Part Three: Pigeons of a Feather

      How often it happens these days that a young man, cast back upon himself by outer adversity, suddenly sees his young tormentrix as though reflected in crumpled aluminum foil, her playfully accusing eye, sweet as rabies, with its retina of a slain cobra broken over those brilliant facets and jumbled into the textured crust of her flytrap vulva, motionless as any crack-veined caryatid or neon angel; so that, summoning out of his poisoned entrails a fool's courage, he reveals a forlorn-looking prick decorated with hieroglyphs drawn in mascara, and deludes himself that her lips have become runes dyed with a mystic tincture ... teeth turned black and wobbling in proxy moonlight, grimacing ... and hears the whisper: “We are infinite, you can divide us forever.” “I must be a strong person.” What is reason, or reasonableness, when such events can occur so frequently as to barely deserve mentioning? A grid-sucking sponge infects the brain of a mammal and we are all of a sudden “Living For The Future” when out of nowhere a pile of bones gets thrown in the face of the parasitic hope for some kind of law or principle, some kind of guarantee … “The true values of a society are embodied in the junk yard dogs it creates.”

      So it was with me that morning after I had drifted back up out of my seizure into the fangs of the newly risen sun, my elongated shadow running fugitive ahead of me on the sidewalk as I rushed without certain destination throughout my neighbourhood, impelled by a need for movement pure and simple to clear my mind. I was to be given no reprieve from my enigmatic curse by mere exercise of my limbs and lungfuls of city air, however. The buildings watched me sternly, their troubled histories heavy on their brows as crowns of plutonium. It was already past rush hour, the nine-to-fivers were by now all safely nestled in their hives, leaving the truant dreamers and the dangerously dispossessed to wander the streets unhindered, desire squirming under their nerveless skins, not even bothering to avoid the occasional yellow blob of puke or dark trail of blood underfoot. And I was among them, a brother.

      Then came the sinister miracle. “Vous êtes toujours la même!” I breathed. For there she was again, my Kali Pigeon as I liked to call her (a pun on the Greek 'callipygian', meaning 'one with beautiful buttocks', I know, I know) -- the girl in the sky blue tights! As before, I had only the briefest glimpse of her, though I registered that a) this time she was going in through the door I'd seen her exiting before, and b) she was carrying a rolled up mat under one arm. When I reached the storefront I discovered that it was the entrance to a Yoga studio. I made a mental note of the time and day of the week. Now I knew when and where to find her!

      As soon as my initial excitement had passed, however, I was left feeling drained and confused. The coincidence linking my partly Hindu-derived nickname for her and her enthusiasm for Yoga took on a monstrous significance, as though this sighting had been staged by hidden agencies who I could not be sure had my best interests at heart, who somehow had gained access to my private thoughts ... It all seemed a bit too tidy, a bit too convenient. Kali: the destroyer-goddess. Pigeon: a flying vermin unlawful to kill in this city, a filthy bird that always returns to its master ... I began deliberately and slowly placing one thought after another, as though building a stone wall … but the phantom still rose panicking inside me …

      At these moments, it is common for some worldstruck old soul to approach you, with the kindliest of motives, and announce: “A spider has taken over residence in my eye! A goddamned spider!” And you look. There are the lines, the jointed dark lines over the irises, blurring into a memory when someone stood, naked to herself yet clothed to the gazes of the impure, knowing her own silhouette against a redblack sky, and muttered something about winning the game, something about the best of times …

      And then there are the fuckbones and alternative bones and the other tiny skeletons to deal with, mounting up and surfing on red heat and radioactivity, family picnics and extracurricular handshakes, always ready with the glad sensibility and the joy-buzzer of immortality expertly concealed in their cold palms. And then there are the bleeding eyes of the starving children to face, and you (and by you I mean I) wonder if it is lawful to fall in love under such conditions ...

      I was listening and watching. None of the facts would escape. All of the facts would be punished according to the crime.

      I saw them. I heard them. The Meat Vandals. Busking. As usual.

      A tintinnabulation lost in the contours of a well motored lonely street.

      “Pierogies,” a woman sighed as she limped up to the street musicians, and dropped a handful of the dumplings in the guitar case that had been left open for donations. The mixture of the hornrimmed refractions on the slight mustache of the dreary chanteuse with the rollicking demeanor of the off time guitar ninja jellied the air around the ear of the listener. Endless turbulence of fat, waves of fatty flesh with a smile in the middle, floating and poignant eyes, sincere and homeless eyes, beseeching, while the tumult rose in the carefully sculpted vocal hopelessness. They were playing a bunch of broken instruments in front of the grocery store. Spare change. We are The Meat Vandals. Applause. The limping old lady, nodding vigorously, dropped a two-dollar coin. Applause.

      But there was a secret. In fact, their innocuous appearance, their nincompoopery and outright hipness was a disguise. It takes a mind such as mine to recognize a secret code. Take the hex-transliteration of the name Meat Vandals itself. Scary to me. But everything scares me...

There was a time when I was still true to myself, when I remembered my mission: to observe and experience the world through the eyes, ears, tongues, nostrils, and skins of others. Things have become cloudier lately, more complex. No, simpler. Much simpler. Simpler than an honest living, but not simpler than crime.

      Sherry Plus was singing, “God Wasted His Time On You” (I, nodding my head for rhythmic support, only had nowhere else to be) when the Kali Pigeon appeared.

      She stood a few moments with her head cocked, her face bearing a contrived expression of serious contemplation, while I did my best to hide my agitation, from time to time sneaking glances at her. “These guys are all right,” she said. Had she really just spoken to me? I felt as though lightning was surging through my groin, and it seemed that she and I were somehow destined to become hopelessly, stupidly intertwined.

