I live now in a quiet condominium on an active stretch of Miami waterfront. It is the sort of place where the elevators are mirrored and the doormen still remember your preferred newspaper. The writing career that paid for it was never spectacular, only steady: essays, the occasional novel that found a mid-list audience, some well placed investments and enough residual income that I can treat the remaining decades as a long, well-furnished afternoon. I am fifty-seven. I keep the air conditioning low and the blinds half-drawn against the white glare of the bay. On certain mornings I still catch myself rehearsing the old Montreal weather in my head - leaden sky, titanium mood - as if the body refuses to believe it has been transplanted into this softer climate. The light here is relentless and slightly theatrical; it does not permit the same interior grey. Yet the grey returns anyway, as I write this, invited. Carrying with it the particular weight of a city that no longer exists in the same configuration.

The memory that returns most cleanly is not the climate but the particular social weather of those in-between days when I was not living at home and had not quite left yet. There were two friends who had left home, decisively, and subsequently our Westmount high school. In those 1980s days such young men were considered an embarrassment not to be tolerated among the student body. The school still operated on the assumption that its charges belonged to households, that the households belonged to a recognizable order, and that any permanent rupture of that order was a kind of public failure. When my own time came in the Star Chamber, an administrative hearing whose name we used half in jest and half in accurate dread, I am told it was the English Department that stood up for me. Consequently I was allowed to stay enrolled, to finish the year, and to graduate. I never saw the minutes. I only know that someone argued, successfully, that a boy who still appeared for classes and still produced competent essays on Phyliss Webb or Michael Ondaatje had not yet forfeited his place in the visible world. That small institutional mercy remains one of the cleaner facts of the period.

It was minimum-wage work, three dollars and five cents in those days: restaurant overnights, then the marginally better commerce of selling records and books. The restaurant was one of those fluorescent all-night places that served the city’s residual population: cab drivers, nurses off double shifts, couples still arguing after last call, and of course, the gays. I learned the particular smell of coffee left too long on the burner and the useful skill of carrying plates without meeting the eyes of the people who ordered them. Something of a survival skill after the bars closed. The work left the mind free, and the mind, being young, spent most of its freedom rehearsing exit strategies. There was a dignity in the monotony that I only later recognized: the dignity of being paid, however little, for hours that belonged to no one else.

In the wilder days before leaving home for good I would stay at a friend’s apartment, the technical residence still listed as my parents’ address while the actual nights were spent elsewhere. He was the second of our small circle to be dehoused by his family; he already had a place, and therefore I had a place the night I left for good, my father’s balled fist having become the decisive argument. The fist itself is less interesting than the sound of the front door closing and the sudden lightness of walking down the drive with one bag. It was a cold January night, my sole possession the clothes on my back and the hair dryer my father had thrown at me. The drama.

The air on the Summit was colder than expected and hardly warmer once I reached the Village. My friend opened the door without surprise. We sat on the floor, smoked, and listened to records. We did not discuss fathers. In the morning the city looked unchanged, which felt, at the time, like a minor miracle. The bag contained almost nothing of value. The value was the closed door behind me.

In those in between years before either of us had left home, we went to the clubs. There was one club in particular, I will continue to call it The Club despite potentially confusing the issue with LeClub Sandwich, a different spot entirely emerging later in this missive. The Club, by contrast, was a spot where an enterprising fifteen-year-old could be served if he arrived in the right company. I am appalled in retrospect. What were any of us thinking? At the time it was simply the available world, there for our adventures. For the most part the men there were perfect gentlemen toward us. Even the police, regularly parked in a white van out back, seemed to observe a kind of age-based truce. They had never, we were told, beaten boys as young as we were. That was not the same as a guarantee. The room itself was low-ceilinged, the floor slightly sticky, the lights cheap enough to turn every face the same temporary colour; underwater blue, then sudden red, then something that belonged to neither. You felt the bass in the sternum alongside that hit from a glass bottle. You felt, if you were young enough, an astonishment at the aging queens in their twenties with their moustaches and tight jeans, already clearly passed it. The absolute aristocracy of youth.

These were my gay friends, distinct from both the high-school crowd and the witchy ones in Shaughnessy Village. The soundtrack was Dead or Alive and Bananarama. I was present for the precise moment my friend realized the lyric he had been hearing as “penis” was not, in fact, that word. The look on his face, of surprise, wonder, pure delight, remains one of the cleanest expressions of joy I have ever witnessed. The mishearing had been communal, a private joke that collapsed into ordinary English and left us laughing until we had to sit down. He was a lovely man; I expect he would still find the thought hilarious. He still is. And not gay, as it turned out. That small linguistic resolution is still, in memory, a momentary alignment of the world with itself.

The constellation was small and vivid. There was my Friend. There were his friends Patrick and Luc, I have never worked out how they met. Patrick looked like Morrissey; I was helplessly infatuated and said nothing, having not yet learned to ration my attention. Luc looked like a French whore of the better sort; beautiful, slightly exhausted, already practiced in the art of being looked at. Later Patrick would take up with a peculiar and quite sexy Buddhist whose name I have forgotten; I will call him the Monk. Roxie was the first transvestite I ever met properly: bottle-blonde, Marilyn-adjacent, the one lately of Boy George’s wider circle, an absolute knockout who moved through the blue light, suddenly red, as if the room had been arranged for her entrance. She called everyone darling in a voice only slightly lower and more elegant than expected. I never learned her daytime name. In that room it would have been irrelevant. She remains, in recollection, a figure of pure theatrical courage, most especially for the one time I ever saw her out of context. I was passing a private bank on the street, glancing in the door to see her working security, full uniform seated at an entrance desk and yet done up to the nines. It was practically impossible in those days. I would dearly love to know what became of her. We were all transients in those days and AIDS just coming up over the horizon.

Five years later, I was nineteen or twenty,I found myself sampling the vegan menu at LeClub Sandwich and meeting the Monk. He was by then the former boyfriend of Patrick but remained a practitioner of Nichiren Daishonin’s Buddhism. The chant is simple and absolute: Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō. He recited it the way people recite a telephone number they have known since childhood. The place was bright, institutional, trying hard to make virtue look appetizing, Montreal diners and Buddhist proscriptions against eating meet an unlikely fit.

He asked two questions, his eyes slightly scrunched. The first was the question they always ask. The answer was yes. The second was whether I knew I had been exorcised.

I did not. The information arrived with the mild shock of a fact that should have been dramatic and yet somehow wasn’t. While spending their Saturday nights on the town with us, Patrick and Luc, it turned out, had spent their Sunday mornings at Living Waters Mission in Griffintown, a Pentecostalist outfit whose tents appeared and disappeared with the weather. They would repent of their evenings with the same energy they had spent acquiring their hangovers. What I had failed to understand was that they blamed my Friend and me for having lead them astray the night previous, this after they had pestered us relentlessly to leave the couch and come out with them. The Monk informed me, with the calm of someone reporting a medical diagnosis, that the two had singled me out in particular as a Source of Darkness.

Only now, forty years on and typing in my filtered Miami light, do I begin to understand what they meant. I enjoyed myself once they got me through the door. I still do, provided there is a quiet place to return to afterward. I never felt the slightest guilt for anything that happened at The Club. That absence of guilt was the Darkness. They required the cycle of transgression and absolution; I required only the night and the music and the temporary democracy of the dance floor. The difference was theological well before it was moral. Damned if you do, I suppose. And damned if you do as they theatrically begged on the regular.

It is worth pausing on the Buddhism the Monk practiced, because it was not the vague, therapeutic spirituality that later flooded the bookstores. Nichiren’s teaching is specific, one might say aggressive in its clarity. The Lotus Sutra is the final and complete teaching; chanting its title is both the practice and its realization. There is no gradual path of self-improvement or scenic route through the chakras; believe me, I have seen them. Instead, you face the Gohonzon, a calligraphic mandala, and you chant. The universe is supposed to respond because you have aligned yourself with its fundamental law. It is a way of confrontation rather than consolation. The practice left little room for ambiguity. Either the chant was efficacious or it was not. He seemed to live inside that binary with a kind of calm that I both envied and found slightly inhuman.

I used to set this against the white liberal Wicca that occupied another corner of our small world. My witchy friends spoke of the Goddess, of the wheel of the year, and of energy that needed to be ‘raised’ and ‘grounded.’ Thee rituals were soft-edged, candle-lit, full of found objects and borrowed mythologies. There was a great deal of talk about healing and almost none about judgment. It was, in its way, a kinder system. It also required almost nothing of its adherents beyond sincerity and a willingness to speak in a certain register. Nichiren demanded the chant and the faith that the chant was sufficient whereas Wicca demanded atmosphere. Both, in those years, felt like available toys rather than competing orthodoxies. One could move from the Gohonzon to the circle and back again without any sense of betrayal. It was the ideas themselves that remained portable.

And that is the part I want to mark with some care. We had, for a brief window, the peace simply to play with ideas. The ruling Protestant asabiyyah of the city, Ibn Khaldun’s term is exact, was still in placed. The old group feeling of the English Montreal establishment had not yet fully dissolved. It was paternalistic, frequently hypocritical, and entirely capable of expelling its inconvenient sons; yet it also provided a kind of ambient shelter. You could experiment with Buddhism or Wicca or the more theatrical forms of homosexuality without the experiments immediately becoming identity mandates or political weapons. The culture still assumed a center solid enough that the edges could be decorative. We were free, in a way that later generations would find difficult to imagine, to treat belief as a form of serious play. The asabiyyah did not have to love us in order to leave us room, only to remain sufficiently intact for the room to exist.

I think of that freedom whenever the old imagery surfaces. A table of Masonic riches going spare, the black silk banners embossed with stitches that told geometric and esoteric stories in red and gold. Raised letters and curlicues. Robes and shoes and the long stretches of fabric that suggested both ceremony and concealment. The whole display felt Aeonic and Platonic at once, the patterns trying to echo the everything of everything. The wishes of every falling starling, the space between the observer and God and the indifferent passersby. I stood once, years after The Club had closed or changed its name, in front of such a window. As I have suggested, the sky that day was leaden. My mood matched it with a kind of titanium neutrality. I did not want the banners. I only wanted the permission they seemed to represent: the permission to stand between wall and street and consider the world’s irritation without being required to resolve it. That neutrality has followed me south. In Miami the light is different, the humidity and salt air a constant low-grade argument with the skin, but the interior weather can still turn titanium when the memory arrives.

I do not romanticize The Club. The police van was real. The risk of violence was real. The poverty of those first years after leaving home was real and occasionally frightening. What I do mark, and even celebrate, is the narrow historical corridor in which a boy could move among Pentecostal tents, Nichiren chanting, Goddess circles, and the blue light of a gay dance floor without any single system yet claiming the right to define him completely. The Protestant asabiyyah - declining, already half-aware of its own obsolescence- still supplied enough social cohesion that the experiments remained experiments rather than declarations of war. Later the same ideas would harden into positions that demanded public allegiance. In that earlier window they could still be handled like interesting objects, turned over in the hand, set down again.

Patrick and Luc needed the Darkness to have a source outside themselves. The Monk needed the exorcism to have been effective, if only as a diversion regarding his first question. The witchy friends needed the energy to be healable. I needed, it seems, only the night and the absence of apology. Forty years later I am inclined to think that need was less a moral achievement than an accident of temperament. Some of us are simply born without the receptor for certain kinds of guilt. The culture of the time allowed that accident to remain private. Later cultures would insist on making it public, diagnostic, and political. I am not nostalgic for the cruelty of the old order. I am, however, prepared to note that its residual solidarity created a temporary clearing in which incompatible systems could rest in the same room without demanding that one of them win.

