Tonight, you know, is my birthday, although technically it was all day. That’s not a supremely technical point, you’ll pardon the lazy language, but to be precise, if not supremely technical, I tumbled down from Mother at 6:31 p.m., just in time for supper. In any case I’m now 27, my dark marriage fruit is rotting, my dowry has cobwebs. Egad! the clock has flipped past midnight, it’s no longer my birthday, I’ve turned into a pumpkin, I’ve pumped into a turnkin, but perhaps now I have the distance and clarity and visual acuity to tell you, O Journal of Fleeting Feet, about my Very Memorable Soirée.

I should remind you of the situation with Harriet & Bruce (& when I say “you” I mean “me” and when I say “I” I mean “you” (hmm: why was I the only child in preschool without an imaginary friend? (hmm: why was I the only one without real friends?))) since they were central to the Soirée. They revealed their secret engagement on day 1 of this Toronto trip, and Harriet wanted me to be So Sad, so I acted So Sad, because who wants to lose their only sister / protector to a tall man with a Devonian accent? Such was her theory of the case. And then we met up on Tuesday (day 5), but I avoided the topic so that I could extract leverage for future use and also Harriet was looking 19th-century ill with her new haircut, instead I lambasted her internet posts and impersonated her, which led to a terrible, if muted falling out, also Bruce invited me out for a quiet pint on Friday (day 8) but still all was in limbo going into today, aka my birthday (day 9).

Speed ahead, though, to 11 a.m. this morning, I was hearing about rationality as the day dawned, over wood-fired bagels in Kensington Market, on Augusta Ave. I think, or else it was Oxford St. possibly. Or rather my new friend Gordon, if Gordon will still consent to being called a friend (given how much I’ve been jousting at his viewpoints on Art) was relaying his recent reading on rationality & ethics, whilst I countered (internally) that any comprehensive theory of rationality & ethics must contend with how cream cheese pillages the bagel hole.

5. COULD IT BE RATIONAL TO CAUSE ONESELF TO ACT IRRATIONALLY? This was the section of Reasons & Persons, by Derek Parfit of All Souls College, that Gordon was engaged in. Whatever Gordon might say, and indeed I hardly listened, since James Brown’s “King Heroin” came on the bagel shop radio (“I came to this country without a passport”; the saxophone panthers prowl), I already had my answer: yes. Gordon read aloud some overwrought, yet oddly moving thought experiment in which a man takes an Irrational Pill to, in essence, circumvent a home invasion, about which more later. Honestly when one makes a brand-new friend, all is a crapshoot! I was glad to hear some philosophy, because there’s only so much you can discuss with a person, even if they’re kind: the hometown (Etobicoke), the birthday (April 4th, 1998), the surname (Lee), the job (something in biology) and then before long things get redundant. But may I say, if it’s not too late, or indeed too early, to render my summary judgment, and also as an ancillary, positive judgment on Gordon, that I am in love w/ Toronto, & am sad to be getting on an American Airlines Embraer 190 tomorrow and flying home, even if I do miss The Greatest City in the World.

Could it be rational to throw oneself a birthday party in a foreign country? As we strolled through Kensington Market, ducking in & out of fromageries, I puzzled it out. Reasons in favour of a party: it’s “what’s done,” it allows one to override others’ preferences for a spate. Reasons against: the fatigue of socializing, where am I / who am I / what’s even happening? In any case, I drafted a guest list for the night: me myself, new friend Gordon, new friend Kia, sister Harriet, soon-to-be-brother-in-law Bruce. Despite it being self-aggrandizing (at the same time, whom better to aggrandize?), I asked Gordon if five souls formed a quorum for a birthday party, the celebrant included, and if not, could he invite a few of his friends too, perhaps three, totalling eight, but not his prickly bandmates. It’s your birthday?! he interrobanged. Happy birthday Virgil!!! Then he proceeded to do all the Typical Things Typical People do when they hear it’s someone’s birthday, following which pleasant tedium, I asked again, and he said okay!

I’ll admit my theory of how everyone’s reducible to a computer program is challenged to some degree by Gordon and his robin’s-egg-blue-veined Canadian compatriots. In some respects, Gordon can be schematized: he is an artist and he plays occasional saxophone in a band and he writes short fiction and he likes films from around the world & all the decades; a v. cool kid. Yet he’s terribly polite, terribly mild-mannered, terribly unattached to any ideals! So much so in fact that when I announced to him that I like Coldplay, he didn’t rise to take the bait, not even when I sang the universally maligned “I’d rather be a comma than a full stop” line, no, Gordon said plangently that he’s a huge fan of their drummer. But I should be grateful: with him, at least, there’s no looming threat of Diagnosis poking at my vagus nerve.

What does “plangent” mean? Looking it up. Ah, it means that.

It’s so tedious to list out all that happened in a day (this is a running dilemma with us, O Journal of Subordinate Blankness) and yet I feel that to elide time is to deny reality. I’ll proceed quickly! It was already time to start planning the party & gaining assurances from guests. Kia said yes, Harriet and Bruce said yes, I mean in fact Harriet had texted me several happy birthday messages prior to my bagel, wanting to make sure I was okay and not lonely and seeming in a way to implicitly apologize, even Mother and Father had airdropped some gelid wishes. Though I wanted to see A.M.’s sister, I didn’t entirely want to see A.M.; so they were off the invite list. And then Gordon found three friends to join (four, really, but I didn’t like the idea of nine guests: odd-numbered seating arrangements). Then I needed to pick a time and a place, so I settled on 7 p.m. at a 24-hour pho place right off Spadina Avenue that I’d had my eye on in recent days.

Little of interest happened before dinner, not counting a few hours spent in my lodging’s armchair watching two raccoons cart away trash & reading Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time courtesy of the lodging and nearly calling the party off because I grew enamoured of the war descriptions! Like: “The Finns fought on skis, in white camouflage uniforms; they’d always appear out of nowhere, like angels.” (The lodging has a weathered copy of The Communist Manifesto on its shelf too, yet condescends to charge an arm & a leg, per Harriet, who picked up the tab for the lodging, doubtless with Bruce’s help, but it’s hard to be a consistent citizen these days, even for Canadians.) Alas, the Russo-Finn War is neither here nor there. Most of life is neither here nor there. And so with these visions of war sugarplumming in my head, I took the Spadina streetcar south, the clouds looking fulminous and late-summery out the window.

∰

On Dundas Street W., medium busy, cars gliding by. The restaurant had a waiting room feel, despite the reviews’ reverence for the food. Harriet and Bruce arrived first, but before we could get much past light embraces etc., Gordon and Kia came in, which appeared to stun Harriet back into a master’s program (Gordon in a red crop-top, Kia with her angular bang-sweep) & when Kia told Bruce that he resembled Idris Elba and Bruce smiled meekly, the totality of what might actualize this evening, by which I mean the everyone-socializing-simultaneously madness, bowled me over, feet over head, tumble-tumble and I thought I might faint buuuut I didn’t (thank goodness Gordon’s additional friends didn’t show up until much later). We sat around the table, and Harriet glared at me, not seeking any concrete response, but with the ugly thought “what? *you* are capable of making *friends*?” chyroning cross her forehead — and with most of that energy, aka disbelief, aimed at Kia, without even knowing that Kia and I had recently taken a three-plus-hour car trip to the Sheepdog Trials in Gananoque & that I had seen Kia in her, ahem, underwear. Simply her well defined jaw made Harriet incredulous, like she was in the presence of dark matter, although, even in her incredulity, Harriet managed to look at me with DSM-5 eyes. Had I pushed myself further into Atypicality with my friend-making (if so, how?)?

Harriet said, So Kia, what do you do? because she had to lasso Kia, give her some basic shape in her mind, in order to know how to handle her. Kia said she was starting medical school in the fall. I whipped out Peggy’s almanac and rattled off a couple facts, choicest among them that the most visited tourist countries are France and Spain, not the U.S., not at all. It’s not a very good almanac, I’ll probably leave it behind in the lodging & evade JFK Customs, but Bruce found that bit interesting, but Harriet told Kia, You know why Virgil has such a good memory? He keeps a Journal and records every fact of the day in it and reviews it every morning; he had his old almanac memorized, too, down to the top RBI baseball player for each season. As if this were itself emblematic of a Diagnosis, not just Self-Care or what-have-you. Gordon said, That’s very impressive, and Kia smiled and said, Ooh. But Harriet went on, I’m glad Virgil has made some friends in Toronto; Bruce and I, we got engaged, and I’ve been worried, because Virgil and I are so close, in fact we’re roommates, back in New York, I mean, not here, and well, Virgil doesn’t like change (my goodness, by this point, she was practically figure-skating around a Diagnosis) — however, this was uttered, in the usual practice of elegant females, while Harriet was leaning in and talking in a hushed mutter, as people often do in movies, when boundless conversations are afoot at a dinner. Yet in this case, there was little competition, it was simply Bruce + Gordon looking at their menus & making noises of approval, so in effect, then, what Harriet was doing was BROADCASTING all of this with (in my opinion) a tendril of jealousy — so I did what I deemed equitable, and, in a prosecutorial tone, said, Since you two are getting married, will you be having children? Bruce, you’re 50-odd, and Harriet, you’re getting older, you’re wearing a dowdy blouse, and I demand a niece/nephew! (This last statement is, by the way, in line with what humanity wants: continuance of the blood, starchy calories for poetry.)

There was a cooling-off after this exchange, predictably, and it was intentional, on my part, at any rate, and while we cooled off, everyone ordered a smelly durian shake & pork spring rolls & thinly sliced beef pho, on my command, after which, we turned to Parfit’s overwrought thought experiment.

A caution: I do this purely from memory, so forgive any mistakes. (Check the clock: 1:15 a.m. One sips the piping hot coffee.)

The crux of it: someone breaks into your home and threatens to kill all the members of your family if you don’t surrender your jewelry. Option 1: You do surrender your jewelry, but in all likelihood, the burglar kills everyone anyway, because, “why leave a living witness?” Option 2: You don’t surrender your jewelry, and so the burglar begins to kill your family members to force your hand. There are no good rational options! So ex machina, Parfit produces Option 3: Drink an Irrational Potion that makes you act in an unpredictable fashion, thereby disarming (in a manner of speaking) the burglar, who can no longer bargain rationally with you. So by becoming irrational, you preserve your family, which is what you rationally want. Conclusion: Yes, it can be rational to act irrationally.

Once this was said & done, I awaited a response, but none came, until Kia wobbled her head to and fro, and said, That’s obvious, isn’t it? And then they all moved on to discussing other things, summer concerts, patios in Toronto, etc., and I could feel the fatigue sweeping over me like a wind in a cornfield, no that’s too unoriginal, like like like, whom am I even channeling in that simile? Lawren Harris? Tom Thomson? I’ve hardly seen a natural gust of wind in my life — they say that love is the only bridge, per that book I haven’t finished, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, but ideas can be a bridge too! — indeed I was so moved by the thought experiment the more time I spent with it, so sad & happy for the man and his family, rescued from death by a scintillating mind, my eyes welled up (I’m still opposed to the morose! still a fan of the ecstatic!) & simultaneously I was so fatigued from this party, all the people w/ their different personalities needling and coddling and battling as we loped on boringly to Nowhere, what an affront! and we were only at the appetizers (I am fatigued now just recalling it) so I walked out into the street, Dundas St. W., and sat head down shivering in an alleyway to compose myself (and now I find myself also, in the privacy of my lodging, in need of a break, you’ll pardon the interregnum).

∰

I return with a coffee and a numbered list. Not for any good reason, just to have a familiar friend: the number line. Let me count to 27, for obvious reasons, without an obvious destination.

(1) What were they saying when I got back? The food was cold, but I wasn’t hungry, & Kia was describing why she was going into medicine, the need for doctors, the complexity of care and the need for patient-centred thinking; Gordon was describing his aunt’s journey in the medical system in 2022; Harriet related a similar experience, a “medical scare,” which she had never mentioned to me, although Bruce was well apprised. I told them all I needed to be silent, but was content to be an audience, and to watch their programmes commingle, a concert of sorts. (2) Despite having lost my appetite, I felt sad not to eat, thinking as I often do of the Tracy K. Smith “roast chicken and red wine” poem that NYC’s Poetry In Motion Subway Series displayed for several years and the joy-connection to food that people feel, indeed one of the few bodily joys I feel — at the same time, a line from Secondhand Time: “But heaps of salami have nothing to do with happiness,” though that’s about communism versus capitalism, however isn’t that struggle isomorphic to most struggles? (3) There was nary a birthday cake, nary a candle, Harriet knew me well enough, I was grateful to her, as I fingered Bruce’s icosahedron in my palm, & Bruce settled the bill and we spilled out onto Dundas Street with the inevitable “Now where, Virgil?” question. I saw some truly pregnant clouds now, their bellies lit up by the light pollution of the city and the million souls eating food and laughing on a Saturday.

May I retreat? Please oh please, may I retreat from this narrative, O Journal of Useless Self-Absorption? It would be so lovely simply to observe people sedentary in luxurious chairs in cool colours and not need to insert an “I” in every sentence, and indeed Harriet has called me a narcissist, not to my face, but I’ve overheard mornings in our apartment when she was on the phone and thought I was sleeping, I have no wish to be a narcissist, I wish to be a camera’s eye. No more! Whom to blame? The Spectacle? The polymedia that slurps us all up like an amoeba? I can be only who I am, I can say only what I say, I am trapped like we all are. Bruce, shuffling down the street beside me, thinking something pleasant, or acting that way anyhow, seemed to have escaped the orbit of the Spectacle. I feel some regret about my earlier comparisons of him to Mr. Collins from P&P. I admire Bruce; happy returns on his tolerable fortune.

(4) Enough melancholy! “Now where, Virgil?” Characteristically, I wanted a park. But which? We’d done Trinity Bellwoods Park to death in nine days, and Bellevue Square Park was hardly a park, so we decided to walk quite a ways to Christie Pits Park, close to my lodging, in fact. Flecks of rain were starting to come down, Gordon’s three surplus friends joined us on the walk, and the simple matter of motion and narrow-enough sidewalks allowed us to pair off now, a more manageable arrangement for me, with less onerous conversation dynamics. One of the friends asked if Virgil was my real name, and I said not my Christian name, but then, pointing at Harriet, added, She has a better middle name but just refuses to use it! (Livia O’Shaughnessy!) And then next I paired up with Gordon and asked if he would list his 10 favourite cities, which he didn’t have at the ready so I just said, Okay list some cities you like, and this passed the time and I got, too, a fuller picture of him and was strengthened in my belief that Pleasantness may be his overarching aim. What aim do you have for reading books about ethics? I asked, and Gordon said, No aim per se, I’m just interested, that’s all. And then I paired up with Bruce, by now we were moving north up our friend Palmerston Avenue, to which I’d become inordinately attached over nine days in Toronto, and I asked Bruce if he would be good to my sister, & he looked at me like that was a stunning question (and yet isn’t it a standard question? (under what circumstances should one ask this question if not this one?)) — regardless he said he would, and I said he had my blessing, which I had performatively withheld from him and from Harriet for a week, since he had announced their engagement to me at that barbecue pork restaurant on Spadina Ave. He seemed relieved to get the blessing. We had an off-brand hug.

(5) And then we stopped off for ice cream somewhere, I’m not quite sure where, I was getting a little lost in the Toronto grid from the birthday overwhelm, I got vanilla with chocolate sprinkles of course, after which I was walking beside Harriet. Have you had a good birthday? she said, and I said, Sure, but it’s not over, and she said, No, it’s not midnight, you’re quite right, I’m sorry; but of course (though I appreciated the apology) I wasn’t litigating the point; and she said, I hear you gave Bruce your blessing? That means a lot, more than you can know, more than any blessing I may receive from Mom and Dad, I haven’t told them yet, we told you first, Virgil (and she put her arm around me; as Harriet’s taller than I am, it was a bit aggressive). Feeling uneasy, if happy, I dislodged a fact from the almanac: Brazil has more forest land than does Canada. And she said, No way! which was pandering, but it’s fine. She continued, Does that mean you give me your blessing too? And I said, It’s transitive, of course, how could I give him my blessing to marry you but not you my blessing to marry him? That wouldn’t make sense. And she nodded & smiled with teary eyes, and I realized too late that this wasn’t a *make-sense* moment so I said (with tremendous belaboured redundancy) Y-E-S, I give you my blessing, Harriet; and very nearly I said that I had no standing, municipally or kinship-wise, to betoken her with a blessing, but again, this was not a make-sense moment, very well, very well, I smiled at her too, all the teeth, there you go, Harriet, take my teeth in this toothy smile!

(6) It was, from there, only a hop, skip, and a jump to Harriet’s next topic, which I had in a sense handed to her on a silver platter, or even a gold one (or platinum? (is platinum truly more valuable? (that’s suspect))) — Harriet said, Tell me more about Kia? Oh, I said, you mean my potentially heterosexual sex partner? (No, that reply merely slalomed in my mind; no, I don’t say everything I think.) What I said, in actuality: What would you like to know? & Harriet said, of course, Are you seeing each other? And I said, Would that make you very happy if we were? Harriet could see it was a trap, a natural trap, but she couldn’t avoid her passions and situational needs and so she said, Yes, she’s lovely, so smart and confident, and you say that you really like Toronto so it could be fun to visit her, in fact, you & I could make trips up here together, right, as long as Bruce is working here regularly? To which I said, Sure, Harriet, sure, dolloping a scoop of simple pleasure onto the platinum platter, even though it was my birthday, not Harriet’s, but she wanted what was best for me, she wanted (dot dot dot) an advantageous marriage.

(7) At the intersection of Bloor & Harbord, our birthday group of eight reshuffled whilst waiting for the light, and then I was with Kia, whom I’d hardly spoken to all evening. Though we fell behind as if in a couple’s moment, we continued to hardly speak, for that was my wish and she seemed to sense it and honour it (although she did posit that Harriet was an enneagram type 3). But eventually I asked her, What do you make of all this? She said, Of all what? And I admit it was an adamantly vague question, since her mental computer program remains obscure to me, even though we’ve hung out thrice and talked for a while, and I didn’t care to influence it all that much. I gazed into her very, very, very dark eyes, and said, Answer how you see fit. She said, It’s been a nice night, thanks for the invitation. But this settled nothing: the clouds overhead roared once by way of objection (“overhead” is hardly a better word than “underfoot”!), and the pedestrians coming our way gave us a wide berth, the rain was quickening; & so then I said something I didn’t exactly mean, although I didn’t anti-mean it, I just absence-meant it, if you catch my drift, O Journal of Lagging Comprehension — to wit, I said, Kia, I feel like you *understand* me. She raised an eyebrow appropriately, and I hastened to add, What I mean is, if I were to do something odd (a plan was formulating, O Journal!), you wouldn’t be thrown by it. Kia replied, Probably not, I know all sorts of weirdos, Toronto’s a big city. Around which point the rain started to come down in sheets, which I realize is a clichéd phrase, but cliché is just lyricism plus time, so what if you undo it, what if you just sit with the phrase for a moment:

(8) rain

(9) coming

(10) down

(11) in

(12) sheets

(13) Have you pictured it? Clear sheets? Clear bedsheets entangling you and a friend in the summer-dark? Kia’s clothes clung to her, sheer dark fabric, lit up by the flood of lights in Christie Pits as we approached; Harriet was kinda screaming, Bruce glancing at all of us unsure to whom to defer, Gordon’s friends scampering off, Gordon hanging back out of fealty to my birthday, my ice cream melting from the kilopascals of rain pressure — Onward! I cried, and we made it at last to the park, which had a huge downslope, at the bottom of which rainwater was fast collecting. (14) When we were all there at the bottom, in a circle, smiling in the rain, even Harriet, looking like a little kid in her dowdy wet grey dress, 23 Celsius, I took Kia’s hand, and I made an announcement: I’m so happy to say that we are engaged! What an advantageous match! a doctor in training!

I smiled, squeezing the sopping wet Harriet. (15) Kia, still holding my hand, nodded & we raised our arms in the air, like medalists at the Winter Olympics, & Gordon said, Wait what! But we bowed and curtseyed, and Harriet laughed, a bit at first, then up-ROAR-iously. (16) [Where are those Finnish skiers, those angels, those men darting in and out of the snow?] (17) At this point, I permitted, which is to say mandated, that they sing happy birthday to me, a public domain song, thank goodness, and they obliged, and the rain came down. One rain may hide another. One engagement may hide another. (18) Is it rational to behave like this? Is it rational to live in America when another country awaits us, a little bit farther north, a little bit kinder? (19) Now look, I’m accelerating through these late numbers, but you needn’t be equidistant with these things. Harriet had the nerve to say, Virgil, I’m proud of you, which almost undid it all, and so I screamed into the air, a plangent scream, a joy-performance, the truth wasn’t exactly joy, even if it was rather close.

(20) Good night! Good night, all! There was hardly more that one could hope for at this juncture. And so Kia and I walked east out of the park toward my lodging, still holding hands, my body trying to ascertain what it wants in this world, if anything, & really it wants the ocean, or failing that, a long hot shower, hardly more. (21) Pursuant to (20), a fact about the world that is true regardless of one’s observation (in a non-strict sense) is that when it becomes rainy and cold, we may see a person’s nipples. Or their penis. We may be simply standing there or walking beside someone, and their nipples may be erect, right there, in our face, without prejudice or aggravation, which is why we sometimes have questions forced upon us — and Harriet, she is eager for a Diagnosis for me (and has endless thoughts on the Loomings intro of Moby-Dick), but is unaware of other spectra that some of us may be on, implying the existence of, for all we know, other Diagnoses. Although not every possible Diagnosis entails a Sickness! or a Problem! Have you heard of a Person? A marvellous, labelless person? (22) So now we come to the point where, somewhere in the vicinity of Albany Avenue, I was standing next to Kia and her erect nipples, broad and thick, there was no disguising it, whatever your preferences may be, there they were, visible as any visual phenomenon, like an end table or a turkey leg, and her huge dark eyes were looking at me, and I was forced into being who I am, there was no way out, I was stuck! I let go of Kia’s hand, although I suspect she let go of my hand first, in fact I’m confident she let go first, seeing me studying her (not exactly studying, not in that way), and wanting to prevent something foolish from happening, but indeed *I* already knew I didn’t want something foolish to happen, I was gifted (& on my birthday!) with this knowledge that I’ve always had, latently, discreetly, that I have no interest in certain aspects of the Human Endeavour.

(23) Nevertheless, Kia’s strength, if I don’t tread upon condescension to label it that, was such that she said, Would you like me to come back with you, Virgil? Have a cup of birthday tea or something else? I said, No thank you. And I said, Thank you for playing along with that farce back there. My sister Harriet doesn’t — at which point, I trailed off, not knowing precisely where the sentence planned to carry me. But Kia said, Hey, it’s okay, I get it. (Get *what*? Unclear. But I believe she did, if it’s not too callow to admit.) Kia said, I hope you had fun, I hope you’ll come back to Toronto before long. (24) Some sort of wobbly sadness perpetrated my knees. In a flash I reached out and hugged the life out of her (not really) and she seemed to accept my hug in the spirit it was offered, whatever that was. (25) Together we stopped by a late-night deli or is it a different name in Canada and loaded me up on coffee for my night’s journaling, and then we said bye, and she headed south on Brunswick Avenue, and I headed north. (26) I sobbed on the street, I did, I’ve done a fair amount of sobbing on this trip, I hope I have used up all my tears. (27) But I am happy, I am happy, I am happy it is my birthday, I am happy to be the person who I am in the shoes that I own in the mind I ceaselessly call forth into being.

∰∰∰ ( ( ( THE END ) ) ) ∰∰∰

( ( ( P.P.P.P.P.P.P.P.p.P.S. If you enjoyed this, you could buy me a coffee? ) ) )

Tonight Bruce stood with his arm on the doorframe. Behind him, the street unfurled a ribbon of summer dark. “Come, Virgil. Let’s have a drink.”

They struck out south on Brunswick Avenue. “I know you don’t like to talk,” Bruce said in his soft Devon accent. “I’m not always the best listener. So how about you listen, I talk.” They crossed a parkette & fell into a pool of buttered light. “I wanted to share something with you. Something that happened to me a few years back, around when I met your sister.”

At Bloor Street, he took Virgil’s elbow, scanning west, then east. “Do you think tea might be better than a drink? I’d love to stroll while we talk. Might be too loud in a pub.”

He studied Virgil, then seemed to reconsider. Perhaps he wanted to be kind. They headed east, toward the University of Toronto campus. The university’s library, a maximalist structure of 1970s vintage, usurped the horizon.

“I had many obsessions when I was younger,” Bruce said. “For a time, as a kid, I thought of little but where the water companies were dumping sewage. It infuriated me that my sisters & I were swimming in filth. My mum called me an oddity. That was her word. Over and over. ‘You are quite the oddity, Bruce.’ As I got older, after university, I took an interest in fractals. Do you know what fractals are?”

He spread his hands out in the night air, as if he could reify fractals with his fingers.

“It’s when the same pattern repeats at different scales. You see it in nature: with broccoli, snail shells, clouds. I became fixated.”

The temperature had plummeted since the sun set. Bruce whooshed his hands together. St. George Street was all but empty.

“Did you know I was married before? Her name was Victoria. I met her toward the end of my fractal phase. Your next oddity, as my mother said to me. The fractal phase evolved into an obsession with geometry. I discovered a group called the Modern Pythagoreans. They owned a complex in the outskirts of Luzern, Switzerland. I told Victoria that I had a business trip and I would need to be away for a week. The intoxicating thing about geometry, Virgil, is it exists independently of us. Nevertheless, we comprehend it without loss of fidelity.”

His accent was a flock of summer sheep, a bale of hay rolled in a Devonian field. Now there came a trumpet floating along the avenue.

“They greeted me in Luzern and drove me to the complex. It had a monastic work ethic. I could eat one bowl of rice in the morning, they said, and another one in the evening. Talking was discouraged. They wanted me to ruminate on mathematical forms. I felt happy; that was what I wanted too. Until I realized they planned to lock me in my room at night. I left immediately. I walked until I found a bus, and in my scant German, I convinced the driver to let me ride back to town. There, I walked across a covered bridge that had pictures depicting the death of the saints. Victoria was waiting for me in Luzern. She had followed me down from England.”

Bruce guided them around the overcoated university buildings. The hour was late, and soon Virgil’s head was notched into his collarbone.

“Our marriage ended on that bridge. I had never wanted to be married. I had wanted to please my father. He played chess, which was an allowed oddity. He scolded me for the oddities I chose. But since Victoria had ended our marriage, I felt I had discharged my duty to my family. Clearly I couldn’t be what they wanted. So I flew to Canada, started anew.”

A man on College Street (east-west) was playing ragtime from a tuba. He looked like he needed a friend.

“No, let’s get a drink,” said Bruce. “There’s a pub on Harbord with a patio and jazz.”

The entrance to the pub was in an alley. Bruce motioned for Virgil to sit outside at a table while he went inside. He reemerged with two dark red beers. He put his down. A chain of lights hung above their heads. There was no jazz in sight. While inside, come to think of it, Bruce had purchased a coffee for Virgil, as well as a hot dog on a stick.

“It has fermented rice inside,” he said. “Korean-style.”

A gust of wind sashayed pine tree nettles down on them.

“In Canada,” said Bruce, “I thought I would be free. However, my father’s ghost pursued me even more assiduously here. (He’s still alive. My mother has never disagreed with him. That was written into their vows, I imagine.)”

He swigged his beer, lumbered inside, came back outside with another. I mean, another coffee. Holding up the coffee cup, he tilted it toward Virgil’s lips.

