw data flooding him. He came up fast on a sixteen-wheel Mayflower truck and passed it, left the trucker’s horn screaming impotently down a corridor of cold night air.

This was a world only he was fit to inhabit, he thought, this landscape of speed and reflex. For anyone else it would be next door to death. For John it was a sunny meadowland through which his thoughts ran in a cool, rapid cascade.

There was a shimmy now from the rear end of the Corvette.

And he would have to slow down soon in any case, or risk running some radar trap or pushing the engine past its tolerances. In any case, it was time to fill the gas tank. But he allowed himself one moment more. This fine intoxication.

He was beginning to ease back on the gas pedal when the Corvette fishtailed coming around a slow curve.

He was on top of it instantly, manhandling the wheel, feeling the sudden change from vehicular momentum to deadly inertia. There was a long spin on the cool night pavement, tire treads fraying and screaming as the rear end wheeled around and the car tottered, wanting to turn over. John held onto the steering wheel, focused into this long moment … working with the car’s huge momentum, tugging it back from the brink, correcting and correcting again as the tires etched long V’s and Ws on the dark pavement.

He had the Corvette under control within microseconds. A moment later it was motionless on the shoulder of the road.

Sudden silence and the ticking of the hot engine. Wind in a dark October marsh off to the right of him.

A shiver of relief ran up his spine.

He looked at his hand. It was shaking.

He opened the glove compartment, tugged out the Ziploc bag, rolled an amphetamine cap into his mouth.

He dry-swallowed the pill and angled the car slowly back onto the highway, carefully thinking now about nothing at all.

Fundamentally, it was a question of past and future.

He took the first car ferry of the morning across Georgian Bay to the northern shore of Lake Superior. The North Shore was a stark landscape of pine and rock and the brittle blue Superior horizon. Gas station towns, souvenir stands, Indian reservations; black bear and deer in the outback. During the last world war, captive German military officers had been assigned logging duty in this wilderness. There were places, John understood, where their K-ration tins lay rusting under the pine needles and the washboard lumber roads. In summer the highway would have been crowded with tourists; but it was late in the year now and the campgrounds were vacant and unsupervised. He drove all day through the cold, transparent air; after nightfall he turned down a dirt track road to an empty campsite near the lakeshore. He zipped up his insulated windbreaker and stoked a kindling fire in one of the brick-lined barbecue pits; When he had achieved a satisfactory blaze he added on windfall until the fire was roaring and crackling. Then he settled back to rising sparks and stars and the lonely sound of Lake Superior washing at the shore. The fire warmed his hands and face; his back was cold. He heated a can of soup until the steam rose up in the wintery air.

When the meal was finished, he sat in the car with the passenger door opened toward the fire, thinking about the past and the future.

The past was simple. He contained it. He contained it in a way no other human being could contain it, as a body of mnemonic experience he could call up at will—his life like an open book.

Excepting the chaos of his earliest infancy, there was not a day of his life that John could not instantly evoke. He had divided his life into three fundamental episodes—his time with Dr. Kyriakides, his time with the Woodwards, his time as an adult. Four, if you counted the recent re-emergence of Benjamin as a new and distinct epoch. And each category was a vast book of days, of autumns and winters and summers and springs, each welling from its own past and arrowing toward its own future with a logic that had always seemed incontrovertible.

Until now. For most of his life he had been running toward the future as if it contained some sort of salvation. In the last few years, mysteriously, that had changed. The future, he thought, was a promise that might not be kept. Now he was running … not quite aimlessly, because he had a destination in mind; not toward the past, precisely; but toward a place where his life had taken a certain turn. A fork in the road. Maybe it would be possible to retrace his steps, turn the other way; this time, maybe, toward a genuine future, an authentic light.

He recognized the strong element of rationalization in this. Self-deception was a vice he had never permitted himself. But there comes a time when your back is to the wall. So you follow an instinct. You do what you have to.

A sudden, bitter wind came off the lake. The fire was dying. He banked the embers and then shut himself into the car, blinking at the darkness and afraid to sleep. He looked longingly at the glove compartment, picturing the bag of pills there. But he had to pace himself. He felt the fatigue poisons running through his body. No choice now but to sleep.

Anyway—he would need the pills more, later.

He watched the stars until the windows clouded with the vapor of his breath. Finally, with an almost violent suddenness, he slept.

He drove west into the broad prairie land.

Coming through Manitoba he ran into a frontal system, rain and wet snow that sidelined the Corvette in a little town called Atelier while the Dominion Service Station and Garage replaced the original tires with fresh snow-treads. John checked into a motel called The Traveller and picked up some books at the local thrift shop.

Entertainment reading for the post-human: a science-fiction novel;The Magic Mountain (the only Mann he’d never looked into); a paperback bestseller. Also a battered Penguin edition of Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John—the joke, of course, was on himself.

He had read the Stapledon many times before. It was a classic of English eccentric writing of the thirties, the story of a mutant supergenius born to ordinary humanity. During his adolescence John had adopted the book as a kind of bible. The story was fuzzy-minded, uneven, sometimes silly in its literal-mindedness; but he felt a resonance with Odd John’s sense of “spiritual contamination” by mankind, his “passion of loneliness.” The John of the book sought out others of his kind!—telepaths and mutants—and founded a Utopian colony which the Great Powers ultimately destroyed. Two unlikely assumptions there, John thought: that there were others of his kind, and that such people would constitute a perceptible threat to anyone.

But the biggest mistake Stapledon had made, John thought, was his character’s self-sufficiency. Stapledon compared his Odd John to a human being among apes. But a human being raised by apes isn’t a superior ape. In all the qualities that matter to apes, he’s not much of an ape at all. And if he feels contemptuous of the apes, it’s only the automatic contempt of the rejected outsider.

