Robarts Library

It broods over St. George and Harbord Street,

A Brutalist hulk in solemn concrete;

Imposing enough in the sunny day,

A Medieval dungeon ‘neath night’s dark veil,

Spiritual child of Le Corbusier,

Embodying zeitgeist in form and scale.

Bright and eager Scholars the Peacock calls

To its mazy stacks and stygian halls.

Yet stranger stories one perceives within,

As shadows play on the Student’s tired mind,

Not bound in books, but steeped in secret sin;

One heeds the peopled lobbies, lest to find

Things best unsaid, save in whisper and blog—

Ghosts that lie waiting for a daydream’s fog.

A Scene of a Street in Ancient Times

A scene of a street in times long ago,

Whence colours, people and dreams did flow;

Almost beyond memory

Are those days of bustle and revelry,

Before the Misanthropes

Cried wolf, were heard, and stifled hopes

Spiteful seeking to legally blight

Ambition’s envy-breeding light,

And mask the Beauty and choke the Arts

Which tear the veil from their petty hearts,

They who preached themselves as warriors righteous

For the addicts, the poor and homeless

Now they fume, and curse, and turn aside

If shown the bankruptcy, ODs and suicide:

It is a poison pill; a bitter herb

This trading work and commerce for eternal CERB.

Yet they hide and scowl, and bawling demand

Their castles’ rent from calloused hands;

Those who strive, they mock and scorn,

As Living itself from life is shorn;

But just as from Winter’s ice and mud,

The apples bloom and maples bud,

However hateful, a herd of sheep

Cannot forever frozen keep

The Love and Faith and Livity

That are our True Humanity.

《回羊人城》

瘟疫過後欲回鄉，

唯怕鄉土非原樣；

水泥屍體鋼筋骨，

城市擁擠心空虛；

古云男兒當自強，

今人爭先當綿羊。

A Knock at the Door

by M.G. Warenycia

The overtaxed AC unit wheezed and strained against the exhalations of the fatigued, sweat-basted bodies that packed, tighter and tighter, into the already-crowded subway car. It did not offer even token resistance to the evil melange of odours accumulating with each succeeding stop. The northbound train hauled units of production away from the downtown core like a boilerman’s shovel dragging spent ashes from a still-warm firebox. Through the windows, its passengers could observe the southbound train carrying scantily but expensively clad clubbers to drink and dance, and, if they were fortunate, acquire a man who would spare them from riding the subway for a few weeks or months of Friday nights. At the end of the line, you would glimpse serried platoons of this army, advancing clumsily down the sidewalks to the gates of the great night hotspots on stilettoed feet, hoping it might be assumed that they had come out of one of the Porsches or Benzes in the parking lot, rather than a bus two or three stops away.

There was a time, not so long ago, but already seeming more of a half-forgotten dream than a tangible memory, when Angeline Boucher would have been heading out on the cusp of a sweltering summertime night like this one. Only she would not have rode the train. She could have walked, in fact, and more than one night witnessed her, with a squad of housemates, staggering home, heels dangling in the air, skin-hugging dresses and miniskirts taxed by gross quantities of poutine, pizza and artisanal burgers, which they would have virtuously shunned in the light of sober day, a good portion of which would end up in the sinks of the Edwardian duplex they inhabited – to be cleaned up by the least successful of the night’s huntresses…usually Angeline herself.

Not that Angeline was the ugly duckling – quite the opposite. Clad in yoga tights and sneaker whites, or in a winter ensemble arranged around her prized ultramarine blue, coyote-fur-trimmed parka, she was a veritable goddess among that urban tribe, sometimes loosely referred to as hipsters, though, really, the subcultural lines are blurry. A lean oval face, broadest at the prominent cheekbones, relieved of its severity by a subtly retroussé nose and shaded by an umbrella of jet black bangs; roseate lips painted crimson to contrast with the marble whiteness of her complexion, and a pair of wide, searching eyes whose tint precisely matched Holbein Manganese Blue Hue. Add to that long, supple limbs and the hands of a pianist, her comprehensible yet exotic (to Torontonians) accent and one did not wonder that so many of her classmates asked her to serve as a model for their own life drawings. When, of course, it was that they wanted a traditional Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite or Flapper-era vision of beauty and not something chosen for ‘are you avant garde enough to pretend you find this attractive?’ sorts of images.

The wheels gave a banshee screech, rending her out of her meditations. “Due to track maintenance…we apologise…” in the staid female voice of the intercom. It was almost 8 p.m. The sun stabbed in at low angles, flickering through the window frames, stinging those manganese blue hue eyes, but the heat and the soothing rhythm of the tracks lulled her once more into somnolence. She drew an old sketchbook. She did not take out a pencil. She was too tired to make art and, besides, the way people were jammed into the subway car, her elbows would get jostled something fierce. She had learned early on what people wanted to see. They wanted to feel guilty, or to be persuaded they were tyrannically oppressed so as to impart some faint degree of pathos into their lives. Insecure from childhood, she craved praise and acceptance. Had she not been both talented and consciously beautiful, this would have been enough. She had imagined the City would be a safe harbour of like minds in which she could be the Angeline Boucher she sometimes dared to daydream was her real but hidden self. Unquestionably, she had succeeded, in every objective sense…

She happened upon a sheet of heavy watercolour paper, wedged among the leaves of the sketchbook. A ‘portrait’ of one of those trees in the Sahara which are otherwise perfectly normal-looking but just so happen to be hundreds of kilometres in all directions from the next nearest living tree. It was executed with a brush and pure India ink, with an airbrush-smooth graduation of reds and oranges in the background, representing the sunset. For added interest, she had put a pen-and-ink-wash Egyptian ruin, with headless columns and rubble off to one side in the middle ground. She submitted it, two winters ago, as part of her portfolio for the semester. She’d even constructed themed series dealing with current events and cultural heritage, which she had tried to make an expression spectacle of discovering through her artistic development. Not only did her professors fail to display the enthusiasm they showed for her classmate Becky’s (‘Jake’ by third year) exploration of ‘transcendent’ sexuality through abstract expressionist acrylic paintings and junk sculptures (in a literal and figurative sense), or Zabeeha Al’Sulaiman’s crude copies of famous paintings – sometimes actual commercial prints – with hijabs drawn or painted over the female figures. Zabeeha – not that it mattered – had gingery red hair, freckles and hailed from some hinterland town not unlike Angeline’s own hometown.

The watercolours – her favourite medium, though she worked in many others – of rolling hills, bucolic farmsteads and cosy villages dominated by church steeples were taken as generic landscapes, mere technique exercises, probably assumed to have been made with wall calendars or postcards as reference photos. Actually, it was her hometown and its environs. It had been embarrassing in the extreme to stand, waiting five or ten minutes, while her favourite art-history prof, a scatterbrained ex-hippie, scrutinized her ‘masterpiece’ series: a half dozen large canvasses, depicting religious scenes taking stylistic inspiration from medieval illuminated manuscripts and Jules Breton’s paintings of devout peasant women, transposing them into modern urban environments. “Oh, wow, wow, I can tell you were really connecting with the medium…your colour balance, the way it carries the composition…” the prof gasped and mumbled in awe. Then came the let-down. The professor had been spending all that time searching for the disguised irony and subversive innuendo she was sure from the first must have been incorporated into the painting…searching long and hard because she didn’t want to appear ignorant or hurt a student’s feelings by interpreting incorrectly and therefore de facto implying the student had failed to communicate their message. “Mmmh!” Brenda – the prof’s name; everyone called her by her first name – exclaimed after a swig of steaming peach tea from the tacky mug that never left her desk. Professor Brenda proceeded to congratulate Angeline on how she had cleverly subverted traditional iconography to satirise the ways in which the Catholic Church inculcated backwards medieval ideologies into modern women, particularly marginalized, uneducated ones.

The pièce de résistance – depicting a latter-day Mary Magdalene in jeggings and a Canada Goose jacket, encountering Jesus, personified as a dreadlocked homeless man – was particularly incisive in showing the absurdity of internalized patriarchy in ‘current year.’ Angeline smiled uncomfortably. She had intended, in fact, to portray the spiritual journey of a modern young woman finding herself – and God – in present-day Toronto. The only irony was in her deliberate application of archaic styles to present-day models embodying the true sincerity of past artists who saw spiritual themes in the living world around them. Pious women in 14^th century Books of Hours wore wimples and long dresses; those in Breton’s paintings were clad in the peasant garb of late 19^th century northwest France. The spirit which inspired those old artists was present in their world, not frozen perpetually in the image of first century Roman Judea, to be contrasted with a pure and crass materialism for today. Angeline had occasionally started attending services at a church that still did Latin Mass on some occasions – though she did not make confession or take communion – in order to put herself in a frame of mind closer to that of the artists she meant to channel.

She waited patiently for the other passengers to clear out before attempting to wheel the tower of stacked and strapped-together suitcases and bags she was handling. She winced at the jolt coming up the stretched-up handle of the suitcase forming the base of things, winced in anxiety not for the paints, books and clothes inside, but for what was on top – a very small cat carrier, inside of which a very large cat cringed in mute terror. “It’s ok, Giselle, my baby! Mama is here for you…” she kissed soothing words of comfort to the anxious feline, but grew suddenly uneasy and trailed off. She hurried on; it was only a few blocks, and when she was standing up walking straight ahead, she could not see into those plaintive yellow orbs behind the wire grate. She could barely remember when she’d been anywhere near this far on the line, but that’s where Google Maps comes in.

The neighbourhood was mostly modest, late-20^th century bungalows and split-levels, though here and there rapidly rising property values manifested themselves in massive brick edifices with cathedral ceilings and double or even treble garages, built to the very edges of their respective lots. The general quality of the place was more prosperous and confident than…what was it, four years ago? She did not remember so many eye-catching garden plantings – a lot of houses had impressive displays of peonies, as well as red and fuchsia climbing roses, presently in full bloom. The driveways no longer harboured rusty ‘beaters’ and primer-spotted Astro vans. Upscale Hondas and Toyotas stood alongside smaller members of the BMW and Benz families, lending an air of modest but ambitious respectability. The complex of 60s-70s Brutalist highrise apartment blocks looming behind the station, with their weather-stained cladding and dungeon-like, syringe-strewn stairwells had seemed to oppress the very atmosphere beyond their press-bar actuated, mesh-windowed steel doors – its character of tired gloom only enhanced by the colourful murals depicting an idealized version of the community – seemed to fade into the background; a relic of uglier times and no longer the representative face of the neighbourhood’s identity.

Such occasional jaunts into ‘Fordland’ had only reassured her of the wisdom of her decision to reside downtown – sometimes in Queen West, Baldwin Street for a semester and change, then Kensington Market. The number of roommates required to hold down a place there inevitably led to conflict over fridge space, toilets and showers fouled, and misappropriation of booze and other common resources. More aggravating still was the talk; the scheming, almost always clothed as well-meaning concern for a ‘gurlfriend,’ wanting the best for her. Such eye rolls, and hushed (but not so much they wouldn’t be overheard) conversation shattered fragile egos, broke up promising relationships. But striking out on one’s own, away from the cannibalistic flock of a particular roommate situation, demanded sacrifices. Sacrifices one would not even consider but for the wet bleakness of November, the anger of family-less Christmases, and the interminable, ice-bound nights of December, January, February…black nights of bone-soaking damp cold that no coat or blanket could resist; nights where a young life’s accomplishments grew dim and one had to flee from oneself to keep from suffocating out of existence.

It was always comforting to know that, tough and frustrating as things were, it was better than being out by Kipling, Finch, or, God forbid, Kennedy. She had gone out rarely, always only after receiving repeated invites, to birthday or dinner parties in such parts. How satisfying it was to sigh about the difficulties of travelling ‘all the way’ out to Scarborough or Etobicoke and to see the envy in the faces of people who merely shopped and studied where she lived. Then, when she finally had a proper spacious condo to herself – a condo practically overlooking the Lake – she was too afraid to attend any more of those parties.

She gazed up at the cuboid lowrise, a parkette on one side, a modest corner strip mall with a Shopper’s Drug Mart, florist, fish-and-chips shop, Afghan supermarket and some other typically suburban GTA shops. The sky as bright and the breeze noticeable fresher and cooler han where she’d come from, and a massive relief after the subway. Yes, this was it, undoubtedly. Beige, flush tinted glass, with chrome details and milk-white orb lamps along the flagged walkway. Always the artist, Angeline reckoned it had a sort of toned-down Art Deco revival style with a Middle Eastern palette. A fresco of winged goddesses and picture writing, maybe a pair of pharaonic sentry sculptures too – those would be a nice touch. On entering the faux-marble floored lobby, she was pleasantly surprised to find a mosaic on the walls by the empty front desk, though it was just a geometric pattern. The emptiness of the halls and elevators was mildly disquieting to someone who spent most of her days – and nights – never leaving the radius of other humans’ body heat, without a full five minutes of silence week to week, but she reasoned that the families (mostly immigrants, she suspected) were probably all in their apartments eating supper. The melange of aromas assailing her nostrils from every direction confirmed the hypothesis.

Not that she was bothered. Her lithe physique belied the fact she was something of a foodie and had sampled the cuisines of much of the known world since arriving in Toronto. Mind, there were always times – more often in the last year or so, it seemed – when she craved some old-fashioned provincial home cooking. Her grandmother made all kinds of wonders – cipaille, vitréais, pudding chomeur, the best pea soup in the world – things you couldn’t really make correctly just by following recipes off the internet…even if she’d had a proper kitchen to herself, the money for the right ingredients, and the time and energy all on the same occasion. That was all in the past, though; so far in the past she couldn’t remember much else that happened around then, or wouldn’t. You could get lots of poutine in Toronto, true. But she was reluctant to let loose into ‘hangover food,’ even if it was late and she was very drunk. She didn’t want to become sloppy, careless; lose her edge. One thing leads to another and she would end up like…it did not bear thinking now.

A beseeching, kittenish mew escaped from the carrier atop the luggage stack. “Oh, calm down…” Angeline whispered, dragging her fingers along the carrier’s grate as she wheeled her baggage along. “You’ll be out soon…” she trailed off as she came up to the end of the hall which overlooked the street above a radiator and a broad ledge decked with houseplants that looked like miniature palm trees. “Makes it easy to watch the street and parking lot,” she mused to herself, before shaking off unpleasant memories of peering through a screen of monstera and spider plants to watch for a man – or men – in a green ’93 Camry at the behest of a shitty roommate who left in the middle of the night while Angeline was at work, taking the espresso machine, a jumbo bottle of Point Pelee and a pair of Ray-Bans that didn’t belong to her. Never heard a word about that again.

“Room three-zéro-a’whun,” she enunciated, rolling her feet. She raised an arm, drew up her parachute-like sleeve with the other hand, and daintily flicked the door with the backs of her fingers, so that the stubby, green-painted nails clacked against the resonant wood. The hallway deserted. She heard a shuffling and a tinny clanking through the door; a few more seconds, then the shlick of the chain and the thunk of the bolt, and the door swung open.

The young man who opened it had not changed much from the last Angeline remembered, what, three…no, more like four years before. That was Dayna’s house party, maybe? Or at the samba studio…Even the same hairstyle. He was wearing a baggy faux-silk mandarin shirt and holding a dish towel and wooden spoon. The pair stood in silence for a moment, till Angeline giggled and asked, “You’re cooking?”

“Oh?” the fellow looked at the towel and spoon. “Oh, yes, well, not much of a chef – heating food enough to make it edible, I guess, is how you might put it,” forcing a laugh and retreating back into the kitchen to lift a lid and give some bubbling, spicy goo a stir.

Angeline took this as a sign to come in and heaved her luggage over the sloped threshold with a winsome “Hmph!” then stood demurely at the edge of the open living room.

“Oh, sit down, make yourself comfortable,” the man emerged again from the kitchen, sans utensils. “Goodness, it’s a lot to catch up on. I mean, there’s Facebook and all, but you’re hardly ever online and one doesn’t always like to follow people’s business; makes for bad, erh, you know…Coffee?”

“No thanks,” Angeline bowed and looked about for a seat. “Way too much caffeine in my veins already today.”