      I looked into her eyes. That seemed like something to do. She looked like a sailor's nightmare, and I telepathically broadcast to her that she had already been clawing at me, ripping apart my dry and brittle fibers, the congested dust and insulation, ripping through the ratshit and vapour barrier, ripping apart the joists of my skull … “Hey, I've seen you around before,” she told me. “You always walk by when I'm on my way to yoga. Our schedules must synch up somehow.”

      “Or maybe I'm stalking you.”

      She laughed. “You're funny.” Then, extending her hand, “Amy.”

      I took it. “My name's Eureka.” Now she laughed harder than before. “No, really, that is my name. My parents are kind of … peculiar.”

      “I should say so, raising a stalker for a son and all.” Dumbfounded, I pretended to yawn, to search in my pocket for something. “Anyways, I'm having a barbecue at my place tonight around seven. Are you free? I know it's kind of … oh, I don't know … forward, or short notice, or something, but there'll be a lot of very cool people there, and I think you'll fit right in.”

      “I suppose I could ...”

      “Great! It's at 124 James Avenue. Seven o'clock. You'll remember all that?”

      “Oh yes. My memory is excellent. Better than photographic. Sometimes I even remember things that haven't even happened yet.”

      “Funny guy,” she said with a wink; which puzzled me, for I had made no joke. “Ok, see you then, I have to run.” I returned her wave, feeling sullen and filled with dread.

      I had made no joke.

      When I knocked on the door of Amy's sooty-bricked, semi-detached house, I was still laughing at what had just transpired, and was eager to tell her about it.

      Hurried footsteps inside, and the door swung open. “Oh, hi!” she greeted me.

      I stepped into the foyer. “A funny thing happened to me on the way here tonight,” I said.

      “Oh really? What happened?”

      “I was looking for your house, but somehow got lost in this network of alleyways. So I stopped to get my bearings, and noticed a woman washing dishes in the window of a basement apartment. There was something hypnotic about the way she handled the silverware, and I must have been watching her for a good while before she started screaming at me to go away. So what did I do? I began jogging on the spot and yelled down to her, 'Sorry Ma'am, just catching my breath for a moment!' Then I turned and jogged away. Can you believe it?”

      “Okay … That is pretty weird ...” She looked me quickly up and down. “Well, you got here … Come on through to the back and meet the other guests.”

      I followed her through a living room with yellow drapes and furniture that struck me as having been designed for maximum discomfort. My eyes, momentarily confused, quickly recoiled from a painting that dominated one of the room's walls: an enormous portrait of a wizened lady staring out at the viewer with an absurd sidelong grin, the face in radical foreground against a distant seascape, a truly screwed up resurrection of the Mona Lisa. We proceeded onward through a disorganized kitchen and out through a sliding glass door to a stone patio where a mismatched group of six people sat in folding chairs, arranged in a semi-circle around a large table. Amid the smells of meat grilling on a futuristic barbecue they sipped out of plastic cups; they seemed reluctant to make eye contact or conversation with one another, or with me.

      “Want some punch?” my hostess asked while already ladling out some into a cup, which she promptly thrust toward me.

      I began to compile mental dossiers on my fellow guests as I was introduced to each. First, there was Tina, a gaunt woman in her late fifties with brightly dyed, reddish-orange curls, viridian eyeshadow, and lipstick applied beyond the bounds of her actual lips. Psychically, I sussed out her loneliness, alcoholism, weakness for abusive men. Then came Raj, a young bespectacled south Asian man whose beige, office-ready clothing indicated an ascetic sense of duty and a facility with numbers and computers. Next, I was introduced to Lynette: short, chubby, blond, thoroughly matronly in the careworn sense, the dark circles under her eyes like upper echoes of her baby-ravaged breasts. She exuded internalized panic and a readiness to complain, to scold and to preach, and I concluded that her husband had not bedded her in many months, preferring to protect his frazzled mind from her exhortations by falling asleep on the couch, night after night, in front of the television. Fourth in line was a thirtysomething man named Rick, clad in a denim jacket and jeans and sporting a head of heavily gelled, spiky dark hair. I could tell he considered himself a seducer, a rebel, the life of any party, chronically underappreciated for his supreme ability to innately know everything while doing nothing for anyone else. And here I was presented with an unsettling before-and-after snapshot; for, seated beside Rick and next in the introductions, I met Rick twenty years in the future, in the form of Doyle. Yes, Doyle was the inevitable outcome of Rick, as time would surely transform him. Doyle was fat, balding, sheened in the sweat of desperately believing himself to still be a “Rick” -- a belief which he no doubt preserved by bribing strippers with cocaine to accompany him to his hotel room during his eternal business travels. Finally, there was Kamiko, a Japanese woman in her early twenties, dressed in black, her face painted in a vampiric palette of black on beyond-pale, which gave a ceramic look to her round cheeks and forehead. All but this last guest shook my hand eagerly as I was introduced, each with a strained smile that was the horizon of a dying world of which they were citizens and unwitting architects. Kamiko merely said “Hey...” in a gloomy voice. She was the hardest for me to telepathically probe, and I guessed she was either a performance artist or a connoisseur of hallucinogens that were so obscure or so newly developed that they could be legally procured. Perhaps she was both.

      Before I had a chance to sit down, Amy grabbed my arm. “Not so fast! Come over here, yes, stand right here where everyone can hear you. Now, Eureka, we have a little tradition here, which is that any newcomer to the group has to tell us something interesting about themselves. So, go ahead, don't be shy, tell us a little something interesting about Eureka. We've all done it in the past; now it's your turn.”

     “Is everyone going to share something interesting?” I asked, mortified.

     “No, like I said, we've all done it before, it's only newcomers who have to do it.”

     “Well, that seems unfair, to be singled out just for being new,” I protested.