Still—in this desolate prairie town—some of that contempt came welling up.

After dinner he went walking along the narrow main street of Atelier where the Trans-Canada passed through. Atelier was a grain town; its landmarks were a railway depot, a Chinese restaurant, and a five and dime. Nobody much was out in the weather except for a few sullen leather-jacketed teens occupying the Pizza Patio. He pressed through the sleet beyond the local mall and discovered signs of life at a tiny sports arena. An illuminated Port-A-Sign announced:

John gazed awhile at the sign; then—curious, sad, and entirely alone—he joined the small crowd in the overheated lobby, indoors and away from the rain.

The auditorium was three-quarters full when the ushers closed the doors.

It was an elderly crowd, with a few earnest young couples scattered around the arena. He counted several wheelchairs, a great many crutches. A woman in a gingham skirt moved down the aisles, stopping here and there to exchange a few words with the audience. She paused at the row in front of John and chatted with a hugely overweight man about his gall bladder troubles. She caught John’s glance and moved toward him; when he did not look away she asked, “Are you here for healing?”

He shook his head in the negative.

“Are you sure? You look like a man with a need.”

He gave her a long, focused look. The woman in the gingham dress tugged at her earlobe, stared a moment longer, then shrugged uneasily and moved away.

The audience hushed as the lights dimmed. A local choir performed a hymn, and then Reverend Belweather took the stage. He was a squat, compactly fat man in a sincere Republican suit. His hair was cut to Marine length; he wore rings on his fingers. He began in a low-key fashion, whispering into the hand mike—you had to strain forward to hear him—but he was good, John thought. He read the crowd well and he was good with his body, with his aggressive strut and upraised palm. He preached to the crowd for forty minutes under the fierce klieg lights, rising to thunderous crescendos of damnation and salvation, the sweat rivering off the slope of his forehead. John closed his eyes and felt the crowd around him as a single, physical thing—an animal, aroused to some terrible confusion of eroticism and fear. The human odor was as physical as heat in the confined space of the auditorium and it beat against him like a pulse. I pity them, John thought. And I hate myself for my pity. And I hate them for provoking it.

Wishing, at the same time, that he could be a part of it. He understood the profound comfort here. To be not alone. But he could not wholly grasp the beatitude beneath this stink of human sweat. He had read too much history. It smelled like Torquemada and his chambers; it smelled like Belsen and the killing fields of Cambodia.

The healing came last. Reverend Belweather called up the afflicted by name or disorder. “God informs me there’s a Michael among us … Michael with a gall bladder!” And the fat man in the forward aisle stood up and ambled toward the stage, shocked into obedience.

Obscure in the shadows, John followed him down.

An experiment.

He stood in this cluster of diseased, dying, and broken individuals and felt a second wave of paralyzing contempt. Contempt for their sheeplike vulnerability; contempt for the man who was shearing them. I hate them, he thought, for cooperating in this … for their stupidity, he thought; because I cannot forgive them for it.

The healing act itself was anticlimactic, a tepid discharge of the tensions that filled the auditorium. A hand on the forehead, the hot breath of blessing, the command to shed those crutches and walk—at least as far as the wings, where the Reverend Belweather’s muscular stage crew redistributed the crutches and wheelchairs as needed. The woman in the gingham dress lingered there, also.

John edged his way to the stage.

Reverend Belweather regarded him with a certain amount of suspicion—this odd bird among the flock—and said, “Quickly, son, what exactly is your ailment?”

“I have a headache,” John said.

Reverend Belweather turned his eyes toward heaven, as much exasperation as prayer in the look. “Dear God,” he said to the microphone, “we join together in begging an end to this young man’s discomfort.” And the hand on the head.

Reverend Belweather’s hand was fleshy and moist. John imagined something pale and unwholesome, a dead thing touching him.

He concentrated for a moment. He could not say why this impulse had overtaken him. Some marriage of cruelty and distaste. One more experiment; there had been many before. But there was no restraining it.

Reverend Belweather yanked his hand away from John’s head as he felt the skin writhing there.

Spontaneous scars and wounds that appear in a religious trance are called “stigmata.” The phenomenon occurs in faiths from Catholicism to Voodoo; an interaction between mind and body triggered by religious ecstasy.

John was able to do it at will.

Reverend Belweather stared with honor at the cross of raised, feverish skin that had formed on John’s forehead.

He managed, “Who are you?”

“It doesn’t matter,” John said. “What matters is that your wife has a radio transmitter built into her hearing aid and that you’re using it to defraud these people. You’re in violation of three federal statutes and you’re committing a sin. You should cancel tomorrow’s performance.”

Reverend Belweather staggered back as if the floor had shifted under his feet. He looked for his stage crew—the big men in the wings. They had already sensed a ripple in the flow and moved forward. “Get him the fuck out of here,” the Reverend Harmon Belweather said, his voice suddenly shrill and petulant. “Just get him the fuck out—now!” But he had clutched the hand-mike to his chest in an involuntary spasm of panic, and the words rang and echoed through the big Tannoy P.A. speakers like an invocation, or a failed and panicky exorcism.

It had been, of course, a stupid and dangerous thing to do. John turned and merged into the crowd of the crippled and the ill as the Reverend Belweather’s henchmen advanced. They were large but slow and they hadn’t had a good look at him; he was out a Tear door and into the cold rain before they realized he was gone.