“Then I took the first step in my current life,” said Bruce. “I enrolled in a finance class here in Toronto. I had studied math. It was rather easy to transition. Before long, I got a job. It paid well. I rang up my mum to tell her, and she thought it quite nice, and told my father, who thought it quite nice.”

A cat wandered onto the patio, black but for a white head, and sat on the table between Bruce and Virgil. It closed its eyes forever.

“But the story I wanted to tell you — I was walking in the ravines here in Toronto, and I came across a small red leather box. My initials were printed on the box in gold letters. So I told myself I could take a look inside. When I opened it up, I saw a set of the five Platonic solids. I had been extremely interested in these solids back in my geometry days.”

The cat began to meow, yet the sound was closer to speech than to animal patter.

“Given what I know about you, Virgil, you won’t have a birthday party tomorrow. You will still be in Toronto, but I doubt I’ll get to see you. And if I do, I’m sure you won’t want any gifts. So I wanted to give you one of the solids I found that day: the icosahedron. Do you know about icosahedrons? They have twenty faces and twelve vertices and thirty edges. They are, in my opinion, utterly remarkable.”

He held it out, palm up, for Virgil to take.

“And the day after I found it, I flew down to New York on a trip, and that’s where I met Harriet, and you, of course.”

Spinning circles now on the table, the cat grew louder. It knocked pebbles to the ground. What are we to do with this parallel class of souls?

“In fact, Harriet is odd in her own way. Don’t you think? She is often, as your older sister, forced to be straitlaced, like any older sibling is. Devoted and reliable. But when she’s with me, when she’s teaching, I’m sometimes startled by how strange she can be. The other night, she stayed out late in the park by the AGO reading the Grand Armada chapter of Moby-Dick aloud. Her voice rang out for blocks. A crowd gathered. They brought her pastries and tea and begged her to keep going.”

Here, Bruce withdrew a small cosmetic mirror from his satchel. It had a strap on it, and he attached it to his forehead, so that Virgil could see himself properly.

“What I would like to tell you, on the eve of your birthday, is that the worst thing you can do in your life is to cease being an oddity. I feel silly telling you this in such a didactic manner! Could I say it sillier? I feel tilly selling you this. The thirst wing ewe can dew in your lice is to be scene in Ottawa. But I don’t need to be silly. Just remember the gist: you are free.”

Now the jazz band that Bruce expected, along with the tuba player from College Street and a bassist from Harbord Street (east-west) and two saxophonists, entered the patio to play Duke Ellington’s “Fleurette Africaine,” with the saxophonists performing the piano part.

Bruce took the mirror off his head, but his face remained reflective. “You’re going to have an off-the-wall birthday,” he said.

A dancing university student took his arm and jerried him up. The patio grew loud with the sound of clomping feet.

Unfazed, the cat got up from its nap, its fur as long as birthday streamers. It leaned into Virgil and said, “So then, was this what you whispered about in my backyard? Has everything you wanted come to pass?”

∰∰∰

( ( ( P.P.P.P.P.P.P.P.p.S. If you enjoyed this, you could buy me a coffee? ) ) )

Tonight I am finally revving up on caffeine. Then again, it is hardly night. It is 7:05 p.m., the sun hasn’t started its initial descent, there are the various beginnings of grandstandings going on at pubs on Bloor St. (Blue Jays this, Yankees that), where I sit outside at a coffee shop, articulating or (“if I’m honest”) misarticulating. How will I manifest-on-paper whilst in public?

Earlier in the day, I did my usual circuit: over to Trinity Bellwoods, back to Kensington, the bagel, and the coffee. Not seeing Kia or Gordon, I decided I would text Gordon, since (1) I’d seen Kia yesterday; (2) Gordon is my friend; (3) Harriet hadn’t contacted me since electing to pause our relationship, nor had I her (nor had Bruce me); I felt an umbilical despair. I said, quite simply, to Gordon: Would you like to hang out today, Gordon? A vanilla Canadian text, right down the middle of the plate. He wrote back after a few minutes: Actually I’m hanging out with my friend Peggy in the Annex but you can join!

I popped the last nubbin of bagel in my mouth & spirited to the address Gordon provided. It was a magnificent home with Virginia creeper. Or some creeper. I rang the bell, and an elderly woman with birthday streamer hair let me in. She said, Hi, I’m Peggy. Peggy said Gordon hadn’t arrived yet, which was dispiriting. We had suffered a present tense misunderstanding, he & I, viz. he had written “I’m hanging out” instead of “I will be hanging out,” and I had failed to litigate his usage. I said to Peggy, When will he arrive? She said, Soon, I expect. By this point, she had ushered me in and closed the door behind her, in the typical manner of elderly females, and I had taken a few steps into her entryway. Then she was asking my name, offering me herbal tea, all the usuals. I asked her if I could have coffee instead, and she bellowed, No, never caffeine in my house! It seemed performative, nonetheless I didn’t care for it, one should not bellow around a new acquaintance. I said, I assumed you would be younger! She raised an eyebrow but didn’t reply. Never fear, I pressed the matter: Like, Gordon’s age, I mean. With a low laugh, she said, I am indeed older. I said, It’s unusual to be friends with such a young person, & she said, I used to be his writing teacher, it would appear we have transitioned into being friends.

Her home smelled earthy, it had twenty thousand flowers, it felt like she was composting something, or compensating for something, or — Anyway she showed me into her Sitting Room, poured me a cup of tasteless tea, and asked if I was a student at the U of T. I said I was from New York, and she said, Ah, America. I said, America (I too dislike it). She didn’t react. I said, Tell me, Peggy, do you spell it emprison with an e, like the British do, or imprison with an i, like the Americans do? She said, You’re thinking of inquiry, I would imagine; regardless, British English and Canadian English are distinct. I said, Why don’t we kiss under the narcissism of small differences?

Peggy said, So tell me about yourself, Virgil (even as I was steeling myself to ask her the very same question)! I relayed my vitals, told her what had brought me to Toronto, sped through my in-media-res Cold War w/ my sister (I included Harriet’s CV, seeing as Peggy was a teacher; she seemed impressed with the Princeton job prospect). Peggy said, And Gordon has befriended you? I said, And Kia too! She said, That makes sense you’ve found friends, Canadians are polite. I noted it was a bit early in our conversation for her to issue snide remarks like that. But I noted it internally, I didn’t show her my hand. Instead I replied, Your house smells rather like peat. She wore purple-rimmed glasses, have I mentioned, she took them off now, revealing large divots on either side of her nose. She said, My husband, Eli, is in the basement tinkering with something, he’s an old grump, maybe you’ll enjoy talking w/ him. I said, Am I an old grump? She guffawed in a hoarse way. & I said, Let me get acclimated to you first, before we go adding a 2nd person.

After smelling the dirt in her house for a while and listening to the quiet music, ambient meets classical, I would say, in the background, she cleared her throat and said, Why don’t we go outside while we wait for Gordon and I can show you my flower gardens (he didn’t tell me, by the way, that you were coming, if I seem like an imperfect host)? There was no need, of course, for me (Virgil) to apologize, since I’d committed no impertinence, the blame lay with Gordon, but I said, That’ll do, and walked outside with her, and listened to her enumerate her flowers. I said, So are you a gardener or a teacher by trade? She said, I’m a fiction writer by trade. I said, Really? And then I realized that she was Peggy Blanchard, whose fantasy paperbacks I greatly enjoyed in middle school. I said, Ms. Blanchard, I have an idea for a novel. She asked what it was. I said, It’s a time travel novel. The book opens, and then some stuff happens, when all of a sudden, boom, we go 200 years into the past! Peggy frowned; but I could tell her frown didn’t come from sadness. She said, But what stuff happens, and why does it happen? I said, That’s not the point; the point is, it’s not the characters who travel 200 years into the past; it’s the *reader* who does! This conceit didn’t sit well with her; I wondered if it was better suited for a Gen Z audience. It’s a campus novel, I added.

Peggy stared up at a plane flying overhead, YYZ to JFK perhaps or YYZ to YUL, and then showed me her zinnias, and then I said, What are you working on these days? She said, My writing group says my newer works are dystopian, although I’m wary of all genre terms. I said, I don’t enjoy morose stories either. She said, Then again, Virgil, you can’t justify levity without sadness. Take Dickens, for example. I said, Kim Dickens? She said, Charles Dickens. I said, Oh, Boz. She said, You think you’re rather funny; perhaps you are. Nobody had accused me of being funny in recent memory, and I didn’t have an opinion on the matter, since one must recuse oneself from the court of one’s own humour, recuse oneself from amusing oneself, in other words, don’t get high on your own, etc.

Sniffing her zinnias & dahlias & bougainvilleas, I said, My head hurts, and I’m dizzy, is there truly no caffeine in your house? Peggy said, It’s a rule. I told her, However, Balzac drank litres of caffeine, and look at all that he accomplished! In fact some posit that the Renaissance was wholly a caffeine event. She nodded and said, An intellectual Tonguska. Yes, I’ve heard that theory. Are you likening yourself to Balzac? I told her I wasn’t sure, my output was slim, and I had never read his books, except for ten pages of Pere Goriot. But that’s my reading habit, I went on, I go to the bookstore and read the opening ten pages of a few books & then stop!

This caused Peggy to sigh like a westerly wind, and she suggested we sit on a wooden bench near a decorative fountain in her yard, an ample yard for Toronto but small for real life. I said, It’d be a relief for me if we could discuss our favourite streets in the city; mine are Dundas, Bloor, Palm — She cut me off: No, let’s get some food. I said, Dim sum? Peggy said, No way. I considered arguing, but she was wearing a tie dyed shirt & I had a feeling she would successfully mount a defence on her food choices, anyway I was up for trying different fare, so long as it was tasty. Peggy said, I’ll make you an egg sandwich. I said, Will it have bacon jam on it? She said, No, I can’t stand bacon jam. We were in concordance.

Peggy walked with disinterest, she talked with disinterest, as if I were the least alluring part of her day! And there is no harm in saying that acting this way can be hurtful, even to people in the snug bosom of the Bell Curve, the Normal People. Nor are there any demerits added to my record, nor any Dependence implied, by saying that in that moment I did long for Harriet, whom I hadn’t seen in three days, which felt like half a lifetime, although it was only three days, which honestly isn’t that long if you think about it.

∰

Had Harriet been with us, or had I been willing to contact her (which I didn’t need to do, indeed scarcely wanted to do), I might have solicited some praise about how expertly I was coping with yet another new contact in this foreign land. As it was, I humbly followed Peggy to the kitchen for my sandwich. A text came in from Bruce, I didn’t read it, not yet. Peggy said, I doubt I need to explain that your reading habits trouble me, both as a lover of books and a working author. I said, Perhaps books need to be — She tossed the plate with the sandwich down on the table and held up a hand, palm out. She said, You seem hellbent on interrupting. I was trying to say, stories serve a purpose for us. They’re our way, as a species, of communicating lessons. And not that I have any hope of convincing you (she let out a gargling laugh), but I’d say you might be cheating yourself of an important life lesson if you bail on a book after only ten pages. Just imagine your caveman buddy in Lascaux or Chauvet trying to tell you where the jackal was this morning, but oh-oh, you say, Sorry, I’m bored, I’ve got to move on.

At this point, I thought, Are you *quite* done? But I didn’t say it, out of civility, again, & also because the egg sandwich was *quite* delicious. Peggy paused too to take a bite of her own sandwich. After counting to 30 in my head, I said, So, I should read more than ten pages? Peggy replied, Sure. I told her I didn’t enjoy dystopias, why couldn’t she write something with centaurs like she used to, or (better yet) something utopian, or (one rung higher) something absurdist? She said, Your sister’s a 19th century scholar? Ask *her* about utopias. They were all the rage back then. We don’t live in an inspiring era now; we need our dystopian fictions in order to illustrate how things might get worse. Besides, I don’t find utopias credible. They always fail.

Her kitchen was green & verdant, not merely from the (over)abundance of plants, as well as a bookshelf of musty rare titles, but the woodworking was green, the curtains were green, the tiles were white and green. She seemed to be at peace, albeit a fragile peace. Regardless, she went on, (and thank you for letting me talk by the way, I can see it’s a Herculean effort on your part (she guffawed)), regardless of whether it’s a utopia, a dystopia, or a mistopia, we need stories. I’m not talking about novels or short stories, I’m talking about the business of daily living. I said, E.g. adding mayonnaise to your sandwich? Peggy nodded, Possibly, it could be as simple as that, though for many, the material conditions of life push the choice of a condiment to the margins. Now you say you don’t like dystopian fiction; alright, but don’t you think we might owe it to the future, a future that’s rapidly getting frittered away, to engage with these issues? You can’t do it every second of every day — but you’re a good guy, right, Virgil? And you can see that you have a certain responsibility to the world and to your community to get your head out of the sand every now and then. Not everybody has that luxury, many people are too busy surviving, but you do have the luxury, Virgil, wouldn’t you say?

We squinted hard at each other, I couldn’t tell if she was on a high horse or if I was on a low horse. Anyway all sides of all issues are evident to my pulsar-like mind, and I could see her point, and could argue its opposite too. I said, Peggy, obviously I don’t have a good response to any of that.

Her phone buzzed. She read the news with a sigh: Gordon can’t make it. He’s been in a bit of a car accident. Don’t worry, he’s fine. I said, How dystopian! Peggy said, Let me go check on my husband. I said, Your woolen lover? She squinted and said, Make yourself at home. & I, who never fail to interpret people literally w.r.t that phrase, said I would.

∰

On the second floor, Peggy had a little writing alcove, where there were some dapper pens and a smattering of antique desks. I noticed, too, a stack of typed pages, with a title that I’ve forgotten. Common wisdom said I shouldn’t glance at them, since she is a Public Figure, nor indeed (says c.w.) should I reveal that she lives on B— Ave., but my wisdom is uncommon. I sat in an armchair, gazed out the north-facing window, seeing Casa Loma, the Scottish castle portaged by some baron for his wife’s or lover’s benefit, and I read the first page of the book. Indeed I took a photo of it so I could transcribe it faithfully:

A new year, and she was surprised to find herself alive. She rose from her bed, the rough sheets chafing her thigh, and boiled water. Her son stirred in the next room. He would be hungry. Sweaty, too, feverish, like when he was a newborn, clawing at her. She would have little to offer him today, however.

Outside there were berries, nuts, and edible bark, yellow with lichens, the colour of her sister’s hair. The mist rose from the ground like a tired guard and watched her as she foraged. At the end of November, the Ministry had taken away her chickens — a tax, they said. She had hidden several dozen eggs in a hollow half a mile from the house. These were long since gone. Some eaten by her son, some by roving pigs.

The day was getting warm fast. In her childhood, the autumn leaves would have been buried under a coating of snow. Now they were exposed, desiccated, and they crunched underfoot as she sought sustenance.

She had only a handful of berries when the first car approached. She could see it from afar, its tires kicking up dust like a swarm of bees. The men from the Ministry came to see her at least once a week, due to her special talent. It was a thing, they explained, to be monitored and cared for. “Just as we care for a lamb,” one of them had said, back when she was a child and her talent had first revealed itself.

The car came to a halt in her driveway, crushing the small patch of daffodils she had managed to cultivate the past year. The flowers lay calmly, never expecting life.

I grabbed a red pen from Peggy’s cup. Herewith, what I circled, and the notes I wrote on my own steno pad:

• [1] “surprised to find herself alive” — Neither silly nor evocative. Why would I want to read this? Welcome the reader in.

• [2] “chafing” — This is an off-putting word, in general, bad mouthfeel.

• [3] “boiled water” — How? Electricity? Fire indoors (somehow)? You need to detail the post-apocalyptic amenities.

• [4] “like a tired guard” — I enjoyed this.

• [5 “Ministry” — Is this set in Canada? Ministry is a spooky word, though I gather it’s how your bureaucracies operate here.

• [6] “a hollow” — Charming, but who can truly picture a hollow?

• [7] “some eaten by her son” — I read this as “some eatin’ by her son!” Consider the plight of the audiobook narrator.

• [8] “childhood” — Purple word.

• [9] “autumn” — Medium purple world.

• [10] “underfoot” — So purple! I am on a campaign to eject this word from the English language. Including Canadian English. Please do not use this word. It is not a word that ordinary people use in ordinary situations.

After which, I got bored and took a moment to glance at what Harriet had posted recently. It was a Moby-Dick quote (about which more in two sentences) with the caption: I feel seen.

• In my opinion, you have two ways to prop up your story (I’ll label them (a) and (b)): (a) Use run-of-the-mill words; (b) Use absurd, non-ornamental words. Here’s a line from Moby-Dick, for inspiration: For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth.

• [11] “swarm of bees” — But why? When you said dust, I pictured dust, but then you said bees, and now I’m picturing bees?

• [12] “special talent” — I expect you will ride this phrase to a forbidding conclusion, but I am picturing fun things!

• [13] “having never expected life” — One whole page and not a scintilla of joy!

• These comments notwithstanding, a bracing start. You could avail yourself of Germanic Noun Capitalization, perhaps. It can help w/ variety and emphasis; e.g. Special Talent.

• Give your people proper names. You’re trying to make me feel pity for them since they don’t have names, but you’re the one keeping them anonymous, Peggy, not the Ministry.

∰

When I looked up from my edits, wielding my baton rouge, Peggy was there. I said, When did you sneak up on me? She said, You yelped, and I came to check on you. I told her it was probably because of the word “underfoot,” and she said, Glad to see you’ve made yourself at home.

Her eyeballs moved *audibly* to the shelf beside us, where several of her books (many with an embossed Bestseller stamp) were displayed. She took a few moments to debate, I could see, in private, whether all the red ink on the first page of her story was duly offset by her prior art. In any case, I received a text, again from Bruce, and muttered, Mr. Collins is texting me; Bruce said, Let’s get a drink, Virgil, can we? — and Peggy said, Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice? And I said, Goodness not literally. But she was curious, if only to distract herself, to know why I called my brother-in-law-to-be by that moniker if he indeed bore no resemblance, physical or attitudinal, to Charlotte’s man. I said, It just fits. She said, And who are you, Lizzy? No, I said, I’m Mr. Bingley! She said, Why does Bruce want to get in touch? & I elaborated on how I had commandeered Harriet’s social media and hadn’t seen her in a few days and had never quite given her my blessing, how our Cold War was due to a mélange of the above.

Peggy’s office was full of red hues, not green like the kitchen, a plush maroon rug that my feet sunk into, a wine-dark wooden chair, curtains that blocked out daytime / sent the room’s light inward toward itself. She sat beside me on the couch, her eyes sunken in shadows, she made a motion for me to hand over my notes, and said, Your sister is a strong influence on you. But — you truly don’t care about stories, do you? Even when it comes to your own life, you don’t believe there’s some story? (I frowned.) It’s a guileless question, Virgil. Don’t you ever think you’re on some quest to learn a lesson about yourself? Or to help somebody? I said, No, ma’am. She said, Even on this trip to Toronto? You must have some goals, no? To see a Blue Jays game? To visit the zoo? I said, I *have* been to the aquarium, but honestly that was Harriet’s idea, and it was puerile. She said, You talk about Harriet and Bruce a great deal; there must be some portion of your identity, your needs, bound up in them. I’d bet you have aspirations related to your sister, ones you haven’t even told yourself. I shrugged. She carried on, And speaking of Moby-Dick, if ever there were a book with a story, with a great mission, it’s that. Alas (citing the research of Prof. Harriet O’Shaughnessy, Barnard College) I knew Peggy was wrong, that indeed the thrust of the book was the asides, that Ahab’s arc was not the arc of interest, etc., etc. Peggy said, What if we do have missions, though? What if most people view their lives through this lens? What if life is a journey? I said, What if lots of things? & felt embarrassed (sorry to say) to be myself.

Peggy criss-crossed her legs a couple times, criss-cross applesauce, then said, Why don’t you go to the corner of the room, where I can’t hear you, and whisper your goals to the wall? It’s important to be a good guest, I know that at least, so I stood, walked to the corner, & whispered a Truth to the unseen world. When I returned, she said, How do you feel? I said, I had a quibble or two with your new book. Peggy said, I can see that! and stuttered out a laugh, then added, It’s by a student of mine; I’ll let her know. She asked if I wrote stories myself, and I said, No, but I keep a daily Journal. Of course, it wouldn’t do to keep talking in this wine-dark room, where she had home field advantage, so I said, I’ll tell you more about my lovely Journal if we go for a walk on Palmerston Avenue. She said, Why would I want to hear about your Journal? I said, Why not?

Even so, we were soon back in her yard, not walking toward Palmerston Avenue, and I was expatriating expatiating, and she was regarding me with Diagnostic curiosity (I don’t know how to define it, but I know it when I see it!), still I didn’t mind, I was tired of being immersed in her world, her house, her words, her thoughts, it had brought me to the precipice of overwhelm, being outside allayed that somewhat. (Relatedly, I texted Gordon, It’s not too late to come! (But I had forgotten about his car accident. I followed up with an apology, one can hardly be expected to remember every sheer fact of the day.))

I said, Peggy, here’s how I see it. We are mere fragments. What we say, what we do, it gets pulverized the minute it leaves us. And then it’s memorialized in the Spectacle. These dreary narratives with their dreary adjectives, they don’t correspond to our contemporary life! The only story arcs that matter are conspiracy theories; and even these are strung together on the thinnest horsehair. Maybe I didn’t put it quite so fire-fangledly, but Peggy took it seriously, she said, You are describing a problem, not a worldview, and I feel sorry for you that you have never lived in an era where things were otherwise. Diminishing attention is a tragedy, Virgil, you haven’t been alive until you’ve zeroed in on a person or a place or some passion of yours for hours on end. I said, How would you know what I — But Peggy interrupted: Let me get us some popcorn, I’m peckish! I said, It’s my birthday tomorrow! But Peggy kept walking.

When she came back, some dark clouds had passed over the sun, if I dare to describe the maudlin scene, soon they would pass, it’s fine, and Peggy said, What concerns me is that in all this fragmentation you’re describing, and in the kind of storytelling you seem to prefer, there’s a clear avoidance. Of what I’m not sure. And don’t get me wrong, I enjoy experimental, abstract, pulverized art, but only in balance with more cohesive forms, ones that give us some connection and grounding to humanity. She flicked her tongue out to taste some popcorn, waiting for my response. I tiptoed over to the corner of the garden and whispered another private thought (I’ll not say what! a goal before the trip’s end!), then returned to Peggy’s side.

I said, There are no arcs in life. Every day is a mishmash. My goodness, I’m blinded by all the novelties and bright colours in your house, that’s all my brain can handle without thinking about arcs. The day has an arc: the day begins and the day ends. Beyond that? I don’t give much credence to the arc of the year, the seasons, &c. There is only the Day. That’s the only timescale, and when you wake up in the morning, everything is erased. You seem to be exhorting me to find myself on this jaunt to Toronto, but I’ll do no such thing. Even if I wanted to! I’m a full person, I know who I am! The only things that change are browning bananas. Surely you aren’t comparing me to a banana? And re: Harriet, since you are so keen on her (no doubt you are excited by her Ph.D.), she & I will reconcile. I’m not at all worried. She’s taking a break from being my sister — Peggy interrupted, You didn’t mention that. — I went on, Sure, but that can’t last forever, and she will keep being herself, her hair will return to its old style before long, one can’t fight nature, & she’s in the same boat as Ahab. We cobble together fascinating nests of words over the course of the day, and then we spring up again in the morning. Isn’t it wonderful? That’s all we can do, and it’s wonderful; these, I posit, are my Aesthetics.

Peggy squinted at me, a squirt of melancholy in her eye, and I modulated: That said, I do like Pride and Prejudice. And Pet Sematary. & since I’d been talking so much about Days, which our friend Hesiod wrote about, I took out my phone and played for her the nice song “Days” by Television, which I’d been recommended on Wednesday and felt kindly toward. What a sunny, snaking, melodic guitar. Peggy seemed to know the tune already, she leaned back with joy on the railing of her porch steps and reminisced about living in New York for a few years in the 1970s and seeing this song live, I guess she’s friends with Patti Smith, she hadn’t mentioned living anywhere but Canada prior to now, though of course we’d been focused on other matters. After the song was over, Peggy asked how old I was, and I told her I’d be 27 tomorrow. She said, You’re a poet at heart, I have a feeling; this Quality Assurance job you have, it will pass, you’ll become a poet before too long. And she added, You’ve got loads of life still ahead of you (solemnly, as if this were a judicial ruling). It’s nearly suppertime, it’s time for you to go, Virgil. To which I said, But it’s impressive how long I stayed & chatted, eh, Peggy? Also, before I leave, I need your washroom.

On the street, I realized I had a few more messages from Bruce, including one that dialled up the Englishness: Come on, mate, let’s meet. Would there be any harm to meeting him? Was I, indeed, on a trajectory for poetry? As a litmus test of sorts, I allowed myself to fall victim to the clouds, and let them tickle my vagus nerve with their wild colours, however it was a far cry from sunset, and the clouds were but a single cirrus smear. The Natural World doesn’t always provide, O Journal of Infinite Mental Mirrors. So I sat on the author’s stoop, closed my eyes, and found my own beating lyricism. In my hand I held a musty almanac, plucked from Peggy’s shelf.

∰∰∰

( ( ( P.P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. If you enjoyed this, you could buy me a coffee? ) ) )

Tonight in F major; tonight a rumination on clemency, tranquility, & the future; tonight, we’ll get there, although it will be a circuitous route, a long and winding road, the 401, a highway here in Canada with a darling British crown perched atop its road signs, depositing me once again in the bosom of the Annex. Which is to say, I was a traveler earlier today, an Alexander going east, only instead of India, it was Eastern Ontario; instead of Bucephalus, it was Kia’s car (instead of a Kia, it was a Hyundai station wagon); instead of murdering the enemy, it was “murdering a roti,” as I’m told they like to say in the U.K., perhaps in Canada too, given its adjacency to the Crown, though perhaps “murdering” is unlikely, given the Canadian temperament.

But you see, O Journal of Provincial Badinage, Kia called me this morning, early, 6 am ish, when my mind was still recuperating from Wednesday’s musical escapades, as some 1980s French movie about sea shanty singers in Bretagne played on the computer, I was scarcely on the leeward side of Thursday. On the phone, which I seldom answer and didn’t want to today (my voice froggy, my mind unused to the sunlight), Kia’s timbre was brassier than I remembered, and she seemed what an altogether different person might call “blissed out” & she said she’d swing by my new lodging, where I had dozens of local books strewn about like a mid-tier psychopath (some Canadian, e.g. Mordecai Richler; also Eugene Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros”; also there were some magazines (including one about cottage life (“cottage” is Canadian for “country house” )) & I was cutting and pasting words and images into makeshift «assemblages») and pick me up and guess what, we would be going on a trip! She said, Unless you have plans? Honestly I was still 80% in a dream & “You Never Give Me Your Money / Golden Slumbers” was circulating in my head, so I mumbled, Sure who huh what where?

Once we were on the road, she had brought bagels by the way, I found myself shivering & didn’t know whether it was from the cold Canadian morning or fear that this relative stranger from Nova Scotia was going to hand me over to the Premier or the Prime Minister for unknown international offences, & yes I did place a brief call to Harriet, then hung up, then renamed her contact DISLOYAL MONSTER in my phone, then blocked her (and couldn’t remember, as tired and chilly as I was, if I was truly mad at her, or not (was I both tactically *and* truly mad at her (since the two can coexist, surely; parasocial feelings can swim alongside real feelings in the modern muddled bloodstream) or, rather/additionally, was she mad at me, or was I just morose and lonely, in the end) hmm maybe one more closing parenthesis? mmmwah) — anyway there’s no embarrassment or psychiatric gotchas that arise from saying that I missed her at that moment, I wanted to hear her pouty voice to assure me all was well! But I sipped the mahogany coffee Kia handed me. No! then I spat it out the window in case she had poisoned it. Goodness, possibly it was the rabies from my shoulder presenting at last.