“You can use it as a couch; that’s what I normally do when people are over – not that folks from uni come out here often,” the man motioned to a neat, post-less IKEA bed presently covered with patterned rugs and throw pillows like a Persian divan. Meanwhile, he seated himself on a battered old ottoman, racking his brains for a way to ask ‘how things have been’ without probing that which politeness does not permit to be probed. He came up blank. “Eh, you must have taken a while to reach. We should let this little fellow out, no? Cooped up there so long…” Taking Angeline’s silence as assent, he unstrapped the carrier from its place and heaved it down to the floor. “Ough! Hefty feller you got ‘ehr!” An enormous, beaver-shaped black-and-white cat shambled out of the carrier on incongruously frail-looking legs, proceeding to sniff and scout around the room.

“Mmh hmm,” Angeline cleared her through, twisting her toes together under the bed. “Her name is Giselle. Really, Ruslan, I’m so grateful, you don’t know how much…To find someone who would take…”

“Bah! It’s nothing,” Ruslan blushed. “You took in some of my furniture while I was moving house way back when. And gave me that antique sidetable. Matches the place too, Art Deco antique, not some Nordic particle board crap or ‘midcentury’ hipsterness. So, hmm, you been doing ok lately? Going to Montreal for the long weekend?”

“I like how you’ve set this place up,” the girl responded, wriggling in her seat and patting its springy surface with her palms. “You’ve got a theme going…like, adventure, silk road, Himalayas. Neat! Did you draw those?” She cocked her chin at an arrangement of framed monochromes, most depicting exotic scenes in keeping with the rest of the décor.

“Yes, actually. Pen and ink, based off the sort of illustrations you find in Victorian travel journals, which you can find online. It used to be a popular thing, before mass jet travel, the internet and convenient cameras; pretty much the only way to get an idea of what some far-off land was like, if you planned to travel or wanted to write a book set there…” realizing he might be boring the charming young lady seated on his couch-bed, Ruslan changed tack. “Have you found a next apartment yet? Just, it’s an odd time to take a vacation, no? Rentals, even in Scarbs, are getting snapped up in hours of people posting them. I have a friend from uni – you don’t know him – like six, seven places he and his girlfriend checked, and not like they are looking for a bargain basement deal. Fifteen, sixteen hundred and of course that’s not counting utilities. Heck, CAMH is moving out of their place over by U of T. Three hundred thirty-three percent rent increase, just like that. So I tell the man, best withdraw to Markham, be amongst your own people. Look me, I’m out here because I’d be homeless if I insisted on staying in ‘the Core.’ People paying a hundred-and-ten percent of their income for a rabbit hutch.” He saw that Angeline’s attention was drifting. The cat was rubbing its solid, round head against her leg, coating her tights with a clingy residue of coarse hairs, like a loveable porcupine cheerfully quilling its victim. “You live in downtown still, yes? Kensington, right?”

“Mmh,” she kept gazing about the room. “I mean, I’m moving, but, yeah.”

“Ah. And, where to…right, none yet…how did you find it?”

“Oh, it was alright. Lotta real local culture; you’ve got so much colour, diversity and all the old homes. Plus the shopping’s great. I mean, duh!” She managed to look back at Rusland and laugh; the cat head-butted her shying feet but was ignored.

“Ehh,” Ruslan sighed. “Scarborough doesn’t have diversity? It’s an ideal I guess. Yeah, I see it. Character, history, the whole Jane Jacobs mixed-use neighbourhood package. Everything Toronto is supposed to be, but that’s mostly just in people’s imaginations, or thirty years ago. I’d live there myself, but only if I had money, or else you’re sleeping in a windowless ex-laundry room. One needs a certain basic minimum of space, or else how do you paint? Have people over? Or even just pace about when you feel like it alone at night?”

“I dunno, I have a full bachelor. I cook n’ stuff. I mean had.”

“Ugh, that’s lucky. Must cost, what, two grand, twenty-five hundred? Wah, that’s more than a barista makes in a whole month…one and a half times their income…” Even as each sentence left his lips, Rusland was inwardly berating himself; “Why did you do that? What good do you think you’ll get out of pushing things? Is it so important that she knows that you know? Probably why she hasn’t even said ‘hi’ on Facebook in years and why Teresa and Emilia and everyone no longer have any gossip to tell.” Naturally, he did not speak these thoughts aloud, though he was convinced he had been speaking in a tense, inquisitorial tone that had put his guest on edge.

As if to confirm his suspicions, Angeline turned and glanced about the room with an astonishment which seemed to spring out of nowhere. “Wow! Is that yours, too?” She pointed to a large watercolour of a calico cat luxuriating on a Louis Farouk settee.

“Yes, in fact,” the sweetness of her voice and the unaffected smile in her voice washed away his anxiety but left him quite confused. “I did that one for a friend who went to med school out in BC. His cat. It would cost a fortune to ship it out that far, so I scanned it for him to make prints if he wants. Took me an awful lot of failed attempts to figure out how to get the effect of fur without making it look rough or muddying the colours.” He frowned as he saw himself spilling accidentally into another lecture, but was again relieved as, far from being bored, Angeline’s limpid eyes sparked with unaffected delight.

“Really? Awesome. You totally killed it. Like those portraits, too…”

“Kriehuber is my inspiration for those. Parker ballpoint pen for everything, except when I needed solid-solid black, or to wash in backgrounds.”

“It’s so much more…ngh! I know what I want to say but…the word!…Like, you know, something that you can tell somebody poured a lot of attention and energy into, like art that shapes you as you’re shaping it, through the intensity of the process….raffiné, cultivé…”

“Refined? Hmm, well, it’s nothing compared to what you turn out, but I try.”

“No, for real. Like, compared to, you know, how in OCAD the number one thing is photography. Which, okay, you can take a photo that required lots of time and judgement, but anybody with a few hundred buy a digital camera or even an iPhone and photoshop, and honestly you can’t tell the difference whether they did four years studying photography in school or if they just bought a camera and started snapping pics two weeks ago – except based on what they take pics of…normal stuff or trying to gross people out, or be ironic, or make some statement that’s supposed to be all brave and shocking but is just what everyone else is doing.”

“Such as? I think I see what you mean, though…Lazy, I guess.”

“I mean, like,” Angeline’s pallid complexion flushed with uncharacteristic anger; “Say you wanna be, ‘oh, I’m so avant garde that I laugh at silly people with backwards habits and organized religion.’ So, like, this girl I know, you take some photos of people dressed as nuns or mocking some famous religious painting for attention. And if somebody complained, she’d get all outraged, like, ‘oh, how dare you, the church has been oppressing womb-myn for centuries…’ yeah, brave act of rebellion. An’ you know, one time I saw she posts on her wall asking people why there’s all these people on the streets with black marks on their faces. It was the start of Lent. You gotta ask, why such people…ugh!”

“And they’re the same people who would say the French cartoonists were asking for it,” Ruslan hoped he had grafted something onto the topic without stealing it from Angeline.

“Exactly. This girl also had one of those Himalayan salt lamps in her dorm and believed in horoscopes. People want all the street cred of being an ‘artist,’ but they don’t want to live the life.”

“You mean hipsters?” but the passion of the moment had so infused Angeline’s graceful frame that she did not notice his question.

“…They think that living at a certain address, having those ugly glasses and a fixed gear bike makes you an ‘artist.’ And if you don’t play along, you can’t be one; doesn’t matter if you can draw or play an instrument or whatever. Screw that. And you have to believe everyone who can read a book and use a paintbrush voted for Justin Trudeau and Olivia Chow…”

“Right, completely agree…”

“…They don’t want to make the sacrifices. Those neighbourhoods in Paris, you know, that the Impressionists and those modern masters lived in; people moved there because it was cheap and shabby, which meant they could devote their lives to their passion and still pay the rent. The places became special because they lived there. It’s like the total opposite here, where you pay crazy rent, which means you have to work at two or three mundane jobs and never have time for actually creating anything, just so you can live in a place that looks n’ feels like where some authentic starving artist who eats $22 burgers, and…ngh! It’s like, a product you buy: you.”

“But you lived in Queen West or Kensington Market, no?” Ruslan chimed, instantly regretting it in his head: “Stop. Why can’t you just stop?” He was doubly intrigued now, wondering what exactly it was about this topic that got her so riled up.

“…And it’s like, if you don’t play along and pretend all that stupid stuff matters, then everybody hates you. And if you seriously try to…be what they pretend to be, they’re scared to ever talk to you or laugh behind your back…! Like, joke’s on you!”

“I see, yes, I know what you mean,” although Ruslan’s understanding of the problems that tormented the young lady was intellectual and detached. As an overheated boiler venting steam, Angeline suddenly returned to her usual wistful demeanour, staring longingly at the cat which had now mounted the bed beside her and, this exertion completed, was kneading a sleeping place for itself. She stroked its dense, somewhat greasy fur, occasionally wiping her hand against the blankets to scrape off static-clung hairs. As she did this, she half-closed her languid eyes, cooing softly in joual baby talk to it, fully aware that as long as she wasn’t looking at him, Ruslan would not take his sight off her – she could guess he was envisioning her replacing the central female figure in a dozen famous paintings.

“That’s my favourite kind of cat; you could make her the star of a YouTube channel which would consume thousands of cumulative labour-hours each day!” he suggested, trying to be humorous with obviously tongue-in-cheek grandiosity.

“Ha-ha, oh, good they don’t allow pets in the studio, or I’d never get anything done!”

“Mmh, what is she? Looks like Maru, if he was black and white. Scottish fold – one of the prick-eared ones?”

“Hah, no. You’re right, this loafer could get a job, with her celebrity good looks. Actually, she’s a Laurentian Shorthair, purebred, registered and everything. Got her from a breeder’s in Hull, back in second year. Cost me twelve hundred bucks, too.”

“Oooh, precious kitty! Pricey as a Canada Goose jacket, one of the top-of-the-line ones, at that.” Ruslan darted into the kitchen to check the pots simmering on the stove. He opened the fridge and surveyed the contents shelved on the door. “Ask or don’t ask,” he debated with himself, laying hands on two bottles of wine. “No,” he concluded in his head, “Just one,” reflecting that, while the commonsense advice holds that naturally prudish and awkward persons, in social situations, especially those involving the opposite sex, ought to toss away inhibitions and try to be fun and playful, it never worked out very well for him in practice. He didn’t want to appear to have ulterior motives. On the other hand, it wasn’t like ‘keeping proper distance’ these last couple years had won any victories. And if it went badly; if he got an indignant ‘that is NOT OK,’ the worst case scenario was…more of exactly the same. He returned to the living room holding a bottle of Red Label. “Something to drink?” he asked, furtively watching Angeline’s reaction. “Been so long, you must have a lot of stories. I’d uh, if you feel like sharing…” toning things down as the embarrassment hit almost before each word had left his mouth; “Catch up on old times, I mean. I’ve always…admired your sincerity, as an artist, you know. How you live your life, determined to be what you want, not just have and act, or…” He wanted to bash his head against the coffee table.

To his surprise, Angeline responded warmly, “Ah, thanks, definitely!” taking the bottle off him and filling her cup. “Hmm, Red Label ‘wine beverage,’ Kingston, Jamaica…oooh-kay. Didn’t know they could grow grapes down there.” Things moved more smoothly than Ruslan dared imagine, as Angeline regaled him with all kinds of random anecdotes about OCAD life, gallery shows, and her attempts at learning to cook traditional French cuisine. She was also gulping back the 13.5% alcohol fortified wine with a vengeance, leaving him to strategically nurse his initial half of a coffee mug’s worth. Maybe the second bottle would have to come out. Afraid now of seeming like he was only pretending to pay attention, waiting for an opportunity for…whatever. Ruslan searched for a talking point. Alas, he had been too lost in those huge and radiant, yet icy, blue orbs, the measured movements of those tactfully bared porcelain shoulders and the slender but well-formed thighs pressing smoothly against the black leggings confining them….he could only recall with any clarity that very last thing she’d said. “Cooking, eh? I suppose, done well, it’s an art in itself. French especially. You never learned growing up?”

“What do you mean?” the passion in her face flared once more.

Caught off guard, Ruslan stumbled. “I mean, I thought you grew up in some little village, farm country… and you’re always keen on history and culture…you know, from mother to daughter, traditions, that sort of thing…thought your mom or grandma would have taught you, I don’t know. Not to stereotype or anything.”

Angeline quietly rested her eyes inside her cup for a moment. “My grandma died when I was seven. My mom never taught me how to make anything, except Kraft Dinner. She wanted to smother anything creative I ever tried to do. Like, ‘who do you think you are?’ Everything was like that.” She brooded on her words, taking a long, loud sip and pouring another cup.

“I see…I see…” The only one in the room not affected by the tension was Giselle, sitting sphinx-like, flapping her short, clumsy tail against the bed. “I thought your dad was a painter. Odd they wouldn’t support you then…”

“I dunno, if you find him you can ask. My stepdad is a house painter, which isn’t painting; just coating shit in coloured liquid.”

Ruslan had scanned old photos of childhood birthday parties, with balloons and sheetcake aplenty, and a seemingly affectionate, unselfconscious working-class family on her Facebook. If that was the stepdad, he looked an awful lot like Angeline. Then again, a small Québec village settled four hundred years ago, everyone probably was more or less related. Or relations could have soured. Pretty much nothing new had been uploaded to that page in at least a year. Too nervous now to do anything but dig himself deeper, he carried on. “I thought you visited them lots, like when you got Giselle here. And Aida posted lots of albums of you guys on road trips to Montreal.”

“Montreal is nowhere near my place.” The hot anger dissipated into cool and airy contemplation. “There’s not really hotels or anything, and nothing to do, unless they want to play dairy maid.”

“Like Marie Antoinette.”

“Hah, yeah. Plus we usually go in Aida’s car. I wouldn’t want to drag people out to the middle of nowhere and people don’t speak English…” She trailed off, lost in some melancholy reminiscence.

Mustering his courage, Ruslan moved over to the bed and sat down there, though keeping a good two or three feet down from Angeline, the cat interposed between. “You keep in touch though, right?” he asked tenderly, now petting the cat, making clicking noises, “good kitty,” and so forth, to put a thin disguise on his surely-perceived plan that their hands should come into contact, with adoring the kitty providing plausible deniability for both parties.

Angeline was silent for another moment or two – their hands brushed slowly, not staying but nor did she flinch away. “They know I’m in university, studying fine arts…” Ruslan could see her eyes in the shadow of her glossy bangs, looking vaguely at the coffee table in front of her, but seeing something far away – something which he could not see. Her lips parted, revealing the barest hint of even, gleaming teeth, but no words escaped. The foamy clatter of a pot lid startled Ruslan from his trance, and he dashed up towards the kitchen before lentil soup met stove burner and all his neighbours would be irritated by the smoke alarm going off.

When he got back to his guest after ploughing up the tarry matter on the pot bottom with a long spoon, Ruslan was dismayed to see her standing up beside her luggage, looking perfectly at ease, as if no profound sentiments had crossed her mind all evening, though her cheeks were glowing crabapple pink from the wine. “Going already?” was the best he could do. “Who are you staying with tonight? I know some ex-classmates who might help with the apartment hunting…there’s a lot of units around here, actually, seeing as it seems time’s soured you on downtown…Need help getting tubbums into her carrier?” He picked up the cat, which was purring contentedly, wrapping its paws over his chest like a sleepy, well-fed baby.

“Hee-hee! She likes you!” Angeline tittered.

“Seems so! Well, you know, I am a cat person…”

“Me too!”

“Yes, that’s pretty obvious. You know, there’s this author, horror-mystery stuff, wrote a fascinating essay on the character differences between cat people and dog people…a bit overboard sometimes, but funny…and true! Pretty much, anyway. I’ll send you the link on F-B…”

“Actually, I’ll be spending the night on the road.”

“What the?!?”

“Travelling!”

“Oh, right.”

“I’m going back home for….a while…”

“With Aida and them?”

“No…I mean home-home. Not Montreal. I’ll be taking the Greyhound.”

“Oh. How long will you be staying?”

“I dunno. A while. Anyways, I haven’t got a new place in Toronto yet, and the people on Bunz weren’t any help. Seeing how much she likes you…”

“You want me to be cat sitter for Giselle here?” Ruslan sighed.