On certain evenings I walk the short distance to the water and watch the light go out of the bay. The condominium is quiet. The residual checks from the writing still arrive. I am, by the standards of my generation, comfortable. It feels something of an insult to the situation young men along my lines must face today, albeit with less chance of being attacked by the police or, one prays, one’s own family. The old friends are mostly lost to time and geography or the ordinary attrition of decades. Not everywhere remained for the combination therapies to arrive. The Friend remains lovely in recollection. Roxie, I hope, remains a bottle-blonde absolute. The Monk remains in memory a man who asked two precise questions in a sandwich shop that no longer exists. And the Darkness the earnest men of Living Waters reportedly named in me remains what it always was: my failure to feel sorry for dancing. I keep a few books on the shelf that still carry the faint scent of those years. Nichiren commentaries beside a battered paperback on the Wheel of the Year beside a novel whose author I once sold across a counter. They sit together without quarrel, the only lasting inheritance of the asabiyyah that once sheltered us. We have the capacity to let the banners and the chant and the circle and the sticky dance floor occupy the same memory without forcing a hierarchy among them.

That cool summer in Montreal every affect fell flat. Every encounter with the world felt provisional. I was waiting for the results. The clinic had been clear enough about the window. Elliot sat across from me at a small table near the window of a café near the bookstore where I worked part-time. He ordered for both of us. The coffee came in thick white cups. Outside the traffic moved in its usual rhythm. Inside the air held the faint taste of air-conditioner and Hertel floor cleaner. For young aristocrats such as ourselves, this leant authenticity.

He asked how long it had been. In my mind, I said from what the clinic had told me I had ten days to two weeks to go. In a world where I had said it aloud, a world where it were the sort of thing we might have discussed, he would have nodded and looked at the surface of his coffee as if the answer itself might surface there.

In our world, in my actual world with Elliot, he was asking how long it had been since I had seen her, my friend from my high school days, when most of my friends were not to be found at school. There was the club set and then there was the Wiccan set. She was of the latter. Most of my friendships had already drifted away from the school halls by then.

He was asking about Zoë. I was telling him about the afternoon previous when she had stopped by the bookstore unannounced just as I was ending my shift. We had gone for coffee to catch up. We had sat in these self same chairs at precisely this table.

It had been four or five years since I had seen Zoë-with-an-umlaut, as I had helpfully insisted on calling her. She would invariably correct me. It was a diaeresis, she would say, not an umlaut. To which I would explain, which hardly sounds healthy, let alone better. As I’ve said, I said to Elliot, she had come into the bookstore on St. Catherine just as I was finishing my shift the day previous by happy accident. The last customer had bought a used copy of something on planetary hours and left without a bag. I locked the register and we had walked here. Here being this hole in the wall with a Pepsi fridge by the register.

As it happens, With An Umlaut and myself had met years yet earlier at an event at Café Thélème. I was seventeen. She was, I think, sixteen. The gathering had been organized by the people who called themselves the mainstream circle, the ones who wore black cotton robes and spoke of balance and the wheel of the year as if the phrases themselves conferred the moral high ground. An’ it harm none, they would say. Zoë and I shared an interest in the cards and the stars and the older books, but more than that we shared a slight arch distance from our entire performance.

We left that night with the dancer and the waitress. The dancer was my height but muscular, clean shaven in the morning with a beard coming in by five. He kept a two-bedroom place in the Plateau with his boyfriend. The waitress worked nights at Lux. She would come home at dawn, exhausted by too much coffee and the tips you make on a plate of fries nursed by two or more teenagers. Together they had begun a smaller group, more strict, more hermetic than the public ritual of the mainstream circle. They called it a groupuscule, this after the waitress’s indefinite sociology degree in progress at Concordia. They had taped a pentacle on the hardwood of the waiter’s second bedroom and called it the Temple. The tape was black electrical tape, the kind you find in any toolbox.

Elliot interrupted my recollection. Who are these people, he said. What were your parents thinking? There, I said, my parents were scrupulous in leaving us, my siblings and myself, to sort these things out as best we could. To my mother at least these teenaged explorations were no surprise whatsoever. She had seen the notebooks early. I had announced my decision to study the old arts at the age of seven, keeping a Spider-Man notepad into which I copied spells culled from the comics, the ones with Stephen Strange and from the one who called herself Mighty Isis. The lined pages filled with words that promised control over weather and distance and the body, the world itself. Aren’t you the odd bird, Elliot said. And here he had been wasting time at that age on the track and in the gym, learning how to make conversation and hold eye contact and such like.

You mock, I said, but then so did Zoë and so did I at the time. Such was postmodernity before I had learned its name at McGill. We maintained this attitude even after a particular afternoon at the dancer’s place that might have led us to conclude our skepticism was not entirely justified.

We were at his place in the Plateau some afternoon his boyfriend was at work, whatever he did for a living. The sun came through the living-room window in literal rays, I could hardly make it up. The partial canopy of the trees from the second floor broke the light into gently moving bars. Motes of dust hung there, almost still in the air. Practically a William Faulkner novel, with Zoë and me sat on the oval braided rug in the dancer’s living room.

She was a beautiful girl, half French, half Ukrainian, the source of her mischief not entirely clear from this knowledge. The dancer and the waitress were in the Temple setting things up, hush hush. The rest of our serious circle had not yet arrived. We decided to meditate. We took up a quiet IAO, the vowels drawn out low so as to sync ourselves without interrupting the preparations behind the closed door.

Our eyes closed. Or rather hers were closed when I shut mine. The sun rendering the insides of my eyelids a glowing field of orange-red. At which point I felt myself rising from the floor. I was cross-legged in the old style and somehow floating.

This is where I have lost you, obviously. Nobody was more mildly surprised than myself. I did not open my eyes. A mild surprise again. I had not set out to do the old rope trick, let alone without the rope. I wondered what was happening but did not want to interrupt the process. Did not want to break whatever had begun. I moved my right hand from my lap where it had rested with the left, reaching out and down to inquire into the space beneath me. I might have been three inches off the floor. Carefully, I switched my fingers into the empty air. Here it became clear Zoë had not kept her eyes closed and I would not be able to continue my investigation uninterrupted. Her voice came sharp, even judging. Why are you levitating? she wanted to know. That was Zoë. No preamble.

This was quite enough for Elliot. He interrupted again. And I am expected to believe any of this? I do not expect you to believe anything, I said. Neither about this nor about anything else.

You were on something, he continued. That afternoon or the night before as we both know that would mean earlier that morning.

I cannot speak to the night before, I said. But if you insist on believing anything I say, believe me I would be just as happy if we had been enjoying hashish or anything else just as entirely innocuous. This is not like a comic book, Elliot. Substances do not make you believe you can float from the floor. But if I had been on something, on anything, in my case it would have been the antihistamines that might have done it. If so, I would be grateful. I could write the whole thing off and it would hardly be worth mentioning. The trouble is precisely that I cannot account for the incident so glibly.

I do not remember if we shared the moment with our hosts. By the time they emerged from the Temple I had long since returned to the floor and With An Umlaut and I had turned to something else. We were rarely entirely forthcoming with either the dancer or the waitress. As much as we enjoyed and appreciated them both, we had some skepticism as to their methods. We had left the larger circle in the first place because we were after the real thing, not years of training in the basics and all the public ceremony. We were looking for magick.

Did you ever find it, Elliot asked. Well this is just the thing, I replied. You would not believe what she told me in our catch-up yesterday.

Zoë sat across from me in that same café, the one off St. Catherine, not the more downmarket yet more glamorous Café Thélème where we had met all those years before. She has cut her hair shorter than I remembered. She said she had been living with a man who worked with metals and the old remedies. Her man had told her to take silver for the lethargy and the depression that came in the dark months and she wondered if it would work with the same efficacy this cold summer.

Are you Pisces, she asked me as she could not quite remember. Zoë was still a Virgo. And are you single, she wondered.

She had met her metalworker in a passageway between one gathering and another, a Ren Faire or some such where sometimes people find the next room to open. He had said they were alike and she was beginning to believe they were.

They had passed through tunnels underground, she said, through great empty spaces of stone and mill and well. In the light and in the dark spaces. In the spaces between people and what ailed them. She might have been listing the contents of a drawer. The man had a way of placing silver under their tongues. He claimed the metal remembered the body, held the shape of what ailed it. She said she had learned to wait with him. The arrangements of their days were simple. Morning light through a high window. Evening when the air cooled. She had come to the bookstore that afternoon because she had seen my name on the schedule in the window and wanted to know if my floating had ever returned.

I told her it had not. It hadn’t in those days. I told her I no longer waited for it. She smiled the old smile, the one I remembered from the Plateau, and said that was probably for the best. The real thing, she said, turned out to be the holding out for what worked consistently. The silver. The tunnels that led nowhere special. The mere knowledge that the body could lift and then return to the floor without explanation held no particular consequence without its return.

Elliot listened to the rest without comment. Outside the window a woman pushed a stroller past the café. The child inside wore a cotton hat that had slipped to one side. I noted it to no particular effect. The light continued its slow decline into the afternoon. We finished our coffees. Mine had gone cold. The test results would come in a week or two with whatever they might have to conclude. Nothing I could do about the timing. The narrative we imposed on the days would hold for a while longer. Zoë had left the café first the day previous, walking north toward the mountain. I watched her until she turned the corner. I have not seen her since.

Elliot paid the bill. We sat a few minutes more in the fading light. The air-conditioning unit in the Pepsi fridge clicked and fell silent. Zoë had said we were still alike, I told him. I did not know if she was right. I had said nothing about the rugby player or the rite of passage underway to her anymore than I had Elliot. The city went on around us. The coffee cups sat empty on the table between him and myself. I had said nothing of consequence regarding my floating act actually underway, the one between the heat of a moment and its outcome at the clinic. The actual spell was a matter I could not name at that table. Not for the last time, our conversation had nowhere left to go, not to the one place I wanted and would not allow. Elliot and I left the café together and went our separate ways. The street the same as always.

I arrived in Durham early on a clear February afternoon between contracts. I was after an informal meeting, a few days away with colleagues Up North. Their schedules allowing, I would not meet the first of them until later in the afternoon. I had time for a small adventure of my own.

The river Wear lay below the city in its deep curving cut, dramatic from the window of my train as I approached the station. It is a sight to see if you haven’t. The cathedral rose on its mighty Norman peninsula of rock, the central tower a black outline against the sky.

Up close and inside, light from the nave came down in long vertical bands between massive columns. The stone grooved in thick cylindrical forms shouldering the weight of the vault high above. Here and there the carving showed a flat, simplified pattern that recalled work from far to south, the Alhambra I would have guessed.

I walked the length of the nave and stopped at the Galilee Chapel, stumbling upon the tomb of the Venerable Bede. Here the stone was plain. I stood there for several minutes because the name had been known to me since school and because the scale of the place seemed to require some acknowledgment. Bede had written in his Ecclesiastical History that the present life of man upon earth seemed to him the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where a king sat at supper in winter. Fire blazing in the midst while storms raged outside, the bird flew in at one door and out at the other, safe for a brief space of the light then vanishing again into the cold. His story one of my mother’s favourite observations of life and the world. She was still with us in the mead hall in those days..