I said, in an ordinary voice, Say, Kia, do you have siblings? She said, I’ve got an older sister and a younger sister. I said, Does the older one terrorize you and belittle you when you act even a shade outside the norm? (Meanwhile the coffee, which I had decided couldn’t very well be poisoned, they wouldn’t know where to find poison in Canada, was warming me up fine and starting my engines.) & Kia said, Um, belittle me? i.e.? And I said, You mean e.g., not i.e. One mnemonic, if you’ll permit me (and she gave a little head nod), one mnemonic you can use, since memorizing the Latin isn’t simple, is that e.g. is like egg-xample, while i.e. means *that is*, and though there’s no easy mnemonic for that, i.e.’s just the one that’s not e.g. I’m surprised that they didn’t teach you this in college. She said, I didn’t go to college, I went to university. And I said, Egg-xactly; evidently it’s not on the syllabus here? Say, where are you going to medical school again? Kia said, Here; the U of T. To which I said, Harriet didn’t get into Harvard, either. Kia said, Lol I didn’t think to apply to Harvard. I said, Lamowww!

We were still in Toronto, that sprawling brutal plain loveliness, but from the map on the dashboard I could see some highways approaching, & it occurred to me that I didn’t know where we were going on our road trip. Should I ask? I asked myself. Kia was a calm and patient driver, she paused to take a puff of something and then was Medically Calm, she said, My older sister is nice, to your question. I said I was glad to hear it. I added, But now Harriet works at Princeton, well almost, she more or less has the job, & that’s nearly as good as Harvard, it’s like third-best, some would say, certainly a step up from Barnard. Kia said, Is that where you went, Princeton? And I said, Don’t be silly, that’s in New Jersey.

Then whoosh we were on the 401, which is what people call it here, The 401, almost with a capital, reverential T, it’s essentially the only highway in Canada, half the country’s population fills its ten lanes. I said, Are we going to Halifax? Kia said, Nope — I can tell you where we’re going, I never said I wanted it to be a mystery. (I’d forgotten it was me who had wanted it.) She asked if I would take over driving soon, and I said, What? No, I’m from New York City, I don’t do that. But apparently that was why she had invited me along: to share the driving duties. This was a disappointment, some might say. I sang, The long and winding road that leads… & now I needed to hear the song itself, the genuine article, so I hooked my phone up to Kia’s stereo and put “Let It Be” on — “don’t leave me waiting here!” — but then DISLOYAL MONSTER rang me up, her face commandeered the dashboard and brought the song to a halt, how embarrassing, evidently I hadn’t blocked Harriet after all.

Kia asked, Who is DISLOYAL MONSTER? While I set about blocking Harriet properly, I said, by way of dodging, since we weren’t all that different from strangers, Did your older sister ever say she didn’t want to be your sister anymore? And Kia said, Sure, all the time. Anyway we popped into a Tim Hortons on the side of the 401 because we needed more coffee, at least I did, and Kia continued, That’s just how it was, how she told us when we’d gone too far, so we would take a step back and give her some space; and then we would keep right on bothering her. I said, You’re using the past tense, as in, when you were a kid. Kia nodded, and I said, So I gather that this dynamic has run its course, and now you’re busy adulting.

May I add that it was brusquely warm today, Kia was dressed nearly like she was going sunbathing, plus a lulling blue sweatshirt on top for the morning cold; she said, Is DISLOYAL MONSTER your sister, then? By which time, we once again were speeding along the 401, I had put on “Revolver” & then BRUCE showed up on the dashboard, so I blocked him too. Canadian highways are much like American highways, I observed aloud, casually, although the signage is blue, at least sometimes, and there are crowns, & the mileage indicators are in kilometres not miles, yet the conversion is doable, or at least easily approximated, and best of all, as far as I can surmise, there are no billboards, not a one.

My Fruit of the Loom sweatshirt felt itchy. I said, Kia, tell me more about Australia. (She seemed glassy-eyed, she must have snuck another puff, still I trusted her, in a fashion.) Kia said, I don’t remember it too well, we moved when I was five. I said, So do you have an accent? She said, Do you hear an accent? I asked, Why did you move to Canada? She said, My father was in the military, so we moved to Kingston for a bit; then he left and taught at Dalhousie, in Halifax, that’s where I mostly grew up.

The idea of an Australian military, not to mention a Canadian military, was too much for my early-rising mind, so I giggled for several minutes & then invited her to play some Australian music. She put on an artist named Courtney Barnett, none of her songs was in 11/4, I didn’t like that twist, and didn’t care for the music otherwise, honestly, too much ennui, so I switched us back to The Beatles, then I fell asleep like rocks and when I woke, we were on Princess Street, in Kingston, Ontario.

∰

Kingston is a small city, like Manchester, N.H. or our friend Portland, Me., but far more orderly: battlements, turrets, cobblestones; scant evidence of brutalism, which I appreciated. It was barely past 9 a.m., Kia took me to a breakfast restaurant she favoured downtown by Clergy St., run by Australians, she claimed, although the food tasted American to me, i.e. haute & v. good. I told her my theory of Australian Collapse, namely: all Australians are secretly the same person at their root, like that giant fungus in Oregon with many caps but a shared subterranean body. She said, Doesn’t sound far off. I couldn’t pierce her medical cool! Not that I was trying to! I was wearing my smartest authenticity for her, executing my mental directives w/ alacrity and finesse. Also I suggested to the staff that they add a sandwich called The Babadook to their brekky menu and they said they would consider it.

To Kia, I said, Now please tell me where we’re going, and I hope it’s not Quebec (note: I pronounced it correctly) because I don’t have my passport. Kia said, You don’t need a passport to go to Quebec (I interjected: Could be a good idea!) but no, you and I are going to the Sheepdog Trials, over by Gananoque, in Ontario. I said, Repeat that? She said, Ga-na-no-que. Shouldn’t she be walking dogs? I inquired. No, yesterday was her last day as a dog walker. So we got a muffin to go, coconut cream, quite excellent, and went down to Highway 2, over a causeway, the lake bragging from sun. Kia pointed out the military college where her father had taught.

From there the landscape turned rural, not Westchester-rural, actual rural, hay and horses and cows, dissolute barns, etc. Pastoral is the word. I said, Is Halifax like this? Kia said, Halifax has 400,000 people, but the access to the water is great. Her eyes were giant black saucers again, I asked, When you’re a doctor, will you huff & puff so much on that stuff? With a slyness, she replied, Bedside manner, Virgil. She saw me watching the landscape and asked, Have you never seen the countryside? Your eyes are agog. I pointed out her eyes were agog! She said, I’ve never been to New York, I guess it must do a number on your mind growing up there.

This line of questioning (even though there were a few formal questions elocuted) put me a tad on the defensive, & I cried, What a facile comment (even though “facile” is undoubtedly the most facile word in the English language)! Nevertheless, being facile has its uses; I said, Surely if I’d been raised out here, my mind might be more at ease, more pastoral, more monochrome or placid or glassy, rather than what it is right now. She said, Which is? I said, Rainbow confetti! & she laughed, and then we agreed to put on Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, Gordon + his bandmates had suggested I would like it; and I did. It was like listening to water. But the highly particulate nature of the music made deep conversation difficult.

Eventually we turned it off, then there was silence, I said, Well who would you be if you had been raised in New York? Kia shrugged. So I said, You know, I have a whole host of theories about the rural/urban divide, and Kia said, When you say things like that, do you actually have a theory, or are you simply clearing a path so you can talk? & while this was quite a conversational gambit, like the second half of “Abbey Road,” Kia said it w/ a disinterested grin, and after saying it she turned away, and I had the feeling it truly didn’t matter to her one way or the other, and I realized how DISLOYAL MONSTER always acts as if everything I say *matters*, which is to say it’s under the microscope, and how tiring it is to be on that little glass slide as the Ph.D. peers down at you and you wriggle this way and that, hoping to break free!

Suffice it to say, there was no need to reply to Kia directly, I swallowed my theories for the time being, since we were arriving at the magnificent park by the lake where the sheepdog event was being held.

There were hundreds of cars parked in the grass, a small array of food tents, and a grand green open field where dogs were chasing sheep around, one would have naturally thought they were sheepdogs, yet they were border collies. This was an annual event, said Kia. She used to go during her years at university. It’s known throughout Canada — as are many things that never get lobbed across the 45th parallel. Nevertheless it was lovely, very pastoral, I said, Thank you for bringing me here; and then, as I sometimes but not always remember to do among company, I said, Let me tell you three nice things about you, Kia: (1) You are open-hearted and welcoming; (2) Even if it’s medically induced, your overall calm makes me calm; (3) Your hair is very shiny and almost space-black. She thanked me, and I realized I hadn’t asked her when her birthday is, so I did, and she said, October 28th. I said, Oh, Penélope Cruz’s half-birthday, which was news to her! I said, Would you like more than three nice things? But she watched the dogs run and the sheep frolic for a few minutes and didn’t reply, until she said, This is quite an extravaganza. But I averred that it was, at best, a vaganza.

Hours lazed by, maybe we slept; Kia said, You were saying that you have theories on the urban/rural divide? I said, You really want to hear about it? And I said it with markѐd surprise, of course, because Harriet will often capitalize on my general tendency to distract myself, and never return to the subject at hand, but rather instead allow me to gambol on about the guitar melody in, e.g., “Strawberry Swing,” anyway I said, Wonderful, okay, but perhaps, to begin, a concrete example would be best; take Harriet; who would she be if she had grown up on Nantucket, if she spent her days chasing after White Whales, covered in briny barnacles, awake at the whip-end of dawn, instead of maturing in anxiety-riddled & guilt-swaddled Manhattan, merely reading about White Whales? Kia said, Having not met Harriet, I can’t say, but I imagine she’d be different. I said, Hmm maybe it’s not best, in fact, to begin with a concrete example.

Meanwhile the sheepdog announcer was calling out all manner of facts about the current dog and his Newfoundland owner, drawing applause from the Ontario crowd. & I felt suddenly at sea, as anyone might, so far from home, amongst blue highway signs and fresh vestiges of the monarchy, and I hadn’t even kept my placeholder almanac! So I resorted to another old soothing tactic; I said, A moment please, and grabbed a coffee from a beverage tent, and found the shade of a pine tree, seeing as the sun was legitimately burning my ears, and looked at place-names on my phone’s map: touring along the northern coast of France, where the place-names are clement, I saw Villers-sur-Mer, and Blonville-sur-Mer, and Benerville-sur-Mer, and Deauville (which had the gaul gall not to pin its name to la mer), Trouville-sur-Mer, Villerville, Cricqueboeuf. This last one intrigued me, & so I scanned a few pictures, it was mostly Celtic church ruins.

And then returning to where Kia sat, I said, Frequently I wonder who I would be if I were raised in the woods. And Kia said, Frequently? Do you really do it frequently? I said, No, it’s just a figure of speech; and then I added, Harriet said that I should call my journal In Which Virgil Demonstrates His Cleverness, but I daresay a better title would be In Which Virgil Is a Figure of Speech, since that is all I am, eh, a figure made up of speech? To which Kia shrugged and smiled at the sheep and the sheepdogs, which made me want to ask her about the great white dog she had been walking when I first met her; instead, I said, I can say three more nice things about you if you’d like. But she said, Would you like me to say three nice things about you, Virgil? And I told her how tremendously I’d *dislike* that (although I was polite about it (I said, to be clear, You’re so sweet, as part of my refusal)). How much of me (I continued) is due to slash just *is* the traffic and bustle of the city I was born in, & the same for Harriet? And how much of me would, on the other hand, be a slowdrift of leaves and hay bales if I had been raised elsewhere, an unincorporated town in a county deep in the middle of a pastoral state?

These are good points, said Kia, her eyes were both focused on me and on the dogs and on the pastoral vacuum; I said, No, no, let me try again — but honestly it didn’t improve. & if I may confess something, O Journal of Voiding Witness, no sooner had all these words dribbled out of my mouth than I became very, very, very sad. There was a much truer thought within me, a gorgeous & new-to-the-world thought; yet my mind hadn’t shepherded it to safety. How awful, how trapped we are, how much of our souls are beyond the torch light dropped into the mouth of the cave! But you see, at this point Kia handed me her little smoke-cylinder and said, Would you like to try? and I said, Yes please, and then I lay down for a spell.

And I said, after N minutes had passed, When I was younger and sadder, I used to dream that some creature would come & carry me away! Kia said, What kind of creature? I said, I don’t know, some beautiful genderless being, like that fluffy white retriever you were towing around Toronto the other day, but 30 feet tall. To which Kia said, I guess I had a similar dream when I was a kid, only for me it was my grandma who helped, she flew up from Melbourne and wore a red floral kimono. I said, Why did you need help? & Kia said, You really want to hear about it? It’s pretty rough. So I said, No thank you, I’m tender at this moment (I could have handled it, of course), nevertheless, I do want you to feel warmth & pleasure, so I could, if you’d like, offer you additional compliments. And then the sheepdog announcer told us some facts about Cape Breton, & Kia said, If you insist, Virgil, sure, go ahead.

∰

Mid-afternoon we left the sheepdogs and traveled back on Highway 2, the King’s Highway, they also call it (presumably Charles is pacified by this & releases his grip on the Governor-General’s throat), back to downtown Kingston, and grabbed a late lunch of roti at one of Kia’s university haunts, I chose the goat roti, after which she drove me to a beach near a hospital on King Street. How can it be so hot in Canada? I wondered, as Kia sallied forth and in one go spanked off her shorts and her top, leaving what one could only call underwear, & then proceeded to plunge into the water. She whooped, I guess it was rather cold, and invited me in, but I was in my Fruit of the Looms, which get miserably heavy when wet, and I had no ancillary outfit (nor any real interest in submersing myself (this was the 13th biggest lake, after all, not Lake Baikal nor the Caspian Sea nor even Lake Superior)), nor did I, even if suitable accommodations were made, want to go in the lake in my heart of hearts, even as I saw Harriet floating above me and wagging her finger diagnostically and saying, Thou art weird.

The pleasant thing about Kia, in her role as a Canadian, was that she applied no pressure, indeed seemed not even to notice. I shouted out to her, Here are four more nice things about you! as she dipped in and out of the admirably large waves, indeed they were whitecaps, I doubt she could hear me, & regardless, I don’t remember what I said. It was quite the Normal Day we were having, good cheer, etc. Who would I be if I had grown up in Canada? In Kingston? (In a Duke Ellington Suite?) It only occurs to me now to think of that sludge vector the East River by way of contrast; darn, I mean occurs to me only now; it didn’t occur to me while watching the lake-waves crash, approaching Group of Seven territory. Kia emerged from the waters essentially in a state of nudity, but that’s fine, and I said, So — what about your sister? What’s she like? Kia said, Who, my elder sister? She works in climate justice. I said, Oh dear. Kia said, Hmm yeah I know. We were passing her puffer back and forth by then; I said, What do we owe the future? Kia said, Man, it’s tricky. I said, Surely 26-year-olds can’t be expected to run the world or answer for its faults; I feel as if I’m still in my downiest infancy; I want to be absorbing paintings and songs and words; I don’t understand the bureaucracy nor how to inch any progress along. I have a fake dog at home named Norm who’s made out of paper. I want to enjoy pastoral landscapes, not be responsible for their caretaking. Kia said, And the doors of fate open outward, besides.

Together we gazed at the lake, as a windsurfer skirted along, then shortly after him came a parasailer, & were our legs touching, Kia’s and mine, hard to be sure, it was sisterly, let’s say. DISLOYAL MONSTER was doubtless getting worried. But then, what if I had escaped at long last from Harriet’s gravity? & then I asked Kia, because it was high time I knew, what was in her puffer, and she laughed and said, Who cares (and having asked, I felt I did not need to (and for propriety’s sake should not) ask again). The sun on the lake reminded me of the metaphor “spangled coins.” She said, You don’t talk much, do you, Virgil? which may sound odd to you, O Journal of Voice Activation, because you don’t see when I’m not ON, you miss all my entombed silences. I said, You don’t seem to mind that I don’t talk much; and Kia said, Why would I mind?

The sun had dried her, Kia put back on her clothes, I felt tranquility, and she noticed the redness on my shoulder and asked if this was due to the Doberman and I said yes, but I’m mostly fine, & felt tranquility, Kia was a clement presence, we drove to some restaurant by the water and ate supper, I felt tranquility and clemency, & the worst idea was to puncture that tranquility, just as the worst idea is to skip stones on a glassy lake. Evidently she knew some servers at the restaurant and got them to put on The Ellington Suites, and I closed my eyes, fluttered my lids, felt zero urgency to open them ever again. Until the lemon curd galettes, which I ate with zest (the restaurant offered lemon zest). But what about the future? I said as Kia sipped coffee. And also where’s all the French discourse if we’re so close to Quebec? And what about the pastoral? Could I rebuild my personality from the ground up as a patchwork of red & yellow leaves? F major is the pastoral key; I learned that in a college music course from a professor who was probably 30 and looked like Nathan Lane. Could I live in F major? Could we set the future in F major? (By now I was improvising, like Duke Ellington.) (I felt unmoored in a good way.)

But then while Kia went to use the washroom, she left her phone on the table unlocked and I saw that she had texted a friend “hanging with cutie Virgil,” maybe she had wanted me to see the message, anyway I watched my tranquility set sail. Let’s get the bill, S.V.P. the bill, I said. The bill arrived, I paid on the card Bruce had given me — & trot trot trot to the car, shut the door as fast you can, then we were questing for the 401 again, and I said, too loud I’m afraid, too loud, I shouted, Sometimes I don’t like people!!! But I said it with the window thrust open into the hot summer air, and Kia opened her window and shouted, similarly, Done with people!!! which, in an unexpected turn, quelled the embarrassment in my heart. Covertly I took out my phone and I changed DISLOYAL MONSTER back to Harriet Livia O’Shaughnessy and unblocked her (but didn’t call her (truly I felt no need right then)) and said, What’s the airport code for Kingston? Since Kia couldn’t tell me, I said, Want to hear three weird things about Harriet? Kia said, Want to hear three weird things about Hafza? I said, Who? She said, My older sister. I said, No, let me do mine, if you wouldn’t mind. (1) Every night, she wears a retainer to bed, like a little child. (2) She has a mole cluster on her right leg, quite gross. (3) When she goes to the bathroom, it smells like when our mom goes to the bathroom.

Granted, these were all physical Weirdnesses, bordering on prurient, perhaps even a mild invasion of privacy (not that I necessarily said all of them out loud with cotillion-level diction), but they restored even more of the tranquil mood. Then I enumerated a few airport codes: YVR = Vancouver; YWG = Winnipeg; YYC = Calgary; I told Kia other celebrities’ birthdays (Sarah Polley and Bruce Greenwood, aka Kia’s compatriots), & then I relayed some of Nostradamus’s predictions from my poor almanac (which waited for me on my rickety wooden nightstand in the Greatest City in the World). Kia said, Now I’d guess your enneagram is 5 wing 4. Then I looked at my watch and said, Ice cream o’clock? Perhaps ice cream was overkill, what with the richness of the galettes at the Kingston restaurant, still Kia said she knew a nice spot & though it was a bit out of the way, we got off the 401, drove to a little town called Cobourg, which has a beach on Lake Ontario and some summer lights, I endured soft-serve and took off my socks and walked in the sand, keeping a cordial distance from my companion.

Moving the conversation along, I said (or perhaps I thought), It’s funny, without Harriet impinging on my nerves sunup to sundown, all these Intrusive Thoughts about the future, about society, how I ought to be in a pastoral setting, they’re living all over me. Kia said, I’m sorry. I said, Or do you think it’s rabies? To which Kia said, I doubt it’s rabies (of course she didn’t know the details of my raccoon fight); but I understand what you’re saying, it’s tricky; these problems never really go away, you do have a responsibility to the greater collective, but you also have a responsibility to yourself, to your own joy. At last! I cried. At last someone mentions joy!

The sun had dipped, it was falling in the direction of Toronto, the waves caught a dash of lavender. I said, Do you think people in rural areas feel joy? Kia nodded. I said, Do you think if they reframed their environment as “pastoral” they’d feel even more joy? Kia shrugged. Several minutes prior she had finished her kiddie cone and was back to her puffer. There was an instinct in me to chide her for shutting out the world, but of course I shut out the world too, as do you, Journal, with your vertical margins; who was I to judge? Anyway we *should* be shutting out the world, it makes us clement, it certainly made Kia clement, so much so that I had forgotten about her romantic texts and sparkling wet body. She said, Virgil, has anyone ever told you that you look like — ? But I cut her off: Nobody has ever compared me to another soul. That was how I felt, in any case, and there should be no harm in saying how you feel. (As Harriet often says (too often), Feelings aren’t wrong.)

Even though it was a longer route, we took the King’s Highway back to Toronto, since it partook more of the pastoral, and I found as many string quartets in F major as I could, alas by the time we were near Oshawa (not Ottawa), my phone died, so we sat in silence, we were both tired, or I was. We got more caffeine, tons more, we didn’t talk much; without my phone, I had no idea where the lodging was, but Kia remembered, having slept there Sunday night, and now it was Wednesday. At my doorstep, I said, Did you know that Friday, this coming Friday, actually, is my birthday? She said, You’ve mentioned. Making sure to keep my body well outside the car, i.e. well outside her zone of influence, I said, And if I were to have a birthday party, would you like to come? She smiled and said she would. But of course, I told her, plans change, who knows, who knows! & she said, Who knows, and switched on the CBC, there was a sonata playing, and she drove off in the key of F major.

∰∰∰

( ( ( P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. If you enjoyed this, you could buy me a coffee? ) ) )

Tonight, a play! Why not? A play! Could you, would you, in a play? A play about music & plot twists, paired with an accelerating slide into loneliness.

~DRAMATIS PERSONAE~

R. VIRGIL O’SHAUGHNESSY, a dilettante

GORDON LEE, a saxophonist

ODIN, a guitarist

ALIX, a guitarist & occasional vocalist

ROHINI, a clarinetist & social worker

HAROLD, a multi-instrumentalist & amateur musicologist

ST. MALO, a drummer

∰

[Evening. Summer. Toronto. VIRGIL is walking past a tavern on a side street, near Augusta St. approximately, when he spots GORDON sitting alone at a table outdoors. Dressed in his Fruit of the Looms, VIRGIL might be labeled unkempt, though he’s eminently comfortable. GORDON has a knit cap; otherwise, head-to-toe denim. His cheeks hang, his neck is a question mark, it’s very nearly as if he’s asleep. VIRGIL approaches.]

VIRGIL: Hi ho, Gordon.

GORDON [snapping to attention]: Virgil? How are you? Are we meeting?

VIRGIL: No, I’ve been doing concentric laps of the Kensington Market neighbourhood. I had a feeling I would bump into you, or into someone, sooner or later.

GORDON: You’ve been doing this all afternoon?

VIRGIL: Actually I’ve been here since late morning. I got a wood-fired bagel with a fried egg inside, and it hemorrhaged yolk when I tried to eat it. It was horrendous!

GORDON: Oh really?

VIRGIL: Yes, it’s true. That’s why I said it.

GORDON: Right.

VIRGIL: I didn’t expect you to be down in the dumps like this. Or is it exhaustion?

GORDON: Both. Work was long today, and a friend of mine was rotten to me last night.

VIRGIL: Do Canadians have friends?

GORDON: Everyone has friends.

VIRGIL: That was 70% a joke. The rumour is that Canadians are aloof, even with each other, & their friendships aren’t as bracing as American friendships.

GORDON: Whose rumour would that be?

VIRGIL: The world’s, I suppose. [Pause] Are we friends?

GORDON: Sure, I’d say so.

VIRGIL: I won’t be offended if you need time to consider it. This is only the second time you’ve seen me in your entire life! Born and raised in Etobicoke, you were —

GORDON: I was actually born in Hamilton.

VIRGIL: Indeed? See, I didn’t know that. Maybe we ought to hang out five more times before committing to being friends.

GORDON: If we’ll need five times, why did you ask me if we’re friends?

VIRGIL: Good point.

GORDON: Sorry, that was rude.

VIRGIL: Let’s begin this hang-out: I can share with you how yesterday my sister and I had a *major* falling out. How lonely I am today, probably lonelier than you (no offense). And we can get dim sum, as we typically do.

GORDON: It’s rather late for dim sum. I’m sorry to hear about your falling out.

VIRGIL: And I’m sorry about your thing. Mine was over Harriet’s social media posture, “if you really want to hear about it.” Look, though, she’s back at it. [VIRGIL holds up his phone, which has a picture of Harriet’s face, extremely pallid, some dryness around her mouth, a drink with an orange-ish tint, aperol perhaps, some Queen St. city lights behind her. Caption: “the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!” No alt text is provided for the benefit of the Blind.] So, no dim sum, if I understand you correctly?

GORDON: I’ve already eaten supper. But thank you for telling me about your sister. I can’t say I understand it, but I’m sorry. Anyway, I do have to get to band practice pretty soon.

VIRGIL: Band practice? Can I tag along?

∰

[Another tavern, this one with a more extensive menu. VIRGIL and GORDON approach, and find ODIN eating a grilled cheese. It looks delicious, i.e. with the bread browned and the cheese suitably bubbly. ODIN is wild-eyed, thin-haired. He wears a tasseled scarf around his psoriatic neck. He is considerably older than VIRGIL and GORDON, perhaps 39.]

GORDON: Hey Odin, this is my friend Virgil.

VIRGIL: His friend! [VIRGIL and ODIN shake hands.]

ODIN: The others are running late, Gordon. Grab a drink while we wait. [GORDON heads into the tavern. ODIN burrows into his sandwich, then looks up at VIRGIL, having forgotten, it would appear, that he’s not alone.] Are you a musician, Virgil?

VIRGIL: Not exactly. I played piano in my youth. And music is math, at its root, is it not? My rhythm’s shoddy, though. [noticing ODIN’s melancholy] Are you alright?

ODIN: Yes. It’s just — I cheated on Alix.

VIRGIL: Who’s Alix?

ODIN: My partner.

VIRGIL: Are we friends already? (Our names are sonically similar.)

ODIN: She’s also in Nameless Enemy.

VIRGIL: Is that your band name? [ODIN nods, and VIRGIL debates internally whether to pass judgment on it.] Thank you for confessing your cheating.

ODIN: You’re the first person I’ve told. What’s your name again? Virgil? It was six days ago, Virgil. Why am I telling you? You can’t tell anyone else in the band!

VIRGIL: Why? Aren’t the other members of Nameless Enemy your friends too?

ODIN: Yes, but we’re an incestuous group. We’ve all dated each other. And I cheated on Alix with someone she knows. Sorry. You have a trustworthy face.

VIRGIL: My sister is always sorry when she tells me things. 100% regret within the hour. Yet she keeps doing it. Glad to be your friend in any case.

ODIN: You have enough friends without me, I bet.

VIRGIL: Back home (New York City, by the way), I’ve got oodles. Most of them have moved away, it’s true, but there’s the doorman, Arkady, and the waiter at the diner. I can’t recall his name off the top of my head.

[GORDON returns with two points of copper-coloured air, just as ALIX and ROHINI enter stage south. [They’re all in a neighbourhood called The Junction, incidentally, and the pub is on a quiet street off of Dundas St. W. GORDON and VIRGIL got there by taking the Dundas St. streetcar, then walking a fair bit.] ROHINI is tall. ALIX is short. Both have dark hair & cream-coloured blouses. ODIN looks guiltily at the space before him. VIRGIL glances at his phone: no note of apology from HARRIET. But she isn’t in this play, so she is simply Harriet, without the honour of capital letters.]