     “When you bring newcomers of your own, then you can hear their interesting stories, or details, or whatever. Now, go ahead.”

      I thought furiously for a moment, reeling, hating their wretched eyes. But then I suddenly perceived a glorious opportunity in this otherwise dismal predicament, and I began in a loud, oratorical tone:

      “My father's hair – that is, the hair he has now – is, in fact, the hair of the film actor Michael Douglas. By which I mean not only the hair, but the entire scalp, the living skin from which the hair of Michael Douglas continues to grow atop my father's head. Allow me to explain. Many years ago, after seeing the film The Star Chamber, my father (a man of no small means) became much enamoured with the eagle-esque sweep of the young actor's coiffure. In vain, he tried to have it reproduced on his own head by the most skilled stylists he could find; but his congenital locks resisted the sought-after form, being themselves of a staunchly wavy inclination. So, armed with his considerable wealth and even more considerable influence, he approached the then relatively unknown actor with a bold proposition: an incredible sum of money and guaranteed fame in exchange for a surgical transplant of his scalp onto my father's head. He would ensure that Mr. Douglas would have his own hair replaced with a reasonable facsimile, taken from the head of a newly deceased homeless man. You may ask why my father did not himself take the homeless hair, which would have saved him much expense and effort; but in asking such a question you would reveal your ignorance of my father's tenacity, of how unstoppable he is when seized by an idée fixe. There was no alternative: he had to have the actual hair he had seen in the film. Mr. Douglas, who was struggling at the time to take his career to the next level, was surprisingly receptive to the procedure, and, despite some initial misgivings over what would happen should the surgery fail (which my father quickly allayed by upping the offer), finally agreed. A team of plastic surgeons were enlisted; they conferred, planned, and dreamed; there were arguments, tears of both disheartened frustration and joyful breakthrough. When the fateful day arrived, they worked for six hours in the operating room to pull off the feat. And behold, it was a success! Now, I can see by your faces that you find this difficult to believe, but I say to you: watch The Star Chamber and Romancing the Stone back-to-back! Watch them, and compare the hair – or, I should say, hairs – of Michael Douglas! You will not fail to detect a subtle difference, a coarser quality to those strands cresting the head of the later Michael Douglas, attributable to their poorer upbringing. Yes, you will notice, if you pay close attention, the faintest aura of a hobo's resignation when the light hits the actor's head at certain angles. Go ahead, perform the exercise: it will prove most illuminating!”

      Revealing such a hallowed family secret to this group of strangers had put me in a state of great passion, and I took a second to catch my breath before I turned to Amy and asked, “Now, can I please sit down?”

      “Why yes … yes, please do ...” she replied dreamily, perhaps a bit dazed.

      As I sank into my chair, I was suffused with a beautiful sense of well-being, as though I now truly saw, for the first time, the rightness of everything; and the universe opened before me as an entity perfectly arranged and unfolding exactly as it should. This must be what group therapy is like, I thought, this catharsis, this vulnerability, this open and innocent trust that the truth will always conquer the hardness and fear in the damaged hearts of people.

      Amy was turning meat on the barbecue, smoke enshrouded, in agitated squiggles of movement, and her buttocks loomed, attacked, throttling my spirit, entering my skull to digest and usurp the very hemispheres therein. She went into the house and returned with paper plates and plastic forks, which she unceremoniously set down on the table, and a hinged wooden box, which she now held out before us in both hands, as though it might contain gold, or frankincense, or myrrh.

      “The moment we've all been waiting for!” her voice lilted teasingly. Slowly she lifted the lid to reveal a set of steak knives nestled in two rows of plastic velveteen slots. “The new line has arrived folks!”

      My fellow guests leaned forward to get a better look. “Everybody take one!” Their eager fingers went squid-like toward the handles. I waited for the others before taking one of my own. It felt light and delicate in my hand, as though hammered out of aluminum foil.

     With startling violence, Amy stabbed one of the steaks and lifted it from the grill, plopped it steaming on the bare tabletop, and halved it in a single, samurai gesture. “Like hot butter,” she cooed. “Just like goddamned hot butter!” With a kind of defiant and brutal ecstasy she proceeded to stab one steak after another, transferring each by knife-point onto a paper plate which was then virtually tossed in the direction of each of the guests in turn.

      “Try for yourself!” she commanded.

      They began cutting into the meat. Doyle and Lynette nodded approvingly; Rick's eyebrows lifted in delighted surprise; I heard Tina murmur excitedly, I'm gonna sell the shit out of these; even Raj and Kamiko, though more reserved than the others, were nonetheless visibly impressed -- whether by the knives or by Amy's pageantry, I could not tell.

      “The workmanship speaks for itself,” Amy continued, “but, sadly, these knives will not sell themselves. That's where you come in. Your talent, your single-mindedness, your hunger to make the sale, your refusal to take no for an answer.” With each your she thrust the point of knife in her hand toward one of the guests. “But all of you know that we face one major obstacle to our success. Let me hear you: what is it?”

      “PREJUDICE!” the others shouted in unison.

      “That's right. Those pesky little letters written on the blades of these finely crafted instruments, that tiny sentence that, through no fault of its own, tends to turn off the North American market, and deny us from getting the price we deserve for these awesome knives.” I stole a quick glance at the blade before me: it read 'Made in China'.