“If you’re ok with it. Otherwise…the Humane Society…”

“Kitty Auschwitz?” Ruslan puffed with righteous indignation. “Good Lord, no, no. It can’t happen. Such a wonderful creature, but…do you have to be travelling now, then? Why not wait?…”

“Listen, things have been…” Her looks said she knew that he knew – if only intuitively and through fourth-hand gossip. “My mom is…sick. And I have to see her. I can’t keep hiding out here. I can’t run away…”

Ruslan wondered if that was the meaning of Angeline’s coming to Toronto. Running. Then hiding from what she’d fled. The lights and rush of the City did appear to be a king of anaesthetic for a lot of young people, usually from elsewhere, whether from foreign countries or Northern Ontario, the Maritimes and such places (which was essentially the same thing). It pained him to contemplate this secret muse of his as being one with the cookie-cutter hipsters; the castrated race of interns competing in obsequiousness; the hackneyed academics quoting post-modernist drivel like religious mantras to accompany vicarious lives, the coffee shop toilers with their resentful herdist attitudes; the meth-scabbed slumpartment dwellers whom three generations on welfare had stripped of all ambitions beyond the fulfilment of the animal appetites. It was inadmissible in the scheme through which he viewed the world. Wiser men that he believed it; if Thomas Hardy, Lombroso and such genius minds were agreed, surely there had to be something to it – that a vessel so exquisite, seemingly embodying so much history and culture (all the more if it was done unwittingly) should, after all, contain a soul undistinguished amid the low and level plain of millennial North American urban humanity. Were the laws of environment so ironclad that the types which inspired the poets and novelists of one or two centuries prior were now no more than stories themselves? Was it so stupid to wish that there were still real flesh-and-blood people who were ‘The Solitary Reaper,’ ‘The Tired Gleaner,’ or ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles?’ It was undeniable – he insisted to himself – that such permutations of the human character existed – even if they tended to suffer unhappy fates. If it were otherwise, where would anyone have got the idea? Though whether they still could exist in a modern metropolis…

“I’ve got to go, or I’ll miss the bus and they only come like every two or three hours. You’ll take Giselle, then?”

“Yes, yes. I’ll look after her till you get back. Oh, I don’t have your address or phone in Québec. I mean, if I needed to get in touch with you…”

“It’s ok. I’ll probably be staying at a hotel in Montreal while I’m there, not at my parents’ house.”

Ruslan wanted to ask how that possibly made things ‘ok,’ since he’d be equally at a loss how to reach her. He knew how little she came on Facebook and emails…he’d feel cheated, since he’d never know if she read them or not. Before he could find the words, though, Angeline had slipped nimbly outside. He managed to catch a glimpse of the hall-end door swinging shut on its pneumatic hinge. He had the cat and a suitcase full of sketchbooks, painting supplies and canvasses to ponder upon in the sleepless hours after midnight.

The leaden white paint clung like a curse to the clapboard walls of the bungalow, grudgingly conceding, flake by flake, to the age and decay which had eaten away at the rest of the house. The mesh screens of the small-paned sash windows, kept open because there was no AC, were holed and gashed by squirrels’ teeth and errant songbirds. The grass around was green and lush from the summer rains, but unmown. An old navy blue LTD, stuffed with random items like an impromptu storage shed sagged to the wheelwells under an open carport. A Chevy van in marginally better condition rested in the gravel drive. The asphalt shingles of the roof were peeling up at the edges like the petals of burnt pinecones. It was not a farm; there were houses on either side and across the road, spaced not that much farther apart than in a typical suburb. For all that, though…perhaps it was the contrast with throbbing, bustling downtown Toronto, or perhaps it was other memories…the bungalow might as well have been in a different postal code from its neighbours. The property had an atmosphere common only to itself – though how much of that was due to its physical condition and how much to other, less quantifiable factors could not be easily determined.

The CBC news wooshed and crackled on an elderly CRT television. A sluggish retriever was dumbly gnawing a rubber kong, inherited from a predecessor, lolling on the brownish-olive carpet whose pile was cropped and felted with years. The syrupy savour of sausages crisping in a well-greased skillet wafted out of the kitchen. A stiff-faced, knob-jointed woman prodded and turned the blackening meat logs with a two-pronged melamine fork. “Christ, you don’t haftah burn them ta ashes! The money’s gotta last till the first. Gawd, half of everything you gotta throw away, even the daag won’t eat it,” a beefy armed, square-headed man in a rough patterned cardigan shouted from the sofa in the living room.

“Well, if you were workin’ instead of on pogie…”

“Don’t come at me with that crap. It’s my pension; they won’t give me anything else ‘cause I worked too damn much. If it wasn’t for me doing twenty-seven years in the mill, how much d’ya think you’d get?”

“I’m just sayin’…”

“When you get out and earn it for your goddam self, then you can say whatever you like. Hmph! Yeah, you’d haftah work a lot ‘a overtime, the way thing’s lookin’ now, ya would.”

At first she had not noticed it above the scrape of the fork and the clatter of dishes. But after the sink was full of hot and soapy water, she paused and listened. Had she really heard anything? The TV was getting in the way. “Turn it down!”

“Whaaat?”

“The TV. I heard somebody knockin’ at the door.”

The man grumbled, but complied.

“A minute ago,” she considered, glassy-eyed; “I heard someone knocking at the door. Knocking real light. A couple of times, now that I think of it.”

Probably Jo-hos. Or somebody sellin’ something.” The man turned the volume back up and returned to watching the news, but the woman was gripped with a curiosity – almost a compulsion. It made her uneasy. She went to the front of the house and flung open the rickety screen door, stepping in her socked feet onto the sagging porch. She looked searchingly, left and right, down a long and empty road.

終

The Lake

by M.G. Warenycia

‘And thro’ the drifts the snowy clifts

Did send a dismal sheen;

Ne shapes of men ne beasts we ken –

The Ice was all between’ – Coleridge

The seasons are moods as much, or more, than they are sections in a calendar. Following the foetid, grossly humid summer in Toronto, the city enjoys, for a brief fortnight or perhaps a month or more, a sort of season, cool but not health-endangeringly frigid, where the life of the great northern metropolis proceeds in a relaxed, yet productive mode. This is particularly the case for students, hordes of whom are returning to the city’s several universities, but are not yet faced with the tedious burden of term papers or the looming existential dread of exams. It was an unremarked certainty that this quaint and pleasant season was over. It was clear, in the wind shipping down out of the Shield Country with all the unflinching sternness of a Puritan schoolmaster, rattling the glass-walled canyons, spearing through jacket collars and zipper seams, flinging empty coffee cups across the busy roadways.

The shuffling, hustling current of pedestrians moving along Dundas Street covered elbows with palms, tucked heads into collars and stiffened their gaits. It was, ironically, perhaps, not so bad for the immigrants – those still sufficiently ‘fresh off the boat,’ at least – who, coming from less-homicidal climes, had not adopted the schizophrenic local dress code: fur trimmed parkas as soon as they were bearable in autumn, beach or strip club fashions as soon as temps rose above fifteen degrees in the spring. Among the locals, many a pair of sockless ankles grew pink as boiled hams, and crossed arms gave a feeble boost to thin ‘mid-century’ print rompers. Ramen and Mongolian hot pot restaurants lining Dundas and nearby shipping streets did brisk business. Spadina fruit vendors huffed glum cloudlets of tobacco smoke as the chattering crowds ignored their pyramids of refreshing, but unfortunately cold and watery, bounty. And the rain began to pink bullets against streetcar windows and the plastic shells of bicycle helmets…

Jemma Paquette, luckily, was dressed more akin to the sensible foreigners, in an olive and beige patterned Aran Isles sweater of heavy wool and sturdy jeans, as opposed to the yoga tights which had rendered pants almost obsolete among the local womenfolk. This was not out of any desire to be unfashionable, nor because she was unattractive – quite the contrary, although a natural insecurity prevented her from showing herself off to best advantage. Rather, it was a habit formed in long hours spent drawing and painting in the studios at TCAD-U, the city’s – indeed, the country’s – premier arts-focused university. The combination of sitting still plus the strong AC in summer and weak heating in winter made such ungainly armour necessary.

As Jemma leaned forward and squinted her eyes against the wind, she had to simultaneously fight to steady the enormously broad, flat bag she was carrying. It caught the gusts like a galleon’s sail, paining her wrist and guilting her as it occasionally slapped a passer-by. A white plastic bag with the ‘Curry’s’ logo splashed across it. Jemma was coming from the location on Yonge, near the campus of Ryerson University, for they alone among the chain’s downtown outlets happened to have in stock the particular pigments she needed. She could not wait the four to six weeks to order online; she needed her tools now. The stretched canvas, which shaped the bag’s bulk, would embody months of thought, sketches and art theory research, including the term paper she had submitted at the end of the spring semester.

“I wouldn’t wanna get caught in that going home!” Jemma heard a familiar voice; “but I won’t, ‘cause I live like, right here!” Jemma saw her friend and classmate, Eunice Yu emerge from under the awning of a one of those shops selling Chinese curios and random goods that crowd in on the sidewalks of Chinatown. A faux-Qing Dynasty porcelain urn held out salvation in the form of some colourful, wood-handled umbrellas. A wise shopkeeper ran this place. Before Jemma could suggest that her companion wait a minute for her while she goes into the store, Eunice read her thoughts, “Bought ‘ya one!” and offered her a shield against the rain, which was now threatening to become a proper downpour.

Jemma and Eunice, in accord with a prearranged plan, walked northwards up Spadina. Eunice knew the place where they were going, a restaurant. Suggested it just off the top of their head, as she always did when they needed to eat or shop somewhere new. Jemma had to look up the review of the place on BlogThe6ix.com, even though she had lived in this area, owing to her studies, for the last 6 years. She marvelled at her classmate; envied her. Eunice knew these streets; knew their pulse and flow like a salmon knows its ancestral stream. She could navigate them just as well night or day, summer or snow, drunk or sober.

The two young ladies squealed in unison as a peal of thunder clapped the red and white plexiglass signboard, heralding the beginning of the real storm. Eunice called from a table in a nook by the window – she would never sit in the middle of a restaurant – talking in Chinese to the bowing, vest-clad waiter; rather overformal for what was really no more than a slightly glorified version of your typical ‘chop suey house’ sort of restaurant, which, along with beautifully illustrated cookbooks of dubious authenticity, was one of North America’s principle points of contact with Chinese cuisine during the very beginnings of the era of Multiculturalism back in the reign of the first Trudeau. New Ho King, being deep in Chinatown, and with (so one of Jemma’s Chinese classmates had told her) a fair number of allegedly triad-affiliated clientele, had a somewhat more elaborate menu than most and a ghost story or two to its name, but was still of the same basic type. BlogThe6ix online magazine gave it 4.5 out of 5 for providing hearty, greasy fodder for cheap, such that cold, hung-over students at the two nearby universities appreciated, served in a suitably “homey” (read: “close, cluttered, tacky”) and “authentic” (read: “just clean enough to get a Health Department ‘Pass’”) atmosphere. It probably lost the point-5 because there were no schoolgirl-looking waitresses, adorably incompetent and tittering uncontrollably in foreign languages, like at the wildly popular Korean cheesecake place around the corner. Also, it had obstinately kept serving sharks’ fin soup, even when, during a campaign to ban the stuff a couple years back, hipster students, fresh from classes where they had imbibed Edward Said’s Orientalism and raged at their country’s historic discrimination against certain immigrant cultures, proceeded to decry the fact that these Chinese immigrants were permitted to practice their barbaric, backward culture in the sacred and progressive municipality of Toronto. If the owner, old man Hwang, understood, one suspects he enjoyed the yu chi at this grandson’s wedding banquet all the more.

Jemma loved the place for all the reasons BlogThe6ix.com told her to. The dinginess made it even more comfortable a refuge from the blizzards of winter, or the blasting winds of autumn and spring. It was as if the greasy spirit of the past (visible and tactile on the wallpaper and picture frames) somehow lent its spicy, salty warmth to the diners in the present, making its Cantonese comfort food that much more comforting.

Jemma ordered General Tao’s Chicken – it didn’t feel wrong, now, with a Chinese friend – with hot and sour soup, while Eunice chose BBQ pork on rice, with pork blood soup. The rain was lashing down hard outside; so heavy it was like a curtain of water, enshrouding the scene beyond fifty feet or so from the restaurant window. That and the savoury, well-laden dishes made the conversation expand as their stomachs.

Eunice chatted, or, really, lectured about her latest boyfriend, how the crusty old judge had no right to sentence him for a full two years for what was just an ordinary break-and-enter; how school was busy and dull; how her father’s doctor said his blood pressure issues had mysterious vanished…Jemma wasn’t bored by this sort of talk. But, who, who has some secret affair or project, does not wish for others to ask about it and make it the centre of conversation? She wiped the syrupy General Tao sauce from her fingers and fumbled in the Curry’s bag, keeping her eyes and half-hearted smile on her companion. Taking advantage of a moment when Eunice turned to beckon the waiter to refill their teapot, Jemma drew out an object which she made an act of studying while nibbling the batter off a lump of chicken.

“What’s that? Paint?” Eunice was a painter herself, of exceptional talent, moulded by being crammed through all-day art school by her parents from kindergarten till their emigration to Canada when she was in high school. While even the professor paled next to her in sheer technical ability, Eunice was, unlike most artists, not too much of a snob to take genuine interest in individual styles different from her own. The soft tones and use of glowing, flooding light in Jemma’s works, especially her landscapes, impressed Eunice. For all the derivativeness of her subjects and her stilted forms, Jemma had that knack – impossible to learn from books – of using light to create and atmosphere that expressed the ‘mood’ of a season or place better than the light of whatever scene in a true-to-life photograph…kind of like how a horror movie director can make a clean modern office tower into a site of creepiness, or how 1980s Hong Kong filmmakers shot bar and party scenes that long onscreen just like how such experiences feel in the warm, drunk mind of one experiencing them or remembering them in melancholy reminiscence. “Something big cooking in the studio?” Eunice noted the impressive size of the tube.

“No…” Jemma answered absent-mindedly. “I mean, yes, but, like, not in the studio on campus. You know, if you have a really original idea, how those lazy hipsters will just copy it and claim some shared inspiration”

“Yeah, I know, right?” Eunice recollected, with no small bitterness, how she had one planned out a series of vaguely cubist-surrealist canvasses themed around the TTC. She had shown off her sketches (stunning works of art in themselves) to classmates, basking in the warm glow of being the first and most admired among colleagues all competing for the same thing. Her triumph was short-lived. Weeks before the end of semester, when she planned to make a dramatic presentation of her series, she saw a poster in the halls and cafeteria of the admin building. She immediately rushed over to the student gallery. Oh. Em. Gee: there was a full on show, complete with elaborate and ridiculous artists’ statements, music, even slam poetry. A couple of her adoring classmates, either more industrious or less scrupulous than her, had pumped out a dozen canvases, large and small, that, besides the signature were indistinguishable from those she was working on or hoped to begin work on. So much for hashtag sisterhood, hashtag ‘you go gurrrl!’ “What is it then?”

“Well, you know like how the England like Thomas Hardy writes about had Constable, Victorian Australia had Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin, and the Boreal forest had the Group of Seven…”

“Yes, I do know most of those names. Settler colonialist art? What are you getting at?”

“No, that’s not what I mean…ugh!…It’s…It’s like, you know, an era in space and time, sort of crystallizing its spirit in a distinct style, not created but like channelled through a couple artists who just are that place, that time, that energy….you know?”

Eunice’s broad, empty smile showed that she kind of got it though failed to see the profound relevance of Jemma’s remarks in the context of her hauling home the canvas and tubes of pigment.

Jemma Paquette had had spent many years in earnest study of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, John Campbell’s theories of symbolism and archetypes, Gimbautus’ flattering but groundless pseudo-archaeology, the colour fetishism of the Romantics and the line-worship of the Neo-Classicists. She had diligently practiced, with varying degrees of success, but always with a solid competence, replicating the flat perspectives and unique palette of Ancient Egyptian papyri. She had created convincing works of Medieval illumination (with allowances for material limitations of budget and convenience), even though she had never read the Bible (though she had a self-satisfying sense of being persecuted by the Catholic Church) and found monkish piety unintelligible and revolting. English-style watercolours, cubism, Ab-Ex. She had done a little bit of everything, and done each morsel with the same exacting seriousness and technical proficiency, in her long period of study.

Actually, you could say that Art, capital A, had been her raison d’être for the entirety of her reflective life, which one might fairly say begins in high school. Indeed, you could say the whole of her education was consecrated to the visual arts, for she had attended a small, selective (though not expensively private) high school, where the focus was on the arts and other ‘soft’ subjects, largely through the charismatic influence of the art teacher, a crazy but genuinely interested and caring old hippie who was also the history teacher, the ‘Ancient Civ’ teacher (Canadian history being taught by the principal), and the World Religions teacher. Poor marks in math and science classes were generally tolerated if a student showed promise in those that counted – not that many of the school’s graduates were inclined to pursue STEM fields in uni anyway.