[Everyone says hello. GORDON introduces VIRGIL to ALIX and ROHINI.]

VIRGIL: Odin here was just telling me about how much he dotes on you, Alix.

ALIX: Is that so?

VIRGIL: He’s devoted the appropriate amount, I should say. Where did you two meet?

ALIX: Montreal.

VIRGIL: Montreal, Quebec! I’d like to go there on my next visit. I’m from America.

ALIX: It’s Mun-treal, not Mahn-treal, and it’s Keh-bec, not Kwuh-bec.

VIRGIL: That’s useful feedback, thanks.

ALIX: Sorry, I get crusty with Yanks. I’m crusty in general.

VIRGIL: And everyone here is friends?

ROHINI: Chosen family.

VIRGIL: I’ve heard that phrase before. It reminds me, in a way, of margarine.

ROHINI: That’s annoying.

VIRGIL: Are you crusty too?

ROHINI: No, but I’ve worked impossibly hard to get the bad people out of my life & bring good people into my life, so I resent the word “margarine.”

VIRGIL [internally reckoning w/ her use of the word “impossibly”]: If I were a musician, you know what would really get under my skin? Music reviews. Have you ever noticed that they’re exclusively about lyrics & the lyricist’s personal life? Sometimes I read a review to see whether I’ll like an album, and I walk away with no idea what the music sounds like.

ALIX: Music writers are terrible.

VIRGIL: It can’t be all that difficult. Let’s give it a shot. Imagine you were reviewing the music of Nameless Anomie, what would you say?

ALIX: Nameless Enemy. Not Anomie.

ROHINI: We’re not going to describe it.

VIRGIL: Gordon, *you* describe it. You said you play originals, not covers.

GORDON: It’s rock. Kind of —

ROHINI: Anti-capitalist rock.

VIRGIL: Look, if I were to describe The Beatles’ “Michelle,” here’s how I would go about it. Off the top of my head, mind you. I’d describe the instrumentation first. A slow, loping beat. Acoustic guitar. Some French lyrics. Soft backing vocals. A love song with a sadness about it, where there’s a language barrier between the singer & his object of affection. Or is it an even more insurmountable barrier? Do they know each other at all? The instrumentation evokes a car ride through the countryside of France, late afternoon. There’s a ragtime guitar solo midway, not much treble. And that’s about it.

ODIN: Sounds right to me.

VIRGIL: I didn’t talk about Paul McCartney’s mental state.

ALIX: Alright: we play rock music that’s part orchestral, part rustic, with lots of instrumentals. The songs are on the long side, often ten minutes.

VIRGIL [soliloquy]: Music is the highest art form. Perhaps it always has been, but it certainly is in this era. Not because it’s “democratic,” but because it’s non-narrative. The present moment is over-narrativized. O Harriet, if you were here, you would caution me that I’m about to turn these people against me. You are being ANNOYING, you’d tell me. You could be a character in this drama named ANNOYING. (How cruel, Harriet.)

[VIRGIL shuffles his feet and sips his beer, & wrinkles, i.e. furrows, his brow while he toys with his thoughts, and gulps the distant Toronto skyline.]

VIRGIL: Gordon, do you want to come with me? [They go inside the tavern.] Your bandmates aren’t super-nice. Anyway, they’re not as nice as you.

GORDON: No?

VIRGIL: Sometimes I feel like I’m a Russian doll. Like my outermost layer, the one that people see, is good and moral. But below that, I think I’m not very good. But below that, secretly, if I could be what I wanted to be, I’m good. And yet below that, I’m not very good at all. And I feel everybody knows all of this the moment they catch sight of me.

GORDON: That’s a hard way to feel.

VIRGIL: I’ve brought the mood down. That’s never a thing I aim to do.

ROHINI [offstage]: We have a quorum. We’re going to practice!

VIRGIL: How many people are in your band?

GORDON: On a good day, fifteen. It’s a collective. I’m not sure how many we’ll have tonight.

VIRGIL: I don’t do well with that many people. I don’t do well at all.

∰

[The practice space is deeper in The Junction, or possibly the neighbourhood past The Junction. Honestly what if Bloor St. and Dundas St. just extend to the ends of the earth, great meridians? It is dim and carpeted and musty in the room. There is a drum kit, a rack of amplifiers, a coterie of microphones. The sound of other people making music bleeds through the walls, not like blood, so, rather, say it pulses through the walls. Everyone in Nameless Enemy grabs their instruments happily. HAROLD and ST. MALO have joined. They are both big people, one French, one not.]

[ALIX counts off. The first song is a long drone. Most of the melody is provided by HAROLD’S banjo and ROHINI’S clarinet. GORDON’S saxophone blends in with the drone of the guitar, while ST. MALO clicks their sticks on the rims of the drums.]

[But what does it sound like? It sounds mechanical, grinding, like a train, but also folky, but also minor-key, so when it’s all put together, it’s like living in an unfortunate future, where electricity is owned by the state and the average citizen has access only to crude tools. The song ends on a minor 3rd.]

VIRGIL [applauding gently]: What’s that one called?

ALIX: “Sister Joist.”

VIRGIL: What’s a joist?

ALIX: Part of the frame of a house.

ODIN: We need to figure out the coda.

[VIRGIL considers saying, “What’s wrong babe, you didn’t resolve to a 1 chord,” but he doesn’t. There are too many people, all but one of them strangers, & they are talking over one another, & it’s never clear (in this situation as well as others) when it’s VIRGIL’S turn to speak. This is why two-person scenarios are best. Tonight there is so much denim, so many cream-coloured blouses. The leather of ST. MALO and the corduroy of HAROLD — all the patterns are clashing. Life has too many people in it sometimes. The Group of Seven knew that.]

GORDON: Did you like that song, Virgil?

VIRGIL: I did. Thank you for treating me to it.

ROHINI: You didn’t love it.

VIRGIL: My favourite part was toward the middle, when the guitars became more melodic and they were changing chords, 4-5-1, and the bassline, that’s when you were playing bass, Harold, stayed on one note. Is there a word for that? When you can tell that the chords in the song are changing even as the bass instrument is holding to a single note? [Nobody knows.] It feels like a kind of weightlessness. Like you’re held up by a parachute. The bass isn’t falling when it should.

GORDON: Virgil has lots of thoughts about art.

ROHINI [eyes widening] [unkindly]: Anything else you want to say?

VIRGIL: Your clarinet melody at the beginning was nice.

ROHINI: I took that from “The Ellington Suites.” Duke Ellington: the greatest composer of the last century. Him and Janáček.

HAROLD: Excuse me? Charles Ives.

ALIX: Leonard Cohen.

ST. MALO: Ligeti.

[So many people are talking. Too many. It feels like a trash vortex next to an apartment building in Manhattan.]

VIRGIL: Who? I liked the patterns in the song too. I love patterns. Simple patterns.

ODIN: My guitar part was an homage to Steve Reich. Do you know Music for 18 Musicians? I wonder if you’d like that. Who are your favourite musicians, Virgil?

VIRGIL: The Beatles. 1950s jazz. Some classical: Prokofiev, but not Copland. Alfredo Zitarrosa. [He hesitates to mention Coldplay, since Nameless Enemy is clearly a part of The Scene, and Coldplay is highly antithetical to The Scene.] There’s other lowbrow music I like, too.

ALIX: Lowbrow? In what sense?

VIRGIL: Lowbrow how? [He attempts to steer himself away from bizarre mannerisms and odd verbiage. He wants to say: Pop songs, trite lyrics, normal time signatures, standard chords. That kind of lowbrow. Songs that people might sing along to in an arena.]

HAROLD: The Killers?

VIRGIL: Who?

HAROLD: Taylor Swift?

VIRGIL: Is she a real person?

HAROLD: Coldplay?

ODIN: Coldplay are like the golden retrievers of rock music.

VIRGIL: Sounds delightful.

ODIN: You should try Television. Listen to the song “Days.”

ALIX: I don’t believe in highbrow and lowbrow.

VIRGIL: Same. Music is pure joy, compared to the other arts, which can be so self-conscious.

HAROLD: You can’t think that music is un-self-conscious.

ROHINI [laughing mockingly]: Didn’t you hear the song we just played?

HAROLD: Bach, for example: highly self-conscious.

[HAROLD gives a small lecture in which he cites, among other entertainers, the Ballet Russes and Mahler. Others chime in, including ST. MALO, who has strong opinions on atonal music, & ALIX, who finds it atrocious. VIRGIL has difficulty keeping track of all the personalities in the room — we know it from his facial contortions, from how his eyes dart about when people talk, nervously, exaggeratedly, like he’s performing the idea “human society is a tennis match.” As the day advances & the loneliness of dusk envelops Toronto, his face shadows into gray.]

ALIX: Let’s play another. “Tin Heart.” [to VIRGIL] You’ll like this one.

VIRGIL: Why?

ALIX: It’s a love song.

ST. MALO: In reality, it’s a hate song.

[The piece begins with GORDON on saxophone, playing an ever-ascending tone, a Shepard tone, but also it sounds like “Giant Steps.” ST. MALO begins to percuss. A bit of bass from HAROLD now. Everyone in the band wears a careful expression.]

ALIX [singing]: But it can’t be harmony / if it’s always ascending. / It can’t be real to me / if your answer is always “depending.”

[The song is beautiful. VIRGIL turns around and cries.]

∰

[Band practice has ended. They walk as a group along Bloor St. It’s late; there is talk of getting ice cream, although ALIX objects to the idea, steering them instead to her apartment, several buildings off the avenue, not before, however, VIRGIL loads up on coffee, getting a 20 oz. cup, or whatever the milliliter equivalent is. It’s the first true Canadian apartment VIRGIL has visited. The decor is municipal, drab. A small bar takes center stage. The band pours shots of The Hard Stuff and begins to drink. Loud shouts, insistent laughter.]

[VIRGIL pulls GORDON aside. They talk in the kitchen.]

VIRGIL: Did you want to tell me more about your friendship woes?

GORDON: You’re crying. Are you okay?

VIRGIL [realizing that he is, in fact, crying; retreating deeper into the apartment] Am I annoying you? I’m sorry. No, actually, maybe now is the perfect time to talk about this phenomenon that I’ve been noticing. About the narrativization of the present moment. [talking over himself] But really it was that song, “Tin Heart,” that made me sad. But look how ALIX, I mean Alix, has so many posters of old police movies! Le Cercle Rouge. Le Doulos. How odd! But this is what I mean. I’ve been watching thrillers to help myself fall asleep back in New York. (I can hardly sleep wherever I go.) But nowadays, modern shows and movies, there’s always a Twist. The Bad Guy is a Good Guy. Haven’t you noticed? You watch the first hour of the movie, knowing that you’re being introduced to the array of possible Bad Guys. Eventually, when the Twist arrives, and it always does, there’s the revelation of who the actual Bad Guy was. It’s never just a Bad Guy, off by himself, being bad, disconnected from the pack!

GORDON: Why are you crying so much?

VIRGIL: Because it’s terrifying! Which is to say, it’s as if real life, or whatever this thing is, has contracted the same bug.

GORDON: Pardon? Which bug?

VIRGIL: The idea that circumstances are on the brink of folding in on themselves. Everything’s a conspiracy. Everything’s explainable. There’s no mystery. Nobody can be happy or free. And there’s so much chatter everywhere. When I was 16, I listened to music when I walked to school. Didn’t you? And now everyone listens to podcasts, to people chatting with each other. The world is full of experts. There’s no silence. There’s no ignorance. There’s no wandering off into the woods. And it snowballs into this avalanche of awful thoughts in my head, thoughts I feel no kinship with. E.g., everyone is going to leave me. And you don’t like me. And Odin told me he cheated on Alix only because he wants me to be implicated somehow & overrun by insanity!

[VIRGIL is not quite himself. He bows his head and removes a photograph of a dog from his pocket, one he cut out of a magazine this morning and has been carrying around all day. It’s damp from sweat.]

VIRGIL: That’s why music is so good, Gordon. Right? There’s no story, there’s no delusion.

GORDON: Let me get you some water.

VIRGIL: Because, because, because, despite what Harold may believe, and what those in the know may know, music doesn’t ever tell you that the world is a trick waiting to be revealed.

ROHINI [appearing as if from nowhere, as if from a poof of devil smoke!] What are you two crying about?

GORDON: Virgil says Odin cheated on Alix.

VIRGIL: No! [He leads them further into the apartment, chugs coffee, accepts a brown liqueur] I said Virgil. Virgil! Me! I’m a cheater. I’ve cheated on myself. You’ve simply misheard me with your Etobicoke ears!

ROHINI: Do you want to tell me about what you’re going through? I’m a social worker, Virgil. Maybe I can help you out.

VIRGIL: Will you put on The Ellington Suites? I need to hear music.

[They return to the living room, where ROHINI takes out her phone, connects to the stereo, and puts on Duke Ellington. The first song, “Sunset and the Mocking Bird,” is *transporting*. Next, ROHINI orders dessert, i.e. ice cream, on her phone, for VIRGIL’S benefit. But VIRGIL is still crying. Has it evolved, though, into a cry of fraternity?]

GORDON: Say, Virgil —

VIRGIL: Let’s play a game where we describe our family members. I’ll go first. Harriet is my roommate in addition to being my sister. She’s 37, [lowers his voice] much like you all look, and her hair resembles rotini (not Rohini). Please, if you could, somebody, a tissue? Harriet studies Melville and Whitman and others from the 19th century, biting off more than most can chew. But she has a big mouth. Yet it’s a prim little mouth. But she might get a very prestigious job soon. Perhaps I’m too upset to be here in front of everyone. Thank you for playing music for me!

[He rushes out of the apartment, onto the street, but he loiters by the building’s front door in the hopes of intercepting the ICE CREAM delivery. ODIN appears.]

ODIN: You told them I cheated on Alix?

VIRGIL: In roundabout terms.

ODIN: I told you in confidence. Come on, man.

VIRGIL: This is the Twist! I knew it would come.

ODIN: What twist?

VIRGIL: The plot twist where you accuse me of something.

ODIN: It’s not a twist if it’s of your own devising.

VIRGIL: Isn’t it, though? Aren’t we all our own worst enemy?

ODIN: When I was your age, 24, 25, whatever, I had the same compulsion to screw things up for everyone in my path. Cut it out.

ALIX [bursting out onto the street]: What did you do, Odin? Who did you screw?

[A rumble from below — the Bloor Street subway, perhaps. VIRGIL feels the rumble migrate into his toes, and he starts to dance. VIRGIL can’t dance. He searches his mind for a song whose rhythm matches the rumble and comes up empty. So he begins to sing random words, trusting that he will hit upon a thought or a mood. ODIN watches him but is not inclined to intervene. ALIX is yelling.]

[The ICE CREAM man arrives. VIRGIL removes the pint that he had selected and hands the bag to ODIN. Alas, the bag has no spoon, and VIRGIL has no spoon, so (what is to be done?) he eats the ICE CREAM with his hands.]

VIRGIL: Why don’t you kiss under some ice cream?

ALIX: Shut up.

VIRGIL: Okay, okay, so long, okay.

[The ice cream is melting in the night-heat. VIRGIL sucks on his vanilla fingers as he walks east on Bloor. It will be a long walk back to his neighbourhood, but he’s glad to be alone once more. & in truth, he is never fully alone, since he has a JOURNAL, to whom/which he will recount the night. There will be no Twist; there will be a destination, an ending: the lodging in the Annex; there will be a progression, a trajectory: eastward on Bloor; but nobody from the beginning of the day will wait at the lodging’s entrance, revealing, conspiratorially, how s/(t)he(y) were the prime mover of the trials and tribulations that befell VIRGIL.]

[Similarly, Duke Ellington’s Queen Suite will not resolve how you expected, not with a tonic 1 chord but with the drums of “Apes and Peacocks.” A tricky ending. VIRGIL listens to the Suites as he walks. It gives Toronto less of a brutalist character. His neck begins to itch. HIs shoulder too. The raccoon bite! He stops off at a Shoppers Drug Mart, which, for the reader’s benefit, is Canadian Duane Reade, and gets some lotion, and applies it. No comments are made by the staff re: VIRGIL’S vanilla-coated fingers. The lotion feels gelid and unhelpful.]

[GORDON texts VIRGIL a few minutes later to confirm that he is doing alright. He references VIRGIL’S “tears.” But tears come and go. VIRGIL looks to see if Harriet has posted anything recently on social media. There is one, photo-free, that says: “enjoy your transcendentalism when the whale is attacking the starboard side.”]

HARRIET [6+ km offstage]: I don’t need a brother anymore!

VIRGIL [reaching Ossington St;, listening to “Ad Lib on Nippon”; spotting a print of “Winter Morning, Charlevoix County” in a shop window; in morbid soliloquy]: Am I alone? Am I alone forever now?

[He takes out his phone and, wanting to call Harriet but lacking the nerve, instead dials the mirror image of Harriet’s phone number, which, ending as it does in 185, becomes a call to area code 581. This puts him in touch with a stranger in Chicoutimi, Quebec, who begins by speaking in French, but then switches to a medium-accented English. She demands to know who is on the other end of the line and hangs up when VIRGIL cannot provide a good answer.]

[VIRGIL proceeds along Bloor St., purchasing more coffee along the way, eventually arriving at his lodging, where he sits down abuzz and turns into a puddle of tears.]

VIRGIL [soliloquy]: There was too much talking tonight.

∰∰∰

( ( ( P.P.P.P.P.P.S. If you enjoyed this, you could buy me a coffee? ) ) )

Tonight it rained. Tonight. It. Rained. Tonight. It rained. Tonight it! Rained. Today it rained too. All day. Most of it. Today was a spectacle. Today Harriet wanted to meet up with me, and I had promised yesterday I would, however my faux-anger about her engagement had started to pollute my real feelings, O Journal of Simpering Erudition. But since it was raining, she talked me into buying clear umbrellas and taking the TTC to the aquarium downtown like I was a little child! In the morning, i.e. the early afternoon. There was a peculiar stab of displeasure in not walking my familiar thoroughfares, by which I mean Dundas Street and Bloor Street and Palmerston Avenue and Trinity Bellwoods Park and Kensington Market. I wondered what my new friends were up to. Without their company, Toronto, a city that I felt I was beginning to know, again felt a touch alien, and simultaneously boring, not in a Canadian way, but an exhausted way, the way Europe felt in 1945, per Tony Judt in his opus, Postwar.

First Harriet suggested we go to some tea place Bruce liked in the banking district (I said, BRUCE CAN’T COME, since I’m “mad” at him (how dare Mr. Collins get engaged to Charlotte Lucas? etc.) & she said, Don’t worry, Bruce is working today), knowing that scones are lures for me, and I gave her zero hugs when we met, although it did feel like ages since we had seen each other and it wouldn’t have felt all that bad to hug, especially when I thought of A.M. & Fran and their fondness. There was a true undercurrent of dyspepsia between me and Harriet.

But first! oh goodness, Harriet had gotten a haircut, some exotic style I won’t condescend to describe, but I hardly recognized her on the street. I mean I recognize-recognized her, she is my sister after all, & yet I didn’t entirely believe that it was her. She had turned into a Double of herself. I did, admittedly, scream at her for a minute re: the hair, but it was unavoidable, and she understood that, and reacted appropriately. All this talk of the Body, respect the Body, everyone is Embodied; & then you take someone to task for a haircut and remark how they’ve fundamentally changed and a Diagnosis gets pinned to your chest like a kindergartener. No thank you! Her hair was dyed too, w/ some auburn highlights, straightened, defrizzed. Hats off to me for getting used to it by the end of the day, and hats off to me for not reporting it as tonight’s headline.

But so the street was slick, the buildings tall, finance was in the air, we were near where the Royal Banks of Canada are, the Banks of Montreal, the Scotiabanks, etc. & then before long, Harriet was taking photos of everything in sight so she could post them w/ larky quotes in order to summon quippy responses. She said, It is vital to have a social media presence in my job. I said, You mean as a professor of 19th C literature? She said, Yes. I said, I doubt that very much. She said, For freelancing, Virgil, but also if I want to get my second monograph published with a major university press. I said, On Loomings? Or armpit sniffing? She said, Sure, laugh, but it’s for job interviews too. I had an interview with Princeton the day we flew to Toronto, didn’t you know? (Evidently tenure at Barnard didn’t satisfy her, she craved more.)

We were, by then, at tea, and I said, Babe what’s wrong you’ve hardly touched your cress sandwich, & she said, That’s not how you deploy that meme, I feel like you know that — (I don’t like the taste of cress, she added, the scones are yummy though) — and don’t call me babe. I told her of course I knew that, one needs merely a whiff of the internet to deduce how it works. And I’ll deploy what I want to deploy (but never troops!)! Harriet ordered a 2nd pot (Darjeeling, rain coming down) & said, Ugh you sound ridiculous when you use memes in real-life conversation. It’s strange, you’re so young, and somehow you don’t know this stuff. I said, Sister, we’re both millennials, you’re only 37, we’re the same generation. She said, Please don’t say memes out loud. I said, Not even if I ship them? She groaned. I said, Lamowww! Which is my unique way of verbalizing “lmao.”

But don’t worry, naturally I have deeper opinions here, I won’t just gloss it (“gloss” is overused); I said, Harriet! You, the world, his wife and these parasocial relationships! We must make the parasocial social; we must take the parasocial out of its toxic media incarnations and force it to breathe hot oxygen! Harriet said, So you think, based on the last few years, that the problem with the world is that online things aren’t bleeding into the world *enough*?

Upon which I crossed my legs, like at the ankle you know, one can admire a good rebuke (even if one anticipates it / agrees with it mostly), and I said, Harriet, you’re being unkind, given that you dropped a total bomb on me, that you will be leaving our sunny life together, and here I am trying to express a few thoughts on the Modern World, & you’re clambering down my throat, wagging that Ph.D. in my nose; I cancel thee!

She snorted, unintentionally, gracelessly, and said, Okay sorry, Virgil, how are you doing? Some fruit salad arrived, there were rotten brown banana bits, and I flicked them away. Harriet took them and balled them up in a napkin and threw them in the washroom in the basement, then came back. I repeated her question: How am I doing? Fine, I’ve made three friends in Toronto, & I’ve tried bubble tea, have you ever tried it? Harriet arched an eyebrow and said, You act like you’re 62, not 26. & I said, Quoth the spinster? She said, I’m not a spinster. I said, Why are you settling for Bruce, you could do better! (I didn’t truly think she could.) She said, I love Bruce, and besides you can’t have everything. I said, That’s spinster thinking! She said, But I’m not a spinster, Virgil, I’m getting married, that would be a paradox! I said, And yet of course there are no paradoxes in life.

This was all getting rather too fraternal, and I had just remembered, too, that she’d sent me an insulting, if accidental text over the weekend, and so I threw a finger sandwich onto the floor — one of those “why did Virgil do that?” moments; inscrutable to curtained eyes but all too sensible from the right vantage, as indeed everything is — and Harriet said, in a whisper, We’re okay, Virgil, everything’s okay. I took a wonderful breath & stared out the window at this petit sliver of Toronto, which in my estimation was too American-feeling today, this tiny downtown corridor, the high-rises and the glass, even if the rain garnered it some admiration.

And then we were off to the aquarium! Even if I wasn’t comfortable, I could be brave for Harriet, even if her hair had altered, she wasn’t in a pantsuit, she was in her basically-sweatpants. I felt better around her & struggled, in fact, to keep up my performance of acting wounded by her engagement, my mind was penduluming. It is, one can admit, nice to have a family. Anyway I said, What ocean creatures will you be spending time with today? She said, Whatever sounds good to you. & then we did some classic sibling bantering. I said, Fine. She said, Fine. I said, Fine! And maybe by then it was parody, but still she said, Fine.

Should I use quotation marks? Or follow the Irish convention of em dashes?

—Fine, I said.

No, quotation marks are better.

She said, “Fine.” I said, “Fine.” Seeing as we were in Bankers’ Row or whatever they call it in Toronto, we were close enough to the aquarium that we could walk, though the skyscrapers felt imposing to pass under; clearly Manhattan has skyscrapers too but they’re familiar, similarly I don’t think I would be afraid of the Matterhorn if I lived in the shadow of the Matterhorn. Some financiers had dog walkers on the job, even on these busy downtown streets, like King Street. I engaged a few dogs as they went by, and Harriet said, “Look at your buddies!” I told her, “You want me to like dogs more than I do, which isn’t to say I don’t like them, but I don’t like them *that* much.” Harriet grimaced, and I said, “What, have I semantically exhausted you? How do you keep pace w/ your 19th century boys?” At this point, she was thinking, I imagine, how I would benefit from some Medicine, but I was calm, I walked purposefully, left right left right.

∰

It is a truth universally acknowledged, etc., that jellyfish blooms are like social media memes. I’ll not go into it, no, I don’t like symbols! Once inside the aquarium (they need to reduce its Maximum Capacity, if indeed anyone ever pays attention to those limits), I didn’t have a plan, yet after a couple laps, it turned out I only wanted to see the jellyfish. Pardon, I mean I wanted to see *only* the jellyfish. And it would have been nice to switch the lights off and play ambient music, alas one is rarely in command of aquariums. I sat there awhile admiring the jellyfish as they drifted up & down, I put on my personal headphones, wooing a Diagnosis, and allowed myself to escape the din. Then I’d had enough! In the space of a second, I was ALL done, I said, “Harriet, let’s get going!” And she replied, in the manner of Typical People, “Sure, let me just see the stingrays,” as if by “let’s get going,” I meant “let’s remain here an indeterminate amount of time and then at some point go.” She added, “We’ve only been here ten minutes,” and I said, “You mean, we’ve been here only ten minutes,” and she groaned, “Is every single thing you say designed to make me insane?” & I said, “You appear to define yourself in opposition to me, eh?” Then I started to yell.

Anyway! the rain had picked up, we jellyfished open our clear umbrellas and stood on the curb (is it spelled kerb in Canada? let’s say no (will they send me to gaol for these opinions?) (or will there be an Inqueƒt?))) I have a trick by the way for counting my parentheses upon closure, squirrel that away for later — I thought since movie theatres can be disorienting in the daylight hours, & since we were near Bruce’s apartment, we should go order Chinese food there and wait out the storm. “Are you okay?” Harriet said. “The tea house was too much, you started shouting, and now the aquarium, which I grant, was loud, but are you okay? Is this trip overwhelming?” I said, “Don’t call it shouting!” The exclamation point means I shouted it. With a bit more humour in her marrow, Harriet would have laughed. And she was wrong: I hadn’t shouted or yelled at the tea house. I added, “Change is horror / Virtue is really stubbornness,” even if, with that quote, I was vacationing in a century Harriet hardly knew.

Mid-10s Celsius, drizzling, approaching merienda time. “Not that you asked,” I said as we walked, “but one of my friends is named Gordon, he’s from Etobicoke, and the other one is named Kia, she’s from Halifax” — I elided Kia’s spending the night, so to speak, at the lodging, have I mentioned Kia had snuck out while I was dozing — “and these two could very well be at my birthday party, which could very well happen. However I doubt A.M. will be invited, we did have an interesting time, but he had a curious air, though his sister was v. nice.” “Exciting,” said Harriet, with an arrogated enthusiasm. “I didn’t ask because I know how private you are.” I said, “Say, what does arrogate mean? Never mind. That’s enough of the birthday party talk. I want to get multiple dumpling types.” And I added, in a whisper, “Bruce is at work, right? RIGHT?” And Harriet assured me he was. “During our late lunch,” I continued, “we should talk about social media strategy, I fear you’re on the verge of getting cancelled, what with that haircut.” Harriet rolled her eyes, her favourite mode of exercise.