The stairs to the central tower began behind a door near the crossing. There were three-hundred and twenty five of them to count, for those so inclined. A narrow spiral that turned steadily upward. Never brave with heights, or rather always needing to be, I preferred not to consider the number with specific care. The steps were uneven in places and the walls pressed close on either side. My shoes made a steady sound on the stone, one at a time and up. No one else climbed at that hour. The air grew cooler as I rose and, a half pack a day of Silk Cut telling even at thirty, my breath came harder. Keeping one hand on the inner wall for balance, the steps grew narrower still near the top. I paused once on a small landing to let my legs settle and attend the quiet that followed when I stopped moving. Then I continued until the final turn opened onto the platform and the open air.

The parapet was low. The drop began immediately beyond it, two hundred feet to the ground. Below that, another one hundred feet down, the river moved between its steep banks, inscrutable at this height. Away into the near distance, the roofs of the city lay in irregular blocks of slate and tile, the cloister appearing as a square of green and stone. On a clear day, on this day, the view reached north toward Sunderland and the low hills beyond, not that I could pick out any single distant monument from where I stood. For one thing, I was hardly standing. I would dare it for a moment and crouch back at the safety of the stair.

I could feel the sun just, a vanishing pressure on my face, and the air was cold, moving in thin currents about and above the tower. I sat at the top step with my back against the wall, letting my hands rest on my knees. The sky stayed cloudless and the light falling without warmth on the stone.

It was here that the thought of him returned. Elliot. We had been the same age and from the same kind of family, the same schools at the start. He had chosen marriage and a house that needed painting each spring and now a child whose arrival his letters mentioned with careful detail. One of these letters had come a couple years earlier when he was still deciding things; it carried a faint scent of his study, of Montblanc ink and woodsmoke and something like vetiver. On one of his visits, from the days when he still had the time and inclination to visit, I showed it to him; the envelope had carried an unfranked stamp. He asked whether I minded if he kept the envelope. It was from England and its stamp unfranked and something to do with his letter inevitably reaching its destination. He was always the better Lacanian. He explained he needed it for a contest of valor and needs must. I told him that I did not mind though I now suspected the message carried some special charge I had allowed to go unnoticed and became irrationally jealous of its possession, as though by keeping the envelope he had claimed a fragment of my own crossing, proof that something between us had been marked for delivery and he had somehow taken it back.

Of course, I was not actually worried about an envelope. His request had been exact, something small at a time it seemed when larger questions still remained open between us.

The view from the tower did not change any of that. The river carried on its curve below or so I imagined. The longer I sat there exposed to sun and sky the less inclined I felt to risk peering out over the edge and into the abyss.

The sparrow in Bede’s account had flown into the hall at one end and out again into the night and storm, the moment inside only a short space between two doors. If Elliot had lingered in the warmth; I had already passed through.I stayed seated until the cold from the step reached through the cloth of my coat, a possession of those times I lost track of in a move and now dearly miss. I had to take some thought to the time and was not entirely certain of how long it would take from here at the pinnacle down to the parking lot. I rose as the hour began to run short and started down the spiral again, the steps turning in the same sequence as I wound my way down to the nave. Ahead of me an evening of owls, most welcome, and my introduction to Nabakov, a minor horror.

While I have a specific number of chapters in mind for the project, this based on a ‘fixed number’ first draft, the three stages in life I am building on top of it are new to this iteration. I have been tracking these stages in a chapter sheet, colour coding each story by location and age, the idea being to tell the story in part through movement from one place and time to another. With ten published, how to position the rest of the lily pads to get across the pond?

This lead me to think more broadly about shifts of perspective in novel writing and how other writers have managed to balance or otherwise organize changes from chapter to chapter, act to act, book to book.

My first experience of this was as a very young child having got through The Hobbit once or twice and now old enough for Mum to read the next story to us as a family, The Lord of the Rings. We are with Frodo and his pals reliably - with the exception of Gandalf in Woden mode - all the way through to Lothlorien. It is only at the fall Boromir beyond the Falls of Rauros that the party is split. For the remainder of the novel, our time with Frodo is necessarily time away from the rest of the party. No matter who we followed, we found ourselves missing our friends, concerned for them at some cliff edge.

GRRM’s riff on LOTR, the Ur-text of high fantasy (an accident), ASOIAF, itself producing low fantasy (another accident), also uses change of perspective to dramatic effect. Each chapter is told from a strict, limited, varying first person, a tactic I believe he borrowed from The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying* (famously, people used to skip the Sansa chapters, a rookie mistake).

There is an extensive fan literature on Martin’s character changes, particularly for the first three novels; I gather Tyrion and Jon get a bit more airtime. And of course Faulker is the subject of a century of forensic literary criticism. The Sound and the Fury considered “highly symmetrical and framed” in its changes in perspective and As I Lay Dying by contrast “kaleidoscopic and journey-driven,” this according to Grok though presumably at least in part a gestalt of academic opinion rather than a quick reading of the novels in expert mode (I did not provide access to the novels, I am surface skating with this).

My problem is simpler, one narrator recollecting moments from three passages in his life and an occasional reference to his present. I have stories to tell and an architecture to build them on but what I have come to need is an order to tell them in. Here geography and times of life line up neatly - though perhaps not entirely, we shall see - so the underlying question is to ask what rhythm I am after and to what effect with a corollary of figuring out what pattern is most likely to achieve it.

This brings me to an AI component of the process. Here I have considerable latitude; as Flowers in Asphalt is being written and published live, it would not be of much interest to most publishers even without its subject being a niche interest to begin with. I can, therefore, do exactly as I please.

Let us start with two simple things. If I am using Google to search, I am effectively using Gemini as that is front and center in returns. While there may be a way to disable this function I would not trust it; if I am working on a project that requires a strict AI process firewall, I use Bing. That said, it is entirely possible Bing’s returns are in some way AI assisted at the back end but, if so, this is black boxed; what is visible to me are straight returns for pages.

For example, just now Bing’s first return for “william faulkner pattern analysis in chapter character perspective. sound and fury. as I lay dying” is a LitCharts study guide for As I Lay Dying.

Who knows? Some of the returns I am looking at might themselves in turn be the product of AI assisted research and writing. But if this were a discussion with a student, I would say, with perhaps an aside on Dead Internet Theory, look, there is a limit to the decontamination protocol that is realistic or even possible with the matter a moving target. Models six months from now will likely be used for things we have as yet to imagine, let alone consider, so at this point I think it is a question of best practice. To some extent, it is a question amenable to the same tools we have used for some time. If I am quoting someone or crediting someone, I cite a source. If I am making a literary reference or allusion, I have to trust my judgement it is sufficiently recognizable to a reader for the egregore to do whatever work I am conjuring it to do.

This is to say, at least to some extent our problems are not new. They have to do with attribution and to a large extent even this is a culturally mediated challenge. If I were to cite Plato to a French academic, this would be an insult. If I were to fail to reference the same allusion to a Canadian academic, I might be committing plagiarism. It is irrational to expect the line on AI to have a clear demarcation that will be universally accepted.

Preamble done, you can call this next bit a note on process or a confession, depending.

Further detail, for context: I am using SuperGrok (whatever model is current as of July 4, 2026) (Happy Birthday, America!). I should likely be on Claude as this appears to be the current prestige model and I would guess what anyone studying AI work processes is using to study it with. My choice does not have a methodological basis, it is just baked into X/Twitter and so ready to hand (a Heidegger reference, in case I should say).

Here, I thought, is a potential use case. Other novels and other novelists have thought through the problem of how to balance shifting perspectives. How did they do so? What did they consider? How did it work out? See above re ASOIAF, books 1-3. This as a question I think would not trouble any but the strict purists as my choice, whatever it would be in the structuring, would be based on a research summary. If Wikipedia had ever considered the question (and they may very well may have done precisely so), my Grok return would be comparable in output (quality of said output, a separate issue). What would be the difference?

Thinking this through as I am typing, I remember an old friend who was working as a research assistant on a work of nonfiction for his employer. In the end, he felt the work published was a light reworking of his draft and his credit limited to one of many ‘thank yous’ in the introduction. I have been involved in at least one project along these lines with my work submitted word for word for grant review under the lead researcher’s name. I have done straight up ghost work and have no problem with the practice; it is as lindy as it gets for professional writing. What bothered me, and my friend with his uncredited book, is not understanding up front just how much work we were doing for so limited a return. We were compensated but were not paid ghost rates.

Is a Grok summary the effective equivalent to the work product of a hired research assistant? To what extent does that research summary itself deserve credit? With a human agent, it is a matter of contracts and clarity. With an LLM, is it a matter of disclosure? Again, I believe we are dealing with a moving target.

My next step is where I might have stepped over the line and why I believe I haven’t.

Again, ten chapters on the fly, each told from one of three general times and places. How to most effectively shift from place to place and time to time in a balanced way, with a specific effect in mind (rising action, etc etc), over a set number of chapters?

To this end, I provided my existing chapter outline with a link to the first nine published here. Could Grok, taking on the role of a critic familiar with the way novelists have approached the problem effectively in the past, suggest how to proceed?

The short answer is no. At least, not with my prompt game.

My first return split up the remaining chapters into all Montreal, then all the UK, then all Florida, split into three sections. This is specifically not how I have been hopping around the place and not, I thought, what I had asked for. And this quite aside from the whole point of a non-linear story structure. Grok didn’t get it.

But of course, why would it? Grok does not know how to parse these considerations ; I had not explained them. Once I attempted to do so, throwing notes at it, I found it did not make the slightest difference to its output. Worse yet, as I have Grok’s “personalized” conversation history active, Grok tried to insert suggestions based on my Miami real estate searches. Not at all what I was after and a waste of limited time.

Thinking about this overnight, I decided the problem might be asking an LLM to weigh in on a specific project. Grok did not need to know anything about the story, it just needed to help me decide what order to do things in. In other words, the help I am after is not narrative at all, it is pattern analysis.

Which, as it happens, I have some slight experience with. Once upon a time, for my first unfinished PhD, I took a directed seminar on the subject for a quantitative analysis credit. I cannot say I deserved the A+ but for anyone curious, I shall likely include that paper in the academic volume I am slowly editing alongside the narrative design book. More to follow.

The issue was not strictly about character progression but keeping a reader’s interest while also keeping my line of flight unpredictable. Transmitting a signal while frequency hopping, in other words.

I gave Grok the pattern of my first ten chapters composed of a sequence of three letters, each letter standing for a broad place and time of life. I then directed Grok to take the total number (of chapters) in the sequence with the caveat I wanted to end the series with a specific letter (a specific time and place for the close). One final (I think) instruction was to create two alternative complete patterns that would echo, extend, and build on the first ten. Letters only. Just the pattern.

This Grok managed handily, presenting two patterns and - unprompted - providing a “feel” for each. What was particularly fun was Grok’s guess as to why I had asked. Was I working with a genetic code, a musical sequence, with something linguistic or purely mathematical?

With these, we were cooking with Claude Levi-Strauss (The Raw and the Cooked) and I was on familiar territory. Both patterns Grok provided still looked mechanistic and predictable to me but - and here is the process part - looking at them broke whatever block I had and this specific problem. I produced a third version, my version, with reference to what I have in mind for our protagonist. Consequently, I now have a working guide for my my next weeks as they unfold. I did ask Grok what it thought of my decision. It said the result felt conversational and more like jazz than what it had offered. Reassuring to me, at least.