He arrived back at the motel wet, cold, and rank with amphetamine sweat, but the girl behind the desk smiled at him as he passed; and the smile provoked an old response. He stopped and turned to face her. Eighteen or maybe nineteen years old, broad bones, an aggressive blur of lipstick. And that smile. She returned his look. “318, right?”

His room number. He nodded. “You were here when I checked in.”

“Right, that’s right. I’m on till midnight. Shift’s just about up.”

He watched her eyes and her lips. The smile was tentative but provocative, an offer half made. He surmised that she had allowed guests to come on to her in the past and that she had mixed feelings about it, guilt colored with arousal; that she liked him because he looked a little dangerous coming in hollow-eyed from the rain; that she was scared of him, too, a little.

The possibility was tantalizing. She was a sheep, a goat, an ape, a human animal—but I’m human too, he thought, from the neck down. She shouldn’t have provoked him with that smile. Nobody ever smiled at him. The rain and the tension had disguised some obvious clue to his nature:she doesn’t recognize the devil. Horns and tail don’t show in this light. Reverend Belweather, I am a stronger persuader than you are.

It was as easy as asking. Easy as buying a used Corvette. Look deep into my eyes and see precisely what you want, a tall westbound stranger with no attachments and big hands, see our dovetailed needs. He took her to his room and undressed her in the dark, pronouncing the words she wanted so desperately to hear, disguising himself so that she would not recoil and leave. Dangerous, this eager merging of skin and skin, sudden loss of surface tension; this knocking loose of props inside him until, delirious with orgasm and fatigue, he was no longer sure who or where he was. After a time she stood and dressed in the faint light—the light that comes through motel windows in prairie towns on cold nights after midnight—a glimmer of wet on her thigh, and John was startled by the immediacy of the vision (or was it a symptom of his decline?), the absolute solidity of white shoulder and cascade of hair. A sudden longing radiated through him like a pulse. She turned toward him momentarily and he waited for the revulsion in her eyes, her dawning sense of his alienness, but there was none: only a flicker of curiosity. She smiled. “Who’s Susan?”

John sat up on the bed, wordless.

“You said her name. I guess you didn’t even know it. Girlfriend? Wife? Well, it doesn’t matter.”

He managed, “I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m flattered. You must love her a lot.”

She left him staring at the door.

Sleeping, he dreamed of his first sexual encounter.

He was sixteen and he had abandoned Benjamin and he was about to abandon the Woodwards; as an experiment, he seduced a female classmate. He selected his target and approached her methodically. She was a fragile bundle of neuroses and exposed nerves, therefore easy to manipulate. Which he did: he flattered and provoked and humiliated her into a motel bedroom, and he fucked her there—there was no other word for it. He obtained her passive submission and he fucked her.

Was it satisfying?

On the most elementary level, yes, it was. As an experiment, it was wholly successful. Fucking this schoolgirl in the dark was a confirmation of everything he had learned about himself, about his superiority. She was a lesser creature, which rendered any ethical objections moot. The sin, if there was a sin here, was not rape but bestiality, surely excusable under the circumstances.

Two things bothered him, however, and made him reluctant to repeat the experiment.

The first was that, while he was with her, while he was hovering at the brink of orgasm, some subterranean and scary impulse caused him to mouth the words “I love you” against her ear. She hadn’t noticed, thank God. But it troubled John immensely. The words weren’t his words! And words were his environment: words were where he lived. If this brick could collapse, how secure was the structure he had made of his life?

The second disturbing thing was the way she looked at him when they were finished. He switched on the bedside lamp and began to dress. He turned and caught her eyes fixed on him, and the expression on her face was one of silent shock:What am I doing here? Christ, what have I done?

He recognized the look.

He hated it.

It was far too familiar.

When he awoke it was five-fifteen of the next evening and the last daylight was bleeding away in a steely grey sky.

He checked out at the desk. There was another woman at the counter, middle-aged, lumpily overweight. She smiled and totaled his bill. “Late to be leaving,” she observed. “Are you one of those night drivers?”

He nodded.

“Yeah,” she said, “we get a few of those. Some people prefer it. Me, I think it’s lonely going down the highway all by yourself in the dark. Oh well … I guess people are different that way.”

He looked at the bill. “What’s this charge?”

“Why, that’s your phone call. Long distance to Toronto about 11 a.m. this morning. You came in the office and asked me how to get a line out, and I—hey, mister, is something wrong? What’s the matter—you don’t remember?”

In the Corvette he swallowed two pills and washed them down with coffee from a thermos, then gunned the engine and sailed west.

He passed the arena on his way out of Atelier. According to the billboard, the Reverend Belweather had canceled for tonight.

There was fresh-fallen snow in the Rockies but the roads were clear. The Corvette labored up and through a world of pine and snow and rock and cold blue sky; he was closing in on his objective now. John especially did not want to sleep—the sleep might revive his twin, if only momentarily, as it had in Atelier—and so he began to rely on the amphetamines when he felt fatigue settling in. This effectively killed his appetite, which in turn eliminated restaurant stops and saved a little time, though he did periodically force himself to stop for food. He was running the physical machine hard and he was conscious of the dangers that imposed.

He was careful; but even so, coming down the slope of the Rockies into coastal British Columbia, he began to hallucinate.

Rockfaces and switchbacks took on a sinister, knife-sharp significance. One looming wall of granite, where the mountain had been blasted to accommodate the road, compressed itself into a sudden likeness of Maxim Kyriakides—the rugged features, fierce brows, flat gray eyes. Max as he had appeared to John as a child. This immense, this unshakable. Well, he thought, as Amelie might say, Fuck you, Max. Get thee behind me.