Bruce’s Royal Bank of Canada residence was in a gleaming building, through whose lobby I had no compunction about trailing umbrella water, and as we went up in the elevator to a CN-Tower-adjacent floor, I peered over Harriet’s shoulder & made sure she tapped the correct dumpling buttons on her phone. The browser sputtered, the reception cut out on certain floors. She said, “I hate planned obsolescence,” and I said, “Don’t talk about yourself that way.” Maybe I didn’t say that one aloud, though. At Bruce’s there were windows wide & tall in the living room, I doubted that he brought in enough revenue to deserve it (certainly we don’t see news reports along the lines of Englishman from Devon Brings Alberta Mining Funds to Land of the Free; then again I don’t read the trades). There was a bedroom with a clean-sheeted bed and no pictures on the wall and two nightstands, one of which had Harriet’s literature and some jewelry she felt she didn’t deserve to wear in class-fearing Canada. There was, too, a full glass of water wrapped in an uxorious paper towel. And in the fridge, I spotted some nice playfulness between the English and French names of products. On a single label, it would say ENGLISH MUFFINS ANGLAIS, or DIET COKE DIЀTE, the adjectives like opposites in a mirror, the noun being the mirror, or perhaps the hinge, we always knew nouns were the powerful part of speech, or at least the Germans knew it, and capitalized accordingly; how nice, how bilingual, how apropos.

Harriet asked, “So where will your birthday party be?” and I said, “Haven’t I already said that topic was closed for now?” Possibly I gestured violently, in any case my shoulder, which I had given little thought to since the raccoon had scratched it a couple nights ago, gave a startle in response. Harriet crossed her legs, folded her hands on her lap, it felt studied. “Dumplings will be here in 35 minutes,” she said, which anyone would agree was a long while. I said, “You say social media is important to your career,” I said, “so let’s get serious about it.” Harriet said, “You aren’t in a position to advise me,” & then the dumplings arrived! (I had a feeling the app wasn’t telling the truth.) We unpacked the bag on the glass coffee table, stared at the drizzly cityscape, the grey lake, 13th largest in the world, according to the almanac. How odd that Harriet thought I couldn’t arrive at informed opinions in this arena, i.e. social media; by the way, the hot sauce was rather sweet. “I miss Bruce,” she said. I replied, “What if you kissed under the altar?” But then, with markedly more earnestness in my perennially well-controlled manner, I said, “You are trying to create a brand for yourself, and there is no market for your brand. Nobody wants salty posts about Queequeg.” Harriet slurped a soup dumpling, frowned, I carried on: “But even that point doesn’t matter much, when you are in danger of being cancelled.” “Tell me how,” she said. (Harriet didn’t realize I was spelling cancelled with two l’s in my mental transcript.)

I organized the dumplings in a crescent moon and said, “It’s too hard to explain.” She said, “But you have a theory?” I said, “I do. I see it like a vista, it’s spread out before me, the full sweep of the theory. Your personality is a brittle thing online & it can be shattered like *that*, you’ve got to zig and zag to keep them all guessing, that’s the only way to escape. Break your mind in view of your public.” “Aha,” she said. I said, “Don’t limit yourself. Start with almanac facts!” At which point, I showed her the risible volume I had purchased with Kia, its tacky red cover with a picture of Earth (as if we would be seeking facts re: some other planet!) which acted as a bit of implicit shaming for Harriet, since she had forgotten to pack the proper volume, & I added, “The top exporter of tin in —” But Harriet interrupted! She said, “Virgil, my followers do not want to hear about tin. I’ve got 17,000 followers!” I said, “17,000? That’s a minor city in Michigan. Your average Joe in Michigan would be thrilled to hear about tin, certainly he does *not* want to hear you crack wise on Song of Myself with that hairdo vandalizing the picture frame.” Harriet said, “You probably want me to post Coldplay song lyrics.” I said, “Might as well! I have a pun about a famous dictator too, albeit in need of wordsmithing.”

Harriet curled her legs under her bum, a teenager, dour and lacking colour, ever-pallid, and said, “You’re not going to say anything nice to me today, are you? I thought we agreed you’d say three nice things every day to me. Didn’t we have that rule? We’ve let it fall by the wayside.” So I spoke three truths, I don’t have time to recapitulate them now, it’s bordering on 3:00 a.m., & then I continued, “Your online identity is nothing like the real you, Harriet, it’s a monoculture, I fear, and as soon as a better version of you comes along on social media, you’re done, you’re cancelled.” Harriet said, “You don’t even know what canceled means!” (One l in canceled for her, observe.) At least she was getting closer to Thinking. The crucial moment approached, my vagus nerve tingled. With a dollop of sweet-hot sauce added to a shrimp dumpling, I chewed and watched her muscle through my words.

Harriet said, “Why don’t you tell those kids you met at the coffee shop how they should do their social media?’ I said, “Which kids?” She said, “Kia and Gordon.” I said, “You mean my friends?” Harriet laughed & said, “Sure.” Her voice was positively *dripping* with derision & although my feelings weren’t truly, i.e. catatonically, hurt, since I’m in control of my faculties, nevertheless society depends upon people acting as if slights genuinely hurt — so I said — no in fact, I’m quite done with quotation marks, my apologies, O Journal of Golden Retriever Loyalty, you’ll need to keep up from here on in — I said, They are indeed my friends. Harriet said, Aha. I said, Let’s post something! She said, I need you to slow down, Virgil, I need you calm, today has been really hard, I know, and maybe, please, in the next month or so, back in New York (and she turned, fixing me with a look that felt like her last full measure of devotion) let’s consider talking to another psychiatrist. I said, Pardon?

Canadian rain lacquered the windows.

Tactfully I tooted.

Harriet said, When are you flying home, Virgil?

∰

Eventually the dumplings were done and I had coaxed Harriet into opening her computer and giving me a demonstration of what she planned to post, namely a picture of herself with a white pot of Darjeeling and a comment along the lines of “Darjeeling is my white whale,” which felt to me, as a non-scholar, like what a non-scholar would write, or at least a non-funny person, though Harriet objected that it was just a draft, she was still ruminating. By then she had wheeled out a decanter, a junior one, let’s say, to be charitable, of wine, which is one of Harriet’s tricks for squelching and justifying abnormal behaviour (“it wasn’t me acting poorly, it was my friend the Gewürztraminer!” (or, in other circumstances, early in the day, she might be found saying it was her deadlines, her students, the essays she’s grading, certainly it wasn’t the peculiar structure of her Brain, that’s a charge she reserves for other people)). Anyway she sipped her wine & asked if I was doing my Morning Pages, I said yes, though of course I’m doing them in the evening, with Godwins-Austen of caffeine, which I couldn’t mention either, since Harriet is always worrying about my aorta’s integrity.

At some point, maybe around when I was looking at her Gewürztraminer bottle & saying that overall I was glad not to have been born in Germany due to the requisite umlaut upkeep, she excused herself to use the washroom. I saw my chance, swiped her laptop, and bounded out of the apartment. The tricky thing was: since I didn’t know her password, I couldn’t very well close the machine, so I had to walk down the street with it half-open like a clam shell, happily the rain had abated. I typed as I went, leveraging the almanac: “The top exporter of tin in 2022 was (drum roll) Australia.”

(Perhaps I’ve had my fill of Harriet, my de jure but not de facto guardian. Perhaps I have filled my coffee cup up to the brim, now it’s brimming over, the clock has brimmed over from 3:59 to 4:00 a.m., the racoons rustle outside, the police sirens respond to a wounded Canadian, the morning considers exhuming itself & limping to the tea kettle.)

Several people liked my tin post — off to a good start. Perhaps the likers were Australian & felt great pride in their exports, certainly national pride is a wonderful thing, apart from all the counterexamples. I weighed my next move. Harriet texted: Where did you go? And: Where’s my computer? I fired off another one: “Let’s give it up for the scent of these armpits!” (A fact check this evening revealed that Walt Whitman hyphenates arm-pits, a fact Harriet’s true believers no doubt spotted.) Once in the shadow of free wifi from a Second Cup, I uploaded a delicious photo of Harriet sipping tea and captioned it: “or, The Whale?” Which netted seven likes.

Portaging the computer in this half-open fashion didn’t agree with certain joints in my raccoon-injured shoulder region, I had to pause often & buy pastries, forming a daisy chain of wifi as I humbled north along the usual route, up Spadina Avenue, w/ an eye toward Kensington Market (you’ve gotten used to this route by now, O Journal). Perhaps someone in Harriet’s circle informed on me, because I got another text from her, worried now: Virgil, what are you doing? Are you posting as me? (Admittedly I giggled at the thought of her, novel-haired, fearing that her second monograph was on the chopping block.) Harriet said, I know that thief stole your work computer, but that doesn’t mean you can steal mine. There was coffee to be had along the way, and I had it, I posted (because I’d read some Ashbery that morning): “The Picture of Little L.O. in a Prospect of Bankers — I am not wrong in calling this livid version of myself the true one” (using L for Livia, Harriet’s better name). That educed ten likes and two comments, although I didn’t read them; as an alert on my phone told me that Harriet was on the move! and I looked at the tracking app we share, so that she can know where I am in New York & I can know where she is, for our mutual benefit (in theory) and I could see her oolong oblong head w/ its formerly frizzy hair wrapped in a purple shawl, from a photo of our last vacation together in the Catskills, proceeding up Spadina Avenue on the map of Toronto, rather quickly, but not as quickly as if she were in a speedy car, perhaps she was in the streetcar. She texted: Please stop, Virgil, this is my livelihood!!! Which one could argue is very histrionic (even, to invite all the contemporary Discourse Landmines, hysterical) given that she has a comfy salary via tenure, and tenure is impregnable.

I hadn’t wordsmithed my pun properly, so I texted new friend Kia from my own phone: Who’s the funniest dictator? It was the first message we had exchanged. & she wasn’t quick to reply, so I just made it generic: “Say what you will about dictators, at least they command your attention.” The idea was that it should be only 20% funny, I imagined it was in that vicinity, at least high teens. Then I posted a smiley face w/ the caption: “on mere emoji.” Harriet’s head drew near me on the map, I carried her machine onto a sidestreet, namely Lippincott Street, to elude her. Nevertheless, she was coming fast, though she couldn’t have been on a sidestreet, no, perhaps Bruce had her on piggyback & was sprinting! I found an alleyway, of which Toronto, like Chicago, has many (although they call them laneways), and watched Harriet go by on a bicycle, steely-eyed, square-jawed, eminently serious. No one at all liked my dictator post. And yet this signalled to me, in a way, that my strategy had succeeded & Harriet was free! Simultaneously, I had the sense that I would be deemed to have Gone Too Far, as I do roughly once a week. Naturally any anger on Harriet’s part would pass, I wasn’t unduly worried, she would unload on Bruce about a Diagnosis, & time apart would be needed, that’s all. Honestly Harriet’s judgments had started to feel v. extremely anticlimactic; yes, the more time I spent in Toronto, the happier I felt!

So I put the computer down in the alley, and because the phone had the tracking app, I put the phone down too. And despite the fact that I hate Symbols, and this verged on a Symbol, I put the almanac down too, face-down, getting it mucky, Symbolizing how she had failed me in her packing and consigned me to a bad almanac. Maybe a younger, more naive part of my mind, feeling scared, required a lullaby, because I found myself whistling “And Your Bird Can Sing.” For only a moment! & then I hushed myself and retreated to an alleylaneway with a minuscule parking spot, from which I could see brutalist Harriet approach again on her bicycle. She slipped the computer into her bag, she looked around with feverish annoyance, she put my phone in her pocket, she kicked the almanac, she pedalled away & then the rain returned in a wallop. Without my clear umbrella, I felt my shirt and pants getting sticky, my wallet and my Canadian money, Harriet had my phone, so that wasn’t a concern, I shivered my way up Palmerston Avenue, on the lookout for hot tea to accompany me to the lodging, and upon finally reaching it, I took off my clothes, towelled off, and enjoyed a nap.

∰

Who knew it would be dark when I awoke, and the raccoon would be scratching on the window screen again? I got up out of bed, naked, and danced in full view of the raccoon, and I sang our favourite and oft-overlooked Coldplay song, “Death and All His Friends,” for the second time in two days, so not *that* overlooked. Surely there would be correspondence in time from Harriet, chiding / apologizing / lamenting / being who she is. There was too little time tonight, this life, to worry about it, of course! It was ice cream o’clock! (Call the roller of big cigars!) Yet human relations are inescapable, I soon found out, for outside the front door of the lodging was a box with my phone, and taped to the door was a handwritten note that read: V, I need a break from being your sister, H.

Truly what I thought about as I ambled, clothѐd, down the street en route to vanilla ice cream with chocolate sprinkles, was you, Journal — how you have allowed me to take the most effervescent thoughts in my mind and deposit them for safekeeping. How you allow me to be in conversation with myself. How unlucky some people, e.g. Harriet, are; those who lack an outlet, fighting with themselves in real-time without infrastructure to fall back on. (Extra sprinkles, I said to the nineteen-year-old boy serving me. He grinned.) I do not think, if I may address you directly, that you are here to let me get *myself* down on paper. As if there were only one of me. You are here to let me be manifold. It is useless to be scared and confined! And it is critical to be untethered. “Only in the light of lost words / can we imagine our rewards.”

Despite the yellowing sky, it’s not too late to relate the three nice things I said to Harriet back when she requested them at Bruce’s apartment: (1) You would follow me to the ends of the earth, Tierra del Fuego, even if I were cruel to you on the trip down. (2) You have smooth skin. (3) Before I read your first monograph, I didn’t like Leaves of Grass, and now I can tolerate it.

There was a drizzle melting the ice cream. I persisted.

Anyhow uncharacteristically, in a sense, after the ice cream, I walked by & stopped by an English style pub with a knight in a coat of arms right inside the door. I ordered, for me, a warm ale and, for the dowager on the stool beside me, an even warmer ale. It nearly transpired that I said to her, Babe what’s wrong you haven’t touched your warm ale, but I thought better & didn’t feel like talking, anyway she didn’t appear glad or distressed to have an ale purchased for her. And no doubt when I floated away, she felt equivalently morally neutral.

The idea of my birthday circled back to me once more, and I began giving it a fighting chance, it == a party in Toronto, by, again, considering you, Journal. It seemed like if I could tell you about it later, throwing a party would be a justifiable thing to have done.

But where were you at the pub? You were nowhere! And so my well-coiffed mind began to escape from its trap, and possibly I knew that was its trajectory, and had sought out a pub for that very reason. Either way, I began to sing “Happy Birthday” aloud, very out loud, & it being a pub, most people didn’t mind and many joined in. However, some last bastion of logic cried out, halfway through, that it wasn’t my birthday, and if I’d had a good almanac, I might have found out someone whose birthday it was and redirected the celebration to a worthy party.

Nevertheless the celebration carried on, and that was fine, and I walked out after it was over, ale stein in hand, fearing no retaliation from the State, this being Canada, and looked at the bright colours of the clouds swished by the city lights and tried to make myself go blank until I could come back home, Journal, and make myself manifold again.

∰∰∰

( ( ( P.P.P.P.P.S. If you enjoyed this, you could buy me a coffee? ) ) )

Tonight let me report on an epistemic, or perhaps behaviourist, or perhaps silly, Discourse, one that started in a gong-flooded teahouse & also simultaneously in the cloud, i.e. in Toronto’s storied Annex neighbourhood & also distributed across our world, accompanied by an oolong, preceded by coffee.

Although first, you will probably want to hear about my morning, O Journal of Tawdry Palaver. So, to start: I woke at ten-ish, Kia was gone, there was a divot in the bed’s mattress from her bum, a divot in the couch from mine, and a scribbly thank you note on the counter with her phone number. My shoulder ached and burned, from the Doberman and raccoon, respectively, but the raccoon family had skedaddled, and the shoulder ached more than it did burn, which gave reason for hope, and anyway riding the NYC subway throughout my childhood has inoculated me to world diseases in perpetuity. Which of The Fab Four, I wondered, had even been scratched by a raccoon? Surely one of them, likely the cute one. Anyway I cast off the night with a shrug, it was a new day, “Good Day, Sunshine,” of course, the new day trumps the old.

This was to be day three of Zero Harriet. Despite my pain, I felt bright & bouncy, snugly settled into my new life in Canada. Deep in the lodging’s cupboard, I found a shortbread cookie. I made coffee, I leafed through the lodging’s book collection, there were plenty of Soviet leaflets for some reason, I resisted work for a spell, then at last donned an outdoor face and ventured out, stopping at a Second Cup to have a bran muffin & coffee and a sweet whistle of “Michelle” from Rubber Soul (& executing a quick Bloor → Palmerston → Dundas → Trinity Bellwoods → Kensington Market loop, passing election posters on the way w/ Toronto mayoral candidates’ pristine faces); then, needing tea to wash the bran away, found a well-appointed teahouse. It was full of Canadians, quiet, good for a mind like mine. With me I had brought my newly purchased 2023 almanac as well as a 5” x 8” Lawren Harris print purchased from the Art Gallery of Ontario (hereafter, AGO): “Lake and Mountains.” How many texts, emails, and voicemails did I have from Harriet? None, as a matter of fact. Still, all was well: I set my provisions on the table and took an everloving breath, then flipped open my laptop.

This being Monday, I was scheduled to work, but hadn’t told work I was in Toronto, and when I did, they said, as if they had sovereign authority over my time, no, Virgil, you may not take today off! But Charles III is the new sovereign of the Commonwealth, I told them, and so is the Queen Consort, to some extent, probably. & yet since I respect my coworker Pamela Q. and she needed my help, and since it isn’t pleasant to have conflicts at work, or anywhere, unless you want adrenaline splashing in your blood, I did my contractual duty.

(How crass, how prosaic! I don’t like to be boring, O Journal, I clock out dutifully each night at five p.m., I roam Manhattan Island and, on occasion, Western Long Island, which some would prefer to label The Outer Boroughs, I jot down only what’s worth preserving for you, e.g. the Hopper gas stations, my apologies!)

In the team chat, Pamela Q., Product Manager / stalwart colleague, relayed unease from top executives about how our soon-to-be-launched thingamajig may not be as stable or secure as The Market (by which term I understand old farmers selling strawberries from the backs of their trucks in the town square) expect it to be. Thereupon vectors of jealousy unfurled in Harriet’s direction, owing to my internal computer model. She lives in service of her Queequegs, her Songs of Myself, with only occasional interference from provosts, lucky her.

So I typed, AOK Pamela Q., what do we do? And she typed, We need to write more tests; we === me, since I am responsible for Quality Assurance. I may have sighed, a teahouse man may have scoffed, the gongs in the background music may have resounded. Pamela Q. said, Can we have a quick call? In reply, I typed, Sure, I’ll write tests; but you know that I prefer chatting, indeed, I have accommodations to that effect! Her response: There’s a lot of pressure from the higher ups today, let’s have a call.

The man in the teahouse said, Would you mind? Because, I presume, I was clicking and clacking with my tongue; and I said, Pardon! Not that I noticed right away (seldom do we notice any detail at the time, at best we register & then report it later with a false verisimilitude (finally, a chance to use that golden word!)), but I can report in retrospect that he was wearing a collarless button-down shirt of a faint tan hue, had close-cropped hair, was in his 50s or thereabouts, had a cup of peony tea before him and no reading materials, no technology of any kind, he was staring at his hands with a softly militaristic zen.

Quite suddenly a phone call noise began to radiate from my machine, so I reached (or lunged (if you must)), for my handy almanac to enjoy some facts, however I opened to a section titled Rulers of Scotland. No one cares about Scottish kings! What a useless almanac. Outside there was a blur of people on Bloor Street, the music in the teahouse was serene, but still it felt important to answer Pamela Q.’s call, she provides my income, and yet I obviously wasn’t going to answer. I said NO to the screen. & I texted Harriet to tell her about Pamela Q.’s temerity in calling, as the man in the teahouse started tapping me on the shoulder and the gongs of the teahouse music got louder, a welter of noise pricked each pockmark of my brain.

Let us pause to sip coffee in the palindromic privacy of 1:11 a.m.

The man in the teahouse asked why I was being so loud, didn’t I realize we were in a teahouse? Of course I realized that, I said. He said, And you realize people come here to feel a measure of peace? Do you care about other people? About a healthy, functioning society? I said, All of that sounds like a reach, and a mere construct, too, not a hard-boiled fact. Upon which red splotches appeared on his neck. His blood was mottling, an argument was blossoming. He said, You’re banging the table with your hands again (the way he said it, “a-gain” rhymed with “rain” (Canadian)), what exactly is the issue, sir? & I said, I’m sorry, I am different. He said, Different? I said, Yes, some people think I warrant a Diagnosis. He said, Pardon? What kind of Diagnosis? And I replied, *Apparently* that’s in the eye of the beholder, so you tell me!

This gave him some pause, which was around when I found time to study his clothes and comportment. He looked out at the street, perhaps caught sight of the Toronto mayoral posters on Bloor, and found his better angels in Olivia Chow’s smile, then he reached out a long-fingered hand, and said, My name’s A.M., with a smile, to which I said, That’ll be confusing when I write about you in my journal later. He said, Why is that? I said, Because we’re introducing ourselves five minutes before noon, 11:55 a.m., you can see the issue. He didn’t see the issue. I said, But probably you aren’t like e.e. cummings, you must capitalize your initials, it’ll be fine, because when *I* reference the morning hours, I go: lowercase a, lowercase m (sometimes with periods, though not always), since I find A.M. to be too flamboyant.

Probably I thought that, rather than saying it, since it would be pooh-poohed by Harriet.

He asked, What are you working on? And I said, Quality Assurance (hereafter, QA). & he said, Do you mean — ? But I cut him off, sensing a chance to escape genuine conversation for a good quarter-hour via some tactical blithering.

A.M., I said, it will be important to explain what QA means, not important in a grand sense, just for the purposes of this discussion, which *may* be important in a grand sense. QA means ensuring that a thingamajig does what we say it does. (And I crossed my legs in an artful fashion so he knew I was legitimate.) So if I claim that I make wet green widgets in blue boxes, then I must prove that what issues forth from my assembly line is wet, green, a widget, in a box, and that the box is blue. Rather trivial in this example. But Pamela Q. and I do not make wet green widgets in blue boxes, we make, rather, our precious thingamajigs, which is to say Software, aka Nothing. However, some Nothings are more substantive than are others; and this thingamajig of ours, coming late summer to the mobile phones of North America (!), is less substantive, closer to Pure Nothing, closer to the dampness on a page of poetry left by a frothing porter whilst you scurry to the washroom.

He attempted to interject, Yes, but you shouldn’t call it a thingamajig, and —

But what, then, is a QA test (I continued)? I will explain + will set forth the concomitant issues. If my Software thingamajig says that when I click on a button in the thingamajig, the button should disappear, then what I do, QA-wise, is this: write some Software that summons the thingamajig and checks to see that the button does in fact disappear.

Three issues arise (concomitantly (as I mentioned)):

(1) The thingamajig under test is a fake thingamajig, because who can afford to produce a real one? A real one includes the people who buy it, the people who use it, the microchips onto which all the 101011 usage gets zapped, etc. So the thingamajig is fake, the button is fake, the hand that clicks the button is fake, the disappearance is fake (although that may be a different category of fakeness; consult Gilbert Ryle et al.).

Of course, he said. (Already I was weary from talking so much, being far from home, and engaging with a stranger. Nevertheless, I blithered on.)

(2) The Software that I write in order to test the Software that comprises the thingamajig is Additional Software, often composed in a different framework, which has its own dialect and idioms and rhythms. The two frameworks are similar, but perhaps in the way that Norwegian & Swedish & Danish & Finnish are similar (but isn’t Finnish different from all of these? (and isn’t Welsh different from the Gaelic tongues? (or is that, rather, Manx?))) but then again, I haven’t personally been to Scandinavia, indeed Canada is my first foreign country! at 26-nearly-27! & so regardless, surely you wouldn’t seek to conduct any actual official Swedish government business in Norwegian, and/or vice versa, if you wanted to validate that a Swede said “hej då” to another Swede, you would never do so in Danish! & I am coming to my point, rest assured, A.M.; to test a thingamajig in some cousin dialect of the thingamajig beggars validity, especially when that thingamajig is fake (see: (1)).

And (3)? he said.

(3), I said: What if you don’t even know what your thingamajig is supposed to do? What if, worse still, nobody knows? We have acronyms in Software that promise the world, and we declare that our thingamajigs connect ever more thingamajigs, in near-zero time, but, then, can a thingamajig whose stated purpose is to interconnect thingamajigs be pinned down with any true precision? Can it be a marbled component of reality the way a turkey leg is?

This was all reasonably well articulated, I thought (even if, as I articulated it, I could hear Harriet’s pesky voice telling me I was talking FAR TOO MUCH, verily she popped into my mind much in the way that computers show you pop-ups, software updates, etc.), anyway I started to type some of this to Pamela Q., but then deleted it, & then typed it again, I said: I do not know what this product is, therefore I don’t know how to test it. And Pamela Q. typed, So what have you been working on these past few months, Virgil? So I reared back and I typed, Obviously I’m being funny! & then sipped tea and laughed, quite loudly, by accident, but it made A.M. laugh too, and Pamela Q. typed, Wait — are you joking? You haven’t written any tests? She called me again; again, I declined to answer.

A.M. was still standing before me. After all my blither, his jaw had softened, and his eyes had un-narrowed, as he took on the bearing of a man whose discipline had made him kinder, not crueler. He became, in a word, Canadian. Since I am a mimic, I pushed my accent a few hundred kilometres northward, buttered up my vowels, etc., and said ooh-kay, etc., when after a few more pleasantries, he apologized, and I said, You don’t have to apologize a-gain. Thus concluded our teahouse Discourse. I had a feeling that I might be on the on-ramp to a new friendship, A.M. was a bit old, yes, a bit cranky-adjacent, but there was likely some kinship between us to discover, and he was at least Canadian. And I am Canadian-adjacent.

As it happened, he presented this kinship in short order, saying, You know, I used to work in Software testing. That was pleasant-adjacent to hear, so I dashed off a quick button test, and closed my computer & my eyes, and dreamed of the idea of friends.

∰

When my eyes clicked open, either an hour or a few minutes had passed, A.M. was standing over me still and/or again & pointing at a woman on the street spiriting away with my computer. I told him, It’s fine, it doesn’t belong to me; it’ll be a bad day for Pamela Q., but now at least I’m free to roam about and hum my Coldplay tunes. But A.M. didn’t like that answer, doubtless because he didn’t trust in the resilience of Pamela Q. He hoisted me up by my shirt cuff and then we collaboratively stumbled onto Bloor St., by which time the thief was gone. I feel like this is my fault in a way, A.M. said as he studied me. In his eyes, I had evolved from an object of scorn to an object of pity, which is ordinarily one of my *least* favourite objects to be, at least when it’s coming from my family, especially Harriet, who tends to make such a big show of it. However, since I was no longer working and my mind was getting summer-cleaned by this trip to another country, I made a conscious choice to let A.M. view me how he wished.

I said, Do Canadians steal from one another? That’s very macho! A.M. said, So it’s your work computer? I said, Yes, but don’t worry, it’s only Software, and I’m based in New York; this is all very transient; & I added (because the thought just clambered into my mind), You remind me of me when I’m older. This sentiment appeared to puzzle A.M., and yet I hardly knew how I meant it; I was sleepy, I was tinker-toying with words, sensing that closeness between us, one neither of us would have intentionally sought out & would surely cast off once the day was over. I looked at the Lawren Harris print I’d carted along on my outing: the cloud arcing like a wave over the mountains, a Canadian Hokusai.