There isn’t a chance I am going to stick with it. These matters have a life of their own. They get away from us, sorcerer’s apprentice style. And this is after all the precise magick I am calling up for the invocation. Possession by the process, by a daemon in Roman-speak, is as lindy as the human and near human world. We could be sitting around an ancient fire, the stars themselves thirty thousand years displaced from where they now sit, and be up to much the same business.

Even so, it is a pattern, I used the steps as outlined as inspiration to produce it. For some that would take the future structure of this book over the line from the strictly human. I do not believe so personally but I am not married to my conviction. I am more curious how far I will stray from what I have come up with as the project unfolds.

* I do not know that Catelyn Tully - we know her as Catelyn Stark - was a riff, a nominative allusion to be technical, on Cora Tull but it fits his MO (respect). Cora is pious and judgmental by contract with her practical and grounded husband FWIW. I did once pose the question at Not a Blog but Mr. Martin either did not see or or did not decide he would like to answer. I remain curious!

The invitation had come from a source I could no longer trace, a chain of acquaintances that began with a magazine editor in Toronto and ended with a handwritten note slipped under the door of the flat off Upper Street. The note mentioned an event at the University of London Student Union, a leather weekend called Dungeon in the Sky. It suggested that I might find it of interest.

The ULU building stood on a street lined with bare trees that had not yet leafed out, branches black against a grey sky over Bloomsbury. Inside, the main hall had been transformed by red cellophane taped over the overhead fixtures and a sound system that played a low throb of bass and static. The air was warm and close, carrying the scent of polished leather and the sharp chemical edge of the poppers someone had opened. Men moved through the space in various combinations of harness, vest, and boot, their conversation low and their gestures economical. Years later I would conclude the appeal of ritual to the neurodivergent. I was never intrigued by leather itself; not this writer’s barely concealed fetish. But there was an appeal to the way people behave when they know the rules and it is understood they are negotiating the exceptions. The appeal of the explicit.

I noticed the young man almost immediately. He was twenty eight years old, as I was myself, a fact he volunteered later without being asked. He stood near a pillar supporting the mezzanine, his weight shifted onto one hip in a posture that suggested a combination of readiness and ennui, one assumed feigned. His leather vest was open, revealing a chest harness made of the same black hide, the buckles catching red light in slow flashes. He watched the room with a calculating expression I recognized from other places and other nights. Reflected surfaces. I approached him because he seemed the least likely to be performing for just any audience. Perhaps we might be aloof together.

He did not smile when I stopped beside him but he did turn his head slightly, acknowledging my presence without committing to conversation. After a moment, he spoke. You here for the show. You just looking, he said. Not quite questions, Not exactly, I said. But it has been a while. My humor can be somewhat oblique.

He nodded. It changes, he said. The names change. The places change, he said. The way people stand around pretending stays the same.

We stood in silence for a time. The red light made his skin around his eyes look older than twenty eight, the lines deeper, the hollows beneath his cheekbones more pronounced. I noticed the way his hand rested on the strap across his chest, the thumb moving in a small circle. Testing the tension.

He told me he had come to London from the north three years earlier, after a relationship that had ended when the other person wanted to make plans and he wanted only to keep his possibilities open. He spoke of the city as a place where he could disappear into the crowd and reappear as someone slightly different, in this case the leather and the darkness providing the costume and the stage. You can be anyone here, he said. Until the lights come up. Then you have to remember who you said you were.

Three figures caught our attention. One was positioned on the stair leading to the mezzanine, his body arranged against the railing at an angle that made him seem welded to it. Arms extended and head tilted back. Another, grizzled, crouched near the open door of a closet used for coats, a trick of perspective making him appear to have grown up from the floor. A fungus taking hold under a heat lamp. The third lay on a black mat in the center of the hall, limbs loose and clothing half removed, his state of calculated disarray so complete the particulars of his position remain too much to mention in polite company.

They seemed to me like three versions of the same story, each body trying to take the shape of their specific narrative, their specific genre. Such is fetishism. Again, a handy perennial point of reference for a man otherwise oblivious to social queues but of zero inherent affect. In a strong sense, and despite all their efforts, I was the only sinner there. For I had come in bad faith.

The young man, I had not asked his name and didn’t, call him Statler to my Waldorf, followed my gaze.

They look like they belong here, he said. But they don’t. None of us do. We just borrow the space for a few hours and then we have to give it back.

It was then that JPG appeared, his arrival causing a small ripple in the crowd. Recognition yes but more to do with affect. Toujours joyeux. The way he carried himself. For all the world as if he had wandered in from a different kind of event entirely but was already dressed for this one and mildly amused to find himself here with us. He wore a tailored jacket over a t-shirt printed with one of his own motifs, the combination deliberate and only slightly ironic. More tongue in cheek. When he turned to se me he inclined his head slightly, the gesture minimal but unmistakable.

I thought you were in Manchester, he said as I joined him, crossing the hall to the bar, his voice low. I will be, I said.Somewhere up north. For now, I am here. His eyes tracked around the hall, taking in the red light and all the arranged bodies and careful negotiations.

It is always the same, he said. But one day the story has to be rewritten. One day soon, I said. For the moment, it is something like a collection. You show it once - you, you specifically - and before it is done it already belongs to everyone else.

I will not betray a confidence but I can say we spoke for perhaps two minutes more, about the always alreadyness of fashion and these gatherings here and in Paris. About blackrooms and catwalks. Both depended and depend on the temporary suspension of ordinary rules and the imposition of another. A word on the rain that had been falling ever since I arrived. Then someone with a notebook approached and he was gone. The man always was as concise as the cut of his lapel.

I returned to the young man at the pillar. He had not moved, his thumb still tracing that strap. The music had shifted to something slower, a bass line more insistent. The three figures had adjusted their positions only slightly. The one on the mat had drawn his knees up, his disarray now suggesting rest rather than collapse. Hardly keeping the side up.

It was at this moment the security detail arrived. Three men in dark jackets moved through the room. The volume dropped. Conversations stopped. The red gels on the lights seemed a bit too bright of a sudden, everyone’s arrangements a little too obvious. My three figures doing their abrupt best to set their stories straight. The one at the stair stepping away from his railing, rolling his shoulders as if just waking from a long sleep and taking in his surrounding with some surprise. The one by the closet standing to close the door to the cloakroom. Our Lady of the Mat gathering his shirt, his disarray resolved into something that could pass if not examined closely. Yet these were JPG’s men and had likely seen worse earlier that morning. Hardly cause for alarm let alone a curtain change to another performance. Here is where it pays to pay some attention.

The young man beside me watched without expression, he had evidently not clued in neither but it would take more than a few men in suits to break his frame. Good for him. Yet even so, I noted his hand was now still on the strap.

See how it works, he said. The story always gets straightened whether you want it to or not. That’s the part that always gets left off the invitation.

I left soon after, walking out into a rain that had not let up. The street reflected the lights of passing cars in long streaks, glowing tears smeared across the pavement. Once we had concluded every part of our conversation, the young man had not asked where I was staying and I had not volunteered. I took a bus back from Bloomsbury, the 73, the windows fogged with the breath of passengers. I thought about the ways people invented spaces where the narrative could be suspended, and what it took for the suspension to last as long as it did.

The rain followed me as I hopped off the back of my double decker all the way to the door of my flat. I stood for a moment under the awning, cigarette lit, listening to the rain.

The balcony railing was iron, painted white once but now chipped where the winter salt had eaten through to the raw metal. I leaned against it, only slightly, I had never been good with heights, and I looked down eight floors to the parking lot. The pavement wet from rain that had stopped hours earlier. The lights from the streetlamps and pools of black puddles. Beyond the lot the city opened out. The low blocks of the Plateau giving way to the bright scatter downtown and then the dark rise of the mountain with its cross still lit against the sky. It was early June but somehow still chilly after dark. Cold enough to make the skin on my arms tighten under the thin wool of my sweater.

I had come out here after the others went to bed because the apartment felt too close. The television in the living room still on with the volume low. Someone had left a half-empty bottle of wine on the kitchen counter. I lit the last cigarette from the pack I had bought at the depanneur on the corner as I had arrived earlier that evening. The smoke rose straight for a moment. The wind catching it and carrying it out over the drop. Three months. That was the interval they said you had to wait. Three months ago and the clinic on Sherbrooke had drawn the blood and marked the calendar and sent me home. The call had come that afternoon. The results were ready. They told me to come in person.

Just over three months earlier, downstairs in the same building, was a get together, a party, with music too loud and a kitchen counter sticky with spilled beer. I had arrived late, slender and vaguely gothic in black jeans and a voluminous gray sweater that made me look even smaller than I felt. The kitchen was full of them. Rugby players from McGill. Elliot’s friends. They filled the space. Large animals in a pen, shoulders brushing the doorframe, voices loud with the easy confidence of men who knew exactly how much space they took up. I saw Laurent first at the counter pouring something into plastic cups. His hair was closely cropped, the way they all wore it, has gold against the pale skin of his neck. There was reddish stubble along his jaw, it caught the light when he turned his head. His forearms were thick, veins standing out under the rolled sleeves of his shirt, the muscle shifting as he twisted the cap off a bottle.

Another big blond, I never learned his name, looked up as I came in. He glanced at me and grinned. Hey, sweetheart. Turning to his friends, You bring the girls or what? The others laughed. It was the kind of joke they made. Bonding over nothing, men enjoying the edges of a line they did not actually cross.

I was used to it. I smiled back, quiet and careful. Laurent glanced over then and our eyes met for the first time that night. Electric. He was a viking in boat shoes. Thick thighs in chinos, the fabric stretched tight. I felt the familiar pull, the thing I had carried for Elliot longer than I cared to name. Laurent did not correct the blond. He just smiled and handed me a red plastic cup and said, Drink this, it’s cold. This was my first encounter with Laurent in the kitchen.

They talked the way they always did, loud and physical, shoulders bumping, hands clapping backs. Someone told a story about a tackle that had left a guy with a broken collarbone. I imagined the scrum as a wall of meat and bone. The humor turned on the gay jokes, easy and relentless. The humor that let them touch each other without consequence. Pass the beer, princess, one said to Laurent, and Laurent shoved him hard enough to make him laugh. Watch it or I’ll make you mine on the pitch tomorrow. They roared. There was a sense of capacity for violence in all of them, a controlled power they could unleash in the game. Laurent caught me looking once. He did not look away.

The pills came out later, small and white, passed around casually. Amphetamines, though no one said the word. It made the lights sharper and the hours compress. Everything moved faster. The conversation. The decision. Laurent was there and I was there. He clapped me on the shoulder the way they all did and we talked about nothing in particular.

The speed made it hard to tell who noticed what or how we arrived. Laurent’s room was two floors down. The window was open to the street. No discussion of anything. No pause. His forearms pinned me down with no particular force, just the weight of what he was, and I let it happen because it was close enough to what I wanted. Afterward he had clapped me on the shoulder again, a teammate. I walked home through the empty streets feeling nothing in particular. Just the cold. You took what was offered. It was close enough.

Elliot knew nothing. Or perhaps he knew everything. It was hard to tell with Elliot. He had left the party early that night with someone else. I had stayed. It was the pattern. You substituted what you could get for what you could not have. Now the seams were showing.