It was the pills, he thought. They were responsible for this, the eruption of metaphor into his visual field. He shook his head and worked hard at concentrating on the road.

Of course, he thought, it might be the dissolution that Susan Christopher had warned him about. The cortical locus of his ego, the John Shaw part of his brain, misfiring in the dark of the skull … as it had when he almost allowed the Corvette to cartwheel on the highway out of Toronto. But that was not an allowable thought.

Not yet.

He blinked away the mutant landscape and reached for his baggie of pills.

He abandoned the Corvette in the vast parking lot at Tsawassen, where the ferries left the mainland of British Columbia for the Gulf Islands.

It was a bright, clear autumn day. The ferry dock was at the end of a long artificial spit of land; the waiting room windows looked over the placid blue water. John stood in the sunlight watching as the Victoria ferry eased into dock. Peaceful here, but he was wound up with drug energy. Twitchy restlessness and fatigue poisons, strange little seretonin rushes from his overworked neurochemistry. He made his body calm, tried to suppress the raw-nerve tingling in his arms and legs. He thought of Susan Christopher.

The thought was unbidden but very strong. Another eruption out of his past, he thought, this one more recent. Another face. Well, he liked her face. He held it in his mind for a moment, and the influence was soothing. Her face was uncommonly revealing and it was possible to read every flicker of her psyche in it. Her timidity, of course, and her fear of him, and under that something else, a fresh grief … but these things did not define her. There was also an openness, a willfulness. Intelligence. And she liked him; she felt some connection with him.

A dim sexual urge fought through the amphetamine haze. But that was inappropriate … now and maybe forever. Sudden associative memories of old experiments, encounters in the dark. And this cynical, familiar thought: A man may be raised by apes. But does he love the apes?

In the blue Gulf water a ferry sounded its horn. John shouldered his knapsack and shuffled aboard.

The afternoon faded toward evening. Crossing the Gulf, standing alone on the windswept outer deck, he watched the peak of Mount Hood, ancient volcanic cinder cone, fading to red on the horizon.

He had come to Canada fifteen years ago. Memories of that time unreeled behind his eyes.

After he left the Woodwards, after a few years in transient jobs from Detroit to San Francisco, he decided he would be safer in Canada. Safer or, at least, harder to find. John understood certain facts about his past. He knew that his creation had been overseen by the American government in one of its more macabre incarnations—the CIA’s MK-ULTRA or some related institution—and that this agency had lost interest in him shortly before he was delivered to the Woodwards. He was also aware that he was a potential embarrassment to these powerful people and that he would be safer if he could become anonymous. Canada seemed like a good place to do that.

Money had never been a problem. He was able to bluff his way into almost any kind of work. He paid for fabricated ID and began with a typesetting job in Vancouver. He put his savings into small, solid investments; he anticipated the city’s urban growth cycles throughout the volatile 1970s and turned that insight into capital. He wasn’t wealthy—wealth invites attention—but within a few years he was at least independent. For a time, his most permanent address had been a houseboat anchored on the North Shore. In the summers, when he could afford the time, he used the boat to explore the B.C. coastline.

Those journeys had satisfied his appetite for isolation, at least for a while. But it was an appetite that, once briefly whetted, began to grow beyond all bounds.

The ocean fed it. The ocean was indifferent, calm and vast. The ocean did not pay John Shaw any particular attention; the coastal rocks and piney inlets ignored his passage. There were places where he could land, come ashore, and move among the dark trees as quietly as the Haida or the Kwakiutl of a thousand years ago. The isolation was a new discovery for him, a thrilling one. Alone, he could become what he was meant to be: a new thing, a fresh creature on the earth.

In the spring of 1984 he had liquidated the bulk of his savings and bought property on one of the more obscure and inaccessible of the inhabited Gulf Islands, a chain of rocky prominences paralleling the inner coast of Vancouver Island. The smallest of these were unmapped rocks and shoals that disappeared with the tide; the one he came to think of as his own was hardly larger. The entire southern tip of this island was in effect his property: a domain; a kingdom, though he did not think of himself as its owner or ruler. He was its citizen—its subject. He had ransomed his savings for that privilege. There was enough money left to keep him in provisions, to pay for a cabin and a wind generator, for the books and the PC terminal he ferried in from the mainland.

Alone, he had immersed himself in cellular biology. He recognized the irony: he was adopting Max’s specialty. But it was suddenly and overwhelmingly important to establish the link between himself and the rock pine, the sea otter, the sea itself. At the most basic level they were all very much alike, ribosomes and rysosomes, hydrogen and oxygen. Evolutionary history was inscribed into the substance of itself—organelles, once independent creatures, were imbedded in the cellular structure like the effigies of saints in the wall of a cathedral. Climbing among the shore rocks in late summer he observed blue-green algae in the glassy tide pools, prokaryotic cells, filaments of DNA floating free in the cytoplasm: primitive protein inventions. He handled shells washed up by storms, calciate rocks with the Fibonacci series imposed upon their shapes as if the clay itself had been possessed by mathematics.

This was the estate from which he had been disinherited. He was not even a genetic sport—the cells in his body, his DNA, were no more unusual than anyone’s. His progeny, if he produced any, would not resemble him. Max had intervened after conception, in the womb; had performed chemical modifications that operated at the level of transcriptase and RNA, skewed protein messages carried through cellular reproduction in the zygote. In effect, his blueprints had been tampered with. Specifically, the protein code for the construction of a human forebrain had been altered; the basic human neural command—to build a more complex cerebrum—had been amplified. He was born with voluntary motor control and cutaneous sensation measurably greater than the norm. Other cortical functions—the generalized sensory threshold, language skills, abstract thought—registered beyond the curve of expectation as soon as they could be reasonably charted. By the age of five years he was way off scale on the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. He was “smart.” He was also not entirely human.