      “But, as we all know, there is a way. A way, not to fight prejudice directly, but to turn it back on itself, to use prejudice against itself.” Amy trailed off, giving her audience a chance for reflection, to let hope grow, and for them to really get the hang of what she was about to say next. “Now, I know you've been through the drill before, and I know some of you are probably thinking, 'Oh, but Amy, it's such a pain in the ass, it's too much work, why don't we just sell the darn things as is.' But that won't do, and that's why I have to emphasize the importance of The Transformation -- over, and over, and over again. And since we have a newbie in our midst, I'm going to take the opportunity to go over The Transformation with you again tonight. I call it a transformation, because that's exactly what it is. We are transforming prejudice into a weapon against prejudice. And when we transform prejudice into anti-prejudice, we transform low sales and low earnings into high sales and high earnings.” I hadn't noticed earlier the small table beside the barbecue on which stood a small array of bottles and a bag of cotton balls, toward which she now strode. “Now, remember, The Transformation is easy. The Transformation, in fact, has only two steps! So people, tell me: what is the first step in The Transformation?”

      “DROP THE BOMB ON CHINA!” they shouted.

      Amy was pleased. “Of course, we aren't really going to drop the bomb on China...” (here there was general laughter; myself, aghast, excepted) “… but, with a little bit of acetone--” she grabbed a cotton ball, stuck it in the neck of one of the bottles, inverted the configuration, set down the bottle, and began to rub the dampened wad against the blade “--we can at least kick that scary word out of our path to wealth!” She held up the knife. “See? No more China! Gone! Obliterated! Now that's step one. Who can tell me step two?”

      “ONE HIT WONDERFUL!”

      “Oh, you guys catch on fast! That's right. But remember, this step takes a little preparation. We know you need black nail polish--” she held up a phial of the substance “-- but in order to get the best results, you have to remove most of the bristles from the brush until only three or four remain.” She unscrewed the lid, showed each of us in turn, close up, how she had thinned the applicator brush to a fine point; the smell of the stuff made me feel dizzy, unpleasantly intoxicated. “Then, with a very steady hand, we make a small vertical stroke in the space on the blade between the word 'Made' and the word 'in'. What does our knife say now?”

      “MADELIN!” replied the jubilant chorus.

      “Zounds German, ja?” she asked in a profoundly hokey accent.

      “JA! JA! JA! JA! ...”

      While they chanted this syllable, all sharing in the mirth of the occasion, Amy went into the house and returned with several boxes of knives, which she put on the table in front of us, along with cotton balls and bottles of acetone and nail polish.

      “Now, I want you all to practice The Transformation. I want you each to do at least three boxes of knives, right here, right now. Not only will you get better and faster at The Transformation, but you'll walk away with some sale-ready merchandise!”

      “But,” I ventured, “that isn't even how you spell that name. There's supposed to be a letter 'e' at the end at least, if not also before the 'i'! Even in Germany, as far as I know.”

      But Amy was intractable. “Ha! You try writing an 'e' that small with a nail polish brush! Anyways, most people don't know as far as you know, as far as I know! It's just our brand name, it doesn't have to make sense, it just has to suggest to the buyer the idea of quality, and get around the negative attitudes people have about Chinese manufacturing, which are obviously totally unjustified!”

      Furious, I stood up from my chair and began walking backwards toward the yard's exit at the side of the house, solemnly pronouncing: “Thou mermaid! You have enchanted the imaginations of these poor souls lost upon the sea of life, yet you don't … even … really ... exist!” Amy waved her cheap little blade, shining with cruelty, above her head while screaming insults at me to the effect that I'd never be a success story, that people like me were destined to be penniless losers, that I was a dodo bird in a world of tigers; I turned and ran; and my last image of that hapless cabal was of Tina as she shuddered and fell sideways in a kind of thunderstruck coma, her hair waving across her face, its finest and most shocking orange filaments gilded in pre-sunset light.

Part Two: An Absence of Quirms

      I turned out the lights in my apartment. The window across the street softly glowed, framed almost exactly in the center of my own window. Sometimes there was movement, furtive shapes, indistinct and blurred as though jelly had been smeared across the pane. A gorilla's arm plunged a curved blade. A naked pair of legs winged into the pose of a gynecological patient. A limpid human skull floated up and sideways. Could I be sure I was seeing these things? I began to incant quietly to myself:

      “I must train my perceptions into sharper focus ... more flesh and less fancy ... I must be sure ... my impressions must learn to 'pop' ... must pop like the veins in a body-builder's biceps ... like champagne corks on New Year's Eve ... rapid-fire like a Gatling gun annihilating tribesmen ... pop with the street justice of the proverbial cap in yo ass ... with the cold refreshing power of the prefixed -sicle and likewise like the suffixed soda ... like cherries behind the bushes at a Baptist youth picnic ... must become like the sonic landscape of AM Top 40 radio ... like daytime television psychology ... like fugitive tires on a stop-strip ... like eardrums on a transcontinental flight ... like dried corn in a lake of hot oil ... like the kappa in my own given name on the glottis of noble Archimedes as he ran naked through the streets of Syracuse upon exposing the goldsmith's grift in the case of the golden crown ...”

      In response to this litany, as though my words really did bear supernal powers of evocation, the phantasmagoria shifted; this was no longer spying, but rather, scrying, the window my crystal ball; yet, the images were not of things to come, but of things that had already passed, scenes from my life replayed in dazzling colour and detail, framed in the window as though on a television screen ...

      It was late last summer, in the park near the high school a few blocks from my home, and the Dope Androids were, as usual, having another hard-luck day. I had positioned myself in one of my regular spots, a bench near the one the Androids frequented, my Whisper2000 listening device (marketed as a hearing aid, but easily adapted to espionage) trained on their conversation, sunglasses and low-tilted captain's hat shielding my face, bag of stale bread in hand to round out my disguise as one of those dislocated souls who find solace in the company of pigeons and sparrows and the occasional screeching gull who showed up to bully the other birds, under a slate-coloured sky now and then breathing down gusts cooler than the static air, the leaves pointing downward, the birds low-flying: omens of rain within the next hour or so.