Like most of her colleagues at TCAD-U, there had not been a great deal of questioning as to what sort of major Jemma would pursue at uni. True, had she been a bit more aggressive and embittered, she might have gone in for Gender Studies. Had she had a messianic streak, Social Work may have beckoned. But there was never any thought of, say, engineering – so dull and practical; so devoid of soul-cleansing ideological indignation. Nor, for that matter, was the Sisyphean task of ploughing through law or medicine – and the necessity of having one’s skills tested in life or death matters – in the cards.

She made the choices everyone, including herself, expected her to make. Like most of her colleagues, too, she never asked herself whether they were good choices; she just instinctively knew that every alternative was wrong or not up for consideration. If she needed any reassurance of this – such as when an ex-high school classmate, who had become insufferable for his constant complaints about Toronto (rendering him a pariah among Jemma’s friends and no small embarrassment as a guest at parties), actually left to become a lawyer in hot and easy-going Queensland – she merely had to consult NOW Magazine, BlogThe6ix, or the student newspaper. In an emergency, blocking on Facebook, or at least hiding posts from her feed would prevent any arrogantly posted photos from insulting her and her life choices.

It was only in the last year of her undergrad and, especially, in the last year, that, unexpectedly and quite unnoticed at first, a nagging, unpleasant feeling had crept over Jemma like a pair of possessed sunglasses that made her world appear in hard-to-describe but manifestly discomfiting tints. As first, the ‘sunglasses’ could be batted off with little effort. Some energizing music, a shopping trip to Pacific Mall with Eunice, foodie-food or PSAs and gossip with the ‘gurrrls.’ An hour or two of the bright sun in the busy city. Then it would be gone for a month; a couple weeks at the very least. But the ‘sunglasses’ kept installing themselves in front of her eyes, casting the throbbing urban life-drama before her in that brooding, inexplicably isolating and mind-fatiguing light. It began to happen with increasing frequency, too. Gradually at first, till, last winter, it was like a person with a longstanding chronic lung complaint, who has suddenly met with cold, damp weather with an immune system that had been silently weakening for months.

What ‘colour’ were these sunglasses? Of course, they had no colour in a literal sense – in that case she would have gone to a doctor. But there was a definite ‘colour’ nevertheless; not any of the major slices of the colour wheel in their bright, solid forms. No; it was an uncanny blend of tints, cool and murky; a good deal of titanium white blended in, but with some greying by a splash or two of strong ochre and ultramarine. Uncanny it was, too, that she had seen it before…knew it such that if it were in tube form she could come up with a catchy, descriptive name to stick on it. It was in her memory; she felt it in her young bones; in the prickly of her pale, lightly freckled skin. Try as she might, though, it would not burst out of her unconscious.

A casual observer with a practical mind might have diagnosed the mundanely material worries of a student looking down the barrel at life in a city with few prospects for a young person seeking the normal sorts of things one is supposed to grow up into in a post-Second World War Western capitalist culture. What, with an average house in the City – and not even in the sacred core of the City, where any sane arts grad would want…would need to live being over a million dollars, while the average BA-holding barista-slash-office peon-slash-contract sweater-folder earned barely enough in a steady month to pay the rent on a cramped and scuzzy room in an apartment shared with a couple other random (and usually loud and filthy) co-habitants. And that on a diet of predominately instant noodles and Kraft Dinner to save pennies between the socially-obligatory, vigorously Instagrammed visits to the BlogThe6ix and Torontoist-approved Black Hoof charcuterie pub, Thai fusion at Spring Roll on Yonge, Cantonese comfort food at Kom Jug Yuen, Burgers from Hero and Burgers Priest and poutine from Smoke’s. Not to mention the unmentionable fact that a battery of Aboriginal Studies and feminist theory electives on top of the typical Toronto girl’s YOLO-forever attitudes and non-existent domestic skills had rendered her essentially unmarriageable to a man with prospects anywhere above barista, office peon or contract sweater-folder. A life lived on social media, in restaurants, bars, clubs and galleries, between long intervals of mercifully hidden drudgery, tedium, and doubting loneliness darker than an impasto gob of Mummy Black.

Such an observer would, for the most part, be overthinking the problem. Though Jemma was not naïve, and all her friends were well-educated, none of them ever really thought about such problems in any theoretical sense. True, there were the aforementioned dissidents, but thankfully they mostly ceased to exist as soon as they passed south of the great lake, or east of the Bluffs. Everyone else she knew as in the same boat, whether they were a few years older or just starting undergrad.

Sometimes, though, the never-ending orgy of consumerism and, above all, soul-cleansing toil, comforting because it brought no awkward, guilt-ridden success to detach oneself from one’s friends and classmates…it was alive, real, vital…as a process. The brush strokes were textbook; the professors all nodded encouragement. Yet, in the wee hours of some mornings, or on a late-night walk past the century-old Bay & Gables whose narrow, fretwork-browed eyes glared in the eldritch shadows of the ancient lindens and silver maples…sometimes – just sometimes – her heart would skip a bit as she wondered what on earth she was painting?

As the thermometer dropped and the wind bit at throats and eyelids, one tip of the iceberg weighing on Jemma’s mind revealed itself to her. It had not been detectable when the student and alumni gallery of TCAD-U was a new, hard-won and hence imposing privilege. Not when Delacroix, Kriehuber, Ingres, Alma Tadema and Bouguereau were just hard-to-spell names in books, more condensed representations of ideologies and aesthetic value-sets in textbooks and lectures; archetypes who existed in a purely hypothetical world with no real-life models to compare against. Familiarity breeds contempt, as the saying goes. When she entered undergrad and began to slavishly hang around the cafes and shops around campus, attending the regular uni social events and house as well as dinner parties, she assumed that her classmates were the modern incarnations of such great names. After all, was not the “starving artist” a creation of the fin de siècle in urban Europe? And was not the Queen West indie café the modern iteration of that in 1890s Vienna where delightfully deranged painters, political poets, poetical revolutionaries and edgy psychiatrists had mixed and mingled – albeit with pumpkin spiced locally-sourced frapp’ foam and gluten-free macarons (not macaroons!) instead of kaffe mit schlag and sachertorte?

As she struggled with preparing her Master’s ‘thesis’ for the spring – there is no doing an all-nighter before the due date with an oil painting – everything suddenly looked very different. Which is not to say it was different: everyone looked and acted exactly the same as in undergrad. That made it all the more disturbing. She finally got it after she – perfectly ingenuously – kept trying to discuss art and share her works with her colleagues. She felt like she was being magnanimous, inviting them to share in the creative process (and naturally offering to reciprocate herself), for, she was sure, it was only in their mutual sharing of their artsy lives together that they could live the types they modelled themselves on. To do otherwise would feel fraudulent and a waste of their precious years of uni time, all relatively free and easy (if impoverished). She’d held off on being more aggressive with publicly adopting an ‘artiste’ persona, in fact, until a massive accumulation of professor’s praise, high marks, and Facebook-liked finished works had given her shy nature sufficient confidence to shake off some of her habitual self-deprecating introversion. That loneliness, especially in the winter – it is a killer.

When she actually went so far as to bring a sketchbook and a couple small canvasses over to a dinner party at Eunice’s, it was as though she’d fallen off her fixxy bike into a mass of urticating caterpillars, her romper-bared legs stung till she wanted to writhe in bloody madness. Oh, yes, Eunice gave the event some artsy name on Facebook, suggesting it was some clubby, insular meeting of avante garde types. Eunice’ own profile pic had her standing in a beret in front of the Louvre, too. Over several hours, what she witnessed was several generic-faced (she had thought all her female friends as beautiful as goddesses, but then she’d never been to Ryerson or bothered to realize that the fact drunken men will sleep with a woman does not make her beautiful), generically dressed young harpies bragging about how they are “like, genuinely, actually, a slut; for real!” Boasting about their exploits with random men at parties or on vacation in Jamaica, England or Spain – when she knew some of them had boyfriends, who were decent men. Stuffing their mildly overweight faces with coarse, greasy food (not regarded as ‘junk food,’ as what is expensive cannot be junk) and dry, weak local wines with no regard for ladylike etiquette. Conspiring with the preternatural cohesion of an ant colony surrounding an intruder to backbite and cause this or that friend of theirs who wasn’t there to break up with her boyfriend. He “wasn’t right for her,” “she could do better,” “she shouldn’t settle,” “he isn’t in her league.” Really, of course, what it really meant in translation was “he earns more money than her even though he doesn’t have a university degree,” “she got banged by someone hotter than him at Danielle’s Halloween party,” “she shouldn’t settle for someone who is not a handsome billionaire, seeing as she’s an up-and-coming young artist with a BA…even though she works at a coffee shop or as a retail clerk,” and “if she gets with him she might one day be above us.” What pathetic people, Jemma though, who would rather smash someone else’s happiness – and convince each other they are actually doing her a favour in it – than make the slightest real effort to improve their own lives. Not to be outdone were the gay-best-friends, with their affected lisps (apparently lisping and limp wrist tendons are causally related to having an address in the old Metro Toronto), skinny-fat physiques squeezed into plaid and skinny jeans fit for their 12-year-old selves, insecurity-concealing beards and shaved-sides long-top hairstyles. Many an honest, muscly but degree-less plumber and one scion of a prosperous Dubai-based Persian business family were spared months of annoyance and stress and perhaps the agony of a mispurchased diamond ring and premature Facebook relationship status due to the conversations that evening.

And not one of them gave a damn about her sketches and paintings. Nor, for that matter, did they seem to give a damn about their own. It was as if being an “artist” to them really and truly meant the purchase of certain items of clothing, the renting of accommodations within a specific geographic area, riding a ‘vintage’ or otherwise shabby bicycle, particularly in weather and road conditions unsuited for the purpose, and espousing certain superficial ideologies. Nothing more. Nothing.

The issue weighed her down for weeks afterward. How was she different? She looked at herself in the mirror. The skinny jeans, the thick-framed glasses she didn’t actually need to see, the ghastly and shapeless rompers, the Canada Goose jacket she had to wear on alternate days to Tabitha (who put up half the cost), the snotty bangs, the bicycle that took up a huge chunk of her allotted space in the shared rental which she rode whenever she didn’t need to get anywhere urgently or carry meaningful quantities of groceries or other goods.

It all suddenly was superficial; hollow; as predestined to collapse as Gibbon’s Roman Empire. Yonge Street was fast becoming unrecognizable. Block after block, she could see it, tacked up beside the laundromat that had been open since Trudeau the First was in office, the army surplus emporium that had kitted out generations of punks and urban rebels, and the sushi place that opened to serve the first yuppies who predicted how the miraculous robot people of the Pacific Rim would become the ruling global superpower of the 90s. The grim black-and-white signs. The owner of this property has applied for re-zoning…to construct a tower as tall and un-godly as that of Babel. All the way from Xanadu in the south, where Eunice had briefly strip-danced to ‘pay her way through uni’ (though the government had already taken care of that) and rebel against her conservative Confucian father, to its main competitor, the Bronze Rail, in the north, and east, and west, soon to blot out what her aesthete’s eye cherished to see. She drew away from her classmates as much as politeness avowed. Indeed, she saw neither of her friends, besides Eunice and Parvaneh, whom she felt could not rightly be lumped with the others as they did not share the taint of their baseness. She would focus on her art, yes…though whether she was in fact an artist was now a matter for doubt.

One late winter afternoon she and Parvaneh, another ex-high school buddy, were strolling along College Street near Bathurst. They were heading to a Persian restaurant, Parvaneh’s treat – she had plenty of spending cash. Then again, she lived with her doting, shamelessly bourgeois parents in North York. She wasn’t even an arts major – studied tropical agriculture, actually, a subject as practical as it was absurd. However, she had the hyper-developed aesthetic sense that all Persian people seem to have… “Am I being racist to think that?” Jemma wondered to herself. Parvaneh could share in the art galleries, museum visits, and the general appreciation of the beauty in the details of everyday life that Jemma regarded with unaffected seriousness – the bloom of the crabapples in April-May, the majesty of a hundred-year old willow waving on the banks of a watercourse, the sublime waves that crashed against the Beaches in all but the cheeriest weather. They passed a stone-fronted section of the sidewalk strip, where, between an upmarket curry house and a Japanese fashion store, was an art gallery, no doubt converted from some random shop closed more due to rent than lack of business. A small bay window projected beside the recessed door. While it was impossible to see inside the gallery proper from the sidewalk, the window bay was given over to a display of small to medium-sized paintings, stacked three layers high. Jemma broke off the trivial conversation she’d been carrying on with Parvaneh and stopped. She stared, half the enchanted dreamer, half the cynical critic.

Every single one of the pictures was a recognizably “Toronto” scene. Not Canadian. Oil on canvas, watercolour, gouache – all were Toronto. Most were winter scenes, the more to distinguish the notoriously frigid city. Too, there was something about the winter and how it played on the pulses of the citizens. What it was Jemma could not specifically identify, but it was there. There were sections of old-school Victorian shop-tenement fronts, carefully cropped to exclude any chain stores or glass-and-steel condos looming in the background. There were certain famous intersections – Dundas and Spadina, for example, or that spot in front of the haunted old castle-looking building on the U of T campus – with streetcars passing. Without the streetcars, of course, the entire character of the scene would be lost. Usually vintage designs, the streetcars, often ones that were pulled out of service when Jemma was just starting high school…though the presence of modern cars and the still-recognizable arrangements of businesses in the images reminded one they were supposed to represent the unique character of the City as portraits, not as history pieces. None of the paintings, for instance, featured horse-drawn vehicles. It was a past that, to the ahistorical smartphone and Twitter generation, was blurry enough to be beyond critical analysis, yet near enough to somehow identify themselves with.

“Hey!” Parvaneh tugged the fur-trimmed shoulder of Jemma’s parka. “I thought you were hungry. What’s so interesting?”

Jemma stepped back and gestured to the window display.

“Meh, they don’t have much character to them, do they?”

“I…I think they’re charming scenes. And it’s our life,” Jemma tried to respond to the stinging but all-too-correct dismissal of the works that had so charmed her fifteen seconds earlier.

“Ehhh, yeah, no, not really. I mean, there’s nothing like the architecture and history in the landscapes you can find here that would match any street corner in London or Tehran.” Both cities’ names were over-pronounced in volume and accent. Parvaneh never bragged about her degree, though it was a Master’s in a subject genuinely intellectually challenging. She did, however, endlessly lament how everything in Toronto was not like its unarguably superior equivalent in London (though her university was in Manchester) and equally not like its indisputably more cultured and exotic equivalent in Iran – even the bad aspects of which were so foreign they were interesting, at least in second-hand story telling.

“But this is our City. The snow. The streetcars. Don’t you ever find it cool, you know when something that you have special feels for; something that you think is just like some stupid part of your own personal tastes…and, like, suddenly see it in some format you never expected. Like when they make a Hollywood movie out of your favourite TV show when you were a kid, or, like, an oil painting of Mario Kart, or a gourmet restaurant serving mac n’ cheese prepared by Michelin-starred chefs.”

“I know what you’re talking about, yeah, ‘it’s ironic,’ But…these paintings…I mean, I guess you love ‘The 6ix’ and all, but you could do way better than that. It’s like they were all done by the same artist, although obviously, with the signature n’ things, it’s not. It’s like they are painting for cookie tins.”

Jemma understood what Parvaneh meant. And she was right. Each of the paintings was of that style, hard to describe but familiar to any critical eye that’s seen it, if, indeed, it would be reckoned a style at all. Jemma had to admit that the paintings were more about their subjects than the art. Irony over inspiration. Jean-Leon Gerome and Edwin Lord Weeks also painted contemporaneous with photography. It was not for the simple purpose of possessing images of India and the Middle East that people bought works by Gerome and Weeks. They could get those easily enough and more economically from the camera – a whole genre of vintage French postcards attest to that. But the soul, vitality, ‘colour’ (in the metaphysical sense) of the Orient; that no mere camera could capture.

Jemma sighed and the two girls carried on up the street. Their destination’s turquoise-framed door and sign styled like the inlaid walls of a Central Asian mosque were within sight when Jemma felt a hand grab her wrist. A hand larger, rougher and…she struggled against fear to turn her head…much darker than Parvaneh’s….aye, it was purplish black in parts, with dirt or necrosis from drug injections; possibly both. Parvaneh was dumbstruck; she motioned with her cellphone as if to suggest calling the police and held her mouth open as if to say something, but couldn’t figure what to do. Jemma giggled nervously. “I don’t have any spare change,” she tittered, pressing the palm of her free hand over the bulge of her wallet in her coat pocket.