He was not human, but he was protoplasm, and he guessed he had come to this isolated place to prove that to himself. We are all cast out from some kingdom, he thought. It was how the process worked. Chordates exiled from the world of the invertebrates, air-breathing vertebrates exiled from the sea. Mankind itself, cast out from the animal kingdom into the high, chilling air of self-awareness and the anticipation of personal mortality. I am not unique, he told himself. Merely alone.

It was a kind of consolation. But it had faded through the long winter and he was left with a growing sense of morbidity. Alone, he turned his attention to cellular pathology. He read research abstracts. He built an elaborate add-on memory system for his PC and tinkered with its program protocols until he could use it to generate elaborate models of metastatic 3LL carcinomas. He came to understand disease and aging as the agents of thermodynamic necessity—the spring of life unwinding on itself. The universe itself, he thought, was a broken symmetry in the unimaginable unmaterial from which it arose, an eruption of imperfection. And life was both a product of that process and a mirror of it. We carry our corruption from the womb, he thought. Max had believed in the perfectibility of mankind. But that was a superstition. Bad teleology and bad thermodynamics.

As time passed, he had traveled to the mainland less often. When he did, he began to attract attention. His Levis were thin and sun-faded; he had grown a beard. He was astonished at his own reflection in the window of the night ferry to Tsawassen. Here was some feral creature, sun-darkened and wild-eyed … where was John Shaw?

What was John Shaw?

But he knew the answer. John Shaw was an invention—the lifework of Dr. Kyriakides.

How strange it must be, he thought, to create a human being—or a facsimile of one.

But I’ve done that, he thought. I do know what it’s like.

He had invented Benjamin.

Waves of memory were triggered by the thought … memory, and the faint, disquieting sensation that something alive had moved inside him.

Coming back to this place now, it seemed as if he had never left.

He bought a week’s rental on an aluminum motor launch from one of the larger islands, and made his way directly to the cabin, avoiding the main docks at the civilized end of the small island and beaching the boat in a rocky inlet. He secured the boat against the incoming tide and followed a crude path to the cabin from the shore.

The cabin hadn’t changed much. The weather had pried up a few boards, and dry rot had taken out a corner of the porch stairs. A window was broken. Hikers had been here—he found a limp condom and the remains of a six-pack discarded in the back room. Forbidden pleasures.

Violation and trespass. He swept all this away, down the back steps into the bushes. There was a small storage closet built into the rear of the cabin, which no one had bothered to loot; it contained mainly maintenance supplies and he was able to mend the broken window with a sheet of polyethylene. Night was falling fast. John moved into the lengthening shadows of the pines beyond the cabin and gathered windfall for a fire. It had been a dry autumn and there was plenty of loose kindling. He startled a deer, which regarded him with wary eyes before it bolted into the bush.

He had a fire blazing in the stone fireplace before the sky was entirely dark, and enough kindling set aside to last the night. Come morning he would chop firewood. The weather was clear but very cold.

He rolled out his sleeping bag in front of the fire.

He was immensely tired.

He gave himself permission to sleep. Now, here, finally. But sleep wouldn’t come. Strange how it was possible to be crazed with fatigue and still wide awake. Too many amphetamines, he thought, for far too long. He was still, on some level, speeding.

He wrapped himself in his down jacket and went outside, walking a few feet down a dark path to a slab of granite overlooking the water. He gazed at the cold, wholly transparent sky and listened to the rustle of dry leaves against the windward wall of the cabin. He felt his aloneness. And he understood—quite suddenly—that it was that once-glimpsed sense of connection that had brought him back here. The need—even if he was dying, especially if he was dying—to feel himself a part of something. If not humanity, then this. This stark, unforgiving, lovely night.

But there was nothing of him in this wilderness. He had expected to find at least an echo of himself, of his isolation, in sky and sea and stone; but the sky swallowed up his voice and the rock rejected his footprints.

He shuffled inside to wait for morning.

9

Amelie did her best to ignore the note on the kitchen cupboard. Problem was, it refused to go away.

She pretended it didn’t exist. When she came home from the restaurant and found it, that first time, the note was like something washed up in a bottle: indecipherable and strange. Must leave. Try to understand. What did that mean? It didn’t even look like Benjamin’s writing.

He had talked about going away. True. But this—

It was too weird.

She washed the dishes. George had given her the evening off. She watched Entertainment Tonight, followed by a game show and a detective show. The images slid on past, video Valium. One day, she thought, we’ll get cable. Then maybe there’ll be something good to watch.

But the “we” made an odd hollow sound in her head.

She went to bed alone. Deep, brooding, dreamless sleep, and then she woke up—still alone. Well, that happened sometimes.

You couldn’t predict with Benjamin. Obviously, he had problems. It was not as if he could entirely control … what he was.

She forced herself to make the trek to the bathroom, cold these mornings. She looked at herself in the minor, naked and shivering, and she didn’t like what she saw. Small breasts, pinpoint nipples, a mouse-brown thatch of pubic hair. A ratty little body, Amelie thought. Someone, probably Sister Madelaine from the Ecole, had called her that. “Amelie, you are a ratty thing.”

Ratty little me, Amelie thought.

She went to work without thinking about Benjamin.

It was an ordinary day at work, and that was good. She thought maybe she was projecting some kind of aura, because nobody bothered her much. Even her customers were polite—even George was polite. At the door, as she was leaving, he put his hand on her shoulder and said, “Are you okay?”