A.M. said, That’s my car right outside, let’s get in and we can drive around and look for her. For who? I said. The thief, he said. Ah yes, the thief. That seemed fine, A.M.’s car was well maintained, a Honda hatchback, pacific blue, except when he turned it on, some classical station was playing Shostakovich’s waltz, aka the introductory music for our friend Eyes Wide Shut, i.e. not the music you want to hear as you climb into a stranger’s car.

You’re a New Yorker? A.M. said as he turned onto Bathurst St. There were tons of people in crop-tops, cut-offs, etc., which was odd for 295 Kelvin, aka 71 Fahrenheit, and it didn’t feel all that comfortable to me to see so much skin. A.M. said, You must think you’re in a real podunk town here, but Toronto’s very cosmopolitan. I said, Well, I don’t consider myself cosmopolitan, if anything I’m monopolitan. A.M. said, Huh. He had the surety of a man who can change people with his words, I had a feeling he wanted to change me, surely our time together in his car wasn’t a 100% coincidence, which is to say the theft of my computer was a mere entrypoint for A.M, although I couldn’t articulate the ways in which he wanted to change me.

We’re not going to find her, he said with a sigh. I said, Who? He said, The thief. Instead we pulled up in front of a driving school, where A.M. explained, with a giggle, a hobby of his: tailing the juvenile driving students and giving them “challenges,” e.g. cutting them off, stopping short, honking at them. When I was very young, he said, I was a driving instructor; so many jobs, so many lives! I pointed out, not yet to him, but to myself, that he was the man who had scoffed at me in the teahouse for my harmless quirks & then I wondered how many tea drinkers, Western Buddhists, socioeconomic critics, etc. are, as in the horseshoe theory of politics, only a meter or two, as the crow flies, from a tempest of rage.

My understanding of him seemed to shift from moment to moment. He was angry, he was kind, he was odd. Gordon and Kia, my other friends, had made sense on first blush, but I felt like I lacked the C.V. to disentangle A.M. & moreover, it felt like all Canadians were taking advantage of me, constantly affixing themselves to my hip!

I checked my phone: nothing from Harriet. (And suddenly I feel lonely recounting my day with this man, let me stuff some pieces of Tim Horton’s old-fashioned plain cake donuts, which I picked up on the way home, in my gums like gauze to cauterize this wound, O Journal of Complicit Weeping, and go on, go on, go on!)

Shostakovich was playing still, a different quartet, I guess the disc jockey was making a statement, even though everyone knows Prokofiev (sometimes spelled Prokofjew, believe it or not) is the better of the two, although they’re not exactly comparable, other than, I suppose, both being Russian (are they? fact check: oh, Prokofiev was born in Ukraine, even if his quartets were inspired, I hear, by his time in the Caucasus) — anyway we switched the station & settled upon Miles Davis’s “So What,” which is reliably playing on a million radio stations at all times, thank goodness, and I looked at A.M., wondered if he was Russian or if he was Ukrainian, but then, at the risk of phrenologizing, decided he had a Norse head, and I said, taking a deep breath, in-out, Tell me about yourself, which is what Typical People say. A.M. frowned & nearly crashed into a girl learning how to navigate driving on top of the Bathurst St. streetcar rail lines (those power lines dangling down, the rectangular yellow signs with black X’s), & then said, Look, I feel bad, I feel like the computer is my fault. I’m supposed to meet my sister for a late lunch. Come along, we’ll feed you, I’ll tell you about myself.

∰

A.M.’s sister was waiting in a parkette near Ossington Ave. with Portuguese sandwiches. When she saw him, she exclaimed, Andy! and ran toward him eagerly, giving him a big squeeze. Not long after, she was whistling “Love Me Do,” which endeared her to me. Her name was Fran, an old-person name, short for Frances. I asked her, Do you always run and hug A.M.? & she said, I don’t know, but we haven’t seen each other in almost a week! To which I said, My sister, Harriet, seldom hugs me, and seldom brings me sandwiches. Fran said she was sorry for my troubles.

A.M. had grown bashful from sisterly affection, but then straightened his spine fifteen degrees and said to me, I owe you a story. & he began: Many years ago I lived in New York too, and I was employed by a Software company, like you. We worked long hours. We ate dinner at the office. We were brothers and sisters in arms. It nearly drove me crazy, that job, but I guess I should be grateful, because it’s what led me to my current job: Technology Critic. (Interrupting, I said: Is that what you are? He said, Freelance.) Well, the company didn’t know what it wanted to make. It was a healthcare company, nominally, but it wasn’t clear on its north star. There was a mission to improve patients’ lives, and yet nobody, not even the founder herself, could describe in clear terms what our products were supposed to do. This was back in boom times, when you could sell anything to anyone. You could make pitch decks about “engagement” or “insights” in healthcare, and some customer somewhere would snap it up. So I took it upon myself to define the product.

As A.M. talked, his sister leaned in, engaged, and I whispered to her that my sister, whom I had already told her was named Harriet, seldom leaned in, engaged. (What do you try to tell her? Fran whispered. I said, Oh I don’t know: Canadian airport codes, almanac trivia, that sort of thing.) I also mentioned to Fran that Harriet never called me by a nickname, as she had with her brother, e.g. “Virg” or simply “V,” not once.

But A.M. was snapping his fingers to marshal my attention: This is relevant to you and to what you’re going through, Virgil. I was the lead software engineer at this company. I told my fellow engineers to start writing a whole battery of tests. We would make the product fail if it didn’t do certain things! And see, if it failed, it couldn’t be released! That was our approach. Our tests had a positivist bent, you could say. We made sure that the product actually *did* things, and that those were the things we talked about with customers.

As a society, he went on, we give too much credence to technology, to what it’s capable of, because we are too lazy to define what a particular piece of technology does. See, if we could just say what something was, a lot of the angst might go away. Some of the discontent I sense in you is coming from the same place. You have this job, you work for this company, and you’re being asked to write tests, even though you don’t know what the product you’re working on is, ultimately. (Shh, I said, quietly.) And so you feel sad and alienated and confused. (Shh, I said again, a little less quietly.) What I’d recommend is that you use these quality tests as a chance to define the product. Fail it into existence.

Fran said, Want my chips, Andy? I got extra; and gave his leg a familial squeeze.

∰

Later, after saying goodbye to Fran; after eating dinner at a sushi place where the spicy mayo was all mayo, no spice; after watching A.M. kaleidoscope into different versions of himself, chatty & bawdy, kind & retiring, fraternal & cruel; after relocating to a small park off of Albany Ave., near which Jane Jacobs spent her final years (the houses were beautiful; I drank in the mixed-use streets), I said, May I say something candid (since often people will say this on the eve of saying something confrontational and/or to avoid a Diagnosis)? A.M. nodded. I said, You don’t seem to have a fixed centre; no, that is v. dramatic, but I mean I feel like I can’t pin you down. You show me a different side of yourself every hour. A.M. said, Is that bad? I said, Not sure; I wonder what Harriet would make of you. (I checked my phone: a text message, at long last, from Harriet, asking to meet up tomorrow. I pocketed it.) A.M. said, Do you feel like you know anybody well? I told him I knew Harriet, and Bruce more or less, and Gordon and Kia to some extent; and I knew, like the back of my hand, the people in Studs Terkel’s Working, though they lived in a time where work made some sense, even if it was awful sense. The mason, the janitor, the fireman: they knew their business. It was brutal, and there were bar fights, and there was “violence to men’s souls,” but the words they said located something in your heart. And, I said, it doesn’t feel like that with you, nor with most of the people I meet. With work, I said, one apparently has to have a whole philosophy, a “fail it into existence” credo, in order to understand the work. I don’t like your philosophy, I added, it’s only 30% true, and it feels quite reductive in its approach, akin to a Microaggression; nevertheless, I see the sense in it.

With an apology to A.M. for dragging down the mood, I got to my feet on the bench in the parkette near Albany Ave., boy do I like parkettes, and sang the final refrain of Coldplay’s “Death and All His Friends.” The leaves of the maple trees in the parkette were still green, this being August. The trees stared at me, some people glared at me, the light was nearly gone from the day. It felt impossible that my birthday could happen in this city. You know, I said, I used to think a live oak growing in Louisiana was rare, but then I looked it up, and they’re all over the state! A.M. nodded and looked away.

We got back into A.M.’s car under the pretence of searching for the laptop thief, whom A.M. thought to mention again (and I texted Pamela Q. from my personal phone to account for my silence), by now the clouds were soft pink yarn, the music was honey-ragtime from the radio, & I said, We’ll never see each other a-gain (like “rain”), eh, A.M.? Which was a tongue-twister, I rolled up my tongue like a newspaper and shoved it his way, and he said, You’re lost in your own world, Virgil; I do hope we stay in touch. I asked him, Have I changed your mind about anything today? And he said, No, not really, but was that the point of today? No, not really, I said, and we cheers’d with our empty hands, & said “No, not really” until the words dissolved like a powdery candy, and then we drove around the perimeter of Toronto searching for a long-gone thief. Yet I didn’t like how rubbery he had made my mind feel, and how inflexible simultaneously, and some central part of me wanted to exit his presence at once.

At ten p.m., I told him I always eat ice cream at night, and so I needed ice cream, so we got some rather far north, like St. Clair Ave. N.-ish, vanilla with chocolate sprinkles for me, rainbow sherbet for him, and licked it with the windows down and our feet up on the dash, and repeated the word “computer” until it dissolved too, Sonny Rollins on the stereo, almanac on my lap, and A.M. said, You’re really only 26? And I said, No, not really, echoing our favourite phrase, given that I would be 27 before long. I asked, Is there a situation where that phrase doesn’t work? E.g., What do you do for a job? No, not really. What’s your name? No, not really. When are you going back to New York? No, not really. Will you be depressed if you’re always friendless? No, not really. A.M. laughed in his tan collarless shirt, his close cropped hair, and I whispered into my own closed fist, This is no good, I’m a complete performance right now, this is no good; & I bet he heard me, but he stayed quiet.

I texted Harriet when I got back to my lodging, because she always likes to know. Once she said, It’s always important that at the end of the night I know where you are (& I could see the logic in that). Anyway I told her I had made another new friend, that’s three friends now in Toronto in only three days! But she didn’t seem to believe me, she probably thought they were mere picaresque journal entries. I said, It’s true! She said, Cool! But *I* believe me, at least, I am the sovereign of myself, not Charles III, and always shall be. I am my own quality test, surely I exist, undoubtedly, whatever the output of that test might say. Or so I told myself as I poured my coffee with shaky hands and wondered where on Earth I was.

∰∰∰

( ( ( P.P.P.P.S. If you enjoyed this, you could buy me a coffee? ) ) )

Tonight, we begin with a message that Virgil received midday. It was an accidental message. One that he was not meant to see. It came from his sister, Harriet, and it was intended for Bruce, her fiancé. It said: “Virgil can’t help it. He just can be so infuriating. Don’t be weird ALL the time! Don’t make it about you ALL the time!”

And so, O Journal of Close Third Person, I have been given permission to address you. I have known Virgil since he was a newborn. Perhaps even in the womb I knew him. But “I” am not “he.” I wish that I were an aleph-like narrator and could tell you about his day with shining faith and clarity. I shall do my best, regardless of any stumbles!

Virgil arose at his usual time, well past ten in the morning, and, having had a splendid day yesterday, made an impetuous decision. He would not leave Toronto after all. He had found a friend in Gordon and had enjoyed visiting the Art Gallery of Ontario, as well as walking certain streets, like Dundas Street.

Surely there was more of this fine city to see. Yes, he would stay a bit longer.

This impetuous decision gave rise to several challenges. First, Virgil needed an almanac. He hadn’t purchased one yesterday, thinking he’d be going home. Second, Virgil needed a new place to stay, as his lodging expired at noon. Third, his flight home had to be changed. Fourth, he required more clothes, since his sister had packed him only for the weekend.

(The position of “only” matters here. Had I said “only packed,” that would imply Harriet should have done something to the clothes other than packing them, e.g., insuring them.)

He tackled the second challenge first, texting his sister, Harriet, “I will now be staying in Toronto for another week. Please book me a new lodging, as close to this one as possible.” It might have been wiser to book a place on Dundas Street, since this was where he was spending all his time, but as I have said, the decision was impetuous, and besides, there was some gain to be had by remaining in The Annex neighbourhood. Whatever its shortcomings, it felt familiar.

“Really? That’s exciting! So you’ll be in Toronto on your birthday?” Harriet responded, or words to that effect. “Yes, I’ll work to book you a new place.”

“What’s more,” said Virgil, pouring himself a coffee from the French press in the first lodging, a contraption that had baffled him the day before but that he had since mastered, “I will need more clothes. A week’s worth.”

“You can’t do laundry?”

“I cannot.”

“Okay. Do you want your usual?”

“Do they have Fruit of the Loom in Canada?”

“I’ll check. Do you want to have breakfast with me?”

“S.V.P. deliver the additional clothes to the new lodging,” said Virgil, “and see that my bags are transferred over.”

With that, Virgil turned off his phone and left the lodging, making his way south along, first, Brunswick Avenue, then Spadina Avenue, toward Kensington Market. Once there, Virgil bought and consumed a wood-fired bagel (rhymes with “haggle” in Canadian English) with chive cream cheese (so-called) and poked around the shops and streets for his friend Gordon. (Mark that the appositive comma here — “his friend, Gordon” — would be correct only if Virgil had no other friends in the world, which I am not in a position to know, having been estranged from Virgil during our college years; he went to Chicago, I went overseas, to the University of Budapest, with Sandor Szavost.)

The song playing on the bagel store radio was in 11/4 time. Virgil asked about the song, and the clerk said it was by an Australian band. It made perfect sense to play Australian music, Virgil observed, since Australia belonged to the British Commonwealth, like Canada. The clerk lacked grounds upon which to disagree. He did not lack coffee grounds.

Turning his phone on again to text Gordon, Virgil realized that he didn’t have Gordon’s number. However, a text that had been sweating in limbo arrived. Harriet: “You could at least say please.” And then another, the accidental one to which I referred earlier: “Virgil can’t help it. He just can be so infuriating. Don’t be weird ALL the time! Don’t make it about you ALL the time!” Then a third, a link to a new lodging — the link took up enough real estate to punt the accidental text out of her sight — plus a comment: “How does this look?”

“Send me no fewer than three options,” Virgil replied.

“Be nice?”

“You dragged me to Canada only to abandon me!”

His attitude toward his sister was morally perilous, Virgil knew, but she had wanted him to be devastated by the news of her engagement to Bruce, and the best way to make her believe she had achieved her object was to insult her. These are the ways of society, and they are fixed.

∰

Although Gordon didn’t materialize in Kensington Market, not on Augusta Avenue or Oxford Street or any of the less trodden mews, Gordon’s friend Kia did. Again she had a white dog in tow, albeit a different one from yesterday’s.

“You’re Gordon’s buddy, right?” she said. “Myrtle?”

“Nearly. Virgil.”

They were outside the bagel shop, both sipping coffee. Kia began to smoke too. Were “redolent” not an overused word, one could remark that the air was redolent of illegality.

“You liked that dog I had yesterday, eh? Want to tag along? I’m hanging out with Gordon later, but first I have to walk some dogs. I’m a dog walker this summer.”

“And after the summer?”

“Med school,” she said.

They strolled up to College Street, then headed west, talking little. Kia’s eyes had glazed over from her smoking. They were dark eyes, and the glaze made them outlandishly dark. She suggested they each take an earbud and listen to a podcast about psychedelics; Virgil told her he didn’t partake in that pastime, i.e. podcasts.

“What enneagram are you?” said Kia.

“That’s not a term I know.”

As they stopped to pick up their second dog on Beatrice Street, Kia explained. Under this rubric, namely the enneagram, each person was assigned to a type, a number between 1 and 9, inclusive. The numbers were not ordered, not exactly. They were not ranked, in any case. Each number corresponded to what the person’s deepest need was, and the need issued, in turn, from childhood wounds.

“But I have no wounds!” Virgil asserted.

“I’m a 3,” said Kia, “because — ”

“Do Australians always play music in 11/4 time?” Virgil asked.

“I was born in Australia.”

“Were you? So you would know about 11/4 time signatures.”

“Did you want to hear about the enneagram, though?”

Virgil’s attempt to shift the discussion toward Australian music, while originating from a genuine inquiry, did, at the same time, provide an answer to Kia’s question. She didn’t notice.

“I’m a 3,” she said again, “which means I don’t want to be a failure. I’m driven. I have a terrible impulse to succeed.” She said this while clutching the leash of a horribly mangy dog and exhaling smoke that smelled like carpeted menthol. Then again, a similar accusation could be volleyed at John Lennon, and he was a success, notwithstanding the fact that Paul McCartney’s songs were better.

“Who wants to fail?” said Virgil. “Mark me down as a 3.”

“You struck me as a 4.”

“I should sample more Australian music.”

Kia handed the second dog’s leash to Virgil as she walked up the steps of a two-family house, bifurcated in color down the middle, to get the third dog. What street were they on now? They were on Crawford Street. Virgil took note; I codify that note.

“What a 4 dreads is being ordinary,” said Kia. “They want to be unique. Lots of artists are 4’s. You know, people who think they’re special.”

“That’s me too,” Virgil admitted, although in admitting it, any desire for his specialness surely ceased to hold sway. The maple trees on the block shuddered in the breeze, a fact that he would not have noticed if he were so busy trying to be special. (Is this fair narration? Who’s the arbiter?) “Where are we taking these dogs, Kia?” he asked, using her name like a typical person. “My legs ache from walking yesterday.”

“Trinity Bellwoods Park.”

“I know it well.”

“Aren’t you from New York?”

A text tolled on Virgil’s phone, but he had no free hands with which to look at it. “That’s probably my sister,” he explained. “She’s getting me a new lodging and some clothes. But then it’s my responsibility, evidently, to find myself an almanac. Or do you know where I can get one? Gordon tried to help me yesterday and failed.”

“Interesting,” said Kia. “You’re a 6, maybe. If so, your fear is not having anyone around you. You find support wherever you go. You’re loyal, a problem solver.”

At this point, it would have been nice if somebody had recited Wallace Stevens’s poem “A Clear Day and No Memories,” but nobody did.

If I were a more skillful narrator, not akin to a servile 19th-century Russian narrator, I would better explain why Kia decided to invite Virgil along, why she was adumbrating this odd taxonomy to him, how the weather informed their interactions, etc. And I would list the house number for each dog they picked up. I would be more exacting, let’s just say. Indeed, if I were better at all this, I would add more charisma to my sketch of Kia and not confine her to the role of enneagram promulgator.

“Here are three places,” Harriet texted, with links. “Two of them are hotels, not homes. Best I can do on short notice. Lmk.”

“Hotels!” Virgil said. He wound the leashes around one hand while he replied with the other. By now they had five dogs. Virgil held two, one of which, a black Doberman, was pulling so hard that Virgil’s shoulder threatened to dislocate. “Hotels, how awful. What an intemperate sister. Fine, I’ll take the lodging. And how have you not gotten me a replacement almanac yet?”

Some of this was written via text; some of it was internal monologue; but some of that monologue may have slipped the bonds of thought, because Kia acted as if she had heard it. “On the other hand,” she said, “you’re not all that afraid of losing support. I get the feeling you’re studious, introverted. That could make you an enneagram 5. You’re interested, above all else, in how things work.”

“E.g., Australian music,” Virgil said.

By the time they reached Trinity Bellwoods Park, which had an off-leash dog run at the bottom of a hill, Kia and Virgil had amassed six animals. They let them go free. People cheered and chatted. It was hot: 300 Kelvin. A man named Larry introduced himself (as Larry) and asked Virgil which dog was his; Virgil didn’t give him the favour of a reply.

Perhaps it was 301 Kelvin. The sun came out to crisp the tips of the blades of grass. (This last sentence is an exercise for heavy tongues, a levee against boredom.)

“Why,” asked Virgil, “if you’re going to medical school, which is a place for reason and science, are you filling my head with this para-astrological business?”

Perhaps he put it more gently, more colloquially.

“You sound like a 1.” Kia laughed. “What a 1 fears is being bad or evil, but that expresses itself as a hyperfocus on morality, right versus wrong, good versus bad.”

“There’s a single truth,” said Virgil, “that’s for sure.”

“I’m just having fun, man.”

They ran through the remaining numbers: 2’s wanted to be loved (Virgil did, in his way), 7’s wanted to have a good time (Virgil was already dreaming of his late-night vanilla ice cream), 8’s wanted control (Virgil texted Harriet, “Take my bags to the new lodging!”), 9’s wanted peace (but hastily added, “Thank you, dear”).

“They all fit!” said Virgil. “I’m a hopscotch board. I’m a type 10.”

“Nah, you’re a 5,” said Kia.

Why was there a need to break people down thus? Why not just watch them run around like mutts in a park? In all this theorizing and sparring, Virgil had barely gotten to know Kia. He took note of her features (angular brown bangs), her height (roughly his, 5’6”), her clothes (linen dress), her biography (born in Australia, reared in Halifax, N.S., undergraduate studies at Queen’s University). He ingested, that is to say, the taxonomies that mattered to him. Were I a better narrator, I might not be so quick to point out this hypocrisy.

The sun found a cloud. One could say: the day was “fine” or the weather was “cool.” But why would one stoop so low?

When the hour was up, Kia pulled out a bag of dog treats and called out to each of her charges. She handed three of the dogs to Virgil, including the Doberman. As they walked along Beatrice Street, a black squirrel darted by, and the Doberman sprang after it, jerking the leash so hard that Virgil’s shoulder dislocated audibly.

Kia took the leashes and tied them to a nearby railing, then examined Virgil’s injury. “It doesn’t look good,” she whispered. “Your shoulder is all swingy.”

∰

As your narrator, do I have the liberty to slide forward in time a bit? The dogs were returned to their houses, after which Kia shepherded Virgil to urgent care.

“Can’t you fix it?” he said. “You’re in med school.”

“Not yet I’m not.”

“But you must have adjacent qualifications. You can’t be admitted to a literature graduate program without some exposure to literature. Similarly for med school.”

“I’m not going to try to set your shoulder, Virgil,” Kia said.

At urgent care, his dislocated shoulder was not, per the triage nurses, calamitous enough to get him to the front of the line. Kia droned on about the enneagram in the waiting room, her voice glazed, assigning Virgil once more to a 4 — the same as her initial analysis, since deeper thought only carries us back to where we started.

“Should I tell my sister about this emergency?” Virgil asked.

“Up to you,” said Kia. “It’s not that bad. And I can take care of you.”

“But I don’t know you. We aren’t countrymen.”

“We basically are.”

“You’re a subject of the Commonwealth. King Charles, the Queen Consort.”

Kia shrugged. “Sorry for all the enneagram talk,” she said. “I’ve been on a kick. Once I get stuck on something, I can’t switch. But I guess you want me to stop figuring you out.”

“Yes, please.”

She smiled lazily at him, and he decided, with a sudden softness, that he trusted her.

Two men, both later identified as Brendans, came to tell Virgil that he was speaking too loudly, carrying on about how “Mr. Collins was only 25!” and issuing various vocal effluvia. Although the Brendans’ faces were Canadian, their energy was far from catholic. One thudded a hand on Virgil’s poor shoulder. Kia jumped up with a cry: “Leave him alone!” And thus, Virgil’s trust was borne out.

Several more hours in urgent care passed. Virgil again asked Kia to set his shoulder, and she, now too fatigued to argue, relented. Pop! It was back in; the pain abated.

They walked out onto College Street. Several texts had arrived from Harriet during their time in urgent care: an address for the new lodging, instructions for getting in, and a photograph of Virgil’s luggage placed with tenderness in the hallway.

“She sure looks out for you,” said Kia.

Virgil texted back, “It’s the least you could do,” whilst saying aloud, “True.”

“That’s nice, isn’t it? Having someone look out for you.”

Kia stepped off the curb, right into the path of an oncoming car, but Virgil, a fleet man from the Greatest City in the World, reached out with his unspoiled arm and pulled her back. They exhaled in tandem as the car’s dopplering horn rang off the houses.

∰

Everyone wants to hear about the subtle ins and outs of two people’s interactions. Nobody wants to hear the street names, the thought-stream of one of those people, the colour of the light, devoid of intimations. Everyone wants to know how Kia made Virgil feel. Nobody wants to think about the hours when Virgil was gazing at the closed captions on the urgent care’s TV, ignoring her.

Everyone, e.g. Harriet, wants to ask: “Where are you now? What are you doing? Are you okay? Did you get my message about the apartment?” Nobody wants to write back: “What are you doing? Are you tending to Bruce? Are you aware that it’s a Sunday and he works for the bank, the Royal Bank, and the markets are open in Asia, and presumably that’s very stressful for him? Can you put aside your unease with traditional gender roles for an evening and cook him a meal? Do you appreciate that you, as an academic in midsummer, are free, or are you inflaming Bruce’s ear with talk about your research, as you sip white wine and underline Leaves of Grass for the hundredth time, double-stroke for ‘the moisture of the right man’? Do you stare at Bruce and wonder if he was the right choice?”

On this day, in 2023, in Toronto, many things happened well outside the boundaries of these interactions, too. Nobody wants to hear about them.

If I were a more adept narrator, or perhaps a more reliable, which is to say punctual, one, I would prune the alleged text messages above and make them as ordinary as they were. The next one, from Harriet, merely said: “Yes, we’re having dinner. Bruce is steaming mussels.”

∰

Since it was summer, the lull of Sunday and the fading of the light were not as apparent as they might have been, although perhaps neither is ever true in Toronto, and so it was quite late before Virgil realized how late it was. Kia suggested that they get dinner. Virgil said he wasn’t hungry and argued, not in so many words, that since Kia had monopolized their day, what with her dog walking chore and the consequent visit to urgent care, it was only fair that he got the run of the evening.

“What I still need,” said Virgil, “and what nobody in this city seems interested in helping me acquire, is an almanac. I am starting to feel homesick, I’m thinking of all the ways in which this country differs from my own, I feel no allegiance to King Charles, I wonder if extending my stay here was a grave mistake, and if it’s not too much to ask, I would like an almanac.” Again, he may not have said all of these words out loud just so. He may have come quite close to calling Harriet to see if she could help him get away from Kia, who kept leaning into him, shoulder to (good) shoulder, while they walked up Palmerston Avenue. While he did trust Kia, it was clear, too, that she didn’t share his need for an introvert’s perimeter.

They dipped into a parkette, and Kia glazed her eyes with her cigarette.

“How about we get you your almanac and walk around the city until dawn reading facts aloud?” she said. “How’s that sound, buddy?”

“Hmm,” said Virgil. “I guess that sounds good.”

Did it sound good? Not precisely. That is to say, it sounded fine, but does it still sound fine? The lay theory is we go on vacations only to remember them later — but the exact medium of that memory matters. Photos, videos, family stories: these are the accepted media. But how will Virgil enjoy his memory of today? How, if not through me?

One day, Harriet will text: “Remember that girl Kia? Remember how she took you to a late-night bookstore on Bloor Street in a basement and the two of you spent an hour under stark lights searching for the right almanac? The search for the almanac itself took only a few minutes. Before long you had one in hand. It was a bad almanac. It was dated 2023, and it lacked verve. But you were starting to realize that the almanac you wanted wouldn’t be found in Canada. You sat down on the floor and started to read facts to Kia there. She looked tired. By now, thankfully, she knew not to lean her head on you. She propped herself up on a bookshelf. The two of you felt like it was an imposition to stay so long at the store, or at least you did, so you offered to buy the clerk coffee. You ran out and came back with a tray of three drinks (two coffees, one jasmine tea) and some pastries. Did you have a good time?”