This hobo – no one would guess him anything but a member of that tribe which is all too numerous in Toronto, what with his long, dishevelled beard and hair, trembling, liquor-rotted frame and greasy, shapeless clothes – did not appear to be interested in ‘change!’ though.

“Get your hands off me!” Jemma managed to cry out.

The leathery brown claw dropped, but the strange man, somehow still he held her, held her with his glittering eye: “Sorry, lil’ lady…I dunno, I dunno,” he slapped his forehead; “When I see the face, I just know it in my bones, Gawd, I got’s ta’ tell my story. Won’t cha’ hear my story, lil’ lady? There was a ship…”

“I, uh…I’ve got to go to the restaurant there with my friend…uh…I’ll…I’ll mace you!” but, brave words aside, it was as if she could not choose but to hear the ancient and filthy wanderer tell his tale, even as his overproof breath made her choke and wince.

He rambled and ranted, yet his voice, and more so his glassy, hypnotic eye fixed the two girls in place, struggle as they might to tear away. At first, the tale appeared to be like the typical fantastic ravings of such individuals, replete as it was with mentions of golden apples on golden trees…golden apples for everyone….slithering eels and snakes crawling upon seas of slime and what appeared to be references to dreams that troubled him. It eventually became apparent that there was a coherent story to the greybeard lunatic’s mutterings…a story that, if true, might make an episode of the Fifth Estate. Something about a ship, a storm….there was mention, probably another fantastic element, of a “great gull” whose eyes could see the sins of a man’s soul, and whose piercing cry denounced the sinner to God and man (he stopped up his ears when he spoke these lines). Something about waves roaring with the voice of hell; about a beach; a hot summer night; lost souls dancing in the moonlight…

When he quivered out “The body and I pulled at the same rope…but she said nuttin’ ta’ me,” the two girls’ will and fear overpowered the spell and they sprinted into the restaurant.

The restaurant was one which Jemma loved to eat at whether in the harsh cold of winter or on sweltering summer nights, for the food and décor were equally suited to both. Mind you, just as she never went into certain Chinatown shops without Eunice (even where she did not anticipate any conversation with the staff), she would not eat here without Parvaneh as escort. She would not be looked askance at by the owners, who, for that matter, had netted much of their early clientele from among local professionals and academics who had done the ‘Hippie Trail” in their younger days – before the Revolution in 1979 that both put an end to that party and sent the restaurant’s owners and their beloved Monarch into exile (a portrait of the Shah and Shahbanu hung in a discrete but respectful location from the date of opening). Too, those well-paid baby boomers were willing to pay good coin to savour a slice of their youths, which required the owners to set the place up properly, almost opulent – like something out of a 1970s National Geographic. This suited the owners as much as their customers, for Mr. and Mrs. Ispahani, too, liked to be able to imagine themselves in a piece of pre-Revolution Iran, cryogenically preserved and transplanted. It was a sanctuary as much as a business.

As it was a weekday afternoon, Parvaneh was able to secure one of the coveted dining booths that were one of the restaurant’s main draws, now that plenty of other establishments in the area offered similar food. These were raised platforms towards the interior of the dining area, situated somewhat above the level of the regular tables and cordoned off by wooden railings and partition screens. Inside, one got to dine in an atmosphere right out of….well, a 1970s National Geographic… “The High Road through Central Asia” or some such. Patrons sat on cushions and rugs, lavish things hand woven by the most talented traditional labour (surely either blind old women or illiterate children), in rich maroons, blacks and creamy whites, with detailing in yellow and forest green. On the walls were calligraphy scrolls and framed reproductions of Qajar-era paintings of hunting and palace scenes.

Somehow, this time, the cosy and exotic atmosphere did not succeed in transporting Jemma’s mind to the freer, more interesting haunts of daydreams, however. While Parvaneh ravenously attacked her morasa polo, Jemma dug her spoon listlessly at her kashk-e bademjaan. Parvaneh may have been rich as well as pretty, but that did not prevent her from being sensitive to the moods of her friends who were less fortunate in both departments. “Hey, darling! Don’t play the mysterious artist with me! Something’s bothering you. Is it your roommates? A guy? Tell me and I will teach him to behave himself with you!” She gripped her knife in mock menace.

For a minute or so Jemma was silent. Eventually Parvaneh gave up and returned to the task of eating. Then Jemma suddenly leaned in to her, wide-eyed, “It’s my art…”

“Oh? You got bad marks on your exams or something? Worried about that…thesis?”

“What? No. Not worried. I mean, I was but…it’s like I was given an epiphany today.”

“Today? When?”

“The wise man who shared his story with us before we…”

“What the…you mean the crazy homeless guy talking about…I dunno what…somebody he murdered out on a boat or something.”

“Buried in the shore, I think….but you get it was moving, right? Like, remember what I was saying about an oil painting of Mario Kart or something?”

“Yeah….but I don’t see….”

“Think about it. Ok, I know you like my art. But, be honest. It’s all so formulaic. Like everyone else who puts on a lumberjack shirt and skinny jeans and a toque and is like, ‘Oh-em-gee, I’m such an artist!’”

“Yeah but you’re more talented than your classmates. You’d think the first time some of them held a paintbrush was in the first semester of undergrad. That’s why they all go in for photography…as if it was difficult to take yet another pic of the CN Tower looking all spirey and tall, or of red streetcars in the white snow and the crowds huddling up in the cold at Yonge and Dundas under the bright lights…Oooh, the contrast!”

“I know, but it’s the same thing. I mean, in spirit, what’s different with me? I paint what the professor tells me. I take photographs everyone else takes. I’ve done art of the City. But what have I done for the art of the City? Do you get me?”

“No…” Parvaneh’s good will ran into a wall of perplexity. “I’m afraid I don’t, actually. You mean like volunteering at the AGO or something? You wanna do some artistic job outside class? Sure, why not…”

“No! Nnngggh!” Jemma clenched her hands. “That’s not what I mean! Like, ok, you know why people like us, progressive young people, now, in 2016, are moved by the poems that William Blake wrote back in the 1700s, or Wordsworth, and how people still read Dickens’ novels, but nobody gives a crap about Coleridge, or Bouguereau, and honestly the Brontes are more popular than Trollope or Wilkie Collins now? Right?”

“Umm I see what you mean but, uhh, my dad has a print of a Bouguereau up in his study. And, oh my God, what are you talking about…’as if some vast Tropic Tree, itself a wood;’ that one doesn’t make your spine tingle? There’s a reason I didn’t take Eng-lit.”

“Hear me out. There’s a reason people love the Impressionists and not Bouguereau; Dickens, not Wilkie Collins; Blake not Coleridge.”

“Depends on your people, but ok.”

“The Impressionists painted raw, authentic Life. Bars with tired, sultry-eyed ladies of the night drinking absinthe. Polynesian women, their innocent freedom unspoiled by civilization and patriarchy. Crowded, urban streetscapes on rainy evenings. Bouguereau painted, what? Exotified, Otherised Arab girls with thick eyebrows and devilish glances? Umm, the objectifying male gaze anyone? Dickens and Blake wrote about chimney sweeps; about mill workers; about the marginalized of early capitalist society. Collins wrote about ‘good ol’ boy’ white Anglo-Saxon heirs solving poor girls’ problems with their stuffy honest-to-a-fault chivalry and inherited fortunes. And stereotyping Indian and Caribbean religious practices for poetry…there’s a reason that shit just doesn’t reach educated people today.”

“Suit yourself. I’d like if my man was honest and respectable and bought a yacht and a big country mansion for me…and hired Bouguereau to paint my portrait…in oil! Take that, our high school art teacher!”

“Please tell me you see what I’m getting at. All of the contrasting artists I mentioned. They all, you can’t argue, reached the highest level of skill and technique in their respective mediums, yes? The difference was in their spirit; their choice of committing in faith and self-identification with…with who and what? With rich country squires and damsels with dulcimers? With emotionally dependant princess who die of sadness? With dying generals; soldiers in khaki lusting with yellow fever after colonized maidens with whom they have relationships with unhealthy power dynamics, because they can’t stand the strong, independent women back home?”

“Unladylike is more like it. But go on…”

“Identification plus inspiration. Plus talent, of course. And sheer determined energy. We respect Blake, Dickens, the Impressionists in ways we don’t respect the others because they chose to take all their skill and social status, and throw in their lot…live with, identify with, express the soul of the mill towns, the slums, the South Sea islands, the seedy cabarets. They volunteered themselves to serve as the conduit of the soul of their eras, places…”

“If I follow, you propose…to be to The 6ix, in the 2010s, what Constable was for the English countryside in the 18^th century? Wow, ambitious. I mean, I’m not saying you can’t do it but…how? What will you paint?”

“How? Classical oil painting. The most exacting, the most prestigious style. No acrylic cookie tin images. No abstract or surrealist easy excuses. No editing photos in with an App to look like paintings. As for what I will paint…”

“The CN Tower? The streetcars? The pretty signs and fruit stalls in Chinatown? The condo towers glittering at night?”

Jemma pondered. “Hmm, no. No…That’s…that’s its expression; the soul of the City’s expression in terms of higher level stuff, more superficial stuff, yes. I want the soul itself. To depict that; to speak that in paint. Not the Constable of The 6ix…the Caspar David Friedrich.”

Parvaneh had only the faintest idea of what her friend was saying, so let the matter lie. Eunice, too, forgot her girlfriend’s worried face and gloomy thoughts, blending them in her memory with the countless other vicissitudes of the hyper-emotional lives of perpetually up-and-coming university artists, struggling to find their individuality as they savagely beat themselves into narrow subcultural moulds.

It was several weeks, in fact, that neither of them had seen Jemma, though they never troubled themselves about it, nor thought it unusual. Late in semester, as exams are coming up, some students prefer to study on campus…perhaps for socialization, perhaps so they can be seen to be studying, or maybe their residence situation makes it necessary. Others instead cloister themselves in their apartments, compelling concentration with solitude. Jemma had been putting up regular Instagram posts. Never of social situations, though; always natural scenes, or pictures of old architecture in the still-lowrise-dominated parts of Toronto which can still properly be said to have something of an ‘urban forest.’ Cherry Beach was the most recently dated one, as Parvaneh checked her social media again after the gauntlet of exams and final papers had been run, though that was dated Friday. Now it was Monday. It was an unseasonably warm early December. Still cold in a general sense, of course – everyone in coats at least, though not necessarily full parkas, toques and boots yet. There was no snow on the ground though. Just decaying grass, flattened like gelled-down hair and faded to a sickly pale olive-yellow.

Cherry Beach. Parvaneh remembered, that was the ring tone on Jemma’s phone. Cherry Beach Express. Something told her she should waste no time in hurrying down there. Hurrying was possible for her at least, as she didn’t have to rely on the riding ‘the rocket.’ She raced her mom’s Rav4 south through the downtown core, down to the beaches. Luckily, it was early in the afternoon, before the rush. She parked on a side street and trotted down the boardwalk, across the stiff hummocks of grass-knotted wet pink sand. She looked around. Not a soul in sight, besides a soccor mom running with her golden retriever two hundred yards or so down the shoreline. And the seagulls circling overhead – if those had souls. She instinctively walked over to a spindly but venerable white ash that she, Jemma and Eunice had often picnicked and sketched under. She remembered that the last time they had done that, on the Labour Day weekend, Jemma had remarked on how all the ash trees in the city would soon be gone; victimized by the emerald ash borer beetle, or cut down by the municipal authorities desirous of saving time. Probably to be replaced with Norway maples or oleasters, Jemma had lamented. Parvaneh remembered this, though she didn’t understand what it meant.

Then, half buried in a tuft of grass at the ash tree’s roots, she saw Jemma’s cell phone. There was no mistaking it. Jemma had made a point about bucking the trend towards ever-more-complicated and capable smartphones by acquiring an old mid-2000s flip phone from an indie trading site online. She used her own, much more effective device to call Eunice. “Hey, Eunice.”

“Sup, girl?”

“I need you to go to Jemma’s place. Need. Break down the door if you have to.”

“Haha, don’t worry, I know how to pick a lock. But…why exactly?”

“I can’t explain right now. I am not sure actually…just…just go. You’re like five minutes away.”

“Ok, sure thing, but you gotta explain if it’s some CIA shit your trying to get me involved in!”

It was an agonizing several minutes of waiting. Parvanah gazed out at the lake. The overcast winter weather meant that the New York side was not visible. It was as if the edge of the sand represented the end of her world. It was a windy day; the waves were enormous. The slimy green water, flecked with indecipherable objects, roared at the land and its inhabitants. It was opaque, as if the clear greenish pigment had been blended with a chalky white. She almost felt tempted to try dare the waves as they climbed up the shore with her foot, as she did on vacation in the Caribbean, laughing hysterically when the sea caught her bare ankles. She fought the temptation; it scared her.

Her phone rang. “Yeh, hi, Eunice again. Listen, her roommates know me and they didn’t mind to let me in. Her door wasn’t locked actually. But…I dunno how to explain this.”

“Just…ugh, tell me. Did you talk to her?”

“She’s…she’s not there. The girls here say she left out Saturday morning for a walk. Man, though…her housekeeping standards have really been slipping. You can hardly walk with all the Mr. Noodles cups and cooler bottles on the floor. Eww…I just saw a roach…”

“Is there…” Parvaneh didn’t want to admit to herself what she was asking. “Is there a note?”

“No but….there’s a painting. Huge. Like wide as the bed. Really amazing, too. Sublime. Like, a Gothic Romanticist sort of sublime. A landscape.”

“Just send me a pic!” Parvaneh yelled, losing herself for a moment.

Eunice duly did as requested. Parvaneh held up her phone in the shadow of the ash tree, so as to see the screen more clearly. She held it straight in front of her and stared. It was as though she were looking through her camera App. Above, a seagull shrieked. She cast the old flip phone in her other hand as far as she could fling it and ran, stumbling, across the hummocks and board steps up towards her car.

終

《雜句》2015年7月4 日

蜀師講渡人

而首需渡己；

若欲清假真

先要定誠志；

西洋即遼闊

有情一瞬過；

彼岸已熟悉

夢里多歸遊；

此岸雖吾籍

仍為陌生國；

雞怕大天孤

鶴嫌雞籠窒；

身還未逃獄

神早飛天際。

Huron Street

by M.G. Warenycia

Under gable and turret shadows weave

Over painted brick with ivy fingers

Lacing through flower-carved eaves

Where the stranger’s meditation lingers

As laughter floats through linden leaves.

Dormer and bay peep with yellow lights

At the velvet dark of the summer night.

The streets this late are good for wandering,

Empty, so the thoughts can crowd for pondering.

The pho joint’s still there, and the cheapo beer,

But the bookstore’s a ghost, and posters few

Tell of ‘scenes’ vanished like the dew,

And the light in the parkette is admitting to fear.

The subway lurches a final shudder;

For homebound drunks the streetcar tolls—

Sounds that recall days of learning and leisure

As hard to hold on to as wayward souls.

Their rented fortress was a fragment in time

As fabled and fragile as the city’s clime,

Whose earnest languor makes the heart grow sick

While darkness deepens and memory flows thick;

Hurry, like a leaf upon wind-lashed stream,

Along the pavement, where neon ripples gleam

Warm as once was spring’s rosy dream.

What Did the Owl See?

by M.G. Warenycia

“What did the owl see

Painted blue by a gibbous moon

That made her cease her nocturne tune

As she perched in the ancient maple tree?

I would tell you, if I had been

By the clayey shore of that shallow stream

Where the swarming salmon slither and gleam;

Were I walking past, why, I’d sure have seen.

What eldritch sight did draw her eye?

A shadow loping across the moor,

Hounding upon a human spoor?

A guess, that’s all, since you asked me why.

What shocked the she-owl’s tender ear?

It would clear, too, your face of mirth—

The crunch of sharp-edged steel in gritty earth

Would taint your sleep with buried fear.

And who did the owl see

‘Mid the mad and mazy suburban wood,

Shrouded beneath a sombre hood?