      For about six weeks I had been following with a kind of sadistic glee the misadventures of this small band of would-be gangbangers. There were five of them, ranging in age from fifteen to seventeen. Not once did I feel as though I was neglecting my civic duty in not reporting them to the police, since they never, so far as I witnessed, managed to successfully commit a crime. The few times they thought they had secured some “product” to sell, it turned out to be fake; their one attempt at obtaining guns had likewise met with failure when Raze, who was supposed to meet their contact, had been obliged instead to attend his grandmother's eightieth birthday celebration; they'd tried their hand at pimping, but none of the local working girls feared them or seriously believed they could offer any kind of protection -- in short, they were the laughingstock of the neighbourhood underworld.

      And yet, despite reveling in their profound lunkheadedness, I also felt a degree of tenderness toward them. I could sense how poignantly they wanted the guts-and-glory dream they had forged out of the raw materials provided by the music they listened to and the movies they watched: a vision in which their actions were legitimized precisely by their criminality and their run-of-the-mill, middle-class teen yearnings were stylized into a heightened reality.

      “This is bullshit yo.” Kid Coriander, the alpha of the group, was giving one of his motivational lectures. Tall and lanky, stooped, with thin patches of whisker randomly scattered over his mulish face, and dressed in the same uniform of baggy jeans, bomber jacket, and skewed baseball cap as his cohorts, his was a figure that immediately commanded disrespect. “We gotta get something goin' on for real, know what I'm sayin'? Like phony credit cards, or identity theft, or some shit. We gotta start using our muthafuckin' brains yo.” Amused at the boldness of the speculation that any of this crew might have the technical insight, let alone the attention span, to even consider attempting such complicated rackets, I was eagerly awaiting the continuation of Kid Coriander's brainstorm when a mysterious signal, picked up through some electrical defect in my Whisper2000, intervened.

      Exploding like novas in the midst of radio-static nebulae came these puzzling fart noises, exaggerated and obviously oral imitations of the real thing, punctuated by childish laughter. Then, a low and serious voice, “I am the dark cloud of vengeance! Feel the wrath of my wonderful gas!” More laughter, followed by an especially loud and prolonged lip-fart. And on it went. I tossed the remainder of the breadcrumbs to the frenzied birds, bag and all, and launched myself to my feet. Half-running, I went here and there, rotating through various compass points in order to triangulate the signal -- since I recognized, as only a professional such as myself could, how imperative it was that I discover as quickly as possible the origin of this transmission so fortuitously intercepted.

      I found myself on a street running perpendicular to the one that bordered the east side of the park. The signal was getting clearer. I could now hear the faintest aspirants and bubbles of saliva in the bursts of false-flatulence, and I knew I was nearing my goal. Here the houses were better kept than most in the neighbourhood – real family homes, not the ramshackle rooming-houses that dominated the nearby streets, where all day long divorced men in grease mottled shirts drank fortified wine together and complained about the government. Rain began to fall, fat cold drops, sobering, oppressive; the farts took on an exhausted, almost melancholy tone, and I worried that my unknown broadcaster would quit on me before I had tracked him down.

      But no, here was the place, it had to be this house, with the yellow tricycle on the front porch and the door-mounted wooden placard with the inscription burned into it: “God Bless Our Home”.

      I rang the bell. A boy of about twelve years old answered and regarded me wordlessly with a shy, faintly guilty expression.

      “I know what you've been up to,” I said in a conspiratorial voice, and then pointed to my right earphone while performing my best imitation fart. The boy's eyes widened. “Don't worry,” I added quickly, sensing his panic, “I just want to know how you're doing it.”

      The boy took a moment to size up the situation before warily answering. “My brother got this microphone for his birthday. You put the radio on a certain station, one with no music or anything, and you can hear yourself. Coming out of the radio, I mean. We were just fooling around on it. We didn't know anyone could hear.”

      “Do you think he'd be willing to sell it? I'll give him twenty dollars.” And to show him I was in earnest I took out my wallet and opened it toward him.

      “Uh ... I don't think our mom and dad would like that ...”

      “Of course. What was I thinking? I totally understand. It was a birthday present. But listen: is there any way I could at least see it? I might want to get one myself.”

      “I guess that would be okay.” He turned toward the interior of the house and yelled. “Hey Kyle, come here for a minute! There's a guy here who wants to see your microphone!”

      The brother, who was perhaps two or three years younger, appeared in the door's opening, holding a red plastic tube with an enormous green foam globe at one end. I leaned closer -- “I just need to read the make and model ...” -- and then I had snatched the microphone out of his little hand, jumped clear of the front steps, a cry of “Hey!” from the older brother and a tearful wail from the younger rising behind me; then hurling myself through cold meshes of rain, rounding this corner, then that, making a headlong, mazy escape back to my apartment, exhilarated at the success of this latest mission. What a find! I knew it wouldn't have sufficed to merely buy an identical microphone, since there could have been deviations in the transmission settings, even from the same manufacturer, and especially in such a cheaply made product. In order to confidently build my remote listening device, a bug that I knew would work with the technology I already had, I needed this one.

      Children are resilient, I assured myself. They'll be over it in no time.

      The scene in the window began to ripple-dissolve, accompanied by sweeps of long phantom fingers on ethereal harp strings to complete the effect, as though the image of myself I saw in the window was now entering a dream, morphing into another scene from last summer . . .

      Pierre and I had been up all night drinking gin and tonic in his tiny basement apartment and watching a twenty-four hour marathon of our favourite TV show, Criminal Spirit, in which a team of FBI paranormal investigators tracked down and brought to justice the ghosts of serial killers who had died before being caught and who continued to torment the living, usually the families of their victims, from the afterlife.

