hypodronic

Stoneye

hypodronic

0. Craig: Red Then Dead

I used to go to that school. I walk past it every day on the way to the college across the street. Psychology and Math, maybe leading to a career in something. Maybe psychohistory. Maybe nerdology, more like. But that school. It's a gray square thing with horizontally waved metal paneling. All gray. The red bricks around the base are a gray kind of red. The fresh pavement in the parking lot is gray. The bright yellow paint on the kerbs is gray. The waves on the gray metal siding don't even give it a texture. The peaks don't cast real shadows in the valleys. They're too sterile.

I think it wouldn't be bad if it was a darker gray. Like two stories of shaded, textured, highlighted ash. The waves could be the grain of it. It could be a charcoal bunker hunched behind the fielded, hiding from the road. The swarming little proto-people could have been ominous. And the road. There is no crosswalk along this part of the road. It's a major road, too. Traffic all day, every day. A body could get killed right good crossing it unwary. And farther along it there's my school. My college isn't much, but at least we have colours, and open spaces where people pass each other. I remember sailing the fleshy seas of the other place. By the time I was finished there I had developed a whole new brain lobe specifically to plot routes through the currents of colour and gender.

You can pretend that it isn't that way, but I don't have to. There's white girls and brown boys and whatever, and they congeal in sizes dependent on their commonality. You surf them, you ride them, you dodge them. They have textures, wakes, surface tensions. Hue and thunder. Smells.

Sweet jumping monkey Jesus, the smells.

And there's the inside of it. The white, white walls. The gray floors. The pale wood railings. Everything intentionally designed to be wear-resistant. To last the ravages of decades of uncaring students. And it's true. There's no people in the world who care less for their surroundings than students. They make the railings out of plain, thick, gray bars because a hundred kids will stand on each one in its lifetime, and the lower ones will be kicked by a hundred times as many.

The design is kind of post-ironic. We're all so jaded these days that nothing can be earnestly valued or appreciated. If they'd tried to make the place organic or noticeably styled, it would have been trying too hard. There was a power struggle even here, before the place was built. The People In Charge couldn't tip their hand that they wanted comfort or environment for their charges. That would be a sign of weakness. Then the kids would be in charge. Then when they sharpied on a wall or kicked a locker or scratched something dirty in the toilet stalls, the people in charge would have to be hurt. They'd have to be. If it was a pretty place, they'd have to punish people for making it ugly. For being ugly, even. And they couldn't do that.

So everything is plain and hard and unfinished and bare. There are some muted blue walls, it is true. And there are some curves here and there. But the blue is just paint, and it ends in a flat line either at a corner or in the middle of a stretch of wall. And the curves are only around the ends of straight, rectilinear hallways. There are points A, B, C and D, and between them is only lines.

The BING...BING...BING of the bells inside and the squawk buzzer thing outside. I never understood why people went outside at lunch. You only have to come back in again afterwards. It isn't like college, where you have to go outside to get from one class to another or to the cafeteria or whatever, and the people you pass are also going somewhere because they want to be there. Even if it's because they think that some piece of paper will solve their problems. Even if they think they have problems.

God, don't get me started on that place, too. And before I hurl from all of the sweet, putrid adolescent nostalgia, all corny and green and reality-like, I'll tell you what I know about the high school.

I know I don't blame him.

I was in Psychology, naming brain parts of various primary colours, when it happened. I was home before I knew what it was. There were police and news vans (which are spooky to see in real life) so I really kind of suspected. I had to walk around. I told the 'rents when I got home and it was on the news a half hour later. No kills, four woundings, one in Surrey Memorial (which is a fate worse than death; if I was hemorrhaging from the head you could have given me some duct tape and an aspirin and put me in a cab to New West before you sent me there), some crying people I'd seen around the neighbourhood, mowing their lawns. Some people bleeding from the face. From the face, kids, from the face! On the tee vee! My old high school! It was a proud day for us alpacas or kakapos or whatever our stupid animal was. I think our official mascot was an idiot in a cheap mask, but there was something with fur on the letterhead, so there you go. The Hairy Idiots.

So yeah, someone shot some people. I didn't know we had guns up here, laying around for any curious discontent to stumble across. If I had, well... But, again, there you go.

Anyway, it was this guy who finally got my old school. Got it all over the news like guro bukkake. Like Jack's brains in Jackie's lap. Like nerds on ironic pop culture references. Or on porn. But a little less creepy, because it was actually on the tee vee and Peter Mansbridge knew that his momma was watching and still talked about it so it couldn't be that bad, cause no one wants their momma to know they've been on the internet looking at ladies in strategic pieces of Mandalorian armour, even for legitimate research and journalistic purposes.

I love digressions, don't you? Well, I like making them. When other people make them its just verbal wankery. But whatever gets you up in the morning, I guess.

So anyways, this guy I find out later had his locker right next to mine, which I guess tells you something. I mean, propinquitous in space but not in time, if you dig my jive, yo. It wasn't as bad as the dungeon in the old building, by christ. That was the hallway equivalent of skid row, and the dispossessed denizens of each would have had a lot in common with each other. Actually, I bet a lot of them were the same people. Identical, in this case, across time but distant in space. Word. Irony.

Shit, I keep forgetting to get to the story. So in this locker, he had a gun. In this gun he put some bullets. These bullets he fired at some people. Technically, that's the story, so I can ramble now.

Ramble ramble ramble ramble.

Ahem.

Well, really, that's all I have to say about it. I don't know. I guess it is freaky to have people killing each other in my neighbourhood, but it’s only the physical manifestation of what the place is about, anyway. The suburbs. Sure there's trees along the side of the road and nice, clean sidewalks and every three blocks there's an elementary school or a corner store or something. But the old houses are rotting and falling. The new houses have filthy sub-code basement suites. Rich people move here because they can legally use more of the lots for houses. There are fines for knocking all of those trees down so the plebes can see those big pink stucco cubes, and the fines they can pay. It costs less than radiant heat in the second floor, it costs less than that rounded wall moulding, it costs less than the security system. There will always be people who think they need to live in those shitty basement suites where they can hear people talking on the other side of the wall, where the whole place floods when it rains. I've heard of mildew and mice and cockroaches in suites that have never been rented yet. I've heard of people taking their landlords to court because they won't turn the heat on in winter. Not all. Some is enough. One or two is enough, here and there. And like I said, they can always find someone.

I wonder about those people. Will there always be plebes to see the fancy houses? How many of the plebes know they are like the ball in a game of fiduciary polo? These rich guys are like the new gentry. Each subdivision is like a little barony. There's this war of expensive houses going on between them, and like feudal serfs, the rest barely even know it's happening. They'll talk about how much they liked that tree, or about how close that house is to the street or wonder why someone would pave their back yard. Why so much expense? Why do they knock down those trees when everyone knows you'll get a fine?

Because if it costs you money to show off you much money you spent, then that's just more money you can brag about spending.

Anyway, that’s the shit that really matters to people around here, not whether they can breathe or eat, or if someone's liable to bash their heads in with a rock and steal their animal skins or something. This “school shooting” stuff is just atavistic, not deviant. Those puffy jackets the kids wear all through summer. Do they research puffy materials with poor insulation for the summer season, just like they research thin materials with good insulation for the winter? They don't worry about whether they'll perform a useful service, that’s for sure. They're purely cosmetic. Like peacock tail feathers. You think they fly with those? You think they dazzle predators or warm their young with them or something? In Peacockland or wherever the hell the things exist, there ain't much to be scared of, so they can spend their time evolving colourful ass accessories. And if you'd asked me in high school where to find an ass, and I'd have said “look for the puffy jacket”, let me tell you. And let's face it, if you were a woodpecker and you had to put up with those fucking peacocks and their fancy butt fuzz and their constant mating displays for a few hundred thousand years, you'd probably evolve a few barrels yourself, just to calm everyone the fuck down about it all and get back to eating sowbugs or earwigs or whatever they may have in primordial Peacockia.

So the big surprise of the whole thing is that it this guy happened to be wearing the same colour pants as me and three cops come and follow me across the neighbourhood on the way to my afternoon class – I was heading towards the school(s), returning to the scene of his crime – and they shoot my flat yellow ass just around the corner from my second cousin's place. Second cousin, second big surprise: She dated him in grade eight or something. I dunno, I guess the philosophy behind the police training about dealing with suspects of violent crime doesn't cover the contingency that they may, in their duties, come in contact with someone who is not a criminal. I don't know if you've ever been followed through your neighbourhood by a mysterious pack of armed goons, staring at you and whispering and radioing people and such. It's a little threatening, is all I'm saying. I mean, I'm sure they feel justified and all, but they're the ones with body armour and guns. I just had some green jeans.

So I come around the corner (there's a hedge, you see, and a lot of lovely trees all spread around, at least where people haven't knocked them down) the flashing lights come on and this guy's all “put your hands up” or something to that effect. So I do. Then this other guy says “put the bag on the ground”, referring to my bag, which was in my hand. Well, it had been on my shoulder, but upon raising my hand, I guess I sort of brought it with me. With my hand. Well, my hand is me, so I guess I brought it with me.

I dunno, I just get the feeling like I was in a kind of one-way conversation, you know? Where you're talking to somebody who just isn't gonna have it. When you may as well have stayed home and watched some Star Trek. They always have such ridiculously reasonable people in science fiction, like that pointy ear guy, but not just him. Actually, he's not bad. But so many other people see their loved ones die and snag up a ray gun to fight back instead of shooting themselves or curling up into a quaking ball of sticky shock. Not like real life, where stuff like this police thing happen. Like I said, one-way. I got the feeling that one side just wasn't listening. I mean, when I talk to someone and they just plain stand there with their arms in the air in slack-jawed compliance, I usually feel like something's wrong and want to know if there's some miscommunication or misunderstanding somewhere. But these guys didn't worry about that. I just stood there with the lights red then blue then red then blue making me red then blue then red then blue, with my hands in the air and I put my bag down. Well, those guys were so not prepared to make a commitment to listen to me that they didn't listen to each other. Or maybe the one cop just didn't feel that obeying another cop was a good enough reason to disobey him. Either way, I started to put my bag down and somebody shot me and then I was red then purple then red then dead. So I didn't get to class. Which was kind of lame, because we were watching a movie on brain damage and our instructor said there was a lot of people drooling and twitching and it really sounded entertaining. And the rain had stopped. I like walking after rain. The air is so clean.

Not like your mom's crusty poon.

1. Yun & Leto: Slant-eye & The Lotus Prince

Craig was too white for his own good. He never put down his middle initial even though I know his parents got him a chinese name on his birth certificate. Something appropriately convoluted and flashy. Prince of the Eldest Lotus Kingdom. Third Sunrise of the Emperor's Birth. You know how chinese names are. Well, you probably don't, but their like that. Whatever. I'm Correctly Evinced Eidolon of the Illustrious Slant-eye or something. Maybe something less racist.

That's what racial pride is about these days, not those guys in sheets down in the other place. The perks of an ethnicity are like special moves in a fighting game. The asian guy gets to make jokes about driving badly and eating neighbourhood pets. The black guy can suggest he has the largest penis in the room. The white guy can be guilty and humble without people telling him not to be a pussy. The hispanic guy gets cheap car audio equipment.

The day before Craig got his self killed down the street, I was out losing my laser tag anal virginity. As in I got surprise buttsecksed at the laser tag place for my boyfriend's birthday. Leto's bitch-ass friends were all “lets go laser tag” two days after they were all “we can't afford to come to the movies with you guys” when I wanted to see Snatch. I've always said that you can't trust whitey. Ol' paleface lies to your face and then he lasers you in the back, all the while laughing and singing his top fourty with his disposable grocery bags and high efficiency halogens and whatnot. A century ago he'd hire you to build him a railroad, blow your ass up, and once it was done he'd change his mind about letting you bring your family over and you'd never see them again. A century before that he'd give you a blanket full of AIDS and march you at gunpoint to the other side of the continent. Things don't change.

Leto's a bit pudgy and pale, even for whitey. He plays the video games, and looks down on the guys at the Electronics Boutique because they'll sell any old piece of shit. One time I was with him – buddha knows why I went, but I did – and the guy recommended Fallout: Tactics to him. He said it was as good as the original. I don't play those games. I don't play many games compared to the guys, or compared to all the other asians. I've never been a Dance Dance Revolutionary, if you catch my drift. But apparently this Tactics really blew fat, sweaty goat balls and everyone knew it. He would not stop bitching about the guy. I had to drag him out of the store. He just kept hanging around the new PC games and telling everyone how much Fallout: Tactics sucked and how he can't believe people would pay for it and that that guy tried to tell him it was good and no one should shop at such a hole. Then he bought it. Fallout: Tactics. And played it every day for two weeks.

After a few days, we're on the phone and he starts talking about it.

“Like those stupid robots in Fallout: Tactics. Just suddenly there's robots everywhere somehow,” he says.

“Leto?” I say, very sweetly.

“What?”

“I don't want to know about that game, okay?”

“Oh. Okay.”

And we never spoke of it again.

Anyway, there we are at the laser tag place. My ass is the centrepiece of a luxurious table setting, served on a silver platter with a garnish of lemon slices on a bed of parsley. Dozens of fucking children and all of my bitchboy's friends helping themselves.

“Relax,” he says, poking me in the rib with his laser, that emblem of my pussitude.

“I'm sorry if I don't enjoy being humiliated in front of your friends,” I say. Which isn't true, I'm not sorry at all. But he doesn't want to go down on me like my old boyfriend, which makes up for a lot. It's funky down there kids, and not like the 70s. Actually, that's probably what the 70s did smell like to a pretty big degree, but I don't want to think about that.

So turns out Emily is right behind me and she gets all up in my face with her cheek pinching and baby talking “Is widdle Yun getting beat? Yes she is! Yes she is!”, and, no surprise, I slapped her whore face. Because she's a whore. And that's what whores get.

It is a spacious laser tag arena. The main lobby area is two stories, atrium style. The walls are cement, the ceiling corrugated steel swaddled in gray stuff. Is the stuff hard or soft? Porous? Ductile? Who knows. It’s too high, wherever it is, to touch. The walls carry lame murals of standard science fiction copyrights. Predators, Enterprises, Death Stars. Lopsided big-tittied women in spandex. But not too dirty, because the target audience is fricking ten-year-olds. But the seven of us, passing Rob's pipe around in a shivering circle, packing and lighting and coughing, we were mostly nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. Rob's stepsister is younger, Eric's boyfriend is older. And Eric and that guy aren't the only fruity ones around.

So here's Lars and Wally. His name isn't Wally, but he looks like a walrus, especially in the Jacques Cousteau toque. Whenever we smoke up... and I notice this, because I notice things when I'm high, like now, that I don't notice other times. So whenever we smoke up, Wally makes a point to stand before Lars. And he smiles this dirty smile when he takes the pipe or the joint from Wally – Wally always holds the bowl or the burning end when he passes it – when Lars takes the pipe he licks his lips a bit and just about goes down on it. Like, there's some tongue action there, I think. No one says anything, but I bet someone's else has noticed.

Still, the question is: does Lars get off on the joint having been in Wally's walrus face, or does Wally like Lars sucking on his slobber? Does someone imagine it’s their dick? Is there some weed pipe head happening in this here circle? I mean, it would be kind of cute. Eric told me he and his boyfriend did that stuff so we could have handled if they were gay for each other, but whatever.

Rob's poor pipe.

“Captain my captain,” Rob says, packing the bowl. Some hooligan youngsters are crowded around the far end of the parking lot. Three of them, with bikes. The young, clean cut variety that live in the houses here, out later than they should be. They wear orange, and they watch us. He sees them seeing us. He turns back in to the circle.

“What's that?” Lars says, Wally and I betwixt he and his questioner.

“Well, I guess Wally's the captain of this carnival cruise. I'ma call you Gavin, Wally.”

Can anyone remember Wally's real name anymore?

“Quit blowing my pipe, ass captain.”

“Fuck you, faggot,” Eric says, his boyfriend meek and hiding his offense.

Nods are exchanged, signaling that Eric extends his mystical fag aura over him, allowing him to coordinate window dressings and say things like “ass captain” without being a cocksmear queerbasher homophobe redneck. Everyone forgets about Lars.

It's a little more magical packing the bowl amidst everyone. We all get to be privy to the shaman's ritual. Poking the ashes, scraping the threads where the lid screws on to the pipe. Rob always unscrews the lid and hands it to his right when he sparks his pipe. I think he didn't have pockets when he started smoking.

We pass the kutchie down the left hand side like those Jamaican kids in on VH1 again, and over Yun's shoulder I see the kids are gone. She won't quit bitching to me about laser tag. She doesn't like the dark. She's allergic to the smoke. It's too expensive. Asian people can't shoot straight. Eric didn't come to the movies with us, blah blah blah.

Again it reaches me and it burns like the fulminating tumours of a thousand cigarette package warning labels. It occurs to me that I must, on behalf of the assemblage, thank our gracious host for his philanthropic providence of pot. The epicity of the evening requires a chorus worthy of the court theatre of Croesus.

“Dude,” I say, preamblely. I clear my throat.

“Yeah,” Rob says.

“Thanks.”

“Yeah.”

“Like, a lot.”

“You're welcome.”

“Alright. Thanks.”

“Yeah.”

I can do better than that.

“I mean, the whole night,” I begin to wave my arms, gesturing with the force of my fidelity. “Everybody, you're just making this all so great, by being so great, and sharing your bounty with us. Thanks.”

Then he looked me deep in the eye and I saw a bottomless electric column of emptiness reaching back through his eyes into the other side of the universe, and I saw a bit of a joke and a bit of pity and he said “Yeah,” again. By then, no one else was listening to us. A watch was consulted, and the packed pipe put away. A new round was imminent.

As we assembled in the ready room, our LED lit laser vests the harbingers of luminescent unreality, we split. Now, we had allegiances. The eternal battle of Red and Blue had somehow insinuated its way to our world and our time, drawing us in to its ineffable machinations. Like the Blood War of Dungeons and Dragons. Like classism but the people who don't know which side they're on are called colourblind instead of sellouts.

I bore the Red Twelve. Its beaten polywhatchimacallits had borne ten thousand battlers as fierce as we and more. Perhaps the vests, too, were brothers split bye the huey twists of fate. When the vests are deactivated, what distinguishes them? Nothing but the hue of their lights, and the fate of no entity should be decided by their colour. The raging ghost of Martin Luther King should beat down the cruel oppressors who split these feudless vestments and set them against each other. Well, no. Just like there's no use complaining that people of different colours would never have gotten off to such a bad start if they hadn't lived in different places, there's no point complaining that vests must be split. Did we not all come here today to be sundered? To face one friend an ally and another a foe, then forget our monochromatic nations and begin anew? What fealty do we owe to the flags of Red and Blue? They don't even have flags! They're just colours!

Around about this time I realized that I'd been running around obliviously shooting everyone on my team for a good minute. Yun and I met up and followed Rob, because he's badass and I thought she'd have better luck in his exemplary company.

He signaled for us to hold position, then ran quickly around a corner. We heard his voice: “My life for Aiur!” and he was back with us, urging us around a corner, up a ramp, to a position held by the Blue. We had them temporarily pinned when a sniper distracted us, and they unfroze, and shot us. I shot some more people, and some more people shot me. I guess I was doing well.

In a quiet corner, Yun spat at me: “You don't need to do it, too.”

“Do what,” I asked, like a chump.

“I fucking hate this game.”

She held her hands up and walked away into the wild angles and black light. I didn't know whether to follow her, and in confusion I turned again to Rob. He stepped from one shadow to another, his shoulder next to mine, in the dark so only our teeth showed in the ultraviolet.

“You are a golden god,” he said.

2. Lars: Hashishim

Lars has had his hat since he was fourteen. It is yellow with red under the brim and white top-stitching. This is how he got it.

The day is Sunday, March the seventeenth, and the year is nineteen-ninety-six. The sun is high. Lunch is eggy and finished, and burbling in the stomachs of all. His sister is spinning on her stool one way and the other, slowly. He doesn't want to do the dishes because it's his birthday but he doesn't think he can ask anyone else to do it without catching hell. He tries not to look at the sink and the inexorably drying egg crusties.

They are the only ones left in the room. It is then that he noticed her eyes. They squinted menacingly. And her mouth. It smiled like Wile E. Coyote.

“C'mon kiddo, we're going to the mall,” she says.

“The mall?” he asks.

“I'ma buy you a hat.”

This is a big deal. Hats are expensive.

He looks at the sink. He hears the door of his parent's en suite closing and the distant rumble of their voices. He leaps up and runs as silently as he can to the door, the holes in his socks allowing his bare toes to grip the linoleum of the kitchen.

And so to the mall. There are, in fact, hat stores in malls now.

A cool hat can define your identity for years, provide you a place of social honour in your circle. As the Honda plies the ways to Guildford, Lars wonders if he might one day be “The guy in the green hat”. Might the entity whose logo he chooses today ascend to some noble place, either in the realm of competitive sport or corporate marketing? He dreamed up a pantheon of mighty publicity poses, arranged in supplication to his whim. In what chapeau stock might he invest?

He was quiet in the parking lot, his voice silently raised in supplication to the cosmic columns of design and promotion.

The store was more of a closet. Two staff milled awkwardly about. There simply could not be enough customers to occupy two staff. There wasn't enough room for that many people to stand in the store. There was barely room for the four of them. As they entered the store, Lars did not notice the words passed between the parties, his eyes were burning with the spread. He stepped from the cobbley mallway through a cosmic gate to the Olympus of haberdashery and at once knew the fear and helplessness of a mortal in the realm of gods.

What if he chose wrong? What if, in two or three years, no one knew of Fox Racing? What if no one else ever had a similar hat? What if his champion was the first Einherjar to fall in Ragnarök?

“I have to take my chances,” he thought. Not an obvious, gigantic brand like Nike or Reebok. Those were certainly not going anywhere and the safe path does not lead to glory. His hat must ride the vagaries of public opinion like the waves of fate. In the end, he needed a hat whose success would be dependent on its qualities, as well as its context. There were a thousand aesthetic characteristics. Symmetry? Contrast? Colour? Material? Here were canvas, denim, polyester. The stretchy kind, one size fits all? Or the adjustable kind? Examining some Fox Racing hats with a raised blue logo, he found that they were all of the stretchy variety.

Suddenly the gravity of the moment gripped him. This day, his five thousand, three hundred and thirteenth, would echo down through the rest of his life. A misstep now could leave him directionless one day. Should his champion fail him, he would have to abandon it. Dark and desperate hours could drive him back to the hat closet in the mall, and he would, ashamed, grovel before the beings he had shunned. Surely, at such a pass he could forget being The Guy With The Hat forever. He may never have a chance to Have A Thing again.

Though she kept directing him to more and more expensive ones, he naturally couldn't pick the most luxurious. Torn by a thousand conflicting concerns, he surrendered to the hat. The red was vibrant and visceral, but perhaps the blue was nobler? Perhaps he needed the whimsy and joy of yellow? The humility of plain black? Perhaps a striking and uncompromising white? No, it would get all gray and dirty. Teams were at least as impossible to pick between. What sport, even? And then to pick a local team for loyalty? That would be the safe choice, so he could not. But the fortunes of a distant corporation, adrift on the treacherous sea of rules, trades, injuries, refereeing, merchandising... These were too risky. And really, he was only a dilletante in such things. Certainly, he knew if there was some great event in the works. He would watch some playoffs. Certainly the Stanley Cup, after all he was only human. But no, that wasn't right either.

There was one hat. He held in in his hands, with his fingers. This hat spoke to his bottom. His root. He felt its fabric and its stitches. He felt its seams and its stretchy. He felt his die was cast. He lifted it up and the skinny brown guy moved behind the tiny counter.

The girl is milling around outside the store, pretending to adjust merchandise, and his sister is tapping her foot and smiling. The girl is watching them in case they try to shoplift.

He presents the hat to her and she purchases it. He watches as one watches a thunderstorm.

As they walk through the mall and in to the parking lot, he studies the hat. He observes it in shadow after they passed through the doors under the big glass pyramid. He observes it in the sunlight as they enter the parking lot. He observes it from all angles.

“You get to wear it too,” she says.

“Soon enough,” he says. “Soon enough.”

“Gotta calibrate it?”

In a moment he is confused.

“Huh?”

“Magnetify it?”

“Uh... What are you talking about?” He clutches the hat to his chest as though she would eat it. As though she would tear it in to strips, hang it from a skein of gut and cure it for the winter.

“You have to lay it along a line pointing towards home and drop it.” She unlocks his door and continues as she walks around the car. “Then from another place, you do the same, and another and another. Eventually, the hat becomes aligned to the WAVEBEAMS that connect every living being to their homes. Then later the bill of the hat will always try to turn towards home, so if you get lost you can always get back.” She unlocks her own door and sits.

For a moment he faces the bare green Accord roof. He opens his door and sits, wondering why she has done all of this. Why buy him a hat? What does she want? Does she want to play an elaborate prank on him, and the hat was only a convenient opportunity? That must be it. She has seen him looking at a hat on someone's head or in a magazine or on television. No, that couldn't be it. They don't wear hats on television. Hats shadow the face.

So perhaps the gift is sincere?

“That's funny,” he says as they leave the parking lot and drive.

“You're so serious. You'd think you were turning fifteen.”

Perhaps this is only a lighthearted joke because he is taking the hat so seriously? He regards it, suspiciously now, and unable to accept it as his Thing.

One must not fear one's Thing.