If know you must, then come with me…”

***

The Rhythm of the Night

by M.G. Warenycia

The apartment, which occupied the whole upper (i.e. the third) floor of an old Bay and Gable, faced south towards the waters more Sea than Lake. Notwithstanding its thousand-foot depth and murderous undertow, the cool waters seemed doubly inviting to those gathered in the apartment. Tugging at their collars and pinching up plastered shirts, they were frequently compelled to retreat to down the stairs to the second and ground floors, where buzzing window ACs provided a measure of relief. “Must’ve cost a fortune fer the view, before some developer went and ruined it,” a burly constable remarked, casually glancing out the protuberant bay window.

“You kidding?” his sergeant, who, unlike the constable, was a born-and-bred Torontonian, scoffed. You know who used to live in these kinds of places? Students, immigrant Italians, Portuguese ‘n pensioners. It’s just last couple years somebody decided it’s the all hip and chic for yuppies to live in ‘The Core’ or whatever fancy name they made up for it. Now you got all these foreign investors, too. Yesterday’s garbage is today’s gold, at least if you’re in real estate. Gaaad, it’s a friggin’ sauna in here.” He mopped his forehead and scratched his bulbous stomach.

“They sure didn’t build these places fer ventilation. Seems he liked it toasty, though.” The constable jabbed his chin at a stack of boxes for fluorescent and UV lamps of various types. The images on the boxes alone made the atmosphere more oppressive. “Not too shabby as bachelor pads go, otherwise, though, eh?”

Although the structure of which the apartment was a piece was a Victorian building consisting of three or four ‘houses’ stuck together, with plenty of ornately carved stone details and gingerbread fretwork hanging from the eaves, the interior was furnished in a fresh, boldly-coloured fashion that, if it was somewhat dateable, was so out of choice and not because of neglect. Plump low-back sofa pieces, some leather, some cloth in bright ‘Memphis’ patterns, solid (though heavily scratched) hardwood floors; a pristine kitchen with lots of turned honey oak and faux granite surfaces. A laptop sat upon the kitchen table, while a sleek flatscreen desktop glowed atop a cherry formica desk, its ivory-yellowed CRT predecessor, complete with hulking CD tower, stored beneath. A pantry stocked with a menagerie of pastas, jars of overpriced whole grains, bags of exotic coffees and bottles of equally exotic sauces, along with an overflowing fruit bowl spoke of a diet richer than a student could afford. These, however, were barely-noticed background elements. The police officers could not help being distracted by the arrays of cages, terrariums, carpet-wrapped perches and scratching posts.

Saltwater, freshwater, Australian desert and Amazon rainforest; they divided the apartment into habitats and made it feel vastly bigger even as they crowded it. There were cichlids, redtail catfish, skinks, piranhas, geckos, tarantulas, a small tortoise, and perhaps other creatures hidden among rocks, driftwood and aquatic plants. After a forensic tech lifted up the skirt of a couch to look for objects that might have rolled underneath in a struggle got the skin nipped clean off the top of a finger joint, the cops studied the tanks and cages more cautiously. They realized that there were no lids in some of the places where lids should have been and that there were faeces in secluded corners without any visible creature which could explain them.

“I won’t test the theory myself, McMurtry, but I will bet you that was a green iguana under there,” remarked the lead detective, who had just arrived on the scene. “A homicide—not much doubt of that, hmm?” Caterpillar brows danced above Inspector Julius Ngai’s sleepy eyes as he moved to get a view unobstructed by the sofas.

“No sirree, wouldn’t say there’s any doubt about it.” Constable McMurtry, kneeling over the body, concurred.

“Wouldn’t be the first time a lonely weirdo offed himself,” Sergeant Barlow conjectured, disgusted by the horde of black and red and yellow eyes staring at him from watchers conspicuously less than half their number. “Who keeps a scorpion for a pet?!?”

“I don’t believe he was a loner,” Ngai mused entrancedly, stepping slowly around the room, meditating on its symbols.

“No, we already spoke to the building super—lives on the ground floor,” the Sergeant would not be persuaded. “Also been taking statements from the neighbours—the ones that are home, anyway. There’s nobody who says he didn’t live alone. Sole occupant. And all the shoes, coats, everything men’s, same sizes. Didn’t bring people over much, either, at least not as anybody paid attention to.”

“You put the most important part last. They wouldn’t be able to tell you anything, unless they caught people coming and going. All this extra sound deadening he’s added to the walls…I wonder if the landlord knows. And that stereo system, which it appears he actually uses: I doubt my car cost as much. On top of all that, he occupied the whole flat. Unless someone was spying on him through those tiny windows, how would they know anything?”

“Ehh, okay, bud, but let’s be honest. I dunno if it’s the same where you came from, but, here, the kind of guys who keep all kinds of reptiles in their apartments don’t exactly gave the reputation as being successful with the ladies.”

“And yet…” Ngai ran a gloved finger across the top of a shelf adorned with various mostly Amerindian and Aboriginal Australian curios, then quickly removed the glove, tossing it to a befuddled forensics man. “Only the slightest film of dust. Such a man as you describe; as…” he nodded towards the body…”As that; he keeps his apartment spotless, by and for himself? And there’s no dishes in the sink.”

“Guess he had a girlfriend, maybe?” McMurtry hypothesized.

“I would think so.”

“Huh. Shocker.”

The victim was laying on his back, in the space between the kitchen, the edge of the living room sofa circle, and the computer desk. He was wearing a T-shirt, the black of which had fade to charcoal, its silkscreened Harley Davidson logo flaked and fissured. Worn jeans, fitted tighter than they were meant to be, a rubberized Seiko watch, and a pair of branded retro sneakers completed the outfit. Almost certainly, it was Scott Gillespie, a forty-something white male who had been the tenant of the same flat for the past eighteen years. The police inferred this from what the superintendent had told them about the person renting the flat and from the general appearance of the corpse, though any legally definitive identification would have to wait for fingerprints, dental records or DNA analysis.

“I guess that’s another point fer what Ngai’s saying,” Constable McMurtry added. “You gotta have somebody you’re intimate with in yer life fer them to hate you that, uh, passionately.” He was referring to the condition of the face. It is well known in the field of criminology that either a deliberate and excessive destruction of the face or an attempt to conceal the face where the rest of the body is not concealed, after or during the commission of the crime, is indicative of there being a close personal relationship between killer and victim. “Too bad he didn’t have a parrot. You ever heard about that? Where, I think it was in England or some place, this guy had a pet parrot and the parrot helped them catch the guy who did it? I think it was because it sort of re-enacted the murder, verbally, screaming and doing voices.”

“Hmm. Make sure you have all the pet accounted for. It’s still early in the summer. A miniature zoo like this could cause quite a bit of havoc before winter kills them off, if they escaped. I understand the collector’s desire, but,—“ Ngai tapped on the glass of an apparently empty terrarium, luring a bloated Urodacus manicatus out of its stony burrow. “Goodness, everything here looks like it wants to kill you—the iguana definitely wants to. One wonders how he slept at night.”

“Maybe he slept during the day,” McMurtry offered. “The super says you never saw him in the morning. ‘N he wasn’t a student, ‘least not fer a long time. No criminal record, not even a DUI. You’d think a guy with…let’s face it, weird-ass habits, like this, he’d be on something, or have gone off on somebody.”

“Music kept his daemons at bay, perhaps,” Ngai began perusing the stacks of records and CDs on the far side of the living room, beside the television. The officers continued poking around, each in their respective corners. Gradually, their heavy footfalls and occasional snorts, ‘hmm’s, and grunts were softened, then drowned out by a pulsing rhythm that first conducted itself into them through any hard surfaces they touched, rattling in their bronchial tubes. Only after ten minutes or so did anyone hear it with their ears.

“It’s….like you said…here,” McMurtry muttered indistinctly.

“Huh? Can’t hear you over that racket,” Barlow growled.

“I was saying, to Ngai, ‘it looks like what you said,’ about how this poor sucker wasn’t alone in his life.” McMurtry beckoned the others to the laptop, which was not password-protected. “Lucky bastard.”

The desktop wallpaper and an album of readily accessible photographs showed a man, presumably the deceased, and a woman—‘girl’ would be the more appropriate term—in a plethora of poses and places, most being scenic or chic spots in the City: ‘happening’ gastropubs, viral pop-up restaurants, nightclubs, beach parties, a recording studio. The contrast between the pair could not but provoke comment in any who saw them. She was almost certainly still in undergrad—if she was in university. She was not slim but rather compactly built in a way that communicated bouncy, explosive vitality. Muscular thighs and an ample posterior filled out her yoga tights and jeggings in a way that clearly was of great interest to the photographer. Her bust was about as large as it could be in a woman of her size without declaring artificial enhancement. Her mouth was broad, her lips full, her nostrils pointed ever so slightly towards the sky, while her eyes glittered with the pure emotion of the Moment.

“Even the most generous observer would not credit that token of a forehead with either knowledge of the past or plans for the future,” Ngai observed. He delighted in exasperating his colleagues with lectures on abstruse and archaic subjects, such as phrenology and feng shui, though was careful to restrain this tendency in his official reports.

“You read too much into things sometimes.” Barlow rolled his eyes as he raked his shirt cuff across the border of his scalp.

“And what do your methods get from these pictures?” the Inspector challenged him.

“I get that she’s a hell of a lot younger than him, and ‘she likes her icies,’ as the kids say it these days. Probably how she says it, too. Geez, some guys have all the luck. I ain’t no Calvin Klein model myself, but, come on, he’s gotta be twenty, twenty-five years older than her, and he’s not in such great shape, either. Dresses sloppy. Yeah, long hair looks good if you’re Fabio, but…on him, it looks like a rat’s nest.”

“Money, maybe,” McMurtry pointed out the obvious.

“Come on, it’s fine to rent a nice crib when you’re twenty, thirty, but his age and he doesn’t have a house of his own?”

“Yer livin’ in the past, Sarge. The white picket fence and two-point-three kids doesn’t exactly have the appeal that it used to.”

“He drove a twelve-year-old Integra, for crying out loud.”

Meanwhile, as the noise outside began to thump uncomfortably loud, the reptiles and insects grew fitful in their glass-walled abodes and Ngai strolled back to the stacks of records and CDs.

“If he’s got any Stones, or Springsteen, maybe they could have got lost in the chaos of the whole incident here, you think?” Barlow chuckled. He meant it.

Ngai clutched his hair with one hand, flipping through the albums with the other. “The face is familiar, but, in my head, it doesn’t fit the name…”

“Huh? Just tell me what he’s got there.” Barlow implied, ‘before the forensics guys return.’

“I know the face, the look…maybe minus fifteen years and fifty pounds…” Ngai coughed, then read aloud: “’Emjay – Take Me to the Moon,’ ‘Capital Sound – Higher Love,’ ‘Spiral Sun featuring Lovanca – Feel My Lovin’…Tribal Mix and the radio edit…Lex & Spiro – Stages of Trance’…”

“What? Who?” the others cried in unison.

“…that would be the DJ Armin Fiero remix, the Lex & Spiro…actually, a lot of DJ Armin Fiero remixes in here…”

“Never heard of any of that shit. What is it, rap?”

“Some of these, only the clubbers in a particular establishment, on particular nights long ago may have ever heard them: a third of these are promotional copies. Labels printed on an old-school bubble jet printer, marked with Sharpie pens.” The murder victim’s tastes in music were as eccentric as his choice of pets. “It’s EuroDance,” Ngai informed his colleagues. “Electronic dance music, lots of bass and beats, high energy—grunty male rapper lines interspersed with wailing, dreamy female vocals. Popular in the 90s. Canada, believe it or not, was one of the world’s biggest producers, and the quality of the output—much of it from studios in the GTA or Québec—was top notch.”

“Strange record to be proud of—no pun intended. You’re a fan, are you?”

“Goodness no, but my wife—she grew up here—was into it. Mr. Gillespie must have been quite well connected. The vinyl records; it wasn’t a fad back then. The DJs would physically spin them, on turntables.”

“I’d like ta get in touch with one of those connections,” McMurtry sounded pissed. He was still sorting through the files on the deceased’s computer. “Lot of pics of this woman. No name. I’m guessing he didn’t keep a pen-and-paper diary. Weirdest thing: nobody seems ta know this Scott Gillespie. I mean, when we were asking around. His parents are both dead. Blue collar people, lived out in Windsor. Nobody remembers him ever mentioning siblings. There’s no address book, unless it’s locked up in one of these computers somewhere. Guy doesn’t seem to have had a job, unless it was under the table. He pays a heft rent, on time, every month fer the last eighteen years. Girlfriend’s got no identity. Neighbours can hardly tell us when he came and went. You’d think the guy was in the CIA or KGB or something but…who’s a guy like this hiding from? Animal control? Carmen San Diego—I mean with all those Mesoamerican artefacts there?”

The officers debated each other to distract themselves from the stultifying heat and to provide the sense of doing something, so that they might sooner be done whatever it was they could do in the apartment. Meanwhile, Ngai, who was sweating as much but noticing it less, oscillated in slow semi-circles, keeping well away from the body, studying random features of the room as a cat earnestly ponders a blank wall at 2:00 AM.

“That—“ he said as he passed in front of the open bay window; “That is EuroDance, what you’re hearing now. Not very clearly, but that’s it.”

“So that’s what they’re always playing in the Club District. Didn’t know it had a name.” McMurtry was grateful for this nugget of useless knowledge. The window faced directly towards the heart of the Entertainment District, barely hidden by a row of lowrise shop-apartment buildings.”

“Not always; not anymore.” An expression of cunning crossed Ngai’s face and he hurried to the music library again. “Where is it…” He pulled out a jewel case containing a garishly inked label.

“Gloves, Julius…If that’s a clue, that is.”

“It is!” the Inspector exclaimed. “’Teena T – I Can Keep a Secret,’ produced by Metromuzik Inc., 410 Passmore Avenue, Scarborough…mixed by DJ Armin Fiero, vocals: Lise Desjardins…and digital editing by S. Gillespie.”

“The same guy lying there?” the others asked innocently.

“No, not the same. Knock of fifteen years and fifty pounds, as I say, and do not drown his professional discipline in the delusions of sugar daddying and, then, yes. Half these deejays from those days, you can’t even find an article about them on the internet. A zeitgeist, or a section of it: it emerged, thrived, was gone, essentially unrecorded. He does have the face of a composer. Or did.”

“So you think he’s, er, was a…like a record producer?” Barlow tried to fit the idea of ‘deejay’ into the range of concepts he understood.

“Producer, sound engineer, something like that.”

“Prolly offered her a contract. He’d help her break out if she let him break her in, y’know what I mean?” McMurtry joked. “She is a cutey, fer sure.”

“Yes!” Ngai practically shouted as he grabbed his cell phone and hammered out a text.

“Alright, I’ll happily accept what you’re saying: we can check it later. This heat…I don’t wanna be in here longer than we have to. Where’s the CSI van?” Barlow peeped out the window. “Murder weapon…what’s the murder weapon? And how’d the killer escape? We had to break the door down to get in here. The super and the neighbours were all on high alert, seeing how they heard the fight. Nobody came down the stairs and, anyhow, the door to the hall locks from the inside.”

Ngai walked to the kitchen, plucking up the knives in the knife block. “Dull as if they haven’t been sharpened since sundried tomatoes were a thing.” It did not require an experienced homicide investigator to discern that the instrument used to deliver the fatal sash to the victim’s throat, as well as to produce the defensive wounds on his forearms and the devastation to his face, had been uncommonly sharp and fine; as sharp and fine as a fresh razor blade but longer and double-edged, tapering to a point at one end.

“Check the bathroom,” Barlow ordered McMurtry, unwilling himself to enter what promised to be the most humid room in the flat. “Killer might have taken a razor—the old-timey barbershop kind—from the bathroom and used it on Gillespie here. The girlfriend would know if he shaves with a straight razor; personal things like that. The bathroom’s between here and the bedroom…he’s barring her way to the hall, she wants to leave. Fits with the story the tenants in the apartment below tell about a domestic. Said she was screamin’ like a banshee. Never heard anything like it in their lives.”

“Easy there, Sarge. We don’t even know she was in here tonight. None of the witnesses say they saw a woman running down the stairs or coming to visit, either. Heat’s getting to ya.” The perky smile and comely figure of the victim’s girlfriend was getting to Constable McMurtry. “Kinda sad when ya think about it. I mean besides him getting killed. You travel the world, pump out all that creativity and, what, to be chasing sugar babies when yer drivin’ a twelve-year-old Acura and you don’t even own yer own place? Not me, buddy. Handle the fundamentals before you dive too deep into yer daydreams.”