Then three ordinary months of in between. I went to class. I met Elliot for coffee sometimes on the Plateau, the two of us sitting at the small tables outside the cafés where the wind cut through even in late May. He would stretch his legs under the table and I would watch the way he moved, the same easy confidence of the other rugby players, playing on or off the field. Laurent came up in his stories sometimes,his teammates a loose circle around Elliot’s life. You should come to a game, he said once, and I pictured myself on the sidelines.The metaphor was not strained.

I waited for the test results. Three months. In the meantime the city went on. Snow melted into slush on the streets. The mountain stayed dark at night except for the cross.

My cigarette burning down toward the filter. The words came to me: for some problems, dodging a bullet is less about finesse and more about speed. The words had come to me weeks earlier, a half-remembered line from a conversation I could not place. They fit the moment. The speed with which everything could come apart.

I had been turning the same thought over for weeks. I dropped the cigarette over the railing. It was not quite out. A bright orange ember spiraled away into the black, turning end over end as it fell toward the parking lot eight floors and down. I watched it until it blinked out. The railing felt colder now against my palms. I stayed there anyway looking out at the lights of downtown.

The wind picked up. I thought about the way the veins of Laurent’s forearms had stood out when he poured the drinks that night. I thought about the blond player’s casual sweetheart and the laugh that followed.

The apartment behind me was quiet. The others would wake in the morning and make coffee and talk about the party three months earlier as if it had been nothing. Elliot might call later. He might not. Laurent might appear in some story Elliot told. The city lights held steady against the mountain. I stayed on the balcony a while longer.

The stories we tell ourselves are never quite the stories that happen. We impose a line on disparate images. We are shifting scenes and letting the embers fall, an augur watching a spiralling cigarette butt and making sense of it. I had done that with Elliot for years. I had done it with the night in Laurent’s room. I would do it again with whatever the clinic told me. The speed had been the illusion. The bullet had already been dodged or it had not.

Either way the night went on. I went inside eventually. The living room smelled of stale smoke and wine left out. I did not turn off the television. I lay down on the couch and closed my eyes. The cross on the mountain still burned behind my eyes. In the morning I would visit the oracle.

We tell ourselves these stories out of order. The alternative is the raw sequence. The fist already balled before the words arrange themselves into blame. Let’s call this one strictly fiction.

I was in the townhouse off Wilton Drive that summer. The one with the jalousie windows that never quite closed and the overgrown hibiscus pressing against the screen like it wanted in. The one where the light was merciless at four in the afternoon.

He stood in the kitchen doorway. I had been slicing limes for no reason except the knife needed motion. Motion kept the silence from settling.

Don’t make me, he said.

He sounded like he’d practiced it the whole drive from the beach. Flat. Almost bored. Or maybe just done. No drama. Just a decision the faultline ran through someone else.

No, don’t make me.

You’re going to make me.

I watched the way his shoulders moved under his faded polo. The fist he was not going to use hung at his side, an object he had forgotten he owned. The other hand held the keys to the Jeep. The silver ring caught what was left of the sun and threw it against the refrigerator in small bright darts.

Look what you’re going to make me, he said.

The limes bled on the cutting board. I noticed the exact shade of the juice against the white laminate. How it spread and then stopped. Outside the afternoon storm had come up from the Everglades. It carried the smell of wet asphalt and frangipani from the neighbor’s yard. It jolted the loose jalousies. For a moment I thought we might simply lift away. The summer. The townhouse. The man. The story we had both agreed to inhabit.

He balled his fist tight. Knuckles showed white against sunburned skin. I had seen that same whitening on the hands of men loading coolers at the marina in Fort Lauderdale. On the hands of boys in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven where I once bought cigarettes at two in the morning. It was only the body preparing its instruments.

Until I made him say he made me.

The sentence arrived broken. He twisted the words so he stayed clean. You have this coming, he said, and turned to walk away with a not quite smile. It did not reach the eyes and therefore commit itself to anything so definite as pleasure. The screen door slapped shut behind him. The Jeep started on the second try. I listened to the tires on wet pavement until the sound dissolved into the larger sound of the rain on our tin roof.

It wouldn’t be the last.

Later, when the light had gone, I sat on the concrete steps and picked pulp from under my fingernails. The hibiscus brushed my shoulder like it had better things to do. Somewhere down Wilton Drive a siren rose and fell. The note thinned as it traveled the empty streets. I thought about the little trades we strike so we can keep breathing. The way we file the receipts under headings we can bear to read. Domestic. Inevitable. Whatever the sky decided that time of day.

I wasn’t Job. Never tried. Protest needed another kind of man. He might still believe the next sentence could redeem the last. I had lived long enough in this latitude to understand that words never fixed a damn thing. They only accumulated with our unpaid bills in the drawer.

The Jeep did not come back that night. The townhouse settled into its own silence. I left the limes on the board and went upstairs to the room where the bed faced the dark canal. I lay down without turning on the lamp. The ceiling fan turned slowly. It stirred the same warm air it had stirred the night before and would stir the night after. Things stay put right until they don’t. That is the only story this place ever gave you.

Outside, the rain kept its own counsel. I listened to it for a long time. Then I closed my eyes and let the whole mess fall where it wanted by morning.

In late payments, elegy

In all forgery, effigy

In things forgotten, surgery

In things whispered,

Nick the Lich

I was in Islington that autumn when the rain never stopped quite and the streetlights turned everything a faded ambrotype. Late nineties. When people still carried cash in their pockets and the clubs stayed open until the first orange blush of light leaked under the doors. I had come over for reasons I rapidly outgrew. A flat in a converted warehouse off Upper Street. The sort of place where the radiators clanked at irregular intervals and the windows rattled whenever a bus passed. I kept the lights low. It suited the work I was pretending to do.

He moved between tables the way other men might move between rooms in a house they had once owned. It goes like this, he said. It goes like this. That was the phrase he used the first time I noticed him. He said it without smiling. He said a great many things without smiling. I watched him from the banquette near the back where the velvet had worn thin at the edges. The bar was called the Fox and Hounds then or perhaps it had already changed its name. Names shifted in those places. So did the men who carried them.

He wore a leather jacket the color of wet slate, under it a black T-shirt that had been washed too many times. His hair was cropped close at the sides and longer on top. He had a scar above one eyebrow that caught the light whenever he turned his head. I never asked about the scar. Questions like that were not encouraged.

He shifted between tables. Between floors. Between worlds. He would lean in close to a man at the bar and speak softly. Then he would be at a table by the window pulling a wallet from the inside pocket of a coat left draped over a chair. The gesture was so fluid it looked rehearsed. Credit cards. Driver’s licenses. Small folded notes. All of it in plastic sleeves with raised ridges that caught the light like Braille. He examined each item under the table as if reading a private letter. Then he replaced everything exactly as he had found it. Or almost exactly. That was the art of it.

Oh excuse me he said once when our eyes met across the room. I don’t mean anything by it he said. His voice was low and carried the faint trace of somewhere else. Manchester perhaps. He pulled one wallet then another from the leather jackets from the coats that hung on the backs of chairs. It goes like this he said. In late payments. In elegy. In all forgery. In effigy. In things forgotten. In surgery. In things whispered.

The words stayed with me the way certain songs do. Not because they made sense but because they arranged themselves into a rhythm that matched the low throb of the music coming from the back room. House tracks. The kind that repeated a single phrase until it became incantation. Nick the Lich they called him. Not to his face. Never to his face. The name had something to do with the way he could make things disappear and reappear without anyone noticing the change. A credit limit altered by a single digit. An address updated in careful block letters. A photograph swapped for one that looked almost identical. The kind of forgery that required patience rather than skill.

I sat there most evenings with a glass of warm white wine and a notebook I rarely opened. The rain beat against the windows in irregular bursts. Outside taxis hissed through puddles on Highbury Corner. Inside the air smelled of cigarette smoke and spilled beer. There was also the particular sweetness of amyl nitrate that drifted from the toilets in waves. Men danced in the small space between the bar and the DJ booth. Others stood in clusters near the door checking their reflections in the mirrored panels behind the optics. Everyone was waiting for something. Or pretending not to.

He came over once and sat down without asking. He placed two wallets on the table between us. One was black leather worn smooth at the corners. The other was a cheap nylon thing with a Velcro flap. He opened the first and slid out a driving licence. The photograph showed a man in his thirties with a serious expression and a tie that had gone out of fashion two seasons earlier. He studied it for a long moment.

It goes like this he said again. In late payments. In elegy. He closed the wallet and pushed it across the table toward me. Keep it he said. The man won’t miss it until tomorrow. By then the numbers will have changed. I did not take it. He shrugged and slipped both wallets back into the inner pocket of his jacket. The gesture was so casual it might have been lighting a cigarette.

I asked him why he did it. Not out of moral concern; I wanted to hear the answer in his own words. He looked at me for a long time. He said people carry their lives in their pockets. They think the plastic and the paper and the raised ridges make them real. They think if they keep the receipts they can prove they were here. But the receipts are just paper. The cards are just plastic. One good night and none of it adds up anymore.

He said this without bitterness. That was the strange part. There was no anger in him. He had an acute attention to the way things came apart. The same attention I had once tried to bring to other places. Other proposals. He understood entropy the way some men understand engines. He could see the moment when the balance shifted.

Later that same night I watched him work the room again. He moved between tables. Between floors. Between worlds. He would brush against a man on the stairs and come away with a credit card tucked into his palm like a playing card. He would stand at the bar and order a drink with money taken from someone else’s coat. The barman knew him. Everyone knew him. No one ever said anything. It was part of the arrangement. The night had its own rules. They were fragile and they changed with the weather.

I thought about the flat I kept in the warehouse. The radiator that clanked at three in the morning. The way the light came in gray and diffuse even on the rare days when the rain held off. I thought about how easy it would be to slip one of those cards into my own pocket. Not to use it. Simply to see what happened when the numbers no longer matched the name.

He caught me watching again. He came over and sat down. He pulled another wallet from his jacket. This one was brown calfskin. Expensive. He opened it and showed me the photograph inside. A man and a woman on a beach somewhere. The man had his arm around her shoulders.

He said this one I keep. The rest I put back. He closed the wallet and placed it on the table between us. It goes like this he said. In late payments. In elegy. In all forgery. In effigy. In things forgotten. In surgery. In things whispered.

I did not ask what he meant by surgery. I understood it had nothing to do with hospitals.

Outside the rain had eased into a drizzle. The streetlights still blurred. A group of men in leather jackets stood smoking under the awning of the club. Their laughter carried across the pavement. They were young. Or they had been young not long ago. Time moved differently in those rooms. It stretched and contracted according to the music and the amount of cash left in your pocket.

He stood up. He adjusted the collar of his jacket. He said he had one more table to work before closing. He did not say goodbye. He never did. He simply shifted between tables. Between floors. Between worlds. The phrase stayed with me long after he had gone. It described the way the entire city felt that autumn. Everyone moving through versions of themselves that overlapped but never quite matched.

I left the brown wallet on the table. Someone else would find it. Or it would disappear into the lost property box behind the bar. Either way the numbers inside would no longer add up by morning. That was the situation. That was how the night ended. Not with drama but with the small specific adjustment of a single digit. The kind of change no one notices until the statement arrives in the post and the address on the envelope belongs to someone else entirely.

I walked back to the flat through the rain. The radiator was clanking again. The windows rattled.