      “There have been three manifestations in the past week, whereas before that, the unsub was only appearing on the fifteenth of each month,” observed Agent Spears, the trigger-happy vamp of the team.

      “He's escalating,” Boyko, the black suited agent-in-chief, intoned in a voice as solemn as a shallow grave. “Chalmers, do a full numerological and astrological rundown on this calendar month, including the year, as well as lunar and Mercury positions during the manifestations, cross-indexed against the time and place of the original crimes.”

      “You got it, Chief.” Fingers already rapid-fire clickety-clack on computer keyboard. “I'm not seeing anything with regard to the moon or Mercury, boss. However, there is ...”

      At this point our beloved program was eclipsed by hissing snow.

      “Fuck!” breathed Pierre. We tried other channels, but they were all down. I checked the connections at the back of the television set – everything appeared to be in order. “It's that old fuck upstairs, I bet,” Pierre concluded. “I knew I shouldn't have asked him if I could splice off of his cable. I should've just done it and kept my mouth shut.”

      “Well,” I said, lifting a corner of the towel that served as a curtain for the apartment's one small window and squinting in hard sunshine “it looks like a nice day out there. We could sit outside.”

      “Fine. Grab the booze. I'll tell you one thing, though: that old man upstairs better hope he doesn't run into me! I have no quirms,” ('quirms' = one of my favourite of Pierre's accidental neologisms, an exact synonym for 'qualms'), “no quirms at all about making him wish he'd never messed with this faggot!”

      We climbed the stairs, legs drunk-heavy, and emerged into a bright summer day. There in the driveway, gleaming like a giant poisonous insect, sat a red van with the logo of the cable company emblazoned on its side panel. Its driver, wearing a collared T-shirt of the same colour and bearing the same insignia as the van, was returning a yellow ladder to its spot on the vehicle's roof rack.

      “Hey mister man!” Pierre shouted, approaching the tech. “Who called you here?” The tech silently continued what he was doing. “Oh, so that's it, eh? You're just going to ignore me? You like to do that, I suppose, block people's driveways and then ignore them?”

      “I'm here to fix a problem, that's all.”

      “Ohhhh, I see. You've got a problem to fix. I've got a problem too. You want to hear about it?”

“ ... ”

      “Yeah, I've got a real problem alright. I'm sitting watching my very very favouritest TV show, trying to enjoy the last years of my life, and then some corporate asshole shows up and cuts the cable! I guess poor people like me don't deserve to watch TV. Oh no. We can't have that. What do you think? Well? That's right, ignore me, you fucking ... puppet!” Pierre was now standing with his face less than six inches from the tech's, swaying in alcoholic storm winds.

      “You're lucky I'm wearing this uniform,” the tech replied coolly.

      “Ah, I'm lucky am I? Let me tell you something, my friend. I'm sixty-four years old, I'm bald, I'm ugly, I'm gay, I live on a pension ... do you think I give a flying fuck about your threats? I don't have anything to lose!”

      “Look,” said the tech. “If you want cable, you have to pay for it.”

      “Oh, come on,” changing tack, now plaintive and forlorn, “have a heart, buddy. Have a heart. You know how much I suffer? Just last week I was walking along, minding my own business, when two humongous hairy balls filled the entire street! Ah ha ha ha ha!” Pierre's eyes, swollen green orbs as lacking in empathy as goat's eyes, seemed to roll in opposite directions. “They almost crushed poor little me! Ah ha ha ha!” The tech took an awkward step backwards, but came up against the side of the van, trapped. “They belonged to a cop! A tall blond cop who looked like a Nazi! I'm telling you, I was sooo turned on! Believe you me, I wanted to climb that mountain and rock that tree, my friend!”

      “Ok, ok, that's enough now,” the tech blurted out.

      “Oh, am I making you uncomfortable? Am I inconveniencing you? Let me show you something, my friend!” Pierre turned and went back down to his apartment; the tech must not have finished the job yet, since he did not take this opportunity to get into his van and flee, but instead began writing something on a clipboard. A moment later, Pierre returned, his arms piled with laundry, which he began to strew across the front lawn. “You see? I have to pay for cable now, so I can't afford to dry my clothes! I have to spread them out on the grass like this to dry. Are you happy now? No money for the dryer, all because I have to pay for cable. Are you happy?”

       The vision melted away; my soft laughter trailed off, turned sour in my throat. The window across the street was dark. How long had I been standing here, transfixed? Was I happy? I fell back from the window, writhed on the floor gnashing my teeth, fearful that I would spend the rest of my life alone -- my senses befuddled by my arcane fascinations, my social skills stunted by years of secret ritual, like some hoary wizard in a tower that history forgot, discovering too late that his magical treasure bears a hidden curse.

       Pale in the light from the street, swollen to blimplike dimensions, the clown stood over me, the fatal pawn gloating over the fallen king in a surprise checkmate.

Part One: In Which Eureka Jones Contemplates a Life of Danger

      This could have been any day of the week, beginning, as it did, like all my days.

       I awoke resenting the fact that any effort whatsoever, even that of simply forming a thought, was necessary for me to so much as move a finger. This has always felt to me like some kind of personal insult, this thing called “effort” -- a design flaw in the fabric of reality at the very least, since it is totally superfluous. For I can easily picture a world in which my desires are gratified quickly and efficiently, without any resistance or obstacle, internal or external, standing in the way. The sensation of gravity pulling against me as I struggled to arise from underneath my bedclothes in order to relieve my bladder was merely another instance of the continuous and apparently mindless persecution leveled by the cosmos against me, an innocent man, innocent enough anyways. And I imagined as I lay there indecisively, tempted to urinate right where I was, those countless others who were at that moment springing with enthusiasm from their beds, eyes aglow in anticipation of the day's wonderful prospects, gliding through life as though it were made especially for them. Which nearly reduced me to tears.