Barlow had no theory of the crime—he had no precise thoughts except a longing for conditioned air when he announced it was time they handed it to the just-arriving CSI people, to come in and process the scene. “Come on, you can brainstorm in the office,” he barked to Ngai, who lingered to examine one last time the victim’s travel souvenirs, nearly arranged but for one jarring gap in mute testimony of stories no one was interested to hear. “Probably gonna get some neighbours coming back after midnight, people who live in the student res next door. ‘Course, they’re probably too stoned out of their minds half the time to notice anything, but, hey gotta do our due diligence.”

The ground floor was insufferably quiet and gloomy, with the tenants being holed up in their units or deciding to take a detour and kill some hours elsewhere as soon as, coming from the subway or campus, they saw the police vehicles parked out front of their building. Ngai escaped onto the sidewalk, preferring the throbbing air of the open city at night, however muggy and buzzing with newly-hatched June bugs. At the curb was a heap of rusting bicycles, blenders, disassembled drawers, pornos, records and CDs in cardboard file boxes. The odour of marijuana and the jasmine scent of linden blossoms mingled in the breeze.

McMurtry, intrigued by his colleague’s cool contemplativeness, followed him outside. He thought of the open bay window and the locked hall door, and quickly checked again the sparsely planted garden bed that lay directly beneath said window. “Beats me how he—or she—got out. Soil’s completely smoo—“ he uttered before the Inspector hushed him.

“I’m trying to remember something…”

“She looks like a frisky one. Could’a done it, I figure, if she was drunk, and in the middle of a fight. Still, she’d have to be a ninja ta get out of there and not leave a trace, and nobody saw her; no ladder, no van or truck parked outside pretending to be contractors or something.”

“She’s innocent, I’m sure. Sorry, not innocent; not guilty, at least. Not guilty of Mr. Gillespie’s murder. I know I’ve seen the face somewhere—“ his cell rang. “Ah, my wife!” he spoke with incongruous excitement. “Yes, yes—I’m at the scene now, or just outside it. Listen, you remember, once or twice—it wasn’t often but we did go there—there was that place you liked to go with your friend, the Greek girl with the curly hair. Lots of blue, pink, green lights; they had something like a beach-jungle theme going on, rooftop patio…They all have rooftop patios? Oh, well, this one had palm trees—fake ones, I guess—and things on it, and there was that Persian DJ…sorry, Armenian….had that grunting, hyper voice, announcing everything…”

McMurtry listened—he knew his friend didn’t mind. In fact, he enjoyed being an object of awe for his deliberately obscurantist smarts…

“…Armin Fiero, exactly, yes, him, and they had another fellow…’The Scarborough Sound Guy Scotty G?’ That’s a mouthful, but okay….Yes, memories, I know. Maybe I’ll bring you back a signed CD, then….And the club was?…I see. Good, thanks. Aye, dzoi geen! Oi nei! Come, Douglas, let’s take my car. Don’t want to startly any of these e-freaks.”

“Uhh, where to?”

Ngai stared in the direction of The Beat…

“Bouncer said that Armin Gulbenkian, err, Fiero’s free to talk if we want. Heh. Never used to be cooperative like this, these club types. Anyhow, I talked to him when I was in there. Seems a really chill dude if you wanna…”

“Ssst!” Ngai raised the power windows. The black ’84 Electra, square and sober as a Yuppie’s business suit, practically disappeared beneath the umbrous lindens lining the sidestreet.

“Prolly should have gone in yourself. Plainclothes…The cut-eye the crowd in there was giving me…”

“I said, ‘ssst!’ Watch the trees, behind the parking lot; the ones that run into the connecting streets like a canopy.”

“Uh, ‘kay. Crazy, ‘bout his little lady there. You’d never think in this day and age, in a City of two million people, somebody can exist, a real ‘creature of the shadows,’ like that. Nobody being able to tell…”

“Hush. Of course people know who she is. Obviously she eats and works. Eats, at least. And has friends, family. It’s only that her social circle and his do not overlap; a non-Venn diagram, so to speak. Undoubtedly, a deliberate choice on her part.”

“Yeah. The bouncer’s seen her. All the staff. Bouncer knew Gillespie fifteen years, almost since he started out. Real cut up about it. Her first name is Ashley, and that’s all anyone knows fer certain. Bit of a princess. Kind of a bitch to the employees, honestly.”

“What matters is, is she here tonight?”

“Oh, no.” McMurtry told of how Scott Gillespie, adopting his stage persona of the Sound Guy Scotty G, would return to his old haunts in the Entertainment District, where, if EuroDance was on the playlist, the dishevelled but still magnificent mage of the turntables was always welcome.

Unlike with most music starts, those who made it big upon CityTV’s Electric Circus tended not to experience the stereotypical dizzying crashes into ignominy when the tides of musical fashion changed. This was mostly due to the fact that they never made enough money to entirely lose touch with reality, on top of which they were otherwise ordinary people, perfectly capable of resuming their original paths as car salesmen, office workers, real estate agents, chefs or veterinarians, content with the occasional themed gig for nostalgia once in a while. DJ Armin Fiero ran a bar and a used car dealership in Etobicoke in partnership with members of his extended family, for instance. As for Gillespie, in the brief conversation he and McMurtry had, the DJ opined that his old partner, coming from a broken home and having nothing else in terms of a focus besides a software development company that never took off or, for that matter, seemed to actually do anything, took his artistic identity more seriously than anyone he knew in the CanCon EuroDance community. “Like, look at Emjay, probably the biggest star in the whole friggin’ scene back in those days, at least for Canada. She’s a housewife baking pies in some hick town in Quebec. I got my family, my kids…Scotty, he never had any of that to ground him, you know? That’s why, I think, when this thing came to him, on a silver platter, he threw himself into it; got tunnel vision. He said Ashley wanted to be a singer, and I guess he saw himself as like her mentor, but you could tell she didn’t give a crap about him. He was just a meal ticket…”

McMurtry, naively, asked whether they ought to pounce on ‘Ashley’ or trail her. “Ya don’t usually see that kind of violence from a woman on a man, not unless there was some crazy abusive shit going on. Ol’ Codrington told me once, when he first made detective, very first homicide he ever worked, it was this chef—I’m talking the white hat kind, not just a cook—older guy, no history besides a couple DUIs, nice building, quiet…and the scene inside looked like an abattoir. His face was like ground beef, and his ‘sausage ‘n meatballs’…let’s say I hope nobody bought his food processor at a yard sale. Yup, yup. Didn’t take long ta find out who did it. Tons of witnesses, no alibi. Somehow I think she honestly wanted to be caught. Guy had a daughter, see. Err, stepdaughter, from a woman he used ta live with. She ran away from home at sixteen. He turned the mom soon after, ‘cause, you can guess the reason he was looking after her. So, her life kinda fell apart—not like it was ever together—and, things coming full circle…”

The DJ was convinced that this temptress intended to destroy the friendships Scotty shared with everyone at the club, but to do it slowly and in such a way that something one of the waitresses or bartenders did would appear to be the cause of the final break. “She had it planned, bro. You could tell, she was one of those types…”

“Yes, yes. Codrington told me that story. Thrice, at least.”

“Yeah, so, just saying it reminded me. Hey, all those deadly pets. Like some kind of a power fantasy? How ‘bout it?”

Ngai pouted, keeping his gaze fixed on the clump of green ashes at the corner of the club’s parking lot. “Bah. Of the whole lot, only the iguana is truly dangerous. The rest, only if you do something stupid—well, getting a green iguana for a pet in the first place, aiyah! Psychopath. Anyhow, she is not involved—not directly—and has no idea the Sound Guy Scotty G is dead.”

“Huh? You think a rival in the music business maybe? I’ve known hip-hop uys sometimes have beefs that turn deadly. Guess I don’t listen to euro…EuroDance, so…”

“No. I’m still working it out in my head—the story. But it has nothing to do with duelling DJs. You heard Mr. Fiero. Gillespie’s new belle was a pain. Different generations, different tastes. Their photos together, generic dates. He was helping her to get recording sessions, but there is no way she was singing the sort of music he produced, or that one hears at clubs like this on Throwback Thursdays, Wayback Wednesdays and every such night. You heard he was he was slipping out of his passion, dragged out by his bewitching baby doll. No, I think his ‘manic pixie dream girl’ made him feel young and desired again, but the price was severance from his old friends, his old social home. Once he put a rock on her finger, the exotic pets would be the next to go, mark my word. I doubt there would ever be a wedding. I suspect that Fiero and his other co-workers would be in total agreement with me, and if Gillespie’s iguana had the intelligence, it would mercilessly set its diamond-sharp teeth into Ashley’s painted toes.” Ngai studied the sign atop the club entrance. “The Funky Monkey, eh? And they spell it ‘Fünké’…”

“Wonder how they came up with that one.”

“Oh, if you had been there, you’d know that they didn’t just pull things out of a hat. The lyrics of the songs back then, they sound stupid, true, but there’s real sentiment behind them.”

Beside the golden streetlamps, the voluminous foliage of a monarch among the ash trees rippled with special energy in a particular spot, ever so slightly out of tune with the undulations produced by the stiff breeze rolling off the Lake.

“Wonder what the used. To stab Gillespie, I mean.” The night was no different than many a hot summer night in Toronto, but the lonesome and unfamiliar spot and the deranging tug of sleep made McMurtry eager to fill the silence with speech, any speech. Intellectually, there was nothing to fear; he was cool as a refrigerated cucumber. Reason will cede its place at the driver’s seat, however, when fatigue, illness or other heavy strains press it from all sides. “Not like I’ve done autopsies, but ‘ve seen ‘em before, and, to me, that’s surgical precision they used—not the way it was done; not talking the angry blows or the mutilation part of it, but the cuts themselves. Real fine. Like they were done with a scalpel.” His partner remained disconcertingly quiet and focused on the trees. “Ya think there’s a link, maybe? Heck, no way even a sushi knife, or a fileting knife; no way it could just zip through like that. ‘N you saw the knives in the kitchen, right? It wasn’t a knife from the house, and there weren’t any razors, besides the normal kind…”

“Yes, the knives were all there—the ones in the knife block—and, while his girlfriend seems to have kept things clean—I’m guessing it’s her—you know bachelor habits. All of them dull as butter knives, practically.” Suddenly, a thin, whistling cry pierced the night air, but it was too brief to make head or tail of. “You heard that?”

“Yep. Holy…”

Mad drunken screams and shouts regularly punctuated the Entertainment District on weekend nights. A broken heel, a broken heart; the narcissistic impulse to shove one’s ecstatic emotions onto unseen strangers. McMurtry thought he would have been used to this kind of thing by now, and yet he found his hand on the butt of his gun.

“Do you know when the first burrito restaurant opened here—when you could first buy avocadoes in the store?” Ngai asked, as if, being in some ways an archetypal example of his race, Constable McMurtry ought to know the whole local history of the GTA.

“I prolly wasn’t even living here, not back then.” Not wanting to seem a dunce about a topic where his professional senior regarded him as an expert: “But, uh, I figure it’s gotta be, I dunno, 80s, 90s? More 90s, I suppose, before that stuff started going mainstream. You never saw all the ethnic foods before, other than Greek stuff on the Danforth, Chinatown, Italian. Right about the same time our guy had a career, huh?”

“A career that was relevant; part of ‘the scene,’ yes. He must have travelled a lot.”

“Yer saying because of the masks and idols and stuff he had decorating his apartment?”

“Yes, quite the collection, isn’t it? Granted, I don’t know much about Mezo-American art and culture, but they certainly looked genuine to me—genuine and old. As with his zoo, I don’t imagine he only began collecting yesterday—probably the two passions are linked and he brought things back, bit by bit, as be brought in his pets.”

“Had ta be before 9/11.”

“Mhmm, well, that’s when he had more thriving career; when his life last had drive and purpose. Which, I agree, would have ended not much after 9/11, until…”

“…Until the chick came into his life…” They tried to finish each other’s sentences.

“…And brought a new star to guide him, drawing him away from his old friends, his old music.”

“Yeah, sometimes life is like that. Ya get into a rut; need someone ta come along and break yer shell, stop you from living in the past, in nostalgia.”

“And yet all that nostalgia was real,” Ngai cut him off. “And the people, and music—look, the parking lot is nearly full. What that little gold-digging trollop was promising him was an illusion. Undoubtedly, his old partner saw it, the bartenders would have known it—a quarter of the women in that place have probably tried to rope someone into a trap like that. The iguana might have sense it, even—I wouldn’t put it past him. Anyways, let’s go hang out with deejays for a while. I doubt they’ll charge us cover.”

The bouncers, wary of why they weren’t able to obtain work other than as bouncers, gave the two cops wide berth. The interior was coolly lit and densely packed with dancers, and the patrons were sufficiently entranced by the music and booze that no one took notice of them. Had they never seen an album or poster bearing his image, Ngai and McMurtry would not have assumed that the moniker ‘DJ Armin Fiero’ referred to anyone other than the leanly muscled, thoroughly tanned guy with his black hair in short, gel-stiffened spikes at the front, an open-necked aubergine shirt, with plentiful white gold chains and orange-tinted Matrix-style shades, despite the late hour. On seeing his official visitors, he handed the turntables over to a lip-biting, flame-haired girl and ushered the cops up a hidden flight of stairs. Noone could hear anything but the bass, beats and melody until Fiero shut the door of the second-floor lounge. The faintest traces of Foggy—‘In Your Eyes’ seeped through to help maintain the mood.

“Yo, your uh—this dude here—he told me what happened to Scotty.” Armin’s stagetop swagger melted like the Dippity-Do on his temples. “Damn, man; I told him that b*tch was bad news. Like, come on, one of us could have set you up with somebody. Hotter, sweeter, not just a freakin’ gold digger. But he didn’t want to see his limitations. Sorry, have a seat. Drinks? No charge for you guys, obviously. Shit, man; Scotty…”

“We actually don’t think Ashley or whatever her name is was involved, except indirectly.” Ngai spoke for himself and McMurtry. “No one rents the VIP lounge, eh? Place looks busy, though.”

“Oh, no, it’s ‘cause they’re doing renovations, or supposed to. Full disclosure: there’s mould in the ceiling. Yeah. And, you know, the old look…” The lounge had a cheerful, cheesy jungle-tropic theme in the ornaments, potted tropical plants and designs painted on the walls that the Inspector remembered (hazily) from so many years before. By contrast, the dance floor and stage were indistinguishable from those of a hundred other clubs, here, in Montreal, in Manchester or Munich.

“Yes, when we first came in, I thought to myself, it looks different than I remember it, which was, eih! Too many years back!”

“Yeah, that…” Armin appeared somewhat embarrassed. “We’re spinning the same classic tracks, only, the tacky old décor, it’s too much, you feel me? Besides, we’re only in here on Wednesday, Thursday, Saturdays—it’s a different crowd the rest of the week, so they gotta meet everybody’s needs.”

“You kept the name, though.”

“Yeah, everyone knows where it is, so…”

“The Funky Monkey…” Ngai chewed over the words. “I can’t help but ask, why all the umlauts? You can’t even pronounce them. It sounds wrong.”

“Just a style thing. Like Yogen Früz. No reason really.”

The detective stifled a groan of exasperation. “The monkey, he’s funky—I don’t think I need you to interpret that for us.”

“Hahaha, ah man!” The deejay’s eyes glazed over as he recited lines from a radio ad the club had aired on z103.5 FM a decade ago, putting on his best attempt at a sultry female voice. “Is that a banana in your pocket or are you just a funky monkey? Hahah, ahhh, the days, man; those were the days!”

“I remember, and an audio sample—I swear you used it, too, when I was there, between when you were changing tracks and so on—a sample of a screaming monkey. Or maybe I was drunk or imagining things.” They were all laughing now, two for nostalgia, one at the strange tastes of City People. Scotty G’s murder seemed to belong to a less real world for the moment. “I always thought to myself, are they insane? How is that cool, or urbane, or sophisticated? It’s certainly not relaxing—a deranged, screaming simian sounding like he’s had too much vodka and means to settle some scores. Disturbing, in fact.”