Is this some common joke that he does not know? Has she heard someone tell this story before? Does everyone know you can magnetize your headwear? Does everyone tell naive little brothers that you can, for a laugh?

Most importantly, if he tells the story to his friends, will they think him weak for not knowing the truth, or mad for speaking it?

What if it is true?

Think of it! A million teenagers, roving across the countryside, always secure in their return route! A secret brotherhood of navigators, surely guiding the lost, the stoned, the drunk and the stupid. Perhaps even all four at once.

Could this be what it means to be The Guy With The Hat?

They speak no more on it. When they arrive home, he thanks her one more time and then retires to his room. There he sits on the side of his messy bed, spinning the hat on his fingertip, for an hour. Later, when he has done the dishes, silently resenting the injustice of it all, she drives him to the movie theatre where he meets his friends. They watch Broken Arrow and afterwards pretend to stunt-fight each other and walk around like Air Force action heroes.

“Can you please stop shooting at the nuclear bomb?” one of them says.

“Would you mind not shooting at the thermo-nuclear device,” Wally says with his finger raised.

This Wally he has never met before but suddenly he is impressed with his authority.

Later, as they walk back to his house, he manouvres to the back of the group and stops to retie his shoe on a fire hydrant. As he ties he checks in his head. Home is almost directly ahead, just a little to the left. He carefully drops his new hat straight to the ground. It lays for an instant before he scoops it up and dusts off the bottom. He stands and walks, but Wally is walking backwards, watching him.

“Dropped it,” Lars says.

And they go.

Now, years later, after the laser tag, as they burn down Rob's weed, Lars looks out to find landmarks. He sees the street and looks down it, turning his hat almost parallel to it. When Yun and Eric leave the circle, he readjusts it ever so slightly as the circle changes shape.

Wally sees it all. Wally sees that he touches it whenever he turns a corner. That he seems to keep it pointed in the same direction for a while, then another direction later. That when they are near his home, he takes it off and spins it around on his finger. That he is never without it.

Wally wonders if Lars' Thing is somehow magical. Somehow supernatural, or at least privy to forces and laws outside the ken of mortals.

Emboldened by herb, he asks.

“Dude, does your hat, like, point somewhere?”

Lars looks sharply at his eyes and then his touque.

“Yes.”

Lars leans close, forgetting the shrinking circle and its ashening bowl.

“Does yours?” he asks.

Wally nods slowly.

Lars leans back away, tokes, passes, waits and watches.

“Where,” he asks, thrilling with the intimacy of the metaphysical secret and the audacity of their sharing it. Others leave the cold circle for the laser tag place and its shelter. The night is cool and there is the feeling of imminent rain about. The air is silent and still between them. Wally looks long and hard at Lars, his burn sliding down to his toes. He feels a spatial being. He touches his toque, as black as the night and glistening woolly.

“Home,” he says, and points his thick finger upwards.

Lars stares wildly at the sky in amazement, then down at the eyes again, and then the sky. Some few stars push bravely though the smog, the light pollution and the sparse clouds. He walks, arms at his sides, through the parking lot towards the McDonald's, his eyes lost above.

Wally follows him slowly, watching. In time, Lars' face calms and he spins less. By now, all of the others have filtered inside and the door has at last swung shut. There is no human voice. They watch each other silently.

“If you go, can I come with you?” Lars says at last.

Immediately Wally's square hand begins to rise, swinging out to point crookedly at Lars' own hat.

“You will have to leave that behind,” he says.

“Then what can I keep?”

And after a pause, “You can have mine.”

They went inside and played laser tag. They were on the same team every game.

Rob always had good weed.

3. Emily: To The Catmobile!/Mural

Emily's mom was a cat lady.

Not a cat person, as in someone who prefers having a cat over having a dog, a cat lady. Someone who prefers having cats to having friends, or furniture. Or to bathing.

She has six with names. There are more in the crawlspace, but they have only seen a few. On last Halloween, only two children came by for candy and both of them trailed hard-faced parents, prepared for domestic disputes, redneckery, trailer trash, anything unseemly that their precious clones should not suffer. This meant more candy for Emily and less filthy idiot children, so she thought it all balanced out in the end.

The house is one of two dozen once-identical houses in a subdivision by a small road. Now a third of the houses have been stripped and crushed and carried away, and in there places monochromatic stucco cubes with alien roofing tiles have come. The newer ones are less tacky, though. There is just about always some house nearby with orange mesh staked around a tree, signifying which one they might not knock down, at least until the bylaw officer's been by. When Emily was young, there was almost no traffic on the road. Dirt shoulders, intermittent asphalt sidewalks, broad lanes. In the daytime you could look both ways and see no more than five cars all the way to horizon one way and to the wave in the road the other. Most of those were on the major road on the hill. Now there are new cement kerbs, new cement sidewalks, crossing lights and a grassy boulevard. When Emily snuck out at three in the morning to stalk the completely non-spooky suburban streets, there were perhaps four or five cars visible on the road, most of them at the twenty-four hour car wash on the other side of the road and halfway to the hill.

Who, she wondered, needed to shampoo their trunk at three in the morning? Were there that many pig farms full of dead hookers in the lower mainland? Were there even that many hookers?

Of course there were, she realized. Normal people don't walk up and down King George Highway all day and night, passing the KFC and the chicken plant over and over and over and over. Normal people wear pants in January. Few normal people came in to the KFC. This is at least partly because of the chicken plant.

The chicken plant smelled like poo. Tractor trailers delivered entire loads of chickens in blocks of tiny cages to the chicken plant every day, and almost as many Sunrise Poultry trucks left, but you couldn't see the insides of them. Some of the trucks had to contain meat, but some of them must carry The Rest. The chickens are mechanically separated. A machine takes of all of the parts of them that people don't eat. The heads (already debeaked at the farm), the legs, the guts, feathers if they have them. The machines were faster than people and never wanted to unionize, but they tended to be somewhat inaccurate with regards to the entrails. A lot of splattering would occur in the machinery, which is why you have to be careful around raw chicken more than other meat. It tends to have poop on it. The plant as a whole exuded a sickly fecal odour, which, unsurprisingly, did not attract voluntary customers to the KFC. There was hardly any point in protesting the injustice of it all, because the meat they sold in the KFC was, if not harvested in the same plant, harvested in the same way.

Were all of the chicken plants in the world the same squat, square, high-fenced beige blocks? She thought there would be little point in making them look pretty, if they always smelled like that. Then again, there's little point in making chicken plants at all if all they can make is the crap they sell at the KFC. True, she has had chicken that was better than KFC. It took her a few months to realize, of course. At first she was excited about eating delicious chicken bits every day. After a couple of weeks she stopped enjoying it so much and at lunch she went down the street, out of sight of work, and jaywalked to the A&W. But that wasn't much better. There was simply no escaping the chicken smell, and the chicken at work after lunch. They had chicken at her cousin's place one day, and she did, intellectually recognise the superiority of the meat and the preparation, but she still did not enjoy it's consumption. She hated chicken. She hated the trucks that brought them and the other trucks that must take them away.

One way or another, Emily thought, all of those chickens must leave the plant somehow.

And Emily had a theory.

“How much does the dump cost?” she had asked Edward, the owner's son and the manager.

“Uhh, depends what you're dumping,” he said, wiping the spotless counter for imminent lunch.

“Food,” she said. “Food garbage. Leftovers or trimmings or whatever.”

“I dunno. Do you guys need to clean out your fridge or something?”

“I'm wondering about Sunrise. They must have tons of chicken feet.”

Edward pushed his glasses a tenth of a millimetre up his nose, which he did when he was talking with equals. It was a great moment in that way.

“They probably sell some of it to dog food factories or something. Or maybe they dump it. Either way, I'm sure it's thousands just to ship it wherever. Those trucks don't run on sunshine,” which was another thing he said to equals, because all of his friends were crusty conservatives with inefficient cars. That was a less special moment.

So Sunrise would have to spend thousands of dollars a day shipping chicken bits out to the edge of civilization and dumping them. And then pay someone not to complain. Well, pay someone for the privilege of accepting their surplus intestines, sticking them in a pile with some used condoms and granola bar wrappers and eventually burying it all and selling it to a trailer park or corporate planned community developer.

But what if they didn't have to ship it so far? At least, not all of it?

The KFC was right there. They had to get their chicken from somewhere, and she'd never seen exactly what came in those KFC trucks, but it might not be everything they served. Sure the fries come in boxes, and the produce and the buns, all frozen in a cooler truck. But perhaps Edward's dad had struck a deal with his neighbour? Maybe they helped each other out, one saving money on disposal and the other on popcorn chicken?

What if they came in at night and moved a few flats down the side street?

What if?

It would explain how they made plain old chicken taste so bad.

“How's the fryer,” Edward said.

She was staring longingly at the A&W across the way, where the soft drinks were less watery, the music was tasteful and the counters were long. She was not cleaning the fryer. She was not, in fact, doing much of anything that anyone would pay her for.

“Uh,” she said, looking futilely into the murky hot depths. “Not bad. Not perfect, but not bad.”

Each greasy crumb of mass-produced foodstuff that passed through this building, Emily reflected, has been steeped in cruelty and duplicity from its inception to its delivery.

Her cat-lady mother, a bare eighteen years her senior and inexplicably drawn to identical fashions, had made an appointment to cut her hair an ominous day and a half after Emily had come home with hers bleached on the surface and dyed black underneath. Subconsciously dreading the planned Superstore trip of the evening, she arranged to meet Wally and Lars while she was away.

They met beneath the monkey bars, pea gravel dragging on their heels.

A joint was burned and they retreated to the swings.

“How's your mom,” Lars asked.

“Crazy. I don't want to talk about it. How about you guys.”

“I don't really want to talk about your mom either,” Wally said. “She talks about herself enough when I fuck her every night. And twice on Thursdays.”

Fingers were extended parallel to the bare flagpole whose tip was still lit by the pink sunset.

Lars was hungrily eying the huge bare wall of the gymnasium, facing the backs of houses.

“I'm going to get you some fucking spray-paint at the grocery store today and I'm gonna come get you out of bed tonight and you're gonna do your fucking throw up, you pussy,” Emily told him.

He shook his head undisturbed. “Not yet. I'm not ready yet.”

“What the fuck is gonna be in it, anyway?”

“The crudest damn thing those kids have ever seen. I swear to god they'll cry.”

“I'm gonna be a shrink,” Wally said, “so I can make a fortune off of those kids when they get older. It's a make-work project.”

Lars was standing at the edge of the playground, lost in the bricks again, and Wally was smiling murderously.

“You guys won’t tell me anything?” she said. “Is there dicks?”

The both nodded.

“Tits?”

“Oh yes.”

She though a moment.

“Shit?”

Lars turned his head a little and opened his mouth, but stopped. “All three of those things, for sure,” he said.

“That's nasty.”

“That is but the beginning. It will be beautiful. If only we had scaffolding, and time and more painters,” Lars said.

“We'll do what we can,” Wally said.

“Do you have diagrams or plans or anything? How do you keep it straight?”

“Some stuff we have sketches. A lot we have in our heads.”

“How do you know it'll match up? Like, how do you know that you have the same ideas?”

“We do.”

She had mixed feelings about it. The poor kids didn't really do anything especially terrible to anyone to deserve shitty cocks all over their gymnasium. On the other hand, it would be pretty cool. The school would have to get it cleaned off or repainted or something, but the memory would remain underneath that paint. The terrified faces of the suburbanites, their wet eyes searching for a villain, a victim, a vengeance and finding only themselves and their families, these faces crowded the edges of her mind's vision, but while she felt uncomfortable with their suffering and afraid of their vengeance, she felt that those same faces loomed in her friends' dreams, enshrined.

And it was a dream. Moral quandaries aside, the mural – for surely there was no other word for such a project, so comprehensively plotted and lovingly presented – was of a near epic scale. It would stretch the entire length of the gymnasium, reach as high as they could silently ascend – Lars' family had a large ladder, but it would be too conspicuous, awkward and noisy to use – and it would cram in every perversion they could conceive. Whenever anyone mentioned furries or cosplay, Lars and Wally would share a smile, but say nothing. When Rob explained futanari to a shocked crowd – what are colloquially called 'dickgirls' in English – Wally and Lars nodded knowingly.

But still the project troubled her.

“What more do you need to do it?” she asked.

She looked back and forth between Wally, silently facing away from her to the wall, and Lars who watched her.

“There's one empty spot, right at the end.”

“If I give you guys an idea to fill it, can I help?” she asked.

Wally turned and shared a look with Lars.

“If you can think of something we've never heard of, then yes. We'll tell you all about it and you can come along and help when we do it,” Wally said.

“I can't spray-paint,” she said.

“We'll worry about that later.”

Gravel crunched and drew their attention to the parking lot. A filthy Firefly with 'SECURITY' on the hood shone its headlights directly at them.

They watched it right back for a moment until their eyes hurt and then they turned away.

“So what's your idea?” Lars asked.

The car was silent but for the thrumming of its engine.

“I'll have to think about it for a while,” she said. “I'll call you tomorrow.”

“Okay, but we don't discuss it on the phone. We'll have to meet.”

She suddenly remembered her mother and her hair. She looked at her watch and found herself late.

“Okay guys, I'll call you tomorrow. Both of you. I have to go grocery shopping with my crazy mom.”

She jumped up from the swing and ran away from the car and into the shadows.

They stood in the glare of the headlights for a moment before turning towards them and leaving the playground.

4. Secret Shopper

This was me playing war when I was a kid. I was a pale-faced round kid with limp hair. Cindy was the girl next door, and it was her birthday party. All of her parent's friends had boys, so all of the kids at the party were boys. Naturally, being boys, we played war. Naturally, being a girl, she had a tea party. She was a princess, and I was a spy. The other team claimed her as their princess, so we were on opposite teams. We didn't have royalty, so we designated a rock as our secret doomsday device, so we'd be matched. Both sides had sergeants and lieutenants and all of that conventional army stuff, and everybody pretended to shoot each other with rifles or pistols. Sometimes they threw grenades.

“Tsht-tsht-tsht,” went someone's stick machine gun.

“Pshew-pshew,” returned a pistol.

Then suddenly a grenade went “Kchououououo,” and some people dove to the ground.

The patio door rumbled open and someone's mom said “Can you guys keep it down just a little bit?”

Nobody shot anybody for a few seconds until someone made a really quiet “Kch, kch,” gun noise and the door was safely closed. In a few moments, normal play resumed.

So I was hiding behind a tree, skulking around the edge of Cindy's yard, the battlefield. I realize now it wasn't very stealthy because they only had a row of low trees that would later grow in to a hedge, and I was really just loudly rubbing myself along the fence and stopping behind the trees, with round evergreen needles in my face. I ran into this kid calling for an air strike. Like, he was hiding between trees along the gray fence talking into his hand, asking an imaginary command centre for air support.

“Get out of my way, I'm a spy,” I said.

“I have to call for air support,” he said.

“Well get out the way.”

“Command, you're sending the bomber? Okay, I'll tell everyone,” he said and ran screaming out into the yard. “Air raid!” he yelled, “Get down! There's gonna be bomber planes!”

Spies don't have time to worry about stupid kids, so I carried on with my mission. I don't think I knew what my mission was, but when I found something cool to do – cooler than calling for some lame air strike, that's for sure – then that could be my mission, and all of the sneaking would be explained. As I came farther along the fence, I spotted Cindy having her royal tea party around the end of the patio. As was appropriate for a princess, she was out of sight of most of the battlefield. As was appropriate for a tea party, she was alone and pouring dozens of cups of tea for a brand new doll. She'd already done presents, you see. I don't remember what kind if doll, I'm afraid. I was a boy. It didn't matter.

“You guys aren't being very nice, I'm trying to have a tea party,” she yelled behind her at the battlefield, where that kid was now pointing into the sky and shouting about bombers.

“Its okay princess,” another kid shouted back, “when we kill them all, you can have tea in pea- Augh!”

He had been shot by a kid from our side, and died dramatically.

Princesses are natural spy targets. You can have tea with them and discuss your spyly plans with them and they have to be polite and can't shoot you because princesses don't do that.

I put my finger-pistol away, checked to see if the coast was clear, and I sauntered over to the princess.

“Might there be a cup of tea for me, your highness,” I asked, trying to waggle my head like a spy.

She glared at me for being a boy and for playing war, but I was quiet and her doll was so new it must have been unbearable to have a tea party with it alone.

The air raid kid was making loud, obnoxious bomb noises, but my princess poured me some imaginary tea anyway. “Cream and sugar?” she asked, making the motions anyway, even before I'd said “black as the night,” which I'd seen in a movie. I pretended to drink the pretend tea anyway, because a spy would never be so rude as to refuse a princess' tea.

The sliding door to the house rumbled open again like the voice of a vengeful god, and this time disgorged the head of Cindy's dad.

“Keep it down, okay guys? I don't wanna have to come out here again.” He looked around for Cindy, and when he saw us together he didn't seem any more relieved. Nonetheless, the door shut again, and the air raid kid quietly gave up on blowing everybody up. No one had died in it anyway. Shadow was stretching across the corner where we tea partied, the shadow of the side of the house. As time wore one, the war behind her and before me became more and more fantastic. More bulletproof armour turned up, more people were only wounded and fought on. Tension and shouting mounted as I accepted cup after cup of imaginary tea from the princess. Soldiers eventually tire of dying, but spies never die. After the other kids had gone home, Cindy and I retired to her room and played a different game. Unfortunately, we didn't know you were supposed to play with each other's bits during the examination when you played doctor.

Now the winds are blowing away the rain clouds of the day. The trees are spinning in the parking lot, the cars in an unnaturally wet for the suddenly sunny day.

Now I am a secret shopper. I pay the bills by pretending to shop at the Superstore. I follow around scrubby white kids buying cheetohs on the off chance that they try to pocket something.

Today my basket contains a tube of toothpaste and a jar of olives. My gaze wanders intently over the shelves... or at least it seems to! Because I am not, in fact, looking at those shelves, though it is to them that my eyes are turned. My burning glare, frowned with the perfect pensivity, is a ruse. I usually don't even know what I'm looking at, and today is no exception, because there's a matching mother-daughter trailer trash tag team in the canned food aisle, and I espied their slippery proletarian fingers all over the instant gravy packages. I didn't see anything as such, but, as the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, I watched and followed. I guess the price of freedom isn't really the issue at hand, is it? I mean, no one's freedom is at stake if some scrubs pinch some dried meat juice.

They're looking at me. The poor people.

Hell, aren't I poor? I'm a fucking secret shopper, for christ's sake.

Enough, I need to get back to work. I bend down to pick up whatever it is I'm looking at. Unfortunately it's flour. And not the little bags either. I have no choice but to pick it up. What else could I have been bending over for? To read the ingredients? I can imagine it.

“INGREDIENTS: WHEAT”

Oh, well, if it's wheat flour, then maybe not. Yeah. I'm going to be lugging this piece of crap around for the next hour until I can wind my way back here and put it back, which I'm not supposed to do. I suppose it’s just as suspicious as not taking it in the first place. The god damn whores and their god damned whore bi-level black and blond hair and their filthy goddamn vaginae have left the aisle already. Fuck it. I put it back down.

I stand up and next to me is a soccer mom, her dirty little crotchlings in tow. She's going to bake them something, I can tell. She has that competent air about her so rare in our customers and absent in our staff.

“Baking?” I ask her, because shopping is fucking disgusting and I need to talk to real people and even though I'm a fat, balding secret shopper and she'll never have anything to do with me. I think I might love her.

“Yeah. Birthday cake,” she says. “For my daughter.”

“Ah.” I don't know anything about birthday cakes or daughters except I haven't eaten enough of either and I'm not likely to in the future. Still, I got her to talk to me once, I have to try again. “Have you tried the unbleached flour?”

“No, I hear it isn't as dependable, like it doesn't always rise as well.”

I nod my head. How do I lie? I don't know anything about flour, either. Do I commit? I could just say “I've heard that too,” but I need to give her something definite. A solution. It isn't like she's going to use the unbleached flour just because I say so, so I won't get caught in some awful situation – a collapsed birthday cake, confused, shocked and hurt children, about to scream – because I said it was okay. And then I'd get to be positive. It would be good news. Everything Is Okay.

But what if I said the opposite? Doesn't it sound less naive, less reckless, to use plain white flour? Is she a pessimist or an optimist? Well, she has kids. On the other hand, don't you have to be optimistic to procreate? I mean, you have to believe you can raise them not to be little shits, right? But what if she likes pessimists?

Shit.

I have no idea what to say.

I can't just nod my head all fucking afternoon.

“Probably not worth the risk,” I say. Save!

Wait, is it?

“Yeah, I don't have time to sift and all of that stuff, I better play it safe.”

“Ah, who has time?” I say. Me. I have time enough to have a membership at the Red Hot Video. I have time enough for World of Warcraft. I have all the god damn time in the world to stand in the aisle of the Superstore and talk about flour to soccer moms with husbands in collars who watch ROBTV to keep track of their investments.

“Yeah,” she says. She picks up a fat bag of flour and slides it into the bottom tray of the cart. She does it so effortlessly.

God, why couldn't I work in apparel? Her goddamn pants all sliding up her crack like that?

But then I'd have to wear the stuff. Of all of the Superstore employees, only management and secret shoppers don't have to wear Superstore clothes. And that shit is crap. Bad stitching, cheap materials, patterns that fit no living human being. When I deign to speak to the regular staff – outside of work, of course, for I would never blow my own cover – they always complained about the crappy clothes.

But perhaps she'd go in to one of those booths, and though I wouldn't get to see anything, I would be close to her nakedness.

One of her children is stealing.

She hasn't noticed maybe she won't and then I can pretend that I didn't either, but her runt is stuffing an entire bag of chocolate chips up his shirt. The bag is half the size of his fat wobbly head, but he thinks he can slip it up there without anyone noticing. Without my ninjic spy senses delineating his avarice in coruscating theft-waves. Without any one of the five hundred people in the store noticing the crinkling of the plastic, the whole way across the store and throught he checkout. The chips will inevitably melt a bit if he has it up there for more than a minute or two, and reform into a single lumpy block of unsellable chocolate. His god damn filthy child body will heat it with booger warmth or Mysterious Sweater Goo. I grimace with the effort of not saying anything. I do not tell her. I do not. I make myself smile at her.

“Thanks,” she says, and pushes her cart down the aisle and out of my life forever.

5. Cindy: Cinderella

Cindy had married young and babied it up. She was not, contrary to her family's expectations, babied up when she was married, but it was barely ten months from the wedding to the birth. Inder's friends said that they hadn't wasted any time, but everyone knew that Inder wasn't the father because the father was one of them and they happened to be the type only to keep secrets from the people they directly affected. In fact, the father was Sukhjinder, who was somehow inscrutably related to Inder through someone's great aunt who'd had twenty kids or something like that. Their families both happened to migrate in the late seventies and into the same area – but given how many people have moved from the middle east to Surrey over the last thirty years this is no amazing feat. Now they have so many cousins and aunts and uncles they don't worry about it any more. At the time, however, they had become close, and now, twenty years after high school graduation and eighteen years after Inder started at the chicken plant, they were still friends. The rest of their friends are predominantly white because it's still The Great White North up here. Nonetheless, everyone knows that Sukhjinder gave her a good one around two weeks after the wedding, when Inder went to visit his mother in, of all places, Winnipeg.

Cindy's friends were initially a little awkward with the whole brownness factor, but as they had forgiven her for screwing everything else under the good sun on account of her jovial attitude to life, they could hardly complain out loud after the first ten years or so. The baby was a light brown, with a pudgy little baby face and a tremendous crop of thick, black hair. As it grew, the nose thinned and the face lengthened. By the time he was twelve or so, it was plain to anyone who cared to look that he did not resemble his stout, coarse-faced father. Now, the kid was grown and moved out and the other kid, who did look like Inder, was mostly grown and attending the newly rebuilt high school just down the road. His name was Kip, which Inder's side of the family never said anything about and everyone knew it was because they couldn't pronounce it correctly with a straight face.

Now, Kip was failing math, attending English on every day when there was nothing due and slouching on the steps of a portable at lunch watching the skater kids smoke up. His portable steps faced west, and in the winter the sun would barely warm them at the end of lunch so that he went back to class shivering and numb.

Cindy didn't know any of this.

Cindy knew that her kid promised sombrely and earnestly to try harder after his parent-teacher interviews. His report cards came back high in the beginning of the semester and low by the end.

Cindy knew that he sometimes did extremely well and couldn't imagine that it was because he was cheating.

Cindy knew that Inder was cheating on her.

Cindy did not know with whom.

Inder comes home from the chicken plant in his boxy sedan because he's an oreo and he smells like Eau du Skank because he's a bastard and he brings KFC because he's a guilty bastard with a weak but persistent conscience and he knows the manager of the KFC next door so he sometimes gets a deal.

When he got drunk and hit Kip, he had silently searched through the bungalow and poured every single drop of liquor down the drain. Cindy was in their room and Kip was in his. He did not pour out the Glenfiddich, which he only offered guests. They didn't talk about it.

Edward sat at the round table in the cluttered dining room, delineated from the kitchen proper only by the imagination, and he smiled. He smiled the smile of someone who has seen too god damn much chicken in their lives and is glad to be able to eat some vegetables that didn't come out of a cooler truck, too.

In fact, “these are the best samosa I have eaten in my life,” he told Cindy when Inder had stepped out to take a business call in the bedroom.