“Just a little down,” Amelie said … regretting it instantly; because, in a strange way, saying so seemed to make it true.

“Some woman thing,” George diagnosed.

Yeah, she thought, I’m getting my period. George could be such a moron sometimes. But he meant well. “Something like that.”

“So cheer up,” he said.

Thank you a whole lot for that terrific advice, Amelie thought.

She walked home in the cold dark. When she reached the apartment, the note was still attached to the cupboard.

She looked at it harder this time. Forced her eyes to track it. Blue Bic hieroglyphics. Really, what language was this?

And at the back of her head, where impossible thoughts were nevertheless sometimes pronounced, she heard:

I am alone now.

Oh, no.

Screw that He’d be home. He would! It was only a matter of time.

She poked through the dresser drawers looking for something to smoke, something that would soothe her to sleep. This turned out to be a bad move, because she discovered that Benjamin’s clothes had been pretty much cleared out. The vacant space was a signal to her, more comprehensible than the note and more final. This sad empty drawer. She slammed it shut. As it turned out, there was a joint hidden at the bottom of her purse—something she’d bought from Tony Morriseau a while back.

It got her stoned enough to enjoy a William Powell Thin Man movie coming fuzzily over the border from a network affiliate in Buffalo … but not so stoned that she didn’t leap up from the sofa when the telephone rang. Benjamin, she thought, because it was late now and he must be thinking about her and who the hell else would be calling her at this hour?

Her hand trembled on the receiver. “Hello?”

But it wasn’t Benjamin. It was Roch.

She couldn’t understand him at first. He was speaking thick, muddled, obscene French. He’s drunk, she thought. She said, in English, “What do you want?”

There was a long pause. “I need a place to stay.”

“Oh, no … hey, come on, Roch, you know that’s not a good idea.”

“Oh, it isn’t? Isn’t it?”

Amelie wished she hadn’t smoked. She felt suddenly feverish and sweaty. She felt her brother’s attention focused on her like a heat-ray through the telephone.

“They fucking kicked me out of my apartment, Amelie. Nonpayment. Bitch landlady calls me a deadbeat. You know? This …toad, with a dress like a burlap sack. Looks at me like I came out from a crack in the plaster. You are a deadbeat, she says, I’m locking you out. I told her, I have stuff in there. She says, you have trash in there and you can pick it up from the side of the road. I should have fucking killed her.”

Amelie, who was tired of this, said, “So why didn’t you?”

“Because she had some goddamnned pit bull or something on a leash beside her. One of those killing dogs.” He emitted a high, drunken laugh. “It even looked like her! But I should have … you know … I should have fucking killed her.”

So do it sometime. Just do it, and then they’ll lock you up and I won’t have this problem.

She said, “There must be someplace you can stay.”

It sounded like pleading.

“You’re it,” Roch said. “You’re my sister. You owe this to me.” He added, “What’s the problem—that shithead you’re living with? Well, you can just fucking ditch him. This is an emergency. I mean, I’m family, right? So tell him to get the hell out or I’ll kick his ass.”

You didn’t have much luck last time you tried, Amelie thought—but then she remembered that Benjamin was gone. Maybe because she was stoned and frightened now, his absence became abruptly real. She really was alone here. All by herself in these broken-down rooms.

She didn’t want to give in to Roch. But if she refused, odds were he’d be over here anyway. He would want a fight; and she couldn’t face that … not now…

So she told him, “Just tonight. Just until you find something. Okay? Just tonight.”

He was instantly soothed. “That’s my girl.”

“I’m not your girl, Roch.”

“You’re there when I need you. That’s what counts, right? That’s what family is for.”

“Sure. That’s what family is for.”

In the aftermath of his call, the silence in the room was stunning. She turned down the volume on the TV but she could still hear a high-pitched whine radiating from inside the set. A leaky tap ticked in the kitchen.

She turned away from the phone, then turned back as a flutter of motion attracted her eye. A slip of paper had been tucked under the phone; now it slipped to the floor. She picked it up and unfolded it.

A phone number. A name.

Susan Christopher.

The woman who had come looking for John Shaw.

Maybe Susan Christopher knows where Benjamin is, she thought. It was possible. But the Christopher woman might be out of town by now. Probably was. There was a hotel address written under the fold of the paper. Probably she would have checked out. Still—

No, Amelie instructed herself. Don’t think about it now. Save it.

She tucked the note into her purse, down deep between her wallet and her make-up case—a safe place. She might want it, she thought. Later.

10

Susan stayed an extra month over schedule in Toronto, living frugally on the money Dr. Kyriakides had wired her and waiting for the phone to ring.

She developed a schedule. Her mornings were her own, and she used them to explore the city, on foot or by public transit. There was always the possibility that John might try to contact her during these hours, but it was a calculated risk: she could not simply sit in her room and wait. So she would wake up, shower, buy breakfast in the hotel coffee shop. She had left standing instructions with the switchboard to take her messages—which must have amused the telephone staff, since there weren’t any messages, ever—and she was careful to get back no later than one o’clock in the afternoon, a stern rule that served to assuage her guilt.

In time, she developed a few favorite destinations. She liked riding the ferry to Ward’s Island and back, Lake Ontario bleak and pretty in the November weather. She liked Chinatown. She discovered cheap, interesting lunches in the Vietnamese restaurants along Dundas west of University—John would approve, she thought. She shopped for reading material in the second-hand bookstores along the city’s somewhat bohemian Queen Street strip. Afternoons, she would read by the phone. There were days when she spoke to no one except the waiter in the Saigon Maxima and the desk clerk at the hotel. The isolation had become a fact of her life. I am, she thought, like those people who live in caves for months on end. She had begun to lose any real sense of time.