The city kept moving outside. Taxis. Buses, the No. 43. Men in leather jackets heading home or not heading home. I sat at the table by the window and opened my notebook for the first time in weeks. I wrote down the words he had repeated. Late payments. Elegy. Forgery. Effigy. Forgotten things. Surgery. Whispered things. I did not try to make them into a story. Stories were what people carried in their wallets. I simply let the words sit there on the page the way the rain sat on the glass. Rain drops catching the light for a moment. Then they did not.

“There are patterns here to see and their point will soon be clear to me.”

First: I’ve been leaning on life after the rain, fully intend to keep doing so, and wish to express my apologies to Ridley Scott at this time.

Second: Didionites make much of her journaling. I think it’s in her editing.

I had come to Wilton Manors after the move from Manchester. The decision had been abrupt. One morning the humidity refused to lift and by noon I was driving south from a brief stop in Montreal with the windows down and the radio off. I was thirty-six that summer. The house sat on a short rise above the canal, light coming hard off the metal roofs at four in the afternoon. I wore the same denim shirt every day, the cuffs worn from where I wiped the sawdust. There was a man named Tomas who delivered the lumber in a faded red pickup. He was in his fifties, thick through the shoulders, blue-collar in the way that suggested years of loading docks and early mornings. He wore no wedding ring. I noticed this the first time he leaned against the truck bed. He had a way of standing with one boot on the running board, talking about the price of pine as if it were the weather. I listened. I measured twice.

I bought the saw at the hardware store on Wilton Drive. The clerk wrapped it in brown paper and tied the package with string the way they still did then. That first evening I laid out the new planks across sawhorses in the yard. The sun was low and the light caught the edges, making them look sharper than they were. I cut them to length and fitted them into place. By dusk the floor was level again. I stood in the doorway and felt the give under my feet had vanished.It satisfied.

Tomas came the next week with a load of cedar for the exterior trim. We unloaded in silence at first. His hands were broad and scarred across the palms, the forearms corded from years of lifting. He told me about a job he had done years earlier on a property farther north where the owner had insisted on using only reclaimed timber from an old dock. The wood had been full of nails and hidden rot but the man wanted the look of age. Tomas said he had spent three days pulling splinters from his forearms after that job. I nodded. I understood the appeal of the reclaimed. There was something in the way old wood remembered its shape.

The neighbors watched from across the lane. There was a man named Russell who lived in the house with the blue shutters. He wore a coral pink cotton shirt most mornings and he would stand on his porch with a coffee cup in one hand, shading his eyes with the other. His partner worked the night shift at one of the clubs on Wilton Drive and he kept the yard swept even though the dust came back by midmorning, the small ritual of it suggesting arrangements that had already begun to come apart. One afternoon Russell crossed the lane carrying a plate of biscuits still warm from the oven. He set it on the sawhorse and asked if I needed help with the trim. I said no. He lingered anyway. He told me about the couple that had lived in my house before me. They had planted hibiscus along the fence but the iguanas ate them down to the stems every spring. Russell spoke of his own household with the same careful neutrality, as if naming the facts might keep them from shifting. I listened while I fitted the next board. His voice had the flat cadence of someone who had lived in the neighborhood all his life. He had learned not to expect too much from the hours after dark. When he left I brushed dust and debris from the sawhorse and noticed a thin splinter lodged in the pad of my thumb. I pulled it out with my teeth and the blood came quick and bright.

The work gave me something steady to hold to. I could take a length of pine and see the finished window frame before the first cut. I kept the boards swept and the joints tight. The floorboards no longer shifted when I crossed the room at night. I began to repair the porch railing where it had rotted at the base. I mixed the preservative in an old coffee can and brushed it on in long strokes. The liquid soaked in dark and even. By the time the sun dropped the railing looked new. I sat on the steps with my back against the post and watched the light fade from the metal roofs across the canal. The air cooled slowly. A truck passed at the end of the street. Its headlights swept the yard for a moment then vanished. The house felt steadier underfoot, anchored. I thought then that some part of the day had stayed in my hands.

Tomas returned with more lumber toward the end of July. The heat had settled in and the canal ran low. He wiped his forehead with a bandanna and said the forecast called for wind by the weekend. I paid him in cash from the envelope I kept in the kitchen drawer. He counted the bills twice out of habit. Before he left he pointed to the new trim and said it looked professional. I thanked him. I was conscious again of the way I looked at him, at the set of his shoulders and the line of his jaw, at the absence of any ring on his left hand. He met my eyes for a moment longer than necessary. That same faint amusement crossed his face, nothing cruel in it, only a kind of knowing tolerance. After the truck pulled away I stood in the yard and ran my palm along the cedar again. The grain was tight. There was no give. That night I dreamed of the ship canal and the way the fog used to press against the windows of the old flat. When I woke the room was still and the floorboards held my weight without complaint.

Russell came again a few days later. He stood in the yard and watched me work for a time, his shoulders set against the heat. He said the wind was already stirring the dust in construction along Kensington Place. I could see it rising in thin plumes beyond the fence. When he left I swept the porch and found a splinter the size of a needle embedded in the wood near the railing. I pried it free and held it to the light. It caught the afternoon sun and looked almost translucent.

The wind came on Saturday as Tomas had predicted. It started low in the morning and built through the afternoon. By evening it was pushing against the house with a steady pressure. I stood at the front window and watched the dust swirl across the yard. The boards stayed in place but the new trim creaked once or twice. I went outside and checked the nails. They held. Russell’s shutters banged against the blue siding across the lane. He came out in a sweater pulled over his shirt and tried to fasten them. The wind tore the fabric from his hands. I crossed the lane and helped him. His fingers were cold against mine. We got the shutters latched and stood for a moment in the lee of the house. He said his partner had called from the club and told him to stay inside; the words came out hard, the way instructions do when they follow something harder to say. Back in my own yard I saw that one of the hibiscus stems Russell had mentioned earlier had broken loose and lay across the path. I picked it up and carried it to the trash. Brittle and stiff it scratched my palm but I did not feel it until later.

The next morning the air was still. I walked the boards and saw where the wind had shifted one an eighth of an inch out of line. I pried it up and reset it. The grain had twisted slightly overnight. I sanded the high spot until it lay flush again. Tomas drove by and slowed the truck. He waved once and kept going. I worked through the morning fitting the last pieces of baseboard in the front room. The radio played low in the kitchen. The announcer spoke of storms arriving in the keys to the south. I paid no attention. The wood absorbed the words and lay silent.

I watched Russell from the porch later that week and felt something give a little in the usual order of things. The boards were true but the lives around them kept their own pace. I saw then how the wood had given me the illusion of order while everything else moved toward its own unraveling.

By late August the house was finished inside and out. The floors gleamed in the early morning sun. The windowsills fit tight against the frames. I walked from room to room and the sound of my steps was solid. Russell came one final time. He stood on the porch and ran his hand along the new railing. He said it looked like something built to last. His coral pink shirt had a tear at the hem where the wind had caught it weeks earlier. I offered him a chair but he shook his head. He said he had to get back before the club shift ended. I watched him cross the lane. The light slanted low and caught a swarm of lovebugs dancing in the air.

I left Wilton Manors in September. The house stood empty again but the boards remained. I packed the saw in the trunk and drove south again. The radio played the same station until the signal faded. I thought about the splinter in my thumb that first day and how it had healed without a scar. The control I had felt was real enough while it lasted. The wood had obeyed. The rest had not. In the rearview mirror the neighborhood receded under a clear sky. I did not look back again. The wind would find the loose nails soon enough. The dust would settle into the new joints and the floors would shift once more. It was the way of things in that place. I kept driving until the scent of salt was gone and the light changed to something softer. What I carried with me was quieter than I had expected. The superpower had been temporary. I had shared a house, and a bed, but I was alone that summer.

I was seventeen the winter I first went down into the clubs under Montreal. Although I would not have said so at the time, seventeen felt like the last year you could pretend the world had not already decided what it wanted from you. The city itself was white and hard in the way Quebec winters are white and hard, snow banked against the curbs on Sainte-Catherine and the wind off the river slicing through whatever coat you owned. You took the métro as far as it would go and then walked the last blocks with your shoulders hunched and your hands jammed in your pockets. The clubs had no signs worth noticing. You knew them by the men standing outside in the cold smoking, by the bass you could feel through the soles of your boots before you reached the stairs.

Inside it was another country. The air was thick and warm and smelled of sweat and spilled beer and the faint sweet chemical edge that came with what we swallowed. I learned early that the small white things had names no one bothered to keep straight. You bought them from a boy in a hooded sweatshirt who kept them in a small plastic bag inside the cuff of his parka. One night he called them doves. Another night he called them something else. It did not matter. You swallowed what he gave you with warm beer from a plastic cup and waited for the moment when the music stopped being noise and became something that moved inside your chest as a second pulse.

The first time it happened I was standing near the bar at a place we called the Tunnel because that was what it felt like, a long low room with black walls and a low ceiling and lights that flashed white then red then white again. The music was the kind that made conversation impossible and therefore unnecessary. A man came up beside me. He was older than most of the others, maybe forty, wearing a leather jacket that had seen better days and a shirt open at the throat. He did not speak at first. He simply stood there letting the lights move across his face. When he did speak his voice carried the flat vowels of somewhere west of here.

You look like you could use a friend, he said.

I did not answer. I was watching the way the strobes caught on the sweat at the base of his throat. He bought me a drink anyway. We stood together until what I had swallowed earlier began to lift me out of myself and into the music. After a while he asked if I wanted to go somewhere quieter. I said no. He nodded as if he had expected that. Later, when the lights came up and the music stopped, he offered me twenty dollars to walk with him back to his car. I took the money. It was not only because I needed it for the métro home and the next night’s small white things, though I did. There was something else in the transaction, the way the folded bills passed from his hand to mine under the sodium lights, a quickening I did not name. I told myself it was only a walk. I told myself a lot of things in those days.

The clubs changed names and locations but the pattern stayed the same. You arrived after midnight because anything earlier felt like admitting you had nowhere else to be. You wore the same clothes you had worn to work: a white shirt with a collar, black trousers, boots that had begun to split along one seam. You danced or you did not dance. Mostly you stood against a wall and let the crowd move past you like water. Sometimes someone touched your arm. Sometimes someone pressed what you needed into your palm without being asked. The transaction was understood. You swallowed it and waited for the rush that made the night feel possible again.

I met a man named Marc one February night when the snow had turned to sleet and the streets outside were black and shining. Marc worked days in a print shop off René-Lévesque. He had a scar across one eyebrow from something he never explained and a way of looking at you that made you feel seen in a manner that was not entirely comfortable. He liked the music that came from the front room, the harder faster beat that made the floor shake. We took what we needed together and danced until four in the morning. Afterward we stood in the alley behind the club sharing a cigarette while the cold settled into our bones. He asked if I needed money for the week. I said I did not. He gave me thirty dollars anyway and told me to buy myself something decent to eat. I took it, feeling again that same faint quickening, the small shame of the exchange that was not entirely shame. I bought what I needed instead. The proposition repeated itself more times than I now can count. Marc never asked for anything in return except that I be there the next weekend. I understood what was being offered and what was not. The line between the two was thinner than I liked to admit.