“It took me five years to get the recipe from Inder's mother, and she still won't tell me what spices to use. She makes great samosas,” Cindy said, holding a spoon between her fingers like a cigarett. She quit smoking except for when she had friends over or after sex with certain people.

“Well there the best I've ever had, anyway,” he said, settling back in the chair and listening to the distant mumble of Inder's voice.

“That scotch,” he said after a moment.

“Yeah,” she said. It had been six months so the thought of alcohol didn't bother her anymore.

“It wasn't scotch. Well, it certainly wasn't Glenfiddich. Tasted more like Crown Royal, to be honest.”

She didn't know what he was trying to say, and she said so.

“I don't think I know what you're trying to say,” she said, seriously.

“He's so cheap, I bet he poured the good stuff out and kept it somewhere else, or drank it, and he just keeps the bottle full of rye for show or something. Or does he drink from it?”

“He doesn't drink from it,” she said. She had thought the seal was closed until tonight, in fact, but she daren't ask Edward or, obviously, Inder.

No more was spoken of it that night. The next time they met, they didn't say anything either. Cindy felt that Edward didn't remember or find significance with the event, which almost made it harder for her not to say anything. Kip had sulked almost constantly when he was out of his room since the original incident. Now that Inder's affair kept him from home longer and longer, he had re-emerged somewhat, and re-emerged changed. Cindy found him more self-reliant and less likely to complain, which was relieving and frightening together. He would do the dishes if she asked. He would always take out the garbage without complaint. He seemed somehow not to care. As if he had chosen to do his chores just to keep things simple and civil. She tried to be happy about it, but it nagged her. And then she half-woke one night and thought she heard him moving around the house. She was still half asleep, though, and no mischief exposed itself in the sharp light of spring morning, so she did not conciously think about it. Then it happened again. And again. Yet nothing ever seemed amiss in the morning. He still went to school and he didn't quite fail. Still, it bothered her.

Then there was a Saturday, when the two of them had planned to visit Inder's cousins. She liked to bring Kip along because then everything stayed polite. He served as a kind of reminder to all parties that they were all stuck with each other so they may as well get along. On this particular Saturday, however, Kip appeared to be hung over. He crashed out of bed at seven in the morning, quietly vomited in the bathroom sink (she could hear because he left the door open), splashed water around the sink and stayed in there, water running, for two minutes.

As Cindy sat in the cool bed next to the immobile Inder, his dense limbs consuming the sheets, she thought of that nice asian girl Kip had dated years ago and wondered if she would turn out to have an easier time. Cindy was afraid to move, not just because she didn't want to wake Inder, but because she was inexplicably afraid of going to Kip. Her motherly training urged her forward eventually, and Inder slipped back into unconsciousness with nothing more than a cruel “What?”

When she opened her door she blurrily saw Kip, down the hall, wiping his face on his skinny forearm and standing.

“You okay honey?” she croaked.

“Yuh.”

“You sick?”

“Yuh.”

“Lemme help you back to bed.”

He nodded and she did. He was wearing the same clothes he had left in the night before and his bed had clearly been slept on rather than in. She made him chicken soup and left alone before Inder woke. He was sleeping later and later even though they both went to bed at the same time as they always had. When she came home he was gone again. Kip was zombically staring at the television, watching old Star Trek reruns. Cindy had never liked Star Trek but Inder had introduced it to the boy years ago. Kip preferred the new shows and Inder the old. He had once done a romantic Khan impression on a date when she was pregnant, but in the end they got in a fight and he slept on the couch. She had always felt responsible for ruining the evening because he'd gone to so much trouble. He had made her sushi. Back in those days, no one in Surrey ate sushi or made sushi or even knew how to make sushi, but he had found sources through a contact at work. He made veggie tempura rolls, spring rolls, B.C. rolls, and edamame tofu. All her favourites. They stayed up late watching movies and drinking red wine. At two in the morning, he had tried to get freaky with her but she wasn't – well, it wasn't that she wasn't interested, but she was showing and she wasn't comfortable with it. He said it would be fine, she said she didn't want to and they shouted. She asked her doctor a week later, and she said that sex during pregnancy is fine right up until near the end, and Cindy felt silly at first and only later felt guilty.

And Kip was hung over.

She sat in the kitchen listening to the dishwasher hum and rumble and sloosh. It seemed a jolly little stereotype of an ethnic group. In fact, being at least one-sixteenth Irish, it seemed like a jolly little member of the extended family, who seemed rambunctious when it came to fulfilling every remotely Irish stereotype conceivable. Then again, Inder's brothers were a pretty loud, hard partying bunch, so maybe all of their relatives shared something in common with the dishwasher. She sat at the table listening to Kip's Star Trek until it ended, even though they had groceries to buy and laundry to do, speaking of stereotypes. The dishwasher stopped with the show. Kip eased up off of the old couch in the other room and turned off the new TV. He walked low and sure into the kitchen with his blanket around his thin shoulders, his thin black hair greasy and limp.

“Kip,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. He filled his glass with water from the fridge dispenser.

“Are you hung over?”

“Yeah.” He didn't look up at her. “Kinda.”

The glass filled slowly.

“What ever happened to Yun?” she said.

“Um, she was busy with the drama club.” This was all years ago.

“You still see her?”

“I guess.” Now he looked up and took a drink from the tall cylindrical glass. He lifted it heavily as if he was going to drink the whole thing, but when he brought it back down it was still almost full. He topped it off again – he'd done this when he was young – and walked through the kitchen to the hallway, his blanket sweeping back so that it didn't quite touch the floor.

She didn't feel like searching the house for liquor. She wouldn't. He would drink or not, and, well, so would Kip. There was no point being an ogre about it.

She got the bottle from the cabinet and poured herself a drink of something.

6. Kip: The Sky, Wet And Dry

It is the most beautiful you ever saw it, or ever want to. The night of the full moon. The moon was the closest it ever gets, and it was full and it was so bright. Thin, smooth clouds hung low above the damp construction site. The light rain of the last few days had left the ground muddy, but not as wet as it has been on previous trips. Other times the ground had been impassable in places. The constant rains and the clay mud in Newton combined to make a kind of semi-solid suspension that looked firm on the surface, but when your foot met it it sank almost a foot deep. In fact, one time you almost lost your boot in the mud, and had to scrape dried brown chunks of mud off of your pants in the morning. That was back before the construction really started. Back before there was anything much more than foundations and a handful of girders. Back before there was Security. It was beautiful that night because of the soft light. The clouds dispersed it across everything. It was directionless. You couldn't even tell where the moon was. Everything was uncommonly still and bright. There were no shadows. It was cool but was not cold. It was the harvest moon, up there.

But now it is dark.

Bulging out your coat is your binoculars, bought from the salvation army for ten dollars. You walked home with them in your hands and dared the world to wonder why. What do you need to look at? What do they need to look at. They have rough lenses and they're hanging from your neck by string, but they'll let you see a little farther, perhaps. See perhaps right into the soul of the building itself. Into the future, into the past. Into the present. What is there to see? What is there not to see?

Here is the fence. It's a temporary affair for the most part, rented fences held together with wire where the ground is too uneven for the interlocking feet of the segments. Farther down there is the fence that marks the end of the school grounds proper. And right at the dip where the whole lot should have drained through but for a piece of incompetent landscaping, right where the two segments are tied together with wire in the shadows of the trees, right there you slip through, your hands feeling the cold and muddy earth within them. You move slowly now, and you watch the edge of the rental fence segment to make sure you don't catch yourself. You've done that before and attracted the attention of Security, but you are a sure learner and rarely make the same mistake twice. You are through and only now remember to search him out. You slowly – for you know that the peripheral vision is more sensitive to sharp motion than smooth – slowly crouch down and hold yourself up with your left hand in the wet grass. There you wipe off the mud of the trough and alternate holding yourself up with them. If the site was drained as it should have been, you reflect, not only would the workers be better able to walk and therefore do their work faster, but you would have had to find another way in. The trough would be completely muddy and impassable now. Perhaps you never would have started coming.

The government funding for the new building has been barely scraped together from all three levels of government, and their natural animosity made it a tenuous enterprise. Five years ago a better school building was built – a brand new school, not a few kilometres away, to boot. The much-needed replacement of the existing facility was postponed for all of that time. The current building has asbestos, they say, and surely lead pipes and drafts and worn, old bricks. The layout is Byzantine, a collection of ratty limbs tacked on to an original structure half a century old, and irreconcilably inefficient. It takes up too much space and doesn't fit in enough students. These two things – the improbable funding and the overcrowding – are the real reasons for the replacement, and they contribute more to its emerging form than any other factor. Now it appears to be almost a cube. The western end, the side most distant to the college across the way, has a second floor of squarish proportions. It is roughly mirrored on the other side in the red pillars standing mutely on the cement.

There is Security. In his car, still. It is cold tonight. Soon you will have to wear gloves. Already your fingers are chilled by the grass. You lift them from the ground and balance. You work your hands back and forth to limber and warm them. You watch Security in his car, wishing you knew what he was doing. You remember the binoculars. You could take them out and see what he was up to, see if he had seen you and was now phoning the police.

But if he has seen you crouched in the depression and the shadow, almost completely out of sight, he needn't know of the binoculars. You can't bear giving away your ace in the hole this early in the game. You peer at the distant dirty Firefly, wishing yourself better night vision or wishing, as ever, the floodlight above the portable would switch off. You wait. You watch him moving from side to side and eventually he leaves the car. He lights a cigarette and now you draw out the binoculars and hold them to your face. It is hard to keep them steady, crouching on the ground. You lower them and concentrate on your balance and the sound of your surroundings. The wind rustles through the branches of the trees that line the yards behind you to keep out the raucous noise of the schoolyard. A squirrel or bird or bat shuffles in the upper branches. Traffic shushes by on the road in the distance. You feel the vibrations of your muscles, the tenseness. You let go of the tenseness, you let the vibrations of your flesh float off into the aether.

Suddenly, overriding all of your senses is the sound of muddy footsteps. Instantly, your eyes are opened again and focused on Security. He is walking away from the car, away from you. Out of the light, and into the building, such as it is.

He disappears within, and you seize your moment. Tucking your binoculars back under your jacket, you stand and walk calmly inside through the door of the gym. This is the perilous part. The gym is such an open space that you would stand out in it from a great distance should any eye turn your way.

You hear Security opening a distant door and scamper up the nearby stairs. From here you can more easily duck out of his sight from the ground, but you can feel in your skin that you are all the more exposed to any other observer. And you know that if he comes up the other stairs near the centre of the building, you will have almost no cover.

You tour the outlying classrooms, the bathrooms with their bare plumbing and their walls delectably skeletal and metallic. The science labs, their sombre hoods awaiting reluctant chemists. Somewhere might lay the staff room. The bathrooms might be for girls. It is all kind of titillating, isn't it? You feel like a voyeur in a way, watching the building site in its sleep. It is defenseless except for the wandering Security, and he is hardly vigilant. Now here he comes up to the second floor and you slip around a corner, nearly overturning a scrap piece of sheet metal stud. Here, in the shade of the rare wall, you find the ladder to the roof. The hatch is open, as it often is, and you ascend the ladder quickly in case Security is coming.

Out on the roof you are surprised by how cold it is, how windy out in the open. Minding the footsteps below, you pull yourself up on to the asphalt of the rooftop. You half-crawl onto the roof, gracelessly but silently. The surface is bare corrugated steel. The squarish grooves run down what will be the long axis of the building.

There is only one way down now, and no cover. If he climbs the ladder and looks up out of the hatch, there is no chance. He must see you.

You have to pee.

It must be a combination of the cold and the adrenaline. You should have gone before you left, but you didn't. Here you are on the rooftop, exposed and plainly incriminated in any eye that should find you, but there is only one thing to do. You walk across the slightly flexible roof to the far corner of the unfinished building. Standing right near the edge makes you feel unsteady, imperiled. The unsteady roof beneath your feet is frightening enough. The wind seems to rush past you, intent on your death. Though you have a very sturdy balance, you still fear the drop. It is two stories straight down in to the smothering, drowning mud. If you fell, there would only be that idiot Security to find you and that would be worse than the dying. You take a moment to contemplate the view. There are houses you can see from here, but no one is looking. And if they did, no one would suspect you of mischief. You clearly aren't stealing anything. You aren't vandalizing anything. You walk so calmly around the building and across the roof, what could you possibly be up to?

You judge yourself safe. You plainly unzip your fly. The cold and the adrenaline have contracted more than your bladder, but it is functional nonetheless. Eventually you squeeze out a few spurts off the side of the building and into the mud. Shaking is difficult because of the shrinkage.

Relieved, you feel your work here is done. You feel you have made a kind of love to the construction site, to the building, to the institution. You back away from the edge and look down through the huge hole, that will one day be the atrium skylight, into the building. It is dirty, bare and cold down there. No living thing knows it like this but you and the filthy Security, and he just walks around flashing his damnable light on everything, stomping his feet and looking everywhere. Bringing his light. He looks so much that he doesn't see it like you do. The darkness, the shadows, the corners and the hiding places make it alive. What would those nooks and closets be but for the darkness? What is the big, empty library without the bare cement and the security lights shining in from the school, cutting straight across the space? And every visit yields some new growth. To you, it is secretly accreting through the unconscious efforts of an alien force. The workers you see here in the day, walking by on the way to and from school, they perform their tasks and build their building, but this place is something else. You feel like you are walking on the back of a sleeping monster on the roof, its coarse and inhuman skin occasionally squeaking beneath your feet and threatening to awaken it. Meanwhile its eldritch organs form.

Security is but a flea in its primeval coat.

You walk to the edge of the roof. As you near it you enter the view of the floodlight by the portables, and keep an eye out to the sides for signs of Security. You hear a thumping as of plywood below, and you walk right to the edge to investigate. Sure enough, there he is, looking blindly about him in entirely the wrong dimension. He reattaches his flashlight to his belt and thumps across the plywood – the mud beneath is yet too soft for his brute toes – and returns to his car. He leans against it, facing the building, and you crouch once more. Your head peeks motionlessly over the edge and could barely be brighter than the stars.

You watch him not watch you.

You can't believe you're seeing what you think you're seeing, can you? You slowly draw out your binoculars again and steady them with both hands, kneeling on the roof and getting your pants wet. The steadier you hold the binoculars the plainer it is that Security is picking his nose.

Right there in plain sight for anyone to see, he is shamelessly leaning his head back and driving his finger into his head up to the knuckle.

You almost wish you had a camera.

But who would you show the picture to?

This page intentionally left sexy.

7. Craig: Diatomaceous Earth

There's these little microscopic doodads called diatoms, which I personally think is a shitty name. It suggests that they're only made of two atoms or at least only out of some combination of two kinds of atoms, and that doesn't really qualify them to be life forms, but they are. That would barely even make them proteins, really. More like salts or ions or something. Creepy little silicate deposits or some other sciencey thing I'm not familiar with. Like I said, math and psychology.

Anyway, they are these tiny little creatures that live in water or mud or asses or whatever microorganisms live in these days, and when they die, they tend to accrete in big dusty white deposits in rocks or dirt or riverbanks or, I guess, asses. Trillions of them die and leave these little skeletal tube remains. One of the things people use this stuff for is pool maintenance. The kind they use for that is really toxic to breathe in. The less toxic kind just has more intact microskeletons and is used to kill ants. It's still terribly bad to breathe because of the way it works, it’s just less terrible. Sort of like new cyanide light, with only half the immediate death (contains almond extract, sucralose, aspartame, mercury, lead and yellow #5).

You see, these dry little boney dusty things are very staticy. They stick to things very well, and, being pointy little boney dusty things, when they static-cling to some little ants crawling around the corner of your filthy little tenement, perhaps over the dessicted remains of your cheap pizza or the mouldering panties of your whore, they will poke through the disgusting slimy mucous layer that protects the average ant, and the little defenseless guy, who wanted nothing more from life than to live and perhaps to love (and carry your entire 10 kg sugar bag back to its queen piece by piece) will die slowly and painfully of dehydration. They will do this by the hundreds until their tiny, dry corpses litter your hovel from end to end. You will find them buried deep within that sugar bag for months to come. You will find them in your clean laundry, should you own enough to was and posess the inclination to do so. You will find them in your deodorant, if someone breaks down and gives you some.

God I hate you.

So why do you and I care about ants and their filthy mucousy deaths? Well, you probably don't unless you have ants, in which case you should go get some, motherfucker. Its cheap shit and it'll kill all your damn ants right good and you'll thank me even though I trivialized the deep and meaningful sexual relationship you share with your filthy hoe-bag mother, even though she doesn't really love you as much as she loves my ball hair. I, however, care about diatomaceous earth, which is what its called when you buy it in a really light plastic tube so you can sprinkle it on your ants like it's coke in the 70s and almost as comically deadly. I care about diatomaceous earth more than the social safety net cares about your meaningless paperwork, and believe me that’s a lot. I care about diatomaceous earth more than I care about your mom's miscarriage that she didn't tell you about because everyone knows your dad is impotent so it couldn't have been his.

It's significant that I care more about diatomaceous earth than your mom's miscarriage, because, in case you missed my implication, it was probably mine because I fuck her so much.

So why do I care about ants? When I went to that school, we had them in our class.

The story really begins, though, with my stupid teacher. He's just a regular teacher. That is, pathetically enamored with his feeble field of study, sick on his own minuscule power and bloated with the faint adulation of his idiot students. Also, convinced that he alone, through the medium of Principles of Mathematics 10, can provide the guidance and inspiration that the young generation requires now more than ever. So really, he was just like every other failure of a high school teacher for the last few hundred years. He has a stupid wool vest and stupid pants and a stupid face, just like every other failed high school teacher. He liked me but was deeply troubled by my poor performance in his class, just like every other failed high school teacher. Also like every other failed high school teacher, he was a bit of a slob. This is why he had ants in his class.

I swear he never finished a bagel in his thrice damned life. You see, I had arrived late the first day had to sit in the front row. Because math teachers are pathetically anal about seating plans and things, I was stuck with it for the rest of the semester. They're very Industrial Revolution, those math teachers. Every single day, by the time class started, there would be a sickly, buttery bagel on the corner of his desk, right in front of my face, and as he droned on, writing on the whiteboard and wiping off the slimy ink with his bare hands and rubbing it in his hair, I would stare blankly and suicidally at that sick little ring. If I had his class first thing, there would be just a few bites taken from it, but by the end of the day – for it did not disappear at lunch, for some ungodly reason – at the end of the day it would still be sitting there, half congealed and wilting. The fat would half-congeal in little globules down the smooth sides of the bread. The paper plate would be translucent. Every day.

One day during conic sections, I saw an ant on his desk. I looked around but no one else noticed. I kept very still so that they wouldn't. I didn't want anyone spoiling it by letting on to him, and I couldn't trust the simpletons around me to keep their pants on about anything. So I sat still, patiently watching the ant explore the desk but secretly rooting for it to find, consume, and if possible defecate upon that doughy demon. It didn't. But the next day, just when I first lost interest in the tedious lecture I saw an ant already climbing down the side of the desk. Over the next hour, a solid dozen ants crawled up and down the side of the desk and no one but me saw them collecting slimy crumbs or crowding around a drop of butter. For a week this was my daily entertainment. Perhaps I let my inspired and expertly wrought facade of apathy slip. Perhaps some eye roved the room for some precious stimulus and found me intent upon the ants crawling up and down the desk. Eventually – all good things, they say – eventually that tumescent polyp Daryl – who is not a good thing, although I would like him to come to an end – noticed them and said, the slack jawed proto-methhead that he was, “Hey Mr. Silen, there's ants on your bagel.”

The rancid poopkernel. The mouldy booger. The bloody hairless idiot-boy. Silen snatched up the bagel, dusted off the ants with a tragic, pathetic expression and, sad as only a high school math teacher can be, dropped it in the garbage. He seemed broken, the rest of the day, and glanced often at the empty, barren corner of his desk.

Naturally I thought my one simple joy was ruined forever and I was angered, even though it would have been folly to think that it could last very long. By Monday I was resigned to sitting, chinese-water-tortured by an antless desk and unmolested bagelturds, for the rest of the semester. But lo! When I walk in, there it is, as viscous as ever. Silen had certainly heard Daryl. He certainly knew the risk. Humaniform verminitude, Daryl. But on Monday there was another bagel, plain as day, barely eaten and slightly anted. I didn't look my gift horse in the mouth. It was a while before I noticed the pile of white dust under the corner of the desk. Soon after I made out a trail of similar powder crossing the room away from the bagel, and there in the corner was another little pile. I held my eyes on it for long enough and I detected movement: ants!

This all confused me. I assumed correctly that it must be some kind of ant poison, but could not for the life of me understand why he would keep his bagel next to it. Really. His glasses were not quite horn-rimmed, but they were thick and I bet if he ever broke them in some award pratfall he'd look off and ponder whether, perhaps, a few rolls of tape around the bridge would patch it up alright. He was the real old-school math and science nerd that really thrives on the kind of blatantly common-sense chemistry that suggest you shouldn't keep your lunch next to your fucking intentionally deadly poisonous toxic killer fucking powdery poison that would probably float around pretty good if there was a draft.

But no.

Eventually the class ended and lunch began. I had nowhere in particular to be that lunchtime – my crowd were otherwise engaged preparing for a presentation for another class – so I packed up slowly that day. It so happened that day that this Silen picked that moment to take his little black mesh trash can into the bin in the hall. It was just as everyone but I had left. My bag was on my shoulder. No one was looking. I bent and snatched up some dust and examined it instantaneously in my right fingers. This was merely a body language pretext, you see, for I could drop it now if I looked up and found I was observed, and argue in the court of plausible deniability that I had only beenlooking at it and not about to poison my stupid math teacher. In another instant I looked up and found still no eye on me.

I dropped a pinch of the white powder on the bagel.

I pulled my hand out of sight of anyone who might look in from the hall, and I brished the residue off of my fingers, on to the floor. It was important not to have any on my pants. I'm paranoid this way. Evidence, you know.

I fought my way through the rank and seething halls to the can, my tainted right hand held stiffly a little out from my side, to the washroom.

I washed my hands.

I ignored the unmentionable noises from the stalls.

I left the washroom.

I got a slice of pizza from the place next door to celebrate.

I ate my slice of pizza with my left hand.

I looked up ant poisons on the internet that night, which is why I know all about how those little guys kill those other little guys.

He was okay, though. It's only really a problem if you breathe it in to your soft and gooey lung sacs and the tiny bones clog your little alveoli and tear up your delicate membranes and you bleed all over your insides and die. If you eat it, I bet it just gets broken down by stomach acid, I guess. Like my sperm in your mom. Or maybe he got the Amazing LiquiShits(tm). I wouldn't want to know. But he kept coming back to class and boring all merciful fuck out of generations of unsuspecting idiots.

He survived me, and, a few years later, he survived that guy. Kip. I hear he was one of the wounded, though. Probably more than he deserved, but hey, that's how it goes. Who am I to complain? Christ I'm bitter.

8. Yun: “Earring Magic”

When we were young, Craig and I were the only ones in our family the same age. At least in our immediate family. My mom is white as an anal-retentive klan member's sunday best. My dad is a twinkie. Yellow on the outside (barely) but inside he's white through and through. Also, kind of greasy, but that isn't strictly relevant to this part of the story. All of his siblings were the same. I secretly think grandma was secretly as upset at the end of the noble ethnic tradition of overbreeding as she was that she had to poop in a bag through her side. When she eventually died (I never asked if her poop-bag was full, but I like to think they'd just emptied it) and we all came back to our place for a sombre family dinner together, all of the other cousins were big enough to bitch if they didn't get to sit at the big table and only Craig and I ate in the other room. Even after dinner, they all stayed out in the den (that's how white we are, we have a den) and Craig and I played with Transformers and Lego in my room. I had Ultra Magnus, who was not as cool as Optimus Prime even though they were both tractor-trailers in their vehicle form, but he was bigger because he combined with his trailer. I had a few houses and cars and things built out of Lego, and I used them as the landscape through which the Transformers carried out their cosmic battle of good and evil. Also, my dolls lived in them.

So anyway, we were about eight, and we were playing with them Craig wouldn't let go of my Galvatron but I didn't like Galvatron anyway because he was from the movie and I didn't like the movie, so I didn't mind that too much. He wasn't very fun to play with. He'd always be saying that he shot “infinite antimatter” or “impervious bullets” from his toys, or some other boy thing, like boys always make up. For boys it was always like some kind of a contest of who can make the most indestructible omnipotent thing. Who could make up the baddest sounding gun name. Who makes the biggest machine gun noise. Eight year old boys are almost as stupid as sixteen year old boys, and that's saying something, believe me.

So we bashed and shot each other's robots for a while – he always wanted to actually smash my houses and cars and things and when he did and I told him to stop he said “just put them back together after” like I had the time and inclination to rebuild a bunch of houses just because he was a tit. Or like I remembered exactly how they were made and could just slap them back together afterward. Eventually I hit him with Starscream – not really hard – and after that he sort of stopped playing with the Transformers and moved over to the Lego. At first he put together a few little shapes out of irregular, loose pieces, but eventually he started fitting them together into something bigger with some wheels and guns, which is all boys think Lego needs. I was busy breaking up Soundwave and Gay Ken (you know the one I mean, he may have said “Earring Magic” on the front, but let's face it, he was “Fudgepacker Cocklick Ken”, and he was always the bottom when I played with him) and they were throwing each other's luggage around (luggage made of those little plastic bubbles that toys come in from vending machines) and threatening never to kiss each other again. I wasn't exactly missing Craig's super phased laser bolts so I just ignored him and let him take apart a few little things I'd made and a few of the larger chunks of Sailor Venus' car that he'd broken up and use that for whatever he was building. Then he suddenly went “here comes the army” and rolled around his big blocky thing, its wheels all squealing and guns covering it. He swiveled a bunch of the guns back and forth and drove it into their house.