It was Dr. Kyriakides who reminded her of how much time had truly passed. He phoned at the end of November and said, “I want you to come home now.”

“But he hasn’t called,” Susan said. “He—”

“I think at this point we have to admit that it might not happen. When was the last time he contacted you? Almost a month ago, wasn’t it?”

Approximately that. And it had been Benjamin, not John, and the news had not been encouraging—he was calling from a motel somewhere out west and he believed John was acting out some kind of regression, unwinding his life down the highway toward some unknown destination.

“But he said he’d try to call again,” Susan protested. “If I leave now he won’t be able to find us!”

“John can always find us if he wants to. That decision is in his hands. I suppose it always has been. We can’t force our help on him. But my main concern, Susan, is you.”

“I’m doing all right.” But it sounded petulant, childish.

“You’re becoming obsessive,” Maxim Kyriakides said.

“Shouldn’t I be? You’re obsessive about John. You told me so.”

“I have a legitimate reason. I’m entitled to my guilt, Susan. I’ve earned it.”

She didn’t want to explore the implications of that. “One more week.”

“I don’t see any point in prolonging the inevitable.”

“I’ll make you a deal. One more week, then I fly back—no arguments, no regrets.”

Dr. Kyriakides was silent for a moment. “You know, you’re not in a position to bargain.”

“As a favor, then.”

“Well … then let me make the arrangements. I’ll buy you a flight back to O’Hare. One week from tonight. Precisely.”

The thought of it was chilling. But he was right, of course; she couldn’t stay here forever. She was living on his money, borrowing time against an academic career she could not postpone indefinitely. “All right,” she said. The offer was generous, really. “Yes.”

“Good. I’ll call back when I have a flight number for you. You can pick up the ticket tomorrow.”

The deadline came quickly. Susan counted off the grey, cold days one by one until they were gone. She confirmed her reservation at a travel agency opposite the hotel, and on the afternoon of the day of her flight, she packed her bags.

Funny, she thought, how anonymous a hotel room seems when you arrive; and then you occupy it, you make it your own. Now the process was running in reverse. With her clothes folded into her suitcases, the closet empty and the key on the dresser—it was as if she had never moved in. Where had all the time gone? But that was one of those dumb, self-punishing questions.

Darkness came early these cloudy days. At four o’clock she flicked on the room lamps and began to dress for the flight. A seven-thirty flight, but Susan preferred to arrive early at airports. Dress and maybe catch a snack at the hotel coffee shop, then a cab to the airport. Check in by six or six-thirty … buy a book at the newsstand and camp out in a waiting room until the flight was ready to board.

She was standing in her slip when the phone rang.

She scolded herself for a sudden leap of hope. Reprieves did not come at the last minute. Only in the movies, Susan.

She picked up the receiver and said, “Yes?”

“Is that—” It was a woman’s voice. “Is that Susan Christopher?”

Far away and unfamiliar, tremulous and odd. Susan frowned. “Who’s this?”

“Amelie Desjardins. You remember me?”

Amelie who had lived with Benjamin. Amelie barefoot in the doorway of a slum apartment, radiating suspicion. “Of course.” Susan wanted to add, How did you get this number? She asked instead, “Is anything wrong?”

“I have to talk to you.”

“Well, I—the thing is—I have a plane to catch. I’m leaving tonight.”

“Oh, shit. Oh! Well—listen—if you could just tell me, you know, where heis—just give me a number or something—just so I could talk to him—”

Susan said desperately, “I don’t know!”

“You don’t know? I thought that was why you came here—to take him away!”

“He left! John, I mean. He got scared and he just, uh, left.” Should she be saying this? “What is it, Amelie, is there a problem?”

“It’s my fucking brother! I think he wants to kill me.”

Susan could not frame a response to this.

“I just thought if I could talk to somebody,” Amelie said. Then she added, “But you mean it, don’t you? You lost him, too.”

“Yes. Well, I—If you could get here soon, maybe we could talk. I have some time before I absolutely need to leave. Is this connected with John?”

“Partly. Look, I don’t want to make a problem for you—”

“No, no!—I mean, I want to talk.”

“Well, if there’s time—”

“Can you get here inside the hour?”

Pause. “Sure. It’s not that far.”

“I’ll wait for you,” Susan said.

They met in the lobby and then found a booth at the back of the coffee shop.

Amelie’s eyes were puffy and bloodshot; her hair was down in matted bangs across her forehead. She wore jeans and a T-shirt under an oversized red plaid lumberjack shirt. Susan, sitting across from her, felt instantly helpless.

“It’s Roch,” Amelie said. “He’s my brother.”

The girl seemed anxious to talk; Susan listened carefully. She was not accustomed to having people come to her with their problems. It wasn’t the sort of thing that happened to her. She paid close, somber attention as Amelie spoke.

Amelie had a brother named Roch who had followed her to Toronto from Montreal. “A real son-of-a-bitch. I mean, he has trouble dealing with people. I don’t think he registers people at all, they just don’t exist for him, unless they get in his way or humiliate him—and then his instinct is just to crush them, grind them under his foot. He can be pretty single-minded about it. I learned how to deal with it, you know, how to keep from making him mad. But it isn’t always easy. When we came here—”

When they came to Toronto they had lived in the streets and Roch had encouraged Amelie into occasional prostitution.

“But that sounds like—I mean, you have to understand, it was the kind of thing a runaway kid might do. It happened maybe four or five times and it was a question of having money for food, a place to stay. It was a long time ago.”