      As I have mentioned, none of this was remarkable.

      I finally got to my feet and shambled the brief distance across the cold floor of my bachelor apartment to the bathroom, giving my clown punching bag a decently half-hearted wallop as I passed (one of my few showpieces, this overgrown inflatable plastic bowling pin with its pouch of sand in the bottom for ballast, ensuring that no matter how hard one hit it, the jovially sinister circus face returned to an upright position asking for more). My urine was nearly brown – blood? -- and in the mirror I saw that the puffy crescents under my eyes had virtually turned into hemorrhoids. Still, I looked young for my age, in that way that grown up, responsible women find non-threatening and sexually null. “Oh, you're cute...” female acquaintances have said sometimes, responding to some angling remark of mine, this observation invariably voiced in a similar pity-laced tone to that reserved for abandoned puppies staring out of cages in Humane Society advertisements. Drug addicted teenage girls seeking to rebel against their drunken single mothers by hooking up with older men might see in me a certain allure, and there were certainly enough of them in this neighbourhood. I scrutinized my face more closely. No, I'd probably have to be more dangerous looking for that.

      As I probed an unfamiliar bump on the area of gum above my left upper bicuspid with my right index finger while still inspecting myself in the mirror, wondering about cancer and remembering that the word was derived from the Greek for 'crab', due to the multi-legged look of the blood supply network a tumor manufactures around itself, another word began to recur in my mind. Dangerous. Dangerous. Maybe what I needed was more danger in my life? Too bad the universe had invented me a coward to the core. I quickly condemned this idea of inviting extra peril into my existence to the same fate as the brownish-yellow liquid in the yet unflushed toilet, where now my mother's face stared mermaid-like up at me from the murky depths.

      “That's right, Eureka,” she said, her voice bittersweet as a fairytale. “Only fools rush in where angels fear to tread ... Discretion is, after all, the better part of valour ... Play safe ... You're built to be an intellectual, a thinker, not a doer, not a man of action ...”

      “Thanks Mom,” I replied, shrugging and feeling a wave of childish embarrassment. “For a moment I almost forgot myself.”

      With grim resignation, I flushed the toilet.

      After a few indeterminate hours of drinking coffee and watching the people at the streetcar stop below my window fidget and turtle their chins into their collars against the wind-blasted snow (I am these days “between assigments”), I finally ran out of cigarettes. I had tried to smoke more slowly than usual, realizing in advance my dwindling supply, since I hate cold weather even more than hot; I had endeavoured to relish, like a wine connoisseur at a tasting does the drop in the bottom of his glass, each drag, each wisp; and failing to extend my stores sufficiently by this method, had resorted to emptying the tobacco from the butts in the ashtray into rolling papers, my fingertips turning an ominous black; and having smoked all of these, had rolled the butts of the rolled butts; and had even gotten stoned on some weed I had lying around, vainly hoping this might alleviate my cravings, yet they only intensified; now, after all of these stratagems to put off the inevitable hour it had come, as, all along, I knew in my heart that it would. It scarcely seemed possible that a universe supposedly built out of laws that could be apprehended by rational mental processes could play such perverse tricks on me. Groaning, I put on some pants, bundled myself in my winter gear, and set off for Kalim's Super Bargain Zone -- about a two and a half block journey through the frozen wastes.

      Indeed, I could have simply crossed the street to the Three Star Convenience, but there I would have had to pay an exorbitant sum, falsely inflated by federal and provincial taxes. For less than the price of three packs of twenty-five at the Three Star I could obtain a whole carton of two hundred from Kalim, since he imported them (illegally) from a nearby Native reservation, where they produced their own (tax-exempt) cigarettes. Nor was there any cost or eco-conscience wasted on unnecessary packaging. At Kalim's, a whole carton came as a unit, sold in a single resealable plastic bag. Sure, sometimes the filters fell off, and the flavour was mysteriously inconsistent, making one wonder what exactly was in them besides tobacco; but the point is, there was tobacco in them. At any rate, chatting with Kalim usually afforded a pleasant diversion from my anxious routine of nothing-doing.

      It was by now mid-afternoon, and the street was full of people going here and there, their faces set in masks of blithe confidence or else urgent seriousness that they had obviously copied from the expressions of screen actors, in order to convince themselves, where their life-coaches, spiritual advisors, and self-hypnosis recordings had fallen short, that their lives had some kind of importance. I had just begun the final block of my trek when I noticed a woman who had emerged from the door of a shop walking ahead of me. It hurt me to watch her. She looked a few years younger than me, and was wearing a short, tight-fitting, white winter jacket and even tighter sky-blue stretch pants that did a marvelous job of showcasing her superb physique. She stopped at a crosswalk and I continued past her. Suddenly, wanting to see if her anterior regions matched those I'd already been voraciously studying, but not wanting to crane my neck around to gawk, in case she happened to be looking, I found myself pantomiming an improvised mini-drama in which I was unsure of what direction I should be going, giving me an excuse to pause and survey my surroundings. But she had already begun crossing the street, and her face remained a mystery. As I reflected on the pointlessness of my behaviour, I filled with hot self-contempt. Why hadn't I done something bolder? Why hadn't I simply walked up to her and introduced myself, asked a question, cracked a joke of some kind, begun raving like I was in the throes of the Pentecost -- anything besides this pretense that had no chance of leading anywhere? I had nothing to lose, even if she'd told me to drop dead. What was this gulf that so often separated my first impulse, acted upon before I even knew what was happening, from the kind of gambit that had at least a molecule of hope attached to it?