Armin laughed and shook his head. “Nah, bro. You weren’t high or anything at the time. That’s our thing, or was. Be different. Be out there, you know? Like, we used a sample for the radio, yeah, but, nah, that was a real monkey. No lie. He was a pretty small critter. Heheh, used to, if you carried him around the dance floor—he’d ride on your shoulder, like a parrot on a pirate—used to f*ck with people. Cheeky bastard! Sometimes he’d pull the straps on girls’ tops or if he didn’t like you, he’d grab a drink from one of the waitresses’ trays and throw it on you. I’m tellin’ you, man. But he was so cute—you knew your girl would be pissed if you hit him or something. But then somebody threatened to sue—health code violation or some shit like that—so we kept him on a leash by the tables. Ahhh, it was a freer time. Now you got me thinking about Scotty. Guess it hasn’t sunk in yet. Tomorrow’s gonna suck ass.”

The party engaged in small talk for a few minutes, letting Armin relive pleasant memories. The Star or Sun would come calling on the morrow. They exited the club. McMurtry followed the Inspector around back. A couple making out in what was far from an ideal spot, beside the skip bin, and a shocking amount of empty bottles and cans—especially Smirnoff Ice and Red Bull—were strewn on boulevards and lawns ringing the parking lot. The cars were crappier than those parked out front: Corollas, Hyundais and stock Civics, instead of the BMWs, Porsches and heavily modified rice rockets in the front lot. Other than that, there was nothing of note. They went back to the car, Ngai driving southeast, zigzagging slowly to avoid the inebriated pedestrians beginning to filter out of the clubs. There were people on the street, even at that hour, but the further east one went, the less their presence symbolized youth and celebration, the more it told of latent degeneration festering beneath the bark of the Yggdrasil. The drab, semi-animate forms blended with the concrete and brick and steel as if elements of the same organism. Once or twice, McMurtry blurted out a “what’s happening to this City,” or “it wasn’t like this back in the day,” as seemed proper to the occasion.

It must have been sleep overtaking him, why he did not sooner ask his colleague, “Umm, where are we heading? Kind of out of our jurisdiction…”

The spot where Ngai parked, just north of the Gardiner Expressway, stood at the mouth of the Humber River and was naturally fertile in comparison to most of the rest of the paved-over and road-salted downtown. The vegetation was at the peak of its abundance. Each tree was a verdant cloud; the reed beds were so thick that the strongest paddler wouldn’t dream of attempting to drive a canoe through them. A paved trail led up around the water treatment plant into the marshes which dominated the river’s lower reaches, meandering parallel to its amorphous banks. “Take out your flashlight,” Ngai commanded with inexplicable vehemence. “Shine it in the water, especially along the shore, wherever something drifting might get caught up. Also, under any particularly large trees, especially walnuts, chestnuts—oh and especially the crabapples.”

“Huh? This one’s gonna need some explaining.” McMurtry was terribly confused, but an order was to be followed, and, if the Inspector was wasting the Toronto Police Service’s time, that was on him.

“We’re looking for the killer of Scott Gillespie, what else? Neither of us has signed off for the night. Really…I appreciate your estimation of my intelligence, but the things you assume about my character, sometimes it’s insulting…”

“Sorry, geez.” The park established around the marsh was a lonely place at 12:48 AM. The contours of the nearby roadways and the impossibility of building large structures on the mushy ground meant no one would be just passing through. That habitué of the nocturnal urban park—the alcoholic hobo—was also nowhere to be seen. The occasional ruby glimmer in the bushes and the way the billowing canyon of herbage dampened sounds—including cries for help—made it a spot one did not want to be alone and rendered clumsy or helpless by alcohol in, privacy and (usual) lack of police presence notwithstanding. All the parts of the City close to the lakeshore had once been like this, except for the Beaches, so named because there was a real beach and not merely the usual reed-choked marsh where Lake met land. The notion felt like food for thought, even if contemplating it served no practical purpose.

Contrary to his assumption that they were out there for nothing, McMurtry’s flashlight caught a sparkling beneath a tree; a relict forest monarch, holding undisputed sway over a patch of blonde grass studded with willow bushes. The boughs of the ancient tree hung almost to the ground and it was a lucky angle by which the flashlight caught the…

“Bottle of whisky. Crown Royal. Huh. Hey, what’s this—“

“Don’t touch it!” The profound blackness of the shiny object, roughly triangular, fat through its centre line and perhaps four inches long, disguised traces of a liquid which itself has a tendency to appear black under certain kinds of nocturnal lighting. “Yes, as I guessed, pretty much. That’s the murder weapon.”

“This? Glass? A rock or, looks like crystal? What’s…” McMurtry squatted, painting the flashlight beam across the strange object’s surface from this direction and that. “Like something you’d give a naughty kid in his Christmas stocking.”

“It would be a waste to put this into a fire: you won’t get any heat out of it. It’s obsidian—a type of glass, and, I suppose, a rock as well, so you’re not exactly wrong. Volcanic in origin. I wouldn’t touch it for more reasons than one. It’s sharp. Incredibly sharp. Makes the barber’s razor and surgeon’s scalpel seem like crude instruments in comparison.

“Obsidian, eh? Heard of it. But what the heck’s it doing here?”

“The murderer dropped it, clearly.” Ngai nodded gravely. “It might be a real artefact—I wouldn’t want to say you couldn’t have brought something in a Mexican or Guatemalan market when Mr. Gillespie was doing his globetrotting. Or it could have been made as a tourist souvenir. Doesn’t matter. As our very distant ancestors used flint tools—arrowheads and so forth—so, up until the Spaniards introduced them to metal, did the Aztecs, Maya and such peoples use obsidian. It cut better than the finest Castilian steel if, say, you were trying to lop off a horse’s head. Trouble was, it’s as brittle as it is hard. Easily shatters if you strike something resistant with it—a shielf, armour, a conquistador’s sword. Against soft flesh, however…” He snapped off a twig from a willow beyond the great ash’s shadow then used it to peel back the unkempt grass surrounding the lump of volcano’s spew. “A hand axe, like cave men used, or maybe it’s a spearhead or a tooth off a macuahuitl—an Aztec war club studded around its circumference with obsidian blades. There was an empty space on the shelf in Gillespie’s apartment where he displayed his curios, subtly distinguished by its sheen amid the faint dust-born matte texture of the rest of the shelf. Last dusted, I’d wager, when ‘she’ last dropped by. A couple days. Bachelorhood develops habits that only the anxiety of disappointing a woman can break.”

“Ya figure she told him she was calling it quits? Maybe he figured he’d dumped all this money into her; he was entitled to her? Lot of times, when it’s a guy, especially an older guy, in a financially controlling position, they look at it like a contract; a business arrangement.”

Ngai ‘refuted’ the other’s conjectures in his habitual fashion, shutting his eyes as if in deep meditation, huffing faintly through his nostrils and extending his arms, palms upraised as if stretching. “You saw that face; that visage he worshipped. ‘Celestial’ nose, empty head and a mouth that could swallow his wallet whole, among other things. I suspect—no, I am sure, since there’s nothing else he could offer her, besides pocket change—I am sure his links with studios, sound engineers, record labels and the like were the substance of his feeble hold on her. It wasn’t enough. You heard what the people in the club said. She needed—yes, needed—to sever him from his friends, from the fragments of faded glory that were all he had left from a career whose potential he grossly overestimated.”

“What for?”

“Mmh? So that when she inevitably dumped him, perhaps via a phone call while she’s on a vacation he is working a second job to pay for, he would have nothing left.”

“Wicked, eh.”

“Wicked. A…a bottle of Crown Royal—not this one—says that there would have been an ad on Craig’s List or Kijiji. Maybe there is already. An ad selling exotic pets, the same ones we recently became acquainted with. ‘Oh, honey, it escaped while you were out.’”

Unable to resist testing the theory, McMurtry whipped out his Motorola Razr and began searching.

“Check for monkeys. Capuchin monkeys—the kind that are black or dark brown with pale fur around their faces.”

“Loading search results—reception sucks out here. Didn’t see any monkey in his apartment. How’d you get it so specific?”

“That was the one in the photos on the wall of the lounge at the club. It’s not the scene of the crime, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing useful to glean—such as the face of the suspect.”

“Wha…?!? Hold on.” McMurtry nearly dropped his phone. “Suspect?”

“The monkey and his eponymous club—actually, I never asked which inspired which; whether they bought the monkey as a joke because of the club, for instance. The Funky Monkey. You would have seen him in the old pictures, framed and hung on the walls. I doubt iguanas would use climbing trees with swinging rings on ropes. Scorpions and salamanders certainly wouldn’t. The same monkey perching on the shoulders of DJ Armin Fiero and the Sound Man Scotty G or trying his hands—and tail—at the turntables for fun and marketing gimmicks. It’s safe to assume he came into the country like the lizards and arachnids and the shelf-top curios, maybe on a plane, maybe on a boat, when customs was not the dragnet it now is. When health and safety regulations and changing tastes forced the club to retire the party-loving primate, Gillespie kept him at his apartment. While he could no longer get funky as before, human companionship, alcohol and, above all, the euphoria-inducing euro beats were still there for him. Friends would come to visit and so on.”

Privately, McMurtry wondered whether it was time to call backup and encourage Ngai to call it a night. If he wasn’t high, he sure needed sleep.

“You were there with me. And even a drunken monkey could have seen what that harlot was doing. Already there would have been conflict as she simpered and sneered, and he, obedient, replaced the familiar tunes on the stereo with currently popular trash as per her request. One of the Funky Monkey’s few pleasures in life, silenced, literally. Visits from humans he knew grew scarce and, as for the lively atmosphere of the club, all he could do was to clamber to the bay window, pry it open, stare out at the distant spotlights raking the bellies of the clouds and listen with ear, heart and soul. The CDs doing in the trash were the last straw. You noticed the ‘trash’ being left out for garbage collection, along with other detritus of summer moves? He—I am referring to the monkey—may not have had a precise concept of Craig’s List, but animals sense our thoughts before they manifest as action. He knew something was up; that the familiar life he knew—the only life he could know—was about to be destroyed. Something happened. He heard some words of phrases he recognized or he sense, as only animals and small children can sense, the birth within a mind of hostile intent, though it might be so subtle that were we to look in a mirror it would not be revealed to us. He grabbed up the object which his primitive but supple intellect could best comprehend as ‘weapon’ and, with all of his wiry strength attacked the one who had given him an easy and comfortable life, then cruelly betrayed that trust for a motive even more inane and selfish than Mammon. As is usually the case when there is a close personal relationship between offender and victim, special savagery was devoted to the destruction of the face as representative of the victim’s identity. I don’t know that one could properly call their relationship ‘personal,’ but it was undoubtedly very close.”

“Yeah, really went to town on ‘em. A regular Furious George, ya could say.” McMurtry couldn’t resist chuckling at his own joke. “Guess it is kind of like the weapon a Neanderthal would use, so, fer a monkey…”

The pair moved out and circled the tree, stabbing the mass of leaves with their flashlights, but the beams caught no glimmer of watching eyes. McMurtry looked across the narrow valley which enclosed them It was not big in the sense of wild spaces; you could see the luminous windows of the surrounding apartment buildings, like neatly stacked rows of fireflies. Yet in the middle of the night the primal Forest, in spirit as much as in fact, asserted itself. The marsh and its wood in summer fulsomeness presented a volume of mystery that could be probed but haplessly, one square metre at a time—a task which inspired vague and sinister feelings unrelated to the late Sound Guy.

“Even if we bring out search ‘n rescue, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell we’ll find anything—unless he starts hooting and hollering. Huh. You’d think, even if we can’t see him, we’d at least hear him.”

“Hmm. Yes, you would.” Ngai avoided stating the obvious inference: that the four-handed killer was aware he was being hunted and did not want to be found. Too, it was likely that a pair of intense, not-quite-human eyes were watching them as they conversed, ready to blink or shield themselves behind leaves should a flashlight turn their way.

“Wee, it’s really more a thing fer Animal Control, don’t’cha think?”

“Agreed. I don’t think a monkey falls under the jurisdiction of the Criminal Code. Possibly the sections about keeping exotic species as pets.”

The detectives thus gave themselves an excuse not to wander further into the marsh, which had so suddenly taken on an eldritch aspect. It was a relief to leave the spongy tangle and to feel hard asphalt under their soles again. Winter—heck, autumn—would take care of the ‘suspect,’ although, knowing the full story, they couldn’t help wishing he would be safely trapped and sent to an animal rescue.

The first breath of fall was ruffling the willows. The soft tones of the sluggish, strangled river were broken by the neon hues of kayakers and their crafts. These and the more numerous figures moseying along the shore (mostly in pairs) were largely students seeking to squeeze the last drops out of a fast-extinguishing summer. Unnoticed, a hunter was stalking the edge of a grove where were planted, a century or more ago, some apple trees which had since gone feral and been in turn superseded by their children. The shapes of these rewilded apples were wholly unrecognizable as of their tribe, but the fruits they bore were new-made relics, perfect copies of their parents—a strain of goldish baking apples whose name has since been lost to pomology. They were approaching the zenith of ripeness and a few of the burnished orbs had already fallen upon the grass, tingeing the air with a cidery perfume.

Parks Canada normally insisted its agents be equipped with powerful firearms when stalking dangerous animals, but there were too many people in the marsh and the glass walls of the looming condo towers were practically begging for stray bullets. Ranger Valerie Paquette was not scared. She knew there were plainclothes police within shouting distance, on the stakeout for the man who had been throwing rocks at kayakers. The same troublemaker was believed to be responsible for the theft of a hiker’s backpack, which had been set down while the owner was fishing several metres upstream, as well as for a couple harassment incidents where someone had been leering and laughing at female visitors from the bushes. Trivial incidents probably attributable to the high schools and public housing buildings just beyond the woods. There would be nothing or her to do that the police could not do better, she insisted, hoping to excuse herself from the boring assignment. Then, the roles reversed themselves when the attacks got more serious. At dusk one day, a Labrador retriever ran into the treeline and returned the following morning with bloody wounds and a missing tooth. Coyotes or possibly foxes were the initial suspects, but a veterinary exam could discover no bite mark capable of founding a definite conclusion. The boilerplate warnings, already emblazoned on park signage, to keep pets leashed and under supervision at all times were re-promulgated and occasionally enforced.

The toddler…the newspapers hadn’t got ahold of that one yet, but they would when the parents found out how little park management could pay as hush money. Maybe he’d ran into the bush after a butterfly; maybe kids just do stupid things. Certainly, his parents had not been watching him and wanted to cover their guilt. It was brown, or black, or grey, the thing that mauled him, and had ‘ears and a face.’ So the boy said, anyhow, though he was traumatized and toddlers aren’t the most reliable witnesses, to begin with. Bobcat wandered in from the 905, where there’s more of them than you think? A lynx? Could be—but so far south? One swipe of a bear’s paw would have killed him and the marsh wasn’t near big enough to hide a bruin, so that theory was out. Whatever it was, Ranger Paquette was to kill it so that by the time the headlines broke the park could already declare the problem resolved.

Tricky thing was, there were no tracks. The soft riparian clay should have been ideal for prints, and the tightly grown trees with a dense understory meant you often didn’t have a choice as to where you could step. A Taser, a nightstick and bear spray would at best ward off a determined lynx, wolf or bar, but nothing in the evidence, run against her memory bank of such things, suggested any of these. Hence, she was not afeared, though she was uneasy as anyone confronted with the unexplainable. She more than once put her hand to her chest to check if her rosary necklace was still present. Before she took her weekend, she wanted to catch a glimpse, a sound; anything. The sixth sense, common to all who’ve made the Forest their leisure and livelihood, was active in her, just below the level of conscious thought, registering inputs and calculating probabilities. Not a big cat, nor a bear, nor a wolf. Patiently, she waited as dusk drew its purple curtain and, after the post-rush hour lull, the City of Night again stirred to life. From the Entertainment District and the lakeshore; from the balconies and rooftops of those lucky enough to have homes nice enough to throw a party in, there drifted the insistent, wilful beat, beat, beat: the heartbeat of the City in summer, when it deigned to live and love, and not merely to toil. As she shouldered her gear and trod out of the sinuous marsh, there came a cry, laden with melancholy, hunger and a jealousy for others’ joy that was somehow pure of envy. Valerie Paquette heard it only as another note in the rhythm; the Rhythm of the Night.

終

《二零二零年祝劉師偉生日快乐》

        九月湖畔刮銳風
        天際鴻雁直南飛；
        一葉一株紅侵綠，
        憾嘆凝神專讀書。
        或憐鄉土被污染，
        或思修建新金山，
        正道邪路難辨認，
        義者心頭煩得很。
        余雖栖居在遠方，
        學期友情莫可忘；
        陡欲起筆敘雜意，
        祝你生日樂又喜！