Susan nodded.

Eventually Amelie had found a job and a cheap apartment. Roch had taken a whole string of jobs, mostly lifting and carrying. He was strong, Amelie said, but he didn’t get along with people. He’d been working for the last six months at the Bus Parcel Express depot down at Front Street, but he lost that when he put a choke-hold on his supervisor and almost killed him. Roch was outraged when they fired him. His life, Amelie seemed to imply, was a continuous series of these outrages: he would be provoked, he would respond, he would be punished for it… “Christ knows what the guy said to him. Some kind of insult. So Roch practically breaks the man’s neck, and he’s fired, and it’s business as usual, right? Except that, for Roch, every time this happens it’s like brand-new. Like he’s filing it away on some index card in his head:fucked over again.”

Amelie had avoided Roch fairly effectively for a few years. But the BPX firing had been a point-of-no-return … now Roch was back, and he had changed, Amelie said; he was closer to the edge than he had ever been before.

“Like this thing with Benjamin. Suddenly Roch is jealous. For three years he ignores me altogether, then suddenly he resents this guy I’m living with. What makes it worse is that Benjamin—or I guess it was John—did this humiliation thing on him, the fight they had. No real physical damage, but the contempt—you could feel it shooting out of him. And Roch just soaked it up. Charging his battery—you know what I mean? You could say Roch is at a very high voltage right now.”

Amelie stopped long enough to finish the beer she’d ordered. Susan waited.

Amelie drained the glass. “Maybe it’s better Benjamin left. I don’t think he could stand up to Roch right now. I don’t think—I’m not sure I can, either.”

Susan said, “He’s staying with you?”

“I can’t make him leave.”

“Is he hurting you?”

Amelie looked across the table, then reached up and pulled her hair away from her forehead. There was an angry blue bruise underneath.

Susan drew in her breath. “My God!”

Amelie shrugged. “I’m just worried he’ll get worse.”

“You should call the police!”

She laughed derisively. “Have you ever seen a domestic dispute call? I have. You know what happens? Fuck-all, is what happens. And it would make Roch really mad.”

“You can leave, though, can’t you?”

“It’s my apartment!”

“I mean temporarily,” Susan said. “There must be a women’s shelter in the city. You could have a restraining order put on him—”

“A restraining order,” Amelie said: the idea was comic. But she added, “Are there really shelters?”

“Well—we can find out. Let me make a couple of calls.” Susan looked at her watch. “Oh, lord—myplane!”

“That’s right,” Amelie said. “You gotta go.” She stood up; Susan fumbled out money for the check. Amelie added, “You expect to hear from him again?” Meaning John.

“I don’t know,” Susan admitted. “Maybe. Maybe you’ll hear from him first. We have to keep in touch. Listen, there are phones in the lobby … let me make a couple of calls for you?”

Amelie shrugged.

Susan stopped at the front desk, hunting in her purse for the room key. Check out, locate a shelter in case Amelie needed it, then take a cab to the airport—there was still time for everything, but only just. She tapped the bell and the desk clerk hurried over. “Ms. Christopher—”

“Yes,” she began. “I—”

“That call came through,” the clerk said. “I suppose the one you’ve been waiting for? Long distance collect.”

Susan just gaped.

“No message,” the clerk said. “Except that he would try again in an hour or so.”

Susan checked her watch a second time.

“When was this?”

“About twenty-five minutes ago.”

“Thank you,” Susan said. “I’ll wait up in my room.”

“Yes, ma’am. Was there anything else—?”

“No—not just now.” She turned to Amelie. “You can wait with me if you like.”

Amelie said, “Won’t you miss your plane?”

“Yes,” Susan said. “I will.”

11

John said he would meet her Wednesday morning at the ferry docks at Tsawassen.

Dr. Kyriakides wired the money for her flight to B.C. and two tickets back. Susan helped Amelie check into a YWCA, spent a sleepless night at the hotel, then caught a taxi to the airport and a westbound plane.

It was windy and cold at the docks. Susan bought a cup of bitter coin-machine coffee and huddled in the waiting room. She was excited but terribly tired. She slept for a few minutes with her back against the wall, woke up stiff and uncomfortable—and saw John standing a few feet away.

He looked thin and worn, a duffel bag in one hand and a grey visor cap pulled down over his eyes. He was sun-brown and his hair was longer than she remembered. But it was John, not Benjamin … there was something in the way he stood … she knew at once.

She stood up. She had envisioned this moment, played it over in her mind a dozen times during the trip from Toronto. She wanted to embrace him but decided she didn’t really know him well enough—it just seemed that way, after all the waiting.

She took his hands: a small, spontaneous gesture. “I’m glad you decided to call.”

He looked at her for a long time. He reached up to touch her cheek, and the expression on his face … Susan could not take the measure of it; but there might have been surprise, curiosity, maybe even gratitude.

She said, “Can I ask what it was—why you changed your mind?”

He took his hand away and held it up in front of her.

His hand was trembling. It was a pronounced, involuntary tremor; Susan was suddenly afraid, watching it. He was sick—he was admitting it now.

He said, “I found out that I don’t want to die.”

She called Dr. Kyriakides from a booth in the airport, confirming the meeting. “He hasn’t said it in so many words, but I think this is his way of telling us he needs us. That’s important, isn’t it?”

“Possibly,” Dr. Kyriakides said. He sounds worried, Susan thought; or worse—he sounds frightened.

“Hey,” she said, “the battle’s over, isn’t it? We’re almost home.”

“No,” Dr. Kyriakides said. “I think you’re mistaken. I think the battle has only just begun. I think we’re a very long way from home.”