The raves were different. They happened outside the city, in warehouses reached by taxis that smelled of cigarette smoke and pine air freshener. You heard about them by word of mouth or by a number written on a scrap of paper passed hand to hand. The music was relentless and what we swallowed was cheaper and stronger. One night we drove across the river to a place that had once been a textile mill. The roof had holes in it and the snow came through in thin silver lines that caught the laser lights. Hundreds of us moved together under those lights. I remember the way the chemical warmth spread through my arms and legs and made the cold air feel like something I could push aside. A man in his fifties pressed against me and asked if I wanted to go upstairs where it was quieter. I went. We did not speak much. When it was over he gave me a ten-dollar bill folded small and said thanks. I took the bill and walked back down into the crowd. No one looked at me any different. That was the thing about those nights. Everything that happened felt both inevitable and weightless.

I kept a room in a walk-up in the Village where the windows shook when the wind came in off the river. I paid the rent with the wages from a job I had at a bookstore near the station and whatever else came in from the nights that ended with money in my pocket. I told myself it was temporary. I told myself a great many things. The mornings after were the worst. You woke with your mouth dry and your head full of static and the knowledge that you had to be at school in three hours. You stood in the shower until the hot water ran out and tried to remember what you had said or done. Sometimes you remembered everything. Sometimes you remembered nothing. Either way the day went on.

There was a song they played often that winter. I never knew its name. The words drifted through the smoke and the lights and lodged somewhere behind my eyes. Underground I make my way. One day we’ll gain our say. Above the ground another day, we make our way with underground prayers.

It spoke to something in the room that none of us would have admitted out loud. The locked and bolted doors, the tunnel barred against contingency. The code that might or might not resolve itself in time. I hummed it sometimes on the métro home when the streets were still dark and the other passengers kept their eyes on their shoes.

By the time I turned nineteen the scene had begun to thin out and I had returned to my parents’ home for awhile. Some of the boys stopped coming. Others moved away or got clean or simply grew tired. Marc disappeared for a month and then reappeared thinner and quieter. He told me the print shop had laid him off. I gave him what money I had. He took it without comment. We sat in the Tunnel one last time and watched the lights move across the same black walls. The music sounded the same but it no longer lifted me in the same way. I understood that something had shifted and that the shift was permanent. I stopped carrying what we swallowed in my coat pocket. I stopped accepting money from men who offered it after dark. For awhile. The boots I had worn until they split and I threw them away.

Forty years later and the city I live in is warm and bright and nothing like Montreal. The light here is hard and clear and leaves no room for shadows. I sit at a desk in a room that overlooks a garden and I think sometimes about those nights under the ground. I think about Marc and the boy in the warehouse and the man in the leather jacket and all the others whose names I never learned. I think about the money that changed hands without discussion and the small careful bargains we made with ourselves to keep the night going. None of it seems dramatic from this distance. It seems only like a particular arrangement of light and sound and need that held for a while and then came apart the way all such arrangements do.

The song comes back to me sometimes when I least expect it. The hunter sings in sonar. In radar. In taps on the wall. Strangers with no hope at all. Another day, we make our way with underground prayers.

I do not hum it anymore. I let the words move through me and then let them go. There is no point in holding on. The code was never resolved. We paid what we could and we moved on.

It was a morning in early April when the light on the street was refined to an unnatural clarity. I stepped out the front door of the narrow house I rented just off La Rue de la Visitation and the cold caught me at once. The pavement still carried patches of wet snow from the night before and the sun struck it in small bright fragments that scattered across the sidewalk like something spilled and left to dry. I was twenty.

I carried my books for the day in a canvas bag slung over one shoulder. The bag had begun to wear at the seams. I had bought it the first week I arrived in the Village and it had lasted longer than some of the people I had known then. I closed the door behind me.

My apartment was on the second floor. One room with a kitchenette that leaked and a bathroom shared with the tenant below. The rent came from student loans and the shifts I worked at the cafe on Saint Catherine where the espresso machine hissed all day and the customers spoke in French or English depending on who was behind the counter. My family in Westmount had stopped the checks the day I told them I would not be coming home for the summer, this was two years ago now. The conversation had taken place at the dining table with the silver that had been my grandmother’s. My father had set down the wineglass and said nothing. My mother had asked if I understood what this meant. I understood.

I started down the steps. The neighbor from the house next door was on her porch with a cup of coffee. She looked up and said, Hi, it is you. The words came out faint but friendly. I paused. She wore a gray sweater that had pills at the elbows and her hair was pulled back with a clip that caught the light. Her husband Dan came out then. I had known Dan from a job some years ago when we had both worked in the bookstore on Sherbrooke. Dan was a father now. He had the baby inside with his wife. Dan said, There she is. The phrase hung between them for a moment as if it referred to something they both recognized but had never named.

I kept walking. Two doors down another voice. Hi, and, Hey it is him. It was Rob. A former boss from the same bookstore. Now a friend. A professor. He stood on the porch with coffee and the morning light. He had a friend with him. Someone I had never met. The friend hopped up on the railing. Hand on the post. She said, You have those guys just there across the street. They called your name.

It was true. They were calling again. It was more. It was them. They were moving in. They were taking up the whole damn house. Some on the lawn. Some on the stair. In the windows. On the roof. And in the air. I looked both ways. The street was empty except for them. I crossed and said, I want a hug from everyone. One and two then clasping arms round shoulders and waists they shuffle and slide into a dance. The music starts. A voice. A song. A circle inside a circle inside a circling sky.

The light held. It struck the shoulders of the people who had gathered and made the fabric of their jackets gleam. One man wore a leather coat that had seen better days. The collar was turned up against the cold. Another had on a red wool scarf that had been knitted by hand. The colors were bright against the gray stone of the houses. I did not know all their names but I knew the way their bodies moved. The dance was not planned. It had no steps I could name. Yet the circle formed as if it had been waiting for this exact alignment of light and cold and the particular angle of the sun on the wet pavement. I felt the arms link. The pressure of a hand at my waist. The shuffle of shoes on the concrete. The song came from somewhere I could not locate. A voice low and clear that seemed to rise from the street itself.

I had studied this kind of thing at McGill. Cultural anthropology. The way people organized themselves around what they needed to believe. The business class had taught me the other side. The exchange of value. The scarcity that drove the market. In the Village the scarcity was time. The bodies that were still here carried a kind of currency. I had watched it in the bars on Saint Catherine. The way eyes met and looked away. The way conversations circled the names of those who were gone. I had lost three friends in the last eighteen months. One had been a bartender who could make anyone laugh. Another had been a student like me who had talked about going to law school. The third had simply stopped answering the phone. The hospital on the hill had taken them all in the end. They had passed time together for a while and then they had not.

The circle widened. More people joined. I saw faces I had not seen in years. A man who had worked the register at the cafe. A woman who had lived in the building next door before she moved to Toronto. They moved in the same shuffle. The arms linked again. The song continued. The sky above the rooftops seemed to turn with us. I felt the rhythm in my chest. The cold air filled my lungs. The sparkle on the pavement caught the movement of our feet and threw it back in bright fragments. I thought of the class I had taken on urban subcultures. The professor had talked about ritual as a way to hold what could not be held. I had written a paper on the Village as a kind of economy. The exchange of touch for survival. The paper had earned me an A. I had not shown it to my family.

The circle turned again. Inside it another circle formed. I saw the face of the first friend I had lost. The bartender. He was dancing in the inner ring. His leather jacket open. The smile the same as it had been on the night we had closed the bar together and walked home through the snow. The friend looked at me and nodded once. The nod carried the weight of all the nights we had spent talking about nothing and everything. The song rose. The arms tightened. The circle inside the circle turned. Another face appeared. The law student. He wore the same scarf he had worn the day he left the hospital for the last time. The wool was faded but the color endured. He danced with the same careful precision he had once brought to every argument in the cafe. The third friend joined them. The one who had stopped answering the phone. He moved with the others as if he had never left. The circles spun. The light held them all in place.

I thought of Westmount then. The house with the garden that faced the mountain. The dining table set with the silver. The way my mother had arranged the flowers every week. The way my father had spoken of the firm as if it were the only possibility. I had left it all for this street. For the apartment with the leaking kitchenette. For the shifts at the cafe. For the friends who had died and the ones who had not. The dance did not judge. It simply continued. The circles expanded. The sky circled with us. I felt the hand at my waist shift. The pressure changed. The song altered its key but did not stop. The people on the roof leaned down. Their faces were clear in the light. One of them was the professor who had taught the business class. He had spoken once about the market as a kind of story people told themselves to keep moving. The professor danced now with the same measured steps he had used in the lecture hall. Another face appeared in the outer circle. A man I had known only from the bars. We had shared a cigarette one night on the sidewalk and talked about the weather. The man was here now. His coat was the same. The cigarette was gone.

The light began to change. A cloud moved across the sun. The sparkle on the pavement dimmed. The circles continued. I felt the fragility of their disposition. The way the arms could unlink at any moment. The way the song could fade into the traffic on Saint Catherine. The way the faces of the lost friends could slip back into the places where they had been. I had learned this in the anthropology class. The ritual ended. The participants returned to their ordinary lives. The value of the exchange was in the memory it left. The business of it was the way the memory could be spent or saved. I kept dancing. The circles turned. The sky circled above the rooftops in pale blue and white and blue and white.

I thought of the hospital on the hill. The rooms with the windows that looked out on the city. The way the light had fallen across the beds in the afternoons. The way the nurses had moved with quiet efficiency. The way the visitors had spoken in low voices. The friends had died in those rooms. Been made and then unmade. The dance did not erase that. It simply held it for the length of a song. I felt the arm around my shoulder. The hand at my waist. The shuffle of shoes on the concrete. The music rose again. The circles spun faster. The faces blurred into one another. The lost friends were there and not there. The living were there and not there. The street holding us all.

The song reached a point where it seemed it would not end. The circles expanded until the whole block seemed to be part of them. The houses leaned in. The bare branches of the trees along the sidewalk moved in time. The wet pavement reflected the movement in bright fragments that shifted and reformed. I saw my own face in one of the puddles. It looked back at me with the same detachment I had learned to wear. The face of the boy from Westmount. The face of the student who studied the economy of bodies. The face of the man who had lost friends and kept dancing.

The cloud passed. The light returned. The sparkle came back stronger. The circles slowed. The arms unlinked. The song faded into the ordinary sounds of the street. A car door slammed somewhere. A dog barked. The people on the lawn stepped back. The ones on the stairs went inside. The ones in the windows closed the curtains. The ones on the roof disappeared over the ridge. The inner circles dissolved. The faces of the lost friends slipped away. The bartender. The law student. The one who had stopped answering the phone. They left no trace except the memory of their hands on my shoulders.

I stood on the sidewalk. The canvas bag still on my shoulder. The books inside heavy with the weight of the day’s classes. The street was ordinary again. The pavement held the same wet shine but the fragments of light had settled. The neighbor from next door was back on her porch with her coffee. Dan had gone inside with the baby. Rob and his friend had returned to their porch. The friend on the railing had hopped down. The cold air pressed against my skin. I adjusted the strap of the bag. I looked across the street at the house that had held us all. The door was closed. The windows were dark. The roof was empty.

I started walking toward McGill. The path took me along Saint Catherine where the cafe waited for my shift later. The light on the buildings was the same as it had been when I stepped out the door. Yet something had shifted. The sparkle had been there and then it had not. The circles had formed and then they had dissolved. The lost friends had danced and then they had gone. The family in Westmount remained. The Village continued its economy of bodies and time. I thought of the paper I had written. The ritual as a way to hold what could not be held. The market as a story people told themselves to keep moving.