Long story short, I left my room and found Aunt Elizabeth and told. By god did I tell. The stupid kid was acting like he was six. Aunt Elizabeth tore him a new one but by then it was too late. All my Lego was in ruins and I didn't really feel like gay robot drama anymore anyway. I stayed in my room bashing dolls lightly on the side of my bed until Aunt Elizabeth came and got me too. I guess Craig had been remanded to the living room the whole time, although it was probably only ten minutes, but still. The Mothers had conferred, I guess, and decided I shouldn't mope alone in my room, but should come out and mope with the family about crazy Grandma. After all, we were all dressed up, it would be wasteful not to use it. When I got out there my mom was holding Craig's shoulder with one of those iron fingertip grips that only mothers can do, where you know you could, physically, just walk away, but where the psychic force of those fingers make it feel like they could rip your joints apart just because they're so still. He was sort of looking at the wall like it was interesting – you find things to be interested in those kinds of situations.

“Hey Yun,” mom said. “Craig is sorry he broke your Lego's, aren't you Craig.” Craig jiggled noncommittally. It wasn't a nod but it wasn't a shake. It was clearly all I was getting and I was clearly expected not to call him on it because The Mourning was more important than my feelings. Elizabeth patted my shoulder and mom took Craig away to the other side of the room and sat him down. I stayed with Elizabeth.

I think that was the beginning of my dislike of that boob.

I thought it was a little weird when he stared blankly at the grave and the plain headstone during the ceremony, but I didn't really know what to do either, besides cry.

We went to different elementary schools even though we both lived close to each other. The catchment boundary came right between us. The high school was close to both of us, though, so eventually we found ourselves co-educated. We walked in different circles, though. To begin with I was a girl and he didn't have much to do with us. He didn't have much to do with the other side, either. The few people he was seen with where the people who otherwise were never seen with anyone else, if you can get that. Like, a very tight knit circle. Basically they were the creeps. They might have worn trenchcoats if they could afford them, but we weren't that glamourous an area. Only the brown kids in Newton had disposable income, and they all wore gangster rapper black clothes or preppy white clothes depending on who I suppose they wanted to be rebellious towards.

I mention the trenchcoats because it was that time, when things got all tense. When we were all watching the creeps even more than usual and they were watching us back, I think. I don't know if we were just getting prepared to say I told you so when they started shooting us or what. I remember this one time after that Oregon one. That guy had the same name as Craig and I could tell he knew and that everyone else knew and that everyone knew that everyone knew and everyone was expecting some people to get shot. Now he was not a common sight at lunch in that filthy warren of unwashed flesh that they called the cafeteria – I think he didn't eat lunch, or maybe he did it in some weird place where no one ever went – so when he turned up sitting at that table with those nerds (some girls, even!) that it was kind of a tense lunch and everyone watched. There were totally people on the walkway above (ironically, where Kip started) staring and pointing and talking about him. He didn't notice I guess and I never mentioned it. We never really talked. We were sort of both at the same family events and stuff, but after the thing with grandma and the gay robot tank fight, we just sort of coexisted in the same vicinity without any contact between us. I was a couple of years younger when that all happened and had just broken up with Kip the semester before because he was so creepy and, well, partly because he reminded me of Craig. Really, we only played laser tag twice (he took it way too seriously, big surprise) and went to A & W once.

Seriously, the day after the second laser tag thing, I called him up and basically said it wasn't working for me and maybe we shouldn't keep seeing each other, and he said “Okay,” eventually, and we pretty much never spoke again. I guess I'd thought he was deep or mysterious and, I guess, kind of cute. But he was just crazy for shooting people and disappearing into the shadows whenever he had the chance. The rest of the time he was just fed up or offended or something with everything. Anyway. I don't want to talk about him anymore. Does his dentist get this shit? It's not like we had some deep and meaningful zen psychic dream bond and finished each other's sentences. We went out for a week – kind of – in grade nine. It was not a big deal. I didn't like him that much or anything.

9. Lars: Day's Never Finished

Lars works Saturday mornings at the print shop near the bridge. There were a lot of bikers and drug dealers up there, and hookers and junkies and generally every unsavoury sort of person you could expect to find. There were too many bridges and docks up there, too many things and people going in and out of Surrey. He thinks it’s probably why people think so badly of Surrey. The first thing they see when they get there is all the scum and dirty stuff. But its like Surrey's stanky cooch out there, with everybody and everything that takes a fancy passing through one way or another.

Lars takes the Skytrain from Surrey Central to Scott Road Station every day and then walks through the big honking Park & Ride parking lot, down Scott Road to the print shop. He catches the 324 on Saturday mornings at 9 am. To get to his uncle's print shop just about ten o'clock on the dot, which he thought his uncle resented because his uncle used to liked to come in a little late on Saturdays, but he felt bad leaving Lars standing there like a pud in Bridgeview to get drive-byed by a roving pack of junkie prostitute bikers. In fact Lars only saw one or two drug drops in the trees across from the print shop the whole six months that he came in on Saturdays. Once a skinny, hurt-looking white guy made a real show of it. He saw Lars watching him from the cement barricade in front of the print shop, back from the road, and he gave him a kind of offended look, like Lars'd kicked the guy in the shin by looking at him at work. He wore a gray pullover hoodie with studs through the hood and some obvious holes where studs had previously fallen out, and a limp, worn pouch. He jaywalked from Lars' side of the street to the opposite and paced back and forth staring into the bushes along the road, arching his head as if he could see straight through the foliage from just a slightly higher angle, his two hands clenched in his pouch like it hurt. Eventually he seemed to remember where he was going and disappeared out of sight around them. When he came back he had both his hands in his pouch and a calmer look on his face. Lars only realized then that he went to elementary school with the guy, though they hadn't really known each other. Did the guy recognize him? Was that why he'd given him the look? Did he just look like that? Only when he needed a fix? Only when he was picking up inventory? Only in January? Sometimes in Winter?

But then drug dealers aren't that uncommon in Surrey, especially North Surrey. Surrey Central used to be a really exciting place back in the day. Before the police started hanging around all of the time, there were absolute throngs of people across the street and Lars was too young to realize then but they were all the creepy dealer types.

Not just all dealers are creepy though. Lars bought pot from Rob all the time, but Rob wasn't trouble like these guys. Once on the way back from work he'd been slowly descending the crowded stairs at Surrey Central and just when he was breaking through to the middle-level platform on the south side of the station he heard this guy on a cell phone, talking loudly into his phone while facing the passing crowd, heedless of incrimination. He said this: “I'm at Surrey Central. Where are you? You aren't at the escalators at Surrey Central. I'm at the escalators at Surrey Central. Are you on the other side? Yes, the other side. There's another side. At Surrey Central there is. Look. Look around you. Go up to the platform if you have to, that's where the buses are. Do you see any big sides along the sides? Gateway? Well then I guess you're at Gateway Station and not Surrey Fucking Central, aren't you, you fucking stupid crackhead.” By this time Lars was past and almost down the stairs to the bus loop.

Lars liked the print shop. He wouldn't tell people, except maybe Wally or someone else he was close to in a kind of manly seventeen year old guy kinda way, but he really liked it. It satisfied him making signs and silk screening CDs for small South Fraser record labels. He always bought the albums that came through the shop. There weren't a lot because no one listened to local music in South Fraser except for dirty white kids like him, and they didn't have money for local albums except for their friends' bands. Silk screened labels are an expense a lot of bands can't pay for after saving up from McDicks for six months just to cut a record in someone's converted garage. They can't afford the expense and their friend's can't afford the extra album price. There were punky bands and metal bands and industrial bands, mostly, which was cool. There was the odd hottie singer-songwriter but they usually came from Guildford and eventually their fame eventually introduced them to makeup and they became professional middle class pretty college English majors and gave up expressing themselves. The real girls all smoked to make themselves look older and became ugly because of it. Lars didn't smoke tobacco and felt like a pretty boy because it was starting to show on his friends. He knew people who'd been smoking since they were twelve, and he could already tell from their faces. There's a kind of dirty hardness or slackness in their skin and eyes. Hard and slack. It was the extremes that gave it away. They'd have hard arms and dull skin or they'd have sharp eyebrows and saggy lids. They just looked a little broken. They reminded him of the dark and smoky beer-smelling parties his parents used to go to when he was a kid and give him some toy to amuse himself with for hours while they talked and smoked and drank. The houses had dark fake-wood kitchens. The cabinets had deep, thick patterns cut into them. Sometimes they were real wood. Holdovers from a previous decade of greater prosperity. When the sun was up they looked dirty or burned with all the smoke soaked into them but once the dark seeped out the kitchen would fill with electric life and energy and force. It was like people came alive, but the people they were the rest of the time died.

He'd had enough smoke when he was a kid for a life, he figured. Maybe that feeling only took a smoke to reclaim, but the yellow walls and yellow floors and yellow tables didn't bear the sunshine well. And you need sunshine.

The train ride was short but it was the highlight of the weekend in a way. It wasn't a party but the weekend commuters had a cool vibe, like they'd gotten zen about their weekends. They didn't have to relax as hard as possible when relaxing time came around. They could work on Saturdays and relax on Tuesdays. Or work every day but always finish by lunch. Even the ones who clearly had to work on Tuesday too, or go to school or raise kids or whatever. It felt like a train full of rebels, and it made him feel like he belonged a bit.

That's where Lars met the lady who got him out of Surrey forever. His uncle had a big contract from a moving company across the river, labeling the sides of their trucks. The contact was this lady who scared his uncle, so when he was having a bad day he'd pawn her off to Lars. Much to his poor uncle's further frustration, he got on great with the lady.

“I'd like it sort of straight across but swelling in the middle,” she said.

“Like this?” he asked, and doodled a rectangle with some curves in it for the top and bottom of the text.

“Yeah, but I think it would be longer with the whole name,” she said.

“Right,” he said, nodding and redrawing the lines.

“And the trucks are longer,” she said.

He grabbed a new piece of paper and redrew the whole thing.

“More like that? That's good because it looked a little chubby otherwise.”

“Yeah,” she said, “the guys are fat enough, I don't think we need to tell advertise that. Poor customers'll find out soon enough.”

They spent an hour or so on the design and even in that one hour or so they found a kind of strong, warm feeling for each other, that Lars would have described as respect if they had that in Surrey. All he knew was that he felt it for Wally, too, but not as happy and sunny and firm as with this lady from the moving company.

It wasn't like he had a thing for her or anything, which I know you're thinking. She was in her fourties and not exactly pretty anymore but certainly not ugly. She wore makeup, but not too gaudily. But he didn't really take notice of that. He was glad that she had never smoked (which of course he could tell by her face) but not for aesthetic reasons. It made him feel glad and somehow real because she'd felt perhaps the same way about it as he had and it'd been okay. Tobacco felt frantic to him and her professionalism was calming.

So when winter ended and the shooting thing was calmed down and he felt ready to leave he asked if they needed anyone up there at the moving company. He was wiry enough and he'd helped Wally's family move after the funerals (he wasn't the only one ready to leave) and Wally's dad had thanked him with a beer (when he mentioned this he realized a second later that he shouldn't have but she smiled and it was okay) so he figured he was qualified and besides he was a fast learner and she stopped him and said they needed a new secretary and thought he would be great if he could stop talking for a minute and answer a phone. He decided it would be worth it if it was the sort of place where he could feel like that all of the time and by April he'd moved out and was almost ready to drop out of Douglas because he preferred the moving company to the college crowd.

Lars met a nice girl working at the independent coffee shop next to the moving company's offices, fell in love, got married and smoked a bowl before he mowed the lawn every Friday afternoon from March or April until October, depending on the weather. They lived happily ever after.

He never told her about the mural.

10. Emily: Shitting Dicknipples

Emily woke to the rapping on her window that she'd forgotten she was waiting for. The fam were not aroused when she cracked open her blinds to make them stop and Wally got a peek of something special. She turned on the light and waited for her eyes to adjust and her limbs to decalcify. The clock said 2:57 and it said it very loudly in Emily's opinion. She dressed dark and warm and utilitarian. She had a light long-sleeved shirt from Salvation Army she put on over top of a sweater and some sweat pants that would probably let her ass get incredibly cold but there wasn't much to do about it. She turned off the light and opened her door, slipping out into the hallway in silence and darkness. She had her house key in her pocket, and that was all. She slowly unbolted the door. She opened it and closed it behind her, committed. She could, in theory, go back in. She could turn to Lars and Wally standing there and say she changed her mind or she was too sleepy or her finger hurt or whatever. Not that she would be doing much painting. She was mainly in charge of the spare nozzles and cans, and felt touchups if necessary. Really she was mostly coming along for moral support.

They were there, leaning on her house, facing the hedge along the street. She left the door unlocked – they always locked their door, but her family was full of heavy sleepers so it was unlikely anyone would notice. Just in case, she left the key under the doormat.

“Good morning,” she said.

And it almost was. The night could not have been this light the whole way through. The trees of the neighbourhood shivered in the cold morning, though in truth it was no less than eight or ten degrees above freezing.

“Sleep well,” Lars asked.

“For a while, but then I had this terrible dream that these bad men wanted to take me away to paint a dirty mural on a school.”

“Terrible,” he said.

They walked in silence for the most part, exchanging nozzles, cans, and markers. Lars had ten cans in his backpack and his nozzles in his pocket. Wally had a black messenger bag with some kind of embroidered pattern on it Emily wasn't familiar with. They fit their cans in snugly so they wouldn't rattle.

“Emily,” Wally said about a block from the school. “We're gonna need you to run back over to my place and pick up our other cans. You know where our shed is? It's right around the side behind some grass.”

“Umm, okay. You want me to go alone?”

“Umm, I guess.” He seemed a little confused.

“You've obviously never been a teenage girl, Wally.”

“Oh,” he said and looked relieved. “Yeah, nobody scary is awake at three in the morning on a Wednesday.”

“I guess. It's cold though. And I'm gonna be tired at school.” She yawned for effect and the guys caught it. They yawned down the sidewalk and into the schoolyard. A car drove by from the apartment complex as they split up to opposite ends of the gymnasium wall.

Emily walked back from it to take in the whole thing.

Obviously it was higher than they were going to be able to cover. On foot, they could cover perhaps eight feet above the ground, along the length of the building. This was the extreme western end of the school, with playground and houses on all sides, hidden away from the roads with traffic. A few harmless shift workers might be returning home, but they'd hopefully be too tired to get in a tizzy. Lars set his bag down on the ground next to him and put his bare hand against the wall. His beanpole body looked at home next to the brick wall and the flat playground gravel. Wally was pacing, crunch crunch crunch, crunch crunch crunch, crunch crunch crunch, looking high and low and back and forth. At last he went down on one knee at the edge, pulled out a can from his bag without looking and fitted a nozzle to it. They both donned facemasks.

“Good luck,” Emily said, because it was the most fitting thing she could think of. What does one say? Happy vandalism? May your offensive mural be left uncensored?

The cans hissed and the gravel occasionally crunched. They began with the rough shapes and outlines of people. Lars's first figure was disturbingly childlike in proportion, leading out to some incomprehensible billowing shape above. Wally's had hands and feet that seemed normal in themselves but everything in between was confused and disconnected. They both seemed to know what they were at, and Emily had failed completely to grasp the many styles and conceits of the art. She was used to graffiti being incomprehensible to her, especially the wildstyle stuff. She sat and watched them go for a few minutes until she caught Lars looking down at a piece of paper from his pocket.

“Did you guys sketch it out?” she said, loudly so that they could hear.

“Shh,” Lars said.

Wally spoke in a quiet, calm voice, “We did outlines last night so we'd know what cans we'd need and stuff.” He pulled a notebook out of his bag and she came over and took it.

It was dirty.

It was really some kind of panoply of inexplicable, disgusting and dirty things. There was a mutilated body with unnatural orifices and protrusions carved in it and used for sexual purposes. There was an enormously endowed rabbit cornholing a guy in a dog suit. There was fluids and solids of all kinds airborne and across them all. There was more. It was all stylized in the dreamy, cartoony and bubbly way of graffiti and their doodles that they weren't allowed to do in Art class so they did in the halls when they were supposed to be in class. But it was god damned dirty. She looked at Wally and Wally looked at her and he looked a little guilty and a little proud and a little embarrassed. Maybe because she was a girl.

“Wow.”

“Thanks,” he said.

She wasn't entirely sure that was a sensible response, but she retreated from the wall again. Lars had a furrowed brow. They roughed in figures and organs and fluids and occasionally gases for what seemed like hours, filling in details here and there. Emily carried nozzles back and forth and tried to chat with them without distracting them or calling attention. Once a police car drove by on the street, but after the bag-clutching and paint-bag clutching and the general clenchiness of the immediate realization of the presence of The Man they resumed work re-energized. The mural seemed somehow realer when they knew that they would be in a real whole lot of trouble, for trespassing (as the school is not exactly public property), vandalism and some kind of terrible obscenity law all together. Also, Wally stole cans sometimes. It was tradition once, he would say, to steal all your materials, and roots are important. Wally still went to Art class sometimes.

The whole work began to come to life then, the colours more organically melded, the lines kinetic.

The sky began to lighten a little as the two converged in the centre of the wall. The mural had been building along both sides to a height, converging in the centre on some centrepiece that had not figured in Wally's outline. She was curious.

“Can I see your outline,” she asked Lars. He avoided her eye when he handed it to her. It was similar in theme to the other, although the content varied. The rightmost figure, along the edge, was indeed a child, and the next an outrageously obese woman – perhaps, the gender was she could place only tentatively – and a limbless torso covered in fluids of various kinds. Still, though, there was an empty space towards the centre. Combined with the other outline, there would still be a gap high in the middle of the wall, plainly visible through the walkway through which many of the children entered in the morning.

Emily went to retrieve the backup paint bag. She was worried sneaking into Wally's yard, not of police or teachers or authority figures, but of Wally's parents. They might be drunken idiots, but it still felt different and icky to be hiding from them. She wanted to go home and sleep and not to go to school in the morning.

She looked at her watch. It was after six. It was morning. More and more cars were passing through the neighbourhood and she passed a woman jogging and a man walking his dog, and they both nodded to her. The sky was lightening. She could feel honest and decent people materializing all across Newton and converging upon them, chasing her back to the school gymnasium wall.

Maybe it was because this was her own elementary school. Sure, she didn't enjoy being there at the time but it was better than high school.

They were almost finished, though.

Their respective sides had converged, and now only the mysterious gap remained. Emily dropped the bag off without a word and retreated across the playground to watch.

It was a hermaphrodite, to say the least. That is, it had a penis. It had breasts, too, though, except those breasts also had penises sticking out of them instead of nipples. They began to draw something coming out of the dicknipples, and Emily's stomach turned when it turned out to be even worse than she'd expected.

Shitting dicknipples.

The spray cans subsided to occasional whispers at just after seven in the morning. Miraculously, they had not been discovered in all of their time there. Lars and Wally stepped back and surveyed their creation, a mountain of obscure and ineffable perversions in furious Technicolor. They collected spent paint cans and crammed them into their bags, backing across the gravel towards her and their egress. They arrived with empty faces that she hated to meet.

“I can't believe it. You guys. I mean...” she trailed off. Lars looked at her expecting some poetic praise or something, but Wally looked too tired to receive it.

“That's fucking sick.”

“Yeah.”

“No, it's fucking sick. Fuck. Fuck you guys,” she said, turned her back on them and walked away, leaving them at the head of the walkway clutching paint cans. A sliding door opened on a balcony on the house next to the path and rumbled into silence. They stood still, shaded from view themselves by the fence.

“Holy...” said someone on the balcony. Lars moved his head slightly from side to side to catch a glimpse of the person through the slats of the fence. When he had had enough and gone back inside to alert whatever authorities he believed in, they ran down the path to the empty street. They found Emily not far ahead of them there, and crossed onto the pavement to pass her in silence. Within a block they had split up to head to their respective homes.

When Emily got home, she didn't need the key under the mat. The door was still unlocked.

11. To Walk A Dog

Jim has had six dogs in his life. His father gave him a yellow Lab puppy for his seventh birthday. It licked people in embarrassing places and it peed in the kitchen, but the people that hung around their home were understanding and the kitchen had good sealant around the edges, so it was okay, really. That dog was hit by a car two years later and they put her down. Three months later Jim's mom convinced his dad to try again, and they got him a mutt from the shelter. He was a pointy faced brown guy with floppy ears and scruffy hair. He had some liver problems and lived just long enough to knock up the German Shepherd down the street. They were pretty sure that was what happened, although no one was around to witness the event itself.

He walked his Basenji every day along the same route, because he knew that he wouldn't run into any other dogs there, and Basenjis don't take kindly to other dogs in their turf. Jim had picked Arturo a year and a half ago because he wanted an excuse to avoid dog owners. Jim likes to walk his dog early in the morning through the park by the school and the abandoned lot almost adjacent, because no one else walks their dogs there at those times, and the dog owners he runs into these days are not the dog owners of his youth. There are rich immigrant families with pit bulls and rottwielers who he would see a reluctant kid walking for a few months and then never see again. Probably ran away or taken by the pound or put down for biting someone. No one had a well-trained dog anymore. The few responsible dog owners he knew told him of more and more dog bites, and it was commonly known that people were simply not responsible with their pets anymore.

And Jim liked the cold.

The summer is not Jim's time. He likes to wake before dawn to sort of prepare for the sun before it arrives, and in the summer that means getting up very early, so he doesn't, and it bothers him. It chafes him all day if it’s bright out when he wakes. And he likes wearing heavy clothing – he would tell people that you can always put more clothes on if you're cold, but there's only so much you can take off before they take you away.

Jim's wife would not laugh, because even when she heard him say it for the first time, she could tell from the sound of his voice that he had said it a thousand times before, but she felt that there was no point not smiling and making a show of amusement because if he'd said it a thousand times, he wasn't going to stop saying it on her account. So Jim told jokes to the dog, and didn't mind when the dog didn't laugh either because the dog never seemed to care very much about anything he did. Arturo would give him a dirty look when he felt like investigating or hunting or preening (Basenji are fastidious) and the leash would not allow it. Otherwise, the dog id his thing and Jim did his, which was fine. A lifetime of dog ownership had lead him to a relaxed attitude to interspecies relations. He didn't need to be licked or sniffed or anything, and neither did his wife or his friends. He liked having the dog around, but didn't need to be its bum buddy, and Arturo felt the same, so it was all good between them.

So Jim and Arturo have seen many things together on their morning walks. Sometimes there are homeless people sleeping in some bushes or taking shelter under the awning of the school. Sometimes there are drugs deals. Sometimes there are coyotes sneaking around, watching from afar and hiding. Once there was a deer drinking from a puddle and he wished he had brought a camera. Whenever they spotted something interesting like that, one of them would look intently at it for a moment and the stillness would carry through the leash like current on a wire and the other would know immediately that something was up. They would frown or mutter but if Arturo tried to investigate or intervene Jim would hold the leash fast.

This time they saw some kids spray painting a wall. This is not an entirely foreign experience, even in the suburbs. There were two teenaged boys and a girl skulking behind them. He saw them only distantly from the opposite end of the park. On his way back some half an hour later, they were still there, though their respective positions had changed. From his perspective, he could see nothing of their subject matter, as he viewed them from the side as he neared the end of the park and could only see the distant one because of his greater height. From that distance and with his eyesight there was no chance of identifying them.

Soon he was home. The wife was up and preparing vegetables for an omelette. He would have to leave for work soon and didn't like big breakfasts, especially eggs because eggs made him gassy, but Jim and his wife were the type who wouldn't really talk about that. He just said “Eggs?” when they came in, without any inflection as if he'd forgotten how. Arturo immediately wandered off when he was released from his collar.

“Eggs,” she said. “And green onions and tomato. Maybe even salt and pepper.”

“Alright,” he said. She didn't get that she was being reprimanded, and he didn't get that she didn't get it.

“Some kids spray painting the school this morning.”

She whisked.

“Yeah?”

“Yup. Big.”

She nodded and whisked.

He looked at the words on the newspaper. Some of them were scary, but that was okay because he didn't read them.

“Should you call the police or the school?”

“Oh, no. They'll find out.

“Well, they could find out sooner.”

He shrugged. He pulled open the plain white drawer and stood facing the dining room with the phone book. The phone book was as useless at providing telephone numbers as the dog owners were incapable of taking care of their pets, so it took him a good twenty minutes of flipping, scanning and cursing to find anything like the right number. He plopped the phone book down on the counter and dialed the number.

“School Board 36 works department, can you hold please?” the phone said.

“Yeah,” Jim said to the phone.

Jim then looked at the clock and discovered that he could not, it fact hold, and felt a little bit that it had been irresponsible of him to mislead the poor School Board 36 works department on the subject.

“Shit,” he said. “Honey, can you take this, I've got to get ready.” He held the cordless out to her.

She diced.

“Not really.”

He didn't know what to do. He listened to the phone again in hopes that some person was there he could speak to, but only Elton John was there making highly subjective metaphors about lighting or something.