      Just as I was grinding my brain in an attempt to analyze and solve this terrible enigma once and for all, a grizzled old man in gray, shabby clothes tossed himself down in the middle of the road and began thrashing around in the brown slush, loudly singing “Heartbreak Hotel” as a chorus of horns arose from the stalled traffic.

      “These are a new batch I just got in,” Kalim said as he set the cigarettes on the counter. As usual, the carton had been placed inside an additional opaque plastic bag, the bag that actually held the cigarettes being transparent and its contents therefore easily spotted by the authorities. “I'm told they don't taste so much like recycled phone books and moose shit.”

      “Thanks.” I looked around at the imitation designer watches, the bins of beige panties and bras, the bongs and weed pipes, the clip-on hair extensions. “You know Kalim, I've had this thought pinging in my head all day ... like sonar or something ... that maybe I need more danger in my life. You know, that I need to take more risks.”

      “Well man, you're smoking these Indian cigarettes, which I'd say puts you in the risk-taking category. That's living dangerously, bro.”

       It occurred to me again, as it had so often in the past, that despite the fact that Kalim did his best to talk streetwise and had a gorgeous wife (she sometimes worked the store in his stead), he was obviously a homosexual. This was especially apparent when Pierre happened to be there. Pierre was an elderly neighbourhood faggot (his preferred label) with whom I sometimes drank, mainly because he had a seemingly endless supply of booze, money, bitchy wisecracks, hilariously fractured idioms, business schemes that skirted the law, and bizarre anecdotes from his days as a hustler and male go-go dancer during the twilight of the disco era. Moreover, his drunken antics and practical jokes were the stuff of legend in these parts. Oddly, although Pierre was openly and even exaggeratedly gay, he was also expressly homophobic, mocking anyone he considered a “Nelly”, as if only he were allowed this distinction. “I hate fags ... I'm only attracted to straight dudes,” he often proclaimed, strolling – or rather, half-staggering – along the sidewalk on his way to the liquour store for the second or third time that day in his long black coat and shapeless, wide-brimmed black hat, looking like some kind of cross between a badly shaved rabbi and an undertaker in the Old West.

      “How's Pierre?” Kalim asked.

      “In poor health, as usual,” I replied, my voice sounding to me as though it came from someone else.

      “He's such a lovely man, you know? Really, he's a great guy. Tell him I say hi when you see him.”

      When I arrived back at my apartment I dispatched three cigarettes in a row to a blissful, fiery demise. Then I rolled a joint, smoked that, another cigarette, thought for a moment I was going into cardiac arrest -- “No, Eureka, you're just high,” I reminded myself in a soft voice – thought of masturbating but then decided that first I should do something I could consider productive, using the anticipated reward of an orgasm or two to motivate myself. So I began writing an experimental science fiction novel. At a loss for a protagonist's name, I used my own. I had written for about half an hour before I gave the project up as dreadfully misguided:

      The men do not know one another's names.

      The Little Commander's face, deformed by countless scars into that of a shrunken head transmitting bad juju to any who might gaze upon it, leers pitilessly toward the man codenamed Hedgehog, bending the drizzle-chilly twilight to its menacing contours, spittle flying from the tight, barking lips.

      “Ah, I see. You think you can get by on your looks alone, eh? Yeah, I can see that now. I've seen your type all my life. Know what I call guys like you?”

      “No sir.”

      “Abalones, that's what! Pretty shells filled with slime. Put some iron in your balls, soldier!”

      But Hedgehog, head angled downward from the pistol-whipping The Little Commander has just dealt him across the jaw, only intensifies his blubbering protest. “I just don't like dark places ... closed in places ... I can't help it ... Please oh please don't make me go in there, sir!”

      The line of dripping noses, chinstraps, helmet rims, and rifle butts of the others at attention remains unaltered by the scene. It would take a direct order from a superior, or a surprise attack by the enemy, for the men to show any sign of life.

      Before them, the mouth of the abandoned railway tunnel is growing indistinguishable from the night. The Little Commander resumes his briefing.

      “We suspect this tunnel connects to an underground complex...”

                                                                               * * * *

      “Alphabet, what's your position? Follow my voice. Come to my voice ... as you would come to own your mother in distress...”

      Blindness reaching towards blindness.

      “Form a chain. Here's my hand. Come to my voice.”

      “What happened to our lights? Our batteries had at least four days' charge.”

      “Maybe the enemy is using harmonic disruptors to screw up our gear?”

      “I can't see a damn thing!”

      “Doesn't anyone have any emergency flares left?”

      “Where is The Little Commander?”

      “Become one with the darkness...”

      The voices, the footsteps, are getting fainter. Eureka Jones, codename Alphabet, holds his breath, letting the rest of the group melt away into unseen voids.

      Silence brings relief.

      Relying on touch alone, he flips over the limp body of The Little Commander and begins rummaging through the dead man's pack for supplies.

      Ahead, in the darkness. Something glowing, a pale green mass undulating toward him. Could it be the ghost of the Little Commander, come already for revenge? Eureka approaches the specter, his proton-carbine at the ready, safety decidedly switched to the OFF position.

      What the...? His brain, still reeling from the atrocity he has committed – the murder of his superior, his desertion from his platoon – struggles to piece together the weird spectacle.

      “My God,” he breathes. “It's some kind of giant phosphorescent larva...”

      And he cannot shake the feeling that the worm is communicating to him, using some form of telepathy. Foreign images, not of his mind's own making, begin to flood his consciousness.

      Down, down, his soul plunges into night.

      The clown regarded me, smiling amiably.

       I punched it.

      The smile returned, wobbling back and forth in diminishing arcs before coming to a complete stop.

      In the lighted window of the second floor apartment across the street, a silhouetted figure crept from right to left, hunched over like a cartoon villain.

      I enjoy spying. That's it.
     At last, I had something worthwhile to do.