The day continued. The classes at McGill would begin on time. The professor in cultural anthropology would speak of subcultures and the way they mapped survival. The business professor would speak of value and scarcity. The light in the room would fall across the desks in the same way it had fallen across the pavement. I would think of the circles. The way they had turned inside one another and the way the sky had circled with them. The way the lost friends had appeared and then vanished. The way the music had risen from the street itself.

I reached the corner. The traffic moved past as a bus hissed to a stop. I crossed with the light. The cold air filled my lungs again. The sparkle had gone from the day but the memory of it remained. I told myself the story of the morning as I walked. The neighbor on the porch. The husband with the baby. Rob and his friend. The faces across the street. The hugs. The shuffle. The song. The circles. The lost friends in the inner ring. The light on the leather jacket. The faded wool scarf. The nod that carried the weight of all the nights. The dance that had held everything for the length of a song. The dissolution that followed as it always did.

I reached the steps of the building at McGill. The stone was cold under my hand. The door opened and the warmth inside met me. Students passed with their bags and their notes. I found a seat in the lecture hall. The professor began. The words were the same as they had been the week before. Subcultures. Exchange. Survival. I took notes.

I had known him since we were seventeen, in the way one knows people in certain Westmount schools, where the social map is drawn less by affection than by the particular light that falls on the tennis courts at three-thirty and the exact shade of the Chanticleer that lines the drive. His name was Ellis. He wore shorts in a Madras plaid that had been washed so often the pleats had given up. We climbed together because neither of us had anywhere better to be on those Saturdays when the fog burned off early and sky made a soft palette, east over the St. Lawrence.

This time it was not the familiar ridges above Val-David but a place in England I had never seen before and would not see again. The trip had been arranged by his mother, who believed foreign travel improved character. We were twenty-two. I carried a rucksack with a thermos of tea gone lukewarm and a packet of digestive biscuits that tasted of nothing. Ellis carried the rope, coiled neatly, the way he did everything.

The hills were hollow in a way that suggested they had once been quarried or mined or simply worn through by water that no longer ran. We entered them sideways, through fissures barely wide enough for shoulders. The rock was slick with moss and mud the consistency of wet plaster. We moved without speaking much, the only sounds the scrape of boots and the occasional fall of pebbles that seemed to go on falling longer than physics allowed.

At one point my fingers lost their purchase on a ledge that looked drier than it was. For perhaps three seconds I hung there, the full weight of my body dependent on the tension in my left forearm and the uncertain grip of my right boot on a root that felt no thicker than a pencil. The drop below was not dramatic. Ten feet, maybe twelve. Enough to break something important. Enough to lie there with the moss closing over one’s face while the light changed and the English rain began again.

Ellis did not look back. He kept moving, the rope paying out behind him in economical loops. When I finally hauled myself up and caught up with him in a wider chamber where the ceiling opened to a slit of gray sky, he was sitting on a flat stone eating one of the biscuits. Crumbs clung to the corner of his mouth. He offered me the packet without comment.

We could have died there, I thought. We could still die here. The notion had a certain clarity. It was not fear exactly. It was the recognition that our time is strictly provisional. That the purchase we think we have on the world is mostly illusion maintained by daily fictions.

Later, when we had emerged onto a slope cropped close by sheep, we sat with our backs against a stone wall that had lost most of its mortar. Ellis lit a cigarette he had bought at the airport. He smoked the way we did then, as if the act itself proved something. I watched the smoke drift toward the hollow hills.

He never loved me the way I never quite loved him. The sentence formed itself without drama, the way certain sentences do when the body has spent its small store of adrenaline. It was simply information, like noting that the tea had gone cold or that the lichen on the rocks was the precise shade of the Melamine kitchenware we kept at the cottage. We had climbed together because it was what we did. Because the hills were there and the rope was there and the possibility of falling was there and none of it required declarations.

I have thought about that climb often since, usually at odd hours when the house is quiet and the only sound is the refrigerator cycling on in the kitchen. The memory arrives without warning, the way certain weathers arrive. The slick rock. The roots. The clear sky. The deliberate way Ellis coiled the rope. The way neither of us spoke the obvious, which was that we had come a long way to prove nothing in particular except that we could still grip and pull and keep moving even when the purchase was doubtful.

It is the kind of memory that settles into the bones rather than the mind. One does not revisit it for consolation. One simply notes it. The facts remain. We climbed. We did not fall. We emerged into the thin English light carrying the same small failures we had carried in. The hills stayed hollow behind us. The moss kept growing. Nothing was resolved and nothing needed to be.

That is the way most directions end, I have come to see. Not with declarations or with ropes that hold or with love declared or withheld in any final way. They end with the sound of boots on wet stone and the taste of a biscuit that has gone soft in the rucksack. The recognition that the purchase was never as firm as one pretended. One simply keeps moving until the light changes and the wind shifts and it is time to go down again.

I was standing in the checkout line at the Publix on Bird Road when the girl in front of me dropped her receipt. She was maybe nineteen, wearing a white tank top and frayed denim cutoffs. I can’t articulate the reason so much as the feeling. She reminded me of myself sitting on a specific curb outside a 7-Eleven at two in the morning waiting for a ride that might or might not come. What is important at the start is to point out the receipt that fluttered down between us. I picked it up and handed it back to her. She took it without looking at me, folded it once, twice, creased it sharp with her thumbnail, then once more, until it had become something angular and deliberate. A paper plane.

She smiled then, a quick private smile that did not include me or the cashier or the woman behind me pushing a cart full of cat food and diet soda. She turned toward the automatic doors that opened onto the parking lot and the wet heat of a Miami afternoon in late April, and she threw the plane. It caught the draft from the air-conditioning and rose, absurdly, spinning once before it caught the light and sailed out over the asphalt where cars idled with their windows up and their engines running.

So much for my fear of heights, she said to no one in particular.

I watched it go. The plane cleared the hood of a silver Accord and disappeared between two rows of shopping carts. Someone honked. The girl laughed once, short and bright, and walked out into the glare without looking back. Her flip-flops made a soft slapping sound against the concrete. I stood there holding my own bag of limes and tonic water and thought about how certain lines of flight collapse without warning. One minute you are waiting in line for skim milk and the next you are watching a stranger fold herself into flight.

Later that evening I drove north on 95 with the windows down. The radio played something I did not recognize, all minor chords and a woman’s voice repeating a single phrase until it sounded like weather. Traffic was slow because of construction. Orange barrels flickered past in the dying light. I kept seeing the paper plane, the precise way the girl had creased it, the small decisive motion of her wrist. It was not a gesture of defiance exactly. It was more the recognition that the ground had already fallen away and the only thing left was to commit to the drop.

I thought about the times I had done something similar, though never with paper. I thought about standing at the edge of certain decisions that looked, from a distance, like solid floor. The move from Montreal to London when I was twenty-four and still believed distance could rearrange the facts of a life. The afternoon I signed the papers for the place on Visitation Street and realized too late that the light in the living room would always arrive at the wrong angle. The night I told a man I loved him and then drove away before he could answer, the taillights of my car reflecting red in the rearview mirror like small signals of retreat.

None of those moments had felt like courage at the time. They had felt like the only available motion. You fold what you have, you throw it into the air, and you watch to see whether it will glide or stall or simply fall. The fear of heights is not really about falling. It is about the interval between the release and the impact, the long seconds when nothing is decided and everything is in play.

The girl at Publix had understood this. Bet you never had a girlfriend who could do this, she had said, and I wondered who she had been speaking to.

I exited at the airport and circled back south on LeJeune. The sky had gone the color of old photographs. Somewhere over the Everglades a plane was taking off, its lights blinking against the dusk. I thought of the girl again, her white tank top, the way her shoulders had squared just before she let the plane go.

The paper plane would be somewhere on the asphalt now, already softening in the humidity, already being stepped on or swept away. It did not matter. The throw had been made. The crease had been sharp. The girl had walked out into the heat without looking down.

So much for my fear of heights, I said to the empty car.

The words sounded different when I said them. Smaller. More precise. Like something I had folded carefully and then released into the dark.

I’m calling this a prologue but as I’m writing I’m wondering if it will evolve into something like a user’s guide. If you were there for The Invisibles as Grant Morrison ran the voodoo down, you will have a good sense of what I’m up to. I arrived for that one after the fact but have everything on good authority from a Ragged Robin of my own, for a short while, who was there. I’m confident I’ve got the basics.

Call it ‘the power of positive thinking,’ if you are skeptically inclined. An appeal to a guardian angel, if you are paying attention. The work as a whole is meant to be a kind of prayer. I have a lot to answer for.

This is a work of fiction. The narrator isn’t me, he is quite specifically someone else who is therefore, strictly speaking, not me. But as I’m Pisces and I’m told there is an ongoing issue communicating with perfect clarity when I make this sort of statement (thank you, Capricorns), I should add that every word happened and every word is true.

The work(ing) is called Flowers in Asphalt, a variation of Flowers of Asphalt. Flowers of Asphalt, in turn, the title of an ‘imaginary or unwritten’ book, specifically an unwritten novel by Stephen Crane.

This is a properly Borgesian title, quite literally unclear if Crane ever meant to write it or if the novel was always already apocryphal.

The story goes:

One night in April or May of 1894, I ran into Crane on Broadway and we started over to the Everett House together, I’d been at a theater with Saltus and was in evening dress. In the Square a kid came up and begged from us. I was drunk enough to give him a quarter. He followed along and I saw he was really soliciting. Crane was damned innocent about everything but women and didn’t see what the boy’s game was. We got to the Everett House and we could see that the kid was painted. He was very handsome—looked like a Rossetti angel—big violet eyes—probably full of belladonna. He took the kid in and fed him supper. Got him to talk. The kid had syphilis, of course—most of that type do—and wanted money to have himself treated. Crane rang up Irving Bacheller and borrowed fifty dollars.

He pumped a mass of details out of the boy whose name was something like Coolan and began a novel about a boy prostitute. I made him read À Rebours which he didn’t like very much. Thought it stilted. This novel began with a scene in a railroad station. Probably the best passage of prose that Crane ever wrote. Boy from the country running off to see New York. He read the thing to Garland who was horrified and begged him to stop. I don’t know that he ever finished the book. He was going to call it Flowers of Asphalt.

If I were collared and compelled to plain speaking, I’d say it’s likely the work was an invention, a mirror image of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Language does this. This is how urban legends are born, the ones everyone’s heard and the many more that effervesce then return where they came. The grammar of culture grinds its way through a series of binary oppositions, recombinant, iterating. In this version, she’s a girl of the streets. In this version, a boy.

You should be unsurprised to learn, I’m not the first person to have noticed Flowers of Asphalt and took an interest. Samuel R. Delaney - the soul of a gentleman in person when I was young and pretty - argues it’s a fabrication. With Hotel de Dream (2007), Edmund White, inventively, set out to write the novel Crane never did.

My ambition is modest by comparison. I don’t have the truth of the matter one way or another and Crane’s story, whatever its existence, remains his concern. For me, the premise is a tool. I intend to break into a parallel universe. The Egyptians might have described it as a chisel. Or a feather, if that’s the shape I will need to open the mouth at dawn, to bypass the encryption of the library of libraries. For my purposes, Flowers in Asphalt is The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim, The Book of Imaginary Beings, The King in Yellow. It’s the Necronomicon for rent.

There’s a start.