It takes Jim twenty six minutes to get ready after he's back from his walk. He wakes early and showers, then walks with Arturo, then shaves and dresses and whenever he hurries he cuts himself and his tie comes out crooked. However if he leaves late he may miss his bus (it arrives at the stop across the street no earlier than 8:09 and sometimes as late as 8:22, but he must be there at 8:09 just in case) and the next one isn't for half an hour which would lead him to the unforgivable failing of being late for work which he only is every few months. But if he cannot leave the phone, one of those terrible eventualities may come to pass. He must leave the phone. He phone is cordless, he remembers, and he can take it with him some of the way.

He carries the phone on his shoulder while he hastily selects a shirt and tie, hoping against hope that years of tying will guide his neckpiece somehow skukum as he thrusts the phone on the bed for a moment. When he picks it up again, a miracle! A human voice, unrecorded, comes forth! “...lo? Hello?”

“Yes!” he says, I need to report some spray-paint on a school.

“Hold on a moment while I direct your call, please.”

“Shit,” he told Elton John because there certainly was no one else in the room. He had to shave.

He took the phone with him into the bathroom. He could no longer postpone his daily depilation.

He was so flustered he forgot there would be no point in putting his tie on if he still had to shave. “Bloody,” he said, and brushed his teeth instead, wondering who at the school board works department was the Elton John nut and if anyone else out there knew about it because in his experience when it came to public education you couldn't wear perfectly normal eyeliner. The reader will please note that Jim went to High School when Poison was on the charts, and that the normal here therefore refers to the normal of 1986, which is fucking out there by everyone else's standards.

His teeth clean, he put the phone right down on the counter next to him and tried to shave with the water running quietly. He sprayed the shaving cream into his palm and waited a moment to see if the sound had drowned out a voice on the phone. He spread it across his face. Now he was committed. He began to shave.

Just as he had got from his cheek back to his jaw and was about to begin on the right side of his neck, he heard a definite voice on the phone. He threw down the razor with abandon, scattering shaving cream and stubble across the lavender counter. He snatched up the phone exultant at last and as he lifted his head again to regard his reflection he discovered, as the phone said “How can I help you?” that he had held to his left ear, and had consequently smeared the entire mouthpiece in shaving cream. A big glob of it he had wiped clean off of his cheek and now poked him in the nose.

He angrily wiped it away and said “I'd like to report some graffiti on a school.”

“Excuse me?”

“I'd like to report some graffiti?”

“I'm sorry, I can't hear you.”

Jim wiped some of the foam off of the phone, but there was clearly still bluish shaving cream blocking the mouthpiece holes.

“Hello?” he said.

“What?” said the phone, perfectly clearly.

He looked at his watch.

8:09.

Filled with anger, which was rare for Jim, he exercised that anger towards an institution of authority, which was even rarer. He swore one last time, hung up the phone, and put it on the counter.

And that is why no one at the works department knew about the mural before school started.

12. Inder: Tables and Chairs

In most places in the world, a table is a table and chair keeps your ass off the floor. But for some people, specifically people like Inder, it’s a little more.

You see, religions are funny things. At the heart, they bring people together and give them something to talk about and share, which is spiffy. Sometimes people say some pretty wacky things and sometimes people aren't so keen on sharing with people outside their religions, but those are not the things which concern us today, although they are certainly matters of undeniable import.

Today we are concerned with tables and chairs.

Inder is a Sikh, like a heck of a lot of people in Surrey, and like just about all of the people named Inder, and believe you me there's no shortage of them.

Sikh's have, like every religion, a set of quirky traditions and beliefs which outsiders often feel they are very silly about. Ask a catholic why they have to pray with a rosary, for instance. It’s a spiffy totem as far as totems go, but no more special than a yarmulke or a turban or a McDonald's hat in itself. Well, it’s certainly a good deal more aesthetically attractive than a McDonald's hat, and they're probably better made and... Well, forget the McDonald's hat, it was clearly a stupid example. Anyway.

One of the things Sikhs do is give away food at their temples to anyone who wants it. There are a variety of quirky traditions revolving around this regarding hand washing, shoe removal and gender segregation, but, again they are only some of the idiosyncrasies of the particular group and bear no strict relevance to this case.

The reason I mention all of this, as you may rightly be wondering, is that a certain one of these idiosyncrasies does bear relevance to our discussion of Inder as I hope to demonstrate.

In general, this food is served on the floor.

There are two reasons popularly given for this.

One is that, back in the day, the rich people around town would bring their own chairs with them so that they could sit comfortably above everyone else and, in all likelihood, have their servants feed them all the delicious free food (in turn, donated by the faithful).

Understandably, the early Sikhs didn't like this sort of behaviour. It sounds like a pretty ungrateful attitude to me, and I hope if you think about you agree it's at least pretty rude. Moreover, if you're the type to take things like humility and generosity seriously, as I expect the early Sikhs were, you fell compelled to tell them to go fuck themselves and stay at home if they're too good to sit on the ground like a normal person. However, being, again, the kind of people to take humility and generosity seriously, they felt more compelled to be polite about it, which is probably just as well for all concerned because these kinds of things can get violent even today, never mind the fifteenth century. So they made it a rule that everyone had to sit on the floor, or at least the chair-bringers were so cold-shouldered that they got the hint and left the chairs at home, perhaps with themselves in them.

The other story is more symbolic. In the temple they keep a copy of the Sikh holy book that the priests read out of while everyone around sits on the floor. Again, there are sundry other customs and traditions and beliefs concerning this whole arrangement from incense to circling the book during the wedding ceremony and to leaving donations and all kinds of texture and detail to the whole thing. In this case, the significant point is the position of the holy book. It sits on a fairly low cushiony display kind of thing with curtains around it. It is considered sacrilegious to sit above the holy book in the temple. This is symbolically logical in a way. It is considered sacrilegious to turn a cross the wrong way up or to pee in the font if you’re a Christian, so parking your rear in a position of more prominence than the holy book, you can see falls in the same category.

Now it seems likely to me that the two reasons are not mutually exclusive or even independent. I suspect that there were rich people sitting around on nice soft cushions piled up high as you please and that some clever Sikh cleric thought “holy heck he's farting at holy-book level” and started talking to the other clerics and eventually someone declared it was no good, no sir, no good at all. This all seems perfectly reasonable to me, and I hope to you too.

But how does this matter to us in the present? I'll tell you. There are tables and chairs in the free kitchen at one of the temples in Surrey. It's a pretty relaxed place compared to Sikh temples in other parts of the world, due to the long-standing Sikh population and their contact with the non-denominational-figure-of-evil-and-mischief-may-care attitude of the average Western Canadian to organized religion and dogma and ritual.

In the kitchen, they have tables and chairs. They are owned by the temple. Maybe they're donated too or maybe they bought them, the important thing is that they are provided for all to use in the kitchen, and all use them. This is in contrast to many of the other temples in Surrey whose goers sit on the floor for their food and sort of resent the flaunting of tradition (doctrinally justified tradition, no less) and made a bit of a deal about it at one point. Some Orthodox types were elected in the temple election and there was some contention about the whole issue and some people got rough and a guy got cut. This is unfortunate, but hey, it's no Spanish Inquisition. Anyway, it was a hot topic of discussion in the schools, bars, workplaces and bedrooms of Surrey for a few years, and Inder (being, as you will recall, a brown guy) was by no means excluded, although he participated in the discussion as little as possible.

“Yeah, they don't need tables,” he said when he visited his cousin on 88th, only he said it in Punjabi, which I don't know so you'll have to take my word for it that that's what he said, more or less, because it was. Really.

“Yeah, it's not that big a deal, the holy book's upstairs,” he said when he explained it to a white co-worker at the roofing outlet. This is true, at the temple in question the holy book is upstairs.

You see Inder, unlike just about all of the brown people in Surrey, really doesn't care that much about the chairs. He's sat on the floor, he's sat on a chair. He's sat in blue chairs and yellow chairs and he's sat facing north and facing south and facing east and facing west. He's crossed his legs with the right leg in front and with the left. He's gone to temple with brown friends and white, with Sikhs and Muslims and Atheists and whoever else was around. He's gone with his wife Cindy who doesn't worry too much about religion. She has a cross up in the hall but she takes it down when she knows his family's coming over because it isn't that important to her. He's gone with Kip who doesn't say anything about it except when the food isn't very good or the old guy sitting nearby smells, both of which happen sometimes.

While this subject is rampant in Surrey discussion in all circles, it is completely absent in their home. They don't talk about not because they have conflicting opinions that they don't want to express, but because they really don't care. It's in the paper, and Inder turns the page. It's on the news and no one clucks their tongue or mutters, they just wait for the piece to end. Once, when the guy was cut up and they showed a bunch of Sikhs on the news covered in blood and shouting at each other, Inder said “Huh,” in a kind of bemused way, exactly as he had when that old lady was arrested protesting logging in the interior and when that guy got a blowjob from his intern at work.

Contents: One (1) lemon.

13. Kip: The Ground, In Shadow And Light

The steel and the concrete and the drywall and the filth crawled up around you over the months until eventually it was too much like a school and you didn't go anymore. There were doors and locks, and though you found a key once in a room you couldn't name because it was not a place of names, you didn't want it because locks disgust you and to take the key would be to submit to the lock in a way – to become its master. And the master is always slave to his servants.

The very last time you walked around the building without entering. You saw Him entering with His key and you walked around the building watching through the windows for his silhouette in the halls and when you saw it you just keep walking because you knew by then that he must know you were there in his stupid way, from footprints and sounds and shadows. And if he didn't he should, shouldn't he? If he saw you then, he would do nothing. He could not then pretend to care, decide that time to take action, if he had decided not to all the dozens of times before. And if he hadn't noticed you, he is too incompetent to worry about.

So you walked around the building three times until you are tired because the adrenaline is gone and you see some kids across the field, outside the fence, and you don't want them to see you because you know they wouldn't suspect and it all sickened you. It was over. Whatever it would be, it would be, and you had seen all you would see.

Now the school has moved from the old building to the new, though both stand side by side and the dirty men in helmets who neither know nor care have moved from the one to the other. You've been inside with some people but it is hardly any different than it used to be although it was to them. You've seen dirt on floors before, and walked where you oughtn't and some men in helmets don't scare you. You avoid the asbestos, though, because it does not know day from night.

The new place if clean and new and white and plainly cheap. There is no texture, no detail. The walls are flat even when they curve, the windows square even when they are long. Every filthy thing in sight is coated in cheapness and daylight. You miss the smell of the empty halls and the damp night intruding, the damp insulation, the bare gypsum. The halls are filled with swarming idiots and whores and assholes who stink and jabber. This is a nightmare.

In the core of the building festers a human cesspit. The creatures converge, sliming out of their cracks and lairs to feed. The quiet and sneering art students with their guilty jokes which they think are racy but which aren't. The grease monkeys proud that they have a trade and securely jaded so that they don't care to look down on anyone. The nerds who are afraid to look down on anyone in case their newfound bubble of respect should burst around them and drop them into the void. And the arrogant brutes from the gymnasia thinking that they really do intimidate the rest. Many more who squirm around, homeless, relegated to the smallest crevices between the others.

They all pour down into the pit between the bells and writhe, raucous. Above there are balconies from which no one looks because the sight is too horrible. Some walk by, but the wickedness of the sight is too great, and they turn away their eyes.

But you don't.

You stand upon the balcony and watch them all. They come and go, they have their stupid dramas, or they try to. Most are jittering mockeries of real emotions, rough imitations by the fearful and alone.

Here is a jock, his hair is slicked and his nose is long. He takes a fancy to a nerd, with long hair she never lets down, but they only hold hands and sometimes kiss, you see as you watch them and the rest day after day. When they part you watch them closer and you see her face blank and his face blank and you know why. They hate each other, but they don't know how to do it properly so they play the one game they do and romance. One day they do not sit together. They sit with their old groups and each does not look back at the other although those around them do, in fear or in hope or in whatever it is that makes an animal look up into the darkness when there is no sound.

You watch and you watch and the days pass, and then the months pass and you watch them all. When you come and go, they others, the stragglers, the skittering remnants avoid you. Now, up here above, the halls are only sparsely populated. Meeklings congregate and scatter, chitter their little laughter above the omnivocal cafeteria below.

But what is lunch? What is this festival of the flesh to you? This Carnival?

There are classes, too, and, if you will, there are friends.

Take this English. Here you read about a guy who thinks about rye fields and lies, and bums around a bit. You get him but he's an annoying pussy, and you don't enjoy it. They ask you questions – What Does Holden Think? What Does Holden Say? Do You Believe Him? You say some things and write some words and when the discussions come around some are hopeful that you will laugh or disappear somehow. Maybe the bold ones hope you will share some insight. The Man is a little scared but her instincts run deep and she asks you anyway because she wants you to belong, so you will... What? So you will belong. And what more might one ask?

But yes, there are friends. Sometimes this guy Evan meets you at the balcony and he leans against the side facing the other way and you talk and he would say “Man, I hate this place,” or “You ever smoke?” or “You think she's hot?” or “Fuck,” and you would say you think that hate is a tame word. You would say that no, you don't smoke but you don't say that it’s because you are an oxyacetylene torch and your mixture is smokeless. You would say that she is a tumescent ambulatory neck wattle, and you say “damn fucking right, fuck”. You would sit in silence for a while and this time, you turn your back on the pit, as sometimes even you tire of watching it, and you see the rest passing on their errands. And he scratches his neck hair because that's all he has and says “I wish I could just kill these people,” and you say “Don't let me stop you.”

And he laughs without really laughing so it’s more like a sneer and you consider him. He is not particularly special in many ways. He is not more things than he is. He is not of an interesting religion or race. He is not a jock, a nerd, and artist or a grease monkey. He is not a shouting idiot atom in the shitstorm below. He is not a squirming coward looking for a home. You see him seeing the rest and he does. He sees them. They aren't just there, he considers them as you consider him.

“If I come and kill everyone, I won't kill you,” you say.

“Thanks,” he says. “I won't kill you either.”

And you turn back around and you look at them all and wonder. Their fates are so unwritten. You wonder how each of their little sparks may sputter here, in another place, soon or distantly. And yourself? Why, asking what will happen to you is like asking what happens to a bolt of lightning after the flash and the thunder. It's over. It doesn't need posterity. You would hate to be one of those poor forks caught on film for any faithless gawker to study and mock. To strike, to burn, to end is your way. The method and the legacy are not for you. And as you look down from your dark and pendulous balcony at the forest below and you feel their tips reaching out to you with staticy tendrils he turns and he looks too, and you think that yes, you will spare him if it comes to that.

And you watch them, you watch them all together, and you watch them apart. And the bell rings, and you tell the Man what he wants to hear and you don't look at the rest because you don't need to and the day ends, and you go. You go perhaps nowhere better or worse, but, like the thunder, you go.

You walk the dry streets – the semester is ending and the rain is gone. The sun is burning down and drying the air, the road, the sidewalk and the grasses. In the morning where once dew would drop like rain itself in the morning, now the leaves burn green and blow in the wind. Shadows shorten and sharpen and the animals of night are distant even then. You don't go out at night because the night is not, somehow, night enough. It is cool but not cold. It is moist but not wet. It is breezy but not chill. Any dirty fucker could walk these nights and they do, the dirty fuckers, they're everywhere with their underage drinking and their marijuana smoking and their fucking little romances and friendships and brooding and sulking.

It is all lies. It is all the murky shapes of night, isn't it? It is all a distorted shadow in the corner of an eye, a tree branch blowing into a billowing terror and back into nothing.

But then the lightning strikes and for a sudden, furious moment, all is revealed. The shadow monsters are gone because the only thing – the only real thing to fear is the light and the truth and the darkness after be damned.

14. Craig: But Enough About Me

I'm sure you want to know more about him, and I imagine most people don't have the hah-hah-it-is-to-laugh kind of unbiased opinion of him as me. I'll just use my superhuman ghost memory to describe our one meeting in more detail than I could have in life. It's one of the benefits of talking to you... from beyond the grave.

Because I'm dead. See chapter one.

So we met once. Okay, Yun and I didn't get along great, but our family didn't care much. So during that brief time they were dating, or around there, I was over at their place with my dad dropping off a circular saw he'd borrowed from them with which to cut planks for the fence which had blown down in the big storm of December 1st. The willow tree had flailed over the fence for hours and the shingles had flown off and the shitty old piece of crap fence our incompetent previous neighbours had slapped together out of fucking driftwood and popsicle sticks had flopped over like your mom on your kitchen table on Thursdays when I come over for lunch or even when I don't because I have her trained like that.

So the wind had stopped after that and left little leafy segments of willow branch across the three levels of the yard, draped across the cement retaining walls and caught on the stupid weather vane on the shed with the paddling duck that every body has. Everybody who just can't manage to be white enough any other way. I held up the posts while dad poured the cement and the new neighbours watched because dad wouldn't let them help. He was all disillusioned by the previous guys. When all that was done and we'd measured and cut and measured and cut and measured and fucking cut until the god damn sun went down and I didn't go the movies or play video games or even MSN the whole damn afternoon, when that was all over we took the saw back to Yun's family's place. I had to go too because that's how it is in our family.

So there I am, standing in the car like a pud because I don't need to go in or anything, really.

Then I think that, being as cold out as it still was, I may as fucking well go inside because the heater doesn't work very well and I didn't have the keys to turn in on anyway. Well, I don't know if they're just freakishly paranoid over there or they didn't like me or what, but I get over to the door of their yellow split-level with the peeling green trim (which somehow doesn't look utterly ugly together, go fig) and thinking what the hell it wouldn't be obviously creepy to just go in or anything, I go to open the door but its locked. Now I'm standing here like an idiot in the little sprinkly rain and the rapidly cooling outside when I could have been at least sitting down, out of the rain and somewhat insulated in the car.

Well by this point my alia is clearly iacta est as they say, so I knock. No one comes to the door, but I can hear voices somewhere. Not distinct enough to determine if they're close or not, there's nothing to do but wait. So I wait. And knock again. Soon enough I give up (I didn't want to ring the bell or anything, like some kind of animal) and I turn to go back to the car and the door unlocks. I turn back around and wait a second. No one opens it but I didn't hear them leaving or anything (not that I heard them coming) so I figure I'll knock before they leave. So I do. So the door opens. And there he is. This tiny freak – you have to remember, I was fifteen and he was thirteen, and these things make a big difference when you're alive and a teenager – this tiny freak is standing there with a bath towel around his head and a pillowcase draped over his arm like a waiter's little napkinny thing.

“Belcome in, sirdr,” he says in this silly indian accent. He bows and the towel drops onto the sill. He snatches it up and smushes it on his head.

I didn't know what to say, so I didn't.

“Pdease, sirdr, may I teahk yoah coht?”

“No thanks,” I say, but I went in anyway, and Yun bursts out laughing on the steps above like an idiot girl, which is two of the many things she is.

“Oh, pdease sirdr, I must inseest,” he said and bobbed a little in a really inconsistent way. Like, it wasn't like he bobbed the same way he had when he first held the towel on his head, no. He did some sideways twisty thing to keep the towel out of his face. Yun had calmed down because really, it wasn't that funny. She was just smiling now, but I still felt the need to get out of there. I really just wanted to get inside and wait while my dad talked about stocks with my uncle, and if it wasn't for Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Fucktard over here I would have just stood there and maybe peeked through some drawers and pinched a mint or whatever presented itself. There was some weird african mask things on the wall. Those would have been good for a solid minute of blank stare and shiver. There were keys on a hook, and surely some of them would be exotic, unorthodox keys – those four-sided ones they use for anti-theft devices, the matched pairs for my uncle’s old truck – and then there are the attachments. Garage door openers, bottle openers, decorative doodads and gewgaws. There was a decorative trim around the top of the room. All of this and a thousand other insignificant details awaited my uninterested eye. When my dad came back and said “Cold?” to me and shook my uncle's hand and we left, why, I might be discovered looking out of a window, at a picture, up the stairs, at the book on coffee table.

But no.

No, I could do none of that with the Shah of Poo-ran and the Empress Gigglepants. So I had to make my way into the house. Now, this was a complex proposition in itself. I couldn't very well ask my waiter where I could find my dad and uncle, and I couldn't hear them anywhere and follow the sound, but if I just started wandering around I might very well go the wrong way and have to come back, looking like an idiot.

I was beginning to feel that my dies were getting cast a bit more than I particularly liked, but you gotta know when to hold 'em and know when to roll 'em, I guess, so I rolled 'em and I said “Where's your dad?” to Yun because I sure wasn't going to talk to the other one, let me tell you.

“They're on the deck,” she said.

“Pdease, det me escoht you, sirdr,” this Kip guy said.

Again, this was one of those situations. I obviously didn't want him opening the door for me – and if I let him escort me, he might well take me someplace else, anyway – and I couldn't tell him no because then I would be admitting that I didn't want him around, and that's what he wanted. We had nephews and nieces, you see, and I had learned how to deal with them. When they want attention, if they do not get it, they'll go away. So I had to ignore him.

But I still didn't know where the deck was. There was a living room attached to the entryway above and a closed door below. I did not, unfortunately, recall at that point whether the deck was on the ground floor or above, but I didn't have a heck of a lot of choice because the guy says “Dis way, sirdr,” and bends over and climbs the stairs around Yun. He bends so low he almost hits his head on the steps, but he is in no danger of hitting Yun because she's a skinny asian girl. So I follow him.

Turns out he's not bullshitting me about the location, but he slinks away once I'm in sight of the sliding door to the deck and I don't have an obvious excuse for being there anymore. I mean, if I'd turned up attended by the idiot towelhead (and I'm not being racist here, either, remember), then it would have been clear I was trying to get away from him but I could no more stand in the kitchen like a pud and wait until they came through than I could stand in the doorway like a pud and wait for the others to leave. So I open the sliding door, or at least I try to, but it’s locked. So I flip the catch thing and I try to open it again but again it doesn't move. And there's my dad and my uncle who notice me now and now I look like even more of a sissy crybaby mama's boy who's afraid to stay in the car all alone in case the boogey man comes and steals his M&Ms because I have to fiddle with the lower-down catch thing on the ground that people usually only use at night.

Duh, I realise. No wonder they didn't answer the door for so long. So I diddle the little thing and unlock the door and rumble it open (damn but those things are loud) and there they are, and my uncle nods and my dad turns back to the yard and says “Yeah, you should look into that mower blade, cause that'll save you a lot of grief later on,” and then he turns to me and he says “Cold?” and I really look a fucking idiot because I obviously didn't mind the cold so much if I came back the fuck outside thank you very much fucking fuckity fuck.

“No radio,” I say, which is really degrading because then I sound like a whiny bitch instead of a class-A internationally competing professional moran.

And that's exactly how they nod, is like I'm a pussy teenager and when they were kids they didn't come running inside because they were deprived of entertainment for five minutes and actually its a lot like the way your mom nods when she's on my junk because she has the mad neck motion like that and some seriously flexible throat muscles from all the cock.

15. Leto: The Mighty Fraser

Leto did not want to go camping, but Yun did, and Yun was the girl so they went. Unfortunately, Yun was too busy to make the arrangements so Leto had to do that, too. But it was her car, so it wasn't all bad.

She picked him up at five pm. on the Friday just before you-know-what happened. He was waiting with the sleeping bag, the tent and cooler full of food, which they would likely be eating cold. They had only four meals they had to eat there, and they could perhaps stretch the food out to five if they really had to. Mostly it was cans of chunky soup, granola bars and sandwich-related supplies. The uncanned meats would have to go first, which meant honey ham sandwiches for late dinner that night or breakfast in the morning (she hated roast beef sandwiches, so it was always ham) and the bacon kept for the last day if their willpower and ice held out that long. She was covering the gas, the transportation and the site fees. Everything else was all him. He had directions from mapquest and printouts from google maps. He had the address and fees copied down on the back of one. He had not shaved in a week and a half so that he might look old enough to get the site unmolested.

They loaded the bags in the trunk and the back seat with the cooler in the footwell behind her. There was space as she was short and asian. He fastened his belt and arranged his Duo-tang of Direction.

“Are Lars and Wally coming?” she asked as she pulled the purple civic out of the cul-de-sac.

“They don't like camping,” he said. He did not say “and they don't have to because they aren't dating you,” but he did think it.

The sun was getting high this time of year. It was still clear sunshine with only a few white globs mostly hidden by the running trees of the suburbs. Down the streets and then down the roads they drove.

“Are we heading to number ten?” she asked as they passed 64th avenue.

“Yup,” he said.

“Not too far out, I hope.”

“Langley, only.”

“Oh.”

She wanted to go as far from civilization as possible, but she didn't want to be on the highway for more than half an hour, and it was clearly his fault that the shape of the fucking universe did not cater to her convenience.

Okay, that was cruel. Really, he understands that highway driving is no less tedious for the driver and I guess if you're gonna let any stupid thing you can't change piss you off, it doesn't matter what exactly it is, that much. And he guesses that we all do.

Soon the housey plateau dropped behind them and they dove to the flat, low farmlands.

“So where are we headed, exactly?”

Leto looked up from the maps at the highway and it ran out ahead of his eyes as far as he could see until it was just a line on the hill on the other side of Surrey and even there it just ran straight up without wavering and over the hill to perhaps another farmy plain and another and another and a deeper and a deeper until they were all around the earth and arrived in Delta somewhere at a massive cliff they could never re-ascend and the journey back would be unbearable as they were so close to home already.

“Fort Langley,” he said.

“Fort Langley?”

“Fort Langley.”

“Fort Langley.”

“Yup.”