∰

As the hour advanced, Kia turned into a sleepy mouse. She asked where Virgil’s lodging was. She lived all the way in the East End of Toronto, she said, too far, too far, and Gordon was stuck in band practice. As is common even for typical people late at night, there was a lack of pretence in her actions and musings. Which is not to say that it was clear what Kia wanted, but rather that she was unguarded.

“Why don’t I come back and see where you’re staying?” she said to Virgil.

“But I need ice cream and coffee.”

“More coffee? Okay, but then your place?” She yawned and played with the linen of her dress. “It feels like it’s so late. Like I’m on Australian time. Like 11/4.” While they walked along Bloor Street, and Virgil took advantage of occasional streetlamps to give a readout on worldwide iron ore production, Kia muttered that she would be a success after she started med school, but this was her last free summer before her life was vomit and plasma, and she intended to enjoy the opposite of success, whatever that was, for now.

They got their dessert and coffee supplies. Divining Virgil’s mind, Kia trailed behind him a ways, talking less, scarcely commenting on the moony trivia that she heard.

The new lodging was bigger than the previous one: a swooning red brick house hidden behind a maple. Virgil, in his admiration of Harriet’s finding, let it slip that his birthday was a few days away and that this house, especially if it had a generous yard, could be a good setting for a party. “I’d come to your party,” Kia breathed. Upon which, a vision took hold in Virgil’s mind — that he would indeed throw himself a party, that it was a necessity, that he would be trapped in Toronto forever unless he could show his sister that he didn’t require her services.

Kia walked around the first floor of the house, touching the marble work in the kitchen with deference, or maybe it was detachment, and whispering, “I’ll leave you be” to Virgil, who, while his unconscious outlined his party from the entryway and his subconscious took in the new surroundings, existed in a fact-laden, liminal state.

“In 2021,” he intoned, “for federal crimes in the United States, the mean sentence length was 48 months. The median was 24 months.” Kia glided toward the bedroom on the main floor and tossed herself onto the bed. A plump raccoon scratched the window screen in the kitchen. Fireworks sizzled in the distance. “I am happy,” said Virgil. “I am happy!” If this was a message addressed to Kia, she didn’t answer. She may already have been asleep.

He opened the Fruit of the Loom packages and validated their contents: five pairs of grey underwear, five grey shirts with breast pockets, five pairs of grey socks, one pair of slacks, navy blue. He unzipped his suitcase and validated their contents. He texted Harriet to let her know he was safe and to express a prim thank you.

∰

It was a rare thing for a fellow breathing human to be asleep in Virgil’s lodging. Since this was a proper house, he assumed it had multiple bedrooms, but he didn’t want to venture upstairs yet. Why not? He simply didn’t. The couches looked starched, antagonistic toward sleep. The floors were hardwood.

He stepped into the kitchen — the primary bedroom in full view, the door open, Kia’s linen legs and undulatory bottom — and squinted at the lodging’s coffee maker. Often in places like this, the hosts would leave instructions. Nobody had left them here. Eventually, we can say, Virgil figured out how to operate the machine and got properly twizzled with caffeine, but until that happened, he felt a profound disorientation. A joyous and ecstatic disorientation, because he refused to feel otherwise, but disorientation all the same.

Over the course of this Sunday, and particularly in the period after brewing his late-night drinks (which is NOW, as you must have guessed), he’d spent little time with his thoughts. Harriet had accused him of being self-centered, and he had done his utmost to fight that accusation. But why? What a poor choice. Now he hardly knew who he was. (I should say: He hardly knows who he is.) To portray his world and himself as if he were not its main actor was false, and in trying to portray a view from nowhere (did one even exist?) he had portrayed a nowhere world, a petty fraction of what he perceived, and had forgotten himself.

The time had come to rhapsodize. He sat down next to Kia on the bed, sipped his coffee, and spoke at a moderate volume. “Tick tick tick,” he said, because he had the freedom to say it. “Drip drip drip. I am going to have a party for myself, for my 27th, on Saturday. Maybe you’ll come, Kia, Maybe Gordon will come. Harriet isn’t invited. Neither is Bruce. He’s a real nowhere man. I’m going to double the ground coffee in the next batch. I’m going to smell my armpit, if you don’t mind. I’m going to lie down here. Easiest thing in the world. I’m type 7, everything’s easy. I’m type 1, let’s have some fun. I’m a type 9, time to unwind.”

This chatter was nervous and unnatural. It was as if Virgil had been locked out of his own mind. “I don’t like this,” he said to the sleeping body beside him. “It’s all your fault.” Another scratch on the window screen: the raccoon. Virgil left Kia and walked out to the backyard, where the raccoon family had convened a protest. There was a smell like sewage or decomposed onions; and yet, in common parlance, the smell grounded him. Back home, on the occasions when Virgil went out to dinner with Harriet, he would always spend a good fifteen minutes in the restroom, looking at the tiles, sniffing, acquainting himself with base truths. But he wasn’t back home, he was here, he was in the moment, he was ululating sonic experiments at Canadian raccoons.

Still, the whole business felt awfully dour. “Harriet,” he texted, “wake up and send me a funny picture of yourself!” It was a little past midnight. She would be asleep: a spinster, an early bird. “Wake up, clementine!” This was not a pet name he ever used for her, but it sounded sweet, here in The Annex. No response. So Virgil called her, knowing it would ring through, because she was his emergency contact. When she answered in her sleepy voice, “the vast ventriloquism of sleep,” he hung up at once and texted again: “Funny picture.” And he waited. He looked at a Lawren Harris picture on his phone and smiled at the lake and the mountains.

How many raccoons were still near him? He didn’t know.

Soon the picture of Harriet arrived. Her eyes were puffy and her hair mangled. A lamp revealed her old-timey bedclothes, even though they were in Bruce’s financier condominium. However, Harriet was sticking out a pink tongue. She had played along.

“Good,” Virgil wrote back, and sent her one of himself with a raccoon in the background.

“Virgil, be careful!” she said.

To which he replied, “Clementine, I was born careful.”

With that, life’s normalcy was restored, and the hydraulics in Virgil’s gut groaned, and he strutted around the yard to get some air out of his bum.

One of the raccoons, no doubt the one that had been scratching the window screen, chose this moment to jump on Virgil and slice him on his recently injured shoulder. The other raccoons hissed, and Virgil ran back into the lodging. He closed the door quietly so as not to wake Kia and brewed the strongest coffee conceivable while he debated if it was worth searching for the word “rabies” in his almanac’s index. The cut was deep enough to draw blood, but not so deep that the blood pooled. Still, he rinsed the area thoroughly and, for want of antibacterial cream, lathered it up with hand soap. “I am happy,” he said again, “and all is well.” Check the clock: impinging on 12:30 a.m. It was time to write in his journal before the day got away. Since he’d been wounded by Harriet’s words — that it was ALL about him — but was now healed, Virgil made another impetuous decision. He would say what he had to say, he would center Kia in the day’s events, and he wouldn’t even mention the raccoon attack until the very end, even if it meant he couldn’t see himself in his own account. Behold, Virgil, a paragon of modesty, awaiting rabies.

∰∰∰

( ( ( P.P.P.S. If you enjoyed this, you could buy me a coffee? ) ) )

Tonight I nearly forgot you existed, everything’s out of order, I don’t have my usual “kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!” ecstasy, and whose fault is that? Speaking of my sister, i.e. Harriet, unless she’ll be taking a new Christian name too, along with the likely surname change, since this is how marriage goes, she was not in our lodging this morning (with my encouragement to board with Bruce last night, but still), leaving me roommateless. She’s spent the night with Bruce before, but always when we’re in the familiar din of New York, so to wake up in a foreign land, Toronto, I felt (as anyone would), an Arctic loneliness, the loneliness indeed that I’d *pretended* to feel last night when they revealed their engagement.

But I blamed nobody & considered it, more or less, a physical malady, like a ragweed allergy, not a verdict on the workings of my own mind, which I keep well-oiled, etc. But the ragweed reaction was heightened by the foreign objects in the room: foreign coasters, foreign light fixtures, foreign duvet covers. It didn’t pass quickly, the loneliness, but it signaled that it would pass by day’s end, and I, in the meantime, lacking an almanac (as Harriet forgot to pack mine!) resorted to random lodging books, I read up on Ontario politicians and a cursed forest named Aokigahara in Japan. & after that I ravaged the cupboards for some coffee, then set out on foot through a brutalist landscape (Toronto seems to have gone through a whole 1970s phase in which it cared not a whit for beauty), anyway I was unchaperoned, and in need of an almanac, this was really the conflict of the morning, all my customary objects had been replaced, I lacked even familiar facts. Harriet is against facts, it seems, she wants to rip away all context and point & laugh at me like I’m some silly boy.

Goodness who wrote that! Facts aside, I was hungry and needed this province’s take on a bagel, having heard, with unease / foreboding, about what goes on in Montreal vis-a-vis bagels. O Journal of New York Water, you’ll understand, it made me feel safe, starting out alone on a fresh morning, to retrace my precise steps from last night. Not only safe, but also my phone hadn’t charged, Harriet had hidden the voltage adapters, & so I had no mobile map. To prepare I studied the maps on my computer (including the TTC subway and streetcar maps) and then I wandered along familiar Bloor St., then over to lovely Palmerston Ave., then Trinity Bellwoods Park from last evening, passing no establishments that screamed bagel, at least not audibly to my American ears, then toward Chinatown, back along Dundas St. West.

If it sounds morose to walk the same streets, please recall: (1) I existed by myself in Chicago for four years while attending college, which surely means I have proven *something*, granted, Harriet was in graduate school at the time and we did live together but many times I did wander around Hyde Park alone, in search of Chinese food that wasn’t bathed in some odious Midwestern “gravy,” and also now she occasionally travels for work or to see Bruce, leaving me unsupervised in New York; (2) alongside the mental programs of which I am the owner-operator there lives another, considerably doughier program that I have to coddle in certain situations, and alas this program relaxes only when we repeat, repeat, repeat what we already know.

Anyway Toronto is very busy and has lots of traffic, etc., and yet nobody yelled at me, and I felt strangely at ease, anyway I stumbled, following sights & smells, getting hungrier and singing stadium rock under my breath, into a patch of land that I now know to be Kensington Market, a charming little faux-village-green, full of fromageries (“cheese shops” in English) and used clothing stores and coffee and empanadas and that sort of thing, and there I spotted a bagel, “wood-fired,” as they called it. They also call scallion cream cheese “chive” here, and I took it outside to eat, and there found myself petting a Great White Dog, much furrier than Norm, my cardboard cutout dog at home whom I like to pretend, to my own detriment, is real, while eating my bagel, and *here* is where a new acquaintance enters the picture.

He said, She really likes you! (In reference to the dog.) I said nothing. Of course it’s 95% illegal to talk to other people in New York. He kept speaking: Her name’s Honeypuppy, she likes you; and the dog, who was wearing a bright red vest emblazoned with the words Service Dog, was nuzzling me (which, later research has revealed, was maybe against her directive; the same research suggests that she may have thought I was in distress, therefore nuzzled me (yet since this is fodder for Harriet’s alleged Diagnosis of me, I’ll not mention it further!)). I still hadn’t talked, I was petting the dog & simult. sidestepping the question of talking by making sure my mouth had plenty of “chives” in it. But he said, My name’s Gordon, she isn’t my dog, she’s my friend’s, but isn’t she sweet? I’m just watching her for a bit. Gordon’s voice was accentless, pure river water undulating in the St. Lawrence. He was about my age. The morning was crisp, as no doubt they always are in Canada, he had on tan pants and a cardigan, and beneath the cardigan, he wore a t-shirt that was a trifle too short.

There was no use explaining to him the law of the land in New York; given that this was Toronto, I would have to chat w/ him. My name, I said at length, blowing all my cultural capital, is Virgil, I’m from New York, and I’m 26. Gordon smiled and said, I love New York. I said, Oh what, because of pizza? (But I didn’t really say that one.) He smiled, the dog leaned into me, and I felt my body relax (distinct from *me* relaxing), and I said, in order to usher the conversation along, Where can I buy an almanac? Gordon said, Not sure, but we can try to find you one. We were a “we”? — No, I didn’t like that at all. Gordon was eyeing the dog closely, he seemed to be in communion with her. & then: Want me to show you where a bookstore is?

For your sake, O Journal of Blushing Dasein, I’ll avoid the dance of acquaintanceship, or most of it. Gordon’s friend Kia came and picked up Honeypuppy the dog, then he and I walked east along Dundas St. West. And I wanted to run away! But I didn’t! Gordon said that he wanted bubble tea, and asked if I’d like some (his treat) and I said I would try it to be polite, even though I was nauseated at the suggestion! Soon a four-lane straw was flicking tapioca pucks down my throat, but the sugar was nice, & honestly I figured now that I was outside the protective embrace of Harriet and her Celtic jawline, everyone in this bilingual nation would be speaking Français (“French” in English), but instead I heard mostly Mandarin. We were on a new street now, I can’t be sure which, my phone was dead, and I have only memory (mental memory, that is) to guide us through the maze of my mind’s eye. Gordon found a bookstore before too long, I imagine it was socialist or at least brutalist, insofar as it was quite ugly and poorly stocked. There were a few almanacs, which Gordon held up for me to peruse, but I stomped my foot (he didn’t understand!) and said, It can’t be just any old almanac! At home I have one from 1996, the year of my birth, and it has Nostradamus predictions, but my sister failed to pack it; but regardless, that’s the one I would want, not a contemporary almanac. Hmm, said Gordon. I asked the clerk if there were more, and he went in the back to check but found zero. & I left not feeling very well. I wanted to call Harriet and yell at her.

Gordon said he was sorry for this predicament (his word), and added, Actually I was planning to go to the AGO if you’d like to come; I might get some dim sum afterward. This was a psychopathic move, predatory toward Americans, even, and on my first day alone, despite his gentle voice! Come on, it’ll be fun, he said, come on.

His arm was around me! What choice did I have! My sister had abandoned me in this hinterland. And I needed an almanac, and a phone charge, and couldn’t have navigated back to my lodging if I’d tried. But on top of that, I thought, maybe I can make friends, *Harriet*. I said yes! Gordon reacted with much brio. Before long we were standing in front of a building that resembled a 1970s spaceship, i.e. the Art Gallery of Ontario. Let me speed past the tickets, past the bag check, etc. in fact, let me gulp this midnight coffee and lick a dab of sugar off my wrist, and tell you about kangaroos and sequins and chocolate sodas!

∰

Thus it was that I disappeared into paintings. The Group of Seven, a band of 1920s-ish painters whose works grace the AGO. Their names are Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, and five others I suppose. Evidently they are known to all Canadians, but I’ve never heard of them. Their subject: the landscape, the colours of Canada, nothing more.

[1] A.Y. Jackson, “Winter Morning, Charlevoix County.”

[2] A.Y. Jackson, “Laurentian Hills.”

[3] Lawren Harris, “Lake Superior.”

[4] Lawren Harris, “Lake and Mountains.”

These are the four that remained with me the most. And it was a pleasure at the AGO, and it is a pleasure now, to dissolve into them and leave Gordon behind. [2] “Laurentian Hills” shows a rural landscape in the snow, rolling hills, pink-white for snow, purple-white when there are shadows, caused by the small valleys & the failing light, in the distance, mountains of darker purple, not as rough as a bruise, with a sandy blue sky, getting deeper as we ascend, some copses of trees, small triangles, a dark green, two farmhouses with a slender winding road between. Really the painting is about colour, & for you to step into it, you should just repeat those colours until they are all you see: soft purple, soft pink, soft purple, soft pink, soft blue, pink-white, purple-white, blue-pink, blue-purple, the snow, purple-pink, the trees, purple-green, the snow, white-blue, purple-blue, the sky, the hills, richer purple-white, slanting, angles, purple, white, pink, soft, purple, dark, snow, sky. & now, see, you are there. No figures, nor sharpness nor abstraction, except the abstraction we all provide in our own ways, this landscape is hardly more than the thin vellum between what I see and what another person sees, purple-pink, soft snow, and so on.

[1] The other A.Y.J. is similar, but the colours are sparer, darker, there is what appears to be dirt in the road, stripes of dirt in the mountains too, as if the spring thaw has begun, although I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t the hour depicted, too, casting darker shadows, i.e. less pink; and telephone poles; curving, matching the bends in the road and the hills, unnatural, but this color was the lone note of conflict in [1], there were no notes of conflict in [2], which in a sense is where the paintings led me, to a Serenity that made me forget people, and wish I had legal status in Toronto, they slowed my mind (which remained quite slow until night-coffee-time), I wonder how long I stood in front of A.Y.’s paintings, the gallery was not empty but not loud, & there was a magnificent wooden walkway along its back that helped me pretend I was up in the Northern environs, the NWT.

[3] Here, a similar colour palette but more elementary shapes than in A.Y.’s efforts, e.g. foothills like isosceles triangles, trapezoidal islands rising out of the lake, perfect shafts of soft sunlight beamed through the clouds, only in the water and the grey clouds, shaped like the beaks of eagles, do we move away from simple geometry. Lawren Harris seems less naturalist than A.Y., more about form, but still a lack of conflict. & [4] was similar, but round geometry and a palette of almost entirely blue and white, the snow-covered fissures in the mountains like whale tails, a tree branch repeating the same shape. Don’t you think, Journal, that shape, colour, form, elements, metals, that if you go several layers below the Human Endeavour, maybe halfway to the bosons and the 1000111s, that’s where we arrive? Don’t you think that someone who was tossed through Canadian airspace & abandoned by their sibling-guardian would do well to keep these simplicities in mind if only to make it through the afternoon?

The upper chamber of my Bicameral Mind thus instructed the lower. Anyway eventually Gordon found me, he had been in a contemporary wing, and I told him all I’d seen, and he tilted his head slightly, which may be a violent reaction in Canada, & he said, Sure, everyone loves the Group of Seven, but he said no more, although I could see, underneath his plain expression and plain hair, some conflict. Indeed I had witnessed Conflict in the chatter of a few museum goers: how the Group of Seven was made up of socialites, rich men who loved a lavish party, etc. But however of course the lack of conflict in these paintings, their focus on the phenomena of colour, this was what mattered. Indeed I observed this calm, which I may have erroneously or in jest labeled “kangaroos,” etc., in the face of Gordon, which is why I liked him.

But this hesitance in his reply made me want to cross-examine him and confirm that his discontent would remain in its holster (& perhaps it was also, I can admit, a reflexive need) plus I found myself cross at Harriet, even more cross than the day before, so all things considered, the concept of Conflict is what my focus whirlpooled around, and so I said, If you don’t like A.Y. Jackson or Lawren Harris, it’s fine. He said, No, they’re beautiful paintings, “Lake Superior” is my favourite, it really shows off our landscape, and by “our” he meant Canada’s. I prodded, You don’t like them? You like bold, contemporary art from the Urals? He said, Hmm, I don’t know any art from the Urals. I said, What about [5] Franklin Carmichael, “Snow Clouds”? One could argue there’s some boldness there (even though I found it soothing when on my own). Gordon nodded and said, Yes, I know what you mean. (He didn’t, though, he didn’t!) He added, You’re kind of talking loud, eh? I shuddered & said, This is simply my voice, and I told him about the dream I’d had in the airplane yesterday, about Ed Sullivan & The Beatles and JFK, for lack of a topic, and since there were no new dreams in the larder. There was a need to text Harriet at this point, she would know what to do (although haha! I had a decent grasp on what to do), however my phone was out of battery, so all told it was a relief when Gordon said, Shall we get dim sum? Because indeed I was lightheaded and needed to leave, pardon me, though, I tried and I’ll try to perk up, because what I can’t stand, and I told Gordon this too, I said to him, I simply can’t stand it when people are lachrymose!

∰

The dim sum restaurant Gordon favoured was on Dundas St., which was beginning to seem like the seat of power in Toronto, it was up a few flights of stairs, and audibly crowded, full of lights and music like an arcade, thankfully they gave us a table with four seats, since people who have just met wouldn’t want to sit across from each other gazing into each other’s eyes, even straight as an arrow Typical People! So I sat beside Gordon and, still woozy from my travels and all loss of property, let him order. What came were caravans of dumplings in bamboo steamers, most of them with shrimp and chives (and they do not call shrimp “prawns” here, I report to you happily, O Journal of Acela Corridor Nomenclature), *everyone* is sometimes squeamish about shrimp, I would have made fun of Harriet had she placed the order, but as it was, civility, civility, yes I ate what Gordon ordered, shrimp et al., and chased the affair with some thimbles of jasmine tea, and was feeling much better before long.

I said, Are we friends yet?

(But I didn’t really say this.)

I said, I should probably speak with my sister, do you have an American voltage adapter? And Gordon said, It’s the same voltage as in the States, 110V, you don’t need any adapters. This was revelatory, and perhaps I should have tested the outlets at the lodging, but then of course we are only able to function as humans by ignoring asymptotically 100% of the stimuli to which we are exposed! I scootched my chair over, in any case, to a wall where there was an omelet, I mean outlet, and indeed the charger Gordon offered worked! While the phone marshaled some life, I had another cup of tea and discharged a few more pleasantries with Gordon, and then went back and found I was hounded by missed calls & texts from Harriet, wondering if I was okay, she can be awfully anxious, it’s like she’s never been outside the country before.

Dear Harriet, I texted, yes I’m okay, thanks for your concern, I’m having dim sum with my new friend. & then aloud, to Gordon, I said: Ugh can you believe Harriet? Gordon said, Who is Harriet? I said, My sister. And Harriet texted: I’m at the lodging now, when are you coming back? Detecting some hauteur between the lines, I returned: Possibly tomorrow. She said, Do you want to have dinner tonight? Will we see each other before you fly home? Let’s have dinner and I’ll stay at the lodging tonight and then I can help you get to the airport tomorrow. I said, YYZ? She said yes (of course I knew that, it’s just a pleasure sometimes to enumerate airport codes, especially Canadian ones (which all begin with Y)). I said, Possibly, I have to buy a new almanac (since you forgot to pack one [it was unlikely that she required a refresher, but she hadn’t apologized since yesterday]) and also I have plans to visit a museum [we already had visited it, and I could have told her which one but who would want their frizzy sibling showing up and spoiling the fun?]. But then I processed what she said a few sentences prior about her helping *me* to the airport, and I said, You’re staying here??? You’re supposed to come with me back to JFK!!!

Harriet ventured an ellipsis of thought on the phone, then the ellipsis vanished, and it was quiet. We chewed on our shrimp buns, Gordon and I, and I asked him, If the voltage is the same and the language is the same and dim sum is ubiquitous and the two dollars dance around parity more or less, then what in the final analysis is the actual difference between Canada & America? Gordon mused diplomatically, We get a lot of our culture from the States, you know? It’s kind of like this loud downstairs neighbour, but it’s cool and it throws cool parties, I guess. Remember [2], Laurentian Hills? I said, because I think *that’s* the difference; granted I’m not schooled in these things, I hadn’t ever crossed the US-Canada border until yesterday noontime, but are you familiar with Edward Hopper? For example, take his famous [6] “Office at Night.” There’s a comparable simplicity in Hopper’s colour palette, comparable to [3] / [4], but the palette itself is different, greens and browns that don’t feel like nature unfurling itself in your lap but closer to dried blood or rotting flesh, humourous colours, humourous in a Galen sense, & there are people in his painting, to be sure, like what is the man planning to do to that woman? Indeed, what has he already done?! And then there’s the poor soul in [7] “Automat.” I’ll not prattle on about this, I see from your expression (note: I had turned slightly to examine his face, it was rather stiff and plain still, he appeared to have lost some interest in me; sadly, I turned back) that you don’t think comparing two paintings from the approximately 1920s/30s isn’t the entrypoint for us to discern our countries’ differences, however I hope you’ll think about it later. Gordon said, Sure!

Right then, upon surmising how his Pleasantness was going to win the day, was when I decided to adopt Canadian spellings, etc. & I started humming “Don’t Let Me Down,” one of the best songs, and imagined Paul McCartney swishing his hips on that London rooftop, and really, even if The Beatles hadn’t stormed The Ed Sullivan Theatre and Shea Stadium, etc., the 1960s and all their discontent likely was written in the stars. That was my feeling, anyway, as I ate my last dumpling and exhaled contentedly, and waited for Harriet to tell me whether she was flying back with me to New York or abandoning me twofold in Toronto.

∰

How often do people make friends? What a strange, silly overlapping of two itinerant computer programs! We all know that John and Paul were friends, we can see it in how they regarded each other on that rooftop in January, 1969. Still, they hardly seemed to know their status. And if they couldn’t figure it out, then who among us can figure it out? Everyone loved Ringo, yes, but then, Ringo wasn’t a top-level program, he competed with nobody. Which is to say, it could hardly be expected that Gordon and I, on day one of knowing each other, with his expressionless face and pleasant manner vs. my glistering mind, were in any shape to reach a consensus. But! anyway! that’s why we humans have quests, & in this case there was the quest-ion of the almanac. Gordon said he was free for the remainder of the day and mumbled an observation that I reminded him of his brother, which I didn’t interrogate further, although I could see a maudlin fondness there, in the vicinity of pandering, or at least pity. He said he’d help me locate a suitable almanac, and we sang “Don’t Let Me Down” together on our way north up Spadina Avenue.

I have never been able to harmonize; he was able to harmonize; I asked him if he’d ever been in a singing group, & he said he was presently in a musical group but he played saxophone. I asked the question musicians prefer being asked: Do you play originals or covers? To which he replied, Originals. I said, What kind of music? He said, Rock, I suppose. Here, I stopped short of mentioning Coldplay, who can be divisive. I had the feeling that he was in league with highbrow music, but didn’t press. Instead I asked him if he wanted to know if I made any Art. & he said, Sure! And I said, No, not really. (Even though in truth of course I do make my colláges, or as I would rather call them, were anyone to inquire, «assemblages», welters of scissored-out poetry thrown at a glob of glue & sprinkled with glitter — )

Off the deep end! Let me combat this espresso’d coffee with a slice of bread & a tumbler of orange juice. We found a rare, or at least used, bookstore near the University of Toronto, the U of T, they say, like U of C, a familiar ring, and stepped in, ringing the bell. While we searched, I asked Gordon for more of his take on Canada vs. America and did he think I should move here, etc. He said, Is that something you’re thinking about? I said, This is my first time ever outside America, naturally I hadn’t considered it, but I’m having a wonderful time (this was 60% true) and maybe being startled out of my natural habitat is just what I needed — maybe I should be Canadian after all. What do you think? Gordon said, I’ve heard citizenship is a long process, but you could try. I said, Surely you don’t deport people here! You and whose army?

He pulled out a musty book from a shelf, an almanac from 1984, with nothing about Nostradamus and zero references to The Mets winning The World Series in 1986. It would not do. A text came from Harriet: So do you want me to stay here at the lodging and then we’ll have dinner when you come back? Palpable anxiety, absolutely palpable! I said, No thanks, dear. I was a combination of authentically mad at her and performatively mad at her, not that she could tell. We browsed the shelves, I asked Gordon for his biographical details, I asked about his job, none of it is too pertinent, he was born on this very day as far as I’m concerned, a saxophone reed dangling from his lip. He asked me more about me, like my job, and because I had never done what we are all supposed to do in college, namely “reinvent yourself,” since at the University of Chicago that would be a foolish endeavour, I made that move now. I said, I work in the NYC Dept. of Sanitation. He said, As a garbageman? I said, No, an analyst: plotting out routes for the trucks, doing surveys of rat populations, etc. I hear there are lots of raccoons digging through the trash in Toronto!