The plain passed in silence. An endless greenhouse consumed a green field on the left so slowly it would take a year to double but it would cover the world in a lifetime. A truck drove in front of them, a rectilinear honeycomb of the kind the legends said carried chickens although no clucking or feathers or even motion were evident.

A sedan drove beside them with a mustachioed old man who was too tall to fit in it. Behind them was a truck. No one passed anyone very much for once.

“So what's on the menu?”

“Sandwiches first,” he said.

“Ham?”

He nodded.

“I love ham.”

He nodded.

“Put on a CD.”

“Where's the case?”

She looked around and plucked it from the door pocket.

Pop-punk, scary wailing chinese ladies, top fourty and oldies. He put on The Killers because he actually liked them and didn't care about the lyrics or the music.

The building and the trees returned and lifted them up out of the valley into the other world of Cloverdale. At first the unbelievable whiteness of it all is strange even to Leto, who is as white as an albino coke dealer's pickled septum. Four-wheel drive vehicles have clearly been taken off-road. Personal pickup trucks bear marks of carrying heavy loads. Though specific incidences may be fleeting and hard to catch, there is a feeling that if you nodded and said hello to a passerby, they might answer you, and in English to boot. It just isn't natural to an honest Surreyite.

“Those wife-beating posters are wasted on the Skytrain stations,” she said, pointing at some yokels.

This, too, was true.

Soon Cloverdale was over and the faint attar of cow poop was soon forgotten.

“Left here,” he said.

“Langley Bypass?”

“Good job, you can read. Maybe you can poop by yourself soon.”

“Maybe you can suck my ass.”

“Can I?”

“No.”

“Well, not if you've been pooping.”

“How about not if you shut up?”

“Ehr, I guess I have to keep talking then?”

“No.”

The sucky bit of the album was starting and wouldn't be ending until the end of the album, but Leto didn't feel like being one of those twitchy passengers who changes the disc every five minutes so he left it. It would be good practice for when they were all alone in the minimal wilderness of Fort Langley.

Langley is a different thing entirely. Here is no outpost of stinky hicks, irregularly shaven monkeys, tipping the cows that don't put out and jeering anyone whose drink leaves them sighted. They have little boutiquey shops, they've seen them. There's a Ten Thousand Villages and the fair trade coffee house and the tiny, ruined music studio, the last two of which they'd seen bands in although only the Ethical Addictions show was any good. There was an art store and a used video game place and god damn culture and such out here. Less than half a dozen Starbucks in the city proper. It was disturbingly utopian, and when it ended it was almost a relief.

And soon they were at the campsite. It was just by the highway. In fact, it was really just by the highway, as in directly adjacent to it. There were throngs of children in the pool. There were drunken college kids in the sites all around them. There was the filthy, frigid Fraser running by.

But as disgusting as the Fraser was, it was quiet, so the water was where they went after the tents were set up and the sandwiches made. They sat on the grass behind the little muddy beach under the trees and past the field. The water was unnervingly close and alive and opaque.

They laid out their towels and Leto saw the water and wondered what it was doing in there to churn so.

They held hands and he wondered where it was all going to that it would rush together so forcefully.

They ate their sandwiches and he wondered what it was made of that it was so brown.

It churned like a living incorporeal serpent, somehow more powerful than its physical form belied.

In the distance, a blimp flew, but it was too far and kept disappearing behind the taller trees so that they couldn't identify it, but it held Yun's attention as they sat and didn't talk very much.

Discarded by one of the innumerable crotchlings, a stick lay nearby. Leto took it and poked the sand, slowly chewing his last triangle of mayoey of sandwich, until he turned up, to his surprise, a fish hook embedded in the wood.

It was only a little rusty, but surely steeped in the ungodly silt of the river. “Some larva,” Leto thought, “has cheated Darwin today.” A thought struck him and he stood to pace the beach. His quest was an easy one for in ten minutes he had a good ten feet of fishing line tied together and hanging from the end of his stick. It was a dry and barky affair but it felt sturdy and satisfying.

“You're joking,” Yun said from the trees.

He made a show of pulling the meat out of his last piece of sandwich and eating the rest – realising a moment later that his hands were, by now, anything but clean – folded the meat several times and affixed it to the barbed and rusty hook.

He cast his line a pathetic distance out into the water and the current pulled it along to the shore in barely more than seconds. He cast it again and it came in again. She came and stood beside him and held her arm around his waist and kissed his shoulder as he watched the line swing back around again. This time, as he pulled the line in by hand, he felt a tug.

“Holy shit, I think I've got something!” he said.

“Holy shit,” she said.

He pulled it up and it was a blue condom.

“That's what you get for using meat,” she said.

When they got back to civilization and washed the Fraser mists off of themselves, Leto curled up alone and listened to old time radio until midnight, and he felt cleaner from that than the soap and water.

16. Lars: Readin' A Book

Now Lars' parents don't have much of a care for their kids' day to day adventures, the blessed devils, and just to play on the safe side, he spent the night over there after they painted the mural. You see, to prepare for the mural session, he'd gone to bed earlier and earlier and gradually left for school earlier and earlier (although he hadn't actually gone to school early, don't worry) and his fam were used to him waking some of them when he left as they were light sleepers and their house was echoey and squeakily floored. He thought they were the sort to think he'd simply not waken them this time and not worry a bit. So round the back of Wally's place – closer to both schools than Lars' place and no inquisitive younger siblings – they traded their rough old painting bags for their rough old school bags, festooned with valuable buttons not to be invested in a bag that might have to be dropped in case of police, and sharpie tattooed with intricate patterns and complex scripts.

So, equipped, the popped in for quick showers and Wally busted out the pizza pops for some celebratory grub.

“Math?” said Lars, because that's what he thought they had first thing.

Wally took a tiny nibble off the end of his pizza pop to blow on it, and said “IT.”

Lars burned his tongue instead. “Shith,” he said through his cheesy mouth plasma. “I thought it was D first.”

“C.”

“Shit.”

For Lars had slept early last night and so had not printed out his English essay yet, and now would have to do so before school rather than at lunch. But on they ate and away they went to school, a bit early to facilitate printing, and on the way as the sky bluened and they discussed smoking a bowl.

They did not.

Soon the school was before them and the normalcy was creepy, really. All kinds of people were walking by as if nothing was happening. Somewhere, perhaps, children were crying and all they could see was poop-eating gay furries but here no one knew, including them. The nerdy mom-surrogate supervisors didn't know and probably would have looked a lot more suspicious even than they did if they had. The librarian didn't know and, as they had their student IDs, he didn't care and only would have looked down over his glasses at them if they had. After the printing was done and the holes punched and a staple cajoled out of some brown girl, they were ready to go to class.

“Well,” Wally said.

“See you in Math,” Lars said.

“Suppose we'll hear about it before then?”

“Nah. Not unless someone goes crazy and kills someone about it.”

“True. Math.” This last accompanied an arm raising wave, a turn and a final separation and Lars felt like a terrible, terrible, monstrous person for a moment as he stood there in the hallway with the early crowds passing him and he saw some girls practicing their cheers or whatever down below, in the empty cafeteria. It was another twenty minutes to class and Lars did not know what to do with his time. On one hand, he could sit at a table down the hall and fear or guilt or sleep, but he might never wake if he did because it had been a tiring morning. He wondered if perhaps he had some other task he might undertake in preparation for the looming day. Math? Done, for once. Drama? What little he needed memorized he had, indeed a bit of it had ended up in a bubbly throw up the other day. There was nothing critical up in English as they'd just had a test. He resolved to read ahead in The Mountain And The Valley. He sat at the table in the Math wing by the stairs and he read, or tried to. He simply could not get into the thing. It was too slow and descriptive and quiet and fucking maritime and he just couldn't bear to look at it for more than an hour at a time but he only had a quarter or so of that so that was fine.

The guy in the book fell from the barn rafters and burned his face on a barrel, finally. He'd had this aching scar at the prologue that Phibbs, the English teacher, had been harping on about or hours and Lars knew some entirely uncelebratory satisfaction that he now knew how it happened although he wouldn't know until class tomorrow what it was supposed to mean when someone led the class onto the subject.

So he read for a bit and some stupid kid came by and sat at his table and wheezed and did his grade eight math all wrong which was disgusting. He looked over at his messy, huge letters every minute or so and each time he'd done some simple algebra clearly wrong, so clearly wrong it even looked wrong to the casual glance upside-down across a table. Numerators and denominators transposed. Wildly incorrect single-digit multiplication. He couldn't stop looking as long as he kept making such terrible errors. Eventually the kid noticed and watched him every time he looked, as if he was going to stab him for his long division. When the bell rang the kid stared at him with his great gooey sow eyes and waited for him to finish tucking The Mountain And The Valley into his bag before he made a single move to collect his things. The crowds had thickened around him, human colonies filling available hallspace like spores in agar. He cut through them and felt dirty, which he was. He was filthy from adrenaline sweat and fumes and god damn tired. It was only eight o'clock and it felt like lunchtime despite his week of sleep training. His own dirtiness mercifully hid the stank of the student body from him, though, and he only felt a little guilty for contributing to it.

English was, in a way, a tedious experience because of his meagre foreknowledge. All this talk of pigs and cleanliness and oinking and such was entrancing more than interesting. He felt kind of zen. It was like the first time he'd smoked up at lunch and spherical trigonometry had completely blown his mind but no one around him had noticed. They all glared their vacant angry faces toward the uncaring front of the room and he couldn't understand why they didn't even notice. Not just notice that math was crazy but notice that he'd noticed. He was much better at math since then.

But this time the simple familiarity and mundanity of the discourse made it like a monastery or something, where people sit still for hours and are dead serious about doing so, as if the fate of the world or at least the monastery or at least themselves depended on their intensity of purposelessness. This was all so normal and guarded.

“Why are we doing this?” he said at last, out loud.

“Excuse me?” Phibbs said.

“He's so restrained and bottled up. Why are we, too? Shouldn't we learn from David not to be so stiff and... and fake?”

“Maybe, maybe that was Buckler's point in writing him like that.”

“Whatever, his point isn't my point. I mean, he complains all the time that he wishes he would just do things instead of thinking and maybe saying them. Whatever, Buckler. David tells us we should be honest.”

“Yeah.”

“I think this class is boring.”

Phibbs smiled and pushed his glasses up his nose and waved his hand nervously the way he did when someone challenged him or he didn't know something or both. “Well, ah, that's great that you can share that, congratulations.”

“Thanks. I'm gonna go now.”

He picked up his bag, his binder and his book and he wound through the surprised faces towards the door. “Gonna read this in the hall,” he said.

“Well, alright then,” Phibbs said, flapping his hands in his lap in defeat. He closed the door behind him and walked down the empty hall past the old grad photo displays to the table where he sat and he read and despite the long and overcoloured descriptions he was into it. He didn't notice consciously, but he heard, around the corner and down a ways, the stairway door opening and closing a moment later and some footsteps moving into the English wing. A door was knocked on. Said door opened. A moment later he heard a surprising bang, which he did notice, and then the door opened again. He looked up in a bit of surprise, because loud noises don't belong in the monastic prison of high school. The footsteps returned and brought around the corner towards him a guy in black. He had his hands in his pockets and his hair cut down to the scalp although he recognised him from some class they'd shared last year as some weirdo with an inexplicably white name.

The guy stopped dead and looked right at him in the eye and he said “What are you doing?”

“Readin' a book,” Lars said.

“Cool,” the guy said. Lars went back to his book and the guy walked on across the main upstairs passageway to the socials wing. A minute later when he was just forgetting about the whole thing he heard another bang and this time he was unequivocally intrigued. The PA beeped at the school a moment later as the guy walked calmly and solemnly back from the other wing with his hands again firmly in his coat pockets. He broke into a jog down past the balcony over the cafeteria and the PA spoke.

“Attention all staff,” it said, “please remember to keep students out of the hallways during the superintendent's visit.”

Lars' normally dormant spirit was already roused by his work of the morning and now his physical weariness dropped off and he positively leaped up to look down the hallway where the guy had gone. He jogged with his hands in his pockets, still. Lars himself jogged over to the balcony to look down into the cafeteria and peer down into it. It was empty. He looked back down the hall to see the guy scamper into the science wing. He crossed over to the stairs to peer down them, and they too were empty. Wherever this superintendent was, Lars thought, he's being sneaky about it. As he stood there in confusion and what can only be described as alarm some completely different footsteps ran around the corner from the English wing and completely tackled him to the floor and squished him right good. Lars was quite surprised and really quite afraid at this point. SOMEthing was going on, with a capital SOME.

“Dude,” he gurgled into the floor. The footsteps reminded him of a Socials teacher and in a moment he realised that they were. “Dude, I didn't do anything, it was that guy,” he said and tried to jiggle whatever parts of him he could move towards the distant end of the hallway.

“No, not him,” a frightened woman said. Suddenly he was just lying on the ground all on his own and someone muttered “Sorry,” and the Socials teacher was away down the hall accompanied by the frightened woman and some people screamed and shouted somewhere. Lars picked himself up. His tooth was chipped and his lip bleeding. He ran.

17. Emily: Get Down

Emily saw Wally and Lars in the library out of the corner of her eye on her way to her locker that morning. She was already amazed enough that she'd gone and sat there while they did their stupid dirty mural all over the elementary school and when she saw them it was weird and she wanted to sleep because the half hour or so she'd gotten before school was totally unsatisfactory. Sometimes a nap is really refreshing and when you wake up you can go for another six hours before you blink but this was not one of those naps. This was one of those naps where your body or your brain or your sleep gland or whatever just gets rollin' and then you go and fuck its shit all up and it gets bitter and bitches at you for the rest of the day that you should get your ass someplace comfy and lay down because you aren't gonna be able to see straight or make useful words or anything anyway. So, her stuff gotten, she retired to the counseling department where they have comfy couches and they're all understanding if you're god damn fucking tired. Much to her surprise, Wally was there when she arrived.

He was sitting on one of the comfy chairs in the tiny waiting room space with his eyes closed and his head leaning back against the wall. His blue backpack was in his lap and the lights were off. This is not uncommon in the waiting room of the counseling department, as it is surrounded by windows and every other room in the building is full of eyelid-twitching neck-crimping retina-searing fluorescent lights and utterly white walls. Emily stood there in the hall with the door open for a moment wondering what to do. She kind of didn't want to see Wally again. But she wanted to sit down someplace comfy and dark and quiet, which was only here in the whole school.

“Don't be shy,” Wally said without opening his eyes.

Then again, she didn't want to see Wally again. So she let go of the door and left.

But where to go? There wasn't much point now, as the stress and effort of finding another suitable place would negate any benefit she might gain therefrom, the big-nosed dicklick. And a pervert. And kind of smelly.

She realised then that she was still standing in the hallway outside of the waiting room and muttering insults under her breath, which was still somewhat therapeutic but not quite satisfying.

She could fink.

The office was right next to her. Understanding administrators were all around. Hell, she could say she was so traumatised by the whole shebangabang that she couldn't go to class today. But then she'd be a rat, and a collaborator and a traitor and she'd end up shaking somebody's hand or talking to police or reporters and that would all be unconscionable.

The door opened behind her.

“Hey,” Wally said. She had to turn around.

“Hey.”

“Looking for a place to nap?” he said, and waved sleepily at the room behind him, his eyelids steady as a rock and his face refreshed and calm. She set her jaw and pointed her eyes at him, holding them straight and open with all of her might and said “Yeah.”

“Be my guest,” he said and held open the door for her. “I'm off to class.” And as he said this the warning bell pinged. She had only a few minutes before class started but decided that a moment's rest would be worth it and she entered and watched him leave with a little bow and an adjustment of his sailor toque. She sat on the comfy chair and she leaned back her head unto the wall and held her bag in her lap liker a teddy bear with pokey book insides and dropped right the fuck to sleep. She almost awoke when the second bell rang but decided on balance to sleep all day instead. There was some commotion a few minutes later, but she slept through it. Then there were people shouting and when she opened her eyes she saw a glob of students pressing down the hall with nervous teachers and some office staff behind them.

And then the fire alarm went off.

Well, she thought, I guess I'm off the hook for class.

The stood up and stretched and went out into the hall and as she was yawning and just a moment from turning down the hall to follow the crowd someone grabbed her by the arm and yanked her along quite forcefully.

“Hey, I'm comin' already,” she told that skinny science teacher with the cockeyed glasses but as she dragged her down the hall she just kept squeezing harder and harder and pulling harder and harder until Emily pried her wrinkly talons off her arm and swore at her.

The lady looked up in shock as if noticing she were a person for the first time. It only lasted a moment, though, and she grabbed his wrist and said “Come on now,” and pulled a little easier, without digging her barbs in so much. Emily tried to one-handedly swing her bag up on her shoulder but they reached the corner and the lady yanked on her arm again as they rounded it. She dropped the bag and it slid and span across the linoleum in front of some other kids coming from the other hall. She tried to reach it but the woman's grip was still iron despite its relocation and defanging. For an instant she thought her shoulder pop out. The woman pulled her through the door and she somehow caught the eye of a kid in the other group.

“Can you grab that for me?” she said, but there was no chance she was louder than the fire alarm and they were all too spooked to care. The first few went around it but when she looked back a moment later and they had passed it, it was still there on the floor, smushed and kicked to the side.

She turned back to the fell creature that led her like a lodestone to the field and she glared. The woman had regained her composure and then some, and didn't take the slightest notice. Her knot of stinky children were even more suspicious than the one behind them and as the alarm bell receded Emily became suspicious, too. The students were all looking at the school and talking loudly and animatedly, so that she could almost hear the sound of their collective voices tussling in vain like a detuned orchestra. It was the staff, though. The staff were spooked. They strutted like herons above the younger classes and crowded at the front of the older ones, snapping at any who tried to pass them, always turning to the school. A vice principal and two counselors patrolled the front of the mass assembling on the raised field before the school and their walkie talkies to their ears to hear over the noise.

Something was up, in a big way.

“You can let go of me, now,” she said to the woman, trusting that they were now far enough away to discourse like rational beings.

The woman did not respond or acknowledge her in any way except to slow a little, but they were still walking very fast and her wrist was getting quite sore.

This is enough, she thought and she wrenched her hand free again, but this time she sped kept walking alongside the woman so she would have no excuse to seize her again. The woman was clearly in no mood to let any student out of her sight, so she would likely be stuck with her grade eights for the duration of whatever it was.

As they reached the other side of the parking lot she heard sirens somewhere but couldn't tell which kind or where.

“So what's up,” she asked the lady.

“Alright children,” the woman hollered at her flock, waving her arms like she could magically command them with her dangly wrist-beads, not to mention adding insult to injury by calling her a child. “Please stay calm, everything is going to be fine. I am going to check now if anyone is missing.” Emily realised she had some kind of accent and it distracted her for a second as she began to sift the crowd for her charges. Emily turned from them to the school to see what was so exciting.

It wasn't on fire, that she could see. There was no smoke above and all of the windows were empty and steadily lit. Administrators passed before her talking closely into their radios so that she could overhear nothing.

“What class should you be in?” the lady asked.

“What?”

“What class are you supposed to be in?”

“Uhh, English with Mr. Phibbs. No, Math. Silen. It's D, right? Silen.”

If she was being this compliant and the school wasn't even on fire or anything then there was going to be hell to pay when this was all over.

On the other hand, she wasn't feeling sleepy anymore. The crowds thrummed behind her across the field and there was evidence of all kinds of miniature dramas. Some people were crying and there were sharp movements sometimes in the corners of her vision. She felt as if she was being left out.

A police car pulled around through the parking lot between the field and the school. An administrator was detaching from the front lines to meet it when she saw, above his head across the way, one last person exiting the school. In a second the administrator noticed them, too, and stopped.

A wordless exchange took place from the line along the top of the hill to the tall man in the bow tie at the bottom. The participants looked quickly from each other to the student in the ratty black denim coat to the police car. The crowd at large made no sign of noticing, although some were pointing at the police car.

The guy walking towards the crowd had reached the parking lot and was heading directly towards the middle of the front line. The admins congregated loosely down there with the gait of defensive wolves. The police car had silenced its sirens and its contents were now slowly and steadily flanking that same spot. Their hands, she could not help but notice, were on their guns.

It was at this moment that she realised that Wally was right next to her.

“What the fuck, eh?” he said.

“Fuck you,” she said.

He shook his head. “Dude. Someone's about to get shot and you're worried about that?”

“Fuck. You.”

“Woah,” he said as the approaching guy pulled what looked undeniably like a gun out of his pocket and pointed it upwards. He was nearing one end of a long line of cars in the parking lot, the two police officers at the end.

“Oh shit,” she said as the thing in his hand made a noise undeniably like a gun firing and then all hell broke loose all over the place.

Some people shouted “Get down!”, some people shouted “Get him!”, a lot of people shouted or screamed or swore or gasped out unintelligible things and in the chaos and confusion she lost her view of the parking lot, the police, the admins and the guy. She heard some more shots, and she ran.

18. Counsel

The high school counselor is a singular breed. They range from the austere to the zany and from the considerate to the objectivist, although the tendency is certainly towards a certain end of either spectrum. Any vocation which specifically entails assisting others in hardship naturally attracts the compassionate more than the callous, although it often seems otherwise to those in their care. A person in traction might have a low opinion of the empathy of their nurse simply because their professionality can at least seem to be detachment. In truth, a nurse or a high school counselor or a food bank volunteer is more likely to give blood or donate to charity. The group is still, by no means, homogenous, however.

To illustrate the range that the species may exhibit within a single habitat, we will take for example Mr. Hornridge and Mrs. Adell. They are counselors at the high school with which, I believe, you are familiar. Furthermore I believe that in disclosing the matters I am about to discuss I will not be including you in any confidence to which you are not privy.

We shall begin with the case of “Wally” Henriksen.

The student body is divided, for counseling purposes, alphabetically by their last names. Henriksen falls in the range of Mr. Hornridge. As Mrs. Adell is new to the department this year and with the ever-increasing student body to divide between the finite resources of the counselors, the portfolio of each varies from year to year. The only other time that Henriksen has made use of counseling services was in eight grade, shortly after the death of his cousin. Often the counseling needs of students are humble and straightforward, and this was such a case. He spoke with Mr. Singh, who is now no longer a counselor here, for some ten or fifteen minutes about this cousin and the imminent memorial service, specifically his minimal responsibilities therein.

“Well, you won't have to say or do anything you don't want to. It's basically an opportunity for people in your family to come together and share their feelings and their grief. No one is obligated to do anything they don't want to. You won't have to give a speech or anything, just go and be there and share your feelings with your family.

He cried for a few minutes, and Mr. Singh comforted him with a pat on the back and when he telephoned the family after the service he was assured that Henriksen was grieving but well. Everyone was satisfied.

But children change quite drastically throughout adolescence and that incident did not inform the next. For the next year Wally had little dealings with the administration and none with the counseling department except for routine course selection issues. He had drifted a little in his academics, experiencing varying successes and challenges in a variety of subjects without a definite gift or disability. He would achieve averagely or better in generalized science, but when he took chemistry he barely passed. He did not possess a significant aptitude in any field.

But near the end of the first term of the ninth grade his academic performance dropped across the board. His various teachers were concerned that he was not feeling involved in the academic life of the school, and that he seemed detached from his meagre social groups. One of them asked Mr. Hornridge to speak with him on the subject, and he was called down on the PA during that teacher's class. There was snow on the ground and the sky was a grim dark gray, almost black, even though lunch had just ended. There was a pall over the world that made the school seem almost a relic from the lost side of an apocalypse, an impossible place that whose place in the world had gone. The floors were slick and muddy, the doors all shut, the heating system struggling to make up for the thousand cracks and seams of the lowest-bidder building and the open doors of students' passing.

He kept his office door open.

Wally stood in the doorway silently and Hornridge had to turn to see him. “Wally,” he said. “Come in and have a seat.”

Wally felt this somehow presumptuous and rude. He had no idea why he had been asked to come and had no particular reason of his own to want to be there. However, being invited, he was compelled to comply to avoid being even ruder. So he stepped as little inside the door as he had to in order to close it. He sat stiffly on the chair with his bag on his back and his elbows on his knees. Hornridge closed the document he was working on and turned back to find thin eyebrows raised at him, and a round jaw clenched.

“Um,” he said, his bowl of mints providing little comfort even to him. “How are your classes?”

“Fine,” he said. Was there some reason behind this visit? Was this some pathetic social call?

“Oh yeah? I heard you haven't been doing very well in History.”

“Nope.”

“Did you want to talk about it?”

He considered.

“No.”

“Okay. Can I ask why not?”

He considered some more.

“No.”

“Um. Alright then. Well, your teachers are concerned, and I'm concerned, so if you have anything you do want to talk about, come and talk to us, okay?”

“Okay.” He had not moved since he sat and didn't move now.

“Well, thanks for your time, then.”

“Alright.” Now he stood and opened the door and with a glance back to see if anything further would be required of him, he left. Hornridge sat in his chair and leaned back, which he rarely allowed himself to do because it hurt his back if he did it for too long. He was stumped. There was no sense that Wally was engaging him in any kind of power struggle, or challenging his authority in any way. He simply obeyed exactly as much as he had to and would not engage him further. The boy was like a slippery stone. He responded to no force or influence and Hornridge couldn't even get a grip on him.

Students are naturally inquisitive and social, and Hornridge thought he had succeeded in producing a comfortable and interesting environment, and the majority of students responded. He had years of counseling training enabling him to assist most students with their problems. This guy he just couldn't get a grip on.