For both our benefit, & not wanting to extend the lie overlong, I recounted the paintings we’d seen. I said, The thing with Harriet is that she is opposed to conflict too. (“Too” meaning like Canada, but also like Gordon (although I didn’t say that), and in a way like yours truly, even if, when I roll up my sleeves, I Really Roll Up My Sleeves.) To some extent, I was reframing our whole day together around Conflict, with A.Y. Jackson and Lawren Harris and the other five of the Group of Seven as our spiritual mentors. I said, Indeed, I wonder if that’s Harriet’s problem, ultimately, she swallows all Conflict she can find, makes no room for herself, and maybe our British-Irish heritage would make us better suited toward living in this country; and here I am standing on my own two feet in international waters! This was meant to be incisive, cutting, but she wasn’t even there to hear it, poor Charlotte Lucas.

Gordon said he was hungry, have I mentioned he was tall? We stopped by a Syrian hole in the wall on Bloor St, I said I didn’t need anything, although when I saw his food, I decided I would have a nibble. He’d also ordered some bread thing that I’ll not try to spell, he didn’t seem to like it, and I said, Babe what’s wrong you’re hardly eating your bread. But evidently he didn’t know that meme, maybe it won’t make its way to Canada until 2026, the culture does lag, he had said that earlier. Anyway then there were more bookstores on Bloor, and truly it was heartening how much Gordon wanted to be friends, sharing so much w/ me. I snapped a photo of him and sent it to Harriet so she could see my friend, & I heard her respond right away, the phone went *ping*, but I didn’t bother to look at what she said.

The next bookstore was a local chain, full of new releases and cat calendars, and it had modern almanacs, nothing before 2022. It occurred to me that I was flying home tomorrow, and wouldn’t likely find a suitable replacement almanac in the next 12 hours, thus the question was: Would I prefer imperfection or absence? I chose absence.

Now I checked Harriet’s reply: Fun! Should I come meet you? Where are you?

By then it was late afternoon, and the light, while bright and summery, was approaching a state that the Group of Seven would enjoy. It turned out Gordon had dinner plans with his parents in Etobicoke (I got him to say this word several times) & so around 5:30 pm I was on my own. I ordered a slice of pizza, which turned out to be one large slice of pizza thereafter cut in two, and meandered back toward the lodging. There was a parkette across from the lodging with a copse of trees, like “Summer Afternoon, Charlevoix County,” and I hid in that copse and sent a text to Harriet, saying, I’m going to be out all night, you may as well exit the lodging. She wrote back at once, Okay, you sure? And what about tomorrow? Let’s get breakfast before your flight? And I said, I will be in touch tomorrow. Before long, the door opened and out shuffled Harriet, her hair up in a high frizzled pony, emanating spinster energy. I got my first glimpse of a Toronto raccoon (this is not a joke about Harriet, it merely accompanied her arrival on the street) and Harriet let out her trademark EEK, which, to my surprise, proved sufficient to scare the animal off, perhaps, being a denizen of Canada, it’s as civil as its human counterparts. Also EEK is an airport, as we know, in Alaska. Anyway Harriet looked first north, and then south, quite unsure where to go (I know *exactly* where to go in this city, its map is imprinting itself onto me). Harriet coughed. Harried wiped her feet on the pavement. Harriet was utterly alone & without friends.

It occurred to me that I rarely observe her from afar, did she always look so rumpled and disoriented? Did someone need to call her a cab? Did someone need to call her fiancé? She was wearing the grey pants that she thinks nobody can tell are sweatpants, she was carrying some supplies in a grocery store paper bag, she had no makeup on, a feat I usually applaud but one must make occasional calls for decorum. In any case, I knew my night was safe and accounted for, I would drink my coffee and likely step out to fetch an ice cream (certainly, in fact: vanilla, chocolate sprinkles) & then bring you up to speed, O Journal of Saturday Nights, and there was even a Red Garland LP in the lodging beckoning to me, but what would Harriet do? Who would take care of her? Anyway she shambled off, this wasn’t my problem, ultimately we all can only be responsible to ourselves, we must stand on our own two feet, even when we are in another land, even when the facts have shifted. Yes this sounded right to me, I thought, as I hid in the copse, and watched Harriet turn the corner and disappear.

∰∰∰

( ( ( P.P.S. If you enjoyed this, you could buy me a coffee? ) ) )

Tonight let me first reassert that every person is a computer. I’ll come back to that! Or maybe I won’t, I’m forgetful, anyway, I’ll begin with where I was midday (also “I’m Only Sleeping” is on the phone-radio right now) which was in the middle of a dream on the flight to YYZ, Toronto, where we’ve come to visit Bruce, Harriet’s on-again/off-again with the intent of at last telling him it’s over (her intent, not mine), but the dream isn’t too crucial, it’s a first course, no, it’s standalone, no, it’s just for us! In the dream I was Ed Sullivan introducing The Beatles in 1964, but right before welcoming them to the stage, I realized what an awesome responsibility I had. The country needed to reckon with JFK’s assassination, not distract itself with British boys, it was the opening salvo in that generation’s war against true reality, & I woke up to the beverage service on the pristine Embraer 190 with a conspiratorial feeling that The Beatles had set off a chain of events that has led to our current predicament. Why hadn’t I stopped their performance? Surely it was my duty, surely it is *our* duty to stop performances of all stripes.

No, that’s not true, it’s performances all the way down, there’s no getting around it.

Then came airplane tea! What a delight. I sipped it, I snacked on strange mixed nuts and introspected about why I had this dream (probably a general feeling, not exactly guilt, that we are all paying attention to happenings at too-short timescales & should be doing The Work, not on ourselves but on something else, something hinterlandy and ineffable) as Harriet tossed and turned *very* histrionically in her seat, a performance of hoping-to-sleep, no doubt wracked by anxiety, seeing as anxiety is a prime directive of her computer program.

There wasn’t time to sleep, the flight was too short, the plane rattled and we descended, everyone was granted a scare of togetherness a la disaster movies or even our friend 9/11, indeed Harriet nearly reached for my hand but she withdrew just in time, siblings dare not hold hands! Anxiety, poor Harriet, oh I’ll say what I mean about this computer business, because it makes me sound loony, which I’m not, not exactly how she would have it, she talks about my Diagnosis (I don’t have one! but she wants me to have one! but I won’t let her pin me to labels! (or to lapels! I’m not a boutonniere! (multiple parenthetical statements, pardon me, I must close them all) like) this) there, finished — re: computers, I don’t subscribe to free will, because: inputs go in, outputs come out, and the mental functions on either end of those -puts are at bottom mechanical, your charm quarks, your W bosons. Although! a mechanistic explanation isn’t needed, a behavioral explanation suffices: People are just a miasma of patterns.

Do you think Norm misses me? I asked Harriet. She gripped the armrest with a mix of fear and annoyance, and even though she was all sodden about Bruce, who is cool as a cucumber and talks in a lulling Devon accent like Chris Martin of Coldplay (underrated band!) and has always been from my vantage point a decent bloke, there was no reason, I felt, to be unkind about *my* troubles. Norm’s a photograph of a dog, she said. I’m sure he’s fine, seeing as he’s a photo. Well I miss him, I said, if you even care. (That was a performance, I stipulate: If. You. Even. Care.) And in the same vein: you forgot to pack my almanac, Harriet, I said, I will be positively almanacless this entire trip, if you even care.

The plane rattled harder, O Journal of Jaunty Escapades. Harriet said, Virgil, we’re not going to crash. I said, Are you asking me or telling me? She said, Telling. I agreed. The pilot looked Canadian. He had a bland face, lake-blue veins, mountainous hair. Surely he knew the runways of YYZ well. On the return trip, I said to Harriet, I’m going to fly an American airline, namely American Airlines, so I don’t have a Canadian landing us in a big boy airport like JFK. Good plan, she said.

It wasn’t *that* good a plan, but its performative logic seemed like it helped Harriet feel more at ease, and I’m an expert hand at performative logic, whether or not I have, or will have, a Diagnosis, and I do love Harriet in some fashion or other and I do want to help. Harriet, dressed in a pantsuit, madness for an international flight, shackled to some idea that her demi-boyfriend would materialize at Arrivals & fall to his knees in a tidal wave of feeling that’s set in motion by how she’s dressed? She’s a double Ph.D., not a politician or a fashion scion, Bruce wasn’t going to care about her pantsuit. We must recalibrate. A thirty-seven-year-old acting so deliberate is foolish. Thus flapped my thoughts.

I meant fashion icon, not fashion scion.

Are you excited about Canada? said Harriet. They use the metric system, and you like that. Yes, yes, I said, appalled at her belittling or was it pandering (and in truth Kelvin is the gold standard (over Celsius) as far as temperature goes). My birthday is eight days from now, the big 2-7, but she didn’t seem invested in this event when I mentioned it, even though, you’ll recall, it’s the age at which Charlotte Lucas from Pride & Prejudice marries Mr. Collins.

Am I excited about Canada? Behold the Toronto skyline! The pointy tower & its friends huddled at the lakeshore! Like a replica of an American city. Surely I have pertinent thoughts, having lived a moiety of today in Canada and chatted with a Toronto man in a bar and a man from Guelph in a jerk chicken spot, surely all this is preamble, quickly, Virgil, get on with it! The plane thundered through its landing, we walked the jet bridge, oh my the food courts with quirky foods, what’s this Second Cup coffee shop & the dollar symbol with an uncanny valley meaning, Harriet striding chin-first in search of baggage claim, nobody waiting for her in Arrivals. Then a city bus, then the TTC aka the subway, where we met a man named Brendan, about whom more never, then alighting in a neighbo(u)rhood called The Annex.

Out at the station! On the corner of Bloor (rhymes with o’er, not floor) and Spadina (rhymes with vagina, not penis). Come along, Virgil, Harriet said, wheeling her suitcase up the block, as I looked around with atypical interest at the drab, ineffectual scene, no view of the lake or the needle-nosed skyline, just some brutalist-socialist buildings, made more so by the drizzly afternoon, oh wait, now a few pleasant Edwardian homes appear in my mind’s eye.

To stall our progress, I asked her: Do you think I resemble Ed Sullivan? She scowled and said, This is why you don’t have friends. Perhaps she was too anxious to realize that was a cruel thing to say, in any case I tried a different question: Why did you want me to come all the way to Toronto? Why drag me to another continent? Harriet said, You keep asking that, it’s not another continent (of course I knew that). But she wouldn’t elaborate! I had my theories already. It occurred to me long before I breathed this cordial Canadian air that Harriet may have had no exact bone to pick with Bruce himself (who is named Bruce, after all) and gets moved around like a chess piece by the Royal Bank of Canada, but that she rather she may be doing what all her peers are doing, what’s a la mode, like a scoop of vanilla ice cream, namely dredging up all the injustices one’s parents committed & running said parents through the thresher of the current Justice Framework. Bruce being older, fiftyish, a stand-in therefore for Father, he was on the chopping block! She had been bad-mouthing him the past month, enumerating his flaws. And of course she knew that I would stop her from dissolving the union, because I rather like Bruce’s Devon accent, and also because she has no better options, 37 being the new 27, and Harriet needing a person, a parson, a parson person, a Mr. Collins.

Bags dropped off in the lodgings, plenty of time to kill before dinner with Bruce, we found a bar on Bloor and clinked our glasses, and I chatted with a Toronto-born man, who gave me some entry points into the grid (I told him about Chicago’s rather more rigid grid, which I give more credence to, having spent my college years there and fully absorbed it) and he listened cordially in a Canadian way, his name was Brendan too in all likelihood, p < 0.05. Speaking of computer programs, or networks, more precisely, I said to Brendan, and to Harriet, I do think it’s interesting that America has as its national myth Rugged Individualism while Canada has as its myth Boring Politeness. Whatever the myth is becomes the end state. And this is based on only a few hours’ observation of Canada, not bad! To which Harriet, putting chin in hand, had the gall to apologize to this Brendan type and come within a warm breath of mentioning a Diagnosis and my friendlessness, and I would have had to mention my coworker Pamela Q., the doorman, the waiter at the diner, etc. Sooo as the man turned to use the “washroom,” I took a rich inhale of the beer-soaked barroom & told Harriet that Dad wasn’t going to apologize for his mistakes (they are innumerable, I can’t enumerate them) and she certainly can’t take out her anger at Bruce and she must learn to live with uncertainty in uncertain times. Sometimes sitting with the truth is the sole permissible response, I said, even for the sallow and therapeutically intractable.

By the time Harriet responded, we were several blocks away, on a lovely wooded N-S street called Palmerston (filing the name away for later) and I was editing my jeremiad against The Beatles, echoing Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech, e.g. “we cannot let our country get away from us” and so forth, but with a Sullivan / Al Smith brogue. But Harriet was m-a-d about my therapeutic comment! Still, I had meant to provoke her, you see, my internal computer program contains intentionality even when it goes against the grain, since Harriet hates to see me proven right, and would, I figured, consider keeping her romantic attachment to Bruce if I suggested any itches she had for freedom were pathological.

Let me take a stiff sip of this coffee. Let me look at the clock. Let me tell you that it’s past two in the morning, O Journal of Addled Timefeelings.

∰

Very well, since I have been talking dismissively about Harriet, I will say twenty-six nice things about her, as my mind’s eye carries us down Palmerston toward College Street, the seat of Little Italy, which Canada has one of too, apparently. (a) Okay this one isn’t about Harriet, but about Coldplay. For I do think they’re underrated, not exactly because their songs are good, although some are (see: “Lost!”) but because there is something to be said for Pleasantness (see: Canada) and 35,000 people collectively raptured in a basketball arena. (b) I do believe Harriet’s nose is perfect and distracts from her frizzy hair. (c) Her devotion to Bruce, to our parents, and to me is remarkable and admirable. (d) But devotion, like all things, of course, can be mistaken, mistaken too far. (e) Would I know the word “omakase” were it not for Harriet? Presumably yes, in due time, but she accelerated the event. (f) Twenty-six is too many, sorry, Harriet! Sorry, alphabet! Let me conclude by saying Harriet gives me comfort like a ratty blanket, even when she labels me abnormal & treats me as the only person she feels superior to (a sad state to be in; still, I feel sympathy, if not empathy) and insults me by saying things in the vein of “you should feel shame *sometimes*” or “saying what’s on your mind isn’t *always* good.”

(g) No I’ll press on! Her hair is a lovely faded yellow, her skin is a lovely milky white, she looks nineteenth-century ill, she looks like she would benefit from Tyrolean air. (h) She got tenure at 33, bravo! (i) At this point in my memory, we had veered right, westward, onto College Street and were making our way toward Trinity Bellwoods Park, where we were meeting Bruce. And I told Harriet my nascent thoughts about urban planning in Toronto, and she listened with an open mind, and (j) when I recapitulated my argument about how Coldplay is good, she even offered to accompany me to a concert, and (k) when I made comparisons between stadium concerts and events that bring the world together, e.g. our friend 9/11, she asked probative questions, like (l) But Virgil, you were only five old at the time, do you even remember 9/11? & I said I remembered everyone cuddling on the couch and all the neighbors who made aghast faces at me before in the elevators now making pleasant faces. (m) Still ahead of schedule, we found a quaint bar/coffee shop, which had the effect of making me think of Philip Larkin, can’t explain why exactly, and Harriet recited, Days are where we live. (n) I told her Toronto seemed, so far, like Chicago but walkable, or New York but sans the staticky omnipresent anxiety, but of course, anxiety does follow one like a Pacific trash vortex (I didn’t mean this as an ad hominem attack on her, although she may have interpreted it that way).

(o) I’ve forgotten what this is a list about. O it’s Harriet, how she’s good! Fortified by a small tasse of Zinfandel, we pressed on, and (p) I was reminded again how she had pleaded with me to fly up to Toronto, even attend her dinner with Bruce, why would she, she knew I would be portaging along my Weirdness and forestalling her breakup, and still she allowed me to come. (q) Unless Harriet is a glutton for my peculiarity?

(r) For instance, I said, and now we were on Dundas Street, I believe, Coldplay’s “Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall” has an *incandescent* guitar line and the lyric “maybe I’m in the gap between the two trapezes,” which I’ve heard maligned in multiple media outlets, really gets me. Is it “obvious”? We can’t all be the poet ladling words from a bottomless tureen (as one put drunk into the packet-boat, etc.). (s) One time, when I was 13 and Harriet 23, I saw a boy look at Harriet with such horrid longing that I changed my whole belief system ENDURINGLY. (t) It is my belief, I said to Harriet, as Trinity Bellwoods Park, Toronto’s crown jewel for a certain milieu, came into view, its hundred-odd bicycles, its thousand-odd dogs, it is my belief that we need a good deal less mopeyness in the world (this is me talking to Harriet, of course). Which is to say, more or less, all Art should be buzzingly ecstatic. Enough of this dour business with the word “underfoot” splashed around and a pile of lachrymose adjectives and sad unresolved endings all the time, we’ve got to give psychedelic drugs a run for their money! To which Harriet said, in an airy voice, For all anyone knows, you may be right, Virgil.

(u) Why Harriet? Why not go with her middle name, Livia, the empress? Instead Plain Harriet, Poor Harriet O’Shaughnessy, presuming herself so Plain. (v) Years ago, I read that some people come to things through words, while others come to words through things. I asked Harriet which breed she was, & she said she wasn’t picky. (w) I said, Dactyl is a misnomer, eh? Why not dactylla? Mere silence in reply. Harriet, hello? Gazing off into the twilight haze of the park, too nervous to invoke our fearsome Father, not to say she would have in other circumstances, but doubtless she was finding my brain too scintillating today, & thinking Some Medicine wouldn’t be a bad idea, although with her Ph.D.s it’s more likely she was painting me with a “very well then I contradict myself” brush. (x) My comment about the ecstatic, I went on (oh no! Bruce approaches in the distance!), was referring to how we are all so witty & quippy-snippy online and we need to catch up in this, our paraworld, (y) this isn’t the real world, Harriet, I said, don’t fall for that scam, you old fool! my breath quickening, her heart pounding, Bruce!, and she said, Virgil, thank you for keeping me honest, and (z) I squeezed her willowy gray milky frame as Bruce came up to where we sat in the grass and smooched her on her wrinkling cheek.

∰

If I may anticipate the end, O Journal of Private Mindfire, Bruce, having embraced me too, for I matter by *some* symbological-moral system, said: Virgil, I have something important to tell you. He smelled of cologne or certain toiletries, like the Lake District of England, namely the soap from the hotel in Keswick that Mom brought back. Do we trust men who wear cologne? Cologne is moral, or not amoral. Now Bruce kissed Harriet on the mouth and tractored me into his embrace once more, all 6 foot 5 of him, & I thought how far we are from understanding the world’s polyphony, but at least Bruce offered some sturdiness/calm, and whatever complaints Harriet might have had about his aloofness (this was her chief complaint, plus some unease about their age difference, 10+ years) didn’t strike me as too pertinent. She had let an errant computer sub-program dominate her romantic outputs.

Bruce! I said, as I now tractored *him*, meaning: tractored over his mild comments, as I proceeded to tell him about my Ed Sullivan dream and my incipient theories of societal collapse / “Love Me Do”, while he guided us down the park’s footpath toward Queen St W. He asked how I was, whether I still had no ideas for a proper career, whether I was still journaling nightly as the doctor recommended, although, O Journal, you should know it was a recommendation made by a person who *happens* to be a doctor, as in: some person who might have opinions, too, on the best place to get rigatoni alla norma outside NYC but whose opinions on that wouldn’t count as a doctor’s recommendation. Harriet teased, You should write In Which Virgil Documents His Cleverness on the cover of your journal. Ha, I said, and again, to underline my stance, ha. This was all in the neighborhood of belittling, but Bruce’s Devon accent charmed me and so I said no more, while Harriet soon fell behind and trailed along like she didn’t know us and hadn’t made social plans in decades. Harriet, you look so ollllld, I said, not due to any uncontrollable impulse in my sparkling mind but rather a concrete tactic. Which is to say, I was capitalizing on my putative mental condition in order to make this utterance, nudging Old Harriet toward insecurity.

Chinatown: having parsed the guidebooks and whatnots about Toronto, I knew where I wanted to eat, a place with hanging fat-laced roast pork. And surely Bruce had ideas for a dinner spot, but I made my preferences known, and we rerouted east toward Spadina Vagina Avenue, a wonderland of pictographic signs. We sat, we ordered, and Harriet tugged at her pantsuit, clearly her underwear was bunched.

I grow tired, I grow tired, I will pour the balance of my Irish creamer into the coffee cup, & shift gracelessly into hyper-observant dialogue-recounting.

Bruce, oil dripping down his chin, said, The bank now wants me to fly to Toronto every month, but I’ll still live in New York. Harriet smiled morosely. I said, It’s quite moral to follow the jagged line of your career, though alas the closest we come to true moral commitments these days is turning off notifications. Bruce, who on account of his grand height possesses an inborn authority, again laid his hand on my shoulder, saying, So — why no girlfriends, Virgil? Noodles whipped his chin. “Why no girlfriends”: normative in all sorts of ways. Our dear Father used to say that to me, I lamented to Bruce, paring a fob of bok choy with a knife; he would show up at school social functions and say why not that one, or why not that one, she’s a little chubby but she would give you good loving. Our Father, financier (like you), man-about-town, philanderer (unlike you?), a man of raging ills. You’re a distinct man, Bruce, so you needn’t make comments like that. I added, Harriet neglected to pack my almanac, by the way, Bruce, so could you please grace me with a bit of trivia? And he rattled off interest rates for an interminable minute.

At last we come to it. Virgil, said Bruce, your sister and I are engaged. We wanted to tell you in person, and we wanted to both be here, but I had to be in Toronto this week, and Harriet was so eager to tell you, so here we are, and thank you for making the trip. My goodness, he laid the news at my feet like he was showing me a dead kitten. How we misread people! His crinkly eyes crinkled (and what kind of name is Bruce anyhow? (not its linguistic or phrenological origins (give me some credit (& a low interest rate!)))). He leaned in as if to catch me before I fell to the ground sobbing. Granted, I’m anticipating what Harriet said next, this is all intolerable.

Virgil, said Harriet, who had been so meek all day, and who truly, I again contend, should use her Roman name (shouldn’t she go by Livia? I asked Bruce, who in response squizzled up his lips) — Virgil, said Harriet with renewed vigor, stroking my fingers, I know this is difficult. We won’t be able to live together anymore, you and I. But you’ll still have Norm. You could even get a proper dog? One who’s mature and trained as a therapy dog? But I’m getting ahead of myself. Bruce and I were thinking we could get you an apartment in his building. There’s one opening up a couple floors down. (In the Financial District? How oafish.) And Harriet went on, With his job, Bruce, well, if you were to lose yours again, he, *we*, could support you. (Never mind that I’ve lost only two jobs, and both for Normal Reasons, which is why I named my dog Normal, Norm for short.) Anyhow I made the faintest pip of protest & Harriet interrupted me to make a remark, referring to my job loss, about “conduct unbecoming,” a US Marine phrase, not something to be deployed in civilian life. And then she referenced my conduct on the plane, the quote screaming unquote as we were descending, but I countered that this was comedy, that I’m exquisitely aware of what I’m doing at all times, that I’m more aware of my internal directives than she is, that this oblique campaign for the Diagnosis she wants for me (*she* wants it! not I!) was hideous. I do not identify as Diagnosed, but then again of course indeed I simply do. not. Identify. whatsoever. I Dissemble, I Disguise, I am if anything like the smoke generated as the cartoon spirits away, that’s me, that’s me all over.

Harriet, shame on you, I said, for she had deceived me on the plane with her anxiety, it was not anxiety about the flight or Bruce or some provost, it was about me. Too much! And so I removed myself to the street, where I could, at the same time, issue a private fart, O Journal of Occasional Victorianism, & inhale the Canadian air, and look at the Hopper-blue sky, a choice color for a midsummer Friday eve, although the temperature was cooler than I’d anticipated, maybe 290 Kelvin or thereabouts, and smelled like hand-pulled noodles and hot oil & I gazed north along Spadina Avenue, which, I’ve since learned, turns into Spadina Road (it’s not an Avenue forever) at Bloor Street, at which point the building numbers begin anew, a fact the grid aficionados in Chicago wouldn’t suffer, like for example Diversey Parkway (a Parkway, not a street) is 2800 North and a Parkway from the shore of the lake to the crust of the suburbs.

Oh dear! I fact-checked this, and Diversey becomes an Avenue on its way to Elmwood Park. We must recalibrate. (I’ve shifted the phone-radio to Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue,” the “Mylo Xyloto” of jazz.) In any case let me say a word about computer programs again, for I believe Harriet was executing hers in overdrive in this instance. In other words, using the vogue of today’s language, she was endeavoring to “reparent” herself through Bruce, having failed to bury her spleen in her work, & she had to act, at the same time, in her own eyes, like an awful mother by dissolving her living arrangements with her wretched brother, and as a result resorted to offering me money, a cozy apartment & Canadian roast pork, etc. Her program, so typical by some lights, was crashing. Goodbye, Harriet.

Well, because I am so skilled at being a human, I began to cry right there on the street, right there on Spadina Vagina Avenue! (Canada, the last place one should cry.) My goal, which is to say the goal of my internal program, which operates occasionally outside my full conscious control, was to make Harriet feel as though her absence would indeed matter to me. She needed to believe that her arrow had pierced my heart and that I was lost (“Lost!”) without her, that I was absolutely terrified by this novelty she had introduced to my regimented life. Ignore the fact that I had gleefully crossed an international border, my first ever in 26 years, to be here with her, and was in a foreign place with no creature comforts or almanacs. This, you must understand, is why I was crying.

I watched those lovely wide streetcars glide north-south on Spadina, the young revelers, & marveled at the brutal apartment buildings and then stepped back into the restaurant, where both Bruce and Harriet had steeled themselves in sallow anticipation, and Harriet, seeing my tears, stood up to hug me, even as I was diving back to the table to reëngage with my bok choy, it was a coöperative effort, the bok choy and I were coördinating to keep the emotional temperature low, and Bruce now stood to give me a shoulder massage, thankfully the servers in the restaurant moved quickly through the narrow cörridors among the tables, as though they were accustomed to 26-year-old Americans very intentionally weeping in order to signal they were appropriately impacted by their sister’s engagement, even though this particular 26-year-old was in favor of the engagement and indeed had been pushing it, in subtle ways, since Bruce & his gentle if slightly condescending Lake District manner entered into our lives while we watched the Hudson River slosh around five years earlier in mid-spring in the Greatest City in the World!

We all wept, we all wept, but for whom and for what? Our various computer programs were racing to support each other, I daresay mine was faster than theirs. Anyway! coda! I am still in favor of ecstatic happiness, this midnight coffee is winding down, but I should tell you that I finished the meal with them, imploring them to scrabble together a discussion of Canadian urban planning, since this was a balm and was true to form, i.e. my form. And afterward, as Harriet would obviously want to stay the night with Bruce, I said I needed to be alone, in a subdued but weighty tone, also true to form, and then walked south (by accident) all by myself & ended up at a jerk chicken place and learned about the University of Guelph from a v. tipsy man, and then I headed north up Spadina Avenue, and found some midnight oolong on Bloor, where “And Your Bird Can Sing” was playing, perhaps the best song ever to exist, with apologies to JFK, and then, full of jerk and tea, I ran here to tell you, O Journal of Ships Passing at Night, everything that had happened to me, because in the end, I do come to things through words, and today I said very few words until now, they were all whispered quietly, out of everyone’s earshot, despite whatever I may have implied.

∰∰∰

( ( ( P.S. If you enjoyed this, you could buy me a coffee? ) ) )