Wally walked directly back to class, frustrated. How exactly did dragging him out of class help him in his classes? What did this chump think he was going to achieve? Was he just going to answer his questions? Provide him with all of the answers to life's questions? Explain why life is great and people are wonderful and everyone should be friends, especially with flaky dickwads like him?

No, Wally thought. No.

And sure enough, when Wally returned to class he was so distracted by his anger and disgust that he hardly noticed a thing for the rest of the day. His grades did not improve on his Socials exam. He didn't study, he didn't finish the essay, he didn't do well on the multiple choice. He was now failing Socials and very unprepared for his imminent English essay.

But that was not the end of the affair.

That Thursday he sat alone at lunch at a bench beneath the stairs in the courtyard. It was an unpopular place, and he sat there when didn't feel sociable, which was often because there was no one around worth talking to.

It was, however, a commonly defaced area. The rough kids with knives would carve initials into the bench wood. Wally would read them and ponder them as he ate his simple homemade sandwich. Mrs. Adell was known for eating alone in different places in the school, quietly and aloof. This particular Thursday, she came and sat at the next bench over to him.

Wally stopped eating his sandwich when she sat. He was surprised and unsure of what to do. He certainly felt entitled to sit where he was, as he had at the least got there first. It is not the place of ninth graders to assert their rights when dealing with their superiors, though, and he was nervous.

The lady ignored him.

He watched her for a moment. Eventually she looked up and they made eye contact. She nodded, but she did not smile. He felt inexplicably grave, like he was back at his cousin's funeral. He ate his sandwich some more. She ate her soup from a styrofoam bowl with a plain spoon. They sat in silence at adjacent tables. She glanced at some papers she had with her without significant interest. Eventually she looked up again and their eyes met.

Nothing happened.

Some five minutes passed. He finished his sandwich and she almost finished her soup, holding spoonfuls in the air and occasionally blowing on them.

Then their eyes met again.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

There was some more silence.

“Good sandwich?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Good soup.”

“It's alright. Needs salt.”

Somehow his conversation seemed inadequate. He didn't say anything anymore, but looked at the wall where some rough graffiti had been powerwashed off, leaving a ghostly light patch in the shape of the original.

“Interesting, isn't it?”

He didn't know what she meant and was afraid that he was supposed to. “What?”

“That and these,” she said, pointing to a name carved on the bench beside her. “People put them up, people take them down. People put them up. Is it the same people each time? You know what I think,” she said, lowered her spoon and leaned over a little. “I think some of the graffiti is done by the cleaning people.”

This seemed silly.

“I think the cleaning people work for the school board.”

“Yeah, I guess not,” she said. She seemed genuinely disappointed, although not very much.

“Some kids from here did that,” she said and pointed to the wall ghost.

“Did they get caught?”

“No, I just saw them. Nice kids.”

And the next day, he bought his first can.

19. Cindy: Aftermath

When there's something exciting going down like this, the police find out. In this case, it went like this. After Mr. Phibbs was shot, one of his students had the presence of mind to pick up the phone and dial 911. The phones do not automatically connect to an outside line, however. One must dial nine for an outside line, so when Sharon dialed 911 she was connected to the office where the phone was answered by a woman named. Coincidently, Sharon. Sharon thought Sharon was the 911 dispatcher, even though all Sharon had said was “Office” and nothing to the effect “911 dispatch, what is your emergency?” Sharon was understandably distracted and essentially didn't care who she was talking to when she whimpered and she stuttered and choked and told Sharon that some guy had shot Mr. Phibbs and maybe he was a grade eleven and maybe he was a grade twelve and he was pretty sure he was a student but maybe he was indian and maybe he wasn't and maybe he was still around and maybe he was out in the hall listening and she had to go.

Sharon was a worldly woman, however, and knowing that kids have stress and don't always deal with very well it, she knew that she and her workmates were at even more risk of their personal safety than most. Indeed, it is impossible to protect oneself from every conceivable threat of violence. Criminal justice, police and incarceration may deter the chronically violent or limit their opportunities to harm others, but every person who passes you on the street could likely stab or choke you without anyone being able to prevent them. We must all trust in the people and force around us, else we could not walk down the street. We could only burrow in bunkers with guns and live off of canned tomatoes and go crazy, if we wanted to be completely safe. But high schools are more dramatic places than you normally find in the real world. So when she heard the blubbering and the trauma, she remembered the bang she'd heard in the distance. Just then there was another one and she jumped half out of her seat and snapped her fingers in the air over and over as she dialed nine for an outside line and called 911. Everyone turned to her in annoyance, including one of the vice principals who was milling around and the mailman who was carrying a sack of outgoing mail past her, the only person wearing shorts for fifty miles.

“I need to report a school shooting,” she said. She told them the name of the school and as she spoke it her audience did not yet wonder what the name would sound like on the television, but they would not have to see it for a time, at least.

There was a moment of silence and stillness, before even their faces moved. The mailman kept walking for a moment. The other office staff almost glared back at her desk, their eyes unfocused and half-aimed. The vice principal still looked up over his glasses from the attendance reports. He was the first to react. He put down the folder and raised his head, and only then did the mail man stop in his tracks.

The office staff looked back and forth between each other.

There are contingencies planned for these things. The vice principal turned on his heel and strode fast down the attached hallway to inform the administration, his walkie talkie suddenly squawking as he raised the receive volume. The office staff dropped the tasks they had been previously occupied with.

“I'm sorry,” one said to a phone, “I'm afraid I'm going to have to call you back, we're having an emergency here.” Another shut down her email client and saved a draft. Another pulled the fire alarm. The mail man stood in his tracks and watched it all and wondered.

There was clear evidence to him of planning on the part of the school, although he was quite ignorant of the details of such plans. Perhaps if the minister of education had been visiting, there would be considerations for him or her in these plans, but a passing mailman probably fell outside of the scope of their plans. Also, he didn't want to be shot. He considered looking for a free staff person like that guy in the brown shirt with the suspenders who'd just run off down the corridor, but the alarm went off and he reconsidered. He had his bag of mail. He just kept walking. He walked, faster and faster, out through the tiny foyer of the office and through the front doors of the school, looking up behind him at the library window above and back down before him to his mail truck parked before the huge, empty, open entranceway. His truck was very far away. There was no one visible before him in the parking lot. His red and white truck sat alone, awaiting him like a sailor's wife. It seemed like a mile to it and he looked back again just to be sure and there was still no one on the ground floor beyond the doorway but there was some kind of movement visible through the library window. He turned back and leapt in his truck, feeling exposed. The motor started and he got out of dodge.

But the authorities were informed. As with the school, society at large has contingency plans. The 911 operator dispatched emergency services. Police did their police thing, firetrucks raced down 72nd ave with their sirens, and ambulance drivers abandoned their doughnuts. Of perhaps more interest is how the event spread through the rest of the city.

There are news services who monitor emergency radio frequencies to find news, and they came. But it would be some time before their equipment was set up and they were able to broadcast useful information. Still further until it had become common knowledge, as we do not all have our televisions on all of the time.

For instance, the mother.

Inder was at work, and Cindy had recently got back from working the morning shift at the Tim Hortons on 96th and King George. She sat in the kitchen and sipped her double double. The walls were stained with years of Inder's smoking. They would never paint. Unless there was significant damage to a wall that would be unavoidably noticeable, they would not repaint. They would keep their cabinets as long as they worked, and they had served sturdily for a long time so they would likely do so for a long time yet. She sat among them and she read the paper, which was an average paper. People were killed by natural disasters. People were killed by people. People stole. People faced hardships. People were stupid. It was just like not reading the paper, except when she read the paper she had things to talk about. She didn't really talk to people at work, because she didn't like work and talking to people just made it all the more real. But she had friends, and some of them she knew through work although none of them worked there now. She would talk with them about the terrible things in the paper and they would all kind of hate the people in the paper because they were suffering so loudly. Sure, Tim Hortons blew fat goat in terms of employment standards, sure she had thousands of customers a day and barely a one looked her in the eye or thanked her. Sure she did not know she was going to ever pay off their house, or that her kids would graduate and be happy or that she'd live through the day, but she could keep her mouth shut about it. It seemed that for every person the paper wanted her to feel sorry for, there were other people she knew in similar or worse situations.

Or they had problems that didn't mean anything to her. You've got a wall and armed soldiers in your neighbourhood? You've got no clean water? These things are easy to understand conceptually as undesirable, objectionable, tragic, and other things. But knowledge is not feeling, and those stories meant nothing to her except that she knew it could be worse. The stories that did mean something to her, the familiar ones, just showed her that it was already pretty bad.

So as she read the paper, she heard the screen door open. She listened for the doorbell. Perhaps a delivery? It was not. The door opened. The door closed. She heard shoes removed and thrown in the shoe pile by the door, and from the sound she knew that it was Kip because Inder always tucks his in the same certain spot along the wall with a thump.

She felt like being alone, so she didn't say anything, although another time she might have called out. He bumped around for a few minutes. She had heard sirens in the distance but ignored them. Now they were closer and not diminishing. She heard Kip coming up the stairs but he did not enter the kitchen where she sat. She saw him through the kitchen door, passing down the hall towards his bedroom, but only peripherally. She read the paper. The sirens continued to louden. Soon it became apparent they must be virtually outside her house. She stood with her coffee in hand and walked, sipping and blowing, through the kitchen and into the brown living room. To her surprise, there were two police cars parked in front of her house, with their sirens howling and their lights spinning. Police officers scurried around them. In a moment, another police car drove up. She froze.

She dropped her coffee and it spilled across the carpet.

From down the hallway she heard a tremendous crack as if the house had split in half.

The sirens stopped and a voice spoke from outside, but she did not hear it. Her legs carried her somehow down the hall and into the bedroom.

She found Kip, and Kip was dead.

20. Kip: The River, Rushing and Fallen

You sneak out of your house early because the journey is long and the busses don't run all night. Your father is drunk on cheap whiskey and your mother on her hatred of him. You walk west. You walk along the road while the cars pass, empty. The little puddles in the asphalt leap up and trickle back into their dwellings. There is a frozen fire in the air. The road rises and the road falls and you walk in the rain in a waterproof coat of blue and jeans of black and your short hair flying in the little gusts of wind you feel like the season and the place and the man and everything. Here at last is the bus loop, Scott Road, the theatre's last patrons just leaving and still huddling for warmth like a child would fear a kitchen knife. You turn up the road past the houses and you feel their window eyes on you but still you walk and you walk and by now your pants are soaked through and your flesh is chill as the night. You know they can see nothing important.

At the bus loop there is no shelter but you do not have to wait long. It is like a lucky chance that your bus arrives, isn't it? Isn't it like a jackal might find a lone and wounded fawn? You wonder if you'll spook it. Your instincts say you must have it to live, you must catch and crush and kill the bus. You sneak up to it with your head crouched and your shoulders up as if to look small and harmless. The door stays shut and you slink off again to bide your time. You must not lose it. The cold comes at you all over again beside the concrete hut in the bus loop where the coffee machine is and the lights and the warmth. Newspapers.

He could go in there, but he won't. He doesn't.

The bus coughs into life again and you come forward, almost supplicant now. The doors eventually slide open.

The driver doesn't even look at your ticket, so you don't put it in the machine and he doesn't say anything. You sit in the middle. It is a split level bus, and you sit at the end of the lower level, tucked out of sight. Behind the lower section at the front and hidden from the rear by a flat gray divider. An old woman boards. Where she waited you cannot imagine. She sits far in the back and sleeps. A hooded man with his head down low comes in and sits near the front and twitches his feet, his elbows on his hands. There is the driver, and there is you. You all sit in the churning false-light until he moves and the light goes. He moves and the bus moves. The bus pulls around the loop and runs out into Scott Road.

You ride in silence and darkness except for the engine roaring and jumping to the rear and the flashes of headlights and streetlights and floodlights all around. You know outside is another world. You know that your people – half your people – are all around you. They work here and shop here and you've been to all of the places here before. Somewhere out there is your barber. Somewhere is the place your grandmother gets her pomegranates. Somewhere out there is some place and you don't care about it because it’s out there and you aren't. You are in the bus with the hooded man and the sleeping old lady and the blind, squirming bus-demon. Time passes like a puddle outside. You plow through it and it sprays away and slinks back. Like a transverse avenue – here for a forever moment, and then gone.

Always upward. Bobbing up and down but always more up than down. And then always down, and around and eventually the bus limps into a kind of grave.

Scott Road.

You stand hunched beneath the Skytrain station and beneath the train who whines in over the water and will soon whine back across to the other world. All around the station is parking. All around the parking is trees, freeway, industrial. This is where Scott Road comes to die.

You go towards the water. Now you are at last alone.

Still, there are the cars, but they are nothing and it is easy to forget them when they go so fast. It is wetter here although the rain has stopped. You reach a split in the road and see, across a long way of walking on shoulder gravel, with ghostly cars and trucks hissing and splashing past from behind you. They cannot see you, you know.

A giant car hydraulic ride on the cement wall beside you in mural, like a naked thigh or a breaching sea beast. No one is there now, but you are sure some eye still watches. After a long and miserable block, you reach the overpass and begin to ascend. It is like climbing to the clouds. You turn sharply North again and cross the running traffic like a river. You are alone at the apex of the gentle arch. You are alone at the other end when you switchback down to the ground. It leaves you down on the Earthly plain facing into the little streets of Bridgeview.

Here, alone, at last, there is a man asleep beneath the ramp down. You stop and stand there and survey the new land you have discovered and he does not move. You shuffle a little closer to him, conscious of your need to keep moving. To stay warm. To stay. Perhaps it is a man. It is wrapped up in an old red sleeping bag against the pillar of the overpass and motionless. The sleep of the just? The sleep of the living?

There is a sign, you realize. Weighted with rocks, you can barely make it out because it is wet and dark and worn and messy.

“$1.35 away from taking over the world” it says. There is also a colourless broken backpack adjacent, near the head end of the sleeping bag.

You have two bus passes in your inside coat pocket, dry. You turn away so the sound of your zipped will not wake them. You find a palm-sized rock to hold it down with in the wind, and you place one bus pass in the dense wooden bowl. You zip up your jacket now and walk into the streets and houses. There are trailers to the left. The last of the industrial places for a while, on the right. The rest is houses, all down the hill. You go down and down through them. Dogs bark sometimes. At one point, a pack of kids walk up the other side of the street, some kind of smoke escaping from them. There is a park on your left. It is so dark you almost cry. There are real trees in there, though only a few and the grass about them is freshly mown. But there, perhaps, is a shadow deep enough for a monster. You cut across the park and stop for a moment under the living and freezing sway of the leaves. The dance among themselves and sing to you but your path is long and cold and you must continue. The park transforms at last into a massive muddy square with a bare corner: a baseball diamond. You stay well away from the high fence in the corner and walk behind it, down, down the hill again. It becomes steep at last and you descend to the road bordering the river. It is for a while almost an alleyway through which you descend. In a break in the traffic which you detect from the silence and not with your eyes, you cross.

But on the other side you must go back to the right to get farther down. There are train tracks ahead, you know, and the water. Cargo ships sleep here offload on to the iron crawlers and slink away. You go just a little further down until you are at last in the empty, foreign world of the river.

And there are trees. You go among the real, thick trees and down to the water. Down to the Fraser. Down to the mud. Down through the current of runoff coming down the hill and washing away the meagre path and among whatever living things may be called here too. You sneak up on the final shore.

The tide is high.

A long series of logs float in the water, tied to posts barely visible above the black and brown wavelets. Cars rush still in the distance behind you and across in New Westminster where a road runs along the shore from the bridge. When you bend down to the water and your toes sink into the mud you can hear the water bubbling along the grassy edge of the river. You can feel the still and freezing rush of it. You can feel the whole of Surrey behind you, seething and chomping. A silty calm spot sits out in the middle of the river with two little tufts of life on it, logs and logs and logs tied all around. Across on the other side is more dirty, anonymous and nightless industry. You turn to walk along the shore and your eye catches a glint of light off of a flat surface in the water. What could it be? It is, indeed, in the water, too. You backtrack and look for a disturbance in the flow of opaque water. There it is. You reach your hand into the water. You gently feel, your fingers already numb and stiff from the air which is cold enough. You find a smooth, hard edged object. You reach around it and it shifts in the silt. You calm yourself and seek a grip on the thing before the current slips it away. You pull it out and rinse off the mud.

You hold in your frozen hand a pistol.

You love this page so much.

21. Ten O’clock

Here is Emily. She has run from her school. What has happened at the school? She does not know. She knows she cannot be there. She looks for a street and people. There are some police somewhere nearby. She's no idiot. She knows where there's police and sirens there's trouble and she's had enough trouble for the day. She finds the street, which isn't hard because it covers the whole side of the school grounds that the field is on. She hears the grinding and whining and snarling of the cars down the street and feels the pattering rain like terrible little diamonds falling and melting and running off into the gutter. Down the street. She seems like she's run forever to a strange place and she stops to rest. When she looks up there are crowds running past her, filling the sidewalk and overflowing into the street. Horns and cars. The crowd has no face. The crowd has a hundred frightened faces.

She has not actually gone very far. She would regret not trying harder in P.E. if there was time. There isn't. The crowd shoves her and she falls to the grass on a lawn by the sidewalk. The grass is in her face for a moment and then a tremendous force throws her down onto the ground again. Soon there is another impact and her knee twists on an unnatural axis. There is yet another impact.

Here is Lars. He is long away from the school. The fire alarm started when he was half-way down the stairs and no one else had poked their head out of a classroom by the time he was out of the building. He is a skinny boy and he walks a lot and under the circumstances he runs pretty far and pretty fast. He gets home and dives behind the hedge on the lawn and lays there, panting and wet-faced and sweating everywhere. He lost a shoe.

In a minute his mother runs out in, of all things, a frilly blue apron. “What the fuck?” she says. “Are you okay, Lars?” She dusts him with flour and globs of dough when she kneels down to put her hands on him.

He nods and pants and her hands burn on his chest.

“What happened?” she says, because school'd barely started and he was rarely home soon after it was over.

“Guy. Gun. At school.”

“Oh my god!” she yelped. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

This is Craig. He's at home, at his parent's place. He's on the couch watching a rerun of The Daily Show. On the ads, he's finishing his math homework. He integrates some numbers. He resolves some functions. He solves for x. He scratches his cheek. He gets pen on his hand but he wipes it off before it dries and it barely leaves a mark. He thinks he'll make a sandwich for lunch. He's glad his schedule had changed and he gets Wednesdays off.

This is Wally. He still is sitting at his desk at the school in front of the computer he was working at. There is a perforate IT teacher in the room. At least he assumes there is, because he saw that guy shoot his IT teacher and his IT teacher fall down behind his desk, but he has yet to move his head to the side of his monitor to see if, in fact, he is still there. By all logic, there is probably a dead guy up there, but Wally does not feel particularly familiar with logic at the moment. He reaches his hand up and pulls off his Jacque Cousteau toque and ruffled his dirty blond hair and held his head in his hands.

The door is next to the teacher's desk.

He considers the windows, but they are not wide enough. Perhaps, he thinks, if he looks out the window at the sky, when he turns back his vision will be too clouded by the light difference inside to see anything but the door. He turns his head to the window and stands and walks to it and looks through at the sky. There's an awful lot of people out on the field, and it distracts him from the sky. There's that guy walking towards them. He's got his gun in the air. He dives behind a car and there are more shots. Wally realizes that there are police in the parking lot, shooting at the guy. Serves him right, the jerk. Teachers may suck, but Wally liked IT and that guy had totally ruined his class. Maybe even the whole course. The guy ran away out of his sight, ducked down, his path continuing the rough line of the parked cars.

Wally turned from the window, completely forgetting for an instant why he'd looked out of it in the first place.

“Well, shit,” he said.

There was all kinds of blood over there. Damn, he looked like an idiot, too. The shocked and pained look was really almost comically out of place by this point. There was nothing for it. He scooped up his bag and tried not to step in anything. He was halfway down the stairs when he realized he had a problem. He lived to the east of the school. That guy had been going towards the east side of the school. Maybe he would run up to the street when he was away from the parking lot, but most likely he would go out through one of the back paths and through the side streets. On sober reflection, he decided to sit on the steps and shake for a while. He realized he'd dropped his toque somewhere, too.

He could feel the emptiness of the whole building and the tenseness and mystery of the grounds. His face screwed up painfully and his eyes burned and he wanted to curl up and wail but there was no space on the steps. He had to stand up and walk down the stairs to the landing and curl up there, sitting on the floor with his head between his knees and his bag beside him. Somewhere some doors opened and some people said something.

The fire alarm cut sharply off and his head felt empty.

Eventually the paramedics find him. They scampered up the stairs.

“Are you alright?” one of them said. He looked at them because he's kind of in shock.

“Are you hurt?”

He shakes his head. They knelt down around him and produced instruments.

“No,” he says, and pointed up the stairs.

“Dude up there.”

They looked at each other briefly and one of them nodded at the other, who snagged up his stuff and ran up the stairs.

“Can you walk?” the man asks.

“No. Here, I'll get out of your way.” He scooted over into the corner of the landing and dragged his bag behind him.

“If you can walk, you should probably get out of here.”

“No.”

“I have to insist, I can't leave you here.”

He shook his head.

“It isn't safe here, and I can't leave you.” He hadn't stood yet.

“You should go see that guy upstairs,” he said. “Two-eleven. Some guy shot him.”

The paramedic looked just a little bit frustrated. Just then some footsteps came up the stairs and brought a policewoman with them and the two of them decided that they would just have to leave him if lives were at stake and all, so they went up. The paramedic let the policewoman go first. She looked bulky and scared, but Wally thought that was because of the body armour and the gun. And also because she really was scared.

Once they were out of sight at the top of the stairs he crawled over to the other side of the landing so he could see the floor below. There was no one in sight. He looked out the mirror behind him. No one there either. There was a door to the outside at the bottom of the stairs. He threw an arm through a loop of his bag and snuck down to the ground floor. He felt like an intruder or a jail breaker. He saw someone in the distance walking either directly towards or directly away from him. He could hear the footsteps. They were almost in the middle of the building, near the cafeteria. He only saw them for a second because he immediately ran around the base of the stairs and jumped under some tables that had been stacked, with some chairs, underneath the landing. He waited for a while. When it was quiet, he looked out. No one. He wormed out and opened the door, half expecting it to be locked or an alarm to go off. It opened just like it always opened. The gate in the high fence that blocked the space between the two wings was open. He ran down the exposed distance and through the gate and away from the street to the North. He came to the dumpster and leant against it for a little cover, even though it stank. His heart was beating painfully hard and louder than the wind and the growing rain. To the southwest the field was empty but for emergency types, occupied with emergencies. To the southeast he heard a dog bark. Ahead the lights flashing on the fences and the houses along the edge of the grounds grew brighter and slower. A police car was nearing, cautiously. He had moments. He peeked around the dumpster and there were four officers with a dog by the walkway. They went down the path away from him and he made his break. He walked calmly down the gravelly path to the walkway. They were out of sight. He continued down to the trees at the south side of the park where he knew there were other pathways.

He waited in the trees for a moment and surveyed the field. Some kids lay on the ground and some sat in the mud with blood on them. There were stretchers laid out. Police around and no one paying too much attention anymore. Some more police cars sat in the parking lot of the park. The rain fell harder and harder.

This is Vice Principal Dhaliwal. He was just pacing back and forth behind the school, his charges nestled below the building behind the line of portables. Technically, they are off of school property and in the adjoining park. An invisible line runs up along the steep but short hill between the two and he patrols the ditch along it like a World War I trench. His radio was in his hand. Its hard plastic edges are worn from his year and a half of carrying it. There is a smooth part where he keeps his index finger when he pressed the send button. A little clump of samosa crust caught in the speaker grill. The fake leather carrying case split and peeling where it sat in his palm. He paces like a caged animal. His hair is trimmed short and his face bears only a moustache and he rarely goes to temple except for special occasions.

This is the Woodshop teacher, Mr. Singh. He stands before his class calmly, facing the building but turning back often to see his students and his sombre attitude holds still, awash with the jittery, tense crowd like an old tarred pillar on the beach. His class and those around are calmer than the rest. They cower from the rain less, and stand straight and look at the school expectantly, instead of furtively from under their hands. His beard is long and his turban is turning a vivid yellow as the rain spatters it.

As Mr. Dhaliwal nears Mr. Singh a skinny skater boy calls to him.

“Hey, Mr. Dhaliwal,” he says, “Is there a fire?”

Hey turns his body for only a moment and he says with gravity, “Just sit tight, Gregory.”

He turns back forward and on the way he meets the eye of Mr. Singh. The burly man says “I bet you wished you had a kirpan.”

He can't even think of a think to say to that to dismiss it because he's been thinking about it himself. His walkie talkie has whispered a secret in his ear that is only spoken aloud in his eyes, to every student behind him and to every teacher he passes trying to watch over and control them. Who was the most afraid was a pointless question compared to the worries his knowledge brought him.

What if he came across the boy himself? What if he came out right here, before him, what if he spotted this Kip between the portables trying to break through to the crowd and beyond... or worse. If it came to that, he would have to resolve to force, although the effectiveness of such force was unknowable. The boy was armed. Would he be a human shield? Should he attract the boy's fire and move away from the students, to expend his ammunition?

His polished black shoes are caked with mud from the ditchy length along the bottom of the hill. He cannot spare a glance for his step and nearly slips.

What if it had happened just then? When he had his back turned or was too far away? What if he couldn't draw fire or what if... There was no use worrying but there was no way to stop. The sirens in the distance mock him. What if it’s all too late? If there is a justice or a safety to come afterwards, what if the have already lost their opportunity? If this can happen once, could it not happen again? How might it be prevented? Somehow he couldn't bear the thought of metal detectors and locker searches. It seemed all cruel and somehow useless all of the sudden. What could he do? Somewhere, something was happening but as he looked about himself and held his radio firmly up all he saw was still people and all he heard was static and the echo of the shot and the screaming of the crowd on the other side of the school. For a terrible, lonely second there were five hundred deer in that field, stiff and elegantly alert and then there were a thousand stampeding beasts running forward and backward and away. Only around himself and Mr. Singh stayed a pocket of relative calm, where they all, staff and student alike, cast about in confusion. Another shot shouted out in the distance but now there was no chance of echo over the screams of fear, the screams of anger and the screams, perhaps, of the trampled.

Here is Evan. He’s standing in the crowd in silence and looking at everyone and trying not to smile too much. His face is cramped with the effort. His nose dripped rainwater down in front of him as he hunched over in the rain. Evan loves the rain. Evan loves the tangible fear of the crowd, the cowering jocks and the shivering nerds. Beside him, he hears this:

“It’s that Oswald kid. He’s such a creep. He totally shot Mr. Phibbs in the face.”

“Mr. Phibbs is over there, dumbass.”

“Your face is over there, bitch.”

“Fuck you.”

“Yeah, fuck me.”

“Pffuh”

Oswald, he thinks, and he looks through the crowd, following his memory to another cluster farther from the school, a Mechanics class with a gangly man in shorts standing, muttering in the middle of them. He stood as if untouched by the rain and the wind, falling and blowing as strong now as they were likely to, straight up with his arms folded, a clear head above everyone around him. His students. Among them, the greasy pimply malcontent Oswald. Some jock shoved another into his view and he forgot about Oswald.

“Fucking gora,” one said.

“Fuck you,” the other said. They shoved each other and stepped back and forth from one foot to the other. Evan thought of a pair of acrobats tightrope-walking in parallel, maneuvering closer to each other in preparation for some elaborate froofy loop-swing thing. He couldn’t hold it in anymore and laughed out loud, a low and cruel laugh. One of the things turned towards him but his partner did not and when the first was forced to turn back to maintain his place in the pack, Evan laughed again, quieter and bleaker. He felt like he was waiting for a bus on a corner downtown or something. Standing around, alone, amidst a bunch of other people standing around, alone for their own reasons. It was funny for a moment that they all didn’t realise it, but he was not bold enough to laugh out loud amongst the strangers for the same reason. Another gust blew cold rain on his pointy face and he shivered. He took a few steps out away from the pack but his teacher called “Evan,” and he couldn’t pretend not to hear. He turned back to the woman and her face wasn’t worth defying. For a moment it was almost there in here eyes: the truth. His kind might rise up against her. Might already be doing so.

He forgot her. Evan figures he’s some kind of secret Dalai Lama spirit ninja guy. He figures if they chain your body, leave it behind. He turns to the east and stares blankly into the distance and he forgets the teacher. He forgets the rain on his face and the wind blowing his matted hair in his eyes. He forgets the jocks and the teachers and their little lies and dreams and circuses. He forgets the sirens. He forgets that he forgets them. He does not hear or see or smell or taste or feel anything until he sees some guy run out from around the corner of the building and hide behind the dumpster at the end of the parking lot. It takes him a moment to realise he’s seen it. In a few seconds, the guy walks calmly across the field to the south side. For a moment he expects the police and their dog heading away down the walkway will see him, but they turn down the street just a moment before he reaches the path. He wonders if he could see the guy’s balls from here. Evan looks around himself to see if anyone else has noticed him. No one seems to. All eyes are turned towards the central joint of the school. The high glass wall of the atrium/cafeteria. The gaze of a gray cyclops.

He resolves to stare it down. After a few minutes of aching eyes – which he forgets – someone bumps him and he forgets what he’s doing and looks away. He shrugs his skinny shoulders, hunches over again so that the rain runs down his nose. He looks through the crowd to the south and the guy is gone. Only then does he look around himself. Almost everyone is gone. One of the jocks is lying on the ground, rolling back and forth on the ground, holding his side. Others are bleeding through wet clothes. There is crying.

“Oh shit,” he says.

On the outskirts of the field, the skinny little indian and asian girls were nervously edging off of the field. There were police officers over there. A paramedic bandaged a girl and looked up around, panicked and surprised. There was a kind of tension in his face. He didn’t know if he could keep it all up. Off in the parking lot, a news van pulled up. Evan looked at the ground around him. It was wet and slippery but solid. He went home and watched the rest on the TV.

In an hour his uncle phoned him up at home alone and asked him “isn’t that your school on the T.V.?”

“Yup.”

Evan’s uncle is a secret shopper at the Superstore. His family doesn’t talk to him unless they have to.

“You alright, kiddo?”

“Yeah.”

There was a pause.

“Your parent’s home?”

“Nope.”

And then a few minutes later, his mom phoned from work.

“You alright, kiddo?”

“Yup.”

“Your dad home yet?”

“Nope.”

“Don’t go out till he gets back, okay?”

“Sure.”

“I’m gonna be late but don’t go anywhere, okay?”

“Yeah.”

He started making a grilled cheese sandwich because, well, cheese is awesome and grilling complements it. Grilled cheese is good food. He stood and leaned against the counter and watched the thing cook. He listened to the radio. No one was apparently dead. People were shocked. It was like a saturday morning special. Golly, shucks, isn’t this tragic. People cry. People bleed. People don’t understand. People do understand. The phone rang again and Evan picked it up and it was his dad.

“Yeah, I’m gonna be late. You okay?”

“Sure.”

“Alright. If your mom phones, tell her I’m gonna be late. You got food.”

“Grilled cheese.”

“Okay. There’s ham in the fridge, it you want that in, too.”

“Okay.”

“Take care.”

“Bye.”

Evan’s dad is a joke. He’s going to be late because he thinks that working late at his shitty job will impress the missus and the boss, even though he manages a coffee shop and there’s nothing to do but polish the empty tables and the other manager just keeps arriving later and later for the evening shift. Evan puts some honey ham in his sandwich even though he doesn’t like honey ham and everyone knows it. He puts two slices in as the T.V. says that a suspect was injured in a police incident.

“Who the hell is that?” he asks his sandwich when they show his picture. The age of the face is right, but the haircut, the jacket and the look are out of time. The picture is clearly at least three or four years old. This guy didn’t go to their school. Did some former student come back and shoot people?

“Yeah right,” he confided to the sandwich. It was brown and he flipped it.

“I bet it was Kip.”

He wandered through the house as the second side of his sandwich cooked. He considered the stereo, but there was no music he felt like listening to. He considered the TV guide, but there was nothing good on. Ever. He considered the news. The train wreck factor cinched it. He could play video games any time, but real live local front page gore only comes around once a lifetime.

Here is Lars. He is across the street and standing in the parking lot of the samosa place down the way. He is almost in line with the back edge of the park, the farthest open area of the school grounds from the street. From here he decides he can see if something dangerous is coming. His eye is so intensely turned towards the distant school and the churning crowd emptying down below it that he barely hears the sirens and only knows that they are becoming loud to the point of a kind of sonic violence. They are bursting in on his ears and he thinks about his mural. The sirens are supposed to be there and The Man is supposed to be clucking his tongue at that and casting about in despair at the unsolvable offences of the world. Suddenly a white Crown Victoria leaps past his eye in a blur and the siren spikes and chokes as the doppler shift switches it from high-pitch to low. It slides up onto the grass verge that marks the edge of the park and twists slightly out of control, bumping the right rear fender into the low wooden fence that lines it. Another car charges up beside it and pulls over at a sharper angle to the fence, its rear wheels skidding with the turn. Officers extrude from each of them and confer unintelligibly. They cast their eyes over their shoulders a few times until one of them lights on Lars and his jaw hanging and his broken face turned dead on the school like it was a weight attached to his tongue. The officers confer and look at him and one just steps from the rest to cross the street, but as he looks for traffic to stop to allow him across, the shot. He stops and the officers all look back towards the school and the field and down the street. The other shot spurs the crowd to frenzy. The officers see it too, and spread across the line of the park edge to contain them and keep order.

Lars sees the crowd coming and Lars knows better than to hang around and wait for the stink to restore order. He sets off down the street at a jog, in the direction of the elementary school and his home.

He barely hears the loud and official voices of the officers over the screaming and the sirens. The loudspeaker that follows is no clearer. He does not look back and he does not look at the shocked faces of the people in the windows and on the lawns of the houses along the street. Soon the jocks are running past him. The elementary is close and you peel away from the growing smear of fleeing students into its grounds. All of its windows are closed. A plain white truck is parked in the gravel field near the piece. He drops from his lung-burning jog to a sore walk towards it. There are two men, only a few years older than himself, painting over the mural. They roll away, but they look at him nervously. They know he isn't supposed to be there, but they have no authority or inclination for trouble.

This is the two painters. They are part-time graffitists themselves, and normally when the job is over or if they are left unsupervised while covering something, they mutter in their white paper caps and coveralls that it’s a fine work, or an amateur work, or a promising work or a disgusting mess of gang-tagging, as the case may be, but this time they are silent. They were professionally painting away, thankfully under the fretting eye of a principal. Professional because they were working, and thankful because they didn't then have to talk about it. There was nothing to say. This was like sending someone an email with a link to that ass-stretching guy's webpage. It was just rude and sick and disgusting, however evidently skillful. The finesse of the shading on the dicknipples was distinctive and promising, but the whole piece was unthinkable. Who would do this? What was the message? But then the administrator was called away and they had to work in awkward silence, their brows still stiffly neutral. This was not like the intricate rotting crow taking flight from the gravestone they had covered up the week before. This was beyond the eloquent and harmless macabre. This wasn't just kind of gross while still being some kind of art or message or something. This was just nasty. Poop everywhere. Simply way too many orifices. On a school.

So they paint away in silence until these kids start running by. Like, at first they don't really notice, except that they're all alone, and no one skips school in the morning, alone, and goes running across the suburbs. But whatever. They paint. Then there's more and more. Like, half a dozen, and this guy who's crying and looks really shaken by something. Then this one guy turns up and comes over to watch them, which is pretty awkward because he just stands there and doesn't say anything and they can't say anything either. They all stand around and some of them paint and it is plainly clear to everyone by the complete lack of shock and disgust on this guy's face that he was the one that did it. Then eventually he walks back to the corner of the field, out of sight of the street, and he sits right in there, against the fence, with his backpack in his lap, just staring. They keep painting, of course.

22. Kip: Fire

There is Inder. Inder is dead. He lies where he fell, almost, because dead people are heavy and hard to move, and it really didn't matter where you put him. You pulled on a leg but mostly just tangled his limp and heavy limbs and smeared him all over the carpet.

Inder woke this morning alone, the wife already at work for five hours. He stretched and scratched. The sheets stank a little. He would have to wash them because she never did. He stood and rubbed his eyes and arched his stiff back. He dug through the top left drawer in the long, low, brown dresser. Socks. Shirt. He carried them to the shower and left them on the counter by the sink. You were tossing restlessly, thinking listening to his fucking racket for the three thousandth time in a row. He was in the shower, looking at the filthy grout and the water stains and resenting his family for leaving it there. You, too. What is school that you can't wash a toilet afterwards? He mops up spilt chicken slurry every other day. When he's out of the shower he cuts his toe on the staple that sticks up out of the edge of the hallway carpet. The one he keeps saying he's going to fix. He's swearing in frustration (and in Punjabi) when you said “Where do you get bullets?”

“What?” He leaned on the door frame and looked at his bleeding toe.

“Bullets. Apart from the Gold 'N Guns in Whalley.”

“Gold 'N Guns is closed.”

“So where?”

“Why do you wanna know?”

“Really I just want to know if you know.”

“What?”

“Do you have a gun?”

He stood up straight and put his foot down. He kept his toe up off of the carpet.

“Yeah.”

“Me too,” you said, and you showed him. He ran into their room and dove over their bed. You shot him through the bed and waited a moment. There was a gurgle and a choking whimper. You rounded the bed and he was there, bleeding from the side and shaking.

“Where?”

He looked at the closet. You turned from his shaking death and opened the closet.

“Top shelf? Which side?”

He wasn't helping any more. He was looking at all of his blood. One side of the closet was crammed with old shirts. None of them was white and none of them was a solid colour. There was a medium blue that was the strongest colour, and a half-dozen ties hanging over the top of the rack. Diagonal stripes, dark, low-contrast, plain ties. The other half had a variety of similarly bland pantsuits. A few dresses, carefully selected not to draw attention to anything because your mom didn't have too many things left that could bear it. There was a hatbox, of all things, on the top. You pulled it down to look behind it, but it was heavy for a hat. Even for a bunch of hats, all crammed in. Inside was a greasy rag and inside that was a smaller gun and a cardboard box with bullets. The same.

Now he is still warm, still flexible. The carpet, you realize, will be ruined. For that matter, you think as you walk down the walkway into the school grounds past the skaters and the cool brown kids, there will be a lot of press, and they probably won't be able to sell the house. Even the brown people won't buy it and knock it down and replace it with something nicer, because your dad was brown. They'll know him and they won't want his death house. Ah well.

Now you come up to the door between the two wings on the east end of the school. It is a long and ominous walk for how short and plain a space it is. It’s almost like an alleyway. On one side is an expansion, and on another side the technology wing. Shop. Both sides are featureless and blank, like every face of the school, but here they face each other and it’s all the harder. Elsewhere, the walls are like an obstinate face, a rejection of the world outside. As if to say that what is within is not of the world. The gray walls. The horizontal lines. The riveted panels and shutters on the windows at night. You walk through the high gate – so high, you have to wonder why the fence must reach to the roof – and between the bare faces. Even now, as you are almost within, it almost rejects you more. The shutters are all still closed. They paint them gray. You've stopped and examined them and scraped off a bit of the hard, high-gloss finish that covers the fake gray metal texture. You pass through the door between the closed eyes, although the camera above watches you and records you climbing the stairs beyond the door.

As you leave the stairway, you see the IT teacher, Wilmot, heading to his classroom. You will always be able to find him there. Nonetheless, you check. You keep a chart in your agenda of the blocks you have checked his classroom. When you asked for that washroom break in English and Phibbs winced with the flaccidity of his authourity, and he said “I think you've missed enough class, Kip,” you didn't really need to go, you just had to check on Wilmot. The next day you just skipped class and made sure, because you could hardly operate in uncertainty. You sat and listened to Phibbs squeaking on and on about Hamlet and the authority of the King. Rotten in the state of Denmark, etc. Metaphors. Messages. Themes. Future and growth and indecision. Responsibility, to yourself and to the world. To fix things, and if you can't fix them start over. Adolescence.

You see Wilmot going to his class and you check your chart and it is complete.

Here is Wilmot, every class of the day in the same room.

There is the guy who tripped you last month, in front of everyone. You have his schedule, room numbers scribbled illegibly on loose paper between classes in the packed halls. You followed him when you saw him one day, and then sought him out again and again until you had it all, didn't you? Until you knew where to find him in every block.

And then you did the same for the girl at the party. Why did you go to the party? Because your people were there. Perhaps your people, perhaps not. It would be seen. Perhaps you thought they might understand you, perhaps they were good people, but they had her among them and they did not cast her out. She is a creature.

“So are you, like, gay or something?” she said at the kitchen table with drunks all around.

“No.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Have you ever had a girlfriend?”

“No.”

“So you're gay?”

“No.”

“I think you are.”

“Oh.”

“What?”

“Oh.”

And everyone by then was listening and smiling and looking at you but they weren't smiling at you, they were only smiling at each other. When you met their eyes they were now looking at you like they looked at the dog when it licked itself. Like a zoo animal. She pfffted and leaned back like a 1920s speakeasy dame, like a straightening reed. Like one of those nylon tube people they put in front of the car wash on the street when it opened. Whipping along vertically, driven by the force of her own buoyant derision. Fucking children. Whosoever cannot, at sixteen, behave themselves as if they were at least half of that has forfeited their privilege of life.

Assuming there are good people out there somewhere, they certainly shouldn't have to suffer assholes like that.

And the gym. Really, whatever is in the gym is good enough. Whoever is tallest, strongest, fastest. You can always find a jock in the gym. Perhaps the weight room. In block D there is a P.E. 12 class. People who took P.E. when they didn't have to. Twice.

And today is the day you fix them all.

You may as well get started.

Wilmot. His hair is thin and greasy and smeared across his porous head. You don't know how he can live. How he can keep from simply dissolving in a pile of fucking ugly and stupid and sneering. How his turbulent gut can stay confined in that fucking sweater. Does he keep it pinned to his pants? If you poked him with a needle, would it come gushing out all over like a balloon full of bacon fat? Fuck it. Find out later.

First you must check. You must. Today must be the day. The charts are complete but you must check one last time. Classes have already begun so the halls are yours for the taking. Wilmot's eyes track past you as he turns the corner. Already you are invisible to the mortal eye. Just thinking right makes you almost invisible. It's amazing. Your calm and natural face comes up. Gun from the river in one hand. Extra bullets and the little backup from the closet in the other. It took you half an hour this morning to work out how to load the clip because you've never used one in real life. Half an hour while he soaked into the carpet. A successful test, and a fortuitous one. Sometimes they drop ammo when you get them in real life, too.

You walk the long, straight hallway above the cafeteria. It is empty but for an administrator and a teacher talking near the door outside. A plain red dress and a droopy sweater.

Down at the far end is the gym. The weight room is empty. The gym proper is empty. A field trip, you think. There can be no other time. There is no point in waiting for another time. You walk briefly through the socials wing. You see her through the window by the door. Across to the English wing. He's there. That'll do.

You go down the stairs to look down the lower hallway one last time. The gym lurks behind you as you face it. Down past the cafeteria you see the doors you entered through. Beyond is the high fence, the open gate, the wooden fence on the edge of the grounds, and houses beyond. Filthy little houses with froofy little yards around and flimsy little fences between them. You see them with the myopic view of a bullet down the barrel of a gun. Your gun. Your guns, your eyes. You are ready. You are aimed.

Your turn on your heel with the tiniest of squeaks because your shoes are cheap and old. You pull open the door with a back-wrenching spasm and leap up the stairs forcefully. You are almost breaking in pieces from the tension in your body but it keeps growing. Your footsteps echo down the empty hall towards Phibbs' room where the girl is.

So when it's all over and your work is done and you've spooked the masses in person, you make a break for it. There's no point in just giving up, is there? You feel profoundly tired inside, and aching, but you run from the school and through the side streets and when you hear a siren coming from down one of them you leap behind a hedge and luckily no one spots you and runs out to shout at the police car after it passes. After the siren is around the corner at the walkway you just left the grounds through, you walk calmly down the street again, keeping an eye out now for hiding places in case it should happen again. It doesn't. You walk the familiar streets of the neighbourhood in the growing rain and you get a little cold. You wish you had a warmer coat, don't you? Your black denim doesn't keep out the wind and it will soon soak through and leave you quite damp. You wander in a kind of arc across town that will eventually bring you back to your own neighbourhood. Another police car pulls into the street down about four blocks ahead of you on one street. You jump at first into the yard immediately to your left, then, casting about for cover, hide behind a parked car. It occurs to you that a car parked in the driveway likely entails some people in the house, and people in the house are likely to appreciate you cowering behind their car. So you stand. But you can hardly stand there like a pud when the police pass. You place your open palm on the hood of the round, brown car. It is ice cold and wet. The finish is poor. You make vigourous circular motions like an eskimo or Ralph Macchio and look down at the dash. You look up as the police car passes, and the blank-faced moustache man inside doesn't blink and the car doesn't stop. After a minute you consider your luck adequately pressed and scooch down between the car and the hedge to the sidewalk. Up ahead the police car has just passed through 64th ave so the hurdle is cleared, isn't it?

You walk on down the way, turn the corner and after another eight or ten minutes you're about two blocks from your old elementary school. You are quite wet now, and you remember the shade of the trees along the fence where you took shelter from weather in childhood recess. You could almost re-enact it, although perhaps more pleasantly. Between here and there is the butcher's shop and the empty lot behind it. A collection of trees stand in it, with undergrowth across most of the ground. There is a particularly thick bunch around the single tall cedar in the middle west. Some houses face away from it and a path is worn along the north edge. You walk straight away from the path, perpendicular to it, even. You push through an overgrown path and the hardhack brushes against you the whole way to the tree. Your pants, you realise on arriving, are soaked through. The tree, you realise on ducking under a branch, is inhabited. There's a patched, faded and dirty sleeping bag screwed up in a little dip at the foot of the tree, but there's no person in sight. You wait, still, for a moment to listen for the locals, but you hear nothing. The broken trinkets and garbage do not interest you.

You look up the tree. You are certain you could climb it. Here is a branch you could pull yourself up on, and from there the branches are all thick and evenly spaced. You let go of your guns and only now realise how stiff your hands are from gripping them. You've lost a bullet somewhere. This is as good a place as any, so you pause a moment to refill your clips. Just in case. Boy scout style. You look around and consider. There's no one apparently around. It would be very difficult and possibly dangerous to try to carry them with you up the tree. You look around the contours of the earth here. There, to your right. You see a dark hollow at the base of the tree. Perhaps once the dwelling of some small animal. It is out of sight of the sleeping bag. You tuck them in the dark spot and pile some dead leaves over top of them. Hopefully, the wind will leave them.

You hop up to the branch and hang from it for a moment. Your bullets rattle in the pocket of your pants. You put a foot against the trunk of the tree and pull up onto the branch. Soon you have another branch in reach and you are away. Your view spreads now across the empty lot and a bit into the yards of the houses around, though to the east all you see is trees. You climb higher, and now you can see right into the yards of the houses, and through the kitchen window of the closest. From here the tree trunk narrows further, and the branches too. The rain is coming through the lighter cover. You are cold. You press on. A gust of wind comes along and you suddenly feel the whole tree swing, with you on it, at least six inches to the side. You wait and catch your breath. The branches now bench noticeably beneath your weight, even when you push your foot right against the base of them. You never have more than one hand or foot off of the tree now. Soon you dare not climb any farther. The trunk is a bare palm-width across, and you are constantly swaying in all directions.

From here you can see well over many houses. You can see into the cul-de-sacs and down the streets and into the grounds of the school. There is no one in sight there. The windows are all closed. You see the gate that swings open to allow service vehicles to drive from the parking lot onto the field. It is open.

You climb back down. There at the base, your guns are undisturbed. Your hands are sticky with sap and your head is soaked in rain and sweat. The rain has now stopped for the moment, though, and the clouds are lightening. You wind back out of the brush and remember only a second after stepping into the open that you are holding your guns in your hands. You put them back in your pockets and leave them there, your hands swinging free at your sides. In a few minutes as short as seconds, you turn from the street into the elementary school parking lot.

You hear sirens growing again behind you so you walk quickly to the corner where you won't be visible from the street. As you trot over, your hands still in your pockets, loose bullets rattling and clinking, you see the van parked on the gravel field and the huge graffiti thing the men are covering.

You glance up at it and it is use huge. Huge and sick. You stand amazed for a moment but the police are coming so you have to leap around the fence and out of sight. It's beautiful. It's really, really nasty. You study it for a few minutes and try to commit it to memory. The massive veiny cock shoved in that schoolgirl's eye-socket. The huge, gaping vagina the size of a hallway. The semen. The crap. It's unbelievable.

You catch the painting guys looking at you nervously and looking behind you, as well. You look back there and there's a dude. He's huddled in the corner looking at you, nervous and surprised. He isn't reading his book any more. The ground where he is is not dark with rain. He is sheltered beneath the trees.

Well, you think. Perhaps some company for now.

You walk over to him and sit on the gravel. You sit down on the gravel and the weeds at the edge of the field and lean against the hard fence. There is no rain and little wind, but still, if you sit here for long you will get very cold. Your coat is already quite wet from walking around the back streets, hiding in bushes, climbing the tree. Here you rest against the fence. The boards bend a little, in a pleasantly organic kind of way. One of them squeaks and you take your weight off of it.

“Nice,” you say.

“Thanks,” he says. He's looking at you. You look at him and smile. You watch the men paint over the filthy mural. They roll up and down the wall with their rollers. They dip them in the paint trays. They roll up and down again. He watches them too.

“How long have you been doing it?”

“Coupla years.”

“Keep it up. You should be famous.”

“Thanks.”

There is a pause.

“You gonna keep it up, too?”

“Nah.”

He doesn't really seem afraid, though. He fiddles with the zipper on his backpack. You watch together in silence for a while and then he puts the bag behind him. He leans against the fence and when you look, he's closed his eyes as if to sleep. It feels like you're in a church or a funeral. You wait and you wait and the men paint and paint. They finish the first coat and stop and talk to each other for a minute. This is enough for your part. You stand and look at the guy again. He's sleeping, or close to it. His eyes crack open and he rubs his neck. It must have been an uncomfortable position. You shiver against your clammy clothes. Your butt is wet and frozen.

“Nice to meet you,” you say.

“Yeah.”

You take one last look at the now painted wall and leave. The crunching of your feet on the gravel attracts the attention of the painters, but only for a moment. Soon they are back in their deliberations, nodding and hand-talking too quietly for you to hear.

You wonder if anyone's at home.